Peter Hendra wrote in
:

Now if only people bought a BOAT to live aboard instead of a house,
perhaps they might stay together longer due to the requirement on the
sea for shared responsibility. - Had to think on that one.



I don't know of any married couples who just love the boat so much,
especially after living aboard it for a length of time. She might SAY
she loves the boat, but you see that longing in her eye if you look
close...for SHORE! Sure, there are exceptions, probably 10% of the
liveaboard women in a boat this afternoon. Men's interests and women's
interests are just different.....that's reality.

Cruising a hardware store, I'll see some man loading his cart with stuff
the wife is handing him that needs doing at home. My standard comment
is:

"NEVER bring a woman to a hardware store!"

Boy, did he screw up! He'll be painting and sanding for months! All he
wanted to do was to look for more tools....(c; He's never even BEEN to
the paint department, before!



Larry
--

Don W wrote in news:ScJZh.2579
:

The
people making their living selling mass media
quickly figured out that glamor attracted an
audience, and that no one was interested in the
realistic mundane parts of life.

I think that phenomenon is quite recent. Let's look back at some of the
old TV families.....

"The Honeymooners" hardly had enough money from Ralph's bus paycheck to
make the rent payments on that tenement apartment they lived in over the
sewer rat. These people were all very poor!

Desi and Lucy Ricardo - nice home, middle class, unglamourous life, even
more unglamourous neighbors. They started in an apartment over Fred and
Ethel, remember? Movie - "The Long, Long Trailer" was hardly glamourous.
My parents lived in one just like it, a "New Moon" brand...(c;

Ozzie and Harriet also lived a pretty middle-class existance. No
pretentious mansion, even though Ozzie was a big band leader and Harriet
a very successful singer....not to mention Ricky's Rock band. The TV
show was about middle-class Americans.

The Dick Van Dyke Show - again, very middle class TV comedy writers,
nothing glamourous about house or lifestyle.

later, there were many others, "Three's Company", a bit far fetched with
a young guy living with two supermodels and no sex for my dirty mind.
"Seinfeld", lived in a small apartment. "Cheers", hell they lived in the
bar!

The drug dealer lifestyle of the 90s and 2000s is where the glamour went
berserk....big cars, big whores, big boobs, big everything. Totally
unreality.

Larry
--

Don W wrote in news:ScJZh.2579
:

We just got back from the UK, where we were paying
0.92 UKP per liter for "petrol". That is the
equivalent of almost $8 per gallon. Whenever we
travel outside the USA, I like to check out real
estate, grocery, transportation, fuel etc prices
to get a feel for the cost of living. On this
trip my wife and I both came back with the
distinct feeling that we in the USA still have
things very good compared to the UK, but most of
us don't know it.


Yeah, but you have to factor in other costs in both places....

In the UK, you don't have to pay $850/month for health insurance. You
pay for it at that gas pump, $8/gallon....and everyplace else as VAT.
Visiting a doctor doesn't require $500 plus $56/pill (including the
doctor's kickback for writing the prescription), like it does in the USA.

The price of fuel is, therefore, tied to the price of medical health.
You'd have to look at the whole cost of living in the US and UK for X
months under the SAME conditions to compare these prices. Looking at the
bigger picture, I don't think it costs more to live in the UK than the
USA, especially if you get sick! A friend of mine spent a week, just one
week, at Roper Hospital in Charleston, SC, after a minor heart attack.
They inserted a stint. SO FAR, and the billing is not complete, just the
HOSPITAL bill is over $US70,000! He hasn't said what the staff of
mostly-unnecessary doctors various bills comes to. People outside the
USA don't get to see the "visit scam", as I call it, where every doctor
associated with the hospital comes to your room to "say hi" every day
putting $250-500 onto your medical bill EVERY visit. I sat in my dying
father's room and every one of them poking his head through that door was
told, "No visit scams. You're not going to be paid just sticking your
head in here." I put a stop to it, that time.

$8/gallon looks awful. But, most of that is the taxes used (skimmed?)
and SOME tiny bit actually goes to provide socialist services Americans
have been brainwashed to abhor. If it were $8/gallon and no services,
like we Americans get from our Illuminati government, I'd say that
sucked.

Larry
--

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

In my travels to the US, I have always been impressed with how cheap
many things were. Larry, you may not be as well off as you once were,
but you still have it better than many other developed nations.



Like I said in my other thread, sort of backwards from this. American
prices look cheaper, on face value, but one must also know that this
price for those pants includes NO SERVICES from any government, something
Europeans, Australians and New Zealanders just take for granted. A week
in a hospital bed can cost you from $US10,000 to $100,000. We pay in two
ways.....Our employers use several hundred dollars a month of money they
could be paying their employees and buy "medical insurance" for the
employees. This is not free..no more free than socialized medicine
elsewhere. It is money hidden from our paychecks, which are smaller as a
result. It's done this way to transfer the tax benefits to the Employer
as it's made to look like an expense to the company.

Many things in America have changed, drastically, in just the past 10
years. Our highways are a good example. They WERE beautiful! The grass
was mowed, the trees were kept trimmed, the roads were kept paved, no
holes lasted over a week. America used the tax money collected to keep
them that way. That is no longer the case. America charges 16c/gallon
Federal plus a state tax that varies by state. In SC that's 14c/gallon.
This money USED to be used for road maintenance and improvements. Now,
in reality, the roads are just going back to the forest. The pavement is
left for 20-30 years between repaving, until there is hardly paving
left...unless, of course, it leads up to some politician's home or other
influential person. The trees hang over the road surface from the ground
to the overhead...dragging on the top and sides of my stepvan truck
nearly everywhere I go. Our roads are now in awful shape. That's just
an example of the lack of REAL services US governments at all levels
DELIVER to the people for that tax load. Every year the tax goes up, the
services go down.

We still have it "better" than, say, Haiti, for instance. But, alas, we
are converging at some point. America is bankrupt.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Every dime of Federal Income Tax we pay, a terrible load on us, goes to
INTEREST to the Illuminati Bankers who created this debt to enrich
themselves.

Here's our current reality.....
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zsZO6G7df...elated&search=
Watch the whole movie. Notice it's NOT a conspiracy theory by a nut. Mr
Russo is a famous producer of movies like "The Rose"...a businessman who
loves his country. He presents FACTS, not fantasy.


Larry
--