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Us Politics For Betting (Not Talking About Politics)


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I was going to let this slide, but I just watched the video in question again and I just can't.   You watched a black man almost moved to tears as he passionately talked about an election and a coun

Most of you know that I am a fiscal conservative. If you didn't, you know now. I didn't vote for Trump and Im pretty sure I wouldn't have voted for Bernie Sanders. Would have looked for a 3rd candidat

My aunt used to foster parent children. I don't know how many she had, but I'd guess a few.   The last one she had she ended up adopting and now she's my cousin and she's awesome. She's early in he

Going back to Steve and Zach’s discussion about ‘supply and demand’ – the answers given were accurate, but the situation is probably even more extreme. I have first-hand experience, as my wife and I considered adoption after my wife encountered an extremely serious medical condition with our first. At the time, we only wanted to adopt locally just because of timeframe/ages (we would still consider an international adoption once our kids are a bit older). Similarly, a close family member and his husband have been trying to adopt for 2+ years.

 

 

Dubey’s (maybe Arp too?) commentary on local adoption was very accurate. Demand exceeds supply by a long-shot. The waiting list to adopt a healthy baby through the government is somewhere between 8-10 years. The majority of local adoptions are for children who are considered troubled, either due to health or behavioural concerns, and are much older than babies. Generally families with healthy babies are able to directly arrange adoptive parents through friends or family. As other people have said, government agencies are poorly equipped to deal with it. It is effectively impossible to adopt a healthy, local baby. However, I think that is only a very minor point in favour of the ‘selfish’ argument. Because of the bureaucracy and laws, a mother who is pregnant but doesn’t have a friend or family member who will adopt the baby can expect their children to spend a significant amount of time in the care of hospitals, orphanages or foster homes, and will never be able to know herself whether her child was put into the care of good parents.

 

 

International adoptions will typically run $50K+ in total costs and even then can be very challenging. As a gay couple, my family members have been either explicitly or implicitly shut out from most international agencies. It actually took two appeals for them to even be approved as adoptive parents by their Provincial government, despite being a married couple, both with long-term government jobs and graduate degrees, mostly because they rent instead of own (they live in Vancouver, where no one can afford to own!) The only recognized international agency that would even give a gay couple the time of day was still fishy, and the closest they came to an adoption fell through when they learned that the mother and child’s medical records were falsified by the agency (the baby wasn’t born yet).

 

That isn’t everyone’s experience, and I’m not making an argument for or against abortion (since it seems like we all at least generally agree), just wanted to share my views on one of the rare things I actually know a little about and am not just spraying my opinionated BS.

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Canada seems vastly different than the US. There's over 450k kids in foster care here and close to 200k ready for adoption (where the courts have severed the birth families rights completely) and that number grows every year. Wait time is 3-18 months.

 

Problem with US adoption it's an advertising game. You need to spend $ putting together a portfolio, then people giving up babies search for the family that impressed them the most usually. You can spend $1500-20k on these portfolios and they say the more you spend the shorter the wait time.

 

That's one of many reason we went international. Our chances were slim because we are older and boring. Looking through some of these portfolios was ridiculous. Here we are in Bali where we summer every year. And here's our boat and our yearly trip to Disney. Look we are so young and cute. Those get picked before many others. With international they call you when a child becomes available then you meet to get all the details of the birth parents, medical history, personality, pictures ect. Then we choose if we want to adopt that child. Of course we chose the first one offered :)

 

And as an aside, there are many crappy large popular adoption agencies that use their own agenda to place children. Bethany is one. They refused to adopt to us because we couldn't prove our "faith".

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Canada seems vastly different than the US. There's over 450k kids in foster care here and close to 200k ready for adoption (where the courts have severed the birth families rights completely) and that number grows every year. Wait time is 3-18 months.

 

Problem with US adoption it's an advertising game. You need to spend $ putting together a portfolio, then people giving up babies search for the family that impressed them the most usually. You can spend $1500-20k on these portfolios and they say the more you spend the shorter the wait time.

 

That's one of many reason we went international. Our chances were slim because we are older and boring. Looking through some of these portfolios was ridiculous. Here we are in Bali where we summer every year. And here's our boat and our yearly trip to Disney. Look we are so young and cute. Those get picked before many others. With international they call you when a child becomes available then you meet to get all the details of the birth parents, medical history, personality, pictures ect. Then we choose if we want to adopt that child. Of course we chose the first one offered :)

 

And as an aside, there are many crappy large popular adoption agencies that use their own agenda to place children. Bethany is one. They refused to adopt to us because we couldn't prove our "faith".

 

Is most of the cost going to pay lawyers? Or is there a "broker" for a lack of a better term?

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This is illuminating. I've been waffling on who to bet on in the US election, and this past couple of days on the thread has provided some healthy discussion on wagering on elections.... :)

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Ya, Im realizing Biatch was a genius to put money down on Rubio too. :)

 

Seriously though, my favourite thing about "us" is that we have tackled a litany of issues, some more volatile than others, and yet at the end of the day, we always go back to a respectful understanding of each other. That leads to someone like me being way more open to discuss my feelings and opinions on here than I would be just about anywhere else, even with certain groups of "real life" friends.

I like that we venture beyond "Leafs suck/Leafs rule!" :)

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That is crazy Steve, and there are some different rules for sure. In a number of ways, the birthparent has more "say" in the matter in the U.S. than Canada - both by having more ability to decide who gets the child and more ability to be paid for it. Though I didn't get this deep into it, my understanding is that unless it is with a family member, it is almost impossible for the mother to have any say in who gets the child, and I believe they don't even get to know who the adoptive parents are. Even in case of a family member, the adoptive parents are subject to a pretty significant government vetting process. Very interesting differences.

 

In terms of foster care, the "supply" exceeds demand, as very few people are willing and/or able to adopt "older" (age 3+) kids, troubled or not.

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Is most of the cost going to pay lawyers? Or is there a "broker" for a lack of a better term?

 

For my adoption it was like $4k for the home study. Couple grand for getting all the govt documents and getting our biometrics fine at homeland security. Some went to Korea govt for their paperwork and then a large chunk, like $20k went to the orphanage in Korea.

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Yeah, similar numbers for Canada, though the cost of the home study was lower, and there were some additional checks and visas, medical and blah blah that the organization charged and took a cut from. The organizations are effectively brokers in this case, and in the situation involving the American mother who was still pregnant, I think they even called themselves a broker, and their stand-alone fee was $25K or more I believe.

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If you can't control who gets your baby in Canada, how does surrogacy work? Or is it just not something we do the same way in Canada.

 

Also, the level of screening to adopt is insane considering there's basically no screening to raise your own child. Maybe there should be. Lol

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If you can't control who gets your baby in Canada, how does surrogacy work? Or is it just not something we do the same way in Canada.

 

Also, the level of screening to adopt is insane considering there's basically no screening to raise your own child. Maybe there should be. Lol

 

There's so many different ways to adopt. Private adoptions and foster a kid then adopt etc.

 

I agree. It pissed me off when I was going through all the crap with the home study which is so invasive and long and stressful. Then spending hours at homeland security getting fingerprinted and questioned. Then I go to work and the ahole in E12 comes into say his wife's pregnant with their 2nd kid and he's 4 months behind rent and refuses to go get a job.

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I'm not an expert on 'direct' adoptions in Canada, but surrogacy is much less common because the restrictions on what you can pay the mother (usually just bare minimum expenses) are even tighter in Canada than the US (but I understand are also tight there). My understanding is that a mother can choose, but it is limited to family members and 'exceptional circumstances' (usually close friends). Basically, if you know someone willing to surrogate for you, you can probably make it happen, but of course not many are willing to do that!

 

Like Steve said, the restrictions on adoption in general are completely absurd compared to how easy it is to have a kid! That may be analgous to refugees, but that's a discussion for another day : )

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We had friends who adopted domestically. They waited at least 2 years almost till a birth mother chose them. Then one day they get the call to drive to KC because the baby's about to be born.

 

When they get there they are told that the birth mother decided to keep the baby. Can't remember why. Took almost another year till they got their baby.

 

Another couple went through the same ordeal. The birth mother was told after that she would be unable to have another child due to some condition they found during birth. So she kept it. Took another year to get a another baby.

 

Another friend went the cheaper but riskier way of adopting by fostering a child then later adopting. Looooooong horrible 2 yr story later she lost the kid 2 times to family members that kept winning court battles. Last heard the kid was back with her druggie in and out of jail parents. The "friend" has never really recovered sadly.

 

The reason people wait so long is they want a fresh day old baby. There are plenty 12-36 month old kids to adopt. Plenty. Personally Ana's it's probably crappy of me to say but I know people bitching about their wait but they could easily get a kid and I find it selfish to only accept a newborn. I'm sure that makes me a dick but yeah. That's part of the overcrowding of orphanages and why there's almost 200k kids waiting to be adopted.

 

We've though about getting Jin a sister or brother. We periodically look.

 

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My aunt used to foster parent children. I don't know how many she had, but I'd guess a few.

 

The last one she had she ended up adopting and now she's my cousin and she's awesome. She's early in her post secondary schooling, I think.

 

She must have been like 8 when she was finally adopted. Not sure how old when my aunt first took custody of her, somewhere between 1 and 5 probably.

 

All I remember from back then was she hit me in the face with a hockey stick and scratched my new Oakleys. I was in high school.

 

Anyways, she has all the warning signs that traditional adopters stay away from. She was born to a mother who didn't even know she was pregnant, who drank the whole time (FAS), etc.

 

Anyways, she's awesome, probably in large part because my aunt is awesome.

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Does Jin know he's adopted? It's probably too early for him to have any idea what that means.

 

My neighbor was adopted and I remember when he found out he came running to me. "Zach, I wasn't born, I was adopted!" Lol

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We've though about getting Jin a sister or brother. We periodically look.

 

If I may.....All else being equal, DO IT! Dont blink, do it.

I regret sometimes not having a sibling for my son, and when I say regret, truthfully I mean that its a real heartbreaker at times for me.

 

no guarantees, but for many reasons, wish I had considered a 2nd child thru adoption more seriously.

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Does Jin know he's adopted? It's probably too early for him to have any idea what that means.

 

My neighbor was adopted and I remember when he found out he came running to me. "Zach, I wasn't born, I was adopted!" Lol

 

good question. I don't know lol. We've discussed it. He knows we went to Korea to get him. He knows he has a foster mom. We have pictures he looks at from time to time from the time he lived with his last foster family. I don't know if he's fully grasped the whole thing or if he even knows the word adopted.

 

It's funny and from what I read, very common, that he often tells us made up stories from the time before he came home to us.

 

He asked yesterday what I did while he was in school and I told him I cleaned and ate lunch and the played a bit of Call of Duty before leaving to pick him up. He replied

 

"Yeah I cant wait to get as big as you so I can play call of duty (he knows it's off limits). My foster mother let me play it when I was a baby but decided it was to violent for me. "

 

I also don't think he's realized he looks "different"

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If I may.....All else being equal, DO IT! Dont blink, do it.

I regret sometimes not having a sibling for my son, and when I say regret, truthfully I mean that its a real heartbreaker at times for me.

 

no guarantees, but for many reasons, wish I had considered a 2nd child thru adoption more seriously.

 

Yeah. We can't go back to Korea because we passed their age restriction lol

 

We've been searching locally for older kids. But $ is an issue. We may take it more seriously in September when I can go back to work full time.

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This whole Trump thing calling Cruz a cheater is a bit out there..

 

Maybe what he did was a little unethical, but its politics..Its fair game.

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