Poverty Is A Disease

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

It makes sense to me, and I've got on-the-ground experience in my own life and outcome results as well.

Go ahead though. "Hooey."

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

...
“This is some of the first research demonstrating that low socioeconomic status can lead to changes in the way genes are expressed,” said Swartz. “And it maps this out through brain development to the future experience of depression symptoms.”

Effects Of Poverty Impact Gene Expression In The Brain, Leading To Depression: Study

Funny that you should mention cannabinoids. From the Discussion-part of said study:

...
Identifying specific environmental mechanisms contributing to the effects of SES on methylation observed here will help narrow targets for possible intervention. Moreover, preventive interventions such as training in mindfulness-based techniques may be effective in lowering threat-related amygdala reactivity in adolescents identified as high-risk ...

An epigenetic mechanism links socioeconomic status to changes in depression-related brain function in high-risk adolescents

That's a possible solution right there in front of us, innit? Pulling weeds sounds great though. Legalize it!

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Nice, just like a religion, throw a little guilt at me to make me run down to your alter.

Your one of my favorites Furry, even though we typically disagree, so take the above as me being unesessaraly cynical.

Yes, Poverty sucks, been there done that. I live in California, it's not hard to fall into some hard luck out here.
My point was that you can't prescribe self control, Or can you...

Why wouldn't government use science to help it side step its inability to solve, or even put a dent in poverty. It's messy and dirty. What a better way to wipe their hands of their past failures and now become the new heroes.

If this "Poverty as a disease" concepts keeps brewing, might we see the same replacement of responsibility that we see with Obesity:

Make foods that are bad for you and advertise them to you, then say your not "Normal" eventhough we made highly addicted foods that destroy metabolism, but don't worry it's not your fault or even our fault it's just genetics, it was bound to happen. Don't worry we have a drug and some surgery that will make you look normal. Great everyone is off the hook.

Religious trauma is a disease also.

Anything that backs you into a corner. 7 billion people against you, or at least tossing you aside.

I immediately thought of alcoholism and drug addiction when viewing this thread topic. I will say this. The 12 step program works. Not because of the 12 steps, but because of the community formed amongst participants.

The opposite and cure of these types of disease is not what you think, it is community.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Have to respectfully disagree with you on this bigfurry, but it's a condition. True health issues will but reversible most of the time with change of habit. Or life style.

Brains are quantum multi-function processing units.

The average person easily has Einstein capability, and our intelligence range is very narrow, while easy to move through.

You know how we trash laptops that are older? We've kept the same human processing forever and it upgrades super slowly. It honestly doesn't even upgrade as often as people just micro their processes into more complicated tasks that utilize it differently. We're a big RAM circuit.

Memory is the perfect example of concept to understand your brain is just a massive recall system in the first place. You don't 'know' 1+1=2, you 'remember' that. And just like a computer, you can artificially allocate memory too. Mnemonic techniques give ground proof we don't remember anything as much as we're able to recreate what we see, and it's easy to remember things we want to see, or things we didn't expect to see at all. The average person can remember between 7-9 'things' but the reality is 7-9 spacial memory separators. You can maybe imagine 7-9 different interiors of a building simultaneously, but if those buildings were on the same estate, it would be easier to reallocate them into 1 spacial image as space isn't a problem in your imagination. Basically a 'Mnemonic' technique would be artificially make the buildings an estate despite not really being one in your mind, until it's a reality enough that you can maintain other new spacial states with the first.

Anyway, I don't think being poor means anything to a persons ability...these mnemonic techniques were really easy to teach random people in real life, so was the basic concepts that drive calculus. I affirmatively believe there isn't a person on Earth too stupid to learn calculus without legitimate mental disorder. We just don't all have the attention and time. People are like flowers, we all need sunlight and water, but unlike flowers, there isn't enough sunlight and water going around.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Ah yes, the eternal growth problem. And I'm sure you are aware of the fact that there are some out there who argue for promotion of a zero growth economy.

I've been an avid student of Macro economics for 30 years and all my research indicates there has never been a successful zero growth economy. There are only two near successful examples. The 11th century Byzantine Empire and Japan 1990 to present. The one thing both had in common.......shrinking population. In terms of inflation adjusted GDP growth, today's Russia and Italy near approximate zero growth and again, the driving factor is shrinking population. But honestly, are these really "succesful" economies?

a reply to: Spider879

did you read the article?

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

I had to skedaddle yesterday, but wanted to find this:

Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children's genes

Essentially saying the same thing as your linked article. I remember thinking when I saw it that maybe all of this is just barely scratching the surface of what it really means as far as how we all evolve

You also have to wonder if maybe there isn't some good that comes out of this?

Yet i find myself behaving irrationally in specific ways that just baffle me. When I read these studies (there are quire a few, as you are aware) it just makes sense of things that I struggle to make sense out of otherwise.

It's that level of self awareness that confirms that it's all not for nothin'. If you know what I mean

I read through some of the replies in this thread...not hard to see that the way we think about ourselves, the people around us - and how we all relate to each other is not always happening at the same level

a reply to: TonyS

Perfect point, too.

Because you are right: the economy is tied to people. Both are on an infinite growth curve, and both need to find room to grow into.

Since we are losing more land each day, what else can we do? Grow vertically in a downard and upward direction? Off planet? Under water?

There are limits to just about all of these, besides off planet. And the clock is ticking.

a reply to: Spiramirabilis

THere are quite a few parts im digesting.

I haven't even gotten to the part where i ask myself, "Wait, you mean that by living the right life from the very beginning, humanity can fully express his genetic potential and become 'more' than we are now?!?"

It sounds pretty far fetched, new age, woo to me. So it'll take me a moment to get through it all. But, essentially, it appears that through methylation we can decrease complexity of gene expression which tends to also decrease the ability to cope in a healthy manner, in a healthy world.

The same DNA creates countless variants of itself even. THe complexity of it all is overwhelming.

a reply to: BigBangWasAnEcho

The 12 step program...great for some. Unnecessary for others. It all has to do with the tools you have inside to deal with your addiction. Broken people need a pillar.

My son is a little over a year clean, and only did a couple meetings before being creeped out by the tweakers. Just wasn't something that would help him, so he didn't go. He instead put his time into his new dog. Which made them both winners.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

The same DNA creates countless variants of itself even. THe complexity of it all is overwhelming.

It is - and the possibilities - what all of this could mean is mind boggling

There's every reason to question it too:

Why I'm sceptical about the idea of genetically inherited trauma

Many people bristle at these kinds of reports, both on a personal level and (for neurologists, psychologists and social scientists), on a professional level, as crude genetic determinism does not square with the very real lifestyle and societal events that have an impact on so many people. Without a doubt, we are far more than our genes, and geneticists (myself included) could do a lot better in communicating the somewhat fiendish complexity of our chosen field.

People don't like new ideas or simple explanations. Nothing about this is simple, and I don't believe anyone is looking for that one, magic, all encompassing simple explanation for why we are the way we are

Psychology and biology - science and philosophy. We're a complex subject

Anyway, his piece linked in the original article is a good example of how science works, and why it works

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Why Poverty Is Like A Disease

In human children, epigenetic changes in stress receptor gene expression that lead to heightened stress responses and mood disorders have been measured in response to childhood abuse.4 And last year, researchers at Duke University found that “lower socioeconomic status during adolescence is associated with an increase in methylation of the proximal promoter of the serotonin transporter gene,” which primes the amygdala—the brain’s center for emotion and fear—for “threat-related amygdala reactivity.”5 While there may be some advantages to being primed to experience high levels of stress (learning under stress, for example, may be accelerated6), the basic message of these studies is consistent: Chronic stress and uncertainty during childhood makes stress more difficult to deal with as an adult.

From one perspective, epigenetics offers a compelling narrative of life experiences feeding back directly onto the basic programming that makes us who we are. But the field also has some foundational controversies. In June of last year, a team of researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bristol University, and the European Bioinformatics Institute published a paper arguing that the field is plagued with misinterpreted results. The sources of misinterpretation included confusing cause and effect (diseases can produce epigenetic markers as well as the other way around); spurious and misinterpreted statistics; confounding variables which cause apparent correlations; and a large variability among the epigenomes of individual cells, which is usually not controlled for in experiments.

I grew up poor....but not so poor i didn't know how we would eat. I wasn't a choosy kid, and would eat just about any food given to me (lucky for my mom, i guess). But we were poor, with normal social things my friends did not being a part of my experience. My wife and I talk about our childhoods, and she is shocked that my first vacation happened as an adult. She thought she grew up poor.

But in the grand scope, our poverty was mild and minor. We had school, we ate daily, and our homes passed building codes.

Many of you know my own experiences in this regard, at least in a broad sense. I've always believed in meritocracy. Over the past 2 years the things I read in science journals is leading me away, towards the notion that poverty creates biological changes that make it almost impossible for humans to overcome poverty. The roles of cause and effect in the discussion of poverty and ability are being reversed.

There is a pretty big p-hacking dust up in the world of social science, so I will wait for more info before continuing to refine my position. But if the research holds up, it seems that meritocracy is dead, and liberal social policies are the only way to save humanity from its own self imposed lowest denominator.

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense.

People can be genetically predisposed to develop cancer, bad eyesight, allergies, but it is not possible to be genetically predisposed to be poor.

poverty is a result of many factors, none of them genetic. Poverty is not a disease, there's no pill you can take to cure it.

a reply to: Daedalus

you did not understand it.

Its not saying poverty is the symptom of the disease. its saying poverty, itself, is a disease that infects you and, via epigenetic changes which are proven to exist alters your ability to deal with the world around you.

So we have an informed person with an opinion using some science to support what he has observed, and wrote an article on it. Can you tell me how the science being quoted is incorrect?

a reply to: Daedalus

Studies of mice and fruit flies have shown that epigenetic traits similar to the ones Meaney proposed can be passed down, and last for dozens of generations. The effects of things like diet and prenatal parental stress have been observed to be inherited, not just through histone modifications, but also through DNA methylation and non-coding RNAs.7 In one 2014 study, the offspring of a mouse trained to fear a particular smell were observed to also fear that smell, even with no previous exposure to it. The effect lasted for two generations.8 In humans, inheritable effects of stress have been observed through at least three generations from parents who survived mass starvation (Dutch Hunger Winter),9 a fluctuating food supply (the Överkalix cohort)10 and the Holocaust. The effects of early paternal smoking and paternal betel quid chewing have been observed to be transmitted to children in a sex-specific manner, supporting biological epigenetic transmission in humans.11 According to a 2014 survey of the field, “the few human observational studies to date suggest (male line) transgenerational effects exist that cannot easily be attributed to cultural and/or genetic inheritance.”

Why Poverty Is Like a Disease

That's the point many of you seem to miss. Meritocracy is obviously dead, calling this walker a living being doesn't change the stench of it's rotten corpse.

a reply to: PublicOpinion

I think meritocracy has a place. As a businessman, i've long lived by the edict "put your aces in their places". I've also noticed that many businesses tend to overpromote people, promoting just to the point where they are inept then firing them. They don't seem to realize that they lost a phenomenal asset that wow'd their socks off before that last promotion.

When i worked in the call center world i'd get a lot of heat from corporate because when I was told to remove positions, i didn't just fire the managers (or lay them off, however you prefer it). Every year, right after the major retail season, the call center business drops off in the telecom world. So you're hiring/training frenzy for managers done in Q3 the prior year is completely divested and you lay everyone off. Of course, its hard for a manager to step back down to the pay of their team, as their personal expenses have grown to encompass their new income.

My solution: convert their salary to an hourly wage, rounded down to the nearest 25 cents, and pay them to spend 75% of their time on the phones taking calls. I had already invested a lot of time and effort into training them, and they were skilled enough to get a promotion to begin with. I just could not justify discarding them when we didn't need their position anymore. They were people, not a slot. And they were my best people. Every year my corporate headquarters was stupid enough to ask me to lay off my 10 best employees.

This is throughout the call center industry. The upside: its a great industry to learn basic business skills while earning a decent paycheck. If you can handle being tied to a desk, anyway.

originally posted by: Spider879
a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Have to respectfully disagree with you on this bigfurry, but it's a condition. True health issues will but reversible most of the time with change of habit. Or life style.

Admittedly no, I did not. will correct that now.

a reply to: Spider879

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, to be honest. Yours is an opinion I value.

a reply to: BuzzyWigs

NO. Every single person does NOT have the ability and capacity to change their circumstances.

Want to really talk about ignorance.

Alright.

MONEY to begin with is nothing more than a medium to exchange good and services.

Thats value is subjective at best.

What people call money is printed out of thin air.

It has no real value than what people place on it.

Through the various years it has multiple forms.

I think it's completely IGNORANT to argue over literally NOTHING since all fiat currency is NOTHING.