AN EDUCATED WORKFORCE FOR THE “INFORMATION AGE” UNITED STATES “The U.S. economy’s largest and fastest growing sectors—business services, finance, healthcare and education—have little room for high school educated workers,” notes a 2015 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “Access to education is pretty much the arbiter of middle-class status,” said Anthony P. Carnevale. “It becomes the nut you have to crack.” How to help young Americans to secure a better future? There is no end to the list of items we could spend on “those in need.” We could help Americans by making more taxpayer money available for health care, after school programs, neo-natal programs, housing assistance,…
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After 25 Years, I Finally Do It
March 27, 2018 I can hardly believe it. After some twenty five years of abjuring the National Rifle Association and considering them to be extremists who were more trouble than they were worth, I am about to join them. I am going to join the NRA. I am going to give them my money. I will hold my nose while doing so, but I see I have no real choice. How did I get to this point? I remember arguing heatedly with a buddy about the the Federal Assault Weapons Ban way back in 1994. I was in favor of the ban. This friend, Jim, a passionate gun rights supporter,…
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The Wandering Mind Reflects: The Opioid Epidemic, Menopause, and Claire Dederer
Two weeks ago, in a burst of curiosity, I performed some fifteen hours of research on the current opioid epidemic that rages across the United States. Some 63,000 Americans died from overdosing on opioids in 2017, and every pundit seems to add that this means “more Americans died in 2017 from drug overdoses than died in the entire Vietnam War.” The “opioid crisis” has been much in the news. The media sadly explains that drug overdoses are why the average life expectancy for Americans last year had dropped slightly to 78.6 years of age, a “statistically significant” drop of 0.1. This is the second straight year life expectancy for Americans…
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What Might I Have Done Wrong?
The other day I caught my youngest daughter reading in her loft bed at night in the dark at 11:00 p.m. I was more than a bit angry, as I saw her bloodshot eyes peering out at me from her bed; she would be comatose the next morning, short of sleep, I thought to myself. Getting her out of bed and to school on time on such mornings is difficult in the extreme. In fact, she was using the dim light emanating from her Kindle (ie. electronic book reader) to read the third Percy Jackson book that evening in the dark. Her grandfather gave her the box set of the five…
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Breaking Up With Social Media
Back in the early days of the Internet it was not uncommon to have a “personal webpage.” It was in this environment that I started my own. More than twenty years later the topography of the Internet has changed. Fewer persons use “computers” (desktop or laptop) to access online, and use their “mobile devices” (cell phone or tablet). The HTML has changed over two decades: today webpages look different, and they load differently. The World Wide Web used to be almost entirely text, but now video is at least as prevalent as text. The Internet used to be more populated by individuals, usually “early adopters.” Now commerce and advertising have…