h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Neither is the one outside my small local supermarket as he is ignorred a lot as people there have little money themselves as a poor area. However the one in the town who made a £1,000 a week was selling loads of BI as such a busy place, infact I think I recal seeing him and his selling technique which ws quite fast moving and had a bit of a sideways movement as could sell them on the move at pace with the faster moving punters. The big town is also quite an affluent area so more money to waste.
Some peole are simply better at selling and it has nothing to do with shouting loudly but with perhaps charm, charisma and perhaps genuine politeness, not the patronising and smarmy way of one of the local BI saleman here.
It might also be to do with giving the impression you are actively looking for work, even if you are not.

On a different note - what age do you think is too young to hold high office, and what age do you think is too old? I don't know my way round the presidents, but William Pitt the younger was Prime Minister at 24, which seems extraordinary, and even more extraordinary is the fact that he was extremely successful. I don't know who our oldest PM was, but Menzies Campbell was effectively pushed out of leadership of the Lib Dems last year for being too old - he was born in 1941 so he's in his late 60s.

What do you reckon? How old is too old, how young is too young?

Because this thread is about American Politics and the current economic situation, and because I am a citizen of USAkistan, I'm going to answer Ben's excellent questions using terms I'm more familiar with.

How young is too young?

The minimum legal age for president is 35. That seems a bit young to me, even if one had been involved in politics during high school, perhaps local issues and the high school debate team, gotten involved in student leadership in college while majoring in law, history, political science or something similar, served the community on the town council, was elected to state legislature shortly after college, and in general been politically aware and active from ages 16 to 35.

Yet certainly in another 10 years, an astute individual could certainly have gained the experience and developed the wisdom necessary to successfully lead the nation.

How old is too old?

That's the more difficult question, as different people react differently to the passage of time. On the health and fitness issue, some people appear and behave old and feeble before they are 60, while others enjoy robust health through their 80s and beyond.

Possibly of greater importance than physical health is mental ability, that is, ability to absorb and integrate new ideas and current information, the capacity to extrapolate and predict the consequences of policies into the future. Some people get lazy at a relatively young age, cling inflexibly to political dogma, and refuse to change the course even when headed for disaster. Others retain a necessary mental agility well into their senior years.

As soon as one becomes more attached to an ideology than responsive and responsible to one's constituency, one has become too old to be president.

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when were these rules drawn up and what was the average life expectancy then???

Happy Nerd, I didn't know there was a minimum age to be President. That's interesting. As I was reading your post, I found myself thinking that populations were smaller then - whenever "then" was - which is the question Taff asks.

It's easy to patronise our ancestors, but I do think that the world is more complex, more intricate and it changes more quickly than ever before. I also think there's a density to events now which I struggle to articulate. It's not just that things happen fast, its that a lot of things happen all at once.

I think the speed of change does mean that you can be too old - there is stuff you just don't get. These days it's technology but in the 60s it was what it felt like to have no particular memories of WWII.

B

It's in the Constitution, which was drawn up during a time of shorter life expectancy, to be sure.

As to being too old, I think it's something the voting population has figured out for themselves.

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so 35 would have been seen as an age when one had reached a certain peak, or middle age if you count the bibles age of 3 score and ten years for man,

now with the life begins at 40/ 50 is the new 40/ 70 is the new 50, type of life we have 35 might seem a bit young

I think there is a danger in only having presidents or pm's that have been in politics a long time . By the time they have risen to the top , for some reason I am thinking septic tank , they will have become completely inmeshed in the estableshment and unable to think or act radicaly . When the time comes to act desicevly they are unable to think outside the box . A younger man or woman is far more likely to have fresh ideas and will not be draged down by all the estableshment baggage .

Indeed, but certain candidates showed a certain fossilization, if you will, of opinions and strategies. Perhaps it's independent of age, that relexive of ideology rather than reaction to actual circumstance: our last preznit was certainly of an ideologically fixed mode and he was quite young.

Some of McCain's campaign moves -- like the Palin choice or the campaign suspension -- came across as impulsive and ill-considered, rather than as evidence of independent pragmatism. I considered McCain to be acting too old, and would have done so whatever his ~actual~ age was, if that makes any sense.

Taff, the Constitution was finalized in 1787 and ratified in 1788.

Average life expectancy is a pretty interesting question all on its own. It was generally accepted that the average life span was 35 back then, but that included the fact that most people (yes that's right, more than half) did not survive to see the double digits. Of those people surviving childhood, a male in those times had about the same chance to see 68 as a male now. (I am uncertain if the census figures upon which these estimates are based include slaves.) For women, it was different. Females surviving to age 11 were most likely to die in childbirth. If a woman survived to menopause, she had about the same chance to see 68 as I do.

Of course that is where excellent dental care (unheard of in George Washington's era) and geriatric medicine (unheard of in Franklin Roosevelt's day) come into play. If I make it to age 68, I have a much better chance of seeing 78 and 88 than persons of previous centuries.

This does nothing to help answer the question of when a person becomes mentally ossified. It may well be whenever the person decides he knows it all, or she's "been there and done that", and needs not bother learning more. Pathetically, that can be by age 18. Nonetheless, some of our "elder statesmen" spend more time snoring than attending their legislative duties. Kind of embarrassing. Ok, really embarrassing.

"Some of McCain's campaign moves -- like the Palin choice or the campaign suspension -- came across as impulsive and ill-considered, rather than as evidence of independent pragmatism. I considered McCain to be acting too old, and would have done so whatever his ~actual~ age was, if that makes any sense."

Too old, perhaps. Certainly not wisely, and far too erratically for a man asking to be given the honor and responsibility of representing us all.

Of course the Republican Party had to face the 2008 election season with their B team. Many members of the GOP A team got caught with their hands in the Jack Abramoff cookie jar.

The thing I found hard to work out, from this side of the pond, was how many of McCain's decisions were made by McCain and how many were made by his advisors. If McCain chose Palin, well, 'acting too old' makes sense. If his advisors did, and foisted her on him, well, that was BREATHTAKINGLY cynical and patronising of them.

Here, you can become an MP once you're 21, so technically, you could be Prime Minister at that age, if your party went wild and made you leader within months of you getting into Parliament. I think. I checked with S, and he doesn't know of a lower age limit for PMing. With mucho respect to all the 21-year-olds I know, but I think a person ought to have spent a few years paying taxes and working alongside the general public and dealing with personal relationships and perhaps getting a Serious Heavyweight Education, whether at the University of Life or any other University, before we show them the secret key cabinet and let them loose in Number 10. 35 sounds like a good minimum age to me.

In another bodyswerve - sorry about the ducking and diving - I found this news story fascinating: http://tinyurl.com/cxx2bj

Basically, it seems that just when we get an American leader worth cosying up to, it turns out he may not want to cosy up to us. Obama has returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the Brits which was lent to GW after 9/11 and replaced it - unsurprisingly - with a bust of Abraham Lincoln.

The article speculates thusly:

Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr Obama than those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather.

>>As soon as one becomes more attached to an ideology than responsive and responsible to one's constituency,...

This has nothing to do with age per se, but Happy Nerd, you hit one of my pet peeves. I am bone weary of having my Congressman be nothing more than a rubber stamp for his party. He is supposed to be there representing his constituents, but we are clearly way down on his list of priorities.

Ben, if the bust of Churchill was a loan, then perhaps it would have been returned regardless of who became president. Or not. I personally regret any decision that gives people an excuse to manufacture divisions. The world is facing some pretty grim times economically and ecologically. We don't need to create angst over small matters. We need to save it for what really counts.

It seeem unnecessary to give an attacking speach with return of bust, hardley a way of making a differant world which Obama kept spouting before he was elected.

I missed that part, Strangely. Did he attack Churchill directly or Britain or what?

You know, if I had just been elected President, I would want my office to look like my own, not my predecessors. Perhaps that is why the bust was really returned, because he didn't want Dubya's leftovers staring him in the face every day. Nor would I want to have my office decor dictated by a foreign power. And I certainly wouldn't want to look at the face of the man who ordered the torture of my grandfather, unless iot was to gloat and say, "Look who's having the last laugh." And I don't believe Obama is that petty.

>> It seeem unnecessary to give an attacking speach with return of bust,

He didn't make any speech at all. He absolutely did NOT make an attacking one. Please don't think he did. I'd hate to mislead you about that Strangely.

I extracted a paragraph from the newspaper article I linked to - a paragraph written by a random journalist about the situation.

The original loan expired at the end of the first Bush presidency, it was extended until the end of the second Bush presidency. The Brits offered to extend the loan during the Obama presidency, but the offer was declined. There is nothing to say it was declined by him and not some minion who thought he'd prefer Abe Lincoln. It is now at the British Embassy in Washington.

Another thought is that we might want the Brits to loan us something again and feel it is more likely to happen if we show that we're willing to return things on time.

Well, that tea in Boston's a tad overdue.

Yes, but you collected the overdue fees when you burnt down the White House in 1812.