dividefuel

Does this really demonstrate what the author thinks it does? Other than menus, none of this was really easier before technology.

- Parking meters: you'd have to remember when yours would expire and manually check your watch (if you brought one!) regularly. If you needed more time, you'd have to leave the table to go to the meter to extend it... or leave your event early.

- Splitting a bill: this is notoriously difficult with medium groups [0]. Servers generally dislike split bills, even if you go to the trouble of listing the exact amounts to charge per card. It's also not just a tech problem, but a social problem as well.

Yes the technology involved could be better -- ideally you can easily extend a parking meter from your phone, ideally the app for splitting the bill works well and supports more complicated (but common) scenarios.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8mhQ9wINI

I agree it's primarily cultural. I wonder whether there's anything that a non-totalitarian government can do that would significantly change the cultural side of it.

How people feel about having kids doesn't seem to be a uniform thing. The majority of parents certainly seem to love their children, but I do see a lot of mixed opinions about whether they love being parents.

In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.

It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.

I agree a lot with your hypothesis. Most people in my demographic (mid 30s American) that aren't having kids are choosing not to primarily because they don't want to really interfere with their current lifestyle. Money seems to be a part of it, but secondary to the high opportunity cost of children.

There are also social effects. When half your friends have kids and half don't, you can compare the lives of each and decide which you want to live. You won't be as isolated now if you choose not to have kids... in fact the trend seems to be that having children is the isolating choice.

Coming back a few days later, but here's my current todo list:

- Lawn care

- Pool care

- Trim back trumpet vine in side yard

- Fix a leaking drip irrigation adapter

- Prune dead branches in liquid amber tree

- Repair / replace squeaky dryer parts

- Replace washing machine seal

- Trim back ivy near maple tree

- Cover sprinkler valves that are in the sun

- Replace dining room light bulb

- Trim trees off the fence

- Pull privet stalks

- Paint bare spots on front patio

Most of these are probably 30-120 minutes of work.

In my anecdotal experience in a FAANG, weak junior hiring started during the hiring freezes in mid 2022, and was made worse by the layoff cycles that began soon after. Once you know headcount is going to be extremely tight indefinitely, you want to use your precious few slots to hire someone that can deliver value pretty quickly, rather than take years to coach up.

It personally seems hard to connect that to remote work as that had been going for 2 years and in between was the largest hiring burst we'd done, which included many junior folks. Though admittedly I'm biased as a remote worker.

Beyond financial costs, I was caught off guard at how much time home ownership took up. House maintenance and projects have taken up most of every single weekend of mine for the past few years.

Part of it is simply that I bought a house with more space than the places I usually rented. More to clean, more to maintain, more things that can go wrong, etc.

But the biggest thing is that I'm the only one in charge of maintenance. There's no one person I can call for every single problem. Keeping track of regular maintenance, performing that maintenance, and learning how to DIY things takes a lot of time. And even if I want to pay someone to do it for me, I still have to research contractors, coordinate estimates, and schedule the project. And I still need to learn enough about the project to determine whether they're doing it right!

Home ownership is definitely a lifestyle choice first and foremost more than a financial one.

Born in 1990. In the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, many of my friends lived in the same neighborhood. That's how we became friends in the first place: you'd see each other outside and gradually become friends.

By the time I was 14 or so, many of them had moved to other parts of the town, typically 2-3 miles away. By this age I was comfortable riding a bike or walking to visit them, though equally as often we'd ask our parents for a ride just to save ourselves time or because we were bringing heavier stuff with us.

I did have a few friends that were farther away, about 4+ miles, and I rarely if ever made it out that far on bike or foot. That was a mix of the distance and the type of roads I'd have to take or cross to get there.

Yes, I often wonder this too: It's said all the time that communities are much safer than they were, so why restrict kids? But that raises the clear possibility that those preventative measures might be why it's safer now.

Whether we've hit the right balance of freedom VS safety is still very much worth discussing. But it certainly feels possible that the preventative measures we take have led to safer outcomes.

I think walking VS driving is also about convenience.

In the example we're replying to, the shared suburban street has a marked median (implying medium traffic), minimal shoulder, and no sidewalk. While the houses and foliage are very nice, it feels a little unsafe to walk on. Presumably the train station has nice parking, so driving is quick and easy to do. Choosing to walk in this case is more for leisure or for exercise.

In the city though, driving is a whole other thing. Storing a car and finding parking just to go 1 mile is a huge pain: it's much simpler just to walk it. Walking in this case may be for leisure and exercise, but it's also for convenience.

I know the discussion of urbanism vs suburbanism is a common topic on HN, but I don't think suburbs themselves are the root issue here.

When I was growing up in the suburb, there were kids outside all the time. Yes, some friends lived across town in another suburb, but we just biked there instead of walking.

Now when I visit that same suburb, there are no kids in sight. I still see adults of parenting age, so I assume there are still children in the neighborhood, but they're just indoors. The density of the town didn't change, but rather people's attitudes towards where kids can and can't be seem to be what changed. I also suspect the declining birthrate and having fewer kids is contributing to the problem too.

The opinion polls cited here show people thought the force was unjustified/inappropriate at about 2x the rate of those who thought it was justified/appropriate.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/politics/minneapolis-ice-shoo...

My take is the shift to mobile is what really caused the biggest change in the Internet.

By the mid/late 2000s, the UX for surfing the Web was mostly pretty good. Navigating to another site was as easy as typing in its URL or issuing a quick search.

Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult -- even 15+ years later simple things like browser tabs are a nuisance on mobile. Typing URLs is still a pain. Etc. That extra friction for more traditional Web browsing led to users preferring simpler apps that they didn't have to navigate from, including content that was less interactive. And social media companies were quite happy to exploit that and create endless feeds of content. People who create content followed suit and went were the eyeballs were.

Also, before mobile, using the Internet largely meant sitting down at a computer and browsing the Internet somewhat interrupted for a period of time. With mobile, Internet use became more far more disjointed. You might browse for a series of 2 minute spurts in between other activities, rather than having a dedicated sitdown browsing session. This also rewarded the 'feed' that instantly provided you something to do, without you having to put in effort to find it.

I do think that once an elderly person loses the ability to drive, it's often a big tipping point towards their decline. I would suspect that losing the ability to drive usually (but not necessarily) comes before losing the ability to navigate public transit.

But I don't immediately believe the link that 'car culture' -> 'earlier cognitive decline'. Car culture, for example, is usually associated with living on larger plots of land, which comes with its own set of tasks and chores that can keep someone older occupied. A smaller apartment requires much less ongoing work.

I think a lot depends on the individual and how they best stay active. More dense living probably provides easier opportunities to do things, whereas less dense living sort of forces you to perform ongoing tasks.

I think you have a point: many men work hard to provide stability for their family, and are effectively sacrificing family time to provide that. This kind of hard work feels undervalued in modern parenting discourse, which seems to put most value on time directly spent with children or on direct day-to-day tasks (dishes, cooking, etc).

An example anecdote: my friend works construction. Lots of long hours of hard labor. His wife is unhappy because he doesn't do more childcare, but left unanswered is how he could do more. He can't work fewer hours or move to a new job without a giant income hit. His wife can't earn enough to offset daycare costs. They already live on a fairly thin budget. From the outside, I can see how he'd feel unappreciated.

That said though there are definitely also men who aren't doing childcare OR working hard, and they're happy to have their wife do everything.

Do you have a source for this? What threshold is needed for it to be 'dense'?

Agree with this. I'm a little more sensitive to the idea of horrible things happening to small children (e.g. sad news stories), but for the most part I didn't find kids to be a major shift in my beliefs.

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?