How readily available is it? Is there a site that explains how to get moving efficiently through the airport? I don't know if it would help anyone else, but I would like one.
Try the giant graphical link in the middle of http://www.tsa.gov/ that says "Traveling soon? Learn how to get through the line faster."
As much as I believe infant circumcision is wrong, adult circumcision is worse. When you remove thousands of nerve endings, a developing brain can rewire itself. An adult brain is accustomed to receiving those signals, and cannot rewire itself as readily. Infant circumcision is bad, adult circumcision is much worse.
Recent research in adult brain plasticity with stroke victims, those who have suffered visual or auditory impairments, and amputees suggest that adults are not as hard-wired as we once thought.
All that aside... people use this argument to defend the practice of infant circumcision. If you take it before they've learned it's part of them, they won't miss it, right? And yet, studies have shown that men who were circumcised at birth have a lower tolerance for pain than those who weren't. Babies *do* suffer consequences from the procedure. General anesthesia is too risky for this procedure, but local has unpredictable effects on their brand-new nervous systems, and the baby cannot communicate whether it has been effective.
If a man doesn't want his foreskin, I figure he'll learn to live without it. But no one should make that decision *for* him.
Sorry, but what's the big deal? My penis is less stinky, and doesn't look like a shrivily wad of chewing gum. It's like a permanent haircut, except it just makes my penis look cool. I don't understand why people go into such a fury about this issue. Why should anyone dictate to someone else whether or not they should be allowed to make this decision for their kid?
For the same reason that parents shouldn't be making other cosmetic surgical alterations to newborns. Anyone who wants to can get a circumcision when they're old enough to make the decision for themselves. Maybe you'd have made that decision yourself, too, if you'd been allowed to. That's all well and good. But what if I don't like the size of my kid's nose? Should I get the baby a nose job, too? What about trimming their earlobes? Should I get them some dimples while we're at it? It's all the same... the arguments people make for circumcision at birth could be made for any cosmetic surgical procedure, but would be equally absurd.
Fortunately, at least half the population has gotten the message, and there are some hospitals (like UCSD) where you can't get newborns circumcised at all.
You are also mistaken. UCSD delays circumcision but does it at the parent's request, as is the case with all other public hospitals I'm aware of. No hospital in America or Europe, public or private, would dare prevent a mohel or family practitioner from circumcising an infant.
Well, few mohels operate in hospitals. For that matter, they won't circumcise an infant who is less than eight days old, by which time 99% of infants have been released from the hospital.
UCSD does not offer circumcision as part of the birth package. You can still have the procedure done in a doctor's office, but you have to make special arrangements. Not all OBs are willing to do it, either, so you may have to ask a different doctor if you really want it. All of which serves to help parents consider the decision carefully, as they should with ANY procedure they elect for their children.
Absolutely true. In fact, my older son had infantile phimosis. It was caught early by his pediatrician, before he'd suffered any ill effects from it, and we were referred to a pediatric urologist. When I noted at the beginning of the visit that I considered amputation of the foreskin as a drastic, last-resort measure, she assured me that she did as well, and wouldn't recommend it in my son's case due to his anatomy anyway. The cream worked perfectly, and he didn't need it again after he was about 10 months old.
Actually, it's probably as much to say "how can we market them better so that men make a different decision." It might be about redesign, but there are a lot of limiting factors; you can't make them looser without compromising their reliability... you have few choices of materials for stuff that's thin enough without being porous to viruses and sperm... and there's not a lot you can do about putting them on.
Or maybe there is. Maybe they can design a cardboard sleeve applicator, so you just slide it around your member and pull it off and there ya go, no fuss no muss. That might help a bit. It'd be harder to keep in your pocket maybe... but they could probably make it fold flat. Sort of like a Hot Pocket sleeve.
I'll just point out that in a steady relationship it's _the_ most reliable method of birth control and the cheapest and simplest to implement long-term.
But condoms are not seen as essential primarily because of their birth control properties... it's because they can reduce disease transmission.
So, you can get a vasectomy, but if the relationship goes south, you'll *still* have use for condoms. Sucks, don't it?
Fortunately, at least half the population has gotten the message, and there are some hospitals (like UCSD) where you can't get newborns circumcised at all.
I mean, if my sons want to be circumcised one day, that's up to them. I'll even pay for it. they can get general anesthesia and take pain relievers while they're recovering. I'm not worried about them having a 0.5% increased chance of contracting STDs until they're at LEAST 12, though, so I saw no reason to have them surgically altered at birth.
BBB Accreditation This business has not been accredited by BBB. Businesses are under no obligation to seek BBB accreditation, and some businesses are not accredited because they have not sought BBB accreditation. To be accredited by BBB, a business must apply for accreditation and BBB must determine that the business meets BBB accreditation standards, which include a commitment to make a good faith effort to resolve any consumer complaints. BBB Accredited Businesses must pay a fee for accreditation review/monitoring and for support of BBB services to the public.
Granted, the GP was a little off (there's no indication that they ever had BBB accreditation), but there definitely is such a thing as BBB Accreditation.
Like all other technologies, its not the features, its what you do with them. I've taken good pictures and some Interesting things with my $600 Canon digital rebel xti.
Amen to that. We paid a professional photographer $1600 to cover our wedding... but a couple of my favorite pictures were taken by my cousin with a free disposable camera. They're all about the timing and the framing (and catching the photographer ordering us around;-).
"Hunter-gatherers "worked" an average of 10-20 hours a week to maintain themselves."
My gut feeling is this might be true though I'd like a reference if you have one.
Unfortunately, the cite is "Anthropology 8 lecture, UCLA, 1993 or so". I can't recall the professor's name off the top of my head, but she specialized in the changes to the status of women in the Wonka [sic] civilization when they were conquered by the Inca, so if you find someone who published an article about that and worked at UCLA in the first half of the '90s, that's probably her.
Also true is that hunter gathers in the pre-agriculture past lived much shorter and probably much more brutal lives than us.
They did; however, with the switch to subsistence agriculture, lifespans went *down* and were shorter for millennia, before finally catching up and surpassing the previous status quo with the advent of the germ theory of disease and such. When we switched from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence, heights dropped two inches on average, lifespans shortened by a couple decades, and really interestingly, war broke out. Whereas there was evidence of brief occasional skirmishes between nomadic tribes prior to the advent of subsistence agriculture, fossil records following the settlement into agricultural communities show that nearly EVERY male that attained a particular age (around 12 or 13 IIRC) had sustained a parry blow to the left (or occasionally right) forearm at some point.
See, what agriculture did, beyond just providing a predictable food source, is it made it possible to store food through the winter. It also required people to settle into a static area, and defend that area. Some groups realized that, if they could just capture the food stores, they didn't need to do all that backbreaking labor... so warfare became far more common, further shortening lives beyond the impact of nutrition (the lower heights and signs of diseases like tooth decay show that nutrition suffered from the advent of agriculture).
Fascinating stuff. I was a sociology major, but I paid very close attention in that Anthro class.
[snip comparison]...but I don't buy this "primitive happy savage" idea.
Well, I'll say this about agriculture: nobody does it unless they have to. The native populations of the Channel Islands and parts of the California coast knew the principles of agriculture for thousands of years before they implemented them. In that intervening time, because of mild weather and abundant natural resources, they would not have gained any midwinter survival benefit from planting crops.
The "advantages" of modern civilization are extremely recent. For most of our post-agricultural history, we've worked harder for shorter, less healthy lives. There are still some ways in which our modern diet and lifestyle results in harder work and poorer outcomes than the traditional hunter-gatherer alternative. It's a trade-off, of course; there are things we have that require specialization and settlement, and are well worth the disadvantages. But it's not a straight upgrade.
Boring pragmatic things like "I wouldn't want to live in a world where an infected small cut on my little toe could kill me" put me off that as being better to what I have...
Though truth be told, the infected cut on your little toe is a lot less likely to kill your traditional-living guy who gets an appropriate nutrient balance from food sources, rather than having to take supplements and eat enriched grains to get all the trace elements, B vitamins, etc. that he needs. He also didn't have MRSA, because that was brought into being with injudicious antibiotics. Finally, his feet are a lot tougher than yours in the first place, because he doesn't have shoes protecting him from the world all the time.
But yes, it's great that we have modern medicine when we need it. It's too bad that we've grown d
But, in an ironic twist, the leading Japanese car manufacturers (Honda and Toyota) do a lot of their manufacturing in the US, to get around import tariffs (instituted at the behest of the American car companies). My 2002 Accord was built in Ohio.
Citation needed. The most densely populated areas (think New York city) are the most costly places to live
The most desirable places to live (think California and New York City) are both the most heavily populated and the most expensive. That's straight economics.
and seem to be much more dangerous.
And that's straight conjecture. Greater numbers of bad things happen when greater numbers of people are around for them to happen to. There's plenty of smaller cities that have much higher rates of violence than Los Angeles and New York.
There is a paper by John B Calhoun entitled "Population Density and Social Pathology."
As luck would have it, I reviewed that paper in Social Ecology (mumble mumble) years ago. It was a seminar-style class, where we took turns presenting the articles, then discussed them. My perception (and my classmates saw it similarly) was that the study was very poorly conducted. There was *no* control for the topology of the experimental setup; the observations about the migration towards the end areas and such hold no weight. There weren't any controls to determine whether the sexual behavior was related to the crowding of space, or the unlimited supplies of food and water.
And, finally, these are rats; they don't have governments, community meetings, "neighbors," or a social structure that we would particularly recognize and identify with. It's hard to draw conclusions about human behavior from this study. It's particularly difficult when cross-cultural studies of human environments with similar statistics (people per square mile) but different economic setups or institutions yield wildly different birth rates, violence rates, and QOL indicators.
If you *do* accept the implications of the study, then you come to the conclusion that urban living is pathological, and we need to return to a rural lifestyle. When you get down to it, this is probably true; what is natural for humans is a nomadic life living in small bands that only rarely meet, and usually peaceably, trading a member or two for marriage, and exchanging some goods. I doubt you'll find many people who are up for that, though.
I'm a new yorker. What i know of LA is that those who can afford it, live outside the city in better areas. Those who cant, live in the less desirable places.
Well, I'm an Angeleno, and have been all my life. Is it possible I know more about what people in LA do than you?
People who value having a big house and yard over having a community live "outside the city" (which doesn't mean outside the contiguous urban area, just outside the area that's within a 20-minute commute of Downtown Los Angeles). People who can't afford to buy a house in LA live VERY far out, commute 1-2 hours each way every day, and don't get to enjoy the home they're proud to own, or spend time with the kids they wanted to give a "better place."
There are a lot of great neighborhoods within the City of Los Angeles; I live in one of them. Our local school, two blocks from our house, has a great booster club and lots of community involvement. It's a 15-minute public bus ride to my husband's work or to mine; same bus (which stops four blocks from our house) in opposite directions. We only own one car, and only NEED one car (heck, technically, we could get by without a car, but it's highly convenient to have one for shopping trips and such, and it's not hard for us to afford one).
Our yard is smaller than we could get in Chatsworth or Upland or Santa Clarita. But I get to see it in daylight on weekdays, and it's plenty big enough; we've got a monster play structure with three swings and a slide, roses, blackberries, and room for a garden on the side when I get off my a$$ and plant one. I'm home in time to cook my family dinner every night. Our seven-year-old car is just about to top 60k miles. And the interior of our house is big enough for every family member to have their own bedroom, with an office dedicated to our computers and a family room for watching TV or playing console games. We've also got a HUGE living room and good-sized dining room for entertaining.
I have trouble understanding what people think I'm "sacrificing" to live where I do; yes, we could have gotten a similar house for $200k less 40 miles away, but then I have to wonder how much money the extra two to three hours a day of commuting is worth for me and my husband. Let's see... two hours a day, 50 weeks a year, at our current hourly pay rates... $200k would pay for about 2,500 hours of commuting, so after five years we'd be in the hole. And our kids wouldn't even know us anymore.
Because of !@#$ing Howard Jarvis and the "Taxpayer's Revolt," and because we recalled the governor that was going to make us pay our full 2% auto registration tax again and replaced him with someone who would let us coast along at 0.65% even though that's not sustainable.
The money's here. People aren't willing to give a share of it to running the state, and that's a problem. It's a separate problem, though.
This is really not quite true. I'm very familiar with farm operations, and I can assure you that farmers do not work all the time
As familiar as you may be with modern farm operations, or even with Amish farm operations, I doubt anyone living has any personal familiarity with the labor involved in subsistence agriculture when it was first established 10,000 years ago, which was what I was talking about in terms of the transition from hunter-gatherer labor standards.
You know, the funny thing is, this plan is totally in line with libertarian principles. Right now, there's a lot of tax money going into providing services at great expense to areas that are almost dead. This plan would remove much of that maintenance burden, and would probably place it on the shoulders of those who choose to remain (they may have to pay a private company to come pick up their trash, rather than getting city collection built into property taxes or utilities, for example).
Relocating population from sparsely populated area into that of a smaller area does allow the government to more easily monitor and control the said population as there are now substantially smaller area to cover.
You're absolutely right about that; it's a lot cheaper to provide effective law enforcement to a denser population. Same goes for fire stations, schools, sewer maintenance, water and power...
It doesn't have to be evil just because the government is doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
How readily available is it? Is there a site that explains how to get moving efficiently through the airport? I don't know if it would help anyone else, but I would like one.
Try the giant graphical link in the middle of http://www.tsa.gov/ that says "Traveling soon? Learn how to get through the line faster."
I call B.S.
The entire government in California is run by chimpanzees
You're entirely mistaken. Those are bonobos.
That was true during the pipeline construction era, but it's far closer to 55-45 male/female now.
That's still pretty unfavorable. It means that if every woman hooks up with a guy, there's still 10% of the population that's single and male.
As much as I believe infant circumcision is wrong, adult circumcision is worse. When you remove thousands of nerve endings, a developing brain can rewire itself. An adult brain is accustomed to receiving those signals, and cannot rewire itself as readily. Infant circumcision is bad, adult circumcision is much worse.
Recent research in adult brain plasticity with stroke victims, those who have suffered visual or auditory impairments, and amputees suggest that adults are not as hard-wired as we once thought.
All that aside... people use this argument to defend the practice of infant circumcision. If you take it before they've learned it's part of them, they won't miss it, right? And yet, studies have shown that men who were circumcised at birth have a lower tolerance for pain than those who weren't. Babies *do* suffer consequences from the procedure. General anesthesia is too risky for this procedure, but local has unpredictable effects on their brand-new nervous systems, and the baby cannot communicate whether it has been effective.
If a man doesn't want his foreskin, I figure he'll learn to live without it. But no one should make that decision *for* him.
Sorry, but what's the big deal? My penis is less stinky, and doesn't look like a shrivily wad of chewing gum. It's like a permanent haircut, except it just makes my penis look cool. I don't understand why people go into such a fury about this issue. Why should anyone dictate to someone else whether or not they should be allowed to make this decision for their kid?
For the same reason that parents shouldn't be making other cosmetic surgical alterations to newborns. Anyone who wants to can get a circumcision when they're old enough to make the decision for themselves. Maybe you'd have made that decision yourself, too, if you'd been allowed to. That's all well and good. But what if I don't like the size of my kid's nose? Should I get the baby a nose job, too? What about trimming their earlobes? Should I get them some dimples while we're at it? It's all the same... the arguments people make for circumcision at birth could be made for any cosmetic surgical procedure, but would be equally absurd.
Fortunately, at least half the population has gotten the message, and there are some hospitals (like UCSD) where you can't get newborns circumcised at all.
You are also mistaken. UCSD delays circumcision but does it at the parent's request, as is the case with all other public hospitals I'm aware of. No hospital in America or Europe, public or private, would dare prevent a mohel or family practitioner from circumcising an infant.
Well, few mohels operate in hospitals. For that matter, they won't circumcise an infant who is less than eight days old, by which time 99% of infants have been released from the hospital.
UCSD does not offer circumcision as part of the birth package. You can still have the procedure done in a doctor's office, but you have to make special arrangements. Not all OBs are willing to do it, either, so you may have to ask a different doctor if you really want it. All of which serves to help parents consider the decision carefully, as they should with ANY procedure they elect for their children.
So because there is one condition that doesn't require circumcision, that means that all conditions don't require it?
Logic. You fail it.
There are conditions that require amputation of the foreskin, just as there are conditions that require amputation of other body parts.
Birth, however, is not such a condition.
Absolutely true. In fact, my older son had infantile phimosis. It was caught early by his pediatrician, before he'd suffered any ill effects from it, and we were referred to a pediatric urologist. When I noted at the beginning of the visit that I considered amputation of the foreskin as a drastic, last-resort measure, she assured me that she did as well, and wouldn't recommend it in my son's case due to his anatomy anyway. The cream worked perfectly, and he didn't need it again after he was about 10 months old.
Actually, it's probably as much to say "how can we market them better so that men make a different decision." It might be about redesign, but there are a lot of limiting factors; you can't make them looser without compromising their reliability... you have few choices of materials for stuff that's thin enough without being porous to viruses and sperm... and there's not a lot you can do about putting them on.
Or maybe there is. Maybe they can design a cardboard sleeve applicator, so you just slide it around your member and pull it off and there ya go, no fuss no muss. That might help a bit. It'd be harder to keep in your pocket maybe... but they could probably make it fold flat. Sort of like a Hot Pocket sleeve.
I'll just point out that in a steady relationship it's _the_ most reliable method of birth control and the cheapest and simplest to implement long-term.
But condoms are not seen as essential primarily because of their birth control properties... it's because they can reduce disease transmission.
So, you can get a vasectomy, but if the relationship goes south, you'll *still* have use for condoms. Sucks, don't it?
Fortunately, at least half the population has gotten the message, and there are some hospitals (like UCSD) where you can't get newborns circumcised at all.
I mean, if my sons want to be circumcised one day, that's up to them. I'll even pay for it. they can get general anesthesia and take pain relievers while they're recovering. I'm not worried about them having a 0.5% increased chance of contracting STDs until they're at LEAST 12, though, so I saw no reason to have them surgically altered at birth.
Did you even bother to click on the link?
BBB Accreditation
This business has not been accredited by BBB.
Businesses are under no obligation to seek BBB accreditation, and some businesses are not accredited because they have not sought BBB accreditation.
To be accredited by BBB, a business must apply for accreditation and BBB must determine that the business meets BBB accreditation standards, which include a commitment to make a good faith effort to resolve any consumer complaints. BBB Accredited Businesses must pay a fee for accreditation review/monitoring and for support of BBB services to the public.
Granted, the GP was a little off (there's no indication that they ever had BBB accreditation), but there definitely is such a thing as BBB Accreditation.
Like all other technologies, its not the features, its what you do with them. I've taken good pictures and some Interesting things with my $600 Canon digital rebel xti.
Amen to that. We paid a professional photographer $1600 to cover our wedding... but a couple of my favorite pictures were taken by my cousin with a free disposable camera. They're all about the timing and the framing (and catching the photographer ordering us around ;-).
"Hunter-gatherers "worked" an average of 10-20 hours a week to maintain themselves."
My gut feeling is this might be true though I'd like a reference if you have one.
Unfortunately, the cite is "Anthropology 8 lecture, UCLA, 1993 or so". I can't recall the professor's name off the top of my head, but she specialized in the changes to the status of women in the Wonka [sic] civilization when they were conquered by the Inca, so if you find someone who published an article about that and worked at UCLA in the first half of the '90s, that's probably her.
Also true is that hunter gathers in the pre-agriculture past lived much shorter and probably much more brutal lives than us.
They did; however, with the switch to subsistence agriculture, lifespans went *down* and were shorter for millennia, before finally catching up and surpassing the previous status quo with the advent of the germ theory of disease and such. When we switched from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence, heights dropped two inches on average, lifespans shortened by a couple decades, and really interestingly, war broke out. Whereas there was evidence of brief occasional skirmishes between nomadic tribes prior to the advent of subsistence agriculture, fossil records following the settlement into agricultural communities show that nearly EVERY male that attained a particular age (around 12 or 13 IIRC) had sustained a parry blow to the left (or occasionally right) forearm at some point.
See, what agriculture did, beyond just providing a predictable food source, is it made it possible to store food through the winter. It also required people to settle into a static area, and defend that area. Some groups realized that, if they could just capture the food stores, they didn't need to do all that backbreaking labor... so warfare became far more common, further shortening lives beyond the impact of nutrition (the lower heights and signs of diseases like tooth decay show that nutrition suffered from the advent of agriculture).
Fascinating stuff. I was a sociology major, but I paid very close attention in that Anthro class.
[snip comparison]...but I don't buy this "primitive happy savage" idea.
Well, I'll say this about agriculture: nobody does it unless they have to. The native populations of the Channel Islands and parts of the California coast knew the principles of agriculture for thousands of years before they implemented them. In that intervening time, because of mild weather and abundant natural resources, they would not have gained any midwinter survival benefit from planting crops.
The "advantages" of modern civilization are extremely recent. For most of our post-agricultural history, we've worked harder for shorter, less healthy lives. There are still some ways in which our modern diet and lifestyle results in harder work and poorer outcomes than the traditional hunter-gatherer alternative. It's a trade-off, of course; there are things we have that require specialization and settlement, and are well worth the disadvantages. But it's not a straight upgrade.
Boring pragmatic things like "I wouldn't want to live in a world where an infected small cut on my little toe could kill me" put me off that as being better to what I have...
Though truth be told, the infected cut on your little toe is a lot less likely to kill your traditional-living guy who gets an appropriate nutrient balance from food sources, rather than having to take supplements and eat enriched grains to get all the trace elements, B vitamins, etc. that he needs. He also didn't have MRSA, because that was brought into being with injudicious antibiotics. Finally, his feet are a lot tougher than yours in the first place, because he doesn't have shoes protecting him from the world all the time.
But yes, it's great that we have modern medicine when we need it. It's too bad that we've grown d
But, in an ironic twist, the leading Japanese car manufacturers (Honda and Toyota) do a lot of their manufacturing in the US, to get around import tariffs (instituted at the behest of the American car companies). My 2002 Accord was built in Ohio.
Citation needed. The most densely populated areas (think New York city) are the most costly places to live
The most desirable places to live (think California and New York City) are both the most heavily populated and the most expensive. That's straight economics.
and seem to be much more dangerous.
And that's straight conjecture. Greater numbers of bad things happen when greater numbers of people are around for them to happen to. There's plenty of smaller cities that have much higher rates of violence than Los Angeles and New York.
There is a paper by John B Calhoun entitled "Population Density and Social Pathology."
As luck would have it, I reviewed that paper in Social Ecology (mumble mumble) years ago. It was a seminar-style class, where we took turns presenting the articles, then discussed them. My perception (and my classmates saw it similarly) was that the study was very poorly conducted. There was *no* control for the topology of the experimental setup; the observations about the migration towards the end areas and such hold no weight. There weren't any controls to determine whether the sexual behavior was related to the crowding of space, or the unlimited supplies of food and water.
And, finally, these are rats; they don't have governments, community meetings, "neighbors," or a social structure that we would particularly recognize and identify with. It's hard to draw conclusions about human behavior from this study. It's particularly difficult when cross-cultural studies of human environments with similar statistics (people per square mile) but different economic setups or institutions yield wildly different birth rates, violence rates, and QOL indicators.
If you *do* accept the implications of the study, then you come to the conclusion that urban living is pathological, and we need to return to a rural lifestyle. When you get down to it, this is probably true; what is natural for humans is a nomadic life living in small bands that only rarely meet, and usually peaceably, trading a member or two for marriage, and exchanging some goods. I doubt you'll find many people who are up for that, though.
I'm a new yorker. What i know of LA is that those who can afford it, live outside the city in better areas. Those who cant, live in the less desirable places.
Well, I'm an Angeleno, and have been all my life. Is it possible I know more about what people in LA do than you?
People who value having a big house and yard over having a community live "outside the city" (which doesn't mean outside the contiguous urban area, just outside the area that's within a 20-minute commute of Downtown Los Angeles). People who can't afford to buy a house in LA live VERY far out, commute 1-2 hours each way every day, and don't get to enjoy the home they're proud to own, or spend time with the kids they wanted to give a "better place."
There are a lot of great neighborhoods within the City of Los Angeles; I live in one of them. Our local school, two blocks from our house, has a great booster club and lots of community involvement. It's a 15-minute public bus ride to my husband's work or to mine; same bus (which stops four blocks from our house) in opposite directions. We only own one car, and only NEED one car (heck, technically, we could get by without a car, but it's highly convenient to have one for shopping trips and such, and it's not hard for us to afford one).
Our yard is smaller than we could get in Chatsworth or Upland or Santa Clarita. But I get to see it in daylight on weekdays, and it's plenty big enough; we've got a monster play structure with three swings and a slide, roses, blackberries, and room for a garden on the side when I get off my a$$ and plant one. I'm home in time to cook my family dinner every night. Our seven-year-old car is just about to top 60k miles. And the interior of our house is big enough for every family member to have their own bedroom, with an office dedicated to our computers and a family room for watching TV or playing console games. We've also got a HUGE living room and good-sized dining room for entertaining.
I have trouble understanding what people think I'm "sacrificing" to live where I do; yes, we could have gotten a similar house for $200k less 40 miles away, but then I have to wonder how much money the extra two to three hours a day of commuting is worth for me and my husband. Let's see... two hours a day, 50 weeks a year, at our current hourly pay rates... $200k would pay for about 2,500 hours of commuting, so after five years we'd be in the hole. And our kids wouldn't even know us anymore.
Because of !@#$ing Howard Jarvis and the "Taxpayer's Revolt," and because we recalled the governor that was going to make us pay our full 2% auto registration tax again and replaced him with someone who would let us coast along at 0.65% even though that's not sustainable.
The money's here. People aren't willing to give a share of it to running the state, and that's a problem. It's a separate problem, though.
This is really not quite true. I'm very familiar with farm operations, and I can assure you that farmers do not work all the time
As familiar as you may be with modern farm operations, or even with Amish farm operations, I doubt anyone living has any personal familiarity with the labor involved in subsistence agriculture when it was first established 10,000 years ago, which was what I was talking about in terms of the transition from hunter-gatherer labor standards.
TFA is mostly about Flint, MI... and the big American car companies mostly relocated manufacturing to Mexico.
Yes, actually, they are. But if you were interested, I'm sure you would have read TFA yourself.
Because...
* Lots of research finds that "open space" is one of the higher-ranked criteria people use when determining where to live.
* Children with open space available to them tend to be healthier.
* Green areas (especially trees) mitigate air pollution and lower average summer temperatures.
Actually, FDIC and unemployment insurance have a lot to do with it, too.
You know, the funny thing is, this plan is totally in line with libertarian principles. Right now, there's a lot of tax money going into providing services at great expense to areas that are almost dead. This plan would remove much of that maintenance burden, and would probably place it on the shoulders of those who choose to remain (they may have to pay a private company to come pick up their trash, rather than getting city collection built into property taxes or utilities, for example).
Relocating population from sparsely populated area into that of a smaller area does allow the government to more easily monitor and control the said population as there are now substantially smaller area to cover.
You're absolutely right about that; it's a lot cheaper to provide effective law enforcement to a denser population. Same goes for fire stations, schools, sewer maintenance, water and power...
It doesn't have to be evil just because the government is doing it.