So, you think all of those healthcare workers and lawyers will be in the streets and all of the good apartments will just sit empty? The price of goods and our standard of living :( will have to adjust to something more in line with the rest of the world. Hopefully it will take a while to drop that far. This has become a bit of an obsession for me and I could spend hours in explanation, but this is getting pretty far OT. Take a look at www.myfootprint.org . Read "Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin and "Stepping Lightly" by Mark A. Burch. I've read dozens of books on the subject, these two sum it up well. myfootprint.org and Stepping Lightly will give you some great perspective and Your Money or Your Life help plan what to do about it. Your Money or Your Life should be required reading for everyone. Back on-topic... It's just this re-balancing that I believe will drive people to open-source. The small business I'm working for couldn't possibly afford the services I've set up if I used M$ software. I'm afraid Apple still wants too much for their hardware. That leaves Linux and i386 class machines. :) Dave Alitz > Healthcare? Lawyers? Who can afford a doctor or lawyer when they don't > have a job? Those jobs go away too. Service jobs go away with > the money. If people can't afford the service, they do without. > > The jobs that are left usually don't pay a living wage. > I mean, a cheap apartment in the bad part of town could be had for what? > $400/mo? _assuming_ that your job is within walking distance (most > aren't, that is why rent is so cheap there) $0 for car/bus, you still > have to pay $100/mo for food, $35 for phone (a real requirement these > days), $25/mo for electricity/heat, $30/mo for clothes (laundry still > has to be done), > $20/mo(average) for health care. Sitting at $610/mo. These are lowball > numbers in general, and I know that you can cut your rent by having > a live-in-thief, um I mean roommate. But even at that, you would be > just scraping by at minimum wage. Assuming nothing bad happens. > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list