If you're infertile, or if you lost custody in the divorce, and this is your rationalization to help you stay sane, then stop reading at this paragraph. You're absolutely right. Children are nothing but stress and heartache, and you should pity us as you jet off to your vacation in Europe, made affordable by the fact that you never had to buy any diapers. Children are nothing but heartache.

If you've chosen never to have children because you don't want the responsibility, then stop reading at this paragraph. You're absolutely right. You don't want the responsibility. There's no shortage of people on a planet with 7 billion of us. You should pity us as you jet off to Bali...

Still here? OK, here's what this parent knows. Children are stress. Children are heartache. My children are the gray in my hair, and the points on my blood pressure.

And they and their mother are every bit of the joy in my life. Have you noticed when storytellers want to paint a picture of a man in psychotic amounts of pain and regret, they take away his family and he Goes Mad From the Grief? If I lost my wife and children, there would be nothing left but to crawl into a bottle, screenprint a skull on my chest and run off to kill the Emporer in the arena.

I worked with a man this week who makes millions a year. He's pushing fifty, and he still lives like he's twenty. He's a gym rat, could probably trade his car for my house, dresses hip and expensive, and has enough real estate to host the President of the United States without shame.

For all that, this man seems manically adrift. Since this is Slashdot, I'll pull a geeky Jim Butcher reference and tell you I don't think this guy's house has a threshhold. He catered in expensive food from a local "in" restaurant, and he seemed to think commercial cooking was the best you could get. He took a call from his much younger grilfriend, and he seemed ... less ... not more, like a lot of happily married guys I know when their wives walk in the room, as if the two of them together were more than the sum of the two of them apart. Every ounce of his expensively toned and coiffed appearance screamed "I'm desperately hanging on to my youth." To be fair, I look like a guy who can't get to the gym nearly enough, has pulled out far too much of his own hair, has luggage under his eyes and has a face with worrylines that look like a highway map.

I felt kind of bad for the guy, like watching a child with a lot of toys, but no friends, versus a kid with a lot of friends, but nothing more than sticks and a vacant lot to play in.

Children are more than just responsibility and care and exasperation. They're joy and hope and -- what's the cliche -- "the embodiment of God's belief that the World should be given another chance."

There is more to the baby than the sound of the cries and the smell of the diaper. Don't worry about me and my happiness. Sure, I'm hemorraghing money, losing sleep, losing my voice from the shouting, pushing the clinical definition of obese, shedding hair like a cat in the spring and probably losing my sanity in the process... ...and I would cheerfully murder any genie that tried to take me back to my early 20s. :-)

I traded my "happiness" for joy.

I really need a cite here, but the explanation I got in school went like this, FWIW. Take it with a grain of salt, but it seems within shouting distance of the truth. It basically all comes done to particulate size and time of exposure. The smaller/"finer" the particulate size of the smoke, the deeper it gets into your lungs, the harder it is to get out, and the longer the exposure time it has for any carcinogens to wreck havoc.

Wood smoke from campfires has a large particulate size in the smoke. Burn an oak tree, and your nose and lungs do a pretty thorough job of filtering it out and hacking it back up. The thinking is that natural forest fires have been around long enough to actually influence evolution. This large particulate size is why putting sawdust in a pipe would be unpleasant.

Dried tobacco leaves have a smaller particulate size in their natural form than woodsmoke. Pipes and cigars produce smoke "finer" than wood, and carry carcinogens in the smoke, so pipes and cigars will produce higher rates of lung cancer than being downwind of a campfire. Additionally, since pipes and cigars sit on your lip for extended periods of time, they also produce higher rates of lip and mouth cancers.

Cigarettes produce extremely fine particulates that penetrate deep into the lungs. The particulates are fine enough that you have less ability to clear them out of your lungs, so you get even more exposure to the carcinogens. In addition, cigarettes undergo other industrial processes and additives that may contribute to the problem. This makes cigarettes by far the greatest danger.

Or at least, that was the explanation handed out in a public high school decades ago... :-) Consider it as reliable as the explanation of Bournelli's Principle. :-)

This was at least the explanation they were handing out in health class in public schools long, long ago. :-)

BTW...

It's called work and sacrifice. You should try it some time. You'd be amazed what can happen when you're not afraid to get your hands a little dirty.

Stop it, you're embarrassing me. Do you have any idea who the original "bleeding heart" is? Do you imagine you're insulting me by grouping me together with Him?! When you and I stand on Judgement Day, whose ideas do you think He'll have more sympathy for? That we should just cut the old people loose, or that we should declare that we are our brother's keeper and follow the example of the Samaritan?

You call me a "Bleeding Heart" for declaring we can save them all. I find myself in ridiculously good company. Please, by all means, insult me some more. I don't think I blushed quite all the way out to my ears yet...

Bear with us, Lucratius. We're young, just over 200 years old. It seems every nation has its fits of insanity -- Germany/Japan 1930, France 1793, Spain 1480, etc..., and this seems to be ours. Most of us don't even remember our own core values of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, let alone the sister declaration of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité." I hold out hope that one day we will read the inscriptions chiseled into stone on our monuments and try to rediscover what they mean.

We seem to have lost our courage as well as our heart. We tell ourselves that deciding to be craven bastards is merely being "realistic." We're so terrified we'll break even our own rules to bow down to anyone who will promise to keep us safe. We're so insecure that we attack even the idea of expertise, lest it make us feel even more inadequate.

We follow people who exploit that fear to steal amounts of wealth so obscene it's a blasphemy against God. We're so afraid of the demands that God Almighty would place on us that we've decided to bow down before the idea that we're the only people God loves, and He loves us so much He no longer requires us to feed the hungry, heal the sick, clothe the naked or visit the imprisoned.

It's bad, but we've been worse. We came through the Civil War with most of our ideals intact, though Lincoln did basically try to cancel civil rights for a time. We seem to be repeating the Great Depression, and the shoots and beginnings of a new "New Deal" are starting to show through the cracks. We may yet drag out and dust off the old Frank Capra, Audie Murphy, and Woodie Guthrie that can show us the way back to the light. We may yet find our courage, we may yet remember our heart.

At the very least Lucratius, try to remember that some of us are trying.

Were you asleep that day? Does "Nuremburg" ring a bell? How about "My Lai?" If you have a moral objection to an order, you PUT YOUR DAMNED WEAPON DOWN! Your official scripted response is "I'm sorry, sir, but that is an unlawful order and I cannot follow it." The military makes it crystal clear that not only do you have a duty to refuse an unlawful order, but you will be prosecuted and punished if you follow that order and commit a crime. You absolutely do not "wait until later." You refuse that order right then, right there, or pay the price later for following it.

Seriously, you can't tell the difference between saluting the office and saluting the man? It does have a touch of subtlety, I grant you. Were you an Aggie by any chance? :-)

Doing the math, 1 Billion dollars is roughly the value of 13,000 life careers. We're literally saying this man did more -- and I'll be unbelievably generous and use your yardstick of 15 years -- that he did more in 15 years than 13,000 other men did in their entire lives.

OK, it's within the realm of theoretical possibility. Here is a list of feats -- performed single-handedly, mind you -- that might merit a One Billion Dollar payout:

1. Formulating the Grand Unification Theory.
2. Providing the root treatment to cure all forms of cancer.
3. Finding a way to keep telomeres from degrading during replication.
4. Inventing an efficient machine to keep the central nervous system oxygenated and provided with nutrients after a traumatic event.
5. A root treatment to keep viruses from replicating.
6. A solar cell with 99 percent efficiency.
7. The initiation of peaceful relations with a species from outside our solar system.

Feats in that range would be worth a billion dollars. What did your boy do?

Oh that's right. He committed multiple felonies. From your own cite:

Again, how about we not give billions of dollars to thieves and find a way to keep giving grandma her meds? Why do you people always want to reward criminals?

Nope. You absolutely don't salute Him. Unless he has personally done something that has earned your respect, you're never saluting him.

You're saluting the uniform. You always, always, always salute the office, not the man. The office, again, is a function of the People of the United States, and a symbol of our highest ideals. That uniform is a walking implementation of the idea that "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..." That's why it's worthy of a salute, because it carries an Idea, not just Power. That's why the Oath you swear when you pick up a gun is always to the Constitution, never a man.

If all that uniform carries is Power, if the only thing a uniform has to offer is Force, then "it is [your] right, it is [your] duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for [your] future security."

It chills me to my bones to hear an American claim that a government official should be respected simply because he has brute force behind him. Whatever happened to "the Spirit of '76?"

That's odd. In the America I grew up, on a military base surrounded by F-4 Phantom jets and armed men ridiculously overqualified to kill you, on the school on that base I was taught to QUESTION AUTHORITY, to HOLD AUTHORITY ACCOUNTABLE, that my father and his colleagues practiced the bloody art of mayehm to KEEP US FREE, not to kowtow to those in authority.

I was taught that we routinely hold elections so we could hold elected officials, referred to as PUBLIC SERVANTS, accountable for their actions. I grew up among armed men in uniform who took me to national monuments and proudly declaimed that We the People were the source of authority, that men in uniform always, always, ALWAYS deferred to a civilian commander in chief.

Reading your post sounds odd to someone raised by the sound of Phantom and Tomcat jets. Respecting authority for authority's sake was something we said the Commies and the Nazis did. :-) Americans were born free and bowed to no one. Give me Liberty or Give Me Death. Don't Tread on Me.

Of course, I'm sorry. Reading your post, I assume you must come from some tragic country like Burma or North Korea where you have to bow and scrape just to get by. Please send our warmest regards and deepest repect to Aung San Suu Kyi, who knows more about what it means to be an American than you ever will.

Hey, wait a minute. Cartman? Eric Cartman?! Is that you Cartman?

You're trying to get the efficiency and stability of a public utility, but preserve the competition between companies that fosters innovation and progress.

My question is "Why don't you trust the engineers?"

People like Vint Cerf don't need the competition to drive them forward. People like Vint Cerf and Linus Torvalds will give us progress because that, to their very bones, is who they are. Engineers don't need clueless MBAs and PMPs to drive them forward. In fact, get the managers out of the way and you get things like the Internet and Linux and powered flight.

Singers sing because they can't shut up. Put a singer on a stage, and they'll sing because they can't help themselves, whether they get paid or not (I strongly believe they should be paid). Writers scribble because they can't stop. They'll write in crayon on grocery bags if they have to. Painters will paint even if it means they have to use their own blood as ink. Scientists experiment, even when they have to pay for it out of their own pocket, even if they have to use their own bodies as a testing ground.

Engineers tinker. We build. We make things even if it means we have to pay membership fees to the Tech Shop. Every. Single. Project I have ever been involved with, the corporate structure just got in the way and made worse, less cost-effective decisions that could only make sense to the most clueless of PHBs. I smile, I nod, I get along, I file my TPS reports, I've even worn a suit, but Dear God, I just finished a project where my guys didn't get what they needed to get it done because the business side wouldn't shut up for two seconds and let them work. I had one of my guys come in complaining -- and I didn't believe him until I saw the proof he brought me -- that one of the business side guys called a dozen (12) meetings after hours, stopping all work to bring all the people to a central conference room to discuss why progress wasn't occurring. They literally spent six out of twelve hours talking about why they were talking. I had a chat with the offender and he actually believes the constant meetings spurred progress along?! He literally thinks he was digging in the spurs when he was actually yanking on the reins.

Ever notice how when we NEED something to get done, we bring in a group of engineers and let them just work? We didn't set up competing companies for the Manhattan Project, we don't set up competing companies for the Moon Shot, the Rennaissance and the Enlightenment didn't come from the Innovations fostered by the Corporations. Indeed, if not for the actions of the East India Company, Britain might still be an empire.

How about we try something that has worked so brilliantly before? How about we go and find a bunch of smart engineers and technicians and we ask them to design and build a telecom infrastructure? How about we try the same trick we used to get a national power grid, a national highway system, a working nuclear bomb, footprints on the moon and the damned Higgs Boson we should have had a decade ago? How about we quit listening to the guys who gave us the Space Shuttle Challenger, the Deepwater Horizon and the Titanic?

Oh, I'm quite certain I live in a vastly different reality than yours, and I have no doubt I've built up far more financial resources than you have. I believe this is because you and I have fundamentally different approaches to life.

I look at my responsibilities -- old people to care for, children to raise -- and where the resources don't meet the responsibilities, I INCREASE THE RESOURCES. This requires hard work, courage, investment and foresight.

You look at your responsibilities, and you feel afraid, You look at old people to care for and children to raise and immediately begin deciding where you can shirk your duties, claiming "we're forced to prioritize." "Gotta feed the baby, so Grandma's gotta go." People like you used to shove old people out into the woods to die. I believe we can both take care of the kids AND the old people.

Yeah, I do have a wall safe. I started out homeless at 17, and I have performed tasks to make Heracles wince to put that safe there. You're right, I'm not buying the nonsense that there's not enough to go around when we pay the CEO of United Healthcare 1.1 Billion just to QUIT THE COMPANY. At one point, one out of every 700 dollars spent on healthcare in this country was going directly into his pocket. One pocket of one CEO of one company. You want to recapture resources? How about we begin there? Maybe, just maybe, we can cover Grandma's pain meds for just a little longer if we quit giving billions to felons.

In the meantime, how about you reach down deep, find what little of your manhood is left, and find the courage to say "We can take care of the baby AND we can take care of grandma. We can provide compassion and care at both birth AND death." Let go of all that fear and man up, sack up and take care of business without whining about how it's all too much for you.

I've got some gray in my hair, and I'm just about old enough to join AARP but if I ever become such a sad, defeated broken-down old man such as yourself, please, just take me out in the woods and shoot me. I intend to leave it all on the field before I go, and if you ever hear me start to whine that the ball is too heavy to carry, please, just take me out of the game.
 

Everything you just said is valid, and parallels the situation with another utility, namely the power grid. All of the arguments against why we can't have rural cell coverage were previously used to explain why we can't have a rural electrical grid.

The answer turned out to be that government needed to set up power companies, and that utilities needed to be publicly-owned or closely watched and directed (i.e., regulated). Initiatives like the Tennessee Valley Authority meant that my grandparents got to trade in their lanterns and candles for electric lights.

The simple fact is that there are a few core infrastructure industries that need to be either publicly-held (power, water, sanitation, mail) or kept on a very, very tight leash (Banking, see "Glass-Steagal").

AT&T is making a very convincing case that communications infrastructure -- which was already developed and built by tax dollars -- needs to be another publicly-held infrastructure. Here's how you know this is true.

Every time some local municipality gets together and starts putting up their own wreless network, the telecom lobbyists always descend like locusts screaming that "It's not fair to make us compete against government entities!" What they're saying is that private companies in this industry, with their need for profit, can't ever be as efficient as a public effort. All that means is that as technology has progressed, we've simply discovered another industry that operates as a classic "market failure."

...about the Italians, and the Irish, and the Poles, and every other group that ever came here...

I hunt, fish and have been on scene for a few automobile accidents. I've seen what happens when a guy falls from 15 stories onto cement in a construction accident. I've gutted and eaten my share of game. I've familiar with the story of Timothy Treadwell. I know what bears can do to a skeleton, and I can imagine pretty well what that camp looked like. I've seen fire photos.

It's grisly, but it doesn't stay with me because -- and I know I'm venturing into the domain of poets here -- it wasn't Evil. I didn't hate the deer. No one pushed the construction worker. His coworkers mourned for him, and it seemed sad, but proper. Carnivorous predation -- including my own -- and accidents don't "haunt" me. They seem "natural," as poor as that word choice is. I've experienced accidents -- some that put me in a hospital bed with stitches -- but they didn't --- I don't know -- "stain my soul." How's that for florid prose?

I wish I had never seen the Daniel Pearl video. Not that I wish I could have remained ignorant, but I wish I lived in a world where it just didn't happen. That video stuck with me. That video bothered me. I've met grizzled old firemen who were disfigured in a fire while they saved lives. I've shaken the hands of the men, and the burn scars shine like God's own merit badges.

I've seen photos of women disfigured by jealous men. Context seems to be everything. Just looking at the photos of those poor girls twists my guts into a knot. Maybe it's because I'm a parent, but those kiddie porn photos the cops published where all the people were removed and only the background shown make me wish God had personally appointed me to Go Smite Someone. I know the rage is just a cover for the anguish those photos of Best Western hotel rooms cause me.

If I had to spend a year, eight hours a day, looking at the worst the world had to show me, I'd need a padded cell at the end of it, and I'm a man with some scars and some grey in his hair. Shame on Google for doing this to some kid fresh out of school and then flushing him like toilet paper at the end of it. When you're the Boss, you're responsible for your people, and anyone who could do this is a reprehensible human being.

Hi, welcome to the US where we have massive unemployment and employer-based health insurance. Most people have zero choice in their healthcare provider. Most people consider themselves lucky just to HAVE a healthcare provider.

I looked at your cite, which says nothing about wasting money to keep people alive. It argues hospice is more cost-effective and offers better care than hospitalization. You added the ghoulish bit about wasting money to keep people alive for a few extra months all by yourself.

Well, gee, Mr. Potter, how much do you think some old coot's life is worth? I can totally understand and support "extraordinary measures/heroic intervention/quality-of-life/Do Not Resuscitate" issues and I understand there comes a point when you're just extending the patient's suffering, but that's not the argument you made. YOU are the reason why legalizing medically-assisted suicide is controversial. The whole argument against legalizing doctor-assisted suicide is the fear that old people would be pressured to die before their time because of financial, rather than medical reasons.

And there you are.

How much are a few extra months worth? A few extra months with my family? A few extra months with my wife? A few extra months to say good-bye? Sometimes even just a few extra minutes are everything...

Of course, that argument just bounced right off of you.

The sort of mind that could spew this out:

Wow. Just wow. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. The kind of mental pain and anguish necessary to build such solitary callousness...

I'm sorry.

Only if you define empathy and compassion as weakness. Being unaffected by material like this doesn't mean you're strong. It just means you're heartless.