Ruth Kelly’s thrown in the wet wipe
The comments are… um interesting. But they are all from a childed view. I can see Liz Jones point, well, several in fact. Personally I think RK jumped before she was pushed, but it doesn’t change the reasons she gave… spending more time with the children. Anyway. What do you think of tLiz Jones’ article?
Back soon 
Unless you’ve been living under a rock there is no escape from the swirling financial bad news of recent. It’s unrelenting - and of course, bad news always makes the headlines… because it sells newspapers. The implications of the current economic situation are wide-ranging, because we’re linked so tighly financially now, are world wide.
Even more sobering is the thought that there’s an election in a couple of weeks and I for one don’t think either of the candidates have a clue as to what to do. With the American govt bailing out failing banks right left and centre, (and the UK govt with Northern Rock) and looking more like a socialist state by the day, the tax payer is on the hook for a bill that they may never be able to pay back their lifetime. And that’s with increased taxes - because you can bet that taxes are going to have to increase.
Thinking about all this today it occurred to me that as childfree men and women, though we may be affected as citizens, we may be better off than our childed counterparts. Remember those who say we have to keep having kids to keep paying for those pensions? It’s always been a rather vapid argument, but now it matters even less how many worker bees are produced, because all they’ll be doing now is trying to pay back the debts from their parents life time. And they’ll probably have to pass on the baton to their kids… that’s if they can afford to have them. Want to save the earth for the “next generation?” they’re probably not going to have time to enjoy it… unless they are well connected and well moneyed. Because they’ll be working, working, working.
As it is, many people’s (childfree and childed) pensions (401Ks) have probably evaporated with the carnage on the stock market. So they are going to have to keep working. But at least if you don’t have kids that’s one less thing to worry about. Especially as I heard that grown up kids are being advised to “move back home to save on rent.” No way.
But the childfree don’t entirely escape. Because we have no dependants, our tax will go up. We don’t get tax relief because we don’t have kids, but our taxes go to help support those who do.In Canada there is a promise to spend billions on child care and child tax credits.
Maybe it’s time to start agitating to keep more of it for our own retirement.
Anyway, that’s my train of thought. Feel free to add your own.
Update: I’m off to the UK this w/end for a visit home. I am SO looking forward to it. I can cheerfully say that if we had children, with the costs of flights today, we’d never be able to go this year. But we don’t so, we are. I’ll probably be having too much fun to blog but, then again who knows? Blogging is fun so…. And hey, maybe I will be able to get to some of your blogs! Anyhow… do continue to drop in and comment. I will have one post that will go up before I head off - so I’ll look forward to your usual thought provoking input.
Single Mother Jammie Thomas fined $220,000 for music file sharing
I’m wondering exactly why the fact that she’s a single mother who has two children makes a blind bit of difference. Would they have said, if she was childfree that “Childfree woman Blahblah fined $XX for music file sharing?”
Doubt it.
So what does the woman’s marital and reproductive status have to do with anything?
Other than to prove that she wasn’t very bright.
I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of downloading music and file sharing. Well, not much anyway. The people commenting on the piece in The Times Online have done that to death, galvanized into sudden verbal diarrhoea by the topic of big bad music corporations winning a case against the “innocent” consumer. Most of them completely missed the point. It’s not about downloading music for free, neither was she being prosecuted for downloading music for free .
What Jammie Thomas did was to make an unlimited number of copies of thousands of songs and advertise on the web where everyone can see her ad, telling everyone they were available. Not hiding anything. If she was bright, she would have known that this isn’t “fair use”. She didn’t have a license to distribute music in this way, but she went ahead and did it anyway.
But here’s the thing that proves she’s really stupid. When she got caught, instead of admitting it and saying sorry (like so many others who have been caught have done) and settling, she fought it through the courts, and lost. Boohoo!
Maybe she thought that being a single-mother-with-two-kids would get her off.
She was fined $200k for her stupidity and arrogance.
As for the writers, shame on them. Neither the fact that she’s a single mother, has kids or is Native should make any difference to the facts. For shame.
Just tell the facts as they are.
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