Even with 3 kids, you do not need 5000 square feet of house.

That actually depends a lot on the people involved. As a single person with no kids, I'm finding ~1,800 square feet to be woefully insufficient for my needs. When I do woodworking projects, I have to either lose my master bathroom or my kitchen, and sometimes both, because I don't have a proper wood shop. My drum kit, weight bench, and grand piano take up almost the entire living room, so I don't have a proper living room. My filing cabinet, sewing table, printer table (for a printer the size of an office refrigerator), and Christmas tree (too big for any of my closets) ensure that I don't have a proper dining room, either—just the breakfast nook in the kitchen. My bedroom has essentially no available floor space, between the bed, dresser, two bedside tables, and a treadmill, with the exception of the main walking path into the room. My guest bedroom is completely filled with the bed, one tall dresser, and a small bedside table. I'd like to add another bookcase, but there's no space left in my house unless I put it on the front porch.

Basically, I've done the math, and to be comfortable, I need a minimum of 400 square feet for a wood shop, 200 square feet of closet space for the tree, at least 200 square feet of dedicated space for exercise equipment, and ideally a music room with another 400 square feet or so, for a total of 1,200 additional square feet, or 3,000 square feet total. If I got married, and if my wife had similarly space-demanding hobbies, and if we had three kids, even after you deduplicate the kitchen, bathrooms, and shared living space, we would still need well over 6,000 square feet. So 5,000 square feet for a family of 5 is not excessive. If anything, I'd find it kind of cramped.

Get a smaller, comfortable place to live and put you money somewhere more useful. If you're married, obviously your spouse needs to agree with this...

Or move to a location where you can afford a decent-sized house. Five thousand square feet is not a mansion. I believe that the current lower bound is 8,000 square feet.

Well, (D) and (R) often represent different corporations. There's only a few, like the investment banks and cable companies who bribe everyone.

I can't claim to know how bankruptcy laws work in France, but in the U.S. secured creditors get paid before priority unsecured creditors, which include employee claims for wages. So employees get paid last, since any corporate debt is sure to be secured. This is a company with only $600k per year in revenue that has already filed for bankruptcy once, so I doubt it is standing on a pile of cash.

If the company had the money to pay these severance payments, they wouldn't have had to declare bankruptcy as soon as the courts ruled against them.

I assume employees are hung out to dry when their employer goes BK in France too. Unless the government pays them on behalf of the bankrupt company, or there are assets left over after creditors have been paid (which is very unlikely if the company went bankrupt).

If the company had these debts because of negotiations they made with the employees then I would blame the company's negotiators for the debts. If the company had these debts because of laws, then I would blame the laws for those debts, or perhaps the people who decided to start their company in France and/or not leave the country if these laws were enacted after it was founded.

Regardless, the company would not be bankrupt if the country's laws didn't force them to pay employees who don't even work there anymore. I don't think the company should be able to get out of paying them because that is the law, but it is still the fault of those laws that the company went bankrupt.

That's a really nice fantasy you have there. The employees will likely get absolutely nothing now, because the actual creditors will have priority over any liquidated assets. If they had the money to pay off the workers, they wouldn't being going bankrupt in the first place.

This is the scenario where everyone loses. That is why Mandriva was hoping the courts would allow them to pay in installments.

The employees were left holding the bag anyway, since the company filed bankruptcy and won't be able to pay them. Literally no one won in this scenario. Probably the only people who won were the executives who can now get another CxO job at a company that can give bigger bonuses.

From what the article says, the CEO wasn't trying to get out of paying anything to the workers. The company was asking to be allowed to pay installments so they could avoid bankruptcy. The government either wasn't legally able to bend on this, or hoped investors would invest more money after they exhausted all other options. The investors decided not to put more money in, and the company filed for bankruptcy. So basically everyone loses, which sometimes happens in a game of chicken.

This is what happens when your labor laws are too heavily weighted towards the worker. It generally hurts overall GDP because companies suffer, but that is counterbalanced by the population's desire to give up a little GDP to have a better quality of life. I would like for my country (the U.S.) to give up a little GDP for better worker rights too (not as good as France though), but it is naive to think we can have these better worker rights without companies failing because companies cannot be as "agile".

I am undoing moderation to post this, because I have seen similar comments everywhere covering the story, all moderated up, and it simply isn't true.

Yes sentencing should be consistent which is why we have sentencing guidelines, and this judge followed them. He was convicted of running a continuing criminal enterprise which has a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. And it gets worse when you add up the offense levels in the guidelines for his crimes: It was demonstrated that people who took drugs purchased on Silk Road have died from that drug use, which give him a base offense level of 38. The continuing criminal enterprise offense adds 4 points, and since he played an Aggravated Role as the ring leader that adds another 4 points, bringing him to 46 points. The sentencing table for someone with no prior convictions and an offense level of 43 or more is a life sentence, period, and that is before talking about the other five charges he was convicted of! As a judge you would have to present a very strong argument as to why someone with that high of an offense level should get less than life.

The reason he got such a harsh sentence is because our drug laws are so harsh, not because the judge was harsh. Prosecutors have huge flexibility in what they charge people with, and in this case they threw the book at him.

Based on this forum thread entry level automotive factory workers made less than $30k per year adjusted for inflation in 1957. Are you really that poorly paid as a software developer? Perhaps you were comparing your entry level salary to non-entry level factory workers, but even then the average salary was a little over $40k per year. Even with their better benefits you should be making at least 50% more than an entry level factory worker of the 50's.

What I would agree with is that a BS degree is the new high school diploma, and by the time my daughter is working an MS degree will likely be the new BS degree (unless MOOCs really are as disruptive as I hope). In 1957 I'm sure it took a high school degree to do what could be done with a grade school degree in 1900, so it isn't like progress is anything new.

Not really. At least where I live, school districts are good because upper middle class people find walled gardens where they can limit affordable housing to ensure the tax base in their school district consists of all wealthy families. The median home value in my school district is almost $600k, but it is surrounded by school districts with a median home value of $180k. That is why our high school is the top public school in the state.

These walled garden communities run their schools almost completely independently of the state or even county governments. They don't have to worry about many regulations because they are high performing anyway, and they don't rely on the state / federal funding because 90% of their funding comes from local taxes.

So saying these quality school districts benefit from government commitment is a bit disingenuous. They are generally successful because they distance themselves from everything but very local government involvement.

My mom was very lucky that her parents lived in an area that became much for affluent a decade after her parents moved in. They obviously couldn't kick people out, but through attrition most houses in her old neighborhood are McMansions now.

I did agree with you that the deck is stacked. That is why both I and my children have had the advantages I mentioned. Although I guess I do disagree with the analogy of a stacked deck since it implies the poor don't have a chance. Thinking of it as the upper class starting the game with a larger stack of chips is a better analogy IMHO.

Smartphones on other networks are A. phones for which the carrier imposes a similar requirement of a data plan or B. phones comparable in functionality to an AT&T smartphone.

To ensure that it works on AT&T's network. (GoPhone is AT&T's prepaid brand.)

Phones for use with GoPhone are sold up front.