they aren't. the figures mentioned are true for the North Sea but lower in all other places. also being a saturation diver doesn't automatically put you on a 1400 dayrate when on leaving for a job. you get that only when you're "in the bin" which itself depends if you are the one selected for it. many other sat divers on the same job, but usually there are only 6-8 are actually in saturation the rest does support work on deck. and the time in saturation might only be 3 weeks in a 6 months project. So until you are in sat you would get the normal day rate a diver makes (150 - 200 depending on the location, contract). Project and Life Support Supervisors (LST's) are paid slightly higher. This can still be OK if you're 10 months at sea and no opportunity to spend any money during that time. But doesn't compute in 2018. As I mentioned above if the salaries cited are true they haven't changed much since the 90ies so in 2018 you'd be better off working as a software engineer ...
Depends on your definition of "well-compensated". For people in tech, it seems pretty low. $1400/day is what's mentioned in the article, and I can't imagine they work a regular schedule, as there would necessarily be more downtime. Contractors in tech, and several other fields, can make similar money (factoring in that few fields would require as much downtime) without putting their lives at risk and without going into near total isolation for weeks at a time.
So...it's a pretty good living, but it's not a good life unless you just really love diving. But, even then, I can't imagine this is the fun kind of diving. Then again, as with most high dollar specialist industries, someone ambitious could probably work in it for a few years and then start a company and become management/sales/support for a team of lower ranking folks who do the hard work of actually diving. That's common in a lot of jobs that are hard on your body, like construction.
It may not be politically correct to say, but there ARE differences between men and women. One of them is that, generally speaking, men are more willing to take higher risks for money and recognition.
Saying this is politically correct. The contentious issue is the question of why this is so. Is it because society shapes us in such a way that men are more inclined to take risks for money and recognition. This would imply things can change and women can be excellent saturation divers. Or is it because our genes shape us in this way, making it impossible for women to excel at diving.
Or maybe money and recognition aren't that valuable intrinsically and the industry is basically (ab)using men craving for those both. Maybe women are simply much smarter to not choose that line of job in the first place, or it would take a lot more of something else than money and recognition to convince them to take those risks.
That might be true but brings you back to the question why this is so. Are women intrinsically more intelligent due to their gender or does society place different expectations on the upbringing of boys, leading to a different selection of skills that develop. Or is it a mixture of both?
It is because the sex ratio is close to 1:1 at birth yet there need not be 1:1 men:women in adulthood. If men get themselves killed, it doesn't really matter.
It's a physical job. Men are on average stronger. Even though the distribution of strength might not be proportional, the general perception should lead to a manifest self-image simply by association. And it helps that people like me corroborate this, frequently.
Pure strength is not the only metric that is important on most physical jobs. Endurance is another metric and afaik women tend to rate fairly well on that. This is also a mentally tough job, working in confined spaces in the dark with low visibility requires a whole range of attributes other than mere physical strength.
From a biological standpoint, the reason men take more risks (for any reason) is clear.
Take a tribe made of 10 men and 10 women, each women give birth to 4 kids during their life. You need 8 people for a very dangerous task.
Are you going to send men or women? If you send 8 men and they all die, you are left with 10 women and 2 men. The two men can impregnate all the women and you have 40 kids for the next generation. The tribe will soon recover. On the other hand if 8 women die, there will be only 8 kids for the next generation, which is a much bigger hit.
That women are more risk adverse is only natural, and it is indeed the case. In fact, it maye be the most significant non-physical difference between men and women.
As for women possibly being better saturation divers, I don't know. After all, they do pretty well in space, they even seem to have some biological advantage. However, these divers are not just divers, they are also construction workers, and physical strength is important, an area where men have the advantage.
Sex differences in risk-taking behavior is a well documented finding, and that it has an underlying biological cause isn't controversial as far I've seen.
Testosterone is strongly linked to aggression as well as financial/physical risk taking, so part of the difference between sexes is expected on that alone. [1][2]
The evolution of risk taking is actively researched [3], and we see pretty consistent sex based differences across most species.
On an individual level, women who want to take these high risk physical jobs should clearly have equal opportunity to do so. We're just unlikely to ever hit 50/50.
So I’m not sure I’m very convinced by these papers.
The first (nature) paper appears to show that in market traders increased levels of testosterone result in more risk taking.
The third is mostly about fish and other animals, and doesn’t seem hugely relevant (though it’s interesting).
The second seems like the most interesting (MIT press article). They look at risk taking in adolescents. The paper seems to show that testosterone is linked to risk taking in males, but increased (natural) testosterone in females didn’t seem to show much increase in risk taking.
Overall, boys had very slightly riskier behavior than females. From the graphs the error bars are pretty big and the difference in risky behavior is quite small.
The difference doesn’t seem big enough that it would result in skewed gender ratios in jobs for example.
So, if this is well established in the literature, I’d expect to see better results than this. Are there papers that more really show that males are more prone to risky behavior and that this has a biological, rather than social basis?
It makes more sense in nature for females to be more selective than males, since once they choose a mate they have to deal with that choice for a while, resulting in males competing for females. So I think it makes sense that men would naturally be competing for women, and would have to take more risks, and try and get more money/recognition, to do that.
Role models for example. Movie heroes, book or video game protagonists are predominantly male. That shapes perception and expectations of desired and acceptable behavior.
Parents brag about boys taking risk, but never about girls.
To paraphrase real world office debates, basically man dying after they did dangerous "at least knew what he did it for" while woman "stupid did not knew the risk". Judgement without knowing details in both cases. I havent seen dumb female death framed in terms of bravery, but I have seen dum male death framed that way. (This difference likely hurts men more then women imo, most paid jobs are actually safe)
Imo, neither that man nor that women meant to be death.
I guess the parent comment has been edited, because this comment seems to come out of the blue in relation to what the current parent comment says.
My personal opinion is that if you’re going to make statements like this you should back them up.
As a counter example, being a police officer would I imagine not be considered the safest of jobs. But 30% of police officers in the UK are women, and the number is steadily rising:
>As a counter example, being a police officer would I imagine not be considered the safest of jobs.
It isn't particularly dangerous in the UK. There were no officers killed in the line of duty in 2016, 2014, 2011, 2010 and 2008. Police officers have a relatively high risk of being the victim of an assault, but they're far less likely to be killed or seriously injured at work than workers in agriculture, construction, civil engineering, motor vehicle repair or waste management.
The number is steadily rising, and I’d expect it to be historically lower so it’s not unexpected.
However, I’m not making any strong assertion one way or the other. The parent I was replying to effective said “it’s because men and women are different” without providing any evidence whatsoever.
Yes there are differences - I wonder makes it necessary to protect yourself against contrarians with the "politically correctness" tagging of your statement?
Not to detract one bit from the evil horror of Americans who purchased him and brought him to the US but what of the neighboring tribe who captured and sold him? (As is described in this article, and was news to me.) That’s a story I’ve never heard told.
Is this not taught in school in the US? My country (Spain) profited by the slave trade as well, and the general process of how slaves were brought to our colonies was taught. The man of the article was from (or close?) Dahomey, whose Kings became fabulously rich by selling slaves to the westerners [1]:
King Tegbesu made £250,000 a year selling people into slavery in 1750. King Gezo said in the 1840's he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade:
"The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…"
Other African Kings were making bank as well. After the British made slave trade illegal in 1807, a distraught King of Bonny complained [1]:
"We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself."
You have to also understand that many neighbors hate each other far far more than a distant enemies regardless of evilness scale. Iran vs Saudi Arabia, China vs Japan, S Korea vs N Korea, India vs Pakistan, Scotland vs England, Alabama vs New York :). Many people in these groups will happily sale people on other side as slave to green aliens in exchange for wealth and dominance.
After you understand this, its not hard to imagine that white slave traders would naturally leverage African tribes at constant wars with each other to capture other party's members for money. What's better than killing your enemy? Make them disappear permanently while becoming rich and powerful!
I also doubt if African tribes actually understood this as part of war against their own race. The white salve traders would have surely treated their helpers very nicely and respectfully while introducing themselves as service providers to take their enemies away in exchange of money. People in Africa would at that time have little means to know what these white slave owners in Western world really thought about them and how they treated them because of their skin color.
So the slave traders systematically exploited same trick that colonials used to dominate vast populations with extremely small number of their own people: identify factions, take sides, wait till one faction gets weakened in economic and military strength from wars, load them up with debts and fear, and finally submit them to obedience. The classic divide and conquer strategy works every time through out the history in all kind of different problems.
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1924 when the new Turkish Constitution disbanded the Imperial Harem and made the last concubines and eunuchs free citizens of the newly proclaimed republic.[17] Slavery in Iran was abolished in 1929. Among the last states to abolish slavery were Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007.[18]
Finally, the reach of slavery is pretty incredible. During the Great Game period between Russia and Britain in Central Asia, both sides would come across Russian slaves who had been taken by Turkic raiders. This was at least 1840 or so.
But again, to circle back around to the point, nobody was really unaware of this stuff going on. Slavery unfortunately has been a pretty common feature of history. We all played divide and conquer. The West weren't the only people smart enough to figure out that strategy.
It takes some agency from those peoples when we see them as unknowing, ignorant victims who were tricked by outsiders. They in reality made brutal and tactical decisions about their local enemies. They weren't dumb, they knew what they were doing.
I don't have proof but I think around 15th and 16th centuries, slavery wasn't considered as abhorrent crime by most of the populations. It was just the way of life and no one blinked twice when looking at slave children laboring away their lives. For example, if you failed to pay your debt in many culturally sophisticated places, you get to become slave for rest of your life and it was considered perfectly acceptable that slavery gets inherited by your offspring. There were even laws that slaves can buy off their freedom if they somehow save enough over time to pay off the debt. During Roman times, it was expected that winners in the war will take surviving looser in their wars as slaves, including their family. The Roman laws maintained elaborate registration system for slaves and there were stiff penalties for slaves running off. Salves were huge part of economy (and most of them perhaps weren't Africans). There were few powerful at the top needed massive cheap labor to maintain their large estates and build elaborate structures that are mind boggling to even today's generations. Somewhere along the history, freedom and compassion for the common man suddenly became important and the concept of slavery become repulsive. So it would be wrong to look at people in that time with how we feel about slavery now. I highly doubt the African tribes and even white traders looked at slavery the way we look at it now.
I think many people in the West don’t realize the Arab and Moslim contribution to the slave trade. Especially considering the sympathy these groups receive from Progressive political groups in the United States.
> There was concern among “black intellectuals and political leaders” that the book laid uncomfortably bare Africans’ involvement in the slave trade, according to novelist Alice Walker’s foreword to the book, which is finally being published in May. (...) As Walker writes, “Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture for the slave trade. This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read.”
I agree, though, if we want to be more closer to the truth in terms of what really happened back then we need to also focus on how the African slaves really got to become slaves in the first place (most probably as a result of war or rapines).
> members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.
Even repeating a sentence about this that appeared in the original article gets downvoted and reported. Why is this such a sensitive thing to talk about?
One technique I use is my phones have an area code from another state that I never get calls from. (South Dakota). If I get a call from this area code I know it’s spam.
One potential flaw of this approach is that there are potentially legitimate services that bridge internet calls to local numbers. IIRC, Skype worked this way, and I assume other things like Google Hangouts and Twilio do, too.
Exactly. I am a strict calorie counter and I am not overweight. (155# 5’10” 55 year old man). Sometimes I have hostess cupcakes for breakfast. (330 calories). Sometimes I have a Big Mac for lunch (550 calories). It’s hilarious when fat people talk about ‘whole foods’ and ‘mindful eating’. It’s calories.
I wouldn't call it hilarious, but as Mel Brooks once said "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die".
When you're that obese, food is an addiction in the literal sense. There is a ghrelin/dopamine feedback loop at work and it is not at all fun to break that. People are lured in by these schemes because the addict part of their mind is desperate for excuses not to stop eating. I know how this feels, because I fucking lived it. You wouldn't believe the things you can convince yourself of as an addict. Not to mention that lowered blood sugar is directly correlated with decreased willpower.
It's calories. We know it's calories. We know we shouldn't eat so many calories. That's not the hard part.
But this law is all about calories. And counting calories works. If you’re unable to count calories then of course you need some remedial help. But pretending that it’s about “eating the right foods” is lying to yourself.
Every obese person needs "remedial help", that's the definition of treatment. Even attacking the problem from multiple angles may not be enough. Counting calories combined with accurate monitoring helps but is very often insufficient. And even from just that the drop out rates are big - even without actual caloric restriction.
Increasing base metabolism is known to not work as it does not suppress the appetite or fix reward loop. Though thyroid therapy may be needed for some cases.
Dopamine uptake inhibitors exist but they have other side effects, petty bad. (Among them addiction.) SSRI make the problem worse, as do certain antipsychotics.
Direct appetite suppressants have not been invented yet though you can cheat some with special diets. (Well there are some but they're not stable and pain to inject. Could be done like insulin injections but somehow not considered cost effective and unsafe as ghrelin has additional functions.)
Having accurate data on food contents (including caloric) is vital but insufficient.
This is overly reductionist and places the blame on people attempting diets.
Most people I’ve found have simply been given terrible dietary advice (like eat high carb, low fat), which doesn’t work for the vast majority of people (because it elevates insulin levels, making them hungrier), and then they’re blamed later for not sticking to the program.
It’s completely ridiculous, it’s like putting a faithful man in a whorehouse and forcing him to ingest 4 doses of ecstasy. Sure it’s still his fault if he cheats, but are we going to pretend that the context doesn’t matter?
Ecstasy and whorehouses are a poor plan for fidelity, high-carb low-fat is a poor plan for fat loss.
