03.08.10
Posted in Conventions, Ethics and morality, Feminism, Future, Gender, culture, life tagged China, life in China, one-child policy at 7:21 pm by kyrias
A friend emailed me an article from the Economist.
He asked me my thoughts on the article, and one thing really stood out to me: the author says that “most obviously, China should scrap the one-child policy”.
I think that’s just rank stupidity talking.
The authors says in the article that other countries without the one-child policy also suffer from a skewed sex ratio. This, to me, says that the one-child policy may be a significant cause in causing the numbers to be as ludicrous as 200 boys to 1 female, but it’s not fixing anything to scrap that policy.
There’s a couple of problems with the entire situation:
For those couples who can afford multiple children, they’ll simply keep having children until they get their desired boy. If there is enough affluence, then this would just cause a population surge at worst and at best there would be more girls brought into this world to live in a world of passive abuse and neglect with names like “bringing brother” and “summoning brother” or “might as well keep feeding”. Yes, that last was actually a common name.
For those who cannot afford to feed, clothe and school multiple children, then abortion is still the answer. As standards of living rise in China, more and more couples are realizing the immense amounts of money, time, and energy required to raise a child to be successful. With this in thought, it is more than likely that under those circumstances those people who would prefer sons would abort girls anyways to keep the best for their sons.
In rural areas, I can all but see rag-tag armies of girls doing the chores, working in the fields, toiling whilst their brothers go to school. For a family who has to scrimp and save for tuition, the only person in the family who will go to school is, of course, the son.
As a Chinese female, I would rather die than live in the above scenarios. It would be kinder to strangle me at birth or even much more humane to kill me in the womb. To live and be denied education, to be seen as lesser simply because of my gender, and to be seen as a breeder on legs? No thanks.
Of course, others may not share my view. Others will probably think that life as a slave is better than death. That’s alright. We’re all entitled to our own opinions.
Speaking as a Chinese woman living in today’s times seeing the gender inequality and the crimes that rise from it: bride-napping, sharing stolen wives between brothers, gang rape by villages of men who just want to breed their next generation of rapist sons — at this point I’m not even particularly keen on living in China. Sounds like a rather dangerous proposition to me, actually.
It speaks rather eloquently to me that when the demand for women rises, violence against them also rises in proportion to said demand instead of more respect. Instead of having more choices, our lives are put in more danger.
Nothing is going to change, not the sex ratio, not women’s rights, not anything unless some fundamental views are changed. Before that, perhaps scientists can comfort themselves that at least the numbers aren’t looking quite so horrible at the expense of having more people on the face of this earth — but nothing is fixed.
It’s stupid, stupid, stupid to even think so.
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11.27.08
Posted in Future at 11:26 pm by kyrias
I think it’s pretty much settled at this point that Kell is going to move out next year. It’s really a pity, because now we get to start thinking of what we’re going to do once he moves out.
Any takers? Someone sane? Who doesn’t mind living with four other insane people? 
To be honest, I don’t know how things are going to pan out. Part of why Kell is moving out is because his girlfriend is going to graduate come May and they want to live together. Part of it is because my kitchen habits drive people bonkers.
I sprawl. Shamelessly and endlessly. If you care to call me up on it constantly, which understandably no one wants to do — I can try to curb the sprawl — but there’s been limited success. 
I think I’m going to try and limit the sprawl more and see what I can do. Because honestly, if I clean out the food that’s been sitting in my freezer and just try to live off that for a while — I think I can stop just storing Pyrex in the fridge. There might or might not be three huge containers of spaghetti sauce there right now along with one huge container of broth — which might or might not have all gone inedible because of how long I’ve ignored them.
My sins aside, it’s going to be an interesting few months.
Kell’s going to have to make a decision regarding moving out soon, or relatively so, since if he’s no longer living with us, we’re going to have to take his name off the lease. Then if someone else is moving in to take his place, we’re going to need to put that person’s name on the lease.
Zora, is Mr. Procrastinator moving in with us come his graduation?
Then if we’re not putting someone else’s name on the lease, then we’d be going into the murky realm of subletting — which is sketchy business. So there’s fun.
It’s going to be a fun trip…
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08.13.08
Posted in Ethics and morality, Future, Money tagged frugality, regret, waste at 1:12 am by kyrias
I mean it.
I’ve just had the two most mentally taxing days in a while.
We’ve safely arrived in Boston, hurrah for that! But the process, oh the process. It turned out that we had so much stuff, the mean-spirited would say junk, that we didn’t manage to be able to bring nearly as much as we wanted to.
This, when we had Nollie’s Beetle, her brother’s Volvo, and another sedan Kell brought. Granted, none of them, especially the Beetle, can hold very much, but three cars and still we threw out almost half of our stuff. I suspect that we could have brought a bit more stuff if shot gun could also have been packed full, but all three cars had a driver and passenger.
Yes, half.
I swear, if my soul had not been numbed by the intense pressure and stress of the past week, I would have wept.
We threw away food, tossed bedding and quilts, discarded dishware, abandoned books, and in general were horrible wasteful fools.
If I had to do that again, I’d want to commit ritual suicide.
It was mostly that the things we were tossing were in perfect working condition, yet we had no time to spare to take them to Goodwill. I’m usually a packrat, witness the large amount of stuff we had, and so it was doubly wrenching to throw away so many usable things.
Caesura woke me up at 5:30 in the morning, having a complete mental meltdown about how there was still almost half of the boxes in the room remaining after he had packed up all three cars. I took a look at what was left and start tossing things left and right. Just as an example of how bad it was — Caesura tossed out a graphics card. Granted, it was 5 years old at this point, but still.
When I go back to buying things for the apartment, as is inevitable considering that our room has not a stick of furniture in it — I am definitely going to be much more careful about what I buy. Granted, it’s not entirely reasonable to expect two people who lived in and furnished an apartment to move their entire life across country in three cars — but I so wish to never have to repeat that experience again.
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07.19.08
Posted in Children, Future, Money tagged paradigm shift at 1:26 am by kyrias
I’ve been reading a series of posts on how renting might be a better idea than buying for certain people and thinking about it.
Millionaire Mommy argues that she would never have been able to become a millionaire if she had not sold her house and invested the money. In her area, supposedly rent is so much cheaper than the combined costs of mortgage interest payments, property taxes, and maintenance that she’s unlikely to buy another house again.
Another post on MSN Money argues the same point — saying that houses are a terrible vehecle for “investment” because of the associated fees and that your money would do much better in stocks since you’re not really realizing “gain” on the house, per se, since you’re living in it.
There’s a couple of other bloggers on the Internet who support this, such as the author of Investing Lessons and Cindy Allen.
Then there’s a spiffy little calculator tool that one can use to determine if it’s worth it to buy the house or just rent. It’s assumed that if you’re not breaking even within a reasonable time frame, up to 30 years, just rent.
I’ve poked around a bit and it seems that the answer is not even quite as cut and dried as “if you’re paying less than your mortgage+insurance+taxes, then you should rent and invest the savings”.
I want to share rent with people for as long as possible. I’m not even averse to the idea of sharing rent with people after I get married or have kids.
After all, prices are steep in the cities.
I also want to have a vegetable garden, a baby, and possibly a pet or two. That’s just the “normal” stuff. I’ve also been thinking about chickens in the yard and compost bins and possibly worm farms.
With that, it seems slightly safer to actually own the house so that the landlord can’t just toss you out if they don’t like what you’re doing to their yard. Although it seems that vegetable planting is catching on as a result of the food price hike.
Two of the friends I’ll be sharing rent with come August say that they will probably want to move out once they have their own kid. I don’t know how willing people are to share rent with a couple who also has a little tag-along.
After all, it’s not quite the same when your flat-mates are being slightly too loud with the volume control and when the baby is shrieking at the top of its lungs because it’s sick. One you can yell at, the other not quite so much. Heck, I don’t know that I’d want to move into an apartment with a couple with a baby. Not unless we were good friends.
Guess there’s going to be some more playing with numbers to see how they fall.
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07.02.08
Posted in Future, Money tagged mind-boggling at 1:51 am by kyrias
According to some studies, it may be that a second income may actually work against you, not for you.
However, this article by MSN Money uses examples where the husband is a “high-earner”, whatever that means.
Supposedly, the additional income from the wife pushed them into a higher tax bracket, and that coupled with the costs of childcare, commuting, and other costs of having a job made it so that they were actually better off with the wife quitting her job.
That was slightly surprising — I had no idea that taxes could eat away at so much of your income and it’s mind-boggling to think that the government almost “penalizes” being married.
There’s another article that mentions that women may lose out on almost $1 million if they stay at home with the kids. However, it also says that with the costs, some working moms only end up making the equivalent of $3 a hour after all was said and done.
It’d be interesting to run some numbers and figure out where the line is. At which point is it just easier to have the higher wage earner be the sole income and when is it still worth it to have both people working outside the house.
After all, it has been documented that when both people work outside the home, they tend to spend more on such things as eating out, ordering in, or eating more expensive pre-packaged food. Some even hire people to take care of the chores around the house. That’s not even counting work associated expenses and childcare.
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06.16.08
Posted in Future, Job, Money tagged desperation, temptation, worry at 1:41 am by kyrias
I got fired up enough by a friend talking about joining the military that I came back and did a bunch of Googling on enlisting.
To be honest, if you can do it, what’s not to like?
Employment at a time when unemployment rates are at 5.5%, potential to get into a job that you like, potential to get training for a job that you want, lifetime healthcare, and a pension when you retire…
Not to mention the sign-up bonuses, the possibility of them taking care of your student loans, and them taking care of your room and board. It’s getting so that there’s the term “military millionaire“, complete with Wikihows on how to do it.
So where can I sign up?
Seriously, I thought about it.
I don’t think I’d dislike having a highly structured life and there is the potential for maturity that it’d bring. Then there’s potentially being trained in a field that I’ve always wanted to go into — not on my own dime. And, if it means that I can kill Caesura’s student loans, get a job that I really want (linguist, counselor), and save up money to put myself on the track towards being a military millionaire — I would jump at the chance if it was anything but the military.
I read a bit on it.
There’s the possibility of deployment. There’s the possibility of doing things that I really wouldn’t ever want to do (kill someone / be killed/ be maimed/ permanently psychologically scarred beyond redemption). There’s the potential for being placed in a job that I didn’t want.
Then there’s the fact that I might not even qualify — having had childhood asthma and depression and all that.
I don’t know. I really don’t. But if I can’t find a decent job in Boston — I might just decide to go talk to some recruiters.
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