why should it piss you off? thats the us government's mandate from the constitution, to provide defense and security, or would you rather each state have it's own army, navy, air force, and coast guard? it's supposed to do the things the states themselves can't or won't reasonably do
1) Just because the constitution says it doesn't make it right. Appeals to authority carry very little weight with me.
2) I happen to agree with the constitution on this one.:-) What pisses me off specifically is the *amount* of money I spend on the military every year. I think it should be *much much* lower and not devoted so frequently to pet projects in powerful people's home districts.
If there was a relatively frictionless way to enable top reviewers to give private grants we would probably end up with *more* basic research
Can you cite a supporting study for this?
What I've noticed is that people only think about a meal into the future (evolutionary design, you know) and are much more likely to be self interested than making sure that a project that won't have results for a decade gets off the ground, oh, and we don't know what the results will be yet. Please, give me a dollar?
As for "forcibly stripping". That sounds like a sound byte from the libertarian website. They go on and on talking about how private contract law should be final and that the government should be minimal. Government at the point of a gun is invalid. All that kind of crap.
What about the contract they've made by being a citizen here? They never really address that. They piss and moan about the horror of living in the most open, richest country in the world and forget that, if they are really so unhappy, they can leave. No point of a gun. Just have a go of it somewhere else.
The only time the government is "forcibly stripping money out of people's wallets" or dictating "at the point of a gun" is when the borders are closed. Until then, they've choosen to be here and volunteered to play by the rules. Taxes, speed limits, seat belt laws, gun regulations, drug laws and the rest are all part of that ruleset.
If they want to try and change them, great! More power to them. I support about 2/3rds of their agenda in fact. But they aren't being forced into any of it. They are just telling inflamatory lies to get people riled up and open their wallets.
While R&D based on pure intellectual curiosity is wonderful, it also seems to me that one can satisfy curiosity AND work in a field like biochemistry that has a much larger chance to benefit society.
And where will the biochemists get the tools they need to examine their subjects without the advances in physics?
I agree with the often expressed sentiment that the 20th century was the century of physics and the 21st will be the century of biology. But just as we didn't ignore cancer for quarks in the 20th, it would be foolish to ignore higgs for hemoglobin in the 21st.
This is good news the government should not be doing basic research there are plenty of university people that are in the proper enviroment for basic reseach and have a large amount of slave^h^h^h^h^h er, er I mean undergraduate/graduate assistants. If the government wants to feed some money to university and research institutes its a much better use of money.
Who do you think funds most of the grants that pay for the labs those slaves work in?
Perhaps the funding has dried up simply because the funds have been redirected to other areas, such as defense.
Perhaps? That seems like a certaintly. We have just boosted that budget by better than 10% and are something like double the rest of NATO combined. That's a hell of a lot of money.
*I* think maybe we should cut it in half, fund basic research and, orthogonally, quite shoving our culture and will down the collective throats of every nation that doesn't have a white, male, christian leader. Then *both* problems are solved! (and, sadly, I'm only half joking).
Government effiency crushed by private industry once again.
Yeah, yeah. But there are ten thousand examples of the government getting things done also. In 1990 there was no profit motive for getting the genome mapped that surpased the costs. It took a breakthrough in *how* to map the genome to setup the event you speak of.
On the whole you and I agree though. The government should be doing the "pure research" and leaving the rest to private industry. I just wouldn't choose to be so antagonistic based on it. Shit happens and sometime private industry gets there first. I just choose to recognize that the vast majority of the time that isn't the case. Heck, it's been thirty years and Southwest still doesn't have flights to the moon...;-)
If the research represents technology for defense, or security
that's the stuff that pisses *me* off.
I am for it, but just pork barrelling our dollars into random research projects, that then get sold into private industry so that I can buy back the result of the research I funded pisses me off.
We'll see if you think that next time you're in a PET scanner trying to get a cancer diagnosed or something. A machine that would not have been produced except for the "pork barrel, random research" projects a few decades ago.
No doubt this is the hardest part of the problem though. How can a scientist asking for money explain that the work *does* have value, it's just that it isn't known what the value will be until it is done. The scientific community needs to get much much better at pointing out the results of the "random research" so that the uneducated masses can better understand the value.
I clearly couldn't be more opposite of you on this one. IMO the *only* research the government should be doing is the "random" stuff that won't get done otherwise because there is no profit motive. It's this research, however, that keeps the US at the forefront and allows the directly applicable stuff to be done later.
He can GROW UP and handle some immature bozo who bothers him in online forums like a man. It's an online service, and people know that anything said must be taken *cum grano salis*, particularly when said by someone who's being a jerk via anonymous harassment.
Didn't the poster say he was going to lose his business.
Sounds like you're the one who needs to grow up and realize that not *all* lawsuits are brought by whiny babies. That sometimes, in fact, there is good reason for a court to muzzle a defendent and fine him for his actions.
If the defendent really is putting this guy out of business with lies, this is one of those cases.
I can think of two advantages that you have over the rest of the world.
1) You are young, can work hard and risk a great deal without worrying about the wife and kids.
2) You know how to live on the cheap.
Those two things make this an ideal time to start a business. And I'm not even thinking an IT business necessarily. The reason you got trained up in IT is because businesses need IT skills. Heck, no business can run without them and they are *the* reason why US productivity has done so well compared to the rest of the world the last two years. You can use those skills to run your own business too. I work in IT now, but when I started out I opened a photo lab. These were the days before a one hour lab in every supermarket, and people still went to stores that specialized in processing film. I wrote all the systems for the lab and that gave us an edge over the competition. Now, that said, we failed anyway because of the switch from large scale processing to automated processing in the mini-labs, but I don't regret it for a moment.
So, use those creative skills you have been showing in code to invent your own career. Prepare for long hours and an adventure to match.
Re:Debit cards are protected too
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 2
When debit cards were new, I'm sure that was the case but for a number of years now there has been equivalent liability protection for debit cards.
Read the page again. The liability isn't even close to the same.
The credit card rule is:
Your maximum liability under federal law for unauthorized use of your credit card is $50.
Period! $50. That's all.
The debit card is much much more complicated:
If unauthorized use occurs before you report it, your liability under federal law depends on how quickly you report the loss.
For example, if you report the loss within two business days after you realize your card is missing, you will not be responsible for more than $50 for unauthorized use. However, if you don't report the loss within two business days after you discover the loss, you could lose up to $500 because of an unauthorized transfer. You also risk unlimited loss if you fail to report an unauthorized transfer within 60 days after your bank statement containing unauthorized use is mailed to you. That means you could lose all the money in your bank account and the unused portion of your line of credit established for overdrafts. However, for unauthorized transfers involving only your debit card number (not the loss of the card), you are liable only for transfers that occur after 60 days following the mailing of your bank statement containing the unauthorized use and before you report the loss.
Now, it's true that in both cases you can limit your liability to $50. But in the case of the debit card you are put into a position of proving yourself and understanding the rules, while with a credit card the rules are clear.
so even if they make perfect drives that never fail their warranty support costs would still be half of what they are if the make drives where not a single one lasts for the entire three years.
Heh.
This is incorrect. Teaches me to type and run.
The point is, there are significant costs to a longer warranty even if the drives are high quality. Those costs are passed on to the consumer and the consumer has decided that he would rather have a cheaper drive than a longer warranty. I'll not belabor that point further.
If the drives are so reliable (MTBF of a million years my ass!), then the extra cost would be $0.00 per unit.
1) I hope your joking, but to be pedantic the MTBF is only 500K hours, not years, of course.
2) The extra cost, even if the drive itself is fine, still exists as you vet problem reports from your customers. In fact, the cost of vetting the problems is probably about the same as the drive itself, so even if they make perfect drives that never fail their warranty support costs would still be half of what they are if the make drives where not a single one lasts for the entire three years.
Now, that said, re-read my note. Nowhere do I say that drive quality is as good as it used to be. I only point out that there are valid reasons, market based reasons, to reduce the warranty that have nothing to do with the quality of the drive.
Because two extra years costs the companies money (even if the drives are quite reliable it still costs something) and the market has pressured price down more strongly than warranty up.
Your point was about corporations though. Would they?
Sure, if they can produce it for less than the thing the public really wants and convince the public that what they've produced is what they wanted anyway. You bet they would.
your school district should have somebody who specializes in educational software and stuff of that nature [...] And yes, I know what I'm talking about - I've been working in K12 IT for over 4 years now.
Then by now you should have learned that a district with an Apple III lab probably doesn't have the funding for a person with software specialization anymore than it has had funding for a new lab in the last 20 years.;-)
Not trying to dig at you, just pointing out the context. That lab and your comment inhabit different districts I bet.
I have found LaTeX to be quite sufficient for all of my school-paper-writing needs. It's free, international, supports good advanced math, and does a good job of automating many things like kerning, spacing, placement, citations, and everything else
Yup. I'm with you. I can't begin to count the number of times that my eight year old has come to me in frustration because he can't input the maths he wants to using Word, his citations are completely fuxored and the o next to his W looks like it's a mile and a half away. Don't even get me started on his beefs concerning trying to get latin, cyrillic and kanji to display properly, neither of us has the time for that pandora's box.
Your data set is screwed, all physics PhD's you meet have gotten out of the field already and therefore where not motivated enough or able enough to find a job in the physics field (or they felt the lure of IT money).
So how is his dataset screwed. All he said was that people were leaving it. The most plausible reason being one you yourself mention "the lure of IT money"
The fact of the matter is that there are far more physicists graduating than there are physics jobs. Since he already has an Econ degree, I'll not bother enumerating what the does to physics salaries.
If you love it, go into it. Be prepared not only for the educational cost, but the fact that you will likely be working for not much money for many years after you get your degree and that many physics positions that are available are as term employees and that even the above average will go through several terms before getting a 'real' job.
Also be aware that physics is in many respects a government gig, and the government has dropped the physics budget every year for the last decade.
If the original work order isn't signed - then there's no proof he ever showed up at all, and the cost of rolling the truck the second time comes outta his pay.
That's a sexy, but untrue story. It's illegal to make him pay for that second truck roll.
Now, will his bonus, likely correlated to percentage of second visits, be affected. Perhaps.
You got the quote in your sig wrong. Terribly wrong actually as it changes the whole meaning of the sentiment.
Franklin didn't say, never trade security for liberty as your misquote implies.
He said, "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"
Yes, it's off topic, mod it as such, but at least Aqua OS X will have the right quote going forward!
Re:Your dressed casually to the first day of work?
on
Cool Work Shirts?
·
· Score: 2
I remember when I was younger, I would bitch whenever I had to wear a tie. The fact is that people judge you by how you look
That's right. And if you're the fool who, after interviewing with the company, noticing that your suit was out of place in an office of shirt wearing compatriots and not bothering to ask what the dress code was, shows up wearing a suit then you deserve the ultra-conservative, unwilling to ask questions, timid dork that they'll inevitably label you as.
That doesn't mean you have to wear a tux to work every day (well, if you were a real penguin...), but you don't want to be the frumpiest looking person on the block.
That's much better advice. Don't be a frump, but don't dress out of place on the other side of the equation either.
I'm a consultant, and I was told when I started in the 80's that we were expected to dress one level above the client. I think this is a good rule for everyone not just consultants (though, of course, if everyone adhered to it there would be a clothing arms race).
If your office is business casual, wear a casual tie once in a while. If your office is jeans, wear dockers and a button down regularly.
But, for the love of jeebus, don't show up to a shorts and sandels shop in a suit on your first day.
It's merely a strategy for dealing with those who can't manage their own projects.
True, that it's a strategy that will keep the service provider from losing much money on the deal, but it isn't one that is likely to keep the customer happy.
After all, the central tenet of the philosophy is "once they've signed the bottom line we'll do *exactly* what it says or send in our lawyers to do the talking".
I'm not surprised to see your closing sentence though. That the project group had the hardest time making money is not at all unusual. There are exceptions, but project work is difficult and high liability work. I've seen literally millions of dollars in bills written off because the fees were uncollectable from the unhappy client.
Why so many small firms aspire to this work is a mystery I've still not plumbed.
BTW, I may be coming off a long term contract at the end of the month, so anyone who needs C++/Java/Python/Web services/grid/petabyte scale data warehousing help should drop me a line. rkw at objenv.com
You said yourself that what takes up the dough is schools. This is because the feds have very little involvement in education. But, fine, the free state can opt out. Good for them, now their $10 can go to another state.
try to recruit a lot of good teachers for the required private schools.
Required private schools? If it's required then it isn't very libertarian, is it? And if it isn't state run, then how will the poor afford education?
I live in Illinois and the poor get a crummy education because of the way funding is done here. The state doesn't provide very much, it's up to each locality to fund. And guess what, the schools are much better in rich areas than poor.
A state with only private schools would be that much worse. A state with libertarians at the helm, yet still taxing for schools would be more self contradictory than Ghandi at a gun club.
Slashdot Mirror
why should it piss you off? thats the us government's mandate from the constitution, to provide defense and security, or would you rather each state have it's own army, navy, air force, and coast guard? it's supposed to do the things the states themselves can't or won't reasonably do
:-) What pisses me off specifically is the *amount* of money I spend on the military every year. I think it should be *much much* lower and not devoted so frequently to pet projects in powerful people's home districts.
1) Just because the constitution says it doesn't make it right. Appeals to authority carry very little weight with me.
2) I happen to agree with the constitution on this one.
If there was a relatively frictionless way to enable top reviewers to give private grants we would probably end up with *more* basic research
Can you cite a supporting study for this?
What I've noticed is that people only think about a meal into the future (evolutionary design, you know) and are much more likely to be self interested than making sure that a project that won't have results for a decade gets off the ground, oh, and we don't know what the results will be yet. Please, give me a dollar?
As for "forcibly stripping". That sounds like a sound byte from the libertarian website. They go on and on talking about how private contract law should be final and that the government should be minimal. Government at the point of a gun is invalid. All that kind of crap.
What about the contract they've made by being a citizen here? They never really address that. They piss and moan about the horror of living in the most open, richest country in the world and forget that, if they are really so unhappy, they can leave. No point of a gun. Just have a go of it somewhere else.
The only time the government is "forcibly stripping money out of people's wallets" or dictating "at the point of a gun" is when the borders are closed. Until then, they've choosen to be here and volunteered to play by the rules. Taxes, speed limits, seat belt laws, gun regulations, drug laws and the rest are all part of that ruleset.
If they want to try and change them, great! More power to them. I support about 2/3rds of their agenda in fact. But they aren't being forced into any of it. They are just telling inflamatory lies to get people riled up and open their wallets.
While R&D based on pure intellectual curiosity is wonderful, it also seems to me that one can satisfy curiosity AND work in a field like biochemistry that has a much larger chance to benefit society.
And where will the biochemists get the tools they need to examine their subjects without the advances in physics?
I agree with the often expressed sentiment that the 20th century was the century of physics and the 21st will be the century of biology. But just as we didn't ignore cancer for quarks in the 20th, it would be foolish to ignore higgs for hemoglobin in the 21st.
This is good news the government should not be doing basic research there are plenty of university people that are in the proper enviroment for basic reseach and have a large amount of slave^h^h^h^h^h er, er I mean undergraduate/graduate assistants. If the government wants to feed some money to university and research institutes its a much better use of money.
Who do you think funds most of the grants that pay for the labs those slaves work in?
Perhaps the funding has dried up simply because the funds have been redirected to other areas, such as defense.
Perhaps? That seems like a certaintly. We have just boosted that budget by better than 10% and are something like double the rest of NATO combined. That's a hell of a lot of money.
*I* think maybe we should cut it in half, fund basic research and, orthogonally, quite shoving our culture and will down the collective throats of every nation that doesn't have a white, male, christian leader. Then *both* problems are solved! (and, sadly, I'm only half joking).
Government effiency crushed by private industry once again.
;-)
Yeah, yeah. But there are ten thousand examples of the government getting things done also. In 1990 there was no profit motive for getting the genome mapped that surpased the costs. It took a breakthrough in *how* to map the genome to setup the event you speak of.
On the whole you and I agree though. The government should be doing the "pure research" and leaving the rest to private industry. I just wouldn't choose to be so antagonistic based on it. Shit happens and sometime private industry gets there first. I just choose to recognize that the vast majority of the time that isn't the case. Heck, it's been thirty years and Southwest still doesn't have flights to the moon...
If the research represents technology for defense, or security
that's the stuff that pisses *me* off.
I am for it, but just pork barrelling our dollars into random research projects, that then get sold into private industry so that I can buy back the result of the research I funded pisses me off.
We'll see if you think that next time you're in a PET scanner trying to get a cancer diagnosed or something. A machine that would not have been produced except for the "pork barrel, random research" projects a few decades ago.
No doubt this is the hardest part of the problem though. How can a scientist asking for money explain that the work *does* have value, it's just that it isn't known what the value will be until it is done. The scientific community needs to get much much better at pointing out the results of the "random research" so that the uneducated masses can better understand the value.
I clearly couldn't be more opposite of you on this one. IMO the *only* research the government should be doing is the "random" stuff that won't get done otherwise because there is no profit motive. It's this research, however, that keeps the US at the forefront and allows the directly applicable stuff to be done later.
He can GROW UP and handle some immature bozo who bothers him in online forums like a man. It's an online service, and people know that anything said must be taken *cum grano salis*, particularly when said by someone who's being a jerk via anonymous harassment.
Didn't the poster say he was going to lose his business.
Sounds like you're the one who needs to grow up and realize that not *all* lawsuits are brought by whiny babies. That sometimes, in fact, there is good reason for a court to muzzle a defendent and fine him for his actions.
If the defendent really is putting this guy out of business with lies, this is one of those cases.
I can think of two advantages that you have over the rest of the world.
1) You are young, can work hard and risk a great deal without worrying about the wife and kids.
2) You know how to live on the cheap.
Those two things make this an ideal time to start a business. And I'm not even thinking an IT business necessarily. The reason you got trained up in IT is because businesses need IT skills. Heck, no business can run without them and they are *the* reason why US productivity has done so well compared to the rest of the world the last two years. You can use those skills to run your own business too. I work in IT now, but when I started out I opened a photo lab. These were the days before a one hour lab in every supermarket, and people still went to stores that specialized in processing film. I wrote all the systems for the lab and that gave us an edge over the competition. Now, that said, we failed anyway because of the switch from large scale processing to automated processing in the mini-labs, but I don't regret it for a moment.
So, use those creative skills you have been showing in code to invent your own career. Prepare for long hours and an adventure to match.
When debit cards were new, I'm sure that was the case but for a number of years now there has been equivalent liability protection for debit cards.
Read the page again. The liability isn't even close to the same.
The credit card rule is:
Your maximum liability under federal law for unauthorized use of your credit card is $50.
Period! $50. That's all.
The debit card is much much more complicated:
If unauthorized use occurs before you report it, your liability under federal law depends on how quickly you report the loss.
For example, if you report the loss within two business days after you realize your card is missing, you will not be responsible for more than $50 for unauthorized use. However, if you don't report the loss within two business days after you discover the loss, you could lose up to $500 because of an unauthorized transfer. You also risk unlimited loss if you fail to report an unauthorized transfer within 60 days after your bank statement containing unauthorized use is mailed to you. That means you could lose all the money in your bank account and the unused portion of your line of credit established for overdrafts. However, for unauthorized transfers involving only your debit card number (not the loss of the card), you are liable only for transfers that occur after 60 days following the mailing of your bank statement containing the unauthorized use and before you report the loss.
Now, it's true that in both cases you can limit your liability to $50. But in the case of the debit card you are put into a position of proving yourself and understanding the rules, while with a credit card the rules are clear.
Quibble away.
He said a million years, not 57. Read the parent then retract your goofy quibble if you like...
so even if they make perfect drives that never fail their warranty support costs would still be half of what they are if the make drives where not a single one lasts for the entire three years.
Heh.
This is incorrect. Teaches me to type and run.
The point is, there are significant costs to a longer warranty even if the drives are high quality. Those costs are passed on to the consumer and the consumer has decided that he would rather have a cheaper drive than a longer warranty. I'll not belabor that point further.
If the drives are so reliable (MTBF of a million years my ass!), then the extra cost would be $0.00 per unit.
1) I hope your joking, but to be pedantic the MTBF is only 500K hours, not years, of course.
2) The extra cost, even if the drive itself is fine, still exists as you vet problem reports from your customers. In fact, the cost of vetting the problems is probably about the same as the drive itself, so even if they make perfect drives that never fail their warranty support costs would still be half of what they are if the make drives where not a single one lasts for the entire three years.
Now, that said, re-read my note. Nowhere do I say that drive quality is as good as it used to be. I only point out that there are valid reasons, market based reasons, to reduce the warranty that have nothing to do with the quality of the drive.
then why go from a 3-year to a 1-year warranty?
Because two extra years costs the companies money (even if the drives are quite reliable it still costs something) and the market has pressured price down more strongly than warranty up.
Would you write something that nobody wants?
Me? Probably. I do a lot of that actually.
Your point was about corporations though. Would they?
Sure, if they can produce it for less than the thing the public really wants and convince the public that what they've produced is what they wanted anyway. You bet they would.
your school district should have somebody who specializes in educational software and stuff of that nature [...] And yes, I know what I'm talking about - I've been working in K12 IT for over 4 years now.
;-)
Then by now you should have learned that a district with an Apple III lab probably doesn't have the funding for a person with software specialization anymore than it has had funding for a new lab in the last 20 years.
Not trying to dig at you, just pointing out the context. That lab and your comment inhabit different districts I bet.
I have found LaTeX to be quite sufficient for all of my school-paper-writing needs. It's free, international, supports good advanced math, and does a good job of automating many things like kerning, spacing, placement, citations, and everything else
Yup. I'm with you. I can't begin to count the number of times that my eight year old has come to me in frustration because he can't input the maths he wants to using Word, his citations are completely fuxored and the o next to his W looks like it's a mile and a half away. Don't even get me started on his beefs concerning trying to get latin, cyrillic and kanji to display properly, neither of us has the time for that pandora's box.
Insightful?
That's the mod on the parent?
It's nothing but an ad hominem on Fox.
I think the moderation faq should start out by saying "Just because someone says something obvious and borderline on-topic doesn't make it insightful"
Please mark the parent down, his idea is dealt with in the article, it isn't insightful it reflects a lack of reading of the story.
Your data set is screwed, all physics PhD's you meet have gotten out of the field already and therefore where not motivated enough or able enough to find a job in the physics field (or they felt the lure of IT money).
So how is his dataset screwed. All he said was that people were leaving it. The most plausible reason being one you yourself mention "the lure of IT money"
The fact of the matter is that there are far more physicists graduating than there are physics jobs. Since he already has an Econ degree, I'll not bother enumerating what the does to physics salaries.
If you love it, go into it. Be prepared not only for the educational cost, but the fact that you will likely be working for not much money for many years after you get your degree and that many physics positions that are available are as term employees and that even the above average will go through several terms before getting a 'real' job.
Also be aware that physics is in many respects a government gig, and the government has dropped the physics budget every year for the last decade.
If the original work order isn't signed - then there's no proof he ever showed up at all, and the cost of rolling the truck the second time comes outta his pay.
That's a sexy, but untrue story. It's illegal to make him pay for that second truck roll.
Now, will his bonus, likely correlated to percentage of second visits, be affected. Perhaps.
You got the quote in your sig wrong. Terribly wrong actually as it changes the whole meaning of the sentiment.
Franklin didn't say, never trade security for liberty as your misquote implies.
He said, "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"
Yes, it's off topic, mod it as such, but at least Aqua OS X will have the right quote going forward!
I remember when I was younger, I would bitch whenever I had to wear a tie. The fact is that people judge you by how you look
That's right. And if you're the fool who, after interviewing with the company, noticing that your suit was out of place in an office of shirt wearing compatriots and not bothering to ask what the dress code was, shows up wearing a suit then you deserve the ultra-conservative, unwilling to ask questions, timid dork that they'll inevitably label you as.
That doesn't mean you have to wear a tux to work every day (well, if you were a real penguin...), but you don't want to be the frumpiest looking person on the block.
That's much better advice. Don't be a frump, but don't dress out of place on the other side of the equation either.
I'm a consultant, and I was told when I started in the 80's that we were expected to dress one level above the client. I think this is a good rule for everyone not just consultants (though, of course, if everyone adhered to it there would be a clothing arms race).
If your office is business casual, wear a casual tie once in a while. If your office is jeans, wear dockers and a button down regularly.
But, for the love of jeebus, don't show up to a shorts and sandels shop in a suit on your first day.
That's not really a 'tweener', IMO.
It's merely a strategy for dealing with those who can't manage their own projects.
True, that it's a strategy that will keep the service provider from losing much money on the deal, but it isn't one that is likely to keep the customer happy.
After all, the central tenet of the philosophy is "once they've signed the bottom line we'll do *exactly* what it says or send in our lawyers to do the talking".
I'm not surprised to see your closing sentence though. That the project group had the hardest time making money is not at all unusual. There are exceptions, but project work is difficult and high liability work. I've seen literally millions of dollars in bills written off because the fees were uncollectable from the unhappy client.
Why so many small firms aspire to this work is a mystery I've still not plumbed.
BTW, I may be coming off a long term contract at the end of the month, so anyone who needs C++/Java/Python/Web services/grid/petabyte scale data warehousing help should drop me a line. rkw at objenv.com
What federal education system!
You said yourself that what takes up the dough is schools. This is because the feds have very little involvement in education. But, fine, the free state can opt out. Good for them, now their $10 can go to another state.
try to recruit a lot of good teachers for the required private schools.
Required private schools? If it's required then it isn't very libertarian, is it? And if it isn't state run, then how will the poor afford education?
I live in Illinois and the poor get a crummy education because of the way funding is done here. The state doesn't provide very much, it's up to each locality to fund. And guess what, the schools are much better in rich areas than poor.
A state with only private schools would be that much worse. A state with libertarians at the helm, yet still taxing for schools would be more self contradictory than Ghandi at a gun club.