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That's a giant exaggeration.

Full time work at Federal minimum wage ($9/hour) is about $1700/month. I just looked for single apartments in Houston (a large city with a thriving job market). Right away I found lots of apartments for around $500/month, which is under 30% of minimum wage income.

And of course, if you're on a tight budget, having your own apartment is an unnecessary luxury. You should really be sharing with a roommate, which provides further savings.

This is how it happens:

• The unhappy complain
• The government, pressed to do something, does something. Whatever they do, it is always against the landlords and/or builders — who are a minority. As a result, rents on existing and/or costs of building new apartments rises
• The unhappy complain
• (There is no PROFIT — except for the politicians in power.)

It was not always so — the problem in NYC, for example, started during the WW2, when rent control was introduced as a temporary measure to protect families of servicemen from rent-increases. 70 years later, the program still exists and the rent-controlled units are subsidized by other tenants of the same building. Like lottery-winners, only participation in lottery is voluntary...

Before dismissing this post as "a troll", observe, that the problem is highest in the Left-controlled cities: San Francisco, NYC says TFA. I may add Boston based on personal experience... Meanwhile, in Houston, TX or Atlanta, GA, for example, the prices seem about half as much as in San Francisco, CA.

This is how it happens:

• The unhappy complain
• The government, pressed to do something, does something. Whatever they do, it is always against the landlords and/or builders — who are a minority. As a result, rents on existing and/or costs of building new apartments rises
• The unhappy complain
• (There is no PROFIT — except for the politicians in power.)

It was not always so — the problem in NYC, for example, started during the WW2, when rent control was introduced as a temporary measure to protect families of servicemen from rent-increases. 70 years later, the program still exists and the rent-controlled units are subsidized by other tenants of the same building. Like lottery-winners, only participation in lottery is voluntary...

Before dismissing this post as "a troll", observe, that the problem is highest in the Left-controlled cities: San Francisco, NYC says TFA. I may add Boston based on personal experience... Meanwhile, in Houston, TX or Atlanta, GA, for example, the prices seem about half as much as in San Francisco, CA.

This is how it happens:

• The unhappy complain
• The government, pressed to do something, does something. Whatever they do, it is always against the landlords and/or builders — who are a minority. As a result, rents on existing and/or costs of building new apartments rises
• The unhappy complain
• (There is no PROFIT — except for the politicians in power.)

It was not always so — the problem in NYC, for example, started during the WW2, when rent control was introduced as a temporary measure to protect families of servicemen from rent-increases. 70 years later, the program still exists and the rent-controlled units are subsidized by other tenants of the same building. Like lottery-winners, only participation in lottery is voluntary...

Before dismissing this post as "a troll", observe, that the problem is highest in the Left-controlled cities: San Francisco, NYC says TFA. I may add Boston based on personal experience... Meanwhile, in Houston, TX or Atlanta, GA, for example, the prices seem about half as much as in San Francisco, CA.

You need to get over your favorite language/technology/term you read in the trade-rag you read last week. And then you need to get over yourself.

Give it up slashdot crowd. mod_perl is not a valid technology for a large scale website! Perl was designed for a task, and that task was NOT enterprise application development.

Spoken like someone who has never had to build a very large site (doing "real" work) completely in Perl/mod_perl. I can tell you that it most certainly can scale to enterprise needs. Did this guy do it right? I don't think so either but he most certainly learned a valuable lesson. Hopefully other people will study what he has done and improve their own systems based on his work.

For the record, Java wasn't built for enterprise application development either. As with Perl, people discovered that Java had a future there and here we are today.

A properly designed website with n-tier sepperation will be able to handle a large load and scale infinitly. You'll note that large websites who actually do real things besides logging people's daily problems don't use mod_perl and a thousand servers. There's a reason for this.

You're assuming two dangerous things... (1) That you can't have n-tier and Perl. And (2) that large mod_perl sites require lots of servers. To believe any of these things is to demonstrate your horrific misunderstanding of computer science in general. I pity the company that lets you design their architecture. Wait, no I don't.... I'll gladly take their money for fixing your mistakes.

Oh yeah, and let us not forget some other languages that are showing promise... specifically Python+Zope. In fact, I know of several people implementing n-tier applications with PHP on the front, Python in the middle and PostgreSQL in the back with much success.

And for the record, here are some large companies and sites heavily using mod_perl.

Want more?

I guarantee you that a lot of the emails being identified as "spam" by the filter is marketing content that quite possibly is of interest to the intended recipient.

A lot of companies send email that looks something like spam but which probably isn't. Looking like spam while not being so is easy - just send solicited marketing email. (Spam filters identify spam by the fact that it looks like someone is trying to sell you something.) If you're in that position, then being identifiable is good - it helps people create working blacklists or whitelists, and you think that you'll be on the whitelists.

In fact this early in the adoption curve I'd suspect that virtually all of this "5% of spam" comes from at least somewhat legitimate companies trying to get whitelisted. After all anyone who doesn't see themselves as legitimate has no reason to try to identify themselves. Why make yourself an easy blacklisting target? By contrast people who see themselves as sending clearly legitimate marketing email have every reason to take any steps which help Yahoo etc whitelist you.

In fact legitimate emailers actively want everyone to be identifiable. The easier it is for you to filter out obvious garbage, then the more likely it is that you won't filter overly aggressively and drop stuff that you asked for and presumably want. Things like your Amazon.com invoices. Balance statements at PayPal. The product review newsletter that you signed up for.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that is in exactly this position. Here is a summary of the business. People sign up with us to search for apartments. (We do not buy or sell email addresses. In fact doing so would be business suicide because we would immediately be identified as spammers and rightly get blocked. In addition the programmers would all quit.) If you find one through us, then the landlord owes us a finder's fee, and we owe you $100. Both of us want you to find an apartment. To help you, we'll send you emails with lists of properties based on searches that you did on our site in the hope that you'll find a home.

We know from experience that those targeted emails find a lot of people places to live. Therefore we want them to get through. Judging from the feedback that we get, the people who sign up generally do as well. Unfortunately the spam filters in the way can't tell whether the email is wanted - all that they can see is that there are phrases which look like marketing and therefore it looks like spam. But if we make ourselves identifiable and work with ISPs, the feedback that they get from their customers tells them that we're really not spam after all. And then we can get through those filters.

Last summer I decided to make a major move and planned on being able to land in a new city and find a job within 2 months. Insane you say? I admit to misjudging the situation. It took me 2 weeks to land a 6-figure job, at which point I had 2 other likely leads headed my way before I really got into full swing.

How did I accomplish a miracle like that?

Here are the contributing factors. I use a productive open source toolset, allowing me to be worth a lot to a potential employer. Feedback from open source work has both massively improved my skills and given me a portfolio that I can point to as proof of my ability. Through personal contacts, mostly made through open source, I found out that Los Angeles had a good job situation despite the overall poor economy. And through another personal contact, made through open source, I was able to arrive in a strange city and already have a network of personal contacts though whom I could get a referral.

Worked out pretty well, huh?

Now what would have happened if I had followed the advice in the letter to Aidan?

Well I would never have addressed some of the deficiencies that open source feedback corrected me on, I wouldn't have had a public portfolio, I would have never had opportunity to develop those contacts, and I probably would be using a less productive toolset.

The fact is that most programmers are not hired to produce software for sale. They never were. They are hired to produce inhouse software to meet specific business needs. The more productive those programmers become, the more they can justify good paychecks. Working the other way, anything that you do that discourages productivity makes it harder to justify a decent paycheck.

This equation doesn't change if you add a lot of free software is out there. My employer doesn't make money by selling software, nor do the employers of most companies that hire programmers. As far as they are concerned, software is a cost of doing business. Anything that brings it down improves profits and makes it easier to justify spending on complementary goods. Like my income.

Speaking of which, I'm declaring lunch over and stopping reading this site. It is time for me to continue keeping my employer convinced that I'd be a steal at twice the price.

I live right next door to them. Its the Fashion Mall in Keystone At The Crossing.