"So the inventor's real genius was not to build a chess-playing machine. It was to be the first to notice that, in the modern world, there is more mastery available than you might think; that exceptional talent is usually available, and will often work cheap."
It's funny how the recipe to fix the economy, that our current leaders are pushing, is by trying to raise productivity and competitiveness, by giving corporations the flexibility to increase working hours without extra compensation for employees. Then raise the retirement age at 67 while unemployment in under 30s is in a peak. Yeah, all those counter-intuitive measures they keep preaching for on the media all the time.
Scarcity of a resource is the most profitable opportunity for those who own it. Scarcity of jobs is an opportunity for profit to some people.
Developed countries have in fact lower birth than death rates. In those countries, population is increasing only by immigration.
What stops population growth is political and economical stability, empowerment of women, and education. E.g. check this video http://vimeo.com/m/2905893 to see what research on the matter has to say.
> I want to see the exchange as work for time, because I work much more effectively than many other people. An hourly-rate job is simply not attractive to me, because the hourly-rate will not effectively capture my value.
Why not? If you provide better value per hour than others, you should also get higher hourly rate. If you just work more hours without more compensation, then you're just cheap.
It is money for time. I'm renting my skills by the hour. If my skills are poor for the job is another issue. And a lot of managers can't distinguish real work from long hours work.
Excessive overtime is the way you make a highly skilled professional useless in the long term. No time to rest, no time for recreation, no time to play and experiment with new things, no time to study more stuff. In a fast paced industry this is death in a couple of years.
I agree with the author. We work to make a living, not live to work.
However, he thinks that in Europe there are more human conditions. Well, this is rapidly changing towards the american system. E.g. the bail out for Greece was offered with the exchange of passing new employment rules. Some of them are enabling employers to demand for more work time without extra compensation, or to fire much more easily without specific reasons. Another nice change, not yet implemented but soon to be, the employee will not get the full monthly salary if he had any sick days.
Furthermore, the public pension funds and health care is being demolished. Soon the only option will be to get in a insurance plan offered by your company (big companies have already started to offer such plans). So except if you're one of the very few top talented people, soon you'll be very depended on your job and will be forced to accept to work more working hours without any additional benefit.
Romania has already moved that way, and Italy will follow soon. And the rest of Europe after that.
This mentality that you must sacrifice your life for the benefit of your company, it is just absurd. If the law was enforcing less working hours and bigger compensations for overtime, there wouldn't be any competitiveness excuse. And the developed world should enforce the same work rules to the developing countries.
It's absurd, especially if you think about how much the unemployment rates have risen and how much the technology today automates tasks so no humans are needed, and the production of material goods is so high that most products are never sold and end in the recycle bin. It screams about lowering the working hours and the retirement limits instead of raising them.
My kid is in the autism spectrum and we have seen 3 doctors, 2 psychiatrists, 3 ergo-therapists and 2 logo-therapists. They all seem to agree that when a kid cries with no reason (you learn how to distinct that by experience) you just ignore him until he learns that this is not the way to get attention. It's not that we never give him attention, we just don't overdo it so he won't become manipulative.
They've also advised us that night sleep must be complete, as I mentioned in my previous post. That we should not encourage him to wake up by letting him getting up or giving him food, and it worked. When he has 6 months old, we switched the night milk with water or tee and after a few nights he stopped waking up in the middle of the night. Since then, me and my wife can get some sleep at nights and some rest instead of being wrecked every day.
As far as where is the limit, how far to go? You don't have to go anywhere, you just have to use some common sense, if it has a real problem rush to help it, when it doesn't have a real problem don't encourage it. Yes, be there the first time it will try to climb the tree, but not every time it gets into its mind that it wants to climb a tree. Of course you don't have to start beating it. Duh! I'm a little shocked myself that you find it normal to wake up every night for 16 months.
How else do I know that I'm right? I see other people's kids. When parents rush to serve every vice their kids have just to avoid the crying, the end is that their kids cry all the time and they are never satisfied with anything. Parents that set limits and don't continuously run behind their children, not only have some time left to enjoy their life, but their kids are more polite, they are easier satisfied and happy, and they also make friends easier, since they are not obnoxious.
You say your kid is fine anyway, don't know you-can't confirm it, maybe it's an exception to the general rule, which is if you let crying to be a bargaining card, the kid will cry all the time. Maybe in your country there is no sane parent left for you to see the difference, maybe you should plan some vacation time in France.
Your father not handling the situations properly is irrelevant to what the article debates. The key detail here is that French parents aren't actually trying to discipline their kids, they're trying to educate them. They're teaching them to be polite and respect the people around them, they educate them how to behave and interact with other people and this is high priority principle for them. Although it isn't possible to have all the parents of a nation to always be right and always handle things correctly, having the above principle, it does make an overall better adaption of kids to society.
Something similar happened to me too. It was a self confidence boost and learned how to be more careful and how to deal with problems without panic. Accidents will happen anyway sooner or later, it's better to have small accidents early and learn from them than make big irreversible mistakes later.
Kids must experience all kinds of feelings to learn to cope with them. If you always run whenever your kid cries, it will never learn to deal with things alone and it will cry far more often.
Also, I believe that your approach is the more convenient to the parent, because you don't have to deal with guilt about possibly leaving emotional scars to their kid. But in fact you're just spoiling it and do bad for its health. Sleeping the whole night, at least for 6 continues hours, is very important for kids from half to 2 yo for their proper/healthy development.
The night cry mentioned in the article is just a specific example, it doesn't make much sense to come to a conclusion based only on how you delt with this particular case.
" They stand there, 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the noisy bus to pick them up, then make 3 or 4 more stops, then drive the quarter of half mile to their schools where they're dumped off."
Same experience here. And after xfs_repair, still remaining files and directories which couldn't be deleted or moved. The only solution to move the parent folder or reformat. Though performance wise, it was really fast.
Furthermore 1,2 and 3 seem to make an impact only in establishing the initial connection, which is not that much time, even 40% latency decrease would be less than half a second gain in most situations, and if I got it right, the article states in point 3 that only 33% of http traffic is preceded with a new connection establishment.
A lot of your life is supported by technology, small computers that run some software. If you don't have any control over those devices (e.g. like the iPhone), then a lot of your life is controlled by their creators. Some things you will not notice, like when your phone recommends you a restaurant. Some things might hurt you, like being monitored by a government (w/o the voluntary support from corporations controlling your device) in order to detain you if you speak against it.
Free software, as visioned by Stallman, is just a line of defense for your general freedom rights. And I disagree with you, the article is pretty clear on the matter.