They also collect a million dollars based on an actuarial expectation of paying out $850,000.

And then they spend $50,000 of that to reinsure outlays over a million dollars.

The synthesized extract from Khan's blood will never ever EVER be used again in any abrahms star trek film.

Agree... they didn't use your native vocabulary.

Try saying it as "zero". "Zee Roh".

It's one of those odd differences in dialect between our versions of english.

Wages are leveling out.

My main point of irritation is that I can't legally buy movies, medicine, software development packages, and many other products for the extremely low price the same corporations legally sell them to indians and chinese for.

I have to pay $19.99 for a movie selling legally in china for $2.49.
I have to pay $5.00 a day for blood pressure medication selling legally in india for 10 cents.

It's ILLEGAL for someone to buy a bunch over there and ship it back here and sell the movies for $3.49 and the pills for 20 cents (100% mark up).

A few years ago Microsoft was GIVING development suites to indians free while I had to pay $750 for the same product.

Indian wages (as of novermber 2012) were going up 20%. China is seeing 12% to 100% annual wage inflation.

It's been a long painful walk, but sometime in the next 4-8 years it won't be worth it to offshore any more. These automation programs are a leading edge. Infosys also is trying to rebrand themselves from being a company that sells legions of code monkeys and grunt programmers to a company that sells managers and ceos. That's also a sign of the increasing wage structure.

I was lucky. I lived on half of what I made since 2000 and I was able to retire early. Now I do massage therapy, draw, and paint for fun. I'm looking at doing some programming for fun but haven't done so yet. Either Libreoffice (I read they are friendly), or Android (for my dnd game), or some kind of board gaming table software.

Infosys does something else that american companies used to do with Aramco.

They bring a bunch of infosys people over, warehouse them near the client, and pay them indian wages. They keep them in the country for six months-- preferably from july to december so they can keep them in the country for six months until the next july.

Then they ship them back home. They were never american employees to begin with. They were indian employees. Which leaves us competing here with experienced software developers working for under 30k. It was some special kind of non h1b visa. Perhaps an L1?

The company I retired from laid off about 5k people-- found it had to hire about 800 of those back (and is having a hard time getting suck.. people... to take those jobs).

It's designing it's order entry system to allow it to lay off most of its ma and customer support (another 8000 or so people). But it's SO obvious about it that its losing the good staff which is ironically slowing down the automation.

It's increasingly common so it must not be too hard.

Some companies I deal with have no human "escape hatch" option available any more.

One thing to watch out for is oversell by the retirement industry.

As I said above, only 1.8% of us make it to 90. If you are in poor health or your parents and grandparents all died by 80, your odds of being in the group that makes it to 90 are not good. A lot of people really "know" they are going to die before 80 based on their health and parents mortality.

From experience, when you retire your spending drops enormously.

Your apple comment is odd. Didn't we have an article on slashdot that the "jobs" they were bringing back were almost all going to be done by robots?

Folks, there was a big bad security breach. Now, *adjusts his massive belt buckle* we're investigating this like we would any other serious crime. And right now we're just trying to identify weapons used in this heinous attack. Now, we've discovered that the hackers were using a very vicious mechanism in this attack. In a murder, you might find a revolver used to put two bullets into the back of a poor old defenseless lady's skull in order to get all her coupons and a couple of Indian head pennies out of her purse. Or perhaps in a pedophile case, you'll find the "secret candy" that was used to lure the children into a white panel van with painted over windows.

*expels a long tortured sigh*

Well, I gotta say, in my thirty years on the force, I wish we were only dealing with something like that today, honest to God Almighty I really do. Instead this artifact was discovered at the scene of the crime. Now, I'm not asking you to understand that -- hell, I'd warn you against even openin' up your browser to the devil's toolbox. But let me, a trained law enforcement professional, take the time to explain the gruesome evidence just one HTTP request away from you and your chillun'. The page is black. Black as a moonless night sky when raptors swoop from the murky inky nothing to take your kids and livestock back up with them silently. On it is a bunch of white text that makes no sense to any God fearun' man on this here Earth. That's what they call a "man page" probably because it is the ultimate culmination of man's sin and lo and behold it displays a guide to exact torture on innocent web servers across this great and holy internet.

Even if you want to use this "man page" for WGET to learn how to use Satan's server scythe, you would have to read through almost twenty pages of incomprehensible technobabble like what that kraut over in Cali -- the one who took his wife's life -- spoke. And if you want to just see an example, it's not at the top! No, why, it's all the way down at the bottom. For this one, they don't even have examples. Just enough options to kill a man. Probably gave Steve Jobs cancer, they never proved all these options in these pages didn't. Buried in the mud of a thousand evils lie more evils.

And why, oh why are we even wasting taxpayer money on these Scripps Journos? Who needs a trial when the evidence is in the tools they used? Folks, I think it's time we WGET one last thing, I'll WGET a rope and you WGET your pitchforks and torches ... let's go down to Scripps and put all this computer business behind us. Okay?

Sorry to respond to my own comment but for Ben Rothke it looks like he just reposts his Amazon reviews here:

Book Review: The Plateau Effect: Getting From Stuck To Success is identical to this Amazon review.

Book Review: The Death of the Internet is identical to this Amazon review.

Book Review: Everyday Cryptography is identical to this Amazon review.

Book Review: Liars and Outliers is identical to this Amazon Review.

It just keeps going ...

As someone who occasionally writes reviews for Slashdot (and usually reads all of the ones posted), this is a clear violation of the book review guidelines:

(emphasis mine) There is no difference that I can see ...

As I tried to ask during the first interview who are these people? What have you got to lose in naming them right now? Do they have power in the United States? What's holding you back?!

They can cause you no more chaos or inconvenience and yet you refuse to name them -- WHY? This could only be further evidence in your accusations! Do I have to buy your book to find out or something?

Or really triggers that require 30-50 pounds pressure to pull.

I've been watching Voyager lately. THERE, they have female security officers.

Five million people went on social security between 2000 and 2009.
Five million people went on social security in 2010 and 2011 alone (numbers not in ofr 2012 yet).

The boomers (71 million more to go), the chinese boomers (460 million), and the european boomers (I don't have a figure) are going to be retiring (or dying) fast over the next 18 years.

Only 15% of men and under 10% of women work past age 67 (despite statements that they have to or want to when they were younger).

Half the men are dead by age 75, half the women are dead by age 78.

Currently, only 1.8% are making it to age 90. They make up under 1% of the population but that's because of immigration and population growth since their cohort was born.

I think this boomer situation is going to hit really hard between now and 2016. Essentially, an extra 3.6 million people retire compared to the base rate. Then in 2017, it rises to 2 million extra people per year. That continues for the next 18 years. So 11.6 million extra people retire (from a total population of about 28 million) over the next 8 years alone. That's enough to eradicate the unemployment rate.

And... at least in my case when my early boomer parents passed away, I'd been saving so hard that I was able to retire at 52 and I didn't even go on social security.

So I guess I think thing will get really good for employees between now and 2020 (and probably be quite nice by 2016).

However, robotics and automation are coming on very fast and i think after 2020, that trend will cancel many of the benefits of the fast retirement. It gets very singularity like by the 2030's.

Oh yea, and the life expectancy you quote is almost entirely due to infant mortality.
If you made it past 12, you had a very good chance of making it to 60. Look it up.

I made the same mistake years ago and was corrected (tho I was saying life expectency was 45).

Think of it this way.

2 people are born.
One dies at age 1
The other dies at age 69.
Their average life expectancy is 35 years.