Princeton is indeed beautiful. The housing stock is a little mixed -- the apartments near the university are pretty old, and there wasn't much new construction happening when I attended the university in the late 2000s, but the homes (manors, really) nearby are nice (but expensive). You will absolutely need a car. There are buses, but the routes are sparse. It is indeed possible to do a day trip to NYC, as I did many times. You will end up in Penn Station, which is awful, and midtown, which is awful, but the subways will take you where you want to go.
I overall do not miss living in Princeton, though I know a fair number of people who stayed after graduation, or moved to Princeton after living in some big cities. It's monocultural, to borrow a term some other commenters have used. It is mostly people who work in or adjacent to the university; it is mostly affluent, white people; there is some art, centered around the theater or the museum scene, but it is the art of that one culture. However, take my subjective experience of the city with a grain of salt.
Moving is hard. Moving to a new country doubly so. Make sure you have a strategy for finding friends, likely through your wife's work, or perhaps through meetups. Americans are easy to make friends with. That is, at least, one thing we have going for us, still, in these troubled times.
Freelancing for software engineers is very common. I have many friends who do it. You do not even need to file for a corporation to do it. The taxes are not much worse than being a salaried, full-time employee: as with the W-4 form, it is copying numbers off a page someone mails you.
Ageism is a real thing in the tech industry here. It is not difficult to find a job, but you will likely work with younger people, probably people in their 20s. Some companies do a good job of integrating people across the age spectrum, but some -- the ones that expect late or odd hours, especially -- do not. That is changing though! The tech industry only gets older each year.
If you do move, find a place with central air conditioning. It gets hot and humid during the summers, and only more so now, a decade later, with climate change. Check out, also, the McCarter Theater, which is beautiful. David Sedaris, one of my favorite authors, often gives a talk there each year; and the students from the university put on a pretty good revue each year as well.
This really pisses me off. It's only a matter of time before some random person opens up a cellphone, utlity, or bank account... or worse. Completely messed up.
Everyone American should be scared shitless at this incompetence. It's going to cost everyone thousands of dollars over their lives for credit fraud protection. Just another expense to add.
Not saying it would be great in the short term, but I wonder how it would play out if the entire database was made widely available. It seems like it would be a lot harder to enforce a debt if the borrower was originally identified based on "secrets" that were well known to be public at the time. Maybe then they would come up with a better authentication scheme than "what color was your first car?"
It would be an awful lot like the end of Fight Club. Destroy credit records, or reduce them to meaningless, either way the economy would collapse.
People can complain all they want about credit, but the reality is that it exists as a financial service because loaning things with interest is probably older than agriculture in human society. We've just gotten very good at risk assessment, and this going public would ruin our ability to assess risk for years.
Honestly, the credit industry ought to be the ones raging against Equifax's fuck up. If only all the other credit bureaus weren't on eggshells hoping they're not next.
So far, I have had three phones signed up in my name (essentially stolen from the suppliers), can't easily get a mortgage because I own my own company, somehow making me riskier than people who earn half my income, and in the past had my credit card limit extended to £10,000 without asking when I was almost broke.
To me that doesn't sound like they're good at assessing risk at all, they're just blindly following extremely simple algos instead of knowing their customers.
The records wouldn't be rendered meaningless any way, the fundamental of a credit report is how much debt you already have and if you ever miss payments or have judgements against you. Then a lender compares that to your income.
Maybe then enough people at the same time would pressure state and federal legislators to regulation suspicious data brokers and creditors (and/or address insufficient/broken authentication in new credit accounts).
The Target breach was the thing that finally catalyzed the move from magstripe ccs to EMV ccs. I think we are currently on the precipice of the point when we need to move towards a second factor of authentication ("something you have" or "something you are" in addition to the lots of "something you know" that the current credit bureau system uses).
What would happen if the DB was widely available and many many people just randomly and inexplicably opened as many ranom accounts as possible - it would cause chaos in the economy.
What would an accurate "what if" scenario like this look like?
That's the first five minutes. Then the market for new consumer credit would seize up, banking share prices would flip out, and talking heads on cable would have something new to hyperventilate over.
Overall, many thousands of folks would have their home plans/vacation/card-flipping/whatever plans screwed up, some thousands would have a more severe financial problem, the banks would muddle through, "we'd" rebuild the financial-surveillance system over again, and it would probably be less stupid in some ways at the cost of being more uniformly intrusive.
The thing is, up until now, there was a false sense of security that if someone didn't have your SSN, they couldn't open up financial accounts as you. And there was little being done to protect people whose SSNs are already disclosed in some way.
With such a large percentage of our social security numbers being potentially outright public, financial institutions need to stop assuming that an account holder is legitimate because they provide an SSN. And it is in their best interests to do so, since they end up on the hook in most cases for fraudulent accounts (after putting you through an awful process to prove it isn't yours).
For example, rather than letting someone sign up for an account with the SSN as a verification of identity, new credit accounts could potentially be considered probationary (or just outright not created) until a one-time code is mailed to the credit holder's established home address (based on their existing credits and payment history) as confirmation that the real person with that SSN authorizes that transaction. While such a step would not be completely impossible to defeat, it would mitigate attackers on the other side of the globe opening fraudulent accounts.
Agreed. If you used medical services in any significant way before 2010, your SS and birthdate was all over the place in insurance and medical records.
> It's going to cost everyone thousands of dollars over their lives for credit fraud protection.
In my mind, the Just thing to do would be for Equifax to offer ongoing fraud protection to all of their customers affected by this leak. (Gosh, that might be expensive!)
The best hedge funds should be 2x the SPY... It would beat every body. However, clients won't pay for this. People spend so much effort and don't beat the market, but clients want people to work on stuff...
Yikes. Look institutionalized. The big money is made during the troughs when hand shacks work: 70s, early 90s, early 00s.
At the end of the day, most VC valuations are pulled out of a hat. There's a reason why $1B has become a sexy handle: people ascribed some type of value to this valuation.
Last I checked, Bolden/NASA has spent time gallivanting around the world trying to be inclusive (Middle East, Asia, Africa, etc.). NASA is a larger allegory for the USA. This entire country is toast in 100 years. It's similar to the last Spanish galleons leaving Cordoba. In 2011, we have a similar Galleon Moment. STS-135 will end up being the flight from NASA, ever. To digest this fact makes me extremely sad.
There is a reason that the UK did not have a space program, but lead the exploration of the West in the 1800s. Britons had intestinal fortitude during the Victorian era, and this same urge moved to Americans after WW2.
Clear Channel is also not Clear Channel anymore and do not own 1100 stations.
It is interesting the conversation it has started in this thread even though it is based on false and out of date information. I guess people just accept the infographic as reliable truth and go with it.
In European/Anglo countries, the ruling elite give back. Check out Grand Central, Rockefeller Center, the large parks and gardens throughout the great countries of the world. The ruling elite in Asia don't care about others.
If "no private ownership" = communism, then correct, China is communism country.
But as defined in the textbook, communism also requires highly-developed society, where citizens not work for their living, but for their aspiration, and the society provides the consumables for people's living. And many other necessary conditions to be called communism.
Even for private ownership. If I bought a house in US, do I have an ownership? Then why I have to pay property tax and have a risk of been evicted if not do so.
FFS. China has private ownership of property encoded in its constitution. What are you even talking about? Very frustrating to watch these energetic discussions with strongly-held views based on pure nonsense.
It's 2017 guys. You have a whole internet of information at your fingertips. Use it, please!
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According to the Constitution, land in cities is owned by the State; land in the rural and suburban areas is owned by the State or by collectives. (Constitution, art. 10.) Although individuals cannot privately own land, they may obtain transferable land-use rights for a number of years for a fee. There are a series of laws and regulations regulating the land-use rights and ownership of residential property, including: ...
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Well me neither, but I certainly doubt all those Shanghainese are dropping millions on apartments that they don't even own!
And yes, real estate is leasehold, although the difference between auto-renewing leasehold and eminent domain-subject freehold seems to be a matter of semantics. The only country I'm aware of where a private citizen seemingly really can resist the ability of the state to seize their land, and thus actually does appear to genuinely "own" it, is Japan.
It's funny to see the obviously pro-CCCP replies to you here. It demonstrates my point exactly.
No, you don't have ownership. You only rent the land for 70 years, after which it returns to the government. You can 'sell your property' to somone else, at which point the 70-year lease on the land is reset for them to 0.
This is nonsense. A state can privately own land, and you need to own capital in order to lease it in the first place. And since when does renting not count as a form of ownership, albeit with restrictions? You're not allowed to do certain things in the US with your land, does that mean that the US has no private ownership?
I do not wish to defend the CCP, but Communism is more than just "no private property", and you're wrong on the point on private property, at least coming from the Marxian sense which the Communists mean.
I don't see the US Govt. doing much trust busting or paving the way for competition at all. Just look at the sad state of US braodband--established companies have lobbied for deals that keep competition in check, the bar for entry high, and favorable taxes for all but the middle class.
Princeton NJ is a beautiful part of the state, and close to the university.
Not sure where you will live, but Nassau Street has a quaint charm. There's plenty to do, and you are a 90 minute train ride to Manhattan.
Don't let the comments discourage you. People are just blowing off steam from the roe v wade ruling.