Isn't that the freaking truth. I don't need a truck for work, but I have a lot of hobbies that require one so I've always driven a pickup since I don't want to mess with two vehicles. My current pickup is an 06 F150 I bought in 09 for 14K. It's got 300K miles on it and drastically needs replaced. The Engine and Transmission are in great shape but the frame and body are rusting away badly. A three year old used truck with the same feature set now is 60K. Which is half of what my house cost me in 2014. Course inflation is a bitch because the house is valued at 350K now. That's a fun tax bill. It's no wonder the average age of cars is getting older. They are too damn expensive.

Exactly. What we ought to do, is have government sponsored training in lot of fields that there is a need for. There are many fields that are critically understaffed and only getting worse. Why not have education centers that can give people options.

All you really have to do is look at dropout rates in typical 4 year schools. I've a degree in computer science and am a professional programmer. I can tell you that it was maybe half of my original freshman class made it to graduation in computer science. A lot of them dropped out completely and a even more switched majors to something easier.

You have basically 3 types of people when it comes to phones. First, are people like my mother who don't care about anything other than the phone works and it's cheap/free. These people are never going to use a Nexus/Pixel. This group doesn't know, understand or care about how long a phone is supported. Second, are the people like the wife and I. We tend to look for a good value in a phone and keep it a long time. We typically spend $300-$400 max (less if we can) so we are buying 1-2 year old phone models and using them for 5ish years. We want a better quality phone at a good price. 2-3 years is all the support you can expect from any phone manufacturer these days. So we understand it'll be unsupported for most of the time we are using it. This group will often get a Nexus/Pixel but it's already 1-2 years old at the time. For example, my wife's previous phone would no longer hold a charge. So we just bought her a new Pixel 3a for $350 just last month. She'll use that for 5 years or so. The third group is the group that the phone companies love. And it's a sizeable group. Lots of people buy the top of the line phone for $800 and up and use it for a year before getting the next big thing. Some of them do it because they use the phone as a status symbol. Some are tech or phone nerds. 2-3 years of support is way more than these people need.

I like Lunduke in general. Not as much as I did back in his Linux Action Show days but I still do. I completely agree his focus on the old school and retro is too much. How many people really want to run a 20 year old piece of software? He's also saying that windows has great backwards compatibility. Which is also false. Many things written for windows 7 don't even work right in windows 10. Little yet trying to go farther back.

Nope, I'm very big on work/life separation. I don't answer work calls/texts/emails outside of work hours. Working from home or not has nothing to do with that to me.

Easy, I have a spare bedroom as a home office. It even has a microwave, mini fridge and water cooler. It also sits right beside a half bath. When I'm in the home office, I'm at work. If I'm not, I'm not. I even stock it with drinks, snacks and pack my lunch so I don't end up wandering around the house all day. It's just as much separation for me as going into the actual office.

It's not that uncommon these days. Especially for people that aren't into tech. If all you do is social media, email, and stuff like that then a phone is enough for your needs. My company only issues laptops to a few departments that normally work remotely. Most of our workforce uses a desktop at work. So we have them use VM Ware from their PC at home to work remotely. However we found about 15% of our workforce needed to have a laptop temporarily issues to them. Either because their computer was so old they couldn't work from it (ran into a surprising number of people running XP still), They only had one computer and their spouse and or Kids were already using it for remote work/school or they didn't have one at all. Out of 100 people in company, it was something like 6-7 of them didn't even have a computer at home and just used their phones. We also had to send a couple of those people hotspots because they didn't have wifi at home.

I worked for a company remotely for 13 years. That is what they did. They were based in DC and I live in Ohio. So they averaged the cost of living of the two and determined my rate that way. It saved them quite a bit over hiring someone in DC and It kept me paid above average for my local market so I was very happy. I literally only left there because my business unit was being dissolved and absorbed into another that wouldn't allow me to work remotely so to keep the job I'd have to move to DC.

It isn't as hard as most companies think. First obviously everyone has to be able to access whatever file servers and networks and such they need. Easily accomplished these days for remote workers. Second, obviously is communication tools. Access to their email, whatever IM the company uses, and voip software phones. The software phones is important because there needs to be a company number to reach someone that works rather they are at the office or at home. Don't rely on employees cell phones for that. Third, a simple collaborative tool for meetings. With screen share. Tons of tools for this such as Webex and many others. That is all that is needed from a tech point of view. The rest is just a matter of policy and culture. Which is where most companies really fail.

My company has one. I've only been here a year and they are already tired of me telling them they really need to replace it. Silver light was killed by Microsoft in 2012ish IIRC. Silverlight only runs on IE to boot too. They finally agreeded that we need to do something about it when I showed them that Silverlight will be completely unsupported and unavailable to download for new machines in October 2021. I mean, I get it believe it or not. It's a portal that our partners in China use to know what we need produced and what we need shipped out when. It's a very critical part of our companies work flow and it's working perfectly fine at the moment. But they shouldn't have used Silverlight in the first place. That is 100% their own fault. They are still mad that I'm right though.

To me, the real take away is that only a fifth of "TV-Watching" is streaming. That seems way to low to be honest. Granted there are plenty of old folks out there like my Grandmother who just refuse to move past about 1980 technology wise. She still has a regular old cable box. It doesn't even have a DVR feature (who knew they still made those?). But that isn't the norm these days. Even for the elderly. I know more people her age that have at least one streaming service than those like her who don't. It just seems unfathomable to me. None of my friends have any type of cable TV at all. Not even the sports fans like me. There are lots of sports specific legal streaming options for several sports. The NFL is behind the ball on that one. But most of their games are over the air broadcast. Amazon has Thursday night games now too. I sign up for Sling during football season to get ESPN for Monday night football as well. All the playoffs are over the air as is the super bowl. I suppose if your team was on the other side of the country you probably couldn't watch them over the air every week though. Maybe it's an age thing, I'm only 35. But for everyone I know my age I'd say it's more like 90+% of TV watching is streaming.

Probably. They said computers, smartphones and tablets. A lot of people I know with a desk job listen to netflix or something else for most of the day why they are working. So while it may not be getting 100% of their focus. They are still consuming it. It's not really much different than when a house wife in the past would have the TV on in the background while cleaning or cooking dinner. The content is still being consumed, even if it's not the only thing going on.

I hear you, that's a great idea. But you could accomplish that with timers on regular bulbs. Old fashioned ones that don't need to connect to the internet at all even. They even have switches with timers built in these days. You don't need a smart bulb to do that.

I live in Columbus Now, and I have since 2002 and work in Tech. Housing in Columbus is weird. For the most part its very good, cheap and affordable. But there are some areas of the city where it's stupidly expensive for one reason or another. Some area's it's because it's near campus and landlords know that a bunch of college students will share the place so a 2-3K rent divided between 4-10 students is something most of the students will be fine with. Other areas like German village, Clintonville, or anywhere near the short north it also tends to be pretty pricey. I've honestly never figured out why but people freaking love living in those areas. Most of the city though, nowhere near that. The wife and I bought a great Brick house built in 1960 that sits on an acre of land with a few trees that are over 250 years old. Between the finished basement and two levels it's 4,100 square feet. It's great(until the fall when I gotta do something about the leaves), almost like living on your own private park. This place is 5 miles from downtown, 1 Mile from the freeway, in a very quite and safe neighborhood. We paid a little less than 200K for it. That same type of setup in NY or SF probably doesn't even exist. If it did, it would probably be astronomically expensive. I work in Tech and make well north of 200K. The wife works in banking and makes about 90K herself. For the two of us to afford that place wasn't an issue at all. According to all the cost of living calculators, I'd have to get about a 94% raise just to break even moving out to San Fran. Personally I don't think that is even enough considering how much more my federal taxes would be and the fact that I couldn't afford the same type of home there. People also think that Tech out here is just Banks and Insurance companies. Which isn't the case. Yes there are plenty of Banks and Insurance companies. Which honestly, so what? They pay pretty well too. But if you want something more exciting we have a lot of interesting start ups here too. Many places out in the Valley have satellite offices here too. There are interesting bio tech companies as well. Columbus is a huge logistics hub too, if your a big systems and numbers nerd then logistics is super interesting. Tons of data centers out this way. Which in addition to the typical data center jobs means there are a lot of companies that support data centers. Companies that specialize in equipment that run data centers and need embedded devices programmers. There is a surprising number of data science jobs as well between all the above companies and research labs as well.