Mutually Exclusive Concepts (Ranty Questions)

[MorelCabin]

I don't believe Welfare should be abolished altogether, but I do believe it needs a huge reform to ensure that the right people are getting the help. From what I see, that is not what is happening at all. Paying more taxes is NOT going to solve anything. I am all for helping those that really need it, but I am not impressed with the whole culture that has been created since welfare came into being
As for kids, all you have to do is sit in on a kindergarten class for a few weeks to see that our kids are being taught "all success, no failure" It is sad. Yes as parents we can teach them many things in the little time we have them, but the schools have them for many more hours a week than we do.

 

[Quail_Antwerp]

I wanted to pop in here and say I'm sorry for my outburst on the welfare comments, and I hope I didn't offend anyone.

edited because I thought better of it.

btw, I do vote.

 

[patandchickens]

I apologize for the digression, but:

for anyone who may have been as spooked as I was by the reference to the Quantcast.com demographic data concerning this site (including yearly income numbers)...

I did some digging on their site, which was quite the challenge for someone on dialup lemme tell ya , and it would appear that the numbers they give are largely pulled out of their butt. If I am understanding correctly, they use algorithms that involve quite a bit of imagination and wild guessing and far-reaching extrapolation to come up with "an estimate" -- not, it would seem, one likely to be particularly accurate -- of a site's user demographics based on what other sites the users are also visiting. They have developed correlations (who knows how good the correlations are, I would personally bet on only modest reliability at best) between what sites a person visits and what their race/gender/income/etc/etc are likely to be.

Actually a coupla things about their percentage numbers make me suspect that they may be basing things on *#visits* or *logged in time* rather than on #unique users, causing the data (if it can be called data, with so vast an amount of guesswork involved) to be distinctly skewed by a few people who spend a substantial amount of time here.

So I believe they are doing sort of a sophisticated version of "gee, that person was just shopping on Rodeo Drive, they must make a lot of money! Whereas that was was lookin' up articles on the Dollar Stretcher site, bet they're not so well off!" Given the vast amount of extrapolation going on there, over logical distances of interstellar proportion, I would not take any of their estimates very seriously at ALL. And it does not appear that we have to worry that there is publicly available information as to SufficientSelf.com members' actual real incomes or anything else like that.

Sorry for the interruption, I just was really freaked out by reading that and would suspect I'm not the only one. We now return you to your regularly scheduled ranty questions (which is a great phrase btw Wifezilla )

Pat

 

[me&thegals]

I am not trying to say people on welfare don't vote. VT-chicklit was saying that welfare remains because politicians don't want to lose the votes of people on it. I think such a minority of the population is on welfare that I would be very suspicious of that being the reason for it remaining. In addition to very few people being on welfare, only about 50% of people vote in any given election, so take out probably another 50%. Then, I'm guessing that the very nature of poverty would make it difficult (no car?) for many welfare recipients to make it to a poll.

Maybe I'm just arguing here, but I really doubt welfare stands because politicians can't afford to lose those votes. I think it stands because in America we really believe in helping people who need help. Politicians would lose lots of average American votes if they ditched welfare.

I'm reading Dr. Pausch's "Last Lecture" book. He talks about kids having a sense of rights but not a sense of responsibility. There are many ways to look at that, I guess. You could look at it from a self-responsibility perspective, but you could also look at it from a community responsibility perspective. We have all the rights of citizenship, but what about our responsibilities to each other and the fabric of society?

 

[Quail_Antwerp]

I am not trying to say people on welfare don't vote.

I hope you didn't think I was saying that's what you said, I was just honestly don't know. Not my best morning, and I just skimmed through the posts.

I just need to excuse myself from this and all other political conversations, because this is not my best morning.

 

[me&thegals]

Thanks, Pat--Yes, that was freaky! Of course, this online life of ours is not as private as we might like to think it is. I try to remind myself from time to time that everything I have ever typed is now a public record.

 

[reinbeau]

I do believe that every generation says that about the following generation.

There has never been a generation until now that were raised with the thought that there were no failures in life. Learning how to deal with failure doesn't happen now, because it might hurt their self esteem. MorelCabin is right, I don't know about prisons being full, but there are going to be a whole bunch of 'adults' who can't deal with real life as a result of the self esteem movement.

Maybe we could have less generalization.

I thought I had made that clear earlier."Our perceptions are very much colored by our environments'. I explained where I lived and how the educational system worked around here. It's not a generalization, it's an observation.

My kids deal with failure all the time. I let them know when they've done well and I let them know when they haven't. So does their school. So do their grandparents. So do their friends.

I know my kids don't represent America, but each generation has different parenting styles and so far America has not completely disintegrated. In fact, those ruling our part of the world these days came through the 70s (whether as parents or children) intact, so....

No, your kids don't represent America, but they represent what you perceive, in your environment. There are generalizations, and then there are observations.

Little league nonfailures are even covered in the editorials in newspapers now. Schools that don't give out failing grades are common around here. I live in the liberal land of Massachusetts where, trust me, there are a bunch of clueless children who will be whacked in the face with reality once they're not at home, coddled by their parents, or at school, coddled by the educational system. It's not their fault, it's the system, it's their parents, trying to protect them and build their self esteem. It's a wrongheaded movement.

People fail. They need to know how to do it well, and recover from the failure. That is my point, and it isn't being taught very well, at least in this area.

BigDaddy lives in an entirely different area and environment, and hadn't been exposed to these excesses. That's what I was addressing. YMMV.

 

[patandchickens]

There is reasonable evidence to support what me&thegirls suggests, that very low income voters (dunno about 'on welfare' specifically, tho) tend to be less apt to vote, at least in part because of greater challenges to be navigated in accessing polling places.

See http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p82433_index.html and http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p279928_index.html (full text available by clicking on the link in those pages) for examples of studies suggesting this.

However, the actual issue is far more complicated. Poorer voters are more apt to vote Democratic (and of course the Dems support more extensive welfare type programs) but it is not clear whether that is ONLY out of self interest or whether they simply tend to agree more with those sorts of ideas.

Further, and this is the real complication, BECAUSE only about a third of the poorest income quintile votes in a typical election, there is much more ROOM for politicians to potentially gain votes there and that may encourage extra focus on appealing to those with low income. That is to say, the upper income quintiles (def.: if you rank the whole population by income and then whack 'em into five equal groups, each group is one quintile) are more "already committed", you know? Influencing even just, say, 2% of the historical no-shows to vote in the current election does you more good in a population with lotsa no-shows (the poor) than one with relatively few (the rich). So I could see where even just this alone would be incentive for politicians to extra want to appeal to the low income sector.

It is all very complicated and frankly I find it more useful to worry more about what I, Myself, This Day and Hour am doing with my life than to try to contemplate national demographics and the strategic manipulation of millions

Pat

 

[reinbeau]

Do a dogpile search engine search for Sufficientself.com. Look at the stats. The majority here are college educated women between the age of 35 and 50+. According to the stats 32% of us are in households that make between 30K-60K annually. And 36% of us are in households of 100K+. 20% are in households at 30K or less. Now I don't know how they got this info - however I think it clearly shows we will all have very different views simply based on our demographic diversity. Or it could just be that we are women and stating our opinons is what we do best.

I see nothing here to think the statistics are misleading, they're just generalizations, after all - I don't fit in much of anywhere up there, other than being female, but I'm on the + side of 50, household income around $48k last year (try living well around here on that), but no college, all I learn I learn on my own, and up until this recession, have done pretty well by it. The conclusions drawn by 2dream are hardly anything to argue about, we are from different walks of life, have different experiences, so of course our opinions are going to vary widely.

 

[me&thegals]

Regarding your last sentence, Pat, me too. But we can probably be assured that there are 100s if not 1000s of people out there employed to do just that. Every once in a while I get a shiver up my spine when I think of how strategized politics are.