Quoting "Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on Fri 28 Mar 2008
05:45:41 AM PDT:
Some tongue in cheek comments below
It is off topic so I manfully resisted, but I'm glad Jim or whoever
asked this question as I don't think one could live in the US on a
salary of $1500/month unless it were completely tax free. Post tax this
is likely no more than $1100. Driving a car is likely to cost $200-300
a month, assuming that you already own one and don't have to make either
payments or pay excessive taxes on it.
Off campus apartment in the student ghetto within walking/public
transit distance?
An apartment is perhaps
$600-1000/month unless you share it (far more in certain locales), and
postdocs shouldn't "have" to share to survive.
Why not? The carwasheros working for tips and migrant farmworkers
following the crops do it. Research work and grants are just another
crop, and your fingernails don't get as dirty, but you don't get to
spend time in the healthy outdoors. Adversity inspires creativity, or
something like that.
And then food, even for
a single person, is almost certainly going to cost $10/day or more.
Here, the migrant farmworker DOES have an advantage since they're
standing in the midst of the food. A 70 pound sack of oats runs about
$15-20 at the feed store (2x-3x times that at the health food store),
and I can speak from personal experience that one can eat oatmeal for
many, many days from that sack. And what about Ramen noodles?
Add
it up and you're already spending your salary on room and board and
transportation, leaving one nothing for clothes,
One really needs to buy your bulk oats in cloth bags, so you can wear
them to the lab. The modern trend towards those sort of poly fabric
materials is really putting a crimp in "dustbowl farm chic" clothing.
No more soft muslin flour sacks or burlap sacks.
fees and taxes,
incidental expenses, car payments or repairs,
What car?
entertainment (yes, even
postdocs need vacations and entertainment).
The sheer joy of research and creation aren't enough? Back to the
salt mines, you slacker. At least you're not digging Emeralds in
Colombia.
Honestly, I think it more likely that this posted salary is a typo of
some sort.
I thought the same. that's why I asked.
I'm not sure this is truly irrelevant. Non-technical, sure, but the
economics of clusters is a wholistic endeavor; one of the most often
omitted factors in the discussion of cluster cost-benefit is the human
cost of running it. At $18K canadian (which is currently within a
percent or so exchange value with the USD) this is a low-water mark for
the estimated cost of a human to run a cluster, actually CHEAPER than a
graduate student who would have to make this plus (somewhere, even as a
bookkeeping entry ) the cost of tuition
This is order of magnitude of
$100/node/year for cluster sizes of 50-200 nodes for management, down
there with the cost of power and a maintenance contract, an even better
deal of the postdoc ever did any real "research" on the side. I'd be
very interested in whether or not they fill the position at this price.
And this is why a standard sort of "per desktop computer" fee of a
couple hundred bucks a month in most companies isn't all that
unreasonable.
Joe (a free-market capitalist)
rgb (ditto, but remember Adam Smith's invisible hand WILL just "work")
But not necessarily in a way that will be pleasant or desirable for
YOU. And I don't know that Smith contemplated the concept of multiple
hands with mutual interactions.
Jim
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