How is it racist trying to look at trends and make correlations? I myself thought for a moment "Hey, Italy seems to be getting hit harder than other locations? Is it tourism, culture, public health planning, or is there a genetic basis?" I'm not Anti-Italian. I'm Anti-Pandemic. If a certain population gets harder that is more information for us.

Good god this. Years back I was the "IT Manager" for a very small organization. I was alone but shortly added one person. The process of hiring someone for a position a bit higher than help desk was painful. Bad candidate after bad candidate walked through my door.

I finally hired a woman who appeared to be a self taught, motivated individual who did not have a degree. She was fantastic. Personable, hard working, picked up on things quickly. She was a god send. Until I told her to send out an Email to the organization informing them she would be rebooting a server that night. It was like "I am booting server SW twonight becuz of mainence. Shuld be o.k. tomorow. LoL!"

From then on, any communications going out to the company were to come through me, but I would have her write them and send them to me for editing. Finally, I stopped having her attempt writing up a draft and wrote them myself. I tried to help her with her English skills, but she just never got anywhere near acceptable for a professional communication. Note that English was her native and only language.

That said, I'd hire her again. When she asks me career advice, I tell her to really concentrate on her language skills. I think being unable to communicate clearly and effectively through a variety of means gives you a ceiling in IT and most other positions.

An additional phone line was $25 or so. Internet access was $15-$20. All for the Pleasure of having an unreliable 14400 connection. I could use some really bad search engines to find some very limited content. Now I pay $40 per month for something like, 70/20 with 99% up time. What can I do with that connection? Learn just about anything I want to learn, watch just about any TV show or movie I want to, stay in touch (through text or video conference) with people half a world away), play games that we could barely dream of years ago, do my grocery shopping, and do any other of a billion different things people do on the internet.

Went through a period of three years of serious back problems in my early 20's. I was just about dragging one leg behind me 25 days a month. I've got a pretty high pain threshold but the pain was so intense that there were times I considered suicide. On the worst days, getting out of bed as an epic struggle. Traditional doctors told me there didn't really seem to be anything wrong with me and just kept writing me scripts for painkillers. That left me with a raging addiction and the doctors eventually washed their hands of me, forcing me out to the streets to buy drugs or be dope sick. I decided to go to a Chiropractor even though every fiber of my being thought it was bullshit. I reached a threshold where I would have tried anything....no matter how ridiculous the treatment sounded. Three weeks later, my back pain was gone. Forever. I've never gone back for additional treatment. I know, I know, "The plural of anecdote"...blah blah.

Was it just time that my back fixed itself? Possibly. All I know is that I could walk and even play sports again. My life changed forever. The addiction to pain killers? That lasted some time after that. Truly, they didn't even really take the pain away but damn are they an awesome high.

To be fair, the cost of a computer was a lot different years ago as well. Today, if I didn't have a bunch of gear for no reason, I'm plunk down $80 on New Egg for a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM and Windows 10. Another $75 for a 22" widescreen monitor and I've got a rig that I can pay bills, create resumes, read the news, go on Facebook, and stream netflix. If they both die after three years, I've rented a computer for $50 a year. Hardware repair at that price? Hell no, throw it away and buy a new one. I've I'm a lay man and I get a massive virus infestation....I can either pay to get it cleaned at a computer store for $150 or buy a new one.

Computers are suuuuper cheap.

You are right, it was the right thing to do. She immediately went to the bosses with that information. She did ask me if I was okay with that and I told her that I was. I'm thinking that she was going to go anyway. She got a pay bump....not quite to my level but within $1.00 per hour of what I made. I got a slight talking to from the CIO but I told him that she was worth the extra money. She stayed there another 3 years and was a really solid employee the entire time...which actually benefited me because I got to work with someone competent. Without that pay raise she would have been gone within a year.

Fast forward 16 or so years and she is one of my best friends and is now a little bit higher up the salary ladder than I am. She likes to remind me of that. (It's by a small margin, I'm nowhere near starving, and she is very generous with her money, so it isn't in a malicious way). I should have suggested she get in the kitchen whilst remaining barefooted and pregnant. ;)

I used to go to work daily in the finest of homeless chic. I took pride in not giving a shit how I looked.

I developed a pretty hardcore drug problem, and my appearance began to get even WORSE. My work suffered during that time too, as well as my personal life.

When I cleaned up, I decided to try something a big different. I started wearing shirts and ties instead of ripped jeans and hoodies. Honestly, people began to take me a bit more seriously but that had little to do with it. It helped me separate my past from my future and generally made me feel better about myself. You might consider it to be dreck, but these days I'm more comfortable with a nice Italian silk tie and decent analog watch. And yes, I'm better at my job now than I was a few years ago.

As a very naive young adult, I took a position something along the lines of Level 2 Desktop support. There was a young woman in the same position who had started two months before me. On paper, she was slightly more qualified than me. I really enjoyed those early years of my career and one day I said something to the effect of "I can't believe they actually pay us $35k a year to play with computers all day." She instantly turned sour and said "They are paying you $35k per year?" At that moment I learned two lessons. "There might be something to this gender wage gap" and "Never divulge salary to coworkers." I had even underestimated my pay by about $7000 per year. Turns out I was getting about $14,000 more to do the exact same job. That was quite eye opening.

Because i'm a little bit insane myself, I've taken in four homeless people in the last three years. I give them a place to stay and make sure they are fed. In exchange they clean up around the house and help me prepare meals. I also give them each a (barely functioning) laptop of their own so they could look for jobs. One oft hem took quickly to repairing computers and did side jobs (Mostly virus cleanup/backup and wipe type stuff. It took 4 to 7 months for the first three to get on their feet and get a job and get their own place. Not everyone has friends and family that have it within their means to help them out.....the people i took in came from poor families. I took in women and the common thread was that they did have places to stay....at the cost of being taken advantage of sexually. It is amazing how much easier it is to get your shit together when you don't have to worry about finding your next meal. It's amazing how much fewer drugs you need to abuse to get yourself to sleep on a futon in a warm house than on cold rock under a bridge. its' amazing how much trust, friendship, and loyalty (and an occasional bit of advice.....where to get help for depression....how to make a resume) mean just as much as financial help. My latest one took a bit longer....it's been 9 months and she is working part time and got enough some financial aid/grants to get into school. Shes' going to stay here a few more months and pay me a very modest rent. Her goali s to get her own place by the end of the year. They have turned out to be good, well adjusted people i am proud to call my friends. It cost me some money (and some sleepless nights), but damn it feels good to truly help someone out and see the results. i think my days of altruism to this extreme are over for awhile though!

My phone is old and the power connector is pretty touchy now. Some mornings I wake up and find my phone hasn't charged at all. A charging mat would be nice for situations like this. Not really an earth shattering improvement, but slightly helpful.

Technological advancements also lead to people living longer. That will obviously also contribution to over population.

Then again, with a sliding scale for tickets I would suspect that cops would be encouraged to pull over nicer cars more often than beaters. After all, why spend your time writing out $150 speeding tickets when you can write one out for $15000....

A lot depends on the details of the situation. I was lucky enough to be in a class with about 7 extremely intelligent students. I learned with them, bounced ideas off them, and competed with them. I feel this was the most important part of my public education. No teacher (home or school) could have replicated the experience and extra learning I obtained from my peers. Of course, I'm sure there are many more who lose the dice roll and end up with a bunch of neanderthals in their class.

Well, I did find this statistic on Wikipedia. "In a 2010 Gallup survey, 41.6% of Americans said that they attended church or synagogue once a week or almost every week." That seems fairly significant to me.

The good news is that you gave me a plan for tonight. That bad news is that you are saying I might be depressed.