jlc

While an athlete has to practice to become the best that that individual can achieve, the starting point varies dramatically for different people. I have seen individuals who, after 6 months of basic instruction, out-compete most people who have been doing the sport for decades. These are the 'naturals'. It is not education that produces this difference, it is innate ability.

Jan

blarman -

I am not a millennial, but have experienced being an exception to your rule 'not to say that you expect to stay only a year' at a particular job. As a Medical Technologist who liked to work graveyard shift, I was quite upfront with my prospective employers about my plans, and I do not think my saying as much ever impeded my getting a job...but then you are talking about a niche where I can get 3 days - 1 week familiarization and then begin working independently.

That being said, Schuyler House has contrived a hideous plan to lure unsuspecting millennials into staying with us: We are nice. We have a casual atmosphere. If you have a dog (or social cat) you are kinda expected to bring it to work. And - importantly - we realize that people have other things in their life that are of great value to them, and we not only cooperate with working with these other things, we actually encourage them. (Currently, for example, several of us are working together on an Indie film in progress...not ready to say more at the moment.) The company takes us all out to movies a few times a year; the Missouri office has barbecues too.

Our pay is not great, and while we do get people moving out and up to better jobs, we have had a pretty good retention of some brilliant people. In an era where corporations are trying to drop their employee health coverage, we have just arranged to get our people the premier policy offered by a particular insurance company...because we want to be sure that our people have absolutely no problems in getting their health care. In more than one way, this is a 'lifestyle' company.

Jan

Of course millennials follow a Bell curve, just like most other things do. You, Snoogoo and awebb and others are welcome to be exceptions to the norm. Your mere presence on this site is evidence that you self-select to be part of a non-normative group.

What is the rug that is pulled out from under you.

Jan

So. I wonder why you consider a manual-labor job to be the sweet spot in your career. Would you mind elaborating a bit?

Jan

awebb -

That was a good read, especially the conclusion. The problem as I see it is not in that everyone considers themselves 'special', but that you have to ante up 'a lot of hard work' in order to merit the term.

It is the old saying, "You have to walk the walk and talk the talk." If you can just 'talk the talk' then you are not entitled to be termed 'special'.

Jan, 'special' (but sometimes meaning 'the short bus')

Ben_C, I think your response to puzzlelady (which seems to assume that she is a proponent of Islam) is not the interpretation I have of her post. I think that puzzlelady is correct that the people who become suicide bombers are heroes in their own minds (aside from a few who were coerced). They do succeed in inspiring the next 'patriot' to give his precious life for the unworthy cause of murdering innocent people...but their friends think of them as heroes.

I am not a pacifist, and don't agree with puzzlelady on that part of her comment, but the 'patriotism' of fighting against different sects of the same religion is abundant: The Catholic Albigensian Crusade, the wars between the various Protestant religions and between Catholic and Protestants in the 17th century are non-Islamic examples. In all cases, 'politics' and economics were mixed with religion in the agendas of the generals and heads of state who lead those wars. Shiites and Sunnis are part of this general trend of humans wanting their way to be right at all cost.

Jan

Thanks for the warning.

Jan

I watched the first episode and was presently surprised. Thanks for the suggestion. (I think that part of my disinclination to watch it when Wm described it to me was that I had been inundated with nostalgia emails that looked at the 1950's as some rose-colored paradise of the past.)

Jan, just got second episode

Rational and intelligent agreement is a treasure, as is rational 'you need to rethink this part here' discussion. You can end up with a result that is much better than either partner could have come up with alone. But for either of those scenarios, both people have to have the basis for reasoning on the topic at hand. Sometimes that is no more than 'native intelligence' (which is something that no one has yet found a way to deny women) but knowledge and experience are assets as well.

(I'm glad you chimed in on this thread, Mamaemma. I was hoping to hear from you. I looked up Jim Duggar...hope he does not agree with me on anything.)

Jan

New Zealand has socialized medicine.
New Zealand does not explicitly protect freedom of speech for the individual. Freedom of the media is limited by its requirement to 'support law and order'.
New Zealand recognizes the right to social security and has three types thereof (which seem to be roughly equivalent to medicare, welfare, and unemployment).
The Bill of Rights of New Zealand specifically states that personal rights shall 'bow' if they conflict with other Acts.

I do not consider it a good location for a Gulch. Admittedly, the US now has socialized medicine. I hope that this will be rescinded soon. Sigh. It is a beautiful country.

Jan

...or things less hospitable than "calm down"...

Wm is fond of that series and sometimes talks about it...He and I often do not like the same shows, though. Hmm...if you think I would like it too, I will see if it is available on the Internet and give the first episode a shot.

Jan

It was a huge eye-opener for me when a friend of mine (who happens to be Objectivist) related, from her studies of the Victorian period, that the ideal that underlies the 'Victorian-novel culture' is that a woman is supposed to be an 'eternal child'. She is supposed to be deliberately be kept sequestered from reality, seeing the world only through the eyes of her husband. This makes her a non-competitive safe harbor.

That is the key phrase: Safe Harbor. All of the cultural trappings are oriented towards creating an automatic proponent who will support her husband and his point of view unquestioningly because that is all she knows of the world. In return for his guarding her in perpetual childhood and providing for her sustenance, he has a mini-vacation when he comes home - someone who always sees his perspective and takes his part.

This fair trade of physical support for blind advocacy is repugnant to me, but it explains a LOT about where we are coming from and it has the advantage in that it has no villains. The men are not trying to harm the women, they see themselves as protectors.

Jan

I find that excellent practical advice, DrZ. If I ever find another man who succeeds in passing through the valkyrie 'circle of fire' I will engage your suggested 'trial by cooking' with him.

Amused, but also serious.

Jan

I had forgotten that about the kzinti!

It is going to take time for the genders to come to a better equilibrium after women being second-class individuals (I cannot say "citizens" because women largely were not.) for millennia. But this is happening. We are making good progress.

Like Wm's wife, I was sometimes told as a child to 'make sure I let the boy win' if I wanted him to like me. Mostly, this was from relatives, not my immediate family: what I got there, from my mother, was the advice, "Be the power behind the throne; do not seek to sit on the throne yourself."

Well, as many of you know, I am amongst those folks who do medieval reenactment as a hobby, so 'thrones' are very real things to me. Once, when I was in my 30's, I was having dinner with my mother at her home. I was talking about my boyfriend (with whom I was living) fighting to win the tournament called Crown, the winner of which becomes King for the next 6 months. My mother leaned forward over the table: "You should be trying to win Crown yourself, Jan!" I teased her, ironically quoting her saying back at her, "...be the power behind the throne..."

She was lifting a forkful of green beans to her lips. She paused, with the fork halfway...put the forkful of food back on her plate. Then she looked me directly in the eyes, and the woman who had been born in 1914 said, "Well. I was wrong."

I treasure that moment.

Jan

Thank you. Ayn Rand rose head and shoulders above most of us in transcending her environment to describe a vision of a world that faced peril, but also potential magnificence.

I can only attribute her narrow view of women in power to reflecting Victorian sensibilities. This is certainly a 'human fallibility' that I am quite capable of overlooking - but I would want to ask her about it, if I had the chance.

Other than that, I think the allosaur has the right of it: try to squeeze her brilliant brain about 'how you would make a Gulch in today's visible world'.

Jan

Huh again? Me femnazi? Rand femnazi? Your reply to my original comment was inaccurate (I am able to say whether I am a man-hater or not after 63 years of intensive knowledge of self.). I took the time to make a detailed response and you reply with a worthless epithet: "Feminazi BS."

If you do not make a worthy reply, I will cease to respond to your comments.

Jan

Huh! Hate men? I don't hate men - how did you ever get that out of what I said?

Quite the opposite: I object to Ayn Rand's worldview that the only possible relationship between a man and a woman is that the woman must look up to a man as her superior (not as her friend) and that if the woman herself has a large amount of power then she 'cannot find a man'.

Here is more of what Ayn Rand said on that topic:

"...the higher [a woman’s] view of masculinity, the more severely demanding her standards. It means that she never loses the awareness of her own sexual identity and theirs. It means that a properly feminine woman does not treat men as if she were their pal, sister, mother - or leader.

Now consider the meaning of the presidency: in all his professional relationships, within the entire sphere of his work, the president is the highest authority; he is the “chief executive,” the “commander-in-chief.” ...In the performance of his duties, a president does not deal with equals, but only with inferiors (not inferiors as persons, but in respect to the hierarchy of their positions, their work, and their responsibilities).

This, for a rational woman, would be an unbearable situation. ... To act as the superior, the leader, virtually the ruler of all the men she deals with, would be an excruciating psychological torture. It would require a total depersonalization, an utter selflessness, and an incommunicable loneliness; she would have to suppress (or repress) every personal aspect of her own character and attitude; she could not be herself, i.e., a woman; she would have to function only as a mind, not as a person, i.e., as a thinker devoid of personal values - a dangerously artificial dichotomy which no one could sustain for long. By the nature of her duties and daily activities, she would beome the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting figure of all: a matriarch."

That is a spectacularly twisted view of male-female relationships. While I admire most of Ayn Rand's work, her definition of a 'properly feminine woman' is boggling to my mind. The limits she sets on relationships demean both men and women...and are not accurate. We live in a later era and have examples all around us of various successful permutations of relationships of all sorts.

Jan

Why the hell did you say something as dim-witted as "For a woman to seek or desire the presidency is, in fact, so terrible a prospect of spiritual self-immolation that the woman who would seek it is psychologically unworthy of the job." Who are you to make decisions about someone's personal 'spiritual' life? What shreds of evidence can you scrape up that the definition of femininity requires being mastered by a man? MYOB.

Jan

The concept of democracy arose (again) from a world where the default belief was in god-selected totalitarian kings who by their nature and existence could control your life, your religion, your trade. If the Rome of Western European civilization collapses under the weight of the Volkerwanderung of the immigration of technologically and socially less developed peoples, we will not loose nearly as much as we did in the 'real' Dark Ages.

Why? Because, the printing press. There are millions of copies of the works of freedom (and recipes for apple pie) whereas the fall of Rome had only tens of copies of its documents.

We may fall again, but it will not be so far. I would expect that general tech would fall as far as 1900; medical tech...probably about 1950. And the legend of freedom will not be suppressed. If you doubt this, please watch the movie "The Singing Revolution" and see how resilient the little country of Estonia proved to be in spite of being brutalized by both Stalin and Hitler.

Unfortunately, the warning that Orwell gave reflected the opinion that 'we' - the democratic countries - had the duty to revise the political system of peaceful and relatively benign countries we judged to be less advanced: overthrow their totalitarian regimes in favor of governments that we thought better represented the populace. If we had avoided that arrogance, the world would be more stable. (Their people have the right to evolve their own government system from the ground up - perhaps coming up with one better than ours.)

Jan

Yes, quasi-extinct beast: I think that is the direction my question would go.

Jan

Spend MONEY? Without utmost urgency? What do you think I am...a politician?

Jan

Taking care of big vertebrate critters, in the (California) winter I make a mash using hot tap water (instead of cold water out of the horse trough). I did this for the sheep, Rags, this morning (no horse at the moment and coyotes ate the goat). This warms them up nicely.

Perhaps you could place a shallow dish of warm sugar water just outside the hive so that the bees did not have to fly to get some food. That might help your hive winter over better - and a faster start to honey production in the Spring.

You are right that there is Winter for Bees, as for all non-tropical creatures, but Mother Nature is a Bitch. She does not care if your hive dies, if you dog dies, if you die. She does not even care if your entire species dies (Hi allosaurus!). She is beautiful and terrible; she is not your friend.

So, consider working against her for your own benefit.

Jan, loves nature but tries to be aware of reality

This is excellent to know. (I am still keeping you at the top of the list for when I need to replace my sleeping bag.)

Jan

Hidalgo.

No. Mike M has the right of it: Anomalocaris was not vertebrate; hard and crunchy outside and soft and mushy inside. Good choice for Democrats.

Jan