I feel this pain. I grew up in what I thought were great public schools and am a big believer that public school is a fundamental institution that should raise the floor for society. Now I'm raising kids in Seattle and it's a constant struggle to get the kinds of educational programs and opportunities for my kids that I took for granted when I was in public school and just assumed would still be around when I was an adult. For lack of a better way to phrase it, I feel like I am exactly the kind of parent SPS should want to keep in its system - a strong believer in public education with the means to support the schools, yet sometimes I feel like they are actively driving families like mine out of school system with their decisions.
The simplest version of this problem involves a "potential barrier." Another loose classical analogy here is considering a ball rolling towards a hill. Everyone knows from experience in classical systems that with sufficient speed i.e. kinetic energy, the ball can go over the hill i.e. there is more kinetic energy in the ball when it meets the bottom of the hill than there is potential energy the ball would have at the top of the hill. If it has less energy, it will not make it past the hill. The weird thing about the analogous situation in quantum mechanics is that even if the particle has less energy than the potential barrier (the hill), it has a non-zero probability of being on the other side due to the wave function exponentially decaying in the barrier.
To add to this, I've liked the Room & Board furniture I've purchased as well. It's pretty simple design-wise, but solid wood, American-made (if you care about things like that), and broadly available. But honestly, the nicest piece of furniture I have is something I commissioned a local cabinet maker to make. It was only marginally more expensive than what a comparable piece at R&B would cost, but was completely custom in a way that R&B could not be, and it was also nice to support local woodworkers.
Not disagreeing with the point of this comment, but just as an aside, pumping is something that even mothers who are on leave do. Speaking from personal experience as the dad, I was able to feed the baby pumped milk for some of the many daily feedings instead of my wife doing the breastfeeding, which let her get a few extra minutes/hours of sleep when the baby needed to be fed. Both of us were on parental leave during this period. That tradeoff (getting some extra sleep vs. pumping) is not one that all parents would make, but it did help us get through the first few weeks of a newborn.
For sure. Certainly once she did start going back to work and pumping at the office, it was less "fun" - the pumping room wasn't the most comfortable, she had to do it a lot more and cart it back and forth in a cooler, etc.
One of the first papers I read in this area was very interesting in this regard (https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/2017-1.0-Berk...). I think the challenge is that a business (e.g. COMPAS) can certainly take a position on what definition of algorithmic fairness they want to enforce, but the paper mentions six different definitions of fairness, which are impossible to satisfy simultaneously unless base rates are the same across all groups (the "data problem"). Even the measurement of these base rates itself can be biased, such as over- or under-reporting of certain crimes. And even if you implement one definition, there's no guarantee that that is the kind of algorithmic fairness that the government/society/case law ends up interpreting as the formal mathematical instantiation of the written law. Moreover, this interpretation can change over time since laws, and for that matter, moral thinking, also change over time.
I think the upshot to me is that businesses, whether it's one operating in criminal judicial risk assessment or advertising or whatever, don't really make obvious which definition (if any) of fairness that they are enforcing, and thus it becomes difficult to determine whether they are doing a good job at it.
