Sadly we gave them away for free, in the name of (false) security, not long after September 11, 2001.

It doesn't matter if you find an account with a 5% return. At $5K per year you are not going to get to a million dollars between the time you graduate college and want to retire.

$417 per month ($5004 per year) at a rate of 5% compounded yearly will take 49 1/4 years to get to $1,006,351.71. Realistically you're not going to get a job right out of school that allows you to save that kind of cash, especially if you have student loans and need to start a household. Nor is a 5% rate of return all that realistic currently.

At a 3% rate of return it'll take almost 66 years.

Regardless of how they got there, it's a very visible and obvious problem in San Francisco. While there are other cities in the US that have higher homeless populations, SF is often sited as the on with the most visible and obvious population. Which was my entire point to begin with.

Perhaps part of the problem is that San Francisco is overloaded with homeless. So people become desensitized to the plight of the homeless there. Obviously this is pure speculation on my part. But I know that hospitals from other areas, and even other states bus their mentally ill to San Francisco

Yeah, but the batteries never ran out.

It's not. That's what the GP stated.

My retirement is in lottery tickets. ;-)

I suppose as long as you can work for 200 years, this will work out great. Too bad the rate of inflation is outstripping the .06% savings accounts are at right now. In 200 years, I'm not sure a million dollars is going to buy you a tall coffee at Star Bucks.

You should really do both. My daughter had her own desktop computer before the age of 2. Mainly because she was so fascinated by me working on one all day. I loaded a bunch of edutainment programs on it for her. We didn't use it as a baby sitter though. We would do things together on it. Though sometimes she used it herself. But we also played with MegaBlocks when she was at that age too. It was fun to see how high we could stack them, or chase each other around with them on our fingers. As she got older we got Kinects and smaller Lego blocks. Eventually she needed a new computer and eventually a laptop. The only thing she asked for for her 7th birthday was to have her computer connected to the internet.

She had a school project a few weeks ago where she looked up information on the internet for a poster about an element and built a 3D model of the atom using metal rings and styrofoam balls. Her teacher went nuts over both.

Anyhow, as important it is to have fine motor control, computers are ubiquitous these days. Trying to keep kids away from them is not the best approach. However, I agree with you. Parents shouldn't use them as a baby sitter either.

That also keeps mortgage interest rate extremely low. My first mortgage, several decades ago, was 8.5%, which was really good at the time. We moved last year and I think it's under 3.5% now. From 1975 to 1990 the average fixed rate 30 year mortgage barely dipped below 10% and was as high as 18%.

Inflation in the 1970's is part of why the mortgage rates hit almost 20% in the late 70's through the early 80's.

That's always been the case. The difference is that there is no loyalty to anything anymore. Employees have no loyalty to the company they work for and will leave to go somewhere else for ten cents a day more. And employers will replace you for the dumbest of reasons. Replacing pensions with 401K's looked great on paper. But the unintended consequences weren't so great.

I don't know where you live. But that's pretty cheap from what I've seen rent wise.It could certainly be done on a blue collar salary. The bigger problem is, is that most blue collar jobs are disappearing.

No. I just know what's worth making an issue about and what's not. But at least I'm man enough to not post as an AC.

A couple of decades back people actually saved their money. I remember a time when almost no home had more than one TV (some not even that), Cable was considered a luxury (if available), not a necessity. You made a down payment on a car and kept it for years after it was paid off. Now it's more popular to lease a new car every three years or so. Even though most cars will last for well over 100K miles, if not 200K miles. If you wanted a house, you didn't buy new cloths every season with some designers name plastered on your ass and everything else you owned. You can actually survive without the latest iPhone. But most households have one for each person. That shit adds up fast. You also didn't buy things on credit. If you didn't have the cash, you saved for it. People who rent are probably two years salary in debt these days.

So yes, you can afford a home as a blue collar worker. But it has to be important to you. At least more important than much of the frivolous shit that most of us seem to think is a necessity today. I remember, years ago, refusing to get cable because I thought $5/ month was insane. I'm paying more than 20 times that for satellite now. And cable is even more expensive. I've been wanting to cut it off for years because there's very little worth watching, and I almost never turn on the TV. But my wife and daughter seem to think we must have it.

FTFY

You can turn off beta. I still haven't seen it. You can also not visit /. if you are that bothered by it. In mine, and many others, area there is no real choice for connectivity. Sure I can put a satellite dish with limited bandwidth on my roof, or use a slower, more expensive mobile solution. I could get DSL, which is less than 10th the speed of Comcast. or get one of the local WiFi providers and pay about $1K upfront for equipment. So, no. There really is no comparison between the two.

So it's better to have high velocity radioactive waste flying around and fragmenting all over the place? These types of rounds are meant for use on a battlefield against tanks and armored targets where collateral damage is no little to no concern. Not in urban areas with civilians for a backstop. A stray DU round could easily go through your house, continue on through your neighbors house, through their neighbors house and come to rest half way through the engine block of their neighbors car. And that's if all of the houses are brick

A drone that would need this type of shell to bring it down would probably be too heavy to get off the ground. And it's sure as hell not going to be what someone who wants to put their tag on a bridge is going to use. A shotgun type shell with plastic pellets would probably be much more sensible.

Or do you think they need this type of round to target the person controlling the drone? Are they living in a armor and reinforced concrete underground bomb shelter? If not, then this is pretty damn stupid. But just to be sure, I volunteer your neighborhood for testing. Perhaps they can see how a MOAB fairs. You know, just to be sure.

Don't be stupid. Too much of anything can kill you. Skip the vodka and Percocet and just drink a couple of fifths of water in a short period of time. Let me know how well that works out for you. Hyponatremia can be caused by drinking too much water.

You just need to give the teacher a $100 gift card for each coal miner they "re-train".