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Exactly. This whole "you're beautiful/special just the way you are" thing has got to stop.

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And "Kill yourself, you're nothing special and not needed by anyone" has to start?

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This whole Roman-American connection argument has been around forever. It's almost always made by someone with a political agenda (usually conservative). The flawed argument is basically the implication that


1) Rome did such-and-such and it fell.
2) The US also does such-and-such.
3) Therefore the US should quit doing such-and-such or it will also fall.


The entire argument is meaningless. No matter what someone's country or political agenda, they can find another country to point their finger to and say "see what happened to them". I mean why not make the argument that "most Romans have dark hair, most Americans have dark hair, therefore the US will fall like Rome did".

I don't know how you can even define rise or fall of a country, it's too subjective. If people want to make an arguement that something is good or bad for a country, using that stale Roman connection totally lacks substance.

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That is why I always say that as a requirement to graduate from high school you should be able to rebuild the engine of a car, build a house, and grow a garden. If a person can do those things then they are well on their way to a true education. They would also have the confidence to do things they might otherwise never even try.

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There is always a demand for doing LESS work, and of course you can earn money by satisfying that, so it IS satisfied.

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@JJ

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There is always a demand for doing LESS work, and of course you can earn money by satisfying that, so it IS satisfied.

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A point of minutiae perhaps, but one that maybe mvass at least might appreciate.  You statement above is not strictly correct, and perhaps an example is the best way to illustrate why.

The first patented invention of Thomas A. Edison (U.S. Patent #90646)was a certain device called an "electrographic vote recorder".  Edison came up with the idea when he worked as a telegrapher out of Boston, MA, where one of his jobs was to transcribe congressional proceedings.  He noticed that during congressional sessions, voting on bills was done by calling out the name of each representative, who would respond yes or no, and the vote was recorded one by one and then counted manually.  Edison perceived that this process was laborious, ineffecient and took way too much time.  So, he created a device, based on the telegraph, that would tally votes automatically - which he felt would save time and money by increasing the efficiency of congressional processes.

As it turns out, though a technological success, the device was a commercial failure.  Neither state nor federal legislatures purchased the instrument.  Why?  As Edison later found out, an accepted and often used practice in Congressional sessions is the filibuster, where the oppositon to a particular bill will use delay tactics to block its passage. One of these tactics was to call for time-consuming roll-call votes on long strings of meaningless and irrelevant motions. Congressmen felt that Edison's machine, though it would speed up vote-tallying, would damage the usefulness of this political weapon.  In other words, Congressmen didn't want a tool that led to more efficiency, and so they didn't buy it.

The lesson is, of course, that a good idea is not, by itself, enough.  Consumer demand is what determines what will sell.  Efficiency is sometimes what consumers demand; and sometimes it isn't.  

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That is why I always say that as a requirement to graduate from high school you should be able to rebuild the engine of a car, build a house, and grow a garden. If a person can do those things then they are well on their way to a true education. They would also have the confidence to do things they might otherwise never even try.

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Yes. Just to show people world really isn't that simple.

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