After a big snow storm, my brother and I climbed a pile of snow to the roof and played up there. We thought we were being sneaky about it, but it turns out that walking on the roof in snow boots makes a great deal of noise.
There is a tendency in my wife's family to treat anxiety like it's the videotape in The Ring. They won't rest until I'm worried about whatever they are worried about (almost always related to children) and if they succeeding in making me worried, they feel much better.
It was clear that we conceived of risk in entirely different ways. He thinks of risk in terms of probability: How likely is it that any given child will plummet to his death? Google has an answer to that question (about 150 children in the United States die from falls from roofs, windows and balconies annually),
In so far as there is an argument here, is this the stupidest argument ever? Only 1 in a million toddler die from falling out of an airplane, so it's silly not to let our toddler try skydiving!
I'm sure static line is fine for them.
2: Another way to think of this is that anxiety is a burden that is too heavy for one person to carry alone, and it's best if everyone shares the weight equally.
Some low probability events are low because people put effort into making them low. Might as well not vaccinate while you're at it.
6: well, yes. The number is low because most toddlers are not allowed to play on roofs.
Though the kids going on to the roof in this seem to be rather older than toddler-age. And it's possible that the writer, who seems to be rather stupid, has misrepresented his argument. Note the absence of any direct quotes in that paragraph - always a bit of a giveaway.
Wow do I not want to have to hang out with either of those parents.
This part was bad too:
"Beneath the pleasantries, it was clear that Mike thought I was putting my son at risk of turning into what used to be called a sissy -- a concept whose demise he regrets. And I was of the opinion that Mike was putting his son at risk of being a bully, a label Mike thinks is now used to pathologize normal, healthy, boyish aggression."
It is clearly a hit piece so who knows what is really going on
Berkeley's adventure playground is pretty great though:
http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/adventureplayground/
Without the clarifying effects of pain caused by falling from roofs, we can't tell what's normal boyish aggression and what's bullying.
the kids going on to the roof in this seem to be rather older than toddler-age
She mentions a four-year-old up there at some point.
A hit piece? I think she's charmed by the guy, but thinks he's a bit loony, which seems about right.
And that argument is stupid as it pertains to the roof, but the general issue is real and well-described.
Adventure playground is unvarnished awesome. They have a zipline! More forts than the Maginot line!
Speaking as one who sometimes ventured onto the roof the halcyon days of my pre-helicopter-parent-era childhood, I say let 'em climb.
If we're going to use the statistics for falls from roofs, windows, and balconies to establish that roofs are dangerous, we may just give up on ever doing science.
Yeah, too bad the guy is a dickface. (I have no doubt the author is painting him a certain way, but: dickface.) Adventure playgrounds are great!
This calls for a double blind study where blindfolded, disoriented researchers throw toddlers off of roofs or into ball pits to establish whether it's more dangerous than the placebo.
If the roof is 1 story up, and reasonably low pitch, it's not particularly dangerous at all. A 10 foot fall isn't going to (badly) hurt you unless you land on something (fence, concrete step).
more dangerous than the placebo.
We all know by now that the sugar-for-kids thing is a myth.
12.last: I'm not sold on that reading. Though what the hell, if we're speculating I'll wager that the reason her son's not allowed to go back again is that she and the husband had a fling and she's processing it by writing this hit piece about how he's a charmingly loony sexist. Your move!
Good thing steps and fences in the vicinity of houses are completely unheard-of!
The Lanzas have multistory house, with a sloped top and a narrow, flat area perhaps 25 feet off the ground. If you tumbled off the back, you'd land on the grass or perhaps on the stone patio. Falling from either side, you would be impaled on the fence or fall into the neighbor's yard. From the front you'd hit the concrete driveway, car, picnic table or fountain.
18: Even the use of parachutes isn't supported by randomized trials.
24: when designing such an experiment, what would you give the control group? A backpack filled with those snakes that pop out of cans?
From 10.last: "stepping on a nail is a possibility"
Is this place in Berkeley, Poland?
The key to trolling as a lifestyle is to take basically sort-of reasonable things two steps too far and then act really showy about it. Without even clicking the link I'm going to assume that this is what this guy is doing.
The first time I shuddered was paragraph 1. I will soldier on.
Weren't the DC area free range parents also named Lanza?
30: It's a name not associated with responsible and caring behavior around children.
On-topic for the discussion of risk: "The United Federation of, 'hold my beer, I got this.'" -- http://m.imgur.com/gallery/wpZ4w
The first paragraph reeks of too much money.
31 Also the Connecticut gun range parent.
Too soon?
Oh that was it. I knew the name was linked to parenting somehow.
Wait so is this like in The Manchurian Candidate when Angela Lansbury decides to short-circuit Laurence Harvey's brain and shows him an entire deck of Queens of Spades, this article and me?
9 was my reaction too. The adventure dad is a callous sexist jerk, and the author is a fretful needy control freak.
The yard looks pretty fun though.
Those free range Maryland kids should hitchhike to Menlo Park.
Rich asshole is libertarian, sexist, thinks bullying is normal and acceptable, and by the way also has idiosyncratic parenting philosophy: film at 11. As for the writer, I'd agree that the shortage of quotes around the article is kind of suspicious. But I think she comes across as reflective and self-critical enough that I'd give her the benefit of the doubt overall.
Is anyone else ready for a thinkpiece defending helicopter parenting? It seems like such an easy, popular target, and something so few people identify proudly with, that surely some of the arguments against it are overblown.
For the record, I was walking 2 miles on country roads to a friend's house when I was under 10, maybe even under 8. I had a zipline run between two trees in a copse up the hill, out of sight of my house. I generally spent a lot of time playing outside alone or with friends unattended and turned out fine, for Unfogged values of "fine", and hope to have something as much like that as possible for my daughter given the urban neighborhood. And yet, I still think most complaints about helicopter parenting are as dumb and self-righteous as most "kids these days" bullshit going back centuries.
That dumb family would love the shit out of actual rural country life. Or maybe not. But they sure do seem to be romanticizing it. Go play in the thresher, kids.
What's the status of the attractive nuisance doctrine in California?
23: Well then yeah, that's utterly nuts.
Good thing steps and fences in the vicinity of houses are completely unheard-of!
My point was simply that viewing roofs as out-of-bounds no matter what isn't based on anything remotely rational. I'll even go so far as to say that no-roofs is a fair default position, but it's still the case that plenty of roofs are basically as safe as monkey bars or trees for climbing.
This came up a couple months ago when we were talking about the safety of driving your kids places. The reality is that we, as a society, pretend that certain risks don't exist, while other, smaller, ones are intolerable and represent parental neglect.
I agree with JRoth that certain roofs are safe for kids to play on, even if as a class they generally aren't. Even then though, I'd have a lower age limit. I think four is too young.
safety of driving your kids places
Safer than your kids driving places.
I knew a guy who had his twelve year old drive him when he was drunk.
Things you learn working in a drive through window.
41 seems like a fair and balanced response.
There's attitudes about physical risk from falls, objects, etc. and then there's BS narratives about "balance of power", feminization, "mammals", and the veldt. Correlated, of course, but not the same.
Also struck by his labeling as "decimation" what boils down to children not being raised the way he would prefer. Trumpy in spirit, if not in vocabulary.
Playing on the roof is fine as long as they play Cleaning the Gutters.
The reality is that we, as a society, pretend that certain risks don't exist, while other, smaller, ones are intolerable and represent parental neglect.
The reality is that we vacillate wildly between pretending that certain risks don't exist or pretending that they're incredibly scary*. Humans are incredibly bad at evaluating low-probability risks**.
I saw a comment at one point that humans basically have three settings when it comes to probability, "probably gonna happen. About even odds. Probably not gonna happen." and that it takes a lot of mental energy to assess probability more precisely than that.
* E.g., shark attacks or terrorist attacks.
** There's also a known psychological bias that people feel more comfortable with a risk that they have some control over, rather than a smaller risk that they have no control over.
50: That's right! As I recall the only time I spent on the roof in high school was cleaning the gutter. I remember at the time thinking that it must have something to do with Judaism, because of Farrakhan's remark about it being a "gutter religion". Anyway, I didn't find out about hanging out on the roof for fun until college. It might have been more dangerous then, because when we did it we were often totally wasted.
I think four is too young.
Oh hell yeah.
Let's just be clear: The simplest rule of parenting is that if someone has a strong "parenting philosophy" they are a dick. Doesn't matter what the philosophy is. No more certain rule in human affairs.
54 I dunno what Donald Trump's parenting philosophy is but I'm sure it's strong.
A few weeks ago we had a heavy rain that resulted in a leak in a place we've never had one before, directly below a box gutter. Turned out that the gutter was packed full of essentially compost. It was too rainy and slippery (very low slope, but I did slip, so) to do much other than clear the actual leaky spot.
So we had 2 weeks of great weather, and I never got back out there. Which means that yesterday I was out there at the beginning of a 30 hour stretch of rain, clearing it while I could. Not kid work!
In Miami we used to climb up on the roof of the elementary school around the corner from me. Low slope, tons of friction, pretty safe. Climbing on the roof of the cafeteria, which was much steeper (6:12? At the least), was actually scary. I wanna say age 10. Certainly not parent-sanctioned.
56.2: Do they make kid-sized safety harnesses?
Just put an extra loop in the hosepipe they're using for cleaning the gutters.
When I was four, I asked my Dad if I could go on the roof. He said "when you are twice as old, you can go on the roof." When I was six, I figured out that meant that I had to be eight. On my 8th birthday, having never once mentioned it in the past four years, I told my Dad that I was now twice as old and I wanted to go on the roof. To his credit, he set up a ladder and we went up on the roof. It was totally worth waiting for.
The house I grew up in had a terrifying roof. High, steep, slippery as hell, falls to concrete on every side. Which is a shame, because it had a fantastic view and my parents would have let me up there pretty much unsupervised.
I had to wait another twelve years to have things to throw and roof access simultaneously.
||
My smartphone has died. Any unconventional recommendations for a good replacement, other than the usual suspects?
|>
60: When you was a child, you spoke as a child, you understood as a child, you thought as a child. But when you turned eight, you knew it was time to get a goddamn ladder and go up on the roof because that's friggin' awesome.
We have a couple of secondary roofs (on secondary masses, I think JRoth would say?) that are pretty easy to get up onto if you're willing to squeeze through very tiny windows. Reasonably good sunset views from one that only has a slight pitch. Have thought about going up with a beer sometime, however inadvisable that might be.
When you were a child. Sloppy editing.
Stay away from the Samsung Galaxy 7.
Though seriously I've been happy with my Samsung A3.
I have a Galaxy Alpha and I was always really happy with it until I started playing Pokemon Go. Now it's always hanging up. I think the problem is Pokemon Go, not my phone, but I'm not sure.
57, 58: At school some friends and I abseiled off the roof the (14th century) chapel. So, yes, they do make make harnesses for kids.
68: The Galaxy S7 is fine (more than fine, it's fantastic). It's the Galaxy Note 7 that will burn a hole through the floor.
54. My brother.
I went on a 3 mile hike with some rocky scrambles and nice views this weekend. A bunch of parents took their kids out. One 7-yo with scrapes and bruises all over, sobbing continuously, one 9 yo actually slipping and getting scraped up, much too close to tipping over into a facefirst downslope fall with his arms down.
Maybe if you've got a kid with cautious temperament, climbing is fine, but you watch the kid. Groups of kids are much dumber and more impulsive than individual kids-- an unsupervised group of kids younger than say 8 in a setting where fire, cuts, or falls are likely is just idiotic.
Any unconventional recommendations for a good replacement, other than the usual suspects?
I thought the new thing from Kodak looked cool. I don't know how it is as a smartphone, but supposedly it has a really nice camera with various additional picture-taking features.
I should get a new phone, but am lazy. The S7 size is too big for my taste, incendiary or no.
For no reason at all, I will be very happy if Kodak makes it as a phone company.
72 Right. Has someone done the inevitable Photoshop of a suicide bomber with a suicide vest full of Samsung Galaxy Note 7s yet?
I was surprised too! Maybe I have some residual brand loyalty from all those ads in back issues of National Geographic.
I got the most severe punishment of my first ten years for climbing with some younger kids on the neighbor's garage roof unsupervised -- punishment I thought was bullshit, because it was a pretty high-friction surface, we had good sneakers and were cautious, and it's not like we were riding skateboards off it or anything. And yet I also remember climbing onto the cottage roofs at the vacation home to sweep copious pine needles off them, which was clearly less safe! I think the distinction there was adult supervision and being slightly older.
As a former girl and parent of one, I can't tell if it's worse to be expected to be macho and not-a-sissy in equal measure with the boys (which is what I've internalized) or to be exempt as a hopeless case (which sometimes seems like it would be nice, since I keep on with the sneaking suspicion that I've failed at being a man).
Yeah, the S7 is my default choice, but I don't want to be entirely ovine about it. Google Pixels appear to be "out of stock."
I will be very happy if Kodak makes it as a phone company.
I suspect they are less of a phone company and more of a "lets license the brand" company. On the same display I saw the Kodak phones, I saw phones from Caterpillar, which are supposedly designed to take a pretty serious beating without cracking the screen or whatnot. That's also a nice feature.
I don't know if they are manufactured by the same company, but what Caterpillar and Kodak phones have in common is a well-known (if otherwise unrelated) brand being used to associate a phone with the qualities desired within a specific market niche. Which is good in that its allowing phones to diversify their feature sets to meet specific customer needs.
There were two different roofs I would play on, growing up.
For a garage we basically had a shed with walls on three sides and three bays for vehicles, and a low pitched roof, let's say 20 degrees. Its roof ended at about 5 feet off the ground but was just sheet metal, there's only one place where I could have climbed up it because of a post nearby. I forget when I was allowed to go up there unattended. Probably by 12, maybe not by 10. There wasn't much to do up there besides throwing balls off it, but it was a solitary area in the middle of the yard. Being up high in general is fun when your TV only has three channels.
Our house had a much steeper roof, maybe 45 degrees, whatever's standard for a house in a place with a lot of snow. The door we used 99 percent of the time had a vestibule, and it faced north, so snow would build up under the eaves on either side of it and stay there. Some winters the snow would build up so high that we could climb from the snow pile directly onto the roof. When that didn't happen, we could always get out a ladder. I'd climb to the top of the roof, slide down on my butt, and land in the snow pile.
82.2: It was probably not 45 degrees. It was probably either 8/12 (34 degrees) or 10/12 (40 degrees).
Moby Hick, master of the arctangent.
I just know that you can't really move on a 12/12 roof. Even without snow and with using your hands, it's almost impossible.
In every spec that can be measured, this is a phone that can compete with the very best Apple, Google and Samsung have to offer. It costs half of what those companies charge. And it's still going to be a flop.
Since we're drifting off-topic:
There is a tendency in my wife's family to treat anxiety ... if they succeeding in making me worried, they feel much better.
There's a Chris Smither song which has a nice lyric about anxiety.
There's madness to the method when you pay the piper
Twice once when you start to worry
Once again when you begin to take the future on the
Chin I know that you think worry is your ever-faithful
Friend cuz nothin' that you worry over ever happens in the
End and there might be somethin' to it
But it sure gets in the way of fun today
I knew a guy who had his twelve year old drive him when he was drunk.
Perfect segue for my final 5 Guy Clark songs (5 live recordings, though it's hard to find good live recordings).
"Desperados Waiting For a Train" -- "He's a drifter and a driller of oil wells / And an old school man of the world / He let me drive his car / When he's too drunk to."
"Out In The Parking Lot" -- "You can hear the band a playin' right through the wall / Ain't no cover charge, there ain't no last call / Out in the parking lot"
"Magdelene" -- Commentary outsourced.
"Randall Knife " -- tribute to his late father, which is a little more straightforward than some of his writing, but clearly sincere.
"LA Freeway" -- His one hit (when covered by Jerry Jeff Walker) came early in his career. Smoother than most of his later stuff, but with an effortlessly catchy melody.
And, just because I've been looking up live videos, here's Steve Goodman performing "City Of New Orleans. Arlo Guthrie made the song famous*, but I appreciate that Steve Goodman's essential quirkiness helps keep the song from getting too smooth.
* And, I found out at some point, the song was the source of the name "Good Morning America."
I should add this: Terry Allen talking about and performing a song he wrote with Guy Clark.
A six-year old can go on that playhouse roof. A ten-year old or maybe a big nine-year old can go on that house roof. Both the writer and the dad are niiiiightmares.
I am on the not-anxious side of things but am disproportionately but understandably terrified of taking kids to the ocean (best friend was swept out by riptide and drowned when we were both 6.). If her dad takes her he's not supposed to tell me.
Is this weird: I think I am partly comfortable with giving her a lot of freedom not because I don't worry about risks, but because I am like "well, if my kid died I would obviously kill myself, so it's not like I would have to deal with it for long." This is obviously not my actual rationale but I think it's part of my emotional framework. I guess having only one kid helps with this. Ugh ok done thinking about this.
I would trust my 4-year-old on a roof, probably, because she's a Batman partisan rather than a Superman one. She's very good at knowing her physical limits and getting a solid footing before she puts her weight on something. But she's still not allowed on a roof because I hate all fun because families with lots of moms (she's up to six now, depending on how you count) are the sissiest and most freedom-destroying of all.
I used to climb onto the roof when I was about 11. I was just tall enough to go out a window and stretch to reach the corner above it. It was a great, quiet place to read in the summer.
My impression (based on actual incidents in the metro area) is that leaving a child unsupervised by one or more adults for any length of time anywhere is grounds for calling the police for a lot of people. "Helicopter busybodies."
I let the kids do a lot more stuff if I'm not watching. It gives me vertigo to watch them up high, so I try to sit with my back to the playground or tree or whatever so that my stomach doesn't knot up and they can be unfettered.
Similarly, Hawaii just chopped a bunch of strawberries and grapes with a real knife, which is completely reasonable for a seven year old, but I couldn't watch.
I have chickenshit instincts which I can intellectually override.
94 happened to me recently but because I wasn't watching the twerps also chopped up all the good cheese and soaked it in seltzer.
96 is much more like what I see happening when children are left alone for more than half a second than people calling the police. I guess I'd rather be surprised that there's body wash in my shampoo and blue dye in the lotion than have another CPS investigation, but hey you know what I'd actually prefer to either of those???
96: What??? We have to carefully regulate my stepdaughter's access to cheese, but at least she just eats it all.
I should make onion soup tomorrow. I've been waiting for it to cool off.
I'm not sure they didn't plan to eat it, tbh. I also just learned an important lesson about vanity when my expensive makeup was all mixed into "potions" during a slumber party. And it's quiet for five minutes it means they have filled water guns with toilet water and are soaking themselves and the whole bathroom. Like, I can't keep them from getting into trouble because they invent kinds of trouble that I could never predict or control for.
We used to have to shut the bathroom doors all the time to stop the dog from drinking toilet water.
Right. It's my fault I never made a "no taking a hammer and going outside to smash up a plastic toy" or "no water balloons in the living room" or "no getting up in the middle of the night to paint popsicle sticks with nail polish" because I'm just not a good enough mother.
In terms of things that apparently should bother me but don't, at when Radegund was in kindergarten, there was a shit-stirring social worker who called me at work in the middle of the day to report that Radie had reported a dream about "bison with guns chasing other bison," and this was disturbing and probably a response to the divorce (which had happened when she was 2). Guess what they were learning about in class, bison, and bison becoming endangered.
I hung up without comment and we switched schools.
Why does the media blame everything on the white pioneers when bison-on-bison crime is so high?
I used to be so fucking smug about people who were like "I could never raise kids in the city" like, "whatever you bougie scaredy cat it's not only fine but enriching" and now that there are two kids in the house I weep for want of a yard. I apologize to basically everyone I spoke to about parenting before two years ago.
AIMHMBO, I have a high school classmate who said he was afraid to raise kids in the city and the city he was talking about was Lincoln, Nebraska.
60 is wonderful. It made me think of the liner notes to Leo Kottke's album Great Big Boy, which I give you in their entirety:
My earliest memory is of water. I was submerged in it. I had stepped off a dock into Clark Lake. Before my Aunt Rui jumped in after me I had time to hit bottom - the lake was about three feet deep - and look around. A bubble had formed around my head and I could breathe in it. I was two and a half. I learned this much: adults could not breathe underwater, but a child could do anything. About four years later, I held a paper bag above my head and jumped off a roof. Instantaneously, I reached full speed and slammed into the ground. I learned this much: adulthood begins at six.
Help!!!
I'm trying to send my cover letter and CV as a PDF but it Word keeps copying all the tracked changes into the PDF. It's maddening, even if I copy the text into a new Word doc. WHat the hell is going on?
Seriously yards are the best. I'm super pro urbanism denisty whatever but a yard is fucking great. I guess a communal rooftop yard with some paid child-minder would be even better if you don't want to go full suburban but the benefit of a yard for kids are so damn obvious.
Also, if you copy from one Word doc to another without specifying "use destination formatting," you're going to take all of that with you.
I send the 9 year old (Carrigan?? sure, Carrigan) up to the roof with the dog, but you can't be like, don't come back for two hours.
It doesn't take nearly that long to throw a dog off a roof.
113 No, I will not accept changes! I will rail against these horrible changes and pull the lever for Donald J. Trump!!
Seriously tho, thanks Mobes, that did the trick.
Just sent off a job application (also serious thanks to another member of the Mineshaft). Wish me luck and I'll be back in NYC around January.
Good luck Barry!
Also how do we feel about like, gaslighting a stepchild by gradually introducing pronunciation changes into their name until they respond to a better name and think that's what their name has always been.
108: I'm a little worried about that too. Fortunately, there's a park aground the corner from us. One small jungle gym designated for kids 2 to 5, one much bigger for bigger kids, some water fountains for cooling off in the middle of the summer, and a track/field for jogging around or casual games of football or soccer. She probably won't be playing completely unattended for a long time, but she'll get some sun and climbing and stuff.
There's a park across the street--the street crossing is less of an issue, it's pretty quiet, than the fact that we're in a fifth floor walk-up and they're fucking wusses about the stairs.
Also 123 sounds like only one kid right now? One kid in an apartment is completely fine IME. I mean, it's good for THEM to see a tree, but the real patience-straining zaniness starts with two.
I hate all fun because families with lots of moms (she's up to six now, depending on how you count) are the sissiest
My local paper says that's a gay slur.(a student had sign during the BYU/Mississippi St game that read "You can't say Mississippi without saying sissy.")
123 was me. Yes, only one kid. Not actually an apartment but a rowhouse.
I mean, for adult sanity preservation "go play on your iPads" works about as well as "go play in the yard" would but I'm trying to clear SOME bar here.
110- Twenty years ago when I lived there some people told me Lincoln was beginning to have a serious gang problem.
126: What did you think it meant?
50: Funny you should mention that. About half a dozen summers ago, here at the small New England college nearby, 2 students rolled off a roof. Although not absolutely clear, it was pretty obvious from a not very difficult reading between the lines, that the boy and girl were up there after some pretty heavy drinking and fell 2-3 stories while in flagrante delicto. Both were okay, eventually; I think he got out of the hospital after a few days, at least several weeks sooner than she; I'm not sure about long term emotional issues. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when each set of parents first asked "WTF were you doing up there?"
131- I was born there and like the town. I didn't have a good job or anything though.
Seriously yards are the best. I'm super pro urbanism denisty whatever but a yard is fucking great.
I've been shocked by how little use our yard has gotten. I mean, it's not zero, but we're at 20 child-years in this house, and I'd estimate total time spent by kids in the yard in the way we're thinking of* could be measured in hours. Like, more than 24, fewer than 200. It helps that we have a park down the block, of course (urban!), but really. And it's not like they go nuts at my dad's house, where there's a huge, suburban yard.
Maybe if we let them climb on the garage roof next door and jump down into the yard they'd use it more.
*as opposed to being dragged out there with us while we garden or whatever
So much luck, Barry. Watching your situation decline has been grim.
If you don't get the job, of course, my message is, What an adventure you're having! Good for you!
Since this is now my thread, an update on the computer situation: the repair place couldn't determine whether it was the graphics card or the motherboard that was fried on my old machine, but either way the repair was more than the cost of a new (used) machine. So I've purchased such a machine, and am about to wipe clean this machine, which is my second, uh, "loaner" from Apple (14 day no questions asked return policy ftw). I should get my new/used computer on Weds, and I'll muddle through until then.
What a ridiculous couple months.
135: I didn't know you were a Nebraskan.
133
The reason you go to college is to be taught (in various ways) how to lie your way out that question, and make sure you coordinate with your partner: "Umm, we were looking at my collection of etchings and got etching juice all over our clothes. We were trying to hang them out to dry and fell."
(Yeah, you'd get a terrible grade on that one.)
No discussion of the Dyn attack here? I'm surprised! (I have been out phone-hunting and attempting to work all day. I suppose the DDoS hijinks have increased my interest in the new phone's security.)
And yes, Barry, I hope the right things happen to you. What a circus. Sounds like the move was a little bit worth the trouble even seen from this vantage, though?
I basically haven't been affected by the Dyn attack. Internet works fine. How bad is it for all y'all?
As I said in the other thread: I couldn't access Twitter for most of the day. I also couldn't access Github, and unfortunately part of our build process relies on downloading code from there. So I couldn't be either happily unproductive or normally productive.
Saving grace is that we packed up to move offices today--first move in my nine years with my employer--so at least there was something to do.
Dalriata and I were in similar boats, except I don't require twitter to be happily unproductive (also I had a ton of interviews anyway).
OMG, if they have more massive DDoS attacks can my office move too? TO OAKLAND (CA)?? Please hack me out of Palo Alto thank you
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have been entirely unaffected by the Dyn attack as far as I can tell.
146: As interviewee or interviewer?
Alas, we aren't moving to Real Oakland, but just across the street to another beautiful historic building with terrible acoustics that doesn't make sense for a small, barely profitable software company. It's a trendier location, but without the absurd penthouse balcony with beautiful views we had in the last place.
I didn't notice anything but alarmist emails and Russian devs staying up late to argue about the Kremlin's role in everything on Slack.
149: er.
I would be so delighted if my office moved to Oakland (CA).
Who would have thought that connecting scads of difficult-to-patch devices to the internet would cause a security risk?
152: truly, I will never understand it.
I think this was a dry run for November 8.
The internet-of-things-that-break-the-internet.
Move fast and break things, people. It doesn't matter what the things are, as long as the breakage is fast.
The Founding Fathers obviously intended for things to be broken slowly.
Don't really get what 156 is referring to but I like it.
158: It was Facebook's motto for a while, but they seem to have moved away from it (in favor of the much lamer motto "Move fast with stable infra").
I really do like Vijay Iyer's Break Stuff and its title track in particular (album version is much tighter than this). It's the quietest thing I'll listen to on the train.
Except contra to the mantra, it hasn't really been fast. difficult to patch "things" have been on the Internet for a long time. Remember those awful X10 camera ads from fifteen years back? They were just one episode in a long history of difficult to patch Internet controllable cameras. I guess you can patch some of them but it wasn't easy, there's a risk of bricking the device, and you're getting the patch and installation instructions from the poorly translated site of a Chinese manufacturer.
It's more the usual problem that systemic negative externalities don't start to be fixed until (at least) there's a critical mass of affected people who can show actual harm.
contra to the mantra
Sir, you cannot just drop this phrase into casual conversation.
162: oh, huh, didn't intend to sound like a Blue Oyster Cult song there.
How bad is it for all y'all?
Woke up this morning and read it had happened. Still don't understand why the FSB would want to crash twitter, which seems to be its main propaganda platform these days.
88: his one hit...
Reminds me of Townes van Zandt's introducing Pancho and Lefty, in the Heartworn Highways doco, as "a medley of my hit".
Can't stick around, but thanks for the recs - great stuff. Didn't know In the Parking Lot before. And Magdalene, which for obvious reasons reminds me of Warren Zevon's Carmelita.
"a medley of my hit"
Was that before or after the National Lampoon used that line on "Lemmings"?
Hadn't known that National Lampoon used the line - looking it up, the documentary footage was from 1975 or so, while the National Lampoon show was from 1973, so I guess TvZ intended it as a reference. He liked to clown around a bit during shows, so I guess it makes sense that he followed comedy.
I'm all a muddle. So, as I contemplate moving back to NYC for a job which turns out will involve more sales of rare high end stuff than anything else, and I've never been a salesperson, though I have a palpable enthusiasm for this material which is contagious, it may mean the end of my already somewhat long distance relationship with Chani who I've come to love and cherish dearly. FML.
Sucks Barry. Sales is awful, but I've never tried selling stuff I believe in. Is there a base salary? If not I'd be extremely wary.
There is but it's lower than I'd want. It's basically near what I make now but the thing is I don't pay US federal or NY state or NYC taxes on what I'm making in Arrakis.
Ugh.
The stuff is very high end and he wants to liquidate it. Plus he said he'd be willing to sell at least some of it at under valuation. I think all his capital is tied up in his stock and in real property but he doesn't have much cash on hand.
What a choice.
I'll know more how much I'll hate it here tomorrow because I have a meeting with my new supervisor.
This has the chance to either ruin me* or make me very rich in a short time.
*eh, probably be more like a middling couple of years spinning my wheels. Not sure at all about this.
170: That sounds like maybe not a great move, beyond how much you value returning to the US. Do you have the necessary visas and credentials and what not to have any hope of finding a better job in Arrakis, or the greater Chani-adjacent sector of Eurasia?
173 is my immediate reaction too. OTOH, if you're good at self-promotion the sales thing might make you some good connections. Maybe? I don't have any clear idea of what you actually do.
I once had, in theory, an opportunity to steal some Rembrandt etchings, and feel increasingly I made a major mistake not pursuing that.
It'd make your "come see my etchings" stories more plausible.
Not to pressure you, Barry, into liveblogging a life of international art-dealing. But it would be nice.
In general I hate sales and the idea depresses me. But I love this kind of stuff, talking about it and, well, selling it. Just usually in an academic sense.
Do you know what your target customers will be like? If they're real collectors you'll be able to get rapport with them and it might be fine.
179 I do. And mostly they are (institutional buyers excepted). And yeah, I think I'd be good at that. I'm good at the schmooze. Just don't ask me to sell widgets. Ekranoplans on the other hand...have you considered the smooth ride and world-class luxury of a Lun-class ekranoplan? You'd make even Abramovich green with envy.
119
Also how do we feel about like, gaslighting a stepchild by gradually introducing pronunciation changes into their name until they respond to a better name and think that's what their name has always been.
Still probably not as bad as my parents carelessly celebrating my brother's birthday on the wrong day (by six days) from ages five to ten or so.
Particularly slack since two of my first cousins share the same birthday. That's how it was eventually discovered - my aunt called my parents and said "thanks for the card for [cousin], but why is it always a week late?" And my parents said "No, no way, [brother] has the same birthday as [cousin]" to which my aunt replied "yeah, but it's this date."
Eventually resolved when my parents went to check the birth certificate and had to tell him that he was lucky enough to have an earlier birthday next year, not so long to wait!!
There's only two of us so this was a fairly major oversight, and I'm not sure that their relationship with him has ever truly recovered.
181 is almost as good as 60.
Lots of kids have to wonder if mom and dad liked them best, but you know for certain. That's got to be nice.
In my family, nobody would even think to ask why the birthday card was a week late.
181 perfectly illustrates why Europeans are wrong in the way they write the numeral "1".
I just got that, but actually it was 13 vs 19 and i don't think even we enlightened topless ones have digits that weird
Barry, that sounds like a tough situation. I can say for myself that there are plenty of things that I care about, like discussion, and would be terrible at selling. But it sounds like you're more comfortable with the schmoozing aspect than I would be.
It also sounds like you might be at the mercy of the decisions of one person (about what you could or couldn't sell?) which always has the potential for conflict.
On the other hand this:
This has the chance to either ruin me* or make me very rich in a short time.
Makes it sound like there's a significant upside if everything does go well. That's worth something.
Can't stick around, but thanks for the recs - great stuff.
Thanks, glad you listened to some of them. In case you (or anyone else reading the thread) didn't see the previous two set of recommendations there are here: One, two (not sure that needed separate links, they're fairly close together in the thread.
Also if you like Warren Zevon I recommend the posthumous release: Preludes some very lovely, and sometimes very vulnerable versions of some of his songs. Less rock-and-roll than some of his recordings.
Is anyone else ready for a thinkpiece defending helicopter parenting? It seems like such an easy, popular target, and something so few people identify proudly with, that surely some of the arguments against it are overblown.
Parenting to a Degree defends a specific type of helicopter parenting for specific types of college students. I found it fascinating, both because I'm a sucker for a good ethnography,* and because the whole thing is so completely different from my own college experience. I still find it hard to believe that most of my students talk to their parents at least once a week, much less rely on them for academic and personal advice.
*PtaD is based on the same fieldwork--with Indiana freshmen women who lived on one floor of a well-known "party" dorm--as Paying for the Party.
190: She and I went to school together. I have no idea what her relationship with her parents was like but it's been nice to see her do well with what seems to be good research.
talk to their parents at least once a week, much less rely on them for academic and personal advice
I just don't even. I lived with my parents during college and didn't talk to them that much.
I talked to my mom often in college, but probably not once a week. I didn't rely on her for advice.
I talk to my mother once a week or more.
Hm, is that true? Twice a month or more.
I definitely talk to my mom once a week or more. Usually on Sundays.
It's been two--maybe three?--years since I spoke to my mom. I speak to my dad about once a month (plus he tags me on posts at the other place all the time), and I talk to one of my sisters every week or week and a half, and to the summer sister maybe twice a year.
191: That's great; I enjoyed her writing.
Robot was making sense, until she started talking to siblings. You people are weird.
Summer sister? What's that relationship?
Robot is Athena, summer sister is Persephone. Duh.
In college and until recently I'd talk to my parents for an hour on Sundays. Unless I didn't feel like it.
Since my mom's MS went to shit two years ago I've talked to my dad every day. It's unpleasant and a huge energy drain.
200 makes complete sense. I have no more questions about it.
189: But I listened to all of them! I can prove it! (See comment 214 in the Bobby Effin Dylan thread.) Sorry about the churlish-seeming delays in replies - there are time-zone issues (and in this case deadlines) making it hard for me to stay on-thread sometimes.
(Thanks for the Zevon rec too - listening to it now just now, I think I prefer the Preludes version of Carmelita to the usual one, which maybe leans a little Yacht-Rockish. Still like the G.G. Allin version best...)
That should have been youngest sister, though I do tend to see her only in the summer, or at Christmas.
189: But I listened to all of them! I can prove it!
True, and sorry if you felt impugned. I was working off of habit, which is that I assume people never follow all of the links, but I should have given you credit.
I am really glad that you listened to them, it's fun to be able to share.
I speak to my mum every couple of weeks. Sometimes more, sometimes much less. We like each other a great deal, but I don't think either of us are brilliant at keeping in touch. It probably averages out every 2 - 3 weeks, though, for a long conversation.
My Dad and I have spoken, I think twice in the past year. We also get on OK -- and conversations with him can be fun (also tiresome)* -- but it's much harder to call him (he'd never call me), around child care routines, and I'm never at home weekdays (when I used to call him) anymore.
* he's basically Bob.
I really like talking to my parents, but the problem is the conversation never lasts less than 90 minutes. Therefore it happens way less than once a week.
At first it looks bad. Then you notice the "II" and you realize just how bad.
There's a birthday party in Ghostbusters II. Maybe they were just confused when they first labelled it.
"I don't remember Bill Murray being at Matthew's birthday party, but he does tend to show up at random events, so maybe he was there."
There is also of course a baby, who plays a prominent role.
That's not a nice way to refer to Rick Moranis.
My roof story --perhaps late -- is hard even for me to believe but when my parents bought a house in England it had a garage, with a peaked roof made from corrugated asbestos. Our big game as children was to climb onto it, scramble up to the top, and then slide down the other side, squatting, and leap to the ground when the roof stopped, a distance of I suppose around five or six feet. Great training for being a parachutist.
Later, I used to line up all my plastic Airfix models against that wall and shoot the to shit with an air rifle.
This game came to an end when the boy next door, aged about 13, came round with the shotgun his father had given him and fired that against the same wall. The garage survived, and I don't think there was even a hole -- most of the blast was absorbed by some fencing that was stacked against it. But my mother was extremely disapproving.
I thought people were careless with guns and kids where I was from.
There's a birthday party in Ghostbusters II
Too hot to handle, too cold to hold. They're called the Ghostbusters and they're in control. Had a throwing party for a bunch of children, while all the while the slime was under the building. So they packed up their group, got a grip, came equipped, grabbed they proton packs off their back and they split! Found out about Vigo, the master of evil. Try to battle my boys? That's not LEGAL! They're in control. You, you know it.
190: An average of once a week is a lot? That's weird. I think that's what I aimed for. Realistically, in college, we probably didn't actually talk on the phone that often, but there were e-mails or other check-ins.
Between moving to the DC area and parenthood, I'd talk to my parents almost exactly once a week, just to check in and stuff. Now, there's always something going on to ask advice about or the next visit to plan, and they enjoy hearing and talking to Atossa, of course.
Cassandane calls her mother almost daily. That seems like a lot. Once a week has always seemed like an OK number to me.
My mother grew up with a rather larger garden/orchard, where it was fine for her brothers to wander around with shotguns trying to get pigeons for supper. So the idea of firing off things in the garden was not strange to us.
I really miss shooting things, though this is reprehended now both in my workplace and at home.
If your place is anything like mine, you probably wouldn't want to eat the pigeons there anyway.
After the first month or two that I was away in college, my mother was upset that I was calling her infrequently, so we established a set time that I would call every week. The day and time have changed a few times, but we've maintained the once-a-week phone call routine for the 35 years or so since.
194, 195: How has the response to this not been, "I talk to your mom a lot more often than that"? The standards at this place have gone to shit.
I probably talked to my parents once a month or so during college, mostly to coordinate visits (they'd come once a year, I'd go home 4x for breaks inc. summer).
More notably, the first time I was ever away from home for more than a week was summer college at Cornell: 6 weeks between jr and sr years. They dropped me off, we spoke a few days later, and then they called again to coordinate the pickup. I asked why they hadn't called in 5 weeks*, and they explained that all I'd done in the first call was to complain, so they didn't really feel like calling again.
We're really quite fond of each other, but it's not the sort of fondness that demands a lot of chatter.
*you could only call collect from the dorms
Until around 1980, I communicated with absent parents, other relatives, friends and lovers by writing letters. Some extremely important communications took that form, even though the separation was seldom more than a few hundred miles and time between seeing in person seldom more than a few weeks. A long-distance phone call was a rare, usually emergency-related event, and until the sixties would sometimes be the occasion for a telegram.
