On the subject of maternity leave - "I didn't get six weeks off work to play Skyrim. " (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
127 ups - 0 downs = 127 votes
195 comments submitted at 16:15:16 on Oct 17, 2014 by Mr_Tulip
On the subject of maternity leave - "I didn't get six weeks off work to play Skyrim. " (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
127 ups - 0 downs = 127 votes
195 comments submitted at 16:15:16 on Oct 17, 2014 by Mr_Tulip
Heh.
I remember last week I advocated artificial childbirth as a progressive measure that will benefit both the mother and society in general and people acted like I was a crazy person.
I double checked, and you weren't talking about like practical stuff, it was "WHAT IF WE COULD MAKE BABIES IN PODDDDSSSSSSS"
I mean sure, but why not just have paid maternity leave and medical care for pregnant people rather than developing literal baby pods. Yes it puts a dent in a ladies career but it's more likely than something you described as total science fiction.
Artificial childbirth isn't that farfetched.
And what I said was that I don't think we'll ever get complete work place equality until that happens.
Cause someone has to sacrifice for the maternity leave, which is an added sacrifice that male workers or their employers don't have to bear. Even if we manage to shift the financial burden entirely over to the government, it'll still put a dent (however small) in their career.
I dunno, maybe my tone was too flippant or something. But speculating widely about science that can benefit humanity is fun.
That's why we have a government, to take care of these larger issues that shouldn't be all in the hands of businesses. That's one of it's functions.
Here's the other thing. We will never live in a perfect society where everyone is perfectly equal. It is impractical to strive for that future. We won't because people are far too different to give everyone even a good starting line up. Women are pretty much always going to be at a disadvantage because they start bleeding between once a month to whatever it is with birth control. That isn't going away any time soon.
The practical thing to do is recognize that the difference exists and then put a system in place that mitigates the effect of the difference as much as possible without going crazy. That doesn't mean pod babies, it means tax funded maternity leave. It costs people money, but it mitigates the difference and it's not so much of a burden that people would be noticeably worse off.
Do you know why we don't have flying cars? It's not a technological limitation. They're actually super easy, even the ones that hover. People have made them as side projects and they work. If we put even a third of the budget that goes in to developing new family cars in to a flying car, we'd have one in under 5 years. Easily.
Yet we don't. Why? Because flying cars are impractical. If a flying car fails, it drops to the ground and you're dead. It's more expensive to fuel, it's harder to control than a car, and you'd need hella special training. A car already gets you places incredibly fast and incredibly efficient. A single gallon of fuel can get you, in a good car, something like 50 miles. That's insanely efficient, and driving it is maybe the easiest thing that you do on a daily basis.
There's no worry about throttle or which way your engine points or landing or keeping it balanced. You push one pedal to go faster, one to slow down and stop, and you twist a wheel. There's some other things, but that's pretty much it for the car. A flying car would be a huge interface, or a smart computer to handle it.
We don't have artificial wombs because the real ones already do everything pretty much as good as it's going to get. It gets oxygen and food to the fetus as it grows, it keeps it warm and relatively safe, it makes sure the mother is properly bonded with the fetus so that she doesn't go crazy and kill it, and if something goes wrong there is a massive backup system to keep everything working. The human body is incredibly resilient.
To properly manage an artificial womb you'd need an intense amount of power just to keep the computer process running so that chemicals remained in balance. If something goes wrong, the fetus is just dead, unless you have an even more complex back up system. There's no hormonal change in the mother or father because there's nothing in her to trigger it, which is a whole other can of worms.
In order to get an artificial womb that was as good as the original, you'd need to pretty much take the original model and just make it again, because it's about as good as it gets. The muscles holding in organs needs to be stronger, but even with the horrible rate of death in impoverished countries, 1 in 7 is fantastic numbers for pushing a living being out of a hole that is normally meant to fit something a little longer than a dollar bill and maybe the top half of an index finger wide.
Are we about to have a meta-drama-thread?
IT'S SRDD SURVIVOR SERIES!
I tell the truth! And all you people can't handle the truth!
vi_sucks! When I look at you, and I look at me, I see the sacrifices that have been made. You see, I sacrificed my whole life, my whole career, that's why I look as good as I do, that's why I'm a genetic freak!
Now when I look at you, the only sacrifice I see, is that when it came time to eat a cheeseburger, you ate a cheeseburger, with extra cheese, extra ketchup, and extra onions! When you ate four twinkies, you had FIVE!
>That's why we have a government, to take care of these larger issues that shouldn't be all in the hands of businesses.
I guess I just prefer that if we can use science to eliminate the need for government interference, we should. Because make no mistake, taking government money for maternity leave is inviting the government to dictate how you live your life. What if the government decides that the world is overpopulated and people should have only 2 kids, but you want a large family? Much harder to go against the grain when you need the government subsidy to have the kid you want.
>Women are pretty much always going to be at a disadvantage because they start bleeding between once a month to whatever it is with birth control. That isn't going away any time soon.
I think it will go away. Some women already take birth control primarily to regulate or eliminate their periods. I suspect in another few decades it'll be pretty much ubiquitious, and at some point we'll have figured out a permanent implant that goes in at puberty. And after that we'll just genetically engineer voluntary control over fertility into the human body.
>We don't have artificial wombs because the real ones already do everything pretty much as good as it's going to get.
The same could be said about just about every technological innovation in the history of man. Think of a dishwasher. The natural one works just fine. Hell, washing dishes by hand is always better than using a dishwasher cause you can focus on the stubborn and difficult stains. And yet we have dishwashers (even ones inferior to the 'natural' order) because we want to free up the time to do other things.
The point of an artificial womb isn't to be "better" than a real one. It would be to free up the mother so she can do other things instead of focusing 100% on carrying a kid. More than likely that means more time spent with her career.
But it could also be something as simple as being able to have a glass of wine a week before the kid is born. Or getting to have a kid and still go rock climbing every week.
And I do think there are certain places we can improve on the original. For example, we no longer need a birth canal at all. Just open up the entire thing for delivery. Can't do that on real person without risky surgery. And you can put in a window so you see the fetus as it grows. Imagine how much better medical diagnoses would get if the obstetrician could literally see the baby as it grows and didn't have to guess or use fuzzy ultrasound imagery.
Oh man let's go. I'm going to play this up. SRDD time. Give the fans a show for Survivor Series.
>I guess I just prefer that if we can use science to eliminate the need for government interference, we should.
This is a tremendously general statement that is also incredibly naive. You are also very specifically talking about technology, and while it might not seem like a huge distinction, just going "what if we science'd our way to a better future!" is a meaningless statement. Technology can be evaluated as practical or impractical. Science cannot be. Yes I'm being pedantic.
>Because make no mistake, taking government money for maternity leave is inviting the government to dictate how you live your life.
I already pay taxes that go to welfare. Wait do people not know this? Governments tell you how to live your life. This is an immutable fact of society, because at it's core a government says that you don't get to commit crime.
All maternity/paternity leave would mean is that healthcare or welfare can now be expanded to cover the months following childbirth and cover a period of time where one person in the family is unable to work. Okay cool. It's not going to lead to Brave New World. My evidence is literally every other country with paid maternity leave.
>What if the government decides that the world is overpopulated and people should have only 2 kids, but you want a large family?
There's not a whole lot stopping them from doing that now. It would still be easier to have a large family because the first two would cost less than they do right now because we don't have general paid maternity leave in the U.S.
>Much harder to go against the grain when you need the government subsidy to have the kid you want.
It's just maternity leave. You are not paid to be a stay at home mom. That's not what we're talking about, that would be an alternative income source used in a more permanent situation. We're talking about a period of time after birth in order to care for a child when it's at it's most vulnerable.
>I think it will go away. Some women already take birth control primarily to regulate or eliminate their periods.
They still get periods.
>I suspect in another few decades it'll be pretty much ubiquitious, and at some point we'll have figured out a permanent implant that goes in at puberty.
Doubtful. Birth control is a pain from everything I've heard, and it can really mess with people's hormones if they fuck it up. But again: they'll still get periods, just less of them.
>And after that we'll just genetically engineer voluntary control over fertility into the human body.
No we won't. Like not even a little bit. Genes are not magic.
>The same could be said about just about every technological innovation in the history of man.
No it can't. Rocks are objectively better at smashing someone's face than fingernails. Fire is much better at cooking food than nothing. Cars are better than walking in almost every way.
>Think of a dishwasher. The natural one works just fine. Hell, washing dishes by hand is always better than using a dishwasher cause you can focus on the stubborn and difficult stains.
The dishwasher was put on the market because washing dishes fucking sucks. Washing dishes takes a lot of time and effort and you have to do them all the time. They are a small part of our lives. "I want a way to wash this ceramic disk without spending half an hour or more actively doing it each night" is a different thought than "I want a baby grown outside of a human body."
>The point of an artificial womb isn't to be "better" than a real one. It would be to free up the mother so she can do other things instead of focusing 100% on carrying a kid.
Paternity leave then.
>More than likely that means more time spent with her career.
Also paternity leave.
>And I do think there are certain places we can improve on the original. For example, we no longer need a birth canal at all. Just open up the entire thing for delivery. Can't do that on real person without risky surgery. And you can put in a window so you see the fetus as it grows.
I bet there's all sorts of radiation that the mother's skin and flesh block from the extremely sensitive fetus growing inside of her.
You also missed my point about flying cars. An artificial womb is straight up impractical because going "we could look at this gross fetus in a jar and now there's no birth canal" are not worth the tremendous amount of resources that would go in to getting the first prototype working alone. We have a hard enough timing growing muscle tissue, an incredibly easy tissue to make, in a lab that spends millions of dollars just growing muscle tissue.
Why spend all of the money getting this shit up when we could just all sit down and be adults that recognize that we need to share the costs of children as a society? Yes there are sacrifices. There always are and always will be. Outside of being like "WOOOOO SCI-FI" there's no point approaching it with ideas that are not only so far in the future that even thinking about what society will be like then is pointless, but also ideas that are taken from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of technology and the human body is just a crazy waste of time.
For a fraction of the cost to even just get a working prototype that could grow a fetus for 3 weeks, you could improve birthing methods and dietary guides by vast amounts, or even make a robot that could safely deliver a baby every time. Or just use the money to make paid maternity and paternity leave a thing.
>You are also very specifically talking about technology, and while it might not seem like a huge distinction, just going "what if we science'd our way to a better future!" is a meaningless statement.
I don't think it is. I believe very strongly that human history has been a record of us doing precisely that. Using science to create better futures and better lives. And pregnancy, I think, is one area where science has already made great strides but with this specific advancement, could make even more.
>For a fraction of the cost to even just get a working prototype that could grow a fetus for 3 weeks, you could improve birthing methods and dietary guides by vast amounts, or even make a robot that could safely deliver a baby every time.
It's not an either or. You can both make pregnancy safer for mothers, as we have, and still explore options and do research into the viability of fetuses outside a human womb. And we have made pretty great strides in that regard too. Look at how much more viable premature births are these days. We will keep pushing back the limit at which we can keep a child alive without its mother until we don't need the physical mother carrying the child.
>Or just use the money to make paid maternity and paternity leave a thing.
It's not just a problem of money. It's a problem of time. If you aren't in the office working on your job, no matter how many subsidies the government hands out, that's time you cannot get back.
I'm not saying you're a crazy person but there's something very special about being pregnant, feeling the baby kick, etc. I don't even want kids but I'd love to feel what that's like. Most moms would not want to give up that experience.
Well, that's the kind of sacrifice you gotta make if you really want equal treatment. You can't have everything.
Really? I have to grow my baby in a pod if I want equal treatment?
What about every country in Western Europe (and Canada. And most civilized places other than America) that somehow manages to have decent maternity leave without this scifi option?
Except they don't result in equal treatment. At least not quite.
Those countries have maternity leave paid by the state. It's essentially insurance paid for by taxes while you are still working. The situation in the US isnt that much different. Its not as if people in the US don't get maternity leave ever. Its just not paid for by the national government.
Having your maternity leave paid by the national government says nothing about the total costs involved with taking off huge chunks of time from your career.
Taking time off to take care of your kids means not spending time at work advancing your career. That's an immutable fact of how the laws of physics works. Men have the option of choosing not to take time off while still having kids. Women don't have that option. And until that changes, they'll always be at a slight handicap.
> Except they don't result in equal treatment. At least not quite.
Actually most of them have paid maternity AND paternity leave, so they're pretty equal. At least compared to USA.
That's not what I mean.
But that's the way it is. I'm pretty sure that zero males who have given birth were denied their leave from work. Perfectly equal.
As far as the national government paying for it... it's a short term cost (which businesses love to cut) with a long term benefit (which businesses aren't interested in). Isn't that the exact reason we have a national government?
By equal treatment I was referring to the wage gap and the glass ceiling. Not the availability of time off. The point is that women and men can both choose to take time off from work, but only women are forced to. So if you have a population of women who all have to take the time and a population of men some of whom choose to take time off and some of whom choose not to, you'll see more career advancement in the male population.
Also, just as an aside, the US national govt isn't really the same as other countries. We tend toward greater local and state control. In a very real way, the idea of a national maternity leave is like the EU deciding to have a pan European maternity leave. Which it doesnt, as far as i know. Different states do have maternity leave laws on their own though.
I downvoted you because of your username.
His taste in text editors may be wrong, but that's no reason to be a dick like that