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Funding An Individual BSD Developer
PuceBaboon writes "Poul-Henning Kamp,a committed FreeBSD developer (the
main contributor to
"jails", one of my
favourite features) has lost his main
contract and is
appealing for funding to enable him to work
on FreeBSD exclusively for the rest of the year."
RedHat charged people $60/year for access to binary updates (the company which has taken over supplying updates to old RedHat releases also charges the same rate). MandrakeClub costs at least $60/year, with a "Recommended level" of $120/year.
As phk wrote, "Imagine if some of our users sent $1/month for each FreeBSD machine they were running." There are a lot of people and companies running FreeBSD, and it wouldn't take much from each of them to pay for several people to work full-time on FreeBSD.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Link is broken. A real picture is here.
USD$5500/month? That's more than my net take home
He still has to pay taxes, you know...
It may be where his budget balances, but if he expects to live off the kindness of strangers, he needs to adjust his budget substantially.
He's not *expecting* anything. This is an experiment: See if the FreeBSD community is willing to pay for someone to work full-time on FreeBSD. If not, well, he finds more contract work, earns the same amount (or more), and works on FreeBSD in his spare time.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I have to pay my income tax, which here in Denmark is roughly 2/3, and that means the number you are looking at is a $22K/year net salary.
Depending on the jobdescription, my normal salary would be at least $75K, so I tend to think that the FreeBSD users are getting a pretty good deal here.
(And before anybody falls into the other ditch: For that tax we get full healthcare, free schools (incl university) and a practically non-corrupt political system.
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
You know, the funny thing is, once you're done paying for all the little not-at-all-tax-items like health-care, pensions, education for your kids etc, then I probably have more financial freedom than you have.
For my 2/3 tax, I get healthcare and there are no "pre-existing conditions" or HMOs to deal with.
It's a bit hard to explain to americans, but healthcare is simply not a thing I have to consider in relation to my employment.
I also get education, including college, for my kids.
I don't have to fear the pan-handlers, insane and other strays because we actually have a social care system that works.
And don't even get me started about guns, bureaucrazy, corruption and the oppresive regime controlled by big business.
I've lived in San Francisco. My son is born there.
I don't miss any of those things.
What I get by paying the same amount you do, is peace of mind.
Priceless!
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
Hmm, honest question, why a troll mod ? the link points to http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/
which actually IS poul henning kamp's homepage..
Two quick observations. First, if you are carrying a $415k mortgage on a salary / wage of less than $5500.00 a month you either a) have no kids or b) have a really odd sense of how interest rates work.
"He's got some enormous cojones asking people to give him what amounts to $66,000
Not really. Poul-Henning Kamp is one of those individuals working on FreeBSD that should in no way feel bad for trying to balance time on a great open source project with family needs. He has the skills. It seems to me that this is a creative solution to help keep excellent developers on projects as they get older, have kids, mortgages, car payments etc etc.
Posting as AC
First it would be $66K gross not net since this is taxable income.
Second Linus does not work for free either and I wonder how much he gets paid.
Third $66k is not that much. Teachers make that, and one of my professors pulls in a $104k. Upper management positions can easily pull that much in and a lot more. This may seem a lot for someone working minimum wage or as a receptionist, entry level web designer but that comparison is invalid. We are talking about a proven, experienced, relaible hacker. A fairer comparison would be comparing to surgeons lawyer and other specialist positions.
If you don;t like the deal don't donate and he'll take his time elsewhere at a great to not just FreeBSD but to the entire OSS community.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I don't have to fear the pan-handlers, insane and other strays because we actually have a social care system that works.
You *ALSO* have the benifit os a stable socioty that has set expectations on behaviour.
We Americans come from so many parts of the world, that we Americans can have many views of other Americans...
One person's "Gun Nut" is another person's "2nd Amemendment Fan."
One person's "Dirty Hippy" is another person's "Free Sprit."
America *is* the land of pan-handlers, insandes and strays.
I like it that way - it's interesting.
(PS Thanks for all your previous work with FreeBSD - 4.9 is polised perfection and the 5.0 series is facinating)
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
To put it in perspective -- $66K would be less than half what an experienced UNIX kernel engineer would be making in the Valley or Boston.
Of course, *BSD work is now few and far between. You have Apple, and maybe some maintenance jobs at Yahoo.
The replies to the other 2 PRs were more than exemplary. I got replies (and patches) in less than 2 hours for my reports on wine not compiling and amarok using using up all kern.maxproc. This, of course, doesn't mean that src folks are as much diligent as ports folks are, but the few times I browsed the -current and other mailing lists, devs. seemed friendly and helpful most of the time. Just my 2cents.
The tax rate there is astounding! But I do agree: the FreeBSD community is getting a great deal here. We would be foolish to not take you up on this offering. In fact, we would be foolish to not employ you next year as well.
.-.--
I've only had excellent experiences with the core team of developers. Every well-crafted PR that I've submitted has been treated to a solution in less than one week. The team is very responsive and is quick to escalate a problem when necessary. I've never received such dedicated attention on a paid support contract. These guys deserve every penny we donate to them.
.-.--
seriously,i can understand students with no jobs shying away from donating to fbsd. For everyone else out there, if peeps donated just a bit (either to this guy or the FBSD foundation) then perhaps projects like this could be funded more frequently. just a couple bucks from most people is all it takes.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
It may be helpful to explain to people the exorbitant tax rate you face when asking for donations, then. I'm much more sympathetic to the request knowing that 2/3rds disappears into the government ether.
.@.
Which isn't a lot for a really good programmer. Perhaps my friend you bought too much house, and perhaps you are underpaid. You might want to take that up with HR, and of course interest rates are quite low these days (or recently were).
The team is very responsive...
Yes, well... (*ahem*).
To be perfectly honest, you've been lucky. Ports PRs tend to get resolved fairly quickly; src PRs often get lost in the shuffle. The big problem is that most PRs are poorly written, either lacking necessary information or lacking coherant English; as a result, most src committers won't take the time necessary to comb through the database in order to find the relatively few good PRs.
Prior to getting a commit bit of my own, I often had bug fixes sit in the PR database for months... the trick, as I learned, is to send in the PR with a patch, wait a couple weeks, and then start sending emails to committers.
Dealing with PRs is certainly a major issue which we'd like to improve upon, but in the end it's all a question of time and money; reading through PRs is rather dull work, and if we're not going to pay people (and there isn't any money available for this) then there simply isn't enough committer-time to do as well as we should.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
A fair bit of phk's code is under the Beer-ware license:
(Some formatting changed for the lameness filter)
In all likelyhood, I'll never meet phk, so I reckon I can donate instead of buying him a beer directly.
nice! so what are the immigration laws in Denmark like? Whats the technical job market like?
I'm sympathetic too, but I'm finding it harder to pony up knowing that 2/3 of it will disappear into the government ether and it's not even my government (especially as I just did my own taxes today, and that's not my government either, it's a government that will spend my money on cluster-bombs and daisy-cutters... hm, perhaps I should indeed donate to PHK and the Danish government)
"I can't see how you'll get many donations from the U.S.A. with such a chip on your shoulder."
You can't?! Well, come on over to my house and watch me paypal him some money for his hard work!
2/3rd of donated money doesn't fund you or BSD development, it funds the Danish gov't. While it may be nice that they provide all those nice social services, the thought leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
He's not begging for money. Begging implies that he expects money from you and delivers nothing in return. He will be doing some much needed development work which I'm sure all FreeBSD users will appreciate in the end. And it's not like he's trolling or lying about what he said: "guns, bureaucrazy, corruption and the oppresive regime controlled by big business." All of those seem to apply in some form or the other.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. The US has pretended to have a single dominant culture in the past, but it never really had one. It certainly doesn't have one now. We are a land of hundreds of separate and distinct tribes living in close proximity. While there are benefits to this multiculturalism, it's not without its price.
Europe is different. Many European nations have had a dominant culture for so long that they're actually NAMED for the culture! When everyone in your city looks the same, dresses the same, speaks the same language, and belongs to the same religion, it's pretty easy to lead a very level existence. But you're changing and changing rapidly. The only thing keeping you from US style social turmoil is inertia.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Trust me...1400 sq. ft. is not "too much house". And it's a townhome. Life in Silicon Valley is very expensive, housing-wise.
.@.
I have been in the unique position of working in close proximity with some incredible programmers over the course of my career. Although I have never worked with PHK, I have been the happy user of some of his work. $66K/year for PHK's time has got to be the deal of the century! Even in our post bubble burst economy.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I don't know about Denmark, but have you actually been to, say, Paris or Amsterdam or Barcelona? They're a lot more multicultural than pretty much any city in the US except maybe New York and one or two others (and on the whole much less ghettoised than New York). Smaller towns in Europe are comparatively homogeneous, but no more so than mid-western American towns.
Hmm, I've been to Europe and I have many friends from Asia. From what I hear, Asian big cities are the worst. I honestly can't tell the difference between San Fran and Paris (except for the armed military guys walking around Paris... WTF are they doing with automatic rifles in the subway?!). There are homeless, there are people walking over each other, it smells, you tell me the difference.
Bullshit. You forgot to count Theo, even though he's more of a forker than a developer.
PHK should be getting corporate funding for doing development work on a feature like SMP which enterprise users would want much more than home users.
Yahoo! got started on FreeBSD and now the news is they are having record profits. Where's the Yahoo! funding? Where's the Apple funding? Where's the corporate funding at all?
Ahh.... we over on the east coast, boston in particular, suffer from the same thing, 400K gets you a closet around here.
Maybe the American FreeBSD users actually like freedom? The other Americans who are big fans of bureaucrazy, corruption and the oppresive regime controlled by big business are probably using BSDOfHomelandSecurity instead of FreeBSD and would be unwilling to donate to FreeBSD anyway.
That is why you got the choose if you wanna support him... nobody forces you, if you don't like the terms, don't donate! This is pretty much like ever other charity, you pay them money/time/whatever and they choose what to do with it. You still get something out of it because he will put his full time on FreeBSD and that benefits you! I trust him as an old time commiter to choose good stuff to put his time.
Very nicely said.
with such a chip on your shoulder
I'm glad I'm not the only one that got that vibe. He obviously has some problems if he's going to let his need to rip on others ruin his chances of getting funding from them.
Maybe in a few weeks someone should have an interview with this guy and maybe it could even make it to the front page? That should get more exposure and if includes a line like we are already 75% of the way there then I'm sure that will help the donatations role in. I suspect that some people are worried about not making the minimum and just having their donation get lost there as opposed to some real important work getting done.
My bet: if the minimum gets met than at least two of the months will go too since it will prove that this works.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I have been to Copenhagen a few times, and I can not believe that you seems to imply that the pan-handling problem is much worse in the States. I saw as many pan handlers on the Walking Mall in Copenhagen as I do in DC. As for the crazy people, I have seen Idioterne, the crazies in Copenhagen truely messed up.
For that tax we get full healthcare, free schools (incl university)
:) But considering you get all those services "for free" with the taxes you pay, one wonders why you would ever need the equivalent of $66,000/year to continue working on FreeBSD. Why don't you and your family live (at least partially) off those services for which you pay so much in taxes? Why should you want to earn such a large salary anyway? After all - you have your government to take care of you...
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
If you're paying taxes to get your education, then it's not really "free," now is it?
That's like a car salesman showing you a $20,000 car and saying "Give me $20,000 and you can have this new car for free!" It's a dumb way of looking at trade.
and a practically non-corrupt political system.
One of the things that has been fairly-consistent about statist nations is that after the veil of communism/socialism has been lifted (e.g. after the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism), it's often found that the government beneath that statist veil was quite corrupt. Russia is a perfect example, and it remains as corrupt as ever; China and North Korea too, are prime examples. And Tony Blair doesn't seem too popular among Brits these days, having played along with the Bush II corruption in Iraq.
Not that the U.S. doesn't have its share of corrupt officials -- we have plenty of them -- but at least we *generally* know who is corrupt and who isn't. For example, the former Senator Fritz Hollings was bought off by the MPAA and RIAA (remember the "Fritz chip" that was to be in everybody's computer as mandated by legislation?) - and now he's out of the Senate. Now if only we can do that with President Bush...
Point is, don't buy so much into a nation's horse-and-pony show if you don't have complete and absolute transparency of your government. I wish Americans would take that advice w.r.t. the closed-door dealings we have in Congress occasionally (for "national security," of course *rolls eyes*) and work harder to open them up...
Great work on FreeBSD 5.x BTW.
(I'll admit though, that if you pay 2/3 of your salary to taxes, that you're getting a better deal than us Americans. We pay roughly 50% of our salary in taxes (i.e. we are now 50% socialist), and we don't get subsidized healthcare, university education, and so on. All we get is an oversized military that protects the U.S., Europe, and the rest of our allies, whee... (your taxes would be higher if you had to spend more on your military to protect your country from Russia, etc. You reap the rewards of the U.S.'s implicit protection of the entire Euro-area, including Denmark))
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
From dragonfly.kernel:
:By the way i suppose everyone is aware of the
fundraising campaign by
:phk to be able to precisely work on vfs for>
FreeBSD-5 (please, i don't know
:if mentioning this name here is kosher, don't
flame me ...). By reading his :memo :http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/plan.html
:i cannot refrain remarking some similarities between the work he wants to
:engage into, and your own agenda on vfs. Isn't it appearing as some sort of
:duplication of work in a domain where very unfortunately resources are
:scarce?
:
:--
:Michel Talon
I came across that but I really doubt that our visions are even remotely similar. Our work is going to be based on our well tested LWKT stuff. FreeBSD-5 does not have any LWKT stuff, or anything remotely similar to it. It also strikes me odd that it should require money for work to progress. I realize that there are potentially many people who would like to work on open source to the exclusion of their normal jobs, but the meager amounts of money that can be raised by our projects does not come close to replacement income for even a single person. Money also severely skews the governance structure, creating pressures and consequences that can result in a failure of the normal open source peer review process. In fact, I believe this is precisely what has occured in the FreeBSD project, on multiple occassions, in the last few years. -Matt Matthew Dillon
Activists United
On the other hand, (good) PRs are very important. I've been (I am still) very critical about the quality of gentoo (my roommate uses it, and since he is a *nix novice, I had the pleasure/pain of figuring out some stuff in gentoo), but I saw on their forums developers (ebuild-maintainers to be precise) complaining about the lack of bugreports.
So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.
A corporation is an amoral entity charged with maximizing the profit of its human owners. While generosity is an admirable human trait, it is not necessarily viable in a corporation. A generous corporation will be replaced by less generous corporations unless that generosity leads to profit.
In the end FOSS needs to make peace with this corporate race to the bottom, and convince the guys and gals with the purse strings that FOSS maximizes shareholder value.
I don't know about you but where I work, the higher paid people are expected to be able to work independently, and not have to be told what to do for each buck they are paid.
Donors are paying him to work on FreeBSD.
He is to do satisfactory work on FreeBSD, and I don't see why he wouldn't - he's going to work on stuff he chooses, so I don't see why he would work on stuff he is crap at.
When you order the Chef's Special in a restaurant of some standing you're not expecting "soup of the day", the Chef usually produces something satisfactory, if not impressive.
Better than 3000 ignorant donors telling him what to do. Think 3000 PHBs.
About a 2,800 sq ft home, with 3/4 acre. Large oak trees, dogwoods in bloom.
I have a small strawberry and black raspberry patch. And a garden with beans, squash, and tomatoes.
Work? Software company 10 minutes away, one stop light.
110K is what I paid.
Sorry, there has to be some benefits of living in small town TN. I am sure there are other benefits of living in silicon valley or boston.
Don't forget that the price-controlled pharmaceuticals there have stifled research in European drug companies, so Americans are also subsidizing the majority of the world's drug research. Looks like the AARP lobby is going to have their way, so American outlets will have to compete with foreign ones on price. Say good-bye to any new drug research. I hope the seniors are happy that they're saving a few bucks at the expense of shortening their grandchildren's lifespans. Talk about killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Constitutionally Correct
So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.
That would be great; but much less than that would still be helpful. Having someone go through and identify PRs which
1. Report a reproducible bug, and
2. Contain a patch which fixes that bug
would be useful just by itself.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
How about credit card support?
Paypal doesn't support that many countries.
PHK:"And don't even get me started about guns, bureaucrazy, corruption and the oppresive regime controlled by big business."
You:"I can't see how you'll get many donations from the U.S.A. with such a chip on your shoulder."
Why? Do most of the US americans identify themselves with the: "guns, bureaucrazy, corruption and the oppresive regime controlled by big business."?
I won't be surprised that you are right and a lot of the US americans think that way.
But if that is so then the US americans shouldn't be too surprised if terrorists and others also identify them along with the "Corruption/Oppressive Regime etc". Such US Americans aren't innocent bystanders IF they count themselves part of the "corruption/Oppressive Regime etc".
What next? Someone is going to say the US Gov is not a corrupt and oppressive regime controlled by big business?
I wonder what the US Americans have been drinking in their "Kool-Aid".
There's no politics on his plan page. The political discussion above came into being due to an observation of the differences between US and Denmark tax policies. You are being way too sensitive.
As a libertarian, I long ago realized that most people disagree with me on politics. Even were I a conservative or liberal, there would still be one out of every two people who would disagree with me. Life is about people disagreeing with you. Get over it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Do the calculus again - it is not net salary.
:-)
;-), maybe this is the solution OSS developers should consider to make the fundings sufice.
In Denmark an average resently graduate engenier can expect about USD 4500-5000/month when starting in a new job.
PHK - haven't met him personally but - is highly skilled with 10 years experience hacking freebsd code, not an average resent graduate.
Of the USD 5500 he has to pay VAT 25%. That leaves him with USD 4400/month gross, this is the salery you should compare against. A salery less than that of a recent graduate.
The deal you are offered is extremely good! In terms of price for work. If you don't want that work done - don't donate.
Or donate to something else like the freebsdfoundation if you have more confidence in phk.
Otherwise, I suggest you weigh this investment against the loss in case the solution will wait yet another year. It's a difficult task, but do consider.
Regards, Erik - a dane, but not the red on
PS: Of course, you can reduce cost of living moving to other parts of the world - I'd love to work on a beach in Brazil, surf the waves by day, surf slashdot by night
Try here: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/download.cgi
Activists United
Please tell us then, what would you tell phk to do, if you donate him.
Perhaps people, who rated your post as "Interesting" could also join the conversation.
As some slashdotters pointed out, I am against free speech (because I've proposed to trash the trolls out of BSD section). Perhaps then all those pro-free-speech people, together with all those, who think phk sounds arrogant could reply right below this message.
If you know, how to do things the better way (and I am pretty sure you do; you wouldn't criticize then), please tell us. I am pretty sure we all are interested.
I believe that if he puts up a small work plan with the following items he will convince more funding from corporations such as Yahoo!, Apple, etc.
More details on the work he wants to do.
A description of the benefits from the output and who will benefit most.
Milestones and a rough timeline.
A priorities list on the work.
Just my opinion...
Marcos
There's at least one Y! employee working pretty much on FreeBSD and making it happy on fast, modern hardware.
There were more than one in the past but its been a while since I've spoken to them all.
I believe Y! also provide some resources to the FreeBSD developers.
Basically, Y! have put in their 2c.
I hate to go even more off-topic, but I'm not being sensitive and you've totally missed my point. I clarify:
It was not a good idea for PHK to make the political comment here on Slashdot. (Even though he was just responding to someone else's complaint of Denmark's excessive taxes.) I disagree with socialism, but still very much support PHK and this project and am serious about soliciting my company to donate.
Given your serious misreading of my post, I'm not sure how you can even tell who does and doesn't agree with you.
According to the fundraising page (see cheesy HTML bar graphs here) 98.7% of the goal for 6 months funding has already been reached.
"No Taxation without Representation"
High taxes do not equate to oppression. Paying taxes without having any say does.
And to think I was worried he wouldn't make it. Someone should suggest that as a story that PHK made it. I'm sure FreeBSD could use the PR.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
According to the donation page, the funding goals has been reached. This took about ... uhm, two weeks? It is interesting to see that posting an appeal for funding can raise so much money so quick.
Was it /.? Or was it because the project had well defined goals? (Resolving certain buffer related issues). Was it the phk karma?
I have no idea of the funding the freebsd foundation gets, but maybe they would be able to raise more money quickly if they announced specific projects with specific funding needs, project description, expected timelines and milestones.
Personally, I am more likely to sponsor a concrete project with clear goals. It gives a sence of knowing what you get for the money and that this money is not swallowed by administration or other borring tasks.
I think this should raise a discussion in the community as to how funding is raised and used.
Is going on a political diatribe supposed to attract dirty American dollars?
Or are you counting on your effort to be supported by the Euro?
Is this one more example of the "writing on the wall" for the FreeBSD 5 branch?
> Is going on a political diatribe
> supposed to attract dirty American dollars?
Ahhh, another one of the many Americans who considers any critiscism of the USA as a personal critiscism against Americans.
Why are you so insecure ? It's this "America is great" blinkered attitude that allows things like the RIAA, DCMA, and other arcane corporation-bought things to exist in your "free country"
Sig out of date
Something like 90% of truly new drugs are supported by government research dollars. Drug companies mostly fund research on "me too" clones of existing drugs or new uses for drugs they have monopolies for. See: http://www.citizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID =7065
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
On April 13th pair Networks donated almost 2/3 of the money he received. ($20,000 of ~$33,000)
So, I'd say that's a good start.
A corporation would have to examine the cost/benifit ratio of a donation of that nature. Since it is not a tax-deductible donation, the donation must stand on it's own. Corporations are liable to their stockholders, and frivolous expenses are very much frowned upon.
It's not that the company execs don't appreciate the hard work, it's just that they would have to justify making a donation to somebody who would, in all likelyhood, continue doing what they are doing without it.
This is where non-profit organizations such as OSDN come in. Corporations can take a tax deduction on donations to such entities, which makes it much more palatable to coporate execs. Perhaps phk should consider working for a non-profit that would be willing to support his current work, much as Linus does now.
But by all means, send the guy a few bucks if you can. IMO, he deserves much more than the measely 66k he's asked for.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Well, actually it was the high taxes that kept going up combined with no representaion.
What I get by paying the same amount you do, is peace of mind.
Hehe, I'm a Dane too, and all I can say is -- beautifully said!
But why do you find it difficult to explain the healthcare system? That's easy! If you break a leg, you just go to the hospital without thinking you'd have to have insurance. If they find out you've got an inflamed appendix, they'll take care of that too -- free of charge. Oh by the way, this goes for foreigners too, to some extent.
Dental care? Well as long as you're under 18, school dental service will take care of you (no matter how much candy you gobble), but once you're an adult, you will have to pay for it.
If you want bigger (.)(.) or more lips or less belly, you'll have to pay for that yourself, since that's vanity, not health. But if you got burned in a fire or lost a limb, you can expect the system to step in and pay for a face job, glass eye, latex ear or plastic leg.
If you don't have a home however, you're in different luck. For some reason the gov't thinks it's okay to have all sorts of commercial offices built all over the place, and are only reluctantly putting up housing for students and "regular people" -- an average family can't afford an average house in the vicinity of the capital. Cars are expensive too, given the gov't puts about 180% (yes, that's one-hundred-and-eighty percent) taxes on top of the pice tag of a new car. But now I'm ranting -- I'm just meaning to say it's not all rosy-red over here.
"Good news, everyone!"
That too.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
The drug co's in the US could stop advertizing so damn much. Look at their SEC filing and see how much the major drug co's spend of advertizing. For most it is about the same as they spend on R&D and buying other companies for their IP...