Paying other people's expenses...

I was at the grocery store this afternoon. The woman in front of me was buying 12 cans of baby formula using WIC coupons to pay for them. Then I see what else she is buying--two nice steaks, a container filled from the salad bar, and a large box of bottled waters. She used her debit card to pay for those items. So let's review--she cannot afford to pay for her baby's food and requires my tax dollars to pay, but she can afford to buy herself steaks, salad and bottled waters?

If you can't afford the costs of a child then don't have one. I understand that maybe at first they could have afforded it but due to circumstances they temporarily cannot. Then if that is the case you need to cut back everywhere. Instead of steaks and bottled water why not drink out of the tap and have ground beef?

I know I am just whining. It irritates me though that I have to pay for someone else's lifestyle choices. And yes having a child is a lifestyle choice...

Decline of television

Our less than 2 month old dvr bit the dust a few days ago. We had recorded quite a few things that I never got around to transferring to dvd. Needless to say we were upset over losing everything. It got me thinking though. Yes, I watch too much television. I always have since I can remember. I do other things too, but a lot of the time I will have the tv on in the background.

I wonder now if I should change my habits though. The more I thought about all the recorded shows/movies we lost on the dvr the more I realized it really does not matter. Television really does not matter that much anymore. Unless you are watching a breaking news story or something live like the Presidential Debates does it really matter what is on? I did a quick check of the top rated tv show for this season. In case you did not know it is CSI Las Vegas with a little over 21 million viewers. That seems like a lot. Then stop and think about the population of the U.S. at a little over 300 million. Now we are only talking about maybe 7% of the total population watch that particular show. Even with taking out the under 18 crowd it still is less than 10% of the total population. How relevant does that make CSI? Or any show since they will have an even lower percentage of total viewers?

Thanks to cable the television landscape has become so fractured as to be meaningless. Throw in the internet, books, games, and countless other activities and tv is no longer the driving force in pop culture. Is that a good thing? I still am going to wait to decide that. It was nice in the old days to have a limited number of choices. That meant a much larger percentage of people would be watching and discussing the same things. In a way it helped to bind our culture together. Now we are becoming so many separate sub-cultures we are becoming disconnected from society as a whole. The more choices we have the less we see the bigger picture.

Or am I just getting old. Did I become my parents and start lamenting the loss of the good ole days...