I shop mostly on price, occasionally on convenience and selection. I've got a well-stocked Kroger about three blocks from my house. WalMart is 4-5 miles. I'd say WM gets 95% of my grocery business, cause - guess what - they're the cheapest! Kroger gets my "hmmm, need something special" and "$#!+, we just ran out of $ingredient" shopping. And I use a fake card.
I've got a KrogerPlus card that my sister (on the outher coast) got with an old address of hers a few years ago when she was visiting. In two years, I've never heard a peep from them, or any suspect vendor, for that matter. So they're either "stealth marketing" (aka doing nothing) or they don't bother correlating.
How many of us saw this coming when the previous story hit the wires? *raises hand*
It's like Lucy setting the football for Charlie Brown. Everytime a press release, like the indemnification one, comes out you know it's just a set up. You're just waiting to see what they're really going to do, and you can usually guess from the language exactly what's going to happen. It happens every time.
I'd love a solution which lets me re-distibute HD signal all over my house.
You see, with NTSC, this is a snap. Rack up your components, buy a frequency-agile modulator (multi-port or several singles, your choice), and some pass-band filters. Now, just take the output streams in baseband from your favorite components and remodulate them to free channels above your analog cable device or local OTA, and reinsert the signals on your CATV wiring in the house. In my house, that would be channel 70 for the DVD player, 80 for the main TiVo, and 90 for the main amplifier output (i.e.: whatever is playing in the living room). Now you can stroll to any TV and see regular TV/cable, or flip to the high channels and watch a DVD, or TiVo, or just put whatever's on the main system on (great for when you're cleaning up the house).
Now, I can't do this with HD...yet. With the TS on a carrier signal, output over coaxial, I could have HD on any HD-enabled set, with no special QAM, cablecard, or sat receiver necessary at every TV. Simple, and just about impossible.
Treat yourself to unending reinstalls of the software is more like it. And don't forget you need an ATI DX9 capable card. And it only gets OTA, no cable, no satellite. And it records in a proprietary format, not the transport stream. Oh, and don't try this with a AllInWonder graphics card - these specialty, high end graphics cards from ATI don't play nice together.
It works, once you get it running, but it isn't what I'd call a "fun" weekend(or full-summer-break) project.
just get a regular ol' input card with component or VGA or DVI inputs or whatever.
Yeah, that'll do it. Now, even if I could find one of those cards, I'd need to go drop three grand on a RAID array that could somehow handle the 1.5Gbps raw data rate coming off of that card. Either that or build a honkin' system to compress it in real time.
I'm going to venture a guess that this won't be a viable sub-$1000 solution for several more years.
country=US? every XP PC...hmm...can we just say every household that has a PC? (ignore companies..they have IT depts, ignore nonXP OSs, figure multiple PCs in a houshold balance out those numbers)
105,000,000 Households, 51% have computers in them. Say 54,000,000 computers to "fix"
$60,000,000,000 in cash on hand leaves $1,100 per pc for repairs. If Gates could hire base level techs directly, he'd probably end up paying $35/hr, burdened, to be generous. Now, lets say he deployed from one location, and sent techs out on 5 day repair missions. $500 plane ticket, $250 car rental, 4x$80/nite=$320 hotel, 5x35 M&IE=$175 = $1250. In a week of 40 hours, this tech will need to fix n computers, where 1100n=(1250+40*35).
n=2.4 computers per week, on average. Add 30% for management overhead on the whole shebang, and you'll have to do about 3 per week. That seems extremely doable.
Re:You want Slackware.
on
Knoppix Hacks
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· Score: 1
Okay, bad form to reply to your own post, but all I have to say is...
"newbie, go home"...and do a freakin' google search. Found it in a single file in the top five hits.
Re:You want Slackware.
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Slackware was one of the first distros I downloaded (I've got RH, Knoppix, Slackware, Mandrake, and, um, one other I can't remember, luring in my CD folders). It sounded like what I was looking for, but I never got a chance to really get into it at the time (work always seems to get in the way of things I want to do;-)
That was a couple of years ago, and I hadn't really looked back at it. I should have taken more time to read the book that goes with it. I just cliked over, and I think I'm going to take a few evenings to read through the whole thing, as it seems to be what I'm looking for.
BTW, is there an easy way to get the slackware "book" as a single chunk, either as linked html or some printable format? If not, my assistant is going to have a lousy afternoon;-)
Oh, and thanks for the suggestion. I've been online for 10+ years, and in the last three or four, I've encountered a lot of "newbie, go home" attitude on the ne. It's good to see that it's not everyone.
Re:Umm, using a tool is a hack?
on
Knoppix Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Okay, mod me OT, but since you've pointed to whta looks like a quite useful book for the linux-initiated, here's question for you:
What is a a good beginners book for linux? I'm not talking about the various O-reilly books on the different flavors of Linux (I have two, I think, though I can only find the RedHat one). I mean something that will walk you through the command line and internals, without being a reference for sysadmins.
---you can stop here to avoid a boring rant ---
You see, I grew up on the Apple II and DOS (IBM PC). I understand how it works and I cry a tear everytime I see Windows go farther from some of the simplicity of DOS. Luckily, I can still get to the command line. I started learning AIX a decade ago, but never got the hang of it (I'm still scared of vi, truth be told).
What I need is that background info on Linux. Some nuts and bolts info. I don't want to know how to install a CD and pick on pretty graphic widgets. How is the file system organized, and where do things go. I can infer only so much, and I hate wasting time guessing. I need to know how to get around, or I'll end up just giving up. I don't have hours a day to read the endless forum discussions, hoping to glean five minutes of knowledge, but I do have 30 or 40 minutes to read a chapter before bed.
I swear, I feel "that close" to being able to use Linux, but without a good foundation I know that I'll never really learn how to use it, and it will never take over my desktop.
Thanks
(yes, in the case of Linux, I'm one of the people I complain about in my sig...but at least I know it)
I work in a two person engineering firm, and I'm the only engineer. There ain't no slack here.
Oh, and I agree that there's overpopulation. Losing 4-5B would be a good start. But, again, there's that economics thing that prevents us from doing it too quickly. (I say we start with the lawyers. I've got a concrete mixer and can make up some forms for cast-in-place shoes in an afternoon). I still feel I've got the high ground, as I've limited my offspring to one (a 50% reduction, generationally).
My point was that even the folks without children will benefit from the children of others indirectly. This is a global, macro style benefit, not a personal benefit.
Sorry, I should have added a smiley to the comment. I didn't have my child until 10 years after I was married. We were DINKs in every sense of the word, and I resented those with kids, too.
Personally, I wish more folks would think before they had kids. I also think its stupid that there are tax incentives for having kids...they cost a $#!+load of money to taxpayers.
Nonetheless, there is an argument that there is a global benefit to having a next generation, even if it appears that there is none in your personal situation.
And, of course, if you don't want one don't have one. They're like having a boat, but they take more maintenance, aren't as fun, and cost more. They do attract chicks though.
There isn't a "right" age, but rather a right time and personal experience level. Oh, and a right finacial situation.
One: You have to have a marketable service, and a feel that the local economy can support your services. I talked to potential clients for a couple of months before I jumped, so I knew that there were very few engineers with my qualifications in the market.
Two: I've been doing engineering for a dozen or so years, in three different but related fields. I'm a licenced professional engineer, and have been for 7 of those years. I'm comfortable with my knowledge, and confident that I can provide value. I'm also a people-person, and don't mind putting in a few extra free hours of work to make a client really happy. I've had two clients in the last year send me a check for more than my invoice, because they felt I went above and beyond what was required.
Three: You've got to be somewhat financially stable. I was lucky - I had an open-ended second mortgage I could draw on, and a wife with a decent job that covered about 2/3 of our normal living expenses and health benefits. I also was being paid very little at my current employer, relative to my "market" rate, so I wasn't giving up too much. Figure out how little you can live on, look at your financing, and figure 6-18 months before you can really start paying for things. I know that's a long time, and you might get going in just three months, but it would suck to have to quit your own business just because you ran out of money before you really got going.
Unless there are local issues with self-employed young people, age doesn't really matter if you're really good at what you do, and can communicate effectively with your clients.
No, I'm taking big-budget, only-movie-you-have-to-see summer blockbuster with so much advertising and paid endorsements from critics ("Two Thumbs Up!") that eveyone has to see it. Might even need to invent a controvery around it to catch the folks who wouldn't otheriwse go.
Checking a list to make sure you don't leave some kid at the state capitol on a field trip is a critical safety issue (as well as a legal one).
Continuously monitoring the locations of all students within the bounds of a school building is excessive, for the simple reason that the record of that location at all times is not critical to the safety of the child.
You may argue that it IS critical should certain out-of-the-ordinary events take place. That's a poor excuse; that's what roll-call is for.
RFID in package handling provides continuous financial efficiencies, though inventory control and reduced manpower. Otherwise, the old system of waybills would work fine. I don't see the continuous advantages of this system for students.
(If the school were experiencing significant control issues, this could be one solution, but it doenst' sound as if that is the case here)
If I'm going to be part of the distribution system (DRM'd shared files, right?), I'm going to need to be reimbursed for my upload bandwith and access to local storage on my machine by either snocap or the record labels themselves.
I mean, if I didn't exist, they would have to serve the stuff themselves, and incur bandwith fees as a result (not per bit, but pay for bigger pipes to provide the service). Also, the distributed mechansim makes server storage less critical, lowering cost of maintenance for their systems.
I'm not being greedy, just practical. This is, after all a business relationship I have, right? I'm just doing this to help out the starving artists and help get them better sales and increase their royalties.
Well, um, yes. You've purchased a non-exclusive "license" to listen to the music on the tape, along with the physical media. The user who sold that tape to the store relinquished both the physical media and the license.
If there is a cost for transmission of new data on an alternative media (or simply for transmission), you should bear that cost, but not for the cost of the license. It's worth noting that associated costs (printing, transfer to the new media, reproduction, and transit, and profit on those parts) are acceptable, but marketing and royalties are not. Marketing is one of the largest chuncks of cash for an album, because it can be limitless.
Of course, the **AA don't see it this way because it's not in their financial interest. Licensing, to them, only occurs when no physical media exists.
I think he just did. iTMS is a very easy to use indexing tool which offers a huge catalog in an easily searchable way. You only pay when you find what you want, and $.99 isn't all that much if you've just dropped $400 on a player, and you can rip your existing CDs. Remember, a lot of these folks would buy the CDs anywaym and then have to rip them themselves. iTMS is a huge convenience.
And it's all about convenience. Apple has it down pat, and people are willing to pay for that.
Having had several newbie experiences on P2P myself, a really good, complete indexing service I only pay for when I get content sounds good to me. Make the price closer to allofmp3, and nobody's going to bother getting music over P2P except (a) for the principle of it and (b) they have no money and no job (aka lots of free time) so the time they spnd on P2P has novalue to begin with. The former are a pretty small fraction of the market, and you're not going to get the latter to pay no matter what you do.
Sounds to me like it's time to pull out the license agreement on 1984 and make a summer blockbuster. Anybody have two hundred mil they'd like to lend me?
many of which are resold back to the major pharma companies
So...they'll end up with "pure as the driven snow" RFID tags when they're repackaged by the pharma cos for distribution to retailers.
Part of the problem...
This looks like a regulatory issue, and has very little to do with the enduser. It looks a lot like proper oversight and policing of pharmaceutical distribution licenses is more likely to catch the bad guys than RFID tags and scans.
Don't worry, I'm raising mine right. Thanks to here you'll have social security benefits in your old age (just as you're paying for your parents/grandparents benefits now). What? You aren't going to rely on SS? You're not in the US?
Okay, the offspring of this generation are going to: pay taxes, buy houses, and buy stock when you're old and need to sell those things 'cause you need the money to live. Wihtout them, your assets would be of zero value (no buyers=no value).
As much as I rail against the bene's we give to parents, and the fact that we really don't need more people than are already here, most of our economics is based on the fact that the next generation will be at least a large as the current one.
My question to you is: How are you going to make up for the fact that you aren't doing your share to keep the world economics afloat? Do you really think picking up the slak for a couple lost hours every month makes you even? I think not.
You've missed the bargaining conditions. Nobody wants a raise. They want a 40 (or 50 or 60) hour workweek.
I left my job as a corporate drone when I realized that, no matter what I told the management, the schedules would always come back too short for the hours requried to do the job. They loved to promise the customer the world, and just figured we could put in the extra 15-20 hours a week to make it happen.
Bullshit. My time with my family is worth more than that. So I quit my job and hung our a shingle. It took a year to really turn a profit, but I'm swamped now. I've got the hours I want, and then some. If I want to work the extra dozen hours one week, I can, and I make an extra grand in the process. If I don't, I tell the client a realistic completion date, and they either wait or they find another engineer.
I'm moving to a new office in a month or two, and I'll be less than a mile from home. I help get my daughter ready for school in the morning, and I'm home for dinner and to tuck her in every night. Weekends are for playing. My blood pressure has dropped 15 points, and I rarely have stress headaches. Oh, and I'll make more this year than I made year-before last at my former company.
(I should add that my boss doesn't care if I take an hour on a Friday afternoon to read slashdot;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I shop mostly on price, occasionally on convenience and selection. I've got a well-stocked Kroger about three blocks from my house. WalMart is 4-5 miles. I'd say WM gets 95% of my grocery business, cause - guess what - they're the cheapest! Kroger gets my "hmmm, need something special" and "$#!+, we just ran out of $ingredient" shopping. And I use a fake card.
Well, if they do, they aren't letting on.
I've got a KrogerPlus card that my sister (on the outher coast) got with an old address of hers a few years ago when she was visiting. In two years, I've never heard a peep from them, or any suspect vendor, for that matter. So they're either "stealth marketing" (aka doing nothing) or they don't bother correlating.
Man, I haven't listend to What Up, Dog! in forever. Shame that Walk the Dinosaur was the only track worthwhile on the whole disc.
How many of us saw this coming when the previous story hit the wires? *raises hand*
It's like Lucy setting the football for Charlie Brown. Everytime a press release, like the indemnification one, comes out you know it's just a set up. You're just waiting to see what they're really going to do, and you can usually guess from the language exactly what's going to happen. It happens every time.
I'd love a solution which lets me re-distibute HD signal all over my house.
You see, with NTSC, this is a snap. Rack up your components, buy a frequency-agile modulator (multi-port or several singles, your choice), and some pass-band filters. Now, just take the output streams in baseband from your favorite components and remodulate them to free channels above your analog cable device or local OTA, and reinsert the signals on your CATV wiring in the house. In my house, that would be channel 70 for the DVD player, 80 for the main TiVo, and 90 for the main amplifier output (i.e.: whatever is playing in the living room). Now you can stroll to any TV and see regular TV/cable, or flip to the high channels and watch a DVD, or TiVo, or just put whatever's on the main system on (great for when you're cleaning up the house).
Now, I can't do this with HD...yet. With the TS on a carrier signal, output over coaxial, I could have HD on any HD-enabled set, with no special QAM, cablecard, or sat receiver necessary at every TV. Simple, and just about impossible.
Gotta love technology!
Treat yourself to unending reinstalls of the software is more like it. And don't forget you need an ATI DX9 capable card. And it only gets OTA, no cable, no satellite. And it records in a proprietary format, not the transport stream. Oh, and don't try this with a AllInWonder graphics card - these specialty, high end graphics cards from ATI don't play nice together.
It works, once you get it running, but it isn't what I'd call a "fun" weekend(or full-summer-break) project.
just get a regular ol' input card with component or VGA or DVI inputs or whatever.
Yeah, that'll do it. Now, even if I could find one of those cards, I'd need to go drop three grand on a RAID array that could somehow handle the 1.5Gbps raw data rate coming off of that card. Either that or build a honkin' system to compress it in real time.
I'm going to venture a guess that this won't be a viable sub-$1000 solution for several more years.
country=US?
every XP PC...hmm...can we just say every household that has a PC? (ignore companies..they have IT depts, ignore nonXP OSs, figure multiple PCs in a houshold balance out those numbers)
105,000,000 Households, 51% have computers in them. Say 54,000,000 computers to "fix"
$60,000,000,000 in cash on hand leaves $1,100 per pc for repairs. If Gates could hire base level techs directly, he'd probably end up paying $35/hr, burdened, to be generous. Now, lets say he deployed from one location, and sent techs out on 5 day repair missions. $500 plane ticket, $250 car rental, 4x$80/nite=$320 hotel, 5x35 M&IE=$175 = $1250. In a week of 40 hours, this tech will need to fix n computers, where 1100n=(1250+40*35).
n=2.4 computers per week, on average. Add 30% for management overhead on the whole shebang, and you'll have to do about 3 per week. That seems extremely doable.
Okay, bad form to reply to your own post, but all I have to say is...
"newbie, go home"...and do a freakin' google search. Found it in a single file in the top five hits.
Slackware was one of the first distros I downloaded (I've got RH, Knoppix, Slackware, Mandrake, and, um, one other I can't remember, luring in my CD folders). It sounded like what I was looking for, but I never got a chance to really get into it at the time (work always seems to get in the way of things I want to do ;-)
;-)
That was a couple of years ago, and I hadn't really looked back at it. I should have taken more time to read the book that goes with it. I just cliked over, and I think I'm going to take a few evenings to read through the whole thing, as it seems to be what I'm looking for.
BTW, is there an easy way to get the slackware "book" as a single chunk, either as linked html or some printable format? If not, my assistant is going to have a lousy afternoon
Oh, and thanks for the suggestion. I've been online for 10+ years, and in the last three or four, I've encountered a lot of "newbie, go home" attitude on the ne. It's good to see that it's not everyone.
Okay, mod me OT, but since you've pointed to whta looks like a quite useful book for the linux-initiated, here's question for you:
What is a a good beginners book for linux? I'm not talking about the various O-reilly books on the different flavors of Linux (I have two, I think, though I can only find the RedHat one). I mean something that will walk you through the command line and internals, without being a reference for sysadmins.
---you can stop here to avoid a boring rant ---
You see, I grew up on the Apple II and DOS (IBM PC). I understand how it works and I cry a tear everytime I see Windows go farther from some of the simplicity of DOS. Luckily, I can still get to the command line. I started learning AIX a decade ago, but never got the hang of it (I'm still scared of vi, truth be told).
What I need is that background info on Linux. Some nuts and bolts info. I don't want to know how to install a CD and pick on pretty graphic widgets. How is the file system organized, and where do things go. I can infer only so much, and I hate wasting time guessing. I need to know how to get around, or I'll end up just giving up. I don't have hours a day to read the endless forum discussions, hoping to glean five minutes of knowledge, but I do have 30 or 40 minutes to read a chapter before bed.
I swear, I feel "that close" to being able to use Linux, but without a good foundation I know that I'll never really learn how to use it, and it will never take over my desktop.
Thanks
(yes, in the case of Linux, I'm one of the people I complain about in my sig...but at least I know it)
I work in a two person engineering firm, and I'm the only engineer. There ain't no slack here.
Oh, and I agree that there's overpopulation. Losing 4-5B would be a good start. But, again, there's that economics thing that prevents us from doing it too quickly. (I say we start with the lawyers. I've got a concrete mixer and can make up some forms for cast-in-place shoes in an afternoon). I still feel I've got the high ground, as I've limited my offspring to one (a 50% reduction, generationally).
My point was that even the folks without children will benefit from the children of others indirectly. This is a global, macro style benefit, not a personal benefit.
Sorry, I should have added a smiley to the comment. I didn't have my child until 10 years after I was married. We were DINKs in every sense of the word, and I resented those with kids, too.
Personally, I wish more folks would think before they had kids. I also think its stupid that there are tax incentives for having kids...they cost a $#!+load of money to taxpayers.
Nonetheless, there is an argument that there is a global benefit to having a next generation, even if it appears that there is none in your personal situation.
And, of course, if you don't want one don't have one. They're like having a boat, but they take more maintenance, aren't as fun, and cost more. They do attract chicks though.
I'm a day late, but I'll answer.
There isn't a "right" age, but rather a right time and personal experience level. Oh, and a right finacial situation.
One: You have to have a marketable service, and a feel that the local economy can support your services. I talked to potential clients for a couple of months before I jumped, so I knew that there were very few engineers with my qualifications in the market.
Two: I've been doing engineering for a dozen or so years, in three different but related fields. I'm a licenced professional engineer, and have been for 7 of those years. I'm comfortable with my knowledge, and confident that I can provide value. I'm also a people-person, and don't mind putting in a few extra free hours of work to make a client really happy. I've had two clients in the last year send me a check for more than my invoice, because they felt I went above and beyond what was required.
Three: You've got to be somewhat financially stable. I was lucky - I had an open-ended second mortgage I could draw on, and a wife with a decent job that covered about 2/3 of our normal living expenses and health benefits. I also was being paid very little at my current employer, relative to my "market" rate, so I wasn't giving up too much. Figure out how little you can live on, look at your financing, and figure 6-18 months before you can really start paying for things. I know that's a long time, and you might get going in just three months, but it would suck to have to quit your own business just because you ran out of money before you really got going.
Unless there are local issues with self-employed young people, age doesn't really matter if you're really good at what you do, and can communicate effectively with your clients.
Never heard of it, and I was in HS in 1984.
No, I'm taking big-budget, only-movie-you-have-to-see summer blockbuster with so much advertising and paid endorsements from critics ("Two Thumbs Up!") that eveyone has to see it. Might even need to invent a controvery around it to catch the folks who wouldn't otheriwse go.
Yeah...more like that.
Actually, it's quite different, on one sense.
Checking a list to make sure you don't leave some kid at the state capitol on a field trip is a critical safety issue (as well as a legal one).
Continuously monitoring the locations of all students within the bounds of a school building is excessive, for the simple reason that the record of that location at all times is not critical to the safety of the child.
You may argue that it IS critical should certain out-of-the-ordinary events take place. That's a poor excuse; that's what roll-call is for.
RFID in package handling provides continuous financial efficiencies, though inventory control and reduced manpower. Otherwise, the old system of waybills would work fine. I don't see the continuous advantages of this system for students.
(If the school were experiencing significant control issues, this could be one solution, but it doenst' sound as if that is the case here)
Drip, drip, drip...
If I'm going to be part of the distribution system (DRM'd shared files, right?), I'm going to need to be reimbursed for my upload bandwith and access to local storage on my machine by either snocap or the record labels themselves.
I mean, if I didn't exist, they would have to serve the stuff themselves, and incur bandwith fees as a result (not per bit, but pay for bigger pipes to provide the service). Also, the distributed mechansim makes server storage less critical, lowering cost of maintenance for their systems.
I'm not being greedy, just practical. This is, after all a business relationship I have, right? I'm just doing this to help out the starving artists and help get them better sales and increase their royalties.
And the children. Think of the children.
So...where's my cut?
Well, um, yes. You've purchased a non-exclusive "license" to listen to the music on the tape, along with the physical media. The user who sold that tape to the store relinquished both the physical media and the license.
If there is a cost for transmission of new data on an alternative media (or simply for transmission), you should bear that cost, but not for the cost of the license. It's worth noting that associated costs (printing, transfer to the new media, reproduction, and transit, and profit on those parts) are acceptable, but marketing and royalties are not. Marketing is one of the largest chuncks of cash for an album, because it can be limitless.
Of course, the **AA don't see it this way because it's not in their financial interest. Licensing, to them, only occurs when no physical media exists.
I think he just did. iTMS is a very easy to use indexing tool which offers a huge catalog in an easily searchable way. You only pay when you find what you want, and $.99 isn't all that much if you've just dropped $400 on a player, and you can rip your existing CDs. Remember, a lot of these folks would buy the CDs anywaym and then have to rip them themselves. iTMS is a huge convenience.
And it's all about convenience. Apple has it down pat, and people are willing to pay for that.
Having had several newbie experiences on P2P myself, a really good, complete indexing service I only pay for when I get content sounds good to me. Make the price closer to allofmp3, and nobody's going to bother getting music over P2P except (a) for the principle of it and (b) they have no money and no job (aka lots of free time) so the time they spnd on P2P has novalue to begin with. The former are a pretty small fraction of the market, and you're not going to get the latter to pay no matter what you do.
Sounds to me like it's time to pull out the license agreement on 1984 and make a summer blockbuster. Anybody have two hundred mil they'd like to lend me?
many of which are resold back to the major pharma companies
So...they'll end up with "pure as the driven snow" RFID tags when they're repackaged by the pharma cos for distribution to retailers.
Part of the problem...
This looks like a regulatory issue, and has very little to do with the enduser. It looks a lot like proper oversight and policing of pharmaceutical distribution licenses is more likely to catch the bad guys than RFID tags and scans.
" and kids with groceries"
A modest proposal?
Don't worry, I'm raising mine right. Thanks to here you'll have social security benefits in your old age (just as you're paying for your parents/grandparents benefits now). What? You aren't going to rely on SS? You're not in the US?
Okay, the offspring of this generation are going to: pay taxes, buy houses, and buy stock when you're old and need to sell those things 'cause you need the money to live. Wihtout them, your assets would be of zero value (no buyers=no value).
As much as I rail against the bene's we give to parents, and the fact that we really don't need more people than are already here, most of our economics is based on the fact that the next generation will be at least a large as the current one.
My question to you is: How are you going to make up for the fact that you aren't doing your share to keep the world economics afloat? Do you really think picking up the slak for a couple lost hours every month makes you even? I think not.
You've missed the bargaining conditions. Nobody wants a raise. They want a 40 (or 50 or 60) hour workweek.
;-)
I left my job as a corporate drone when I realized that, no matter what I told the management, the schedules would always come back too short for the hours requried to do the job. They loved to promise the customer the world, and just figured we could put in the extra 15-20 hours a week to make it happen.
Bullshit. My time with my family is worth more than that. So I quit my job and hung our a shingle. It took a year to really turn a profit, but I'm swamped now. I've got the hours I want, and then some. If I want to work the extra dozen hours one week, I can, and I make an extra grand in the process. If I don't, I tell the client a realistic completion date, and they either wait or they find another engineer.
I'm moving to a new office in a month or two, and I'll be less than a mile from home. I help get my daughter ready for school in the morning, and I'm home for dinner and to tuck her in every night. Weekends are for playing. My blood pressure has dropped 15 points, and I rarely have stress headaches. Oh, and I'll make more this year than I made year-before last at my former company.
(I should add that my boss doesn't care if I take an hour on a Friday afternoon to read slashdot