1043 replies to this topic

[eacao]

 

 

I've long believed that some sort of national IQ test is required to participate in elections.

But if we did that then right-wing parties would win every single election worldwide!

 

 

https://www.dailymai...ple-racist.html

 

 

"... That would enable us to come to some understanding of the temperamental proclivity towards those political attitudes, if any. We knew already that political conservatives tended to be low in trait openness (that's the creativity dimension) and high in trait conscientiousness; whereas political liberals tended to be high in trait openness and low in conscientiousness. And so one of the things that's extraordinarily interesting to know from the Big 5 perspective is that your political proclivities are very powerfully influenced by your temperament. And so one of the things you can think about with regard to the ongoing political discussions in the real world is that those discussions are actually attempts by people of different temperaments (1) trying to impose their temperament and viewpoints on the world, and (2) to engage in a dialogue with people who are actually quite different from they are."

 

https://youtu.be/pCceO_D4AlY?t=2349

[caltrek]

US Teen Birth Rate Declines to Lowest Level on Record

 

https://www.courthou...evel-on-record/

 

Introduction:

 

(Courthouse News) – The teen birth rate in the United States dipped to 18 births per 1,000, the lowest since statistics started being kept, the Pew Research Center said Friday.

 

The news comes months after demographers reported 2018 birth rates nationwide reached record lows for women in their teens and 20s, resulting in the fewest babies born in nearly 30 years.

 

The 2018 birth rate among 15- to 19-year-old girls and women was less than half the rate of 41.5 births per 1,000 in 2008, according to Pew’s analysis of National Center for Health Statistics data.

 

While all racial and ethnic groups saw declines in teen birth rates, birth rates in 2018 for Asian and Pacific Islander teens declined by 74% from 2008 levels. For Hispanics, the teen birth rate declined by 65% over the past decade and for white and black teens the rate fell by 53% and 60%, respectively.

 

However, the birth rates for Hispanic and black teens was almost double the rate of white teens and more than five times the rate of Asian and Pacific Islander teens.

Teen birth rates involve only live births. The teen pregnancy rate – which includes miscarriages, stillbirths and abortions – stood at 43.4 pregnancies per 1,000 in 2013, down from 117.6 per 1,000 in 1990.

[wjfox]

Will the 4-Day Workweek Take Hold in Europe?

 

AUGUST 05, 2019

 

Work four days a week, but get paid for five? It sounds too good to be true, but this debate is front and center within numerous European economies, not only because of a culture shift towards accommodating flexible working but because some evidence now suggests it’s good for business. Many organizations in Europe are cutting workweeks, but not wages, from 36 (five days) to 28 hours (four days), to reduce burnout, and make workers happier, more productive, and more committed to their employers.

 

https://hbr.org/2019...-hold-in-europe

[Singularity Kills]

 

Will the 4-Day Workweek Take Hold in Europe?

 

AUGUST 05, 2019

 

Work four days a week, but get paid for five? It sounds too good to be true, but this debate is front and center within numerous European economies, not only because of a culture shift towards accommodating flexible working but because some evidence now suggests it’s good for business. Many organizations in Europe are cutting workweeks, but not wages, from 36 (five days) to 28 hours (four days), to reduce burnout, and make workers happier, more productive, and more committed to their employers.

 

https://hbr.org/2019...-hold-in-europe

 

The UK would be the last nation to adopt this. Kicking and screaming is the phrase.

[wjfox]

[PhoenixRu]

 

Will the 4-Day Workweek Take Hold in Europe?

 

Yes, even "In Soviet Russia..." Proposed by premier Medvedev and actively discussed by experts. Though I'm fully agree with idea by itself, the official justification (excess of labour) sounds a bit shizophrenic after the official justification of recent pension reform (lack of labour).

[caltrek]

More women and children survive today than ever before – UN report

 

https://www.who.int/...efore-un-report

 

Introduction:

 

(World Health Organization) More women and their children are surviving today than ever before, according to new child and maternal mortality estimates released today by United Nations groups* led by UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO).

 

Since 2000, child deaths have reduced by nearly half and maternal deaths by over one-third, mostly due to improved access to affordable, quality health services.

“In countries that provide everyone with safe, affordable, high-quality health services, women and babies survive and thrive,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO. “This is the power of universal health coverage.”  

 

Still, the new estimates reveal that 6.2 million children under 15 years died in 2018, and over 290 000 women died due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth in 2017. Of the total child deaths, 5.3 million occurred in the first 5 years, with almost half of these in the first month of life.

 

Women and newborns are most vulnerable during and immediately after childbirth. An estimated 2.8 million pregnant women and newborns die every year, or 1 every 11 seconds, mostly of preventable causes, the new estimates say.

A mother and her new born baby at Karenga Health Center IV.

[Jessica]

Income Inequality Grows To Its Highest Level In 50 Years

Source: Associated Press

The gap between the haves and have-nots in the United States grew last year to its highest level in more than 50 years of tracking income inequality, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released Thursday.

Income inequality in the United States expanded from 2017 to 2018, with several heartland states among the leaders of the increase, even though several wealthy coastal states still had the most inequality overall, according to the figures.

The nation's Gini Index, which measures income inequality, has been rising steadily over the past five decades. The Gini Index grew from 0.482 in 2017 to 0.485 last year, according to the bureau's one-year American Community Survey data. The Gini Index is on a scale of 0 to 1; a score of "0'' indicates perfect equality, while a score of 1 indicates perfect inequality, where one household has all the income.

The increase in income inequality comes as two Democratic presidential candidates, U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are pitching a wealth tax on the nation's richest citizens as a way to reduce wealth disparities. -MORE...

 

Read more: https://www.msn.com/...cid=HPCOMMDHP15

[wjfox]

250 million children worldwide forecast to be obese by 2030

 

Wed 2 Oct 2019 19.00 BST

 

Childhood obesity is rising exponentially worldwide as the relentless marketing of junk foods reaches around the globe and governments do too little to protect their children’s health, according to data shared with the Guardian.

The number of obese children globally is predicted to reach 250 million by 2030, up from 150 million now. Only one in 10 countries have even a 50% chance of meeting the World Health Organization target of no rise in child obesity from 2010 to 2025.

The chances of 156 of the 191 countries studied achieving the target are less than 10%, according to the World Obesity Federation, which has compiled the data in the first Childhood Obesity Atlas.

 

Children who are obese often become adults with obesity, and are likely to develop serious health problems that will shorten their lives, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

 

“The continuing increase in childhood obesity will overwhelm the health services of many countries. The increase shows a critical failure of government to respect and protect our children’s rights to good health,” said Donna Ryan, president of the federation, and Johanna Ralston, its chief executive, in a call to action in the Atlas.

 

https://www.theguard...e-obese-by-2030

 

 

[funkervogt]

Japan's fertility crisis even worse than before as births fall sharply

 

Japan's fertility crisis is worsening, with data from the first seven months of this year showing the sharpest drop in births in 30 years, according to preliminary government data.

 

Births fell 5.9% from January to July year on year, as the pool of women of childbearing age shrinks and more women delay having children or decide not to have them at all, figures from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare show.

 

During this period, the total number of births was 518,590. For the whole of 2018, the official tally of births was 918,397, a figure which however excludes babies born to foreigners in Japan and Japanese babies born abroad.

 

The decline in births is "happening faster than official projections had envisioned," said Yasushi Mineshima, a spokesman for the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

 

Japan's birth rate has been falling since the late 1970s. In 2005, it reached a record low of 1.26, but then seemed to be on a path of recovery until it started to fall again in 2016, according to government figures. By 2018, it was at 1.42.

 

To maintain a stable population, countries need a fertility rate of 2.1. Last year, it was 1.72 in the United States but only 0.98 -- or less than one baby per woman -- in South Korea, where fertility rates have fallen to their lowest level since records began.

 

https://www.cnn.com/...scli/index.html

[Kabul_3379]

Hours and days worked through out history

 

https://www.msn.com/...BBnb7Kz#image=1

 

 

***Summary***

 

ranges from about 3-6 hours a day for 130 days/year for stone age / present day bushman

to

16 hours a day, 311 days a year for  a mid 19th century English factory worker.

 

Interesting that an imperial roman artesian only worked 6 hours a day 6am-12pm for only 185 days out of the year.

 

 

 

 

[Jessica]

Cigarette smoking falls to record low in the United States

Source: CNN

(CNN)Cigarette smoking among US adults fell to its lowest recorded level in 2018: 13.7%, according to a report published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That represents a drop of roughly two-thirds since the CDC started collecting this data in 1965.

hievement of a consistent and coordinated effort by the public health community and our many partners," the agency's director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, said in a statement Thursday. "Yet, our work is far from over."

The report estimated that 49.1 million US adults, or nearly 1 in 5, used any tobacco product in 2018. Cigarettes were the most common at 13.7%, followed by cigars, cigarillos and little filtered cigars, which were used by 3.9% of adults.

 

<more>

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/...tudy/index.html

[caltrek]

Vox  has the following story on positive demographic and other trends. Many of these trends have been reported on earlier in this thread, but this is a nice recap of some of the more positive trends. Click the provided link for interesting charts on these trends

 

Nine Trends To Be Thankful For

 

https://www.vox.com/...eracy-good-news

 

 

 

1. Extreme poverty has fallen worldwide
2. Life expectancy is up worldwide
3. Teen births in the US are down
4. Smoking in the U.S. is down
5. Homicide rates are down across select Western European countries
6. Homicide rates are down in the U.S. from 1980
7. More people in the world live in democracy now*
8. More people are going to school for longer
9. Solar energy is getting cheaper

 

* Some scholars have expressed concern that we’re entering a “democratic recession”; Freedom House, a pro-Western democracy promotion group, argues, “Democracy is under assault and in retreat around the globe.”

[Jessica]

Census bureau: 80% of the population live in the 3% of the land that is urban.

 

Less than 20% of the population lives in the 97% of the land that is rural.

Yet we're constantly being told that not enough attention is being paid to the citizens in rural areas.

https://www.census.g...- Opens as PDF.

About 60 million people, or one in five Americans, live in rural America.

The term “rural” means different things to different people. For many, it evokes images of farmlands and pastoral landscapes. For our purposes, we define rural based on the official Census Bureau classification. What is urban and what is rural is defined after each decennial census using specific criteria related to population thresholds, density, distance and land use.

In general, rural areas are sparsely populated, have low housing density, and are far from urban centers. Urban areas make up only 3 percent of the entire land area of the country but are home to more than 80 percent of the population. Conversely, 97 percent of the country’s land mass is rural but only 19.3 percent of the population lives there.
SNIP


HOW RURAL AND URBAN ARE DEFINED:

 

https://www.census.g...cs/acsgeo-1.pdf

[Jessica]

Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back

Millennials have earned a reputation for reshaping industries and institutions — shaking up the workplace, transforming dating culture, and rethinking parenthood. They’ve also had a dramatic impact on American religious life. Four in ten millennials now say they are religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center. In fact, millennials (those between the ages of 23 and 38) are now almost as likely to say they have no religion as they are to identify as Christian.

For a long time, though, it wasn’t clear whether this youthful defection from religion would be temporary or permanent. It seemed possible that as millennials grew older, at least some would return to a more traditional religious life. But there’s mounting evidence that today’s younger generations may be leaving religion for good.

Social science research has long suggested that Americans’ relationship with religion has a tidal quality — people who were raised religious find themselves drifting away as young adults, only to be drawn back in when they find spouses and begin to raise their own families. Some argued that young adults just hadn’t yet been pulled back into the fold of organized religion, especially since they were hitting major milestones like marriage and parenthood later on.

But now many millennials have spouses, children and mortgages — and there’s little evidence of a corresponding surge in religious interest. A new national survey from the American Enterprise Institute of more than 2,500 Americans found a few reasons why millennials may not return to the religious fold. (One of the authors of this article helped conduct the survey.)

 

https://fivethirtyei...ot-coming-back/

[Jessica]

World's Population To Hit 7.75 Billion In 2019

Source: DW

The alarming increase is the estimate from a German foundation that monitors populations. It also suggests the 8 billion mark will be reached in the year 2023. By the end of this year there will be some 7.75 billion people living on planet earth, according to Germany's Foundation for World Population (DSW).

The estimate gauges that the world's population will have increased by 83 million since January 1 2019, which equates to roughly the number of inhabitants in Germany. The globe's population is increasing at the rate of 156 every minute and DSW predict the 8 billion mark will be surpassed within four years.

African population to double by 2050. The foundation also predicts that Africa's population will double over the next 20 years. An African mother bears 4.4 children on average compared to the global average of 2.4. The UN's "World Population Prospects" report released in June this year predicted that the world's population would grow to 9.7 billion by 2050.

The same report also predicted that by the same year, more than half the world's population would be concentrated in India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States. In addition, India is expected to overtake China as the world's most populous country by 2027...(Watch Video).

 

Read more: https://www.dw.com/e...2019/a-51758905

[funkervogt]

 

Having children outside of wedlock is also extremely rare: just 2.3% of children were born outside of marriage in Japan, compared to about 40% in the United States. Marriage rates in Japan have halved since the early 1970s, and birth rates have declined in tandem.

 

At the other end of the life cycle, the numbers were also notable. Japan had its highest numbers of deaths this year since the end of World War II: nearly 1.4 million.

 

That means that in 2019, the country's natural population declined by more than 500,000 people — also a first, according to Asahi. The country's population is aging, and it now has the world's highest proportion of people over the age of 65.

https://www.npr.org/...umber-on-record

[Jessica]

US Has Slowest Population Growth Rate In A Century As Births Decline

Source: The Guardian

Increasing deaths and the slowdown of migration also contributed to slowest growth rate since first world war. The past year’s population growth rate in the United States was the slowest in a century due to declining births, increasing deaths and the slowdown of international migration, according to figures released Monday by the US Census Bureau.

The US grew from 2018 to 2019 by almost a half per cent, or about 1.5 million people, with the population standing at 328 million this year, according to population estimates. That’s the slowest growth rate in the US since 1917 to 1918, when the nation was involved in the first world war, said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

For the first time in decades, natural increase – the number of births minus the number of deaths – was less than 1 million in the US due to an aging population of Baby Boomers, whose oldest members entered their 70s within the past several years. As the large Boomer population continues to age, this trend is going to continue.

Some of these things are locked into place. With the aging of the population, as the Baby Boomers move into their 70s and 80s, there are going to be higher numbers of deaths,” Frey said. “That means proportionately fewer women of child bearing age, so even if they have children, it’s still going to be less. Four states had a natural decrease, where deaths outnumbered births: West Virginia, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. For the first time this decade, Puerto Rico had a population increase...

 

Read more: https://www.theguard...wth-census-2020

[Yuli Ban]

What It Feels Like to Be the ‘Impending Doom’ Generation
Iran News Hits Gen Z Hard

Generation Z is all too familiar with fear. 
 
We have grown up in a world where most American students worry about school shootings. A world where mental illness is on the rise and a majority of my peers report mental health problems. A world where climate change is always looming—a ticking clock that seems far too quiet. 
 
And now, a world where war with Iran is not a distant prospect. 
 
The memes popped up instantly. World War III. The draft. In theory, the memes were humorous, but suddenly, every teenager and young adult with social media was being bombarded with scenarios of worldwide violence and death. My conversations with classmates were consumed with the Iran conflict. It was no longer a joke. Gen Z was getting its first taste of war.

[caltrek]

A world where mental illness is on the rise and a majority of my peers report mental health problems

 

One wonders why this might be.  One possibility that occurs to me is a  greater willingness to report upon mental illness problems.  Less of a stigma in doing so than in the past.

 

Another possibility relates to a theme of mine lately.  The importance of the human touch.  Do young people spend too much time on "social media" and in using cell phones to talk with each other as opposed to more face to face contact? If yes, how does that impact upon their mental health?

 

I think there have been studies showing that apes handled by humans or their fellow apes were much less prone to anxiety and fear than apes deprived of such contact.  Could this push to do everything by computer and robot have unintended mental health consequences? Such as atrophied coping skills in dealing with stressful news?

 

Just asking.