The difference with farmers and other occupations is that there's such a strong emotional bond. The land has been in the family for generations. Failure is simply not an option. When the end comes some can't emotionally handle it.
A steelworker or a coal miner may feel sadness at fifty that they have to start over, but they always saw the mill or mine as a necessary evil. The best option they had to provide for their family.
I have a friend who told me the story of his great grandfather losing a piece of his farm in the depression. My friend said we waited eighty years but we've brought it back into the family where it has always belonged. He got into an auction with a neighbor and clearly overpaid but he was so joyful. Almost like he paid a ransom to get his own child back.
But the rest of us better be grateful that they do it. The hours suck, the risk is high and the pay is low. If there wasn't such a strong emotional bond we'd pay a lot more for our food just to get people to do it.
This emotional attachment to the land creates a fundamental economic problem - inelasticity of supply. The uncomfortable reality is that the US is making too much food and has too many small farmers. Federal and state governments spend billions of dollars on farming subsidies, they create indirect subsidies through programmes like crop insurance, bioethanol mandates and food aid, but it still isn't enough to keep small farms profitable.
Unless we introduce some kind of guaranteed minimum income for farmers, their long-term prosperity depends, sadly, on farm closures. We simply have more farmers and more small farms than the market can possibly sustain.
Partially true, but partially not. If everyone grows the same crops then yes. However, there is quite a market for farmers to switch in to more esoteric crops that fetch a premium. However, this requires exposure to new markets, risk, and learning new things. Case in point is hemp, which I grow, and is quite a profitable crop. Eventually, it won't be, but for right now it's something that a lot of farmers could be switching in to and making better money.
Hemp is used to make a variety of commercial and industrial products including rope, textiles, clothing, shoes, food, paper, bioplastics, insulation, and biofuel.
Cheap food means farmers lose. Someone is being sent to the economic butchers block so the rest can have cheap food.
And why should food be cheap that farmers have to spend more than it takes to buy the food?
Regardless it’s moot as commodity crops in the USA is mostly (over)grown for feed or ethanol. It’s a disaster because the cost to environment and water is never taken into account.
And then there is california with its 45 billion dollar Ag income of speciality crops. Most of it is fruits and nuts going to export. 38-39 billion is production costs(at minimum wage rates). The actual food we eat is coming from South America and Mexico. It’s cheap because we are importing our food and not because we overproduce food crops.
Overproduction is also protection against famine and blight.
Produce doesn't keep very long; you can't keep a large store of it in case this year's crop fails. You also cannot suddenly ramp up production in the event of catastrophe; it takes months between planting and harvest. Instead, you have to produce much more than you think you need, so that in the unlikely event that your yield is half of what you anticipated, there is not a food crisis.
You also have to destroy the excess when it's not needed, so that you don't distort the market, or acclimatize it to extremely cheap food.
Deliberate overproduction is a good use of government funds. It stops people from dying.
That overproduction is protection against famine and blight would have been a valid point 100 years ago.
Most of what we overproduce is wasted. We import and export food now. We know how to preserve and process food now. Or converted into processed food. For example: high fructose corn syrup is everywhere. And it’s a lab created by product of our excess corn production. Overproduction and cheap food is causing disease and obesity and waste and environmental degradation.
We can synthesize food in fermentation tanks. We can grow food indoors and in containers and without soil. Having said that..it’s important distinguish between the various kinds of crops we grow..commodities like corn, wheat, rice, cotton, sugar beets, canola, soy etc. and then we have tomatoes and kale and herbs and spices. Everything can be frozen, dehydrated, processed and rationed. Every tilled field extracts a cost from the soil. Every pass of the tractor or every cross country trip to deliver goods is a fossil fuel expense. We haven’t figured ways to use renewable energy in Ag. We save water through drip tapes but we use mountains of plastic. Not to mention the tractor runs to lay it down and to remove it. We grow food without soil and save water but we use electricity with indoor productions.
No matter how you see it, production extracts a cost. Over production is more expensive. Over production a population that is growing exponentially costs even more. We should predict our needs(possible now), forecast expenses(possible now) and budget and ration resources..especially non renewable resources and not fritter them away with wasteful food over production.
So does the US Federal Government, which is the main reason why farm subsidies, although wasteful, are absolutely necessary for National Security.
The quickest way for a country/civilization to fall is by interruptions in food supply. The US is a large country with many people. If the food price increase sharply or if there's food scarcity, it will most certainly lead to social unrest of the kind we've never seen before.
It seems to me that if the point (or at least part of it) of government farm policy is to produce oversupply, you could argue that they set up subsidies to favor small operators.
A large quantity of small farms, with slightly different approaches to problems, slightly different crops, different sources of financing, local ownership sounds like it might be more reliable in the long run. Admittedly, the efficiency of the system would suffer a bit.
One region gets flooded or hit by a drought, and then produces essentially nothing. So you want N+M regional redundancy, where you can lose the output of M regions and the remaining N can produce enough for the whole.
Amartya Sen's work on the huge historical famines argues that they were essentially economic phenomena where there was enough food but not enough money to buy the food. In both the Bengal and Irish famines there were even food exports happening during the crisis.
I’m of the opinion that all national security goods and services should be supplied/funded/organised (delete as appropriate) by the government, even when doing so is unnecessarily expensive, as it’s bad to give a different government the power to crush your own.
Maybe so, but that does rather revert to mercantilism. Or, depending on how you interpret "supplied/funded/organised", nationalised agriculture which has pretty much only been seen in Communist states!
(also for most countries oil is a national security good that they have to import ... this has been a defining problem of the 20th century.)
There's like, a bunch of interconnected issues in agriculture. For instance:
1. Our [read 'us' as being either 'my country' or 'human civilization'] food supply needs to be sufficient to provide adequate nutrition to all living humans.
2. Our food supply needs to be robust against failures in production, transportation and distribution which could be regional, widespread, and last several months or years.
3. Our food supply needs reach all individuals, so that no individual person lacks adequate nutrition.
4. Our food supply needs to grow at a sufficient pace to match population growth.
5. Our food supply needs to be 'sustainable' [used in the sense of 'our agricultural practices shouldn't lead to future shortfalls' rather than 'environmentally friendly'].
6. Our food supply needs to be 'environmentally friendly' [as in, minimizing pollutants, energy costs, land use, and damage to native plant and animal species].
7. Our food supply needs to be 'ethical' [as in, the moral rights of the individuals who participate it and the animals which constitute it need to be respected; what moral rights the people and animals possess is left as an exercise to the reader].
8. Small Farmer Proposition: Individual farmers as well as corporations and state-owned organizations should be able to participate in agriculture.
9. Mercantilism Proposition: Rich countries should not be able to crush the agricultural sector of poor countries through protectionism.
This isn't intended as a strict ordering of priority, but I personally care a lot more about making sure everyone is fed than some of the other issues, and I'll note that if we're not producing enough food, the inadequacy of our food distribution and feeding programs is kind of a moot point. My very-controversial opinion is that that famines are very, very bad and that we should heavily over-invest in preventing them. There are obviously limits to all investments, but it's one of the Four Horsemen for crying out loud.
Unsurprisingly, fixing all of the problems with agriculture is a complex problem, or else we wouldn't be talking about it because it would already be solved, and it's probably going to require many solutions, policies, regulations, technologies and programs to fix, and many of those are going to create more problems that will have to be addressed in turn.
But policy-wise, I think you really want the biggest, dumbest, least likely to fail solutions for the biggest problem of "no famines". Encouraging over-production creates other problems, like depressing wages for farmers and farm workers, both domestic and internationally, but it does a really, really good job of keeping famine at bay, at least domestically. Even in the ways it is prone to gaming or corruption, it still provides a more than adequate food supply. [This is a risk with provisions built on stockpiling; it is much easier for corrupt individuals associated with the program to just not stockpile and pocket the money, or sell stockpiles, or otherwise not do their job, and it can go on for years without being discovered, until you need those stockpiles and it turns out they never existed.]
So even if over-production creates other problems, or is "economically inefficient", I'd much rather see over-production continue, and additional policies, regulations and programs be added to address other concerns, both the problems over-production creates, and the problems it doesn't address, like the adequate distribution of food.
Nor does it help the obese people, of whom we have an increasing number. The causes of obesity are complicated, but at least some of it is due to poor-quality food.
We grow a lot of food, but a lot of the same thing: starch (maize, potatoes, wheat) and meat (beef, chicken, pork). Those were great when the problem was to few calories, but that stopped being the case a long time ago. We still eat as if we were starving.
It would be great if it were easier to encourage farmers to grow a variety of non-starchy vegetables -- including having quick-service restaurants that would serve them. That would take a pretty substantial reconfiguration of the American diet, but it would be better for us.
I have some friends who are small family farmers. God it's tough. I think part of the problem is an ingrained social expectation that success in farming stems from hard work. But work is no match for the efficiency of capital and the economy of scale. As a result, the small farms are being driven under. There's a huge social stigma attached to losing a farm -- you didn't work hard enough.
My one friend pays more for his material inputs (seeds, fertilizer, etc.) and gets paid less for his crop, than the bigger farms. He's got about a hundred side hustles going.
Like you say about the emotional bond, I know at least two people who live on roads named after their families.
I still fantasize about an in-between solution where farmers could do normal work and enjoy just a bit more predictable output. Large scale seems to bring as many problems as benefits and it's quite soul-less. I'd give up a bit of my diet if I had to.
> The hours suck, the risk is high and the pay is low. If there wasn't such a strong emotional bond we'd pay a lot more for our food just to get people to do it.
Are you sure about that? Median farm household income is way higher than normal median household income [1] and farmers get a huge amount of subsidies at the state and federal level.
You need to really know the stats to understand them.
Big Midwest corn operations are like oil. They rake it in when prices are high and crash hard when they fall.
Smaller family operations from 100-1000 acres are all dying or dead now. In the 1970s, a 50 acre dairy operation was a viable business. Today, forget it.
Corporations come in and buy farms that are underwater and then lease them to their previous owners. So farmers are working "their land", but aren't working for themselves and they have rent payments to make.
> In recent years, slightly more than half of farm households have had negative farm income and therefore rely on off-farm income to support their well-being
1) A huge number of farmers deliberately run their farms to try to show a net loss for tax reasons. 2) You're going to have to explain what off-farm jobs all these farmers have that provide them with 3-4x the median income in the places where they live, but somehow they have really rough lives because they own a farm.
> The hours suck, the risk is high and the pay is low. If there wasn't such a strong emotional bond we'd pay a lot more for our food just to get people to do it.
I'm not sure this is the case. It seems like we'd just move even further towards large agribusiness and automation and away from the mythos of the yeoman farmer. Agriculture is far from a free market, and this nostalgia is one of the reasons why (along with more concrete, rational reasons like national security). The idea that a reduction in labor supply would cause prices to rise isn't as much of a given in a market like this, especially after the market shifts to adjust. I find it very hard to believe that the type of family farmer-owner you describe is a necessary pillar of our food production system.
> The difference with farmers and other occupations is that there's such a strong emotional bond. The land has been in the family for generations. Failure is simply not an option. When the end comes some can't emotionally handle it.
I wonder if there is anything more emotionally negative about losing a farm than losing any other multigenerational family business.
Farms tend to be lived on. When a farm is lost, it's not just the family business going, but the longtime family home and maybe recreation area.
I'd think it's more emotionally negative than the closure of the family mine, steel mill, or other such businesses where (typically) you don't have generations of children growing up on-site, playing around, and developing fond childhood memories. It's not just the dangerous workplaces that will have a reduced family connection when compared to a farm. Generations of kids probably won't spend as much time in the family medical clinic, law office, bank, design firm, etc. as they would on the family farm.
Maybe this is closer to the emotional negativity of losing a farm: after clientele dwindles, the multigenerational family restaurant with an upstairs flat has to be sold off. The family must move away, and now the space is an Applebee's.
People lose their homes during times of financial turmoil all the time, and it's not a happy thing for anyone. It's possible this is all different for farmers, but the simplest explanation is that these farmer-specific explanations are all speculation based on the mythology surrounding farming.
The thing about farmers' suicide rates being uniquely bad has been debunked a bit, although the numbers are undeniably quite bad. It just seems to me a lot of unnecessary speculative baggage is being added onto the whole thing for some reason.
A family farm is a bit more than a business though. It's someones career, skill set, home, upbringing, lifestyle and local culture. It's all encompassing in a way that differs from most other businesses and careers. How do you recover from the failure of something so central to your life and so central to who you are?
I would imagine he is referring to attaching your self-worth to external objects. External objects can change and if you lose such an anchor that you have made a pillar of identity - one can become destabilized. Some personalities/mind can't "pull up" (out of it) and frequently suffer the Porkins fate (death, suicide, depression, etc).
At a fundamental level, because we all need to eat. My wife and I can cut each others' hair (though we may be less than pleased with the results), but I can't grow enough food for us.
We all need to eat. But we don't all need to eat food produced by small farms. We all need to wear clothes, but we don't all need hand-stitched wool coats. We all need shelter, but we don't all need bespoke architecture and locally sourced organic timber framing.
I think I understand the sentiment, but I don't agree with it. I am not grateful to small farmers, at least, not especially. I suppose I'm glad that everyone is playing their part, but I feel this way about anyone contributing to our society. They sell nothing that I cannot get just as good and cheaper from large and industrial farms.
I work on something that I would argue many people "need" in their life. But I don't expect anyone to be grateful to me. Of course they shouldn't. I'm doing my work for my own benefit, mostly. I think very little about the end users whose lives are made slightly easier by my work. I am certainly not doing my work out of a sense of altruism toward their well-being. I suspect that most farmers are the same. The production is too far removed from the consumption. This is not therapy, massage, teaching, or housekeeping. This is business.
To the extent small farmers do think of me, I hope they realize that I would rather pay a dollar less for the same eggs, even if it means they don't get to keep working their ideal job. It's a little sad, but I have bills, and childcare, and rent to pay. Those things are no less important than the expenses of a farmer.
I primarily meant farmers in general, not small farmers (though that may have been an error, given the context).
But you might want to re-think your position, because you can also be on the receiving end. That big egg grower? He may feed the chickens exotic chemicals if it means they lay more frequently, in order to produce your one-dollar-cheaper eggs. Those same chemicals may reach any females in your household, either through the eggs or the groundwater, and may do interesting things to their monthly cycles. And so on with other chemicals and other kinds of farmers. It might be worth a buck to support smaller farmers, presuming that they see their customers as human beings who can't be fed that stuff.
Farmers don't feed PCB and DDT to animals. Your exposure to those chemicals through food is based on ground and water concentrations where the animals are raised, not really in farming practices.
If large farmers are using unsafe growing techniques, that is an issue for legislation and litigation, IMO. It's not something individual consumers ought to be required to signal about in their purchasing preferences.
That being said, it seems your idea is a counterfactual. If it isn't, I'd love to know, but I don't see any evidence after brief searching that there are health benefits to eggs from small farms.
Actually no, it's a problem for you since you are eating what they are producing. By the time litigation is done you are already affected.
We are not a microserice entity where each part _only_ needs to know their bit. Each person is expected to get by themselves which means that we need to care about how things are done.
It's why we try hard to educate our kids to know how things work, but as was said, production is separated from consumption, which to me is a big hurdle.
Industrialized agriculture has been a miracle for feeding billions of people, but also incredibly damaging to the planet. It’s also resulted in torturous conditions for animals in feedlots. Animals may not possess our intellect, but they certainly feel emotions...
To me, it’s worth the extra dollar for the eggs if it supports a more sustainable model of farming. Food production is at the heart of our society, yet we’ve become distanced from it.
The cheap clothes, the cheap food — they’re not actually cheap. We’ve just ignored the cost of the externalities. The polluted waterways, full of nitrogen from industrial farms; the antibiotics; the rising co2 levels from damaged pasture that no longer sequesters carbon, and the trucks and airplanes that ship out-of-season produce across the world...
The top-rated comment on this article, describing how obviously farmers aren't really committing suicide because a survey was bad, that's in bad faith.
Perhaps, but please don't respond to bad comments with more bad comments. That only makes this place worse. The site guidelines point another way:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Maybe you don't owe another commenter better, but you owe this community better. And if you know some truth that others don't know, you owe the truth better, too: to help people understand it instead of discrediting it and giving them a reason to dismiss it.
An ag banker I know, has had the conversations with customers explaining that they would be better off taking their equity, putting it in mutual funds and working as a greeter in WalMart.
The problem is one of scale. If a small farmer is underleveraged, its simply not worth the time to farm. The return on equity is too low. If he levers up too much, then every season is literally betting the farm.
(With the caveat that the size of the equity stake and rate of leverage vary very much from crop to crop. Grains are very different than fruits and vegetables)
There is a theory about the suicide rate among farmers (which has always been high) that I'm not sure I completely believe, but I don't think it's nonsense. It goes something like:
Farmers (well, I'm speaking mainly about livestock farmers here) spend their lives dealing with death, and doing cost/benefit analysis. When it's time to send an animal to slaughter, they do so. When the vet says some expensive procedure is not likely to work, they kill the animal, even though emotional relationships are built with what is also their capital. They have the weapons to deal with it.
So when a farm is failing, and they are in late middle age, they are more comfortable than average saying, ok, I gave it a try, it didn't work out, I can't start over doing something else. The skill I have spent my life learning is when to give up, and I've got the tool to do it.
The emotional de-attachment is needed for many people I expect. I once raised a small herd of bottle calves. The day I sold them to market is the day I dropped any dream of raising livestock.
That really only seems to apply to livestock farmers. It seems more likely that it has to do with the all encompassing nature of that kind of life. A farm is a business, home, career, lifestyle, and culture. If something so central to who you are fails with no hope of recovery, what do you do?
"[The 2016 cdc study] counted a lot of farmworker suicides as farmer suicides...so what's really happening is there is a suicide epidemic in migrant farmworkers. Through the magic of data-fudging it became a rash of farmer suicides, and then through the magic of the farm lobby farmworker suicides became a federal opportunity for funding farmers. Who when they're in legitimate financial trouble already have a thing we all have called bankruptcy law..."
Sarah Taber had a recent twitter thread also questioning the therapy efforts as possibly ineffective if those with power in a farming community exert toxic traits: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102961401507782658
Bankruptcy law is a solution to the financial problem of "owing money" but in the case of a farmer you also own the land and means of production, and bankruptcy means forced sales of it, and it effective destroys that lifestyle for you, forever (nobody is starting a farm from scratch these days).
I never thought about that part of it. As a programmer you can't really take away my means of making a living via liquidation of assets. But farmers and I imagine many other professions, this is a very different scenario.
I have to think that they wouldn't want to remove someone's ability to pay their debts. But I also imagine that when you get to bankruptcy, it isn't about that anymore.
Eligible small farmers and fishermen can go through Chapter 12 bankruptcy to restructure their payments rather than selling off the assets they need to stay self-employed.
The limits for Chapter 12 are quite low when you look at the consolidation of farms that's happened in the last 10 years.
Corn land in Iowa runs, say, 5-10k/acre depending on quality and location. 640 acres per square mile. 3.8 million on the low end to buy one square mile...but the Chapter 12 debt limit is $4,153,150.
That doesn't count the 6 figure capex for the equipment, buildings, and the 5 figure spend for seeds,
It's typically at the 2-3000 acre level where farms become economically viable.
It's basically impossible to go from the city to a commodity corn, pig, or cow farmer.
Disclaimer: I have been involved in efforts to increase the limit.
I followed your link. She describes the problem as "predatory communities eating themselves alive". That sounds far from objective and painfully lacking in empathy.
What's your point in saying that here? That suicidal farmers don't deserve empathy because of the inequities in American agriculture? Who is innocent? By that standard we should all kill ourselves, no?
Did anyone else listen to the audio version of this article? Is it a really good text-to-speech engine reading it, or is it a real person? I feel a little bad asking because I'm probably insulting a real VO artist by asking.
The reasons I suspect that it's a machine are:
1. The voice sounds really familiar.
2. The person (or machine, but henceforth I'll just say person) read the names of the authors but never gave his own name.
3. The person had unusually long but consistent pauses between sentences.
4. The person read a few clauses strangely in a way that I don't think a real person, or at least a native English speaker, would have. The clauses were a little strangely worded, but the intent becomes clear as soon as you read the whole sentence. So although it's not impossible that a real person and native speaker would have gotten it wrong, they would have immediately reread the sentence with the correct inflection.
5. I can't imagine a real person reading such an emotional piece in such an unaffected manner.
All that said, if it is text-to-speech, it's the best I've ever heard. But you can see how I feel bad about saying all this. It implies this is either a fantastic text-to-speech program or a questionable VO artist. If this was a real person and that person is reading this, I apologize. I mean no disrespect.
How come? I think it'd be likely that there will eventually be a hybrid text-to-speech engine that is trained on the narrator, and can continue where they left off.
I haven't listened to the audio yet (can't do it right now), but I guess professional voice workers for non-fiction texts tend to use a neutral, maybe slightly robotic voice because that's the industry standard. It's similar with news announcers on TV or on the radio. The professionalism removes the human element.
Businesses use tension metrics to make sure that their primary KPIs are still working, like new users signed up vs user retention after 180 days (to prevent the marketing department from going all in on unsustainable user “growth”).
Perhaps we should do the same with GDP, since as income inequality grows it can continue to grow while suffering increases
To add, the CDC does an amazing job of making the whole of mortality stats available with the fast take being at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm - they also do a weekly report
I think the issue you are pointing at is that you want people to care more about these kinds of statistics, and less about GDP. That's a very different and much harder problem to solve than the one implied by you first post (that we don't measure them in the first place).
When one side is in power, they point to the metrics that make things seem great, and when out of power, they do the reverse.
Republicans in 2017 suddenly talked about how great stock returns / GDP / unemployment were doing when they spent 8 years saying they didn't reflect the true economy and the jobless rate was abominable. Now democrats are focusing on median income growth / GINI index / student loan default rates etc after saying everything was great for years. Statistics are just used as tools to accomplish policy goals and win arguments.
The problem with farming that is unique is that you can't get out. You can't get out without making horrendous choices about animals that you probably love. You're probably struggling mightily and so the farm has taken on a significant amount of degradation that is hard to explain to the future buyers. Things are probably broken all over the place, things are in desperate need of repair and you live with them because you have to, you have nothing. A farm is not like a poor person's house being in disrepair, a farm is a massive property that is constantly depreciating with no funds to stave off issues. How do you invite people in to even begin to solve the problem. You don't own the farm, the farm owns you
Few years ago there was a documentary about the rise of banks in France during the 20th century. One segment talked about country side spread of agencies, with farmes being interviewed. It was tears, struggle and borderline suicide thoughts on tape. Just like today. I don't get how the thing that gives us most of our food has always, it seems, been so harsh.
The thing about agriculture is there is /a lot/ of labor supply. While those with the appropriate degrees and institutional knowledge may do it better essentially anyone with fertile land is capable of subsistence farming.
Wealth is fundamentally something produced - absent generations of labor and progress things tend to be fairly bleak by default unless they are exceptionally fortunate.
I work with suicidal physicists and programmers. We're all women. The men aren't doing great either but that's because they're expected to succeed and are given a disproportionate amount of work. We're expected to fail, left out of meetings relevant to our duties, and wither into obscurity with the excuse "well I asked everybody" time and again, forgotten and excluded.
But everybody has good intentions. God forbid I forget that
> The men aren't doing great either but that's because they're expected to succeed and are given a disproportionate amount of work. We're expected to fail...
how can you be so dismissive of men? I am a physics graduate student and I spend literally every waking minute of my life in lab. It's really embarrassing to admit, but it's been 3 years since I've had sex or had a social life outside of lab. This is self-imposed - I'm chasing a dream, but surely 3 years of complete isolation, devoid of intimacy of any kind can at least compare to being "left out of meetings"?
also as a Phd student you shouldn't expect to be "given work". You make research proposals and execute them, no?
Hey man, as a former STEMy grad student to a current one: Take care of yourself first.
Academia is a lot of things, but Feynman's era is long gone, the golden age of physics is in the past now. I don't know you, and I don't know your situation. But I have known a lot of people that may be like you, and I have know a lot of situations that may be like yours.
Generally, these days, grad school isn't about the work, it about the network. If you want to stay in the ivory tower, networking is your job. If you want to get out and do something else, go through the classes and just learn that stuff. Get the experience, but do not put your soul in this, you will not find the rewards you are looking for in a lab. Hell is other people, yes, but so is Heaven.
From this teeny-tiny bit of a comment that you left, almost nothing to reasonably go on really, it sounds like you need to get out of the lab. It sounds like you want a partner, a girl/boyfriend, and you should probably do that, and it is ok to do that. Save the python script, put down the polarizer, go to ask someone to a dinner. If your advisor freaks, so be it, they aren't a person that you should be trusting if they don't hold your well being above the work.
Do not put your advisor's career first, put yourself first. It's ok to do that.
Yeah, I understand what you are saying. I have a long break scheduled for the end of June where I hope to step back and get a look at the bigger picture...
> I am a physics graduate student and I spend literally every waking minute of my life in lab. It's really embarrassing to admit, but it's been 3 years since I've had sex or had a social life outside of lab. This is self-imposed - I'm chasing a dream, but surely 3 years of complete isolation, devoid of intimacy of any kind can at least compare to being "left out of meetings"?
Woah there. Your lack of sex is NOT my problem. And you're also describing almost exactly my experience in grad school, for most of my time there. Get out of the lab. Make some friends and blow off some steam. Maybe hire a sex worker, if that's such a priority for you.
The situation at my company is ridiculous. Men are literally being assigned to do work on the very topic of my PhD thesis. They're bewildered by the complexity, and the smart ones come to me for help. The others just wing it, and get shit results quickly.
I'm not a PhD student. I have a PhD and a decade of professional experience. I make research proposals and they're silently handed to men, and I'm kept out of the loop until they get stuck and drop a stinking-hot emergency in my lap. My proposals include reasonable research outlooks and timelines. But they ignore my expertise and expect me to produce 6 months of research in a week. Which could be entirely avoided by inviting the subject expert to meetings about the research she kicked off.
My point about the overworked men is that they're working hard but not smart, while I'm under-utilized. We'd all be happier, the company would be more successful, if I was kept in the loop. Sexism is bad for everyone, oddly enough.
I never said it was your problem, in fact I mentioned that my problems were "self-imposed". I simply stated that I have problems that exist as well, with comparable, or worse severity to yours, despite being male. I asked how you could so easily dismiss these problems. You then promptly dismissed my problems. Maybe people don't want to work with you because you have no social skills.
Also the solution to your problems is a lot less drastic than “hire a sex worker”, it’s doing the more common action of leaving your job.
Maybe the response wasn't great, but "what about men" can get tiring to hear every single time anyone says something that non-exclusively affects women.
I recently moved back into academia. An internal equipment funding call, and all of the University’s calls, required at least a 40% gender balance.
As a new faculty member I had to scramble to find researchers in other departments with similar interests to mine and to join up with on a proposal. I had to trawl through their websites to specifically find women and it felt like stalking and it made me uncomfortable. Emailing these women felt creepy and selfish.
However I want to work with anyone I can. Were it not for this specific requirement I would happily had taken the time to contact people and get to know others organically.
Ultimately it’s nothing compared to the despondency you describe and I did get in touch with some great people that I hope to work with in the future. Perhaps this experience was necessary if jarring.
I cannot offer you anything other than good intentions. I’m an engineer and I work with fluid mechanics. I want to work with the people who do the actual work, not the parasites who do all the talking.
> We're expected to fail, left out of meetings relevant to our duties, and wither into obscurity with the excuse "well I asked everybody" time and again, forgotten and excluded.
This sounds like the experience of almost every employee in every industry. Very, very few people get to work on truly influential and interesting problems. And from what I've seen at several big companies, no one simply gets asked to do that kind of work (in a meeting or otherwise). If you want to do that kind of work, you have to find a way to contribute yourself. If you wait for "duties" to be assigned to you, you'll get assigned the work no one else wants to do.
A man who didn't finish high school is over six times more likely to die by suicide than a college-educated woman. However bad things feel for you and your colleagues, they are vastly worse for working-class men.
Everyone has access to the article via sci-hub. Men are three to four times more likely to die by suicide than a woman with equivalent educational attainment.
>But everybody has good intentions. God forbid I forget that
On one hand I get the idea of trying to assume positive intent because wrongly assuming negative intent can make a situation much worse, but I still hate the idea.
First, it gives negative intent the ability to hide and pretend to be positive intent. Not many people will do this, but the ones who do can use it to great effect and cause significant damage they won't be held accountable for.
Second, it contradicts our standard actions elsewhere. If a stranger asks a kid if they need a ride, do we tell the kid to assume positive intent? No, we inform them to assume negative intent. We measure the situation of either option on a case by case basis and only then determine what is safe to assume (and in the example I give, it is more prudent to assume negative intent).
Third, it has an implicit idea that positive intent is good enough. That isn't always the case. Sometimes it is, but especially when it comes to leaders in an organization, specifically those with power and compensation to match being a leader, the demand is higher than just trying to be positive. We need people who have the knowledge and experience to do more than just having positive intent.
When you higher a security expert, do you hire someone who will try to achieve security and count that as good enough, or is the demand for their to be realized results and failing to achieve those results lead to negative consequences unless there is adequate explanation.
When someone is parenting a child, is trying good be a good parent enough, or do we demand a certain level of competence in parenting and remove children from those who fail to reach a certain level?
Fourth, there is a double standard in application. Every time someone tells me to assume positive intent, they were assuming I didn't already have the positive intent in doing so. And dare you point it out, you will be seen as assuming negative intent about their assuming negative intent. This alone isn't really a major issue, but it generally represents a larger double standard on application of such rules.
intent matters when you judge a person, but not when you judge their actions. the bad parent is a good example. if someone tries hard to be a good parent, but can't actually take care of their child, it might be necessary to remove the child from that situation, but we might first see if there isn't a way to help that person fulfill their parental duties. on the other hand, if a parent harms their child through malice, not only would we want to place the child in a different home, but we might pursue additional punitive action against the parent.
intent can't separate actions from their necessary consequences, but it is important to consider before imposing additional consequences on a person.
I was left out of important meetings, asked questions that no one answered and would get in trouble for not knowing something from a meeting I wasn’t invited to. Super fun.
Alentejo, the part of the country where I work, has the greatest suicide rate in the country (~28 suicides/100k in the coast region, 19 suicides/100k in the interior region, when the national average is around 10 suicides/100k).
Some say isolation, ageing alone, the economic crisis and poverty and unemployment are to blame. I suspect alcohol consumption has a lot to do with it.
Just a few days ago someone I knew ended his own life. I was away visiting family, and sadly I could not attend the funeral. He knew my great grandfather. I believe he was sick and didn't want to suffer anymore.
>I believe he was sick and didn't want to suffer anymore.
Just out of morbid curiosity: if you were in this situation -- quite old, quite sick, the very fabric of your body reminding you it's time to go, wouldn't it make sense?
With a spouse, there's obvious pressure not to. Without one, I feel like I'd do it. Ideally, I'd go somewhere where assisted suicide's legal so that I can end things neatly -- much bureaucracy, such dignity. uwu Not have aid workers find some messy or creepy corpse and depress the locals. (At $1,500[0], though, that may be a luxury.)
It could make sense, but I would definitely not do it the way he did. He left a family behind, and his business, and no explanation for his decision.
I talked to some local people about it, and it seems his disease was treatable. I don't know if he was in pain, but I do know he was still working as usual until the day he took his life.
I see you. I hope things get better. Please do not harm yourself, you are valuable and you matter. The people you work with do not define who you are, and neither does their abhorrent behavior.
There's a gender paradox with suicide. Men die very much more often than women in most western countries, but women have much higher rates of self harm and self-reported suicidality.
This is a complex phenomena.
But if women start using more lethal methods we will see the ratio of male:female deaths by suicide change.
To prevent suicide you want to address the misery that causes people to feel suicidal, and since women report similar levels of misery we need to give them some focus, and that focus is currently weak in research and prevention efforts.
>There's a gender paradox with suicide. Men die very much more often than women in most western countries, but women have much higher rates of self harm and self-reported suicidality.
I've heard women attempt three times as much as men, but how much of that is explained by the fact that once you complete, you can no longer attempt. Had every one who succeeded failed, how many more attempts would they have added to the total?
It is kinda like the paradox where planes should have armor in the places they don't get shot, because the planes shot in those places are the ones which crash and are never in the data set to measure.
In integrating to highly male fields, straddling the mindfuck of "when am I being too excluded due to my gender" vs. "when am I being too included due to my gender" must be salient too. On top of the normal traumas like impostor syndrome, adding that valence of paranoia and political intrigue to your work life can't be healthy.
I get reminded of the situation of domestic violence. Both men and women self-report the same amount of being victims, but women uses less lethal violence and thus die more from domestic violence compared to men.
The method matter when it comes to outcomes. With suicide it means men die more, with domestic violence it mean women die more.
Addressing the misery that causes people to cause violence against themselves or others is a good idea. What ever priority we want to use for one is likely a good choice for the other.
So you think women die less often from suicide because because they are less competent at executing it? That seems very unlikely to me. While I am open to the idea that different sexes might be better or worse at certain things, suicide seems simple enough to be mastered by both men and women.
> Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.8 times more often among males than among females in 2008, and 1.7 times in 2015.[4][5][6] In the western world, males die by suicide three to four times more often than do females.[4][7] This greater male frequency is increased in those over the age of 65.[8] Suicide attempts are between two and four times more frequent among females.[9][10][11] Researchers have attributed the difference between attempted and completed suicides among the sexes to males using more lethal means to end their lives.[7][12][13] The extent of suicidal thoughts is not clear, but research suggests that suicidal thoughts are more common among females than among males, particularly in those under the age of 25.[11][14]
> Then why do you expect women will start using more effective methods?
Because we are seeing the beginnings of method substitution in the data, especially for older women.
> Why are they not using them now?
We don't know, which is why it's a complex phenomenom.
We can make guesses. We can guess that women find it easier to access support than men, that women are less isolated than men and so more likely to be found after an attempt, that the elements of contagion around suicide and self-harm prime men and women differently so they use different methods.
I could see that being possible as gender roles drift towards more unisex as part of existing trends. A dark side effect of a good thing. As for why women's suicide methods tend to leave "prettier" more intact corpses as opposed to self-obliterative overkill that makes a horrid mess.
It seems strange at first that concern for apperance and tidyness but given that suicides usually involve skewed priorities.
At my place of work, a tech company with expressly progressive values, we've done a survey. The statistics show a very sharp distinction between men and women. You should ask my management -- who keeps promoting men and shutting out women. We've got some women rising in the ranks: hr, technical writing, marketing. But never on the R&D side.
No no, that wouldn't be generous. Remember, they all have good intentions.
This might not sound honest, but it's how I'm expected to talk
Loving the downvotes. I've literally been reprimanded for pointing out a pattern of sexist behavior -- 'cause apparently, counting to three before bringing it up to management is SO unfair
Your original comment seems tangentially related at best. Gender issues, physicists, programmers, office politics... while the article is about farmers, economics, maybe genetics. I get you work with suicidal individuals, but beyond that superficial observation I don't see how what you originally wrote contributes. Maybe I'm just too thick. If you'll excuse me for saying so, you also seem to be spoiling for a fight.
FWIW just-barely-related top level comments tend to attract some downvotes.
fwiw, I wouldn't put too much stock in the responses here; you're likely seeing the HN crowd's version some of the same phenomena you are experiencing in the workplace. A sincere statement is picked apart, minimized, and denied.
All of it sucks, and while I do not know your situation much, I'd say certainly keep on the lookout for better environments, and very specifically: find good/directional questions to ask in interviews that give you some leading indicators. I've worked for companies that seemed awesome at interview-time and then turned out to be toxic hell-holes. No company will say "we have a toxic culture"; you have to ask the right questions more subtly to get that info. (I wish I knew what those questions are; I haven't had to endure an interview process in many years; yes I realize how lucky I am; maybe others have suggestions?)
Not sure how many options you have, but keep them all open, the positive ones anyway, and I wish you the best.
To me it looks like you're being downvoted for standing up for the company and their false "progressive values" stance. The parent suggested that you meant the values were fake, and you responded by defending the term "progressive values".
You're probably just not being clear, but it looks like you agree with them. Just because they think they're being progressive doesn't mean they actually are.
edit - there is a vicious little set of incentives in certain corporate environments that almost guarantees bullying and fucked up mind games unless the manager is some kind of a saint. Mix stack ranking and any kind of external weighting on a manager and they will comply with the weighting by hiring the person they can get to fail the stack ranking so as not to screw with their project team. And unless this person is lucky enough to be oblivious, they have just entered hell.
We get hired because we're undeniably brilliant. But then we aren't actually welcome in the social fabric, which is more than 80% male. I've been on a few hiring panels and contrary to a sibling comment's implication, the hiring process is quite biased. Though progressive, the company doesn't have anything resembling diversity-aware hiring practices. "The best candidate gets the job" is the rule, but when "cultural fit" is a significant consideration in a heavily male dominated department, we continue to hire many more men than women.
Physicists? Are you by any chance in embedded systems? Where are you, and are you willing to relocate? I know at least one healthy embedded environment in the Salt Lake area.
Yeah, we have only one woman programmer on our team of 14. She's also one of the superstars. (In most interviews, we ask questions because we wanted to find out what the candidate knows. In her interview, we asked questions because we wanted to learn things.)
Somebody who knows they're making a diversity hire, generally (regardless of the actual quality of the candidate, which somebody making this decision probably never bothered to consider).
Feral pigs are menaces and non-native species. We should thank the people that shoot and kill them. Most are eaten anyway, because -- if the ecosystem is healthy enough -- they're quite good.
Turkey are native species, but hunting is highly regulated, and given the stiff punishment for poaching, it is doubtful the person in the article was attempting to poach. That being said, Turkey are hardly endangered; they're like pigeons.
Also, equating hunting with hatred of 'sodomites' is just ignorance on your part.
A steelworker or a coal miner may feel sadness at fifty that they have to start over, but they always saw the mill or mine as a necessary evil. The best option they had to provide for their family.
I have a friend who told me the story of his great grandfather losing a piece of his farm in the depression. My friend said we waited eighty years but we've brought it back into the family where it has always belonged. He got into an auction with a neighbor and clearly overpaid but he was so joyful. Almost like he paid a ransom to get his own child back.
But the rest of us better be grateful that they do it. The hours suck, the risk is high and the pay is low. If there wasn't such a strong emotional bond we'd pay a lot more for our food just to get people to do it.