Random Updates
Once called the "swirl," I was tempted to use that term again because sometimes the news and information comes in so quickly that subjects can ndeed become muddled. Those of you following Brexit will probably identify with this (the BBC recently held a town-hall broadcast in Brussels* which proved most explanatory as both EU and audience members tried to express their views in the confines of a single hour; perhaps some of this time limitation could or should be passed onto the House of Commons). So, have your tickets ready, the ride is about to start (highlighted links take you back to the original post).
Let's begin by jumping back to the subject of milk. Perhaps you've noticed all the varieties of almond and rice and soy "milks" approaching the cost of regular cow milk, and the unsweetened versions coming in without the fat or sugars (and often double or more of the calcium). What was surprising was that of a new trend taking hold in bodybuilders and now moving onto some of the general population in larger cities, that of adults drinking breast milk from lactating mothers (yes, there are actual websites for this where you can both buy and sell such milk). But here's an even larger trend, that of the protein A2. What, never heard of it?...add me to that list. But China certainly has heard of A2 milk, and apparently so has Costco, Walmart and Whole Foods. A2 is marketed as easier to digest when compared to the standard dairy blend of A1 & A2 proteins found the most U.S. and European milk herds, says the company (the A2-only milk was created by a New Zealand scientist "and wealthy dairy producer" who bred special dairy herds, said Bloomberg about the Australian company). But back to that breast milk; it's all just one tiny piece of our procreation in general. Said a piece in Popular Science on our evolution: Over thousands of generations, the pelvis shifted to make our new method of locomotion more efficient. The tops of the hip bones flared, and the pubic bone moved toward the bottom of the spine, shifting the shape of the birth canal. Its inlet—a baby’s first hurdle in the adventure of birth—widened side to side. Offspring now needed to twist to face mom’s rear end to get their shoulders through. Bipedalism wasn’t our only anatomical compromise. A warming climate made it worthwhile to be long and narrow. Lithe limbs and slim hips create a surface-area-to-body-mass ratio that makes sweating more effective. This pressure to have svelte haunches affected the birthing outlet. In modern humans, the canal’s exit is wider front to back (yes, the opposite of its entrance), which means babies rotate a second time to free their shoulders. All of this sort of lends an interesting tweak into the debate about our changing climate (the article also gives you a quick glimpse of how our 9 month birthing rate is pretty much smack in the middle of most of the animal king- or queendom).
And speaking of birthing, there's that age-old search for love but unfortunately for many, the online ease and availability of finding a partner has made "bromance" the latest (and most profitable) tug on those heartstrings. Last year Americans coughed up $143 million for such sites with the average loss coming to a cool $2,600 per person if you were younger, but 4x that amount (at an average of $10,000) for those 70 and older. Unfortunately, many of the "young female models" are actually men and women in call centers overseas, each effectively selling their scripted pleas for help with paying a fake medical or other bill; and they're proving so successful that bromance has become the #1 scam in the U.S. said the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), with users jumping nearly 400% in just the past 3 years. How's it done? A quick listen to AARP's series of podcasts on scams will give you a quick insight and help you empathize with the variety of people caught in the elaborate (and ever-changing) snares that snatch away life-savings without a inkling of guilt. And for those of you caught in the "millennial" title, debt has come in a different form as the unregulated car loan industry has provided it own bromance pitch only this time for a new car. Nationwide, that meant that 7 million people are now 3 months or more behind on paying their car loans with most of those borrowers being under the age of 30; loans average 85% of the new car loans (and a surprising 50% of the used car loans), stretched over 6 years and at high interest rates. Nothing to worry about, you say? The number of "troubled" borrowers purchasing and possibly soon defaulting on their loans is higher than the peak which hit after the last recession, said The Spectator. But none of that may matter since our country is continuing to own path to record deficits (borrowing more than you can pay back), said a summarized report in The Week: If government debt really becomes a problem, we'll know very quickly, said Jason Furman and Lawrence Summers at Foreign Affairs. "The financial markets give immediate feedback about the seriousness of the budget deficit." But we're not there now, and probably not anywhere close. Nice, and a big blow to us old-school boomers who seemingly felt that staying debt-free was a good thing; but apparently not all old-timers said Barron's on a study released by the Insured Retirement Institute: According to the IRI survey, an astonishing 23% of baby boomers have no retirement savings...and never did. Another 17% did save for their retirement once...but then spent the money either in desperation, carelessness, or maybe both. Bromance, Part II?
Of course those are stereotypes, all. For many the prospect of retiring or having savings is or at least was, a valid premise. Things came up...an emergency, a medical bill, a broken car, a cutback at work. And for many those events may seem to just keep coming. Farmers watch as their fields are flooded while others wish that their fields could have even a small part of that rain. Students who protested about gun control wonder what happened as the rest of the country (and the world in general) simply moved on. Measles began spreading like the virus it is (schools began telling parents to leave their children at home as the virus is highly contagious) as if in a mad race with its counterpart, Ebola (also highly contagious and more lethal). It's a confusing time, and even more so if you're slapped into a category that is on the periphery of wondering what comes next, those asking what comes after Generation Z?
Editor Jay Felden of Esquire attempted to sum up this confusion as his magazine begins presenting the thoughts of what it means to grow up now: We disagree as a country on every possible cultural and political point except, perhaps, one: that private life, as a result, has also become its own fresh hell. This has made the very social fabric of modern democratic civilization --watercooler BS, chats with cabbies and total strangers, dinner parties, large family gatherings-- sometimes feel like a Kafkaesque thought-police nightmare of paranoia and nausea, in which you might accidentally say what you really believe and get burned at the stake. A crackling debate used to be as important an ingredient of a memorable night out as what was served and who else was there. People sometimes even argued a position they might not have totally agreed with, partly for the thrilling intellectual exercise playing devil’s advocate can be, but mostly for the drunken hell of it. Being intellectually puritanical was considered backward. More often than not, it was all a lot of fun. These days, most of us have splintered off into our own ideological echo chambers, regurgitating the talking points of Fox or CNN or MSNBC, depending on your taste in agitprop. As adults, it’s actually pretty easy to cop out: We don’t have to go to school, that bossy institution that pokes and prods you while people you don’t particularly like get to watch. Add to this the passions and change this moment has unleashed --#MeToo, gender fluidity, Black Lives Matter, “check your privilege,” and #TheFutureIsFemale-- and the task of grappling with the world has to be more complicated for kids than it’s ever been. The cover story, About A Boy, will give you a small peek into that confused world.
There is so much more, far too much to attempt as even these updates will soon need updates. From graphene to recycling, meat to Mars, melting glaciers to melting hopes, it may all come a bit too late. So I'll end on just that, partially because it seems that I am always a tad late to events or dinner parties or airports (perhaps in rebellion to always having to be "on time" to work). Said Andrew O"Hagan in the London Review of Books: Some people make an art out of being late: it’s said to be fashionable, but it isn’t...The person who is late and the person who is early have one thing in common: they are equally unlike the person who is just on time. This person is in a category of her own, a punitive Goldilocks, who wants everything just right. She values her time, as they say, and feels the second hand perpetually reproving. Maybe it doesn’t pay to get too wound up about ‘your’ time. Time doesn’t belong to you. And perhaps letting other people fuss over it can set you free. The early bird can be a nobody, getting lost in preparations. (It’s nice to know where the exits are.) But maybe the only free person is the one you see dashing in late and dropping her papers, harassed in her head but freer in the world. Her clock’s her own. She implies from the start that we’re all out of control and maybe that’s more honest. In the old days, young people made plans before leaving the house, largely to avoid the poor business of wandering the streets without a clue. We had regular haunts, which made things easier, but, as I remember it, we pretty much kept to whatever plans had been made because in transit you would be out of touch. Today’s young phone-user finds it normal to enter into a daily festival of editing and circumnavigating what has been mooted -- he detests firm plans, even firm suggestions-- because texting allows him to do it all on the hoof. Being mobile, and having one, means he is in step with his desires, so why would he choose to be enslaved to a thing that seemed desirable yesterday or ten minutes ago? Perhaps timekeeping is now for the birds (or for old birds).
As with those closing in on being bumped out of the Z category, I too am beginning to wonder where one fits and perhaps what --if anything-- comes after. Is it saying something that I can relate (and chuckle) at the term "old birds?" Hey, it's not so bad from my viewpoint, perhaps glad to have made it this far...after all, I just might need a bit of updating.
*To all of you devoted to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), the Brexit chaos has led to the possibility that the worldwide broadcasting operation may be moving out of England and on to more European shores, as in Brussels. Hmmm...
Let's begin by jumping back to the subject of milk. Perhaps you've noticed all the varieties of almond and rice and soy "milks" approaching the cost of regular cow milk, and the unsweetened versions coming in without the fat or sugars (and often double or more of the calcium). What was surprising was that of a new trend taking hold in bodybuilders and now moving onto some of the general population in larger cities, that of adults drinking breast milk from lactating mothers (yes, there are actual websites for this where you can both buy and sell such milk). But here's an even larger trend, that of the protein A2. What, never heard of it?...add me to that list. But China certainly has heard of A2 milk, and apparently so has Costco, Walmart and Whole Foods. A2 is marketed as easier to digest when compared to the standard dairy blend of A1 & A2 proteins found the most U.S. and European milk herds, says the company (the A2-only milk was created by a New Zealand scientist "and wealthy dairy producer" who bred special dairy herds, said Bloomberg about the Australian company). But back to that breast milk; it's all just one tiny piece of our procreation in general. Said a piece in Popular Science on our evolution: Over thousands of generations, the pelvis shifted to make our new method of locomotion more efficient. The tops of the hip bones flared, and the pubic bone moved toward the bottom of the spine, shifting the shape of the birth canal. Its inlet—a baby’s first hurdle in the adventure of birth—widened side to side. Offspring now needed to twist to face mom’s rear end to get their shoulders through. Bipedalism wasn’t our only anatomical compromise. A warming climate made it worthwhile to be long and narrow. Lithe limbs and slim hips create a surface-area-to-body-mass ratio that makes sweating more effective. This pressure to have svelte haunches affected the birthing outlet. In modern humans, the canal’s exit is wider front to back (yes, the opposite of its entrance), which means babies rotate a second time to free their shoulders. All of this sort of lends an interesting tweak into the debate about our changing climate (the article also gives you a quick glimpse of how our 9 month birthing rate is pretty much smack in the middle of most of the animal king- or queendom).
And speaking of birthing, there's that age-old search for love but unfortunately for many, the online ease and availability of finding a partner has made "bromance" the latest (and most profitable) tug on those heartstrings. Last year Americans coughed up $143 million for such sites with the average loss coming to a cool $2,600 per person if you were younger, but 4x that amount (at an average of $10,000) for those 70 and older. Unfortunately, many of the "young female models" are actually men and women in call centers overseas, each effectively selling their scripted pleas for help with paying a fake medical or other bill; and they're proving so successful that bromance has become the #1 scam in the U.S. said the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), with users jumping nearly 400% in just the past 3 years. How's it done? A quick listen to AARP's series of podcasts on scams will give you a quick insight and help you empathize with the variety of people caught in the elaborate (and ever-changing) snares that snatch away life-savings without a inkling of guilt. And for those of you caught in the "millennial" title, debt has come in a different form as the unregulated car loan industry has provided it own bromance pitch only this time for a new car. Nationwide, that meant that 7 million people are now 3 months or more behind on paying their car loans with most of those borrowers being under the age of 30; loans average 85% of the new car loans (and a surprising 50% of the used car loans), stretched over 6 years and at high interest rates. Nothing to worry about, you say? The number of "troubled" borrowers purchasing and possibly soon defaulting on their loans is higher than the peak which hit after the last recession, said The Spectator. But none of that may matter since our country is continuing to own path to record deficits (borrowing more than you can pay back), said a summarized report in The Week: If government debt really becomes a problem, we'll know very quickly, said Jason Furman and Lawrence Summers at Foreign Affairs. "The financial markets give immediate feedback about the seriousness of the budget deficit." But we're not there now, and probably not anywhere close. Nice, and a big blow to us old-school boomers who seemingly felt that staying debt-free was a good thing; but apparently not all old-timers said Barron's on a study released by the Insured Retirement Institute: According to the IRI survey, an astonishing 23% of baby boomers have no retirement savings...and never did. Another 17% did save for their retirement once...but then spent the money either in desperation, carelessness, or maybe both. Bromance, Part II?
Of course those are stereotypes, all. For many the prospect of retiring or having savings is or at least was, a valid premise. Things came up...an emergency, a medical bill, a broken car, a cutback at work. And for many those events may seem to just keep coming. Farmers watch as their fields are flooded while others wish that their fields could have even a small part of that rain. Students who protested about gun control wonder what happened as the rest of the country (and the world in general) simply moved on. Measles began spreading like the virus it is (schools began telling parents to leave their children at home as the virus is highly contagious) as if in a mad race with its counterpart, Ebola (also highly contagious and more lethal). It's a confusing time, and even more so if you're slapped into a category that is on the periphery of wondering what comes next, those asking what comes after Generation Z?
Editor Jay Felden of Esquire attempted to sum up this confusion as his magazine begins presenting the thoughts of what it means to grow up now: We disagree as a country on every possible cultural and political point except, perhaps, one: that private life, as a result, has also become its own fresh hell. This has made the very social fabric of modern democratic civilization --watercooler BS, chats with cabbies and total strangers, dinner parties, large family gatherings-- sometimes feel like a Kafkaesque thought-police nightmare of paranoia and nausea, in which you might accidentally say what you really believe and get burned at the stake. A crackling debate used to be as important an ingredient of a memorable night out as what was served and who else was there. People sometimes even argued a position they might not have totally agreed with, partly for the thrilling intellectual exercise playing devil’s advocate can be, but mostly for the drunken hell of it. Being intellectually puritanical was considered backward. More often than not, it was all a lot of fun. These days, most of us have splintered off into our own ideological echo chambers, regurgitating the talking points of Fox or CNN or MSNBC, depending on your taste in agitprop. As adults, it’s actually pretty easy to cop out: We don’t have to go to school, that bossy institution that pokes and prods you while people you don’t particularly like get to watch. Add to this the passions and change this moment has unleashed --#MeToo, gender fluidity, Black Lives Matter, “check your privilege,” and #TheFutureIsFemale-- and the task of grappling with the world has to be more complicated for kids than it’s ever been. The cover story, About A Boy, will give you a small peek into that confused world.
There is so much more, far too much to attempt as even these updates will soon need updates. From graphene to recycling, meat to Mars, melting glaciers to melting hopes, it may all come a bit too late. So I'll end on just that, partially because it seems that I am always a tad late to events or dinner parties or airports (perhaps in rebellion to always having to be "on time" to work). Said Andrew O"Hagan in the London Review of Books: Some people make an art out of being late: it’s said to be fashionable, but it isn’t...The person who is late and the person who is early have one thing in common: they are equally unlike the person who is just on time. This person is in a category of her own, a punitive Goldilocks, who wants everything just right. She values her time, as they say, and feels the second hand perpetually reproving. Maybe it doesn’t pay to get too wound up about ‘your’ time. Time doesn’t belong to you. And perhaps letting other people fuss over it can set you free. The early bird can be a nobody, getting lost in preparations. (It’s nice to know where the exits are.) But maybe the only free person is the one you see dashing in late and dropping her papers, harassed in her head but freer in the world. Her clock’s her own. She implies from the start that we’re all out of control and maybe that’s more honest. In the old days, young people made plans before leaving the house, largely to avoid the poor business of wandering the streets without a clue. We had regular haunts, which made things easier, but, as I remember it, we pretty much kept to whatever plans had been made because in transit you would be out of touch. Today’s young phone-user finds it normal to enter into a daily festival of editing and circumnavigating what has been mooted -- he detests firm plans, even firm suggestions-- because texting allows him to do it all on the hoof. Being mobile, and having one, means he is in step with his desires, so why would he choose to be enslaved to a thing that seemed desirable yesterday or ten minutes ago? Perhaps timekeeping is now for the birds (or for old birds).
As with those closing in on being bumped out of the Z category, I too am beginning to wonder where one fits and perhaps what --if anything-- comes after. Is it saying something that I can relate (and chuckle) at the term "old birds?" Hey, it's not so bad from my viewpoint, perhaps glad to have made it this far...after all, I just might need a bit of updating.
*To all of you devoted to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), the Brexit chaos has led to the possibility that the worldwide broadcasting operation may be moving out of England and on to more European shores, as in Brussels. Hmmm...
Comments
Post a Comment
What do YOU think? Good, bad or indifferent, this blog is happy to hear your thoughts...criticisms, corrections and suggestions always welcome.