Abortion is not the main problem

Some more statistics:
Teens accounted for 1,391 abortions last year, with 19 performed on girls under 15.
Of the 1,279 abortions by teenagers in 2005, 16 were performed on girls under 15.
youngsters between 16 and 23 found 13 percent of them were sexually active.
23 percent did not use any form of contraception.

How many of 1391 are first timers?
How many more abortions will these need?
Under 15 means oldest at 14. Abortion at age 14 means the "success" encounter was at 14 or earlier 13. Typically, the first time does not "succeed". Thus, highly possible that at 13 they are already sexually active!
There must be many more "lucky" ones "enjoying" their sexual life since 11, 12, 13!
This speculated possibility is itself the problem to be tackled. NOT the abortion rate, which is just the number of those small portion of "unlucky" ones.
A future problem that have to be handled now is those "lucky" ones, who lead such lives till they eventually "lucky" enough ("thanks" to the contraceptive technology) to get married, become children, and their children will be breaking their "records"!!

Based on academic records, criminal records, we roughly know who are suitable to become certain professionals such as teachers, army officers, ministers, etc. Any good idea to have some records to indicate the suitability of a person to become a parent??

Argue or discuss

Person A wrote something. Person B disagrees, and conclude that A is trying to do something bad. A is curious to know why would B think that way. There are two ways, one way is to ask or question B directly how did he come to his conclusion; another is to put forth the reasons of A to see whether B still have the same conclusion and think that A is trying to do something bad. A uses second way, but B see it as trying to argue and refuse to respond.

I think argue is personal and destructive. If it is not personal, but objective, I think the above is call discussion. Discussion is a good way for learning and communication.

Why do we need 0-100 scores in marking test? Why not just a pass and fail grade? Better and accurate feedbacks help people to learn.

Dengue and Divorce

Divorces among those aged 20 to 24 have increased sharply in the last 10 years... a sociologist says "... so marriage preparation is more critical."

Dengue fever cases also increased in recent weeks. However, there is only some increase in advertisements on repellent to avoid the sting, which is the late event just before being infected. Thankfully, main efforts are on eliminating the breeding grounds, which is the source of the problem.

Sadly, marriage problems are unlike dengue fever, which has clear element of urgency. Thus, sociologists and many are focusing on repellent-like strategies. Whether a person will be a good husband or wife, a good father or mother, able to go through the challenges in marriage life depends very much on his/her character, belief, determination, worldview, etc. The breeding ground of these is their own growing life with their families.

Thus, I do hope "marriage preparation" refers to educating parents and would be parents how to prepare their kids for marriage, rather than the false hope that a few lessons before signing on the marriage certs could matter.

大禹治水

This is a well known story.
Water flows. We can't and shouldn't stop it from flowing. Thus, it is wise to manage it, or influence the way it flows to suit us.

Businesses and services need to be promoted. Advertisements and distribution of leaflets are common ways. When too much junk mails go into our letter box, we lock the letter box. Now these junks go to our doorsteps. What next? Do we want to seal our doors and windows leaving no gaps? Hmmm... then you may see innovation idea that allows people to shoot their advertisment into your house from the kitchen windows using arrows or even remote control helicopters :)

I don't like the idea of locking mailboxes. I don't think I am the rare few who dislike advertising leaflets at my doors. I may be the rare few who didn't lock my mailbox, but it won't help. We can't expect these flyer insertors to record down which are those units that have locked mailbox and only go to these units' doorstep.

Please, can we have the junk mails/leaflets going to the mailbox, which is a more appropriate place than our doorsteps?

May be someone can conduct a study and hopefully found data that significantly reject the hypothesis that such flyers can increase business. I think better not. I foresee that the data may reject this hypothesis for most businesses, but accept for some, and then these few businesses will generate even more flyers then now.

For the moment, I will not touch these junks at my doorsteps intentionally. They will likely dropped on to the corridor floor. Sorry for the cleaners to have additional rubbish to clear along the corridors, thanks to the "innovation" of locking the mailboxes.

Does it sound like blackmailing?

The suggestion that to encourage people who are potentially HIV positive to go for HIV test is to promise free medical treatment.

"If no free medical treatment promised if tested positive, then people would choose not to test for HIV."

It sounds like a threat or blackmail to the nation, the government, and the general public.

What does 800 births by teen single mom in a year imply?

800 is not a small number, but it doesn't seem to suggest a serious situation.
Lets see if...
For some of these moms, this birth was not their first pregnancy.
For majority of them, this pregnancy is not a first time "success".
For many other teens, they might just have avoidedbecoming a mom, i.e. "succeeded to abort".

Lets give just the above 3 considerations some numbers...
On the average, assume that
this birth was the 2nd pregnancy;
this pregnancy was the 6th "try";
these 800 moms were the "very unlucky" ones at the ratio of 1:10.
These numbers were rough guesses, and I don't think they are the extremes.

Thus, there are at least 800*2*6*10 = 96000 sexual acts by unmarried teenage girls, in just a year.
Individual "freedom" does not give them rights to create or risk creating lives in such irresponsible manners!!!!

How small is 0.3%?

0.3%, the estimated ratio of HIV positive people who are not aware of it.
0.3% is 0.3 per 100, or 3 per 1000, or about 1 per 350.
Seems small..
Consider these:
The population being studied were from blood samples collected at hospitals.
It is sort of bias towards people whose blood were for some reason collected at hospitals.
Nevertheless, it is not obvious that there are more or less "high-risk" behavior people in this group as compared to the general population.
On the other hand, it is obvious that vast majority of the population do not practice "high-risk" behaviors, and it is reasonable to believe that majority of these 0.3% are those who have "high-risk" behaviors.
Thus, my message to those who want to feel that 0.3% is very low and continue your "high-risk" behaviors:
Among the high-risk communities, the ratio is much higher than 0.3%.
For example, if we assume that there are 10% high-risk behaving people, and among these, 50% do not feel that they are infected without recent testing, then the 1:350 ratio might become 0.5:35, or 1:70 or 1.4%!
Personally, I believe 10% is too high an assumption, and 50% too low. What if it were 1% and 90%? Then we have 0.9:3.5, or 1:3.85 or 25.7%!!!

High-risk behaviour

What a nice term! What do we think of people with high-risk behaviour?
Are these people brave? E.g. some performers put themselves in danger by getting close to dangerous animals such as snakes, crocodiles, scorpions, etc.
Are these people skillful? E.g. stuntman and sports man in sports such as diving and gymnastic who risk injuries to carry out actions of high difficulties for movie filming and other entertaining or fund raising purposes.
Are these people sacrificing? E.g. soldiers who volunteer themselves to fight in the front lines to protect their love ones and homeland.
Sigh, the term usually does not refer to the above. It is use to describe people who have multiple sex partners, and therefore risking themselves and their partners to infection of STDs, HIV and the likes. "High-risk" is too neutral a term to be used. Should use terms such as irresponsible, selfish, lustful, inconsiderate, thoughtless, uncaring, careless, reckless, foolish, negligent, etc.!

Birth rate

Recent studies/statistics found the birth (or was it replacement?) rate is 1.26, a 0.01 point above the previous year, or about 800+ more births. However, at the end of the reports, it mentioned that there are few hundreds births by single moms, and out of it about 40 over percent were teenagers.

Hmmm... do we just have interest in the any births, or should we monitor to encourage births within marriage and discourage births outside marriage?

An advice to loving couples.

Do not expect your husband/wife will give you happiness. It won't happen.
Do invest to give your wife/husband happiness.

Why vs How

Imagine a day when pistols became very common. The problem of increased bullet-wounded deaths become significant.

What is more important to do between these two approaches:
a) To teach people at the earliest age possible and relevant on HOW to properly use pistols.
b) To strenthen the conscience and maturity of people from the earliest age possible on living a life that benefits everyone.

To me, it is obviously the latter.

Now, change "pistol" to "condom/contraceptive method", and "bullet-wounded deaths" to "extra-marrital births".

My answer is still (b). What's yours?

Can I buy lesser quantity?

Pay more can buy more, but can we pay less buy less?

There is some kind of lower bound, because raw-material costs is not the main factor. Long time ago ice-kachang can be sold at less than a dollar. The cost of water/ice, red beans and etc didn't change much. However, now it can cost $1.50 to $2.50, for a bowl of ice-kachang. Although the quantity is more. Same applies for many other things such as chicken rice, wantan noodle, and etc.

I think the reason was that the rental, labour and other non-material costs increases tremendously. So a way to increase profit is by increasing revenue. To increase sales would be harder compared to increase price. You can't ask a person to buy two bowl of ice-kachang at 1$ each, but you can put 2 original bowls quantity of of ice-kachang into a bowl and sell to one person at $2.50.

Combine this with a traditionally good habit of not wasting food, we gain weight :(