The Sam Spade Memorial Good Post Gallery

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I don't have lots specific to say, Indy Texas.  I really like reading your posts and I hope things turn up better soon.

What I will say I'll keep general.  Everyone goes through dry, lonely times in life.  I felt a lot of what you are describing on a personal level between the ages of 21 and 26--it was rough.  Life is always changing and, most of the time, things never stay either good or bad for first-worlders.  When things are going well, it's important not to get too cocky, and when things are going bad, it's important to hang in there and not despair.  Life is hard for most people in different ways--it's not singling you out on that score.  So, just keep going, and while you're at it, a few other things maybe to keep in mind.

It's true, I think, that meeting people often gets trickier as we grow older and social circles change.  One thing that might work is finding a hobby and then joining groups, associations, teams, societies of people who also do that.  You'll already have something important in common off the bat, and you'll meet people you'll like beyond the hobby that way.

Not trusting people or being motivated by fear of rejection won't help in the long run.  Trust is only earned through friendship.  But, a good default attitude might be not so much not to trust people, but just not to expect too much.  If you know people who don't ask you for all sorts of things when you're up and don't kick you when you're down, that's already pretty good, so stick with those types and just deal with the rest.

As far as being risk-averse, it's pretty hard, and unwise, to just start taking risks arbitrarily.  You have to find something you love, that's really meaningful to you, something that you'd like to try no matter whether you succeed or fail.  Something that you don't want to find yourself at 45 saying: "I wish I would have at least tried that."  If you have something that you really have passion for, you'll take necessary risks for it without even thinking about it.  What you do for a living is something you'll spend most of your waking hours with for the next several decades.  Make it something you love and that's meaningful to you, because work that's anything else can make life a real bummer.  "Follow your bliss;" Joseph Campbell got that one right.

That's just my two cents.  Might not work for you, everyone's different.  But it's the only two cents I have at the moment.

Hope you feel better soon, Indy.  Like I said, I enjoy your posts a lot.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

kill this thread now. it's dead.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

dead0man has pretty much got it right. I pay $250/week for my son's day care. When he's 2 years old, that'll drop to $205/week, and at 3 years it'll drop to $185/week. In Maryland, the ratios look like this:

<2 years: 1:3
2 years: 1:6
3-4 years: 1:12
5 years: 1:15

A bit more stringent, but the same basic thing. So for my 16 month old, he's in a class with 5 other kids of the same (ish) age, each paying $250 a week. That's $1500 a week. Each of those kids is in care for probably 40-50 hours a week. Let's lowball that and say 40 hours. They have to be cared for by two teachers. So splitting up $1500 between two teachers, we get an hourly rate of $18.75 (if we go with 50 hours per kid, then we get an hourly rate of $15; also, this doesn't really deal with the case where, let's say, you've got 4 kids there. You still need two teachers because there's more than 3 kids.)

But that's if all of the money went directly to the teachers, which we know is obviously not the case. Some goes to center upkeep and administrative costs. Some goes to the snacks and other food that are provided to the kids. Some goes to the toys and art supplies that the center provides. Etc. Even if the provider doesn't take a very big profit margin, we can still see how infant care makes almost no money for caregivers.

This is paradoxically why universal pre-K proposals have wound up driving up prices for day care, too. Because of these ratios, the kids who get covered by universal pre-K were previously the most profitable kids for centers to take, and centers could spread out their fee structure a bit more and take a bit more of a loss on infants. But if those older kids get free pre-K, then all of those costs have to shift up to compensate.

Basically, as I'm finding with my son (and my daughter, on the way in two months), day care is the worst of both worlds: insanely expensive for the customer, and barely subsistence-level earnings for the provider.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

First of all, you can't ban parties just for being "extremist" or distasteful. That's a standard way too arbitrary to be enforceable. It's also quite hypocritical to state that all political speech is protected under law, but that parties can be banned just for political speech. Now if the country doesn't have a protection for political speech, you can set a non-arbitrary standard, but it generally doesn't work. For example just look at Germany which has the toughest anti-Nazi laws in the world, yet the NPD is one of the parties mentioned. All they have to do is not say they are a neo-Nazi party or use the swastika.

Second of all banning parties never works. Can anyone cite an example in history where it did? All it results in whack-a-mole, the banned party just reforms under a different name and we're back we started. Look at how Belgium banned Vlaams Blok and they just came back as Vlaams Belang. Or how Turkey used to ban a Kurdish nationalist party every couple years only to see them reform. Or Thailand after every election. It's not like banning a party will make its members think "Ah dammit, now we can't participate in the political process. Guess we'll quit voting and drop out."

Now if the party actually is basically just a front for a violent criminal organization like Golden Dawn, well then yes the criminal aspect should be cracked down on (and note how most of Golden Dawn's leaders have been arrested). And seeing how extremist parties often tend toward this it often renders the question moot most of the time. But banning parties just for political reasons is something that's never going to be effective.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

What the hell has this thread turned into?   post something good or stfu

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I'm not sure what the "normalization of mental illness" has to do with most of your previous post, Simfan.

The subject that (I think) you're discussing is distinctive to highly literate young people who are (usually) materially secure but lack a stable and well-defined network of social support. There is further social pressure - it's an expectation, really, and campus activists are not the fundamental source of it - that a person should somehow construct his or her own identity.

There are analogues for what you see on campus across most walks of American life. Have you ever received an e-mail from a white collar professional and scratched your head in bewilderment at the alphabet soup of letters listed after his or her name? They're playing a similar game.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

That's not what he said. He was talking about minorities who get artificially placed into more challenging schools above their skill level due to affirmative action. He's 100% correct and I'm not sure this would be controversial in the slightest if you replaced "blacks" with people in general: people do best in a school that matches or just slightly exceeds their skill level (properly measured, that is). Someone who should by skill be attending a state school would wash out in no time at MIT. It's just that blacks are the ones being artificially propped up in this case.

This is obviously what the primary intent was. Thanks for stating that so eloquently. I would also add that there are plenty who likely may be smart enough to handle these schools based on SAT or whatever other factor determines their learning ability, but certain urban public schools have not adequately prepared them on the other side of matters. Unpreparedness to use those skills is a problem in itself that can lead to early transfer/dropout. The problem is not "lack of diversity" when it's mostly reflective of the demographics, but the lack of helping new students through that first year who haven't been adequately prepared, and the problem is pronounced at state schools. I would use Mizzou as one of those examples as their dropout rates have huge differences by race as student leaders pointed out, but there are other underlying factors there not worth getting into. However, I do know a company I interviewed with has a program specifically to help students from failing high schools with the college process including standardized exam prep. One of the problems with their pilot program was the students got to college and immediately fell behind (which led to expansion of that program to continue with them through a few semesters so they could properly adjust). I digress a bit, but that's a relevant consideration for minorities who score in say the 25th to 50th percentile range. Of course it shouldn't stop, but schools need to be far more hands on if they are going to accept them.

I have yet to meet a single conservative who can accurately describe what affirmative-action is besides "Black people get into college over white people".

Please say what it is then rather than acting smug liberal because I can assure you its not very popukar. Do you mean they fail to acknowledge the benefits of a diverse student body and giving disadvantaged people a level playing field because they have had fewer opportunities? That's fine, but realize there are plenty of arguments against those and your simplification of the popular argument doesn't make it less valid. And white people aren't really harmed all too much like Asian-Americans.

Most who get in to the elite programs are extremely qualified regardless though. Most will come from some sort of privelige there. Certain races may face more competition amongst themselves, but that doesn't make the others unqualified there. Even UMICH and Austin are unlikely to have many unqualified in-staters.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

People get very... strange... when discussing diet don't they? Leaving aside the morality issue (apparently people have different worldviews, how utterly shocking!), the idea that we are 'meant' to eat this or that is a silly: humans happen to be omnivorous and can (and indeed do) survive on an absurdly wide range of diets. And what's right for me may not be right for thee: like most people of European origin you'd have to prise dairy products out of my cold dead hands, but in much of the rest of the world lactose intolerance is the norm. Occupation can also be a factor: an appropriate diet for someone doing manual work is often rather different to that of a pen pusher. It is also worth noting that, historically speaking, meat was a rarity before the 19th century even in the West and that current levels of consumption would have been bewildering even in the mid 20th century. The typical diet - outside fishing districts - in preindustrial England consisted almost entirely of bread, cheese and split peas. The typical diet in parts of the South of France and Northern Italy revolved around the chestnut. And so on. Not ideal, certainly not 'balanced', but sufficient to survive.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I most likely agree with Nathan as usual, but I wasn't here for that, and Atlasia always has ridiculously stupid tensions going on related to that silliness.

Yes, CC's views are completely absurd, but bullying a teenager over them with such extreme language is way too far. I hate a lot of what he stands for. Still, this forum could certainly use an injection of love pretty soon because I'm getting really sick of it this election season. Everything is good and evil - no trying to correct - just vicious character attacks. Every time I start coming on, I get more and more depressed reading this complete disregard for others - I hate to direct this to you because you are the least of my concerns, but seriously, let's start making a conscious effort to stop with the baseless name calling attacks. I'm not innocent either - I get swept up in the mob mentality, but how many times do you have to bump this thread?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

It's hard to say whether students were bothered by it.  People are complicated.  There's been plenty of times throughout my life where someone did something that hurt me but I just smiled and said "okay."  Doesn't mean I didn't go in my room and cry afterwards.  Who knows?  Some students might even tease each other about it.  Why encourage that?

Even if it was the student's idea, the teacher could have stepped in.  They are the authority figure and need to be able to guide the students about what is acceptable behavior and what isn't.  Obviously it's awkward if they came up with the idea, but they could have just as easily done the project without actually using their classmates as the examples.  Also, it's problematic that only the black children were used as the slaves in this project.  It reinforces social divisions when people need to be coming together.  Students need to be taught about history, including the slave trade, but they don't need to be identifying each other as who would be the slave and who would be the master if this was 1786.

Maybe it wasn't a positive experience for everyone. We have no way of knowing. What is clear is that no student took any kind of action to indicate that the experience had bothered them, and that local and national media alike have chosen to sensationalize the story. That's what they do: Outrage and controversy begets clicks, views, and impressions.

We also don't know what kind of racial attitudes, whether implicit or explicit, were behind the students' actions. When children are given autonomy, they are almost guaranteed to skirt lines that shouldn't be crossed occasionally. To me, this seems like a critical part of learning. Moreover, children aren't necessarily likely to understand why they shouldn't do something just because it could be made to look bad in over-sensationalized television news pieces.

The overriding concern for me is that I don't think we need be so quick to judge what happens in a classroom. I am sure that anyone with a bit of imagination could come up with a series of horrifying headlines describing events from their schooling that were, in fact, innocuous or even valuable. That's in the nature of learning, and in the nature of children. Far more harm was done to my education by paranoid administrators, overzealous school boards, and overprotective and neurotic parents than by any mistakes made by my classmates or teachers.

Moreover, we live in a country in which teachers are constantly demeaned and controlled, regimented and rationalized. Why do you think the profession has become so low status compared to where it stood decades ago? Part of it is because brilliant career-oriented women now have more options, part of it is because the pay is awful, and part of it is because of the absurd certification requirements. But if the aging professionals whom I know are any indication, the loss of autonomy has also done a great deal to chase some of the most energetic, enthusiastic, and intelligent educators out of the field, or at least out of public schools.

(The greatest horror is in realizing that few students have any choice. Unless their parents - who are probably both overworked, very likely divorced, and almost certainly indebted - have the resources to choose how their children are educated, they will spend thirteen years or more in a system that increasingly resembles a prison sentence and that fails to bring even basic numeracy or literacy to a large share of its graduates. But this is a tangential point.)

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Please stop harassing Dave.  He is on a glorious quest in the mythical lands of Mapia, where the sunsets are an exquisite blend of Republican blue and Democratic red.  The lands are full of bloom and bountiful with many maps.  Even the stars light up with constellations of municipal level elections and alternative gerrymanders.  We're all urgently awaiting his return, and each second that you bother him with frivolous codswallop and flapdoodle emails just puts the holy grail of maps further and further out of his reach.