Yes, dentists are well paid - eventually - but they start earning late, a few years after a software dev, they have a much larger school debt to pay off, and just like a software dev, the early years don't pay so well.

You can't just look at peak earning power, but at lifetime earnings at a given age, and it takes a long, long time for a dentist or doctor to pull ahead. BTW, you can certainly make $300k as a software dev at a big company - that's common for tech track paygrades equivalent to a second-level manager at the big names. Of course, there are far fewer such positions than there are dentists in America, and for someone capable of both I'd recommend dentistry, but the gap isn't as big as you might think.

America is full of god damn law abiders these days. I wouldn't criticize on that count.

"IT" is a crap career no one should enter. Answering calls on the helpdesk? No thanks - well, better than starving, but so are a lot of things. But we were talking about software development

Check out the hours lawyers work, or the oncall duties as a surgeon (or a vet - but dentists, that's the job!). It's not the hours that's the problem, it's the lack of dignity of the profession. When the field was doubling every few years, that meant most software developers were in their 20s, and management could get away with treating all of us like college students. My work environment is more like a dorm room or college lab than a professional office environment - that's what we need to push back against.

As far as pay, after your first 5 or so years in the field, jobs that pay well are there for the taking, though you may need to move to where the work is. If you're past your apprenticeship in the field and you're not making at least 1.5x the national median income, you're likely at a bottom-tier employer: shop around. While we may top out lower than the doctors and lawyers, they don't hit peak earning potential until later in life - a doctor or dentist is typically in his 40s before lifetime earnings net of school costs put him ahead of a plumber or other skilled tradesman.

Personally, I think many women are put off by the limited social interaction involved in the job, or at least that's my theory for why so many female software developers choose career advancement into management or product management over the dev tech track.

OK, but that's been true for 400 years, and isn't actually a barrier to retirement. You've IMO correctly understood the rules of the game, and under those rules anyone can retire on his own wealth, needing only to invest enough of his after-tax pay every year. I've been living on half my after-tax pay for 15 years now, and in another 5 or so I'll have the option to retire (though continuing to work would certainly improve that standard of living). You don't need to be nearly so frugal as "half" if you have 30 years instead of 20.

Wrong, you are a joke, I am being 100% serious about everything I say on the issue of economics and individual freedoms. Your ideology leads to the outcomes that you are supposedly horrified of, the reality is that you should be inspecting your own judgement and motivation and be horrified with yourself once you realise that your own ideology causes the massive suffering as the end result. Your ideology is ideology of destruction of individual freedoms which inexorably leads to destruction of the economy and thus society and then the people who you pretend to care about suffer the most. The solution is of-course actual individual freedoms, but it goes against your idiotic notion of social justice that negates individual freedom both as general concept and as specific implementation.

Everyone just needs to pool their phones and then everyone use a random phone for the day. Sort of a TOR operating at the physical level. An app that made encrypted VoIP calls could probably allow you to even use the same phone number by just logging in through the random phone of the day.

Would it get your attention if you smelled heating gas near your stove?

Smelling that, like smelling gas near a car, means something is wrong...and possibly about to get wronger.

Someone with mod points please mod this up - it's seemingly the only non-trolling post for this whole story. This is exactly the stuff we should be discussing here - agree or not with the conclusion, this is the rational topic at hand.

Did you know most domestic violence in initiated by women? Did you know that by far lesbian relationships have more physical abuse than any other gender pairing? Abused men are just SOL - why do you need support or a shelter? Just man up! Perhaps not an argument for rationality, I'll grant you.

Or, just maybe, we could teach children of both sexes that it's a harsh fucking world out there, and if you don't learn the skills needed for a good job, your life will suck forever. No? Well, the social pendulum will swing back that way eventually, from the opposite extreme we're at now, and once that happens you won't need much to get everyone interested in fields that pay really well, and won't be displaced by automation.

Sure there is. It's so easy, you probably can't see it. Just stay away from individual companies, even individual industries, invest broadly across the market as a whole and ignore collapses - just ride them out. If you invest in some SP500 or "all stocks" fund, or whatever, you've own the same micro-% of the American economy before, during, and after the crash, and through the recovery. The exchange rate between USD and "micro-% of all sticks" may fluctuate wildly for a while, but just don't sell in a panic and you'll be fine in a few years.

The closer you get to retirement, to more you'll need some share of your investments in quality bonds, so that if you need money to live on through a crash bottom you won't need to sell stock. (Government bonds are not quality bonds any more - after the US government punished ratings agencies who dared question the rating of US debt, you can never again trust any sovereign debt rating in the US - just steer clear of the category.) The old-school rule of thumb was "your age as a % in bonds", but that's from a time when interest rates were quite high. Less than half your age as a % in bonds is probably a mistake, however - you need something to be selling that's not stocks when everyone is screaming about the end of the financial world in every decade's crash.

Don't over-think the problem, don't act out of emotion, just accumulate wealth and have patience. In times when everyone seems emotional about the market, make damn sure you're not being emotional before you take any action. I've sailed through the dot-com crash, the 08 finance crash, and I'm fully expected the next one will be along soon enough, but you just keep accumulating "micro-% of all stocks" regardless and, sure enough, you become more wealthy over time.

We used to care about liberty more than safety. Freedom mattered once. The right to be stupid, to make bad choices, to do the wrong thing, was seen as fundamental - after all, we need no "right" to do what everyone else says we should, liberty only comes into play when others disapprove of your actions. This didn't used to need explaining. Now, we're basically fucked - we raised a generation that embraces total control of our lives by the government, that can't even see what the argument against it would be, as long as the government forces us to do the right thing, how could that be bad? History will repeat itself soon enough, and that question will sadly be answered.

That is the key to embracing totalitarianism: everything each of us do will always have some negative effect on another, thus the government must control everything each of us do for the common good. There's always an excuse you can find for that government control - always.

This. Some people microwave and some people cook.