And before someone younger than 26 comes in and says "I'm not careless!", the individual case is irrelevant; this is statistics, taking into account the tendencies of a large number of people.

Paying extra on your insurance if you think you're not careless sucks, but you're probably still not as careful as you will be in a few years.

PS: the worst group here is actually under-25 males.

Some public school administrators are largely a joke.

And so are some private school administrators. Private schools can mostly be divided into expensive, mostly secular, ones, which do well; Catholic schools, which do on average a little worse than public schools, and conservative religious schools, which are generally crap.

Private schools tend to be run more like companies and lousy administrators don't last.

Where does this myth that private sector companies somehow are run competently and effectively come from? Have people not worked

Spot on.

No, it lacks a good editor, although I've heard you can port vi over to it.

(Sorry, if I didn't say it, someone else would.)

I've been running ZFS on FreeBSD for a few years and it's lived up to its promises, but I think I'll be migrating off of it. The problem is that I trusted Sun. They did some goofy things, but you knew where you stood with them. They release ZFS under an Open Source license? You could take them at face value and know that you were allowed to use it. But now that Oracle holds the reins, I have no desire to depend on any Sun-borne projects anymore. Yes, ZFS is Open Source. So was Java, and Google just spent roughly a bazillion dollars defending themselves for using something that looked like it. I can't afford to take on a case like that.

Other than the Oracle-owned btrfs, what ZFS alternatives are available and ready for use today?

I've got a Math degree (not Math Education, mind you, just plain Math). I couldn't find a job to save my life for awhile, but sooner or later I took a tech support job and was moved up to Quality Assurance and may one day move into development.

One thing I *want* to do, but just don't have the fortitude to do is take some of the actuary exams. If your wife is a standard math nerd, doing actuarial work should be right up her alley.

I guess she can really do whatever she wants. A lot of place will just take anyone that isn't an idiot that has a degree. I'm sure anything that she wants to do will be rewarding in and of itself.

There are families who value education and aren't satisfied with schools.

That's not really true, but it's a risky proposition. I grew up in a religious family, and the last church I attended as an adult was wonderfully logic-driven. The preacher was fantastic, and he presented every sermon almost like a mathematical proof. He'd start with some basic axioms from the belief system ("the Bible is literally true", "Jesus is a real person and said everything credited to him exactly like the Bible says, barring negligible translation mismatches", etc.). Then he'd present a premise and build a formal proof for it based upon facts derived from those axioms. Sometimes he reached some surprising conclusions, but as in math class, if you accept the axioms then you can't really disagree with results that come from them.

But that works both ways. By presenting an effectively bulletproof belief framework, it's left open to disproof by formal methods. In my case, that was disproof by counterexample, where the premises were "the world is 6,000 years old" and "God loves us", and the counterexample was "there's a vast amount of hard evidence that the Earth and universe are billions of years old". Given that "the Earth is more than 6,000 years old" is roughly as demonstrable as "the sky is blue", that led to at least one of two conclusions: either God hates us and wants to trick us for some sociopathic reason known only to Him, or one of those axioms was invalid. And once you reach that point, what axiom do you throw out? "The Bible is literally true" is the obvious choice. But there's a huge amount of other conclusions predicated upon that axiom's validity, and once it disappears...

Ever had everything you know yanked out from under you in an instant? It sucks. But that's the risk of rigorous examination of religious beliefs. If you examine them closely enough to "prove" that your beliefs are true, then you run the very real risk of demonstrating that they're not.