This is a sample of our children and grandchildren’s future.
I heard about this technology decades ago. Imagine, using a copy machine to manufacture tools, bicycles, sculptures and body parts such as heart values, the liver and kidneys.
National Geographic shows us how to print usable, movable/adjustable tools
After watching the first video, you may understand why I wanted to do a post on this topic.
3D Metal Printing – more complex and time consuming
As you have seen with the first two videos, this isn’t fiction or fantasy. It is the “real” thing.
Printing a Bicycle with a 3D printer
However, how many manufacturing jobs might be lost once this technology is widely used but who cares if this technology also saves lives?
Printing a Human Kidney
Of course, people will still be necessary to operate the copy machines but for how long before computers do that job too?
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I’m impressed when a reporter does his or her job properly and balances the news instead of feeding the mob that bellies up to the slop-trough of Yellow Journalism, which is based on sensationalism and crude exaggeration.
In his piece, Hall wrote, “From state legislatures to Congress to tea party rallies, a vocal backlash is rising against what are perceived as too-generous retirement benefits for state and local government workers. However, that widespread perception doesn’t match reality.”
According the Hall, “Pension contributions from state and local employers aren’t blowing up budgets.” They amount to just 2.9 – 3.8 percent of state spending, on average.
In addition, Hall says, “Nor are state and local government pension funds broke. They’re underfunded…”
With those facts, we should ask what is the real reason to turn on public-worker sector pension plans.
The answer may be Wall Street and US bank private-sector greed, the same greed that caused the 2008 global economic crises.
According The Council on State Governments, in 2006 before the crash, the total amount of money held by these federal, state and local public-pension plans was almost $6 trillion dollars, and greed, it seems, has no limits.
If you do not believe me, ask people such as Bernard Madoff [$50 billion], Scott Rothstein [$1.2 billion], Tom Petters [$3.7 billion], Allen Stanford [$8 billion], March Dreier [$400 million], Lou Pearlman [$500 million], Michael Kelly [$428 million], the Greater Ministries International church [$500 million], Scientology minister Reed Slatkin [more than $600 million], and Nicholas Cosmo [$370 million].
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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It is a fact that misery loves company and when the accountants, carpenters, clerks, plumbers, reporters, salesmen, and secretaries and many other professions in the private sector read the Yellow Journalism in Don Thompson’s Associated Press [AP] piece,Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny, many of these people in the private sector will say, “It isn’t fair. If we have to work longer and suffer, so do they.”
In fact, that is already happening. Due to pressure from the private sector, this has led to: “Earlier in New Jersey, part of a legislative deal struck between Democrats and Republicans raised the normal retirement age from 62 to 65,” AP’s Thompson wrote.
In addition, “An initiative circulating for California’s 2012 state ballot seeks to increase the minimum retirement age to 65 for public employees and teachers and to 58 for sworn public safety officers.” [California’s teachers may retire at 55 now but those that retire early also will earn about 30% of gross pay and most will have to go without medical coverage.].
I know where the money comes from that funds CalSTRS. Part of it was from the monthly contribution from my paycheck for thirty years and when I retired, the taxpayer money that was used to pay me as a teacher stopped.
Moreover, I was a public school teacher in California for thirty years but I do not qualify for Social Security. I also retired without medical benefits because I was unwilling to pay $1,400 a month for COBRA insurance until I qualified for Medicare.
“The Teacher Pension Blues” tells the story AP’s Don Thompson did not!
On the other hand, when given a choice, many private sector employees do not save toward retirement other than Social Security. Many do not put money into 401k plans or pay into tax deductable IRAs. Many that own homes take out equity loans to finance vacations, purchase new cars, pay off credit card debts, or to have money to go on spending sprees.
The result is that the average family in America cannot afford to retire as early as many public employees that paid into employer-based defined benefit pensions.
For example, total U.S. consumer debt was $2.43 trillion as of May 2011. Average credit card debt per household with credit card debt: $15,799. Average total debt in 2009 (including credit cards, mortgage, home equity, student loans and more) for U.S. households with credit card debt: $54,000. Source: Credit Card.com
As for me, instead of paying into Social Security while I taught, I paid 8% of my gross monthly pay for thirty years into CalSTRS, and the school district where I taught contributed a matching amount of about 8%.
To force public educators in California to work more years may cost more than it will save.
When I retired, the school district stopped paying me and saved the tax payers money since most teachers that retire after teaching 30 years or more are replaced by younger teachers that are paid much less.
Keeping older, higher paid teachers longer will only cost the taxpayer more in the long run since those same teachers that are working longer will end up with a larger monthly pension check since the longer a teacher spends in the classroom, the larger the pension. [Note: Part 1 explains how this works.]
In fact, I know three teachers that worked more than 42 years in the classroom and all three retired with a raise, while my annual retirement is about half of what it was the last year I taught.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Another example of how misleading Don Thompson’s AP piece,Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny, was: “With Americans increasingly likely to live well into their 80s, critics question whether paying lifetime pensions to retirees from age 55 or 60 is financially sustainable. An Associated Press survey earlier this year found the 50 states have a combined $690 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $418 billion in retiree health care obligations.”
What Thompson doesn’t mention is that some states managed their pension funds better than others did.
Ross writes, “State pension programs across the country have undergone a major transformation, as more and more of them are cutting back the amount of money they set aside for retired workers, gambling that they can meet their obligations through investments instead of savings…”
In fact, Ross lists the best fully-funded state pensions, which are: New York, Wisconsin, Delaware, North Carolina, Washington, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wyoming, Florida and Georgia. He also lists the worst state pensions where the gamble did not pay off.
California falls between the two lists and is struggling to fill the funding gap. The following video explains why.
In addition, nowhere does Ross or Thompson mention that California has two state pension plans. There is CalPERS and then there is CalSTRS.
The California State Teachers’ Retirement System [CalSTRS], with a portfolio valued at $148.2 billion as of October 31, 2011, is the largest teacher pension fund and second largest public pension fund in the United States. CalSTRS administers a hybrid retirement system, consisting of a traditional defined benefit, cash balance and defined contribution plan, as well as disability and survivor benefits. CalSTRS serves California’s 852,000 public school educators and their families from the state’s 1,600 school districts, county offices of education and community college districts.
How well funded is CalSTRS to meet its future obligations?
CalSTRS makes it clear that “It’s important to understand that the risk of facing depleted assets exists approximately 30 years from now versus actually facing insolvency today.”
Note: Due to losses from investments during the 2008 global financial crises, the CalSTRS retirement “fund took an enormous hit to its stock portfolio when the market plunged during the heart of the recession, losing nearly $43 billion — roughly 25 percent of its value — from June 2008 to June 2009.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Due to the politics of money, beginning early in the 1980s, during the Reagan era, there was a rapid shift away from private sector employer-based defined benefit pensions to employee-controlled personal retirement accounts.
Under President Reagan [1981 – 1989] this trend in the private sector was helped along by the Republican Party that controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987 giving President Reagan the leverage he needed to shift private sector pension money to the stock market and other risky investments—another part of the Reagan plan besides adding two trillion dollars to the national debt by cutting taxes on the wealthy, raising them on the working class by cutting deductions and spending more.
In fact, “Since 1982 and the Ronald Reagan economic program, profit expectations of American corporations have skyrocketed, and right behind have been the costs of health care, the cost of housing, the cost of military programs, the cost of banking, and the cost of many other products and services.” Source: The Agonist
In 1980, approximately 92 percent of private retirement saving contributions went to employer-based plans; 64 percent of these contributions were to defined benefit pension plans [similar to the public pension plans of today].
Then by 1999, [thanks to President Reagan and the Republican majority in the Senate while he was president] about 88 percent of private sector contributions went into defined contribution plans, the vast majority of personal retirement accounts being set up as 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA).
However, the Public Sector did not follow this risky path to retirement. The Public Sector stayed with employer-based defined benefit pension plans such as the one I’m in with CalSTRS.
It helped that the union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent).
To understand the numbers better and why the media focuses its Yellow Journalism circus act to attract the biggest mob, in November 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were 20,404,000 public sector employees [2,000,000 work for the federal government—the rest work for the states or local county or city governments] and about 128,000,000 private sector employees.
If you published a newspaper, a magazine, ran a TV news network, hosted a conservative talk show, or wrote a popular conservative Blog, which audience would you focus on to boost advertising rates? As I said, it’s all in the numbers.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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During my full-time university days on the GI Bill [1968 – 1973] before I graduated with a BA in journalism, I learned how easy it was for the media to make mistakes while practicing what is known as Yellow Journalism to boost profits.
And Yellow journalism[based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration] is what Associated Press [AP] did when it ran Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny by Don Thompson on December 14, 2011.
For example, how would you feel if you read, “Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter? His departure from the workaday world [he worked thirty-six years in public education and was the superintendent of one of California’s 1,600 school districts] is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.”
That previous quote was in the second paragraph of Thompson’s AP news piece and it is extremely misleading because of what it doesn’t say.
How many in public education do you think will earn that kind of money in retirement?
What AP doesn’t tell us is that in 2010 the average member-only benefit for retired public school educators in California was $4,256 a month before taxes [less than a third of what Godwin earns in retirement] and that only 16% of educators that retired in 2010 worked as long as Patrick Godwin did. The median years of service was 26.6.
For example, if you were one of the educators that retired after 26.6 years of public service [the median] and was only 55 years old [the earliest you may retire and collect], using the CalSTRS retirement calculator, that person would earn about $2,130 a month before taxes—much less than the $14,525.66 that Godwin earns each month.
I calculated once that if a public school teacher in California taught for 42 years or more, his annual retirement income would equal what he earned the last year he worked. In public education, less than 4% retire in the 100% category.
In fact, 9% retired in 2010 with 10-15 years of service in public education, 11% with 14-20 years, 15% with 20-25 years, 12% with 25-30 years, 23% with 30-35 years, and 16% with 35-40 years. Source:CalSTRS
The reason that AP’s Don Thompson ran with Patrick Godwin’s retirement income as his example is called sensationalism designed to cause an emotional response so people will talk about it. Word of mouth attracts readers and an audience.
In addition, Godwin was a school district superintendent at the top of the public education pay scale, which represents about 0.2% of the total. That means 99.8% of public educators in California do not earn as much as Godwin did while working as a school district superintendent.
The result is that many readers may believe that most public educators in California will retire with Patrick Godwin’s annual retirement income. However, this is far from the truth since most will not come close, but Thompson’s piece doesn’t say that.
The reason AP’s Thompson distorted the facts so much is because of audience share, which determines how much a media source [TV, newspaper, talk show, magazine, Blog, etc] may charge to advertisers, and balancing the news and telling the truth often does not achieve this goal because profits are the foundation of the private sector media.
It’s a simple formula: if you don’t make a profit you go out of business and everyone working for you loses his or her job so almost everyone plays the same Yellow Journalism game, and then there is the politics of money.
To understand why Thompson wrote such a misleading news piece, it helps to understand the trend away from private-sector pensions that were once similar to current public sector-pensions and the answers are in the numbers.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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To understand the lack of motivation among most Hispanic/Latino and many African-American students, all one need do is be aware of a few facts, which I have written about in several posts.
In Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 3, we discover that forty-four percent (44%) of youth gang membership are Hispanic/Latino while thirty-five percent (35%) are African-American, which means that combined, Hispanic/Latino and African-American youths make up almost 80% of youth-gang membership in America, and youth gangs are not pro-education.
You may question why the dropout rate in Mexico has anything to do with America’s public schools until you learn that about 3.5 million public school students in the US are here illegally from Mexico and that high dropout rate is an indication of a cultural bias toward education. When those students slipped across the US border, many brought their lack of motivation to learn with them.
As most of us know, actions speak louder than words, and The Pew Hispanic Center offers more facts that indicate a lack of motivation. Pew.org says, “Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number — 48% — say that they themselves plan to get a college degree… ”
In fact, In 2009, just 19.2 percent of Latinos between 25 and 34 had a university degree, while among Asians the percentage was 69.1 percent, with 48.7 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 29.4 percent for African Americans.” Source: Fox News
In addition, the largest numbers of dropouts come from Hispanic/Latino (17.6%) and African-American (9.3%) students, which is another indicator of motivation. However, only 5.2% of Whites drop out while 3.4% of Asian/Pacific Islanders do.
In Yet One More Doomed Education Reform, Robert Weissberg defines the ‘politically correct’ head in the sand when he says, “Like the unsuccessful NCLB and every other reform of the last few decades, it speaks of transforming the ‘lowest performing schools’ as if schools, not the occupants, were the culprit.”
Weissberg then asks, “Why should a kid who hates school improve if moved to a new building?” Then he explains why Americans do not put the blame where it belongs.
“The term “bad school” is a euphemism,” Weissberg says, “a way of avoiding political trouble with grievance group leaders just waiting to exploit alleged [ethnic/racial] “insults” to rally the troops to extract material benefits.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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What I discovered about Vitamin D deficiency may explain one of the reasons why so many school children age 6 to 18 in the US perform poorly in school and on standardized tests.
In November 2009, Scientific American asked an important question and then provided the answer.
The question was, “Does Vitamin D. Improve Brain Function?”
The answer, “The first study, led by neuroscientist David Llewellyn of the University of Cambridge, assessed vitamin D levels in more than 1,700 men and women from England, aged 65 or older…
“The scientists found that the lower the subjects’ vitamin D levels, the more negatively impacted was their performance on a battery of mental tests. Compared with people with optimum vitamin D levels, those in the lowest quartile were more than twice as likely to be cognitively impaired.”
“A second study,” Scientific American reported, “led by scientists at the University of Manchester in England and published online this past May, looked at vitamin D levels and cognitive performance in more than 3,100 men aged 40 to 79 in eight different countries across Europe. The data show that those people with lower vitamin D levels exhibited slower information-processing speed.
In addition, Science Daily says, “Doctors McCann & Ames point out that evidence for vitamin D’s involvement in brain function includes the wide distribution of vitamin D receptors throughout the brain. They also discuss vitamin D’s ability to affect proteins in the brain known to be directly involved in learning and memory, motor control, and possibly even maternal and social behavior.”
But how much sun should be absorbed to create adequate levels of Vitamin D?
U. S. News.com says, “If you’re fair skinned, experts say going outside for 10 minutes in the midday sun—in shorts and a tank top with no sunscreen—will produce about 10,000 international units of the vitamin.
“If you’re already tan or of Hispanic (Latino) origin, you need maybe 15 to 20 minutes, and black skin may require six times the sun exposure to make the same vitamin D levels as a very fair-skinned person…”
So, next time you hear someone criticize teachers when children are not learning, say there’s more to educating a child than a teacher teaching. A vital aspect of education has to do with what parents feed their children and how much time a child spends outdoors absorbing sunlight.
In fact, Shine.com offers 7 Ways to Increase Your Child’s Success in School and says, “A recent study by Columbia University showed that kids whose families eat regular, relaxed meals together are not only less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and develop eating disorders-they are also more likely to achieve higher grades.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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As discovered in Part 1, the diets of most American children are horrible and this has a BIG impact on a child’s ability to function as a student.
In addition, most children do not spend enough time outside to absorb adequate Vitamin D from sunlight—no eating required and it is FREE!
Although the development of young minds and bodies requires more than one nutrient, knowing what the lack of one nutrient, such as Vitamin D, does to a child’s cognitive ability and mood is a dramatic way to discover how important a balanced diet is from breakfast to dinner.
If the lack of one vitamin from sunlight has a dramatic impact on a child’s ability to learn, imagine what happens when most of the important nutrients for cognitive and mental function are missing.
If you are a parent and you are reading this, what does your child eat, and does he or she spend about a half hour a day between 10 AM and 3 PM outside in the sunlight soaking up vitamin D with the sun’s help?
The odds are that you don’t know the answer.
A recent study published in Environmental Health Perspectives found that many American children are not getting enough vitamin D from sun exposure alone…
In fact, Essentials of Health reported about a new study in the journal of Pediatrics in August 2009, that “Over 60 percent of the children studied had vitamin D levels defined as insufficient. Outright deficiency occurred in nine percent of the subjects. If applied to the U.S. population, these percentages would be equivalent to nearly 51 million children with insufficient vitamin D levels, and 7.6 million children with vitamin D deficiency.
Curious, I wanted to know if vitamin D deficiency affected mental function.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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When I was still teaching (1975-2005), I often started the school year by asking my students about breakfast and discovered that most didn’t eat it. When I asked what they did eat, the average answer was a bag of French fries or a slice of cheese pizza (and maybe both), and a 60-ounce Coke or Pepsi, which was usually for lunch.
And let me tell you, fifth period was my first class after lunch and that was the class with the most behavior problems. First period and sixth were usually the classes with the least behavior problems since too many students do not eat breakfast and by sixth period the sugar crash has arrived and energy levels among many students is unusually low.
It’s like teaching a room full of zombies.
In fact, USDA.gov reports that 88% of children ages 7 to 9 are not eating a good diet and most diets do not improve as children age. In a classroom of 36 students, that means about 32 arrive in class without the adequate nutrition to feed the brain where learning takes place.
The news gets worse when the diet includes too much sugar, which also comes from consuming too much grain products since these complex carbohydrates also break down in the liver to form sugar.
Brain Health and Puzzles.com says, “Another connection between sugar and brain function concerns dysfunction. These people often have dwindling mental capabilities. They are more at risk to develop depression and different cognitive problems with memory, processing information and recognizing spatial patterns. It can even lead to dementia.”
In addition, Grist.org reported that most Americans eat 30% more grain (which converts to sugar) than they should and 20% too much meat, while eating just 80% of the recommended daily servings of vegetables (French fried potatoes or chips usually represent all vegetable consumption) and 40% of fruit–mostly apples and bananas. Did you know that the apples you buy from the store could be more than a year old?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 