Absurdity, hmmm? Both my grandmothers did exactly that. One had a college degree. The other had a HS diploma, which was quite fancy for a female who grew up in the Great Depression. My mother did nearly that, except for a bit of part-time work near the end. My wife is a full-time mother. AFAIK, all of her friends are full-time mothers.It's not counterproductive. It produces decently educated people who stay out of prison.
Yeah, I agree for the most part. You seemed to ignore where I said "in those last few years", where, I'm sure you'll also agree it would be counterproductive to have an overvigilant, overbearing mother wathing over you from, say 15-18. Not that your case (and that of your matriarchs) was what we were discussing exactly. If you have the means to permit the woman not to work, that's perfect and all the better for the kids. But we were discussing the case of the majority of the population where the woman DOES need to work, and what would be the best period (from a cost/benefit PoV for society) would be to give women as paid leave. So don't make points where there are none. Altho, judging from the pieces of my posts you decide to reply to, I see (and therefore understand) that you don't have many counterpoints to make.
Your "job description" sounds like a union concept. It's static. The employer gets in trouble if I tighten a screw on my desk because I'm not in the union with the contract to tighten screws on desks.
In the sane world, a job description is an approximate description used for hiring. The employee is generally expected to do whatever is asked. He can of course refuse because he is not a slave, but then of course he may lose his job.
No, I'm not saying a job description should be neither static nor inflexible. But if "being nice" is so paramount to her job as you make it out to be, you'd think it'd be included there, right? I just think you're trying to justify to yourself (legally, ethically, and perhaps even morally) your wanting to fire her, when, in reality, as you yourself admitted, she is doing her job adequately. Maybe not the way you'd like her to (specially since the new hot one has been introduced to you), but she IS doing it, which is the point. There is no reason to fire a person who gets the job done. Hence my "fixation" with job descriptions (which you've yet again hyperboled into absurdity).
Allow me a little divagation before carrying on. Being the (mostly) good person that I am, I'm going to help you out to discern between what is ethical and what is not because (as you'll see) I have experience in the matter. In the hospital where I worked for a while, we had an ethics commitee (I know, right? Who knew doctors don't actually make really important decisions according to what comes out of our asses?), and I got to participate in it a couple of times. When deciding if some solution to a problem is ethic or not, we have a few key points to reflect on to use as criteria (you can look this up). One of those points is "public scrutiny" which means you have to imagine trying to explain your proposed solution to everyone and anyone (including your family) and see how that makes you feel. If you feel unconfortable with that idea, it generally means that that particular solution is a poor ethical choice. Maybe you'd like to do the same and imagine yourself trying to explain all of this to your stay-at-home wife? (I'm not joking or making fun of you, this is really how decisions {more important ones, granted} are made. Sorry beforehand if you feel I crossed some line there).
Now let's continue.
It's people like you who support the parasitic army of lawyers that is choking our economy. It's people like you who would have me sit idle for weeks while waiting for somebody with the proper job description to get around to unpacking my computer.
Those are some harsh (and very missinformed) assumptions. I'll have you know, I dislike unions probably every bit as much as you do. They have been deformed into corrupt institutions that mostly serve to make their higher-ranks rich, and sometimes even to applaud lazyness as you have said. But I do recognize a) why they NEED to exist, b) that they do SOME good and c) that they level the field in the classic battle of worker vs big company. But yours is a common mistake. But that's ok, you're not nearly the only person who disregards history completely and is more than eager to repeat the mistakes of the past. But suffice to say it is a very just right to have, so much so that it is written in your (and most other countries') constitution. Unless you're trying to tell me that the people who wrote your constitution (amongst which is Thomas Jefferson), not to mention all the great thinkers who did the same for other countries just had it wrong because you say so.
That union attitude is an anti-productive poison that will ultimately sink our economy below that of places that don't put up with such nonsense.
It's funny you say that, because over this side of the pond, where "my attitude" (excepting those parts thatyou just assumed, of course) is much more commomplace that over there in the US, everyone (well, except for Greece and Ireland, but those have completely unrelated reasons) is doing JUST FINE. Not just that, but actually much better than how you're doing over there (and yes, I DO mean economically, the other sort of "just fine" {ýou know, the one you critize me for, people actually being happier and having a richer family life} is just a given). So, I don't know, maybe you ought to rethink your ideas (not likely, I know, just a suggestion).
BTW, which are these "other places where they don't have to put up with this nonsense"? China? Cuba? Most of Africa? Yeah, I'd like to live in a country where things were done the way THOSE guys do them /sarcasm
(hopefully this will make you reflect upon that comment you made, barring the possibility that you tell me all about this marvellous country with a booming economy and happy people where they don't have worker rights).
I'll leave it at this. I'll just ask a favour of you; do not make me waste more time. I've been a pretty cool guy by replying to your hyperbolic, polarised, selected (just responding to what you want/can), and generally ignorant and wrong comments. I do enjoy intelligent discussions (for what I gain and learn from them), but thus far I've got no such thing from this discussion. So please either think your answers through (and research them), or don't bother.