Gongol.com Archives: October 2009
Brian Gongol


October 6, 2009

Humor and Good News Beginning electrical engineering

Business and Finance British Conservative Party acknowledges the population-age curve
They've come out promising to raise the retirement age -- only by a little bit -- but at least they're acknowledging the demographic inevitability that retirement at age 65 is economically untenable when people routinely live to their 80s and beyond

Humor and Good News The viral video that summarizes all previous viral videos

Aviation News UPS Airlines: You used to be able to hop a passenger flight on Brown

News Are huge families really a good idea?
A movement to have exceptionally large families (with ten children or more) suggests that doing so is a way of carrying out divine will and combating societal ills. But there's something wrong with using children simply as tools or agents to serve a social agenda. Biologically, we're driven to have children so that our genes can endure. Practically, large families are common in times and places where a large labor force is necessary to keep economies (like un-mechanized family farms) afloat, or where high mortality rates will keep a large number of children from reaching maturity. But in a wealthy, safe, and developed nation, the practice of having more kids just for the sake of fighting a perceived cultural war seems disrespectful of those children as being "images and likenesses of God". They should be welcomed because they are loved, not because they'll stack the deck on Election Day. It's like a peculiar inversion of China's infamous one-child-per-couple policy. Wanting a large family for the sake of loving each of the children is one thing; having them to fulfill an agenda is quite another.

Science and Technology What we need next
A short list of things that we need but don't have yet

Water News The world's best fertilizer is also one of the most unmentionable

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