I was sort of surprised when I read debatechick's blog about being disappointed in progressiveu bloggers. I understand if we saw these personal attacks, but I haven't seen them. Maybe I have been lucky in the blogs that I have chosen to read that they were realatively new and didn't have any comments, but I really didn't see what she was speaking of. If you have an example, I'd like to see just for evidence.
Well, my actual classes ended on Friday, but we have exams for the next two weeks and it's definitely crunch time. Unfortunately I've been procrastinating, but that's beside the point. So, I was looking at the classes I had chosen for next semester and I decided to look up some comments about my professors on ratemyprofessor.com. Well, I didn't find anything about my future professors that was very interesting. Just the usual stuff. This person is really hard or this person wants the problem sets done a certain way. However, I found the funniest stuff about one of my past professors.
Alright, so every year I try to compile the top ten things that happened. This can be in politics, in the general media, and even some personal events. This year, while I was thinking of a list, I thought "hey, why don't I make this a list that all progressiveu bloggers could take a part in. What I plan to do is ask you the top ten things that happened in the media and to you in 2006 and I'll post it on December 31. This way the dedicated bloggers who will be blogging after the scholarship is done will see it. It can be anything and if you post a really important personal happening, that would be great because I plan to make the most touching or radical personal event my number one.
So, this isn't a problem for us progressiveu people, but I bet you are wondering why people don't get off their lazy rears and vote! Well, I don't really think that there will ever be a good enough explanation for that, but here's an economic explanation that I found quite interesting.
Allright, so first of all we have to establish that everyone faces an opportunity cost for voting. This is the cost of the time they could have spent doing something else (work, studying, fun) instead of voting. So one of the reasons that people don't vote is because they think the opportunity cost exceeds the payoff for voting.
Alright, so here's the question: what would you do if the government gave you cash the day you turned 18? Well, discussion has been currently surrounding this question when many have proposed the policy of setting up a children's trust fund. What this entails is that when a child is born, the government puts a certain amount into that child's trust fund and it accumulates until the child is 18 and has the choice to do whatever he or she wants with it. They've already initiated something like this in the UK, and are considering something like it in the U.S. It also is used in a progressive way in which those children from lower income families get more put in to try to reduce this bifurcation we see in society today (you know the rich get richer as the poor get poorer).
So you know how now as a design standard, each new car has to have at least driver and passenger airbags. Well did you know that they actually don't work? Okay, so if you're looking at just the effectiveness of airbags, they do reduce the amount of deaths, but you have to consider the offsetting behaviors of us the drivers.
A study conducted in Virginia found that out of 63 single car or multiple car accidents in which drivers with air-bag equipped cars were involved, 51 of them had the airbag driver as the initiator. So this shows that having airbags in cars actually makes people more aggressive drivers and thus limits airbags' effectiveness in reducing mortality. Actually, mortality rates remain the same and are just transferred to pedestrians and passengers.
So, most of us are beyond those first akward stages of puberty (though they seem to follow us later into life) but I found something very interesting about the time of development and the effects that timing has on adolescents. Pretty generally, if you develop around the average time of your peers, you do experience some of the really positive or the really negative aspects that come along with early development. What really is interesting is that there seems to be a dichotomy in which boys are getting the benefits and girls are getting the setbacks.
Yeah, so when you thought that the whole concept of Black Friday couldn't get any better it actually does. Just the idea of people hyped up from all the sugar of all those Thanksgiving pumpkin pies marching off to stores at 5:30 in the morning to get the best deal on a slow cooker gives me the heebe jeebes, but it gets worse. So I was stuck in college for Thanksgiving and I called my mom around eleven to say good night. However, she was wide awake and was saying she was going to the mall.
