Then lets just get rid of pronouns entirely because they shoehorn all of us into categories. We can always use everyone' s name! We can then have a very precise, long winded, and repetitive language. Seriously... we have pronouns for a reason.
Unless we are going to make up new pronouns for every single gender deviation...
English (like most languages) has three third person singular pronouns: 'he', 'she', and 'it'. Other languages even have gender identifying second person pronouns and gender identifying plural pronouns. English seems to have gotten jipped on the supply of pronouns. If you do not understand our array of available pronouns and their correct usage, then you obviously do not use language much.
We often apply 'he' and 'she' to non human objects, however we balk at apply 'it' to people. In fact, in most other languages each object has actually been assigned a de facto gender. English is perhaps the most gender neutral language currently in use.
We get all uppity about people referring to themselves as 'we' because it makes them sound elitist due to the historic habit of royalty using 'we', so why should we let people incorrectly use 'they'? 'They' implies that there is more than one of you. The misuse of 'they' as a gender neutral person is a terrible abuse of the language.
The fact that our literature and fiction place so much emphasis on the usage of 'it' to refer to a dehumanized creature is telling about how much importance our culture places on gender. If it is now culturally acceptable to not have a gender, then it should be acceptable to call you 'it' since the removal of the gender is no longer offensive as gender is no longer a required trait of being human.
If you have no gender and don't want to be called a 'he' or 'she', well we have to call you something so 'it' is the correct choice (unless there is more than one of you). You can't both be offended at me applying a gender to you and then offended when I don't.
1. People who go to college and graduate, only to become stay at home dads/moms would be a burden on the system.. Easy to fix for marriages, but harder for the unmarried.
People do not always plan for that eventuality. My husband got a Masters in Nuclear Engineering... and now stays home with the kids. When he was getting his undergraduate degree he had plans to go out and work and actually spent 3 years working in industry. Then he married me, got a masters, knocked me up, and decided to stay home to play dinosaurs and sing the ABCs with the rugrats.
He might one day return to industry, or he might not. If you had told him when he started his undergraduate program he would end up a stay at home dad, he would have laughed at you. Life happens. It doesn't always go as you planned.
I don't necessarily agree with this idea of funding college through taxes, but it isn't really that much different than the current state run school system. State schools are pretty much free to residents because we all pay taxes to run them. What we need to do is to stop giving people loans to go to expensive private schools. Education is important, but you don't have the right to go to any school you choose.
The last storm the warnings were issued at 3AM, well before most people got up and went to work... The government and school systems had plenty of time to close the school and simply chose not to. Getting out of bed before the ass crack of dawn was apparently too much effort for the officials to prevent "snowpocalypse" and now we get to watch them do their darnedest to not look like idiots a second time for the same reasons.
We've been watching this current storm for days with no one able to say for sure it would hit us or pass just east of us. We still managed to close the schools this morning when mother nature finally made up her mind and decided to include us. Our school officials managed to get the fuck out of bed at 3AM to look at the radar and the forecasts and close the schools. They have managed to close the schools before when it is bright and sunny in the morning but by noon the storm hits and ices everything. They do that by watching the radar and listening to the warnings.
If the snow starts at 12AM or 12PM it doesn't matter. You still get to see it coming hours in advance. On the gulf coast they don't wait for the hurricane to make landfall to start making preparations. You also don't wait for the snow and ice to hit the streets before doing something about it. The idea that if it's sunny at 7AM means the day will be fine when the radar clearly tells you otherwise is insane.
By your logic if we didn't introduce kids to things like nuclear technology in high school, no one would go into that field in college. There are number of weird and niche collegiate programs that high schools do not generally touch and they still manage to somehow suck students into them.
Do high schools actually teach genetics beyond recessive/dominate genes? My husband's high school taught agriculture, not hard sciences. He still managed to end up a nuclear engineer.
Besides, if you bothered to RTFA, they are not simply ignoring it completely and pretending it doesn't exist. It's probably a poor decision, but its no where near the level of 'OMG! an entire state of children are going to grow up in darkness and ignorance!' that slashdot likes to make it out to be.
Please explain to me how an understanding or lack thereof of evolution impacts my ability to program computers? To be a successful photographer? To be a lawyer? To be a nuclear engineer? Build a bridge? A writer? In fact, any profession other than 'scientist studying evolution'.
I have never in 10 years of being a very successfully software engineer ever needed to know how old the planet it or where people came from to do my job. It's just never come up. I don't need to know about evolution to build a database or a webpage or a high performance processing system. I have needed to go look up Keplar's equations, figure out how to convert from sidereal time to SI time, model the atmosphere, and parse proc. Age of the earth? Never comes up. Did human's evolve from monkeys? Never comes up. Is there a god? Never comes up.
Seriously. Get over yourselves. The origins of life are not critical knowledge to the vast majority of the population.
Are they learning basic math, physics, reading skills? Those are actually important and widely applicable skills.
Ah! But CRITICAL THINKING! Really? Evolution is the only theory that allows you to impart the skill of critical thinking onto children? Reading literature and building robots don't do this?
Yes... but does anyone care if Counselor Troi is in Commander Worf's quarters? She could be doing some weird klingon therapy...
What if Ensign Ricky is getting ready to off himself and thought it might be good to talk to Troi before deciding to hold engineering hostage because he doesn't want to go on the away mission?
Lately we like to talk about disconnecting ourselves. But one of the reasons we connected ourselves is because we have responsibilities and sometimes these responsibilities are time critical. If your kid is stuck on a street corner in the freezing rain because he can't call you cause you turned your phone off to have a relaxing spa day, is that a good scenario?
However, a co-worker of mine and I were at a conference giving a paper once. My co-worker's wife texted him about 30 times with messages a long the lines of "call me right now it's an emergency" right before our presentation. So he stepped out and called her. The emergency was his wife had found a stray dog... And yes, we were out of town so WTF did she think he was going to be able to do about it?
The flip side to being connected is that responsibility now lies on the shoulders of those who are trying to contact or locate us. If the computer tells you that Troi is in Worf's quarters, don't leap to conclusions and go telling the entire ship that Troi is banging Worf. Don't text your husband 30 times demanding he call you about stupid things he can't do anything about.
Pro-lifer's see it as a matter of morality; however, a woman's decision to abort a child is in reality motivated by socio-economic reasons. Either she believes that bringing the child into the world will be a blessing and beneficial to her life, or she sees it as a burden or stigma. You abort a child either because you can't/don't want to care for it or being pregnant and having the baby is dangerous, either medically, socially, or economically. Abortion rates go up when the economy goes down and then go back down when the economy recovers. In China babies are/were aborted/killed because they were female, the legal system limited you to one child, and it was culturally desirable to have a boy. Single women used to abort because they got knocked up and having a baby out of wedlock made you a bad person.
The classic example thrown around by the pro-choice lobby is rape. A woman aborts the baby because she doesn't want to be reminded of the rape or doesn't want to raise a rapist's child, etc. There is stigma and pain associated with the rape and so the baby is not seen as a blessing. Maybe her family cannot accept the child. These are cultural problems. We are placing value on these other things and not on the new life. Eventually we might start seeing life as life, but right now we place more value on the stigma and pain of how the life was created.
By ignoring the underlying motivations for abortion and simply crying "life is sacred", pro-life advocates do not solve the problem. People are selfish people. A group at my church provides support and assistance to women in crises pregnancies. They give the women car seats and cribs and other stuff for the baby. Those kinds of actions actually do prevent abortions. Bombing clinics or murdering doctors does not. I apologize if I made it sound as if all pro-lifer's were hypocrites. Many of them are good people actually working to understand and fix the underlying problems, but the vocal ones just stand in front of clinics and call people murderers. They have no idea what motivates the people getting an abortion. A friend of mine had an abortion because her baby had no brain. She wanted the baby and was so excited to be pregnant and ended up crying for months. And then someone had the gall to call her a bad person. So fuck them and all the people too busy to get their heads out of their asses and actually try to understand what motivates another person.
And I struggle with the brainwashing I received from American culture that told me that a woman's self worth is directly tied to her physical appearance. We all have issues. We are all fucked up by something our parents did or didn't do. Grow some balls, get over it, and don't perpetuate the insanity to your children. Find something else to mess them up with. THAT is how we grow as a society.
If children could not shake off the insanity taught them by their parents we would still be living in caves and terrified of the monsters roaming the woods in the darkness. But every generation some of us look outside and say "maybe my parents are wrong." Actually, that is the default attitude of most teenagers.
Adults join the church. Adults leave the church. Adults leave and then return. We are each individuals and one day we turn 18 and we can choose to be an adult or remain forever a child. Adults make their own decisions; children let society do it. It's tough but life is tough.
Because mandatory abortion is absurd. We have already (mostly) decided that eugenics is a Bad Idea and as such is a poor straw man. Aborting ALL pregnancies would end the human race. Try again.
Since you brought it up, the real issue behind abortion is not a right to life or a right to choose, but a socio-economic one. People that really cared about babies would care about supporting pregnant women and new mothers. If our society provided the support network for women (and men) to make it easy to care for children, abortion rates would fall. You can compare abortion rates in the U.S. to other countries with even looser abortion regulations and see the correlation plain as day. Laws don't stop abortions, society not being made up of dick heads does. The fact that people will stand there and say it's wrong while doing nothing to support the potential mother and baby is insane and hypocritical. It is indicative of the same spiteful attitude that the anti-Christians express when they ridicule religions.
And the pro-choice people are just as bad. They degrade and ridicule women who chose to not have an abortion in tough times just as the feminists degrade women who chose to put themselves in submissive relationships or not work.
That said, religion is a part of this country and you are going to have to learn to deal with it. People want/need to be able to express their culture. It does not hurt your child to hear another child say a prayer. It does not hurt you if someone else says 'god bless you'. If they aren't blowing up your kids or throwing you in jail for not believing in their god, why do you give a fuck?
EVERYONE should leave everyone else alone. Don't set the infidels on fire. Don't degrade people just because they believe in an invisible man.
And it is going to take a long time for those new recommendations to make their way into the general public. There are piles of parenting help books that old parents gleefully shovel onto new parents. There are articles and magazines and Grandma and the crotchety old lady down the street. Everyone has an opinion about how you should be raising your kids and how you are doing a shitty job at it and your kids are going to die or need therapy or be a bum because you didn't give them the special new omega whatever supplement that promotes brain growth.
And the advice is constantly changing. My husband is the youngest of three. His eldest brother slept on his stomach as a baby. Their mom was told to put the middle one on her side using this bizarre wedge pillow everyone had to buy or your baby would die, and by the time he was born, we had decided that babies had to sleep on their back. They just recently came out telling us to keep kids in rear facing car seats until they are two and they are pretty much in booster seats until they turn 21 now.
On top of that, you only ever really get one shot at being a parent. You might get a couple tries with different kids, but each kid is only ever a baby once.
So give the parents a break. They've never done this before, are sleep deprived, are the scourge of all the non-parents in the grocery store, and all they really want to do is go home, drink a beer, watch a TV show that doesn't involve a super hero named 'Word Girl' from the planet Lexicon, fall asleep, and not get woken up by a 30 lb bouncing bundle demanding pancakes at 5AM on a Saturday.
And that is an attitude that we seem to lack around here. We, as a society, need to learn to be able to not give a damn about other people's wacky beliefs (unless you believe I need to be set on fire or something and then we have a problem). There are people in the world who believe that cows are sacred. We slaughter and eat these sacred cows daily. They are going to teach their children that cows are sacred and we are going to teach our children that cows are tasty.
It does not hurt you for someone to believe that the world was created by a flying spaghetti monster or aliens or green mold. It does not hurt anyone that people want to believe that invisible space monkeys have a plan for them that involves them giving food to the poor. It does not hurt anyone if someone wants to believe that the world magically sprung into being cause their invisible magic man cried or something. And it doesn't hurt anyone when they teach their children these things. No one complains that Amish kids grow up without electricity. If the kids decide their parents are crack pots, they will figure that out on their own when they realize that cows and bacon are tasty and the internet is grand thing.
I wish we would stop trying to force our beliefs on each other. Let people teach their kids about their invisible men or aliens or evolution as they see fit.
Because the pediatricians tell us that if we give peanuts to a child under 2 years old, he will die (ok... they really just strongly advise against it). Should we ignore the advice of the pediatricians and medical practitioners that supposedly spent a long time in school, have followed studies related to childhood development and allergies, and whom we trust to help us fix our kid when he is running a 105 degree fever, covered in a rash, and vomiting?
We are also advised to avoid honey during the first year due to pathogens that babies do not have the proper immune response to handle and when introducing new food to babies we are advised to try them one at a time so we know that it was the tomatoes that caused the baby to break out in hives and not the yogurt.
There is a whole list of foods that babies should avoid at different times for a variety of reasons. You don't pop out a baby and start giving them peanut butter sandwiches the next day. You have to give their immune system and digestive functions time to develop.
I live in PA and we don't plow until the snow stop falling... And we stopped salting the roads because it's been too cold for the salt to matter. So yes, the roads get pretty shitty and we have these nice mountains that become impassable by normal cars when covered with ice.
They also delay/close our schools at the drop of a hat (too much, I think) and if the roads were shitty, I would sit at work for a bit and see if clears. Or have my husband come get me with his truck. I wouldn't venture out into it to just to get stuck.
The difference is Atlanta said "oh look there's a storm coming. Should we close the schools? Nope. Oh SHIT! the storm really is coming! EVERYONE RUN!"
Had Atlanta not collectively panicked, it would have been fine. The NWS gave them 9 hours of warning. I get calls at 5 AM telling me school is closed/delayed all the time. They have called to announce a delay at 10PM the night before because it was going to be cold. Someone wakes the fuck up and makes that call BEFORE you end up with a city full of kids stuck.
But the exam administrators need to charge money for people to take it and if students aren't taking it then they can't get that spiffy new boat...
When I graduated college I could answer yes to all those questions and I still didn't take the exam. I didn't take the exam cause it was stupid and I had better things to do like take other AP tests. And if it matters, I'm a girl.
I wanted to test out of courses like English and German so I didn't have to take all those annoying gen ed requirements. Freshman comp sci was an easy A. Not to mention that it is actually not always a good thing to test out of too many of your college classes.
Mommy... I have to pee... Mommy... I need a glass of water. Mommy... why does the man sitting next to us have this funny mask over his eyes? Is he playing a game? Can I play too? HEY! Do you have an extra mask? What are we playing?
But but but... the government has to tell us how to live our lives. Without the government we won't know how to treat other people or that we are supposed to breath air to survive. Could you imagine the chaos if the government told us they did not require us to breathe air? People would try to breath sand in the unregulated aftermath.
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Then lets just get rid of pronouns entirely because they shoehorn all of us into categories. We can always use everyone' s name! We can then have a very precise, long winded, and repetitive language. Seriously... we have pronouns for a reason.
Unless we are going to make up new pronouns for every single gender deviation...
I called my unborn babies it until they got assigned a gender and so did the doctors. No one was offended. We didn't know so used 'it'.
English (like most languages) has three third person singular pronouns: 'he', 'she', and 'it'. Other languages even have gender identifying second person pronouns and gender identifying plural pronouns. English seems to have gotten jipped on the supply of pronouns. If you do not understand our array of available pronouns and their correct usage, then you obviously do not use language much.
We often apply 'he' and 'she' to non human objects, however we balk at apply 'it' to people. In fact, in most other languages each object has actually been assigned a de facto gender. English is perhaps the most gender neutral language currently in use.
We get all uppity about people referring to themselves as 'we' because it makes them sound elitist due to the historic habit of royalty using 'we', so why should we let people incorrectly use 'they'? 'They' implies that there is more than one of you. The misuse of 'they' as a gender neutral person is a terrible abuse of the language.
The fact that our literature and fiction place so much emphasis on the usage of 'it' to refer to a dehumanized creature is telling about how much importance our culture places on gender. If it is now culturally acceptable to not have a gender, then it should be acceptable to call you 'it' since the removal of the gender is no longer offensive as gender is no longer a required trait of being human.
If you have no gender and don't want to be called a 'he' or 'she', well we have to call you something so 'it' is the correct choice (unless there is more than one of you). You can't both be offended at me applying a gender to you and then offended when I don't.
But for some reason people get offended when we call them "it".
1. People who go to college and graduate, only to become stay at home dads/moms would be a burden on the system.. Easy to fix for marriages, but harder for the unmarried.
People do not always plan for that eventuality. My husband got a Masters in Nuclear Engineering... and now stays home with the kids. When he was getting his undergraduate degree he had plans to go out and work and actually spent 3 years working in industry. Then he married me, got a masters, knocked me up, and decided to stay home to play dinosaurs and sing the ABCs with the rugrats.
He might one day return to industry, or he might not. If you had told him when he started his undergraduate program he would end up a stay at home dad, he would have laughed at you. Life happens. It doesn't always go as you planned.
I don't necessarily agree with this idea of funding college through taxes, but it isn't really that much different than the current state run school system. State schools are pretty much free to residents because we all pay taxes to run them. What we need to do is to stop giving people loans to go to expensive private schools. Education is important, but you don't have the right to go to any school you choose.
Naw... just require a vote to raise tuition. We'll vote it down like a raise for teachers.
The last storm the warnings were issued at 3AM, well before most people got up and went to work... The government and school systems had plenty of time to close the school and simply chose not to. Getting out of bed before the ass crack of dawn was apparently too much effort for the officials to prevent "snowpocalypse" and now we get to watch them do their darnedest to not look like idiots a second time for the same reasons.
We've been watching this current storm for days with no one able to say for sure it would hit us or pass just east of us. We still managed to close the schools this morning when mother nature finally made up her mind and decided to include us. Our school officials managed to get the fuck out of bed at 3AM to look at the radar and the forecasts and close the schools. They have managed to close the schools before when it is bright and sunny in the morning but by noon the storm hits and ices everything. They do that by watching the radar and listening to the warnings.
If the snow starts at 12AM or 12PM it doesn't matter. You still get to see it coming hours in advance. On the gulf coast they don't wait for the hurricane to make landfall to start making preparations. You also don't wait for the snow and ice to hit the streets before doing something about it. The idea that if it's sunny at 7AM means the day will be fine when the radar clearly tells you otherwise is insane.
I had to explicitly tell the groomsmen at my wedding that the flowers were poisonous. At a previous wedding one of them had eaten his corsage for $1.
By your logic if we didn't introduce kids to things like nuclear technology in high school, no one would go into that field in college. There are number of weird and niche collegiate programs that high schools do not generally touch and they still manage to somehow suck students into them.
Do high schools actually teach genetics beyond recessive/dominate genes? My husband's high school taught agriculture, not hard sciences. He still managed to end up a nuclear engineer.
Besides, if you bothered to RTFA, they are not simply ignoring it completely and pretending it doesn't exist. It's probably a poor decision, but its no where near the level of 'OMG! an entire state of children are going to grow up in darkness and ignorance!' that slashdot likes to make it out to be.
Please explain to me how an understanding or lack thereof of evolution impacts my ability to program computers? To be a successful photographer? To be a lawyer? To be a nuclear engineer? Build a bridge? A writer? In fact, any profession other than 'scientist studying evolution'.
I have never in 10 years of being a very successfully software engineer ever needed to know how old the planet it or where people came from to do my job. It's just never come up. I don't need to know about evolution to build a database or a webpage or a high performance processing system. I have needed to go look up Keplar's equations, figure out how to convert from sidereal time to SI time, model the atmosphere, and parse proc. Age of the earth? Never comes up. Did human's evolve from monkeys? Never comes up. Is there a god? Never comes up.
Seriously. Get over yourselves. The origins of life are not critical knowledge to the vast majority of the population.
Are they learning basic math, physics, reading skills? Those are actually important and widely applicable skills.
Ah! But CRITICAL THINKING! Really? Evolution is the only theory that allows you to impart the skill of critical thinking onto children? Reading literature and building robots don't do this?
I think you have your dates wrong... Today is the 6th.
Yes... but does anyone care if Counselor Troi is in Commander Worf's quarters? She could be doing some weird klingon therapy...
What if Ensign Ricky is getting ready to off himself and thought it might be good to talk to Troi before deciding to hold engineering hostage because he doesn't want to go on the away mission?
Lately we like to talk about disconnecting ourselves. But one of the reasons we connected ourselves is because we have responsibilities and sometimes these responsibilities are time critical. If your kid is stuck on a street corner in the freezing rain because he can't call you cause you turned your phone off to have a relaxing spa day, is that a good scenario?
However, a co-worker of mine and I were at a conference giving a paper once. My co-worker's wife texted him about 30 times with messages a long the lines of "call me right now it's an emergency" right before our presentation. So he stepped out and called her. The emergency was his wife had found a stray dog... And yes, we were out of town so WTF did she think he was going to be able to do about it?
The flip side to being connected is that responsibility now lies on the shoulders of those who are trying to contact or locate us. If the computer tells you that Troi is in Worf's quarters, don't leap to conclusions and go telling the entire ship that Troi is banging Worf. Don't text your husband 30 times demanding he call you about stupid things he can't do anything about.
Yes but they only use the computer for good and never evil. There are advantages to being able to find people. The problem is one of trust.
Pro-lifer's see it as a matter of morality; however, a woman's decision to abort a child is in reality motivated by socio-economic reasons. Either she believes that bringing the child into the world will be a blessing and beneficial to her life, or she sees it as a burden or stigma. You abort a child either because you can't/don't want to care for it or being pregnant and having the baby is dangerous, either medically, socially, or economically. Abortion rates go up when the economy goes down and then go back down when the economy recovers. In China babies are/were aborted/killed because they were female, the legal system limited you to one child, and it was culturally desirable to have a boy. Single women used to abort because they got knocked up and having a baby out of wedlock made you a bad person.
The classic example thrown around by the pro-choice lobby is rape. A woman aborts the baby because she doesn't want to be reminded of the rape or doesn't want to raise a rapist's child, etc. There is stigma and pain associated with the rape and so the baby is not seen as a blessing. Maybe her family cannot accept the child. These are cultural problems. We are placing value on these other things and not on the new life. Eventually we might start seeing life as life, but right now we place more value on the stigma and pain of how the life was created.
By ignoring the underlying motivations for abortion and simply crying "life is sacred", pro-life advocates do not solve the problem. People are selfish people. A group at my church provides support and assistance to women in crises pregnancies. They give the women car seats and cribs and other stuff for the baby. Those kinds of actions actually do prevent abortions. Bombing clinics or murdering doctors does not. I apologize if I made it sound as if all pro-lifer's were hypocrites. Many of them are good people actually working to understand and fix the underlying problems, but the vocal ones just stand in front of clinics and call people murderers. They have no idea what motivates the people getting an abortion. A friend of mine had an abortion because her baby had no brain. She wanted the baby and was so excited to be pregnant and ended up crying for months. And then someone had the gall to call her a bad person. So fuck them and all the people too busy to get their heads out of their asses and actually try to understand what motivates another person.
And I struggle with the brainwashing I received from American culture that told me that a woman's self worth is directly tied to her physical appearance. We all have issues. We are all fucked up by something our parents did or didn't do. Grow some balls, get over it, and don't perpetuate the insanity to your children. Find something else to mess them up with. THAT is how we grow as a society.
If children could not shake off the insanity taught them by their parents we would still be living in caves and terrified of the monsters roaming the woods in the darkness. But every generation some of us look outside and say "maybe my parents are wrong." Actually, that is the default attitude of most teenagers.
Adults join the church. Adults leave the church. Adults leave and then return. We are each individuals and one day we turn 18 and we can choose to be an adult or remain forever a child. Adults make their own decisions; children let society do it. It's tough but life is tough.
Because mandatory abortion is absurd. We have already (mostly) decided that eugenics is a Bad Idea and as such is a poor straw man. Aborting ALL pregnancies would end the human race. Try again.
Since you brought it up, the real issue behind abortion is not a right to life or a right to choose, but a socio-economic one. People that really cared about babies would care about supporting pregnant women and new mothers. If our society provided the support network for women (and men) to make it easy to care for children, abortion rates would fall. You can compare abortion rates in the U.S. to other countries with even looser abortion regulations and see the correlation plain as day. Laws don't stop abortions, society not being made up of dick heads does. The fact that people will stand there and say it's wrong while doing nothing to support the potential mother and baby is insane and hypocritical. It is indicative of the same spiteful attitude that the anti-Christians express when they ridicule religions.
And the pro-choice people are just as bad. They degrade and ridicule women who chose to not have an abortion in tough times just as the feminists degrade women who chose to put themselves in submissive relationships or not work.
That said, religion is a part of this country and you are going to have to learn to deal with it. People want/need to be able to express their culture. It does not hurt your child to hear another child say a prayer. It does not hurt you if someone else says 'god bless you'. If they aren't blowing up your kids or throwing you in jail for not believing in their god, why do you give a fuck?
EVERYONE should leave everyone else alone. Don't set the infidels on fire. Don't degrade people just because they believe in an invisible man.
And it is going to take a long time for those new recommendations to make their way into the general public. There are piles of parenting help books that old parents gleefully shovel onto new parents. There are articles and magazines and Grandma and the crotchety old lady down the street. Everyone has an opinion about how you should be raising your kids and how you are doing a shitty job at it and your kids are going to die or need therapy or be a bum because you didn't give them the special new omega whatever supplement that promotes brain growth.
And the advice is constantly changing. My husband is the youngest of three. His eldest brother slept on his stomach as a baby. Their mom was told to put the middle one on her side using this bizarre wedge pillow everyone had to buy or your baby would die, and by the time he was born, we had decided that babies had to sleep on their back. They just recently came out telling us to keep kids in rear facing car seats until they are two and they are pretty much in booster seats until they turn 21 now.
On top of that, you only ever really get one shot at being a parent. You might get a couple tries with different kids, but each kid is only ever a baby once.
So give the parents a break. They've never done this before, are sleep deprived, are the scourge of all the non-parents in the grocery store, and all they really want to do is go home, drink a beer, watch a TV show that doesn't involve a super hero named 'Word Girl' from the planet Lexicon, fall asleep, and not get woken up by a 30 lb bouncing bundle demanding pancakes at 5AM on a Saturday.
And that is an attitude that we seem to lack around here. We, as a society, need to learn to be able to not give a damn about other people's wacky beliefs (unless you believe I need to be set on fire or something and then we have a problem). There are people in the world who believe that cows are sacred. We slaughter and eat these sacred cows daily. They are going to teach their children that cows are sacred and we are going to teach our children that cows are tasty.
It does not hurt you for someone to believe that the world was created by a flying spaghetti monster or aliens or green mold. It does not hurt anyone that people want to believe that invisible space monkeys have a plan for them that involves them giving food to the poor. It does not hurt anyone if someone wants to believe that the world magically sprung into being cause their invisible magic man cried or something. And it doesn't hurt anyone when they teach their children these things. No one complains that Amish kids grow up without electricity. If the kids decide their parents are crack pots, they will figure that out on their own when they realize that cows and bacon are tasty and the internet is grand thing.
I wish we would stop trying to force our beliefs on each other. Let people teach their kids about their invisible men or aliens or evolution as they see fit.
Because the pediatricians tell us that if we give peanuts to a child under 2 years old, he will die (ok... they really just strongly advise against it). Should we ignore the advice of the pediatricians and medical practitioners that supposedly spent a long time in school, have followed studies related to childhood development and allergies, and whom we trust to help us fix our kid when he is running a 105 degree fever, covered in a rash, and vomiting?
We are also advised to avoid honey during the first year due to pathogens that babies do not have the proper immune response to handle and when introducing new food to babies we are advised to try them one at a time so we know that it was the tomatoes that caused the baby to break out in hives and not the yogurt.
There is a whole list of foods that babies should avoid at different times for a variety of reasons. You don't pop out a baby and start giving them peanut butter sandwiches the next day. You have to give their immune system and digestive functions time to develop.
Snowplows themselves aren't a huge investment, and they last basically forever with little maintenance.
One of our snow plows just caught fire the other day.
I live in PA and we don't plow until the snow stop falling... And we stopped salting the roads because it's been too cold for the salt to matter. So yes, the roads get pretty shitty and we have these nice mountains that become impassable by normal cars when covered with ice.
They also delay/close our schools at the drop of a hat (too much, I think) and if the roads were shitty, I would sit at work for a bit and see if clears. Or have my husband come get me with his truck. I wouldn't venture out into it to just to get stuck.
The difference is Atlanta said "oh look there's a storm coming. Should we close the schools? Nope. Oh SHIT! the storm really is coming! EVERYONE RUN!"
Had Atlanta not collectively panicked, it would have been fine. The NWS gave them 9 hours of warning. I get calls at 5 AM telling me school is closed/delayed all the time. They have called to announce a delay at 10PM the night before because it was going to be cold. Someone wakes the fuck up and makes that call BEFORE you end up with a city full of kids stuck.
I sleep nude so lets start with... Sexual harassment and Hostile work environment
But the exam administrators need to charge money for people to take it and if students aren't taking it then they can't get that spiffy new boat...
When I graduated college I could answer yes to all those questions and I still didn't take the exam. I didn't take the exam cause it was stupid and I had better things to do like take other AP tests. And if it matters, I'm a girl.
I wanted to test out of courses like English and German so I didn't have to take all those annoying gen ed requirements. Freshman comp sci was an easy A. Not to mention that it is actually not always a good thing to test out of too many of your college classes.
A night flight. The plane is quiet.
Suddenly...
Mommy... I have to pee... Mommy... I need a glass of water. Mommy... why does the man sitting next to us have this funny mask over his eyes? Is he playing a game? Can I play too? HEY! Do you have an extra mask? What are we playing?
But but but... the government has to tell us how to live our lives. Without the government we won't know how to treat other people or that we are supposed to breath air to survive. Could you imagine the chaos if the government told us they did not require us to breathe air? People would try to breath sand in the unregulated aftermath.