Category: Current Affairs

The New York Times Magazine has an outstanding article on American kids with HIV.  Most of them are teenagers now and confronting all the issues that teenagers usually struggle with.  Because the first babies with HIV didn’t live long, this is the first generation to make it to adolescence with HIV.  And, at least in the US, they will most likely be the last, since we can now prevent HIV mothers from transmitting the virus to their children.

The stories of these children and their families are amazing.  Imagine growing up, taking medicine several times a day, and never being told why.  Imagine having a disease that you aren’t supposed to talk to anybody about because if you did people won’t want to hold your hand or invite you to a party or sit next to you in school.  But other than getting sick a lot, you are a kid like everybody else.  You might grow up fast.

I highly recommend taking the time to read the article.  It’s worth it.

Their Unexpected Adolescence – New York Times.

The city of Chicago is trying to curb prostitution by posting the pictures of men arrested for soliciting prostitutes.

Chicago Police Department – CLEARpath – www.chicagopolice.org.

How well it works is going to depend on what type of man usually visits a prostitute.  I would think factors that would make a difference are:

• Do they have wives and children?
• Do their friends think visiting a prostitute is ok, cool, terrible, brave, fun, …
• Do they tell their family and friends that they visit prostitutes?  Don’t assume they don’t!
• Would it affect their employment at all?
• Do their friends, family, and employers have easy internet access?
• Do they have easy internet access?

The ice is melting in Alaska and some towns are in danger of being swallowed by the sea.  In this article, they talk about relocating Kivalina, a little town that we lived in for a year, Vanishing Alaska.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looked at relocating Kivalina, a nearby village of 380 people, the price tag was $100 million to $400 million — roughly $1 million for each resident.

(If that’s really the price, I’m thinking they should just build a new town for a fraction of a $1 million/person and give people a chunk of the money to help them relocate.) The New York Times Travel section had a good article about global warming is affecting Alaska’s tourism, The Race to Alaska Before It Melts. Good in the short run as people worry they’ll miss the great sights of Alaska – the glaciers are melting.

According to Paul Brown’s  What’s Offline column in the New York Times, people go through three stages in retirement:

1. The traditional things people plan for in retirement – travel, new hobbies, gifts to family.
2. After that, they settle back into the life that made them comfortable before they retired.
3. In the final phase they tend to have increased health problems.

So he contends that you should do financial planning with those three phases in mind.

There is an article in the Daily News about how Nerds make better lovers.  While the article itself is some what interesting (there’s a website where you can find geeks who are looking for mates), the more interesting page was the conversation that nerds themselves had.  Check out the conversation on Slashdot | Nerds Make Better Lovers.  They accurately point out that Tiger Woods isn’t exactly your typical geek, the article doesn’t mention female geeks and share their own experiences and sense of humor.

Mat Miller in this New York Times Op-Ed column advocates for restructuring jobs to allow more work/life balance.  Jobs should be more flexible in order to allow people room and time to realize their passions both inside and outside of work.  I really liked his reference to weekends and minimum wage:

Skeptics should recall that everyone once "knew" that a weekend or a minimum wage would spell economic ruin, too.

We’ve made big changes in our work life over the past century, hopefully we can continue the trend.  Too many jobs require too much travel, too many weekends and too many evenings.

I’d be happy living off half of my salary, but work wouldn’t be happy with me doing half of my job.  I would no longer be on an upward career path.

The New York Times has a very cool graphic, How Class Works – New York Times, that displays the results of a data they gathered on social class.  Their theory is that class is composed of four factors, occupation, education, income and wealth.  Your social status is a combination of all four.  On this web page, you can select your stats and see how you fit and you can play around and see how changing different factors could change your status.

One of the reasons this was interesting to me is that I currently manage a team of software developers, 65-73rd percentile (depends on whether you think programmers are information technologists or engineers).  However, I’m going to massage school (for fun) and everyone keeps telling me not to quit my day job.  Now I know why they might be saying that.  Massage therapists are in the 16th percentile as far as occupational prestige goes.  That’s regardless of what they make or how much education they have.  Occupation is one of the four cards that affect your class according to this model.

Playing around further in the "How Class Breaks Down" tab, you can see that people in the "Computer, Math" field are almost exclusively in the top two fifths of income and almost all have at least some college.  Pick "Health Support" (which is where massage therapy fits in) and you can watch the graph flip.  Very few are in the top two fifths of income and very, very few have a college degree.  (Although quite a few have some college which is probably massage school.)

The graph also shows data on income mobility and lots of other interesting data.  It’s worth playing around with.

Wow!  Did you know that in seven states it’s illegal to live with a person of the opposite gender if you aren’t married to them?  I think that just goes to show how much our society is changing … I had a male roommate one summer in college.  It was no different to me than having a female roommate and I would have been quite upset if the government interfered in my private business.

Yahoo! News – Woman Sues Over N.C. Anti-Cohabitation Law.

I saw a quote in the New York Times today that I like.

Herbert Hoover who said: "You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too damn greedy."