Peter Hendra wrote in
:

Larry,
You paint a wonderful picture of growing up in such a completely
different environment that experienced in more temperate New Zealand
which is 1,000 miles or so long but which has temperate weather
inducing surrouinding seas. The original name for N.Z. was the Maori
one - Aotearoa - essentially "the land of the long white cloud" As I
read your writing I became aware that the mental imagery your words
provoked were from the movies that I had seen since childhood. They,
usually from the Disney studios, of course portrayed idyllic
situations with the ideal stereotype American (white of course) family
of the time. America was apparently a heaven on earth where everyone
had large cars, large houses, toboggans, ice skates, drive in movies
and every other desirable feature of modern life. The kitchens of
these houses were very middle class with all the conveniences and the
mothers never worked and were always supoportive and understanding
while the fathers had good jobs but sort of hovered within the
periphery of the family. Looking back, it seemed that American Mothers
were very much in control as were the young girl children of the boys.
I remember at eight years old when I lived in a Boy's home, when we
were in bed at night after seeing such a family at the 'pictures'. We


If you want to see a little piece of that world in the USA, you need look
no further than the Lustron Corporation, who created those middle class
American homes of enameled steel around 1950 for several years. Lustron
homes have a real cult following, today, and are still as nice a house as
they were in 1949.
http://lustron.org/

Returning GIs met very short housing markets unable to sell them a home
on their new GI Bill guarantees. Lustron built whole tracts of houses,
almost overnight with their prefabricated cities.

The people pictured in the Lustron movie and ads are just the people you
are talking about...(c; Mom stayed at HOME and ran the household and
children. Dad worked and his meager salary supported them all, in their
new $7000 Lustron home. His $900 new Chevy sedan got him to work just
fine....

Then, the money mongers decided to ruin my country......
Moms all work, now trying to make ends meet. The US Dollar is WORTHLESS.
It's all gone and won't ever return....

Larry
--

On Tue, 01 May 2007 02:22:21 +0000, Larry wrote:

Fascinating, and i am getting an education to boot.

The sad thing about this type of picturing the "typical American
family" is that many people believed that it was the norm and thus
expected it.

When I taught high school science for a couple of years, a colleague
who taught social studies (in N.Z. - other countries and society) set
an assignment for his 14 year old boys and girls to make a collage
from newspaper and magazine pictures - or any pictures, of their
future in ten or so years time.

The boys of course had cars and motorbikes. Most of the girls had
collages combining expenive, unaffordable homes, candlelight dining as
in the Lustron picture, loving family scenes and such as pictures of
them waving off hubby to work in his equally unaffordable to most
sports car whilst standing at the door in an evening gown complete
with diamond earings and impractical (for cleaning the house and
washing the nappies, that is) hairstyles. All the men were muscular
and handsome and all the women were fashion models - not a pot belly,
sagging boob or unslightly stretchmark in sight.

Is it any wonder that, with the reality of stretching the meagre
budgets of the newly wed, kids screaming in the middle of the night
from illnesses etc, wife finding that she has to work, husband
realising that the GT40 is beyond his reach etc., etc., that reality
sets in, romance and hope die a little and our divorce rate is close
to 50%. I don't know what the figures for the U.S. are but I remember
that a survey taken in Dallas, Texas a few years ago gave the figure
of above 90% to financial reasons being the primary cause of Marital
breakdowns.

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.

Peter

The people pictured in the Lustron movie and ads are just the people you
are talking about...(c; Mom stayed at HOME and ran the household and
children. Dad worked and his meager salary supported them all, in their
new $7000 Lustron home. His $900 new Chevy sedan got him to work just
fine....

Then, the money mongers decided to ruin my country......
Moms all work, now trying to make ends meet. The US Dollar is WORTHLESS.
It's all gone and won't ever return....

Larry

Hi Peter and Larry,

Peter Hendra wrote:
On Tue, 01 May 2007 02:22:21 +0000, Larry wrote:

Fascinating, and i am getting an education to boot.

The sad thing about this type of picturing the "typical American
family" is that many people believed that it was the norm and thus
expected it.

When I taught high school science for a couple of years, a colleague
who taught social studies (in N.Z. - other countries and society) set
an assignment for his 14 year old boys and girls to make a collage
from newspaper and magazine pictures - or any pictures, of their
future in ten or so years time.

The boys of course had cars and motorbikes. Most of the girls had
collages combining expenive, unaffordable homes, candlelight dining as
in the Lustron picture, loving family scenes and such as pictures of
them waving off hubby to work in his equally unaffordable to most
sports car whilst standing at the door in an evening gown complete
with diamond earings and impractical (for cleaning the house and
washing the nappies, that is) hairstyles. All the men were muscular
and handsome and all the women were fashion models - not a pot belly,
sagging boob or unslightly stretchmark in sight.

The major change in civilization that led to these
unrealistic fantasies of life in the youngsters
was the rise of mass visual media--photography,
magazines, movies, and then television. 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. Advertisers also
needed to attract eyeballs to their product so
featured the beautiful people enjoying their products.

The result was a generation of children raised
with unrealistic expectations of life, and, as
they became older, the vague feeling that they
were failing at life because they did not have the
lifestyle portrayed and expected.

Is it any wonder that, with the reality of stretching the meagre
budgets of the newly wed, kids screaming in the middle of the night
from illnesses etc, wife finding that she has to work, husband
realising that the GT40 is beyond his reach etc., etc., that reality
sets in, romance and hope die a little and our divorce rate is close
to 50%. I don't know what the figures for the U.S. are but I remember
that a survey taken in Dallas, Texas a few years ago gave the figure
of above 90% to financial reasons being the primary cause of Marital
breakdowns.

It is said that 50% of the marriages end in
divorce, but I have noticed that there are a lot
of people around that have been married only once
and are devoted to their mates. At the same time,
there are a fewer number that have been married
four or five times. This would suggest that the
statistics are skewed by a small percentage of
people who have many marriage failures.

To illustrate, consider five siblings. Four of
them have long term marriages with committed
mates, but one is married four times with each
marriage ending in divorce. In this case, you
have eight marriages, with four ending in divorce
for your "50% of marriages end in divorce"
statistic, but it doesn't show the real picture.


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 wonder what the statistics for divorce are among
liveaboard cruisers. I've heard that a lot of
marriages end under the strain of one party being
an avid sailor with dreams of seeing the world,
while the other is a reluctant participant.
Oddly, it seems that either sex is equally likely
to get the wanderlust.


Peter

The people pictured in the Lustron movie and ads are just the people you
are talking about...(c; Mom stayed at HOME and ran the household and
children. Dad worked and his meager salary supported them all, in their
new $7000 Lustron home. His $900 new Chevy sedan got him to work just
fine....

Then, the money mongers decided to ruin my country......
Moms all work, now trying to make ends meet. The US Dollar is WORTHLESS.
It's all gone and won't ever return....
Larry

Larry,

The US$ isn't at all worthless. You should do
some foreign travel to get a feel for what people
in other countries are having to put up with.

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.

Don W.

On Tue, 01 May 2007 10:43:13 -0500, Don W
wrote:

Hi Don,
You provide food for thought. I know that many of the full-time
cruisers of post 40 years old that we have met are onto their second
marriages and that we, on our first, are noticably in the minority. I
cannot give you figures but it has struck us like that. Both partners
want to see the world in most cases and like the lifestyle. Some even
met because of the boat.

I wonder what the statistics for divorce are among
liveaboard cruisers. I've heard that a lot of
marriages end under the strain of one party being
an avid sailor with dreams of seeing the world,
while the other is a reluctant participant.
Oddly, it seems that either sex is equally likely
to get the wanderlust.


Larry,

The US$ isn't at all worthless. You should do
some foreign travel to get a feel for what people
in other countries are having to put up with.

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.

Don W.

I would agree. you should buy diesel in Europe where we were paying
over 1 Euro per litre a couple of years back. In traveling through the
Med., I tried to compare not just prices (expensive) but what the
avergae earnings would buy in real terms between countries I was on
familiar terms with such as Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia. In
Spain (we never made it to Northern Europe) I came to the realisation
that the average person was far better off and had a higher standard
of living in both Australia and New Zealand. When I took car and home
ownership per capita and the amount of income directed to that as well
as other non-discretionary spending, I gained the belief that the
average citizen of Malaysia, a developing country, was better off than
those in Spain, southern Italy and Greece. This was by no means a
strict academic exercise. It was fueled by my own curiosity. Anyone
could drive a bus through my methodology.

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.

You want to know where your dollar has gone? - to China as it has done
many times over the centuries - US/China trade deficit 30:1 in China's
favour. Ever wondered why Spain, with its vast empire and the tons of
gold and silver and other wealth that was brought back from the new
world, does not seem to have profited by it?

During the time of their empire their king was none as "The silver
King" in the east as Spain shipped hugh quantities of the stuff east
to pay for consumables such as silks, spices and porcelain. It wasn't
invested in capital works that could create further wealth; most was
spent on consumer goods - and they didn't have an adverising industry

cheers

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
--

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
:

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
--