That's what makes the United States different form places like Kenya. In the U.S., unlike most of the rest of the world, class mobility allows you to become very rich without rich parents, rich friends, or pure luck.
Wealth isn't a disease to be caught. It isn't a genetic defect to be passed down. Wealth is produced. In a country where a totalitarian government, raiders, druglord thugs, and other various armed men aren't taking it away from you, all you have to do to become wealthy is to find a way to produce wealth.
They use the polarized system at my local theater, and I can't watch it because I get seriously motion-sick. Nausea detracts from the experience, to put it mildly, and now I will downright refuse to watch movies that are only released in 3D.
Ah, kind of like how Obamacare contained a mandate, not a tax, when it was passed while circumventing the controls for creating new taxes, but it's a tax, not a mandate, when the mandate's constitutionality is questioned in court?
Yeah, the redefinition road is par for the course with Obama.
I've got one. Let's have a real person stand there at the gate and watch the people going in and out.
Israeli airport security officers are trained to look people in the eye and judge based on their behavior. You don't hear of a lot of Arab profiling there (yes, a substantial number of Israelis are Arabs), and you don't hear of a lot of Israeli planes getting hijacked or bombed by passengers.
All the supertechnology in the world still can't compare to the human brain, where facial recognition and identification of behavioral patterns is concerned.
If your best friend watches you dally between two favorite ice cream flavors and finally grab the one you'd rather have that day, does your ability to choose vanish the second he says, "I knew you'd pick that one"?
So instead of having one reasonably small nuclear power plant powering an entire city, you'd rather overcrowd the skies with solar panels and kill the birds with fan blades. Lovely.
Did you know that the process of manufacturing solar panels is more environmentally destructive than simply burning oil or coal? And that when they wear out, they're about as easy to absorb into the environment as nuclear waste, but guaranteed to have a lot more to get rid of?
As well, solar panels are a lot less useful north of the line where the sunlight is not strong enough to activate Vitamin D production in the human body for seven months out of the year, and distribution from places like Arizona is prohibitively expensive and environmentally problematic. And wind only works when you have, you know, wind, preferably coming in a constant speed and direction.
Interestingly enough, you did not mention the one alternative energy source that I do find promising, and that is using geothermal to heat and cool buildings. With use of geothermal and nuclear-powered energy, we could truly make coal-burning a thing of the past.
But we're not going to do it with windmills and solar panels, at least not until technology advances far above where it is today.
And either strip-mine the world trying to feed our electrical needs, or just shut down those hospital ventilators and traffic lights and send us back to the Stone Age... which would require a drastic decrease in population because modern technology allows us to live a lot better on a lot less with a lot less pollution than ever before.
I don't like where your train of thought is taking us. Will you be the first to volunteer to die?
Dropping the word 'modern' in this discussion would lead me back to my original point: Avoiding building and upgrading nuclear reactors for electricity generation due to fear of breakdown in ancient models is like avoiding buying a 2010 vehicle because you believe it will run like a 1960 Ford Edsel.
In other words, you don't know how to explain how a modern reactor must unavoidably malfunction in the same way as Chernobyl, therefore it was a silly question from a rude person.
Not really sure why that makes it a good idea to not build any more reactors and not repair the ones we already have. In your attempts to try to make me wrong, you're only hurting your own point.
Still, the other responder makes a good point... "How many large, deadly accidents have occurred with pressurized water reactors?" I would not try to predict, say, the likelihood of mechanical failure on a Prius by looking at the failure rate of a washing machine, or a vacuum cleaner, even though all of them contain electrically-powered motors, because the implementation is so different that you can't possibly compare the results of a crash.
Yeah, gotta call BS on this one. You're claiming that, no matter what precautions are taken, no matter how many reactors, no matter what kind they are, no matter how they're built, that An Accident Will Happen Every 40 Years and that it Will Be Bad.
I simply don't understand your line of thought.
The important thing to understand with statistics is that they can be changed. If a certain percentage of people get heart disease, that doesn't mean I just ignore my cholesterol numbers because that percentage "is going to happen anyways". If a certain percentage of cars fail on the road, that doesn't mean that the manufacturer will get nowhere by redesigning the line to eliminate the flaws. And if a large deadly accident "happens every 40 years" (basically meaning that we've had one large deadly accident in almost 50 years of running nuclear reactors), that doesn't mean that the new safety features on modern reactors means nothing because it's going to find some mysterious way of defying physics and chemistry and blow it's top Anyways.
You are seriously acting as if nuclear power is magic or something.
Except, of course, that if there weren't such burdensome regulations preventing nuclear plants to be built or fixed up, it wouldn't be only a matter of time before an old, over-used machine breaks down.
Still, thanks to safety protocols, the chances of one turning into Chernobyl when it goes is pretty near nil. More likely, it'd just shut itself down.
Fine, but the next time you buy a brand new car, you need to factor in how much extra it'll cost you in part replacement and physical injury from airbag-less crashes, because you're assuming it's going to run like a 1960 Ford Edsel.
Which at this point is kind of like the parent saying that he won't stop you from going, he'll just dock your allowance and forbid you the use of the car.
Everything the Federal Government has, it took from us, and everything it gives back to us, it does with strings attached. Sadly, it takes so much that we can't get by without what it gives back...
The problem I have with 3D movies is nausea, not headaches. I'm not sure how to get that fixed. I suspect it's motion sickness. I'm probably going to be the old goat sticking to my ancient LCD flatscreen when everyone else has gone 3D decades ago...
Because a 16-year-old girl can bear and raise her own children to be a well-adjusted, contributing member of society, but there's no WAY she could EVER help her parents raise her 1-year-old brother to be a well-adjusted, contributing member of society, because at some point teenagers just cross a magic line and suddenly become PEOPLE.
I am the eldest of five, thank you very much. I changed the diapers of my youngest three siblings. I tutored my youngest brother in algebra.. I was a paid calculus tutor at the time. Now I'm a mother of my own, and guess what! I didn't need to go to a class to learn how to change a baby.
Live it, or at least watch it in action, before you assume it's nonsense.
During the 2008 election, Obama made an infomercial that talked about the horrible conditions of want among the less fortunate Americans. One of his examples showed a woman with an exquisite nail job complaining that all she could afford was soda for her family to drink at every meal, so she couldn't afford to buy milk.
For starters, I looked into what it costs to have and maintain fake nails, and for that cost alone, I could keep my family in milk easily.
But all that aside... If she served water at every meal, she would have enough money for enough fresh milk for each family member to have one tall glass a day. The family would have the added benefit of avoiding the nutritional detriments of soda, which tends to counter all the positive effects of the main nutrients in milk. If she bought powdered milk instead, it would be cheaper than the soda. I agree the powdered milk is an acquired taste, but if it's combined with reconstituted canned evaporated milk, it's really pretty decent and still costs as much or less than the equivalent amount of soda.
The answer to this is not forbidding people from having children. The answer is discouraging a culture in which "my baby's daddy" is more common than "my husband".
The Fragile Families study came up with some interesting data from which interesting conclusions can be made. For instance, roughly 70% of families with children could be lifted above the poverty level merely by having the mother marry the father, who is employed 80-something or higher percent of the time and is abusive less than one percent of the time.
Even so, 'starving children' is almost non-existent in the U.S., to the point where they've had to coin a new phrase to claim that there's a hunger problem. Now it's called "food insecurity", which means that you had good meals today and will have good meals tomorrow, but you're not too sure where it'll come from beyond that.
The other problem is poor nutrition, but that has nothing to do with the inability to afford good food. Families on food stamps tend to overspend on processed foods. I personally feed my family abundantly and healthily on only slightly over half the food stamp allotment in my state, and I do it by buying only food-stamp-allowed foods. (No, I am not on food stamps. I pay for other people to be on food stamps, so I don't have enough money left to eat like I was on them.)
The trick, and I have been considering making a pamphlet or writing a book on this, is to watch your dollars per meal and per pound. Brown rice, white rice, beans, and lentils are far higher in meal per pound and far lower in dollar per pound than a bag of frozen Tater Tots. They're also nutritionally rich and not expensive to cook. (I can make most of my recipes with a pot or pan, a heat source, and a source of water, which even homeless families can acquire.)
What matters to me is not how many children someone has, but how much we're paying for them.
I am less opposed to a father and mother supporting and raising six children than I am to an unwed mother on welfare dumping one child on the system for you and I to support.
My husband, with an IQ of at least 135 (it gets higher each time he takes the test), was sent to a psychiatric hospital in the '80's and put on Ritalin in the '90's. When he moved in with his father and stepmother, the first thing they did was to get rid of the Ritalin and establish structure in his day and give him plenty of exercise. Vast improvement.
Fast-forward a few years. We had our son evaluated for ADHD by an actual doctor who is actually trained in it, and his diagnosis was that the boy was borderline and could become ADHD soon. He said that my son might need medication in another year or two. Well, it's been over a year, and he's actually improved noticeably.
What did we do?
I homeschool him. Every one or two subjects, I set a timer for ten minutes and tell him to run around outside. Sometimes I lay down the law and make him do 'grunt work' that he doesn't feel like doing. Other times, I'll accelerate his learning to keep him interested. I keep him on enough of a schedule that he knows each day what is expected of him. I remove as much artificial flavorings and sweeteners from his diet as feasible, to the point where I make almost everything he eats, down to the dessert. Butter, milk, cane sugar, fresh or frozen fruit/veggies, whole-grain bread, brown rice instead of white... You get the idea, I'm sure.
To those above who get defensive about it, I acknowledge freely that some kids have real ADHD and they really need the medication. However, this article is about kids who are misdiagnosed, and I believe that the education system and modern culture is mostly to blame for that.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what makes the United States different form places like Kenya. In the U.S., unlike most of the rest of the world, class mobility allows you to become very rich without rich parents, rich friends, or pure luck.
Wealth isn't a disease to be caught. It isn't a genetic defect to be passed down. Wealth is produced. In a country where a totalitarian government, raiders, druglord thugs, and other various armed men aren't taking it away from you, all you have to do to become wealthy is to find a way to produce wealth.
They use the polarized system at my local theater, and I can't watch it because I get seriously motion-sick. Nausea detracts from the experience, to put it mildly, and now I will downright refuse to watch movies that are only released in 3D.
Ah, kind of like how Obamacare contained a mandate, not a tax, when it was passed while circumventing the controls for creating new taxes, but it's a tax, not a mandate, when the mandate's constitutionality is questioned in court?
Yeah, the redefinition road is par for the course with Obama.
I've got one. Let's have a real person stand there at the gate and watch the people going in and out.
Israeli airport security officers are trained to look people in the eye and judge based on their behavior. You don't hear of a lot of Arab profiling there (yes, a substantial number of Israelis are Arabs), and you don't hear of a lot of Israeli planes getting hijacked or bombed by passengers.
All the supertechnology in the world still can't compare to the human brain, where facial recognition and identification of behavioral patterns is concerned.
If your best friend watches you dally between two favorite ice cream flavors and finally grab the one you'd rather have that day, does your ability to choose vanish the second he says, "I knew you'd pick that one"?
So instead of having one reasonably small nuclear power plant powering an entire city, you'd rather overcrowd the skies with solar panels and kill the birds with fan blades. Lovely.
Did you know that the process of manufacturing solar panels is more environmentally destructive than simply burning oil or coal? And that when they wear out, they're about as easy to absorb into the environment as nuclear waste, but guaranteed to have a lot more to get rid of?
As well, solar panels are a lot less useful north of the line where the sunlight is not strong enough to activate Vitamin D production in the human body for seven months out of the year, and distribution from places like Arizona is prohibitively expensive and environmentally problematic. And wind only works when you have, you know, wind, preferably coming in a constant speed and direction.
Interestingly enough, you did not mention the one alternative energy source that I do find promising, and that is using geothermal to heat and cool buildings. With use of geothermal and nuclear-powered energy, we could truly make coal-burning a thing of the past.
But we're not going to do it with windmills and solar panels, at least not until technology advances far above where it is today.
Please give me the names and sufficient evidence to prove the superiority of these alternatives.
And either strip-mine the world trying to feed our electrical needs, or just shut down those hospital ventilators and traffic lights and send us back to the Stone Age... which would require a drastic decrease in population because modern technology allows us to live a lot better on a lot less with a lot less pollution than ever before.
I don't like where your train of thought is taking us. Will you be the first to volunteer to die?
Dropping the word 'modern' in this discussion would lead me back to my original point: Avoiding building and upgrading nuclear reactors for electricity generation due to fear of breakdown in ancient models is like avoiding buying a 2010 vehicle because you believe it will run like a 1960 Ford Edsel.
It just doesn't make much sense.
In other words, you don't know how to explain how a modern reactor must unavoidably malfunction in the same way as Chernobyl, therefore it was a silly question from a rude person.
Not really sure why that makes it a good idea to not build any more reactors and not repair the ones we already have. In your attempts to try to make me wrong, you're only hurting your own point.
Still, the other responder makes a good point... "How many large, deadly accidents have occurred with pressurized water reactors?" I would not try to predict, say, the likelihood of mechanical failure on a Prius by looking at the failure rate of a washing machine, or a vacuum cleaner, even though all of them contain electrically-powered motors, because the implementation is so different that you can't possibly compare the results of a crash.
Yeah, gotta call BS on this one. You're claiming that, no matter what precautions are taken, no matter how many reactors, no matter what kind they are, no matter how they're built, that An Accident Will Happen Every 40 Years and that it Will Be Bad.
I simply don't understand your line of thought.
The important thing to understand with statistics is that they can be changed. If a certain percentage of people get heart disease, that doesn't mean I just ignore my cholesterol numbers because that percentage "is going to happen anyways". If a certain percentage of cars fail on the road, that doesn't mean that the manufacturer will get nowhere by redesigning the line to eliminate the flaws. And if a large deadly accident "happens every 40 years" (basically meaning that we've had one large deadly accident in almost 50 years of running nuclear reactors), that doesn't mean that the new safety features on modern reactors means nothing because it's going to find some mysterious way of defying physics and chemistry and blow it's top Anyways.
You are seriously acting as if nuclear power is magic or something.
Except, of course, that if there weren't such burdensome regulations preventing nuclear plants to be built or fixed up, it wouldn't be only a matter of time before an old, over-used machine breaks down.
Still, thanks to safety protocols, the chances of one turning into Chernobyl when it goes is pretty near nil. More likely, it'd just shut itself down.
Fine, but the next time you buy a brand new car, you need to factor in how much extra it'll cost you in part replacement and physical injury from airbag-less crashes, because you're assuming it's going to run like a 1960 Ford Edsel.
Is it really any worse than the way the federal government already operates?
Which at this point is kind of like the parent saying that he won't stop you from going, he'll just dock your allowance and forbid you the use of the car.
Everything the Federal Government has, it took from us, and everything it gives back to us, it does with strings attached. Sadly, it takes so much that we can't get by without what it gives back...
Yeah, because Israel has so far to go before it becomes as civilized, democratic, and upright as Turkey...
The problem I have with 3D movies is nausea, not headaches. I'm not sure how to get that fixed. I suspect it's motion sickness. I'm probably going to be the old goat sticking to my ancient LCD flatscreen when everyone else has gone 3D decades ago...
2) According to the study, the vast majority of fathers were neither criminals, in and out of jail, nor unemployed.
1) You've pretty much got the actual reason down right there.
Because a 16-year-old girl can bear and raise her own children to be a well-adjusted, contributing member of society, but there's no WAY she could EVER help her parents raise her 1-year-old brother to be a well-adjusted, contributing member of society, because at some point teenagers just cross a magic line and suddenly become PEOPLE.
I am the eldest of five, thank you very much. I changed the diapers of my youngest three siblings. I tutored my youngest brother in algebra.. I was a paid calculus tutor at the time. Now I'm a mother of my own, and guess what! I didn't need to go to a class to learn how to change a baby.
Live it, or at least watch it in action, before you assume it's nonsense.
That's because the richer people are living off of government aid, including the taxes being paid by the hardest workers.
Trust me, the 'working poor' don't have as much in resources and disposable income as the people who aren't working at all. I've lived it.
Let me add an addendum and example here:
During the 2008 election, Obama made an infomercial that talked about the horrible conditions of want among the less fortunate Americans. One of his examples showed a woman with an exquisite nail job complaining that all she could afford was soda for her family to drink at every meal, so she couldn't afford to buy milk.
For starters, I looked into what it costs to have and maintain fake nails, and for that cost alone, I could keep my family in milk easily.
But all that aside... If she served water at every meal, she would have enough money for enough fresh milk for each family member to have one tall glass a day. The family would have the added benefit of avoiding the nutritional detriments of soda, which tends to counter all the positive effects of the main nutrients in milk. If she bought powdered milk instead, it would be cheaper than the soda. I agree the powdered milk is an acquired taste, but if it's combined with reconstituted canned evaporated milk, it's really pretty decent and still costs as much or less than the equivalent amount of soda.
The answer to this is not forbidding people from having children. The answer is discouraging a culture in which "my baby's daddy" is more common than "my husband".
The Fragile Families study came up with some interesting data from which interesting conclusions can be made. For instance, roughly 70% of families with children could be lifted above the poverty level merely by having the mother marry the father, who is employed 80-something or higher percent of the time and is abusive less than one percent of the time.
Even so, 'starving children' is almost non-existent in the U.S., to the point where they've had to coin a new phrase to claim that there's a hunger problem. Now it's called "food insecurity", which means that you had good meals today and will have good meals tomorrow, but you're not too sure where it'll come from beyond that.
The other problem is poor nutrition, but that has nothing to do with the inability to afford good food. Families on food stamps tend to overspend on processed foods. I personally feed my family abundantly and healthily on only slightly over half the food stamp allotment in my state, and I do it by buying only food-stamp-allowed foods. (No, I am not on food stamps. I pay for other people to be on food stamps, so I don't have enough money left to eat like I was on them.)
The trick, and I have been considering making a pamphlet or writing a book on this, is to watch your dollars per meal and per pound. Brown rice, white rice, beans, and lentils are far higher in meal per pound and far lower in dollar per pound than a bag of frozen Tater Tots. They're also nutritionally rich and not expensive to cook. (I can make most of my recipes with a pot or pan, a heat source, and a source of water, which even homeless families can acquire.)
The answer to poverty is not birth restriction.
What matters to me is not how many children someone has, but how much we're paying for them.
I am less opposed to a father and mother supporting and raising six children than I am to an unwed mother on welfare dumping one child on the system for you and I to support.
I am impressed. You are entirely correct.
My husband, with an IQ of at least 135 (it gets higher each time he takes the test), was sent to a psychiatric hospital in the '80's and put on Ritalin in the '90's. When he moved in with his father and stepmother, the first thing they did was to get rid of the Ritalin and establish structure in his day and give him plenty of exercise. Vast improvement.
Fast-forward a few years. We had our son evaluated for ADHD by an actual doctor who is actually trained in it, and his diagnosis was that the boy was borderline and could become ADHD soon. He said that my son might need medication in another year or two. Well, it's been over a year, and he's actually improved noticeably.
What did we do?
I homeschool him. Every one or two subjects, I set a timer for ten minutes and tell him to run around outside. Sometimes I lay down the law and make him do 'grunt work' that he doesn't feel like doing. Other times, I'll accelerate his learning to keep him interested. I keep him on enough of a schedule that he knows each day what is expected of him. I remove as much artificial flavorings and sweeteners from his diet as feasible, to the point where I make almost everything he eats, down to the dessert. Butter, milk, cane sugar, fresh or frozen fruit/veggies, whole-grain bread, brown rice instead of white... You get the idea, I'm sure.
To those above who get defensive about it, I acknowledge freely that some kids have real ADHD and they really need the medication. However, this article is about kids who are misdiagnosed, and I believe that the education system and modern culture is mostly to blame for that.