The site seems to be going pretty slowly, so here's the article:
Ten years ago grunge musicians and college-age Cassandras who had never held a day job preached that corporate America would crush their generation's soul and leave them without a pension plan. Films like Singles and Reality Bites chronicled their transition from college graduate to Gap salesclerk.
A few years later the core of Generation X--the 40 million Americans born between 1966 and 1975--found themselves riding the wildest economic bull ever. Salesclerks became programmers; coffee slingers morphed into experts in Java (computerese, that is)--all flush with stock options and eye-popping salaries. Now that the thrill ride is over, Gen X's plight seems particularly bruising. No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this. Everything the dot-com boom delivered has been taken away--and then some. Real wages are falling, wealth continues to shift from younger to older, and education costs are surging. Worse yet, for some Gen Xers, their peak earning years are behind them. Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won't be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.
FORTUNE recently encountered the bitter and (now) experienced voice of Generation X in a chain restaurant in suburban Dallas. Age 32 and piercing-free, Karen Doss has found out that the alternative rockers were right. To pay for college she worked full-time as a secretary at Pillsbury world headquarters. After graduation in 1993, she accepted her sole job offer as an advertising copywriter, even though she despised the industry. She finally quit last year to get her real estate license so that she could better support her husband while he fulfills his dream of owning a bar.
Halfway to pension age, she has just $5,000 in a 401(k) and $20,000 in home equity. Ideally, someone her age should have at least $100,000 stashed away. "I don't have a corporate pension, and they aren't what they were," she says. "Social Security is obsolete and ineffective. And I already know that I'm going to have to have a private health-care plan. I'm angry that I can't seem to get a break."
Yes, yes, yes, we know what you're thinking. The free-spending slackers have only themselves to blame, since the dot-com boom should have made them rich for life. On the surface that's true. A 30-year-old today is 50% more likely to have a bachelor's degree than his counterpart in 1974 and earns $5,000 more a year, adjusted for inflation. But that's where the good news stops. He also has more in student loans and credit card debt, is less likely to own a home, and is just as likely to be unemployed. His salary probably topped out during the boom, whereas his predecessor's rose throughout his career. Social Security will start to evaporate as he turns 50--or before, if the lockbox gets raided--so he'll have to depend almost completely on his own savings for retirement. The comparison with a 30-year-old in 1984 isn't any rosier.
Gen X "has done worse than their parents have done according to a number of dimensions, like net worth and home ownership," says Edward Wolff, a New York University economist who studies trends in income and wealth. In a recent paper Wolff notes that young households lay claim to a smaller percentage of total U.S. wealth than they did in 1989.
Additionally, the inflation-adjusted median net worth of a Gen X household ($9,000) is lower than that of a comparable household in 1989, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.
Silicon Valley and Manhattan aren't the only stomping grounds for disgruntled young professionals. FORTUNE interviewed more than 50 Gen Xers in Dallas, Louisville, and Seattle, with jobs ranging from construction manager to software engineer (see table). Battered by the economy and the bad luck of being born between Madonna and Britney Spears, they're Generation Wrecked.
The kids who toted STAR WARS lunchboxes are the most highly educated generation in American history: Almost 60% of Gen Xers have some college education, and 6.6% have graduate school degrees. The Census Bureau calls their pursuit of higher education the "Big Payoff," since historically a college-educated full-time worker earns 1.8 times more over his lifetime than a high school graduate.
When you can't find a job or pay your student loans, though, college can seem like the Big Rip-Off. Today, the median student loan debt is at its highest level ever, $17,000, compared with $2,000 when the baby-boomers were in their 20s. According to educational lender Nellie Mae, graduating students average $20,402 in combined student loans and credit card debt. Those who have borrowed to pay for professional school, especially doctors and lawyers, are increasingly likely to have immense debt that is not reflected in proportionately higher salaries. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed by Nellie Mae had combined undergraduate and graduate student debt of more than $30,000, and for 22%, their loan payments ate up more than one-fifth of their monthly income.
After midnight at a young professionals party in Louisville, Steve Flores, 31, and his wife, Jessica, 32, mingle, while the rest of the revelers line up for last call. Steve is a communications specialist for the party's sponsor, Brown-Forman, the big distiller. While working full-time, he is also pursuing an MBA. Although Steve worked to help pay for college, five years after graduation he has $40,000 of undergraduate debt to pay off; Jessica, an art therapist and professional harpist, has $50,000 in student loans. "I haven't started paying back my student loans for undergrad because they're deferred. I'm not taking any student loans for grad school," Steve says. He isn't so jovial when he thinks about the total tab. "We're dreading the day we actually have to start paying."
Those Big Payoff estimates rely on what 50-year-old college graduates make today to guess what 50-year-olds will make 20 years from now. That's not all that useful. "Whereas their parents experienced rising wages over their lifetime, Generation X may not. So college may have been a bad investment," says Wolff, the NYU economist. Adds Bruce Tulgan, a Gen Xer and founder of RainmakerThinking, a consultancy that studies labor trends: "I had a college president say to me, 'I don't know how much longer I can pull this off because people will start to ask, Is it worth this much money to be that much smarter?' "
Maybe they could keep a load of fake, but interesting looking, information on to the honeypot to keep the hackers entertained but ensuring their corporate network isn't breached.
Obviously as you point out the police won't really be able to do anything. Maybe if you sent out your own security but then it's a bit hard to prove anything. Anything more sinister like sending a virus to the hackers machine would be illegal.
Scientists say 50 grammes of sugar would keep a 40-watt light bulb lit for eight hours.
So could something like a sheeps eye see you through the week?:-)
Presumably different waste food will be more suitable for generating power. This could be very useful if it somehow could join with your existing home power supply. That or it could power your waste disposal unit. If not then it could have some uses for things like camping. This could definitely prove useful in the future. It's a very good idea.
The article says
"Here in the US only two frequencies, 27MHz and 49 MHz are licensed for wireless toys, and are used. That means only two cars can race each other at once, because otherwise the signals will conflict. You can find Asian imports in some places that operate at the other three frequencies, but they are not FCC-approved for the US."
Sadly it is a real pain not being able to race more than 2 at times.
They may be smart, but I bet they still had to write down the apparatus, method and observations (dedicated to everyone that studied science at school)
Originally Unix became so popular because it was provided to colleges and students.
Programmers that had been using it at colleges were keen to use it in the workplace. I think it's likely that Linux will follow this pattern.
The things that have kept Micro$o£t so popular are that people tend to pirate a copy and that it is installed on just about every new PC. Arguably making their software harder to copy will damage them in the long run.
Is it just a coincidence that you get small holes in your socks abd fluff in your belly button? I think not. I can't explain why it's always blue though.
Other important things to research should include
1) Where do lost biro's go to
2) Why trouser turn-ups attract so much fluff (perhaps it's related to belly buttons?)
3) If you tie 4 cats together and drop them wil they all land on their feet?
Certainly in Europe diesel is a lot more popular. That's probably a lot to do with the price of North American unleaded being very low. Current UK price of unleaded is around 74.9p a litre where I live (which I think is about US $4.50 a gallon). Diesel costs more and you get more miles per gallon.
There is some debate about the cleaness of diesel though. In the UK there is the suggestion that diesel has a worse effect (mainly of children's lungs). The government keeps the diesel prices high to discourage private motorists from wanting diesels. However they are reluctant to say diesel is bad because 99.9% of transport lorries, busses, taxis, etc. are diesel. There is reportedly a link between an increase in children with asthma and an increase in the use of diesel. There's a bit about it on the following sites.
http://www.doh.gov.uk/airpollution/airpol2.htm
http://www.eta.co.uk/tr/pj/polution/roadpol.htm
Sorry if that sounded a bit 'conspiracy theory'. I think your opinion depends on what reviews and reports you read.
It's true that this sort of electric car is really a concept car. Eventually something like it may appear on everyday roads but not for years.
Something like the Prius is showing a possible future. It's not selling that well as yet (relative to normal cars) but is at least quite practical.
What is needed are electric cars which can function almost as well as a normal car (in terms of range and speed). Until recently most alternative fuel cars had maximum speeds of about 40 mph and a range of about 50 miles before needing an hours charge. Unless cars like these are available very cheaply then how many people will buy them?
Something like the Prius has the best of both electric and petrol cars and represents the present and near future. This huge supercar thing represents, at best, something vaguely from the distant future.
I worked in hi-fi/tv sales for a number of years so spent quite a long time trying different cables. All hi-fi people agree that the cheap cable you get in the box isn't up to much and that a slightly more expensive shielded cable will give you better results. The problem is the differences are small, so most people would be hard pushed to tell the difference between a very expensive cable (such as Monster) and something cheap from Wal-Mart.
It's definitely better to have something like S-Video rather than an RF connector. However, a cheap S-Video would only look bad compared to a more expensive cable if you are using good quality Home Cinema equipment. I'm not convinced the output of a game from a console is that good. Generally you'd be better off cleaning the screen, buying a cheap connector and breaking & making the connections periodically to avoid the build-up of dirt.
Exactly. If they want more 'average' home PC users having Linux then it will probably come from it looking nice. Micro$oft has a very poor reputation with reliability and people tend to regard Linux has a good reputation.
Now if we could get a bit more software off the shelf we'd be laughing......
Agreed. I use a phone for talking and a bit of text messaging. The novelty of the games wears off after about 5 minutes. It's much more important to have features such as a good UI.
Besides, what's the point with all this cameras on phones thing. I've never seen anyone try to put a phone on a camera. Probably be much easier as cameras tend to be bigger!
Perhaps they should offer some payment if someone happens to help find a cure for something.
It's a bit strange that people are willing to help as long as someone else does not make a profit. Do people not donate to certain charities in case it results in someone finding a cure for something and they don't get any money back? Anyway, I'm sure the people at Seti@home would profit if they did find alien life.
I run Seti@home but have absolutely no objections to possibly helping to cure disease.
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Ten years ago grunge musicians and college-age Cassandras who had never held a day job preached that corporate America would crush their generation's soul and leave them without a pension plan. Films like Singles and Reality Bites chronicled their transition from college graduate to Gap salesclerk.
A few years later the core of Generation X--the 40 million Americans born between 1966 and 1975--found themselves riding the wildest economic bull ever. Salesclerks became programmers; coffee slingers morphed into experts in Java (computerese, that is)--all flush with stock options and eye-popping salaries. Now that the thrill ride is over, Gen X's plight seems particularly bruising. No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this. Everything the dot-com boom delivered has been taken away--and then some. Real wages are falling, wealth continues to shift from younger to older, and education costs are surging. Worse yet, for some Gen Xers, their peak earning years are behind them. Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won't be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.
FORTUNE recently encountered the bitter and (now) experienced voice of Generation X in a chain restaurant in suburban Dallas. Age 32 and piercing-free, Karen Doss has found out that the alternative rockers were right. To pay for college she worked full-time as a secretary at Pillsbury world headquarters. After graduation in 1993, she accepted her sole job offer as an advertising copywriter, even though she despised the industry. She finally quit last year to get her real estate license so that she could better support her husband while he fulfills his dream of owning a bar.
Halfway to pension age, she has just $5,000 in a 401(k) and $20,000 in home equity. Ideally, someone her age should have at least $100,000 stashed away. "I don't have a corporate pension, and they aren't what they were," she says. "Social Security is obsolete and ineffective. And I already know that I'm going to have to have a private health-care plan. I'm angry that I can't seem to get a break."
Yes, yes, yes, we know what you're thinking. The free-spending slackers have only themselves to blame, since the dot-com boom should have made them rich for life. On the surface that's true. A 30-year-old today is 50% more likely to have a bachelor's degree than his counterpart in 1974 and earns $5,000 more a year, adjusted for inflation. But that's where the good news stops. He also has more in student loans and credit card debt, is less likely to own a home, and is just as likely to be unemployed. His salary probably topped out during the boom, whereas his predecessor's rose throughout his career. Social Security will start to evaporate as he turns 50--or before, if the lockbox gets raided--so he'll have to depend almost completely on his own savings for retirement. The comparison with a 30-year-old in 1984 isn't any rosier.
Gen X "has done worse than their parents have done according to a number of dimensions, like net worth and home ownership," says Edward Wolff, a New York University economist who studies trends in income and wealth. In a recent paper Wolff notes that young households lay claim to a smaller percentage of total U.S. wealth than they did in 1989.
Additionally, the inflation-adjusted median net worth of a Gen X household ($9,000) is lower than that of a comparable household in 1989, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.
Silicon Valley and Manhattan aren't the only stomping grounds for disgruntled young professionals. FORTUNE interviewed more than 50 Gen Xers in Dallas, Louisville, and Seattle, with jobs ranging from construction manager to software engineer (see table). Battered by the economy and the bad luck of being born between Madonna and Britney Spears, they're Generation Wrecked.
The kids who toted STAR WARS lunchboxes are the most highly educated generation in American history: Almost 60% of Gen Xers have some college education, and 6.6% have graduate school degrees. The Census Bureau calls their pursuit of higher education the "Big Payoff," since historically a college-educated full-time worker earns 1.8 times more over his lifetime than a high school graduate.
When you can't find a job or pay your student loans, though, college can seem like the Big Rip-Off. Today, the median student loan debt is at its highest level ever, $17,000, compared with $2,000 when the baby-boomers were in their 20s. According to educational lender Nellie Mae, graduating students average $20,402 in combined student loans and credit card debt. Those who have borrowed to pay for professional school, especially doctors and lawyers, are increasingly likely to have immense debt that is not reflected in proportionately higher salaries. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed by Nellie Mae had combined undergraduate and graduate student debt of more than $30,000, and for 22%, their loan payments ate up more than one-fifth of their monthly income.
After midnight at a young professionals party in Louisville, Steve Flores, 31, and his wife, Jessica, 32, mingle, while the rest of the revelers line up for last call. Steve is a communications specialist for the party's sponsor, Brown-Forman, the big distiller. While working full-time, he is also pursuing an MBA. Although Steve worked to help pay for college, five years after graduation he has $40,000 of undergraduate debt to pay off; Jessica, an art therapist and professional harpist, has $50,000 in student loans. "I haven't started paying back my student loans for undergrad because they're deferred. I'm not taking any student loans for grad school," Steve says. He isn't so jovial when he thinks about the total tab. "We're dreading the day we actually have to start paying."
Those Big Payoff estimates rely on what 50-year-old college graduates make today to guess what 50-year-olds will make 20 years from now. That's not all that useful. "Whereas their parents experienced rising wages over their lifetime, Generation X may not. So college may have been a bad investment," says Wolff, the NYU economist. Adds Bruce Tulgan, a Gen Xer and founder of RainmakerThinking, a consultancy that studies labor trends: "I had a college president say to me, 'I don't know how much longer I can pull this off because people will start to ask, Is it worth this much money to be that much smarter?' "
Obviously as you point out the police won't really be able to do anything. Maybe if you sent out your own security but then it's a bit hard to prove anything. Anything more sinister like sending a virus to the hackers machine would be illegal.
So could something like a sheeps eye see you through the week? :-)
Presumably different waste food will be more suitable for generating power. This could be very useful if it somehow could join with your existing home power supply. That or it could power your waste disposal unit. If not then it could have some uses for things like camping. This could definitely prove useful in the future. It's a very good idea.
Sadly it is a real pain not being able to race more than 2 at times.
As long as the contestants aren't a statistician, a mathematician and a different kind of mathematician.
Personally I don't mind what happens as long as they don't get sent to that planet of the apes. Wait a minute, that was earth.....
Is part of the prize the return flight or is this another one of those scams we keep hearing about? ;-)
If you're talking about the atom that would definitely win the Nobel Prize.
They may be smart, but I bet they still had to write down the apparatus, method and observations (dedicated to everyone that studied science at school)
Programmers that had been using it at colleges were keen to use it in the workplace. I think it's likely that Linux will follow this pattern.
The things that have kept Micro$o£t so popular are that people tend to pirate a copy and that it is installed on just about every new PC. Arguably making their software harder to copy will damage them in the long run.
Yes, it seems that it just came to me.....could this be the breakthrough we're all looking for?
Vanishing biros and vanishing socks have to be linked. No doubt about it.
Other important things to research should include
1) Where do lost biro's go to
2) Why trouser turn-ups attract so much fluff (perhaps it's related to belly buttons?)
3) If you tie 4 cats together and drop them wil they all land on their feet?
There is some debate about the cleaness of diesel though. In the UK there is the suggestion that diesel has a worse effect (mainly of children's lungs). The government keeps the diesel prices high to discourage private motorists from wanting diesels. However they are reluctant to say diesel is bad because 99.9% of transport lorries, busses, taxis, etc. are diesel. There is reportedly a link between an increase in children with asthma and an increase in the use of diesel. There's a bit about it on the following sites.
http://www.doh.gov.uk/airpollution/airpol2.htm
http://www.eta.co.uk/tr/pj/polution/roadpol.htm
Sorry if that sounded a bit 'conspiracy theory'. I think your opinion depends on what reviews and reports you read.
Something like the Prius is showing a possible future. It's not selling that well as yet (relative to normal cars) but is at least quite practical.
What is needed are electric cars which can function almost as well as a normal car (in terms of range and speed). Until recently most alternative fuel cars had maximum speeds of about 40 mph and a range of about 50 miles before needing an hours charge. Unless cars like these are available very cheaply then how many people will buy them?
Something like the Prius has the best of both electric and petrol cars and represents the present and near future. This huge supercar thing represents, at best, something vaguely from the distant future.
I think she said "burlap".
It's definitely better to have something like S-Video rather than an RF connector. However, a cheap S-Video would only look bad compared to a more expensive cable if you are using good quality Home Cinema equipment. I'm not convinced the output of a game from a console is that good. Generally you'd be better off cleaning the screen, buying a cheap connector and breaking & making the connections periodically to avoid the build-up of dirt.
Exactly. If they want more 'average' home PC users having Linux then it will probably come from it looking nice. Micro$oft has a very poor reputation with reliability and people tend to regard Linux has a good reputation. Now if we could get a bit more software off the shelf we'd be laughing......
Agreed. I use a phone for talking and a bit of text messaging. The novelty of the games wears off after about 5 minutes. It's much more important to have features such as a good UI. Besides, what's the point with all this cameras on phones thing. I've never seen anyone try to put a phone on a camera. Probably be much easier as cameras tend to be bigger!
Perhaps they should offer some payment if someone happens to help find a cure for something. It's a bit strange that people are willing to help as long as someone else does not make a profit. Do people not donate to certain charities in case it results in someone finding a cure for something and they don't get any money back? Anyway, I'm sure the people at Seti@home would profit if they did find alien life. I run Seti@home but have absolutely no objections to possibly helping to cure disease.