Nice response. Part of the problem is "pull yourself up by bootstraps" PG-tier p0rn. With a king, an average person isn't being told everyday that they too can become a king, if only they worked harder. With people like startup founders, VCs, Musk, Bezos and the like, constantly writing articles on how you too can become rich like them: http://paulgraham.com/richnow.html, average people view this life as achievable and it harbors disappointment and insecurity to not achieve those levels.
Your whole blog resonates deeply with me. All this corporate grifting and women's empowerment months will do jack shit until we figure out how to make workplaces and lives more equitable for mothers and allowing for gaps, breaks and destigmatizing time off for parents of both genders.
Instead, we talk about how sexism is the biggest problem. Sure, sexism might be annoying, but in the west, it is hardly something that creates a genuine barrier for women.
Startups have it worst, and everday I count the number of years I have to work in the high stress places I want or do a startup if I want to have two kids before 35. No one talks about planning around fertility. When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien. As if wanting to be pregnant and not working at the same time as being sleep deprived and wanting to spend time with my own baby when they are at their youngest is some strange outlandish fantasy.
All careers are built this way. PhD to tenure, startups, generally high stress professions. I wish the world wasn't so male centric, that feminists actually cared about finding structural solutions instead of forcing women to become copies of men to achieve gender parity. But they care more about power than actual equality where we acknowledge that women have different needs and desires, that those needs and desires are equally valuable and not inferior to desires men have, that the two genders have different strengths and capabilities and it is equally important to reward both. And maybe not wanting to outsource your baby to a nanny during their most vulnerable years is not a heretical thought.
I wish we had more focus in allowing people to transition back from taking a few years off to raise young kids, and it wasn't automatically assumed that you would be a worse founder or professor or software engineer just because you have 2-4 years you didn't commercially work. Hell, I want to take that time to contribute to open source, something I don't get to do much usually and I'm looking forward to it because I am willing to face the consequences. But I wish more women could be less scared of their career prospects for choosing to have children.
Why do you think that? We can still work and produce, but instead of having new shoes released by nike every month, they would be released every year. People who want to work 80hrs/wk can still do that, essential jobs like firefighters that currently pay very little can pay 250k a year, instead of getting 10 fruits in your supermarket, you will have to deal with 5 locally grown ones, but anyone who wants to pursue other things will be generously allowed to. Usual work days can be reduced to 3 days of work per week.
We just need to reduce fetishism with non human scale technology at the cost of nature and humans. But people are still free to pursue it, and societies can pick what aspects they want.
And investment in preserving nature, learning from it, and investment into human beings and nurturing their capabilities dwarfs all the investment in technology.
And I don't mean nurturing capabilities to make them drones spending all their energy working for corporates, but for themselves and being able to pursue their own causes. And believe me, we won't need new shoes and new apps and perfect games every week if we are not being drained of our energy 50hrs/wk. We can and will happily do with much less if what we have is not cheap trash hurting our bodies and souls, manufactured by suffering working class people (please look up suicide rates in chinese factories and in working class communities in america).
Mixed feelings, on one hand, I'm so excited about the investment since I'm a big fan of Rust, on the other, I don't want it to be a clusterfuck like IETF and web standards development where companies like Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla get to dictate what is and isn't allowed on the web. I just hope the Rust community is able to stand up for itself and resist inclusion of unnecessary things against these big players with infinite resources.
I am really worried about Chinese cyberwarfare while we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Just look at how easy it is to spy on millions of americans with things like TikTok and Huawei. Google could be a lot worse at the size it currently is. I view Google as almost a kind of university that tries to enhance technology by "poaching" good people and in some sense, allowing them to work on whatever they want while guaranteeing them a very good wage. Aside from the standard Chrome, Android-tier projects, let's think about all the stuff that they've done that has been pretty radically useful. I'm not talking about products, they do a terrible job with maintenance and shutting down products is very infuriating to any user. But it is almost like research projects. So let's just focus on technical contributions to the software engineering field.
Golang, gRPC, Protobuf, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, WebRTC, QUIC protocol, very interesting innovations in camera technology such as NightSight, Google Maps which has changed my life completely. Furthermore, millions of contributions to open source projects and protocols, so many security improvements by the Security & Cryptography teams that I have on occasion worked with.
Personally I wouldn't work for Google because I don't enjoy the kind of atmosphere where there's no real "mission". But doing this much innovation is impossible unless you are funded by the government, or have a money printing business.