> it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
I agree with this but minimizing the cost changes the ROI.
Personally, I've discovered useful insights tracking various life metrics. But I also found quickly diminishing returns after a few weeks or months -- if an association isn't obvious within that timeframe it's either too much effort to isolate or too slow or small to matter.
At various points I've tracked calories, macronutrients, weight, allergens, supplements, sleep, exercise volume, exercise timing, nighttime screen use, spending/budget, air quality, and mood. Now I know what kind of cooking wrecks the air quality in my house, what foods I don't digest well, what various protein/carb/fat ratios look like on my plate, how much effort it takes to improve fitness, that exercise in the morning or early afternoon improves my sleep while exercise in the evening harms it, and that any alcohol or caffeine wreck my sleep while screens at night have no measurable effect. But once I understand the associations I can alter my behavior and move on.
> The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.
I would agree that continuing to track metrics every day long after they've stopped yielding new insights is often compulsive behavior. But I think that's an argument for time-boxing experiments, not necessarily avoiding them altogether.
> That only works if your printouts aren’t too long
It depends on what you mean by "too long".
A few folks in my office have binders with dog-eared code printouts for some of the more stable internal libraries in our codebase. A 3" thick 3-ring binder can hold a little over a million lines of code. I wouldn't use it for Firefox (~21M LOC) or Linux (~40M LOC) because you'd need to dedicate several shelves and print it regularly to be useful. And there's no grep. But for things like a stable, versioned library it can be very useful.
> the friends are mostly here to get a feel for the place and see if they want to emigrate
As a US citizen who has daydreamed about moving to a Dutch city like Ultrecht I'm curious what they found, and how it feels to be an immigrant in the Netherlands.
Sounds lovely. Our kids enjoyed the local bikepacking trips we did this summer, perhaps our next will visit the area. (In the off chance you have personal recommendations for bike touring companies/routes, let me know.)
It's not so easy to do. You can't just daydream about it. A friend of mine spent 18 months just with the paperwork. He's now making half of what he might make at home, but he's happy. The people are definitely friendly and welcoming, but the legal system makes it hard. And the businesses know this so they underpay because they can.
I have a general sense of the difficulty based on preliminary discussions with an immigration lawyer, but the Netherlands seems like one of the easier routes we're considering.
The reason it's "daydreaming" is that we're not yet ready to give up on New England, but I'd still like to start getting our ducks in a row in case there's a rush for the exits and we have to move quickly.
> He's now making half of what he might make at home, but he's happy.
That's amazing! But are you sure that the page is not satire?
> Tired of putting "Portions of this software..." in your documentation? Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit? ... Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers.
And the testimonials from "Definitely Real Corp", "MegaSoft Industries" and "Profit First LLC" are a bit suspicious, as is the fact that most of the links in the footer are not real.
Well, if the chardet relicensing stands then something like this will eventually be real, though perhaps not so publicly shameless. (The page is still a fantastic find though.)
For many years I commuted by bike in a city that prioritized driving convenience, speed, and free parking over safety and sense of place. I tried convince my neighbors that we ought to make different tradeoffs to improve safety and I volunteered at and financially supported various transportation safety groups.
Ultimately I gave up and moved to a place that was a better fit and my only regret is not doing so sooner. I still believe that it's possible for any city to eliminate traffic deaths, but I no longer believe that this obligates every city to make the tradeoffs this requires.
It reminds me of the Paul Graham essay [1] about the benefits of surrounding yourself with people who care about the things you care about:
> It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
Very curious what city you moved to if you don't mind sharing! I live in a small city that in its downtown proper has good bike infrastructure but everywhere else it is terrible and the broader area is very anti-cyclist unfortunately.
My situation was similar. I lived in a small city that trumpeted their aspirational walking and biking infrastructure but did nothing to change a driving culture and police force that were actively and physically hostile to anyone on foot or bike.
We initially moved to Arlington, MA. The Minuteman Bikeway runs right through the center of town and it's packed with commuters in the morning heading into Cambridge or Boston. It's also adjacent to Cambridge and Somerville where more than one in ten commutes are by bike, and fewer than half are by car.[1]
We eventually ended up moving slightly further out and sacrificing some walkability/bikeability for lower housing costs. But the bike racks at our schools are well-used even in the winter and I'm never the only cyclist on the road. There's also a growing network of rail trails like the Bruce Freeman and the Mass Central that are bringing out a lot more recreational cyclists. And contrary to their reputation, I've found Massachusetts drivers basically respectful of other road users, at least insofar as they generally give a wide berth and I've never had a MA driver throw something at me or do a punishment pass.
> My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids.
This is true for many people. I know a few childfree couples that you could offer them a hefty salary to raise kids and they would decline.
However I know even more people who ended up having fewer kids than they would have liked, especially when I lived in a big city. Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids, found raising their current child(ren) challenging enough that they didn't think they could handle another, or reevaluated their preferences after watching friends and neighbors struggling.
> It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
For many, sure. But for other people addressing the root causes (of which cost is one) can move the needle.
> Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids
You then brought up cost as the reason. Cost can basically be removed as a reason. There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
To be clear, I said cost is one root cause, I did not say it was the root cause.
> Cost can basically be removed as a reason.
How have you come to this conclusion? From an empirical standpoint, Pew Research finds that financial concerns rank among the top reasons adults say they are unlikely to have more children, the US Census reports that a substantial share of women who expect to have fewer children than desired cite economic constraints, and OECD fertility analyses find that financial insecurity and housing costs are closely associated with lower realized fertility in OECD countries.
> There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
Can you provide more detail about these studies? At least when it comes to paid childcare in the US this seems to run counter to the data. Before the 1940s paid/institutional childcare was less common in the US, with most childcare provided by mothers, extended families, neighbors, religious institutions, and charities. From 1990 to 2025, the Day Care and Preschool CPI index increased ~280%, outpacing the ~150% increase in overall CPI during that same period.
Not to mention that double-income households are much more common, especially in high cost-of-living areas, and this raises the opportunity cost of having a child compared to a couple with only one income.
And not to mention housing costs outpacing inflation, and for many people stable housing is often a prerequisite for considering starting a family.
Again, I'm not saying spiraling costs is the only reason, and I would not even claim that fertility is highly elastic, but the worsening economics of child rearing do seem to be shifting behavior at the margins.
> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money
"Public goods" like parks, museums, bridges, roadways, transit, nature preserves, community spaces, and public safety services produce both direct value to their immediate users as well as substantial diffuse value to their community. Direct value can be captured by user fees, tolls, subscriptions, etc but capturing diffuse value is challenging. A park raises surrounding property values even for people who do not visit the park. Good transportation infrastructure increases the value of surrounding land and and productivity per capita even for nonusers. Relying solely on user fees may force some of these entities to close or fall into disrepair, thereby reducing overall value by substantially more than it would have cost to maintain them. And in some cases shifting the cost burden to direct users substantially lowers the diffuse value, for example back when fire fighting companies would let houses burn unless their owners paid them, ultimately resulting in more overall community fire damage.
In these cases, subsidizing these public services with taxes (optimally Georgist land-value taxes) is an economically rational decision.
One could plausibly argue that artists similarly produce diffuse value e.g., raising the profile of their nation or culture, making their neighborhood a more desirable place for people with money. Not only do artists typically struggle to collect a share of this diffuse value, as renters the very value they create often ends up pricing out of their community. I could imagine cases where it is a net benefit for a government to subsidize such entities if such subsidy is less than the fraction of the diffuse benefit that ends up being collected by taxes.
I have no insight as to whether this scheme in particular is net positive, please see sibling posts for that. I'm just explaining that such arrangements are both economically rational and extremely common in high-functioning societies.
Your argument makes sense, but a park has a measurable scope. We all want it to be X sqft, with Y trees, and it will cost Z dollars. Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
Expect something? Yes. Enforce it? Not sure for the first tranche, but make it a prerequisite for continued funding.
One big obstacle is, of course, how to define what to expect from each artist. For example, you can't expect the same level of output from sculptors and musicians. Another big obstacle is obviously the expected quality of output.
I don't pretend to know the solutions to either of those obstacles, but they should be surmountable [1]. I think it's fair to expect some output in exchange for funding, but it doesn't have to be a high expectation.
Personally, I like the idea of hiring artists as full-time with particular projects in mind [2], but intentionally leaving ~50% of their time to personal projects.
[1] Perhaps artist communities themselves could discuss ways to make this exchange work for all parties.
[2] Murals, restorations, beautification of public spaces, etc.
A little late, but this is something that I've been considering a lot lately. When there's a limited resource (funding) how do you determine who will receive it?
For something like this I think a citizens assembly[1] may work best. Take all artists receiving funding and are NOT up for renewal. Select a number of them randomly to form the assembly. This assembly then reviews submissions from artists up for renewal and determines if they meet a minimum standard for funding to be renewed.
I don't think there's any evidence that those obstacles are surmountable, unless it's something like the Pope telling Michaelangelo to paint a ceiling. A bridge has defined scope and budget (ish) and a defined benefit attached to it, which many people will sign off on before it is commissioned, and it might take years to do, but it will also serve the local population for potentially hundreds of years in a practical way.
Actually, you provided an example where the obstacle was somehow surmounted [1].
The expectation doesn't have to be too specific or unrealistic. If you agree on some common ground [2], everything else can be fair game for the artist.
Your analogy with the bridge would apply if art also had a minimum viable version. Collapsed to its functional requirements, you could say that visual art is something to look at. But I doubt either party, especially the funding body or the public, would be happy without inserting some quality requirements (i.e., what makes something nice to look at).
Many artists do commissions, so you can see this as a commission with deliberately underspecified requirements.
[1] I won't get into the disagreements between the Pope and Michelangelo, and it's certainly not an example of a good contract, but we can assume that both parties were somewhat satisfied in the end.
[2] For example, both parties need to like it. Or the patron doesn't have to like it, but it needs to appeal to some public audience.
> Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
My understanding is that the Irish scheme doesn't force any specific work for the three year period, though I'd expect any artist who takes a three year, ~$60k grant and uses it to do literally nothing may find it hard get a grant in the future, potentially ending their art career. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a few recipients end up doing that, in which case it's an economic question as to whether the net loss from such freeloaders is more or less than the cost of the bureaucracy necessary to prevent them.
The economic question will be whether the Irish taxpayer gets enough value out of the art produced to warrant its total cost, including artist subsidy costs, administrative cost, etc etc.
Note that my response above was solely responding to the question of how to handle freeloaders.
Of course the more fundamental question is whether the whole scheme is even worthwhile. Clearly the Irish government believes that their trial in 2022 demonstrated a positive financial return, but my guess it that it will take decades before we can truly answer this question.
> Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids?
Yes, absolutely.
I used to work in a big city where friends, neighbors, and coworkers with young kids had to sacrifice their career trajectory, friends, hobbies, savings, personal space, and more. Most couples we knew had no kids, some had one, a few exceptional folks had two. A few couples we knew even commented that they ended up having fewer children than they were planning to because of the difficulty with the one(s) they had.
Then my partner and I moved near relatives to a small, family-friendly town. Most of our neighbors have two kids, some have three, and a few exceptional folks have four or more. Almost everything here revolves around families -- even my company has family events and taking time to take care of kids is normalized.
True, living here did not change our decision to have kids, but it actually did change how many kids we ended up having.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
That's a plausible model, but my model is that people alter their goals based on what they observe happening to other people who pursue those same goals. If young people see their friends, coworkers, and neighbors struggling due to their decision to have children, it seems reasonable that they would reevaluate how important it is to them.
> It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month.
Agreed that it depends on the area. In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less. In my experience having lived in different areas the price ranges for infant/toddler daycares and (legal) nannies are closely correlated.
> I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required.
Having employed a couple of bad nannies, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Real median personal income in the US is $45k which is $3750 gross per month. [1] Nannies are obviously not making more than the vast majority of Americans. What was your experience with bad nannies?
> Nannies are obviously not making more than the vast majority of Americans.
Experienced nannies in high-cost-of-living areas do. Many charge $35 to $55 per hour [1][2][3] and at 45 hours a week, that is $82k to $129k a year or $6,825 to $10,725 a month.
> What was your experience with bad nannies?
Not wanting to pay the aforementioned prices and dealing with strong cigarette smoke smell on clothing, strong perfumes, buying them age-inappropriate toys, issues with timeliness, general messiness in our home, questionable unemployment claims, even a DUI. All the problems of an employee and roommate rolled into one.
All of them had prior experience, first aid training, and loved children so in retrospect I may have been overly harsh to refer to them as "bad nannies". But I still think it was absolutely worth the time and effort it took to find a good nanny.
You originally said: "In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less."
You're now limiting your price to high cost of living areas with extremely experienced nannies (even that 'hire for your yacht here' page you dug up only gets into these $72k+ prices at 8+ years of experience and specialized skills), and working overtime every week. And in those conditions - sure, but that is quite atypical. A normal search for 'us average nanny salary' turns up about a million hits in the $19-$23 hourly range. I imagine off the books is rather lower yet still on average.
And yeah it sounds like you had some remarkably bad luck with nannies. I take most of those, like showing up on time, completely for granted, and would certainly never hire a nanny who smokes. And it's not just the stink. I mean I don't even understand how that's supposed to work - how do you even nanny while also taking smoke breaks? Yeah, just ridiculous.
> Why would somebody ever pay that much rather than just hire a private nanny?
In my experience the price distribution for nannies and infant/toddler daycares in the same area are largely overlapping bell curves so the decision typically comes down to logistics rather than cost.
I agree with this but minimizing the cost changes the ROI.
Personally, I've discovered useful insights tracking various life metrics. But I also found quickly diminishing returns after a few weeks or months -- if an association isn't obvious within that timeframe it's either too much effort to isolate or too slow or small to matter.
At various points I've tracked calories, macronutrients, weight, allergens, supplements, sleep, exercise volume, exercise timing, nighttime screen use, spending/budget, air quality, and mood. Now I know what kind of cooking wrecks the air quality in my house, what foods I don't digest well, what various protein/carb/fat ratios look like on my plate, how much effort it takes to improve fitness, that exercise in the morning or early afternoon improves my sleep while exercise in the evening harms it, and that any alcohol or caffeine wreck my sleep while screens at night have no measurable effect. But once I understand the associations I can alter my behavior and move on.
> The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.
I would agree that continuing to track metrics every day long after they've stopped yielding new insights is often compulsive behavior. But I think that's an argument for time-boxing experiments, not necessarily avoiding them altogether.
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