Childfree selfishness rage (x-post from f7u12)

dummystupid · 4 days

Ha! Were you at North York General too?

RichardPepin · 5 days

... and that's why some women wear burkas.

LindySquirrel · 17 days

That's actually pretty good. I get my beans from these guys. They're more expensive, but they're local so I don't have to pay for shipping and customs fees.

LindySquirrel · 17 days

For home roasting you can start here. Asterisk has a hell of a learning curve, but FreePBX makes it significantly easier to start.

LindySquirrel · 17 days

Much cheaper

Yes.

tastes similar.

Not even close.

judgemebymyusername · 17 days

We scrimp on things we don't care about so we can afford the things we do care about, such as living in an expensive metropolitan area.

LindySquirrel · 17 days

I roast my own coffee. Green coffee is cheaper than pre-roasted, and fresh-roasted coffee tastes orders of magnitude better than anything you can find in a supermarket.
I run my own PBX using free software (asterisk). I get all the features I could possibly want from a telephone system (voicemail, voice menus, conferencing, call forwarding, "follow me" ringing, blacklisting, filtering, failover, etc., etc.) without paying a cent.

Logical_Psycho · 17 days

I do want to know more about other peoples countries, but in the context of 'poor in America versus poor in Kazakhstan' it starts to become white noise.

Ah, I see. Neither moralizing nor one-upmanship was my intention, sorry if it seemed that way. As an Eastern European-born Canadian addressing an international audience on this forum, believe me when I say I have zero interest in lecturing Americans in particular on anything. I just enjoy exchanging experiences with people around the world.

Logical_Psycho · 17 days

I will be down voted for this comment

I don't usually bother to vote either way, since karma means nothing to me. You can post crappy puns, tired memes, "me too" comments, whatever, I won't downvote you. Hell, you can post spam and links to child porn for all I care, I still won't bother. But I make point to downvote comments / posts that mention their own impending downvoting, just because. I mean, who the hell cares? Why do you even mention it? You have something to say, say it, don't waste everyone's brain cycles with irrelevant whining about meaningless internet points.

I do not fucking care how cheap and shitty growing up in another country was when compared against growing up poor in America.

I'm always interested in the experiences of people who lived a life very different from my own, just because of pure curiosity, but that's just me. You have every right not to care. Go ahead and skip the comment containing information you don't care about and move on to something else. Because that's what you do with stuff you don't care about, ignore it and move on, right? Right?

You had the unfortunate luck to be born in some back water 3rd world shit hole

2nd world shit hole. You should have paid more attention to your history classes.

I feel sorry for you the individual human being for having shitty fucking luck

I appreciate the sentiment, but there's no need, really. My shitty luck has made me who I am, and I like who I am. If I was born to an upper middle class American family I could have just as well grown up to be a whiny unemployed "forever alone" type who's in a mountain of debt, lives with his parents and wastes his life away masturbating in front of the computer. [shudder]

That's why immigrants are still flocking to America

Heh. My personal opinion is that immigrants are flocking to America because they're misinformed. I "flocked" to America because I was misinformed. The minute I had better information, I left for Canada.

Hutty590 · 18 days

I can't imagine carrying a bunch of paper bags onto a busy bus

How do you carry your LCBO purchases then?

Logical_Psycho · 18 days

$150k is high by North American standards

Somehow it doesn't seem all that high from NYC, where I used to live or Toronto, where I live now. We (me & my wife) did live on ~$40k for a while in grad school, and we felt poor compared to the people around us. Who, admittedly, may have just been living on credit, which we refused (and still refuse) to do.

You have quite the rags to riches story

Almost literally. When I showed up at JFK in 2000, I had about $500 to my name, 2 suitcases, and a high school education. I attribute the fact that I somehow managed to complete an undergraduate, then a graduate degree in North America with 0 debt only to my sheer ignorance of the preposterousness of such a goal -- sort of the /r/frugal equivalent of accidentally solving an open research problem because you mistook it for that week's homework. And to my monomaniacal passion for computer science and (later) math, which got me a few merit scholarships and summer research jobs.

What industry are you in?

Software development.

Logical_Psycho · 18 days

I lived in the US for a while, then moved to Toronto 6 years ago. I live a solid middle class life with a household annual income of ~$150k and no children. It's not much by Northern American standards, but the standards of my inner poor Eastern European immigrant (it's true what the Cracked article said, your poor self stays with you forever) I'm unimaginably, stupendously rich. Hell, I'd have been happy with a roof over my head, enough food to never be hungry again, and utilities that don't shut down for a random period of time every day. The fact that I can now afford to spend a couple of weeks anywhere on the globe whenever I want, or blow $3k on coffee making equipment and not give a single fuck still blows my mind.

Logical_Psycho · 18 days

Could you just use the water that the tongue was cooked in?

I believe that's what they mean by "tongue stock".

Logical_Psycho · 19 days

I did one last year.

Logical_Psycho · 19 days

This one is pretty close. Just replace margarine with butter (silly Jews and their dietary restrictions) and add some tomato sauce after combining the tongue and onions. You can try googling "limba cu masline" and let Google translate have a go at the results if you want to see fancier variations.

Oh, and they're not kidding about simmering the fresh tongue for at least 3 hours. That thing is all muscle and comes out tough as a shoe sole if you don't cook it long enough.

Logical_Psycho · 19 days

Wow. So familiar, and yet so alien. I also grew up poor -- In Eastern Europe in the 80s. Here are some of the differences:

to avoid multiple trips to the grocery store and burning shitloads of gas

No such thing. The so-called "grocery store" is almost always empty, and when it isn't, one trip is more than enough to carry the minuscule amount of food allowed by your monthly ration. Gas? You have to be rich to buy a car, they cost a fortune. Patient, too -- once your application has been approved by the Party, your car will show up in 5 to 7 years. Same goes for color TVs. Other appliances are more easily obtainable, but they are of poor quality and break often.

TV dinners, pot pies, chicken nuggets ... meals that can be frozen forever, and preparation isn't more complicated than "Remove from box. Nuke. Eat."

No such thing as a microwave oven. Which is OK, because there's also no such thing as a TV dinner, or any processed food for that matter. All that's available to you, officially or on the black market, is basic staples. Fruit and vegetables are always fresh, you can only find ones that grow locally, and only when they're in season, and they spoil no time flat. If you want canned vegetables, you have to can them yourself.

Meat is rarely found in stores. You either keep your own livestock / poultry, or, if you live in the city, you buy it from someone who does. When you slaughter an animal, you eat everything except the hooves / beaks. Organs, heads, brains, intestines, chicken feet -- everything. Comfort food for me is pan-fried pork brains and beef tongue stew with olives. Both a bit difficult to find in Toronto, but not impossible.

There's a reason many poor people blow through that money instead of saving it for future bills

We also blew through our money, but it took a bit of creativity since there was nothing to buy in stores. So money got blown on absurdly expensive black market coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes.

You don't get many gifts, and the presents you do receive usually aren't as cool as what your friends are getting

The presents I got were exactly as cool as the ones my friends got, because our parents got them from the same source on the black market. Exotic fruit such as oranges and bananas, which I only got to eat once a year, shitty second-hand toys, and, very rarely, a pair of jeans or a box of good chocolates from the occasional care package from "The West" that somehow got through customs intact.

swiping the debit card for gas will put you into overdraft territory

No such thing as overdraft, because there's no such thing as a debit card, or a bank for that matter. Your net worth is the cash you have on hand, and when it's gone, you better have someone to borrow some cash from, or you're SOL.

Good times...

JamesRPerry · 21 days

To add to your list:

Renting means always having a short commute (because you can always move when you change jobs), thus giving you the opportunity to save on fuel or even ditch the car completely.
When you're renting you don't have to pay for homeowners insurance and property taxes and some utilities and renovations and repairs and landscaping and maintenance.and appliances.
30% of homeowners are currently underwater. 0% of renters are underwater.

theeddie23 · 24 days

i am sure there are people which have no ma/paternal instinct, but those are a rarity.

That's all I wanted to convey, really. There are those of us who do have the kind of sex that doesn't have anything to do with reproduction (aka gay sex), and there are those of us who really honestly don't need to parent anything. We may be rare, as you say, but we do exist.

theeddie23 · 24 days

For a different perspective on this issue, I've always thought it was having children I'd need to have reasons for, not remaining childless (which required no effort, since it was already my default state). I couldn't come up with any reasons to have children, so I didn't have any.

theeddie23 · 24 days

What is this "human nature" you speak of? There are several couples in this thread in similar situations as the OP except they have no pets. I personally know a few couples who don't "parent" anything, be it pets or children of relatives. Does "human nature" apply selectively?

theeddie23 · 24 days

Drift away until you're forgotten?

Pretty much. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that.

eigenmouse

TROPHY CASE

eigenmouse

TROPHY CASE

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