I still rank getting getting buzzed by some dude jumping the Captain while climbing the last few pitches of the East Buttress as one of the more exciting things that's ever happened to me. Maybe it was you, probably not though :)
An note about the cables, mostly because I've always found this to be a weird historical aside.
The cables today were put up in 1919, but follow closely both the style and path of the first ascent of Half Dome, which took place in 1875, 15 years _before_ Yosemite became a National Park. The first ascentionist basically drilled a bunch of holes up the side of the dome and used sticks or poles or something stuck in them to pull his way up like a ladder. In a sense the Cable Route thus really does "provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner" as Yosemite was before it was a park :)
In any case, and I say this as someone who spends a lot of time in Yosemite, it's best to think of the ditch as a big piece of land that we are sacrificing so that people can have some appreciation of what real wilderness is like and (hopefully) want to protect it. Most certainly nothing going on there is about keeping it preserved in it's original state.
I won't call you over-cautious, but I submit that it's much much cheaper to travel around the world for an extended period of time that you might imagine depending on where you go (i.e. Thailand = cheap, Iceland = not cheap) and how comfortable you are working odd jobs and/or staying at strangers' houses. I traveled literally around the world a couple of years ago (albeit for months, not years) and spent far less than I do living as I do now in the Bay Area, plane tickets included.
As someone in their 20s who spends a lot of time climbing and wondering how that lifestyle is going to work out long term with programming, your story sounds pretty inspiring. Nothing terribly substantive, just wanted to say thanks!
I have found it quite possible to spend ~$20k annually living in San Francisco and (currently) Palo Alto. Of course, I don't own a car, don't have kids, and live with six housemates, but the lifestyle suits me just fine for now.
Being legally allowed to weave between lanes doesn't seem right.
Yeah, I'm not really sure why it's legal, but I've also never ridden a motorcycle. A quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that it's legal in most of Europe and Japan though, although not in most places in the US.
Anyway, FWIW, I commute by bike and ride in the center of the lane when there is no bike lane for the exact reason that you describe. However, I don't really get what you are saying about "not belonging". Cars and bikes are both legally allowed on the same roads. Just because this inconveniences some drivers doesn't mean that bikes are "culturally unacceptable". In other words, the opinion of said drivers (legally, and I'd argue culturally) is no more important than that of the bikers who think that it's a totally acceptable thing for them to be there so long as they follow traffic laws.
But if bicycles are treated like motor vehicles, why is it that you often find them creating a lane where there is none? You don't often see motorcycles riding alongside cars, in the same lane, grazing parked vehicles.
I'm not 100% sure what you're describing, but it sounds like you are talking about a situation where a cyclist is riding on the far right side of the lane next to the parked cars and is being passed in the same lane by other cars. What sounds dangerous to me about this situation is not that the cyclist is creating his own lane (because he's not, he's in the proper right most lane), but rather that cars are trying to pass him (a vehicle that is legally allowed to be there) without leaving enough room.
Also, kind of off topic, but where I'm from (California), motorcycles are legally allowed to weave between lanes and do it all the time. Not that I think this is a particularly smart think to do :)
The trade off being that it takes twice as long to get anywhere because you can't go very fast. At least that was my experience commuting on a bike in Japan.
Except that, as is mentioned in the OP, in the US cyclists are legally allowed use most all roadways and are treated legally like an automobile in cases where a bike lane does not exist.
Sorry, in retrospect that first comment came across as super condescending when I didn't mean it that way at all.
How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this?
I agree with you here -- they suck and shouldn't exist. I had the luxury of attending a school that (with the strange exception of the Econ department) didn't allow mandatory pre-reqs as a matter of policy.
You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it.
Sure. But that doesn't mean that the opportunities for hard things aren't there, just that you weren't motivated (and perhaps rightly so) to pursue them. Also, these things are only tedious because you already know them. It sounds like you went back to college because you saw an economic advantage in doing so and are upset because it wasn't also intellectually advantageous. In other words, you were optimizing for economics and not knowledge. If you were instead optimizing for knowledge, then it sounds like going back to college would not have been the best choice for you, although I still stand by the claim that it's impossible to go through college without being presented with an opportunity to learn something of deep and meaningful value.
Anyway, I think the problem is not so much that college is generally useless, but rather that there is an economic benefit for seemingly smart, self-educated people like yourself to go back to college even though the experience is perhaps not that useful for you otherwise.
EDIT:
My point is this: Just because you can pass classes you already know everything about with an easy A in college doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to learn more advanced things via the faculty and resources provided to you and it's partially on you to take advantage of those opportunities. Moreover, I think it's impossible to go through college and have none of those opportunities open to you.
With that being said, college isn't necessarily the best way to learn things, and whether or not it is is completely dependent on who you are. In your case, college was probably economically advantageous in the long run, but sounds like it wasn't the best way to learn novel skills. This doesn't mean college isn't a valid way for people to educate themselves generally, as not everyone comes to college able to place out of everything.
At the risk of sounding trite, college is what you make of it. If all you care about is trading in your four years and n-thousand dollars for a marketable degree, then of course you aren't going to feel like you learned anything, but I argue that this is your fault for not prioritizing actual learning and understanding (aside: "actual learning and understanding" is an incredibly vague phrase and that bothers me. Oh well).
Just like Y Combinator is a fantastic chance to be around mentors who know a ton about startups, college is an opportunity to hang around faculty who know a ton about whatever it is you are interested in. It's perhaps easy to get an A in a class by "doing everything" required of you on the syllabus, but that doesn't mean that the opportunity for learning isn't there. If you are legitimately interested in a topic, you almost certainly have some sort of open ended question about it. Ask said questions in class of office hours, talk to your professors, get involved with research. These are all things are at the very least much harder to do outside of college, even with the internet making communication between experts trivially easy.
I'm not trying to say that you can't educate yourself outside of college to the same level that you can within, and certainly there are people who don't need to go to college to do great things, but if, when presented with the opportunities that college provides, if you can't find any way to further your own "intelligence" and "understanding", then it seems like those are not the things that you are optimizing for.
I still rank getting getting buzzed by some dude jumping the Captain while climbing the last few pitches of the East Buttress as one of the more exciting things that's ever happened to me. Maybe it was you, probably not though :)