October 16, 2011 • 18:32 0
30 hours at $8 an hour x 52 weeks = $12,480. 1 year average state university cost = $7,650. Cheap house = $500 rent x 12 months in a year = $6,000 without utilities. Ramen and hot dogs for a month = $100 x 12 = $1,200…$12,480 – 7,650 – 6,000 – 1,200 = the fact that the majority of middle and lower class Americans cannot do this. -antiwasp
Filed under: Education, Politics, So there I was . . .
March 19, 2011 • 23:05 0
Success in employment, learning in school, healthy relationships, productive children, and everything else that middle-Americans could wish for in the world comes down to how much we put in to achieve it. Contentedness, for middle-America, is attainable from the sweat of our brow. But how do we know that contentedness is available for us to reach out and pluck? How do we know that we have to work to live the American middleclass daydream, and that the daydream won’t happen on its own? Well, you know by being a genius, or by learning the tricks from other people. We, middleclass-ers, learn that we have to work for the American daydream by watching our parents and others in our community hustle for it. We learn to work because our parents tell us we have to work. Not everybody has real-life examples or someone telling them how life should be lived.
This is the problem that many in America face today. They don’t have a community looking out for them, and the communities can’t turn around on their own. They need federal intervention. We need a nation-wide strategy that will mobilize all fronts to engineer our society (economic, education, psychological, medical, public works, food programs, etc). We need a central vision, a mission statement . . . something to work towards, because right now we’re all floating in differing directions. We’re moving away from our common goal. We are a divided house. -antiwasp
Filed under: Culture, Economy, Education, Health Care, Parenting
March 17, 2011 • 02:22 0
I don’t think differing levels of intelligence in human beings is natural (exceptions exist for the mentally retarded). Psychologists and other specialists develop tests to assess characteristics in individuals. Tests are deemed to be invalid if the results, from testing a large group of people, don’t fall within the bell curve. Invalid tests are thrown out if the curves are too wide, too narrow, or without tapered ends when depicted on a graph. My mind-construct forces me to believe that the majority of the population that I’ve met have been of average intelligence, and that a smaller number of people have fallen into the moron or genius categories. So I see the world in a bell curve when it comes to intelligence, but maybe that’s because cultural influences have taught me that the intelligence bell curve is an inevitable fact of life. Maybe it’s because I see the results of nurture and call it intelligence. But either way, I can see through my life development, the development of my children, and the development officers in the Army that intelligence is a product of mentors, work, and situation. I was a tard in my early life but am no longer, and I’ve seen tards turn smart. It’s the result of nurture, and nothing else. The earlier the good nurturing occurs the more effect it has . . . but individual or forced nurture has to continue throughout the life of the human if the human ever wishes to become a person. -antiwasp
