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Off topic:

Wierdly enough, in other human societies and in many animals, being ‘fat’ (or at least chubby) shows that females are healty and capable of nourishing thier young in utero.

Only in America, where the natural urge to eat has been so distorted and manipulated, would anyone think that an Alpha Male would chose the skinniest girl in the bunch.

Do you actually know what Alpha and Beta male mean?

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Hello fellow Brit!

I’ve posted on here before, I think, on having the same perception when I moved over here – big, clunky, inefficient, well just about everything!

carlislematthew is right – the UK isn’t a paragon of fabulous, intelligent people, but it is much harder to get caught in the ‘debt trap’ over there, simply because its harder to get a line of credit.

Having said that, its been 6 years since I lived there, so I have don’t know if things have changed.

One thing hasn’t changed, or at least amongst my UK friends – people haven’t grown up with the “spend, spend, spend!” mentality. Huge wasteful consumer durables are ignored as being, well, huge and wasteful.
People are more concerned with energy conservation, smaller cars (if a car at all iin a big city like London), houses in line with family needs (few McMansions in Greater London – there simply isn’t the land for them), and living within your means.

A couple of things, I think, help explain this:

A) the cost of gas in the UK, and many other European countries, has been very high for a very long time – gas in the UK has been over $3 a gallon since the mid-1980’s. Consequently, most people need to find the smallest, cheapest transport, have energy-efficient household goods and cheap-to-run houses because otherwise they would simply not be able to survive.

B) historically, Europe is a generation behind the US in its ‘hard times’.

The US had the Great Depression in the 20’s and 30’s, and now most of the people who lived through it have passed, taking with them thier stories and tips on living frugally. There are few alive today to share what its like when things get really tough.

Over in Europe, the ‘hard times’ were the WWII years – so anyone born just before or just after 1939 – 1945 has first-hand knowledge of living frugally. As many parents and grandparents were born at this time, there’s still enough people living today to remember what it was like to live at rock-bottom.

Bear in mind too that in the UK, rationing was still in effect for some things until 1957! Well within the lifetime of many people in the UK.
While Europe was busy picking up the pieces after WWII, the US saw its biggest boom in consumerism and expansion – a direct contrast.

Anyway, my tuppenceworth 😉

[speedingpullet]

Amazing!

How can La Jolla, Encinitas and Carlsbad still be going up?

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LOL!

A statistician’s nightmare.

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lindismith? Cynical? Non! 😉

Watching CNN as much as I do, every day during the ‘gas prices across the US’ section, CA is consistently red – the highest.
We’ve been hovvering around the $3 a gallon mark for weeks. Crude oil closed today a mere 5 cents off the all-time high in July 14th.

i’m wondering myself how this will affect the price of everything, RE included.

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Off topic

Re:Kibbutzim.

I think someone is pulling your leg.

Kibbutzim are mainly agricultural/light industrial communities. Yes, they are more ‘socialist’ than most Americans can stomach, but a lot of other countries around the world don’t have such a negative view of small-scale socialism (as opposed to Totalitarian States) as the US does.
They work well, because they are small and if you really don’t take to the life (many don’t) you aren’t forced to stay.

Amazingly, much of the fruit and vegetables sold in Europe – especially in winter – come straight from kibbutzim, and thier more capitalistic sisters, moshavim.

Most people live on a kibbutz because they like the lifestyle – work hours normally don’t stretch much beyond 8 hours a day, and if you’re a member (rather than a volunteer like I was) you normally find a job that you enjoy and stay at for years.

In return – housing, food clothing, job security, a sense of community.
Its not the life for everyone – many youngsters leave to go and work/live in cities – but a surprising number of them return once they have families and want a quieter life.

If you define your life by how much money you have, or how big your ‘toys’ are, then kibbutz living would be anathema. Still, more ‘other directed’ people like the emphasis on commonality and working for the greater good of all.

As for ‘open’ marriages…I couldn’t tell you, though my gut feeling is that its no more common than it is anywere else.

Common rearing of children? Yes, kids are sent to school (on the kibbutz, taught by teachers who are kibbutz members) and when they get older (teenage) they will go and live in single-sex dormitores.
But, as they all live in the same place, the whole family will sit down together for meals in the Dining Hall, or around the parents table. Most of them get to see more of thier parents than many American kids with two working parents do. Plus, any kind of emergency, one or both parents can be with thier kids within minutes.

Its been a long time since I was on a kibbutz, so I don’t even know if the older kids still live away from the parents anymore.
When I was there, most of the kids really liked having the experience of living away from home (what teenager wouldn’t?), and were comforted by the fact that their parents were never more than 1/2 mile away.
Add into that the rural setting, the sense of knowing each and every person on the kibbutz, a sense of value and personal repsonsibilty towards yourself and others, and you have a pretty good place to grow up.

Having said that, I think anybody sending their kids over to Israel at the moment is insane. My old Kibbutz is 1.5 miles south of the Lebanese border, was busy evacuating everybody they could to all points south, last I heard.

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I worked on a kibbutz for a year in my late teens and found it an incredibly good life lesson. For many its the first time they’ve ever been away from home and living on thier own. Not only do you need to keep your place clean you have work 8 hours a day, or they’ll kick you out!
It teaches lessons about how a community is greater than the sum of its parts, and helps to foster the understanding that, as part of a community, you are responsible for your share of making it work.

Personally, I can’t think of a better thing that youngsters today could learn. She may not like the lifestyle – its pretty basic, especially for American kids used to hot-and-cold running everything – but at least she’s experienced it, which is more than many other kids today will.

Lots of people live in a ‘communal’ way – not just religious orders or the military. Even renting in an apartment complex is a sort of ‘communal’ living style. If you’re totally unconcerned about the other people around you then eventually you’ll get kicked out.

I don’t really understand why being taught to consider others needs and to work for a common good ‘isn’t a good way to start off life’.

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I was watching ‘Real Orange’ a couple of days ago and there was a short piece on housing being constucted from surplus shipping containers from China!

Apparently, there are so many surplus that new laws have been passed to stop shipping companies from stacking them in near residential zones, because they’re piled so high that they can block out sunlight.

Surprisingly shipping containers make pretty good pre-fab units: they’re insulated, already have hardwood flooring, are termite-proof and have decent internal proportions.
There was an architect in the piece, who specialised in modifying them to make low-cost apartments and also houses of multiple containers.

Very interesting.

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…horses for courses, as they say where I’m from 😉

My mother-in-law is deliberately looking for a 2-storey house whe she moves.

She says that, now she is getting along a bit, she wants the excercise of climbing up an down the stairs!

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I like it too, although I don’t often have much to contribute. San Diego’s near enough to me, here in LA, to be of interest. Although I have to admit to going to Patrick, Housing Doom and even craigslist (just for a laugh), too.

Re the website – its fine when I’m on the PC, but when I’m blagging the husband’s laptop it gets a bit frustrating.

Maybe you could put page numbers in the thread menu? Just click on ‘last’ and be taken straight to the most recent poste?

Otherwise its click on the thread, scroll down to the bottom, hit ‘last’ , wait for the page to refresh and scroll down to the last posts. Then backpage, packpage and start again on the next thread. As I said, cool on a PC with a mouse, but time-consuming and fiddly on a laptop with fingers.

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Equalizer said…
If Software companies, intel really wanted hire people coulnt they sponsor a few classe here at UCSD and SDSU to get more EE,CE and CS majors ready? The labor dept reqts to advertise for local people before hiring H1B is a major sham.

Sadly, not as easy as it seems. While the US has several of the top 10 best-rated universities in the World, when it comes to ‘normal’ education, the US is slipping behind.

I read an article recently that showed a worldwide educational league table, ie how many science/engineering/computing degrees per capita. Depsite the few very good (top 10) universities, the US as a whole was below the top 20 mark worldwide (in fact, I believe India actually came out higher).

Also, more students last year graduated with a degree in Sports Fitness
than did in Electrical Enginering!
Science and Math simply aren’t being taken up in the kind of numbers you need to have a totally homegrown workforce

As for H1B’s..I only have anecdotal experience of a small group of specialised companies.
My husband works as a games programmer for a large Japanese company here in Santa Monica. Of the 10 other programmers, 4 are from the UK, one Canadian and 3 Swedes. Only 3 of the 11 are Americans.
And its not as if there’s no opportunity to hire US Citizens – one post was left empty for 18 months while they tried to fill it with homegrown talent. Couldn’t do it.
This is also true for many other games companies here in LA: half or over half of the programmers are H1B’s.

As for the H1B ‘sham’…if @@NY is having problems recruiting sufficently qualified US citizens, what hope do smaller companies have?

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The problem isn’t so much the supply of cheap oil, its the refining process that has reached a deadlock. No one acutally knows how much oil is left, but at the moment the refining industry is working flat-out. No one appears to be investing in new refineries or improved oil technology at the moment.

Which means that, no matter how much of it is left in the ground, until the oil can be processed into gas, aviation fuel etc…we will have a percieved ‘shortage’.

I know almost nothing about the stock market, but it would seem that refined oil products, as opposed to Crude, will go up due to limited supply. Just my 2 cents worth..

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LOL!

You answered my question….’freaky and surreal’ as CA may be, it beats a 3+hour drive, each way, to a city big enough to have the kinds of businesses we work for.
600K can buy me a nice house much nearer to my work, even here in LA.

Thanks anyway, and good luck!

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Well, at least there’s no excalamation marks in the blurb. I hate exclamation marks in blurbs. Anyone who uses exclamation marks loses my attent…….zzz

Sorry, suffering from heatstroke…105f..and that’s just in the living room

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Mr Young, speaking as exactly the kind of person you’re looking for (renter looking to buy, enough cash to pay down a sizeable deposit etc)…..here’s some thoughts:

Yes, its custom.
But, for me and my husband its too big. We’d rattle around in that place like peas in a drum. We’d probalby be more happy in the 3-car garage!

Wierdly enough, I’ve never been one of these people that equates new with better. Over here in earthquake-prone LA, older is often better – at least you know the house stood up to temblors.
No knowing what’s going to happen to a new place when The Big One comes..

And, custom for whom? Custom implies that it was built for a particular person/family. Custom for them, but not ‘custom’ for me.

How much does it cost to heat/cool?
Granite countertops are lovely, but if I’m paying their replacement value every month in power bills then all the granite countertops in the world aren’t going to help.

I’d relocate in a hearbeat if I could find a city that has the kinds of jobs we do. Unfortunately, we’re both in the Games/Film/Postproduction business, and we live here because that’s where the jobs are.
How far would we need to travel to jobs (assuming they exist at all) of the kind we both do now? This is isn’t taking into acount the considerable paycut we’d expect by moving away from the West Coast, making your home even less affordable.

How near are the stores? Do I need a car to go and buy a quart of milk?

Explain to me how your house is better than a comparable house in South San Fernando Valley (Encino, Sherman Oaks, etc..), where prices are already steadying (and in some cases droppping) and we can commute to work in less than 30 minutes? And still see our friends and relatives?

Sorry, don’t mean to be cross, but I feel I’m being taken for a Greater Fool.

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