Apparently wounded veterans must return their signing bonuses because they cannot serve out their commitments. That just doesn’t seem right to me. Granted, their contracts may have said that—but they shouldn’t say that.
Radley Balko points out how excessive regulations are killing small businesses and helping big business. I see the same thing in the brewing industry: the law is designed to aid Coors and Budweiser at the expense of the start-up brewery.
A Swiss study has found that dope-smoking students do as well as non-using students; they are also more likely to have strong friendships and are no more likely to be depressed. The Boston Herald has more. The only response from a politician: to attack the study for being inconveniently true. Typical prohibitionist.
Justin Etheredge points out the sartorial splendour of the technical class.
We really do look like a bunch of vagrants.
In the we-knew-that-already department, a
has demonstrated that men prefer young women due to their
high fertility while women prefer older men due to their wealth and high
social status, which make them good providers for the offspring.
Well, duh.
More interesting is that the data suggest that men maximise evolutionary fitness by marrying women 14.6 years their junior, and women maximise their evolutionary fitness by marrying men 14.6 years their senior. That is, those couples had the highest number of children reaching adulthood; the study spanned several centuries of data and considered grand-children and I assume great-grandchildren as well.
Even amongst primitive Lapplanders there’s a taboo against large age differences, as in modern society, and thus most couples didn’t have nearly as large an age difference. I suppose that means that there’s even more competitive advantage for those who did marry thus.
Given the notion that a man should marry a wife half his age plus seven years (e.g. a man of 24 should marry a woman of 19), this would indicate that a men should marry at 43 and women at 29 in order to maximise evolutionary success. Seems a bit old for women, but it is pretty obvious that a man of 43 is better-suited to providing for a family than a younger man: he has managed to survive to 43, which is a neat trick; he has probably socked away a great sum of money; less likely to go off on wild-eyed crusades; more likely to have a strong social network. And it doesn’t need noting that a woman of 29 is far, far, far more likely to have children than one of 43.
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 
|
| Technorati
Profile
This is my blogchalk:
United States,
Colorado, Englewood, Centennial, English, , Robert, Male, 21–25, Free
Software, Society for Creative Anachronism.