I don't think you understand what these trades were. By "Tax these millisecond trades..." I am assuming you are referring to the proposals of adding a small transnational tax to every trade. These proposals aim to cut down on high frequency trading where lots of trades are made very quickly (squeezing in between other trades and eking out small amounts of profit).
This wasn't high frequency trading, this was a big trade, made intentionally to take advantage of a presumed market movement, and whoever made the trade would still have made it if there were a tiny transnational tax on top of it. This wasn't some computer constantly submitting prices and making hyperfast trades, it was probably a trading decision made by a real live human--it just happened to be very time dependent and was scheduled with millisecond accuracy (maybe too much accuracy if the story is correct).
A per-transaction tax would do absolutely nothing about a trade made based on information acquired over golf (which would already be illegal).
I don't get the number of people in this story who are defending it like it's their god given right to text at a stoplight. 10 years ago, they probably wouldn't have even thought about texting in the car (or maybe thought much about texting at all), and now they've got texts that are so important that they have to be read immediately? Probably have some emails on there too (oh boy, for those you used to have to wait until you were home with your dialup to even know if you got one)...
Driving your car is a privilege. Part of the deal is that you are supposed to be paying attention to your surroundings, even when you are sitting at a light. There is definitely some distinction between navigation and communication--have you seen how antsy people get when they feel that little vibrating notification in their pocket but can't look at it right away? You aren't going to play with your GPS unless you actually need to (and most people set their GPS before going somewhere, not at random)...but your phone is designed to tell you "Hey! Pay attention to me right NOW!". If you can't figure out how to suppress this urge, that same phone has a multitude of apps available that will find you alternative transportation (Uber, Lyft, Bus/Train Tracker, Sidecar, etc.).
Right, because your average traffic cop is also just as good of an investigator as a 15 year veteran detective. The traffic cops are also out and about--they are the ones who are nearby and can respond to a call about a nearby breakin or a dangerous freeway crash.
I don't see why it is a terrible law (except the parts about not being able to use navigation on a phone mounted in a convenient location...although I bet these people were "navigating" with both hands on a phone held in their lap).
When you get behind the wheel of a car, turn it on, and put it in gear, you are operating a motor vehicle. Just because your foot is on the brake and the car is not moving, doesn't mean you aren't still driving. You should be paying attention at stop lights, there are still moving cars around you and the light could change at any second--haven't you ever seen a texting driver do something stupid when they hear a horn and realize in a panic that the light has turned green in front of them? Maybe if we are allowed to text when the car is stopped at a light, can we extend that to also texting when a car stops for 5 seconds in rush hour traffic? How about allowing open containers at red lights (as long as your BAC is still below the limit when the light goes green)?
If you don't like the fact that you have to actually pay attention while on the road, how about taking the bus, hailing a cab, or hiring a driver? If your text is so damned important that you have to read and respond to it now, then pull off the road to a safe location...otherwise save it until you get to your destination.
They have show rooms and you can still go home and order a car form out of state if you like what you see.
What they can't do in the showroom is tell you how much the car costs (although who knows if they abide by this) or take your order. So no. They are not selling the cars in Texas, they are simply promoting them and then allowing the laws on interstate commerce to make room for the rest.
Except it isn't the only way to get their foot in the market.
Instead they are opting to push to get the rules changed (and are still making money elsewhere). It seems like a pretty valid method, and it seems to be working considering how many people get riled up over the fact that they can't sell in texas. The current law is just a weird protectionist throwback to a bygone era anyways...and this gives them plenty of press and wins them plenty of friends elsewhere. Hell, the traditional automakers are probably waiting to see them succeed so they can stop using their own dealers.
The big 2 carriers don't offer a discount for bringing your own phone (like T-mobile does), and they don't require a different plan for different price point phones (they won't require data on dumb-phones, and used to have cheaper messaging options on non-keyboard phones though).
So if you are on AT&T, and don't plan to move or change carriers in the next 2 years (which is pretty rare...most people just stick with one provider year after year), you are throwing away money to not pick up a new subsidized phone when you are eligible. You are paying for the subsidy every month, but not getting anything in return. The only reasons to buy a device outright are if you want something they don't offer, you aren't eligible for a new subsidy and need a new phone. or you want an unlocked/developer edition.
I have a friend who used to work for a prop trading firm and it sounds like this was par for the course. You trade based on a model...lots of traders are working it from different angles, so while it is guiding your actions, you don't actually know how it works inside. If you stick around long enough and work enough different desks, you might start to get an idea of how it works and if you become important enough, you might actually be told how it works (or help improve it).
Where did that model come from? Your bosses probably stole it from the trading firm they used to work at (where they stuck around long enough to get the model and get enough capital to seed a new trading firm). They probably didn't steal any actual source code, but they took the proprietary model and hired some new programmers (or took some of the original programmers) and had them recreate a version for their new firm. Its a trade secret, so it doesn't have protection like copyright or patents (but it lasts forever if you can keep it secret). Barring NDAs and noncompete clauses, you can't do anything if somebody copies your model and starts trading on it...so the mistake these guys made was that they stole actual code instead of just figuring out the algorithm and re-implementing it.
They are required to verify the signature. They may also call in a potential fraud (whether or not the signature is a match).
So if you have Susan's signature down perfectly, they can still phone it in. I don't know what the credit card company does in this situation. If it is a small charge, maybe they just let it go through, but will try to call the card owner for a large charge? I would assume that once the merchant calls it in, they can't be liable for fraud if Visa says "no, that's ok, let them use it".
Don't forget. You aren't required to carry papers in the USA (yet). Yes there is still cash, but credit cards are pretty ubiquitous and and around here you can't pay for parking or get on a public transit train without one--I for one am not in favor of mandating a government ID to pay for my sandwich at lunch.
See my comment on the post above--Visa officially suggests against checking ID and it cannot be required to accept the card. Its not like you are liable for fraud on your card anyways (as long as you point out the transactions).
You don't get asked for ID because the merchant agreement forbids the cashier from requiring an ID for a credit card transaction. An ID is not required to use a credit card and random merchants or customers don't get to change the agreement willy-nilly (not that it stops them from trying...just like all the shops that had $5 minimums on CCs before that became legal in 2010). In fact, a credit card without a signature is technically not a valid card and can be refused.
A merchant can ask for your ID, but they cannot require it for acceptance of the card (maybe it will scare someone off, but a smart criminal would just refuse). In the case where the card is not signed (or has See ID or some other housewife-myth written on it), the protocol is for the cashier to ask you to sign the card in front of them and compare the signature to a government ID. In this case, it is not quite clear, but it sounds like they *can* deny you for not presenting ID. So basically, the unsigned/See ID trick only works once--the first time someone actually follows the rules and calls you out on it, they will make you sign the card.
Check out pages 33 and 34 (the written numbers, not the PDF numbers) of this PDF for more info: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/card-acceptance-guidelines-for-visa-merchants.pdf. If you recall back to maybe the early 90s, there was a big ad campaign where celebrities (I think I remember a seinfeld one) would try to pay with a check and the cashier wouldn't take it since they forgot their ID...and then some random guy would walk in and pay with a CC without a question.
I suspect the point of this particular law is really a grandfather clause to allow people to keep things they already own (and encourage people to take firearms out of service), but ban the continued creation of replicas.
If you have a deactivated souvenir rifle from your service in WWII, then it is no longer really treated as a firearm. It is a sentimental piece like a sculpture sitting on your mantle. Its hard to justify coming back to these people and making them get rid of their guns (which haven't been functional since 1945). People aren't out there producing deactivated weapons so the only way this stock would grow is if people go and deactivate current weapons (thus reducing the number out on the street).
Replica weapons that look like real guns (and could be used to rob a store or get you shot by the cops when they see you playing with it) are inexpensive and much less likely to run into people who would be angered by losing them.
Low-wage workers without standard schedules/payment amounts often benefit from shorter pay periods.
If you are a waiter and all of the sudden need some cash to fix your car, its a lot better if you can pick up an extra shift or two and not have to wait a month for the paycheck (especially since you can't walk out with a pocket full of credit card tips like you could when everybody used cash). Same goes for people who get paid overtime...put in some extra hours and see the money right away.
I would agree that if you are an exempt salaried worker, payment frequency shouldn't matter that much. You are only going to earn $X in a month and earning it once, twice, or four times a month shouldn't have a significant impact. Monthly is easy with bill cycles (get paycheck, pay bills, spend/save rest), but months are not all the same length so you either have to get paid slightly less in February or the company has to do a 1/12 split--but then hourly workers still need to be paid by hours worked so each month will vary. Bi-weekly and weekly at least guarantee that all pay periods are the same length and that you always know what day is pay-day. I worked somewhere for a while that had Twice-Monthly paychecks and thought it was kind of weird--was never clear which day was pay day since they wouldn't cut checks on weekend (or mondays IIRC). Pay periods were always different lengths and started/ended on different days of the week so as a part-time hourly worker, my checks would have huge variance.
Why not a savings account then? Can't bounce a check if you can't write a check, and you can't overdraft an ATM that knows your current balance.
Most banks will waive a minimum balance if you have direct deposit...if you are getting these payroll cards, it means you are employed and thus you could also do direct deposit (if your employer would allow it).
The voicemail transcripts often suck. There is one thing they are pretty good at picking up though--phone numbers. 95% of the time, I can listen to a voicemail where somebody gives me a callback number, pull the phone from my ear, and click on the number to dial it.
No more having to listen to it multiple times or having something ready to write down a number. Just look at the transcript and its there.
Other way around. If the *sender* has sprint, you will get an email from google. This has happened to me approximately twice (since nobody I know has sprint).
Unfortunately, the iphone (in the hands of others) almost completely broke google voice for me. By default, the iphone sends multi-recipient messages as an MMS so that they can include a recipient list and enable the ability to reply-all to a group text (because that's what the world needs on their email enabled phone...another way to reply-all).
If those people use your google voice number, you won't get the message at all. You won't know that you missed a message and the sender won't know that it wasn't delivered. My good friends know my direct number and know that I can't get group-texts on the GV number...but I don't want to explain that kind of stuff to people I just met. So I have to decide if I want to potentially miss out on communication, or if I want to give them my google voice number (and thus be able to call/text them as myself from any computer). Now that new versions of android have started switching to the apple MMS paradigm, I basically can't rely on the GV number. So in addition to the fact that the stock android text client is way better than the google voice client (love being able to mark messages read form the notifications box), it means that google voice messages are actually sub-par.
Its at the point where I wish I could switch. I want my google voice number to be the direct line (because it is local to my current area and happens to spell my name) and my current direct line (the number I had in 2005) to go to google voice. That way I wouldn't miss out on old contacts calling my old number...but I could keep giving out my "better" google voice number to people.
Well, its probably not irony in *their* eyes. But if you don't actually think the UN is a merchant of death, and that the bombers are instead deranged assholes, then the description fits.
Well considering it involves programs and hardware being designed to work as fast as possible (to the point where you are hitting pesky physical limitations such as the latency on the speed of light through a fiber), I'd say it qualifies as news for nerds.
Certainly compared to the trading that is done by a bunch of big dudes yelling at each other on a trading floor.
Actually...at a 70k difference, I think you'd need to have more than one kid.
Can't speak to exactly how tax deductions come into play for tuition, but with one kid, a 70k salary increase for however many years you work there sure beats free tuition for one kid for 4 years.
figure tuition costs 40k (ignore housing/living expenses since you pay those in both situations). This benefit is then worth 160k (not sure if you have to pay taxes on the tuition reimbursement).
The 70k salary gets you 280k in the same time span...and if you pay 40% taxes on it, you are left with 168k (maybe more if you get extra deductions for the tuition). Now if you work the job for 2 more years after the kid graduates, those numbers are 420k and 252k while if you stay at MIT, its still only worth 160k (and thats only if your kid gets into an expensive school...worth a lot less if they go to a state school).
Of course if you have twins, then the MIT deal is worth 320k and beats the job over 4 years. But if you have the kids 4 years apart, the private sector job is back to winning.
I think the moral of the story is that you probably shouldn't base your life and career plans on how one specific benefit relates to hypothetical children.
Yeah, that's one thing that people always forget. Some things are priced the same everywhere.
New Yorkers always have the coolest toys. If pay is even partially adjusted for cost of living, buying an ipad in NYC takes a much smaller chunk of your income than buying one in Topeka. Why do you think there are so many camera stores in NYC? If you don't care about living in a large, beautiful home, most of the cost of living difference is gone.
Travel costs about the same everywhere (tickets might even be cheaper since you can originate from NYC airports). Mid-range groceries aren't really that much more expensive and often high end groceries are cheaper (since the compact NYC population can support specialty goods retailers that the population of Memphis cannot). Anything you can buy on amazon is the same price, and you get delivery fast courtesy of amazon prime and a warehouse just across the state line. It just depends what you value. If you love lounging around your big house, finishing up a carpentry project in your basement workshop, and then taking a spin in your sportscar, then the NYC area is a terrible place for you.
If its like other similar caliber schools, MIT will probably pay up to MIT tuition to any school for the children of faculty. I think you're still on the hook for housing/living expenses, but there aren't many schools that cost more than MIT so you are covered there.
Not sure they cut the same deal to children of "staff" like IT guys...probably academic faculty only.
Although I think it is especially true for the type of SAS/R programmer he is referring to.
These are programmers who get hired by places that don't employ developers. They use SAS as a tool to weed through data. There's not a lot of fancy programming, just a lot of programmign to pull together packages of stuff that would otherwise take 10 business analysts a week to do with excel. Lots of one-off programs rather than pieces of code that must be streamlined and maintained and packaged up as an application. The code has to work and has to be done now, but it doesn't have to be able to handle every conceivable input or have user-friendly features
To do this, you have to have a lot of domain knowledge. Most people I know who do this are not programmers by education. They are trained in the field they work in and picked up statistical programming as a way to help them analyze data faster and more efficiently which makes them much more valuable. Since the scope of the programming is not broad (and since best practices aren't as important on one-off programs as they are on public applications), you can quickly learn enough SAS or R to be an asset. In other industries, being that inexperienced of a programmer might actually be a negative...but working with data analysis, you can usually tell if everything is ok and be productive early on in the process of mastering the language.
They won't throw them away, they will just install windows 7.
Unless your computer is actually 10 years old from when XP was current, it will run win7. If you are on a corporate standard 3-year replacement program, odds are your last two computers came with a "Windows 7" sticker on them and was only rolled back to XP to be compliant with the rest of the infrastructure. You don't have to sell somebody a new PC for them to solve the problem of XP hitting EOL.
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This wasn't high frequency trading, this was a big trade, made intentionally to take advantage of a presumed market movement, and whoever made the trade would still have made it if there were a tiny transnational tax on top of it. This wasn't some computer constantly submitting prices and making hyperfast trades, it was probably a trading decision made by a real live human--it just happened to be very time dependent and was scheduled with millisecond accuracy (maybe too much accuracy if the story is correct).
A per-transaction tax would do absolutely nothing about a trade made based on information acquired over golf (which would already be illegal).
I don't get the number of people in this story who are defending it like it's their god given right to text at a stoplight. 10 years ago, they probably wouldn't have even thought about texting in the car (or maybe thought much about texting at all), and now they've got texts that are so important that they have to be read immediately? Probably have some emails on there too (oh boy, for those you used to have to wait until you were home with your dialup to even know if you got one)...
Driving your car is a privilege. Part of the deal is that you are supposed to be paying attention to your surroundings, even when you are sitting at a light. There is definitely some distinction between navigation and communication--have you seen how antsy people get when they feel that little vibrating notification in their pocket but can't look at it right away? You aren't going to play with your GPS unless you actually need to (and most people set their GPS before going somewhere, not at random)...but your phone is designed to tell you "Hey! Pay attention to me right NOW!". If you can't figure out how to suppress this urge, that same phone has a multitude of apps available that will find you alternative transportation (Uber, Lyft, Bus/Train Tracker, Sidecar, etc.).
Right, because your average traffic cop is also just as good of an investigator as a 15 year veteran detective. The traffic cops are also out and about--they are the ones who are nearby and can respond to a call about a nearby breakin or a dangerous freeway crash.
When you get behind the wheel of a car, turn it on, and put it in gear, you are operating a motor vehicle. Just because your foot is on the brake and the car is not moving, doesn't mean you aren't still driving. You should be paying attention at stop lights, there are still moving cars around you and the light could change at any second--haven't you ever seen a texting driver do something stupid when they hear a horn and realize in a panic that the light has turned green in front of them? Maybe if we are allowed to text when the car is stopped at a light, can we extend that to also texting when a car stops for 5 seconds in rush hour traffic? How about allowing open containers at red lights (as long as your BAC is still below the limit when the light goes green)?
If you don't like the fact that you have to actually pay attention while on the road, how about taking the bus, hailing a cab, or hiring a driver? If your text is so damned important that you have to read and respond to it now, then pull off the road to a safe location...otherwise save it until you get to your destination.
Although I do think that doing away with dealers would make things like warranty service much more difficult.
What they can't do in the showroom is tell you how much the car costs (although who knows if they abide by this) or take your order. So no. They are not selling the cars in Texas, they are simply promoting them and then allowing the laws on interstate commerce to make room for the rest.
Instead they are opting to push to get the rules changed (and are still making money elsewhere). It seems like a pretty valid method, and it seems to be working considering how many people get riled up over the fact that they can't sell in texas. The current law is just a weird protectionist throwback to a bygone era anyways...and this gives them plenty of press and wins them plenty of friends elsewhere. Hell, the traditional automakers are probably waiting to see them succeed so they can stop using their own dealers.
The big 2 carriers don't offer a discount for bringing your own phone (like T-mobile does), and they don't require a different plan for different price point phones (they won't require data on dumb-phones, and used to have cheaper messaging options on non-keyboard phones though).
So if you are on AT&T, and don't plan to move or change carriers in the next 2 years (which is pretty rare...most people just stick with one provider year after year), you are throwing away money to not pick up a new subsidized phone when you are eligible. You are paying for the subsidy every month, but not getting anything in return. The only reasons to buy a device outright are if you want something they don't offer, you aren't eligible for a new subsidy and need a new phone. or you want an unlocked/developer edition.
I have a friend who used to work for a prop trading firm and it sounds like this was par for the course. You trade based on a model...lots of traders are working it from different angles, so while it is guiding your actions, you don't actually know how it works inside. If you stick around long enough and work enough different desks, you might start to get an idea of how it works and if you become important enough, you might actually be told how it works (or help improve it).
Where did that model come from? Your bosses probably stole it from the trading firm they used to work at (where they stuck around long enough to get the model and get enough capital to seed a new trading firm). They probably didn't steal any actual source code, but they took the proprietary model and hired some new programmers (or took some of the original programmers) and had them recreate a version for their new firm. Its a trade secret, so it doesn't have protection like copyright or patents (but it lasts forever if you can keep it secret). Barring NDAs and noncompete clauses, you can't do anything if somebody copies your model and starts trading on it...so the mistake these guys made was that they stole actual code instead of just figuring out the algorithm and re-implementing it.
So if you have Susan's signature down perfectly, they can still phone it in. I don't know what the credit card company does in this situation. If it is a small charge, maybe they just let it go through, but will try to call the card owner for a large charge? I would assume that once the merchant calls it in, they can't be liable for fraud if Visa says "no, that's ok, let them use it".
Don't forget. You aren't required to carry papers in the USA (yet). Yes there is still cash, but credit cards are pretty ubiquitous and and around here you can't pay for parking or get on a public transit train without one--I for one am not in favor of mandating a government ID to pay for my sandwich at lunch.
See my comment on the post above--Visa officially suggests against checking ID and it cannot be required to accept the card. Its not like you are liable for fraud on your card anyways (as long as you point out the transactions).
A merchant can ask for your ID, but they cannot require it for acceptance of the card (maybe it will scare someone off, but a smart criminal would just refuse). In the case where the card is not signed (or has See ID or some other housewife-myth written on it), the protocol is for the cashier to ask you to sign the card in front of them and compare the signature to a government ID. In this case, it is not quite clear, but it sounds like they *can* deny you for not presenting ID. So basically, the unsigned/See ID trick only works once--the first time someone actually follows the rules and calls you out on it, they will make you sign the card.
Check out pages 33 and 34 (the written numbers, not the PDF numbers) of this PDF for more info: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/card-acceptance-guidelines-for-visa-merchants.pdf. If you recall back to maybe the early 90s, there was a big ad campaign where celebrities (I think I remember a seinfeld one) would try to pay with a check and the cashier wouldn't take it since they forgot their ID...and then some random guy would walk in and pay with a CC without a question.
If you have a deactivated souvenir rifle from your service in WWII, then it is no longer really treated as a firearm. It is a sentimental piece like a sculpture sitting on your mantle. Its hard to justify coming back to these people and making them get rid of their guns (which haven't been functional since 1945). People aren't out there producing deactivated weapons so the only way this stock would grow is if people go and deactivate current weapons (thus reducing the number out on the street).
Replica weapons that look like real guns (and could be used to rob a store or get you shot by the cops when they see you playing with it) are inexpensive and much less likely to run into people who would be angered by losing them.
If you are a waiter and all of the sudden need some cash to fix your car, its a lot better if you can pick up an extra shift or two and not have to wait a month for the paycheck (especially since you can't walk out with a pocket full of credit card tips like you could when everybody used cash). Same goes for people who get paid overtime...put in some extra hours and see the money right away.
I would agree that if you are an exempt salaried worker, payment frequency shouldn't matter that much. You are only going to earn $X in a month and earning it once, twice, or four times a month shouldn't have a significant impact. Monthly is easy with bill cycles (get paycheck, pay bills, spend/save rest), but months are not all the same length so you either have to get paid slightly less in February or the company has to do a 1/12 split--but then hourly workers still need to be paid by hours worked so each month will vary. Bi-weekly and weekly at least guarantee that all pay periods are the same length and that you always know what day is pay-day. I worked somewhere for a while that had Twice-Monthly paychecks and thought it was kind of weird--was never clear which day was pay day since they wouldn't cut checks on weekend (or mondays IIRC). Pay periods were always different lengths and started/ended on different days of the week so as a part-time hourly worker, my checks would have huge variance.
Most banks will waive a minimum balance if you have direct deposit...if you are getting these payroll cards, it means you are employed and thus you could also do direct deposit (if your employer would allow it).
No more having to listen to it multiple times or having something ready to write down a number. Just look at the transcript and its there.
Unfortunately, the iphone (in the hands of others) almost completely broke google voice for me. By default, the iphone sends multi-recipient messages as an MMS so that they can include a recipient list and enable the ability to reply-all to a group text (because that's what the world needs on their email enabled phone...another way to reply-all).
If those people use your google voice number, you won't get the message at all. You won't know that you missed a message and the sender won't know that it wasn't delivered. My good friends know my direct number and know that I can't get group-texts on the GV number...but I don't want to explain that kind of stuff to people I just met. So I have to decide if I want to potentially miss out on communication, or if I want to give them my google voice number (and thus be able to call/text them as myself from any computer). Now that new versions of android have started switching to the apple MMS paradigm, I basically can't rely on the GV number. So in addition to the fact that the stock android text client is way better than the google voice client (love being able to mark messages read form the notifications box), it means that google voice messages are actually sub-par.
Its at the point where I wish I could switch. I want my google voice number to be the direct line (because it is local to my current area and happens to spell my name) and my current direct line (the number I had in 2005) to go to google voice. That way I wouldn't miss out on old contacts calling my old number...but I could keep giving out my "better" google voice number to people.
Well, its probably not irony in *their* eyes. But if you don't actually think the UN is a merchant of death, and that the bombers are instead deranged assholes, then the description fits.
I think you missed the irony in that post.
Certainly compared to the trading that is done by a bunch of big dudes yelling at each other on a trading floor.
Can't speak to exactly how tax deductions come into play for tuition, but with one kid, a 70k salary increase for however many years you work there sure beats free tuition for one kid for 4 years.
figure tuition costs 40k (ignore housing/living expenses since you pay those in both situations). This benefit is then worth 160k (not sure if you have to pay taxes on the tuition reimbursement).
The 70k salary gets you 280k in the same time span...and if you pay 40% taxes on it, you are left with 168k (maybe more if you get extra deductions for the tuition). Now if you work the job for 2 more years after the kid graduates, those numbers are 420k and 252k while if you stay at MIT, its still only worth 160k (and thats only if your kid gets into an expensive school...worth a lot less if they go to a state school).
Of course if you have twins, then the MIT deal is worth 320k and beats the job over 4 years. But if you have the kids 4 years apart, the private sector job is back to winning.
I think the moral of the story is that you probably shouldn't base your life and career plans on how one specific benefit relates to hypothetical children.
New Yorkers always have the coolest toys. If pay is even partially adjusted for cost of living, buying an ipad in NYC takes a much smaller chunk of your income than buying one in Topeka. Why do you think there are so many camera stores in NYC? If you don't care about living in a large, beautiful home, most of the cost of living difference is gone.
Travel costs about the same everywhere (tickets might even be cheaper since you can originate from NYC airports). Mid-range groceries aren't really that much more expensive and often high end groceries are cheaper (since the compact NYC population can support specialty goods retailers that the population of Memphis cannot). Anything you can buy on amazon is the same price, and you get delivery fast courtesy of amazon prime and a warehouse just across the state line. It just depends what you value. If you love lounging around your big house, finishing up a carpentry project in your basement workshop, and then taking a spin in your sportscar, then the NYC area is a terrible place for you.
Not sure they cut the same deal to children of "staff" like IT guys...probably academic faculty only.
These are programmers who get hired by places that don't employ developers. They use SAS as a tool to weed through data. There's not a lot of fancy programming, just a lot of programmign to pull together packages of stuff that would otherwise take 10 business analysts a week to do with excel. Lots of one-off programs rather than pieces of code that must be streamlined and maintained and packaged up as an application. The code has to work and has to be done now, but it doesn't have to be able to handle every conceivable input or have user-friendly features
To do this, you have to have a lot of domain knowledge. Most people I know who do this are not programmers by education. They are trained in the field they work in and picked up statistical programming as a way to help them analyze data faster and more efficiently which makes them much more valuable. Since the scope of the programming is not broad (and since best practices aren't as important on one-off programs as they are on public applications), you can quickly learn enough SAS or R to be an asset. In other industries, being that inexperienced of a programmer might actually be a negative...but working with data analysis, you can usually tell if everything is ok and be productive early on in the process of mastering the language.
Unless your computer is actually 10 years old from when XP was current, it will run win7. If you are on a corporate standard 3-year replacement program, odds are your last two computers came with a "Windows 7" sticker on them and was only rolled back to XP to be compliant with the rest of the infrastructure. You don't have to sell somebody a new PC for them to solve the problem of XP hitting EOL.