Flash has always sucked on mobile. I'm glad Adobe is finally admitting it.
No one disputed that flash was terrible even before mobile devices. That has never been at issue. One of the great selling points on android was 'it's like an iphone, but with flash'.
And that's the problem. The web still uses flash, just because that's stupid doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and intentionally making phones less capable of browsing the web would seem to be counter productive. But I don't have stats on what percentage of sites people visit have only flash dependent content, and that's important because it's possible this entire discussion is irrelevant and no one important actually depends on flash. But I doubt it.
I suppose it forces you to end flash support on your service, but then why not kill the entire flash product line (desktop and mobile)? It's just an odd choice to kill it only on phones, and only some phones at that.
So to start with, I'm a PhD student finishing up, and we graduate about 20 PhD's a year where I am, so I'm quite familiar with what's happening to them. We have an IBM lab here in town which takes a bunch, and Cisco just bought out a company that has a lab here as well, we have a few every year who go to google, MS and facebook and AMD etc.
Firstly, a PhD can open doors to many jobs outside academia, as an industry researcher
I didn't say it can't. But if you're mature it's much harder to get that door opened. Besides that, a researcher is not a programmer, if the OP is a programmer and thinking a PhD will make him an uber programmer he's mistaken.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "on 20k a year"
You understood exactly. You get paid ~20k a year to live on while you're there. Lots of places don't have summer internships for grad students. Honestly, i can't see how that would be a good idea. We've tried it here and it was always a disaster. The moment you let people out of the door and experiencing real pay they don't want to come back, and they're always scrambling away 6 weeks into the term trying to finish up projects that were supposed to be done over the summer and so on. A PhD programme should have you focus on actually getting the PhD done, internships are for undergrads.
You need to think of a PhD like this: it's an apprenticeship.
No, it isn't. That's a Post Doc. But I see what you're getting at. The OP would be in a difficult position because he's lining up to start a new career when he's already in one that can do well. If he said he was a computer tech making 40k a year who was looking to do a PhD in comp sci that's a different calculation because the PhD in comp sci would be much more lucrative than a computer tech job.
Many of the faculty I have spoken with prefer older students
Yes, older students can make the faculty look good by actually completing and being more flexible than a starting student. Faculty are happy to have any student they think will finish. Agreeing to be 'anyone who can finish' isn't necessarily a good plan on a personal level.
Also, if you want a PhD, apply for a PhD.
this advice needs to be context sensitive. The OP isn't sure he wants a PhD, and doesn't appear to have an MSc. Applying directly to a PhD in many cases isn't possible at all, and applying to a PhD programme and then deciding he hates it could leave him with nothing. Some places (including some UK schools I know of) will give an MSc on a partially completed PhD. But that depends on what school you're going to.
letters of reference are probably the most important part of your graduate application
Only if you don't have a supervisor arranged first, which you should. Otherwise your name is just on a list that's sent out to faculty with your academic average and your letters of recommendation, at which point yes, if that's the first time a potential supervisor heard of you, your letters of recommendation matter. If that's the first time they're hearing of you, you're doing it wrong. There's no point wasting money applying to a programme that can't even consider taking you, so you always ask first if they're looking for PhD students, give a description of yourself and then apply. Applying first is just pissing money away.
If you have a spouse, you will need to sit down with them and have a frank discussion about this, especially if you have kids. For me, this has been the hardest part.
Yes I'm in essentially the same boat. Grad school is a really stupid idea if you have financial commitments that can't be met with a 20k a year salary. I fortunately don't have kids but one of my friends does, and his kids are university age. Needless to say he had to drop out of our PhD programme because he could make 90k a year be
9000 GBP is no where near the average starting salary for an undergraduate even. It's about 1/4. For a BSc in comp sci you can easily make 35k GBP within a year of graduation.
In in canada and we get 23k ish a year unless you're at the university of toronto (where it's more like 35k, but you have to deal with brutal living expenses in toronto).
After tuition (7k) I take home about 17k.
A foreign student will make 37k or something, but then they have to pay 20k in tuition. That is if they get scholarships.
Granted, sweden probably recognizes that getting a PhD shouldn't leave you impoverished, while the rest of us use it as cheap slave labour, but the US and canada especially it's not well paid.
So letters of recommendation don't usually mean a whole lot for a senior student. If technically competent people have given you good recommendations that's fine, but usually you find a supervisor first, then apply.
A PhD in comp sci isn't a guarantee to anything, it's usually not worth it financially (an MSc usually is), and spending 4 years, or more, of your life on 20k a year with the theoretical payout at the end of it is a bad plan. Academia is usually based on years since you completed your PhD, so even though you could talk your way into some credit as a programmer (a programmer is not a scientist by the way), so that's more likely to be more harm than good. Research is usually very front loaded in a career, you produce the good stuff before you're 40, you supervise other people doing good stuff until you're 50, and then you teach and sit on committees and supervise people who may or may not do good stuff. If you're jumping into that process late you have to realize you're going to be treated like you're supposed to be 20 years younger than you are, and well, it's just not easily workable.
In terms of industry an MSc is worth it, a PhD isn't. An MSc shows you have a bit of a step up as a self starter, a bit more advanced knowledge and interest in a specialized area and you can do something interesting that isn't necessarily financially driven which still sounds cool. (My MSc was on GPU ray tracing, which, when I did it, wasn't going anywhere fast but everyone I applied for work with knew what those things were and immediately had a connect as to something 'interesting'). But for a PhD it's not usually worth it, industry experience is more valuable (and lucrative) unless you really need a PhD for a particular job you want, which would only be in academia, it's not worth. Again, keep in mind, a PhD is definitely science, you can get by as a programmer in a BSc and an MSc but if all you are is a programmer you're going to get your arse handed to you when someone asks you to develop a novel model of a problem or a novel solution and they don't really care what language you implement it in, if at all. Where I am we have a couple of PhD's in comp sci who I don't think ever write code, ever, but they're extremely well respected because they do theory of computation and fairly sophisticated mathematics development (which their grad students might implement).
As someone else said, there's no harm in doing a masters, and it's usually upside, so it's worth doing if you're interested, and the requirements are pretty lax to get in. Don't do a coursework masters, do a thesis masters though, coursework masters is like an undergrad with more advanced topics, so you're not getting anything, those are basically there to pad 'years of experience' for foreign students looking to move to your country. A masters you can reasonably accomplish at least part of it part time and keep your job (and income) too. Here the course requirements are 4 courses total, so one or two a term for a year or two, and then a thesis after (which is basically writing a 150 page book on some topic, and having an interesting idea you can demonstrate an example of).
A PhD though... ugh. It's a lot of risk, if you're a stellar programmer already it won't make you better and you're better to just keep making money. It lets you solve more novel problems, but those can be bad precisely because they're novel, which makes them hard to solve if not unsolvable. There's no guarantee for a decent gig at the end of it either, and you might end up stuck in a job that is the same as someone with an MSc, so you've wasted 4 years or more of good earning power on it.
That is a level that has been associated with economic destabilization, and no one seems to care. Our debt ratio is higher than any time except the time immediately surrounding WWII. This is a real problem. Not for the next couple of years, this could be a problem for decades, and probably will if it's not solved.
claiming something is a problem (wrongly) doesn't make it a problem. The UK ran the world with about 100% of GDP in debt for a century. http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_debt is tremendously illustrative, and I suggest you look at it. First, 250% of GDP in debt is manageable. Secondly, if you get yourself out of an economic crisis you can manage the debt.
As you (correctly) point out, the US has had much higher debt and managed quite successfully, which is the historical context, in fact that same historical context showed that massive spending and borrowing (ww2) was the way out of a long protracted recession and liquidity trap. Claiming you have some serious problem now despite the problem being half what it was when you manged quite well is making an intellectual pretzel.
The problem is when it doesn't work,
Well your plan demonstrably doesn't work, my plan demonstrably has worked in the past, so odds are it's the plan you should be going with. Clinging to a failed plan isn't helping anyone.
exactly what happened during the "stimulus"
Your assertion, unfortunately, is factually untrue. The stimulus worked about as well as one expected. One short term burst of 700 billion dollars in a crashing economy when it should have been 2 trillion will a very limited effect. It barely stopped the proverbial bleeding, and that's about all you can say for it. When the math says you should spend 2 trillion dollars and you spend a third of that don't turn around and claim the math calling for 2 trillion dollars was bad.
destroy the economy with runaway inflation within a decade of the recession ending.
I realize you're wrongly obsessed with inflation, without any real evidence that inflation will be a problem beyond your gut feeling, but that's not helping your case. Obviously stimulus like the olympics is worse than useless, a mountain of spending that immediately crashes does have an effect but not much of one, and in the end you're left with a bunch of junk you need to get rid of. Building bridges, roads, a space programme or the like can at least leave you with something to show at the end of it.
Obama stimulus plan (and touted by such luminaries as Krugman) that we just need to spend a lot of money, and it doesn't matter how.
Krugman was correct, the stimulus plan was about a third of the size needed at the time, and now that the situation has gotten worse because the stimulus was 1.4 trillion too small in 2009 another 3 trillion or so has been wasted on waffling around, and more will be needed to fix it.
One thing I've found is that, in the long run, economics is simple.
Simple is relative. Economics is inherently hard to test in a vacuum, but you have a series of natural experiments when governments make policies, and assuming you can do differential equations and stats, no, it's not that hard to figure out. And the people who have working predictive models are calling for more spending, and the people with models that predicted 4 years of inflation which didn't materialize are clearly not worth listening to.
insinuate that our mounting debt poses no long term risk, I have a problem with that. We can't ignore it.
Ignore is a strong word. It's not really a problem unless your politicians make it a problem, and it's certainly a manageable one if you bother to deal with it, as it has been dealt with by economies in much worse shape than yours.
Unfortunately you claim economics is simple, but then you base all o
So I realize that this is chapter ad verse from the Book of Bernanke
No actually, he's part of the problem. His refusal to use monetary policy to try and bolster employment means he should be removed from his position.
After all, even given your math, if the principal keeps increasing, the interest rate has to keep going down, right?
uh... no it doesn't. That's simply not mathematically correct.
So my question to you is, how long do you think the US can keep pushing interest rates lower? Certainly not forever. Probably not much longer at all. These historically low interest rates will have to increase at some point.
yes, interest rates will start to pick back up as there are things worth investing in, at which point you can start to cut spending and raise taxes. That's the whole point. You're in this mess because you refuse to get out of it because you're waiting for the end of it to start doing things that would end it. Circular stupidity is circular.
I make analogies to household finance because it's easier for people to see certain ideas as completely insane when framed in a conventional frame of reference
And this is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because your spending is my income and my spending is your income, but thanks for trying.
The problem with your strategy is the same problem that happened then: everything gets screwed up when the interest rate merry-go-round stops and the cost to service the debt balloons.
People have been claiming that's on the verge of happening for about 4 years. It hasn't. Eventually interest rates will rise yes, but right now they're in real (PPP) terms negative, so you have a long way to go before they become a problem.
Claiming that the debt is an artificial political construct is fantasyland.
True. The debt crisis is entirely a political construct. The debt itself is very real.
that amounted to as much as he makes in a year
Uh... this is why you don't compare personal finance to government. If your neighbour makes 75K a year and has a 300k loan on his house he's perfectly fine, but his debt is 400% of his income.
If only it were that easy - sorry, but you can't keep them this low forever.
uh.. you didn't really understand what I wrote did you? You don't need to keep interest rates low, in fact you only have some influence over interest rates. As long as your GDP is growing faster than debt (when you have decent employment and so on) then you're fine, and it's not an issue, and you have quite a lot of knobs to turn to keep nominal GDP growing faster than interest on your debt, especially when most of your debt is at a fixed rate for years.
. And that's why our debt problem isn't an artificial political issue. Anybody who thinks that hasn't thought this issue through past the next year or so.
other way around. Anyone who thinks now is the time to be worrying about debt is why you've been stuck in a liquidity trap for 4 years when you could have been out of it 3 years ago. Right now *is* the time to borrow more money to get employment going and get jobs created to spur demand to get the economy going. When demand picks back up then you cut those jobs and raise taxes and so on so that you can ride things along while the debt shrinks away. Anyone who can do math that has thought about this problem realizes that now is the time for more spending, and at negative real interest rates, that can easily include more debt, because in the long term gutting education, social security, healthcare etc. will just trap the US for a more protracted period of no growth, bad education with less competitive workers etc. until someone else picks up the slack and drives demand. That's a stupid long term plan, because your w
It's clear you haven't a clue. Interest rates are already at all time lows and have been for quite some time. That didn't really help. You seem to think the way out of debt is more debt and to print more money because after all it's an "artificial political construction" anyway. Just print money or declare it suddenly has more value.
No, that's not what I said. Borrow more money to get demand going again so the economy can keep functioning. Then *decrease* the value of money gradually over time (which even with 2% inflation is what happens) and then grow the economy on a nominal basis (again, what happens in the US with a growing population and growing productivity).
This is all a result of going off the gold standard
No. Greece is what happens when you're trapped in a currency you don't control, like gold. For Greece being trapped on the gold standard are exactly the same, and their problems reflect what would happen if you were still on gold. Not to mention all the bizarre effects of china and russia manipulating the price of gold to fuck with you.
Great fallacy. You have just shy of 3 trillion dollars in revenue. You've got a long way to go before interest on the debt comes anywhere near revenue, (and you're spending close to 4 trillion dollars a year total, so having 10 cents on every dollar in taxes paying interest is not, in and of itself a problem).
The US (and the UK especially) have had far far far worse debt situations than they have now and managed quite successfully. The UK peaked at over 300% of GDP in debt and fluttered around 150% for the better part of the 19th century. The US has peaked up around 200% of GDP in debt, and right now is fluttering around 100%.
Again, you can also gradually ease your way out of debt with inflation.
My general feeling is that there are probably about 30 or 40 cities across europe canada and australia that are all within a margin of error of each other, and you could sort of randomly pick one and be about as well off as the others.
By moving to europe. US 25 days off a year. Just about everywhere else on the list, more than 30, with some over 40. Even working a shitty call centre job in ireland will get you 5 weeks vacation. Finding that in the US or canada if you're not a professor is basically impossible.
*Health care is not an issue with health insurance (salaried IT worker). US physician skill level, medical equipment, drugs, and access/availability of care are top notch.
False. Lose your job, lose your insurance. You also pay a lot for inferior care. Even those insured in the US get bad care. The problem in the US is that you actually get a lot of treatments (even covered ones) that aren't very good, and insurance providers are interested in reducing costs or attracting customers with flashy treatments, not trying to provide the best care for the minimum cost. This is why, for example, the poorest in the UK get better healthcare on average than the richest in the US. e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/world/europe/03health.html?_r=1 and the UK system provides better outcomes for everyone.
Lets not get into things like lifetime caps on insurance, or not getting preventative care covered, because Obamacare will theoretically help but it's still an enormously wasteful system.
I saw significantly more racism/hate of specific foreign cultures/immigrants when living in areas of Finland
Without a doubt. Europe has a racism problem. It's just a different racism problem than the one in the US. If you're used to the one in europe why bother getting used to the one in the US? The racism problem in europe is going to get worse before it gets better as it becomes 'blame the turk' 'blame the arab' 'blame the indian' 'blame the roma' etc. for all that ails them, and their lack of jobs.
but they're often expensive
Unnecessarily expensive. As an american you are in many cases likely to get a better education for less money by being a foreign student in Canada or europe (paying 20k a year in tuition) than by staying in the US. Some of the state schools in the US aren't bad and aren't soul crushingly expensive, but every school in canada australia or europe is 'not bad and not soul crushingly expensive'.
obviously, if he's in southern europe especially. The issue isn't so much what *are* you doing, it's what job specifically are you capable of doing. A PhD in computer science is very different than a community college diploma in setting up a LAMP server.
The greeks are in the mess they are because they don't control their currency, and there's no transfer or averaging effect from the european union the way there is for poor states in the US, and because now that they're in this mess trying to balance their budget is going to make things worse not better.
If Europe had a single heathcare, retirement and maybe a few other things funds (like the US with medicare, medicaid and social security) greece would not be in nearly as a bad a situation as it is. They can't get out of it because they can't depreciate their currency.
I'm guessing you've been buying into the rhetoric that the greeks were somehow fiscally irresponsible and now need to be punished. That's completely batshit crazy economic policy, and going with that plan is why greece is in the mess it is. Their interest rates are absurd because everyone figures they can't stay in the euro (true without major changes), when they exit the euro, or the euro collapses it's not clear what debts they will be able to pay, if any.
The US situation is completely different. Which is pretty much as I described.
Greece needs euro area inflation, (the US can set it's own inflation targets), they need to refinance the debt they do have (which was flat at about 100% of GDP from 1993 to 2008) at interest rates they can afford (The US is paying negative real interest rates, and from the chart I linked the US 10 year rate is 1.73% whereas for greece it was over 8% before all sorts of policies kicked in to make tracking it today meaningless), and they need to spur job growth, while stopping existing economic contraction. The economic contraction is because the government is cutting spending, which is cutting government worker spending which is cutting consumer spending, which is cutting demand, which is cutting government revenue, which is cutting government spending. The US is going through the same thing with states and cities slashing employment rolls (teachers, firemen, police etc.), but it's buffeted by private sector growth. The US would be in good economic shape right now if you weren't cutting government spending, and you'd have significant growth. So the last point is how to attract investment. Greece can't attract investment because of a lot of factors, first is 'nominal wage rigidity', to be competitive everyone needs to take a pay cut, but they can't, and the euro area doesn't have strong enough inflation targets so employment will continue to lag, the second is that persistent unrest makes investing (and travel) risky. I have two weeks vacation left for this year, and as much as I could get a deal going to greece I'm not going to risk getting trapped at an airport for 2 days, or in athens in the middle of a strike. I could go to the US, where there's much lower risk for major protests etc.
So to summarize
Having to pay interest on a loan is absurd
That has no basis in what I said. If your interest rate is lower than your income growth the net effect is you are reducing the relative problem of the debt.
while free money is normal
Doesn't matter if it's normal. Right now people who have money are clamouring to give it to germany and the US. Either tax it away, borrow it, or both.
Balancing your budget is stupid
Right now it certainly is. If you don't understand that go run a business but don't try and do economics for a living.
while spending money you'll never have is smart
That would be the difference between a euro area country and the US. As I pointed out, the US can have the money if it wants it. Euro area countries cannot.
Ok, by objective measures, low crime, highest average disposable income (which, without specifics of his qualifications we can't pin down more), the 4 I listed at the end, on health, education, vacation time the US is still behind canada australia and northern europe. On immigration ease the US is behind northern europe (for a southern european anyway).
You would actually be hard pressed to find, on any average measure, a reason why the US is a better place to live than a number of choices elsewhere. If you're a staunch religious nutter then sure, but if you're a staunch religious nutter you're not going to ask on/. the best place to be.
If all you value is highest disposable income then I guess you want to move to norway Luxembourg or Qatar or something, but still not the US. If you're looking for what is, on average, the best place to live, it's not going to be in the US. That's why none of the links I had put any US cities on it.
If you're coming from India or the middle east it's a different calculation entirely. Because there you are much much much more concerned about where you can get into, and in what time frame. It doesn't do you any good if it's going to take 10 years to move to norway or 3 to move to the US even if the US is 10% worse by every objective measure. It's not that the US is really bad, but compared to europe it's not all that appealing, and if you just want riches there are smaller novelty states that will always outperform the US because they aren't burdened by being big which has a natural averaging effect.
I grant you, I'm assuming he's looking for an average measure of where is a good place to live, because he asked/. If you want to live somewhere with the highest average salary you can look it up yourself in 10 seconds.
No, but assassinating him in Ecuador would pose massive regional problems, and would be blatantly illegal (as would kidnapping him, which again, while not that hard, is not legal).
I'd be more worried about a change in government having a change of mind in Ecuador, and suddenly assange finding himself without a friendly government to protect him.
No, it doesn't. as the historical chart on gold prices I posted demonstrates. Gold easily flies around by a factor of 4 or 5 and that change can happen over a year or two.
The government that does business in your own currency controls QE. Gold production is external. Essentially it's always in a gold producers interest to fuck you over, it's not always in your governments own interest to fuck you over because they get paid with the same dollars you do.
Your debt is at negative interest rates for anything past 10 year notes. 16 trillion dollars is spread across 330 million people.
What matters isn't how much debt you have. That sounds strange, but hear me out. If you owed me 1 million dollars but I was charging you 1% interest a year (10k/year) you could probably manage. If you owed me 100k at 10% interest a year the net cost is the same. So then the issue with the US is whether or not your interest rates are going to magically spike (which despite all the predictions they haven't), and if they do whether or not you can still pay the debt off. Which you can.
The US debt problem is *entirely* an artificial political construction. Right now you should be borrowing several hundred billion dollars a year more to fund job creation (in this case in particular probably infrastructure rebuilding) so you can get the economy back to growing. Paying people unemployment when you could pay them to do work is simply stupid. Leaving people unemployed when there is work that needs to be done and you can borrow money at negative interest rates to pay them to do it is willful damage to the economy.
The way out of any debt problem for a government once the economy picks back up (which is different from a person) is to manage the money supply to keep interest rates low relative to nominal GDP growth (nominal GDP grows with inflation, productivity and population), and then make sure you have sensible tax revenue, especially when the economy is doing well. The US has a nominal GDP growth rate of 5% a year over the last 60 or so years (and remember the government can tweak that number itself with inflation and immigration), so even running a 4% of GDP deficit (which right now would be about 640 billion dollars) is still shrinking the relative size of the debt, which is all that matters.
That's simply not true. The best places to live are canada, australia or northern europe.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_livable_cities or http://money.msn.com/family-money/the-worlds-15-best-places-to-live/ etc.
For a southern european the best (and by far easiest) bet is simply northern europe, including germany, but preferably somewhere not in the euro zone. Even somewhere that is indexed to the euro, but not on the euro.
The US can be lucrative if you're in IT. But it has unnecessarily long work hours, bad health care, and a persistent civil rights and racism problem that aren't worth dealing with if you can avoid it. Not that europe doesn't have racism problems too, but they're different than in the US, so why deal with the US problem at all? If you go to the US and have kids you have to worry about the education they'll get, how you'll pay for post secondary etc. In a civilized country those are problems, but at 1/10th the magnitude, so why would you deal with it? Healthcare is the same sort of problem. If you're going to the US you may as well talk about brazil, russia, china, there are all very lucrative opportunities but you can also end up really screwed if the police or government or just some random local asshole decides they want rid of you.
If you're seriously worried about politics then the US and UK in particular are bad places to be. Both have political parties (the conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in the US) pushing thoroughly discredited economic policies on their own country, and that again, is just not worth dealing with. It's not that their problems aren't solvable, it's that the people in charge are deliberately not solving them. Germany is in the same boat, but their discredited policies are fucking over the rest of europe, rather than themselves.
Failing a european solution, which from an immigration perspective is by far the easiest, your second choice is probably canada. Australia is probably more lucrative, and you don't have to worry about being dragged down by the americans the way we do in canada, or buried in our own internal political stupidity (the french separatists in quebec, the Alberta-ontario split on oil vs manufacturing etc.) but canada is much closer to europe physically, which makes going home a lot less painful.
Then it's a matter of immigration. I'm not 100% sure on australia, but I would think they have the same thing as everywhere else, if you have paper IT skills it's easier to get immigration, at which point any of canada, australia, new zealand all work reasonably well.
The problem is the questioner is an "IT Researcher". It's hard to know what exactly that means. Is that a PhD in some IT field looking for a faculty position? Then basically anywhere you can find a job is the right answer, because faculty positions are decent everywhere. If you're looking for private sector research that's much harder, because it depends what you can do exactly.
It's not that there aren't great opportunities in second and 3rd world countries, there are, but if you don't know your way around the local system it's very hard to capitalize on those without a lot of money to start with. If you're just looking for a job to settle your life down with, then go somewhere with a high per capita income, decent vacation time, decent education and decent healthcare (on which the US gets 1/4, canada australia 3/4 and northern europe 4/4).
The hope is that they already have logic, and need the grammar, and not even very much of it, just enough to understand the difference between a logical concept and the programmer parlance of a particular method of implementing said logical concept.
In the same way that the first couple of weeks on the job as a programmer you hear a lot of MBA waffle, and have to figure out what it means and whether or not the upcoming quarterly report, retention bonuses or data-driven decisions matter to you.
For non programmers the barrier to entry is simply too high when dealing with on staff programmers. Trying to explain the difference between CSS and javascript to someone in marketing is about as painful as grandma tech support, so we don't generally do it, or if we do, we do it badly, leaving the guy in marketing with no fucking clue.
Unfortunately, this part of nerd culture bites us back in the arse, because we need to learn mind reading (we used to call a portion of a course we taught to cs grads 'mind reading' for this reason) to figure out what the requirements given to us are. The people asking us to do things don't really understand how we make it happen, so their requirements are bad, we are generally incapable of teaching them, so the requirements continue to be bad, and we make crappy products.
If someone thinks they've found staff who can talk to non programmers enough to get them to the point that programmers can catch them up more power to them. They're probably wrong, but this is a problem that needs to be solved.
You're right of course, that actual programming is a problem in logic, and some people simply aren't capable of thinking logically, but they're a lost cause anyway.
And you're basing this assertion on what exactly? You're 1 QE away from hyperinflation if you want to be, and an infinite number if you don't want to be. QE is however much money you want to create.
Nonsense statements are gibberish, which is pretty much everything you've posted. Hyperinflation is a deliberate choice, and can happen with gold (it can happen with gold involuntarily too), it's brought on by a need to eliminate debt, the US debt situation isn't artificial and isn't dire, so there'd be no reason to do so. But crazy people can do whatever they want. US debt isn't denominated in any major amount in a foreign currency, and the US has foreign currency holdings to back those up. Weimar germany had debts denominated in Francs (gold) which it couldn't pay, and so needed to get out of the debt it could pay (its own government debt).
The money I save is not to live a lavish lifestyle but rather to support me when my health fails and I can not support myself.
if you live in a civilized country, or make it to 65 in the US health care isn't an issue. But yes, you have the basic idea, don't waste money, save enough. Living on 10k doesn't mean much. Did you have to send kids to school? are you counting that? Do you own your home? How much did you have to pay to get there. You only live once unfortunately, and there are lots of things in the world worth doing if you have your health, and those can take money. We live in a wonderfully interesting world, and it's a pity if you never get to see much of it.
As you say, you make your own beer, if you don't have any more money then you pretty much have to, if you have money you can free up time spent making beer for other things and just buy your beer. For most people trying to balance kids, a home, getting to and from work, and retirement takes a pre tax income of 40 or 50k at a minimum if you want to have any time for the kids, any time for things that aren't directly related to work and so on.
but not as many as the paper dollar which has lost 95% of its value since 1913.
Which is completely irrelevant. Dollars today aren't the same as dollars 99 years ago, and no one would expect them to be. This is why governments have things like social safety nets that they index to inflation (government pensions, health care etc.).
Remember, if you have debt, any debt, the devaluing currency has real benefits. And by the way government debts are your debts. So are your dollar denominated direct assets (cash, bank savings, but not stocks or mutual funds) worth *more* than the debt you owe through your government.
which they are steadily eroding in value
which as I say, is reducing the relative value of your debts too.
The way to preserve your savings is to own things that can draw income. Owning *some* gold isn't a bad plan, but just owning gold is stupid because if you didn't know, the US doesn't control world gold production, that would be china australia and south africa (and south africa and australia are particularly problematic because of their per capita production being able to wreck havoc on bigger countries).
Gold has all of the problems real money does, and a few others, which is why no one sane still uses it.
The value has remained almost constant. Suit == 1/3 ounce of gold.
Precisely as I showed, the buying power of one ounce of gold has been all over the place, from 1920-30 it tanked quite a lot, now it's worth almost 4x what it was 100 years ago, but 30 years ago you could have said the same thing, and 3 years later it dropped 3/4 of its value. That's what's wrong with it.
Oh and the price of a suit has changed over time too as labour has changed.
On a nominal basis you would be correct. But on an inflation adjusted basis, no, it's not, and suggesting that it is is simply untrue. That's the point of using inflation adjusted data at all. You could do equivalent to one ounce of gold for the same effect, but the graph would be equally bizarre. One 'unit' of gold quadrupoled in buying power and then tanked.
Gold goes crazy in prize as various wars are fought (south africa anyone?), mines are found, fraudsters convince people to buy gold that drives the price up, and then people realize the scam, and it tanks again and so on.
Because governments ditched the stupidity of the gold standard years ago (and yes, they debased gold currencies too) and are hopefully never going back.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash has always sucked on mobile. I'm glad Adobe is finally admitting it.
No one disputed that flash was terrible even before mobile devices. That has never been at issue. One of the great selling points on android was 'it's like an iphone, but with flash'.
And that's the problem. The web still uses flash, just because that's stupid doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and intentionally making phones less capable of browsing the web would seem to be counter productive. But I don't have stats on what percentage of sites people visit have only flash dependent content, and that's important because it's possible this entire discussion is irrelevant and no one important actually depends on flash. But I doubt it.
I suppose it forces you to end flash support on your service, but then why not kill the entire flash product line (desktop and mobile)? It's just an odd choice to kill it only on phones, and only some phones at that.
So to start with, I'm a PhD student finishing up, and we graduate about 20 PhD's a year where I am, so I'm quite familiar with what's happening to them. We have an IBM lab here in town which takes a bunch, and Cisco just bought out a company that has a lab here as well, we have a few every year who go to google, MS and facebook and AMD etc.
Firstly, a PhD can open doors to many jobs outside academia, as an industry researcher
I didn't say it can't. But if you're mature it's much harder to get that door opened. Besides that, a researcher is not a programmer, if the OP is a programmer and thinking a PhD will make him an uber programmer he's mistaken.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "on 20k a year"
You understood exactly. You get paid ~20k a year to live on while you're there. Lots of places don't have summer internships for grad students. Honestly, i can't see how that would be a good idea. We've tried it here and it was always a disaster. The moment you let people out of the door and experiencing real pay they don't want to come back, and they're always scrambling away 6 weeks into the term trying to finish up projects that were supposed to be done over the summer and so on. A PhD programme should have you focus on actually getting the PhD done, internships are for undergrads.
You need to think of a PhD like this: it's an apprenticeship.
No, it isn't. That's a Post Doc. But I see what you're getting at. The OP would be in a difficult position because he's lining up to start a new career when he's already in one that can do well. If he said he was a computer tech making 40k a year who was looking to do a PhD in comp sci that's a different calculation because the PhD in comp sci would be much more lucrative than a computer tech job.
Many of the faculty I have spoken with prefer older students
Yes, older students can make the faculty look good by actually completing and being more flexible than a starting student. Faculty are happy to have any student they think will finish. Agreeing to be 'anyone who can finish' isn't necessarily a good plan on a personal level.
Also, if you want a PhD, apply for a PhD.
this advice needs to be context sensitive. The OP isn't sure he wants a PhD, and doesn't appear to have an MSc. Applying directly to a PhD in many cases isn't possible at all, and applying to a PhD programme and then deciding he hates it could leave him with nothing. Some places (including some UK schools I know of) will give an MSc on a partially completed PhD. But that depends on what school you're going to.
letters of reference are probably the most important part of your graduate application
Only if you don't have a supervisor arranged first, which you should. Otherwise your name is just on a list that's sent out to faculty with your academic average and your letters of recommendation, at which point yes, if that's the first time a potential supervisor heard of you, your letters of recommendation matter. If that's the first time they're hearing of you, you're doing it wrong. There's no point wasting money applying to a programme that can't even consider taking you, so you always ask first if they're looking for PhD students, give a description of yourself and then apply. Applying first is just pissing money away.
If you have a spouse, you will need to sit down with them and have a frank discussion about this, especially if you have kids. For me, this has been the hardest part.
Yes I'm in essentially the same boat. Grad school is a really stupid idea if you have financial commitments that can't be met with a 20k a year salary. I fortunately don't have kids but one of my friends does, and his kids are university age. Needless to say he had to drop out of our PhD programme because he could make 90k a year be
9000 GBP is no where near the average starting salary for an undergraduate even. It's about 1/4. For a BSc in comp sci you can easily make 35k GBP within a year of graduation.
In in canada and we get 23k ish a year unless you're at the university of toronto (where it's more like 35k, but you have to deal with brutal living expenses in toronto).
After tuition (7k) I take home about 17k.
A foreign student will make 37k or something, but then they have to pay 20k in tuition. That is if they get scholarships.
Granted, sweden probably recognizes that getting a PhD shouldn't leave you impoverished, while the rest of us use it as cheap slave labour, but the US and canada especially it's not well paid.
So letters of recommendation don't usually mean a whole lot for a senior student. If technically competent people have given you good recommendations that's fine, but usually you find a supervisor first, then apply.
A PhD in comp sci isn't a guarantee to anything, it's usually not worth it financially (an MSc usually is), and spending 4 years, or more, of your life on 20k a year with the theoretical payout at the end of it is a bad plan. Academia is usually based on years since you completed your PhD, so even though you could talk your way into some credit as a programmer (a programmer is not a scientist by the way), so that's more likely to be more harm than good. Research is usually very front loaded in a career, you produce the good stuff before you're 40, you supervise other people doing good stuff until you're 50, and then you teach and sit on committees and supervise people who may or may not do good stuff. If you're jumping into that process late you have to realize you're going to be treated like you're supposed to be 20 years younger than you are, and well, it's just not easily workable.
In terms of industry an MSc is worth it, a PhD isn't. An MSc shows you have a bit of a step up as a self starter, a bit more advanced knowledge and interest in a specialized area and you can do something interesting that isn't necessarily financially driven which still sounds cool. (My MSc was on GPU ray tracing, which, when I did it, wasn't going anywhere fast but everyone I applied for work with knew what those things were and immediately had a connect as to something 'interesting'). But for a PhD it's not usually worth it, industry experience is more valuable (and lucrative) unless you really need a PhD for a particular job you want, which would only be in academia, it's not worth. Again, keep in mind, a PhD is definitely science, you can get by as a programmer in a BSc and an MSc but if all you are is a programmer you're going to get your arse handed to you when someone asks you to develop a novel model of a problem or a novel solution and they don't really care what language you implement it in, if at all. Where I am we have a couple of PhD's in comp sci who I don't think ever write code, ever, but they're extremely well respected because they do theory of computation and fairly sophisticated mathematics development (which their grad students might implement).
As someone else said, there's no harm in doing a masters, and it's usually upside, so it's worth doing if you're interested, and the requirements are pretty lax to get in. Don't do a coursework masters, do a thesis masters though, coursework masters is like an undergrad with more advanced topics, so you're not getting anything, those are basically there to pad 'years of experience' for foreign students looking to move to your country. A masters you can reasonably accomplish at least part of it part time and keep your job (and income) too. Here the course requirements are 4 courses total, so one or two a term for a year or two, and then a thesis after (which is basically writing a 150 page book on some topic, and having an interesting idea you can demonstrate an example of).
A PhD though... ugh. It's a lot of risk, if you're a stellar programmer already it won't make you better and you're better to just keep making money. It lets you solve more novel problems, but those can be bad precisely because they're novel, which makes them hard to solve if not unsolvable. There's no guarantee for a decent gig at the end of it either, and you might end up stuck in a job that is the same as someone with an MSc, so you've wasted 4 years or more of good earning power on it.
That is a level that has been associated with economic destabilization, and no one seems to care. Our debt ratio is higher than any time except the time immediately surrounding WWII. This is a real problem. Not for the next couple of years, this could be a problem for decades, and probably will if it's not solved.
claiming something is a problem (wrongly) doesn't make it a problem. The UK ran the world with about 100% of GDP in debt for a century. http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_debt is tremendously illustrative, and I suggest you look at it. First, 250% of GDP in debt is manageable. Secondly, if you get yourself out of an economic crisis you can manage the debt.
As you (correctly) point out, the US has had much higher debt and managed quite successfully, which is the historical context, in fact that same historical context showed that massive spending and borrowing (ww2) was the way out of a long protracted recession and liquidity trap. Claiming you have some serious problem now despite the problem being half what it was when you manged quite well is making an intellectual pretzel.
The problem is when it doesn't work,
Well your plan demonstrably doesn't work, my plan demonstrably has worked in the past, so odds are it's the plan you should be going with. Clinging to a failed plan isn't helping anyone.
exactly what happened during the "stimulus"
Your assertion, unfortunately, is factually untrue. The stimulus worked about as well as one expected. One short term burst of 700 billion dollars in a crashing economy when it should have been 2 trillion will a very limited effect. It barely stopped the proverbial bleeding, and that's about all you can say for it. When the math says you should spend 2 trillion dollars and you spend a third of that don't turn around and claim the math calling for 2 trillion dollars was bad.
destroy the economy with runaway inflation within a decade of the recession ending.
I realize you're wrongly obsessed with inflation, without any real evidence that inflation will be a problem beyond your gut feeling, but that's not helping your case. Obviously stimulus like the olympics is worse than useless, a mountain of spending that immediately crashes does have an effect but not much of one, and in the end you're left with a bunch of junk you need to get rid of. Building bridges, roads, a space programme or the like can at least leave you with something to show at the end of it.
Obama stimulus plan (and touted by such luminaries as Krugman) that we just need to spend a lot of money, and it doesn't matter how.
Krugman was correct, the stimulus plan was about a third of the size needed at the time, and now that the situation has gotten worse because the stimulus was 1.4 trillion too small in 2009 another 3 trillion or so has been wasted on waffling around, and more will be needed to fix it.
One thing I've found is that, in the long run, economics is simple.
Simple is relative. Economics is inherently hard to test in a vacuum, but you have a series of natural experiments when governments make policies, and assuming you can do differential equations and stats, no, it's not that hard to figure out. And the people who have working predictive models are calling for more spending, and the people with models that predicted 4 years of inflation which didn't materialize are clearly not worth listening to.
insinuate that our mounting debt poses no long term risk, I have a problem with that. We can't ignore it.
Ignore is a strong word. It's not really a problem unless your politicians make it a problem, and it's certainly a manageable one if you bother to deal with it, as it has been dealt with by economies in much worse shape than yours.
Unfortunately you claim economics is simple, but then you base all o
So I realize that this is chapter ad verse from the Book of Bernanke
No actually, he's part of the problem. His refusal to use monetary policy to try and bolster employment means he should be removed from his position.
After all, even given your math, if the principal keeps increasing, the interest rate has to keep going down, right?
uh... no it doesn't. That's simply not mathematically correct.
So my question to you is, how long do you think the US can keep pushing interest rates lower? Certainly not forever. Probably not much longer at all. These historically low interest rates will have to increase at some point.
yes, interest rates will start to pick back up as there are things worth investing in, at which point you can start to cut spending and raise taxes. That's the whole point. You're in this mess because you refuse to get out of it because you're waiting for the end of it to start doing things that would end it. Circular stupidity is circular.
I make analogies to household finance because it's easier for people to see certain ideas as completely insane when framed in a conventional frame of reference
And this is a fundamentally flawed analogy, because your spending is my income and my spending is your income, but thanks for trying.
The problem with your strategy is the same problem that happened then: everything gets screwed up when the interest rate merry-go-round stops and the cost to service the debt balloons.
People have been claiming that's on the verge of happening for about 4 years. It hasn't. Eventually interest rates will rise yes, but right now they're in real (PPP) terms negative, so you have a long way to go before they become a problem.
Claiming that the debt is an artificial political construct is fantasyland.
True. The debt crisis is entirely a political construct. The debt itself is very real.
that amounted to as much as he makes in a year
Uh... this is why you don't compare personal finance to government. If your neighbour makes 75K a year and has a 300k loan on his house he's perfectly fine, but his debt is 400% of his income.
If only it were that easy - sorry, but you can't keep them this low forever.
uh.. you didn't really understand what I wrote did you? You don't need to keep interest rates low, in fact you only have some influence over interest rates. As long as your GDP is growing faster than debt (when you have decent employment and so on) then you're fine, and it's not an issue, and you have quite a lot of knobs to turn to keep nominal GDP growing faster than interest on your debt, especially when most of your debt is at a fixed rate for years.
. And that's why our debt problem isn't an artificial political issue. Anybody who thinks that hasn't thought this issue through past the next year or so.
other way around. Anyone who thinks now is the time to be worrying about debt is why you've been stuck in a liquidity trap for 4 years when you could have been out of it 3 years ago. Right now *is* the time to borrow more money to get employment going and get jobs created to spur demand to get the economy going. When demand picks back up then you cut those jobs and raise taxes and so on so that you can ride things along while the debt shrinks away. Anyone who can do math that has thought about this problem realizes that now is the time for more spending, and at negative real interest rates, that can easily include more debt, because in the long term gutting education, social security, healthcare etc. will just trap the US for a more protracted period of no growth, bad education with less competitive workers etc. until someone else picks up the slack and drives demand. That's a stupid long term plan, because your w
It's clear you haven't a clue. Interest rates are already at all time lows and have been for quite some time. That didn't really help. You seem to think the way out of debt is more debt and to print more money because after all it's an "artificial political construction" anyway. Just print money or declare it suddenly has more value.
No, that's not what I said. Borrow more money to get demand going again so the economy can keep functioning. Then *decrease* the value of money gradually over time (which even with 2% inflation is what happens) and then grow the economy on a nominal basis (again, what happens in the US with a growing population and growing productivity).
This is all a result of going off the gold standard
No. Greece is what happens when you're trapped in a currency you don't control, like gold. For Greece being trapped on the gold standard are exactly the same, and their problems reflect what would happen if you were still on gold. Not to mention all the bizarre effects of china and russia manipulating the price of gold to fuck with you.
Great fallacy. You have just shy of 3 trillion dollars in revenue. You've got a long way to go before interest on the debt comes anywhere near revenue, (and you're spending close to 4 trillion dollars a year total, so having 10 cents on every dollar in taxes paying interest is not, in and of itself a problem).
The US (and the UK especially) have had far far far worse debt situations than they have now and managed quite successfully. The UK peaked at over 300% of GDP in debt and fluttered around 150% for the better part of the 19th century. The US has peaked up around 200% of GDP in debt, and right now is fluttering around 100%.
Again, you can also gradually ease your way out of debt with inflation.
My general feeling is that there are probably about 30 or 40 cities across europe canada and australia that are all within a margin of error of each other, and you could sort of randomly pick one and be about as well off as the others.
*High work hours are easy to fix -
http://squirrelers.com/2010/10/20/vacation-days-by-country-how-do-we-rate/
By moving to europe. US 25 days off a year. Just about everywhere else on the list, more than 30, with some over 40. Even working a shitty call centre job in ireland will get you 5 weeks vacation. Finding that in the US or canada if you're not a professor is basically impossible.
*Health care is not an issue with health insurance (salaried IT worker). US physician skill level, medical equipment, drugs, and access/availability of care are top notch.
False. Lose your job, lose your insurance. You also pay a lot for inferior care. Even those insured in the US get bad care. The problem in the US is that you actually get a lot of treatments (even covered ones) that aren't very good, and insurance providers are interested in reducing costs or attracting customers with flashy treatments, not trying to provide the best care for the minimum cost. This is why, for example, the poorest in the UK get better healthcare on average than the richest in the US. e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/world/europe/03health.html?_r=1 and the UK system provides better outcomes for everyone.
Lets not get into things like lifetime caps on insurance, or not getting preventative care covered, because Obamacare will theoretically help but it's still an enormously wasteful system.
I saw significantly more racism/hate of specific foreign cultures/immigrants when living in areas of Finland
Without a doubt. Europe has a racism problem. It's just a different racism problem than the one in the US. If you're used to the one in europe why bother getting used to the one in the US? The racism problem in europe is going to get worse before it gets better as it becomes 'blame the turk' 'blame the arab' 'blame the indian' 'blame the roma' etc. for all that ails them, and their lack of jobs.
but they're often expensive
Unnecessarily expensive. As an american you are in many cases likely to get a better education for less money by being a foreign student in Canada or europe (paying 20k a year in tuition) than by staying in the US. Some of the state schools in the US aren't bad and aren't soul crushingly expensive, but every school in canada australia or europe is 'not bad and not soul crushingly expensive'.
obviously, if he's in southern europe especially. The issue isn't so much what *are* you doing, it's what job specifically are you capable of doing. A PhD in computer science is very different than a community college diploma in setting up a LAMP server.
The greeks are in the mess they are because they don't control their currency, and there's no transfer or averaging effect from the european union the way there is for poor states in the US, and because now that they're in this mess trying to balance their budget is going to make things worse not better.
If Europe had a single heathcare, retirement and maybe a few other things funds (like the US with medicare, medicaid and social security) greece would not be in nearly as a bad a situation as it is. They can't get out of it because they can't depreciate their currency.
I'm guessing you've been buying into the rhetoric that the greeks were somehow fiscally irresponsible and now need to be punished. That's completely batshit crazy economic policy, and going with that plan is why greece is in the mess it is. Their interest rates are absurd because everyone figures they can't stay in the euro (true without major changes), when they exit the euro, or the euro collapses it's not clear what debts they will be able to pay, if any.
The US situation is completely different. Which is pretty much as I described.
Greece needs euro area inflation, (the US can set it's own inflation targets), they need to refinance the debt they do have (which was flat at about 100% of GDP from 1993 to 2008) at interest rates they can afford (The US is paying negative real interest rates, and from the chart I linked the US 10 year rate is 1.73% whereas for greece it was over 8% before all sorts of policies kicked in to make tracking it today meaningless), and they need to spur job growth, while stopping existing economic contraction. The economic contraction is because the government is cutting spending, which is cutting government worker spending which is cutting consumer spending, which is cutting demand, which is cutting government revenue, which is cutting government spending. The US is going through the same thing with states and cities slashing employment rolls (teachers, firemen, police etc.), but it's buffeted by private sector growth. The US would be in good economic shape right now if you weren't cutting government spending, and you'd have significant growth. So the last point is how to attract investment. Greece can't attract investment because of a lot of factors, first is 'nominal wage rigidity', to be competitive everyone needs to take a pay cut, but they can't, and the euro area doesn't have strong enough inflation targets so employment will continue to lag, the second is that persistent unrest makes investing (and travel) risky. I have two weeks vacation left for this year, and as much as I could get a deal going to greece I'm not going to risk getting trapped at an airport for 2 days, or in athens in the middle of a strike. I could go to the US, where there's much lower risk for major protests etc.
So to summarize
Having to pay interest on a loan is absurd
That has no basis in what I said. If your interest rate is lower than your income growth the net effect is you are reducing the relative problem of the debt.
while free money is normal
Doesn't matter if it's normal. Right now people who have money are clamouring to give it to germany and the US. Either tax it away, borrow it, or both.
Balancing your budget is stupid
Right now it certainly is. If you don't understand that go run a business but don't try and do economics for a living.
while spending money you'll never have is smart
That would be the difference between a euro area country and the US. As I pointed out, the US can have the money if it wants it. Euro area countries cannot.
Ok, by objective measures, low crime, highest average disposable income (which, without specifics of his qualifications we can't pin down more), the 4 I listed at the end, on health, education, vacation time the US is still behind canada australia and northern europe. On immigration ease the US is behind northern europe (for a southern european anyway).
You would actually be hard pressed to find, on any average measure, a reason why the US is a better place to live than a number of choices elsewhere. If you're a staunch religious nutter then sure, but if you're a staunch religious nutter you're not going to ask on /. the best place to be.
If all you value is highest disposable income then I guess you want to move to norway Luxembourg or Qatar or something, but still not the US. If you're looking for what is, on average, the best place to live, it's not going to be in the US. That's why none of the links I had put any US cities on it.
If you're coming from India or the middle east it's a different calculation entirely. Because there you are much much much more concerned about where you can get into, and in what time frame. It doesn't do you any good if it's going to take 10 years to move to norway or 3 to move to the US even if the US is 10% worse by every objective measure. It's not that the US is really bad, but compared to europe it's not all that appealing, and if you just want riches there are smaller novelty states that will always outperform the US because they aren't burdened by being big which has a natural averaging effect.
I grant you, I'm assuming he's looking for an average measure of where is a good place to live, because he asked /. If you want to live somewhere with the highest average salary you can look it up yourself in 10 seconds.
No, but assassinating him in Ecuador would pose massive regional problems, and would be blatantly illegal (as would kidnapping him, which again, while not that hard, is not legal).
I'd be more worried about a change in government having a change of mind in Ecuador, and suddenly assange finding himself without a friendly government to protect him.
. It just seems that
No, it doesn't. as the historical chart on gold prices I posted demonstrates. Gold easily flies around by a factor of 4 or 5 and that change can happen over a year or two.
The government that does business in your own currency controls QE. Gold production is external. Essentially it's always in a gold producers interest to fuck you over, it's not always in your governments own interest to fuck you over because they get paid with the same dollars you do.
It is a huge Deal!
No, really, it's not. Saying it's a huge deal doesn't make it a huge deal.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/pages/textview.aspx?data=yield
Your debt is at negative interest rates for anything past 10 year notes. 16 trillion dollars is spread across 330 million people.
What matters isn't how much debt you have. That sounds strange, but hear me out. If you owed me 1 million dollars but I was charging you 1% interest a year (10k/year) you could probably manage. If you owed me 100k at 10% interest a year the net cost is the same. So then the issue with the US is whether or not your interest rates are going to magically spike (which despite all the predictions they haven't), and if they do whether or not you can still pay the debt off. Which you can.
The US debt problem is *entirely* an artificial political construction. Right now you should be borrowing several hundred billion dollars a year more to fund job creation (in this case in particular probably infrastructure rebuilding) so you can get the economy back to growing. Paying people unemployment when you could pay them to do work is simply stupid. Leaving people unemployed when there is work that needs to be done and you can borrow money at negative interest rates to pay them to do it is willful damage to the economy.
The way out of any debt problem for a government once the economy picks back up (which is different from a person) is to manage the money supply to keep interest rates low relative to nominal GDP growth (nominal GDP grows with inflation, productivity and population), and then make sure you have sensible tax revenue, especially when the economy is doing well. The US has a nominal GDP growth rate of 5% a year over the last 60 or so years (and remember the government can tweak that number itself with inflation and immigration), so even running a 4% of GDP deficit (which right now would be about 640 billion dollars) is still shrinking the relative size of the debt, which is all that matters.
The US - still the best place to live
That's simply not true. The best places to live are canada, australia or northern europe.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_livable_cities or http://money.msn.com/family-money/the-worlds-15-best-places-to-live/ etc.
For a southern european the best (and by far easiest) bet is simply northern europe, including germany, but preferably somewhere not in the euro zone. Even somewhere that is indexed to the euro, but not on the euro.
The US can be lucrative if you're in IT. But it has unnecessarily long work hours, bad health care, and a persistent civil rights and racism problem that aren't worth dealing with if you can avoid it. Not that europe doesn't have racism problems too, but they're different than in the US, so why deal with the US problem at all? If you go to the US and have kids you have to worry about the education they'll get, how you'll pay for post secondary etc. In a civilized country those are problems, but at 1/10th the magnitude, so why would you deal with it? Healthcare is the same sort of problem. If you're going to the US you may as well talk about brazil, russia, china, there are all very lucrative opportunities but you can also end up really screwed if the police or government or just some random local asshole decides they want rid of you.
If you're seriously worried about politics then the US and UK in particular are bad places to be. Both have political parties (the conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in the US) pushing thoroughly discredited economic policies on their own country, and that again, is just not worth dealing with. It's not that their problems aren't solvable, it's that the people in charge are deliberately not solving them. Germany is in the same boat, but their discredited policies are fucking over the rest of europe, rather than themselves.
Failing a european solution, which from an immigration perspective is by far the easiest, your second choice is probably canada. Australia is probably more lucrative, and you don't have to worry about being dragged down by the americans the way we do in canada, or buried in our own internal political stupidity (the french separatists in quebec, the Alberta-ontario split on oil vs manufacturing etc.) but canada is much closer to europe physically, which makes going home a lot less painful.
Then it's a matter of immigration. I'm not 100% sure on australia, but I would think they have the same thing as everywhere else, if you have paper IT skills it's easier to get immigration, at which point any of canada, australia, new zealand all work reasonably well.
The problem is the questioner is an "IT Researcher". It's hard to know what exactly that means. Is that a PhD in some IT field looking for a faculty position? Then basically anywhere you can find a job is the right answer, because faculty positions are decent everywhere. If you're looking for private sector research that's much harder, because it depends what you can do exactly.
It's not that there aren't great opportunities in second and 3rd world countries, there are, but if you don't know your way around the local system it's very hard to capitalize on those without a lot of money to start with. If you're just looking for a job to settle your life down with, then go somewhere with a high per capita income, decent vacation time, decent education and decent healthcare (on which the US gets 1/4, canada australia 3/4 and northern europe 4/4).
The hope is that they already have logic, and need the grammar, and not even very much of it, just enough to understand the difference between a logical concept and the programmer parlance of a particular method of implementing said logical concept.
In the same way that the first couple of weeks on the job as a programmer you hear a lot of MBA waffle, and have to figure out what it means and whether or not the upcoming quarterly report, retention bonuses or data-driven decisions matter to you.
For non programmers the barrier to entry is simply too high when dealing with on staff programmers. Trying to explain the difference between CSS and javascript to someone in marketing is about as painful as grandma tech support, so we don't generally do it, or if we do, we do it badly, leaving the guy in marketing with no fucking clue.
Unfortunately, this part of nerd culture bites us back in the arse, because we need to learn mind reading (we used to call a portion of a course we taught to cs grads 'mind reading' for this reason) to figure out what the requirements given to us are. The people asking us to do things don't really understand how we make it happen, so their requirements are bad, we are generally incapable of teaching them, so the requirements continue to be bad, and we make crappy products.
If someone thinks they've found staff who can talk to non programmers enough to get them to the point that programmers can catch them up more power to them. They're probably wrong, but this is a problem that needs to be solved.
You're right of course, that actual programming is a problem in logic, and some people simply aren't capable of thinking logically, but they're a lost cause anyway.
Worked for warren buffet.
And you're basing this assertion on what exactly? You're 1 QE away from hyperinflation if you want to be, and an infinite number if you don't want to be. QE is however much money you want to create.
Nonsense statements are gibberish, which is pretty much everything you've posted. Hyperinflation is a deliberate choice, and can happen with gold (it can happen with gold involuntarily too), it's brought on by a need to eliminate debt, the US debt situation isn't artificial and isn't dire, so there'd be no reason to do so. But crazy people can do whatever they want. US debt isn't denominated in any major amount in a foreign currency, and the US has foreign currency holdings to back those up. Weimar germany had debts denominated in Francs (gold) which it couldn't pay, and so needed to get out of the debt it could pay (its own government debt).
The money I save is not to live a lavish lifestyle but rather to support me when my health fails and I can not support myself.
if you live in a civilized country, or make it to 65 in the US health care isn't an issue. But yes, you have the basic idea, don't waste money, save enough. Living on 10k doesn't mean much. Did you have to send kids to school? are you counting that? Do you own your home? How much did you have to pay to get there. You only live once unfortunately, and there are lots of things in the world worth doing if you have your health, and those can take money. We live in a wonderfully interesting world, and it's a pity if you never get to see much of it.
As you say, you make your own beer, if you don't have any more money then you pretty much have to, if you have money you can free up time spent making beer for other things and just buy your beer. For most people trying to balance kids, a home, getting to and from work, and retirement takes a pre tax income of 40 or 50k at a minimum if you want to have any time for the kids, any time for things that aren't directly related to work and so on.
but not as many as the paper dollar which has lost 95% of its value since 1913.
Which is completely irrelevant. Dollars today aren't the same as dollars 99 years ago, and no one would expect them to be. This is why governments have things like social safety nets that they index to inflation (government pensions, health care etc.).
Remember, if you have debt, any debt, the devaluing currency has real benefits. And by the way government debts are your debts. So are your dollar denominated direct assets (cash, bank savings, but not stocks or mutual funds) worth *more* than the debt you owe through your government.
which they are steadily eroding in value
which as I say, is reducing the relative value of your debts too.
The way to preserve your savings is to own things that can draw income. Owning *some* gold isn't a bad plan, but just owning gold is stupid because if you didn't know, the US doesn't control world gold production, that would be china australia and south africa (and south africa and australia are particularly problematic because of their per capita production being able to wreck havoc on bigger countries).
Gold has all of the problems real money does, and a few others, which is why no one sane still uses it.
The value has remained almost constant. Suit == 1/3 ounce of gold.
Precisely as I showed, the buying power of one ounce of gold has been all over the place, from 1920-30 it tanked quite a lot, now it's worth almost 4x what it was 100 years ago, but 30 years ago you could have said the same thing, and 3 years later it dropped 3/4 of its value. That's what's wrong with it.
Oh and the price of a suit has changed over time too as labour has changed.
Uh... hence the inflation adjusted.
On a nominal basis you would be correct. But on an inflation adjusted basis, no, it's not, and suggesting that it is is simply untrue. That's the point of using inflation adjusted data at all. You could do equivalent to one ounce of gold for the same effect, but the graph would be equally bizarre. One 'unit' of gold quadrupoled in buying power and then tanked.
Gold goes crazy in prize as various wars are fought (south africa anyone?), mines are found, fraudsters convince people to buy gold that drives the price up, and then people realize the scam, and it tanks again and so on.
Because governments ditched the stupidity of the gold standard years ago (and yes, they debased gold currencies too) and are hopefully never going back.