[dvtv75]

> Shit salaries, overpriced housing, and everything is expensive

You're not kidding. A decade ago I looked at buying Autodesk Maya. It was $US3999 if I were in the US, so how much was it from the local reseller in NZ? $NZ13,000, just because it could be. At the time, that was enough to make a deposit on a house. A group of us started calling it "the New Zealand tax," because we noticed that almost every price for an imported good was 2.5x what it would cost to purchase, ship from another country, and pay tax - often more. HDMI cables were $40, and my friend from Dick Smith (roughly equivalent to Fry's) told me they bought them for $5.