It must be nice to be able to set the terms on which you'll work for the company. You must have a lot of leverage there. A lot of us are not so lucky.
I don't like "being on call". I might be willing for the right price, but that price hasn't been offered yet.
I also don't imagine I'd like cleaning porta poties. I've never done it, but it looks like a nasty job. Being that I find it distasteful, I've never applied to a porta pottie company. There have been times when it's taken me a while to find a job whereas if I were willing to clean porta potties I could have been immediately employed. There probably is a salary threshold where I'd be willing to consider cleaning porta potties, but it'd be pretty high.
I hope you see where I'm going with this. If you hate cleaning up shit, don't apply for shit cleaning jobs.
I see far too many references to the "weakening" of humanity via medicine. The short version goes: "People who would have died xx years ago live today. Thus we are being weakened." This is such a bass ackwards way of looking at things to border hilarity.
The above statement is based on the presumption that, say, jane's resistance to disease Y is her greatest contribution to the gene pool or her weakness to Y the greatest detriment. What if Jane has an IQ of 190 or is resistant to allergies? What if, aside from her susceptibility to a single disease, has a life expectancy of 110? However, in yesteryear she may have died at 9 from chicken pocks before passing on those genes
It's easy to sit back with armchair assessments of "the best of all possible worlds", but the reality is far more complex. Only one thing is guaranteed:
As time progresses, surviving populations will be suited enough for their particular environments . . . or they will die out.
Remember folks, Evolution isn't about Survival of the Fittest. It's about Survival of the Fit Enough.
Over the years I've noticed a trend within my jobs. Often I'm "the technology guy", yes that's singular. For example, I'm currently working in a research lab as "the tech guy". I'm often never given the time or resources to write truly clean code. This is usually due to three situations, though all are similar. Let me explain:
Situation one is when a need is perceived and a fix is desired *now*. I'm asked to implement a fix, then constantly asked if it's done yet. The moment I can give an example of it somewhat working, I'm pulled off the project with the declaration of "it's good enough". The code is usually barely out of the prototype stage. Subsequent fixes to the code are done sporadically and in between more pressing needs. Again with pressure on quickness rather then robustness.
Situation two is a result of gross under estimation of the depth of the project. Such as "Hey, can you implement a usb driver for this new device we have that isn't supported. We also need a gui front end for it. Oh, we have two weeks." I work solo btw and have never written a device driver before.
Situation three is a lack of appreciation for specialization within the technology field. I find this one very surprising being that I work amidst individuals whose careers are defined by their specialization. For example, I'm given a project of the utmost priority to back port/port an application in a language I've never seen before. Or perhaps asked to spec out an enterprise level backup system. Since I'm considered "the computer guy", my "expertise" is viewed to encompass network engineering, hardware design, all languages ever conceived, and the ever pervasive "helpdesk" type tasks.
It makes for an interesting and dynamic work environment, but also leads to less then ideal code and many projects I would consider incomplete.
It's gunna happen and we'll just keep boiling like the frogs we are.
A little off topic, but the boiling frog story is actually a myth: boiling frog.
Interestingly enough, this sort of behavior is more often seen in warm blooded animals. Amphibians rely on external temp variation to regulate body temp. Thus they are very sensitive to those changes. Mammals, on the other hand, self regulate. This leads to a bit less sensitivity to minor changes in the environment (since we have no need to be aware of that).
So, in short, it's humans that are much more likely to tolerate gradual changes until they become detrimental to our health rather then our very sensitive friends the frog.:)
i don't know how old your mom's old computer was, or what version of windows she was running, but DHCP is a pretty trivial thing to enable. In fact, it is enabled by default in windows....
This includes all the way up through win XP. I've always found Windows networking to be "quirky". Notice that's not a horrid notch against it. For someone with a little knowledge it's trivial. When a connection would go down, I've seen systems often not grab a new IP until either rebooted or go to Network Places and right clicking the connection then choosing "repair".
Though this seems trivial to most, it can be quite confusing for others. Especially basic users. "I can't reach the internet." was not only one of my mother's most frequent requests, but was also one of the most frequent support calls I received from the general public.
I've also seen odd ball behavior where you had to go through a process to get windows to grab an ip. Dances like following a sequence of plugging and unplugging connections while rebooting system at the appropriate time. No, makes no sense to me, but it worked sometimes. Like "Unplug computer from router. Shut down computer, plug back into router, reboot computer." Simple enough, but anyone whose worked in tech support can already see a list of 20 questions about that statement. "Which one is the router? Wait Wait, I just unplugged the computer...oh, my I'm sorry that was the router I guess...wait, what am I doing? So plug the router back in? That's the little thin box not the really big rectangle one I put my cd's in right?. . . . I thought you said unplug it?"...ME: "I have to smoke a cigarette. I'll call back in 20m"
She pretty much was being unreasonable about the whole thing and said over and over, "I'm 57 years old, I don't want to learn something else."
I had to put up with tons of phone calls to support windows, clean of viruses, etc. my mother and father's windows computers. One of my main tasks when I came home to visit was "Look at the computer for a while", which means try and make it run like new.
I bought them a Mac about 2 years ago. At first, I got the same response. Endless whining about not wanting to learn something new. I simply told them that I was their computer "advisor and repairman", this was a lower maintenance, lower risk machine and if they chose to go back to windows they'd be on their own from here on out. Stick with mac and I'll be their free tech support bitch again.
Took a month or so, but now they'd never use windows again. In 2.5 years, I've received 4 phone calls. Two of them were a broke cable modem. The cable company kept telling her "it was a mac thing", but a surge had killed the modem. After insisting they replace the modem, everything worked. One of the calls was to ask me how to get from Hotmail to Gmail + Apple Mail.app. The third was to ask how to connect the internet, which used to be quite the support call with windows. Yes, I can do it quickly but trying to get a 55 year old woman who learned computers relatively recently to "Go to start, Right click Network Icon, blah blah" proved quite the trial often involving a couple of reboots and head scratching on why the hell it wouldn't come up. With her new Mac my only support advise was "Plug in the wire that looks like a huge phone plug on the end into the only place it'll go on the back of the computer".
My only point being, she comes to you for advice because she knows no better. If she's going to be stubborn, then return in kind. Just tell her you'll never help with computer issues again if she doesn't put minimal effort into learning her new one (I mean really, 99% of the effort is learning two new icons: Safari & Mail). Little does she know you won't really be doing any tech support whether she stays with mac or not.;)
Hurm...slightly ridiculous hyperbole given Apple's pathetic market share.
Not really. The true technological ground breakers in any industry often don't have near the market share of the lower end brands. BMW, Ferrari, Mercedes. Of course, we could look at Apple Inc. as an OEM rather then an OS vendor and in that case they're the 3rd largest in the world.
I'm not saying they are or are not spyware. However, if your definition of spyware includes all programs that scan for malware then even anti-spyware applications are spyware.
I prefer to define spyware as software which collects without permission user information. By this definition, unless the above scanners are doing something other then they say (e.g. checking for known exploits) they are by no means spyware. So until I see some sort of legitimate evidence that Warden is doing something like collecting browsing habits or a list of installed software (other then malware), I dub thee alarmist tin foil hat wearer extraordinaire.
911 calls were the first thing I thought of, too. Any business owner who jams a call about somebody having a heart attack would be sued into oblivion, and deserve it.
I'm sure the restaurant would allow their landlines to be used for emergency calls. In fact, I bet someone would even call for you when the medical emergency occurs.
Until there's some solid evidence that cell phones have increased survivability in proprietary businesses in emergency situations, this argument is completely specious. Public areas like the street or subway *could* be different. Cell phones would appear to be more useful here. But a restaurant, bar, etc? I doubt it.
Trojans don't rely IE vulnerabilities to get email addresses after infection. They can do the exact same thing they do on Windows on an OS X box once infected.
It sounds like this trojan comes with a local privilege escalation vulnerability otherwise this also depends on users on Macs having root level access.
It was only a matter of time before someone would target it. Whether more and more people target it is a completely separate issue.
As a cross-platform user of all sorts of systems I generally prefer that things aren't targeted at all. I do enjoy the people saying OS X was inherently secure based on absolutely no knowledge of OS X's foundation finally being hit with the clue-by-four. Now they can actually start learning what it is they are spouting about and present intelligent arguments which are always better than empty ones.
Of course that may just be a tad bit optimistic on my part. No system connected to the outside world is 100% secure, does this in any way change my thoughts on OS X security? Nope, not at all because I always understood this problem as it exists on any platform which lets the user download and run software.
Let me clarify: There is no OS ever made that is immune to user stupidity. I could have an installer for any *nix based OS authenticate then run rm -rf/* or "take over a system". This is a given. It's not a security flaw, it's a user stupidity flaw. When windows is appropriately bashed for its poor security record, it is due to unavoidable holes and exploits that allow escalation of privileges. IE has had a particularly horrid record in this area. Further, remote exploits impact on windows systems are aggravated by having said services enabled by default ready and willing for any network probe from an infected computer.
and after cost of living differences, $100 in LA is around ~$55 where I live. Makes me glad my employer pays on a national average.
I feel compelled to add that some things are amazingly cheaper. For example, in a shitty little apartment in NO your summer electric bill can get up to 250'sh a month and it never drops below 100. That's even if you turn off the air conditioning and suffer through the stifling heat. Entergy jacks up the prices and adds really sketchy sounding charges that appear to be arbitrary. My favorite is the "Additional Charges: $100". I've made numerous calls to Entergy inquiring just what these "Additional Charges" were and even asked a EE (whose wife I knew) what he could make of it. Apparently it's a company secret at the highest levels.
In LA my bill rarely goes over 30 or 40 dollars a month. All year round.
First, the shortcuts are not consistent from program to program.
The blame lies in application developers, not with Apple. I'm not sure what you mean by "the shortcuts are enforced in other OS's". As far as I know there's nothing preventing a programmer on another platform from binding functions to any key they wish. However, the "Ctrl" combos are canonical for Windows/Linux (who got it from windows) whereas the "CMD" combos are for OSX. The developers should take this into account when porting. Basically, it's either laziness or they don't want to confuse old time users with new key combos. However, there's nothing preventing you from reassigning these combos in either OSX apps or the third party apps to conform to the combos your used to. (Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shorcuts.
Second, window switching is abysmal.
This is a difference in UI functionality. For windows you want to keep in your workflow you CMD+H to hide them. This unclutters the desktop and allows for switching via Expose. Minimizing apps/windows are for taking them out of the workflow. Say to put something on hold for several hours or so. A third solution is to script your most used apps to hotkeys that will either focus them if open or open them if not, this way no tabbing is necessary to focus an app.
Third, I have had weird things happen with my MBP
These problems sound unfortunate and are not the norm in the least. I'd suggest you have something funky going on with your laptop and should return it for repair/replacement.
It's not my intention to start a flame war anyway
Neither is it my intention. Rather I wish to provide some advice that can help your work flow. Don't buck the system, learn the system. OSX is highly configurable, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you can change it. (P.S. If the application switching really gets to you that badly and you can't grow comfortable with the OSX way of doing things there are many 3rd party (and often free or dirt cheap) apps out there to provide you with the windows like functionality you've become accustomed to)
If you spend $250 for a dinner with your wife, you are making too much money. I spend that much for a month's worth of groceries AND all my eating out. I donate my money and my time to various things that can use that money to make a lot of people almost as comfortable as I am, such as Asheville Homeless Network. If you are interested, we would love a donation... maybe two meals' worth...
Hugs,
Moss
Let's break this down a bit. I buy a new vid card about every 1.5 years. 250/78 = $3.20 cents. That's less then a single cup of coffee every week. Link your organization and if it interests me I would be glad to donate $5 per month or almost twice what I pay on a video card. As I said, I don't spend 250 on a meal all the time. It's a rare, but very enjoyable event. Probably about the equivalent of a couple of cups of coffee a month.
Even when I was kid working off of a meager allowance for chores (like 5 dollars a week), I was the type to save my money up for large rewards (like game consoles or a big show) rather then spend a little here and a little there every day. I carried this over to my adult life.
As far as groceries, I've really crunched the numbers and the bare minimum I could possible spend in my part of the country is around 350 for my wife and I. Different areas have different budgets. I'll go ahead and throw out my income, since everyone seems to think I make so much. Both me and my wife bring home about 35,000 combined in Los Angeles. I'm a research assistant working on getting into grad school. So our income should increase a good bit in time, but as for now we barely make the same as a decent single income. A 250 dollar card/dinner/whatever comprises of only.005% of our total income during that 1.5 year period. Considering the amount of entertainment it provides, that's negligible.
Around here the dollar does stretch that far, I guarantee it. Stop flying over the states, and stop in once in a while. We really do it up well for pretty cheap. Oh, and there's plenty of parking. Just sayin'.
I'm originally from new orleans, now in LA. Yeah, the differences in price are outstanding and I've not been anywhere in the country that can beat NO for good, cheap food. Like a 5 dollar Po Boy that beats the socks off of many a 60 dollar meal here. But still, for anyone with an education and a 1/2 decent job 100 dollars is a little over an hour's work.
Problem with stage6 is that their search features are horrendous. No exact string searches or the ability to "drill down" with advanced search that I can find.
Well, that link crashed both safari and firefox. Looks more like a browser killer to me.
Works in both safari and firefox for me. I'd start looking at something more user specific like plugins or some such. Been using stage6 for a good while now.
Because the sort of person that wants a $100 video card is the type of person who would get several nights out for $250 at what they perceive to be nice restaurants, including drinks.
Though I quoted you, there were several replies along these lines. One mentioning I must be in the top 10% of american incomes. Actually, the truth is far from that. I'm actually closer to the bottom 20% of income levels. I don't have 250 dollar meals every week or even every month, but I do enjoy a really nice meal with a bottle of wine a few times a year. It's considered a splurge for me and my wife, one we enjoy.
But what can one do with only 100 dollars? Take a girlfriend out to a concert? Here in cali tickets are around 50 a piece for any major show, so you could swing that on 100 if you take the bus and don't buy any swag, drinks, cokes, and smuggle your own water in. Unless the girl your taking out is also a starving college student or ghetto queen, she probably won't view that as a very full date. Maybe you could go out for a few drinks, you know just sip a bit and call it a night. Better stick to beer, and it better be domestic. If you do this, you could make that 100 bucks stretch to two nights assuming you go to a dive and don't drink more then a 6-pack.
I could go on, but that dollar doesn't stretch near as far as you make it seem. I'd have to say, if my wife and I can afford the occasional extravagance while still putting back a decent savings, taking decent vacations to the islands, and living in a comparably large 2 bedroom (not a luxury, just clean and in a safe neighborhood), then anyone making 3-6 times what we do who claims they cannot is just being cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
And whom will testify against them if the telecoms have immunity?
Don't be a pud fucker, call your senator.
Hehe, it was 1:30am when I posted that. Late night posting for the loss.
If you let someone have full access to your computer, they can delete personal files and directories! News at 11!
I don't like "being on call". I might be willing for the right price, but that price hasn't been offered yet.
I also don't imagine I'd like cleaning porta poties. I've never done it, but it looks like a nasty job. Being that I find it distasteful, I've never applied to a porta pottie company. There have been times when it's taken me a while to find a job whereas if I were willing to clean porta potties I could have been immediately employed. There probably is a salary threshold where I'd be willing to consider cleaning porta potties, but it'd be pretty high.
I hope you see where I'm going with this. If you hate cleaning up shit, don't apply for shit cleaning jobs.
*uptime => approx. 4-6 hours per week
*usaage => playing video game X entire time
The rest of the time I'd be on different boot partition with a different OS.
I see far too many references to the "weakening" of humanity via medicine. The short version goes: "People who would have died xx years ago live today. Thus we are being weakened." This is such a bass ackwards way of looking at things to border hilarity.
The above statement is based on the presumption that, say, jane's resistance to disease Y is her greatest contribution to the gene pool or her weakness to Y the greatest detriment. What if Jane has an IQ of 190 or is resistant to allergies? What if, aside from her susceptibility to a single disease, has a life expectancy of 110? However, in yesteryear she may have died at 9 from chicken pocks before passing on those genes
It's easy to sit back with armchair assessments of "the best of all possible worlds", but the reality is far more complex. Only one thing is guaranteed:
As time progresses, surviving populations will be suited enough for their particular environments . . . or they will die out.
Remember folks, Evolution isn't about Survival of the Fittest. It's about Survival of the Fit Enough.
Over the years I've noticed a trend within my jobs. Often I'm "the technology guy", yes that's singular. For example, I'm currently working in a research lab as "the tech guy". I'm often never given the time or resources to write truly clean code. This is usually due to three situations, though all are similar. Let me explain:
Situation one is when a need is perceived and a fix is desired *now*. I'm asked to implement a fix, then constantly asked if it's done yet. The moment I can give an example of it somewhat working, I'm pulled off the project with the declaration of "it's good enough". The code is usually barely out of the prototype stage. Subsequent fixes to the code are done sporadically and in between more pressing needs. Again with pressure on quickness rather then robustness.
Situation two is a result of gross under estimation of the depth of the project. Such as "Hey, can you implement a usb driver for this new device we have that isn't supported. We also need a gui front end for it. Oh, we have two weeks." I work solo btw and have never written a device driver before.
Situation three is a lack of appreciation for specialization within the technology field. I find this one very surprising being that I work amidst individuals whose careers are defined by their specialization. For example, I'm given a project of the utmost priority to back port/port an application in a language I've never seen before. Or perhaps asked to spec out an enterprise level backup system. Since I'm considered "the computer guy", my "expertise" is viewed to encompass network engineering, hardware design, all languages ever conceived, and the ever pervasive "helpdesk" type tasks.
It makes for an interesting and dynamic work environment, but also leads to less then ideal code and many projects I would consider incomplete.
A little off topic, but the boiling frog story is actually a myth: boiling frog.
Interestingly enough, this sort of behavior is more often seen in warm blooded animals. Amphibians rely on external temp variation to regulate body temp. Thus they are very sensitive to those changes. Mammals, on the other hand, self regulate. This leads to a bit less sensitivity to minor changes in the environment (since we have no need to be aware of that).
So, in short, it's humans that are much more likely to tolerate gradual changes until they become detrimental to our health rather then our very sensitive friends the frog. :)
This includes all the way up through win XP. I've always found Windows networking to be "quirky". Notice that's not a horrid notch against it. For someone with a little knowledge it's trivial. When a connection would go down, I've seen systems often not grab a new IP until either rebooted or go to Network Places and right clicking the connection then choosing "repair".
Though this seems trivial to most, it can be quite confusing for others. Especially basic users. "I can't reach the internet." was not only one of my mother's most frequent requests, but was also one of the most frequent support calls I received from the general public.
I've also seen odd ball behavior where you had to go through a process to get windows to grab an ip. Dances like following a sequence of plugging and unplugging connections while rebooting system at the appropriate time. No, makes no sense to me, but it worked sometimes. Like "Unplug computer from router. Shut down computer, plug back into router, reboot computer." Simple enough, but anyone whose worked in tech support can already see a list of 20 questions about that statement. "Which one is the router? Wait Wait, I just unplugged the computer...oh, my I'm sorry that was the router I guess...wait, what am I doing? So plug the router back in? That's the little thin box not the really big rectangle one I put my cd's in right?. . . . I thought you said unplug it?"...ME: "I have to smoke a cigarette. I'll call back in 20m"
I had to put up with tons of phone calls to support windows, clean of viruses, etc. my mother and father's windows computers. One of my main tasks when I came home to visit was "Look at the computer for a while", which means try and make it run like new.
I bought them a Mac about 2 years ago. At first, I got the same response. Endless whining about not wanting to learn something new. I simply told them that I was their computer "advisor and repairman", this was a lower maintenance, lower risk machine and if they chose to go back to windows they'd be on their own from here on out. Stick with mac and I'll be their free tech support bitch again.
Took a month or so, but now they'd never use windows again. In 2.5 years, I've received 4 phone calls. Two of them were a broke cable modem. The cable company kept telling her "it was a mac thing", but a surge had killed the modem. After insisting they replace the modem, everything worked. One of the calls was to ask me how to get from Hotmail to Gmail + Apple Mail.app. The third was to ask how to connect the internet, which used to be quite the support call with windows. Yes, I can do it quickly but trying to get a 55 year old woman who learned computers relatively recently to "Go to start, Right click Network Icon, blah blah" proved quite the trial often involving a couple of reboots and head scratching on why the hell it wouldn't come up. With her new Mac my only support advise was "Plug in the wire that looks like a huge phone plug on the end into the only place it'll go on the back of the computer".
My only point being, she comes to you for advice because she knows no better. If she's going to be stubborn, then return in kind. Just tell her you'll never help with computer issues again if she doesn't put minimal effort into learning her new one (I mean really, 99% of the effort is learning two new icons: Safari & Mail). Little does she know you won't really be doing any tech support whether she stays with mac or not. ;)
Not really. The true technological ground breakers in any industry often don't have near the market share of the lower end brands. BMW, Ferrari, Mercedes. Of course, we could look at Apple Inc. as an OEM rather then an OS vendor and in that case they're the 3rd largest in the world.
I'm not saying they are or are not spyware. However, if your definition of spyware includes all programs that scan for malware then even anti-spyware applications are spyware.
I prefer to define spyware as software which collects without permission user information. By this definition, unless the above scanners are doing something other then they say (e.g. checking for known exploits) they are by no means spyware. So until I see some sort of legitimate evidence that Warden is doing something like collecting browsing habits or a list of installed software (other then malware), I dub thee alarmist tin foil hat wearer extraordinaire.
I watch nbc shows in OSX all the time. It works in both Safari and Firefox.
I'm sure the restaurant would allow their landlines to be used for emergency calls. In fact, I bet someone would even call for you when the medical emergency occurs.
Until there's some solid evidence that cell phones have increased survivability in proprietary businesses in emergency situations, this argument is completely specious. Public areas like the street or subway *could* be different. Cell phones would appear to be more useful here. But a restaurant, bar, etc? I doubt it.
Let me clarify: There is no OS ever made that is immune to user stupidity. I could have an installer for any *nix based OS authenticate then run rm -rf /* or "take over a system". This is a given. It's not a security flaw, it's a user stupidity flaw. When windows is appropriately bashed for its poor security record, it is due to unavoidable holes and exploits that allow escalation of privileges. IE has had a particularly horrid record in this area. Further, remote exploits impact on windows systems are aggravated by having said services enabled by default ready and willing for any network probe from an infected computer.
I suppose we could go
I feel compelled to add that some things are amazingly cheaper. For example, in a shitty little apartment in NO your summer electric bill can get up to 250'sh a month and it never drops below 100. That's even if you turn off the air conditioning and suffer through the stifling heat. Entergy jacks up the prices and adds really sketchy sounding charges that appear to be arbitrary. My favorite is the "Additional Charges: $100". I've made numerous calls to Entergy inquiring just what these "Additional Charges" were and even asked a EE (whose wife I knew) what he could make of it. Apparently it's a company secret at the highest levels.
In LA my bill rarely goes over 30 or 40 dollars a month. All year round.
The blame lies in application developers, not with Apple. I'm not sure what you mean by "the shortcuts are enforced in other OS's". As far as I know there's nothing preventing a programmer on another platform from binding functions to any key they wish. However, the "Ctrl" combos are canonical for Windows/Linux (who got it from windows) whereas the "CMD" combos are for OSX. The developers should take this into account when porting. Basically, it's either laziness or they don't want to confuse old time users with new key combos. However, there's nothing preventing you from reassigning these combos in either OSX apps or the third party apps to conform to the combos your used to. (Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shorcuts.
This is a difference in UI functionality. For windows you want to keep in your workflow you CMD+H to hide them. This unclutters the desktop and allows for switching via Expose. Minimizing apps/windows are for taking them out of the workflow. Say to put something on hold for several hours or so. A third solution is to script your most used apps to hotkeys that will either focus them if open or open them if not, this way no tabbing is necessary to focus an app.
These problems sound unfortunate and are not the norm in the least. I'd suggest you have something funky going on with your laptop and should return it for repair/replacement.
Neither is it my intention. Rather I wish to provide some advice that can help your work flow. Don't buck the system, learn the system. OSX is highly configurable, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you can change it. (P.S. If the application switching really gets to you that badly and you can't grow comfortable with the OSX way of doing things there are many 3rd party (and often free or dirt cheap) apps out there to provide you with the windows like functionality you've become accustomed to)Let's break this down a bit. I buy a new vid card about every 1.5 years. 250/78 = $3.20 cents. That's less then a single cup of coffee every week. Link your organization and if it interests me I would be glad to donate $5 per month or almost twice what I pay on a video card. As I said, I don't spend 250 on a meal all the time. It's a rare, but very enjoyable event. Probably about the equivalent of a couple of cups of coffee a month.
Even when I was kid working off of a meager allowance for chores (like 5 dollars a week), I was the type to save my money up for large rewards (like game consoles or a big show) rather then spend a little here and a little there every day. I carried this over to my adult life.
As far as groceries, I've really crunched the numbers and the bare minimum I could possible spend in my part of the country is around 350 for my wife and I. Different areas have different budgets. I'll go ahead and throw out my income, since everyone seems to think I make so much. Both me and my wife bring home about 35,000 combined in Los Angeles. I'm a research assistant working on getting into grad school. So our income should increase a good bit in time, but as for now we barely make the same as a decent single income. A 250 dollar card/dinner/whatever comprises of only .005% of our total income during that 1.5 year period. Considering the amount of entertainment it provides, that's negligible.
Problem with stage6 is that their search features are horrendous. No exact string searches or the ability to "drill down" with advanced search that I can find.
Works in both safari and firefox for me. I'd start looking at something more user specific like plugins or some such. Been using stage6 for a good while now.
Though I quoted you, there were several replies along these lines. One mentioning I must be in the top 10% of american incomes. Actually, the truth is far from that. I'm actually closer to the bottom 20% of income levels. I don't have 250 dollar meals every week or even every month, but I do enjoy a really nice meal with a bottle of wine a few times a year. It's considered a splurge for me and my wife, one we enjoy.
But what can one do with only 100 dollars? Take a girlfriend out to a concert? Here in cali tickets are around 50 a piece for any major show, so you could swing that on 100 if you take the bus and don't buy any swag, drinks, cokes, and smuggle your own water in. Unless the girl your taking out is also a starving college student or ghetto queen, she probably won't view that as a very full date. Maybe you could go out for a few drinks, you know just sip a bit and call it a night. Better stick to beer, and it better be domestic. If you do this, you could make that 100 bucks stretch to two nights assuming you go to a dive and don't drink more then a 6-pack.
I could go on, but that dollar doesn't stretch near as far as you make it seem. I'd have to say, if my wife and I can afford the occasional extravagance while still putting back a decent savings, taking decent vacations to the islands, and living in a comparably large 2 bedroom (not a luxury, just clean and in a safe neighborhood), then anyone making 3-6 times what we do who claims they cannot is just being cheap.
I spend 250 dollars for a night out at a nice restaurant with my wife, especially if a nice bottle of wine is included.
Wh wouldn't I spend this on a one time purchase that will provide hours and hours of entertainment for up to 1.5 years?