Parent of a 4 and 1 year old here. Kids can be surprisingly smart and "dumb" at the same time. Their rote intelligence can shine if problems are presented in ways they can easily comprehend them but even simple emotional intelligence tasks ("if I kick my sister it hurts her the same amount as it hurts me when I get kicked") stump them. This confuses adults (myself included) and sometimes makes us expect more from them than would be realistic.
I disagree completely. What about all inherent biases which make humans do things not in their best interest (they just think it is in their best interest, but many times they don't think, they panic) ?
I second the vote for diesel cars/minivans. Much simpler internals than hybrids with comparable (if not better fuel economy). I'd also venture to guess that the total environmental impact including the manufacturing processes is much less too. I wish VW/Audi/BMW/Mercedes sold a decent minivan with a diesel engine here in the US and I'd be a buyer. The VW Sharan gets 43MPG+ (http://www.greencarcongress.com/2010/07/sharan-20100701.html)
It's no coincidence that nearly half of the European cars have diesel engines.
One more problem: essentially tying healthcare coverage to employment and giving all kinds of tax-breaks to employers to offer it. You're artificially limiting the population that can get coverage, increasing the risk for insurers. Also, by creating a large population of uninsured (who still have to get emergency treatments and public health safety treatments (think epidemics etc)) and you drive the cost up for others who pay for healthcare.
I think this is very important and not because of the fact that you're more likely to talk shop when eating with your team. What is more valuable IMHO is that you'll get to know your teammates better as _people_: what they like, their hobbies, their tastes their culture (if you're in such an team) etc. It's insanely interesting and valuable: it will make communication much smoother and misunderstandings much less frequent.
A team needs to gel and having common experiences outside of strict "work" settings is really important for that. BTW, this can't be forced but can be facilitated by creating the right conditions and I think that's what Joel's post is about.
One more thing: having lunch with people only loosely connected to your day-to-day activities is also very interesting and can lead to serendipitous insights about things totally in your area of expertise.
* Your customers/clients don't care how much you work. The only thing they care about is whether you can help them solve their problems. If you do that consistently, you'll be fine.
* More work =/= more quality output; in fact I'd argue that after a certain amount of work, it is an inverse relationship.
* Find ways to solve more with less: write less code and still have features. Have fewer servers and still handle the traffic. Work less and still get things done. It's incredibly empowering.
* Knowledge, experience and honed intuition more than compensates for fewer hours of work. My suspicion is that a lot the extra work performed at startups is needed because of inexperience. I worked at a very early stage startup and it seems that a lot effort was spent on getting systems to work as they were supposed to (usually bleeding edge systems). We also spent a ton of time learning to deal with the data volumes we handled; in hindsight most solutions we arrived at were known and publicly available at the time, we just didn't know (enough) about them.
Background: I'm currently moonlighting on a startup idea while having a family and working 9-5. It can be done but you need to leverage other people's work as much as possible and need to be very disciplined. I use the best systems/libraries/services I know to basically outsource everything that's not core to my startup idea. I also consciously set aside time to be with my loved ones: dinner, bedtime stories, weekend hikes and trips etc. Being successful is only meaningful to me if my kids know me in person, not just as a distant figure.