The financial reality of being a tenured professor

"who makes you pay for your own parking? universities. Gah!"

What does "your own" mean here? When I drive to work, I pay $15 per day.

"the CSU decided to stave off a budget crisis by taking 10% of my salary for a year – furloughs. 10%! The most awful thing was that I was going through a divorce at the same time. No more 2-income household."

I am not volunteering for 10% pay cuts, and certainly divorces can be difficult. But this reads very strangely.

>"(It takes an hour to go from my apartment to my university on public transportation– an hour, for 4 miles, an hour.)"

How lazy do you have to be to not ride a bike for 4 miles, that takes 15 minutes, probably faster than driving.

Probably many on HN are still young enough that owning a house and having children isn't a high priority for them. So the Bay Area makes sense. But it's very expensive to live there. I've known many DINKs there. Not by choice, but by necessity. Two engineering incomes and yet they couldn't afford children.