Financially fit

Most guys grew up with poignant, pleasant memories of fishing trips on placid lakes or hunting expeditions in the bucolic countryside with ol’ Pop. During such trips, they would nurture and build the innate skills that all men require: bloodlust, chest hair growing, bravado and sportsmanship. But best of all, they would create an everlasting bond that they could share with their father.

“Remember back when you took me fishing Dad? Those sure were some really memorable memories!”

Alas, such was not the case for this young lad, oh no.

My dad never had any real hobbies so to speak. Well, he liked to tend to the backyard. So there were, of course, days spent watering the lawn or digging up soil mindlessly whilst my dad actually tilled and cultivated the earth. But these weren’t the activities a budding buck yearned for, nor were they enough to sate my craving for paternal bonding.

That’s where my mom comes in. I’m not entirely sure how the tradition started, but it was one that lasted for a good four to five years. Beginning at the age of eight or nine, my dearest mother began to take me out with her on her coupon trips every Sunday of every week.

Yes, coupon trips. It was aptly dubbed “Mother and son time.”

What, you may ask, is a coupon trip? Simply put, it was a circuit of establishments my mom would visit in which she would solely go to in order to rummage through the Sunday edition of the newspaper. No, she didn’t want to read the Business section or the Sports section.

She wasn’t interested in the news at all, in fact. What she did want was that “50 cents off your sixth 2-liter bottle of Coke after you purchase five for full price” coupon tucked away in the many folds of the papers. Back in the heyday of double coupons, that 50 cent discount would become a dollar!

And I, blessed simpleton that I was, would follow her obediently around as she would pick through newspaper rack after newspaper rack. It paints a slightly sad scene, I know. But in retrospect, I appreciate the things that my mom chose to do and the sacrifices she chose to make to save whatever money our household could manage.

She also found it both therapeutic and enjoyable, so it was never really a chore or an embarrassment to her.

Throughout the early years, the trips didn’t quite faze me either. But as the years wore on, I grew less and less interested in them, and by the time I was on the precipice of becoming an angsty teenager, I would just sit in the car and play Gameboy while she tended to the task alone and unaccompanied. By the age of 13, I stopped going with her entirely.

Only now does the significance of those trips really hit home with me.

For many of us, this is undoubtedly our first time living alone —a glimpse of what the rest of life will be like from here on out. Once you’re weaned off of dorm food you will inevitably have to use your own money (or I guess your parents’ in some cases) to purchase food.

I’m sure most of us know what coupons are and what they do, but honestly, how many of us utilize them on a regular basis? There’s most likely a stigma against coupons in which the frequent use of them comes off as miserly and stingy. After all, no one really wants to go on a date in which the guy pays for a portion of the check with a coupon, do they?

With that aside, there really isn’t much of a reason to not use coupons. I mean, I’m not suggesting you go out every Sunday and dig through piles of newspapers like my mom did, but if you happen upon some, why not use them? They’re especially easy to access in today’s world since a lot of shops will end up accepting coupons displayed on a smartphone screen.

It doesn’t hurt at all to save a couple bucks here and there. And trust me, it’ll really add up. My mom’s coupons used to be able to knock off a solid $50 to $75 during some of our bigger grocery excursions. I kid you not.

My only disclaimer is that you don’t get something you don’t really need just because you’re saving a couple of nickels and dimes with a coupon. You can do without that power Tropical Sunburst Tsunami from Jamba Juice.

ANDREW POH would like to hear some stories of things that people did to bond with their parents, so if you have an interesting one, please share it with apoh@ucdavis.edu.

It’s that time of year again. Desperate upperclassmen are filling their schedules with leftover general education requirements that teach them skills long ago developed in the natural process of taking classes that directly pertain to their interests.

If you are one of those students, you have just sat through a week of Comparative Literature 001 with a graduate student merely two years your senior. This grad student cares just as much as you do about Books of the Ancient World. They are only teaching to pay off their master’s degree. You will run into them after class at The Davis Beer Shoppe — the only real reprieve after two hours of discussing symbolism with 18-year-olds.

Yes, yes. There was a time when this class would have been useful. But for many upperclassmen, that time has long passed with the days when bong-hits were a novelty and frat parties were fun.

The problem of GEs is really a problem of our impersonal education system. Freshmen don’t have access to the advising necessary to understand the consequences of putting off GEs until their final quarters. And advisors don’t have the time or relationships with students to know when they would benefit from an exception to the requirements.

As a totally random example, the Editorial Board has this friend … and this friend put off their writing requirements until senior year. And even though this friend has taken four upper-division English classes, this friend still has to take ENL 003 to fill the lower-division writing requirement. This friend still has one last English class to finish the minor.

Instead, they are in academic purgatory, relearning sentence structure.

This friend may or may not be an editor at the school newspaper.

This friend KNOWS sentence structure!

Personal problems aside, there are other confusing stipulations that make it difficult to stay on track. Many students wonder why some of their science classes, such as the geology class “Dinosaurs” (Geology 12) don’t fill their GE science requirement. While theoretically we were taught at orientation to check for the abbreviated, italicized “Sci/Eng” in the course catalog, it’s not always intuitive which classes count.
(Of course these codes are different from the new system used by first-years and sophomores, further proving the confusion.)

This is not to say that general education requirements should be eliminated. Ideally, these classes benefit students and help expand their understanding of the world. They bridge the gaps that incomprehensive primary education left, and they encourage interest in areas students may not have known they would enjoy.

However, they should not be an inflexible necessity that cock-blocks juniors and seniors from taking classes that will directly benefit their education. There should be encouragement to substitute classes that would logically teach the same skills, allowing students to graduate on time while still taking classes at their grade-level.

The Tree of Liberty

What is anarchism? Anarchism is the view that “… holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, or harmful, or, alternatively, as opposing authority or hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations.” (Wikipedia)

There are many variants of anarchism. Sometimes, anarchism is packaged with capitalism as a view known as anarcho-capitalism. Other times anarchism is associated with some form of socialism (see the column by Brian Moen on Thursdays).

All of these variants, for a variety of reasons, tend to be skeptical of concentrations of power, especially in governments. In this way, anarchists share a similar attitude to many libertarians, who generally support reducing the state to a great extent, or even completely.

I want to distinguish myself from these views — while I think our government is now corrupt insofar as it violates our rights, I think government is good and important insofar as it protects our rights. Moreover, I think the size of government is inconsequential; what matters is whether it is fulfilling its proper purpose (which may require it to be large, or not).

We need government for a variety of reasons, but basically the case for government can be grasped by observing that in a state of anarchy, as Thomas Hobbes once keenly observed, life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” What he correctly identified is that without government to establish the rule of law, humans must rely on themselves to defend against the use of force. In a lawless society, humans cannot flourish. Who would plant a field, build a factory or design an iPhone if their security even in the next day were not guaranteed? It is inconceivable.

More fundamentally, as Ayn Rand wrote in her essay “The Nature of Government,” “Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions — the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and to act according to his rational judgment.”

Humans, unlike the other animals or plants that rely on what is already available in their environment, need to produce goods to survive, by rearranging the material of nature to create artificial objects such as boats, skyscrapers, furniture and computers. In turn, this requires the use of reason — the advanced level of consciousness that allows us to use language, engage in science, think about causes and effects and have an abstract understanding of relationships between classes of objects in our world.

Society is supremely beneficial to us insofar as others are productive and rational and don’t expropriate our values or our lives. We benefit from a division of labor whereby different people produce different things and we can engage in trade.

But the benefits of living in society can only exist if that society is secure; a society where our rights can be violated at any moment, or our ability to use our reason independently and pursue our values and interests can be curtailed with impunity is not a society that can flourish.

Government, the institution that (ideally) primarily punishes those who violate our rights, is therefore a precondition for a flourishing, advanced society.

So much for opposing power in the hands of government. What about hierarchies, or concentrations of power more generally?

Well, it depends on what we mean. Some hierarchies, like the caste system in ancient India or the marginalization of black people caused by racism in the post-reconstruction South, were irrational and, to that extent, should be opposed. Other hierarchies result from the rational behavior of humans interacting in a social context: It is proper that the person that owns a business has more income than a new employee, and that an employee who has worked longer is less likely to be dismissed than one who has worked less, etc.

Sometimes, when people speak of the “accumulation of power” by individuals or institutions, they are guilty of equivocation. If power in this context means “the influence that one has over others,” then there is at least one crucial distinction worth making: economic power vs. political power.

Economic power is the power that capitalists in a free society have: the power of wealth, or capital. This just means that to the extent that they can persuade others (by offering them money or a job, for instance), capitalists can get people to do what they want them to.

Political power is the legal power to use force. Ideally, the government uses this power only against those who violate our rights, by putting them in jail or charging them fines. This is the kind of power, when used improperly, is a threat to our lives and our pursuit of happiness.

Once again, the essential problem is not where power as such is concentrated, or whether we have hierarchies, or how big the government is. The pertinent issue is our ability to pursue values and live the best possible lives we can; to do this, we need a proper, limited government.

TRISTAN DE LIÈGE can be found not being an anarchist at tflenaerts@ucdavis.edu.

Sex Ed

I don’t know about you, but I love to spend my evenings reading my old sex advice columns. While doing so, I had one of those moments where my brain goes, “bad sex columnist, no biscuit!” You see, I realized that in the past I never devoted more than a few sentences to protection and birth control. So, in penance, I will be doing a two-part special on contraception.

Let’s begin by examining one of those debates that’s always trotted out in the “love and sex” forums of online magazines: who is responsible for bringing the contraception to the party?

For me this question, like so many things in life, depends on context. Now, I want to caveat that by saying that unless you’re trying to make a baby, you need contraception. And, unless you and your partner(s) are 100 percent sure that you’re all STI-free, that contraception should include a barrier method (such as a condom).

If you’re in a situation where you meet new sexual partners frequently, I’d make sure that you have your protection of choice with you whenever you seek out sexy times. If everyone follows this approach, it means that when you meet up with a like-minded partner, you’ll both be prepared. And, even if they’re not, you will be.

If you need an added incentive to follow this advice, consider the fact that if you get into a sexy situation and no one has protection, it’s going to limit your options for the evening. So it’s better to be on the safe side. And, should you not believe that to be true, let me add that they’ve recently discovered an antibiotic resistant strain of gonorrhea. Just saying.

If, on the other hand, you’re in a longer-term sexual relationship, it’s a good idea to discuss how you’re going to acquire and pay for protection. For instance, if someone in the relationship is using hormonal birth control (like the pill), the other partner may offer to help cover the cost. Or, maybe you have an arrangement where one person is in charge of making sure there’s always condoms and the other makes sure there’s always lube. The specifics of this are really up to the people involved, but it’s good to have them in place just so you don’t get all hot and heavy only to go, “shit, we’re out of dental dams.”

Before we move on to the various ways you can acquire your contraceptive of choice, I want to address a comment I can hear some of you making. This comment sounds something like, “but, like, talking about protection is just super awkward, plus it, like, totally kills the moment and if I break the aura of suavity and mystery I’ve created, no one will ever sleep with me.”

My immediate response to is to bang my head repeatedly on the nearest flat surface. However, my real and useful response is to reiterate an idea that I’ve said so many times, both here and in other places, that I ought to get it tattooed: An awkward moment now is better than an unhappy one later. As with consent, if talking about something as important as protecting yourself and the person you’re with ruins the moment, then that moment wasn’t worth much in the first place.

Getting back to the topic of contraception acquisition, you have quite a few options on campus alone. Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Love Lab (LL). I mean, it has its own Facebook page. In addition to charging a whopping $0 for 10 condoms, the Love Lab’s variety of offerings means that you have plenty of chances to experiment and find the style of condom that you and your partner like best. Plus, the LL also offers latex-free and insertive (aka female) condoms and dental dams.

Love Lab love letter aside, you can also get condoms from the Student Health and Wellness Center pharmacy (generally 10 for $1.50). And pretty much any drug store (and many grocery stores) will carry some condoms and safe sex supplies. To find one near you, check out HEP’s condom map. If your interest is in hormonal birth control, I suggest starting your quest at the Student Health and Wellness center. That, and that you check out next week’s column.

SAM WALL wants you to send your sex questions to sewall@ucdavis.edu.