AW's greed delays marriage

[wilmc]

(American)"Women are responding to the increasing disparity in male earnings by delaying marriage while they seek a wealthy husband according to a University research paper looking at the US marriage market." as reported in the June 3rd issue of the Financial Times.
"But this intensely practical approach towards wedded bliss is also a high-risk strategy, since it is leaving more women unmarried."
The study, "...suggests that the greater the inequality of male wages in their city, the longer white US women spend searching for a husband."
"This behavior accounts for about 30% of the decline of the US marriage rate in recent decades," say the authors.
According to the US Census, 19% of 30-year-old white women have never married - about double the proportion two decades before.

My opinion and conclusions:
#1 there is a serious problem in our society where a very small % of our population are getting obscenely rich.

#2 irrational AW's are searching for their own Bill Gates and snubbing everyone else.

I say let them look for their super-rich nerds.  I am going to the FSU were other qualities beside your net asset value are considered for romance.

God Bless the ladies of Russia, Ukraine and all those other places where sincere AM are welcome.

[MarkInTx]

... in response to AW's greed delays marriage, posted by wilmc on Jun 3, 2002


This is a fairly old argument, and I will not bother going into all of it.

I am no huge Ayn Rand fan, but I have no problem with Bill Gates making billions of dollars, either.

Believe me, Microsofts practices are no more unfair than Pepsi, Coke, or Hartz Pet Products.

And don't kid yourself... Bill Gates may have made his second billion because of "unfair" prcatices, but his first Billion was made on a better product.

Yes, Windows 1.0 sucked, but I am talking about MS-DOS. It had its faults... but does anyone remember CP/M? Yikes!

And as for the "Rich getting richer" this is hyperbole. When Reagan lead us to financial recovery, everyone was decrying that he only helped the rich. But the fact is that new millionares were produced at a faster rate during the Regan economy than at any other time.

There are plenty of things wrong with our society. The fact that Bill Gates has an "obscene" amount of money is not one of them.

If you want to see a society where just a few flourish and many suffer, you need to visit the FSU sometime.

Watch the Russian Mafia driving mercedes and then visit a lovely lass who makes $55 a month. THERE is something wrong.

As for the rest of your post about the AW... It simply is a reflection of the over all society. Ours is a society built on competition. That has slowly entered into the area of the family, where now the spouses compete with each other. I agree that this is a bad thing. I had a marriage end because of it.

I am delighted that I have found a woman who wants to join with me and form a family... not a corporation...

[BrianN]

... in response to Problem?, posted by MarkInTx on Jun 4, 2002

That last statement was the best I have ever heard it stated!  Not only are you big, but you're real eloquent for an imported texas dude... lol.

(btw, come on don't knock cp/m!  I miss my old assembly days - calling bdos all the time - heh heh).

[MarkInTx]

... in response to EWWWUUUUEEEE!!!, posted by BrianN on Jun 4, 2002


Sheesh... not only do you know what CP/M is... you remember BDOS!

These kids now adays, with their IDEs and Application Servers have it so easy... LOL... I remember when "C" was considered a high level language!

Yikes, I'm feeling old!

[Michael B]

... in response to Showing your age, posted by MarkInTx on Jun 4, 2002

I remember when "C" was considered a high level language!

You mean it's not? Heck, I still write mainframe assembler every day.

[BubbaGump]

... in response to AW's greed delays marriage, posted by wilmc on Jun 3, 2002

I think you're a little too envious of other people's success.  Wealth has probably never been more equally distributed.  It just depends how you measure it.  In terms of the total wealth in the USA, Bill Gates is nothing compared to John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie or Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Rockefeller controlled approximately 25% of the US GNP and Carnegie 6%.  By that measure, they were much wealthier than Gates.  

I personally never worry that Bill Gates has too much money and that Microsoft is too dominant.  I rather look at the change that PCs have brought to the workplace and how they increased our productivity many times above what it is in less advanced societies.  Personal computers let me do more work and find information through the Internet that I could never get before.  I did a report a couple of weeks ago in just 2 hours that I couldn’t have done in 2 weeks 20 years ago.  Bill Gates became dominant because he was very competent and his competitors were not.  I can’t just say take it all away because he was better at running a business.  

I personally do know several people that have become wealthy and they worked their ass off to get there.  They started their own companies and everything they owned was at risk of being lost.  They did not have connections.  If a person gets a good education, then a decent paying job and saves their money all their life to have a better future, what’s wrong with that?  In life there are a few superstars, some pretty good guys, a whole lot of average and some real boat anchors that drag everybody down.  

At 62 years old I think it’s a little too late to get your ass in gear and improve your situation, so I would just advise you to coast into retirement and stop whining.  Not reading the NY Times editorial page would help since most of them are whiners.  I read the Paul Krugman article you mentioned and he does have some valid points.  A top executive at US Steel in the early 1970s was the highest paid executive and he made less than $500,000.  Now executives doing a lousy job will ask for 10 million dollar bonuses and then lay off thousands of employees to improve efficiency.  That really sucks and I’m watching it happen in my own company.  If I were them I would think more about how many people I'm screwing over so I can top some salary list.  

I don’t mind if a woman postpones marriage a little while to find a better husband but she is up against a deadline to have children.  Some of the girls I dated married guys that were big talk, little action.  They were stupid and suffered the consequences.  They should have waited to see if the guy amounted to anything.  

Oh, and I am an affluent nerd with affluent nerd friends.  As for my friends that got rich, I am happy for them.  

[wilmc]

... in response to Hmmmmm, posted by BubbaGump on Jun 4, 2002

Thank you for your reply.  I hoped to inspire some thoughtful discussion.

First of all let me explain that I firmly believe in the free enterprise system. or capitalism.  Politically I am a libertarian, a student of Adam Smith, author of, "The Wealth of Nations.  I retired from a position as a sales executive.   Thanks to the "fruits of my labor," I am able to enjoy an active retirement, a villa in Spain and frequent world travel.  My presence on this forum comes from my appreciation for the ladies of the FSU and belief in cross cultural relationships.

I believe that the greatest danger to our economic system is the growing disparity between the accumulation of wealth by the top 1% of our population and the stagnation of the middle and the negative wealth of the bottom. I believe that much of the top 1%'s accumulation is by unethical and dishonest practices.  You referred to some youself.  

I certainly do not begrudge the wealth accumulated by hard honest work and the employment of skill and talent. With emphsis on "HONEST."  I agree that your friends deserve the rewards for their efforts and the risks that they took.  How many Fortune 500 CEO's made it that way, Enron's Ken Lay, Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, etc.? Sorry you have such low regard for the NY Times.  Perhaps you would appreciate Businessweek's June 3 interview with Paul Volcker.

Bill Gates does not deserve the credit or the rewards for the PC revolution.  Lets take a look at his "efforts".  He sold a PC OS to IBM that he did not possess. I guess you could call that clever. He then entered into agreement with IBM to develop an OS that would actually function properly to be  called OS/2.   At the same time he put his efforts into Windows.  This product was largely stolen from Apple, another unsuspecting MS partner.  Thats OK because Apple stole it from Xerox.  Mr. Gates than released Windows effectively destroying OS/2 in the marketplace.  I guess you can call this competence, but honest?  I think not.  I will agree that the incompetence of IBM was his unwitting  accomplice.  You think MS has done a good job?  Think about that the next time you get the blue screen of death or read about another Windows, NT or XP security breach.  I submit MS and its monopolizing practices has inhibited the development of superior operating systems.  And those same practices have made Gates rich.  Thank GOD for Linux.  It is probably our only hope for an operating system that will permit our PC technology to perform up to its real capability, without the "cross" of DOS on its back.

[BrianN]

... in response to Re: Hmmmmm, response #1, posted by wilmc on Jun 4, 2002

Unless someone rewrites the entire kernel of linux to turn it into a system that focuses entirely on a gui that all love, and can multi-task at the same time (with the gui being the primary focus of the project).  But who's going to do it for free?

The problem with Linux, is that it's got the cross of Unix on it's back, and then the gui's are free... which leaves us with no competitive entities trying to derive a "better moustrap", which is where the best products come from, competition.

Bill Gates may not have "had product" which was his, but what he did have over and above everyone else, was business savy.  Drive and determination.  This is what determines the difference between success and failure.  I love linux, but I prefer windows because I can always get the job done faster, better and cheaper with a windows machine.  But for a server, I prefer linux or unix.

Bill Gates is rich in his own right, and not because he stole something, but because he decided to work and produce instead of sitting around cutting bait like the rest of the fools did.

jm2c.

[wilmc]

... in response to the latter, will never happen will., posted by BrianN on Jun 4, 2002

FYI
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_2023000/2023127.stm

[BrianN]

... in response to Re: the latter, will never happen will., posted by wilmc on Jun 4, 2002

find me a gui in linux, that works as fast as windows, (without having to be picked and chewed apart and then recompiled), that has all of the easy to install and wide choice of software that microsoft has.  I wouldn't call this a blow to microsoft at all, (and I DO have many beefs with MS, but their online database of help is incomparable to any available regarding linux), as it may even turn some unsuspecting newbies to linux against linux for this very reason - it's a slug by comparison for the single user.

I'll let you have the last word, as this isn't the right place for this discussion anyways - don't get me wrong, I love my linux machine - for the purpose for which it was intended.

cheers.

[John K]

... in response to Still doesn't solve any of the problem....., posted by BrianN on Jun 4, 2002

I am waiting on a final release of Lindows (www.lindows.com) to come out.  Imagine, Windows apps running seamlessly on a Linux box.  If they can pull it off, it would be a coup for them.

On a historical note, when Microsoft was working with IBM to bring out OS/2 (up to version 1.2) their engineers raped IBM's R&D archives for ideas.  A lot of those ideas mysteriously appeared in Windows 3.0 (and more so in Windows NT).  IBM effectively gave Microsoft it's core Windows technologies on a silver platter.

What's interesting is that only about 10% of the original Windows NT code remains in Win 2K/XP.  I wonder who's ideas continued into the new OS, Microsoft's or IBM's.  Nobody will ever know, but it is kind of fun to speculate...

[wilmc]

... in response to Who knows?, posted by John K on Jun 5, 2002

What amazes me is that this thief gates is admired as an American Business giant.  Come to think of it among the present company of American corporate CEO's who daily are proving themselves to be overpaid con men, maybe he does stand out.

[BrianN]

... in response to Hmmmmm, posted by BubbaGump on Jun 4, 2002

and you don't mind if a woman postpones marriage to find a better husband (than you?)?

me thinks he was just making the point that all of us are  reactionary to, and that is to go find a woman that is realistic.  Heh heh, if I would've made the post, the last thing I would be envious of, is some rich dude with his btch snot wife a bmw and three mercedes.

[BubbaGump]

... in response to think he's envious bubba?, posted by BrianN on Jun 4, 2002

Yeah, now that would bother me but it never really happened to me when I was younger.  I think the women are really just trying to get their careers established and think they'll meet somebody in time.  But they blow off a lot of guys thinking they are too good for them.  I'm guilty of that.

And I can think of b1tchy wives that made some rich guy's life more miserable.

[RW]

... in response to AW's greed delays marriage, posted by wilmc on Jun 3, 2002

May be. Depends who did a study.

But also, I hope that is not the only reason you are looking for RW. I am scared to find what the study like this will find out about RWs. After all, most of them ARE getting better financial position after moving to USA. There ARE a lot of marriages with a BIG age range. And to make it even worth for you - even a middle income American might be considered a "Bill Gates" in Ukraine (that would be a separate scholar study based on US media and "Santa Barbara" soap operas).

sorry, but I can not agree with you on your conclusions.

Russian Wife