I'm from the northeast (NJ) and made a similar, drop everything, load up the car and go move to San Diego at age 22. It was lovely, for the first few months. It was so beautiful. People were certainly friendly and welcoming. And then I started to hate it. Everyone was just so damned blase. It was more than being just "laid back" - it was a complete lack of critical thought, a lack of intellectual engagement with the world. It seems to me that the people who stay in San Diego are trying to avoid challenge - be it social, professional, or environmental. They want everything, and everyone, to be easy to handle and thoughtless. I then moved up to Los Angeles, and had the opposite experience - at first I hated it. People were not welcoming, and at every turn I felt like I was going to get my eye poked out by a big huge breast implant. But then, after a few months, I started to love it. I got past LA's horrible, slick surface, and started to find the thoughtful, creative, real people who live in that city. LA is a challenge - but a worthwhile one. It has most of the weather benefits of San Diego, but in a more stimulating social environment. I'm back in NYC now for family reasons, and while I constantly wish I were back in LA, I never feel that way about San Diego. So, the short of this is - like other posters, I recommend getting away from the intellectual sinkhole that is San Diego before you think you're just a New Yorker who cannot change or adapt to a new place.

Michael Bowen, I think to say that she was "always a monster" is unnecessarily harsh. People have an overwhelming tendency to say that bad behavior on the part of others is due to some sort of "innate" evil quality. Yet experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment and that Yale study (I can't remember the name, it was re Nazis, where people would continue to administer shocks to someone they could not see because they were told to do so) show that ordinary people, otherwise "good" people, when put in situations with a bad power dynamics, will behave very badly. The "monster" qualities exhibited by LW's sister may be just as much a function of the power dynamic in her current job as anything within her personally.

In response to the poster above who thinks that the programs are moneymakers due to ads -

The reason for advertising might not be that the programs themselves are moneymakers, but more that the ads are effective in reaching women who actually have the money to pay - women with insurance, or with sufficient personal funds. Poor women probably go to whichever hospital is closest, while women with more social/financial capital can make a choice as to which hospital they go to. By advertising, the hospital may attract enough paying women to defray the cost of those women who would go to the hospital anyway. A program that would have been a HUGE money loser might be turned into one that is only a slight money loser, which, if you're going to have the program at all, is a better proposition.

So what if Prolacta is making a profit here? Babies in Africa who need breastmilk are getting breastmilk. Moms in the US who want to donate their breastmilk to Africa are able to donate it to Africa. If Prolacta wasn't involved, it's possible that neither of those things would be happening.

There are many, many people make money from charity (as charity is essentially an industry in its own right) - from the individual people who work for charitable organizations to the landlords who rent them space to the companies that sell them the goods that enable them to do their work... Prolacta provides a unique and difficult service, and thus the "price" of their help is high - which seems fair.

If a mother refuses to donate at all because she thinks Prolacta is taking too big of a cut, that's fine, but I'd hate it if anyone were arguing that the whole thing should be shut down for that reason.

I started kindergarten when I was four - and as a result was often one of the youngest kids in my class as I went through public school. In contrast, when I went off to an Ivy League college, I found that I was no longer the youngest - not even close. In fact, I felt like everyone I knew had a birthday somewhere between August and January - or even later, for those who had skipped a year. So my thought is that while you can hold your kid back and give them a slight boost, it's only going to get them so far - in the end, your kid's innate intelligence/ability is what's going to matter most for getting to the highest levels of academic achievement.

Please, I'd love to hear a lesson on statistical relevance.

Also, here's a sample size of 1 to say that I find your use of punctuation far more "*annoying*" than Clark-Flory's use of a small survey.

This isn't dialogue, this is repetitive crap - over and over again, it's "men are so downtrodden" or "women are shrewy golddigging whores" or "feminists are __________" (insert negative, overly broad statement similar to one the poster would flip his shit over if it was about men). This is a left of center blog about feminist issues. If you want to talk about male-centric issues, perhaps you should be posting on a male-centric blog? And no, it's not that I can't "handle criticism" or "hate free speech" or any such crap - I'm just sick of thread after thread devolving into the same posts from the same posters over and over.