I wouldn't say that the women are less valuable! Anyone who can play a pipe organ and has the other skills to put in hours on weekly performances and rehearsals, they are rare and indispensable to the place that has the organ.
If someone plays the guitar they can purchase their own guitar, maintain it and carry it wherever they play. Same for a violin or flute or any typical instrument. Piano skills are also fungible because anyone can buy a synth keyboard or an upright and practice at home just fine. While large, even a grand piano can be wheeled in and out of a building if necessary.
But a pipe organ is part of the building. More properly, the building is an inseperable part of the pipe organ. When an organ company builds a pipe organ, they put an Opus number on it because they're going to be unique to fit the space and needs of the community. They're going to last for decades or hundreds of years and they are not going anywhere. The community has come together to install it and commit to its maintenance.
I attended a church with a modestly-sized electronic (non-pipe) organ built in 1980. There was a praise band with drums, guitar, bass, and a very shiny grand piano. The organ had fallen into disuse and it was unclear whether it could be played. We limped along with that lovely piano for a long time, but the organ was finally rescued. Another church had installed a very lovely "theater" style pipe organ, that was also modestly small, and had chronic problems due to the climate environment in the loft. So eventually, it was retired, and a very impressive MIDI organ was also placed in the loft, while they were not really able to remove the previous one. Unfortunately, the leadership and the music ministers cycled rapidly, and they appear to have abandoned the loft entirely...
So, with an investment like that, a church cannot afford to be without an organist. Some are happy just to have someone who knows how to play. Often, an organist may have other roles, such as directing, singing, composing, or administrative. But the organ is the primary and lead instrument. They are always going to be the focal point of the music program. Male and female alike.
>I attended a church with a modestly-sized electronic (non-pipe) organ built in 1980. There was a praise band with drums, guitar, bass, and a very shiny grand piano. The organ had fallen into disuse and it was unclear whether it could be played. We limped along with that lovely piano for a long time, but the organ was finally rescued.
I once got roped into trying to fix an electronic organ that was about the same age, in a church. Some of the notes had stopped playing, or were the wrong pitch, so the organist had to work around them. It was a really interesting piece of analog electronics, with a bunch of separate circuit boards for each note, with an analog circuit on each one to generate the tone. IIRC, I found that some capacitors' values had drifted due to age, so I replaced a bunch of them with new ones; the organist was so happy she could now use those notes again.
Some of the very old very large ones have some strength+endurance requirements.
Much newer ones with electronic actions and whatnot don't have any such problems.
Majority of organists are men (in the US at least).
My wife plays the organ; it looks like dark voodoo magic, with two hands and two feet flying at the same time and so many different types of sounds coming out. She sticks entirely to electric organs.
The exercises are fun (and easy for now, but I'm only on stage 3)!
I must say I was briefly surprised at how disorienting it is to see a graphic of a keyboard from A3 to A4. When you don't see the set of 3 black keys consecutively and instead see what looks like 2 sets of 2 black keys, it really takes a second to orient yourself!
> In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.
Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail. [0]
Of course I recognize that email is often used for time-sensitive matters (like scheduling events), but any time I see an email that is likely to require multiple timely backs-and-forths I'll try to move the conversation to a more suitable medium.
[0] Here I'm referring to solicited emails sent by humans or transactional emails triggered directly by a human interaction. In practice our email inboxes also serve as a general "notifications hub" for all sorts of things including recurring events ("remember to pay your bill") and, of course, unsolicited junk.
Have you routinely received letters or bills from bureaucrats?
I can tell you that those banks, government agencies, and hospitals know how to backdate letters, postmark them like clockwork, and land in my mailbox on a Friday at close of business on a 3-day weekend, just to jam us up and narrow any deadline that may exist.
Even a hand-delivered notice from the landlady shows up at 6:01pm when the office is already closed. I guarantee that you will be helpless to respond in a timely fashion.
It has been suggested that "bankers hours" and 9-5 office hours were originated specifically to jam up the working man, who needed to be in the mines or on the factory floor during those hours. If a bank actually wanted to serve working people, they would be open on weekends. Traditionally it was not something your wife or kids could proxy, if they did not drive or have authorization, but the single working man was doubly screwed in these situations.
This year I also have the experience of very premature "billing notices" sent to my email and text and every other place, where the bureaucrats are counting on impatience to pay a bill far too early, before it is due, luring you in with ambiguous wording. People today are warning "do not comply in advance" and I am observing this maxim with health care billing in particular.
If a bureaucracy sends out a thing that requires followup/action, and it arrives right before the sidewalks are rolled up, then the citizen is sort of flailing for days. Might even forget to act at 9am on Tuesday. Government websites include a lot of scheduled maintenance. Also, that letter they wrote will be dated at least 10 days before you received it. I carefully staple all correspondence to the envelope with postmarks.
If someone induces me to pay a bill 60-90 days early, that is my loss and their gain. Money in my bank is working for me, available, perhaps earning interest. Money in their bank is sunk. For this reason and others, it can be an error to pay your bills too early.
I recently ordered on Christmas Day from a catalog. They charged my card right away. They still haven't delivered some of the items. Vendors shouldn't be taking your payment until the stuff is shipped. Businesses won't pay invoices until the goods/services are received and verified!
As I said, bureaucracies run like clockwork, and they will always act at the right time and date. It will disadvantage the best of us.
Any office worker knows the difference in character between the email that arrived at 9am on Monday, vs. the memo sent at 11am on Wednesday, or the phone call coming in at 4:59pm on Friday...
I’ve gotten the normal stuff via mail: bills, credit card stuff, DMV, the occasional jury summons. And I’ve also dealt extensively with U.S. immigration, which often requires numerous exchanges via USPS.
And all of these things generally work fine with the assumption that response times will be a couple of days, plus the couple of days in transit.
I can’t say I recall ever encountering mail with a strict deadline very near to when I received it. (Usually the frustration is the opposite: I wish things could move a lot faster than they do.)
White collars have the luxury of limited hours, resting on the weekends, and being able to take time off work when they have an appointment or obligation.
This is absolutely true. When I worked as at a restaurant, the mantra from management was: "You got time to lean, you got time to clean." I've worked a lot of blue-collar jobs before making my way into office work. Blue collar workers will get chided for pulling out their phone. I'm posting this comment to HN on either side of a call that came in while I was reading the thread.
In my first real office job, I grew anxious when someone from down the hall came and conversed with my office-mate for ten minutes. We had all this work that needed to be addressed! I'm obviously acclimated to office culture now; I'm just trying to underscore the difference in work culture for those who may not have worked in physical labor environments. The people working those jobs aren't even an afterthought to many people (which I can attest from having dealt with people who mistreat workers).
Are you trying to say that banks can't be open on the weekends because then bank employees would have to work weekends? Much like any business that operates on the weekends? They would have time off during the week and wouldn't have the issue that people working Mon-Fri have because they could go to the bank on their day off on Tuesday or whatever.
> Are you trying to say that banks can't be open on the weekends because then bank employees would have to work weekends? Much like any business that operates on the weekends?
I'm saying there's a reason not all businesses (or government institutions) work 996[0].
> Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail.
I moved from a company that operated under that paradigm (Slack was the primary mode of internal comms) to one that treats email as the primary mode of comms. It was a minor challenge to start watching my inbox and keep it at zero-unread (something I don't care about at all in my personal emails). Feels natural to me now when I'm in work-mode.
If you try to contact me with a phone call, you might as well send your message into outer space. You'll have better luck getting a response from aliens.
99% of incoming calls to my phone are spam. I won't pick up an unknown number unless someone has already contacted me and told me to be expecting a phone call, or it's a call from someone I already know (people I already know don't call me either).
That is to say, your mileage may vary on what counts as a "suitable medium".
Used to be that people had phones at the desk at work and a voicemail inbox. In a business situation I would expect most people to be reachable by phone.
This reminds me: when people insist on having a real phone call in an email, it could be something that they don't like to put in writing. So it's a good practice to ask what the topic of the phone call will be so that you can join it prepared.
If it indeed is something that you feel might be fishy, I further recommend the following: write a summary of what was discussed and send your summary to the people on the call as "meeting minutes -- 2026-02-11" (make this a habit, and always say "I do this routinely to remember what was agreed"). This can easily avoid you being trapped by dubious propsals or being unwittingly on the wrong side of the law.
I record my phone calls for personal records. Often I won't hear or remember details, so the recording helps.
Are there legal or other situations in which meeting minutes would be admissible in evidence, but a recording would not be? Obviously this is jurisdiction dependent.
if you make a recording, transcribe it, the delete the recording, it's probably hard to prove you made a recording. better yet with todays technology you can probably make a transcription live. i don't know if feeding he audio into a transcription tool counts as recording.
but the example was to use a recording in court. if you do that then everyone knows.
Are you truly so confident that people in those countries don’t feel optimistic that their children will have better opportunities than their parents did?
I’d be shocked if they didn’t feel that, and even more shocked if it didn’t end up being the case.
> Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.
You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
I would agree if it weren’t almost everything that must be sacrificed in some capacity. Sacrifice of some things are unavoidable, but when no aspect of life remains untouched it’s too much.
It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relatives, and the town/neighborhood, and after the youngest years kids could (and were expected to) spend their time outside unsupervised doing kid things. This gave parents much needed breathing room that no longer exists, thanks to the ongoing stranger danger panic that was kicked off in the 90s, people needing to move around to have a shot at getting a decent job, systematic destruction of safe third places for kids and teens, and pressure to control and structure every moment of each child’s life.
So I don’t agree that it’s individualism, but rather a natural response to financial and societal forces pushing ever more of the burden onto the parents’ shoulders. We’ve created a world that is actively hostile to children and asking parents to just eat the resulting vastly increased costs.
Talking to my parents, and listening to recordings made with my grandparents and great-grandparents, this is silly. All of them worried about finances and the cost of kids. They survived the Depression, and that informed their view. And they always worried about their kids success and safety.
Worry is going to present, no matter what. Parents with hundreds of thousands in the bank worry, too. That can't be optimized for.
Smart people see when doing something will require swimming against the current for extended periods, however, and opt to not put themselves in that situation. The problem isn't that people can see this and act accordingly, but the direction of the current. The direction of the current is what needs to change.
Might be missing that the whole idea of parenting is a rather new and novel one. Modern parenting starts roughly when baby boomers started their own families.
> such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children
To a certain extent I agree with you that lower standards in parenting made the whole project more doable.
However, when my great-great-grandmother's brother's wife died, my great-great-grandmother had to quit school (about 14 or 15 years old?) in order to stay home to help take care of his baby. Shaped the whole rest of her life.
Responsibilities being split often meant others had to sacrifice in addition to parents, and those expectations of sacrifice often fell hard on women (whether young unmarried or past their own reproductive years).
I think there's a very important distinction to be made here. Having kids and taking care of kids you already have are too very different things.
If you're calling not having kids selfish, that's just completely weird. You are going to have to prove first that your opinion isn't also one of these invented ideas.
If we're talking about taking care of them, I kind of agree. Excluding extreme circumstances like rape in a country without abortion, you kind of know what you're willingly signing up for when you have kids. You forced them into the world, they are your responsibility.
In our culture, we're socialized to minimize our "self." Your life is defined by the roles you play in the extended family at various stages of life: child, father, etc. You spend a life laboring to provide for your kids, and the reward at the end is raising your grandkids and sharing their joy as they experience everything in the world for the first time through fresh eyes. It completes the cycle of life. If you don't have grandkids, you're stripped of purpose and robbed of your reward.
I can understand at an intellectual level that other people are raised differently and probably have a different emotional reaction, and, at an intellectual level, I understand that viewpoint is valid. But I genuinely cannot put myself in that mindset. The idea that you could live a fulfilling life without grandkids is predicated on being something I don't know how to be.
For whatever it's worth, it's my perception that even within the US there are many who come from a culture where it's expected for adults to settle down and raise a family at some point in their lives. That describes my background, and I would like to have kids myself.
I believe for many, the desire is there, but it's not so strong as to overcome the forces against it. It's a major life decision and can make the difference between relative financial stability and a decent retirement or struggling their whole lives and standing in a grocery store all day bagging groceries to keep a roof over their head in their 70s.
Keep living in your bubble my friend. It is not selfish to see the sacrifices required to raise children (and I will not enumerate them here, this thread is full of them if you want to educate yourself), see that all you get from society is "thoughts and prayers" (at least in WA state where I live) and take a hard pass on having children.
This is literally the definition of selfish? You see what you must give up for the sake of someone else (children), see the lack of support you will receive, and decide that you don't want to make that exchange.
That's literally a selfish decision, because you are deciding you want to keep that energy and those resources for yourself.
It's not inherently bad to make that decision, but it absolutely is selfish.
I don't think it matters? A decision to keep resources for yourself is selfish on the basis of it being a decision to keep resources for yourself, regardless of where they might otherwise be going?
I guess, but that kinda makes the word selfish meaningless. By that logic we’re all selfish all the time since we’re keeping our resources instead of throwing them in the garbage.
You're saying it's de facto selfish to not have kids? What if someone can't have kids?
In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).
Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
Not to put words in their mouth, but I think part of the poster's point is that inability is is a more complex equation than simple biological capacity. A couple who judges it economically risky or otherwise irresponsible to start a family (which represents a wide swath of the population) could for example consider themselves unable.
No, this is a pretty typical conversation on the Internet these days: someone takes a relatively well-defined stance on an issue, and then someone else wildly misinterprets or misrepresents it, just to get in a dig at the original person for... Unclear reasons.
It's either terrible reading comprehension, an inability to understand nuance, or just plain trolling. None of these lead to productive conversations.
Is a silhouette not a "picture"? Perhaps "picture" isn't the best term to quibble over, since it is quite broad (arguably its primary use is referring to paintings or drawings).
But if we instead quibble over the term "photograph," I'd argue that a photograph of a silhouette of a mountain is absolutely a photograph of a mountain. Similarly, I'd argue that X-ray photography is indeed photography.
Yes, although OpenCode works great with official Claude API keys that are on normal API pricing.
What Anthropic blocked is using OpenCode with the Claude "individual plans" (like the $20/month Pro or $100/month Max plan), which Anthropic intends to be used only with the Claude Code client.
OpenCode had implemented some basic client spoofing so that this was working, but Anthropic updated to a more sophisticated client fingerprinting scheme which blocked OpenCode from using this individual plans.
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