Prisons

The American prison system is a horrible place, but apparently not horrible enough to stop people from committing crimes. I just read a new article [link] about dementia in prison populations. Caring for a dementia patient is hard enough, caring for a dementia patient who is known to kill people is both hard and expensive. Two or three times as expensive as an average prisoner according to the article.

What can you ethically do with a person who isn't safe to release into public and yet needs constant care? According to the article some prisons are using prisoners to take care of the dementia patients, others have a special high security dementia care facility. Of the two I think the care facility is the better choice, but neither seems ideal.

Death by delay

Every once in a while I find people who have to make a decision but won't. They privately want to say no but they won't because they don't want people to hate them for saying no. But they also won't say yes because they can't justify their desire to say no. So instead they delay, often for years, until the topic goes away. This is exceptionally repugnant to me. If you want to say no then say no, if not say yes. Have the guts to make a stand one way or another, don't just delay things to death.

Sometimes the law is stupid

I read today that a dad suspected of killing his wife had a court ordered supervised visit with his children. He let the kids in, locked the supervisor out of the house, then blew up the house killing himself and the two kids.

The court is wrong to allow parental visits when the parent is suspected of murder. Very wrong.

Spelling and grammar

What do they teach kids in school now? I have never been the worlds best speller but I do read a lot and I have spell check built into my browser so spelling isn't a problem for me. But I see a lot of posts on the internet that are spelled horribly. Now I am not talking about things like "prolly" where they have spelled the word "probably" wrong just to be cool. I am talking about things like "naver used". Really? How can you misspell "never"? It is a common word.

Grammar of course varies a lot from area to area but many times I have seen posts that didn't even make sense. Posts where nobody could make out even the general topic of the post. And yes I checked, these are people inside the USA not people using a second language.

I have to put it down to laziness. With built in spell check and online dictionaries available anybody can be a decent speller. But these people should have learned something from school. Maybe the world has always had a certain percentage of poor spellers and people who can't make understandable sentences but now the internet lets everybody see them instead of them being hidden in obscure low paying jobs. I don't know.