And that is all absolutely true. Mind you I give the advice to start your own business knowing full well how difficult it is, as I've made my living for nearly 10 years being self employed (Well basically, I co-founded a LLC, we both mostly do our own thing within it, but we also keep an eye out for one another and step in and help wherever we can).

It's highly important to find someone who you feel you can safely have fairly intense arguments with.

As I said in a post down below, the key may be starting a business with someone you already like working with. Then you can keep each other motivated. Plus find a location (others in this thread have linked it) besides home to call your "office".

And note: Starting businesses is the advice I give to -everyone- asking a question about employment right now. The current IT job market is simply broken in a number of ways.

You say you don't want to be self employed, but from what you say that's simply because of "motivation and discipline". That can usually be helped by having people to work with. You seem to already be working with people who you get along with, so perhaps your solution isn't going self employment alone but starting a business with others.

What are the immigration rules like for self employed workers in Scandinavia? A lot of us wouldn't mind relocating if anything just for the enjoyment of experiencing more of the world. But as someone who's been looking into this option for myself and my family I find the rules regarding people who are bringing their own employment entirely with them to be vague at best in most countries.

I'm willing to bet they're actually counting a whole lot of us in a percentage that high as pirates, who actually just aren't playing their games at all. Once they started down their horrible DRM path I just stopped playing their games in any fashion. After all, they're just games, not a one of them will kill me if I don't play it.

My own family and I ponder this question regularly. I'm self employed and able to work and support my family and household from anywhere in the world, so we frequently discuss just up and moving someplace. Not so much to get away from the US, but just to take advantage of the fact that there's an entire world out there. I'd be curious what peoples opinions of the best places to go if self employed are. On an up point for myself is I technically meet the requirements to gain Czech citizenship through my Father. So that may open up more regions in the world.

Anyone have any good places to go and live for various lengthy periods of time just to absorb cultures?

I've found it's difficult to get information on, as most people who are looking are specifically looking at countries that may also have work for them and most conversions, like this one here on /. seem to tend toward political/economic discussion of the living.

This isn't far off is it, as I remember at least one article over the past few years saying that an easy way to end up on the no-fly list is to criticize the TSA. Sadly I'm too busy at the moment to find it, but it even got listed here on /. at one point.

To cover the TV's in our house, and get the few channels we even cared about having cable for was running over $170 a month. Plus an additional $40 for internet access.

Dropped the cable. Now we spend $40 for Internet and around $20 a month for all the tv that interests us (We pick and choose between what's available on Netflix/Hulu), once in awhile we'll drop the $30 or whatever for a season of something on iTunes.

Even if we buy the seasons off iTunes of every show we watch we're -still- coming in less than cable. Plus we don't have commercials on most content (minus the Hulu content which is free, so who gives a crap if they show ads). More than worth the switch. The thing is, at the end of the day despite the options we'd picked for cable the vast majority of the time the TV was sitting on with no one actually watching. So what was the point? Now we watch exactly what we want, when we want, and aren't wasting energy or money on all the other crap.

... who just isn't in a rush when I'm driving. I just leave on time to get where I'm going.

But ISP's aren't the equivalent of the Brick and Mortar store. That's the Porn sites themselves.
This is more like asking the road construction crews to prevent people under 18 from going to the Porn Shops.

Hulu could stand to learn from this. In general their ads are just what they are, but they always have that "Is this ad relevant to you?" thing up in the corner. There's some ads that I dislike, so much, I actually take the effort to click no on. Surprisingly I then continue to see those ads over and over again. This generally just annoys me to the point where I would never, ever, purchase whatever product that is, or from whatever company is advertising.

Ironically the advertisers could get a much bigger bank for their buck by not wasting money showing a particular ad to people who have already said that the ad doesn't interest them.

No, the proper thing to do then is to -ignore their content-. Let them go out of business. But pirating it is just proving their point that people want their crap, and if people want it they're bound to bend over and take it at some point.

One thing to keep in mind is that those men who in the past you felt were ready to "settle down and form long term commitments", weren't. A lot of the marriages over the past were purely because of social pressure to "Be" married, or to get married so you could finally get some sex. Note, that the result was a very high divorce rate (Once divorce was legalized). If you want a happy relationship that will last a long time, find someone who -is- ready to settle down. If these people (both Men and Women) aren't? Then leave them be, because forcing them to participate isn't actually creating any kind of special long term bond... it's just going to form feelings of resentment.

My wife and I didn't pirate it, but did finally purchase the entire first season when it appeared on iTunes. This gave us good quality, and commercial free. For a hell of a lot less money than cable and HBO runs in our area. But, now here's of course why so many pirate instead.... we had to wait over a year to -PAY- HBO for the show. If we'd been in any rush to see it (Which the Networks seem to be desperate to have people rush to see their content, given how hard they try to get people to have cable to see it the day it airs) we would have had no choice except to pirate it. Now for us, we weren't in a rush we've got plenty of other entertainment so their show is welcome to sit on the back burner until they make it available. Except here's the thing, now that season 2 is on we're again waiting... which is no problem for us, but the obvious thing would be for HBO to make season 2 episodes available immediately after airing on iTunes. If they did, we'd again be paying for it already! Instead I guess we have to wait until the season 2 dvd's are available... which means that we may not purchase at all if by that time we've found something else to watch or do.

The moral of the story: If you want people to pay for it, then SELL it to them. If you drag it out and keep telling people they can't buy, then yeah they're going to either steal it, or just ignore you.

While I agree, some people really freak out about some chemicals just because of the names and they don't know what they are. There's also plenty of examples of companies putting profit above health and putting out products straight up containing unsafe things. So I'd say, worrying a bit about what's in things is healthy as long as you take the time to learn what things are.

On a similar note, this ties in a lot to this idea of getting rid of government regulation and instead letting companies do basically whatever they want. But people always seem to miss, that to have a "Free Market", we also need Full Disclosure. So that the market actually CAN make an informed decision on the quality of products and where they want to give their money.