In France we have a special health insurance policy dedicated for treating illegal immigrants ("AME: Aide Médicale d'État"). Yup...
Too bad that many people will call you a racist if you ever start to say it is unfair for people who already paid into the system.
I feel the same, maybe I will switch to AMD next time I upgrade.
On the other end, I am happy with my budget dedicated server: its Intel Atom N2800 is so "rustic" that it did not get affected by any of Intel vulns (yet).
Could you elaborate about the headaches in the weekend? I also noticed I can not do much during the day without coffee but I never linked my headaches to caffeine.
The suspected mechanism for caffeine withdrawal headaches is that more blood is flowing to your brain than it's accustomed to [1]. Caffeine works as a vasoconstrictor, reducing cerebral blood flow (CBF) by an average of 27% across users with varying levels of dependency. [2] When you reduce or eliminate caffeine, CBF spikes, causing "weekend" headaches and migraines.
In my personal experience, weaning yourself off caffeine over the course of a couple of weeks is drastically easier than attempting to quit cold turkey. My preferred method of reducing or eliminating caffeine dependence is to reduce intake by 25% every 3-4 days. Once you're down below 50mg per day, you can switch to tea or quit without any physical side effects.
I think it depends on your field/position. From my experience, anything else than management will get you a rather bad income. Most of "software engineers" in France are basically considered as making a job at technician/operator level.
Some of these jobs are actually getting exported to India or Spain.
Well, it's still white collar work and if you have an engineer's diploma in software, you'll have higher salaries than a people with an equivalent degree (engineer's diploma) in other industries (construction, car construction).
But you need that diploma, without it, the GP will have a very hard time finding any kind of position.
Other degrees might give access to the job market, so, in his case, he should try to find a short formation giving him a degree so he can work.
Currently some consulting companies (les sociétés de services) are hiring like crazy, so with a degree and some work sample, you might get a foot in the door.
