The same is true of France. In fact, I think they were the first to adopt that policy; it's been several years.

During the dotcom bubble, I was at the top end of the age range (35-ish) that was fashionable and working for a US TLA as a general-purpose sysadmin greybeard in an all-Unix shop. I networked more than most and corresponded with lots of folks both in govt and the private sector. I don't know why I did it because I loved my work and wasn't looking for anything new but I did like to keep up and keep in touch with lots of folks. Also, it didn't hurt and sometimes greatly amused me that the part of my email address just to the left of the ".gov" tended to get my emails read.

During those years I turned down a number of job offers. I don't remember specifically; some were informal "let's talk" and others were "I'll pay you $X to come work for us". But I distinctly remember several offers that would have as much as quadrupled my pay (which would have put me at double the going rate since, as a fed, I was already being paid only about half what the average private sector employee in my position received.)

I never bit. Of those companies, none survive today. All of them wanted me to trade my 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half for overtime for positions where I essentially worked 24 hours a day, perhaps 12 at the office and the rest of the time wearing a pager. None offered more than a couple of holidays. None offered sick or vacation time that was more than a farce. The pay, though, would have been great if I was willing to step into the hamster wheel and start running.

So maybe I'm a doddering old fool. Maybe I was unambitious. All I know is that now I'm retired. My retirement check covers my expenses plus a little...and that's after deductions for all taxes, decent health insurance, very good life insurance, and fairly good long-term care insurance. It's not lounging on a yacht with supermodels but I'm not afraid of being three paychecks from living in my car, either.

Folks who spit on public-sector employees simply don't understand. I often wonder if it's worth the (usually wasted) effort I sometime put towards trying to help them see things from a broader perspective.

I'm Texan, too, and I (and perhaps you, too) know that the fusion culture you describe already exists in some places along the border. It's not a bad thing. If Texas secedes and such attitudes hold sway, Texas could be an even better place than the one I already love.

Y'know, I'd go to a store that offered all the stuff in the checkout area of my local Fry's (plus their magazine rack) with some regularity. That's a pretty attractive product mix.

But if they've got the "Let's make everybody feel like a suspected shoplifter" jerks at the exit door, then the whole idea is a non-starter. :-)

Seriously, though, the GP is in Houston. There are plenty of neighborhoods around here where stores like he describes are found and doing well. It's partly cultural and partly the fact that Houston has (essentially) no zoning.

... the ones the city council is going to listen to, not someone who can't even find a place to host his business, so they get to influence the zoning that controls where you're allowed to open your business.

I really don't understand your post since where I live, there is no zoning. What was your point and does it have anything to do with trying to find a way to help a guy morph his DVD business into something that can remain profitable?

The people who are still around after 20 years ... are binary: they're either wizards or burnouts.

What gets me is how quick they can flip. I was a wizard, though not a coder, more of a crypto specialist with a TLA who did lots of other stuff on the side.

We went through a management re-shuffle from top to bottom that just about killed morale in the entire organization. In my case, no other function could borrow me for a project without a writ from on high. In the past, IT could lend me to another division to help them over a hump and build up favors that helped *everyone* the next time a new project came along and workload negotiations were happening. No longer. I got all my "interesting" work taken away. This was the stuff I did all day, every day, for years. I was re-directed to my core duties (which were fine...if boring) *only*. Literally, the last time I was lent from my division to another, the person who asked to borrow me had to take the request all the way up to the office of a presidential appointee to get me for two weeks (and I worked in one of the few TLAs where there are almost no political appointees except at the very top.)

It took me less than 5 years to flip from wizard to burnout.

They wanted to reduce staff and one day, out of the blue, offered me a few bucks and a reduced pension to retire early. I was out the door so fast, I feared the vacuum behind me would suck all the furniture out into the hallway.

A few months later, I got invited back for a Christmas party. Management had been lying (of course) and they had not reduced staff. They had replaced me with 2 contractors. My old work partner described them as "#1 sits around and plays with his smartphone all day. #2 has a brain; in 10 years, we'll be able to get half the work out of him we used to get from you. Neither of them will ever have a clue where all the bodies are buried like you did." He then proceeded to tell me he was getting out within 6 months.

Mod parent up; "...hire wizards and ...shift... burnouts into doing something they ... enjoy more, because older workers bring a lot of experience and realism to the game" is the best advice I've seen yet in all the replies to this article.

I recently spent a couple of days in Raton, NM. It's quite small but they have a thing there called the Whittington Center. It's a gigantic place to shoot, museum, store, and library on all things having to do with shooting. (How it got there is a fascinating political story that I'll leave for another day.) I'm retired and I love to shoot but it was that library that drew me in. I spent hours and hours there, finding new gems and old, every time I scanned a different shelf. I would literally consider moving to Raton just to have easy access to that specialty library...if it weren't for the fact that I spent enough time there to discover that Raton is an armpit of a place.

In the large metro area where I currently live there are a couple of niche stores that are doing at least OK. I can think of two stores that sell just vinyl records. I can think of one that rents rare DVDs, has an extensive anime section, even has some old stock on tape that never made it to disc, and sells a small selection of high-value, carefully-selected hardware to equip your home theatre. They have employees who seem to know *everything* and can make a dozen recommendations based on scanty evidence. I've brought three discs to the front counter and said "I've seen these. I liked them. What else would I like?" Within three minutes, an employee will have sprinted me around the store and put a dozen other titles in my hands (guaranteed I haven't even heard of half of them) and I can pick at random from that pile with no fear of disappointment.

I'm definitely willing to pay for that kind of service. It's just too bad I retired and I'm too far away from them to use them now. (In fact, I've been away for so long that I don't know if 2 of the 3 examples I just gave are still in business and I don't want the potential heartbreak of looking them up online to see if they still are.)

That brings me to my last point - location. Most DVD stores that were successful back in the day did so by being where there were the most people. Everybody was renting DVDs so you just had to be located where the most people were to be found. There were even DVD stores that did rentals inside major shopping malls.

Times have changed. Joe Average is no longer your customer. If the store in question is in a place with good traffic flow but no *specialty* traffic flow, then they're screwed, doubly so since not only is the customer base falling but the location rents are probably higher *because* of the good traffic flow.

The first idea that pops into my head is that specialty equipment stores that sell guns, weightlifting equipment, cosmetics, whatever, etc., tend to have a shelf somewhere with a couple of "how-to" discs to buy. The selection is always lousy and the discs are for purchase only. I wish someone would come up with a way to put a smaller, lower-tech version of a Red Box in every speciality store in the country. Said kiosk (or just a shelf of DVDs with bar-coded labels that somehow communicate with whatever vertical app the store is using to sell all their other stuff) would rent out "how-to" and specialty DVDs to those people who are interested in the goods sold by that particular store.

Wherever there's a successful brick-and-mortar store, there's the potential to sell and rent DVDs with highly-specialized content to the customers of those stores.

Why not abandon the "DVD store" concept? Bring the stock to the customers instead of making the customers come to the stock. I know one gun store that tried this with books and it failed but only because it took up too much room. On a per-square-foot basis, keeping a book store inside a gun store is stupid; there's so much more profit in just adding more display space for high-dollar-markup guns. With DVDs, though, we're literally talking less than two square feet of floor space for a tall, rotating rack.

Just an idea. I hate to see the OP's friend go out of business without at least an idea or two on the table.

See? Now that's putting a little thought into it. :-)

...even though I've got points because this comment is just too out-of-touch to let go without a response.

The Texas secession will go nowhere, of course. However, you've missed a couple of things.

First, the kinds of Texans who actually want to secede wouldn't bother with a wall on the border. They'd set up a 1000-yard-wide no-man's land, pepper it with automated machine gun towers and kill anything that moved. That would be a start on the whole "hold off the violent Mexican gangs" thing.

Second, even more Texans than the sort mentioned in the previous paragraph legally carry concealed weapons and wouldn't hesitate to return fire. The brazen, large-scale Mexican gangs activities seen inside Mexico just wouldn't fly in Texas. There are too many ranchers with too many 7.62s and .50s, and too many LEOs and judges who would simply give them a pat on the back and some reward money for every cartel member they downed.

Finally, the U.S. would never let Texas secede specifically *because* of national defense issues. Remember, the PANTEX plant is in Texas. Texans are the people who make nukes for the USA. A successfully seceeded Texas would instantly become a nuclear-bomb equipped nation. Now, delivery systems would be a problem but I'm sure they could figure out a way.

God, these secession petitions are stupid but if you want to insult Texas, work a little harder, OK?

Odd you should mention geese. There are actually U.S. Army bases that use geese as alarms, placing them between fence lines surrounding the base. They make a lot of noise when unauthorized people are in their space.

As for geese attacks, I'd tend to discount that. Yes, they will do that. I've been attacked several times; I used to be a photographer and would often shoot wedding portraits at a lake with geese. I've seen several brides and grooms attacked without much damage as long as they moved fast enough to prevent the goose from latching onto clothing. They got some good stories to tell, though. I've been forced to kick a couple but that seemed to make them think twice and they appeared none the worse for wear.

So the answer to all the misogyny you've built up over your lifetime is to exploit women using money as a tool?

You've got that quite backwards. They're the ones earning the money. The exploitation is running in precisely the opposite direction.

More to the point, you say "misogyny". I say "lessons learned the hard way." I spent 30 years of adolescence and adulthood emulating my father, one of the kindest, gentlest, most respectful and respectable men in the universe. He had a wife who adored him despite the fact that he was far from handsome or wealthy; she loved him because he was a good man, period, full stop. Mom, by the way, was a smokin' hottie, enough so that my teenage friends creeped me out leering at her. Think: Racquel Welch's near-twin.

From the two of them, I learned a great fairy tale. I learned that good women loved men who were good because they were good men and that no other factors could derail that happy outcome. It took me decades to realize that my parents were a statistical outlier so far beyond the norm that it beggars description. The fact that they found each other was wonderful. So is winning the lottery. Both are about as likely.

Fantastic. Well done.

Thanks. I think so.

For the rest of us, who have built actual relationships with women as people,...

I never said I didn't have relationships. Let me clarify. I don't have *romantic* relationships.

we pity your total lack of understanding of the opposite sex,

I'd feel the same way if I didn't think I understood them. Unfortunately, I do.

But most of all we pity the fact you think you can get better social intercourse with someone you're paying to be nice to you than we can from people we've spent decades of our life working alongside.

That's an overstatement. I've "worked alongside", professionally, any number of women who consider me a great guy. Very high quality social intercourse came from those relationships.

It's just that none of them would fuck me if I was the last man on earth. They wouldn't hesistate to ask me to come over on a Saturday ("Bring your pickup; my boyfriend and I are moving to a new apartment.") but there are only so many times in a mans life when he's willing to ask a woman out on a date and get uncontrollable laughter as a response. (No, that is not an exaggeration; I've lost track of the number of times.)

Eventually, we find a different path.

Side note - My mom used to have some words for me that she thought were comforting. She'd say "Most women haven't yet been beaten up badly enough by life to appreciate a man as nice as you. Your day will come."

My response was usually "Yeah, Mom, at about roughly the time I go into a retirement home. I suppose I'll have plenty of tail, then, rolling their wheelchairs down the hall to my room."

Mom would laugh. It was a joke. But I think we both understood the truth of that little exchange and cried a little inside.

I'm sure your favourite prostitute will be crying a river at your funeral.

No one will cry. I have no family that will survive me and I will have no funeral. I long ago accepted that I will someday die in a small room, alone, staring at a blank wall. My attorney has my will and will disperse my few belongings. My cremated remains will be interred in the family plot without ceremony. There will be no mourning.

Believe it or not, recognizing the scope of ones successes and failures in life is oddly comforting. If you find my attitudes mysogynystic, then that's your call to make. Personally, I simply recognize that everyone fails at some thing(s) in life. I've had a success or two, here or there, that have made the world a slightly better place for a person or two. But I've failed at love often enough to give up trying.

You say mysogyny. I say I've simply grown tired of beating my head against that particular brick wall.

So true. It's hard to believe that a geek could reach 50 without figuring out that there are plenty of women who will think you're the greatest, bang your brains out, and not drive you crazy, all at that same time.

All that's required is that you hand over a stack of $100 bills, first.

Since I figured that out, all those desirable girls and women we've known and wanted since we were 12 years old, the ones who plead sincerely that they "just want a nice guy who'll treat me with the respect and romance I deserve" (and are, as we've all figured out by now, lying their asses off,) don't bother me so much. They can be ignored and replaced.

A poster below says it's possible to use the internet to meet socially awkward nerd women. Good for him and good for all you young nerdy guys. Maybe life will be easier for you. I, however, am old enough that the (ubiquitous, affordable) internet didn't exist until I was past my prime. Thus, I avail myself of a very old-fashioned alternative and, frankly, I know I get more and better sexual and social intercourse than a non-insignificant fraction of married folks.

You find your own path in this life, I suppose. Good luck, young nerds.

From TFA:

It features passenger comforts such as bigger windows, larger overhead bins and better ventilation.

Really? Those are the "passenger comforts" so significant they get a mention?

How about they just make the seats (ALL the seats) wide enough for normal Americans to sit comfortably without feeling they are intruding on the personal space of others?

I'd happily fly in slow, noisy, propeller-driven planes fired by coal if they'd just give us enough room to be comfortable on a long flight.

A good guard dog is a good thing, for sure, and the only answer for inside the house.

Personally, if I lived in an isolated area, I'd also raise guinea fowl to serve as an exterior alarm. They provide eggs, they're good to eat, and it's impossible to cross their yard without the whole bunch of them letting loose with some of the loudest, most annoying vocalizations in the animal kingdom. Seriously - nobody, I mean nobody, not even some 15th-generation super-ninja can approach your house without setting off a holy hell of a ruckus if you keep guineas around the house.

On points 2 and 3, I agree. Traditionally, there's also a point 4 on that list - have a cell phone to call for help in case the land line is cut. Nowadays, people don't usually bother to include that last bit since nearly all of us have cells with us all the time, anyway.

"That guy" lived in the middle of Arizona. Law enforcement help, under the best of circumstances, could not arrive in under an hour. Under those circumstances, a little self-reliance is a good thing.

And if you've never heard of biker gangs deciding to descend, en masse, on isolated ranch houses in the western U.S., you might want to read up on the subject. It's not common but it has happened.