Unschooling works for some, mostly those who have a desire to self-direct. That's not everyone. Some need the assistance of external structure to be successful, and if left entirely on their own will gravitate to less useful things -- consumption that doesn't lead to creation.
Personally, I was homeschooled for a few years of my elementary education, and it helped me jump far ahead of my peers. My siblings homeschooled for a smaller portion of their education, and didn't find it useful. While their academic level didn't drop below their peers, it wasn't enjoyable and they were quite happy to go back to public school.
> Unschooling works for some, mostly those who have a desire to self-direct. That's not everyone.
Definitely agree, I've also seen a non-zero number of parents using (home/un)schooling as an excuse to basically not parent their children and have intentionally disconnected from those communities
You might look into a trainer for a few sessions. I'm in a similar situation, and just getting back into lifting with a set of at-home weights. Thankfully, one of my company benefits is an in-house trainer who you can sign up with for a few remote sessions. She's putting together a plan for me, then will do a few zoom calls to make sure I'm doing the exercises right, and hopefully that'll take care of things.
Years ago, I used a trainer in a gym to kickstart a plan, and I found it very useful.
+1, I highly recommend getting a personal trainer for a few sessions. They can even do remote video sessions outside of signing up for a gym. A good trainer can recommend exercises that provide just the right amount of challenge - not too low that benefits aren't there, and not too high that the difficulty makes you quit (this is a problem with gym group classes).
Could be a person testing out stolen cards with a low-value purchase, to verify that the cards are legitimate. They then can use them elsewhere for much larger purchases.
This is anecdotal, but back when I was working in architecture (10ish years ago), I visited the principal of our Chinese sister firm in Beijing, and we walked around and talked about his experience as a native Chinese architect with experience working in the US.
His greatest frustration was the lack of quality in the finished buildings he'd design. As he put it, the designs that Chinese firms were putting out were just as high quality as anything in the rest of the world, but the end result was always worse. It was largely procedural -- in the US, the architect is involved not only during the initial design phases, but throughout the project, and is responsible approving any changes and for certifying that the result matches the intent. In China, that's not the case -- they make a design, bundle it up, and then hand everything over the contractor. The contractor then makes whatever changes they want during the construction process, without any input from the architects. This means materials may get changed, the wrong construction methods may be used, etc, and no-one knows. From a distance, the building will look amazing, but the details will have been skimped on.
not keeping architects in the loop doesn't sound like that big of a problem, if it just affects the quality of the finish as noted. it'd be much more concerning if engineers weren't signing off on construction changes (which can happen here in the US, even with our bloated procedures).
The Architect of Record isn't just signing off on paint colors and finish quality, but on things like the seals around windows, flashing on roofing elements, fireproofing on the structural elements, and many more aspects of the building process. In the US, the vast majority of lawsuits around buildings are due to water infiltration, which is affected by these sorts of issues. The building may not collapse if the architect isn't reviewing it, but the walls and roof might.
That said, I'm not certain that engineers are in a different situation. Judging by videos I've seen of collapsing buildings and other issues, I wouldn't be surprised if structural, electrical, plumbing, and other engineers also hand over their designs in the beginning, and then leave it to the developer / contractor to interpret them and 'value-engineer' as they see fit.
i think my critique is more about the idea the process differences have led to materially different outcomes between chinese and american building projects. i've seen some projects in my neighborhood being made with cheap materials and relatively unskilled labor, that lead to water issues too. i spent 9 months with habitat for humanity building an apartment complex and was surprised at how tolerant the process was to completely inexperienced volunteers showing up for a couple hours and doing all kinds of shoddy work.
when i visited beijing about 10 years ago, i was astonished at how much construction was going on, and i could see that the sheer amount of construction happening would make it seem like there were more issues than here in the US. without more concrete data, i'd be skeptical of that kind of anecdote simply playing into our own biases.
Let me explain a bit more of the procedures, and it may explain why I think this is at least one factor (though I agree that more buildings also means there will be more shoddy buildings in absolute terms, even if the percentage of shoddy buildings stays the same).
In the US architectural process, an architect specifies a particular material (say a roof sealant) that has certain characteristics. During construction, the contractor will look at the material, check its price, and then use their suppliers to see what the best available deal is. The contractor identifies another roof sealant that's half the price. Because they've bid on the project for a fixed price, if they can use that other product and cut their costs, they'll increase their profit margin. So they put in a change request and submit the new product with its data. The architect may review it, see that it is functionally the same as their specified product, and approve it. Or they may look at it and determine that while they're both roof sealants, the specified one has a 10 year lifespan, and the proposed alternate has a 2 year lifespan. They reject it, and the builder uses the specified material.
Without the architect verifying that the material is comparable, the contractor (intentionally or not) will use a lower-quality material that will lessen the quality of the building, because there are no checks in place.
what you're saying makes sense (that this process difference could lead to differences in outcome) but i'd still hesitate against extrapolating to industry-wide conclusions from it. there may be other ways that checks & balanaces are incorporated into the chinese system that we're not seeing or hearing about. and you could as easily flip it around and note how amazing it is that there are so few extra buildings being reported as exhibiting problems despite this missing review process. without survey data, it's hard to know for sure how impactful the review process is (relative to cost in both time and money).
Convenience. Renting from a rental shop involved ordering online using a bad UI, showing up at an office, waiting in line, getting told the car you'd requested isn't available, would you like this instead, would you like to buy more insurance, make sure to bring it back with a full tank, and you're paying for a full day, even if you just need groceries from costco.
Zipcar involved looking for the nearest location in the app (typically a few blocks away, if near SF), picking your car and timeframe, showing up, and driving away. Fuel is included, just use the included credit card. No human contact or upselling required, and you can return the car at 3am.
If you only need a car for a few hours, Zipcar is much more efficient than a traditional rental.
The asynchronous nature of email is useful. If I get a chat message in slack or teams, I generally assume a response is needed immediately. If I get a notification, I'll drop what I'm working on, and respond to their question.
With email, there's no expectation of that, at least not at my company. If you send an email, you expect a response sometime between the next few hours and the next few days. The only notification is a flag on my email client, which is easily ignored until I'm at a stopping point and can dedicate time to the question.
I recall Hong Kong's solution, at least when I was there a decade ago. You had the Metro with fixed rails for core routes, then double-decker buses that went to additional areas in large loops. Next were the green minibuses that had small loops, branching off from the other services. After that were red minibuses, which had specific pickup locations, then would drop you off anywhere nearby. All of which could be paid for using the same Octopus card.
I think Hong Kong can pull this off in part because so much of the city is long thin corridors which can be nearly entirely serviced by the metro, commuter train, by light rail in the new territories (and I guess the cable car). This covers a high percentage of commuter needs, and so buses, minibuses, and taxis are to some extent gap-fillers to get people from major arteries to the remaining small proportion of outlying destinations.
Autodesk makes it possible to design the world. We have products likes AutoCAD, Inventor, Fusion360, Revit, Civil3D, 3ds Max, Maya, Recap...basically, if something needs to be designed in 3D, we probably have a software product for it.
I'm on the consulting team, where we design and write custom software to help the largest Architecture, Engineering, and Construction companies in the world use our products. Right now, we're looking for people with web experience, to help build solutions targeting our Forge APIs. .NET and React experience is preferred, though we do use other technologies as well.
We build lots of short projects (probably an average length of 3 months, with 2-6 projects at a time). Often this will include talking to stakeholders, designing a solution, writing the code, then helping the customer to deploy the solution in their environment. There's a lot of autonomy in your day to day work, with a good support structure of project managers and account teams to let you focus on actual work, not busy work.
If you have experience with the AEC industry, that's a plus.
Autodesk makes it possible to design the world. We have products likes AutoCAD (the most famous CAD software in the world), Revit (building design), Civil3D (roadway and site design), 3ds Max, Maya, Inventor, Recap...basically, if it needs to be designed, we probably have a software product for it. Overall, a great place to work -- good benefits, interesting work, friendly people. We tend to have a lot of 'boomerang' employees -- people work here, head off to try something new, and then come back a few years later.
I'm on the consulting team, where we design and write custom software to help the largest Architecture, Engineering, and Construction companies in the world use our products.
We build lots of short projects (probably an average length of 3 months, with 2-6 projects at a time). Often this will include talking to stakeholders, designing a solution, writing the code, then helping the customer to deploy the solution in their environment.
We need people with full-stack web development experience, especially .NET and React. If you have experience with the AEC industry, that's a plus.
I'm a consultant who fills out a timecard every week. I made an integration for Toggl (https://track.toggl.com) that summarizes my week, and makes it easier to transfer my time into the timecard. It's mostly for my personal use, though a few coworkers also use it.
Personally, I was homeschooled for a few years of my elementary education, and it helped me jump far ahead of my peers. My siblings homeschooled for a smaller portion of their education, and didn't find it useful. While their academic level didn't drop below their peers, it wasn't enjoyable and they were quite happy to go back to public school.