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naraburns
nihil supernum
15m ago
It sounds like something omitted from your books is all the child labor. For most of human history, most of human labor was agricultural. Children grew up working alongside their parents, first through useless imitation ("play") and, as the years passed, through making small contributions, then large ones. Children qua children have been culturally loved and cherished to varying degrees depending on a host of factors, but only comparatively recently has childhood been idle. Everything really is childcare, when your work can be performed while you care for your children--and, as they grow, performed with your children. Well, in the 19th century we sort of collectively decided that child labor is bad, but was it bad because it was bad for children, or was it bad because it was exploitative? There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?
I'm not sure what, if anything, that adds to your analysis, it just struck me as maybe worth noting.
TitaniumButterfly
21m ago
It will always be better and cheaper in sixth months.
Meanwhile I've already used it to do things for my startup that I can't even imagine how I'd have paid for otherwise.
Barfknuckle
29m ago
Yeah it's like if you're gonna create an environment where kids can never get served by better dancers, then you're not giving them any reason to get funky. May as well tear down the community center and make it a strip mall at that point.
chooky
51m ago
Was the failure of DOGE really due to red tape? It seems more like the team was out of its depth given the amount of exaggeration and inaccuracies about the level of savings. Most importantly, Musk and his team seemed not allowed or not inclined to pursue savings in the areas in which they could have had a material impact.
Though doesn't this belong in a different thread?
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
Yeah my comment was more along the lines of a neutral point of information. Any excuse to tell the weird story of Ian Samuel (RIP First Mondays; you were a good podcast while you lasted) and plug ALAB, which is wrong about most things but funny.
non_radical_centrist
1hr ago
My prediction about DOGE from six months ago seems to have come true.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1249/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/268523?context=8#context
My prediction is that early on Musk will run into the incredibly thick red tape that normally prevents massive cuts in government, try to cut through it anyway because that's what he's used to in the private sector, and it results in some sort of lawsuit or other scandal.
It's particularly sad because this was a great opportunity for real reform. They just needed to focus on doing it through Congress passing laws to reform stuff, or altering overly stringent requirements independent agencies have made. Just trying to fire excess government employees is pointless as long the law says you need to first fire employees with under 2 years of tenure instead of firing based on actual merit. Otherwise you're doing nothing to get rid of layabouts and just get rid of any productive new hires you have.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
The only thing I can think of here is to serve the house with info on the delinquent taxes before foreclosing. If that were done, I would have no sympathy whatsoever for the sons (Dennis certainly).
That's what happened in this case. A "pre-foreclosure notice" was sent by both regular mail and certified mail in July 2021, and then the actual foreclosure complaint was served in person in November 2021.
kky
1hr ago
The only thing I can think of here is to serve the house with info on the delinquent taxes before foreclosing. If that were done, I would have no sympathy whatsoever for the sons (Dennis certainly).
They got served! They know that taxes are a thing! And they did nothing at all about it. For ten years. Did they think they were just getting away with it?
I get that paperwork sucks. What was the alternative? That people can just avoid paying taxes because they’re too lazy or ignorant to do it? To increase taxes on everyone else to assign a case manager and counsel them very social justicely? To send the landlord’s bailiff around to collect taxes with a bullwhip to handle the delinquent serfs?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
I am a moderator, and you should care because I enforce the rules here, which include rules against personal antagonism, uncharitability, and carrying on with grudges.
Normally I might give you the benefit of the doubt and point out to you that when you see someone replying to you with that red banner, it's a mod post and it's meant to be heeded if you don't want to lose your posting privileges.
But this is the second time I have modded you for being unnecessarily belligerent, and your response has been to double down with more antagonism. Possibly you did not remember our previous interaction, but I do not think you are so new you are unfamiliar with the rules and moderation here.
I lightly warned you to tone it down, and you seem unable to respond to any kind of criticism or correction with anything but belligerence.
You're banned for another week. Future bans will escalate quickly if you cannot change tack.
Gaashk
1hr ago
Yeah, it seems like it would certainly be desirable both for the kids to have somewhere they want to walk/bike, and to be allowed to do that.
Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.
I had heard about that, though some people push back that it works because Japan is full of Japanese people, and a lot of places in Europe have also stopped allowing it lately. Like the the map about the historic childhood ranges near Rotherham.
theincompetencetheorist
2hr ago
If you find your work meaningful and seeing that it is not bullshit, well good for you. I've also been mostly lucky in that aspect that I've done very little bullshit through the years. But I've ended up recently in "Bullshit Jobs" territory by doing stuff is that essentially specializing to tech that is designed for scaling to millions of concurrent users and applying it for B2B that is going to see tops of a couple of thousands users if they capture the majority of the market. There is very little wrong with the tech in itself, and it is useful... but the thing that I'm using it for is not benefiting the business, improving the world or making me happy because it is being misapplied. I quit my last job for the very reason, thought I was out of it and all of a sudden I got transferred back to doing the same thing at the new place.
fribble
2hr ago
Have you talked to your mom? My college aged kid has been making food-in-house requests that we have taken seriously ever since her middle schooler fruitarian phase. For example, today she specifically asked her dad not to buy her a diet Coke when he runs errands - she will drink it if it's in the house but she would prefer not to. Maybe your mom would happily share the cookies and cake with neighbors or a social group. Or portion and freeze it. Hopefully your mom would like to support you in your goals.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I think free range is good for kids simply because it allows for kids to grow into adulthood. If you are a safety first society and prevent kids from doing anything dangerous or going out on their own, they never learn to navigate that. If the kid is never allowed out of sight of an adult, he can’t learn how to navigate without an adult. If you never allow them to cook, they’ll never learn to do so.
Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
More effort and less…sneering? Mockery? Than this, please.
Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.
Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.
Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.
My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.
The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
ace
3hr ago
This is a form of Gell-Mann amnesia effect. When there's instant feedback and excellent legibility of when answers are correct vs incorrect, like programming, we instantly see the flaws. But on softer squishier questions, you accept the answers. But it's all similarly bad AI slop.
Jiro
3hr ago
Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact.
If 1/3 of your coworkers are worried, you'll notice.
If 1/3 of senior management is worried, that's not a majority, and management won't say anything.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
3hr ago
Hmmm these are reasonable points. But as someone else pointed out, part of the fact that we're in this state is that the government has strong incentives to keep the unemployment rate down.
Then again government dysfunction is increasing too!
aqouta
3hr ago
I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
AvocadoPanic
3hr ago
No doubt though that doesn't really speak to our counter-intelligence capabilities. Perhaps if we had less recent history of CCP connected honeypots or chauffeurs I'd have more confidence in our screening abilities.
Absent confidence in our capabilities, I'm unbothered by a courser net with more bycatch.
Bartender_Venator
3hr ago
I'm at my most attractive when I feel full of will and energy.
You already know the most important thing. And the second most important, which is to learn how to be gregarious. The third most important thing is to dial in your dating logistics. Think like Napoleon - logistics enables everything else. For a classic drinks date, find a spot you like, ideally classy-ish but chill and quiet (I like wine bars), with tables/bar where you can sit close to her, somewhere nice you can walk to nearby to sit and talk in the dark. That's first date and first kiss sorted, and if you're within walking distance to your place often more. For coffee dates, find a place with a park nearby you can walk in with your coffee. Concerts most of your logistics are sorted for you but try to get a drink beforehand so you can have some time but not too much time to talk. Etc. etc., but the main failing I see for guys once they can get dates is that they sit down for 'job interview' first dates and never build up a real rapport because they're not comfortable in their surroundings.
As a funny add-on: a photo of core Rust (programming language) contributors celebrating the 10th anniversary of the language launch: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/05/15/Rust-1.87.0/
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