This was a cross-sectional survey of schoolchildren. It tells you nothing about the direction of causation. Maybe using Facebook and texting a lot does indeed cause early sex, drug use and drinking. Maybe kids who use drugs, drink and have sex, use Facebook more to tell others about it,and text a lot to arrange their busy social lives. Most likely, kids who have sex, drink and drugs, have significant major issues in their lives already, and may be using texting and Facebook as alternative (or additional) coping strategies.

Nothing to see here, pass along please.

Kids who text all the time and live (sort of) on Facebook or Bebo may well be kids who already have problems. This study is a survey of schoolkids at point in time, and does not provide any data on whether early sex and drugs cause Facebook, Facebook causes early sex and drugs, or, most likely, both reflect existing issues facing the kids. Indeed texting and Facebook are likely better coping strategies than sex and drugs, though perhpas les immediately enjoyable.

Pass along please, nothing to see here.
 

From our perspective (I'm a health policy person based in Europe), US health care is staggeringly expensive, very variable, and very unfair. It's the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the States.

Your health is poor, overall, especially you have poor child health, and relatively poor maternal and infant health.

A large part of your population have no access to good quality health care, and this imposes large costs on your society.

Your major companies find high health care costs for staff a major burden, and this sharply reduces the competitiveness of good US employers.

You have the highest administrative costs for heath care that I know of, now running over 30%, and at current rates of increase, in thirty years you will be spending 100% of your GDP on health services.
At the top end, there is no better health care anywhere for acute illnesses, but very few people can access this.

The proposed changes are a start, and only a start. With no public option, there is a real risk that the insurance companies will continue to combine together to rip you off. However, the current proposals will save a lot of money over the next decade, which is why the insurance companies are spending millions buying ads, and influencing politicians to stop the change.

I hope it passes!

I manage all my home directories with Unison, including 80Gig of pictures across Linux and Windows. The only issue I've noticed is that for single files over 1G it gets slow, so I split up my thunderbird folders to get under this. Everything else just works.