Good news statistic

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The number of babies born to teenagers in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level in almost 70 years. 25,977 women aged under 20 had babies in 2014 – the fewest since 1946. (ONS/The Guardian)

On the other hand:

British parents are having more children than at any time since the 1970s. In 2013, 9.5% of babies born in the UK had three or more siblings – up from 5.3% in 2009. The EU average is 5.6%, falling to 3.1% in Italy and 2.6% in Spain. The rapid increase in Britain is thought to be due to the trend for wealthy parents to have larger families, and to rising levels of immigration, immigrant families tending to be larger). (Eurostat/The Times)

Is it just me, but, given the state of the world, what is the thought process young people go through when they decide to have three or more children? What are they letting the kids in for? Or am I being an old misanthrope? (Mind you, my own parents had me 6 months before the outbreak of World War II, and they, and I, survived).

Illegal plunder: moving towards a police State

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America’s civil asset forfeiture laws, another product of law enforcement’s failed war on drugs, originally  designed to deprive suspected drug dealers of the spoils of their illicit trade — houses, cars, boats — now regularly deprive people unconnected to the war on drugs of their property, without due process of law and in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. In such cases property owners have no right to an attorney to defend themselves, which means that they must either pay for a lawyer or contest the seizure themselves in court. The local government holds all the cards, has a financial incentive to play them to the hilt, and, not surprisingly, corruption follows.

Civil asset forfeiture has mutated into what’s now called “for-profit policing”, where citizens who are suspected of driving drunk or soliciting prostitutes are arrested. Sometimes they have cash taken from them on suspicion of low-level drug dealing; in others Federal and state law enforcement keep property seized or sell it and retain a portion of the revenue generated. Some of this, in turn, can be re-purposed and distributed as bonuses in police and other law enforcement departments. 

The ACLU of Pennsylvania issued a report, Guilty Property, documenting how the Philadelphia Police Department and district attorney’s office abused state civil asset forfeiture by taking at least $1 million from innocent people within the city limits. Approximately 70% of the time, those people were black, even though the city’s population is almost evenly divided between whites and African-Americans.(Tomgram)

In parts of the United States the police seem to be a law unto themselves, abusing their position, falsely impounding and then selling goods with impunity, or shooting innocent people. It is becoming rare to hear of a police officer who is successfully prosecuted for exceeding his authority or killing or injuring a suspect. This is a political situation, with the, mostly middle-aged, people stoutly defending the police come what may, persuaded as they are that there is a huge crime wave. There places in the country which are riven with drugs and murder. But there is no national crime wave. Actually, crime in general is down, but politicians and other fearmongers stoke up the fear.  

The useless Internet of Things

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We’re being duped into thinking smart devices are making our lives better. Visit any crowdfunding site and you’ll see campaigns for every imaginable smartphone-connected gizmo under the sun, each promising relief from a “harrowing first-world problem.” There’s the “smart” propane scale that lets you monitor the fuel level in your backyard grill, so that—horror of horrors—you don’t run out of propane during a barbecue. Or the $110 bike lock that promises to “eliminate the hassle” of a forgotten bike-lock combination by operating via your iPhone. Such devices initially seem advanced (“Never worry about propane again!”), but in reality they are just basic tweaks on existing products, with an added layer of “superfluous computing.” Even the most popular smart devices “seem to solve problems that have already been solved. The Internet of Things is “enclosing ordinary life within computational casings” and handing tech companies vast amounts of data on our daily habits. Is this really all Silicon Valley has to offer us? (Ian Bogost,The Atlantic)

Worse than that, they are taking up the most important thing we have least of – time. As you get older you are painfully aware of the finite-ness of our time on this earth and the futility of much of what we have to do. I don’t want to learn how to operate even more electronic gizmos. I don’t want to be studied, analysed and advertised to by faceless corporations (or governments). I want to be out there enjoying the sunset or drawing a beautiful piece of scenery. I don’t want to be wrestling with an email system, for instance, over-designed for every conceivable eventuality. I don’t want to spend prescious days trying to get an electronic health monitor working, only to return it to the manufacturer. Epicurus wandered in his garden thinking about life. Perhaps we should simplify our lives and follow his example.

Short tenure = company inefficiency

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According to an amazing statistic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics the average job tenure of all American employees in 2014 was 4.6 years.

What words of wisdom may we glean from this fact? Experience suggests that, depending on the job and the organisation, it might take, say, a year or two for a new employee to become really effective in a job. He or she has to understand the workings of the company, its market, the way to get things done, the internal politics. Which means that American organisations only get about two and a half effective years-worth of work from the average employee.

And then, just when he or she is becoming a really useful part of the team, guess what? Either the person is fired or, disillusioned, is looking for another job. Thus, there is little continuity and little institutional memory. This is just plain inefficient. I maintain that if companies held onto, trained and nurtured their employees, building trust and loyalty, the profits would be greater. The hire-and-fire nature of the American workplace, particularly in financial services, is famous throughout the world, as is the preoccupation with productivity. All I can say is that productivity would be even better if the retention rate of employees were better.

American Catholic hospitals

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Two types of American hospital have been expanding in recent years – the Catholic-affiliated and the for-profit. One in ten acute-care hospital beds are now in Catholic hospitals, and in many cases they are the only hospitals it is geographically practical to use for care of any kind, including reproductive health care. The American Civil Liberties Union says that these hospitals are violating a federal law requiring hospitals to provide emergency care and are discriminating against women. Advocates for the hospitals reply that the ACLU is trying to force religious hospitals and doctors to destroy babies in the womb and deprive women of the right to go to hospitals that share their religious views. The fact is that the Catholic bishops prohibit treatment that would destroy a fertilised egg or prevent it from implanting. They ban abortion and sterilization in Catholic hospitals, and egg donations from anyone other than a husband.

I have no doubt that there are women who might treat an abortion as a casual incident, but on the whole it is more likely that a decision to abort is a traumatic and excruciating one, not to be undertaken lightly. I believe that to be made to carry a child who will be unloved, unwanted and poorly cared for is a great and unpardonable sin. We have enough maladjusted, resentful and alienated young people in the world already without the unmarried and socially disassociated bishops adding to them. Epicureans care for the real lives of real people.