Friday, July 13, 2018

5 Things on a Friday: We Need More Instagram

I went back and forth this week on how many serious articles I should run.  The news has been so grim, though, no matter where you turn, so I decided to keep it light.  I mean, I don’t know that I’m any more optimistic than you are, but I will say that I don’t want to dive any deeper into the garbage pail than I have to through my writing.  
No one wants that, do they?

1. Americans Are Having Fewer Babies.  They Told Us Why. (NY Times)
The vast majority of women in the United States still have children. But the most commonly used measure of fertility, the number of births for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, was 60.2 last year, a record low. The total fertility rate — which estimates how many children women will have based on current patterns — is down to 1.8, below the replacement level in developed countries of 2.1.
The United States seems to have almost caught up with most of the rest of the industrialized world’s low fertility rates...
In the Morning Consult and Times survey, more than half of the 1,858 respondents — a nationally representative sample of men and women ages 20 to 45 — said they planned to have fewer children than their parents. About half were already parents. Of those who weren’t, 42 percent said they wanted children, 24 percent said they did not and 34 percent said they weren’t sure.
Babies are expensive, and most folks are basically pessimistic about the future.  This is what we were just talking about.  It is not complicated.
2. Universal Basic Income Is Not the Solution to Poverty (Slate)
Most of the really smart tech guys I know argue that UBI is, in fact, going to become necessary at some point within the next 30 to 50 years.  By then, the entire human workforce will have become basically superfluous.  
That’s not why I shared the article, though.  I shared it because I liked the opening paragraphs, which read as follows:
Utopia—a term meaning both “good place” and “no place”—has a long history: It dates back to Thomas More’s book of the same name, which was published in 1516. More imagined a perfect world as a lens through which to see the current one: In order to fully appreciate the unfairness of 16th-century England, More contrasted it with a hypothetical Utopia where all men were equally prosperous.
No one mistook More’s Utopia for a policy proposal. As Rutger Bregman explains in the introduction to Utopia for Realists, virtually all of humanity was living in extreme poverty in More’s day. What’s more, the same was true 200 years later. The average annual income in Italy in 1300 was roughly $1,600; by 1880, after the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the invention of gunpowder and the steam engine and the printing press, it was still $1,600. For all those centuries, Utopia was only an ethos, no more than a provocative thought experiment.
3. Friday Hair Metal: Mission by Rush
This is my favorite song by my favorite band.  Oddly, however, that does not make it my favorite song, though I obviously like it quite a bit.

 Enjoy!


4. Instagram: Mini Milkshake Shooters

I realized immediately after I saw this that I haven’t been doing nearly enough wacky Instagram of late.
Once upon a time, I really enjoyed plumbing the depths of The Bartender’s Handbook.  In that spirit, I’d like to make some of these shooters.  We’d need the right occasion, however, and I’m not sure exactly what that would be.
I suppose we could do it for an Army game if we can come up with a way to make these black, gray, and gold.
5.  This Week in Army Football

This is a ridiculously optimistic take.  I don’t disagree, exactly, but that doesn’t mean that I’m ready to set Army’s Over/Under at 10 wins.  The Black Knights have a better than predicted shot at Duke, but the Buffalo and Miami (Ohio) games will also be much tougher than most folks are expecting, and really, the hardest part of winning 10 games is playing with the proper level of consistency across an entire season.  A lot of things had to go right for Monken and company to pull this off last season.
Anyway, I’m not sure I would pick Duke to beat Buffalo straight-up.  The Bulls are my pick to with the MAC, though that might well shock a few folks.  Eastern Michigan might also outperform, but that hinges on what they get out of their new quarterback.  I wouldn’t want to bet my season on a fifth year graduate transfer who’s thrown fewer than fifty passes in his first four years of college.  The Eagles are gonna try it, however, so I guess we’ll see.

I really want to have some folks over to watch the season opener.  Local folks, is anybody interested in hanging out?  You can come sit out on our new deck.  Maybe we’ll even do some Army-themed ice cream shooters.
* * *
Finally, the Army officially announced a change to its physical fitness test this week.  I therefore scoured the Internet to learn more about, eventually alighting on the following live footage of soldiers training for the test.  Though I agree that the new test is a better judge of soldier fitness, this particular event, the max-weight squat, is probably the most dangerous for an untrained individual.

 But as you can see, the heroes in this clip are well on their way to max scores.

So okay.  That's actually NY Giants' first round pick Saquan Barkley training for the season with Rams' phenom Todd Gurley, and what's amazing about it is how much better Barkley looks than the superlatively talented Gurley.

 Shit.  I can't wait for football season.

 That’s all I’ve got.  Enjoy the weekend!
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