Progress Book Cuyahoga Falls: Fill & Download for Free

Hello, Sean.That is a very interesting question. It is tempting to say less, because we are always extremely aware of the hardships we are dealing with in the present, while hardships of the past get blurry and fade into the bigger picture of those times. Our memory does us the great favor of playing the movies of the past we enjoy seeing — family, friends, great times, and this is important, satisfaction at having overcome hardships and obstacles. When we see people who are bitter and dwell on the bad past, often they were not able to find a way to overcome hardships — and sometimes hardships are insurmountable — and they also are not able to find the explanation they need to accept that. Or they themselves screwed up their past and were never able to find a way to recover. Actions that blew up their families, and they have not been able to bring about the kind of healing that would move the old business firmly into the past and allow some kind of positive relationships to grow. Or it can be friendships, or businesses, or everything.Today we live in a world where every explosion is recorded and quickly made available to every computer, every TV, every radio. When we see coverage of the aftermath in Iraq and Syria, and Libya, and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world, we cannot imagine the world being more brutal. I am especially haunted by a photo in Time magazine after ISIS was finally forced out of Mosul. It was of the men and boys of Mosul going back into the city to begin rebuilding their lives. Except there was no city, just jagged ruins. They often could not identify where their homes had been. And the looks on their faces as they resolutely strode forward Were heart breaking. And many of the boys were little boys, first grade age, maybe. And this region was the cradle of civilization. From Damascus to deep into subSaharan Africa, there are remains of cities in various stages of destruction of war.As I thought about that picture, I did what millions of people do — I realized I can do something, and I made around a contribution to Save the Children’s Iraqi Relief Fund. I have since learned there is a UN relief agency that has a special Mosul fund, and it is on my list. I am one of millions of small-fry donors who make a difference in Iraq and around the world because these and other organizations create the opportunity.Thanks in part to Quora, I am reminded that things have been worse. At a European peace conference after Germany surrendered in 1945, President Truman insisted on going to Berlin to inspect conditions. The photos of what he saw after relentless Allied bombing and Soviet artillery fire was awing and terrible. We know the evil in Germany that led to this end. Cities around the world looked about the same. As the Cold War emerged, Truman developed the Marshall Plan, which sent many billions of dollars to Europe to rebuild economies and lives.Since the end of World War II, the world has been more peaceful than any time since the height of the Roman Empire. Warfare has become localized. But for 40 years that peace was enforced by a standoff between two superpowers, with almost everyone on the planet knowing each of those two countries could destroy all life in the world at the touch of a button. That capacity still exists but, except for one or two exceptions, nations of the world have become much more civilized in our relations with one another.Relative military peace was not always accompanied by other actions that would preserve and extend civilization. By the mid 20th Century, the industrialized world had turned its rivers, streams, oceans and skies into sewers. The global awareness that we need to protect the environment for humanity was raised by the specter of nuclear war, which does provide a different context for viewing nukes.I am most familiar with the American environmental movement, which was kicked offf in the early 1960s with Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring.” In 1969 the Cuyahoga River at Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire, galvanizing American environmentalism. In Florida in the late ‘60s an early ‘70s, environmentalists fought desperately against a Cross-Florida Barge Canal that had been decades in the planning and would devastate the ecology of North Florida, and against a vast jet port that would destroy the Everglades. With construction under way on both projects and from Jascksonville to Miami, they persuaded the government to pull the plug on both. In New York state, a highly toxic waste dump was making the residents of Love Canal very sick, and similar situations were occurring around the country. Alligators, eagles, herons, osprey, hawks and other species that reproduced by way of eggs were disappearing because the poison DDT used in agriculture and for other purposes made the egg shells so fragile. Extinction and near-extinction of predators such as wolves changed ecosystems in the West. Smog blanketed Los Angeles and other cities, pumped into the air by auto exhausts and emissions from industrial smokestacks. Across the country, it was unsafe to eat fish from many rivers. By the early 1970s, the U.S. had the clean air and water laws and the Environmental Protection Agency, and with steady tightening of pollution standards, most of the problems as they existed in 1970 are repaired. The same happened in most of Europe. The fall of the Soviet Union revealed acute industrial environmental degradation in Eastern Europe, those countries have mostly worked diligently at cleanup.But approaching the 21st Century, scientists discovered that the environmental degradation had extended far beyond the surfaces. In fact, the carbon dioxide never went away. Since the dawning of the coal-powered industrial revolution, carbon dioxide accumulated at the top of the atmosphere. After about 200 years of coal- and oil-driven machines machinery, the carbon dioxide had become a powerful insulator, and the heat generated by the earth and by humans on the earth stayed under the blanket of carbon dioxide.For all of this century so far, science has been racing to figure out what is going on. The essential nature of science means that scientific facts are only as good as the last experiments. For regular people, reading about the progression of findings means we are looking at a bunch of contradictory information, but for scientists it means progress in our efforts to figure out what is going on. In the scope of human history, for a global consensus to develop about anything that really matters is rare. For it to happen within three decades, especially when it involves a lot of high science, would have been unimaginable if it hadn’t happened.The movement is complicated by the human tendency to either/or thinking, which is a useful trait in some fundamental circumstances, but not so much when we’re talking about complex and quickly changing circumstances. The consensus is that global warming is a man-made crisis, but it is not a universal consensus. There are hold-outs who say natural climate change is occurring and there are occasional scientific findings that support their case. There is a new discovery of the earth’s largest cluster of volcanoes underneath Antarctica. Maybe all are inactive. Maybe one is putting out heat, contributing of the melting of the Antarctic ice mass. Besides that, the little understood activities of the Sun could be involved. Sudden surges in solar discharges and solar storms can fry communications satellites orbiting the earth very closely, so who knows?The prudent view is that a combination of human and natural activity are involved in global warming, and we need to do what we can to ameliorate it. And what we can do is continue to moderate human activities that contribute To it. When it comes to natural threats to life on earth (especially our species), it will be all we can do to figure out how to make giant asteroids dodge us. But the fact that we as a species in every corner of the planet are working together on this sort of issue is a great sign that we are more civilized.Likewise, massive collaborations are in progress to fight deadly diseases as they evolve across the planet. And the last quarter century has seen the launch of other global humanistic efforts by a variety of governments and organizations.I didn’t intend an essay, but it turns out to be quite a provocative question, one worth books, not just paragraphs. After all the musings, there is still a big question mark. Continuing rapid technological development is changing the nature of labor, and quickly reducing the number of jobs. Most of the world’s economies are based on capital-labor. This has the potential to be extremely disruptive,and most severe in highly developed economies. We have seen it writ large in the most recent American elections. The China-India standoff in Kashmir could be a sign of things to come, particularly if China diverts water originating in the Chinese Himalayas away from India. We are not out of the nuclear woods, as an overweight dictator in Southeast Asia has been reminding us and a mouthy American president has begun echoing. And working through the current cycle of terrorism is going to take a long time. Any of these factors could be de-civilizing if the people of the world let it.During World War II, Thornton Wilder wrote a much loved play called “By the Skin of Our Teeth.” It starts at the beginnings of humanity and shows how humankind has just barely survived perils that could have taken us out. Wilder didn’t know the half of it. Geologists and anthropologists have documented several near-extinction events that reduced humanity to a few thousand persons, which is why there is so little genetic variation among humans.I think the skin of our teeth is the capacity to act in a civilized manner, even in terrible times. I am not going to append it again, but I urge you to look up William Faulkner’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature.Thanks for giving me this opportunity to think about and discuss this stuff.Oh, and remember Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and the other folks. Whatever you can give will help.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act, very erratically enforced in blocking business mergers that destroyed competition and jobs while later on more often focused on companies that had “grown too big” in what sounds more like political extortion of fat cows than economic policies (Standard Oil, IBM, AT&T, Microsoft cases.)Pure Food & Drug Act to try to end adulterating and unsafe processes like adding chalk and water to milk, floor sweepings to sausages, etc. with some success (so now we get a lot of food from countries without such criteria because it’s cheaper.) Robert Gordon’s “The Rise & Fall of American Growth” does the best job on this topic that I’ve come across and I’ve worked with many food processing and meatpacking operations.Women’s Right To Vote, a calculated ploy to get the votes for alcohol prohibition to pass after 70 years of tryingFederal Income Tax which provided a much bigger federal revenue stream to fund programs and allowed unbalanced budgets to become typicalAlcohol Prohibition to prove that sort of social engineering was unworkable so we tried addictive drugs immediately after that with similar lack of success.Daniel Okrent’s history of Prohibition, Women’s Vote, Income Tax in “Last Call” is an amazing look at how cynically and interdependent all of this was.Federal Narcotics Act made marijuana, hashish, cocaine, opium, morphine, heroin, LSD, and some amphetamines and barbiturates controlled substances (medical prescription required) instead of cheaply and broadly available (with perhaps 30% addiction rates in the late 19th Century.) That ended drug abuse in America like any ill-conceived and unenforceable legislation accomplishes on complex problems.Glass-Steagall Act (actually a creation of the Hoover Administration and their master bank examiner/turnaround specialist Jesse Jones who worked with a third of US banks across the Depression at the Resolution Trust Corp-spawning FDIC, OCC, SBA, etc., Glass and Steagall were key members of Congress/Senate in getting it passed and they wanted to take personal credit for it. Hoover’s account of the Great Depression and Jesse Jones’s “Fifty Four Billion Dollars” are the mostly untold story about this important banking restrictions that were unwound in the 1990’s Clinton administration leading considerably to the 2007 banking fiascos.The New Deal programs which managed to vastly increase the federal government’s budgets, staffing, buildings, and impacts in many places and lives while keeping unemployment and misery around 25% for white males and 70% for non-white males, women, and teenagers for 3x longer than the Depression lasted elsewhere in the world. Billions squandered and spent mostly in swing states (who voted either way in Presidential elections) rather than in states with the highest poverty rates. Jim Powell’s book compiling 80 years of economic analysis of the New Deal by dozens of economists looking back, some of it Nobel-winning work is particularly surprising compared to the glowing (no math done) accounts of how well it must have worked.Social Security (not a New Deal program until the fellow who came up with it shamed FDR into adopting it to build a permanent voting bloc that gradually shifted public investment from children to senior citizens.) It did substantially end the common poverty of seniors as no more than a quarter of the population ever had defined-benefit pension plan coverage. It’s a weird and interesting story with a marketing device of Colonial Penn Life Insurance, the American Association of Retired People, becoming the vast organized lobby for Social Security decades after it began.Eugenics programs ending immigration, setting very low quotas for Asians and Eastern Europeans to emigrate to the US for many decades while turning back Jews fleeing Nazi persecutions, mandatory sterilization for people declared unfit based on IQ and developmental disabilities rather than poor parenting practices, segregation of “undesirable breeders” into institutions (insane asylums, county work farms, prisons, orphanages, sanitariums, hospitals, nursing homes, etc.) peaking with the bizarre legalization of abortion (focused on black and low income mothers.) See Edwin Black’s “The War Against the Weak”Hill-Burton Act creating and funding significant rural hospitals in thousands of rural counties and small towns that had previously had a doctor and 1 room clinic at best for all health care.GI Bill for college education of returning military veterans albeit it was primarily a tool to draw many vets out of the workforce for some years to ease the transition to a civilian economy in the late 1940’s. A huge boon to higher education enrollments and growth as more of the population went to college, overall economic growth slowed, stratified in who it benefited, productivity growth shrank, and wages gradually stagnated for 40+ years for 80% of the workforce. Peak performance during the 1950’s was when only 20% of the workforce had a high school diploma and about 2% a college degree.Medicare made health care nearly free for seniors, the biggest consumers of health care with most dollars spent in the last year of life, allowing enormous growth of hospitals, clinics, physicians in number and compensation, nurses, ambulances, medical technologies, pharmaceutical demand, outpatient services like physical therapy, and health insurers. It also, along with Social Security, became a stick to threaten voters with on promises of increasing it or threats of cutting it.Medicaid extended medical care to the poor, particularly children, at federal and substantially state government expense, gradually becoming the or among the largest total expenditures in state budgets, particularly crowding out public infrastructure spending.Clean Air Act addressed air pollution and air quality which had gotten awful in many places with thousands to millions of point sources (heavy industry, commercial, homes, and especially automobiles which provided a full 30%+ of air pollution at the time.) Over time and at great cost, air quality noticeably improved.Clean Water Act addressed the mostly uncontrolled water pollution, rivers being routinely used as free toilets to dump everything from raw sewage to hazardous industrial wastes. When the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire given the mess accumulated in it by mostly factories, this long noted (50+ years) problem was addressed.Sarbanes-Oxley Act was a much too late and haphazard set of financial regulations to address long-standing problems with financial results misrepresentation to boost or sustain stock prices, executive bonuses, merger deals, apparent profits, etc.. While partly successful it also shrank Initial Public Offerings greatly, convinced firms that could to go private and reduce transparency, was a windfall to outside auditing and law firms adding a million dollars in new fees or more for each publicly traded company, and led to the breakup of General Electric which had relied on “managed earnings” for years.Dodd-Frank Act by two of the clueless culprits in decades of serving on the Senate and House Banking committees pushing much of the legislation that resulted in the 2007 Crash. A hugely complex and ambiguous bill to sort of revive Glass-Steagall and throw in many other tools and criteria that have taken many years to initially implement.There’s many more but these were the biggest impacts I’ve noticed, so much of these are political theater with grand vast ambition when announced and far too little dollars available to implement even the feasible ones. It’s like declaring your middle schooler will be attending Harvard and putting $100 in savings for that six figure expense.

Jack Wheat, former Higher Education Reporter at The Miami Herald (1991-2000)Hey, Sonny.By coincidence, Seth Rothstein asked me almost the same question in the past day or so. Seth question is: “Has the world become more or less civilized since the turn of the century?” I am appending the same answer to your question.That is a very interesting question. It is tempting to say less, because we are always extremely aware of the hardships we are dealing with in the present, while hardships of the past get blurry and fade into the bigger picture of those times. Our memory does us the great favor of playing the movies of the past we enjoy seeing — family, friends, great times, and this is important, satisfaction at having overcome hardships and obstacles. When we see people who are bitter and dwell on the bad past, often they were not able to find a way to overcome hardships — and sometimes hardships are insurmountable — and they also are not able to find the explanation they need to accept that. Or they themselves screwed up their past and were never able to find a way to recover. Actions that blew up their families, and they have not been able to bring about the kind of healing that would move the old business firmly into the past and allow some kind of positive relationships to grow. Or it can be friendships, or businesses, or everything.Today we live in a world where every explosion is recorded and quickly made available to every computer, every TV, every radio. When we see coverage of the aftermath in Iraq and Syria, and Libya, and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world, we cannot imagine the world being more brutal. I am especially haunted by a photo in Time magazine after ISIS was finally forced out of Mosul. It was of the men and boys of Mosul going back into the city to begin rebuilding their lives. Except there was no city, just jagged ruins. They often could not identify where their homes had been. And the looks on their faces as they resolutely strode forward were heart breaking. And many of the boys were little boys, first grade age, maybe. And this region was the cradle of civilization. Thus from Damascus to deep into subSaharan Africa, there are remains of cities in various stages of destruction of war.As I thought about that picture, I did what millions of people do — I realized I can do something, and I made a contribution to Save the Children’s Iraqi Relief Fund. I have since learned there is a UN relief agency that has a special Mosul fund, and it is on my list. I am one of millions of small-fry donors who make a difference in Iraq and around the world because these and other organizations create the opportunity.Thanks in part to Quora, I am reminded that things have been worse. At a European peace conference after Germany surrendered in 1945, President Truman insisted on going to Berlin to inspect conditions. The photos of what he saw after relentless Allied bombing and Soviet artillery fire are awing and terrible. We know the evil in Germany that led to this end. Cities around the world looked about the same. As the Cold War emerged, Truman developed the Marshall Plan, which sent many billions of dollars to Europe to rebuild economies and lives.Since the end of World War II, the world has been more peaceful than any time since the height of the Roman Empire. Warfare has become localized. But for 40 years that peace was enforced by a standoff between two superpowers, with almost everyone on the planet knowing each of those two countries could destroy all life in the world at the touch of a button. That capacity still exists but, except for one or two exceptions, nations of the world have become much more civilized in our relations with one another.Relative military peace was not always accompanied by other actions that would preserve and extend civilization. By the mid 20th Century, the industrialized world had turned its rivers, streams, oceans and skies into sewers. The global awareness that we need to protect the environment for humanity probably was raised by the specter of nuclear war, which does provide a different context for viewing nukes.I am most familiar with the American environmental movement, which was kicked offf in the early 1960s with Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring.” In 1969 the Cuyahoga River at Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire, galvanizing American environmentalism. In Florida in the late ‘60s an early ‘70s, environmentalists fought desperately against a Cross-Florida Barge Canal that had been decades in the planning and would devastate the ecology of North Florida, and against a vast jet port that would destroy the Everglades. With construction under way on both projects, and from Jascksonville to Miami, they persuaded the government to pull the plug on both. In New York state, a highly toxic waste dump was making the residents of Love Canal very sick, and similar situations were occurring around the country. Alligators, eagles, herons, osprey, hawks and other species that reproduced by way of eggs were disappearing because the poison DDT used in agriculture and for other purposes made the egg shells so fragile. Extinction and near-extinction of predators such as wolves changed ecosystems in the West. Smog blanketed Los Angeles and other cities, pumped into the air by auto exhausts and emissions from industrial smokestacks. Across the country, it was unsafe to eat fish from many rivers. By the early 1970s, the U.S. had the clean air and water laws and the Environmental Protection Agency, and with steady tightening of pollution standards, most of the problems as they existed in 1970 are repaired. The same happened in most of Europe. The fall of the Soviet Union revealed acute industrial environmental degradation in Eastern Europe; those countries have mostly worked diligently at cleanup.But approaching the 21st Century, scientists discovered that the environmental degradation had extended far beyond the surfaces. In fact, the carbon dioxide never went away. Since the dawning of the coal-powered industrial revolution, carbon dioxide accumulated at the top of the atmosphere. After about 200 years of coal- and oil-driven machines machinery, the carbon dioxide had become a powerful insulator, and heat generated by the earth and by humans on the earth stayed under the blanket of carbon dioxide.For all of this century so far, science has been racing to figure out what is going on. The essential nature of science means that scientific facts are only as good as the last experiments. For regular people, reading about the progression of findings means we are looking at a bunch of contradictory information, but for scientists it means progress in our efforts to figure out what is going on. In the scope of human history, for a global consensus to develop about anything that really matters is rare. For it to happen within three decades, especially when it involves a lot of high science, would have been unimaginable if it hadn’t happened.The movement is complicated by the human tendency to either/or thinking, which is a useful trait in some fundamental circumstances, but not so much when we’re talking about complex and quickly changing circumstances. The consensus is that global warming is a man-made crisis, but it is not a universal consensus. There are hold-outs who say natural climate change is occurring and there are occasional scientific findings that support their case. There is a new discovery of the earth’s largest cluster of volcanoes underneath Antarctica. Maybe all are inactive. Maybe one is putting out heat, contributing of the melting of the Antarctic ice mass. Besides that, the little understood activities of the Sun could be involved. Sudden surges in solar discharges and solar storms can fry communications satellites orbiting the earth very closely, so who knows?The prudent view is that a combination of human and natural activity are involved in global warming, and we need to do what we can to ameliorate it. And what we can do is continue to moderate human activities that contribute to it. When it comes to natural threats to life on earth (especially our species), it will be all we can do to figure out how to make giant asteroids dodge us. But the fact that we as a species in every corner of the planet are working together on this sort of issue is a great sign that we are more civilized.Likewise, massive collaborations are in progress to fight deadly diseases as they evolve across the planet. And the last quarter century has seen the launch of other global humanistic efforts by a variety of governments and organizations.I didn’t intend an essay, but it turns out to be quite a provocative question, one worth books, not just paragraphs. After all the musings, there is still a big question mark. Continuing rapid technological development is changing the nature of labor, and quickly reducing the number of jobs. Most of the world’s economies are based on capital-labor. This has the potential to be extremely disruptive, and most severe in highly developed economies. We have seen it writ large in the most recent American elections. The China-India standoff in Kashmir could be a sign of things to come, particularly if China diverts water originating in the Chinese Himalayas away from India. We are not out of the nuclear woods, as an overweight dictator in Southeast Asia has been reminding us and a mouthy American president has begun echoing. And working through the current cycle of terrorism is going to take a long time. Any of these factors could be de-civilizing if the people of the world let it.During World War II, Thornton Wilder wrote a much loved play called “By the Skin of Our Teeth.” It starts at the beginnings of humanity and shows how humankind has just barely survived perils that could have taken us out. Wilder didn’t know the half of it. Geologists and anthropologists have documented several near-extinction events that reduced humanity to a few thousand persons, which is why there is so little genetic variation among humans.I think the skin of our teeth is the capacity to act in a civilized manner, even in terrible times. I am not going to append it again, but I urge you to look up William Faulkner’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature.Thanks for giving me this opportunity to think about and discuss this stuff.Oh, and remember Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and the other folks. Whatever you can give will help.