Posted by Canadian Dream on October 21, 2011
Well the seven link meme has been running around the blog-o-sphere for a while and I got tagged by Jacq from Single Mom Rich Mom, somehow she assumed I’m running out of stuff to say after doing this for almost five years and 1200 posts later (yes there will be a contest and prizes in early Nov). Ironically I have a back list of posts I need to write…I still have too much material, but I blame that on my fellow writers here on Canada Dream (yep, I’m looking Robert, Dave and Gwen). Keep up the great work of keeping me inspired!
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Most beautiful post – By far I would have to say
this post was my best where I told the story of how I dealt with my son being born 10 weeks early.
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Most controversial. This is sort of hard to measure, but the one that stands out for me was
the post when I talked about charity and how I don’t ever give money to any group that feeds people.
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Post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved. I have always had a soft spot for
this post, where I talk about how to start with personal finance and it doesn’t involve money.
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Post I’m most proud of. It was a minor thing, but when I started to
blog under my own name for the first time I felt really good about the decision. Not to mention that paid off nicely when I got the offer to write for
Moneyville which requires you to use your real name.
Who else should do this link post….hell I’m not going to research who has been missed so far on this one. So consider this an open invitation for anyone else to post their seven links.
Posted by Canadian Dream on October 20, 2011
With the number of protests starting to multiply, I’ve started to pay a little bit more attention to the Occupy movement. While the mainstream media might be a bit confused by what the Occupy movement wants I find the answer a bit more obvious.
The rallying cry of the groups has been how the top 1% of the world has the majority of the wealth (at least in the US, Canada it is a bit more even). People find this unfair and generally I have to agree. Having several more million doesn’t marginally improve your life after the first few millions. So the concept of billionaires is somewhat obscene.
The problem with the mainstream media and somewhat the protesters themselves is they know that this inequity is wrong, but don’t realize the issue isn’t really a problem. Rather the wealth distribution is in fact a symptom of a much larger problem.
This is where some people start to lose my point, but I’ll try to explain this anyway. The issue is in fact the hierarchy is basically married to our civilization. From the company where you work to where you can choose to live there is a hierarchy which always will result in the concentration of wealth towards the top. This isn’t to say the business you work for or where you live is evil, but rather the by product of our civilization. By frame of reference when I say civilization I’m referring to 99.99% of the world population, the handful of tribes still living their traditional lifestyles in remote places are excused from this generalization. Civilization as it stands is great for businesses and products, but rather sucks at being good for what people need.
So when you have any hierarchy it goes really well for those at the top. They get the best of everything while everyone else just gets what is left over. So occasionally the masses get so pissed off and remove those from the top of the hierarchy by way of revolution and then put others into the top of the hierarchy. Things might improve marginally for the masses at that point, but generally speaking things will end up in a similar point in the future because the hierarchy still exists and you will end up with concentration of wealth at the top. The problem isn’t the people involved, but rather the social structure we keep using.
In the end, the Occupy movement really doesn’t want a different government or new banking rules, they want a different system than a hierarchy which effectively means an end to civilization itself. The two concepts are so married to each other there is no way to replace the one without taking out the other. This is why people find the entire moment without focus, because we refuse to even look at that idea. We are terrified of the end of civilization, which is funny because the doesn’t mean the world will be worse off. In fact, it might even get better.
So what other social organization could we use? Well for humans we are lucky that we have several million years of evolutionary development that have weeded out the poor ones prior to our civilization. The only other model that has survived is a tribe. In a tribe, there may be a chief or leader, but this doesn’t make it a hierarchy since the leader is just another job that needs to be done and doesn’t make that person better than the rest of the tribe. The downside of a tribe organization is you are limited to smaller groups since you need to know your other members to keep them accountable. So even if you used a tribe of tribes model (basically each tribe would have a representative in a larger group the represents all the tribes in a small region) to increase the total number of people in a area your upper limit for organization would be perhaps a couple 100,000 or so. Likely less than that.
Now some people might reject this idea out of hand by pointing out many First Nations in Canada and the US have tribes and they have serious problems like poverty, crime and other social issues. This is rather an unfair comparison since this is rather like comparing a healthy person you work with with someone in a hospital dying of cancer since they both have brown hair. First Nations have had a cultural collapse from what our civilization did to them, so they aren’t functioning the same capacity of what they used to do. Their social fabric that once made them a successful tribe is utter been destroyed (By the way, how do I know they were successful? They were here we our civilization arrived, everything else had been weeded out by evolution).
So that is what the Occupy movement really wants: the end of civilization. They want to address the core of the hierarchy. Yet that kind of change would utterly alter our world. Nothing would be exactly the same again. Yet really, this won’t entirely be a bad thing since after all our civilization doesn’t have that good of a track record: global pollution, poverty, crime….you know. It frankly can’t get much worse and for a species as creative as ours it makes sense to experiment with things when you realize they don’t work so well.
So what do you think the Occupy protesters want?
Comments:
Filed Under: Misc
Posted by Dave on August 2, 2011
This is a guest post by Dave, who is also looking to retire no later than 45, but unlike Tim has no kids and doesn’t want any. Dave is from Ontario and is working towards his CGA certification.
Six weeks ago, I wrote about my sister moving in with my wife and I. I received some feedback that people would like to follow how this turns out. I just recently asked my sister to provide my wife and I printouts of her credit card and bank statements from the time she moved in until the present, along with a spreadsheet reconciling the two, so that I could see where her personal spending money was going, and whether she was able to stick to the budget we had set out.
It turns out that she went over budget by $25, or 50%, included with the spreadsheet was also a note:
I’d rather not talk about this as it feels awkward and I’m not doing anything wrong.
Thanks, enjoy my business!
As I had noted in my previous post, my sister, wife and I had initial discussions regarding what was expected with the arrangement, we explained we were not the bad guys. We wanted to provide her with a fresh start (money-wise) and our intention was not to be “parents” but offer assistance where it was needed. Her note basically shows that she resents our rules and would rather not follow them. My wife and I realized that at some point this would happen, but 6 weeks in seemed a little quick for this kind of backlash to occur.
The $25 doesn’t really concern us, we both understand that sticking to a very strict financial plan is difficult and it would be very easy for her to go over the allotment with a few small purchases that in the past she wouldn’t even have thought of – what makes us mad is the selfish attitude that she has, and the fact that she thinks that reviewing her financial records is something that we want to do.
I read the comments people wrote regarding my original post – especially the ones that dealt with this exact circumstance. Perhaps my wife and I asked for too much of a change from a person who had never had structure or had to explain anything financially to anyone (hence the significant amount of debt). Our bottom line however is that we would like to be of assistance, but at the same time we also really would prefer not to have a roommate, we were doing quite well in our home by ourselves prior to trying to help.
Our “rent” from her is following the financial plan that we set out. If she does not want to pay her “rent” then she is not holding up her end of the agreement. We are not forcing her to stay with us, her alternative choice is to live on her own with nobody overseeing anything.
Due to work schedules and other commitments, my wife and I will not be able to actually sit down and discuss my sister’s finances for a few days, which also gives us some time to cool down as we were a little angered by the whole approach my sister took.
How would you deal with this situation? Would you send her packing as she obviously is not taking our charity all that well, or would you try to reason with her?
