1. Many women want the option to stay home and raise their own children, at least for a few years. If a woman marries an otherwise-wonderful man who earns half her salary, she will not be able to easily stay home with her own child while maintaining their former standard of living. So there are some logistical concerns here that just aren't there for men. Perhaps in a country with a lot of paid maternity leave, these issues would not be as pronounced.
2. I have trouble with the blanket statement that women "want established males" "biologically and evolutionarily speaking." We live in a society. Peoples' behavior in a society is not some mystery that can only be deciphered by looking at chimpanzees. Our society has some very messed up rules about who gets to have the most power. People respond to and strategize around their current reality. If that reality were to change -- like, if we had free childcare or 4 years paid maternity leave, or some other radical shift -- many of these calculations would "magically" fall away.
> Many women want the option to stay home and raise their own children, at least for a few years.
> So there are some logistical concerns here that just aren't there for men.
It's true that more women want this than men, certainly in the U.S., but you can't say the concerns "just aren't there for men" -- already in this thread there are men saying they want to be stay-at-home dads.
I have read that shorter baking time can have an effect on the gluten and increase people's sensitivity to it (can't find the study right now). Many bakers use methods to shorten baking time to yield larger output.
In Switzerland some bakers have started to go back to the old methods because of this.
This is my personal best bet. I think if we were to introduce a measure as simple as mechanical compressibility of bread (crust removed), and people with "gluten sensitivity" started eating very low compressibility bread, they'd be fine.
Also I think the FODMAP people are on to something important.
Naturally fermented breads that stay away from commercial yeasts (ie oldfashioned sourdough bread), work out for many people who otherwise struggle with normal commercial bread.
I would similarly be unsurprised if there is just some other factor. I saw an article onetime that showed a link between alergies to apples and the range of an unrelated tree. That is, there was some other type of tree that, if present, increased the occurrence of reported allergies to the apple. Whereas the same apple in a location without this tree had fewer allergies reported.
Sadly... my inability to refind this article makes me suspect that, though I may be unsurprised by this idea, I have no evidence for it. So, if anyone can help refute the idea, that would be great! :)
You may be thinking birch trees. I’m allergic to certain raw fruits (cooked or canned ok), beans, and tree nuts (peanuts and cashews ok). I’m told this weird combination is a thing.
Thanks for the link! That at least makes it look like I didn't imagine the article. The one I remember was a more direct link between allergies to thing X, but only in the presence of thing Y. With no reported allergies to thing Y.
Holy shit. I've always been allergic to random things like cherries, apples, tomatoes, melon, peaches, etc., but only some of the time and never when it's cooked. It could definitely be some other tree or something that's doing it.
Edit: Just read the other reply. I'm definitely allergic to birch and grass pollen and I've always had hay fever. That solves that mystery.
That is a new idea, thanks! I was suspecting pesticides or similar, since my allergy is highly batch-dependant and there have been less and less occurrences over time.
My wife is from Spain and cannot eat the bread here in the US. She struggled for a long time with a lot of digestive issues. When she goes back to Spain she eats all the bread she wants with no issues. She still doesn't really know what causes the problem because she does not have celiac so she just calls it "gluten-sensitive" but we know it's probably not even related to gluten. Most likely it's just some insane thing you can do to wheat or bread when processing it in the USA that isn't allowed in countries that care more about health than profits.
For your theorie I live in central Europe and don't know a single person with gluten issues. While the Americans in this thread make it seem like every 10th or so has it.
Something being widespread in a community doesn't mean that it's tolerated by everyone in that community. Milk is common in central Europe, but some people are intolerant to lactose. Tomatoes and red wine are also common, but some people can't have them due to histamine intolerance.
(I also have a central European colleague who has actual celiac disease. That said, I agree that the general gluten panic is way overblown.)
I'd wager half of them does not have diagnosed gluten intolerance.
There are many chemicals in bread one can be allergic or intolerant to. Gluten proteins are but one. Bad lactose intolerance and lactose sweetened breads may be responsible for some reported symptoms. Soy protein or bean protein used in fast mixes. Fructans are another.
I just wrote my story in a comment. The was same was true for me when I traveled to Japan. I couldn't go near gluten for 3 years. I went to a digestive disease research center and was cured in a couple of visits with special antibiotics that target the digestive tract. If you haven't tried that route, it may be worth looking into.
Do you mind sharing where and how you determined the antibiotic regime/dosage you used? If allowed. Did you just look up the general regime for those drugs or did you tailor it? How did you go about repopulating your gut flora post treatment - ensuring that you didn't reintroduce bad bacteria?
The doctor decided the dosage. Regarding repopulating gut flora: That is such a poorly understood topic. The more you read, the more you scratch your head.
After my first treatment, I made yogurt with special starters that contained specific strains of bacteria based on those suggested by the SCD (Simple Carbohydrate Diet). The next time I took a round of antibiotics, which was after symptoms returned a year later, I didn't do anything special to repopulate flora. My symptoms did not return for 1.5 years.
I tend to believe that eating probiotic-containing foods is generally a good thing. It's best if you ferment your own foods, because the bacteria counts are typically much higher compared with store-bought products. Sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi, water kefir, ginger bug, and others are incredibly simple to make.
That said, the various common strains of bacteria are debated and their effect on existing flora is not yet well understood. It's possible that some fermented foods could be bad for some people. Hopefully one day the medical community will have a good grasp on how to effectively prescribe fecal transplants!
I honestly believe that fecal transplants are the way forward; using the macro (a healthy fecal culture) to solve the micro (which strains are good vs bad). There has been evidence to suggest that both body weight and athleticism are impacted by gut flora.
Thanks
In my experience bread and other (non-sweet) flour-based products in the US have surprisingly high levels of sugar/HFCS/etc. - especially compared to mediterranean bread products, which additionally contain little to no salt (pane sciocco, pan de pagés).
This is less software-related, but one trap smart folks can fall into is being afraid to seem not smart. Like let's say an authority figure is trying to do something that doesn't feel right to you, and you say something about it. And then Mr. Authority Figure says, "Come now, be reasonable or be rational." The fear of being perceived as "irrational" may stop you from standing up for yourself or someone else.
On a similar note, "fear of not looking smart" can make it hard to ask a question. Often when I'm in a meeting and they're going deep into some technical thing I don't understand, I (nowadays) assume that everybody else is confused, too, and I ask the question. And then once I do, everyone else relaxes and follows up. But until that ice is broken, we're all sweating bullets trying to look like we get something we literally do not understand at all.
I had that thought at first, too. But then I thought about it: she has worked on the subtle shades of meaning in words for years in order to translate things. So the more subtle significance of the role of translator is also something she would have pondered for a lot longer than most of us. Perhaps, if someone has thought deeply on a subject and worked in a field for decades, we might listen to what she has to say instead of dismissing it out of hand because it is unfamiliar.
I wish I had known when I was younger that a lot of the people who shoot down ideas, minimize your creativity, and say "that's impossible" aren't smarter than you. They're just more insecure.
It's easier to say no to everything and look like a genius, then to say "I wonder...", and try, and fail, and try some more -- and perhaps (who knows?) actually be a genius. With all of the concomitant messiness and failures and actual real life kept in the mix.
>Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
I am also very interested in finding out more about the tech scene in Spain. Questions:
- Are there many opportunities for technical QA -- folks who know SQL, Jmeter, and other technical tools? What would salary ranges be for those types of positions?
- Are there tech scenes in smaller cities like Bilbao, Valencia, Seville?
- What is the culture like at Spanish tech companies?
I also second the joys of a part-time job. One of the most productive periods in my working life was when I had a job that was 30 hours a week. I worked 6 hours a day -- so that forced me to get out of bed, shower, and become fully human -- and then in the evenings I had enough time and energy to make real progress on my artistic goals.
I even found that the pay cut wasn't a 25% pay cut, but more like a 10% pay cut, because with the extra time I had, I did more shopping and meal planning, and spent less money overall on conveniences. I could afford to do things the "inconvenient" way.
I wish more companies in tech considered offering part time jobs. I know there would be a lot of people interested in those jobs, and they would be super loyal employees because they would be psyched to have the chance to have a real life.
There are multiple factors, but basic discouragement, starting from childhood, is a big one.
100 years ago, when writing could make you a decent living, women were constantly discouraged from writing. Here's Virginia Woolf's character Lily in To The Lighthouse, dealing with nagging doubts:
"Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?"
At roughly the same time, women were often employed as "computers" -- that is, people who did complex mathematical calculations. It was thought that women were good for this more tedious math, thus leaving men free for the higher math to which they were more eminently suited.
So, to review: When writers could support a family, women were discouraged from being writers. When math skill was not connected with a good salary, women were accepted as being good at math.
Nowadays, very few writers can make a living, while mathematically-minded coders can. So today's generally accepted wisdom is that girls are naturally good with words (which doesn't pay), while boys are good with math and computers (which does).
The fact that women aren't in coding isn't a bug, but a feature. Remember the Eniac? Programming that was brutally hard, and it was all done by women, and there does not seem to have been a particular amount of money or glory in it. Now there's both, and that's why women are discouraged from joining in the lucrative boys' club.
Once code starts being written by robots and the average developer can't find a job, then you'll see the field fill up with women.
Good points. Being female puts a person at a disadvantage in certain ways, and particularly makes it more likely that teachers and parents will believe that the easier path of study is preferable to the one that requires more challenges, particularly in mathematics and science.
This does likely have an impact on how many female programmers we see today.
Men are disadvantaged in other ways, such as being taught to suppress emotions and to prefer aggression to problem solving. Many men are permanently damaged by this and the effects harm their employability and relationships for their entire lives.
I'm not suggesting there is equality/equivalence or that large-scale social biases and patterns don't disproportionately effect some people. Just making the point that there may not be an ideal and we may always be trying to correct for various excesses. One notable excess is the pressure put on working parents, which are asymmetrical and backward for both sexes in many ways.
It's not the general wisdom, it's a fact. But not a simple one. There's an experiment (heard of it from an philosopher women talking about women in philosophy) showing that girls perform as good as boys in math, BUT, if asked to color a drawing before the math test, they perform less. Which means, I think, that we don't live in a void of emotions. Men tend to be more aggressive and a hard problem requires aggressiveness. Unfortunately this comes with a shown tendency towards sociopath behaviour, Angular vs React thingy. :)
Women, on the other side, go towards sadness and depression and anxiety. Which is hard on coding. Speaking from my own experience, as a white male.
All in all is unfortunate. Coding is a tiny thing in developing software, and I personally believe that it's much, much easier to work with women. But when they are surrounded by 90% men teammates, I can imagine that it's hard to be a woman in IT.
I tried living totally without internet access, and while I felt a lot better overall, I eventually had to give in. Nowadays phone books aren't usually delivered to homes anymore, so if you want to get in touch with a store or find a doctor's office, you need internet to search for it. Since I wasn't driving at the time, I couldn't just head out to an internet cafe when it was something important.
For similar reasons, I've had trouble detangling from Facebook. 10 years ago, if a friend was getting married they'd send out announcements -- now they just "announce" it on Facebook, and if you don't log in that week, you don't find out about it.
So part of the reason it's hard to disconnect is because the previous methods of staying in touch have atrophied in favor of these new, more toxic systems.
Nevertheless, I'm trying a couple of things (with varied success -- I really do much better cold turkey):
- Trying to reward myself with internet time after I score enough points in Habitica (aka HabitRPG)
- Trying to turn off the modem at a certain time of night like 10 pm (I find I sleep better too -- might be coincidence but I've noticed the difference many times)
Ultimately what would help me would be a pay-per-use internet plan versus an "always on" internet plan. If I know that my plan fee increased after 20 hours / month, I'd have access when I needed it, but then I'd have to "save up" for special occasions like streaming a show. As of yet I haven't found an external limit that doesn't also make life too logistically challenging.
I lived without internet for a while too and had the same experience. There's benefits, but it's not practical long term.
Pay-per-use would is an interesting idea, but if you live with other people it gets a little more complicated.
The best tool I've found is an app called Self Control. It puts rules into your hosts file and either blacklists certain websites or blocks all of them and whitelists the ones you want. It uses an external timeserver so you can't get around it by changing your computer clock, and it runs regular checks to make sure you don't just edit your hosts file yourself. It's really pretty good. And in theory you could set up scripts that would start up certain blocks at a scheduled time every day. The one huge problem though is that it's Mac only.
I don't think there's a way to completely fix the issue externally, but having some powerful tools for limiting yourself would go a long way in making it easier.
2. I have trouble with the blanket statement that women "want established males" "biologically and evolutionarily speaking." We live in a society. Peoples' behavior in a society is not some mystery that can only be deciphered by looking at chimpanzees. Our society has some very messed up rules about who gets to have the most power. People respond to and strategize around their current reality. If that reality were to change -- like, if we had free childcare or 4 years paid maternity leave, or some other radical shift -- many of these calculations would "magically" fall away.