TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!

This just makes me curious what folks will say in 50 years...

"To all the Kids who survived the 1980's, 1990's, 2000's, 2010's & 2020's"....

Remember Walkman?

Scrunchies?

Zip drives?

SUV's?

Laser Disks?

DAT?

Jelly Belly?

holding a cell phone while driving?

Starbucks?

Probably the same sort of things:attribution possibly apocryphal.

Remembered from a cartoon maybe in "The New Yorker":

I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings to watch Cartoons, sitting there in my underwear eating cereal that was chock full of sugar. And Not cartoons with ethnic varigated casts that taught "life lessons" and were so P.C. Hell NO!!! Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny (uncensored!!), Superfriends, Banana Splits, Kroft Supershow, Land of The Lost, HR Puff NStuff, and all that Sid N Marty, Hanna Barbara stuff that we all remember fondly, that taught nothing other than laughter. ANd then, when Soul Train came on, it was time to go outside & play. We'd make friends, get into kid fights over something stupid, then be friends again. And when the sun started to go down, we walked home without fear (unless we did something to the neighbors, boy! Dad was pissed) and Mom would have dinner ready.

Now that is something my Niece will never have the pleasure of experiencing as she grows up.

Why not?

yep, back in the days when Mercury was still medicine

Thimerosal (C9H9HgNaO2S), also spelled thiomersal, is a mercury-containing organic compound (organomercurial) used as an antiseptic and antifungal agent. It was developed and registered under the trade name Merthiolate in 1929 by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly

I seem to recall my mom used Mercurichrome most of the time (contains a small amount of mercury, ~2%)

Chemically, mercurochrome is C20H8Br2HgNa2O6. Mercurochrome (also known as merbromin) is a topical antiseptic. Its antiseptic qualities were discovered by Johns Hopkins doctor Hugh Young in 1919. The chemical soon became popular among parents and doctors for everyday antiseptic uses, mostly in tincture form, and it was very commonly used for minor injuries in the schoolyard, where children nicknamed the tincture 'Monkey Blood'. The FDA banned its distribution in the United States in the 1990s over fears of mercury poisoning. It is readily available in most other countries.

Lechtor, thank you for posting this; I've read the whole thread I remember our teacher, in Science class, giving each of us our own little 'puddle' of mercury. Part of the curriculum; we were supposed to play with it! This thread brought back many memories; of an age of innocence. Yes, kids today won't have what we had...but, they don't know what they are missing, so, their memories will be their own anyway, not ours.

oh and a big chunk of sodium! that was cool

It is interesting that where I live we have one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Every crime is below the national average, many categories a long way below. And yet, a recent survey showed that crime was one of people's greatest concerns.

Funny, isn't it? My daughter attends a far suburban public elementary school with students ranging in age up to 11 years old and yet has been subject to "war on drugs" seminars since she was 6. Her and her peers' idea of a "recreational drug" is sucrose.

At least they haven't installed metal detectors on the doors or instituted mandatory body cavity searches... yet.

Humans are notoriously bad at estimating probabilities, especially for rare events. As evidence of this just take a look at the financial statemetns of casinos. I feel that crime is much lower today that what it seemed to be when I was a kid (born 1969), but our memories combined with our inability to estimate probability made me wonder. So, I did a google search to see what real numbers I could find on homicide rates in the last 50-100 years.

The first chart is from the US bureau of Justice Statistics http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/hmrt.htm

The Second chart is taken from: http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/outlook99/mouzos.pdf
it is the homicide rate per 100,000 from 1972-1997 for several developed countries.

Make of it what you will.

Running a simple χ² statistical test on the local minimum of 1960 and the local maximum at 1980 yeilds a total absence of significance (χ² = 0). As I noted above, as homicide is highly specifically targeted, other explanations (e.g. the War on Drugs calculus of prohibition) are much better explanations for the variance shown. I suspect the left side of the graph (1900-1905) represents data collections changes and is an artifact not related to real rates.

Thanks for the data; for what it is worth, Daly and Wilson have a chart for the US that is derived from another source but is essentially congruent with the DoJ chart.

The first chart tells me that people don't kill each other when there are nazis and commies out there ready to do it themselves. (Of course, lynchings weren't recorded in murder rates.)

The second chart tells me that people of different races can't effing get along, but places where everyone looks the same has more cultural unity and less internal strife.

More stats on this:


This information can be found at


http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Crime/State/StatebyState.cfm?NoVariables=Y&CFID=126458&CFTOKEN=70249898


which is from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Department of Justice Statistics.


You can also find the rates per state or for the whole U.S., going back to 1960.


Rates are the number of reported offenses per 100,000 population.


Violent Crime Rate:

1960: 160.9
1970: 363.5
1980: 596.6
1990: 731.8
2003: 475.0


Murder:


1960: 5.1
1970: 7.9
1980: 10.2
1990: 9.4
2003: 5.7


Forcible Rape:


1960: 9.6
1970: 18.7
1980: 36.8
1990: 41.2
2003: 32.1


Robbery:


1960: 60.1
1970: 172.1
1980: 251.1
1990: 257.00
2003: 142.2



Aggravated Assault Rate:


1960: 86.1
1970: 164.8
1980: 298.5
1990: 424.1
2003: 295


coco

Thanks Coco, I didn't use any of the other violent crime statistics based on the observation:

which makes it difficult to determine how much the reporting of crimes is an increase in actual incidents and how much is from an increase in the rate of reporting.

All that being said, if you go to the website you can see it year-by-year rather than by decade (were the numbers you quoted averages for that decade or the single value for that year?) Most of the rates mirror the murder rate when you overplot them.

No, I just picked the decade years for copying purposes, rather than copy the whole thing. I figured anyone who wanted to see this in detail (or for their own state) could just go to the link.

coco

Bolded for emphasis

Yup, true. This would likely skew the rape rates, but I doubt the others.

coco

There are also wild changes made for political puposes as the compilers of the Statistical Abstract of the United States make clear (doesn't everyone have a copy on their shelf?) and the FBI explains in brief.

There are other confounds which skew the data. For example, in periods when people feel that there will be little to no effect of their reporting a crime, they often won't. For example, purse snatchings in major urban areas are often not considered by many to be worth the time to report as their hope of recovery is close to nil. Another intuitive example is the number of fender-benders (true, not a crime, just an example) often result in the parties exchanging information without police involvement. Domestic violence is almost certainly underreported, for the same reasons you expect rape to be, the victim often feels ashamed or that reprisals for reporting exceed the benefit. Finally, other altercations (e.g. bar fights) may vary in their rates of reportage because they will result in a he-said/he-said disagreement where both parties will be penalized if they report it.

So, for all those reasons and many more, the data may not be wholly inaccurate, but they are way more skewed than for those of homicide. Put another way, even though we'd like decent measures of less violent conflict, the measures are not nearly as accurate as we'd like for purposes of risk estimation or social policy decisions.

Does anyone still wonder what is meant by:"the meek shall inherit the earth"?
Seems the generations since the late 70`s has become more and more meek.....I`m guessing the guy who wrote that saw it coming........

Most likely ^_^