Personally, I would put the money into a couple high-ticket items which will last, with accessories for them (because I rarely have the $ to also get the accessories). Get things which help me do things and give me the ability to expand and further enjoy my life. By this I mean things like:
* DSLR camera with lights and lenses. The lenses will sink that $10k quickly. Canon is the obvious choice unless you're looking to do landscapes almost exclusively, in which case that snazy new Sony is the cat's meow (OK it's about a year old at this point). * home security system with remote monitoring. * general home automation setup (there's a lot available, and inexpensively) * tools. Tools do not, in most cases, need replacement; you pass them on to your kids.
Nobody has so much as said it, but if you've got 5 TVs in your house, you've got some pretty severe problems: over-consumption, a sedentary lifestyle, and a consumerist mentality (as well as possibly a lack of communication in your household due to everyone being glued to different screens throughout the house). You should take this opportunity to change your lifestyle for the better.
Keep your acquisition of 'sedentary consumption' devices minimal. Get devices you can take with you:
* tablets * smartphones * batteries * chargers (eg. of the solar variety for camping?)
Thinkpad W520s? You mean laptops which have common business use as well as tracking and biometric software commonly installed and used, and don't have a quick and easy 'factory reset' like an iPad, allowing any idiot to turn them quickly?
Your reasoning is flawed. You're thinking backwards. Burglars bring their own guns not because home owners (or renters) have guns, but because they're available and force is respected. What you're saying is that criminals are protecting themselves, defensively from the homeowners they intend to victimize. That's absurd!
And it doesn't matter how rare "armed robbery" is when "robbery and assault" is a prevalent criminal pastime - just look at robbery crime rates (and rate changes) in the UK as an example.
Also, while it may be true that more armed robberies occur when there are more guns, as a percentage of total robberies, what is not true is that there is more burglary or more robbery in general. Such things drop precipitously pretty much any time there's an increase in firearm ownership or firearm law permissiveness.
I am fortunate that my house siding is cement. With the AP strategically placed in the basement, there is no signal at the sidewalk or the fence in the back yard. The next door neighbors may be able to receive the signal from their upstairs, but it's questionable.
A basement makes an awesome 'funnel' for your wireless signal.:)
Stone soup doesn't taste too good, and a stone wall is fairly effective at keeping things on one side of it...
Why on earth would I want to let someone access 'my' Internet and suck down the bandwidth I pay for (on a tight budget, I might add, so it's the cheapest one available) to torrent crap or watch Netflix?
I've been thinking about this. In my mind's eye, Awesome might be well configured for something like that, simply because it's written in Lua and pretty adaptable for things like eg. widgets. But I don't know the language or the wm well enough to know the answer to whether it would be adaptable for a touchscreen device without much of a headache: I'm guessing not.
Personally, things like this new Ubuntu framework only have limited applicability unless I can get my choice of window manager/DE once we switch over to full "desktop" mode.
I hate unity, but the question arises (after trying the latest on an ancient Eee901 netbook): WTF are you doing wrong? This lowly tablet doesn't even take that long to pull out the dash.
So what, it's more akin to your girlfriend going to the bathroom to douche before sex than it's like a new girlfriend coming over for a romantic dinner?
From my experience, $60k in the SF bay area is about 2/3 the living utility as $36k in South Dakota. I had to make at least $80k to make it justifiable, financially - and even then it wasn't worth the pain in the ass of being in SF, where there were a lot more 'incidental' costs.
Sure, so SF is high on the stupid meter. Even LA is more 'right' than SF is, though. Does the stupid meter pull the left/right meter, or vice versa? It's hard to tell.
Define 'prosperous'. Highest cost of living? Highest mean income? What are we talking about, exactly?
I can live on a third as much, with more free time that I can spend optionally indoors with or without people, or outdoors with or without people, in other parts of the country - all while having a higher standard of living.
I have a 3 bedroom house with a full basement and run my utilities without worrying about how much it costs to heat or light the place. I can buy incandescent bulbs in a grocery store, which also happens to be where I can buy the same organic produce I could buy in SF. Unlike in SF, I have the option of buying organic, locally produced goods for not much more than the grocery store charges for it's "grown and raised anywhere" produce. I have three vehicles and no debt to speak of (though my credit ain't so great due to past transgressions). And this is while making less than $60k and having significant childcare/alimony payments.
I couldn't do this for $180k in the SF Bay area, not even close.
A more interesting observation would be how many links it takes to get a link to Wikipedia, or a Google search result link. That proves closer to truth in my experience.
And my girlfriend wonders how it can be so easy to end up at a porn site several times a day...
That said, it's a fairly incredible claim. That's not that many deviations of Bacon, considering how many 'deadend' sites there are out there which don't link anywhere. How many of these sites are simply referral to search engines?
Or 6 months, if you get hired working in your field. But 6 figures doesn't buy you much of anything in the Bay area; it's tight, and you'll be hounded by your utility and fuel bills after the huge amount you'll be spending on property taxes, etc.
No, the only way you can make this work is if you do it for a short period of time in your early 20s. But of course, you'd be making half that, and would have to dorm up with half a dozen other early-20s people to make it work..
I would agree with you, if it wasn't for the fact that illegal immigrants are being given carte blanche and free run of the house at the same time, so to speak... you were essentially penalized for playing by the rules.
Judging by your UID and sentiments, you're still a kid - or pretty close to it. How many of these cycles have you seen?
Like the way apps have bounced between central and distributed systems over and over through the years. But superficially, it looks like all that old tech is "obsolete". Much of it isn't. It just resurfaces in a new form.
Except it's not a new form, it's a regurgitated or reimplemented form of the same thing. It's more abstracted and easier, in all likelihood.
The problem is, if you're a lawyer or an architect, what you learned in school is fundamentally going to be the same as what you need to know 30 years later. People don't perceive IT that way. New languages, new paradigms, new hardware. There is a common thread, if you stick with it long enough.
And if you've been in IT for even 10 years, you've seen 2 or 3 of these cycles already. So what you get with an 'old buck' is someone who implemented a very similar 'paradigm' 5-20 years ago, but at a lower, more abstracted layer. S/he understands it much better than someone who's just glomming onto the new technology, inherrently.
As a 'young person' you're trying to justify these practices, I think. Look, this will happen to you, too. It's happening at a more accelerated rate as things go down the road. What's happening here is that some young buck without any experience but 'expertise' in a skill can get hired over someone who was there in the beginning, inventing said skill.
The sickening thing is, when your business is an IT business, why would you do this to yourself? It's like a dissonant behavior where "prescribed action" doesn't even reflect upon the world it's being acted in.
Let's say you do indeed get good value out of your Indian H1B workers (you don't, but let's just say you do). Great. This is the best possible outcome of H1B workers. But in the meantime, you're stagnating domestic IT salaries, which means talented people will not look to work for you or will leave the field. And suddenly, your domestic company is 100% dependent on foreign labor, which you need government regulation to acquire.
And you have no hope of hiring a local, talented or otherwise, because you've effectively priced yourself out of the market - all while handing industrial expertise to foreign nationals.
It's not that SF is really all that extreme, it's that its politics are so far left that the place is run like a circus.
Special interest groups run the city. They make ill-informed 'green' decisions which have drastic negative reprecussions for the city, resulting in 3rd world like conditions (see: their sanitary system - google 'why does san francisco always smell like shit') They do asinine things to the flow of traffic and eliminate parking spots to 'penalize' people for driving, such as removing lanes and parking spaces. Net result: everyone suffers, and driving in the city just becomes more difficult. Public transit, the liberal dream, is only given lip service, in so far as it serves the city to milk it for funding and claim they've got a good public transit system. (NYC MTA puts these chumps to shame.) They 'patch' roadways with steel, not even diamond pattern steel. They do this in San Francisco, one of the dirtiest, grimiest cities in the US. Want to guess what happens to that steel when it rains? I got modded down, significantly, for the GP post. Why? Because they didn't like what I had to say, not that there was anything actually factual with what I said. Where a city like NYC would have built a dozen bridges and/or tunnels to deal with traffic demand, San Francisco does.... nothing. Or rather, they shut down an existing bridge so they can widen it. San Francisco is a "one party" city. (Hopefully I don't have to explain why a single party environment is bad for accountability; the expected corruption from such an environment is quite evident.) The city doesn't really need a reason to raise taxes. They just do, and you better hope you aren't an actual property owner or you'll likely be hurt by it. SF area people are more in favor of illegal immigrants than they are people from "flyover country". Racial and cultural ad hominem will abound for the people who they disagree with - their fellow countrymen. They elected Nancy Pelosi. Multiple times. This is the woman who has abused federal coffers excessively (eg. demanding Air Force planes to fly her around and frequently back/forth to SF from DC). Her voting record aside, she's one of the 'entitled' members of Congress who think they're better than the rest, and act accordingly. The populace takes pride in hedonistic displays as a whole, with multiple city-wide festivals per year. I've never visited or worked anywhere in the US where people seem so incredibly lazy. Pick a view, any view, and hold it: it's valid, accepted, and celebrated, as long as it's not traditional Christianity or a conservative American lifestyle. Whereas in somewhere like NYC, you can have some guy tell you to go fuck yourself and then pick up a conversation with the person 5 minutes later in a line about the weather, in San Francisco someone's liable to throw paint on you for wearing the wrong style or generally be confrontational and hostile for no apparent reason. Even the homeless/beggars are obnoxious and in your face.
Most of the liberals I know like guns, explosives and all kinds of interesting things. Although it does help that most of the liberals I know are also engineers so I don't know what we qualify as.
Evidently you're of the 'software' variety of engineer and not the bridge building type? I hope?
I've not yet personally met a liberal who is good at their job (as a sysadmin) - though I know they exist. They don't seem to have the right mindset. (Similarly, I don't think many conservatives make very good programmers - possibly why there aren't many.)
Are you trying to tell me that most of everywhere else in the world considers the level of retarded behavior and thought process in somewhere like San Francisco is "middle of the road"? I'm glad I don't have a visa...
What does paying federal taxes have to do with roads, public resources, etc.?
You realize that the majority of roadways in the US that people depend on daily are not federally run or funded, right? You realize that there are a handful of states which actually have no state income tax and still manage to do things like pave their roads and build bridges? It's not such a crazy every-man-for-himself without the Federal Government meddling.
You draw a fatalist picture of life without federal oversight, but when the companies making the 'water testing' products are being contracted out to by the so-called oversight groups (eg. the EPA, in this case) to verify their own products (it happens), it's kind of a moot point.
Slashdot Mirror
Here here. These are good recommendations.
Personally, I would put the money into a couple high-ticket items which will last, with accessories for them (because I rarely have the $ to also get the accessories). Get things which help me do things and give me the ability to expand and further enjoy my life. By this I mean things like:
* DSLR camera with lights and lenses. The lenses will sink that $10k quickly. Canon is the obvious choice unless you're looking to do landscapes almost exclusively, in which case that snazy new Sony is the cat's meow (OK it's about a year old at this point).
* home security system with remote monitoring.
* general home automation setup (there's a lot available, and inexpensively)
* tools. Tools do not, in most cases, need replacement; you pass them on to your kids.
Nobody has so much as said it, but if you've got 5 TVs in your house, you've got some pretty severe problems: over-consumption, a sedentary lifestyle, and a consumerist mentality (as well as possibly a lack of communication in your household due to everyone being glued to different screens throughout the house). You should take this opportunity to change your lifestyle for the better.
Keep your acquisition of 'sedentary consumption' devices minimal. Get devices you can take with you:
* tablets
* smartphones
* batteries
* chargers (eg. of the solar variety for camping?)
wow, that's remarkably like getting divorced - except you're only getting fucked once, not perpetually.
Thinkpad W520s? You mean laptops which have common business use as well as tracking and biometric software commonly installed and used, and don't have a quick and easy 'factory reset' like an iPad, allowing any idiot to turn them quickly?
Your reasoning is flawed. You're thinking backwards. Burglars bring their own guns not because home owners (or renters) have guns, but because they're available and force is respected. What you're saying is that criminals are protecting themselves, defensively from the homeowners they intend to victimize. That's absurd!
And it doesn't matter how rare "armed robbery" is when "robbery and assault" is a prevalent criminal pastime - just look at robbery crime rates (and rate changes) in the UK as an example.
Also, while it may be true that more armed robberies occur when there are more guns, as a percentage of total robberies, what is not true is that there is more burglary or more robbery in general. Such things drop precipitously pretty much any time there's an increase in firearm ownership or firearm law permissiveness.
Here here!
I am fortunate that my house siding is cement. With the AP strategically placed in the basement, there is no signal at the sidewalk or the fence in the back yard. The next door neighbors may be able to receive the signal from their upstairs, but it's questionable.
A basement makes an awesome 'funnel' for your wireless signal. :)
It would?
Stone soup doesn't taste too good, and a stone wall is fairly effective at keeping things on one side of it...
Why on earth would I want to let someone access 'my' Internet and suck down the bandwidth I pay for (on a tight budget, I might add, so it's the cheapest one available) to torrent crap or watch Netflix?
I've been thinking about this. In my mind's eye, Awesome might be well configured for something like that, simply because it's written in Lua and pretty adaptable for things like eg. widgets. But I don't know the language or the wm well enough to know the answer to whether it would be adaptable for a touchscreen device without much of a headache: I'm guessing not.
Personally, things like this new Ubuntu framework only have limited applicability unless I can get my choice of window manager/DE once we switch over to full "desktop" mode.
How much do you want to bet that Steam will be one of the first adopters of this new Ubuntu?
I hate unity, but the question arises (after trying the latest on an ancient Eee901 netbook): WTF are you doing wrong? This lowly tablet doesn't even take that long to pull out the dash.
So what, it's more akin to your girlfriend going to the bathroom to douche before sex than it's like a new girlfriend coming over for a romantic dinner?
No, Xbox was retarded when it came out, as was Wii. Metro vs. "7"? Etc. The code names are almost always better.
German engineers? :) They're the only chemical/weapon/etc. engineers I know, personally. ;P
From my experience, $60k in the SF bay area is about 2/3 the living utility as $36k in South Dakota. I had to make at least $80k to make it justifiable, financially - and even then it wasn't worth the pain in the ass of being in SF, where there were a lot more 'incidental' costs.
Sure, so SF is high on the stupid meter. Even LA is more 'right' than SF is, though. Does the stupid meter pull the left/right meter, or vice versa? It's hard to tell.
Define 'prosperous'. Highest cost of living? Highest mean income? What are we talking about, exactly?
I can live on a third as much, with more free time that I can spend optionally indoors with or without people, or outdoors with or without people, in other parts of the country - all while having a higher standard of living.
I have a 3 bedroom house with a full basement and run my utilities without worrying about how much it costs to heat or light the place. I can buy incandescent bulbs in a grocery store, which also happens to be where I can buy the same organic produce I could buy in SF. Unlike in SF, I have the option of buying organic, locally produced goods for not much more than the grocery store charges for it's "grown and raised anywhere" produce. I have three vehicles and no debt to speak of (though my credit ain't so great due to past transgressions). And this is while making less than $60k and having significant childcare/alimony payments.
I couldn't do this for $180k in the SF Bay area, not even close.
A more interesting observation would be how many links it takes to get a link to Wikipedia, or a Google search result link. That proves closer to truth in my experience.
And my girlfriend wonders how it can be so easy to end up at a porn site several times a day...
That said, it's a fairly incredible claim. That's not that many deviations of Bacon, considering how many 'deadend' sites there are out there which don't link anywhere. How many of these sites are simply referral to search engines?
Or 6 months, if you get hired working in your field. But 6 figures doesn't buy you much of anything in the Bay area; it's tight, and you'll be hounded by your utility and fuel bills after the huge amount you'll be spending on property taxes, etc.
No, the only way you can make this work is if you do it for a short period of time in your early 20s. But of course, you'd be making half that, and would have to dorm up with half a dozen other early-20s people to make it work..
I would agree with you, if it wasn't for the fact that illegal immigrants are being given carte blanche and free run of the house at the same time, so to speak... you were essentially penalized for playing by the rules.
Judging by your UID and sentiments, you're still a kid - or pretty close to it. How many of these cycles have you seen?
Like the way apps have bounced between central and distributed systems over and over through the years. But superficially, it looks like all that old tech is "obsolete". Much of it isn't. It just resurfaces in a new form.
Except it's not a new form, it's a regurgitated or reimplemented form of the same thing. It's more abstracted and easier, in all likelihood.
The problem is, if you're a lawyer or an architect, what you learned in school is fundamentally going to be the same as what you need to know 30 years later. People don't perceive IT that way. New languages, new paradigms, new hardware. There is a common thread, if you stick with it long enough.
And if you've been in IT for even 10 years, you've seen 2 or 3 of these cycles already. So what you get with an 'old buck' is someone who implemented a very similar 'paradigm' 5-20 years ago, but at a lower, more abstracted layer. S/he understands it much better than someone who's just glomming onto the new technology, inherrently.
As a 'young person' you're trying to justify these practices, I think. Look, this will happen to you, too. It's happening at a more accelerated rate as things go down the road. What's happening here is that some young buck without any experience but 'expertise' in a skill can get hired over someone who was there in the beginning, inventing said skill.
The sickening thing is, when your business is an IT business, why would you do this to yourself? It's like a dissonant behavior where "prescribed action" doesn't even reflect upon the world it's being acted in.
Let's say you do indeed get good value out of your Indian H1B workers (you don't, but let's just say you do). Great. This is the best possible outcome of H1B workers. But in the meantime, you're stagnating domestic IT salaries, which means talented people will not look to work for you or will leave the field. And suddenly, your domestic company is 100% dependent on foreign labor, which you need government regulation to acquire.
And you have no hope of hiring a local, talented or otherwise, because you've effectively priced yourself out of the market - all while handing industrial expertise to foreign nationals.
It's not that SF is really all that extreme, it's that its politics are so far left that the place is run like a circus.
Special interest groups run the city.
They make ill-informed 'green' decisions which have drastic negative reprecussions for the city, resulting in 3rd world like conditions (see: their sanitary system - google 'why does san francisco always smell like shit')
They do asinine things to the flow of traffic and eliminate parking spots to 'penalize' people for driving, such as removing lanes and parking spaces. Net result: everyone suffers, and driving in the city just becomes more difficult.
Public transit, the liberal dream, is only given lip service, in so far as it serves the city to milk it for funding and claim they've got a good public transit system. (NYC MTA puts these chumps to shame.)
They 'patch' roadways with steel, not even diamond pattern steel. They do this in San Francisco, one of the dirtiest, grimiest cities in the US. Want to guess what happens to that steel when it rains?
I got modded down, significantly, for the GP post. Why? Because they didn't like what I had to say, not that there was anything actually factual with what I said.
Where a city like NYC would have built a dozen bridges and/or tunnels to deal with traffic demand, San Francisco does.... nothing. Or rather, they shut down an existing bridge so they can widen it.
San Francisco is a "one party" city. (Hopefully I don't have to explain why a single party environment is bad for accountability; the expected corruption from such an environment is quite evident.)
The city doesn't really need a reason to raise taxes. They just do, and you better hope you aren't an actual property owner or you'll likely be hurt by it.
SF area people are more in favor of illegal immigrants than they are people from "flyover country". Racial and cultural ad hominem will abound for the people who they disagree with - their fellow countrymen.
They elected Nancy Pelosi. Multiple times. This is the woman who has abused federal coffers excessively (eg. demanding Air Force planes to fly her around and frequently back/forth to SF from DC). Her voting record aside, she's one of the 'entitled' members of Congress who think they're better than the rest, and act accordingly.
The populace takes pride in hedonistic displays as a whole, with multiple city-wide festivals per year.
I've never visited or worked anywhere in the US where people seem so incredibly lazy.
Pick a view, any view, and hold it: it's valid, accepted, and celebrated, as long as it's not traditional Christianity or a conservative American lifestyle.
Whereas in somewhere like NYC, you can have some guy tell you to go fuck yourself and then pick up a conversation with the person 5 minutes later in a line about the weather, in San Francisco someone's liable to throw paint on you for wearing the wrong style or generally be confrontational and hostile for no apparent reason. Even the homeless/beggars are obnoxious and in your face.
Most of the liberals I know like guns, explosives and all kinds of interesting things. Although it does help that most of the liberals I know are also engineers so I don't know what we qualify as.
Evidently you're of the 'software' variety of engineer and not the bridge building type? I hope?
I've not yet personally met a liberal who is good at their job (as a sysadmin) - though I know they exist. They don't seem to have the right mindset. (Similarly, I don't think many conservatives make very good programmers - possibly why there aren't many.)
Are you trying to tell me that most of everywhere else in the world considers the level of retarded behavior and thought process in somewhere like San Francisco is "middle of the road"? I'm glad I don't have a visa...
What does paying federal taxes have to do with roads, public resources, etc.?
You realize that the majority of roadways in the US that people depend on daily are not federally run or funded, right? You realize that there are a handful of states which actually have no state income tax and still manage to do things like pave their roads and build bridges? It's not such a crazy every-man-for-himself without the Federal Government meddling.
You draw a fatalist picture of life without federal oversight, but when the companies making the 'water testing' products are being contracted out to by the so-called oversight groups (eg. the EPA, in this case) to verify their own products (it happens), it's kind of a moot point.