Calls for changes in the movie ratings rules; business cards becoming obsolete; young people moving back in with their parents

Rated S for stupid

Re “Calls grow to revamp movie ratings,” March 17

Congress has better things to do than get involved in movie ratings. As you write: “Two dozen members of Congress— mostly Democrats, though the list includes Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.)— have signed a letter to the MPAA complaining about the’Bully’ rating.”

Our nation suffers from endless wars, high unemployment, uneven and unfair taxation, a bleak future for the younger generation and hundreds of other serious problems. Can’t parents and the movie studios settle their own problems?

We’d be better off if unpaid volunteers were elected to the Senate and House and those representatives only passed laws when the nation needed them.

Tom Novinson

Ventura

Oh Congress, pay no attention to what we might actually need. Concentrate your efforts on movie

ratings.

Both parties are beyond help; they have decided to spend time fighting and changing things that don’t even begin to help most of us just plain live.

Anne Wimberley Robinson

Oceanside

Ironic, isn’t it, that an R rating for the documentary “Bully” may intimidate the very audience the film is designed to protect from watching it.

Ellie Berner

San Diego

I’m a frequent movie-goer, and I often see teenagers — sometimes in big groups — in theaters even if the movie is rated R.

Any teenager with Internet access and a credit card can buy tickets online. Most of the ticket takers I see barely make eye contact. With the crowds of people walking by them, I doubt they’d ever stop someone and ask for ID.

If teenagers want to watch a movie, they’ll watch the movie. I don’t think there will be fewer because it’s rated R. If fewer people see “Bully,” it will be because most teenagers are more interested in seeing a blockbuster than a documentary.

Andrew Saidi

Los Angeles

It’s not the card but what it says

Re “Business cards get filed under ‘obsolete,’” March 16

A reader of your article might conclude that the sole purpose of passing out a card is to convey one’s contact information.

To this graphic designer, however, a business card serves other purposes too. Handing out a business card is a great opportunity to make a strong visual impression of one’s organization.

A striking business card seldom fails to make a positive impression.

Mike Diehl

Glendale

While reading your piece on the obsolescence of business cards, I was reminded of a recent incident: Having arrived, as requested, 15 minutes early for a medical appointment, I was told several times that the wait would be “just a few more minutes.” After an hour, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. (This was unfortunate because I was there for a 10-minute visual field test.)

I left the building, but on my heels came the supervisor, who looked me in the eye, apologized and handed me her business card. “If it ever happens again,” she said, “please alert me.”

Along with the faint whiff of pre-digital social grace, she seemed to be offering a bit of hope, and she was somehow willing, with a 2-by-3.5-inch bit of card stock, to stand by her word.

It helped diffuse my rage and reminded me to behave with a measure of patience, compassion and civility. Is this not the whole point of civilization? That, and reasonable access to healthcare?

It may be the last business card I ever get. I’m going to hang on to it.

Marla Burg

Ventura

Moral lapse

Re “Goldman culture is blasted by an insider,” March 15

In the midst of the brouhaha involving Goldman Sachs, another group seems to go unscathed: career coaches.

These people seem to be saying the same thing: that former Goldman employee Greg Smith acted hastily, burned his bridges, has no place in the financial system anymore and — bottom line — shouldn’t have done what he did in publishing his concerns.

I don’t know what Smith’s motivations were, but it seems clear that “professional” advisors have no moral compass, just job-seeking advice.

Shame on them. Sometimes it’s just about doing the right thing.

Lon M. Burns

Manhattan Beach

In defense of Medicare

Re “GOP is back with a revised Medicare overhaul,” March 17

Let’s remember that Republicans were against Medicare when it was established in 1965, and they’ve been opposed to it ever since.

Let’s also remember that the payroll tax we pay 45 years later is 1.45% despite the fact that for years medical costs have risen much more.

Couple that with the shifting demographic of retiring baby boomers and the fact that Medicare paid for the healthcare of a generation of Americans who paid relatively little into the system, and is there any doubt as to why the system is in trouble?

Slashing benefits or ending the system as we know it aren’t the only alternatives — we pay ever-increasing premiums to insurance companies so they can deny us coverage on the flimsiest of excuses — so why not “man up” and increase the tax for Medicare to more realistically cover its costs? It is by far the most efficient portion of our healthcare “system.” Let’s keep it that way.

Hardy Hayes

Camarillo

The Times correctly points out that typical voters “overwhelmingly support keeping Medicare as is” and “favor … taxing wealthy Americans … to bring the budget into balance.” It is also true that the Medicare program is not in deficit.

So, when there is so much else within the federal budget to redline (perhaps immoral, senseless wars, for example) why is it we must continue providing Rep.Paul D. Ryan(R-Wis.) space to proclaim his “moral courage” in his never-ending attack on Medicare? Sadly, Ryan missed the history that compelled the creation of Medicare: healthcare costs were sending the elderly to the poorhouse and, consequently, into the arms of the state for their support.

Geoffrey N. Lachner

Mission Viejo

Ryan is quoted as saying: “And I really think the politics, if we help push it, will turn to rewarding the people who are bold in taking on the problems, and penalizing the people who don’t.”

Nowhere is the GOP’s doctrine of selfishness more evident than in this statement.

By Ryan’s own admission, he’s revealing that the true motivation for his double-down gamble on destroying Medicare is simply to create an opportunity to further his political career.

Matthew Singerman

Newbury Park

Roughing it at mom and dad’s

Re “You can go home again,” Opinion, March 18

Well, well, well. This Op-Ed article makes a show of juvenile angst. Her “hardships” include “living at home and socializing decades above my age group,” living on a biodynamic farm “with a rampant mouse problem and a refrigerator that didn’t close,” and “living in New York City, with fire alarms that wrenched us from bed at 2:30 a.m.”

She had placed applications that “ran the gamut from Green For All to Google.” She valiantly “started volunteering at KCRW.”

How rough. What does living on a biodynamic farm have to do with learning something to get a job? The author is so — NPR, with her parents’ Volvo.

Keith D. Bristow

San Diego