All of Kerry's Comments + Replies

I had a similar experience with midjourney. The question now is, how do you change your life once you have the more visceral understanding of the near term future? Seriously, this is my biggest problem. I deeply believe change is coming, fast, but I'm still stuck in so many patterns that only make sense if the status quo continues.

Will you contact both accepted and rejected applicants? If so, when?

6Liron
Same question - I applied on Nov 22 and haven't heard back

My decision to homeschool was due to my own experiences in public school, and the common thread amongst my similarly public schooled friends. We were all smart, socially outcast, and had a terrible time in school. If you're smart and weird school holds you back, limits your exploration of your potential, and retards your social growth by forcing you into age based groups instead of intelligence based groups.

For my kids, they get contact with a more heterogenous group than school would allow. They spend time with kids and adults of a wide age range, and a w... (read more)

This is what I came here to say :) I am taking a different approach with my kids: homeschool, then get them to graduate college at 18. Thus they have the credentials to be 'adult' at the same time as the legal rights of an adult. I think it is very hard to be faster than that, at least in the US. 

To the original point, there are often very few rules (it depends on the state or smaller area) about what constitutes 'school'. If you really want to make a difference you could start a private school, and then make real work 100% of your curriculum. Call it... (read more)

1ajc586
What were the principal factors that led to your decision that homeschooling and early graduation was 'better' for your kids then a 'conventional' schooling approach/timetable? Clearly entering the workforce earlier leads to financial independence sooner, more years in employment hence greater lifetime wealth accumulation, etc. It's not clear that these things are that important either to individual well-being and happiness or in terms of one's place in broader society, so I'm interested in other kinds of reasons. Full disclosure: I am 'a priori' against homeschooling in most cases. My belief is the principal value of schooling is to provide maximal 'contact time' with a highly heterogenous group of people, to enable acquisition of the kinds of skills that are important for societal cohesiveness in a heterogenous world. Substituting at least a significant part of this contact time for time at home (or time with a more homogeneous group i.e. other homeschooled children and their parents) reduces the size of the 'soft skills' training data set for teenagers at an important time in their lives. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, even if it leads to on-paper 'adult credentials' at age 18.
4ChristianKl
You can do that, but you are opening yourself up for one of the students suing you for not paying minimum wage. 
1Ulisse Mini
This is awesome, I hope I meet your kids sometime.

This is something that I've only needed to do with kids under 2, still in diapers. For older kids we talk.

Alas! I've got 6 kids, youngest is currently 3. We've used many strategies, but this guide would have helped a lot. My experience is that every kid is different, and you need to be flexible instead of assuming that what worked last time will work this time. I would add that locking kids in their room has been critical for us with the most agressively wakey kids. This is done when they sleep in a closet-ish room next to ours so that we hear everything, and with a sleep friendly floor covering in front of the door.

1Angela Pretorius
Can we please be clear that sleep training and locking kids in their rooms should only be done as a last resort. And if you do lock your children in their bedrooms then at least leave a potty in their rooms. I have some bad childhood memories of bedtime battles and spending hours on end lying in bed pretending to be asleep and having to face the terror of waking up from a nightmare alone because I didn’t want to get told off for being awake in the night.

I can relate to so many of your points. I too am getting less sleep, planning a rural well stocked estate, and stopping my 401k contributions.

The point about social connections makes a lot of sense, but that's the hardest one for me. I think it would be best to have connections with people who share my view of the future, and who want to prepare together. I have my large family, but I think it would be best to have a larger community.

Debt is a good issue. I think in most scenarios where a 401k or the stock market lose meaning debt also loses meaning. So it might make sense to take on maximum debt to invest in physical goods, or to enable you to suddenly react to a change that requires a lot of liquid wealth.

2Dagon
That's why It's important to do the EV calculations, and consider the pain of heavy debt loads if you're significantly wrong about timelines WRT continuity of property rights and/or monetary value.  Also, there really aren't that many cases where financial investments become irrelevant and physical goods remain secure and valuable.   If you put a very high probability on collapse of financial value and loss of property rights on a short-ish timeline, you might consider high debt, but invest in experiences and capabilities rather than physical goods.  Go back to school (in a topic you enjoy, not necessarily to get a job).  Travel the world (has added advantage of making future permanent changes easier).  Party and make friends.

Good points. I think of investing in skills, physical survival goods, or a resilient dwelling as possible choices. For climate this might be building an underground house in the north, in an area predicted to be wetter and warmer in the future. Yeah, exponential is what I mean.