Today, instead of posting on future tech, I am posting about the past… It started with a look at the PAL-V (the 400K chopper / car hybrid available now), and took an interesting turn into donut media’s look at soviet cars…

What do you think?

So, Florida was inland, close to what looks like a mountain range.

This website allows you to enter your address and lets you see where your home would be located through the centuries, as the tectonic plates shifted.

What do you think?

Parkland is just a few miles away from where I live. I have friends whose children went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The shootings at this school, and for that matter every other school is tragic. Our instinct, of course, at such senseless violence against the most innocent of us brings up rage and a desire to make sense of it all. Some of us will point fingers at the tools of the massacre, and many of us will demonize those we already disagree with. This tragedy is big enough for us relive our worst nightmares. And the easy fix is to look to blame our favorite villains.

I recently spoke to a friend who is having trouble with her own son. Not Parkland-variety trouble, but trouble nevertheless. She is a single mother and a good person. She works hard to provide a loving environment to her only son, who is the center of her universe. For as long as I have known them, however, she has had challenges with her son. My own two kids, a few years older than hers, seem to never have the kinds of problems she has had. It would be easy to attribute this to one or two facts such as that mine grew-up in a two parent home and hers did not, but we all know that reality is not ever that simple.

Here are some of my observations of my friends “troubled” child.

From a very young age, he was diagnosed with ADHD and was put on a medication. Growing up in India, I never heard of ADHD. I would never consider medicating my children for a chronic, non-threatening condition at a young age without at least trying some alternatives. My kids were not without fault growing up, and it never occurred to me to “medicate” them to have peace of mind. If someone had suggested ADHD medication to me, I would certainly seek a second opinion. The number of children being raised with medication at young ages is alarming. The long-term effects of not teaching our children to cope with their emotions and just have them take pills for it is just bad and wrong. As I have seen my friends son grow older, his challenges have grown in size with him. Instead of working with her son, my friend has taken the easy, institutionalized way of just medicating him.

Also from a very young age, my friend’s son has been seeing a psychiatrist. Once again, I feel, perhaps wrongly, that this child is missing out on the one connection he needs — with the one parent he has. Once again I feel that my friend has found an institutional solution to an everyday problem. While I understand the need for psychiatry, this is not a child that has suffered any real trauma in life. He is an intelligent, middle-class kid having gone to private schools all his life, and having a pretty decent extended family and a stable household.

There are two modes of communication in my friend’s household. One is a totally loving, caring and vulnerable, and the other is speaking over each other, generally in higher decibels. There is not much adult conversation. There are threats and promises, no voluntary exchanges. On the few occasions when I’ve had the pleasure of taking care of this young man, I’ve noticed him “fake yelling” at me to get attention. When he discovered that all he needed to do was ask, the conversation became more normal, more civil.

Both his eating habits and his health are in the “needs improvement” column. He has always been overweight, and there is not a whole lot of nutrition in his daily intake.

This is a very sweet, intelligent, caring and capable young man, given to mood swings and some mildly violent behavior. He has trouble coping with things big and small. Coping, for right now, means taking a pill or paying someone to listen to your issues for him. I think much of his issues could very easily have been addressed by some real parenting, and instead what he has gotten is a lot of institutional help, and has been made to feel pretty “defective” by people with credentials and authority. This kid will never shoot up a school; however, it is going to take a long time for him to grow up and be stable emotionally.

The 19-year-old who shot up the school in Parkland also had coping issues. He did much worse, though. He killed 17 people in order to be heard. Sheriffs had been called to his home 39 times. While I don’t know enough about him to say that “all he needed was better parenting,” better parenting would have certainly prevented the killings. Institutional solutions are only so good. In each one of these cases, it seems to me, that there is a failure much sooner, much larger. While everyone “knew” he was trouble, all that was done was drugs, and the solution the morning after seems to be “keep him away from sharp object.”

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this picture; with this attitude, this way of thinking. Children are gifts and must be treated as such. Institutional answers will not work. Our worlds should not be an asylum, where inmates are drugged and kept away from sharp objects.

Another great video with Jonathan Haidt. In this, Reason’s Nick Gillespie interviews Haidt on PC culture, and his article with Greg Lukianoff, and on creating Heterodox Academy.

Here’s a link to the “Victim Culture” article Haidt refers to in the interview.

I recently encountered this video of Dave Rubin interviewing Dr. Tino Sanandaji, Kurdish-Swedish economist and author. Three things that struck me about the interview:

1. The quality of talks on Dave’s show including the topics and the diversity is what I expected from NPR 15 or so years ago and never did get.
2. I get tired of being quoted “Sweden” stats, and this is a great video that provides some honest insight into Sweden’s reality.
3. Dr. Tino Sanandaji, much like most Rico readers, has never been to Mises or Property and Freedom Society conferences.

What do you think?