At one time I made a friend at work and we got along so well we became a gestalt entity, always referred to as the pair "AnIdiotOnTheNet and OtherGuy", with quite a few people not sure which was which. It wasn't quite Turk and JD, but it was pretty special. Sadly I kinda fucked it up by having a bad bout of some mental health issues, and then since it was a temp job we parted ways and I never saw him again.
I think there's more implied in 'raising' children than keeping them alive and transporting them to their scheduled activities, which is what I'd expect from a nanny or au pair.
Quite the contrary, a nanny will not just keep them nourished and on schedule, but also provide emotional comfort and educational activities.
It is less frequent now in the west, but in many countries kids are raised by nannies or relatives. Kids get very attached to their nannies- see Mary Poppins. It is a fictional tale, but it shows you how it was also the case in the West.
If your expectations are limted to keeping the kids alive and transporting them, your are thinking about a butler and a chauffeur. I would strongly recommend complementing them with a nanny. A good butler can help you select a nanny if you are not sure on which qualities you should hire.
>Quite the contrary, a nanny will not just keep them nourished and on schedule, but also provide emotional comfort and educational activities.
When my son was younger, we had a part-time nanny (about 15 hours/week) who was simply wonderful. She was always "present", focused on enrichment, and truly loved our son. Even though she hasn't been our nanny for many years, we still keep in touch and occasionally get together.
I've also seen the other side, where a nanny or au-pair is literally just an adult ensuring the kids are alive at the end of the day. Definitely one case where you'd want a solid reference!
> 3) When I did "sleep", there was a 50/50 chance I'd wake up with abs that felt like I'd been doing crunches all night long. I don't know what I was doing. I felt rested, but man was I sore.
...So you're saying there's a way to get 6-pack abs _in your sleep_?
For me at least. Who knows what I was doing though or if my form was correct. Given my mental state at the time when I was awake (my insomnia and anxiety had gotten bad), I'm glad that's all I was doing.
Cool, good for you :). I like the world where the internet enables niche creators to live and engage with invested supporters/patrons.
Aside, have you seen the language Jonathan Blow's working on (jai)? Curious how you'd compare the two, goals or implementation-wise. (Given he hasn't released anything yet, no worries if this is unanswerable :))
> Zig is taking cues from Jai's stance on allocators, since that language is being developed by a high-performance game designer for the usecase of high-performance games."
For me, there's a conflict between long-term and short-term enjoyment. I have a 'goal' of independence from my 9-5, but after I get home from work and play with my kids a bit, it sounds more immediately _enjoyable_ to watch a TV show with my wife rather than spend a couple hours on my side project.
So it does sound ideal to
> do things you enjoy, at a pace that you enjoy
but I think there's a part of life where you're consciously sacrificing immediate enjoyment for a future goal. And hopefully the future goal is to do just that (enjoy life at an enjoyable pace).
If I can be more productive, that's minimizing the time I spend sacrificing enjoyment before attaining my goals :).
> If I can be more productive, that's minimizing the time I spend sacrificing enjoyment before attaining my goals :).
What would you do if you didn't have to work? Spend more time with your wife and kids? Isn't it a bit odd to say "if only I spent less time with my wife and kids, then I could have a chance to spend more time with them in the future!"?
Spend X hours working per week to get Y hours of family time
vs.
Spend X+n hours working per week (or just X if you can find ways to be more productive) to some much larger value of Y hours of family time over some estimated larger timeframe.
It's all a gamble and about risk, but if you think you might be able to retire early in say, 10 years, and get to spend a much larger amount of time with your family (and be presumably less stressed and in a better position to support them financially) that might be worth a bit of extra hustle or focus on productivity than spending 20 years working for some similar result.
I'm being really hand-wavey with numbers, but when people think of early retirement for these reasons, that's often the thinking behind it.
There's a fair question to be raised on the quality of that time spent, particularly when you look at your health when you are younger, and the impact of spending time with children when they are young, but there's a lot of factors that people consider when weighing these questions, and I don't think it is entirely fair to judge someone because they may weigh those questions differently than you did.
For me the question isn't what would I do if I didn't have to work. The question is: What if I could have absolute control over what I do and wasn't beholden to anyone else because of rent and food and such?
That would be neat. I happen to find getting there (working more) more enjoyable than watching Netflix and other time wastey things so it works out. I enjoy my work so I want to do more of it. And I want to do less of the work I don't enjoy.
I'm not really wanting to not work, as such, but to transition from working for someone else to working on my own projects.
So the equation for me is more: Spend a little less time with wife/kids today to improve my future enjoyment of the work part of life.
It's a tough balance, because I highly value wife/kids time -- so when I give up some of that (valuable and well-spent) time for a potential future good, I want to make sure I'm using that time optimally, so that sacrifice is as "worth it" as possible.
There's definitely a balance here; I could make much faster progress by working every night and weekend, but that would be too much of a sacrifice of the good present for the potential better future.
Anyway, I very much agree with/appreciate the point of your questions :).
It's not obvious to me that democracy is in decline, or authoritarianism on the rise.
Over what time-frame? Do you have supporting data you can point me to ("In the past 10 years, more countries have switched from democratic to non-democratic government than vice versa")?
You’d probably be interested in the book “How democracies die” by two Harvard political scientists. They walk through the warning signs of a failing democracy and how many others have collapsed - and the answer is actually yes, there are plenty of warning signs that American democracy in particular is in trouble.
Some of the evidence they walk through: the collapse of political norms, political restraint and the rise of win at all costs brinksmanship, the delegitimization and dehumanization of political rivals, attacks against independent institutions and neutral arbiters, and much more.
> What evidence do you have for such an optimistic assertion?
Wouldn't the burden of evidence here be on someone saying the opposite (that technological progress will stop)? Technology has continually progressed across human history, exponentially so in the very recent past. Do you think it will stop?
> Technology has continually progressed across human history
This is the so-called "Whig view of history", and while it looks superficially true it ignores those cases where technologies have been lost, abandoned, become uneconomic to maintain, or given up for political reasons (e.g. China abandoning its exploration fleets).
How do you account for the European "dark ages", for example?
Collapse is possible: supply chains may be extremely vulnerable to certain risks, such as a war in Korea or an earthquake in Silicon valley. Decline is also possible: life expectancy is starting to fall in the US, as it did in Russia in the post-Communist period.
People need to stop comparing the fall of pre aircraft civilizations to the fall of a post Internet civilization. You wouldnt compare the fall of the roman empire to the extinction of the dodos. We've made enough strives in technology to where it may be fun to say oh history repeats itself, but at this level of unexplored territory you're going to need facts to prove your point.
Why? The technology being better does nothing for human nature. The very things that give us so much for so little also make us vulnerable to very small attacks. We have a police force that’s defeating out opponents for the time being, but as the IRA told Thatcher, the defenders need to be lucky every time, the attackers only need to be lucky once.
>How do you account for the European "dark ages", for example?
The lack of a printing press? From what I have read, the creation of the printing press is what helped lift Europe out of the dark ages and presumably prevented it from ever returning to another one.
The latest thinking on the European dark ages is that they occurred because of the Huns-- they pushed hordes of other barbarian tribes into and overwhelming Rome, and brought Black Plague which killed half of Europe.
And we all know that mass migrations and plagues can’t happen today! No really, if anything the technology we have makes both of those things much harder to control. Climate change leads to drought and famine, which leads to political and social instability, war, and mass migration (as we’ve already seen recently). Those same forces, along with people loving cheek to jowel, with access to rapid mass transit, is a risk for plagues. The current “solution” is runaway spending on the military, and wars that seem to never end.
Also, resource collapse. Yemen is in the process of running out of water; either some large expensive solution needs to be deployed in a very poor country, or a million or more people need to move or die.
I don't see anything in these articles that proves that climate change is either the primary proximate cause or a necessary cause for the migration from the Middle East to Europe. It is still more simply explained by political expediency than it is by climate change.
Technology has regressed seriously at least two times that I can think of. After the Sea People invaded Mesopotamia, and after the fall of the Roman Empire. Arguably in some ways after the colonization of America too, a lost of technological knowledge was lost. It took several centuries to recover from each of those, and technology right now depends on resources that are not renewable and that we are making more difficult to get. If we regressed again, it could take a very long time to recover, because of the exponential growth you mention.
The eastern mediterranean basin. AFAIK Assyria wasn't directly affected, the polities directly affected were Mycenaean Greece (collapsed), the Hittite empire of Anatolia (collapsed) and the Kingdom of Egypt (which repelled the Sea People but likely at high cost).
The Assyrian Empire contracted at a later date, possibly as an indirect consequence of the collapse.
> If we regressed again, it could take a very long time to recover, because of the exponential growth you mention.
An other issue is the ability to access resources. As a civilisation progresses it consumes easily accessible non-renewable resources, the more it progresses the more difficult to access the resources it consumes entirely.
A civilisation following the collapse of the current globalist one would have a very, very hard time accessing non-renewable resources to fuel its growth.
North American pre-Columbian societies were all Stone Age and most were pre-literate. One of the most advanced, the Mayans, collapsed hundreds of years before Columbus. The most advanced Aztecs worked with metals but hadn't discovered the wheel (beyond toys) or bronze. No doubt the collapse from European contact resulted in tragic loss of life, loss of culture and loss of local knowledge of medicine and agriculture, but on net it actually ushered a wave of dramatic technological advancement among indigenous tribes-- particularly adoption of the horse and horse-riding, which the Spanish tried to make illegal. The tribes in North America that adopted the horse (and later, firearms) rapidly conquered the tribes that did not, until they were ultimately displaced in turn by European settlers.
During the 200 thousand years of human history, technological progress was pretty flat. Low hanging fruit like electricity and nuclear power took a long time to develop. Most of our dreams remain just that.
Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.
On top, progress is trickling down pretty badly. We are wasting lots of resources on conflicts, essentially to ensure that the one percenters keep their possessions, including means of production (so that capital can further concentrate).
We will probably lay the planet to waste, by wars and resource exploitation, much sooner than technology will advance enough to save us.
The ingeniuty of the human race is not its predominant feature.
> Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.
That seems a pretty weird argument to make. "Apart from all the people with black hair, nobody has black hair" These two fields alone are wide ranging enough that they can touch almost everything on earth. Furthermore, fields like material science have progressed an incredible amount due to widespread availability of computing power. So have agriculture, logistics, manufacturing, mining, medicine and education. We may yet destroy ourselves before we attain utopia, but it won't be because our technology is too stagnant.
There's no evidence that tech is stagnating but quite a lot that the pace is accelerating, perhaps geometrically. There are two reasons-- one is the integration of many more people into the western/global structure of scientific and material progress (particularly in Asia and South Asia) and the second is the complementary impact of advances across multiple fields. Consider for example, the enormous impact of internet communications tech on medical research.
The Wright brothers, working in a bicycle shop, invented fixed wing flight in 1903 and it took less than 100 years for western civilization to develop jumbo jets and space planes.
It is generally considered impossible to prove a negative. Even if you can prove that something is not now the case, it is usually not possible to prove that it will never happen.
Therefore, the burden of proof is usually assigned, fairly objectively, to the argument that makes a positive claim, e.g., that something will happen or something is true, etc.
In this case, the claims are: 1) I believe space faring technology will advance enough to the point that humans will be able to leave our planet permanently, and 2) I am skeptical of 1.
Two is like the null hypothesis. This cannot be proven; it is the default until #1 is proven. Therefore, #1 should objectively have the burden of proof.
Kind of like how financial disclaimers will include something like "past performance is not proof of future results".
It's not that the claim that "technology will continue to progress forward" is wrong. I think it's a reasonable belief. But that is not itself proof that it will continue on. Reasonableness of a claim is not proof of its truth. Intuition is not very good evidence.
Even if we assume that technological progress will be effectively infinite, that doesn't mean that any specific technology will come to exist.
Don't think it can be decided "objectively", but we usually assume the ordinary scenario is correct and require more evidence the more extraordinary the deviation from the norm (AKA Occam's razor).
Sometimes we explicitly agree on a position, as with the US's "innocent until proven guilty."
Had some customers. But never got that hockey-stick growth all VCs want. And you're always competing with the big boys, Quickbooks, Netsuite, etc... It's a constant arms race to add more features, more integrations, etc... A lot of customer support because your customers rely on you to run their business.
Wasn't preachy, made sense to me :). Thanks for it, I've had lots of vague thoughts swirling around about this.
Perhaps we become who we are through what we pursue. So if we never wade beyond the tide of 'low' goals pushed upon us by that glowing box, we end up the simplistic people you mention above (good teeth etc.).
But do we have an innate identity that's being supplanted by consumerism, or are these just the easiest, most available goals, and so we create our identity from these shallow things?
So perhaps it's less that this shallow self-knowledge is externally imposed over our innate deep self-knowledge, and more that we're simply shallow people because we've set shallow goals.
Maybe we realize our potential and develop that 'real' identity by looking up, aiming higher...
