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I have so many feelings about this article. I feel so much sadness for the parents who need to use these kind of places, but yet I feel happy that the kids have

by veb 12y ago

I have so many feelings about this article. I feel so much sadness for the parents who need to use these kind of places, but yet I feel happy that the kids have somewhere to go and that the parent(s) can pay for it. I still don't like it much. The article's projections just left my head shaking. Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms. I wish it was as easy as that. :( Could someone enlighten me around this? I'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open 24/7. (New Zealand is where I reside) Though, the people who run these wee centres are doing some selfless work. Absolutely amazing, and good on them for doing it. It makes me happy there's still people like that around. (I realise not everyone would be like the daycare in the article but I'd like to think so.)

pilsetnieks 12y ago
> Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms What have programmers, marketers, and algorithms to do with this, since you explicitly pointed them out?
- mattlutze 12y ago
  veb is referring to this paragraph from the beginning of the article: " Working people who live below the poverty line are particularly afraid to say no to these unusual schedules. They may have no one to say no to, anyway—those schedules might have been created by computers, rather than human managers, in the hopes of saving a corporation money. Many companies now use data and algorithms to schedule employees so fewer hours will be spent sitting around. The software doesn’t care if a shift falls in the middle of the night, or that it might tear a big hole in an employee’s family life."
jessaustin 12y ago
I'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open 24/7. (New Zealand is where I reside) I'm not surprised! When I worked in NZ for a few months, years ago, I found very few businesses open outside of "business hours". This made e.g. grocery shopping a challenge. A few touristy places were open on Saturday morning. Please don't take this as a criticism; run your country however you want to run it. It's just that cultural differences go both ways, and the other side looks weird no matter which direction one is looking.
- veb 12y ago
  We used to have a 24/7 grocery store in Dunedin! ;-) Now it shuts before midnight. You'll find in the major centres like Auckland or Wellington that there'll be more of those open 24/7... but I can't think of anything else. Mind you, banks that shut at 4.30pm are kind of annoying for many people and I can't blame them (even though my wife is a banker). There's only _one_ small branch open in a city of 140,000 people on a Saturday. No other banks open in the weekends here at least. That being said, and on topic with the article... it'll be much easier for a single mum to stay at home with her kids and collect money from the govt, rather than to work nightshift at a supermarket most likely. I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. She may not get more money than someone who stacks shelves, but it's definitely much better than her losing out on her children growing up or the children missing their only parent from their lives. Many parents like this will normally go back to work once the kids start full-time school, but still receive maybe $100 for accommodation help if they're not making enough. I like this a lot better than them having to be in the same circumstances as the women in the article. (I know men fall into this too, I just used women as an example as the article primarily did)
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. They're not the norm in USA either. As TFA implied, this is not just a failure of the state (although it is that), but also of the social structure. The single parents described have no one to whom they can turn. I know a family (parents not married, but together for a long time) that had a hard time over the summer. They camped in a state park for over a month. (The younger son loved it.) The good news is that now both parents are working, incidentally at jobs that allow them to still eschew daycare. (Not that daycare is bad for other families; this is just an indication of this family's views.) My time in NZ was almost entirely in Wellington, and was over a decade ago, so maybe everything is different now. One challenge for me was living and working downtown without an automobile. When walking absolutely wouldn't work, I found the buses to be less convenient than buses I've ridden elsewhere.

by veb 12y ago

pilsetnieks 12y ago

> Someone needs to tell these programmers/marketers that there's a wee factor called "humanity" that they need to use when creating their algorithms What have programmers, marketers, and algorithms to do with this, since you explicitly pointed them out?

mattlutze 12y ago
veb is referring to this paragraph from the beginning of the article: " Working people who live below the poverty line are particularly afraid to say no to these unusual schedules. They may have no one to say no to, anyway—those schedules might have been created by computers, rather than human managers, in the hopes of saving a corporation money. Many companies now use data and algorithms to schedule employees so fewer hours will be spent sitting around. The software doesn’t care if a shift falls in the middle of the night, or that it might tear a big hole in an employee’s family life."

jessaustin 12y ago

I'm not in the US, and I have a hard time even thinking about everything being open 24/7. (New Zealand is where I reside) I'm not surprised! When I worked in NZ for a few months, years ago, I found very few businesses open outside of "business hours". This made e.g. grocery shopping a challenge. A few touristy places were open on Saturday morning. Please don't take this as a criticism; run your country however you want to run it. It's just that cultural differences go both ways, and the other side looks weird no matter which direction one is looking.

veb 12y ago
We used to have a 24/7 grocery store in Dunedin! ;-) Now it shuts before midnight. You'll find in the major centres like Auckland or Wellington that there'll be more of those open 24/7... but I can't think of anything else. Mind you, banks that shut at 4.30pm are kind of annoying for many people and I can't blame them (even though my wife is a banker). There's only _one_ small branch open in a city of 140,000 people on a Saturday. No other banks open in the weekends here at least. That being said, and on topic with the article... it'll be much easier for a single mum to stay at home with her kids and collect money from the govt, rather than to work nightshift at a supermarket most likely. I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. She may not get more money than someone who stacks shelves, but it's definitely much better than her losing out on her children growing up or the children missing their only parent from their lives. Many parents like this will normally go back to work once the kids start full-time school, but still receive maybe $100 for accommodation help if they're not making enough. I like this a lot better than them having to be in the same circumstances as the women in the article. (I know men fall into this too, I just used women as an example as the article primarily did)
- jessaustin 12y ago
  I don't even think we have these extreme daycares in NZ. They're not the norm in USA either. As TFA implied, this is not just a failure of the state (although it is that), but also of the social structure. The single parents described have no one to whom they can turn. I know a family (parents not married, but together for a long time) that had a hard time over the summer. They camped in a state park for over a month. (The younger son loved it.) The good news is that now both parents are working, incidentally at jobs that allow them to still eschew daycare. (Not that daycare is bad for other families; this is just an indication of this family's views.) My time in NZ was almost entirely in Wellington, and was over a decade ago, so maybe everything is different now. One challenge for me was living and working downtown without an automobile. When walking absolutely wouldn't work, I found the buses to be less convenient than buses I've ridden elsewhere.