So I was working for a small start up that was eventually bought by RIM. I left a few months afterwards because I passionately hated my boss (same boss as before the merger so nothing related directly to RIM). As a casual observer, I can see why your friend would want to stay. They had great benefits! Not sure if you are in Canada or US, but I am in the US. They were offering me 20 days of vacation a year. This is almost unheard of here now. Additionally, they were giving bonuses every year. The company itself I did not get much exposure to since I left so shortly afterward, but those things alone were pretty good.

Hi, EE here. Before I took my current job, I was looking for 5 months for a new job before I essentially gave up. My background if you look at my resume would probably look like an RF engineer, but at the same time I had done a lot of high level DSP and programming. I was/have been trying to get out of RF and I thought that my skill set was sufficient enough to make the change to DSP and/or embedded SW. I should mention I was living in Chicago during all of this Motorola was not somewhere I wanted to go and was the primary employer for RF engineers, but there were seemingly plenty of SW positions.

I love this particular anecdote. I applied for one job at a big machinery company that wanted an embedded SW programmer. I had probably 90% of the things they wanted. They(HR) did not want to forward my resume to a hiring manager since one of the requirements was 'experience with hydraulics'. WTF? For an embedded SW position? This was obviously a case where they didn't want to train from within, since hydraulics is probably one of the easiest concepts to understand. Force over area. Done! (sorry to all my ME friends out there if I am understating it a bit).

Another anecdote. A small company was looking to fill a senior HW position (more like a principle engineer type), so there was quite a bit of responsibility for this position. They actually wanted me to take a pay cut from what i was making. It was not like I was making great money to begin with. Probably at or below average anyway for my experience. Since I hated my current job that much, I was actually considering it. I even told the head hunter that don't look at my salary. Tell me what the job is, and then we can discuss. Didn't hear back from them. Probably thought I would be too expensive, but I was willing to deal.

I could go on and on, but where I am going with all this is that there might be demand but they are looking for a very specific type. From these two anecdotes, they don't want to train, and they don't want to pay for quality.

I for one am glad to see that congress can come together on such an important bill.

One of the best lines from a movie in recent history that is so true that I think really applies:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it. -Agent K from Men in Black

and you can't forget number 7, which is size related to football fields.

If only it were just a 50 element array. Using Illinois as an example, each county and sometimes city have their own tax rates. The sales tax on an item if I were to buy it in Cook county would be more than if I were to buy it in Lake or DuPage counties. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but I am sure there are other states which have something crazy like this too.

But this is where the burden comes, is that it would require more research than just what does each state have as its base sales tax.

I am thinking that the gp has the opinion that we are always on the right side of the Laffercurve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

This is the entire basis of these supply side guys. The problem is, I think we can say pretty certainly that we are on the left side of the Laffer curve for quite some time. I would probably argue that when Clinton was in office, and at the beginning of W's watch is when we were nearly optimized on the curve.

MSU fan by chance? That is my alma matter too, and I feel like we have a pretty crappy reputation with the refs this year. ahem *Nebraksa game* ahem.

For some, the journey isn't always about the final destination, rather it is the journey itself that is the reward.

Enough philosophical crap. While I have not published any apps for android or iOS, I have learned how to start programming for android for fun. If I actually had time to finish some of the ideas that I had, I most certainly would publish them. I would not expect to make a lot of money on it. I certainly would not expect to replace my current income with app development, since as you so eloquently put, the pay off is only a few days of salary. Part of the reason for publishing it however would be just to learn the process and the sense of accomplishment.

Anecdotal story time. Our company recently interviewed a guy who did some amazing professional level FPGA development on his own time. He went so far as to pay for a double sided board that he routed himself, had DDR3 ram, various video codecs, and an FPGA which had a BGA for a footprint. This are pretty complicated things to do and not necessarily cheap to fab, let alone as a hobby when you are paying for it yourself. While he might think about marketing this product in the future, he mostly did it because he thought it would be cool. Sure enough when he showed us the final product, it was most certainly cool. I would tell you who this is, since he has a you tube channel, but we are still trying to hire him.

"Cocaine is a hell of a drug!"

I can see where he is coming from here. I high school I did not want to take chemistry either. And my counselor even thought that for me to complete my 2 science class requirement that I would need to take it. Instead, I took physics which still met the requirement. This almost perplexed my counselor since she thought that chemistry was required to get into the physics class and that pretty much everyone else took the path from chemistry to physics.

The point I am trying to make here is that I can agree to some extent since I didn't want to take chemistry either, but in my case I still took another science class to meet the requirement. And for the love of god, is taking two science classes really too much to ask of someone over the span of 4 years? Certainly some schools will be different, but sheesh.

Perhaps the algorithm goes the other way. Start really low and work your way up if buying from Alice, in the OP example. Once the order goes through, the buyer has found the minimum sell price. Similarly for selling. Start high, and work your way down until Bob is willing to buy.

And you can meet some interesting folks...

Why put the ellipses there? All I can think of now is that something out of 'Deliverance' happened to you.

Good point. I just looked up the marginal tax rate of 15% and did not compute the effective tax rate. Thanks for pointing out my error. Stupid progressive tax systems* ;-)

*Before I get flamed to death, and for the sarcastically impaired, I am a firm believer in progressive taxation.

I would not calling living on minimum wage in the US as surviving, at least in major cities. Take for example Chicago, since I am most familiar with it. For simplicity, lets assume you work 4*40 hrs/ month. this equates to 160 / month. Minimum wage in Illinois is $8.25/hr (which is more than the national minimum btw). this is a net of $1320/month. Looks good, but Illinois now take 5% leaving $1254. The feds will take 15%, leaving $1056. I don't know the exact rates for Medicare and SS, but lets assume that it will put you under $1k.

So you pretty much need a place to live. The rent for a studio apartment, assuming you don't get a roommate, is going to run about $600 - $700 /month leaves you with about $300-$400/ month. Transportation is going to be about another $100/month for a monthly CTA pass. Taking you down to $200-$300 month. Oh, you want to eat too? ~$200/month (granted, you probably qualify for food stamps, but you still need to pay some money out of pocket). An viola, you are out of money. I didn't even mention utilities or other living expenses.

tl;dr version:
Living on minimum wage is hardly a living wage. It is hardly enough to cover the bare necessities in the US. Most likely you will need to get a second job to make ends meet.