Anecdotally, it seems most of my academic friends also have parents in academia. Chasing tenure track seems insane to me but if you grew up in a professor's household, it may seem less strange
I should say that I and most of my friends were born at a time when there were mighty few programming jobs.
[edit: corrected a typo]
Plenty of people now would love to thank their aunt or grandmother for buying that obsolete-but-still-very-usable Amiga or Atari at a yard sale, or that math teacher who had a Mac in the back of the classroom, or the librarian who let them in an hour before school started to play Arkanoid and read the BASIC books.
These days, of course, you can (and should, since it is considered a much more serious offense) skip the hacking part thanks to the internet and the fact that you can run Linux on a cheap $200 system.
In spite of that experience (or I guess in some degree because of it), I do appreciate the point he is trying to make and I see people making the same mistake he is satirizing on smaller scales all the time.
As poor as we were in the early 80s (this improved over time because my mom went back to school, became an RN and is still working in the medical field despite being a bit over 65), we were US-poor, which is quite different from being third-world poor, but wouldn't be if the ultra-libertarians succeed in killing off every social safety net we have.
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-an...
whether it is or isn't, great post.
