this is a great financial and retirement planning discussion, and so relevant to the topic of why idiotic Americans don't "believe in" evolution

2/18/2008 11:29:34 PM

i wonder how much Mana god used to create humans and animals

2/19/2008 10:47:25 AM

Americans are smarter. We don't believe in the evolution hoax.

2/19/2008 12:10:50 PM

It was nice to see theDuke866 take this on. I threw up in my mouth a little when I read:

Quote :

"GoldenViper: I understand this completely. $500,000 is an absurd amount of money."

Oh but it isn't.

It's an intimidating figure if you view it as something you'll need to accumulate all at once. Kinda like if someone were to explain the dimensions of the Great Pyramid to you and leave you with responsibility for building it RIGHT NOW. But all large structures are constructed the same way. One stone and one dollar at a time.

However much money you'll need to be able to make it on your own is a fixed, finite amount. Every decade you put off accumulating toward that amount doubles the amount you'll need to start putting away.

The $100 a month theDuke866 mentions becomes $200 a month a decade from then. Put it off another 10 years and it becomes $400. You get the picture.

Hats off to Duke for explaining exactly how to find money to save, too. That's another place most people fuck up.

Working in the industry has made me cynical on this topic.

[Edited on February 19, 2008 at 12:28 PM. Reason : ...]

2/19/2008 12:24:48 PM

a lot of people just are not that smart.

2/19/2008 12:25:47 PM

It's actually worse.

In this country we wallow in anti-intellectualism like swine in shit.

[Huge Link]

New York Times Article from Feb 14th, 2008 (Google it)

Quote :

"Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.” Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture. Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness” warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.” Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (“you couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”) and to praise himself (“brave, brilliant”). Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion. Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice. T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.” But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters. She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map. Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11. Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II: “This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said. The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?” “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied. At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.” Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests. In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said. Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution. Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning. Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a “cultural conservationist.” For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said. The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons."

[Edited on February 19, 2008 at 12:32 PM. Reason : holy horizontal scroll]

2/19/2008 12:31:13 PM

Quote :

"“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”"

perfect quote.
I think that attitude is at the crux of the problem of the evolution debate, and that attitude (that facts don't matter, only opinion) is supported and encouraged by religious teachings.

Evolution vs. creation debates often end with the Creationist using that as a final argument. They'll say "well, evolution is your opinion, and you can have that opinion if you want", when in fact, no, it's not an opinion - it's a fact. The original origins of life on earth can still be debated scientifically and theologically, but the scientific fact that evolution has and is occurring is simply non-debatable, just as the earth is round and it revolves around the sun. Anyone's "opinion" on the shape of the earth is entirely, 100% irrelevant, because it's not a matter that's up for debate.

2/19/2008 1:52:13 PM

Quote :

"“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said. The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?” “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied."

2/19/2008 2:13:13 PM

>.> omg ^

2/19/2008 2:43:19 PM

I think america's problem is not that we do not have the world scholars or innovators like everyone else but the standard deviation of intelligence is larger then most industrialized countries.

2/19/2008 2:46:46 PM

^ ain't it the truth? we could play the blame game all day but theres a simple fact here welfare promotes stupidity in the stupid...give it a second to sink in... good. some people just use welfare and bum around all day and never accomplish anything for these people welfare keeps them from starving to death like they would either in the days before welfare or in places that set a maximum limit to the time you can draw on welfare. In America a majority of places simply say you have to have an interview every x weeks. few stipulate you can only draw for y months over a period of z months

2/19/2008 2:49:52 PM

I think 75% of the productive working population agrees with you.

Of course there are the Bridgets who will cry and sympathize saying we owe it to the poor to feed /shelter then. Then you will have your DaBird's who think gov't should have absolutly in role and the 28 yr old dad with 3 kids who just got laid off when his company shipped its jobs overseas is SOL.

btw you are kinda off topic bringing in the welfare debate

2/19/2008 3:30:36 PM

sorry but i didn't just want to say the continual poor are poor just cause they are lazy. it just semed kinda unfair ya know...

2/19/2008 3:33:45 PM

Quote :

" ain't it the truth? we could play the blame game all day but theres a simple fact here welfare promotes stupidity in the stupid...give it a second to sink in... good. some people just use welfare and bum around all day and never accomplish anything for these people welfare keeps them from starving to death like they would either in the days before welfare or in places that set a maximum limit to the time you can draw on welfare. In America a majority of places simply say you have to have an interview every x weeks. few stipulate you can only draw for y months over a period of z months"

Factoring in the correlation between "poor" and uneducated. Then factor in that most educated adults have as many kids as they can afford to raise. Next, factor in that the easiest way for our "poor" to make more money is to have more kids. Is it any wonder why our education level is going down the tubes when you consider what is reproducing the most?

2/19/2008 3:41:10 PM

Quote :

"Then factor in that most educated adults have as many kids as they can afford to raise. Next, factor in that the easiest way for our "poor" to make more money is to have more kids."

I think we have a winner. If only hillary clinton had this level of logic.

2/19/2008 4:02:56 PM

^she does. She is adding to her base. THey encourage it. THe more people dependant on the govt the more her party gains power.

2/19/2008 4:38:07 PM

2/19/2008 4:58:29 PM

^^ every time i hear hillary talks it is

poor people are a victim of capitalism
$5000 baby credits

Universal health care for poor people who can not afford it

evil rich people need to help poor people thourgh welfare

2/19/2008 5:07:56 PM