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View Full Version : the good ole days


killemall
03-22-2007, 07:51 PM
not sure if i ever posted this before.

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as
kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives






TO ALL THE KIDS

WHO SURVIVED the
1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we
rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.


Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.


We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.


We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and

NO ONE actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because .

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day.

And we were O.K .



We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down
the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms......
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,

made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and kno cked on the door or rang
the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.

They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned

HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT ALL!

If YOU are one of them . . CONGRATULATIONS!





Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

bugman
03-22-2007, 07:54 PM
Born in 1955 i am one of them.What a great post. :D

Mastertank1
03-22-2007, 09:41 PM
to natural selection.

This means that the weak, defective and stupid have just as much chance to live long lives and reproduce as the intelligent, fit and strong. :idunno: :sowrong:

Unfortunately, the stupid reproduce at a much greater rate than the intelligent, because they can't understand all the excellent reasons not to and tend to blindly follow religions that forbid the use of birth control. :shock: :disgust:

I reccomend an old, old Scifi short story called "The Marching Morons". I think it was written by Clarke, but I'm VERY not sure about that. :cool:

sabaki
03-22-2007, 09:59 PM
[We have now made our species immune] to natural selection.

This means that the weak, defective and stupid have just as much chance to live long lives and reproduce as the intelligent, fit and strong. :idunno: :sowrong:
Your claim is half false and half irrelevant.

It's false because there are still sexual selective pressures. People are attracted to intelligence, and beauty ideals are still largely based on physical fitness.

It's irrelevant because technology enables us to get around our weaknesses. And a good thing too. Just because someone has a "defect" doesn't mean they deserve to die. Tech evolution is many orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than biological evolution, anyway. But hey, if you want to go abandon modern society, live on an island, and wait another geological age for your descendents to fortuitously mutate into a superior species and other "defective" descendents to die off, be my guest.

Mastertank1
03-22-2007, 11:04 PM
Your claim is half false and half irrelevant.

It's false because there are still sexual selective pressures. People are attracted to intelligence, and beauty ideals are still largely based on physical fitness.

It's irrelevant because technology enables us to get around our weaknesses. And a good thing too. Just because someone has a "defect" doesn't mean they deserve to die. Tech evolution is many orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than biological evolution, anyway. But hey, if you want to go abandon modern society, live on an island, and wait another geological age for your descendents to fortuitously mutate into a superior species and other "defective" descendents to die off, be my guest.
Because the vast majority of the intelligent marry other intelligent while the stupid marry the stupid, in their case due to lack of choice.
For similar reasons, meaning because they can, the attractive marry the attractive (or the rich) while the unnatractive, from lack of choice, marry the unattractive.
It is also definitely true that the intelligent and educated have far fewer kids than the stupid and ignorant, and tend to disregard religious prohibitions asgainst birth control.
While technology gets around SOME weaknesses; we have yet to come up with a technological fix for stupidity, and right now no one seems to be trying very hard. Among other reasons, they figure that those who need such a remedy the most would adamantly refuse to admit that they had any need for it at all. Stupid people are like that.

If any of the eco-catastrophe scenarios being floated now comes true (and I suspect that one will) a lot of people who have graduated from the current, pressure-free, inferiority tolerant school systems that prevail in the USA will die, because the standards-free "education" they got has left them lacking in the basic math and communication skills that the 'old fashioned' 'oppressive' standards and competition based educational system that earlier generations had to struggle through forced those generayions to learn, like it or not.
Abrupt Climate Change, in any of the likely scenarios being mentioned, will require intelligent cooperation on an unprecedented scale just for survival, let alone to maintain techical civilization.

Think about this; there are tens of thousands of kids in every part of this country who will lose the ability to do simple math when they cannot get any more batteries for their handheld devices of various kinds. I've been teaching a LOT of them to do math with a pencil and paper, and they seem awed to discover that they really can do it without the little machines. I find that depressing as hell.

sabaki
03-23-2007, 12:02 AM
MT: Ok, you are complaining that natural selection isn't working properly anymore, but then you bring up abrupt climate change and other disaster scenarios. That makes no sense: natural selection is a very slow process. The human species has not changed in the last 50 years. It will not even change appreciably in 10,000 years (unless we deliberately modify ourselves). So natural selection would be of no help in any of your eco-catastrophes, even if it were still working in full.

The point that education is getting worse does hold water. But enabling schools to kill off or kick out students who get bad grades is not the way to improve education. Make education more rigorous and help everyone, not just the people you consider deserving of it.

Are we doomed as a species because many kids get a poor education? No, that's ridiculous. Not every person needs to be smart and strong for humanity to survive. In fact, it has always been just a few people at the top whose brilliance allows "inferior" others to have a high quality of life. Edison, Salk, Turing, etc... And if a catastrophe occurs and some of the "inferior" people die as a result, I guess you would be very happy. :p
While technology gets around SOME weaknesses; we have yet to come up with a technological fix for stupidity, and right now no one seems to be trying very hard.
Those are both false. I'm a functional genius compared to my last-century counterpart, not due to any virtue of my brain (in fact I am one of your "stupid" people who apparently deserves to die because in a crisis I cannot fashion a can opener out of twigs or whatever), but due to the tools at my fingertips that amplify intelligence and knowledge. And IA is going to get much better this century as we develop technologies that work more closely with the brain. I'm sorry if my living is offensive to you, but things are only going to get easier for me and my defective friends.

Mastertank1
03-23-2007, 12:28 AM
You've missed every point I was trying to make so completely I don't know where to start. I must be too tired or stupid to communicate effectively.
I'll have to go back and start over after a good night's sleep, so I won't reply right now.
Sorry about that.