When I was around 22 I started using the "save/invest half of every raise you get". Worked out pretty well until I changed careers, but was sure glad I had the savings.

Nice anecdote, but there's plenty scientific evidence pointing to the fact that children who go to day care have significant differences with those who do not, and the differences are negative. While they are slightly more cognitively stimulated because of the day care environment, they tend to be more aggressive and impulsive.

Focus is a horrible problem to solve.

"real" photographers don't use auto-focus, because you're almost guaranteed that it will focus on the wrong thing. When I'm taking point-and-shoot pictures with pocket camera, I have to be careful, and hope that nothing distracts the camera. When I'm doing serious photography with my nicer cameras, it stays in manual mode.

Unfortunately, this camera looks cool, but it would be relegated to use like my nice DSLRs are. I bring them with me when I'm doing a shoot. It's silly to carry it with me everywhere. I did for quite a while, but eventually it became too much trouble, and I realized i was taking snapshots with my phone more than the DSLR. Eventually, it was more like thief bait, because it just sat in the back seat of my car waiting to be used.

I'd love to give this iiium (lllum? lilum? ilium?) a test drive. I'll let my friends know, if they happen to win the lottery, I'd like one to be delivered in my new Bugatti Veyron (I hope my newly rich friends will be generous).

Commuting to NYC (Manhattan) is cheap. They have trains running to NJ, CT, and NY (north of the city); you can get monthly passes and it's pretty cheap, certainly much cheaper than gas + car maintenance + insurance. Of course, the trick is living near a train station, or having someone who can drive you to one. The stations have parking lots/garages, but these have reserved spaces and are quite pricey, so if you don't live close enough to walk/bike (and biking in this area isn't really safe, plus the weather sucks for part of the year), and you don't have someone who can drive you, that's going to change the equation greatly. You can also take a bus to the train station, but that adds a lot of time usually because the two don't coordinate well. You can also take buses directly to Manhattan from many places, but these are slower than trains and much less comfortable.

The thing that really affects what you need for salary, commuting to NYC, is housing costs. While obviously not as astronomical as Manhattan, the areas around it are still very expensive, at least on par with Silicon Valley prices from what I've seen, at least if you're renting. On top of that, property taxes are the highest in the country. Expect to pay over $10k/year on a $400k house (which is a pretty modest house, maybe 1500sf). We have school superintendents in every municipality who all need to get $250k, and every little high school needs a brand-new football field with artificial turf, and cops and firefighters all need to be able to retire at 55 with a full pension, so that money's gotta come from somewhere.

I lived in a mid-70s house; the workmanship was crap. If you want quality workmanship, you need to get something pre-war.

- Moving is good. Staying the same place, career-wise, is generally considered to be bad.

That depends on who you talk to. Here in the Northeast, it seems to be a huge negative on your resume if you haven't stayed in your previous jobs for 5+ years.

Also, the quality of work seems to suck in contracting; you mainly just work at crappy defense contractors or large companies like Qualcomm doing BS busywork. The really interesting jobs all seem to be permanent-only. Again, this may be a regional thing.

AFAICT, the "equal pay for women" thing is basically a BS political issue; they already DO get equal pay. The reason women make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns (or whatever the ratio is, I think that's close to the latest soundbite) is because women take lower-paying jobs than men, on average. This article is about tech people making 6 figures; how many female software developers have you met? A few perhaps, but they're a tiny minority. How many male schoolteachers have you met? While teaching is obviously important to society, K-12 teachers aren't paid 6 figures. Women can't expect equal pay for unequal jobs, and any laws to address this "problem" are going to be ineffectual since, just like any other discrimination, it's really hard to prove in court. Most people don't openly advertise their salaries, except for government employees (who have known pay grades).

As far as I can tell, she objected to github claiming to be a meritocracy because other feminists would bully her and other females at github about it and wouldn't let them be in their clubs. Which seems fairly on par for that specific social context. We all have our cultural norms to conform to.

And the problem with meritocracy isn't that it isn't a meritocracy, the problem is that people who have fewer advantages have less opportunity to prove their merit or to reach their capacity (even besides all forms of subjective qualities that tend to influence anything but the absolutely most objective dispassionate standards). Which means that meritocracy isn't necessarily a tool to promote equality and certainly not a reason to claim that a workforce composition looks the way it does specifically due to the specific inherent merit of its membership. Which, depending on your philosophy, ideals and political priorities may or may not be its purpose anyway.

That $2000 number was as of 2006. It's 2014 now.

No, it's not (unless you can prove they really were conspiring). Low-level managers aren't much different from engineers; they just parrot the orders from middle and upper management, and provide day-to-day guidance. They don't make strategic decisions. They frequently don't even get paid any more; they just hope to advance to middle management (or higher) where they eventually will get paid more. They're not responsible for making criminal decisions; they're just doing their jobs and hoping not to get terminated in this shitty economy.

The managers at or near the top are the ones who make decisions like this, or like the GM ignition-switch fiasco. They're the ones who need to go to prison. They get paid the most, and they make all the decisions, so they need to suffer when their deicisions result in loss of life or are otherwise grossly negligent.

Disney has done a horrible amount of damage to society, I think, with its ridiculous portrayals of relationships and courtship and what peoples' expectations should be.

I had some bad experiences in college too, with dating, since all I had as a guide was Hollywood movies and TV. (I was raised by a single mother who never dated.) I wised up pretty quickly and learned how not to be a creep, but it sure took a long time to actually get from there to having any successful relationships.

Actually, what I did was listen to the words that were spoken, and applied to them an understanding of the world and the specific people involved as anybody past the age of three would do. A little critical thinking goes a long way.

Really. You're going to hand-pump fuel for hundreds of thousands of trucks, trains, and aircraft feeding hundreds of millions of people? That will effectively shut down transportation, at least at the pace it's needed to feed cities full of people who keep nothing beyond their next couple of meals' worth of food in stores, let alone in their own kitchens.

Right. We only refrigerate meats, fruits, vegetables, dairy, bread, medicines, that sort of thing.

So you're saying that trucks and planes that have had ignition and control systems destroyed by an EMP can continue to operate? How does that work, exactly?

Which is what starts happening within short days of food shortages. Witness food/water drop-offs in New Orleans getting violently mobbed, with people throwing shots at helicopters.

And because the entire chain is rigged around JIT, the high level of efficiency is the only way it can work. It would take weeks or months to alter that, and that presumes that everything that goes into production behind the scenes can be ramped UP in the middle of a situation where logistics are compromised.

Only the ones you're cherry picking. Are "survivalist types" that bother to keep a couple weeks of food and water around more, or less clueless than their neighbors who do not?

Which is what - your lame way of wishing away the fact that it didn't happen? That thousands of people were wandering to places like the dome in NO without so much as a gallon of water for their kids? Is my "interesting narrative" interesting because it lines up with photos of lots full of school busses parked under water? What's your point?

We're not talking about a passing snow storm, here. We're talking about weeks of no electricity and lots damaged infrastructure. Your couple of days estimate is ridiculous on the face of it.

Where did the parent advocate having the government monitor code check-ins or ensure software quality? All he advocated was having criminal penalties for insecure software, which actually sounds like a good idea to me, provided people are able to pass the blame to their bosses and thus avoid all liability (if you fear for your job because your boss ordered you to do something insecure, then your boss should go to jail, not you. If your boss was just passing orders from his boss, his boss should go to jail, not him.).