Modern industrial society grants little status to old people. In fact, such a society has a system of built-in obsolescence. There is no formal system for continuing our education throughout our life in order to keep up with rapidly changing knowledge. When our education and job skills have grown obsolete, we are treated exactly like those who have never gained an education or job skills and are not encouraged or given the opportunity to begin anew.
As a society becomes more highly developed, the overall status of older people diminishes. Improved health technology creates a large pool of old people, who compete for jobs with the young. However, economic technology lowers the demand for workers and creates new jobs for which the skills of the aged are obsolete, forcing older people into retirement. At the same time, young people are being educated in the new technology and are keeping pace with rapid changes in knowledge. Finally, urbanization creates age-segregated neighborhoods. Because the old live on fixed incomes, they must often live in inferior housing. All these factors—retirement, obsolete knowledge and skills, inferior standards of living—lower the status of the aged in society.
A century ago, when one could expect to live only to 50 or so, the life span more or less coincided with the occupation and family cycle. But today the average life span allows for fifteen to twenty years of life after these cycles. It appears that our life span is outpacing our usefulness in society. The fact that most Americans live in urban areas does not mean that they reside in the center of large cities. In fact, more Americans live in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas than in the cities themselves.
The Bureau of the Census regards any area with more than 2,500 people as an urban area, and does not consider boundaries of cities and suburbs.
According to the Bureau, the political boundaries are less significant than the social and economic relationships and the transportation and communication systems that integrate a locale. The term used by the Bureau for an integrated metropolis is an MSA, which stands for Metropolitan Statistical Area. In general, an MSA is any area that contains a city and its surrounding suburbs and has a total population of 50,000 or more.
At the present time, the Bureau reports more than 280 MSAs, which together account for 75 percent of the US population. In addition, the Bureau recognizes 18 megapolises, that is, continuous adjacent metropolitan areas. One of the most obvious megapolises includes a chain of hundreds of cities and suburbs across 10 states on the East Coast from Massachusetts to Virginia, including Boston, New York, and Washington, D. C. In the Eastern Corridor, as it is called, a population of 45 million inhabitants is concentrated. Another megapolis that is growing rapidly is the California coast from San Francisco through Los Angeles to San Diego. Seeking to frame his new administration as one with a firm focus on closing the gap between children from affluent and poor families, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will propose spending some $1.8 billion on an array of programs designed to boost California's enrollment in early education and child-care programs.
Newsom's plan, which he hinted at in a Fresno event last month, will be a key element in the state budget proposal he will submit to the Legislature shortly after taking office Monday, a source close to the governor-elect's transition team said.
The spending would boost programs designed to ensure children enter kindergarten prepared to learn, closing what some researchers have called the "readiness gap" that exists based on a family's income. It would also phase in an expansion of prekindergarten and offer money to help school districts that don't have facilities for full-day kindergarten.
"The fact that he's making significant investments with his opening budget is really exciting," Ted Lempert, president of the Bay Area-based nonprofit Children Now, said Tuesday. "What's exciting is the comprehensiveness of it, because it's saying we're going to focus on prenatal through age 5."
A broad overview document reviewed by The Times on Tuesday shows that most of the outlay under the plan—$1.5 billion—would be a one-time expense in the budget year that begins July 1. Those dollars would be a single infusion of cash, an approach favored by Gov. Jerry Brown in recent years. Most of the money would be spent on efforts to expand child-care services and kindergarten classes. By law, a governor must submit a full budget to the Legislature no later than Jan. 10. Lawmakers will spend the winter and spring reviewing the proposal and must send a final budget plan to Newsom by June 15.
Though legislative Democrats have pushed for additional early childhood funding in recent years—a key demand of the Legislative Women's Caucus—those actions have typically come late in the budgetwriting season in Sacramento. "Quite frankly, to start out with a January proposal that includes that investment in California's children reflects a new day," state Sen. Holly J. Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) said.
The governor-elect will propose a $750-million boost to kindergarten funding, aimed at expanding facilities to allow full-day programs. A number of school districts offer only partial day programs, leaving many low-income families to skip enrolling their children because kindergarten classes end in the middle of the workday. Because the money would not count toward meeting California's three-decades-old education spending guarantee under Proposition 98, which sets a minimum annual funding level for K-12 schools and community colleges, it will not reduce planned spending on other education services.
Close behind in total cost is a budget proposal by Newsom to help train child-care workers and expand local facilities already subsidized by the state, as well as those serving parents who attend state colleges and universities. Together, those efforts could cost $747 million, according to the budget overview document.
An expansion of prekindergarten programs would be phased in over three years at a cost of $125 million in the first year. The multiyear rollout would, according to the budget overview, "ensure the system can plan for the increase in capacity."
Lempert said the Newsom proposal is notable for trying to avoid the kinds of battles
that in recent years pitted prekindergarten and expanded child care against each other for additional taxpayer dollars. "The reality is we need to expand both simultaneously," he said.
Another $200 million of the proposal would be earmarked for programs that provide home visits to expectant parents from limited-income families and programs that provide healthcare screenings for young children. Some of the money would come from the state's Medi-Cal program, and other money from federal matching dollars. Funding for the home visits program was provided in the budget Brown signed last summer; the Newsom effort would build on that.
(选自《洛杉矶时报》 2019年1月3日)
Why has life flourished on Earth? This question has a two-part answer. First, Earth has been a cradle for life because of its position relative to the Sun. Second, once life began on Earth, simple early life-forms (photosynthetic bacteria) slowly but inexorably altered the environment in a manner that not only maintained life but also paved the way for later, complex life-forms. These changes allowed later organisms to evolve and thrive. Humans and other higher organisms owe their life supporting environment to these early life-forms.
Earth's earliest atmosphere contained several gases: hydrogen, water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, but no oxygen. Gas mixtures emitted from present-day volcanoes resemble this early atmosphere, suggesting its origin from volcanic eruptions. In Earth's earliest atmosphere, methane and carbon dioxide occurred at much higher levels than at present — a circumstance that was favorable for early life. Methane and carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases that warm atmospheres by retarding loss of heat to space. These two gases kept Earth warm during the Sun's early history, when the Sun did not burn as brightly as it now does. (An early dimperiod, with later brightening, is normal for stars of our Sun's type.)
Earth's modem atmosphere, which is 78 percent nitrogen gas, 21 percent oxygen, and about 1 percent argon, water vapor, ozone, and carbon dioxide, differs dramatically from the earliest atmosphere just described. The modern atmosphere supports many forms of complex life that would not have been able to exist in Earth's first atmosphere because the oxygen level was too low. Also, if atmospheric methane and carbon dioxide were as abundant now as they were in Earth's earliest atmosphere, the planet's temperature would likely be too hot for most species living today. How and when did the atmosphere change?
The answer to this riddle lies in the metabolic activity of early photosynthetic life-forms that slowly but surely transformed the chemical composition of Earth's atmosphere. Some of these early organisms were photosynthetic relatives of modern cyanobacteria (blue-green bacteria). In the process of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide gas combined with water yields oxygen. In Earth's early days, allover the planet countless photosynthetic bacteria performed photosynthesis. Together, these ancient bacteria removed massive amounts of carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere by converting it to solid organic carbon. These ancient bacteria also released huge quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere. Other ancient bacteria consumed methane, greatly reducing its amount in the atmosphere. When our Sun later became hotter, the continued removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane by early bacteria kept Earth's climate from becoming too hot to sustain life. Modern cyanobacteria still provide these valuable services today.
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