The author(s) of the following is unknown to Washington Watch and efforts to determine the author have been unsuccessful. But WW thinks it is worth sharing.
I JUST discovered my age group!
I am a Seenager (Senior teenager).
I have everything that I wanted as a teenager, only 55 years later.
I don’t have to go to school or work.
I get an allowance every month.
I have my own pad.
I don’t have a curfew.
I have a driver’s license and my own car.
I have ID that gets me into bars and the wine store. I like the wine store best.
The people I hang around with are not scared of getting pregnant, they aren’t scared of anything, they have been blessed to live this long, why be scared?
And I don’t have acne.
Life is Good!
Also, you will feel much more intelligent after reading this, if you are a Seenager.
Brains of older people are slow because they know so much.
People do not decline mentally with age; it just takes them longer to recall facts because they have more information in their brains. Scientists believe this also makes you hard of hearing as it puts pressure on your inner ear.
Also, older people often go to another room to get something and when they get there, they stand there wondering what they came for.
It is NOT a memory problem; it is nature’s way of making older people do more exercise.
SO THERE!!
I have more friends I should send this to, but right now I can’t remember their names.
So please forward this to your friends; they may be my friends, too.
OLD JUST GOT COOLER!!
The richest 10% of U.S. households are responsible for 40% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The top 1% of households accounted for 15-17% of the nation’s emissions.
The team found that the highest emissions linked to income came from White, non-Hispanic households and the lowest came from Black households. [WP 8/18/23]
49% of American workers believe a 4-Day work week would be successful.
[Ellyn Briggs 8/27/23]
The first semiconductor chips, invented in the late 1950s, held only a handful of transistors. Today, the primary semiconductor in a smart phone has between 10 and 20 billion transistors, each about the size of a virus. [NYT 7/16/23]
7 nations have been led by openly gay heads of state: Latvia, Iceland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Serbia, Ireland, Sarino, Canary Islands, and Norway.
A proposal from China’s internet regulator would try to prevent “internet addiction” by limiting children younger than 8 to 40 minutes of smartphone time a day. [NYT 8/5/23]
Approximately 10 million Americans have entered into a rent-to-own deal at some point in their adult lives, according to estimates by the Pew Charitable Trusts. [NYT 8/5/23]
Nearly 4 million American in 38 states have recently been cut from Medicaid “since the end of a pandemic-era promise that people with safety-net health coverage could keep it, requiring every state to begin a herculean undertaking of sorting out who still belonged on the rolls. Most of those people have been dropped from Medicaid for reasons unrelated to whether they are actually eligible for the coverage, according to Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-policy organization, which has been compiling this data. Three-fourths have been removed because of bureaucratic factors.
The politics: For millions of Americans, this is the only health insurance available. Losing it for reasons of paperwork, not eligibility, is government not running smoothly on a life-or-death issue. [WP 8/4/23]
According to the Association for Advancing Automation, robot orders in North America jumped 42% during the pandemic after essentially being flat over the previous 5 years. [NYT 7/30/23]
Ageless Innovation is a company that creates products for older adults, including animatronic dogs and cats. [WSJ 9/2-3/2023]
When Netflix shipped DVDs to customers, there were about 100,000 to choose from. Streaming which has a different economics has reduced that to about 6,600 titles, [NYT 8/13/23]
The National Diaper Bank Network reports that nearly half – 47% — of U.S. families with young children struggle to afford diapers. That is up from 34% when the study was first conducted in 2010. [Michele Munz 7/24/23]
79% of Canadians and 63% of folks in the United States favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally. The country that is most welcoming is Sweden where 92% favor marriage. [PEW Global attitudes survey]
About Martin Luther King: From May 1963 to April 2023
| Favorable | Unfavorable | Favorable | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| White | Black | |||
| May 1963 | 41% | 37% | 35% | 92% |
| August 1964 | 44 | 38 | 38 | 82 |
| May 1965 | 45 | 46 | 38 | 89 |
| August 1966 | 33 | 63 | 27 | 83 |
| August 2011 | 94 | 4 | 93 | 100 |
[PEW 8/10/23]
Most Americans say King had a positive impact on the country, with 47% saying he has had a very positive impact.
60% of Americans say they have heard or read a great deal or a fair amount about King’s “I have a dream” speech.
52% of Americans say there has been a great deal or a fair amount of progress on racial equality in the last 60 year.
58% of those who say efforts to ensure equality haven’t gone far enough think it is unlikely that there will be racial equality in their lifetime.
Many people who say efforts to ensure racial equality haven’t gone far enough say several systems need to be completely rebuilt to ensure equality.
70% of Americans say marches and demonstrations that don’t disrupt everyday life are always or often acceptable ways to protest racial inequality. [PEW 8/10/23]