What are some things that you figured out on your own as a child?

One of the first things I remember was when I was 8 and we were out with the telescope. I told my parents that it was so cool looking back in time. I remember how weird they looked at me that I had already figured that out by that age. By the time I was 10, I took a class on trs-dos and by the time half of it was over, I was telling the class almost as much info as the instructor. :)

In 1978 (when I was 12) I told my father that he should sell the AT&T stock he had (the one investment he had beside our house) and buy gold. I wish he had.

Making chinese throwingstars out of sheetmetal and being able to chuck them at 30 yards within a 1 foot grouping.

cook. I was making a full fried chicken dinner by the time I was 9, with my own blend of spices in teh breading, mashed taters, gravey, etc. I just had to watch my Mom cut a chicken up once and I had it down. I've always been good with a knife.

Gosh, I remember when I first heard of capitalism my initial instinct about it was disconcerting and I couldn't understand the logic of ownership. I looked around the room and though how ridiculously inane it was that every trinket, the plaster on the wall, and every screw was "owned" by an individual. I honestly felt that there was something awfully "wrong" about this concept—and I still do. I was also very upset at the idea of nuclear annihilation and thought it was monstrous. And the only person in the whole wide world who gave me some assurance of comfort against the nasty fear of being vaporized was... Elisabeth II. I also remember not being able to figure out the concept of movies: I couldn't understand the idea of setting up a camera to film a story. It seemed bizarre, to say the least. And I remember when my father told me that "God" didn't exist. I nodded in agreement, but on the aside, I asked God not to forget me.

That when you play doctor with your neighbors daughter be certain that her

dad doesn't catch you or else you'll be in deep shit! ;)

I learned to spell words that were far ahead of the lesson plan.Gosh, I remember when I first heard of capitalism my initial instinct about it was disconcerting and I couldn't understand the logic of ownership. I looked around the room and though how ridiculously inane it was that every trinket, the plaster on the wall, and every screw was "owned" by an individual. I honestly felt that there was something awfully "wrong" about this concept—and I still do.That's a reasonable attitude when you're living with your family, and it was a reasonable attitude up through the Mesolithic Era, when people lived in small clans of a few dozen extended family members who had instinctively trusted and cared about each other since birth. But Homo sapiens is a pack-social species, not a herd-social species. It's not a reasonable attitude when you're living among thousands of total strangers, none of whom have the instinct to trust or care about each other.

Civilization has been the ten-thousand year struggle of our enormous, powerful forebrains to overcome our pack-social instinct with reasoned and learned behavior, and live in herds among anonymous strangers. One of the ways we do that is by establishing rules that apply to the entire herd, which the members obey because in aggregate they make cooperation and harmony possible. And one of the rules concerns the ownership of property, so that the minority of strong, greedy, deceitful, sociopathic, and poorly-raised members of the herd don't end up with all of it.

And also so that we each can observe the correlation between effort and reward, so that the lazy don't live at the expense of the ambitious. "Capital" is merely a fancy word for "surplus." Large communities that develop even rudimentary technology like farming, permanent dwellings, furniture, weaving and ceramics discover what economists call "economy of scale" and "division of labor," which allow the community to produce more than it requires for basic survival: a "surplus." Managing that surplus has been a major concern for communities since they transcended the Neolithic Era and began building cities, which saw a major increase in the size of the surplus because of a major increase in economy of scale and division of labor.

A surplus can be used for frivolous consumption (e.g. excess toys and liquor), consumer goods (e.g. music players and microwave ovens), or tools that increase work efficiency (e.g. gasoline lawnmowers and computers) or productivity (e.g. factories and computers) and thereby feed back into the economy by producing a still larger surplus. A significant portion of our surplus is expended on the production of artifacts of new technologies, which directly feed back in that way. This is why the world's per-capita GDP has risen to the level that in some countries like the USA the definition of the "poverty line" is: I can't quite buy my own house yet.

After the first ten thousand years of this experiment we have learned that an economy works best when ownership of the surplus is distributed among the citizenry, so that each person manages his own. We tried centralizing it in the palaces of the monarch and his aristocratic sycophants, and learned that once they became that wealthy they had no interest in increasing the economy, while the rest of us were living as subsistence farmers. We tried centralizing it in the offices of a giant bureaucratic government, and learned that government is The Employer Of Last Resort and even though they may have meant well, they were incapable of managing the surplus of an entire nation, particularly given the built-in sluggish response time of a command market. (The Soviet Union did not collapse because its people demanded more rights. It collapsed because its economy produced a negative surplus.)

So thank the principles of ownership and capitalism for the fact that there are enough computers manufactured for you to own one on which to type these posts--not to mention the leisure time your 40-hour job leaves you... and the central heating and well-stocked refrigerator that allow you to enjoy it.

40 hour job - lol my ass, not anymore Captialism winning again...

40 hour job - lol my ass, not anymore Captialism winning again...Okay, maybe it's fifty, maybe it's seventy if you're a testosterone-hyped attorney with a hard night of social drinking ahead of you and a BMW to take you home. You're still way better off than your ancestors. At the time of the American Revolution, 95% of them were mostly farmers, who worked from the first ray of light till the last. 90-100 hours averaged over the year, with maybe a little time off during winter. Dreary, repetitive, unautomated, back-breaking, brain-atrophying physical labor that would make a shift behind a Wal-Mart counter look like a vacation and the average modern desk job look like paradise.

In general, "capitalists" do not win by browbeating their employees into working steady overtime. I did a paper on that a few years ago. Henry Ford was right when he calculated that we could work forty hours in one week on a steady basis before our concentration and coordination started to flag. After "knowledge work" employees have worked three weeks of overtime, their output drops back to the 40-hour baseline... and if they keep working overtime, it keeps dropping! One high-tech company cut its work week to 32 hours and discovered that quality rose so high and rework fell so low, that it was actually coming out ahead. Not to mention, all the brightest people in the field wanted to come work for them.

One software company's stock price fell 20% in three days when an internal memo was leaked that demanded 52 hours a week from its employees. Investors know that Victorian management practices are not the key to profitability in the computer age. Unfortunately not all of our managers have figured that out. But hey, they're idiots. These are the same guys who insist on us "going to work" and donating an extra 3-4 hours to our jobs every day, when most of us spend our entire workday huddled over a computer and talking on the phone--technology we all have at home.

When you young people who have grown up with cellphones, chat rooms, webcams, and MPRPGs take over the economy, you'll let your staff work at home and you won't make them work overtime. Because you know how to manage people and rate their performance without having to physically see them. Right?

What are some things that you figured out on your own as a child?
Eintein's Relativity Theories...

Well Fraggle if you wrote it all up so nice like that it must be true. I agree people are more productive -refreshed and happy. I have not seen it - ever in the I.T field, nor in other professions at companies I've been at.

i learned if ur abused as a child it seems that everyone copies and they ignore kids
or push em away
yeah its true like a natural instinct thing people end up abusing em too
itslike when an animal is injured the others attack it even when they grow up they still cop it
and its hard to get out of that situation unless everyone is educted about abused people they dont realise they do it
its not anyones fault is how life is
its important to keep kids safe from it and sumtimes hard to do that when the dept of child safety is the worse kiddy abusers in the world

I guess nobody noticed what I said.... :rolleyes:

Incidentaly, I also learned subatomic particle physics on my own while my peers were doing basic newtonian physics...

i could divide by zero by age 7...

i was fluent in sanskrit by age 9...

i was a prodigy at sarcasm at age 6...

I learned that the you can have anything you want and can manipulate structures of the world if you're intelligent and flexible enough.

Some just don't see it.

When I was about 8 or 9 I would cook up breakfast in bed for my parents.
I learned to make coffee, pancakes and scrambled eggs. Then I would bring it up on a tray for them.

I also started gardening about the same age.

Sometimes helping others helps yourself as well.

Okay, maybe it's fifty, maybe it's seventy if you're a testosterone-hyped attorney with a hard night of social drinking ahead of you and a BMW to take you home. You're still way better off than your ancestors. At the time of the American Revolution, 95% of them were mostly farmers, who worked from the first ray of light till the last. 90-100 hours averaged over the year, with maybe a little time off during winter. Dreary, repetitive, unautomated, back-breaking, brain-atrophying physical labor that would make a shift behind a Wal-Mart counter look like a vacation and the average modern desk job look like paradise. Selecting a particular minority of one's ancestors to compare oneself with can make almost any present circumstances look good.

but I have ancestors who are known to have lived on far less than 40 hours of dreary labor per week, averaged over the year, and in circumstances that would be an expensive vacation for me to duplicate. And they all - even the poorest - owned their own homes. Capitalism takes, as well as gives.

But on topic: I learned how to produce a second level falsetto. It sounds like a dog whistle. I never recorded it, and lost my chance at fame and fortune. If I did it now I would injure myself.

How to run....lol I was running around the house when I was 7 months old. According to my mom I ran all over the house but when I slowed down I fell because I could only keep my balance when running.

I was always gifted with regards to music as well. I have never taken any music lessons outside of grade school (which I rember hating) and oddly I can play almost anything by ear on the piano, however the guitar is extremely difficult for me.

i worked out how to lie convincingly, sculpt my reactions depending on my situation and intergrate between social groups.

That when you play doctor with your neighbors daughter be certain that her

dad doesn't catch you or else you'll be in deep shit! ;)



Today that equates with not getting caught messing around with married

women for their hubby gets rather upset as well! ;)

when i was just 8yrs i asked my mum why my uncle killed himself, he jumped of chepstow bridge, and she didnt even talk about it, no body talked about it, i just asked her one day, why?

she was so shocked, and i know why now.