Welcome to your Monday open thread. I had quite a busy weekend and now I’m exhausted. At least I have a short work week, then a four day weekend! Hooray for Thanksgiving!
The internet is rotting your brain:
Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”
It seems like there’s always something that is hurting each generation. For the Baby Boomers, it was Elvis’s hips and rock & roll. My generation was going to ruined by 2 Live Crew and naughty rappers. I guess worrying about how the newest thing is ruining our children is an American tradition.
Someone has been feeding Joke Line (Joe Klein) wheaties for breakfast. He actually talks about the hypocrisy of the establishment with their deficit hysteria.
So you’ll excuse me if I muffle my deficit-reduction cheerleading this time. There is much of value in the co-chairs’ proposal. I like the fact that Social Security solvency is mostly achieved by increasing taxes on the wealthy and that there are additional benefits for the working poor. I don’t like the fact that the chairs would limit the earned-income tax credit, which benefits those same working poor. We could go through the proposal line by line — but why waste the lines? There is a larger problem: Why are we spending so much time and effort bloviating about long-term deficits and so little trying to untangle the immediate economic mess that we’re in?
Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that so many of the people whinnying the loudest are prominent members of the financial community, the sector that has had the most to do with hollowing out our manufacturing base and creating the Ponzi scheme in housing that caused the 2008 bust. After all that uncreative destruction, they need to polish their high-minded credentials. (See how some Americans are facing the prospect of long-term unemployment.).
There is, for example, Glenn Hubbard, who was featured on the New York Times op-ed page recently in defense of the deficit commission, describing the problem this way: “We have designed entitlements for a welfare state we cannot afford.” This is the same Glenn Hubbard who served as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser when Dick Cheney was saying that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” One imagines that if Hubbard was so concerned about deficits, he might have resigned in protest from an Administration dedicated to creating them. But, no, he’s here to speak truth to the powerless — to the middle-class folks whose major asset, their home, was trashed by financial speculators, thereby wrecking their retirement plans and creating the consumer implosion we’re now suffering. Hubbard is telling them they now have to take yet another hit, on their old-age pensions and health insurance, for the greater good.
Yes, the thieves can’t wait to get their hands on that pot of money in the Social Security trust fund. But somehow the very serious people listen to the thieves – because money talks (and SCOTUS says money = speech).