The inhabitants of Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit seem to have developed a sudden crush on the authoritarian Chinese government. Why? Well, it seems that the lovable tyrants have decided to crack down on evil golddigger bitches. According to an article in The Telegraph, linked to in the subreddit,
In a bid to temper the rising expectations of Chinese women, China’s Supreme Court has now ruled that from now on, the person who buys the family home, or the parents who advance them the money, will get to keep it after divorce.
“Hopefully this will help educate younger people, especially younger women, to be more independent, and to think of marriage in the right way rather than worshipping money so much,” said Hu Jiachu, a lawyer in Hunan province.
The ruling should also help relieve some of the burden on young Chinese men, many of whom fret about the difficulty of buying even a small apartment.
Never mind that the lopsided demographics in China today — where young men greatly outnumber young women, making it harder for young men to find wives — are not the result of excess feminism, but the result of a toxic mixture of cultural misogyny and the authoritarian regime’s “one child” program. As William Saletan explains the logic in Slate:
Girls are culturally and economically devalued; the government uses powerful financial levers to prevent you from having another child; therefore, to make sure you can have a boy, you abort the girl you’re carrying.
The result? 16 million “missing girls” in China. Ironically, the skewed ratio of men to women gives young women considerable leverage in chosing whom to marry – and that’s what the Men’s Rightser’s seem to see as the real injustice here.
As Evil Pundit wrote, evidently speaking for many (given the numerous upvotes he got):
Wow. I’ve always disliked the authoritarian Chinese government, but for once, it’s done something good.
I may need to reconsider my attitude.
IncrediblyFatMan added:
China wants to become the next superpower and world leader. They aren’t going to do it by allowing the kinds of social decay that rot away at the competing nations.
Revorob joked:
If they brought that in over here, most women in Australia would be living on the street.
“Or,” Fondueguy quipped in response, “they could learn to work.”
At the moment, all the comments in the thread praising the Chinese government for this move (and there are many more) have net upvotes; the only comment in the negative? One suggesting that the Telegraph isn’t exactly a reliable source.
Speaking of which, here’s a more balanced look at the issue on China.org.cn that examines some of the consequences of the new ruling for Chinese women.
Let’s look at some of those. According to one Beijing lawyer quoted in the piece:
“[H]ousewives, especially those in the rural areas who have no job and are responsible for taking care of their families, will be affected most by this new change,” she said. “If their husbands want a divorce, they are likely to be kicked out of the house with nothing.”
Luo Huilan, a professor of women’s studies at China Women’s University in Beijing, agreed.
In rural areas, she said, men have the final say in family matters. All essential family assets, such as home, car and bank deposits, are registered in the men’s names, and women fill the roles of only wife, mother and farmworker.
“Their labor, though substantial, hardly gets recognition. Without a good education, they have to rely heavily on their husbands,” Luo said. “In case of divorce, a woman is driven out of her husband’s life, home and family, and finds herself an alien even in her parents’ home. No wonder the new interpretation of the Marriage Law has aroused concern among women.”
And no wonder it’s drawn cheers on the Men’s Rights subreddit.
“In all fairness, he might have gone to bed.”
NWO? Nah, can’t be! He only gets three hours of sleep a week, because he has to work for a living. Not like you ladies. Because of VAWA and the laws imposed by the feminist-run, Rockefeller-funded government, good hard-working MEN have to stay at the milk machines until their fingers bleed, while you ladies are busy eating bonbons and getting pedicures in your silky robes.
So, an insight into my conversion to feminism. I called myself an ‘equalist’ and thought it was all fine and dandy as things were, except for maybe a few teeny problems. Then I actually READ stuff. I wonder if NWO has actually read any of the seriously obnoxious stuff that’s been written about women? Well, he probably has and thinks that it’s not obnoxious because he thinks it’s ‘true’ that women are inferior to men.
Furthermore, yes lifting heavy things, tilling fields etc. is unpleasant and hard work. You know what else is unpleasant? Pushing a baby out of your vagina. Breastfeeding until your nipples bleed. But no, nothing compares to NWO’s workweek of 300 hours, where he gets out of bed two hours before he goes to bed…
Globalization has just caused a larger demand for gold. More people + roughly the same amount of gold = higher gold prices.
WHAT A FANTASTIC FUCKING IDEA! CONSTANT DEFLATION MEANS WE NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT EVER BEING OUT OF DEBT AGAIN!
Not to mention the idea of handing over control of the money supply to a handful of foreign governments in countries that control most of the gold mining industry! It’ll be just like Middle Eastern oil, only shinier!
And the massive wave of economic stability that would come with the changeover, as enough gold has to be bought to back up the trillions and trillions of dollars in floating US currency! Because our economy is far to stable!
I stand in awe of your godlike intellect. I can’t think of anything that would do nearly as good a job of crippling the US economy as that, but I’ll just have to keep trying. Until then, my hat is off to you, sir! DEATH TO AMERICA!
@NWO, from Wikipedia:
After months of hearings, debates, votes and amendments, the proposed legislation, with 30 sections, was enacted as the Federal Reserve Act. The House, on December 22, 1913[7], agreed to the conference report on the Federal Reserve Act bill by a vote of 298 yeas to 60 nays, with 76 not voting. The Senate, on December 23, 1913, agreed to it by a vote of 43 yeas to 25 nays with 27 not voting. The record shows that there were no Democrats voting “nay” in the Senate and only two in the House. The record also shows that almost all of those not voting for the bill had previously declared their intentions and were paired with members of opposite intentions.[8]
I’m not seeing anything about four Senators approving it after everyone else is gone. Even if that happened, the bill also had to be approved by the House and signed by the President.
Not holding my breath, but do you have a source for your claim–preferably from a website that doesn’t also deny the Holocaust?
Pavlovian dog indeed.
I fooled around with a 15-year-old girl once. Of course, I was a 16-year-old girl at the time… and neither of us were all it’s cracked up to be, I suspect. So am I immune from oppression now? 😀
Per NWO, as a woman, you have never been oppressed and likely never will be. Only white males such as myself have ever experienced real oppression.
Won’t somebody please think of the white males? Or the mite whales?
Typos:
And the massive wave of economic instability that would come with the changeover, as enough gold has to be bought to back up the trillions and trillions of dollars in floating US currency! Because our economy is far too stable!
Although I did dig “massive wave of economic stability.”
I like ‘mite whales’. Sukmy Dick, the great mite whale, leader of MRAs (after NWO and Chucky, of course)
Call me IshMRAL ….
I love reading all these dimwits talking about buying up and hoarding gold. On the long list of things to have in the event of a total or near-total economic collapse, heavy and relatively useless gold is way down on the list below food, water and/or water purification equipment, medical supplies and medicine, weapons and ammo for self-defense and hunting and probably about two dozen other things I’m forgetting at the moment.
But it’ll be amusing to see these fools trying to trade useless hunks of metal for actual useful goods.
“http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P3quEkimnPs/TdBkDSiujFI/AAAAAAAADR8/miD5yrNJkRY/s1600/Gold_1833_1999.gif”
Goldselling site; unsourced.
http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf || It references kitco you stupid tit.
As I said, you want inflation from gold? 1500s Europe, right off the top of my head.
lrn2google scholar, rather than rely on gold selling groups with a direct profit motive.
http://ehes2011.com/papers/monetary_policy_autonomy_under_the_gold_standard.pdf
One example of problems under a gold standard.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/1/12.html || Adequate citations to a number of resources demonstrating inflation’s positive effects; As I said, the global economy is structured under infinite growth. To pretend that constant growth doesn’t require a constant increase to the money supply is dishonest in the extreme, and I don’t see you complaining about the idea of infinite growth (Which I do, when I feel a hankering)
“Globalization has just caused a larger demand for gold. More people + roughly the same amount of gold = higher gold prices. Let’s not forget China’s massive population. If the Chinese start buying gold…you will see that price skyrocket.”
Dude, it’s not globalization. It’s gold suddenly having a use besides idiots like you and the showing off of wealth. Also, gold increases in supply as well.
“In the end, time makes fools of us all. You can rail at me for being bullish on gold all you want. But time will tell. I could make money or lose it. Who truly knows?”
As an investment, gold might be good for you, and I really don’t give a shit about your investments. As a standard for currency, it’s shit.
“People buy gold when they lose faith in the paper currency. The only way for gold to go lower is for people to start believing the US dollar will retain its value. Frankly, I don’t see that happening in the short term and possibly the long term.”
The recession is already slowly ending, you dimwit.
Oh, and I see you’re not defending your claim that people live paycheck to paycheck as a deliberate strategy to manipulate finances, and not, you know, out of fucking need. That’s good, because what you don’t know about the poor could fill a warehouse.
Oh, I totally misread that ‘globalization has increased the demand for gold’ bullet point.
You mean that the demand for gold increased because more people have means, because globalization, right? I invite you to study about what globalization has done for central and south America, the Phillippines, or any agricultural nation, really. Protip: It’s not what you think it is.
And one last point against a commodity-based currency… what do you propose, exactly? Gold is a vital industrial component. Silver too. Platinum is far too scarce for a global economy, and still has important applications in actual use. Obviously Oil doesn’t work, since we need to make it stop being important to begin with, and even if we manage there’ll be too little left for a global economic standard.
I mean, that pretends a commodity-based currency is still a good idea, but what would you even suggest as a baseline? ’cause it can’t be the precious metals anymore, we actually need that shit.
Mertvaya Ruka: Re. what you said, I guess people like Brandon think “Midas” is the name of a chain of auto repair shops. Because reading fiction is for girls and sissies.
Brandon: You should study history a little more. Gold was not regarded as “the store of value” across all civilized cultures. In fact, if I were to name the three most valuable things that were historically most valued pretty much all over the globe, that would be salt, sugar and spices. These things may not be very expensive when you buy them in small quantities from a grocery store, but many more wars were fought and peoples wiped out, right into the present day, over those three than over gold.
As Rutee pointed out, gold is a vital industrial component — but if we see it as only an industrial component, it is not anywhere near scarce, and won’t be for thousands of years. Other significances of gold — namely, its use in fine jewelry and as a “store of value” — are purely cultural and completely arbitrary. The demand for gold jewelry in the past couple of decades has fallen dramatically, which indicates shifting cultural attitudes. And as for using gold as a symbol of value — that’s just as arbitrary as using sea shells, iron nails or, you know, paper currency. Historically, the value of gold has been just as volatile as that of paper money, and unless you can put those gold bars to actual productive use (which you can’t), in the long run is isn’t worth any more than “worthless” currency.
Brandon: If you have a relationship where one party leaves the workforce to support the other in the home/rearing the children you have a chance of paying support. Marriage isn’t required, that’s why I bolded the part about implied contract.
The country doesn’t have a debt problem. It has a political problem. More to the point the SSA isn’t actually in the same money pool. That it gets treated that way is part of why we think we have a debt problem. The SSA is completely funded from payroll taxes, and the way it’s built if it stops being able to fun full pay-out it gives partial. The present prediction (assuming no change in the income stream, which would require a completely stagnant economy, no changes to the system and no replacement of workers) is 2038. Increasing the present cutoff for SSA taxes from the $107,000 it presently is to $214,000 would move that date to the imperceivable future.
As to the debt problem… the debt is a bit more than 50 percent of GDP. That, to use the common analogy of the household budget is equivalent to someone with a $40,000 income buying a $20,000 car. It’s not that big a deal, all in all. No one thinks someone buying a house (which puts one’s personal debt load into the hundreds… someone with a $100,000 who buys a $500,000 house had a 500 percent debt load (more actually, but I’m leaving the interest on the mortgage out of the picture to make the numbers clean). If they use any other debt (a new car, home improvements, etc.) they have a higher debt load.
The problem isn’t the debt (Japan has a debt/GDP ratio of something like 225 percent, and has for some time… no one is saying they don’t have problems, but one doesn’t see any mass panic about the end of Japan either).
The problem is the deficit. That’s actually fixable. Reduce the spending (by say ending the wars) and allow taxes to go back to the level they were at before GWB’s, “temporary tax cuts” which were passed because we were running a surplus. That is 11 years ago we were possessed of a balanced budget and the debt was being paid down.
re 2 and 3: It’s not 10 contracts, it’s a couple of hundred. Most of which one doesn’t discover one needs until one can’t do what one wants. And, as I said, the issue of maintaining them is a problem too. The easiest way would be to have a lawyer on retainer, who is being paid to keep track of them as they sunset, and call you to renew/rework them. untangling such a relationship would probably be more work than a divorce. It will certainly cost more than divorce.
Why? Because if we assume that the relationship ends (elstwise none of this issue of separation matters) the work of dissolving those contracts will be greater than severing them with a divorce, and the work will be proportional to the work they would have been in a divorce. So a messy divorce (single contract) becomes a messy severance of tens/hundreds of contracts (some of which are not severable in the same way they would have been in a divorce. You may have inadvertently changed the nature of the property; relative to where you live [i.e. you may have created community property in a non-community property state, or prevented it in one which is community property).
Because I have a lot of friends who are poly, and who have had to deal with establishing equivalent legal relationships to marriage (and in some cases dissolving them), I can say, categorically (from, you know, actual experience) you are not really informed on the subject.
Again, I do not care if people get married, nor do I insult them for making that choice. I just think it is a bad one to make. Sometimes I talk about marriage and debate it with people, I tell them and they are free to take it or leave it. I am not going to lie to them and say “Marriage is great”.
Actually, though it’s not done in an aggressive way, you do insult people for getting married. You tell them it’s a bad thing to do, and then say a smart person can get all the benefits without any of the problems you think you see. Never mind that you lie to them when you say you are in a position to compare the state of non-married, with contracts, to married.
NWO: Normally when you get fired it’s because you fucked up and deserve to get fired. QFT. Usually when one party initiates a divorce, it’s because the other party fucked up in some way which made it intolerable for that party to continue.
Sometimes (about 15 percent of the time) the terms of the marriage were such that continued support (almost always with limits, in a previous age it was remarriage), is warranted. This is almost always contested but it’s not common and it’s gender neutral* I realised you’ve been brainwashed with old-fashioned mores, and don’t realise this. I recommend a class (you can do them on the internet, intended for people who want to be paralegals) in marital law, and divorce.
*I have a friend who is going through a divorce, her husband is asking for alimony. The odds of him getting it are dropping, because he is being stupid about how he handles his end of things. She wasn’t happy about the idea of paying alimony [she wasn’t happy about the idea of divorcing him either, but that’s another problem altogether], but since he’d been the one doing the renovations to the house, instead of working outside it, that was the right thing to do.
Brandon: Looking at your comments on money/healthcare I see you don’t understand the economics of either money valuation, or of shared risk. If we were still on a “pegged standard” we’d have a problem. Lets say the value of the dollar was still pegged at USD20 = 1 oz (troy).
How many ounces of gold are there in Ft. Knox? What do you do as the economy expands? You can’t put more money into circulation. You have limits on the economy. The other thing to do is to have a secondary metal… say silver, in circulation. That’s useful only so long as there is enough silver to keep up with expansion.
Your economy is also subject to the vagaries of the wider market. If a sudden influx of gold happens (say a huge strike, thousands of lbs, were to be found somewhere) then your currency is either devalued, or kept afloat by fiat/purchase. Only you have to use gold to buy gold, so that trick doesn’t work.
A big part of the progressive movement at the turn of the last century was because we had a gold standard, and the amount of money in circulation wasn’t enough to meet demands.
Want to know what a gold-backed economy looks like in the modern age? The Soviet Union. How did they manage it… well for one thing they had a much smaller economy. For another they did what we would have to be doing, reduced the amount of gold a single ruble was worth.
They are no longer on a Gold Standard, their economy (even with the kleptocratic issues, and the rampant mafia) is growing.
Switzerland is, but they don’t have the same sort of economy as either the US, or the former Soviet Union. They make a huge amount of their money by importing it.
BTW: If you want to invest in metal with really good returns (and based on actual market forces, not woo-woo about retained value…. lead
The more people in an insurance pool, the lower the rates. Yes, there is some affect of people who aren’t paying in; if they aren’t paying in, but that’s not the way it works. I’ve never (in a working life of 28 years), known a company that doesn’t make one pay a bit more to add someone to a policy. Even the DoD requires dependents to pay some of the costs. So more people = more money = less risk.
But the present system isn’t designed to provide care, it’s designed to reward shareholders, which means the incentives are perverted.
NWO: So very wrong, so many times:
The very system that has caused inflation and every economic collapse. Look it up genius.
The panic of 1873
Note the date. Note the similarities to the present.
The depression began with a building boom in Europe, with rapid building construction taking place in Vienna, Paris and Berlin.
Mortgages were easy to get and large British banks happily made loans to developers. Mortgages were also available from new savings banks designed for the middle-classes. Some of these may have been dodgy. People even used half-completed buildings as collateral because credit was so easy to obtain. This created a housing bubble.
The crisis hit when Russia and Central Europe couldn’t compete with American exports of wheat and other crops, including kerosene which undermined the use of rapeseed oil for cooking. Banks no longer wanted to lend so easily. Eventually the stock market in Vienna crashed and the crisis spread to Western Europe.
What about the Panics of 1785, and 1837 (also pre-fed)
Oddly enough, one of the things which caused people to say, we could reduce regulation on bank/investment houses was the dearth of market crashes from the inception of the fed to the present (even the S&L disaster was small, as was, “Black Monday” in 1989).
But I’d had to trouble your pretty little head with all those pesky little facts. They do get in the way of all the charming theories which explain why the world doesn’t revolve around you the way it should.
KathleenB: I have to say that the upper class women were educated. They may not have attended university, but they had tutors. As a single example, Mary Sidney (sister of Sir Philip Sidney). Spoke latin and greek, talented poet. Look at the Paston Letters (written during the English Civil Wars). Upper middle class women engaging in Business.
The Lisle Letters detail the correspondence of a family of minor (if notable, and long-standing) nobility in the reign of Henry VIII, not only is his wife an active correspondent, but the tutoring of the daughters (and their letters) are detailed, as well as the wife’s managing the family business in England while he was governor of Calais.
I have a copy of Magalena and Balthsar which is a 16th century collection of letters between two partner in Germany, as he travelled on business and the managed their lives (and it might do both Brandon and NWO good to read it).
It’s not that they weren’t educated, it’s that the ability to use it was severely limited.
And I see you amended that. I’ll leave this up because those are really interesting people/reads.
@Rutee: If you are going to continue to be insulting…I won’t bother.
1) So what if it is from Kitco? Are you claiming that all the data at a investment website like Yahoo Finance is fraudulent because they earn a profit? Profit doesn’t automatically mean they are lying or committing fraud.
2) Gold just like everything else works on supply and demand. If people want it, the price goes up. If more people want it then the mines can produce…then it goes up more.
3) Gold does have other uses but they are very specialized (e.g CPU pins and gold plated A/V cables, etc…) The only industry that really uses most of the gold are jewelers.
4) ANYTHING can be used as a currency. As long as people perceive it to have value. The paper that the dollar is printed on isn’t even worth a dime…yet I can still go into a 7-11 and get a candy bar for a buck…Why? Because everyone (Americans and non-Americans) perceive that little piece of paper as worth $1 and not the .05 cents the paper actually costs.
The US dollar just makes bartering and trade more portable since people don’t have to lug around heavy bars of gold and silver or even farm livestock to trade with people.
The idea of “store of value” and “currency” are nothing more than abstract ideas…paper money and gold are the practical implementations of that abstraction.
4) When I start seeing jobs getting created consistently month after month and wages increased…then I will put more faith in the US government. Otherwise, I will still remain skeptical.
5) What does corrupt and oppressive central and south american societies have to do with gold prices?
Rutee…have you ever been homeless sleeping in shelters with drug addicts and alcoholics? Not having enough money to eat and going a week without something in your stomach? Well, I have…so please don’t lecture me about the poor, because I was poor for most of my twenties.
@Pecunium: Debt is very much a problem. Mainly because most of our debt is being held by foreign governments. This gives foreigners and not Americans leverage over what the US government can do. If we do something that China doesn’t like…they can start unloading their debt and we are fucked. It’s called financial warfare. See the British fighting over the Sinai Peninsula back in the 50’s for an example.
You know what works as a contract. “I hereby give my father all say in the matters of my medical and financial needs if I become legally unable to make those decisions for myself” (you + witness signatures + date) (notarized). While not standard, it is official and thus a legal contract.
Contracts are not these complicated things that only a lawyer can fill out. I signed a contract when I got my cell phone and cable service. No lawyer needed. You are purposely trying to make it more convoluted then necessary because you feel the need to defend marriage…and all these contracts are a way for you to justify that belief. You are trying to make the point that marriage has “less hoops jump through”. I don’t see it. Plus in my state you need to fulfill other things before you get your marriage license, like getting a blood test and a few other health related issues.
So not only is getting married just walking into town hall and seeing the clerk, neither is it filling out all these cumbersome contracts and paying high lawyer fees.
Again, as I have said before. Marriage is nothing more than weighing the pro’s and con’s. I see far more con’s than pro’s while others might see the opposite. I think we should work on making those benefits that marriage gives out (to those that see them as benefits) available to non-married couples. This way marriage really is nothing more than an arbitrary piece of paper to everyone…not just me.
Oh, and the wedding costs could be put to better use…like a down payment on a house.
Needless to say, you are not really giving up much my not marrying. Immigration issues seems to be the only real thing that has no counterpart for the non-married.
Now on to gold. There are both pro’s and con’s to the gold standard. And I am not even sure I want to go back to pre-nixon monetary policy. But I would like to see the dollar get pegged to something than just “societies faith” in the dollar.
You are advocating lead? Are you serious? The crap we are trying to remove from houses and every other product in existence and people are scared shitless of lead poisoning. Lead has been trading sideways for years. Lead is the worst possible investment idea. Hell, even copper and aluminum are better suggestions since copper is used in wiring and aluminum for house siding. And people aren’t terrified of copper or aluminum.
The fall of the Soviet Union was mainly due to Glasnost. It opened up the media which then shed light on food shortages, pollution, bad housing and widespread drug and alcohol addictions.
‘Not having enough money to eat and going a week without something in your stomach? Well, I have…so please don’t lecture me about the poor, because I was poor for most of my twenties.”
Next you’re going to tell us you’ve gone 200 days without food and routinely work 28 hour days.
Brandon: @Pecunium: Debt is very much a problem. Mainly because most of our debt is being held by foreign governments.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
China owns… 7.5 percent of US Debt.
Here’s the breakdown, according to Business Insider
* Hong Kong: $121.9 billion (0.9 percent)
* Caribbean banking centers: $148.3 (1 percent)
* Taiwan: $153.4 billion (1.1 percent)
* Brazil: $211.4 billion (1.5 percent)
* Oil exporting countries: $229.8 billion (1.6 percent)
* Mutual funds: $300.5 billion (2 percent)
* Commercial banks: $301.8 billion (2.1 percent)
* State, local and federal retirement funds: $320.9 billion (2.2 percent)
* Money market mutual funds: $337.7 billion (2.4 percent)
* United Kingdom: $346.5 billion (2.4 percent)
* Private pension funds: $504.7 billion (3.5 percent)
* State and local governments: $506.1 billion (3.5 percent)
* Japan: $912.4 billion (6.4 percent)
* U.S. households: $959.4 billion (6.6 percent)
* China: $1.16 trillion (8 percent)
* The U.S. Treasury: $1.63 trillion (11.3 percent)
* Social Security trust fund: $2.67 trillion (19 percent)
So the US owes itself, directly, 30.3 percent of the debt. It owes itself, indirectly, another 7 percent (the state/local gov’ts and pension funds, that brings us to 37.3 percent. Add in mutual funds, and banks, and money market funds and the percentage of debt contained in the US rises to 43.8.
So China isn’t really in the position everyone likes to claim it is in terms of debt-based control. When the games Beijing is playing with the yuan, and the intimate linkage between the US ability to pay for Chinese goods driving the economic growth which is keeping the lid on social pressures for a wider change in the way things are run… I’m not worried about China.
It is true, barely, that the majority of our debt isn’t held inside the US, but there is no single debtor with the ability to try to cash in it’s bonds (or refuse to buy new issues of debt) and so change our policy.
For a list of countries with more debt load than the US, we can see:
1. Portugal (Debt %83.2)
2. France (Debt %83.5)
3. Sri Lanka (Debt %86.7)
4. Sudan (Debt %94.2)
5. Ireland (Debt %94.2)
6. Belgium (Debt %98.6)
7. Singapore (Debt %102.4)
8. Italy (Debt %118.4)
9. Jamaica (Debt %123.2)
10. Iceland (Debt %123.8)
11. Greece (Debt %144)
12. Zimbabwe (Debt %149)
13. Lebanon (Debt %150.7)
14. Saint Kitts and Nevis (Debt %196)
15. Japan (Debt %225.6)
Re contracts: Contracts are not these complicated things that only a lawyer can fill out. I signed a contract when I got my cell phone and cable service. No lawyer needed.
Um… who wrote that contract? A lawyer. That you are willing to trust that lawyer is your business (and that such mono-directional, non-negotiable contracts have become a norm is large problem).
You mistake me when you say I feel the need to defend marriage. I happen to think marriage is something people can enter, or not. What I am defending is the facts. You are asserting that marriage is something anyone can replicate; without the risk of punitive repercussions at dissolution (i.e. divorce). I am showing that the legal interweaving required to get those benefits is much more complex than you allege.
My comment on lead that, as a basis for investment it’s trendline is outperforming gold, not that I think it ought to be used as a peg to the value of the dollar*
You say gold is great because of how much money you are likely to make because of the “intrinsic” value it has. I am offering you a way to make more from your investment; in particular because lead is increasing in value as a result of rational market forces and real world demand, instead of the warm-fuzzies people get at the idea of having something shiny they can fondle.
Glasnost what not the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union. If you’d like we can talk about the effects of the war in Afghanistan, the strains that put on the budget, the outside forces from the US led coalition of Wester Powers attempting to keep the Soviet Economy isolated and secondary problems of competing ideologies and lack of access to markets for the goods the Soviet Union was in a better place to provide, as well as the problems of maintaining both an empire, and a hegemony; the border conflicts with China, the strains of both competing for access to client states (and the difficulties of supporting them, in the face of active US attempts to undermine open markets, e.g. Cuba), the costs of lifting a third world nation (tsarist Russia) to a 1st/2nd world nation, while simultaneously trying to help other nations move from colonial status to independent nations at 2nd world levels.
All of that on that selfsame constricted economy being caused by people who didn’t like the Russians way of gov’t (see the US Army being sent to interfere in the Russian Civil War, which meant that Lenin, after it was over, was even more hostile to the West than he might have been had the West not attempted to maintain the status quo ante, and then overthrow the gov’t which was established.
Nope… you think it was just that the press was a bit more open under Gorbachev, and people suddenly found out things were bad.
No thoughts to the samizdat circulation of Sakharov, Yevtushenko, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn; no internal struggles between the Krushchevs, Shevardnadzes, and Gorbachevs, against recationaries like Brezhnev, Adropov, Chernenko, et alia.
Nope, nothing so complex as all that.
Sort of like your views on marriage and money.
*your gut reaction that lead is, “bad” and so isn’t a good commodity to attach value to is a sign of the “warm fuzzy” as motivation for the gold standard which I am talking about.
To clarify on Lead:
In 2010 Gold had an increase of 40 percent.
Lead had one of 155 percent.
Depends on the state you are in on the marriage license-in my county, Maricopa, you only need an ID, $72 and to sign something saying you are single after swearing to tell the truth. If you have a pal who is an internet preacher you can get the actual ceremony for free. Here, having a judge do the wedding at the court during the week costs $60-80, possibly comped if the judge either knows you, you are active military, or you show you are too poor to pay. A certified copy costs $26.25. And yes that can be waived.
So to get all of the legalbenefits of marriage and health benefits, you merely have to sign two pieces of paper (the affidavit saying you are single and the marriage license itself) and depending on the circumstances, you can do so for less then $100.
Or you could waste your time figuring out how to write up contracts that cover every situation and that will hold up in court. You blithely assume that any contract will past muster-not so, a judge can find that the contract had illegal provisions. Or that the terms were so unconscionable that the entire thing needs to be scrapped. Then you are going to have to go with what the judge thinks is equitable and fair.
Marriages already have the provisions worked out so life’s issues are already worked out. Add to it the health benefits, it seems kind of dumb to me for you to be so smug and self righteous about how you can handle any curveball life throws at you during your relationship. Also, since your wages will go up as a male, I find it even weirder that you hate it so much.
Beth…. it’s obvious.
Not Married = Freedom.
Freedom without Alimony = Bliss.
Marriage = Divorce.
Divorce = Freedom + Alimony.
Freedom + Alimony = Hell
It is worth any amount of work (and money) to avoid Hell.