a1pulley

My city (low density suburb of Los Angeles) has outdoor lighting ordinances that spell out rules: all outdoor lighting must point downward, street lights are not allowed, holiday lights must be removed a week after New Years. There are also ordinances governing disputes--fees to get the inspector out at night, paperwork, etc.

If you want dark skies, take some friends to a city council meeting and make your case for similar ordinances. It's doable, even in a place like Los Angeles.

This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income decile (in California). Kids are pushed harder to learn things earlier than when I was growing up. For example, nearly all of my kid's classmates could read before they started kindergarten. All could do basic arithmetic. Now that he's in first grade, most can read chapter books and have a grasp of multiplication. My mom pushed me hard to get me ahead of my peers, but I didn't hit those milestones until a year later. The standards and expectations are extremely high now because it's never been harder to get a spot at a top 20 university—perhaps because a top 20 school is the best chance you can get to maintain your living standards.

"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."

This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.

Forgotten by some, maybe, but there are many Iranian-American and Armenian-American families with medlar trees in their suburban LA yards. It is sold at Paradise Nursery in Chatsworth.

> Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king

A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."

> translates natural language prompt to Google Ads Query Language

I'm curious—did your translation layer change in light of ChatGPT? Are you still using the one you wrote 6 months ago?

If I were inclined to rob houses, I would find the challenge and risk of robbing houses here quite interesting. Apart from the fact that all roads in go through manned gates, this is the most republican city in SoCal. In translation: most of us have a lot of guns.

I came here to say the same as the sibling comment. Why not slow down? That is what happens in my city: residents drive slowly because they don't want to hit a neighbor.

> If I live in such a place, I expect to be able to walk on sidewalks without a flashlight.

We don't have any sidewalks. People either take trails adjacent to roads or walk on the roads themselves. Everyone is aware that pedestrians and equestrians are first class citizens, so residents drive slowly. That's not true for some delivery drivers and domestic workers, but we find the risk-reward tradeoff reasonable enough to have left the lighting provision in our CC&Rs for the last eighty years. Sometimes, expectations are at odds with the realities of what is tolerable in terms of safety, good for local flora and fauna, and pleasurable for ourselves.

> Do people walking on foot carry torches?

It depends. If there's a full moon out, I often walk without a light. It's wonderful. Otherwise, I use a headlamp.

> Doesn't this cause issues?

No. I think the main effect is that people finish their walks, bike rides, and so forth before dark. Obviously that's impossible for much of the year for people who work 9 to 5, but given the demographics of this community—small business owners with flexible schedules and retirees—it works for most. In particular, there is one woman from a nearby street who walks past my office window every afternoon: in the winter she walks by at 3, and in the summers she walks by around 6 with her husband.

> getting lost

I don't think this is a realistic concern for those with smart phones. Moreover, the hilly topography and lack of cycles in the road network (barring one) make it very easy to remain oriented.

HOAs have their downsides, but I do really appreciate one of my CC&Rs: in my ~4 square mile city, we are not allowed to have exterior lights apart from ones to illuminate driveways and patios. Moreover, there are no street lights in the entire city.

It's an oasis of uncorrupted night in the unlikeliest of places: Los Angeles. You can see city lights from certain vantage points, but in most places it is pitch black. Living here feels like perpetual camping. It is wonderful, and it would be stressful for me to return to living in a place with perpetual illumination.

The alternative is gating on soft skills and job experience. Do you really think it's easier for privileged kids to game our industry's admissions tests?

A poor kid would have a much harder time developing soft skills and getting job experience than a rich kid would have passing our admissions tests, which would be worse for social mobility than the status quo. A poor kid with a blue collar dad can't get an internship at his dad's friend's startup. A poor kid didn't go to a high school with a computer science club. A poor kid didn't grow up developing soft skills at a dozen different after school activities.

However, the poor kid can go to college on a Pell Grant (like me), study hard, and at least have a chance to meet the Leetcode bar and gain entry to the middle class.

Does anyone have experience with going to a "school within a school" for "gifted and talented" kids? I was trying to figure out why I don't remember any bullying from my middle school or high school, when it dawned on me that I might have been insulated from it by taking classes exclusively with gifted and talented kids —i.e., kids from stable/whole/educated households. I went to a high school where kids came from a mix of blue collar and lower-earning white collar families; does bullying still happen at public high schools in wealthy areas?

There's a lot of discussion here about how private school kids are insulated from bullying. Does anyone have first-hand experience or hard evidence of this? Based on books and movies about boarding school, it's hard to believe this.