Not yet, but I'm trying to leave retail marketing web development to work at a local water utility. It's difficult to find a position I'm qualified for, though. If it pans out, it'll be a 25-30% drop in income, but with the benefit of a short commute, good long-term job security, and the peace of mind that my work helps keep the community alive and in clean water.
My best to all those out there pursuing peace of mind and happiness.
This topic resonates with me, because I'm currently building a horrible marketing static page with images and videos that top 150MB, prior to optimization. It causes me psychic pain to think about pushing that over the wire to people that might have data caps. Not my call, though...
Back when I grew up in the 80s and 90s there was a child abduction scare due to high profile cases like the Michaela Garecht case in Hayward, California. In fact, we lived in the same general community as her family (my parents knew the Garechts). Yet they still allowed my sister and I to choose how we got to and home from school (bus, walking, or bike) or to our friends' house. Speaking to them in adulthood about it, they said their choice to allow that was a combination of what you said -- teaching us to be autonomous -- and also that it jibed with their busy professional lives. Seems like they also got stares of disapproval from other parents, but I think it was the right choice.
It's interesting to me (viewing somewhat from the outside) that as you have more and more two working parent families that the kids have (apparently) less and less autonomy.
But again, it may be that we're not seeing it for what it is; when I was a kid there wasn't much to do at home so we'd go wander around - if I was a teen today I'd probably be playing video games or wasting time on the phone.
Our family used to attend Newman Hall Church in Berkeley, California back in the '90s -- a very brutalist building of a church. Although religion never took for me, I had fond memories of the after-church donut feasts in the community space.
I don't know if the intention of the architecture was to get me to focus on the mass, but young me just spent the entire time taking in the strange geometries of the place.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/3TtT716k3bUkdAVh6
I've been there once and personally, quite like that aesthetic. But the thing that sticks with me was the priest proclaimed the Gospel passage from the bible word-for-word from memory rather than reading it.
This, exactly. We Americans have very little knowledge base on how to build HSR, so it's as much a workforce training and proving ground as it is a functional line.
You would think we would just hire the dutch/swiss/italians (take your pick out of europe) to come build our HSR, similar but opposite of how we destroyed their cities when they brought in our 'traffic engineers' in the 60s and 70s.
I wouldn't say there's a technical knowledge gap insomuch as there are regulatory and political issues in the cities that need more time to resolve than building a line through farm country & desert do.
