Month: April 2021

In a study that found a correction between Western countries and parental burnout even before the pandemic made life at home challenging:

parenting norms in Euro-American countries … have become increasingly demanding over the last 50 years, resulting in intensification of parental investment, and growing psychological pressure on parents,”

“What parents feed their children, how they discipline them, where they put them to bed, how they play with them: all of these have become politically and morally charged questions… The distinction between what children need and what might enhance their development has disappeared, and anything less than optimal parenting is framed as perilous.”

As the article says, there’ll need to be other studies to determine causation. It’s unquestionably true that the politicisation of bringing up children, including education which wasn’t mentioned here, requires parents to constantly tread a line that seems to get finer every year.

These problems might be a microcosm of the schisms we’re seeing in increasing aspects of our everyday lives. For instance, whether it is ‘right’ to buy from Amazon given how it treats its warehouse workers.

As things become ever more interconnected, ordinary people feel they are responsible for taking stances and making choices about innumerable such issues.

I think this is responsible in large measure for what I see as a pervasively stressed society.

Earlier this year, The Atlantic wrote about what we’ve all felt but haven’t articulated. That all but our closest friendships have suffered greatly during the pandemic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-goodbye-casual-friends/617839/

… much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends. These other relationships have withered largely unremarked on after the places that hosted them closed. The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life—and buoy human health.

More on the withering:

There are people on the outer periphery of my life for whom the concept of “keeping up” makes little sense, but there are also lots of friends and acquaintances—people I could theoretically hang out with outdoors or see on videochat, but with whom those tools just don’t feel right. In my life, this perception seems to be largely mutual—I am not turning down invites from these folks for Zoom catch-ups and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside indoor dining and international travel.

Personally a significant percentage of friends are those with whom for years I’ve been in daily touch with chat apps and the occasional phone call. Those haven’t suffered because they weren’t in person to begin with. But all of them are with people who I had spent some time regularly in person at some time in the past.

I do think new friendships are rather hard to form in these circumstances – although not impossible.

Detailed article on the complexity of the chip deign process and the semiconductor supply chain. Specifically, how the company TSMC in Taiwan is probably the world’s most important chip company.

The world next innovations depend on a single country, Taiwan

The world’s current and next innovations depend on a single country: Taiwan. It’s probably one country you might never hear about, or perhaps confuse with its neighbor, Thailand, or even think it’s a part of China.
I’ve been living in Taiwan for 3+ years, and am baffled that I never pay attention to…

The last paragraph is a pretty good summary, but it doesn’t do justice for the detail in the rest of the article.

The cutting edge semiconductor chip manufacturing is (and was) done in Taiwan by TSMC. The island has acquired strategic significance, with partners all over the world depending on them. The chips they make are essentials to any of today’s and future hardware: (flying) electrical cars, space ships, servers, 5G, machine to discover new drugs or vaccines, and any military equipments.

Update 13 May 2021: Bloomberg has an in-depth article on the complexity of the chip manufacturing process. It also covers the dynamics of the industry.

… it takes years to build semiconductor fabrication facilities and billions of dollars—and even then the economics are so brutal that you can lose out if your manufacturing expertise is a fraction behind the competition…

Manufacturing a chip typically takes more than three months and involves giant factories, dust-free rooms, multi-million-dollar machines, molten tin and lasers. The end goal is to transform wafers of silicon—an element extracted from plain sand—into a network of billions of tiny switches called transistors that form the basis of the circuitry that will eventually give a phone, computer, car, washing machine or satellite crucial capabilities

This is why countries face such difficulty in achieving semiconductor self sufficiency. China has called chip independence a top national priority in its latest five-year plan, while U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed to build a secure American supply chain by reviving domestic manufacturing.

– The Chip Shortage Keeps Getting Worse. Why Can’t We Just Make More?

This post describes well the interaction design principles perfected by social media services to build anxiety, fear of missing out and dopamine rewards: https://medium.com/swlh/user-engagement-is-code-for-addiction-a2f50d36d7ac

Ultimately, the writer asks:

When looking back at this era of humanity future humans will say, “How could they have just scrolled and scrolled all day? Didn’t they know what it was doing to them?” Social media is the new cigarettes. Everyone does it, it’s addictive, it’s harmful, and you should quit.

There are no pathbreaking revelations here, just well known ones laid out as plainly as can be for you and me to see.