Thanks for all the grits.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote a book 10 years ago, before the housing boom and bust, about how education and safety were killing middle America. In a short summary (to a detailed book):

Prior to women entering the workforce, families were more stable, because in surviving off one income, if the breadwinner was sick, mom could get a job, so you lost some income.

After women entered the workforce, family finances became less stable, because now EITHER parent losing the job was a catastrophe. And two jobs might reduce the likelihood that both are unemployed, but drastically increases the likelihood that EITHER becomes unemployed, and that was destabilizing finances.

The main driver of the middle class squeeze has been housing, and housing is driven by safe neighborhoods and good schools. To live in such a neighborhood has required two incomes, because the two income families bid up prices. This has absolutely killed single income families, because they can't compete.

The neighborhood based schooling encourages families to struggle for neighborhoods with good schools, which amps up the arms race for the housing.

Charter Schools aren't something she advocates, but detaching schooling from housing helps put the breaks on the housing run up.

The fact that you can live in a neighborhood you can afford and send to a good school is a HUGE thing. My kids attend a top rated charter in our city, but a few miles from our home. There are students from all sorts of neighborhoods. But the fact that our school competes with schools in millionaire zones has meant that people don't need to take out obscene mortgages they can't afford to educate their children.

The astronomical cost of private education (as a result of education inflation everywhere) has taken away private schooling from the upper middle class with multiple children. The charter schools has allowed us to have a family size we are happy with, a good education for our children, and stay in a house we can afford instead of needing to trade up.

The kicker, our charter school gets 95% of the funding as a traditional school, and our charter rents its building instead of getting it for free. The taxpayers save, the families get a good school, and the housing pressure for elite neighborhoods is lessoned. Now, our charter isn't a great solution for the truly poor. There is a required volunteer/financial contribution (either/or) per family, the school fundraises for stuff that might be provided in a public school, etc., there is no bussing. But if you are working class and willing to make a real sacrifice, or middle class and willing to give up some luxuries, you get a GREAT education.

But things like art classes are gone, and offered as after school programs, etc. But for many of us, an extra $300-$2500/year/student - depending on add-ons chose - is way more affordable than either private schooling ($15k-$20k/student) or fancier housing, $10k-$15k or more per year. I fail to see the downside.

Google dominating for what, 8 years now?

Our young geeks may NOT remember a time before Google, but there was a time where the "hot" search engine changed every two years, and there were new engines launching all the time.

The Wild West phase of the Internet is over, but we're still on the frontier.

Or just get a Power Router running Mikrotik OS (Linux based)

http://www.mikrotikrouter.com/

Mikrotik can also run on PC based hardware, so if you have some task that requires a pile of power, you can find the hardware to do it.

http://mikrotik.com/

A project carrying an "open source" or "free software" license is not necessarily an "open source" project. Plenty of "Cathedral" projects with paid developers with an open source license that may (or may not) get downstream patches kicked up. Those projects are going to look like any other corporate development group. These are really the core projects.

The "open source projects" of people hacking code make up the bulk of developers in open source, and is the hobbyist developers. People that have a lot of time to devote to a hobby are either single, or older empty nesters. Men can hang out in the single realm and start a family @ 40, women cannot. This limits women from engaging in serious time commitments like open source projects.

The pool of women available to do this is pretty small.

That's without dealing with the fact that women tend to have tighter deviations from the norm in various areas, which means that any group that is selected from extreme outliers is going to be disproportionately male. This is true whether you are selecting politicians that reach Federal office, people that are extremely interested in programming to pursue as a hobby, moving to America as a day laboring immigrant, or criminally oriented men to form a gang. The outliers are predominately (but not exclusively) male.

In local politics, where the time commitment is NOT as extreme and the skill set needed to be elected is NOT that extreme, we have a pretty good mix of men and women on city counsels, school boards, mayoral seats, etc. Not 50-50, but a pretty good representation. We have plenty of female mayors, but we've NEVER had a female governor. Outliers in general are predominately male.

Agreed.

Very true, but I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of crap for a free service that can be used for education and entertainment. MySpace stepped over that line pretty quick years ago, and now facebook has just crossed the line. Google+, however, isn't as bad. Yet.

Given how much effort it takes just to get a simple feed of stuff from friends, the way it used to be, I have the feeling that this portends the end of usefulness for the facebook.

I agree, which is why I submitted the request to have my account removed yesterday. It's just too much BS in my browser anymore, which is why I left MySpace years ago for facebook.