DISQUS

Funny... I was reading The Millionaire Next Door and it seems that the more successful millionaire parents *did* pay for their children's educations rather than simply hand them cash. A sort of teaching-them-to-fish, if you will. The other thing the successful ones did was earmark seed money for their adult children to start businesses.

Now if you're not rich like that and you have to choose between your retirement fund and a college fund for the kids then by all means favor your retirement fund. It's short-sighted to put your own future in jeopardy when there are financial aid programs out the wazoo for college kids but practically none for retirement.

For the record? There are fat people everywhere. I am SO TIRED of people slamming Americans for this. First off, being fat isn't a character flaw, and much of the time it isn't even a health problem. (Fact. They found this out for sure two years ago.) Second off, anywhere you can get access to large amounts of carbohydrates, and grain in particular, you are going to see lots of overweight people. They exist in Mexico, they exist in Italy (yes, with their so-called Mediterranean Diet--hello, pasta?), and yes, they even exist in France. There's a budding field of study called paleopathology in which they have discovered that in the ten thousand years that we've had grain agriculture, human health has markedly deteriorated; in fact, only in the mid-20th century has any nation of people regained the average height that the species enjoyed in our hunter-gatherer days. Know why? Advances in medical treatment that made up for bad diet, and knowledge of the role of nutrition which led to supplementation. Go figure.

Yes, we're unhappy, and yes we're in debt, and yes we waste a lot of stuff. But the fat thing happens all over--even in poor countries, if you live an agricultural or industrialized lifestyle, you have to be rotten stinking broke and poor and only eating every couple of days to get away from the weight thing. Which is a significant segment of the population, but doesn't apply to everyone.

And Steve, what "toxic cleaning fluids" are you talking about re: cleaning that cup? How about just good old-fashioned soap? I hear the Romans discovered it when ashes from their sacrificial pyres mixed with the fat of the animals they sacrificed. (Ashes = lye.) That's pretty natural, I would think. I've heard of people using Dr. Bronner's to wash dishes and they seem pretty happy with it; I haven't tried it yet but I'd like to. I make a point of purchasing the one brand of vegetable-based dish soap that Kroger carries, since they're the closest grocery to me. I wash my little girl's apples with it (just one tiny drop will do and a little water, then rinse well), and she does not seem to be the worse for wear.

The farming of soy and other crops causes fertilizer runoff into the watershed which causes a serious imbalance in ocean life, eventually, which sucks the life out of huge regions underwater. There is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico right now because the "breadbasket of America" drains into that body of water. Poof. No more fish.

Additionally, there is some concern that certain compounds in soy lead to health problems in adults and birth defects in boys if their mothers ate too much soy while they were in utero.

On top of that, you have to clear fields to grow big crops like soy, which means cutting trees, which accelerates the global warming rate. Contrary to popular opinion, you don't have to clear fields to raise cattle, or any other kind of farm animal either. Truth. I knew this was true of pigs, goats, and chickens (we had chickens when I was in high school and their coop was at the edge of the woods, under the trees and out of the sun), but I looked it up and it's true for cattle too. On top of that, ruminant animals and birds can eat plants that human beings can't, turning those plants into energy that we can use.

I agree that our industrial methods of raising farm animals for human consumption are completely messed up and are contributing to global warming and the destruction of the planetary ecosystem, BUT, if you raise them in a way that suits their natures and their nutritional needs, you actually benefit the environment more than if you grow a field of soy. You benefit people's health, too, in the long run.

And of course the primary issue is there are just too darned many people on this planet. Until we solve that problem, unless we're willing to make a whole lot of people live under police state conditions and monitor their every move, we're not going to solve the larger ecological problems no matter what we're eating. And while the damage we will do really concerns me, the fact that we are headed for a major human die-off if we keep up the way we're going scares me even more.

Oh, and the thing about the homeless person. I have my own weird little thoughts about that. So often the general consensus seems to be, "What an idiot, he shouldn't be so picky, he should be grateful someone's giving him any food at all." Being grateful for whatever someone gives you is a sign of desperation and can set you up for being abused. Is it really too much to ask that in the process of helping the less fortunate, we take our egos out of the equation for thirty seconds, step back, give them some room and let them tell us what they need?

I remember when I first moved to Ohio and things were really shaky for me, a friend of mine gave me his old car. Now this sounds like a really awesome thing to do, and in a way it was, and I know he did it to be kind to me. On the other hand, it was a clunker--I mean, it sounded like a giant Harley when I started the ignition, it put off clouds of white smoke (which, by the way, I learned is worse for your lungs than soot is), and it was finicky and broke down on me several times. I was not making a high income and certainly could not afford extensive auto repairs. He would have been better off selling it for scrap and handing me the money, and so would I have been. I wound up abandoning the car.

And hey, there are sure to be homeless people with food allergies, homeless people with specific religious beliefs about food, homeless people who are diabetic (it never ceases to amaze me how many food charities expect poor people to exist on starch and sugar--how are they ever going to overcome their problems if they're so sick from malnutrition that they can't work?), and so on.

So I would not just hand a homeless person a sandwich. I *would* rather give them the money. If they spend it on drugs, maybe they feel like that's meeting their needs right now better than anything else would. As long as they're not high around random strangers and small children and don't commit drug-related violence, there is no reason I should care.

But I think the best option of all would be to donate to your local homeless shelter. And don't just reserve your pity or compassion or whatever for the kids--at bottom, people are homeless because they do not have a home, and everyone who is down and out deserves the reasonable amount of help. And donating to a shelter means completely ruling out the possibility that the person begging you for spare change isn't a professional panhandler.

Wow. Zopa... looks downright brilliant. It completely makes sense to me now that I've walked through the "learn more" link. See, the borrower has already qualified for a loan. You're not actually lending them anything. You just siphon off a portion of the interest rate you earn off your CD to go to paying off their loan. That's it. You are lending them nothing. This is an even better idea than Prosper. I would say Prosper still has a place for high-risk lenders and for borrowers who don't have good credit, but if a lender doesn't tolerate risk well or if a borrower has good credit, I would totally go with Zopa first.

And hey, what a great way to preserve friendships, right? :)

Don't know what to tell you about the opportunities you have. If I were offered something similar to your present situation and it was guaranteed I'd get it, I'd take it, because my current situation is completely sub-optimal. If you're already in a good situation, though, and you have the chance to be with your kids and so on... I don't know that it really becomes a question of mediocrity versus excellence. Aren't you in an excellent situation now? Is your life really supposed to center around your career? I mean, I don't think you really intend your life to be that way, or you wouldn't be consulting now, but sometimes these things spiral out of control and next thing you know all your time is eaten up.

Dunno, it's a really personal decision to make. Good luck, whatever you choose.

Actually? Ladybugs *can* bite. I got bitten by one in 2003 while riding a city bus. True fact. They were swarming that year.

It was an orange-colored one, though. I didn't know there were different kinds of ladybugs, I thought there were only red and black ones. The lighter-colored ones seem more inclined to take a chomp out of random human beings. Remember, they're carnivores--that's why gardeners love them.

But they don't make as much of a habit out of it as, say, ticks do, so it's nothing to panic about, either. :)

Congrats to mama, baby, and family! Ha... My mom had three ten-pounders, an average of four years apart. But she's a tall woman, too. :D

You mentioned being surprised about Lebanon not being high on the list, and a commenter mentioned Libya for the same reason. I would be surprised to ever see a Muslim country high on either the personal-debt or governmental-debt lists. Islam forbids "riba," or usurious interest rates, and to avoid even the possibility of same, your average devout Muslim does not borrow or lend under any interest-paying terms at all. It seems to me that if a majority-Muslim country follows that part of shari'a law, the government isn't going to be dealing with interest payments either, and will likely seek out other ways of addressing the people's concerns besides running up a budget deficit like we do here in the States. Government bonds would be unheard of.

It's hard to imagine a life without interest but sometimes I hear people talking about things like P2P lending and how great it is when their higher interest bids go through and I think, "Why are you so happy that that person's deeper into debt with you?", and I think maybe the Muslims are on to something.

Oh, and as for role models? I think one of the big reasons our kids get so fixated on famous people as role models is because their parents are not around to be those role models for them. My daughter learns more about how to behave by watching me than she does by listening to what I have to say. In short, I am going to be a more effective parent being around to demonstrate how human beings behave than I will be only seeing her for a couple hours in the evening and giving her verbal advice all the time.

Pretty powerful, if you think about it.

I care that he slept with a prostitute, because in effect he was saying that a human being is nothing more than a hamburger over which he gets to "have it his way." That is disgusting, half the population of New York state is female, and he's essentially saying half his state is subhuman and should be up for buying and selling. I don't want a man like that anywhere *near* in charge of me.

I also disagree with plonkee that marital fidelity and business fidelity are two different things. I think the personal relationships are the first place a person like this starts acting out because they know they will very likely get away with it; there are fewer laws governing how one must treat one's relatives than there are governing how one must behave in a business transaction. (This is likely one of the reasons Westerners look askance at other cultures which have strict rules about marriage and family behavior: we have no equivalent institution since Christianity lost most of its teeth in the West.) I think that it's when a person gets away with mistreating their family that they move on to mistreating other people. Had Spitzer never been caught buying a hooker, who knows what else he might have gotten up to. If his wife doesn't make a further example of him by dumping him on his butt in the street, he might try it anyway. Not because she made him do it by letting him get away with infidelity, but because people like that think they've gotten away with something if they haven't gotten the worst punishment possible.

(And I wonder if he would even consider it a punishment to be dumped by his wife. Obviously he doesn't care about her or he wouldn't have been off buying hookers.)

The comments on the prostitute's MySpace page were unreal (it's linked from her Wikipedia page, which is linked from Spitzer's)--all positive comments, which goes without saying on MySpace, but then they acted like *she* was the one put out of joint and kept telling *her* to keep her chin up, and most of them seemed more interested in her music career than anything. Bizarre.

What I was getting at was not so much the getting rich angle as the being-the-best-in-your-field angle. Because of the way "being best in your field" is so often defined by others, you may find yourself becoming a workaholic to the point that you miss your kids growing up. Lots of career folk have fallen into this trap, men especially.

You're absolutely right, though, that it's better to work smart rather than work hard (although you always need some degree of working hard--you just want more in the beginning and less later, ideally) if you want to amass wealth.

Well, if you substitute any other major goal in your life for "getting rich," it's still pretty sound advice. And you don't have to be a jerk to focus hard on a goal, although you might still come across as one sometimes depending on the circumstances. Like, a workaholic trying to advance his career might not intentionally act like a jerk but come off as one anyway because he works so much he never sees his kids. But that's the only way to do your absolute best in some lines of work, or at least that's how the conventional wisdom goes.

I don't know how old he was when he made plans but my grandfather did the same thing. He passed last November and Mawmaw didn't have to worry about a thing except to make sure his wishes were carried out.

I am far from my family and not even sure where I would want to be buried.

Ha, I guess Dr. Atkins was only a starting point for you! :P I don't find that all calories behave the same for me, though. I kept track of calories and everything else on SparkPeople for several days and found that if I ate high-fat and got in 2000 to 2900 calories a day, I still lost weight. That doesn't make sense if all calories are the same. From what I understand, the macronutrients (carbs, protein, and fat) do not metabolize in the same way, and cannot be stored in the same way, and if you're in ketosis to boot, the part of your fat (body and dietary) that gets turned into ketones sure can't be stored again. Dr. Atkins referred to that as "sneaking calories out of the body." He wasn't too far off the mark.

I just... find it excruciatingly difficult to stick with it. If it's not people telling me it's unhealthy then it's my little girl's dad bringing crap over he knows I shouldn't eat. And I place way too much of my responsibility in other people's hands. That said, I also believe in taking something of a hacker's approach to life--instead of working against innate tendencies, working with them. In that vein, you don't bring a dieter's favorite off-limits foods into their home, and you don't try to advise them against a particular diet plan if you have not read up on it (directly from the source) yourself. That kind of thing.

As for my own responsibility and motivation I am still trying to figure that one out, because I sure do need to lose 100 pounds. Unlike a previous commenter, being fat is not my natural state and I still am not used to it. It's got to go.

You can also sell CDs here:

http://www.cashforcds.com/

I've used them and they pay promptly. No guarantees how much they'll pay for your stuff, but I bet they're a better deal than Half-Price Books.

I agree that having kids isn't a purpose. Furthermore, trying to make them into a purpose is an almost guaranteed formula for strained relationships with your kids. Children are thinking human beings just like we are, and to mature well they will need to formulate their own life purposes. And they have to do that the way we all have to do it, based on their interests and their talents. Those will necessarily differ from the interests and talents of their parents.

You could say "raising my children to be happy, productive members of society" is a goal, and that is probably what most people mean when they say having kids is a goal, but if you think about it, this goal must be necessarily vague. Why? Because our ideas of what constitutes "happy" and "productive" are going to necessarily differ from our children's ideas of what constitutes "happy" and "productive." So our concepts of those terms as pertain to our children are going to be necessarily vague. And a vague goal is not a goal that leads to success.

Oh, and I don't think he meant that people in that group are doomed to fail, but that that trait is the only one you can't completely fix--you always have to compensate for it in some way. I mean, you can't change your genes. But if you have other attributes that balance out the genetic hand you were dealt, that really helps.

I think what Hill may have been getting at was people who are mentally disabled in some way--not just dyslexia, something you can work around, but something that results in a significantly low IQ. I think referring to it as an "unfavorable hereditary background" was his way of being polite about it. Eugenics was also a popular philosophy in his day, so there may have been a racist undertone there as well. I would not dismiss Hill over that, I'm just saying that those attitudes were a reality back then.