From The Economist: "In 2008 37% of government workers were unionised, nearly five times the share in the private sector (see chart), and the same share that was unionised 25 years earlier. Over that period, the share of unionised private-sector jobs collapsed from 17% to 8%...As a result, public-sector workers are spoiled rotten."
William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting question: We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all...Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming?" The answer is lengthy, but worth reading, if only to open your mind that what we view as "friendship" is fairly modern invention.
From Reuters Japan: A government study researching teen pregnancy says that "Teens who skip breakfast as middle school students tend to have sex at an earlier age than those who start the day with a proper meal."
And Dave Barry's take on 2009 is hysterical, as usual. Love that man.
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