Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password


Why does the U.S. still let 12-year-olds get married?

Posted by takyon on Sunday February 12 2017, @10:27PM (#2230)
43 Comments
/dev/random

Mod journal flamebait!!!

Why does the United States still let 12-year-olds get married?

This is an opinion piece in WaPo written by the founder of a nonprofit. archive.is link because I figured out WaPo has a 5 article/month limit paywall.

While most states set 18 as the minimum marriage age, exceptions in every state allow children younger than 18 to marry, typically with parental consent or judicial approval. How much younger? Laws in 27 states do not specify an age below which a child cannot marry.

Unchained At Last, a nonprofit I founded to help women resist or escape forced marriage in the United States, spent the past year collecting marriage license data from 2000 to 2010, the most recent year for which most states were able to provide information. We learned that in 38 states, more than 167,000 children — almost all of them girls, some as young 12 — were married during that period, mostly to men 18 or older. Twelve states and the District of Columbia were unable to provide information on how many children had married there in that decade. Based on the correlation we identified between state population and child marriage, we estimated that the total number of children wed in America between 2000 and 2010 was nearly 248,000.

Turns out R2D*2pa$tramimacaronomy is doing just fine stateside, for the moment...

My Client Has Asked Me To Do A Second Project

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 10 2017, @03:21AM (#2227)
3 Comments
Career & Education

They're even paying me to prepare my bid. That is, I'm getting paid just to tell them how much it will cost them.

This is really good news. These people really like me.

This despite the fact that I constantly feel like I'm fucking up. Sometimes I don't go in to work because I sleep all day. But as a consultant, I'm not particularly required to show up, I'm only required to deliver a quality product on time.

Which I did, for my first project. It had a hard deadline because our customers were scheduled to go to manufacturing March 1. They wanted a whole month for QA so I absolutely had to finish by February 1, which I did.

Everyone at the client company likes me. I like them too. It's good to work for good people, that makes a lot of difference to me.

I bought a Mac Mini with some of the money from my first paycheck. I worked at home tuesday and wednesday, and will work at home tomorrow (Friday). I brought one of their evaluation boards from work to use at home.

In other news, I busted a button off my coat. I briefly considered purchasing an entirely new coat, then thought "What a colossal waste of money, I'm not that lazy, I'll sew the button back on." Then I braved a torrential rain shower as I went to but a sewing kit on the way home today.

Elizabeth Warren Silenced on the Senate Floor

Posted by takyon on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:54AM (#2225)
27 Comments

Micron 2017 Roadmap

Posted by takyon on Sunday February 05 2017, @06:10PM (#2222)
0 Comments

Trying Vitamins For Sleep

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 03 2017, @06:36PM (#2219)
8 Comments
Career & Education

I recently griped that I sleep more than anyone, but that all that sleep does not make me feel rested. Actually it makes me feel terrible; when I first wake up in the morning I feel as if I've been beaten with a baseball bat.

Back in the day I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, a phenomenon in which one stops breathing during sleep. It partially wakes you, reducing the quality of sleep.

But I had surgery for it in 2008. As far as I could tell the surgery worked. Actually for some time my sleep was just dandy.

In response to my comment, AC recommended I take Vitamin D. Now I am skeptical of nutritional supplement treatment, but at this point I'm willing to try waving a dead chicken over it. I googled it and found what appeared to be a credible report of peer-reviewed research that indicates Vitamin D deficiency diminishes the quality of sleep.

For several months I've had a low-sugar, low-cholesterol diet. I'm pretty sure that diet is low in Vitamin D as well. It's been a cold winter here in the Northern Hemisphere; I haven't had much of the exposure to the Sun that causes our skin to make Vitamin D.

I stopped at the drugstore on the way to work just now and bought some 2000 IU Vitamin D3 tablets. I also got Vitamin B12. The article also recommended Vitamin B5 but the store didn't carry it. I took my first doses when I stopped at Peet's for a coffee.

A while back I complained to my witch doctor that I often slept all day, that no amount of sleep made me feel rested. In response he prescribed the antidepressant Welbutrin. It's working partially, in that, if I didn't have to get up, I would sleep until noon.

My present contract has a long commute. I don't have a key to the office. To work a full day I need to get out of bed at 7:00 AM. It is uncommon that I manage to do that.

I just bought a Mac Mini. Soon I should be able to work from home, but even so it's not going to work if I'm sleeping all the time, especially if that sleep is not restful.

Trudeau avoids poking the "grizzly bear" Trump

Posted by takyon on Thursday February 02 2017, @07:43PM (#2217)
5 Comments
News

Canada's Trudeau decides not to poke U.S. 'grizzly bear' for now

Just play it cool and use Canada's great strength: utter invisibility despite sharing a border with the United States.

Supreme Court: Apprentice Edition

Posted by takyon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @10:13PM (#2215)
7 Comments
News

Trump is reportedly going to summon two finalists for the position to the announcement, at 8 PM EST. There can only be one.

Neil Gorsuch.

2.5 GB/s, 2 TB M.2 SSD

Posted by takyon on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:56PM (#2214)
2 Comments

Evolutionary Biologist to Run for U.S. Senate (CA)

Posted by takyon on Monday January 30 2017, @02:05PM (#2213)
7 Comments

What Can Replace Kuro5hin?

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday January 29 2017, @02:04AM (#2211)
4 Comments
Career & Education

Rusty Foster, the site's owner, said the site went down when its entire data center was decommissioned. While he promised to post a read-only archive, it's been a long time. We speculate that he did not have offsite backups.

Kuro5hin provided an outlet for our cynicism; for example I myself am responsible for the meme of "Ignorant Mother Fucker" - "Mother" and "Fucker" being two separate words, as I feel it sounds more obscene that way.

It also published much-longer essays and stories than one sees anywhere else. My own Living with Schizoaffective Disorder, first published there in 2003, is fifty pages in hardcopy form.

The problem I've got is that I'm bored out of my mind. I really like Soylent News, but it would be inappropriate for me to urge my fellow Soylentils to, for example, "Die In A Fire".

I need something more interactive than just reading what others have written. I like to write, I need a venue for my writing. I have my own website but it's not set up for discussion. "K5" provided that.