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Comment Re:Why is the paper so important? (Score 1) 447


The three of us walking around as a happy family is a public statement of commitment, no? When we were at Walking with Dinosaurs yesterday morning, no one questioned any papers or marital status. In fact there were thousands of people there, certainly a more truly public statement than hand-picked relatives & friends who feel compelled to show up for a plate of free food and booze.

It would cost time and money for something none of us care about. We'd rather spend our money on winter family holidays or finish off the new kitchen or new pool deck or just put extra into our daughter's education fund (which is appreciable already).

Not arguing, just pointing out that people have different priorities.

Comment Re:Questiona re a bit sexists (Score 2) 447

I'm more interested in the "churchgoing" thing. It flies in the face of studies that show atheists don't have very different odds of getting divorced, whereas conservative Christians have higher divorce rates. Maybe the actual atheists are buried in a larger population of people that are nominally religious but don't go to church. I can see how the latter might be an interesting subgroup of religious people. These are people that think something is important but don't do it anyway. Atheists might be a lot more like the unfiltered population of religious people in that they are neither more nor less likely to do things they regard as important.

You have hit the nail on the head. There is a massive group of self identifying Christians who never attend church and never read the bible for themselves but call themselves Christians because their parents (or some family in the past) were Christians and since they outnumber Christians take their faith seriously, it has produced a lot of statistical noise and now we see clumsy attempts like this to work around the problem.

Comment Re:Why is the paper so important? (Score 1) 447


So what you're saying is that everyone considers you married already, so effectively you are.

In essence, yes. The key is that the government recognizes it for taxation and other family matters. In our province here in .CA in 2014 marriage would be an expense with no payoff. We'd be better off blowing that money on lottery tickets.

Comment Re:Why is the paper so important? (Score 1) 447

We're in Canada and considered common-law: there are no extra legal protections the paper offers. When we were drawing up our wills, our lawyer said as much. Our life insurance has each other as the beneficiary, our wills are the same. If we ever split up, it's off to the lawyers to divide up assets and work on custody.

When we file our yearly taxes we check off the relevant box for 'marital status' (or whatever it asks) for common-law partnerships and do income splitting to minimize the tax hit. Our accountant said there was no difference in having the paper or not for us. My lady is a professional and known as her own name. So. if we ever did get hitched, she would keep her name. No hyphenating, etc. Fine by me.

So what are the benefits? Neither of us see any.

Comment Re:Why is the paper so important? (Score 1) 447


Tricky. It might be that right now, you both behave in a way so that the other person would marry you if you insisted on it. But after getting married, you might both stop behaving that way and then things go downhill.

We are not acting in a 'sales mode' after 10+ years, we clicked early on and are ourselves: no lies, no masks, no illusions.

Reading TFA was interesting as, according to that data, we are perfectly set other than the marriage question. We're both atheist, so for the religious question it doesn't apply though I guess saying "The three of us regularly go to the museum, watch sciency shows, etc." would count as attending a church. ;)

Comment Why is the paper so important? (Score 1) 447

My lady and I have been together over ten years, we have an eight year old daughter and are completely happy.
I wonder how the "Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced" extends to us if we ever got married (not that we've ever thought about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)

Comment Re:Just do it (Score 1) 279

I am not running Google Fibre but even with the 120/20 cable connection I have from Teksavvy, the firewall I built using two PCI Gigabit Ethernet cards and an old Pentium 4 (Debian/iptables/Unbound) is a huge a huge improvement over the AP that was there before. I disabled NAT on the AP and set it up to route from WIFI over the new firewall and even my laptop and cell phone run faster.

Comment Re:United States of Amerika (Score 1) 124

I can only hope. From your fingers to God's eyes.

I'm sure someone will trot out the "but countries that have banned guns..." yes indeed, they have pretty much eliminated gun violence. Of course criminals moved onto knives, bats, and other things. Which is why in a place like the UK if you're under 18 you can't buy a knife easily, and why assault with a weapon is the most commonly laid charge with "blunt force, or lacerations" being the primary indicator in cases of death or AS.

I'm sure someone with an agenda will start modding this into oblivion, and I say "disprove it." The stats are out there, you can see them yourself on wikipedia and can order them under FOIA/Open Access in various countries. You don't like it? Tough, it's reality. You want it changed, fix the problem.

The stats are out there but the stats don't back you up. Checking the UN's Intentional homicide, number and rate per 100,000 population For 2008, we have Canada at 1.8, the UK at 1.3 and the US at 4.6. So yes, not allowing people to walk around armed to the teeth really does seem to help.

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