Tag Archives: baby

America Does Not Really Have a Big Aging Problem

by JonathonSundber Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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This isn’t exactly breaking news, but the Census Bureau released a report on America’s aging population today, and the basic takeaway is something we already know: as the Baby Boomers age, our population is going to get steadily older. However, what’s less widely recognized is that this is only true for the next couple of decades. After 2030, our elderly population stabilizes at about one-third the size of the working-age population.

In other words, all the sturm and drang over Social Security aside, our demographic problem isn’t really that bad. What’s more, compared to other countries, our outlook is positively sunny. Take a look at the red bars in the chart on the right. They show the projected size of the elderly population in various developed countries in 2050, and the United States is in by far the best shape. Our elderly population stabilizes in 2030 at about 21 percent of the total population, a number that’s significantly lower than even the second-best country (Britain, at 24 percent). Most other countries not only have elderly populations that are far larger, but their elderly populations are growing. These countries have demographic problems.

It’s worth driving this point home: America doesn’t really have a huge aging problem. We have a very moderate aging problem, which could be handled in the federal budget with fairly modest changes to Social Security and Medicare. What we do have is a health care problem. But that’s a problem for us all.

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America Does Not Really Have a Big Aging Problem

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Using Putin To Push Fossil-Fuel Projects

by Myrna Posted on March 7, 2014

Will natural gas exports really solve the Ukraine crisis? Experts aren’t so sure. A trade union building being seized in Simferopol, Ukraine. Stanislav Krasilnikov/ITAR-TASS/ZUMA The hallmark of a Republican policy proposal is that it can be adapted to virtually any circumstance. Just as George W. Bush advanced tax cuts as the appropriate response to both budget surplus and deficit, congressional Republicans believe that fossil fuel promotion is the appropriate response to, well, everything. And so they have looked at the vexing problem of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region and come up with a carefully calibrated answer: “Drill, baby, drill!” First, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was struck with a brilliant insight: If Russia’s meddling in Ukraine is dangerous because Russiasupplies Europe with oil and natural gas through pipelines that traverse Ukraine, then the U.S. should offer Europe an alternative source of fossil fuels. And so, she argues, the Obama administration should expedite approval of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals. “Our ability to respond quickly and nimbly I think is somewhat hampered by the process that we have in place,” she told reporters at an energy industry conference in Houston on Monday. “If this was a situation in which we wanted to use as political leverage our natural gas opportunities here, we’re not in that place now, and quite honestly it may be some time.” In her speech to the gathering, she also called on Congress to repeal the ban on exporting crude oil, saying, “Lifting the oil export ban will send a powerful message that America has the resources and the resolve to be the preeminent power in the world.” Read the rest at Grist. See the article here –  Using Putin To Push Fossil-Fuel Projects ; ;Related ArticlesCitizen Scientists: Now You Can Link the UK Winter Deluge To Climate ChangeHere Are 5 Infuriating Examples of Facts Making People DumberA World of Water, Seen From Space ;

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Using Putin To Push Fossil-Fuel Projects

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AirPnP app is is like AirBnB, but for toilets

by Myrna Posted on March 5, 2014

While AirBnB allows people to rent out lodging, from the smallest room to the biggest Irish castle, AirPnP has a smaller, though not less useful, ambition. See the article here:  AirPnP app is is like AirBnB, but for toilets ; ;Related ArticlesStudent-designed kit turns 10 gallon aquariums into aquaponic gardensCan you make a living from suburban, backyard aquaponics?A World of Water, Seen From Space ;

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AirPnP app is is like AirBnB, but for toilets

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In the Bay Area, Anti-Google Protests Get Creepy

by KetaHeadraf Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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So, the Bay Area’s tech backlash has come to this: At 7 a.m. yesterday, activists showed up on the doorstep of Google engineer Anthony Levandowski to protest, well, pretty much everything. They’re holding the guy behind the self-driving car responsible for gentrification, destructive gold mining, Chinese sweatshops, government surveillance, and, more generally “the unspeakable horror” of helping “this disastrous economic system continue a bit longer.”

A flyer distributed by the activists, who call themselves “The Counterforce,” left little doubt that their fight is personal. “Preparing for this action, we watched Levandowski step out his front door,” it reads. “He had Google Glasses over his eyes, carried his baby in his arm, and held a tablet with his free hand. As he descended the stairs with the baby, his eyes were on the tablet through the prism of his Google Glasses, not on the life against his chest. He appeared in this moment like the robot that he admits that he is.”

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In the Bay Area, Anti-Google Protests Get Creepy

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What is Deficit Mania Doing on the News Pages?

by EpifaniaBrydon Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Here is Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post on the congressional budget negotiations currently in progress:

The deal expected to be sealed this week on Capitol Hill would not significantly reduce the debt, now $17.3 trillion and rising….Republicans and Democrats are abandoning their debt-reduction goals, laying down arms and, for the moment, trying to avoid another economy-damaging standoff.

The campaign to control the debt is ending “with a whimper, not a bang,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the bipartisan Concord Coalition, which advocates debt reduction. “That this can be declared a victory is an indicator of how low the process has sunk. They haven’t really done anything except avoid another crisis.”

There’s nothing wrong with talking about the federal deficit in a story about the budget. But this entire story is framed around a sense of dismay that Congress has “abandoned” its debt-reduction goals. This is done with no mention of the fact that Congress has already slashed the 10-year deficit by nearly $4 trillion over the past couple of years. No mention that we’ve been engaged in this frenzy of deficit cutting despite the fact that the economy is still fragile, which means that reducing the deficit is almost certainly a terrible idea. No mention that deficit cutting of any size in the wake of recession is unprecedented in recent history. No mention of the fact that the deficit has been falling for years and will continue to decline in 2014 and 2015.

Wait. That’s not true. There is a mention that the deficit will continue to fall over the next two years. It gets one sentence at the very tail end of the story:

Where would that leave the nation’s financial outlook? Not in a particularly good place, budget analysts say. The most recent Congressional Budget Office projections show the red ink receding over the next two years. But annual deficits would start growing again in 2016 as the baby-boom generation moves inexorably into retirement. And the debt would again soar.

This is crazy. A story that’s supposed to be evenhanded shouldn’t simply assume as its premise that any budget that fails to slash the deficit is a failure. That’s what Robert Samuelson and Jennifer Rubin are for. If it’s on the news pages, it should tell the whole story: plenty of people think that deficit cutting has already gone too far. But no reader of this piece would have any idea that this side of the story even existed.

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What is Deficit Mania Doing on the News Pages?

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Scared to Death: Why Reality Is More Terrifying Than Any Horror Film

by f3x43zg0 Posted on November 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

From the time I was little, I went to the movies. They were my escape, with one exception from which I invariably had to escape. I couldn’t sit through any movie where something or someone threatened to jump out at me with the intent to harm. In such situations, I was incapable of enjoying being scared and there seemed to be no remedy for it. When Jaws came out in 1975, I decided that, at age 31, having avoided such movies for years, I was old enough to take it. One tag line in ads for that film was: “Don’t go in the water.” Of the millions who watched Jaws and outlasted the voracious great white shark until the lights came back on, I was that rarity: I didn’t. I really couldn’t go back in the ocean—not for several years.

I don’t want you to think for a second that this represents some kind of elevated moral position on violence or horror; it’s a visceral reaction. I actually wanted to see the baby monster in Alien burst out of that human stomach. I just knew I couldn’t take it. In all my years of viewing (and avoidance), only once did I find a solution to the problem. In the early 1990s, a period when I wrote on children’s culture, Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park sparked a dinosaur fad. I had been a dino-nerd of the 1950s and so promised Harper’s Magazine a piece on the craze and the then-being-remodeled dino-wing of New York’s American Museum of Natural History. (Don’t ask me why that essay never appeared. I took scads of notes, interviewed copious scientists at the museum, spent time alone with an Allosaurus skull, did just about everything a writer should do to produce such a piece—except write it. Call it my one memorable case of writer’s block.)

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Scared to Death: Why Reality Is More Terrifying Than Any Horror Film

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Sea Turtles Are Nesting in Record Numbers

by Toni Tolve Posted on September 26, 2013

A green sea turtle. Photo: Roy Niswanger

We drove green sea turtles to the brink of extinction, by hunting them, collecting their eggs and killing them, accidentally, with fishing equipment. In 1978, says EarthSky, green sea turtles became protected under the Endangered Species Act, and it looks like those protections are bearing some benefit for the turtles. In the southeast United States, says the Fish and Wildlife Service, green sea turtles are nesting in record numbers:

“Green turtle nest numbers are through the roof,” says Bill Miller manager of Hobe Sound National Wildlife Refuge, FL., where a mid-August count of 1,147 more than doubled the 2011 record of 543. At Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, FL, greens had built 10,420 nests by August 21, topping the 2011 record of 6,023. Nesting season won’t end until November.

Loggerheads are doing better, too, says the FWS, though their gains aren’t as dramatic as the green sea turtles. But just because there should be lots of baby sea turtles on the horizon, says the FWS, doesn’t mean the turtles are safe:

[H]ow long nesting gains will offset threats to sea turtle survival is unknown. Says Miller, “If we don’t do something about ocean debris, loss of habitat to erosion and sea level rise, and the pollution of lagoons and estuaries from runoff, nesting gains will be outweighed by environmental degradations.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Captive Sea Turtles Extract Their Revenge by Making Tourists Sick
The ‘FlipperBot’ Is Almost as Cute as the Baby Sea Turtles It Mimics

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Sea Turtles Are Nesting in Record Numbers

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Seventh Generation Liquid Laundry 4x, Baby, 2 Count

by Myrna Posted on August 25, 2013

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Seventh Generation Baby Lotion, 6 Ounce

by Myrna Posted on August 24, 2013

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Seventh Generation Free and Clear Baby Wipes with Flip Top Dispenser, 768 Count (Pack of 12)

by Myrna Posted on August 21, 2013

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