The Isle of Dave

25 of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies CEO’s were paid more than their company paid in taxes.

The average CEO’s salary increased more than 25% in 2010.

The average employee’s salary increased 2.6% while inflation increased by 3.6% in 2010.

The US had no job growth in the month of August this year.

Apart from all this stuff.

See children news isn’t always full of bad things and people dying…Oh well they’re only virtual people. 

Modern medicine does a marvelous job keeping humans alive. The good news ends there. If you have ever been to a nursing home, etc. you know that quality of life is not always the focus. This is not due to a failure in the medicine or a failure of the nursing home. This is a failure of ambition by the part of just about everyone. We have defined medicine as something to heal us. What medicine needs to be defined as is a way to improve quality of life.This means changing humans.

There already is one type of medicine that does this: illegal drugs. However because these drugs are illegal they are stuck with side effects which mean that they currently do not always improve quality of life. A fix to this would be to make them legal and have professionals regulate them to ensure all they do is better the quality of life.

These changes however do not go far enough. Humans need to take an active role in creating changes to their bodies that would better their quality of life before it got worse. An example of this would be to find a way to change telomeres so they would not fray and therefore not die meaning people could be free from cancer. Again this is not enough because all that is doing is finding a way to prevent a disease. What I am looking for is ideas such as extending the visible spectrum with and implant in the eye, etc.

Humans by nature are scared of change which is why stem cell research and such need to be made legal and people should forget fear induced by illogical morals and begin augmenting the human race so we can better our quality of life.

leftliberty:

The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009.

These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.

The Pew Research analysis finds that, in percentage terms, the bursting of the housing market bubble in 2006 and the recession that followed from late 2007 to mid-2009 took a far greater toll on the wealth of minorities than whites. From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.

As a result of these declines, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009; the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth; and the typical white household had $113,149.

Read more

(via )

A Democratic official tells The Associated Press that the White House and Republicans in Congress have reached a debt deal to prevent the first government default in U.S. history.

The official said House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama spoke by phone Sunday evening. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal has not yet been announced. Obama was to go on TV at 8:40 p.m. EDT.

Good thing Their adult brains kicked in.

(Source: diadoumenos)

azspot:

Tax Burdens Around the World

The US is Most Definitely Socialist.

:D HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…

(via diadoumenos)

timetruthhumor:

“The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.”

—

— Paul Krugman, in his column, The Centrist Cop-Out - NYTimes.com

(Source: truth-has-a-liberal-bias, via diadoumenos)

    Who raised it…

D - Kennedy raised the debt ceiling 4 times for a total increase of 5%.

D - Johnson raised the debt ceiling 7 times for a total increase of 18%.

R - Nixon raised the debt ceiling 9 times for a total increase of 36%.

R - Ford raised the debt ceiling 5 times for a total increase of 41%.

D - Carter raised the debt ceiling 9 times for total increase of 59%.

R - Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times for a total increase of 199%.

R - George H.W. Bush raised the debt ceiling 9 times for a total increase of 48%.

D - Clinton raised the debt ceiling 4 times for a total increase of 44%.

R - George W. Bush raised the debt ceiling 7 times for a total increase of 90%.

D - Obama has raised the debt ceiling 3 times for a total increase of 26%.

Come on guys its not that hard. 

  In 2008 almost 2.5 million inhabitants of the US were in prison (Incarceration in the United States). The total population of the US as calculated by the last census was just over 300 million which means the incarcerated population of the US is almost 1% (2010 Census Data). With overcrowding in prison and all the lost revenue that comes along with it we have reached a time when something needs to be done to fix this problem.There have been many proposed fixes but none of them seem to address the main issue. The US needs to convert to a true correctional system instead of a penal system.

  A large population of the US prison is there because of the war on drugs. Whether the US drug war is constitutional, moral, or working are all issues which can be debated forever. Regardless the war on drugs carries a heavy burden on the US economy as it costs money to incarcerate the users and takes away the productivity of the people who may be hard working Americans. The state of New York saved 2.5 million dollars in incarceration costs alone by using its drug court system (War on Drugs). This court is a perfect of example of a correctional system instead of a penal system because instead of imprisoning anyone who breaks the law it corrects the faulty behavior of those break the law.

  Although the drug court system does a good job at helping a few the idea of correction needs to be adopted further until it is used to correct anyone who committed any crime. This is opposed to the current system which focuses on punishing those who commit crime (hence it is a penal system). Proof of this is the return rate of those in prison: 1/3(please correct me if this number is incorrect). This also shows not everyone released from prison is ready to be released.

  The system which should replace the system currently used should focus on rehabilitating criminal and re-introducing them to society as normal Americans. Although creating this system would be hard such systems have been created before as demonstrated by this quote referencing Iroquois culture:

“He who stole another’s food or acted invalorously in war was “shamed” by his people and ostracized from their company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had morally purified himself.” (Zinn)

This obviously could not be put in piece by piece in the US but maybe it could be used as a model to develop a system which could work . Perhaps once they feel they are ready to re-enter society they could be presented before a jury which would then vote if they were ready to re-enter society. 

  If this correctional system replaced our current penal system it would invariably save the US money. Firstly it would decrease unnecessarily long sentences and return people to normal productive life as soon as possible. Additionally it would create many new jobs for people to help rehabilitate criminals. And finally this system would be more morally correct because it would allow good people to recover from a slip-up and not be constrained by our penal system. 

Dave

Works Cited

“2010 Census Data.” United States Census 2010. U.S. Census Bureau. Web. 26 July. 2011.

“Incarceration in the United States.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 26 July. 2011.

“War on Drugs.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 26 July. 2011.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Collins, 2005. Print.

                                                     Vacation

Like all good Americans each year I go on a vacation with my family and normally because of my family I end up going on vacation to a national park. One year I went to Mesa Verde and this year I stayed a bit closer to home and as my sister had a horse event at the Kentucky horse park I went to Mammoth cave.

                I’ll start off by saying I wasn’t psyched to go on this trip as it meant I would have to waste a day at a hotel while my sister was doing a horse thing (I don’t enjoy horse events and my family does lots of them). But that day wasn’t wasted and I got a considerable amount of work done while I was waiting. Additionally, my family and I went to an amazing Italian restaurant that night. I can’t remember the name but it’s in Lexington and highly recommended on Yelp.

                Anyway the next day my family and I got up early to make the drive to Mammoth cave. We were arriving in a hurry thinking we were going to be late for the tour we had reserved, but we failed to account for time zone changes and ending up being an hour early. With that extra time we went on a hike on the trails near the tourist center. A majority of these trails were paved which annoyed me because it was distracting as I was trying to observe the beautiful scenery surrounding the caves. The high point of the hike was when we were returning to the visitor center and the heat was just starting to arrive (this was during that heat wave with temperatures in the 90’s and 100’s). Then we felt a huge burst of cold air as we walked by the natural entrance to the cave. This as well as being a great feeling was interesting to consider how the cold air was leaving the cave.

                When we returned to the cave I was startled by some of the people there. There seemed to be a large number of overweight Americans. Then like in any national park there was an unusual concentration of tourists from Western Europe and Japan; even though I have come to expect this it surprises me every time I go to a national park. This so with this distribution of people I could understand believing that a huge number of Americans are obese as a large number of the ones there were.

                Finally my tour started and when I saw my group I was relieved to see the demographic was more like what I was used too. However this is probably because we were going on the longest walking tour. A four mile tour from one man made entrance to another. When the tour started there was the usual safety speech that you get at the start of pretty much any tour at a national park.

                The tour was simply amazing from the gypsum flowers which were beautiful and apparently not as beautiful as they used to be to the sheer size of the cave; everything was mind-blowing. That was before I got to the end which was named frozen Niagara: a flow stone (stalactite) about 30 meters high and 10 meters wide. And surrounding it were other beautiful flow stones, just the beauty of nature at its finest.

                This summed up my visit it Mammoth caves and left me shocked by the sheer size of the cave and the beauty hidden underground. All in all waiting for my sister riding her horse was definitely worth getting to see the wonders in Mammoth cave. This is a destination I would highly recommend adding to any vacation plan. However, I just didn’t see enough there to warrant more than a two day stay so unless you are in the area I wouldn’t travel there just to visit the cave alone. If you are in the area go.

Dave