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A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her To Work by 7 AM (nytimes.com)
From a report on The New York Times: Sheila James starts her Monday, and the workweek, at 2:15 a.m. This might be normal for a baker or a morning radio host, but Ms. James is a standard American office worker. She is 62 and makes $81,000 a year as a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services in San Francisco. Her early start comes because San Francisco is one of the country's most expensive metropolitan areas. Ms. James lives about 80 miles away in Stockton, which has cheaper homes but requires her to commute on two trains and a bus, leaving at 4 a.m. Plenty of office workers get up at 5 a.m. or a bit before, but 2:15 is highly unusual. "Two-fifteen is early enough that some people are still having their evening," she said on a (very) early morning. But she likes to take her time and have coffee. She keeps the lights low and the house quiet and Zen-like. "I just can't rush like that," she said. When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 -- a reminder to leave for the train in 15 minutes -- her morning shifts from leisure to precision. It is a seven-minute drive to the station, where she catches the Altamont Corridor Express train.
I care.
...but the comments here are an absolute shit-show of whiny, self-centered assholes who can't resist telling the world how much they don't care about other people.
She chose to move 65 miles further away from San Francisco so she could live in a larger place and save $600 a month in rent (on an income of $81,000, keep in mind). FTFA:
Ms. James used to live closer, in Alameda, Calif., about 15 miles across San Francisco Bay from her work. But three years ago, after a developer bought her building and evicted Ms. James and her neighbors, she moved to Stockton.
Stockton has more for the money: Ms. James pays $1,000 a month in rent for her three-bedroom house, compared with $1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment she had in Alameda.
There are plenty of options a lot closer to San Francisco, for less than what she was paying before, and with more space than she had before. And looking at her old rate of $1600/month (which is still less less than 24% of her income) opens up the possibilities even more.
So call it what it is: she made a deliberate lifestyle/money/time tradeoff. We all do that sort of thing all the time, and don't get dramatic write-ups in the Times for it.
The US population continues to grow every year.
US population growth is entirely due to immigration. It's the same story in the entire developed world. The USA is almost treading water as far as internal population growth with a total fertility rate (births per woman) of about 2 (replacement is about 2.1, as birth rates are skewed slightly male). Canada and the EU sit at about 1.6.
When people have the option to control their fertility, by and large, they opt to not have children.
Every year new Americans are born.
And every year, more Americans die than are born.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time