Tuesday, August 15, 2017

The West

Western culture seems at this point to be dying. The most important way is that we are not having enough children. This is how cultures and civilizations die. If you stop having children you have no future. In the Western culture we are all about helping the old. We are heavily in debt due to pensions and health care. The most expensive people are old people for both these expenditures.

It was not the baby boomers who started these programs, but the parents of the boomers who did. They got their health care and pensions because there were a lot more boomers. The generations after the boomers are smaller and this is causing a problem.

We are not supporting the youth that we have. Our youth are heavily in debt due to education cost. This is a big problem for our future. Baby boomers protest that we cannot afford to help with higher education costs. Most baby boomers attitude is leave my pension and health care alone at all costs.

And we have some stupid results. I meet at a meetup a young person who had a concession. She was not working because of the effects of this concussion. She was told to get physiotherapy, but she could not afford it. She also could not work because of the concussion. I also know of a 93 year old man who had a brain aneurism and after he did some recovery in the hospital was sent to physiotherapy in a specialized hospital on University. The 93 year old man had everything covered under OHIP.

No, I do not think that OHIP should cover everything. I paid for physiotherapy in the past, but I could also afford to do so. But if you need something like physiotherapy to go back to work, but cannot do that because you cannot afford it we have a system that is dysfunctional.

We also need to do more with funding day care. It may be counter-intuitive, but there is a positive co-relation between the percentage of adult women in the workforce and the birth rate. The higher the proportion of adult women that work the higher the birth rate.

My child is in his thirties. When I was working and he was going to day care, I paid more for day care that I did in rent. It was nothing fancy. It was run by Social Services of Toronto. It did not have to be as expensive as it was. When my child was school age, he was in school most of the day, but the day care had two shifts of full time workers as they covered the children from 8 am to 6 pm. The workers were also covered by a union.

When I asked what the day care workers were doing when children were in school, I was told this was planning time. So from 9 am to 12 am and from 1 pm to 4:30 pm was needed each day for planning? And, the school was complaining that they did not have enough teacher assistant?

The western culture maybe dying, but they are into interesting things. I read Ben Hunt, one of the most interesting writers I have come across. His latest missive is here. In his covering email he talked about a recent post on AI BS Detectors & the Origins of Life by Neville Crawley. This lead me to an article in Quanta Magazine byNatalie Wolchover for an article called "First Support for a Physics Theory of Life".

One problem we have in the West is that a lot of the people having babies do not believe in evolution. So will the best in Western thought die with the Western culture?

On my other blog I wrote yesterday about EnerCare Inc. (TSX-ECI, OTC-CSUWF)... learn more. Tomorrow, I will write about BlackBerry Ltd. (TSX-BB, NASDAQ-BBRY)... learn more on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 around 5 pm.

This blog is meant for educational purposes only, and is not to provide investment advice. Before making any investment decision, you should always do your own research or consult an investment professional. I do research for my own edification and I am willing to share. I write what I think and I may or may not be correct.

See my site for an index to these blog entries and for stocks followed. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk. The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter. I am on Instagram. Or you can just Google #walktoronto spbrunner8166 to see my pictures.

No comments:

Post a Comment