No high horse, just saying that as a business person you shouldn't be afraid to pay money for the software you use. If you make more money using Excel, that is awesome and more power to you. For me, I use a rusty old copy of Quickbooks 2006 running on a VMWare guest that has XP on it cause the bastards wanted full freight to upgrade to 2007 that claimed to run on Vista, Since nothing was interesting in 2007 and Quickbooks runs fine under VMWare what the hell, right? Quickbooks also comes with a nifty timer appliation that I use to track my billable hours and imports them right into an invoice which I then fire off as a PDF email attachment to my clients. Excel doesn't do that:-)
My point (in this irresisable thread I'm commenting on after wine + dinner party) is that paying for software isn't something to be ashamed of. We are all business people and are looking after the bottom line. If you make more money using Excel, more power to you. If you think you can make more money dicking around for hours with SQL ledger, hey, good for you. Me? I'll stick with Quickbooks 2006 under VMWare. Maybe in 2010 I'll upgrade to something that runs under whatever Microsoft releases in 2010;-)
But to be quite frank, I lost all faith in any open source business application after I tried using Zen Cart. Those guys fucking deleted the *god damn row from the database* when you removed an order!!! Now I ain't no lawyer or professional accountant, but I do know you *never remove anything from the database unless you are planing some scheme to commit fraud!*. Hide it, yes, but you don't delete the fucking thing forever!
After that experience, I will never trust open source business apps again. I would rather pay for software that is designed by people who understand the legal and accounting requirements of running a business. I pay them to keep my ass out of jail. Zen Cart, in the worst case, could land some pour soul in a world of trouble after it nuked some assholes order. Who would you blame?
But yes, Quickbooks isn't the worlds best software. But the point really is you should be prepared to pay for software. Paying for software is a sign you've "arrived" as a professional. Be proud of the fact you pay money for something that helps you make money. It means you are professional and wise.
And if you haven't yet, make sure you are an LLC or an INC. Personally I'd go LLC cause it is easier, but if you are unsure, seek professional advice. Always make sure you bill your clients as your business, not as yourself. You want that legal protection.
If you are geek like me and your state is cool like Washington State, you can usually file paperwork online and get your business license in a few days. No fuss, no law guys, no nothing. If your state isn't cool, well, sucks for you:-)
Don't bill fixed until you have the experiance under your belt to know when it is a good deal. Doing it as an novice is a sure fire way to wind up making minimum wage. Remember, always remember, you pay your own taxes, you pay your own heath insurance, and you pay a *lot* of shit that your employer used to pay that you now pay yourself. Too many newbies dont get this and consequentially bill *far* lower then they should. Do *not* fall into this trap. $100/hr isn't as "OMG that is a lot" as it might seem. $40/hr might seem like a lot as an employee, but if you do the math, that is quite literally minimum wage as a contractor. At that rate you'd very seriously be making as much as you would working at McDonalds. And by "literally" I mean literally and if you don't belive me, do the math in Excel. And if you dont own a paid copy Office running on a working copy of Microsoft Windows, stop now and work for somebody else, seriously. Software purity doesn't pay your bills and thus has no business in your life anymore. So ditch the "OMG Linux and open source only" attitue now so you can pay your rent mext month. You run a business damnit, and Excel (and a paid copy of Photoshop) are tax deductible tools you need to perform your job in a cost effective way for your clients.
PS: Do *not* underbill! Do *not* underbill. Do *not* underbill. And fixed price is a surefire way for you to underbill!!! To *not* do fixed price. You just aren't *there* yet. Trust me. Do *not* underbill and do *not* do fixed even if your client keeps trying to pressure you into it (and honestly if they do, you really dont want them as a client... part of this business is learning when to *not* take on a client)
Good luck. Just dont underbid. And always fucking withhold your taxes, which is another newbie mistake (which is a symptom of the the "dont underbill" issue, trust me!:-)
In 2006, Quickbooks "real" edition came with a cute little utility that let you clock in and out then import it into Quickbooks to create invoices. Dunno if they still include that as I've been running it as a Windows XP guest under VMWare in Vista since they decided to charge full-rate to "upgrade" to 2007 which "works with Vista". Bastards:-)
The online edition is cool in theory, but honestly I think the "real" software was worth the price.
But the original poster is a newbie contractor and has *no* business doing a fixed price job.
You need a hell of a lot of experience (which I even don't have) to really pull off a fixed-priced and come out ahead. There is a lot of ways to win, but even more ways to loose. You need the experience to really know when you will win and be willing financially and mentally when the gamble you made comes out wrong.
Always do hourly, until you understand when a fixed bid might come out better for you. Until you understand when a fixed bid makes more sense for you (as in, makes you more money), never do it. Even then, never do it.
I love the "You can use the same core HTML for both full-bore and mobile" crowd. You guys really think you can use the *exact* same grid and *exact* same menuing for a device that can only display 5% of the text a monitor can will work? Mobile sites require a complete different information architecture that focuses on very different use cases. You have to provide different ways of logging in (for example, 4 digit numaric PIN numbers instead of 8 digit alphanumeric passwords). You have to provide only the most essintail menu options. You have to place your advertising different. You have to give Google a different set of RSS feeds and sitemaps just for mobile content.
The "follow the standards so it works on any device" is the biggest red herring in the whole web industry. You *have* to specifically target mobile phones, you can *never* just say "well, it follows the standards, so who cares how my RAZR renders it". Sure the RAZR might handle it, but nobody will use it!
Too maybe people think they understand this shit, but it is obvious the loudest of the bunch never actually *used* this shit to do real work. If they did, they wouldn't be purity trolls and they'd be bitching more about how shitty *HTML and CSS are.
Because they have never actually had a client pay them directly for their services. Their tune would change awfully quick after a client refused to pay for a website that didn't work in the browser used by 80% of the public. Ain't it cute when these naive greens get a taste of the real world? "ahhh, you mean being such a hard ass can't pay for your rent?" Makes me laugh for some reason:-)
But it wouldn't work with "semantic blah blah blah" or "XML validated screen readers" or some nonsense. Face it, the W3C doesn't work for web designers, it works for people who never did HTML for a paying client in their life. These people have no clue what exists in the real world. They are too hung up on doing it some academically pure, theoretically correct method that has no bearing on what is actually required. It is one of the reasons I think flash and silverlight will become more and more prevalent in the near future. Those guys have to create standards and products that meet the needs of the real market-driven world, not a academically driven standards body.
Look, I'd never use tables for a template based system. But you cannot tell me that it takes the exact same amount of time to do a clean CSS/standards based design as it does a table based one. If you are doing a quick "brochure" site for an art studio with 5 static pages, you are wasting your clients money doing pure, standards based table-free CSS. If they want to you design a template based "the system" to run their business, you'd be insane to use tables.
The answer is really it depends on what is in the best long term interest of your client. And the depends on their long term goals and their short term budget. If their budget is tight, tables might be better. If they plan to grow the site beyond anything but a brochure-ware site, CSS is the answer--it takes longer short term, but pays off big time as you scale. You also have to factor in that CSS based layouts are much more SEO friendly too. But again, it is a balance between their budget and their demands so it all depends.
Bottom line is that it depends. Purity has no business in business. There is no hard and fast rules. It all depends. But you really are to be loyal to your client, not some damn whiny slashdot crowd or purity trolls from the W3C.
The correct answer is you do whatever is within the budget of your client. You and I both know it takes longer to do a proper CSS based two column layout. If your client cannot afford that, do the tables and tell the damn W3C to suck it. Purity trolls have no business in contract work. This is business and you work for your client, not the W3C. You do what is in the best intest of your client.
And yes, CSS is easier to maintain in the long run, so it might be worth your while to convince your client that it is worth *their* while to pay you to do it right so they can save later. It is an up-front investment that will pay off downline. But if you know they are never gonna expand and you are doing a quick one-shot design an they are a budget... tables all the way!
In other words, it depends. Just remember, this is business, not advocacy. If you are in it for the advocacy and not for money, you'll never survive. Sorry.
Yes. Watch for rate chiselers. The people who are cheapskates are the ones who want the sun and the moon. Funny enough, the people you bill at the highest rates are usually the easiest going and the most apologetic when they have issues. Always, always bill higher rates, not lower ones. The people who pay you more understand the value you provide better and don't dick around with you.
It is the hardest thing to learn. What you made at an hourly rate as an employee has *no* baring on what you should bill as an hourly rate. If you billed what you made as an employee, you'd be better of working at McDonalds. $40/hr might sound like the shit, but it is really minimum wage (or worse) for a contractor.
If you cannot afford Quickbooks, you have no business doing freelance web design. You are a business, you a not a fucking hippie charity.
Quickbooks is a god damn scam for sure--they "upgrade" every year and do crap like stop supporting one year old software and force you to upgrade at full price so it runs on vista. But dammit, you are a business person and so you should think like one. Your accountant uses it, you can invoice your clients with PDF files, and it works. It is only $190 tops and if you can't afford something you use for billing, quit now while your ahead.
Guess what, this is business. Just because the software is free doesn't mean you save money. Quickbooks is the *only* accounting software worth your while. You dont bill your clients to fuck around with SQL Ledger or some other bullshit. You bill them for web design. Pay the money and STFU. If you think if is worth your non billable hours to fuck around with getting open source software to work with your accountant and getting it to *just work* by all means use it, but really just pay the fucking price and be done with it.
Seriously. Not all things are appropriate for open source. Accounting software is one of those things. I hate intuit with the passion of a thousand suns, but I have better things to do with my non-billable time then fuck around with software I use to invoice billable hours. Welcome to reality.
That is all nice, but wait until you get a module that *isn't* in PPM. I can name several, especially the little guys written by the parent (Image::Math::Constrain or Image::Delivery for example). I use FreeBSD and it is easy to get such CPAN modules into the ports tree (and actually, most of the ones I've added are for Adam's stuff). Lord knows how you'd get these things added to Active Perl.
Of course, the real "exciting" part of Active Perl is getting anything related to mod_perl* working.
PS: The use case for me is getting EPIC working on a windows build of Eclipse using all the perl modules used by the stuff running on the server. ActivePerl just doesn't support enough of the modules in use to work.
But in practice it would turn out just like the BBB or those "consumerratings.com" sites. A bunch of people with axes to grind who probably are equally responsible for their fuckups as the business they are complaining about.
Plus how do you scale such a beast to the US government. You'd get people all across the globe posting on the thing!
End of story. We don't need the government to spend months, or years even, building websites which dumb data down for us
Yeah. Whatever. If the government cannot explain to us what the hell is causing this economic crisis in terms we understand, what makes you think they understand it either? If they cannot explain it to us, who will? The media?
The government should be *forced* to making things easy for us to understand. For if it is *not* easy to understand, it makes corruption easy.
"Dumbing data down for us" is the exact reason we live in a republic, not a straight democracy. We elect our representatives hoping they can distill complex issues down to forms we can manage. Each of us lack the time to fully understand every single issue facing our country.
Seriously, if this election cycle proved anything it is that public financing is welfare for politicians too stupid to raise money from small donors. If you can't raise money from the public whose vote you need, you have no business getting subsidized by the taxpayer.
I might have issues with politicians whose campaign money comes from a small pool of large donors, but I have zero problem with a campaign that managed to raise more then half a billion dollars in small donations from folks like us. To me, that is capitalism *and* democracy combined.
Whining about his "pledge" to not exceed public financing is both pedantic and sour grapes.
But our diplomatic relations with pretty much everybody have gotten worse over the last eight years. It would seem the world doesn't really like when hypocritical cowboys run around shooting their guns with no regards to their neighbors.
The second problem is in accounting. If they can't justify using less of their budget then their budget should be less
If you've ever worked for the state, and it seems you have, you are probably familiar with the rush to spent your budget before the accounting period ends. If you've got any surplus left, you'll spend it on extra equipment, fancier hardware, whatever. But you better spend it or else next time they'll cut your budget.
I can see both sides of the issue too. Obviously if you aren't spending your budget, they should shrink it. And obviously if you are the one who uses that budget, you better spend it because next time you might really need the cash. I don't necessarily think it is greed either. It is just that as a department head, you know how much of a pain in the ass it will be to try getting your budget raised again--budgets are easy to loose and hard to get.
I dont know how to fix the problem (only worked for them for a summer), but I do know that that style of departmental budgeting always results in end-of-year mad dashes to spend. Perhaps you should be granted a minimum and maximum budget and tie the spending of the maximum to some kind of "if you spend the maximum this year, you better have a good reason to use it next year". I still dont think that will solve the problem though... or actually if it really is a problem at all.
The costs need to be justified and burning budgets should be a felony that disqualifies people from positions of public trust ever again.
The problem is you gotta define "what is justified". And once you do, people will continue to play the same game, only they'll add "justification" into their equation. I mean, clearly they needed to purchase those aeron chairs for the little tykes or the kids would get back problems!
Chelsea Clinton '24. Mark my words you haven't seen the last of the Clinton's:-)
I don't understand the rationale of the president being at least 35 anyway
Some ideas off the tip of my fingers...
1) Who make a better corporate CEO? A punk ass 21 year old kid or a seasoned 40 year old? 2) Once you are 35, you are basically too old to serve in the armed forces. Maybe back in the day, this was fairly important. 3) Back in the day, 35 was "old age". 4) ??? 5) Profit.
with Linux drivers only receiving updates half as a often as the Windows drivers and consistently underperforming against comparable graphics cards
If something hurts, stop doing it.
You expect the world to cater to your lifestyle choices. You made the choice to run a platform that isn't well supported by video card manufacturers. Either stop using the platform, or find video cards that work on your platform. What if there is no good video cards for your platform? Tough luck. Sorry. You should have considered that before installing the OS, eh?
It is beyond arrogant to expect the world to cater to your choice of operating system.
Already, 99% of people don't use 99% of the power of their CPUs 99% of the time
So by your logic, those people would be happy with a computer that was 1% as fast as what it is now?
Make no mistake, once you actually hit that 1% of the time you need 100% of your CPU, the more the better. I can think of two horsepower intense things a normal, every day joe now expects his computer to do:
1) Retouching photos 2) Retouching and transcoding video (from camera/video camera -> DVD)
Dont underestimate transcoding video either. More and more people will be using digital video cameras and expect to be able to output to DVD or Bluray.
Slashdot Mirror
No high horse, just saying that as a business person you shouldn't be afraid to pay money for the software you use. If you make more money using Excel, that is awesome and more power to you. For me, I use a rusty old copy of Quickbooks 2006 running on a VMWare guest that has XP on it cause the bastards wanted full freight to upgrade to 2007 that claimed to run on Vista, Since nothing was interesting in 2007 and Quickbooks runs fine under VMWare what the hell, right? Quickbooks also comes with a nifty timer appliation that I use to track my billable hours and imports them right into an invoice which I then fire off as a PDF email attachment to my clients. Excel doesn't do that :-)
My point (in this irresisable thread I'm commenting on after wine + dinner party) is that paying for software isn't something to be ashamed of. We are all business people and are looking after the bottom line. If you make more money using Excel, more power to you. If you think you can make more money dicking around for hours with SQL ledger, hey, good for you. Me? I'll stick with Quickbooks 2006 under VMWare. Maybe in 2010 I'll upgrade to something that runs under whatever Microsoft releases in 2010 ;-)
But to be quite frank, I lost all faith in any open source business application after I tried using Zen Cart. Those guys fucking deleted the *god damn row from the database* when you removed an order!!! Now I ain't no lawyer or professional accountant, but I do know you *never remove anything from the database unless you are planing some scheme to commit fraud!*. Hide it, yes, but you don't delete the fucking thing forever!
After that experience, I will never trust open source business apps again. I would rather pay for software that is designed by people who understand the legal and accounting requirements of running a business. I pay them to keep my ass out of jail. Zen Cart, in the worst case, could land some pour soul in a world of trouble after it nuked some assholes order. Who would you blame?
But yes, Quickbooks isn't the worlds best software. But the point really is you should be prepared to pay for software. Paying for software is a sign you've "arrived" as a professional. Be proud of the fact you pay money for something that helps you make money. It means you are professional and wise.
And if you haven't yet, make sure you are an LLC or an INC. Personally I'd go LLC cause it is easier, but if you are unsure, seek professional advice. Always make sure you bill your clients as your business, not as yourself. You want that legal protection.
If you are geek like me and your state is cool like Washington State, you can usually file paperwork online and get your business license in a few days. No fuss, no law guys, no nothing. If your state isn't cool, well, sucks for you :-)
I had guests over and thus had a bit of wine. But dammit, your "ask slashdot" is too much for me to resist. Hope you can parse my nonsense :-)
Don't bill fixed until you have the experiance under your belt to know when it is a good deal. Doing it as an novice is a sure fire way to wind up making minimum wage. Remember, always remember, you pay your own taxes, you pay your own heath insurance, and you pay a *lot* of shit that your employer used to pay that you now pay yourself. Too many newbies dont get this and consequentially bill *far* lower then they should. Do *not* fall into this trap. $100/hr isn't as "OMG that is a lot" as it might seem. $40/hr might seem like a lot as an employee, but if you do the math, that is quite literally minimum wage as a contractor. At that rate you'd very seriously be making as much as you would working at McDonalds. And by "literally" I mean literally and if you don't belive me, do the math in Excel. And if you dont own a paid copy Office running on a working copy of Microsoft Windows, stop now and work for somebody else, seriously. Software purity doesn't pay your bills and thus has no business in your life anymore. So ditch the "OMG Linux and open source only" attitue now so you can pay your rent mext month. You run a business damnit, and Excel (and a paid copy of Photoshop) are tax deductible tools you need to perform your job in a cost effective way for your clients.
PS: Do *not* underbill! Do *not* underbill. Do *not* underbill. And fixed price is a surefire way for you to underbill!!! To *not* do fixed price. You just aren't *there* yet. Trust me. Do *not* underbill and do *not* do fixed even if your client keeps trying to pressure you into it (and honestly if they do, you really dont want them as a client... part of this business is learning when to *not* take on a client)
Good luck. Just dont underbid. And always fucking withhold your taxes, which is another newbie mistake (which is a symptom of the the "dont underbill" issue, trust me! :-)
In 2006, Quickbooks "real" edition came with a cute little utility that let you clock in and out then import it into Quickbooks to create invoices. Dunno if they still include that as I've been running it as a Windows XP guest under VMWare in Vista since they decided to charge full-rate to "upgrade" to 2007 which "works with Vista". Bastards :-)
The online edition is cool in theory, but honestly I think the "real" software was worth the price.
But the original poster is a newbie contractor and has *no* business doing a fixed price job.
You need a hell of a lot of experience (which I even don't have) to really pull off a fixed-priced and come out ahead. There is a lot of ways to win, but even more ways to loose. You need the experience to really know when you will win and be willing financially and mentally when the gamble you made comes out wrong.
Always do hourly, until you understand when a fixed bid might come out better for you. Until you understand when a fixed bid makes more sense for you (as in, makes you more money), never do it. Even then, never do it.
I love the "You can use the same core HTML for both full-bore and mobile" crowd. You guys really think you can use the *exact* same grid and *exact* same menuing for a device that can only display 5% of the text a monitor can will work? Mobile sites require a complete different information architecture that focuses on very different use cases. You have to provide different ways of logging in (for example, 4 digit numaric PIN numbers instead of 8 digit alphanumeric passwords). You have to provide only the most essintail menu options. You have to place your advertising different. You have to give Google a different set of RSS feeds and sitemaps just for mobile content.
The "follow the standards so it works on any device" is the biggest red herring in the whole web industry. You *have* to specifically target mobile phones, you can *never* just say "well, it follows the standards, so who cares how my RAZR renders it". Sure the RAZR might handle it, but nobody will use it!
Too maybe people think they understand this shit, but it is obvious the loudest of the bunch never actually *used* this shit to do real work. If they did, they wouldn't be purity trolls and they'd be bitching more about how shitty *HTML and CSS are.
Because they have never actually had a client pay them directly for their services. Their tune would change awfully quick after a client refused to pay for a website that didn't work in the browser used by 80% of the public. Ain't it cute when these naive greens get a taste of the real world? "ahhh, you mean being such a hard ass can't pay for your rent?" Makes me laugh for some reason :-)
But it wouldn't work with "semantic blah blah blah" or "XML validated screen readers" or some nonsense. Face it, the W3C doesn't work for web designers, it works for people who never did HTML for a paying client in their life. These people have no clue what exists in the real world. They are too hung up on doing it some academically pure, theoretically correct method that has no bearing on what is actually required. It is one of the reasons I think flash and silverlight will become more and more prevalent in the near future. Those guys have to create standards and products that meet the needs of the real market-driven world, not a academically driven standards body.
Look, I'd never use tables for a template based system. But you cannot tell me that it takes the exact same amount of time to do a clean CSS/standards based design as it does a table based one. If you are doing a quick "brochure" site for an art studio with 5 static pages, you are wasting your clients money doing pure, standards based table-free CSS. If they want to you design a template based "the system" to run their business, you'd be insane to use tables.
The answer is really it depends on what is in the best long term interest of your client. And the depends on their long term goals and their short term budget. If their budget is tight, tables might be better. If they plan to grow the site beyond anything but a brochure-ware site, CSS is the answer--it takes longer short term, but pays off big time as you scale. You also have to factor in that CSS based layouts are much more SEO friendly too. But again, it is a balance between their budget and their demands so it all depends.
Bottom line is that it depends. Purity has no business in business. There is no hard and fast rules. It all depends. But you really are to be loyal to your client, not some damn whiny slashdot crowd or purity trolls from the W3C.
The correct answer is you do whatever is within the budget of your client. You and I both know it takes longer to do a proper CSS based two column layout. If your client cannot afford that, do the tables and tell the damn W3C to suck it. Purity trolls have no business in contract work. This is business and you work for your client, not the W3C. You do what is in the best intest of your client.
And yes, CSS is easier to maintain in the long run, so it might be worth your while to convince your client that it is worth *their* while to pay you to do it right so they can save later. It is an up-front investment that will pay off downline. But if you know they are never gonna expand and you are doing a quick one-shot design an they are a budget... tables all the way!
In other words, it depends. Just remember, this is business, not advocacy. If you are in it for the advocacy and not for money, you'll never survive. Sorry.
Yes. Watch for rate chiselers. The people who are cheapskates are the ones who want the sun and the moon. Funny enough, the people you bill at the highest rates are usually the easiest going and the most apologetic when they have issues. Always, always bill higher rates, not lower ones. The people who pay you more understand the value you provide better and don't dick around with you.
It is the hardest thing to learn. What you made at an hourly rate as an employee has *no* baring on what you should bill as an hourly rate. If you billed what you made as an employee, you'd be better of working at McDonalds. $40/hr might sound like the shit, but it is really minimum wage (or worse) for a contractor.
If you cannot afford Quickbooks, you have no business doing freelance web design. You are a business, you a not a fucking hippie charity.
Quickbooks is a god damn scam for sure--they "upgrade" every year and do crap like stop supporting one year old software and force you to upgrade at full price so it runs on vista. But dammit, you are a business person and so you should think like one. Your accountant uses it, you can invoice your clients with PDF files, and it works. It is only $190 tops and if you can't afford something you use for billing, quit now while your ahead.
Guess what, this is business. Just because the software is free doesn't mean you save money. Quickbooks is the *only* accounting software worth your while. You dont bill your clients to fuck around with SQL Ledger or some other bullshit. You bill them for web design. Pay the money and STFU. If you think if is worth your non billable hours to fuck around with getting open source software to work with your accountant and getting it to *just work* by all means use it, but really just pay the fucking price and be done with it.
Seriously. Not all things are appropriate for open source. Accounting software is one of those things. I hate intuit with the passion of a thousand suns, but I have better things to do with my non-billable time then fuck around with software I use to invoice billable hours. Welcome to reality.
That is all nice, but wait until you get a module that *isn't* in PPM. I can name several, especially the little guys written by the parent (Image::Math::Constrain or Image::Delivery for example). I use FreeBSD and it is easy to get such CPAN modules into the ports tree (and actually, most of the ones I've added are for Adam's stuff). Lord knows how you'd get these things added to Active Perl.
Of course, the real "exciting" part of Active Perl is getting anything related to mod_perl* working.
PS: The use case for me is getting EPIC working on a windows build of Eclipse using all the perl modules used by the stuff running on the server. ActivePerl just doesn't support enough of the modules in use to work.
But in practice it would turn out just like the BBB or those "consumerratings.com" sites. A bunch of people with axes to grind who probably are equally responsible for their fuckups as the business they are complaining about.
Plus how do you scale such a beast to the US government. You'd get people all across the globe posting on the thing!
Yeah. Whatever. If the government cannot explain to us what the hell is causing this economic crisis in terms we understand, what makes you think they understand it either? If they cannot explain it to us, who will? The media?
The government should be *forced* to making things easy for us to understand. For if it is *not* easy to understand, it makes corruption easy.
"Dumbing data down for us" is the exact reason we live in a republic, not a straight democracy. We elect our representatives hoping they can distill complex issues down to forms we can manage. Each of us lack the time to fully understand every single issue facing our country.
But it is copyrighted by Karl Rove. Thankfully, this year has proven that playbook isn't as valuable as it some used to think it was.
In short. Who fucking cares?
Seriously, if this election cycle proved anything it is that public financing is welfare for politicians too stupid to raise money from small donors. If you can't raise money from the public whose vote you need, you have no business getting subsidized by the taxpayer.
I might have issues with politicians whose campaign money comes from a small pool of large donors, but I have zero problem with a campaign that managed to raise more then half a billion dollars in small donations from folks like us. To me, that is capitalism *and* democracy combined.
Whining about his "pledge" to not exceed public financing is both pedantic and sour grapes.
But our diplomatic relations with pretty much everybody have gotten worse over the last eight years. It would seem the world doesn't really like when hypocritical cowboys run around shooting their guns with no regards to their neighbors.
If you've ever worked for the state, and it seems you have, you are probably familiar with the rush to spent your budget before the accounting period ends. If you've got any surplus left, you'll spend it on extra equipment, fancier hardware, whatever. But you better spend it or else next time they'll cut your budget.
I can see both sides of the issue too. Obviously if you aren't spending your budget, they should shrink it. And obviously if you are the one who uses that budget, you better spend it because next time you might really need the cash. I don't necessarily think it is greed either. It is just that as a department head, you know how much of a pain in the ass it will be to try getting your budget raised again--budgets are easy to loose and hard to get.
I dont know how to fix the problem (only worked for them for a summer), but I do know that that style of departmental budgeting always results in end-of-year mad dashes to spend. Perhaps you should be granted a minimum and maximum budget and tie the spending of the maximum to some kind of "if you spend the maximum this year, you better have a good reason to use it next year". I still dont think that will solve the problem though... or actually if it really is a problem at all.
The problem is you gotta define "what is justified". And once you do, people will continue to play the same game, only they'll add "justification" into their equation. I mean, clearly they needed to purchase those aeron chairs for the little tykes or the kids would get back problems!
Chelsea Clinton '24. Mark my words you haven't seen the last of the Clinton's :-)
Some ideas off the tip of my fingers...
1) Who make a better corporate CEO? A punk ass 21 year old kid or a seasoned 40 year old?
2) Once you are 35, you are basically too old to serve in the armed forces. Maybe back in the day, this was fairly important.
3) Back in the day, 35 was "old age".
4) ???
5) Profit.
If something hurts, stop doing it.
You expect the world to cater to your lifestyle choices. You made the choice to run a platform that isn't well supported by video card manufacturers. Either stop using the platform, or find video cards that work on your platform. What if there is no good video cards for your platform? Tough luck. Sorry. You should have considered that before installing the OS, eh?
It is beyond arrogant to expect the world to cater to your choice of operating system.
So by your logic, those people would be happy with a computer that was 1% as fast as what it is now?
Make no mistake, once you actually hit that 1% of the time you need 100% of your CPU, the more the better. I can think of two horsepower intense things a normal, every day joe now expects his computer to do:
1) Retouching photos
2) Retouching and transcoding video (from camera/video camera -> DVD)
Dont underestimate transcoding video either. More and more people will be using digital video cameras and expect to be able to output to DVD or Bluray.