shovel off

I have been thinking about this for a while, and this is the first good opportunity that I have had.

Maybe a month ago I was in the car with a coworker, who is also a good friend, as he stopped by his house to pick something up. When we approached his house he commented about how annoying it was to have a house that faces the north. I did not get it at first, so he pointed out that all of the houses on one side of the street had snow in the driveway and all of the houses on the other side of the street did not. The shade from the houses with driveways on the north kept the snow from melting as fast as the snow on the other side of the street. This might be a commonly known pitfall of owning a house that faces to the north, but I had not contemplated it seriously until now.

One thing that I have loved about living in the Kansas City area is that snows don't often stick for long. In other places I have lived, such as Michigan and South Dakota, a snow could be expected to stick for weeks or months on end before they melted away. This is the sixth winter we have been in our house, and I have probably shoveled the driveway fewer than five times in that stretch. Most of those times when I went to the trouble have been because we were going to have company and I did not want them to have to walk through the snow. Otherwise, it has just rarely seemed worth the effort if I have known that the snow would melt to a manageable level within a day or two.

I now know that it is possible that my experience may not be identical to my neighbors across the street. This was something I have considered today, since I had to hurriedly brush a couple of inches of snow off my car this morning. It is a bother to have to clear off my car, but the situation could have been worse. I could have to actually shovel my driveway at some point as well.

spring a leak

A story from today caught my eye, but not for the actual content of the story. The actual story is about Starbucks planning to sell instant coffee. I noticed that the whole reason that there is a story is that someone with information leaked it to the press. That seems to happen a lot.

Why is it that more often than not, if a major announcement is going to be made, it is leaked to the press ahead of time? I am sure that is occasionally intentional by someone's calculation that the news will be considered more newsworthy if it appears that people aren't supposed to know about it yet. I don't think this is usually intentional, though. It seems that keeping things a secret until the actual announcement will help build curiosity from the target audience for the announcement.

It amazes me that some people feel it worthwhile to leak information. In this case, it appears to have been a Starbucks executive who leaked the information. If he (or she) was not supposed to leak the information, was it really worth risking his (or her) job? I don't see where the person leaking the information gets any tangible benefit in this situation.

One thing that you can count on is that I will never leak any important information to the press. That has more to do with me not actually having information to leak than anything else, though.

to hurt or not to hurt

Everyone probably remembers the above commercial from the Super Bowl. It was one of the more funny commercials, though I don't think it was in the running for the funniest. Something else stuck out about it to me, though.

Many years ago when I was in high school a friend who was a girl asserted to me that women have a greater tolerance for pain than men. Her argument was that women deal with pain that men couldn't even imagine, therefore women are more capable of handling pain. I never really accepted her argument because this would be very difficult to prove (How can you really know how much pain someone else is experiencing?). Since then, I have always noticed when the issue of pain and one of the sexes becomes a topic of discussion.

It is my guess that there were probably a lot of women who saw the commercial above who laughed at the idea of men being able to deal with pain. In looking around, I did find an article that notes that women tend to respond more sensitively to pain, as if it is more acute. The problem is this says nothing of who copes with pain better.

There is a good chance that I am not someone who copes well with pain. The things that I have gone through in my life that were painful are not things that I have much stomach to go through again, and when I am sick or in pain I am incredibly impatient to get past whatever the issue is. That probably describes most people to some degree, though, so this again illustrates the difficulty in knowing who is best at dealing with pain.

The long and short of it is, if something like the above happens to me I will probably say that I'm good to appear tough. I might whine about the pain a little if I think I can get away with it as well, though.

birth rate

A common theme in movies that depict the future is that the population on the earth reached a tipping point and that the earth could not sustain as much life as it had. While that is not an unrealistic situation, I think the opposite situation is more likely in the near term. I think that in the next one hundred years that most countries that currently have extremely low birth rates and extremely restrictive immigration policies, which are mostly the rich industrialized nations, will buckle under the weight of their aging populations.

Among industrialized nations the United States is actually near the top of the list in regard to birth rates, so all is not lost. I have read some explanations regarding this, largely concerning lower rates of abortions in the United States than in other countries. I think abortions probably do have something to do with it, but I also think that the large numbers of people who belong to religions that discourage other forms of birth control (Catholicism and Mormonism spring to mind) also have a significant impact. Whatever the reason the United States has a birth rate that allows for the population to stay constant. Since more people immigrate to the United States than emigrate away from it, this is what accounts for U.S. population growth. For this reason, I am actually largely in favor of decreasing barriers to legal immigration.

Other nations are not so fortunate. One example is Japan, which regularly rates among the lowest birth rates in the world. I came across the following story about one Japanese company, Canon, which is attempting to do its part to increase the birth rate in Japan. It is a drop in the bucket, but it's a start.