Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
And with due respect to your friends and their swabbuckling adventures, they possibly weren’t quite ready either.
Can you ever be ready for an STD? It's just one of the risks of sex, highly mitigable by taking precautions, and mostly treatable even if you don't. Nothing about that changes just by virtue of your age. In none of the cases with friends did they actually have an STD. They were just being cautious. Yes, children, being cautious. I'm not talking about underage people here, btw. 17 year olds.
-
What the West is achieving is endless asset growth
If by asset growth one means "the asset actually improves in some way" then it's a good. If we just mean "the asset's price went up" then we're talking about inflation which is not clearly either a good or a bad. So long as everything else is inflating at the same rate, it's not bad or good. But if it's inflating relative to other goods, then it's good for owners and bad for non-owners, particularly if that good is something necessary, like a roof over our heads. And the more it goes on, the badder it gets. The same comment goes for deflation.
Which suggests that an easy solution to it is to simply match the inflation by inflating other things. Property prices don't need to deflate, so long as incomes inflate faster. That could be achieved by putting a limit on the property inflation and pushing up incomes.
-
Legal Beagle: D-Day for Dunne (updated), in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I reckon we should have a fixed allowance for all MPs of something like $200k to cover all personal and parliamentary expenses, with it left to the MP and their party (or their cat) as to how they apportion and spend that. (But they would have to produce accounts for the benefit of their electors).
I think it should be pegged to the median wage, so as to give them an incentive to raise that.
-
It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
Says what I was trying to say a whole lot better.
-
Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to BenWilson,
In the book named after this essay he also has some interesting views on architecture, too, how much it can influence the ability to create "cognitive surplus". Just to be a little bit more on topic.
-
Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Sacha,
Yes. Clay Shirky’s 13-minute TED Talk about cognitive surplus is worth a watch.
Cognitive surplus! Nice phrase. In Praise of Idleness here by Bertrand Russell is something I read long ago on the same topic. It's interesting to see views on this topic prior to WW2, when Godwinning was not even possible.
-
Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to "chris",
Thanks Ben, I’m sensing you may be a Brave New World fan
It's a good book. A good think about what the psychology of a well-ordered scientific society could look like. I'm more of a fan of The Dispossessed though, and other works of LeGuin.
I have heard those swabs are really painful. Are they still necessary? I'm not all broken up about the night club experience at 14, it's just one of a great many missed opportunities. All I can say is that if I'd had to be checked for Chlamydia at all I'd have seen it as a pretty minor fuss for the enormous good that I feel a bit of sex would have been. It happened to a few friends of mine, and yet the tale of woe of having to go to a clinic to have a sadistic nurse shove a cotton swab down one's penis was all part of being a more mature kid. I was jealous about every aspect of those stories, from the experience itself to the joy of the shagging that had caused it.
Sorry to harp on about this aspect. I have very little against lowering the age of sexual consent if young parents are accorded the same rights 16 year olds currently have
Yes, that's another aspect of the social unreadiness I'm referring to. In this I feel society has regressed quite a lot. The main "right" that young people lack is that of a reasonable income, something that is vital in raising children. We have a real problem with that now. Indeed being denied a decent income retards every kind of social development, as I see it.
-
Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to "chris",
Actually what set me off was Ben’s 7 year old learning to swim
I'm certainly not suggesting that 7 year olds should be having sex. Just that the beginnings of their training in something very dangerous can begin very young. I'm challenging the notion that people are better off being completely protected from dangerous things when they are young. How that exactly translates into the age of consent debate isn't something I've got a clear plan for. It just seems worth noting.
Another sporting analogy is that kids who play rugby are far more likely to become great rugby players than people who take it up later. But you have to put them into size/strength appropriate competition. 10 year olds won't get much out of playing against 15 year olds, other than smashed. If a 10 year old is the size of the 15 year old rugby players, though, with comparable strength, etc, then they might well be worth putting forward several years - indeed for the good of the other 10 year olds too, who would be royally sick of getting smashed by a giant. As I recall (I never played rugby so I'm not too sure), the main sorting procedure was on weight with kids. But of course by the time they're adults there's no weight limits. Adults sort themselves into appropriate groups. I'm loosely analogizing weight to "maturity" here for the underage sex connection. Both physical and mental (which is similar in rugby - if you're big and strong but totally unskilled you won't be pushed up so many grades).
-
To be crystal clear what I’m saying here, I think it would be a wonderful thing if the average age of childbearing were to return closer to where it is most biologically suitable. I’ve seen far too much of the outcome of leaving it off until the 30s, practically my whole generation have done it that way. It’s great that it’s possible, but not great that it’s become almost an economic necessity. With better levels of support for young parents, it need not be an onerous, life-limiting burden at all. Beyond the last few months of pregnancy and the first few months after the birth, women should be able to lead lives that are much the same*, rather than becoming instant pariahs if they are too young, and forced to give up everything they ever wanted to do to look after a child. If that was how things were, we might have a very different view of how terrible a thing it is for younger people to be risking pregnancy.
*ETA: Men too. Being a 14 year old father should not mean that one should be leaving school to provide for the family. I only forgot to mention it because in that situation, men are so often able to dodge the responsibility. Which is another reason it's a bad social construct, that practically puts most of the burden on women.
-
Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to "chris",
OK, I’ve stopped responding now. not to the thread, just to that reply. And I’m not having a go Emma, I’m attempting to make a genuine contribution
On this issue I don't have views set in stone, so I like your contribution, it furthers the debate. Yes, flirting with the idea of discarding the "age of consent", although not really in exactly that way - I actually said "legal sex" to avoid the consent concept at all. We could still have an "age of consent" but the possibility of a lower age for first period in which sex is legally possible. In fact, we do have that already as has come up earlier in the debate. But the conditions under which it's possible could be made clearer.
And I believe my point there was that, without question, there are certainly many who regard birth as less serious than death, I guess on that issue I’m something of fundamentalist.
Well I think birth is actually mostly a good thing, on the whole, and untimely death a bad thing. Childbearing from a very young age can be very physically dangerous. The same goes at the other end of the fertility range, and most of the danger is on the child, far, far higher chances of being a less healthy baby. But beyond that, the negative outcomes of young people having children are mostly a social construct, the idea that the child is the responsibility of the parent is not a necessarily correct one. I'd say they have some responsibility, but currently one's parentage is like 95% of the determination of how a child will turn out, with social class perpetuating in families because society virtually stipulates that it must be that way.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 344 345 346 347 348 … 1066 Older→ First