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Comment Re:House? What about retirement? (Score 1) 594

...houses are much larger and nicer than they were in 1970. Living space per person has almost doubled, the average house is 1,000 sq. ft. larger and has amenities like walk-in closets and expensive counter-tops you wouldn't find on an average house in the 70s.

Whilst I can find articles to see where you got this idea from, this doesn't quite pass the smell test. This is true only for new homes (i.e. the well off to construct new dwellings) and if you include established homes and the number of children per adult this picture changes.

Here is a page showing the trend of less people per household in the US over time. It may seem like there has been an improvement in living space per person (again check for all residences and not new ones in your stats), but to me it just means that adults are sharing space in the cities that don't really want to and can't bring up kids like they could in the past for financial reasons.

Comment Re:Fortran (Score 2) 633

Fortran was still needed for physics in 1990. In fact, it is still needed in many subfields of physics in 2017.

You are right that it is used still. Happily/sadly (depending on your perspective) there's a "new" version of Fortran coming out soon called Fortran 2015 (coming out mid-2018 because it takes this long to write the first program since its release).

I never understood why c++ is not used for serious physics calculations given how much easier it is to write stuff, but there are people who are very sure that Fortran is superior to anything else. I just wish that Fortran would have a good way to print out results so you can see what is being calculated properly!

Comment Re: Is Hawking up for the rigors of spaceflight? (Score 1) 77

it would be a fitting end for such an important person to science.

If you mention his name, plenty of people will say "that's the smart guy in the wheelchair with the funny voice", but very few of them would know about anything that he has done. He theorized that black holes emit radiation, and came up with some hypothesis about quantum gravity ... and that's about it.

I thought he was the one who in university made the Big Bang hypothesis work out in mathematics for the first time (maybe along with Roger Penrose). This is kind of an important thing in cosmology and in my books puts him amongst the greats like Feynman, Bohr, et al before him. Of course we also have Hawking radiation named after him and all the other stuff that you mention.

Comment Re:Wrong degree programme? (Score 2) 632

Ive recently went through a bunch of major renovation projects. Finding good trades people is impossible. Anyone available sucks. Anyone with good recommendation is booked for months and charge whatever they want.

You might want to think about this type of comment a bit more next time, as it can come across as quite condescending. One of the main points the article makes is that the older people have had it generally good in the past for employment/standard of living, etc. and the younger generations are being screwed by the older ones. In the comment above I read it as saying that the younger generation should be there to service you.

Painters don't get payed much of a wage for what is hard work if you've ever tried to paint a large space. Neither do many laborers. The ones that do have to deal with risk of death or injury that office jobs generally don't have to.

Comment Re: Courage (Score 2) 167

This is what courage looks like.

Umm, did you actually read the summary?

"So it is adding three hours of battery life, but in doing so, it's merely matching the battery life of last year's 1080p model."

If you were truly brave you'd use it with the screen turned off to get that extra 3 hours battery life.

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