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MickeyFinn posted:It isn't just dumb as hell, it is counter productive. Assuming this stuff is even useful, it is far more likely that a large, public repository of blood/guts/tissue will have what you personally need, than it is that someone in your family will have stored it. People need to accept that public goods have merits and not try to do everything on their own, drat it. When my baby was born I wanted to donate to a public cord blood bank, but the hospital didn't do that. So I didn't. The private cord blood banking industry is sleazy as hell. I got a lot of leaflets for it in the big pack of information my Ob-Gyn gave me when I first got pregnant.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:05
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Radbot posted:People say financial literacy is bad in this country, but is there data that actual compares financial literacy from country to country? The USA makes financial literacy much more important than most countries. In the UK you can basically bumble along financially. Taxes come directly out of your paycheck (no paperwork on your part.) Higher education is not as heart-stoppingly expensive. Medical care is free. If you understand mortgages, credit cards, and how to avoid payday loans you are basically OK. There are less pitfalls.
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Apr 15, 2015 13:53
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Mocking Bird posted:In my family, you don't trade in or sell your old car, you park it in the driveway and let it rot "just in case." Something similar to an A&E Hoarders mentality. Yeah, they are meaning to fix them "when they can get the parts" but never get round to it. Or they are just keeping the cars for family/friends who are off somewhere else working/jail.
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Apr 16, 2015 17:06
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The one time I belonged to a tithing church, they were not at all hardcore about it and would let you off if you couldn't afford it. I didn't pay because I was a broke student.
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Apr 30, 2015 13:21
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No Butt Stuff posted:Wait, like... they checked? No, did I imply they checked? As I said, they were fine with people pleading poverty.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:35
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No Butt Stuff posted:Saying they were fine about it and would "let you off" made me think they were checking, yes. Sorry for the poor phrasing. The church were in fact very insistent they wouldn't take money from those who couldn't afford it. My point is that a person going bust who is tithing could probably get out of it, in most churches. Some, of course, are less nice.
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Apr 30, 2015 20:05
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Inverse Icarus posted:That's what I keep trying to tell my dad but it's like talking to a racist, conservative wall. Free healthcare and foodstamps is pro-small-business! I heard a theory once that the UK had so many great rock bands in the '60s and '70s because the welfare state was so generous you could basically start up a band and get the dole until it took off (if it ever took off.) Most bands were no-hopers but some made it huge, which continued paying off for the country for years. This is also one of the reason why Scandinavia is punching above its weight in business and the creative industries; people aren't afraid to take risks, because a generous government will pick up the pieces if they fail. It's a hard sell to taxpayers, though. "Let's fund a load of idiots pissing around pretending to be authors/musicians/entrepreneurs/actors with your cash earned as a wage slave, because one day a small percentage of them will make it big."
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Jun 2, 2015 19:30
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OldMemes posted:Then they all put the money they made doing music in offshore tax havens, so the UK government didn't get a penny back! Some of 'em. Did you know that J.K. Rowling wrote large parts of the first Harry Potter while on government benefits? OldMemes posted:The UK is not a socialist paradise - you get the dole to stop you starving. If you say "I'm not going to bother to get a job because my band will take off!" rather than "I have a band in my spare time" then EVERYONE will hate you here, reagrdless of class or background. I'm not sure whoever came up with that idea has ever been to the UK. This is why they closed that loophole. Everyone hated it.
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Jun 4, 2015 14:29
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Barry posted:I'm fine with a certain amount of do as I say, not as I do but that is really not the kind of person that should have anything to do with large scale fiscal policy. Isn't he from a party that likes to compare good public finance to thrifty household finance?
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Jun 9, 2015 15:55
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It's a combination of luck and talent and hard work. . You can be as hard working as you like, but if you are from a broke and abusive family and are in-and-out of foster care all your childhood, you'll probably not get rich. You can be born talented and into a well-off family, but if you piss away your time on video games and weed, you won't be a big success in business.
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Jun 19, 2015 15:20
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Harry posted:Yeah this applies to the guy who thought his credit card was free money that he won. Having the brains of a turnip is certainly a disadvantage in life. Not everyone is born sharp and canny! People who are sharp tend to be pretty impatient with those who are dense, saying "Why can't they use their *brains*?" but as far as I can tell, some people are just thick. Not mentally handicapped or anything, just dense. I was on the subway with a friend who was studying advertising, once, and an ad caught my eye. It was for some dreadful payday loan place. Only an idiot would have fallen for the gaudy design and obvious con-job. I asked my friend about it, and I don't remember her exact words, but they were something like "If it looks like only an idiot would fall for it, it is aimed at idiots."
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Jun 19, 2015 17:34
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John Smith posted:poo poo. I didn't said it was easy, did I? My question to you is, what does whining about it achieve? I understand and ***fully*** accept that there are challenges and unfairness in life. My question is, why must that mean that we should give up? You people's message is a sick and twisted message, that is socially destructive. Because there is unfairness, we should therefore not try to achieve because we will probably fail anyway. And we should accept this mentality in others. I think you are railing against a strawman. You don't go to a forum called "Business, Finance, and Careers" and talk about your investment portfolio all day if you are fatalistic about your chance to better your financial position. Everyone here is looking to become better off with the tips that people share here. That is the opposite of giving up. Gorman Thomas posted:I'm currently looking to rent in LA and I had this exact conversation with a landlord yesterday. She's renting out her house on a month to month lease and living in a MIL shack in the rear of the property. I wonder how underwater she has to be on her other properties to justify that. She might just be a miser, I mean "frugal" and aiming to cash out and retire somewhere cheap. BarbarianElephant fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Jun 19, 2015 |
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Jun 19, 2015 18:46
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Centripetal Horse posted:This is creepy and insane, right? It's not just me, is it? She just sounds like she's being poetic about being baby-crazy to me. Not actually crazy.
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Jun 26, 2015 00:38
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Knyteguy posted:^ Speaking of non-college tuition. My state is now allowing parents to choose where they want their school tax dollars to go (something like $5,000 per kid). So if someone home schools their kid they can keep that $5,000 (IIRC), or it can go towards a private school or something. My guess is bad with tax dollars, but I'm not sure. Are the child-free allowed to opt out of the tax entirely?
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Jun 29, 2015 18:59
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Phone posted:I gave MSF $20 during the ebola outbreak last year, and they've sent me poo poo every 2 or 3 weeks like clockwork since. I try to donate only biggish sums very occasionally because little amounts get pissed away on envelopes.
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Sep 6, 2015 13:29
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I love being short.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:02
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Krispy Kareem posted:I wonder how bi-polar and maniac depressives expressed themselves in a pre-consumer society. Religious mania was a good one.
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Sep 15, 2015 19:26
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Haifisch posted:If I thought society was going to collapse, I'd hoard toilet paper. Lots of people have thought of hoarding bullets, gold, and canned food, but TP is going to be king once people realize they're running out of it. I don't think people are going to be killing for it, though, as long as leaves exist. enraged_camel posted:I don't have numbers unfortunately, but I imagine suing the government must be expensive. The therapy that autistic children require is also expensive.... wonder if they are skimping on that to sue the government.
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Sep 21, 2015 17:01
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Series DD Funding posted:Women gravitate towards different jobs than men because of the "conspiracy against the vagina." If you work to make teaching jobs pay better, that'll naturally make them more prestigious, and ta da, suddenly the new generation of boys is raised to get Good Jobs as teachers. Just like how women were everywhere in software development until it got too prestigious Yeah, notice how everyone is starting to steer away from Serious Academia now it's no longer a boys club, and how the universities are suddenly more comfortable with paying less well. And "Church of England Vicar" used to be a cushy, genteel job, and now with so many lady Vicars, it's starting to make them as poor as church mice... If women suddenly plunged into software engineering, it'd suddenly become an "easy job for mums to do while looking after toddlers at home."
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Sep 28, 2015 22:06
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Krispy Kareem posted:Has anyone ever met a couple that looked back at their wedding and thought to themselves, "yeah, we should've spent more." It's one of those odd events that seem so important in the run-up and so incredibly unimportant the day after. With hindsight, we could have afforded a honeymoon, but we didn't know that at the time.
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Oct 13, 2015 19:28
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cowofwar posted:Please think of the rich people. Their lives are difficult just like black people. I'm pretty sure that's snide critique on the part of the Guardian. They do this sometimes http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/07/crewing-on-superyachts-wealth-careers
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Oct 19, 2015 15:34
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baquerd posted:At the grocery store the other day there was a great sale - 10lbs of potatoes for $0.99! Right next to the 10lb bags, there were cleaned and plastic wrapped "microwaveable" potatoes - 1 for $0.99. Good with money if you have no storage and don't want to haul 10lbs of potatoes home on the bus. 
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Oct 19, 2015 20:58
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detectivemonkey posted:The times I walk to the grocery store are always the times when they have get one free deals on giant bags of onions and potatoes. Good with money and muscles. Most times the offer seems to apply to one of the item in question, oddly enough. So 2 for $5 works out as 1 for $2.50. Good if you are not planning to make a gallon of soup.
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Oct 19, 2015 22:13
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SmuglyDismissed posted:"For four people to go to the movies, it's over 100 to 150 bucks." In Manhattan it is.
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Oct 20, 2015 21:01
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Nah - I could see $15 a ticket but that's about it. I think the assumption encoded is "going to the movies and buying lots of junk food from the theater". In manhattan it's even easier to avoid because there's probably a bodega with whatever junk food you want a block away. A 3D movie in Union Square is about $20 a ticket. You don't need to buy much junk food to make that up to $100 for 4! Even if you go to the bodega
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Oct 20, 2015 22:18
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Doubtful but I'm all ears. The only alternative I can think of would be to move to a lovely apartment in a bad neighborhood to get cheap rent. But then I'm just trading heating and boat problems for crime, bad neighbors, bugs, etc. If enough people do this you get the dreaded spectre of GENTRIFICATION and rents go up
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Oct 22, 2015 18:26
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High Lord Elbow posted:I've never heard of anyone living I. A houseboat except down-on-their luck private investigators on TV. I think it's pretty big in London at the moment. There's a lot of Thames and not a lot of housing.
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Oct 22, 2015 22:22
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Guinness posted:And this is why "market solutions" for healthcare are a farce. When you're in need of quick medical attention you don't have the luxury of getting price quotes and cross-shopping, not to mention that most clinics and hospitals can't even tell you what poo poo costs until after the fact. They don't even tell you how much it will cost if you have 9 months to prepare. You would have thought that they could quote a standard baby delivery assuming nothing goes wrong, but noooooo. Just watch them squirm if you even try and pin them to a ballpark figure.
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Oct 28, 2015 19:01
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Senf posted:Earlier today, I learned that a friend's relative just purchased a brand-new double cab truck for $32,000. It isn't a terrible purchase by itself, however: What the heck is it with Americans and trucks? They seem to be the "sports cars" of the younger generation. Impractical, gas guzzling, expensive. Plus, they must be absolutely impossible to park.
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Dec 8, 2015 15:19
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NancyPants posted:If you actually need a big truck for your primary job, it's not insane to get one with comfort features since you're probably spending several hours a day in it. The guys who use trucks for their primary job seem to have hideous old rattlebangers, because they use them to haul pipes and stuff, which tend to scrape beautiful paintwork. Vanity trucks seem to have tiny little cargo areas, just about big enough to haul a dead deer, which is probably the heaviest thing they are ever called upon to transport.
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Dec 8, 2015 21:09
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NancyPants posted:I can see up to around $1000 for like, a handmade leather bag with really good hardware. All bags are handmade, thanks to the miracle of sweatshops.
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Jan 15, 2016 15:43
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MrKatharsis posted:The Atlantic has a good article on Winston Churchill being a total SloMo and getting away with it. A rich person may be five million dollars in debt but still fine and living a luxurious, enviable lifestyle. A poor person can be $200 in debt and completely screwed, eating nothing but boiled rice. Such is the magic of credit.
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Feb 2, 2016 17:00
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The Mormon guy could make more of the church in terms of activities for his kids. Choir is cheaper than piano, still teaches music.
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Feb 8, 2016 23:24
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pig slut lisa posted:Here's a goofy story out of Scotland: I guess their ramp budget was full and their lift budget was empty.
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Feb 16, 2016 18:57
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Manhattan is a weird place, with only the very rich and the very poor. The very rich can afford the rents/apartment prices. The very poor live in social housing, homeless shelters and the street. As well as poor elderly folk who got a rent controlled apartment in 1970 and never moved. You just don't find any schoolteachers, firefighters, police, receptionists, etc. It's a place without the middle. This creates some odd effects like a public school where almost everyone qualifies for free school meals on a street of millionaire's apartments (their kids go to private schools.) This is why it's important for the subway to have a flat rate. The poor and lower middle classes live a long way out of Manhattan, but often work there. If it was like London, you end up doubly punished for not being able to afford a home near your job by paying high prices just to get to work. Krispy Kareem posted:Poor kid has been handing 100% of his paycheck to his parents for 2 years and they won't even let him buy new work pants and he sleeps on an air mattress. Now they want him to take out loans for them and charge $950 a month for his room/board. It's not even his parents, but his brother who became his legal guardian when he was five. This is like a modern day Cinderella. BarbarianElephant fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Feb 22, 2016 |
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Feb 22, 2016 16:56
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I wonder how you can set up high-end audio gear without reading the manual.
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Mar 1, 2016 16:10
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Solice Kirsk posted:It's what they told me. A big part of me hopes it was just a scheme to fire me without hurting my feelings and they 5498'd all those funds into another retirement account at another brokerage house or something. I doubt it, but in like 30 years I'm sure as poo poo gonna be checking the obituaries and real estate notifications for their house to see if I can buy it and find the modern equivalent to buried pirate treasure. Great story Solice Kirsk. Their will is going to have to include a literal treasure map or their heirs are going to have to get an archaeological team in to find their inheritance.
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Mar 1, 2016 21:08
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olylifter posted:We broke up and she got with a new guy and had a kid within a year. A few months after the kid came the guy decided he wasn't down for the lifestyle and bailed. She's still working as a PSW, she lives with her parents in the middle of nowhere, with the kid. She's 33, no prospects, no education, no chance of bettering herself, and the dad's hosed right off. While your first example is less than ideal, if everyone had to be as prepared as your second example before having kids, the result would be a massive population crash. Basically you are saying everyone below middle-middle class shouldn't be breeding. That would do interesting.... things to future demographics. You could do a reverse "Idiocracy" by imagining what would happen if only the well-off and well-educated were allowed to breed. Essentially what would happen I think is that you'd run out of working-class people and not be able to replace them with unfortunates falling from the middle classes fast enough, so you'd need to open up immigration to do all the working-class jobs. This is already happening to some extent. Farm hand work tends to be done by immigrants because poor rural families either moved to the city or started having much fewer children, so there's no longer the excess of willing local hands to do the farm work. Oddly enough most right-wingers who preach the gospel of "don't have children you can't afford" don't seem particularly overjoyed by this - in fact, rather the opposite. You'd also get a hellish hot-house atmosphere for kids as all their parents' hopes for grandchildren would be riding on their one or two kids getting good enough jobs to "afford" children. You think middle-class people put stress on their kids to succeed *now* but it'd be nothing compared to if working or lower-middle class jobs led to being completely unable to have kids. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 21, 2016 18:39
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Thursday Next posted:He knows it's not a cure for cancer, but he's convinced it may be able to help. Can you get control of their finances? Power of attorney or whatever. It sounds urgent, before all their money is taken by scammers. Can you talk to your mom about it?
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Apr 1, 2016 14:20
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but yeah I can't even figure out how to help them.)
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Tax guys genuinely act weird as poo poo. I got in trouble recently by closing the door on some "tax men" that were acting super-shifty. Turns out they were tax men... There was a problem with our taxes (an error). No idea why their first idea was to turn up on our doorstep without writing or phoning first.
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Apr 16, 2016 21:45
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