The lesson I derived from Amy Chua's first Tiger Mom book (to the extent that we can get any real information from the public image) was that if you frog-march your children through all the "right" school and extracurricular activities, they'll end up with the confidence and opportunity to seize all of life's many possibilities -- not depressed, neurotic, hating their parents, or whatever else is thought to afflict such children,

As her daughters reached adolescence, they rebelled a little -- by dropping some extracurriculars and adopting others, for example. Not through crime and drugs, and not by dropping out of high school to carve out their own way of life . They went to Harvard and now the world is open to them, and as far as we can tell they also have a rich social life.

Is this the right lesson to draw? I hope not.

There seems to be a pretty sharp lower bound on how cheap a living situation (e.g. rent on an apartment) can be in the parts of the United States I'm familiar with. I would have thought that there would be demand for cheap-but-bad housing on the part of people with low income. Here are some hypotheses I've come up with for explaining this, and I'd appreciate anyone who has relevant knowledge commenting if I'm on track:

• There is in fact very little such demand in the US because people who can afford any kind of rent at all have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living.
• The cost of complying with health and safety regulations makes it too expensive to price rent below a certain amount even at the worst the rental situation is legally allowed to be.
• The people who would try to rent as cheaply as possible are also the people who are least likely to pay their rent (e.g. due to job insecurity), and landlords don't want to take on the additional risk.

The mere existence of the "downvote" mechanism is social and emotional poison.

It's like you're sitting around a table chatting with friends, and everyone has their hands under the table, with an annoying buzzer in one hand and a friendly chime in the other hand. And everyone is chatting politely, and then people realize that they can give "anonymous feedback" by pressing the annoying buzzer when they don't like what someone just said, and the chime when they approve of what someone just said.

But as soon as people start to do this, it is clear that, whatever the intention, the only possible actual outcome is noise. You say something and receive two chimes and a buzzer. What does that mean? What do you do with that? Alice responds, and then Bob responds to her, except he precedes his response with a buzzer, so he might as well have preceded the whole remark with "hey, asshole!" even though his comment would have been perfectly constructive without the buzzer.

Basically my point is the buzzer ruins everything. If you went to a party and people were using these buzzers you would leave.

I've been running during my lunchbreak for two weeks now. I've decided to just walk for the rest of this workweek because I've been moving heavy crap while moving house but it seems an easy habit to keep up and a clear win.

If you know English and Mandarin, you might make an academic career out of writing meta analysis of topics discussed in Mandarin research papers.

For the same reason that there are articles on Less Wrong that give dating advice. Because people are interested in it.

What expert advice is worth buying? Please be fairly specific and include some conditions on when someone should consider getting such advice and focus on individuals and families versus, say, corporations.

I ask because I recently brainstormed ways that I could be spending my money to make my life better and this was one thing that I came up with and realized I essentially never bought except for visiting my doctor and dentist. Yet there are tons of other experts out there willing to give me advice for a fee: financial advisers, personal trainers, nutritionists, lawyers, auto-mechanics, home inspectors, and many more.

So the other week I read about viewquakes. I also read about things a CS major could do that aren't covered by the usual curriculum. And then this article about the relationship escalator. Those gave me not quite a viewquake but clarified a few things I already had in mind and showed me some I had not.

What I am wondering is now, can anyone here give me a non-technical viewquake? What non-technical resources can give me the strongest viewquake akin to the CS major answer? With non-technical I mean material that doesn't fall into the usual STEM spectrum people around here should be well versed in.

Not sure this is clear enough.

I got an offer of an in-person interview from a tech company on the left coast. They want to know my current salary and expected salary. Position is as a software engineer. Any ideas on the reasonable range? I checked Glassdoor and the numbers for the company in question seem to be 100k and a bit up. I suppose, actually, that this tells me what I need to know, but honestly it feels awfully audacious to ask for twice what I'm making at the moment. On the other hand I don't want to anchor a discussion that may seriously affect my life for the next few years at too small a number. So, I'm seeking validation more than information. Always audacity?