Simply factor in the monthly payments for you average 2 car family. You will see that the total cost for the 2 cars is around the same price as a mortgage.
What are the monthly payments on an average 2 car family? $700? $800? I'm guessing because we have three cars, but only one payment, and I wouldn't have that payment if I had had the cash to buy it outright. Now the average person in my area probably DOES have two car payments, and I would guess they might be in the area of $800. The real estate market is pretty low in my area, so there is some possibility of having an $800 a month mortgage payment. However, if you went to a real city, you probably couldn't find a house with a mortgage payment under $2000. Try living in a big city like New York or a European city. When you come back to the gridlock of suburban rush hour you will find your self feeling detatched.
I lived in Chicago. It sucked big time. Had to drive 50 minutes to get anywhere. Couldn't really take the train because those just got out of the city or back in. The El only runs downtown, not out in the suburbs. Now I have moved back to Oklahoma City. No more traffic. Cheap houses. And the average industry pay is only 5% less than the big cities where the cost of living is 60% higher or more.
I'll take the wide open spaces. You can live in the city. We're both happy. Unless it makes you unhappy that I don't like the same lifestyle that you do.
Most Americans spend more on their cars than their homes.
How do you figure that? By including the price of gas? Better include the price of groceries, utilities, and household niceties in what people spend on their home then.
Personally, I know of no one who spends more on a car than on their house. Of course, in an urban area, where houses cost 20 times as much as the average car, it is absolutely impossible, but in cheap areas such as where I live, you can buy a house for only 1.5 times the cost of an average car. But the house still costs you more in insurance, utilities and upkeep.
Sadly many Americans have this odd view that freedom means being seperate/isolated from the community.
What's so odd about wanting personal space? If it doesn't hurt anybody, is available, and you can afford it, and is enjoyable to you, then why not purchase your own space? On the other hand, if you like living in houses where your living room wall, is someone elses bedroom wall, then I want begrudge you to go for it. It doesn't appeal to me, but I won't tell you you can't do it.
Yes, less than 1,000 miles per state seems a little low to me as well. Then again, I live in the midwest, where we have thousands of miles or interstate highway crisscrossing the state. But then, the internet highway system makes up an amazingly small percentage of the total amount of paved road in any given state.
I have employment. I'm not saying the job market is bad now. It's great now, as I said. I get three or four e-mails a day from headhunters. It was after 9/11 that I lost employment. I had programming experience, Solaris admin experience, Sybase and Oracle DBA experience and Data Warehouse architecture experience. I was great at my job and in high demand in the best of times, but in the worst of times, it counts for nothing. Rather, it counts against you, because companies think you will want to much money, or leave when the market gets better. Plus I was a consultant, and at the time, many companies were refusing to hire contracters for the same reasons, and also to punish contractors for daring to be independent and take the money they deserved rather than what a company felt like paying them.
My point remains simply this: when times are tough, they don't care if you are the best, they want the cheapest. RAID 5 when times are good, RAID 0 and hope for the best when times are tough.
Sure the job market is great now, but don't kid yourself. It doesn't matter how good you are, when the job market goes down, employers start looking at the bottom line. Not the top line that says you do three times as much work as everyone else, the bottom line, where it says you get paid 20% more than everyone else. It doesn't matter how much you educate yourself, diversify, whatever, at the end of the day, being better than everyone else is no guarantee of a job. It doesn't matter how much you criticize my skills, claim I am too specified, or have outdated skills, if you think just being great at your job entitles you to continuous employment, prepare to be surprised. I used to think just like you and said the same things about people who were out of work, and I got canned and replaced by H1B workers. I couldn't find a job anywhere in Chicago or Wisconsin.
Now the market is much better. I get several contacts a day from headhunters. All much lower than I would take, but they are all looking for H1Bs anyway, so even if I applied I wouldn't be accepted.
I used to be delusional in that way, too. I was very good at almost any job I did. Supervisors loved me, customers loved me.I was well above average and new it. But I got cocky and thought that as long as I displayed far above average skills, that I would always be in demand. But then after 9/11 I spent nearly a year without work, and started over making a take home pay that was only about 30% of my previous take home. I have now got myself back up to almost 50%.
Don't fool yourself. Companies would rather pay less money for less talent, even if that means that the person can't do the job at all.
Yes, I get a lot of responses as well when I update my resume on Monster or Dice, but the people who contact me are usually headhunters, and almost always offering a pittance. I had a headhunter contact me about an Oracle DBA and Unix System Administrator position. It was a 6 month contract position for $30 an hour. That's significantly less than I get right now as a full time employee.
90% or more of the headhnters that contact me are Indian sounding names.
ALL of the jobs I have applied for have had more information than I felt necessary about H1B status. One of the applications had one page for the basic info and skill requirements, and 4 PAGES on H1B information. Needless to say, I got no callback on that one.
In my experience, H-1B workers aren't worth the effort.
Many companies exclude H1B for exactly the reasons you specify. Of course, this is perfectly legal, and perfectly in keeping with the principals of the H1B system. Amazingly, they don't ever seem to have a problem finding workers from the citizen pool.
Other companies, however, have the H1B system down pat and seem to hire nothing BUT H1B. If you know the system, you can save a lot of money hiring H1Bs and threatening to send them home if they don't work 80 hour weeks.
Such is the state of the world. If you are not an ass from time to time, you will not get what was promised you. You will not get your car fixed under warranty even when it is covered. Your company will not reimburse your expenses when they promised. You will not be given an annual review or raise, you will be shorted fries at McDonalds, you will be overcharged on phone bills for calls you didn't make, you will be billed for 976 numbers you didn't call, etc, etc. "You get what you pay for" is BS. You MAY get what you pay for, if you grab onto it with both hands and scream and yell, otherwise, you will get less.
I'll second that. I've had American Express cancel payments about three times on Shoddy retailers. Most of the time it is because my otherwise well-meaning wife has purchased a one time gift from the Home Shopping Channel or Richard Simmons for someone's birthday, and the subhuman bastard merchants start charging us every month, whether or not they actually continue sending out product. I have had to call Amex on Richard Simmons three months in a row and they didn't even send out any product, just billed us. The home shopping network has gotten clever and masks everything you buy from any vendor behind their corporate name, so you don't have any real clue as to what charge is what.
Now my wife understands that anything that you can buy off the TV is a scam, so we don't have this problem any more, but Amex has been a lifesaver. Now if only they would automatically reject charges from scammers like HSN and Richard Simmons, but then their first objective is to make money, so if people get scammed and pay the money, Amex wins, too. Either way, they come out the good guy.
Use your lawyers letterhead. It's cheaper. You can then put CC:. Even if you don't send the lawyer a copy (which would probably cost you money), it usually gets the company's attention.
you are probably under a contract that you have to pay money to get out of.
This happened to me. I had a contract with about a year left on it, lost my job, had to move. The carrier had no service in the area I moved to. Every call was roaming. The charges were hideous. I complained that I shouldn't have to pay to get out of the contract because they had ageed to provide me service, but clearly were not able to do so. But even I could admit that it was my fault for moving to an area where that company didn't have any service.
I know the contracts sound great, since they let you get exciting new phones pretty cheap, but in the end, statistics say the phone companies will make money off of it, so you're better off finding a no-contract carrier.
I got ripped off by AT&T, too. When I called up the AT&T rep to get put on a long distance plan, they put me on a decent plan with a low per minute charge and an international calling plan. The next month, after using only a small amount of long distance, I got a bill for about $500! When I called to ask why I was being charged over a dollar a minute when I was on a seven cents a minute plan, they said that that plan is not available in my area. I told them I was sold that plan by one of their representatives. They told me that they could not be held responsible for what their authorized representative told me and that if I did not pay they would put me up for collections. The only concession they made was to give me a much worse plan which WAS available in my area, and retroactively repriced the previous bill to that new plan. I still didn't get my seven cents a minute, but at least it got knocked back to 15 cents or so per minute.
Oh, yes, and they still assessed the monthly fee for the plans which were not available in my area.
Unfortunately, I had no recourse to go to another company because my local phone company handled all long distance services and resold them through AT&T. So it was effectively a monopoly.
Paul
Overreacting is what our legal system does best. We had a house for rent, but could not rent it to a person who was otherwise a perfectly good applicant, except he was a convicted sex offender, and in our state, a convicted sex offender can not live within 1500 feet of a school, park, library, day care, or other place where minors may congregate. Naturally, that limits convicted sex offenders to either living in a shack in the middle of nowhere, or just not registering as a sex offender so they can actually get a house.
This guy had been convicted of rape, though he claimed he didn't do it. He had served his sentence, but now was severely limited on where he could live even though the crime was not against a minor, if it indeed occurred.
like getting their IT guy to set up a passphrase
Their IT guy was probably too busy mopping the floor or making a double fudge latee or putting more toilet paper in the restroom.
So you're a fan of the bastard that blew up a nursery? Just go die already, why don't you?
McVeigh got off easy. They should have killed him painfully and resuscitated him over and over so he could experience the 167 deaths he caused. Every April 19th, the state I live in mourns the senseless loss of those people, and especially the loss of the smiling faces and the warm hugs of the children whose lives were cut short. As a Christian, I am supposed to forgive, but I am not good enough to do that. I hope he burns in hell.
Don't worry, capacitors aren't actually infallible. I just replaced the one in my garage door opener. My garage door opener is proven technology and it didn't last near the 300,000 cycles that the unproven technology from MIT is claiming.
I don't know about anyone else, but I can't justify spending $60 on a game that isn't going to give me hundreds of hours of entertainment. Maybe that's why I buy games like Simcity and Flight Simulator.
On the other hand, if you just download the games, as some others have admitted to doing, then I guess I could see how you would just want to rip through them.
Personally, I like games with unlockable features, so long as the unlocking is 1) possible and 2) can be discovered by a normal process. In other words, I don't want to have to stand on a particular pixel, and press L1 and R2, while slowly spinning the left joystick at 27 degrees per second.
Hey, I knew it was Illinois without reading a word of it. What other screwed up state would waste such hideous amounts of taxpayer money on such a stupid endeavour.
Of course it's Illinois. The same state that is wasting thousands of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to send my Dad to jail for accidentally killing one of the billions of "endangered" Canada geese that infest Illinois. It's in my journal if you are really interested in the story.
Of course, humans already have a defense against the sun, that being melanin. It seems likely to me that random mutations in human DNA probably constantly vary the amount of melanin, which leads to some inidividuals being more sun resistant (and having darker skin). In today's society, we have other coping mechanisms, and we travel enough that the color of skin is most likely no longer a factor. In the old days, people got killed by other random events earlier in life such that resistance to skin cancer made little statistical difference anyway. But over many millions or perhaps even billions of years, odds are that people that lived in warmer climates would have evolved darker skin. Except that in that time frame, they probably would have moved to another climate anyway.
Anyway, what I meant to suggest was that perhaps the "random" mutation that popped up in the bacteria to protect against heat was something already "built into" DNA, like our melanin level, and that some of them randomly increased this and became more adapted to that environment. So it was not that evolution was directed, but more that an already existing defense mechanism randomly fired in certain individuals.
That is the nature of science article on slashdot. The article title always makes some great claim about how something amazing has happened, and then when we read the article, we find that nothing of note has happened, but someone has figured out how to do the easy part in the event that someone else ever actually gets around to figuring out the hard part.
Luckily studies on Mars and Earth's moon have thus far turned up no DHMO. If we can manage to make travel to the moon and the planets cheap and effective, there is hope for humanity.
No. Someone merely constructed that afterwards in order to make the joke actually make sense. Of course, it was funny already, because it used the "that's no X, that's my wife!" line in a context that made no sense. With this new explanation, it now DOES make sense and is no longer funny.
Yes, I find numerous references to the jet powered MR2 (which I swear I saw on/. years back), a jet powered Eclipse, and a host of others. You can find literally hundreds of T-58 boat conversions, and many, many cars. I don't know why this particular one warrants a mention on/., Maybe because it has fully half as many T-58s as the MR-2.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply factor in the monthly payments for you average 2 car family. You will see that the total cost for the 2 cars is around the same price as a mortgage.
What are the monthly payments on an average 2 car family? $700? $800? I'm guessing because we have three cars, but only one payment, and I wouldn't have that payment if I had had the cash to buy it outright. Now the average person in my area probably DOES have two car payments, and I would guess they might be in the area of $800. The real estate market is pretty low in my area, so there is some possibility of having an $800 a month mortgage payment. However, if you went to a real city, you probably couldn't find a house with a mortgage payment under $2000.
Try living in a big city like New York or a European city. When you come back to the gridlock of suburban rush hour you will find your self feeling detatched.
I lived in Chicago. It sucked big time. Had to drive 50 minutes to get anywhere. Couldn't really take the train because those just got out of the city or back in. The El only runs downtown, not out in the suburbs. Now I have moved back to Oklahoma City. No more traffic. Cheap houses. And the average industry pay is only 5% less than the big cities where the cost of living is 60% higher or more.
I'll take the wide open spaces. You can live in the city. We're both happy. Unless it makes you unhappy that I don't like the same lifestyle that you do.
Most Americans spend more on their cars than their homes.
How do you figure that? By including the price of gas? Better include the price of groceries, utilities, and household niceties in what people spend on their home then.
Personally, I know of no one who spends more on a car than on their house. Of course, in an urban area, where houses cost 20 times as much as the average car, it is absolutely impossible, but in cheap areas such as where I live, you can buy a house for only 1.5 times the cost of an average car. But the house still costs you more in insurance, utilities and upkeep.
Sadly many Americans have this odd view that freedom means being seperate/isolated from the community.
What's so odd about wanting personal space? If it doesn't hurt anybody, is available, and you can afford it, and is enjoyable to you, then why not purchase your own space? On the other hand, if you like living in houses where your living room wall, is someone elses bedroom wall, then I want begrudge you to go for it. It doesn't appeal to me, but I won't tell you you can't do it.
Yes, less than 1,000 miles per state seems a little low to me as well. Then again, I live in the midwest, where we have thousands of miles or interstate highway crisscrossing the state. But then, the internet highway system makes up an amazingly small percentage of the total amount of paved road in any given state.
I have employment. I'm not saying the job market is bad now. It's great now, as I said. I get three or four e-mails a day from headhunters. It was after 9/11 that I lost employment. I had programming experience, Solaris admin experience, Sybase and Oracle DBA experience and Data Warehouse architecture experience. I was great at my job and in high demand in the best of times, but in the worst of times, it counts for nothing. Rather, it counts against you, because companies think you will want to much money, or leave when the market gets better. Plus I was a consultant, and at the time, many companies were refusing to hire contracters for the same reasons, and also to punish contractors for daring to be independent and take the money they deserved rather than what a company felt like paying them.
My point remains simply this: when times are tough, they don't care if you are the best, they want the cheapest. RAID 5 when times are good, RAID 0 and hope for the best when times are tough.
Sure the job market is great now, but don't kid yourself. It doesn't matter how good you are, when the job market goes down, employers start looking at the bottom line. Not the top line that says you do three times as much work as everyone else, the bottom line, where it says you get paid 20% more than everyone else. It doesn't matter how much you educate yourself, diversify, whatever, at the end of the day, being better than everyone else is no guarantee of a job. It doesn't matter how much you criticize my skills, claim I am too specified, or have outdated skills, if you think just being great at your job entitles you to continuous employment, prepare to be surprised. I used to think just like you and said the same things about people who were out of work, and I got canned and replaced by H1B workers. I couldn't find a job anywhere in Chicago or Wisconsin.
Now the market is much better. I get several contacts a day from headhunters. All much lower than I would take, but they are all looking for H1Bs anyway, so even if I applied I wouldn't be accepted.
I used to be delusional in that way, too. I was very good at almost any job I did. Supervisors loved me, customers loved me.I was well above average and new it. But I got cocky and thought that as long as I displayed far above average skills, that I would always be in demand. But then after 9/11 I spent nearly a year without work, and started over making a take home pay that was only about 30% of my previous take home. I have now got myself back up to almost 50%.
Don't fool yourself. Companies would rather pay less money for less talent, even if that means that the person can't do the job at all.
Yes, I get a lot of responses as well when I update my resume on Monster or Dice, but the people who contact me are usually headhunters, and almost always offering a pittance. I had a headhunter contact me about an Oracle DBA and Unix System Administrator position. It was a 6 month contract position for $30 an hour. That's significantly less than I get right now as a full time employee.
90% or more of the headhnters that contact me are Indian sounding names.
ALL of the jobs I have applied for have had more information than I felt necessary about H1B status. One of the applications had one page for the basic info and skill requirements, and 4 PAGES on H1B information. Needless to say, I got no callback on that one.
In my experience, H-1B workers aren't worth the effort.
Many companies exclude H1B for exactly the reasons you specify. Of course, this is perfectly legal, and perfectly in keeping with the principals of the H1B system. Amazingly, they don't ever seem to have a problem finding workers from the citizen pool.
Other companies, however, have the H1B system down pat and seem to hire nothing BUT H1B. If you know the system, you can save a lot of money hiring H1Bs and threatening to send them home if they don't work 80 hour weeks.
Such is the state of the world. If you are not an ass from time to time, you will not get what was promised you. You will not get your car fixed under warranty even when it is covered. Your company will not reimburse your expenses when they promised. You will not be given an annual review or raise, you will be shorted fries at McDonalds, you will be overcharged on phone bills for calls you didn't make, you will be billed for 976 numbers you didn't call, etc, etc. "You get what you pay for" is BS. You MAY get what you pay for, if you grab onto it with both hands and scream and yell, otherwise, you will get less.
I'll second that. I've had American Express cancel payments about three times on Shoddy retailers. Most of the time it is because my otherwise well-meaning wife has purchased a one time gift from the Home Shopping Channel or Richard Simmons for someone's birthday, and the subhuman bastard merchants start charging us every month, whether or not they actually continue sending out product. I have had to call Amex on Richard Simmons three months in a row and they didn't even send out any product, just billed us. The home shopping network has gotten clever and masks everything you buy from any vendor behind their corporate name, so you don't have any real clue as to what charge is what.
Now my wife understands that anything that you can buy off the TV is a scam, so we don't have this problem any more, but Amex has been a lifesaver. Now if only they would automatically reject charges from scammers like HSN and Richard Simmons, but then their first objective is to make money, so if people get scammed and pay the money, Amex wins, too. Either way, they come out the good guy.
Use your lawyers letterhead. It's cheaper. You can then put CC:. Even if you don't send the lawyer a copy (which would probably cost you money), it usually gets the company's attention.
you are probably under a contract that you have to pay money to get out of.
This happened to me. I had a contract with about a year left on it, lost my job, had to move. The carrier had no service in the area I moved to. Every call was roaming. The charges were hideous. I complained that I shouldn't have to pay to get out of the contract because they had ageed to provide me service, but clearly were not able to do so. But even I could admit that it was my fault for moving to an area where that company didn't have any service.
I know the contracts sound great, since they let you get exciting new phones pretty cheap, but in the end, statistics say the phone companies will make money off of it, so you're better off finding a no-contract carrier.
I got ripped off by AT&T, too. When I called up the AT&T rep to get put on a long distance plan, they put me on a decent plan with a low per minute charge and an international calling plan. The next month, after using only a small amount of long distance, I got a bill for about $500! When I called to ask why I was being charged over a dollar a minute when I was on a seven cents a minute plan, they said that that plan is not available in my area. I told them I was sold that plan by one of their representatives. They told me that they could not be held responsible for what their authorized representative told me and that if I did not pay they would put me up for collections. The only concession they made was to give me a much worse plan which WAS available in my area, and retroactively repriced the previous bill to that new plan. I still didn't get my seven cents a minute, but at least it got knocked back to 15 cents or so per minute.
Oh, yes, and they still assessed the monthly fee for the plans which were not available in my area.
Unfortunately, I had no recourse to go to another company because my local phone company handled all long distance services and resold them through AT&T. So it was effectively a monopoly. Paul
Overreacting is what our legal system does best. We had a house for rent, but could not rent it to a person who was otherwise a perfectly good applicant, except he was a convicted sex offender, and in our state, a convicted sex offender can not live within 1500 feet of a school, park, library, day care, or other place where minors may congregate. Naturally, that limits convicted sex offenders to either living in a shack in the middle of nowhere, or just not registering as a sex offender so they can actually get a house.
This guy had been convicted of rape, though he claimed he didn't do it. He had served his sentence, but now was severely limited on where he could live even though the crime was not against a minor, if it indeed occurred.
like getting their IT guy to set up a passphrase
Their IT guy was probably too busy mopping the floor or making a double fudge latee or putting more toilet paper in the restroom.
So you're a fan of the bastard that blew up a nursery? Just go die already, why don't you?
McVeigh got off easy. They should have killed him painfully and resuscitated him over and over so he could experience the 167 deaths he caused. Every April 19th, the state I live in mourns the senseless loss of those people, and especially the loss of the smiling faces and the warm hugs of the children whose lives were cut short. As a Christian, I am supposed to forgive, but I am not good enough to do that. I hope he burns in hell.
Don't worry, capacitors aren't actually infallible. I just replaced the one in my garage door opener. My garage door opener is proven technology and it didn't last near the 300,000 cycles that the unproven technology from MIT is claiming.
I don't know about anyone else, but I can't justify spending $60 on a game that isn't going to give me hundreds of hours of entertainment. Maybe that's why I buy games like Simcity and Flight Simulator.
On the other hand, if you just download the games, as some others have admitted to doing, then I guess I could see how you would just want to rip through them.
Personally, I like games with unlockable features, so long as the unlocking is 1) possible and 2) can be discovered by a normal process. In other words, I don't want to have to stand on a particular pixel, and press L1 and R2, while slowly spinning the left joystick at 27 degrees per second.
Hey, I knew it was Illinois without reading a word of it. What other screwed up state would waste such hideous amounts of taxpayer money on such a stupid endeavour.
Of course it's Illinois. The same state that is wasting thousands of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to send my Dad to jail for accidentally killing one of the billions of "endangered" Canada geese that infest Illinois. It's in my journal if you are really interested in the story.
Of course, humans already have a defense against the sun, that being melanin. It seems likely to me that random mutations in human DNA probably constantly vary the amount of melanin, which leads to some inidividuals being more sun resistant (and having darker skin). In today's society, we have other coping mechanisms, and we travel enough that the color of skin is most likely no longer a factor. In the old days, people got killed by other random events earlier in life such that resistance to skin cancer made little statistical difference anyway. But over many millions or perhaps even billions of years, odds are that people that lived in warmer climates would have evolved darker skin. Except that in that time frame, they probably would have moved to another climate anyway.
Anyway, what I meant to suggest was that perhaps the "random" mutation that popped up in the bacteria to protect against heat was something already "built into" DNA, like our melanin level, and that some of them randomly increased this and became more adapted to that environment. So it was not that evolution was directed, but more that an already existing defense mechanism randomly fired in certain individuals.
That is the nature of science article on slashdot. The article title always makes some great claim about how something amazing has happened, and then when we read the article, we find that nothing of note has happened, but someone has figured out how to do the easy part in the event that someone else ever actually gets around to figuring out the hard part.
Until the heat sink fails.
What's the big deal? Just use your RAM to cool your CPU. Not keeping it cool enough? Add more RAM.
Luckily studies on Mars and Earth's moon have thus far turned up no DHMO. If we can manage to make travel to the moon and the planets cheap and effective, there is hope for humanity.
No. Someone merely constructed that afterwards in order to make the joke actually make sense. Of course, it was funny already, because it used the "that's no X, that's my wife!" line in a context that made no sense. With this new explanation, it now DOES make sense and is no longer funny.
Yes, I find numerous references to the jet powered MR2 (which I swear I saw on /. years back), a jet powered Eclipse, and a host of others. You can find literally hundreds of T-58 boat conversions, and many, many cars. I don't know why this particular one warrants a mention on /., Maybe because it has fully half as many T-58s as the MR-2.