sheltgor

Have to agree here... my company even develops primarily for Win8, so its not as if I'm not used to using it, but I still vastly prefer Windows 7.

Wish a Windows version was incoming as well. Alas, I'll have to make do with Googling various phrases whenever I want to try and find a webpage I recall seeing and want to find again, but can't remember the name of.

Thanks for pointing that out; I didn't mean to imply that only people with serious advantages get left behind

"you might just come from a social/family background that encourages you to take a job as soon as you finish high school and you get stuck at you minimum wage job."

Not only that, but before finishing high school as well. A lot of people forget that 15% or so of adults (25 or older, I believe) don't have a high school diploma or GED.

DARE and a lot of programs like it have been shows, time and again, to be fairly ineffective. Hell, the DARE program was, in 2001 (curriculum may have changed since then, I don't know), placed on the list of Ineffective Primary Prevention Programs by the Surgeon General. Our current model for drug programs simply doesn't work. And consider too that in many, MANY areas sexual education is limited to abstinence only, which has been demonstrated to be radically ineffective the world over. I would imagine too that many of those areas are also in ones with a very low coverage of abortion clinics. So while you may have taken those warnings to heart, consider that such programs usually just don't work.

And I do agree with you that there are much cheaper ways to, say get a couch, but I do take issue with your food budget. You're making that out to be a low cost, when in reality $100 bucks per person per month is HUGE. If you've got yourself and a kid to support, that's say $200 (with very careful budgeting and probably fairly low quality nutrition) on an after tax monthly income of maybe $1200 bucks. That's an enormous chunk of change, particularly when coupled with other recurring costs like rent and gas money. Also, regarding the couch, as some in this thread have pointed out the idea that everyone thinks logically is unfortunately false. Someone's already under enormous stress from an erratic work schedule and barely eking buy, perhaps has other issues to deal with like health problems, and they want the sense of having one thing that 'normal people' do. It's a very, very powerful motivation especially when the store oh so enticingly packages it as being a few dozen bucks a month.

That, unfortunately, kind of comes with the territory of a site where most users likely don't face those issues on a daily basis.

I, fortunately, can say that I'm privilaged enough to have not faced the scenario described in the article, though through work over the years I've gotten to know a number of people in a very similar situation.

You get a minimum wage job, say at a grocery store, because, well, you literally have no other options. You couldn't focus in high school, maybe you dealt with drug issues, had ADHD, got pregnant in a family that wouldn't permit abortion (or in one of the many states where you have to drive hundreds of miles, have multiple appointments on separate days, and jump through a variety of other hoops). By the time you're in your 20s, you have no high school education and even if you want to turn your life around you need to put in extensive effort to, say, get a GED, go to community college, etc. All while working full time in order to just have food on the table and, if you're lucky enough to have moved away from your parents, a roof over your head.

With the job itself it becomes tough. Say you make $400 a week before taxes working $10 bucks an hour at a grocery store. A fair chunk of that is going to go towards food, and frankly that's not going to be very healthy food for the amount of money you're able to spend and the time you have to prepare it. You've then got to spend 10% of that every couple weeks so you have enough gas to get to work, probably payments on a cheap used car (and numerous repairs that will likely have to come on credit), rent, cigarettes (its an addiction, keep that in mind) and god knows what random medical or accidental expenses come up will eat up pretty much the rest. IF you're lucky you might be able to put a few bucks in a savings account, but chances are when you have those accidental expenses you'll want to use some of those savings just so you don't have to put it all on credit and add more to your reoccurring expenses.

To make matters worse, you have very little control over when you actually work. Most minimum wage employers give you a two week schedule at most, sometimes just a one week, often determine how many hours you have with that short of notice, and have wildly different hours. Working at a Safeway recently I dealt with, say, 35 hours during the week, some late night shifts from 3:00pm-11:30, but then eight hours later being called back in to help open at 7:30 (yes, they can do that). Further, that store only did one week scheduling, so you wouldn't even know until Thursday if you were working THAT UPCOMING SUNDAY. And furthermore they frequently took advantage of loopholes in the contract to have their employees working six, seven, eight, sometimes even ten days straight with such irregular hours. The ability to sign up for classes, make it a regular routine to, say, learn some new skill, becomes winnowed down to nothing.

To make matters worse, you have little opportunity to move somewhere where there might be better opportunities. There's a reason wealthier people are much more likely to move away. You need a deposit plus first and last months rent anywhere new you're moving, but with how little you're able to save that's a huge burden to come up with. Furthermore, the sheer cost of moving, usually in the order of thousands of dollars, is even greater. Plus, if you do chose to do that, you're leaving the only real support network you may be lucky enough to have: your family.

So before those in this comment thread disdain them for making the choice, however illogical, to try and have some sense of normalcy in their lives (or at least the normalcy projected ad nauseum by the American media and in the ad campaigns of the very places they're working), consider the sort of stress they're already under.

Clearly you've never dealt with an addiction before. For some people cigarettes aren't just an expensive 'vice', they're a physical need due to chemical dependency. It certainly doesn't help that the most prominent cigarette ads tend to be in low income areas.

Looking at the actual situation in countires, though, this is kind of a false argument.

Take Africa. Given that there were only two uncolonized countries, the sample size there is too small to be meaningful, though the fact that neither Liberia nor Ethiopia fall into the lowest group of African countries in terms of either HDI, and there are a number of countries below both in Africa that did fall under colonial rule (Central African Republic, DR Congo, Malawi, Burindi below Liberia, plus Niger, Mozambique, Eritria, Guinea, Togo, Madagascar, and Guinea-Bissau below Ethiopia), would seem to indicate that colonial areas can be quite bad off.

Lets also look at your example of Hong Kong. The issue there is that you're conflating a single city, one that was used as primarily a trading and financial hub for the British Empire, with an entire country. Cities across the world tend to be more prosperous in general than the rest of the country. Plenty of Latin American capital cities are quite modern, and many other coastal Chinese cities are as well, but that belies the widespread poverty that might exist in rural area.

I haven't actually poured through the data set linked in the article, but skimming it gives the impression that it includes a variety of images from 1964-70, which seems to me like a lot more than just a snapshot. It even mentions in the article that they were able to see multiple years of polar ice.

I do think, though, that as lake99 pointed out there could be TREMENDOUS value in this. Extending our image record a full 17 years is has enormous scientific value. It gave examples of imagery of the Aral Sea, which allows for significant study there, and 17 years more of full polar ice records. All of that has pretty big implications for a number of fields.

Always found that strange as well. I've always loved being a runner in Seattle because its generally cool, cloudy, and often light rain. To me that's the perfect weather for a run since it prevents you from overheating or dehydrating as quickly, and, in my experience, the sun tires you out much quicker. I've always been confused about the fact that you see by far the most people out running on a hot, sunny day. Every one of them seems to be sweating bullets.