Depending on how many parts you are having made, consider sending them to a company with a good machine. I had to have a few parts made for a work project. I sent the parts, they sent me a quote, the price was reasonable and I got my parts quickly. I don't do this every day, so for me I wanted the parts in my grubby little hands rather than the machine to make the parts.
I know for years Carroll Shelby was trying a number of schemes to build "new" Cobras, importing chassis as washing machine parts and the like. I also know there are any number of kit manufacturers (Factory Five, and others). Looking at auction prices for an original Cobra, Mustang, Camaro, GTO, Charger, etc -- I wonder if the manufacturers are going to dust off the old dies and build some "new" models, or if these new rules don't allow someone like Ford or GM to do that. The list of "old" cars people would buy "new" could be very lucrative. In addition to the American brands I listed, there are people who love 911s, Toyota AE86, Nissan 240sx, Z cars, MR2, Supra, RX7, etc. Plenty of those would never pass modern safety regs, although it could be more possible to put in an engine that would pass emissions and upgrade things like the brakes.
This affects all American businesses doing business overseas -- and that's a lot of businesses, not just Apple. American goods are selling at a considerable price premium versus competing goods in those markets. Long term, that's not a fantastic place to be as it acts like a export tariff on US goods and makes them less competitive. Also when you are selling overseas what sales you make take a cut due to exchange rates. It's demoralizing to see your sales force bust their ass to log a big YOY sales growth in their country but then have exchange rates eat that up and make it a 0% growth (or a loss) on the bottom line.
And I know we all like to throw barbs at Tim Cook sleeping on his mountain of cash, but this applies to all US business, not just Apple.
You can do the onsite thing, but you are right in that you will limit the groups which may be interested, and also you may need to pay more as the group may include the cost of hotel stays, food, etc in their quote for doing the work. So you can limit your potential personnel and it can cost more.
If you do the remote thing, they don't have to log into virtual desktops, they can log into real hardware just as well if performance is an issue.
Also, "I need you to fix my source code but you can't see it"... that's kind of a paradox.
And regarding your source code, set up a NDA. If the group you contract with is a quality group with a good reputation, this shouldn't be a problem. Actually I hate to break it to your management, but unless you are doing an air gap/search of employees entering a special lab where they have no means of getting the code off (floppies, USB keys, etc), your source code has likely left the building one way or another, for good or ill.
You can also tell your management that if they want to do this all internally, etc that the timeline needs to be extended. They are giving you legitimately contradictory constraints. Not that this is uncommon (constraints conflict all the time), but you need to know where the flexbility is.
The only clothing allowed is skin tight and revealing. Yes, even you, hairy guy with a gut who used to ogle the booth bunnies. How's that working for ya?
There are very few companies in the world that do well with multiple products lines in the same space, and even fewer that do well with multiple product lines in radically different spaces. Apple has become wildly successful going after things they do well in the areas they know, generating repeat business and creating a lot of satisfied customers. I'm not a Apple fanboy but you can't deny their business acumen. They could do far better by expanding their already substantial presence in entertainment. I'd find it far more plausible to know they were (for example) going after setting up a Netflix competitor a la Apple Music, or even going after exclusive cord-cutting deals with a major sports league or sports distribution network so that (for example) Apple TV users could watch live NFL games without a cable subscription. They certainly have the money to find these efforts, and have already shown they will pay to get an exclusive (HBO Now).
This is the Internet. We specialize in vague conjecture!
The conjecture comes in that it would fit with the "secrecy" argument. The construction of an auto plant is something that involves too much captial, material, involvement with local, regional, national officials, permitting, etc that you can't just make prototypes happen like you can with small devices like phones and computers. To some extent you can keep a lot of that kind of thing controlled, although of course once you scale up and send it out to be made, it's considerably more difficult, especially when small cameras are ubiquitous.
So if you set up a proxy and have them do the grunt work it can happen in broad daylight. The proxy does all the public meetings, ceremonial first shovel of dirt and all that. Then when things are done, the proxy is bought out by Apple and they have their sealed lab again, with all the machinery needed to fab something up. Walt Disney did similar things when acquiring land for Disney World, and Harvard University used a similar tactic to grow their campus -- buying land through proxies so that the sellers didn't know who they were selling to.
I actually also really discount the Apple Car idea, myself. Apple looks for ways to have large margins on goods the produce, and also is really set up for a consumer electronics life cycle of offering new and better product on a six month cycle (depending on how you look at it... but they announce new stuff about every six months for one of their product lines). Your typical automobile doesn't make anywhere near those margins. There's whole new worlds of complexity that are inherent that they aren't used to dealing with. Dealer networks are entrenched and protected by law, etc. It's a way to throw a pile of money at something and not convert that into a bigger pile of money in a quick manner. Bigger and easier money exists in the domains they already know well through their existing businesses. A jump to old-style manufacturing just doesn't make much sense.
I hear there's a tech company with $200B in cash that's rumored to be building a car. You might have heard of them. They have a bit of a presence in consumer electronics and stuff.
Sure. It's just not going to get legions of run-of-the-mill twelve year olds to lap it up with the same eagerness as the other materials which have been created to appeal to that age group.
Anything with a title that begins "An Elementary Introduction..." isn't likely to inspire staying up late with your friends.
My kids went right after that Scratch / Minecraft skin and Hour of Code stuff because it was Minecraft-related, and also because the examples provided actually DID something... and did it quickly, and it was Kind of Fun. It also Just Works in the browser. No significant barrier to entry, you don't even need Minecraft... since it's just a Scratch skin running in the browser... any browser.
My kids are also keenly interesting in making videos of their Minecraft adventures, and also want to get into mods so they can make purple cows or whatever. They want to know the absolute bare minimum required to get from A to B, and will at first follow any instructions by rote and pray they work, and if they don't, they get frustrated and then look around more. Reminds me a lot of when I started fooling around with computers, although I didn't have this big fancy Internet thing to find answers on, I had to get answers other ways.
Looking at the blog post... arithmetic operations, pie charts, creating lists and operating on the lists, and... DAD, CAN I PLAY MINECRAFT NOW? THIS IS BOOOORING.
You could go all crazy with this idea. Add the ability to sort by interest/category/theme, and then add the ability to have threaded conversations, and you'll have re-invented newsgroups.
Somewhere in a binary star system, there's someone saying it's impossible for life to evolve in a star system with a single sun.
"How can they live without continual light from a star? They would need to have a lifespan of one planetary revolution, and that's nonsense. No way intelligent life could come from an environment like that."
Yes, indeed -- the fact that you can find the candidates, then do further analysis of the candidates and determine if they are planets or stars is quite amazing. They "only" surveyed 150K stars out of the 100 billion (as the lower bound -- could be 400 billion) stars in the galaxy, so this is indeed only scratching the surface of what can be surveyed.
So someone comes up with a list of things that might be planets, then someone does further analysis and finds out that some aren't. Even (gasp) 52% of them! Science must therefore be useless.
No, that's how science works -- you do an experiment, examine the results, then refine your experiment. Or someone else does. Repeat ad nauseum.
So now instead of my girls watching hours of PopularMMOs, they will watch hours of people managing servers? The ability of the human mind to come up with ever more inane forms of entertainment always surprises me. Plus, you know, girls and STEM careers and all that.
Someone should come up with a Minecraft Motif skin. If you are going to go blocky and retro, at least do it right.
Seeking to manage synergy through actionable enterprise wide initiatives with all shareholders in the loop. This will drive market capitalization through our managed shareholder proxy model and improved salesforce engagement pilots. Customer satisfaction is a priority and therefore will be a prime driver of profit margin in the upcoming quarter. We expect to take a one-time write down of fiduciary costs related to acquisitions and duly reported on form X-11.
Fortunately we have buy-in from the top on this strategy, and they also eat their own dogfood. So people bitching about it can complain all the way to the CEO and he will say "too damn bad, that's how we do things, and you were told about it on multiple occasions"
For mobile users there are far better options available now than there ever used to be. For Windows mobile clients we implemented DirectAccess and some other stuff that automatically takes care of a lot of the syncing stuff. We also keep all email on the server only to avoid dealing with local Outlook mail files.
The user profile thing still is a pain. Roaming Profiles can help somewhat but it's not 100%.
And of course I can't go into full detail about everything we do... but when I started in this job we were doing workstation backups... and eventually when presented with the estimate for scaling that out as the company grew, executive management bought into the central server model. The costs of staff, software and equipment to back up thousands of workstations just didn't make sense at all, even if the software is "free", the staff and disk space isn't.
Set up home drives on file servers and back those up. Teach users that those are the only locations that are backed up. Set up the PCs to use that as the default home location. You can do this on Windows and Linux just fine. Invest in the server -- redundant power supplies, RAID arrays, failover, etc. You could even look at various open source NAS devices, or whatever works for your environment.
Why?
Backing up user PCs doesn't scale well and becomes a thankless task for some poor employee who has to keep up with broken backup clients. It's far easier to scale when you only have to keep up with the file servers. You have some number of clients saving to each server, but that's that number of backup clients you don't need to deal with. This frees up IT staff for other, more useful tasks.
It also allows you to replace end-user PCs with a simple re-image rather than trying to recover or fix anything. End-user calls and says their PC is going whacko, you pull a spare off the shelf and lay down a fresh install. Show up, take the malfunctioning equipment away and diagnose it on your time, while they get back to work. Since all the files are on the server they can just get back to it rather than waiting on you to try and fix whatever might be going wrong.
I built the PC I am typing this on in 2012. 16 GB of RAM was $79 back then. The motherboard was $89, made by Intel and can support 32 GB RAM. It has USB 3.0, as well. The entire PC was built for something like $650.
Sure it didn't have a screaming GPU or an i7, but I can add that later if I want. The bottom line is that my $650 PC build quite easily included 16 GB of RAM for less than $100, in a consumer grade motherboard. It's not outlandish.
Yep. People hear the term "good daycare program" and they think it's somehow the equivalent of the Ivy League of daycare. It's not. It's a program with adequate staffing levels, no televisions and plenty of stuff to keep the kids engaged. For infants to preschoolers, that means stuff like toys, blocks, coloring books and so on. Not rocket science. When you go below "good daycare program", it gets scary and it gets scary fast. Day cares where kids are provided nothing but orange food. Day cares where the workers are overburdened and kids sit around in dirty diapers too long and get rashes. Day cares where the TV never is turned off.
Of course, the "mom stays at home crowd" turns up soon after, but the economic reality of many households is that you do legitimately need two incomes to pay for housing, food, electricity, etc. There's a stereotype that many dual income people have lavish lifestyles taking expensive vacations, driving expensive cars and eating out all the time. In reality most of the dual earners we encounter at school have solid, but not high paying jobs -- for example, one is a teacher and the other has some mid-level professional job. The income is solid but there's no way in hell to afford housing in many metro areas, and the day care is priced such that you still come out significantly ahead by using it.
Then the "just move" crowd shows up... but they forget that many people have grown up where they live, and have a network of family and friends they can depend on to help out with the child care when they need it. Moving to another part of the country that's cheaper cuts off the ability to call in reinforcements when you need them, and sometimes you need those reinforcements with little or no warning at all.
Keep in mind that this includes day care. It's very common to line up day care before a kid is born, it's not like you can turn up somewhere with your baby and just drop it off without prior notice. Day cares need to make sure they have adequate staff and space. When we had our first kid we had this all sorted out well before we gave birth.
Make your snide comments, but as a parent, this approach makes a pile of sense. Especially for poor/low income. I'm fortunate enough to have a decent income, education and a spouse with similar background and income. Even with what advantages we have, having kids and supporting kids is a fucking mess of administrivia, not to mention a pile of money.
So getting into a program like this when you are pregnant can literally be a life-changer for a low income person. Not because of the educational content per se, but because you cut the administrative bullshit down tremendously. You know your kid is going to have day care, so you don't have to rush around in panic and get on waiting lists, hoping your kid can get in somewhere. You know what it's going to cost so you can plan your expenses. You can have stable work hours, allowing you to work with an employer on regular hours. Just that right there can make the difference from you being the employee who is on time and dependable versus being the flake who is always late, leaving early and swapping shifts.
Same thing on up into preschool and grade school. There's a plan, there's a structure. That can help tremendously when you don't have a decent salary and pile of money to fall back on. In the case of our kids, there was always a "rolling the dice" moment when it came to child care, preschool, full day vs. half-day kindergarten, etc. Then it's a patchwork of after school programs that you don't know if you got into or not, and if you don't get in, you need to scramble, then somehow get your kid from school to the after school thing, etc. It's a damned mess, and for single parent households or people who work hourly, stupid stuff like not having the after school program in the same physical location as school just makes it impossible.
Then try and get your kid to the doctor's office, which is only open 9-5, and you have to work... and if you aren't working, you aren't getting paid...
You should get there if you spend a lot of time rollin' doobies and getting the munchies! Also, if you are married, you need to get divorced. Hopefully you are already around 35.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on how many parts you are having made, consider sending them to a company with a good machine. I had to have a few parts made for a work project. I sent the parts, they sent me a quote, the price was reasonable and I got my parts quickly. I don't do this every day, so for me I wanted the parts in my grubby little hands rather than the machine to make the parts.
I know for years Carroll Shelby was trying a number of schemes to build "new" Cobras, importing chassis as washing machine parts and the like. I also know there are any number of kit manufacturers (Factory Five, and others). Looking at auction prices for an original Cobra, Mustang, Camaro, GTO, Charger, etc -- I wonder if the manufacturers are going to dust off the old dies and build some "new" models, or if these new rules don't allow someone like Ford or GM to do that. The list of "old" cars people would buy "new" could be very lucrative. In addition to the American brands I listed, there are people who love 911s, Toyota AE86, Nissan 240sx, Z cars, MR2, Supra, RX7, etc. Plenty of those would never pass modern safety regs, although it could be more possible to put in an engine that would pass emissions and upgrade things like the brakes.
This affects all American businesses doing business overseas -- and that's a lot of businesses, not just Apple. American goods are selling at a considerable price premium versus competing goods in those markets. Long term, that's not a fantastic place to be as it acts like a export tariff on US goods and makes them less competitive. Also when you are selling overseas what sales you make take a cut due to exchange rates. It's demoralizing to see your sales force bust their ass to log a big YOY sales growth in their country but then have exchange rates eat that up and make it a 0% growth (or a loss) on the bottom line.
And I know we all like to throw barbs at Tim Cook sleeping on his mountain of cash, but this applies to all US business, not just Apple.
You can do the onsite thing, but you are right in that you will limit the groups which may be interested, and also you may need to pay more as the group may include the cost of hotel stays, food, etc in their quote for doing the work. So you can limit your potential personnel and it can cost more.
If you do the remote thing, they don't have to log into virtual desktops, they can log into real hardware just as well if performance is an issue.
Also, "I need you to fix my source code but you can't see it" ... that's kind of a paradox.
And regarding your source code, set up a NDA. If the group you contract with is a quality group with a good reputation, this shouldn't be a problem. Actually I hate to break it to your management, but unless you are doing an air gap/search of employees entering a special lab where they have no means of getting the code off (floppies, USB keys, etc), your source code has likely left the building one way or another, for good or ill.
You can also tell your management that if they want to do this all internally, etc that the timeline needs to be extended. They are giving you legitimately contradictory constraints. Not that this is uncommon (constraints conflict all the time), but you need to know where the flexbility is.
The only clothing allowed is skin tight and revealing. Yes, even you, hairy guy with a gut who used to ogle the booth bunnies. How's that working for ya?
There are very few companies in the world that do well with multiple products lines in the same space, and even fewer that do well with multiple product lines in radically different spaces. Apple has become wildly successful going after things they do well in the areas they know, generating repeat business and creating a lot of satisfied customers. I'm not a Apple fanboy but you can't deny their business acumen. They could do far better by expanding their already substantial presence in entertainment. I'd find it far more plausible to know they were (for example) going after setting up a Netflix competitor a la Apple Music, or even going after exclusive cord-cutting deals with a major sports league or sports distribution network so that (for example) Apple TV users could watch live NFL games without a cable subscription. They certainly have the money to find these efforts, and have already shown they will pay to get an exclusive (HBO Now).
This is the Internet. We specialize in vague conjecture!
The conjecture comes in that it would fit with the "secrecy" argument. The construction of an auto plant is something that involves too much captial, material, involvement with local, regional, national officials, permitting, etc that you can't just make prototypes happen like you can with small devices like phones and computers. To some extent you can keep a lot of that kind of thing controlled, although of course once you scale up and send it out to be made, it's considerably more difficult, especially when small cameras are ubiquitous.
So if you set up a proxy and have them do the grunt work it can happen in broad daylight. The proxy does all the public meetings, ceremonial first shovel of dirt and all that. Then when things are done, the proxy is bought out by Apple and they have their sealed lab again, with all the machinery needed to fab something up. Walt Disney did similar things when acquiring land for Disney World, and Harvard University used a similar tactic to grow their campus -- buying land through proxies so that the sellers didn't know who they were selling to.
I actually also really discount the Apple Car idea, myself. Apple looks for ways to have large margins on goods the produce, and also is really set up for a consumer electronics life cycle of offering new and better product on a six month cycle (depending on how you look at it ... but they announce new stuff about every six months for one of their product lines). Your typical automobile doesn't make anywhere near those margins. There's whole new worlds of complexity that are inherent that they aren't used to dealing with. Dealer networks are entrenched and protected by law, etc. It's a way to throw a pile of money at something and not convert that into a bigger pile of money in a quick manner. Bigger and easier money exists in the domains they already know well through their existing businesses. A jump to old-style manufacturing just doesn't make much sense.
They also said they would never make a tablet computer, too.
I hear there's a tech company with $200B in cash that's rumored to be building a car. You might have heard of them. They have a bit of a presence in consumer electronics and stuff.
Sure. It's just not going to get legions of run-of-the-mill twelve year olds to lap it up with the same eagerness as the other materials which have been created to appeal to that age group.
Anything with a title that begins "An Elementary Introduction ..." isn't likely to inspire staying up late with your friends.
My kids went right after that Scratch / Minecraft skin and Hour of Code stuff because it was Minecraft-related, and also because the examples provided actually DID something ... and did it quickly, and it was Kind of Fun. It also Just Works in the browser. No significant barrier to entry, you don't even need Minecraft ... since it's just a Scratch skin running in the browser ... any browser.
My kids are also keenly interesting in making videos of their Minecraft adventures, and also want to get into mods so they can make purple cows or whatever. They want to know the absolute bare minimum required to get from A to B, and will at first follow any instructions by rote and pray they work, and if they don't, they get frustrated and then look around more. Reminds me a lot of when I started fooling around with computers, although I didn't have this big fancy Internet thing to find answers on, I had to get answers other ways.
Looking at the blog post ... arithmetic operations, pie charts, creating lists and operating on the lists, and ... DAD, CAN I PLAY MINECRAFT NOW? THIS IS BOOOORING.
You could go all crazy with this idea. Add the ability to sort by interest/category/theme, and then add the ability to have threaded conversations, and you'll have re-invented newsgroups.
Somewhere in a binary star system, there's someone saying it's impossible for life to evolve in a star system with a single sun.
"How can they live without continual light from a star? They would need to have a lifespan of one planetary revolution, and that's nonsense. No way intelligent life could come from an environment like that."
Yes, indeed -- the fact that you can find the candidates, then do further analysis of the candidates and determine if they are planets or stars is quite amazing. They "only" surveyed 150K stars out of the 100 billion (as the lower bound -- could be 400 billion) stars in the galaxy, so this is indeed only scratching the surface of what can be surveyed.
So someone comes up with a list of things that might be planets, then someone does further analysis and finds out that some aren't. Even (gasp) 52% of them! Science must therefore be useless.
No, that's how science works -- you do an experiment, examine the results, then refine your experiment. Or someone else does. Repeat ad nauseum.
So now instead of my girls watching hours of PopularMMOs, they will watch hours of people managing servers? The ability of the human mind to come up with ever more inane forms of entertainment always surprises me. Plus, you know, girls and STEM careers and all that.
Someone should come up with a Minecraft Motif skin. If you are going to go blocky and retro, at least do it right.
Seeking to manage synergy through actionable enterprise wide initiatives with all shareholders in the loop. This will drive market capitalization through our managed shareholder proxy model and improved salesforce engagement pilots. Customer satisfaction is a priority and therefore will be a prime driver of profit margin in the upcoming quarter. We expect to take a one-time write down of fiduciary costs related to acquisitions and duly reported on form X-11.
(include ginormous "forward looking statement" boilerplate here)
With 21 twentysomethings sharing space, I can only imagine the sheer amount of drama and bullshit that will occur on a daily basis.
Also, 21 people sharing a common space? This is Slashdot, I don't need to repeat the story of "the tragedy of the commons".
Fortunately we have buy-in from the top on this strategy, and they also eat their own dogfood. So people bitching about it can complain all the way to the CEO and he will say "too damn bad, that's how we do things, and you were told about it on multiple occasions"
For mobile users there are far better options available now than there ever used to be. For Windows mobile clients we implemented DirectAccess and some other stuff that automatically takes care of a lot of the syncing stuff. We also keep all email on the server only to avoid dealing with local Outlook mail files.
The user profile thing still is a pain. Roaming Profiles can help somewhat but it's not 100%.
And of course I can't go into full detail about everything we do ... but when I started in this job we were doing workstation backups ... and eventually when presented with the estimate for scaling that out as the company grew, executive management bought into the central server model. The costs of staff, software and equipment to back up thousands of workstations just didn't make sense at all, even if the software is "free", the staff and disk space isn't.
Set up home drives on file servers and back those up. Teach users that those are the only locations that are backed up. Set up the PCs to use that as the default home location. You can do this on Windows and Linux just fine. Invest in the server -- redundant power supplies, RAID arrays, failover, etc. You could even look at various open source NAS devices, or whatever works for your environment.
Why?
Backing up user PCs doesn't scale well and becomes a thankless task for some poor employee who has to keep up with broken backup clients. It's far easier to scale when you only have to keep up with the file servers. You have some number of clients saving to each server, but that's that number of backup clients you don't need to deal with. This frees up IT staff for other, more useful tasks.
It also allows you to replace end-user PCs with a simple re-image rather than trying to recover or fix anything. End-user calls and says their PC is going whacko, you pull a spare off the shelf and lay down a fresh install. Show up, take the malfunctioning equipment away and diagnose it on your time, while they get back to work. Since all the files are on the server they can just get back to it rather than waiting on you to try and fix whatever might be going wrong.
I built the PC I am typing this on in 2012. 16 GB of RAM was $79 back then. The motherboard was $89, made by Intel and can support 32 GB RAM. It has USB 3.0, as well. The entire PC was built for something like $650.
Sure it didn't have a screaming GPU or an i7, but I can add that later if I want. The bottom line is that my $650 PC build quite easily included 16 GB of RAM for less than $100, in a consumer grade motherboard. It's not outlandish.
Yep. People hear the term "good daycare program" and they think it's somehow the equivalent of the Ivy League of daycare. It's not. It's a program with adequate staffing levels, no televisions and plenty of stuff to keep the kids engaged. For infants to preschoolers, that means stuff like toys, blocks, coloring books and so on. Not rocket science. When you go below "good daycare program", it gets scary and it gets scary fast. Day cares where kids are provided nothing but orange food. Day cares where the workers are overburdened and kids sit around in dirty diapers too long and get rashes. Day cares where the TV never is turned off.
Of course, the "mom stays at home crowd" turns up soon after, but the economic reality of many households is that you do legitimately need two incomes to pay for housing, food, electricity, etc. There's a stereotype that many dual income people have lavish lifestyles taking expensive vacations, driving expensive cars and eating out all the time. In reality most of the dual earners we encounter at school have solid, but not high paying jobs -- for example, one is a teacher and the other has some mid-level professional job. The income is solid but there's no way in hell to afford housing in many metro areas, and the day care is priced such that you still come out significantly ahead by using it.
Then the "just move" crowd shows up ... but they forget that many people have grown up where they live, and have a network of family and friends they can depend on to help out with the child care when they need it. Moving to another part of the country that's cheaper cuts off the ability to call in reinforcements when you need them, and sometimes you need those reinforcements with little or no warning at all.
Keep in mind that this includes day care. It's very common to line up day care before a kid is born, it's not like you can turn up somewhere with your baby and just drop it off without prior notice. Day cares need to make sure they have adequate staff and space. When we had our first kid we had this all sorted out well before we gave birth.
Make your snide comments, but as a parent, this approach makes a pile of sense. Especially for poor/low income. I'm fortunate enough to have a decent income, education and a spouse with similar background and income. Even with what advantages we have, having kids and supporting kids is a fucking mess of administrivia, not to mention a pile of money.
So getting into a program like this when you are pregnant can literally be a life-changer for a low income person. Not because of the educational content per se, but because you cut the administrative bullshit down tremendously. You know your kid is going to have day care, so you don't have to rush around in panic and get on waiting lists, hoping your kid can get in somewhere. You know what it's going to cost so you can plan your expenses. You can have stable work hours, allowing you to work with an employer on regular hours. Just that right there can make the difference from you being the employee who is on time and dependable versus being the flake who is always late, leaving early and swapping shifts.
Same thing on up into preschool and grade school. There's a plan, there's a structure. That can help tremendously when you don't have a decent salary and pile of money to fall back on. In the case of our kids, there was always a "rolling the dice" moment when it came to child care, preschool, full day vs. half-day kindergarten, etc. Then it's a patchwork of after school programs that you don't know if you got into or not, and if you don't get in, you need to scramble, then somehow get your kid from school to the after school thing, etc. It's a damned mess, and for single parent households or people who work hourly, stupid stuff like not having the after school program in the same physical location as school just makes it impossible.
Then try and get your kid to the doctor's office, which is only open 9-5, and you have to work ... and if you aren't working, you aren't getting paid ...
You should get there if you spend a lot of time rollin' doobies and getting the munchies!
Also, if you are married, you need to get divorced. Hopefully you are already around 35.