Cry Me A River

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There's a story up on the section front of Yahoo! Finance from U.S. News entitled "3 Ways the Economic Crisis Is Destroying Baby Boomer Retirement."  Are you kidding  me? How about a story entitled "No One Born After The Baby Boom Will Know What The Word 'Retirement' Means" running in that spot?  We just went through a period of prosperity where Baby Boomers were able to cash out of their homes at ridiculously overinflated prices, buy new ones in states with no state income tax and sock the rest away in the bank.  And I'm supposed to feel guilty they lost some of it in the stock market?  Oh, cry me a river.

What about the rest of us?  You know, the people who couldn't get a house bigger than a shack for under $400,000 for the past seven years because we had to fund retirement for the Baby Boomers?  We might have more time to invest, but what the heck is that worth now that we've mortgaged our futures in an attempt to prop up the economy?  Baby Boomers will be out of the workforce before that impact is fully felt.

What about the rest of us, who wonder whether social security will even be around when we reach the age at which the Baby Boomers expect to retire?  Fat chance we're going to see that money.

So your retirement isn't going as planned, huh?  What about me and people my age?  Will we be able to retire at all?

Interactive Annoyances

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Post your favorite interactive annoyances here.  Some of my pet peeves:

  • "Broadband" is not synonymous with "High-speed Internet."  Tons of people use it that way, though.  "Broadband" refers to a connection that can carry several types of services.  "High-speed" refers to a fast connection.  It's funny to listen to industry pundits talk about broadband connections as the things that will give rise to widespread adoption of Internet video.  No.  Broadband connections let us do things like get TV signals, Internet access and phone lines over the same network.
  • If we compare the Internet penetration of two markets against a numerical scale with the national average represented by the number 100, we're looking at an index.  If we're looking at two or more of them, they're "indices."  Not "indexes."  And there's no such thing as a singular "indice."
  • If you're following an interesting conversation on an e-mail list, message board, blog or other two-way medium that displays a series of "posts" from various individuals, yoiu're following a "thread," not a "string."  They're called "threaded discussions," not "stringed discussions."

Post yours here.  And please don't get into the "mediums" thing.  Rick Bruner and I went several rounds on that over a decade ago on the O-A List.  It's been done to death.