Lots of good points but there's a doozy that didn't really exist even 10 years ago.

24 hour development.

I travel a lot for work and I get to observe monster codebases (10 MLoC+) in very large companies. The typical setup kind of looks like this:
* Project managers and build and release engineers in North America in 2+ locations
* Development groups in India, China, Eastern Europe, and maybe a few token devs in North America

Non-stop development from teams of various level of proficiency constantly checking in code. Due to the nature of the geographically disparate teams there isn't any decent windows for downtime, refactoring, and maintenance. Add in all the communication challenges and needless to say real world code sucks even more than it used to.

I hardly post anything to mine. In fact I don't think I've posted a status since I joined back in 2007.

However, I probably get more stressed reading other people's pages and comparing my boring life to them.

Once I start feeling bad I try to remind myself that I'm comparing my life lows to their highlight reel.

That's why I expect Microsoft to bet on the cloud as well. When the only way to get the latest version of Office is to pay a $99 subscription for 1 year then the river money will come back a flowing!

Thanks to the walled garden by Apple and SaaS with SalesForce, Microsoft will happily jump onto the bandwagon.

As much as I love my MacBook I wouldn't try and argue in its favor for the completely shitty home/end pg up/dn functionality that requires two hands and is completely inconsistent across applications.

For me it's the little reasons. For example I can close the lid and open it up several hours later and I have a 99% chance instead of a 50% chance that the laptop will continue running. Or I can be typing away and my palm will momentarily brush the trackpad. On my macbook the cursor won't jump halfway across the screen causing my typing to be inserted in the wrong position. Or I can run VMWare Fusion and launch Windows 7 or Ubuntu VMs flawlessly. Or I can dual boot into Windows if I really want to play Skyrim. Or I needed to copy an install CD in an emergency and I've never done it before. I plop the CD into the machine and I can actually figure out what I need to do without having to consult the internet and research driver issues.

I'm at the point where a $500-$1000 difference in a laptop isn't a big deal for me especially over the course of its lifetime. My time is much more valuable.

I've visit at least one new company every week or so in the US and over the last 3 years, I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of places that had exceptional eateries.

One place in particular not only had great food and selection, but external groups would routinely book meetings and events at this company's HQ because the cafeteria was that good! A nice source of extra revenue.

You can put anyone through music school but they aren't going to necessarily come out as a Mozart.

To add to your informative post I never compare the gross pay increase.

Instead I do a cost of living calculation and compare the amount I can save with one job as opposed to another.

Take the $70k vs $120k example. If one could save $5k per year on the $70k salary but could save $40k per year on the $120k that means a savings rate of 800% more.

If you don't automatically up your standard of living then now you can pay off your house in 5 years instead of 40. Buy a new car in 6 months instead of 4 years. Or hit your retirement amount in 1/8 the amount of time.

Hmm, your solution sounds suspiciously like Democrats and Republicans. Tada... all problems solved!

I went for a MacBook for roughly same reasons. I wanted a machine where if I closed the lid I had a reasonably good chance that when I lifted the lid I could actually continue working instead of rebooting because everything locked up.

This is what clicked for me.

On an old mud I was playing, my character's XP was stored in a 32 bit variable. This variable was serialized to disk.

I had 29 days played time. Most of that time was spent incrementing that value in that variable.

Ultimately in the end, it dawned on me that I was spending a lot of my life energy to flip a single bit on a hard-disk somewhere.

Answer: obviously the cost is split across the entire tax-payer base.

Now imagine this scenario... his dad has heart trouble and emergency surgery ends up bankrupting him. While he doesn't croak from his sickness his insurance company conveniently drops him afterwards. Further complications cause him to lose his job as he's unable to work.

He ends up spending the next 20 years on welfare and medicaid. Given that there's no such thing as a free lunch, who pays for it?

Those product makers might want to research this guy and re-evaluate their business model.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-tampon-king-who-sparked-a-period-of-change-for-indias-women-7897093.html

I have nothing against guns myself... but picture yourself there:

Dark theater, loud sounds from the movie itself is playing, smoke suddenly appears out of nowhere, then someone dressed up like a good percentage of the other patrons starts going on a rampage.

Now people are panicking, you still can't see shit and aren't sure what's going on, and your response is to whip out your firearm out your firearm and start shooting in a room full of innocents. Puh-leeeze...

No love for Goldman Sachs here but if the inventors did what this article says (trading their entire company for the stock of a mysterious L&H company) then it sounds like they got greedy.