Thanks Mike, REH
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 1:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: FW: U.S. 30th in global infant mortality Mike G. wrote: > Further evidence of the downward drift. >> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5A30PM20091104 >> >> U.S. 30th in global infant mortality >> [snip] >> >> "One in 8 births in the United States were born preterm, compared >> with 1 in 18 births in Ireland and Finland," added the report, Not enough info in the forwarded Reuters piece to infer much of anything. What's the cause of so many pre-term births? Smoking has declined in the referenced period: >> "The percentage of preterm births in the United States has risen 36 >> percent since 1984." >> >> Smoking and alcohol abuse can lead to pre-term birth but so can >> fertility treatments resulting in multiple births. and big-bore fertility tech is expensive, not for the statistical masses. Is the US way high on booze intake? Street drugs? Prescription drug pandemic? American generic angst is more foetus-hostile than Finnish generic depression? So something is there, yes, but it isn't clear just what. Tongue in cheek, one might say that, in the brave new century of the victorious capitalist reincarnation of Homo Economicus, in the interest of efficiency, babies are getting made by trying to make 9 women pregnant for one month and then the team is downsized to 6, 7 or 8 participants. BTW, entertaining piece by Douglas Coupland in Saturday's Toronto Globe & Mail, "A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next 10 Years". 45 quotable squibbs with attendant marginalia. "The middle class is over. It's not coming back." Considering that every Saturday G&M for a decade or more has had numerous ads each week for machine shops, tool and die works, machine tool companies, precision fabricating shops and the like being auctioned off, I believe it. The businesses, large and small, that make the tools and machines for production are, so to speak, the liver of the middle class. The liver is large, largely unnoticed, robust and you can even live with half of it excised. But a defunct or moribund liver is immanent death. The loss of some consumer product companies is bad but the loss of the machine tool industry is catastrophe. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
