Just to give you a peek into my frequently absurd musings, ponder this situation:
Assuming full-body holography becomes possible, will it be considered rape if an ugly man uses the technology to impersonate a good-looking man and has a one-night stand with a woman who would never consider having sex with the real him? Certainly there’s a large element of deception here, but does it rise to the level of rape?
In my idle time I occasionally like to over-analyze some of the visitor stats of this blog. One could go crazy trying to find a hidden meaning in the random traffic fluctuations, so instead I focus on the search engine terms that bring people to this site. They can be funny at times. Sure, there are lots of kids searching for Zwinky (which I wrote about awhile back). There are always lots of searches for space that somehow manage to find my post on space debris. And the Russian hiker mystery has been a popular topic since I first wrote about it.
But all of these search results are pedestrian. Yesterday, however, someone came to my blog on the search term “how to marry rich”. Presumably they’re finding my blog entry commenting on a ridiculous article on MSNBC about how to marry the ultra-rich. But reading that short blog post, I realized I never cut loose and expressed how I really feel about the topic. For the purposes of this blog post I’m going to be talking about female gold diggers, because a man getting really rich by marriage is a much rarer occurrence (in more ways than one).
If your goal in life is nothing more than to marry someone who’s rich and have everything taken care of without having to put in any work on your own beyond landing the rich guy, you’re basically admitting that you have no value to society, and the only worthwhile aspects to you are your looks and your “charm”. The vast majority of people who succeed in life do it on their own merits by putting in hard work to make a decent living for themselves. The number of people who are able to circumvent that process and just leech off of someone else’s success is very small (much smaller than it used to be when many women didn’t work). It’s hardly a goal worth aspiring to.
Sure, trophy wives may lead comfortable lives, but very few people respect them. They took the easy way out. They cheated. Sure, they live in large houses and drive expensive cars, but what about their self-esteem? It would drag me down every day just knowing that I never really did anything with my life. “Trophy wife” is an insult instead of a term of endearment for a reason — although society doesn’t prohibit people marrying for money, it sure as hell looks down upon it. Can you really be proud of yourself knowing that the only thing separating you from a hobo out on the street is that you managed to land a rich guy?
The basic fabric of society is structured around rewarding those who put in work. Obviously it wouldn’t work any other way. Don’t want to be a hobo? Get a job and make something of yourself. Want a nice car? Ditto. But marrying for money is circumventing that whole system. Trophy wives are a drain on society. They’re nothing more than a glorified call girl with a clientèle list of one (if they’re faithful) — because let’s be honest, they’re trading sex, their looks, and their wombs to a man in exchange for leeching off his income for the rest of their life without actually contributing to society.
And it goes nearly without saying that someone querying Google on how to marry rich is not the kind of person who is going to be successful at it. Hopefully that person who was searching for tips on the easy way out of marrying rich will meet with complete failure, return to Google in a couple month’s time to repeat the query, and then find themselves here reading this.
In 1396, a dispute between two rival clans in Scotland was settled with armed combat. Thirty men from each side fought in the crown-sanctioned battle. Only twelve survived.
Just be thankful we don’t have the judicial concept of trial by combat anymore.
In 1959, nine Russian hikers died in an extremely unlikely set of circumstances. I shan’t rehash everything here, so do read the linked post. But I happened to be hanging out with my friend Greg last weekend and he imparted to me an interesting theory he had about what caused the deaths of the Russian hikers. It seems plausible to me, much more plausible than anything I came up with (and certainly better than the laughable alien theories).
Russia entered the nuclear era with a bang, not a whimper. They saw nuclear technology as the next revolution in generating electricity. As such, they strove to use it everywhere, even when the safety concerns would seemingly override the value of using nuclear (but that’s Communist Russia for you). In particular, Russia employed a great number of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs). The particular model they used was about one meter by one meter by two meters, small enough to fit in pretty much any building. It generated energy not by conducting full-scale atomic fission like in a nuclear reactor but by harnessing the heat given off by the radioactive decay of Strontium 90. It’s the same technology we use to power our spacecraft which journey far away from the Sun (beyond the usefulness limit of solar panels).
The U.S.S.R. employed up to a thousand RTGs that we know of, many in remote lighthouses and navigation beacons. They are slowly being phased out with solar cells and battery packs today, but that technology wasn’t around in the 50s. All they had were the RTGs. And while the radioisotope source in the RTGs is theoretically well-encapsulated inside of a double layer stainless steel, aluminum, and lead casing, it’s easily possible for anyone with tools to gain access to the inside, inadvertently exposing themselves to a deadly dose of radiation.
With all of the background on RTGs taken care of, we return to the case of the nine dead Russian hikers. It is Greg’s theory that they stumbled across an RTG (which is not at all impossible given how widely they were used). The RTG was broken open, either by the hikers themselves, some outside actor, or a simple manufacturing defect. It was giving off heat and the hikers took it back to their tent to keep warm with, possibly mistaking it for some kind of heater. When they realized the true nature of it, probably after experiencing the onset of radiation sickness, they departed their tent in a hurry, stopping not even to put on their clothing. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re drawing very close to the end of an era. The United States only has one remaining living soldier who served in World War I. He’s 107 years old. I’ll be blunt: he’s going to die soon, and with it, the World War I era will draw to a close. It will eventually be consigned to the history books, much like the Revolutionary War is today.
My dad tells stories of how, when he was young, some of the last living Civil War soldiers would be paraded through town on holidays. Although I’ll never be able to say I saw any World War I veterans in parades, I will at least be able to tell my children that I was around at the same time as them. That’s a powerful connection to the past. It makes it more meaningful than if you just read it in a history book. The Revolutionary War is long dead and we only consider it in the realm of history, but the Civil War was recent enough that many people living today remember having seen or met people who fought in it. World War I will retain that quasi-contemporary status for awhile longer, but its primacy participants will all be dead within a maximum of a few years.
So take the time to form a permanent memory of a time when World War I veterans still walked the Earth. Your chances are running out.
I just stumbled across the fascinating tale of the Dyatlov Pass Accident. The case is full of bizarre findings. Nine hikers set out into the wilderness and were never seen alive again. Theit bodies were found in groups a good distance from their camp, all in little more than underwear, as if they had to flee their tent in a hurry. Their tent was ripped open from the inside, like they didn’t even have time to use the tent’s door. Five of the hikers showed no signs of trauma and likely died from hypothermia — two of which were found around a temporary fire that they made while in their underwear. None of them seemed to dare to return to the tent. The other four hikers died of internal injuries but showed no external wounds, one from a fractured skull, and two from fractured chests, as if they had been crippled by extreme pressure.
Here are some more facts of the case (from the Wikipedia article):
I just spent less than five minutes on the phone with Chase, my credit card company, and was rewarded for it with 4 points being knocked off my interest rate. Not a bad use of my time! I haven’t ever carried a balance, so the interest rate isn’t currently a big deal for me, but no one can predict what will happen in the future. I may soon start traveling a lot for work, and since I have to pay for everything and get it reimbursed later, I may end up carrying a balance for one month at a time.
The process was ridiculously simple. I called up, waded through a single robot menu, waited a few seconds for a human, told her I wanted to lower my rates, got transfered to the rates department, waited a few more seconds, and spoke to a man who was able to lower my rates within a minute. The dirty secret of the credit card industry is that all you have to do is ask for a better deal and you’re likely to get one. They’re willing to lower your rate over time as you prove to them that you’re a good customer, but since it’s money directly out of their pocket, they aren’t going to do it automatically. So all you have to do is ask, because by asking, they know you’re comparing rates and shopping around for a better deal, and they don’t want to lose you as a customer.
So, call your credit card company now, even if you don’t habitually carry a balance. Turn your card over, call the 1-800 number, and in less than ten minutes you should find yourself with a lower interest rate (unless you have problems making payments on time). And then call back again every 4-6 months to ask for a lower rate. That’s the approximate timescale of when they re-examine accounts and look for the rates they’re willing to negotiate downwards. The worst that can happen is they say no. It’s really that simple, and you’re stupid if you don’t do it, because you’re just throwing away money in the event that you ever carry a balance.
Don’t be naive and say “I’ll always pay it off in full every month” as an excuse for not doing it now — the future is unpredictable, and all sorts of events could cause you to find yourself short on funds, such as being laid off or facing large unexpected medical bills. And don’t think you can just wait until the situation ever arises when you need to carry a balance before calling for lower rates. When that time comes, you may already have a large balance, putting you at a disadvantageous negotiating position. And they’re only willing to lower your rates by so much each time you ask, so asking early and often will bring you down to a lower rate than if you just ask once right before you aren’t able to pay a bill in full.
Simply calling up and asking also works for increasing credit limits, decreasing annual fees, and possibly increasing rewards or benefits. It never hurts to ask, and you might be surprised with what they’re willing to offer you to keep you on-board as a customer. Of course, the better you are at negotiating, and the more you threaten to switch to another credit card company unless you get some of what you’re asking for, the better your chances of success will be. But even if you aren’t comfortable with doing that, simply calling up and saying “I want a lower interest rate” should pay some dividends.
It occurs to me that we’re still dealing with an archaic tradition that has persisted despite lots of technology. I’m talking about the school year. Many decades ago, having a three or four month interruption in schooling during the summer made sense. Most Americans lived in rural areas, and many were farmers. The farmers needed all the help they could get during the busy summer harvest season, so of course they needed the assistance of their kids. Even my dad spent a summer or two at his uncle’s farm in Oklahoma, putting up fences, handling cattle, driving a tractor to till the fields, etc. But the times have changed.
More than half of all Americans now live in cities and towns, and the number of people who are actually involved in rudimentary farming are vanishingly small. Technology has also come a long ways, making farms much more mechanized, and requiring the use of less labor. Also, consider the changing American societal attitudes of child labor. Children don’t help out at the farm to the extent that they used to, and they really are no longer needed. So why do they need so many months off in the summer? They don’t.
It would be better for society in general if the school year was radically reshaped. Current school years (in the United States, anyway) have just 180 to 182 school days in them — that’s slightly less than half of the year! Think of all of the extra educational benefit we would get from increasing that number to, say, 70%. Simply eliminate the summer vacation and add more one week vacations, like Spring Break, throughout the year.
Now I’m not saying that summer fun should be eliminated, not at all. I went to a lot of educational summer camps when I was younger and I had a blast. But I also went to a fair number of leisure camps that, although they were fun, didn’t much educate me along the way to my adult life. Summer school should be a bit different than winter school. Kids would go on a lot more field trips. It’d almost be like an educational summer camp, except that it would be paid for and controlled by the state, which would do wonders for kids living in poverty whose parents cannot afford to send them to camp.
Looking back at my life, at the current age of 21, I can say there was a good amount of wasted time. It shouldn’t take so many years to get the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in knowledge. If the antiquated summer break were simply phased out, children would be getting much more instructional time each year, would learn more, would be smarter, and would be able to productively contribute to society at a younger age. One of the big problems we’re currently facing in America is stupidity. Increased schooling would fix that.
Money Magazine has a hysterical but fascinating guide on how to meet and marry a billionaire (because millionaires are just so passé). I love the advice, too. It’s like a gold digger’s condensed Bible. It tells you to expand your horizons by considering potential heirs of the super-rich, including children and ex-spouses. The best way to meet an uber rich person, apparently, is at the workplace, so Money suggests getting an MBA. Or, failing that, get into the high class consumption industry, i.e. be the real estate agent that sells that million dollar house to the uber rich.
And the article just keeps going and going. Go to art exhibitions, it says. The uber rich have lots of bare expanses of wall that need covering with something. It has advice on joining charities, not because you care about the charitable causes, but just because rich people tend to be involved in them and that’d be a good way to meet them. Oy vey. There are even “life trainers” you can pay who will give you advice on how to get married by a multimillionaire. Come on!
Of course, the article fails to mention the two most important factors involved in marrying a billionaire: being born into a patrician family and being incredibly good-looking. I guess they failed to mention these because you don’t have any control over them (mostly). Of course, the best way to get rich isn’t to marry into wealth; it’s to become rich on your own through hard work. Or is that attitude just too old-fashioned?
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