2014 Corolla - Edmunds.com TCO = $35,728
2014 Prius - Edmunds.com TCO = $35,727

(Edmunds TCO includes gasoline, repairs, financing, taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc for 5 years)

With savings like that, why the heck aren't people lining up out the door for the Prius?? I mean, 1 dollar over 5 years... that is like 20 cents a year, IN YOUR POCKET. Cash money, man.

**To be fair, there is almost a 3800 dollar TCO advantage for camry hybrid vs camry base model... but 760 dollars a year isn't exactly going to drop a lot of panties.

I know it is hard to believe, but all the things you take for granted are not automatic birthrights to everybody. a pot
a working stove
a working sink
a working fridge
cultural desire to eat "healthy"
accessible groceries
time and energy to cook
working knowledge of cooking food or the ability and knowledge to look up how to do it
a safe place to cook
room in your budget to screw up cooking a few times without going hungry
assumption that you can even afford to have a "budget" at all
an educational background that includes knowing WHAT things are more nutritious than others.

It is cheap as hell for someone who already front-loaded the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars worth of real expenses that go into cooking a healthy meal.

I can cook a meal for my family for 5 bucks, but I interact with my $200,000 house (in a safe neighborhood with grocery stores), my $900 fridge, my $30,000 car, $1,000 worth of cookware, and 6 hours of non-work non-sleep time between when I get off work and when I need to work again. Have I done it with less? Sure, I lived at poverty levels when I had my first apartment and was in school. But I already had years of privilege at that point, which taught me how to do the things I knew how to do.

Now the sign says "No Vacancies" /lethal weapon

financial software has this horrible habit of being surrounded by tons of oversight, process, and compliance issues.

In my experience, enterprise level financial software is at least mostly comprised of components that were written during deregulation in some form or another. In order to write anything that significantly changes the way things work, it has to pass millions of dollars worth of audits and approvals and federal oversight.

If your software is part of a Federal Savings Bank (FSB) it is subject to all kinds of stuff around disaster recovery, uptime, transparency, etc etc... unless it already existed with the same functionality before the bank entered into an FSB Charter, of course.

So the software that does a lot of the lifting is "grandfathered" in. There is so much crappy Bush Sr and Clinton Era code behind every credit card swipe and check deposit, you don't even want to know.

When we adopted my daughter, we were not allowed to leave the hotel grounds for 2 weeks, until some specific paperwork went through (or else it was considered felony kidnapping).

The bank I was working for had this horrible transaction system that had a whole bunch of bugs and was written in a dead language (VB6, oh the humanity). I already had a Java stack running another newer arm of the application. When I landed, I learned that the whole time I was flying out there, I had been getting panicked emails from the higher-ups about how the whole world was finally falling down with this old VB6 horrorshow.

I rewrote the whole thing. From top to bottom, replaced nearly a million lines of legacy code, in a 2 week feverpitch of sleepless nights and rocking a 2 day old baby in my arms while running unit tests.

I worked with that application for 6 more years after that... and never had to change a single line of that "Adoption hostage" code. I'm actually shocked it went so well, looking back on it.

Apple bought an urban market. They don't need Dr Dre to teach them how to build headphones, they need millions of customers who are willing to pay a 200 dollar premium for a brand image (because that has almost ALWAYS been Apple's strategy)... As the black turtleneck fades they desperately need some other angle.

Pay 200 more because it's Beats
Pay 200 more because it's Apple

The two companies could not be a better match.

Phrase it this way, and you can extrapolate similarly useless information:
The striatum is smaller in men who do not attempt to hide the fact that they consume.

So, is this really about instant gratification, or is this about the fact that you can use brain type to predict the results of a selection bias survey?

Buck and Gerber make great knives. Far better than anything gillette has ever put out. So why don't they make a really great disposable razor so that they can corner the market?

Everyone rampaged around looking for an iPod killer and we never got one, until apple made the iphone, and popularized the convergence that everyone else had been trying to popularize in smartphones for years.

Samsung tried to make an iPhone killer, but could never really be successful without the true killer: Google Play/Android Marketplace

The iPod wasn't "the thing," iTunes was.
The Gillette Razor handle isn't "the thing" the cartridges are
The kindle isn't "the thing" the bookstore is.

Trying to beat the kindle with better hardware is completely missing the point. Even more so with the fact that Kindle has an app for most devices that lets you read stuff you buy from Amazon anyway (and vice versa).
The kindle is king because nobody (yes I am counting barnes and noble as "nobody") has any reason whatsoever to compete with it.

that is exactly what I was thinking.

"After you take the Sirloin from that cow, I would gladly take that useless ground beef off your hands"

please ask the same question about gasoline. Then laugh to yourself.

The reason isn't really security, it is mostly to hide the wire monster from my wife's delicate sensibilities and to further drown out the fan noise. One of my closets had an AC duct, which I basically enclosed in a little room to have a "consumer" grade server room (I close the duct in the winter, my temps are fine). The little room has a "crawlspace" panel in the plain old drywall wall, which is pretty low-key and not at all hard to crawl through for the rare times I need physical access. It cost me about 100 bucks at home depot to buy a handful of studs, a sheet of drywall, and a crawlspace panel. I added smoke alarms on either side, because I am completely aware that this isn't the most fireproof of solutions.

Honestly it all started with me putting a 16 port switch in the attic, then realizing it needed to be in the A/C, then moving it to the closet, then my very patient wife (bless her) casually suggesting that closet was becoming a cesspool of discarded hardware, wires that went to nowhere, and loud weird equipment..

A side-effect of this is that the average burglar would barely even be able to tell that I spend a small fortune in very geeky and completely unnecessary server hardware.

you live in Vermont then? That's cool... we have 6 cities that are each bigger than Vermont (in population).

Look, I am not a Texas cheer-leader or anything, but I will say, at least we have jobs, and a much lower unemployment rate than the average. All of my kids are in private schools, because of the education thing... still our cost of living is significantly lower, and our lifestyle significantly higher than when we lived in California.

If I could afford to live like this in CA, I would, but I can't so I just stay indoors in the summer time, and raise my kids as skeptics.

From the time I was about 8 years old I knew I needed to get a BS in Computer Science if I wanted to get my dream job (programmer). I worked very hard through grade school and landed a full academic scholarship, so that I could someday work as a computer programmer.

My Sophomore year, I landed a job that was way too much of a workload (and very fun, and challenging)... and since I was going to school "just to get my foot in the door" as a computer programmer, it became harder and harder to go to class and get my degree.

The problem was that once I WAS a computer programmer, at a real company, there was no reason for me to finish my degree. I walked away.

I mean, I guess on the one hand I could be considered a success story, since I have now been at a few fortune 500s for 14 years, I own a fully vested pension from one of my previous employers... I make enough money, I have never been out of work, etc etc.

But I don't have a degree... I never will.

At some point I decided that even though I would not need to take on ANY debt to get it... A degree was less important to me than having a job in the profession I love. It worked out for me, but will it work out for you? I don't know. But that is the risk you take when you try to work the job you are going school to get.

Cable is over. That is pretty obvious by their constant blundering around trying to find a problem that their solution solves.

the EPA defines a gallon of gasoline as equivalent to 33.7 kWh.

This is based not really on chemistry or scientific properties of either, but on the cost of gasoline at the pump vs the cost of electricity at your house. http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg...

Basically it is done this way to make it easy to do the math in your head "hey, this costs 1/3 as much to fuel than my current car"