dividefuel

Ah I wish I could agree. I've found having kids to be a major challenge. Maybe I just need to wait for them to get a little older.

I firmly believe that many goods like this fall into a cycle.

Existing products are cheaply made and poor quality, so a new company emerges producing a higher quality product. Eventually word gets out and their sales blow up. But to keep their profits going up, they begin to coast and cut corners. Fast forward a decade or two, and now they're the ones making low quality gear, leaving the market open for a new high quality brand.

In short, high quality leads to recognition and growth, and then cutting corners leads to profit.

This drives me nuts. "What a clever question to ask! You must be one of the brightest minds of your generation. Nothing slips by you. Here's why it's not actually safe to stand in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm..."

I agree with this a lot. In the late 2000s, which for me was when I was about 20, posts were very throwaway and low effort -- in a good way! You never really knew what you'd see when you logged in. Photos of stupid things or silly status updates, etc.

Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt like the bar was higher on what people would share, but unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB fun in the first place.

I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.

When I think of times in which I've made friends, it usually has to do with being in a group of similar-ish peers for an extended period of time, ideally with a shared goal. School is the obvious example, but work can be too if your coworkers are similar enough.

I've often wanted something of a service that produces something similar: creating groups of people that commit to spending time together on some task or activity. E.g. people who are into sports commit to meet up N times to go watch their local team, or people who love animals can volunteer at an animal shelter weekly for a couple of months.

The 'tech' part of this probably comes from: 1) matching people well to groups, like considering age, personality, politics, location, interests, etc to try to create a good fit. and 2) making it much easier for them to participate in activities, like by automatically booking tickets for events, etc.

Obviously there would be challenges. How do you prevent people from flaking or bailing? How do you handle groups where one person is clearly a bad apple?

My kid showed an allergic reaction the third time he had peanuts, at 6-7 months old. We hadn't lived in much of a bubble up to that point.

You say they live in bubbles, but is that before or after discovering the allergy? After the allergy is discovered, some amount of bubble-ing is necessary due to how difficult it is to be certain than something is peanut-free.

I do think some automation is useful. For example, being able to order a sandwich online is very convenient because the visual UX makes it easy to be specific and clear about what should and shouldn't go on the sandwich. Communicating that verbally is more prone to mistakes.

It's interesting to compare Taco Bell (and many other chain fast food restaurants) with In-N-Out.

At Taco Bell, a meal costs something like $15/person unless you're aggressive about saving money. They also only seem to have 2-3 workers at a time. There usually isn't a long line in the store or at the drivethru. They still frequently mess up my order, leaving out items or giving me the wrong thing.

Compare that with In-N-Out. A meal costs more like $10/person, and they have more like 15 workers at a time. I rarely have mistakes in my meal. You pay less and have a better staffed restaurant. I'm guessing they get away with it because they always have a long line of people waiting for food. They make up for it all through volume.

If you read forums of new parents (e.g. parenting subreddits), the common consensus is that being a stay at home parent is far harder than a job.

I see three big reasons why people aren't having kids:

#1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being able to offload some of these (or being able to afford to offload some of these) would reduce the burden to carry.

#2: People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.

#3: The network effect. When you're the only one in your friend group having kids, you're going to feel extremely disconnected from that group. You'll be the one sitting out while everyone goes out to have fun. But if most or all of your friends are having kids around the same time, it's more of a shared experience where you can bond over it. It's the opposite: a nudge to your childless friends to join in and have one of their own.

The thing is, none of these are really easy to solve with policy. #3 basically requires #1 and #2 to improve enough to kickstart a feedback loop. #2 is made of the big issues of our era, and won't be solved anytime soon, and certainly not for the sake of fertility. That leaves #1, where the most you can do is to give money and long maternity/paternity leaves. But it would take a lot of money/leave to really push the needle. This likely isn't politically feasible.

Do you sense there's still a reluctance to serve foreign guests, and that it's largely done out of necessity but not out of innate desire?

Isn't this what pricing is for? The "best" places can raise prices because of the high demand. Then the "pretty good" places in comparison wind up being a good value option.

I've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.

Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.

People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?

Among average people, it seems there's widespread understanding that things are collectively getting worse. The next 50 years are more likely to bring turmoil than prosperity, with climate change, AI, and political instability all getting worse every year.

Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the tools that have been part of society for a long time feel cheaper and more fragile than ever.

He's also in his 60s. What happens to the company when he passes away?

At the same time, execs love to paint with a broad brush that everyone working from home is slacking off... while also not sharing any data about how many people are being lazy.

Either your performance management can catch lazy employees or it can't. If it can't, then that's what you should be fixing.

I think there are a lot of reasons, and forced attrition is definitely something they see as a benefit. However, I do genuinely think that a lot of them truly believe that working together in an office, face-to-face, is important. RTO is not just a cold calculation, but also reflective of their moral values towards work.

Whether those values actually lead to a better company is the part that, I feel, continues to lack evidence.

This mirrors a lot of what I've suspected. Executives have a survivorship bias of a very work-focused life. It's hard for them to understand why anyone else would choose differently.

This applies to both work location and number of hours per week. It's gotta be hard to understand and accept that lower-level workers have a different view and priorities from your own, especially when all your fellow execs share your own view.

And, as the tweet says, at a certain level you can afford to offset all the negatives of work location / work hours. No commute. Personal chef. All household chores covered. Full time individual childcare. It's a lot easier to come into the office for 50-60 hours per week when you don't have to also spend your time outside the office trying to balance sleep and survival. But, again, that's not what life looks like for an average employee.

Trying to understand the point of view of companies switching from 3 days to 5 days. Do they see absolutely zero benefit to working from home part of the time?

I can understand -- even if I disagree with -- the idea that fully remote work hurts collaboration. But the hybrid seemed like an easy way to capture the benefits of remote work (focused time, less commute) while still allowing for frequent in person collaboration.

In a lot of modern corporate jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.

Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.

What GPU offers a good balance between cost and performance for running LLMs locally? I'd like to do more experimenting, and am due for a GPU upgrade from my 1080 anyway, but would like to spend less than $1600...

I agree with this as the main factor (over cost) for the falling birth rate. The opportunity cost of having children has never been higher: you give up leisure, hobbies, rest, social life, and income. Whether or not children is worth this cost is a personal thing, but it seems kinda obvious that as the cost increases, fewer will pay it.

I can't imagine that nursing's problems are just fundamentally housing. Tracing back rough work schedules, unreasonable administration expectations, and hostile patients to housing costs feels like a stretch.

There seems to be a broad understanding among those in these fields that these jobs just keep getting worse, and so people are quitting. They may be getting worse for different reasons (worse conditions, less satisfaction, declining pay, more qualifications needed, etc etc), but there's a net sense of dissatisfaction. For people new to the job, there's usually an initial shock that the job is so far removed from its mission that there's no personal satisfaction, and they ultimately leave.

Nursing seems like one where a feedback loop could happen. As others quit, your patient burden increases. The higher your patient burden, the more likely you are to make a mistake. Mistakes are often, as far as I understand, held against the nurse, so you could lose your license. At a certain point, the risk becomes too great and you're better off quitting.

Yes, I think there's a big distinction between "Execs think being in office is better for culture/productivity" VS "Execs have data that proves being in office is better for culture/productivity."

I believe the first one is true, but not the second.

I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of:

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

- Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another company

- Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in future negotiations if needed

- Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks

- Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)

- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)

This feels like a strawman. How many people are working multiple jobs? How many are doing it effectively enough to not get caught nor fired for poor performance? And, if they are able to somehow juggle multiple jobs without performance/NDA issues, then is it really a problem?

It'll be interesting to see how soon the other big tech companies follow suit and do the same. Cynically, I wonder to what extent that forced RTO has been directly coordinated between these companies VS copycatting each other.

I thought 3 days/week would settle as the equilibrium -- enough to maintain real estate value while still paying lip service to employee wishes, and still achieving the stealth layoff of blocking full remote work.