I make enough that I'd max out the EI cap here, though that's still something like 20-30% below the median income for families in the area according to statcan. It's almost like different areas have different costs of living, huh?

I live in a small but comfortable apartment, but around here that goes for slightly north of $2/sqft. If I move further away from work I can get slightly more sqft, but it doesn't get any cheaper because the difference is eaten up in transit costs. Food and misc other expenses eat up most of the rest. The only way I could afford a kid is if my wife was bringing in a second income.

Yeah, I'm the 1% :P

Unfortunately the employer doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the grocery store, my landlord, and the various other services I consume are all convinced they also deserve a premium.

Citation needed.

Up here in Canada, employment insurance currently maxes out at $485 per week. That's taxed, of course, so what you actually get comes out to something slightly over $1600/mo.

If you live in the middle of nowhere and own your property, that might possibly be comfortable. Maybe. For some definition of comfortable. $DEITY help you if you live in an urban area though, and you rent or have a mortgage, or have dependents.

1. The guy who designed the freeway overpass, your doc, your dentist, and your kid's teacher all did a bachelor's degree at some point. It may well have had no particular application towards whatever professional/graduate degree they ended up getting, I know plenty of people with arts degrees who have Master's degrees in CS.

2. Nobody grows up aspiring to be a shelf-stocker at Walmart. Your 'over-educated' (as if there is such a thing) waitress is stuck in a dead-end job with no use for the skills she (and you) paid for because of the grotesque un/underemployment rate. The world needs ditch diggers too, but a depression doesn't mean we should stop educating people.

I can't believe someone is seriously proposing we need *fewer* educated people.

Why go into the white collar equivalent?

I (sometimes) enjoy my work, but glamorous it ain't.

Unfortunately I work in an open concept office, so it's either headphones or listen to everything else around me, which is infinitely worse.

Ever notice how the people who decide on an open concept office usually have a door to theirs?

Thing is though, waking up super early every day won't make a job appear out of thin air. Working super hard doesn't guarantee my wage will match inflation, let alone be close to what a market wage is (or was.)

Personally, I can't complain too much. I don't enjoy my job, and the pay is low, but I make enough to get by and have a little extra for entertainment. I shudder to think how fucked I might be if I'd been born a couple of years later and was trying to break into the job market now. I subsist, but I don't thrive. Savings scraped together get wiped away at the meerest hint of a rainy day. Owning instead of renting is a pipe dream.

Marriage has never been high on my list of priorities, but the idea that I could settle down with someone and raise a couple of kids any time soon is laughable. It's the complete lack of financial security that's fucking this generation.

That hasn't been my experience. The majority of my relationships have started (talking, getting to know people) well before I slept with the person.

I look for someone who shares my interests and is fun to be around. The plural of anecdote is not evidence, but my friends behave the same way.

Can your friends not meet men because of porn, or is it because they're pursuing solitary activities like jogging listening to music?

Is it video games, or that women often have strange ideas of how courting works in the modern world? I've been *thrilled* when women approach me for a change.

That, and a worrisome phrase from your original post. These friends, when they meet a guy, do they let things progress or do they try to push the relationship? That "it's time to settle down" reeks of a ticking biological clock and/or desperation, and it's no more attractive to men than it is to women.

My $0.02

Actually, I think that's called being a douche.

Unemployment and wage stagnation are ruining a generation.

... unless you don't feel like putting X on a server, in which case building from ports is unsupported and sometimes obviously broken.

I don't imagine it is. Anandtech found it wasn't that difficult to evict stuff from the cache you actually wanted. Not to mention that if you start copying anything especially large (your MP3 collection, or installing a couple games from a Steam sale, say) you nuke the cache and are back to mechanical HD performance.

Personally, I prefer to do it manually. Stuff I want to load fast (Windows, applications, games, my profile folder) sit on an SSD. Bulk data sits on a mechanical drive.

These systems depend on notaries, why do I trust them any more than the CAs? The Perspectives notaries are... AWS and a handful of servers from a single American university (MIT)

Not exactly diverse.

Slashdot I know, but neither of you actually read the fucking article, did you? They're talking about last mile connections, not your home LAN.

Still, I don't know many computers built in the last few years that DON'T have gigE, and even though 802.11N doesn't come anywhere close, it still delivers >100mbit in real world settings... so the idea that most computers can't handle it is inane. Yeah most people can't stream 100MB/s to disk or something, and lower powered gear or cheap chipsets may not be able to max it out. But who cares? They can still do an order of magnitude better than what we have now.

These guys must have the imagination of a turnip if they can't see a use for faster transfers. The reason there's no killer app for gigabit residential connections is that most people can't get them, and that when they can the transfer caps are (relatively, at least) anaemic. Fix that and who CAN'T think of a use for it? Just off the top of my head, how about better quality streaming video? Forget dinky little 3-5mbit streams, you could pull down blu-ray quality 1080p all day long.

You're sort of right. The problem is bad drivers, regardless of their choice (or lack) of vehicle.

Everyone has a bad driver story, a bad cyclist story, a bad pedestrian story. They're all hazards, and it doesn't matter who's worse. They're all bad.