Millenials in the new economy

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’”

... Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread...

Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”

All of these characteristics are worrisome, given a harsh economic environment that requires perseverance, adaptability, humility, and entrepreneurialism. Perhaps most worrisome, though, is the fatalism and lack of agency that both Twenge and Alsop discern in today’s young adults. Trained throughout childhood to disconnect performance from reward, and told repeatedly that they are destined for great things, many are quick to place blame elsewhere when something goes wrong, and inclined to believe that bad situations will sort themselves out—or will be sorted out by parents or other helpers.

A sailing stone from Racetrack Playa

Geology.com has multiple photos and some discussion of the sliding rocks at the playa in Death Valley.   I like this one from Fresh Photons because it shows a right-angle turn.  GPS-generated maps of the movements are posted here, and there are more pix here.

Addendum 2013:  A hat tip to reader Bobbie who alerted me to a Smithsonian article offering a possible explanation of the stones' movements.

Humans are not the end point of evolution

It's understandable that we would consider ourselves to represent not only the "end" of evolution, but even the "purpose" behind the process.  J.G. Ballard begs to remind us that modern humans have been present for only a few tens of thousands of years in a billions-of-years process, and that it doesn't stop now:

“Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

The hidden truth about corporate medicine

Tan lines

It's interesting how the simple addition of tan lines makes the Speedo swimsuit seem so much more risque.

Via Reddit.

Fires in Flint, Michigan

The mayor of Flint, Michigan recently laid off 46 police officers and 23 firefighters.  The layoffs come after months of failed contract talks between the mayor's office and public safety unions. The mayor's office has been demanding 15 percent wage and benefit cuts from the police and firefighters unions.

Firefighters union president Raul Garcia accuses the mayor of trying to be a union buster...

Mayor Walling says the city has little choice but to make cuts in public safety. Flint's facing a 6 million dollar deficit and public safety is 60 percent of the city's budget...

But Flint's public safety unions say the city will be less safe. In addition to the layoffs, the city will be closing two fire stations.

Firefighters union president Raul Garcia says if any Flint police officers or firefighters die in the line of duty, it will be Mayor Walling's responsibility.

Since that announcement on March 24 there have been 50 fires in the city.

Via Metafilter

550,000 links to the phrase "hit a milestone"

A hat tip to Michael Kinsley for reminding us that "you don’t “hit” a milestone if you hope to reach the next one." 

A Google search yields a half million such "hits."

What to do about people who park in "handicapped" spots

"I’m in love with a guy. He is perfect in almost every way. Handsome, good earner, athletic, interesting, not a drunk, reads The Atlantic. There’s one problem: if we’re in a crowded parking lot, he’ll go for the handicapped spots. He says that there are always too many of them and that they’re always empty. This makes me crazy. What should I do?"

---T. M., Los Angeles, Calif.


Dear T. M.,

Break his legs.


(From the What's Your Problem? column in the April issue of The Atlantic.)

Aftermath of the Jonestown mass suicide

Up to $65,000 in monthly welfare payments from government organizations in the United States to Jonestown residents were signed over to the Temple.  In 1978, officials from the United States Embassy in Guyana interviewed Social Security recipients on multiple occasions to make sure they were not being held against their will.  None of the 75 people interviewed by the Embassy stated that they were being held against their will, were forced to sign over welfare checks or wanted to leave Jonestown.

The Temple's wealth was estimated in late 1978 to be approximately $26 million.

Photo via A Quiet Life of Modest Achievement.

Garrison Keillor ponders the "information hurricane"

Meanwhile, it is spring, and one has hopes for the beloved country, though an old guy like me has his doubts. We are in the midst of a deluge of literature that only gets deeper and wider. Back in the day, you glanced at a couple newspapers and a handful of magazines and that was it, your duty was done, you had the evening free to sit on the porch and jiggle the ice in your glass and talk slow sensible talk with the friends and neighbors. But now, if you dare open your computer and go online, you are swept away into a vortex of surf and whirled around and around and when you finally gather the will to click Disconnect, you find that hours have passed. Weeks, perhaps. And you can't remember a bit of it...

It's remarkable that the American people manage to withstand this storm of data and get outdoors and rake up the leaves and cultivate around the rosebushes. Turn on your radio and there's a lot of yelling about Marxist socialism and We Need To Take Back Our Country, and yet the American people plant tulip bulbs and sluice off the driveway and haul the glass bottles to the recycling center. Some sanity persists...

The rest of the essay is at the StarTribune.

Minnesota in 1942

I fully understand that fewer than 1% of the visitors to this blog will have any interest in Minnesota, but I'm posting this because this is one of a series of several hundred "Traveltalks" produced from the 1930s to the 1950s.  To find one that interests you, search YouTube for Traveltalks, perhaps with a keyword for your town/state/region/country.

Minnesotans will find the video interesting when it shows the Foshay Tower as the tallest building in Minneapolis and perhaps when it shows an "average" result of a day's fishing.  What interested me was the comment that Minneapolis in 1942 had 1 acre of public parks for every 92 people; I just reran the numbers, and if my data are correct, the current figure is 6,400 acres of public parks for 368K people, or 1 acre for every 58 people!

Tape dispenser

Via mong tumblr.

Two interesting charts about the U.S. economy

The top graph shows the number of people working part-time for economic reasons.  The lower one depicts long-term unemployment.  Note these data go back 40-50 years.  Click to enlarge.

Found at Calculated Risk, where there is some discussion of the data.  Via The Daily Dish.

Television weathermen disagree with climatologists

Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the Earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns...

"There is a great deal of consternation among a lot of us over the readjustment of data that is going on and some of the portrayals that we are seeing..."  Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology. A study released recently by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was "caused mostly by human activities."

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement "Global warming is a scam," the researchers found...

Yet, climate scientists use very different scientific methods from the meteorologists. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who straddled the two worlds when she worked at the Weather Channel, noted that meteorologists used models that were intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but had little accuracy more than seven days out. As a result, Cullen said, meteorologists are often dubious about the predictions made by climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future.

Recent posts at Neatorama

Boston.com's The Big Picture has a collection of 30 pix of recent world-record items (many of them food related).

A zebra in a Zurich zoo was photographed cleaning the teeth of a hippopotamus. 

Feed, seed, and grain sacks are not merely collectible items, but are now being adapted as stylish decorative additions to the home. 

Ever been to a concert and heard "newbies" applaud at the "wrong" moment (at the end of a symphonic movement or a solo performance).  One music critic says "that's o.k."

The world's hottest chili is being weaponized to fight terrorists.  In other news, an Indian woman just ate 51 of them in two minutes.

A clever and effective television advertisement has been created by a Belgian group.  It only takes 30 seconds to watch; it's impressively well done.  If you like it, click the sublink.

MIT researchers have studied how clams burrow into the sand and are adapting the technique for a new generation of boat anchors.

Participants in a childhood vampire-hunting episode 50 years ago now say their behavior was NOT caused by reading comic books.

A German teenager buys a venomous cobra for a pet.  It escapes.  German authorities do not mess around.  Neighbors are not amused.

Very VERY expensive t-shirt.  Very VERY ugly.

A rather rudely-designed Popeye squirt gun.

A four-minute video of scenes excised from movies of the 1930s because the depictions were deemed to be hazardous to the public morality.  Your decision whether to view it or not...

"The Man Who Planted Trees" is an old (read: timeless) award-winning animation which I first saw decades ago.  I was delighted to find it (in three parts) on YouTube.

Still another video, this one of the hooded pitohui - the first bird ever documented to be poisonous.

Letting Go of My Father is an excellent essay by Jonathan Rauch in the current issue of The Atlantic, about the difficulties encountered while trying to assist with the care of a progressively incompetent and dependent parent.

The photos are unrelated miscellaneous images found without links to the primary source; I'll add credits if/when I can find such.