Nine Shift

Pick one: your pension or your kid's education

It's not just auto worker pensions that are in jeopardy, teacher, faculty and public sector retirement funds are in just as bad a shape.

Soon the baby boomers will be suing school boards and cities to get their retirement funds.
Nevermind that many of them are retiring at age 55 with 20 good years of work still available to society. Nevermind that these lawsuits will mean huge cuts in your grandkid's education. It's the boomers versus their grandkids. May the best generation win.

But don't worry about your 20something-30something son or daughter. They won't stay around to pay the boomer bill, and they won't stay around to see their kids get a lousy education. They will jet off to Amsterdam to live (their employers will be all over the world). They got good schools there. What do you think about this issue? Comments win a prize.

How come more boys don't want to drive?

Sitting in a plane recently, Julie and I overhead a man talking about his son not getting his driver's license til age 18.  "He just wasn't motivated to drive."

The word here "motivated" is fascinating, complex, mysterious, confused.
We've talked with dozens of other fathers whose sons have waited years before driving.
When I was young, I rushed on my 16th birthday to get a license. Didn't wait a day.
Picture of a Marmon, the favorite model of bank robbers according to my 103 year old source, because they could go 80 mph down gravel roads!

But our son, now 19, though he finally has a license, won't drive us even when we beg him.
He'll drive himself, but as a necessity, not a joy.
What's going on here? Add your thoughts: : :

Education: Best of the Rural One Room Schoolhouse

Working out in the hospital's cardio rehab center with a bunch of older gentlemen with heart attacks, Julie befriended one great old guy who used to teach in a rural one room schoolhouse in the 1930s.

For 20 years, from 1900 - 1920, it was necessary to badmouth the rural one-room schoolhouse.
The one room schoolhouse wasn't bad, but it was obsolete. And inadequate for the 20th century. Just like today's schools and colleges are obsolete.  And inadequate for this century.

The man gave Julie his unpublished manuscript on his experiences. From one hundred years of hindsight, here are the some of the Best of the Rural One Room Schoolhouse:
1. Since girls mature two years ahead of the boys, the older girls helped out the teacher by tutoring  the younger kids.
2. Teaching/learning units were limited to 15 minutes, to give the kids a mental break, change in activity.
3. Physical activity was a just step out of the door.
4. Students were not regimented into age-grades and had greater flexibility to work at their own speed.  (Painting an original from a small town Kansas artist. Julie bought it at the Kansas State Fair.)
  Got any other positive aspects of the rural one room schoolhouse to add to our list?

Living in a Post-Katrina world

You and I may be unaware we are living in a post-Katrina world, but the people of New Orleans sure understand.

Without telephones, cell phones not working, no way out, some Katrina victims found the only way to get a word out was to find a kid wandering around with wireless Internet connections. Now New Orleans is making 10 square miles in the central business district all wireless.

Yes, the connections are weak, just 512kb, but as one BBC analyst said, "The important thing is its there."  The BBC Go Digital program reporter interviewed dozens of New Orleans folks about devoting precious resources to wireless, and not one person said it was a bad idea. 
PS: Go Digital is a great program. Audio and video versions available at BBC web site.

The virtual versus the real world

Julie and our colleague Kassia Dellabough from Eugene, Oregon, are working together on presenting seminars on generational differences.  So Kassia was saying how her nephew, age 15, had a hard time talking with her in-person. But when his folks set up a web camera, the boy took to it and was much more communicative with Kassia, showing her stuff and telling her things. 
Photo of Kassia Dellabough

For adults, the virtual world is separate from the real physical world.
As in, good versus evil.

For kids, the virtual world is part of the real world. The virtual world is different from the physical world. But they are two halves of the whole. It's not "versus" but "both/and."
...you could, uh, like, comment on this issue.....

Sleepless replace drunk drivers

Wired magazine doesn't get it. Supposedly about the future, it is for some reason trying to save the car.
The latest issue is hyping an autopilot car (can you imagine the deathly chaos while they work out the bugs on this idea), complete with a reader survey "if your car drove itself, what would you do during your travel time?"   Wired readers don't get it either.
Next to reading, sleeping was the biggest response at almost 20%.  Even my son Willie, who has yet to get his first job, was right in saying the correct answer is work, which came in at a lowly 10%. 

Aside from the incredulous implication that sleeping in a car is more restful than sleeping in your bed, I am thinking what the survey really means is that people are driving while sleepy.
While drunken driver accidents have gratefully plummeted, overall auto deaths remain the same at over 40,000 a year in our post-1911 world.  What could be the cause - I'll go with Wired readers and suggest sleepy drivers.  The next issue of Wired features "8 killer ideas for the car" and I think we can take them literally on that. 
(About the photo. In the 1960s a car that could swim was made for several years.)
What are your thoughts about sleepy drivers?

Addicted to oil

Letters, New York Times.
"Mr. President, as a retired professor of chemistry, I urge you to get other science advisors. The ethanol alternative for cars is a pie-in-the-sky idea, as is your notion of hydrogen power for cars.
  Mr. President, the only alternative is an efficient mass transit system in every town in the United States (emphasis added).
   What we need is a Manhattan Project to develop rail, bus, trolley, light rail and all variations of mass transit that get us away from the one-person-one-car habit forced upon the American public for the last five decades, the real cause of addiction to foreign oil."
- Brahama D. Sharma, Pismo Beach, California, February 2, 2006.
Your thoughts? 

Your father was a machine

And so are you.... And that's why we were taught not to talk to each other at school or at work.
And when we are talking to each other, others assume we are socializing, not working/studying.

"Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913." This from page 95 of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Julie's latest reading project.

"Seventy thousand men hurrying last cigarettes or getting in final words - because as they approached the factory they'd begin to speak again, not because they had anything to say but because beyond those doors language wasn't allowed." (Ibid, page 94).

"But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine."
Eugenides said, and history documents, that workers rebelled at being turned into machines in the factory and the office. They quit in droves. All to no avail.
(Painting is "Gods of the Modern World" by the famous Latin painter Jose Orozco, whose work protested turning people into machines in the early days of industrialization 100 years ago.)

Say good-bye to telegrams and film

Last month saw the end of telegrams and film. It's all happening very fast you know.

Over Christmas I found a 1956 "Stork-o-gram" from my uncle to my father, announcing the birth of his daughter. Western Union ended telegrams in late January. 

Just a week or so before that, camera companies announced they would cease making film cameras and just sell digital cameras.

The world's shortest telegrams apparently were from an author to his publisher wanting to know the sales of his latest book. The publisher replied they were selling well.
The author's telegram:  "?"
The publisher's reply:  "!"

Thanks for the comments

There are no stupid comments.  All comments are welcome. All comments are good.
We had over 1,000 visitors in January. Very exciting. And we almost have as many comments as my-posts. Thanks everybody. People making comments get a free NineShift 20 page report.