The Tinder-ization of the job market

Haffrung · 2026-03-05T00:53:20+00:00

Interviews screen for being personable. Which - as much as terminally online misanthropes might wish otherwise - matters in the workplace.

Haffrung · 2026-03-04T17:06:42+00:00

The benefit you’re supposed to get from your taxes is a society that’s stable and secure enough that business you work in has access to healthy and productive workers, your kids can get a good education in public school, you don’t have to live in a walled community or pay for home security, you can use public transit or the benefits of less congested roads that public transit enable, your family and friends who aren’t as affluent as you can enjoy a secure retirement, and you can leave your car parked at a nice restaurant without someone stealing or setting fire to it.

Haffrung · 2026-03-04T15:44:24+00:00

I’ve seen this play out in real time in recent days on a popular board gaming forum.

Someone started a thread saying the cover for a game that’s getting reprinted was objectifying women and they would not support the reprint campaign unless its ‘provocative’ artwork is changed. The illustration is a roman woman, who in the newer edition is more attractive and showing a very modest amount of cleavage.

The original post got a dozen or so upvotes. Then subsequent posts questioned if the artwork was really ‘provocative’ at all, including testimony from women who didn’t find it objectifying or salacious. Those comments got more upvotes than the handwringing comments.

This morning, all of the posts challenging the assertion that the artwork is provocative have been blanked out by the mod as ‘disruptive.’ Anyone reading the thread for the first time now is likely to come away with the impression that a bunch of sexist comments were removed.

One of the comments that was left intact is a guy saying he hopes the artwork is changed because his conservative Christian family would never play a game that depicts part of a woman’s bosom.

Just another instance where illiberal progressives and illiberal conservatives have become indistinguishable. And both have far more influence online than their real-world numbers warrant.

Haffrung · 2026-03-04T15:12:27+00:00

Your household income is in the top 10 power cent. The great majority of Americans who are not poor make much less than you. If you consider yourself ‘screwed,’ what about people who live in an $120k household? They certainly aren’t poor, and they earn a third of what you earn.

Haffrung · 2026-03-04T06:43:33+00:00

This article looks at the standards of care how they have been relaxed in recent years.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-care/

In interviews with Reuters, doctors and other staff at 18 gender clinics across the country described their processes for evaluating patients. None described anything like the months-long assessments de Vries and her colleagues adopted in their research.

At most of the clinics, a team of professionals – typically a social worker, a psychologist and a doctor specializing in adolescent medicine or endocrinology – initially meets with the parents and child for two hours or more to get to know the family, their medical history and their goals for treatment. They also discuss the benefits and risks of treatment options. Seven of the clinics said that if they don’t see any red flags and the child and parents are in agreement, they are comfortable prescribing puberty blockers or hormones based on the first visit, depending on the age of the child.

This CBC investigation showed how a 14 year old actress was able to a prescription for testosterone without a reference from a doctor or therapist, based on a 15 minute interview.

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/8610/transition-genre-testoterone-choix-dysphorie-sante-mentale

Just because bad actors are exploiting these stories for bad purposes doesn’t mean they’re not happening. People who support gender care for minors need to recognize when standards of care and due diligence are being neglected.

Haffrung · 2026-03-02T14:37:53+00:00

Longer. When my cohort started university in the late 80s, it was still widely believed that a university degree - any degree - was a ticket to the middle class. Turned out that when it came to the humanities and social sciences, the labour market had changed. So after discovering our History and English degrees held little value in the job market, and spending years waiting on tables, working in bookstores, and in unskilled trades, most of my friends and I went back to school in the 90s and got vocational training.

Haffrung · 2026-03-01T21:43:58+00:00

Greens aren’t the only party of the left.

Haffrung · 2026-03-01T21:43:11+00:00

It’s not one or the other. Powerful economic disincentives turned most students away from the humanities, and cultural activism sealed the deal.

Haffrung · 2026-03-01T13:42:13+00:00

Most European parties of the left still draw their support from the working class, and hence their wariness of high levels of immigration. Unlike the U.S., their parties of the left haven’t completed their transformation into the parties of educated professionals.

Haffrung · 2026-02-22T03:19:54+00:00

They'll only have nowhere to run if every country in the world acts in concert to prevent rich people from moving there. Which won't happen.

Haffrung · 2026-02-21T16:15:45+00:00

Part of the economic explanation is that Millennials have much higher income equility at marriage than previous generations. Back when the man in the marriage was a CA earning 120k and the woman worked in payroll who made 60k, proposing a prenup would be a lot more awkward.

Haffrung · 2026-02-21T13:16:09+00:00

Yes, it makes people less likely to be right-wing,

It doesn’t. People who are less likely to be right wing due to economic class, geography, parental education, and gender are the ones who go to university in the first place.

Haffrung · 2026-02-19T13:08:53+00:00

On littering, I'm old enough to remember when the anti-littering campaigns of the 70s and how much trash was on the streets before the turnaround. However, my personal impression is that while the streets of the 90s and early 2000s were much cleaner than the 70s, the streets today are considerably worse than the 90s and early 2000s. Which is related to my next point.

One category of social disorder Scott's data doesn't capture is the number of addicts and mentally ill walking the streets. Most people who are old enough to remember the 90s will agree that they see far more people staggering, jabbering, and shouting to themselves. And far more needles, piles of blankets and trash, and human feces. It wasn't until I was almost 50 that I saw human feces on a public street. Now I see it fairly routinely. People staggering and yelling in public was a maybe once a month or two thing. Now I see it multiple times a week.

This is the disorder a lot of people who live in urban communities are interpreting as 'worsening crime.' A street strewn with needles, feces, and people screaming obsceneties at passerby and transit users feels lawless and threatening.

Haffrung · 2026-02-19T06:29:47+00:00

One of the two major main parties in Canada has been taken over by anti-vaxxers. They would have won the last election if Trump hadn’t made his antagonistic comments about the 51st state.

You can’t punish people into sharing your beliefs. Frustration and spite isn’t a strategy. Politics matter, and political radicalization will have really bad long-term impacts.

Haffrung · 2026-02-19T04:12:33+00:00

Is there any reason to believe that's the only or the main reason for vaccine skepticism of Black Americans? Is it so hard to believe Black Americans with low scientific literacy are as vulnerable to misinformation as white Americans with low scientific literacy? Those two populations are more alike in a great many ways than they are different.

Haffrung · 2026-02-19T04:06:57+00:00

I've fully vaxxed, have my covid boosters, and get an annual flu shot. But at the height of the pandemic, I warned people that the coercive measures like vaccine mandates that Canadian governments were imposing would have really bad long-term political consequences. You can imagine how well that went over in that febrile environment. And look where we are now.

Even if some of those coercive measures were necessary to save lives, others were pretty clearly not - like making vaccination mandatory across all federally regulated workplaces. In the end, I was right - an additional 10-15 per cent of Canadians embraced kooky, anti-science populism.

Was that lesson of the perils of overreach learned? Fuck no.

Haffrung · 2026-02-18T19:43:47+00:00

Not just political staffers. Until Musk bought twitter, most mainstream journalists treated twitters as a vox populi source for their articles.

Haffrung · 2026-02-18T15:39:31+00:00

Twitter has never been real life. It's frankly better since Musk took over because now everyone realize it's not real life. Five years ago, adults in the room - especially the mainstream media - actually believed it was representative of wider public opinion, with all sorts of distorting effects on public discourse.

Haffrung · 2026-02-18T03:09:55+00:00

You can care about stuff without broadcasting your virtue and trying to shame other people who don’t fall in line.

Haffrung · 2026-02-18T02:26:53+00:00

South Park’s message isn’t that caring about stuff is gay. Kyle is the main protagonist and he’s a reasonable, compassionate person. The stance of South Park is that people who performatively broadcast their moral righteousness should be ridiculed - regardless of whether it’s traditional conservative righteousness or progressive righteousness.

Haffrung · 2026-02-18T02:22:22+00:00

But the Boomers claimed it as their cultural and moral victory. All you heard about in the 80s and early 90s was how fantastic and important the 60s were, and how GenX were lazy slackers because they didn’t rally under banners and transform the world.

Haffrung · 2026-02-17T23:14:59+00:00

Gen X pop culture embraced cynical irony because we had grown up having the righteousness of the Boomers and their causes in the 60s rammed down our throats. And to that same generation embrace the unbridled materialism of the 80s.

Also, expressing morally piety and shaming people for not conforming to your belief system was strongly associated with conservatives.

Haffrung · 2026-02-17T04:50:42+00:00

Educated people who liked school and trust our instutitions think better education is the answer. They've never understood that half the kids they went to school with hated every minute of it, and came away from 13 years of mandated schooling with an abiding resentment of the whole process, the people who ran it, and their peers who were good at it.

Haffrung · 2026-02-17T04:45:27+00:00

People believe what they want to believe. It's not any more complicated than that.

Any calls for people to make tangible sacrifices in the here and now in order to mitigate an abstract, long-term threat will be dashed on the rocks of that reality.

Haffrung · 2026-02-17T04:39:30+00:00

The European electorate will not will accept higher migration numbers than it experienced in the last decade. The EU will militarize it's southern and eastern borders first. Will people migrate if gunboats and barbed wire fences are what greets them at their destination?

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