These are my monthly bills.

Mortgage $500

Electric $120

Car payment $300

Internet $70

Water & Trash $50

Phone $50

Student loan $300

Car Insurance $120

Medicine $250

Retirement $100

Gas & Groceries $550

Savings $100

Life Insurance $60

That's a total of $2570

If I take out savings, life insurance and retirement savings, that would be $2310. Let's say my car and student loan is paid off. That would be $1710. My take home pay after taxes is $1100 a month. I am fortunate enough to be married to someone who makes more than me and we can pay our bills and save for retirement.

If you make $15 an hour in my town, you might be able to cover that $1710, depending on how much your health insurance costs. I have a friend that makes $15.17 an hour and brings home just under $1800 a month. This was before the Affordable Care Act went into place and everyone had to have some kind of insurance.

Let's say I'm a healthy person who doesn't need medication. Subtracting that $250, you get $1460. My salary would still not be enough to cover the bills. My friend may be able to cover the bills, but that depends on how much she is paying for health insurances as well. At $15 an hour, if there's nothing wrong with you, you would probably be okay, providing nothing ever goes wrong. This is also in my rural area of the country. I'm thinking a large city like Seattle, NY, LA, Miami, etc., $15 will still force you to find a second job.

For $15 an hour, where I live, you're just scraping by. You're not going to get any vacation pay, not that you need it because you couldn't afford to go anywhere anyway. Most people in my town make $10-12 an hour and have a second job.

I don't live an extravagant life. My life is mostly work and home with an occasional night out with friends. If I was on my own, with my salary, I'd never be able to eat out, travel, or do much other than work just to cover my bills.

Not all teaching jobs are unionized. There was no union in North Carolina when I lived there about 10 years ago. If you don't have a union and are threatened with your job on a regular basis, you have to do what administration wants or you get fired at the end of the year.

This is not true. I'm an American. My hometown, which is a city, (East Coast) has no public transportation. When I lived in North Carolina, the city I lived in had no public transportation and still doesn't. The state I live in now has public transportation, but only if you live in the eastern part of the state and only in the two major cities. If I want to travel anywhere, I have to take my car. There are numerous other cities, large and small, in the US that have no public transportation.

My mom had to work nights as a kid, so I had to stay with my grandma. My grandma didn't help with my homework, but she always checked it after I was finished. She would put little pencil marks next to the problems that were wrong. she only helped when I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong.

When it came to math, she was old enough that high school didn't really teach her more than basic Algebra, so she learned along with me. I always thought it was cool that she would sit with me and watch how I did problems and that I could explain Algebra and Geometry to her. I hated math so this made it more fun and I was a lot more willing to try to learn it even though math made me want to punch things.

I have recently seen some Common Core math problems and heard some parents talking about it. I have to admit, I don't understand the reasoning at all behind some of the basic math that they're changing. I'm not sure if a lot of parents will ever be able to help their kids anymore.

I live just a few miles from our movie theater. It has six screens. It's an old one, with sticky floors and seating so bad, if someone sits in front of me, I can't see the screen. Anyway, most of the movies I want to see never come here. They only show blockbusters and kids movies. If I want to see anything else I have to drive 2.5 hours. When I do this, I have to plan an entire Saturday or Sunday and make it worth driving that far. As a result, I've seen far less movies in the past six years because it's a pain in the ass to arrange an entire day just to see a movie.

And what if the girl had five children and her husband died or walked out and now she's scrambling for a way to help pay for her family? You going to deny that woman too? Where do you draw the line? Do you know what will happen if she's charged with child endangerment? Her children will be taken from her home and placed into the system. Now you will be paying five additional people to look after her children plus pay for those children to eat and be able to seek medical care.

The problem with this, is that things will be mandated that people won't eat, thus increasing the fraud. If you mandate that people get orange/apple juice and they prefer water, then they are going to be forced to sell the juice so they can purchase water.

I think maybe a better way would to just eliminate a lot of things that are unhealthy first and then people will make better choices. If you take soda off the list of choices, but keep milk, juice, water, they will make a better decision.

Not quite on the same level, but my local paper recently ran a story of a convenience store robbery. The person who did it stole a lot of junk food and close to $1000. The police admitted they had no leads and were clueless about who did it. They were basically saying that the perpetrator was going to get away with it. Two days later, they arrest a 16-year old male because he was bragging to his classmates at school about how dumb everyone was and how smart he was because no one knew it was him.

In the early 2000s there were a few places that had free binaries. I tried them out. They were slower than dialup and a pain to use, but if you wanted to wait several days to get your binary files, they were there. I didn't like to wait and I had kept my paid usenet account so I just went back to it. The last time I tried one of those free ones was around 2005.

Amazon did exist 15 years ago. It went online in 1995 and I've been buying books from them since around 1997. Ebay was founded in 1995 as well. Google was founded in 1998, so it just makes the 15 year old mark. They may not have been the behemoths that they are today, but they were there and they were well known even in the late 90s.

Unless you're a rape victim.

I try not to juggle while driving. It's not really a safe thing to do.

$5.50 if you tip 20%, $4.13 if you tip 15%. Don't be a cheapskate though. Go for $5.

When I lived in New York it was common knowledge that you had to be doing 10+ MPH over the speed limit before you got stopped. I moved to Western Nebraska for work and am routinely stopped for doing 2-4 MPH over the limit. They all result in warnings. 22 in a 20? Warning. 69 in a 65? Warning. 72 in a 65? Ticket.

I've been told by the locals who have lived here all their lives that there is some government grant that they get if they have enough citations. I don't know if it's true and have no way to verify it, but I can tell you that this happens far more often in town than on the surrounding highways with the exception of the Banner County police. Their tickets are a main source of revenue for their county. For the 20 minutes or so that I have to travel through their county, I don't do more than 67 because they can, and do, give out tickets for anything above 67.

I don't know the technology of how they make it work, but when I toured Dover castle several years ago, they had tour of the secret bunkers used from WWII and they had some smell-o-vision thing where you could smell bread baking and other stuff that I forget now. I assume that the theaters will use something like this technology as well.