331–340 of 382 posts
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You are assuming all family influence is good. There are lots of abusive families and poor parents, though.
In general people take care of their kids. In general the family is good you can always find edge cases.
https://mcnultycounseling.com/moving-past-dysfunctional-fami...
This is ultimately a dichotomy between having the family unit or "the state" as the central point of governance. Many totalitarian regimes looked at newborns as "belonging to the state". The result is a unified mass person who dresses, thinks and acts in predictable ways. The more power, personal connection and influence parents have over their children, the more diverse society will become.
Like in the Democratic, liberal West, where everyone's individuality is created by consuming the same stuff?
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well, except for the fact that, as the article states, it doesn't scale. Or rather, it scales poorly: the quality of care provided by a nation state is going to differ in degree and quality compared to the 1:1 care that humans probably need (and certainly traumatised humans). I'm not sure this comes as a surprise to anyone except for those who have had no interaction with state-provided social services. I'd also say…
Care doesn't scale, but a lot of activities around care should be scalable. A caregiver can be helped so they can spend as little time as possible on auxiliary tasks like admin or logistics.
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Paperwork. I swear, it's paperwork. My mom is a (retired) preschool teacher. By the end of her career, she was working for a school affiliated with a large chain, and maybe 1/3 of her time was spent on filling out all the paperwork required by management. That was time she absolutely was not spending with the kids. My dad is a (retired) doctor. Similar story there. His hospital ultimately ended up associated with a r…
> The same thing happens at my own job, software. The bigger a company I'm at, the more of my job consists of filling out paperwork about the work I'm doing, rather than doing the actual work. There's some irony here considering software has been promising for decades to help businesses scale information sharing.
> In 1967, Henson was contracted by IBM to make a film extolling the virtues of their new technology, the MT/ST, a primitive word processor. The film would explore how the MT/ST would help control the massive amount of documents generated by a typical business office. Paperwork Explosion, produced in October 1967, is a quick-cut montage of images and words illustrating the intensity and pace of modern business. Henson collaborated with Raymond Scott on the electronic sound track.
Usually the discussion quickly converges on how automation in administration is a prime example of the Jevons Paradox[2] in action.
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> The food system is different from homecooked meals This is a good point, and everything I've heard from parents says that it's parents, not children, who identify home-cooked meals with care. Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. In order to feel cared for, all children need is to trust that the person caring for them will make sure they ge…
if you'll forgive my prior snark, some people successfully involve the children in the cooking. When this is done, the children seem to prefer the home-cooked because they are part of the cooking and they are part of the feeding/providing to others. Don't underestimate the human desire to provide value to the tribe, it runs deep in the evolutionary make-up.
Also, in some kind of weird benign parentification[0] twist, she now loves to feed me food, even if (or more like especially if) she doesn't like it.
So having fun with cooking food seems quite decoupled from her desire to eat it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentification - and I say it's benign because cooking together is completely optional for her
If we're going to talk about how to "scale care" and how not to, then Buurtzorg has to be mentioned[0][1]. It's a Dutch home-care company that was started by nurses who basically got frustrated that managers got in the way of them doing their job. It operates by having a flat organization working with small teams of highly trained nurses, and trusting them to make the right decisions. The result is a low-cost provide…
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At my company we are aggressively rolling out policies to forbid the use of AI. I'm one of the bigger folks behind it. I just see no benefits. I have no desire to debug AI generated code, I have no desire to read pages and pages of AI generated fluff, I have no desire to look at AI generated images. Either put the work in or don't.
If you use AI like a quick answer machine, or quick example machine, they all outdo Google by a large margin. The friction between moving between, and knitting different systems and languages together that I don't use frequently enough to be fluent, has been lowered by an order of magnitude or two. Due to small knowledge gaps getting filled the instant I need them to be. The same with getting a basic understanding (o…
I mean, A) hallucinations still happen, and B) Google sucks anyway. I don't know of anyone at the company still using Google because we're largely an engineering outfit and all were aware as Google's search features slid into uselessness.
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This isn't true though. Neither in theory nor in practice. A broad set of individual product quality has consistently declined throughout the industrial era - not least, infamously, one of your own examples: nails. Many products have increased in quality due to factors unrelated to centralised production: new scientific research, intensive r&d, internal standardisation efforts - but centralised production tends inste…
Planned obsolescence is not a consequence of centralization, it is a strategy of capitalism.
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This isn't true though. Neither in theory nor in practice. A broad set of individual product quality has consistently declined throughout the industrial era - not least, infamously, one of your own examples: nails. Many products have increased in quality due to factors unrelated to centralised production: new scientific research, intensive r&d, internal standardisation efforts - but centralised production tends inste…
Are you suggesting there is no provider of high quality nails at industrial scale? That’s ridiculous. Many people just prefer to pay for cheap nails because they are good enough for the application, and that’s a good thing because this option did not previously exist. But the high end still exists and is higher quality than ever. Capitalism has problems, but providing low complexity commodity improvements at scale an…
Nails was one of the examples cited by the gp, which I found funny since there is one famous example of nails being lower quality by definition as a result of centralisation. That example isn't the case for all nails (nor for all the gps examples), but it is still an excellent, if isolated, example: cut nails. Most carpentry nails you buy today are wire nails. I don't know if it's possible to buy cut nails today from any large factories, but broadly speaking, manufacture of cut nails does not scale. The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand (nor quality assurance). Cut nails are still considered superior today.
If you look at antique diagrams of nails available for purchase, you'll see 20 or 30 varieties, all with very distinctly different designs. Those designs have converged on a single design for all applications, not because it's a better design, but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture. Flaws in the design are compensated for via material choice & worker skill.
There's likely thousands of such cases in industry.