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
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