A shift in culture that allows you to bring your children to work would be and would be absolutely sensible for white collar and several blue collar jobs.
Young children (under three) babble and screech and cry and explore and try to finger everything and put everything in their mouth and then screech when you take the thing away from them or try to restrain them from getting at that shiny object they really want. They play for a few minutes then come running over demanding attention and screech if you ignore them. They get hungry and cry, they fall and cry. And this cannot be trained out of them because they are too young for that.
None of this is a problem if you have baby proofed your house and they can wander and play with whatever they want, and if you are just doing chores and can give them the love and attention when they demand it and go back to your chore when they go back to playing again. But it is a big problem if you and other people are trying to concentrate and work.
* most mothers were still with their infants and very young children. The babies weren't being taken care at a daycare where you can have one staffer trying to deal with 4 crying newborns.
* mothers were doing active work, not work that requires sitting in one place, not work that requires long-term concentration, not work that requires being on someone else's schedule.
I have noticed it is no problem doing active work like cooking or the dishes or grocery shopping while bringing along an infant. But I cannot do computer work -- baby goes crazy from lack of stimulation.
Also, being on a schedule while trying to take care of a baby causes immense stress. What if you have a client meeting while baby is crying because he needs to be fed ... or is crying just due to lack of comfort and attention? Or sometimes (oftentimes) baby has a bad night and keeps you from sleeping, but you still need to be up and at work at a given time, instead of being able to nap when baby naps?
Both parents doing a schedule-bound, desk job while raising a newborn baby is not how we evolved to do things, and it's always going to be a source of stress and problems, even if you have "high quality" daycare available.
* Influence by Cialdini - great overview of the psychology of human motivation and influence. You'll get the inside dirt on a lot of sales and marketing tricks.
* Seeing like a State by James Scott - a good political history with lots of insight into many conventions in our modern society, such as even last names, were created to make society manageable by a central government.
* Europe and the Europeans by Barzini - the closest thing I have found to being a time traveler, skipping between different places and times in Europe from 1920 to the 1970's.
"My one big mistake in life has been providing a trust fund for my five children. I’m very comfortable paying for an education for as long as they want to study in a reputable university. However, providing additional funds so they could have a lifestyle beyond what they have achieved on their own was a mistake."
This is one I've actually thought a lot about. Having gone to an Ivy League school, I'm not sure that it would be worth sending my kids to any university. The quality is going down, the tuition is going up. The cost of establishing a household after school is going up, so giving that 250k and 4 years to a university is a huge opportunity cost. It seems like there should be a lot cheaper and more efficient ways of building a network and developing career skills.
But I also don't want to just hand a 20-year old a trust fund of $250k instead of college tuition. So my current thinking is that I'll say: "We've saved up $250k to get you started in life. You can either spend that on a college education. Or you can get a scholarship or get a job directly, and we'll give you the money for one of the following activities: 1) starting a business 2) going to grad school 3) buying a home to raise a family in 4) Up to 6 months of travel or independent artsy work. The money will remain in the investments accruing returns until it is disbursed."
The real problem is poverty and more generally extreme inequality.
I don't understand how people can make statements with this when it is so at odds with the facts.
The homicide rate in Baltimore in 1911 was 5.8 per 100,000. Last year it was 37. Was Baltimore less unequal during the gilded age, long before the progressive income tax and federal welfare? No way. Obviously poverty is also way lower today.
The differences are even more stark when you compare modern Baltimore with a place like Edwardian England. Again, England in the early 1900's was massively unequal, had massive poverty problems. But it had homicide rates a tiny fraction that of modern Baltimore.
Why do the U.S. inner cities have so many more homicides than any slum in China or India?
Read the book Ghettoside or Don't Shoot. Crime happens when people can get away with it. Crime happens when cultural and legal sanctions against crime don't get enforced.
Two of my favorite books growing up were The Real Diary of a Real Boy and The Great Brain. Both are accounts of a young boy growing up in 19th century, small town America. The Real Diary is about Exeter, NH in the 1840s. The Great Brain is about Utah (and is much better written, I think most Hacker News readers would benefit from giving this book to their child). The books were penned after the fact, but were based on the author's boyhood experiences. These books both painted a portrait of old-time life, and also gave me a feeling of continuity with the past.
It is infinitely better to have a product, customers, and technical debt, than to have no product or no customers and no technical debt.
Personally, I focus on avoiding technical debt when the cost of the debt will outweigh the costs of cleanup even within three or four months. So I try to keep to some best practices - having tests, having a good build system, running a linter, because I find those systems help me reduce bugs. And every time I have to fix a bug for a customer in production, it is a major time sink. Every time I have to manually test a new release, or fix problems after the fact, or block my teammates because I checked in bad code, then I am wasting time. So I try to do enough clean up to make sure I avoid breaking things all the time.
"Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included."
This makes sense to me. It infuriates me as a biker and pedestrian when police dangerously disobey the traffic laws. I see them do rolling stops, putting on their lights briefly to get through a red light, or speed up and pass me on the left as I'm making a left turn.
One way to do this would be to allow anyone to report traffic violations that they caught on video. So if I record the video of someone committing a violation, I upload the video to the town's website, they send the owner of the license plate a ticket.
That said, I thought that most of this article was pretty weak, a lot of meandering, incoherence, and conflation of different ideas.
One of the best articles I read on morality, game theory and evolution was here: http://jim.com/rights.html The author derives a theory of natural rights from game theory, and it makes a lot of sense.
Young children (under three) babble and screech and cry and explore and try to finger everything and put everything in their mouth and then screech when you take the thing away from them or try to restrain them from getting at that shiny object they really want. They play for a few minutes then come running over demanding attention and screech if you ignore them. They get hungry and cry, they fall and cry. And this cannot be trained out of them because they are too young for that.
None of this is a problem if you have baby proofed your house and they can wander and play with whatever they want, and if you are just doing chores and can give them the love and attention when they demand it and go back to your chore when they go back to playing again. But it is a big problem if you and other people are trying to concentrate and work.