I do not want to down-play her role and importance but in accordance with what you said, I honestly doubt she constantly works 12-16 hours and is actually creative during all of that time. A lot of management work is just long hours, repetitive drone-work like meetings, summing stuff up in emails or just shaking hands, meeting people and the like. I cannot imagine she actually creates stuff and solves problems 16 hours a day, each day, for years on end.
I worked for a true workaholic. She had a pallet in the closet so that around 2 am she could take it out, have a short nap and resume work. Even her fellow execs thought she was off the deep end.
After a while I noticed that a lot of this "work time" was spent in moving icons around on the desktop, prettying up files, jumping into the middle of other people's work and making a wreck of it and - most unforgivably - ordering clients around to the point that they used to beg us not to let her join in the discussion (as if we had a choice). They respected her talents immensely, but preferred to enjoy them secondhand.
I've read somewhere that out of a regular 8-hour working day, people are at the peak of their productivity for about 4.5 hours. Somehow it doesn't make sense to me that to prolong a working day when you're already tired could be better in term of actual work getting done than giving it a few extra hours in the weekend. But it may be a good way of getting paid for hours spent by staring vacuously at the screen, that much I'll admit.
Wow. You are the first person that ever made me feel like an over-achiever. I always estimated my productivity day length to be about 6 hours.
Actually, my true productivity day is in 2 parts with a long rest in between them. But hanged if I'm going to do that one at an office where your "productivity" is calculated based on how much time your butt is in a chair when the commute is half an hour each way.
Granted, the cube was better than the current desktop switching mechanism, but Gnome 2 is so dated it made Windows 7 look innovative. I think Gnome 3 expanded the usability gap between Gnome and Windows, (i.e. Gnome is winning handily) and completely left OSX behind, whereas Gnome 2 was merely an competant alternative.
(Yes, I know that OSX has hotspots and works similarly to Gnome 3. But Gnome 3 is better, if only because it lacks Apple's old usability mistakes, and is the perfect layout for laptop, tablet or phone. (Not that I ever expect to see a Gnome 3 phone).
It's a DESKTOP, not a multi-media show. Looks are secondary to function here. A lot of us can go long periods of time without ever even seeing the desktop. In my case, the only parts that I regularly saw were the applets and status messages in the toolbars.
If they really felt the need to improve it, they should have spent more effort on making it aware of how we work so that it could tune itself to the user's needs. Instead, they went the opposite way: ignored users altogether and made it "cool". Even if cool meant removing common popular functions.
Longer version: You're an idiot. You don't take into account the fact that self-lit sources mess with your focussing mechanisms. As far as it goes, shining too much light in your eyes can be a strain whether it's attached to a computer or not, but computer screen images exacerbate the problem because they make you try and focus on the apparent image and not the real one.
I will very definitely start crying if I spend too much time staring at a desktop LCD panel. However, as I've said elsewhere, the 7-inch tablets I can read all day long with no strain even though they're both basically the same idea. I can't speak for 10-inch tablets one way or the other - not enough time logged on them.
I prefer the Kindle because it doesn't have a backlight. I find it tires my eyes much less, like reading a regular book. Try one of each and see which one works out better for you.
I had reservations about self-lit displays, too, having spent many a long hour reading from a desktop display while my eyes water. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Nook Tablet is, if anything, easier to read than their eInk displays. YMMV, of course. I don't read in direct sunlight so I don't know how well it would do there.
The Arabic word for "peace" is "salam". And yes, it's the same root as "islam".
Roots can have a lot of different meanings, I've yet to meet a Muslim who would translate "Islam" as "peace", though, same root or not. The conventional translation is "submission" (to God). I've met one quite devout Muslim who made a point of always translating it when he talked about it (which was, ahem, a lot), and that was the translation he used as well.
Thats what I got as well; 'peace' meaning 'not struggling against the will of God', which is a bit different from the English meaning of the word.
You just haven't been dragged to the same churches that I was, that's all. No Jesus, No peace, etc.
A sensible approach to this would be to keep drawing Muhammad and whatever else until these mud people completely exterminate themselves.
Unfortunately, our culture has its own major flaw: "tolerance."
Of course Islam describes itself as 'a religion of peace and tolerance' but I'm not sure exactly what Arabic words get translated as 'peace' and as 'tolerance', there seems to be some... misunderstanding involved.
The Arabic word for "peace" is "salam". And yes, it's the same root as "islam".
There are probably many more peaceful/tolerant muslims in the world than there are Christians, but it's the "Fred Phelp's" groups that get all the attention, not the Lutherans down the block.
Stupidest is a perfectly cromulent word. Normally I'd be on your side, but it's a lost battle, just as "begging the question", "octopuses" etc. are lost now. (Specifically, most dictionaries list "stupider,stupidest" as the comparative and superlative forms of stupid, including spellcheck dictionaries). It may be painful to witness, but language evolves...oops, I mean, language is (un)intelligently designed.
Indeed. I long for the days when we "showed disrespect" instead of "disrespected", and "pro-active" wasn't used because "active" was sufficient.
And while we're at it, bring back the letter "thorn". Why should we have to spell "the" with 3 letters just because centuries ago, English typesetters bought their type from Gemany?
Legislators want ACT to make a Kentucky-specific ACT test
Sorry, hillbillies. We're not making a separate test for you just because you're a bunch of bible-thumping idiots.
Why not? They could make a test where the right answer to every question is "Jeebus" and just flag the results correctly. Good luck getting into a college outside of Central Dumbfuckistan with that test score, though...
Just give them the same test that Texas mandated. And Kansas.
One of the ugliest buildings in the world was removed, and a lot of stock brokers and lawyers died. How is this not a good thing?
Because, unfortunately, so did a few computer geeks. I found this out when I sent an email to a guy who'd been active on a project of mine and his widow wrote back.
Mandatory insurance was forced through by the insurance companies.
Sort of like Obama's mandatory health insurance. The only people who truly benefit are the insurance companies as they rake in the money from the healthy people who don't use it.
You do not understand insurance. Insurance - as originally designed - is 2-dimensional. It covers a lot of people at one time so that the vast majority of the people pay in so that benefits may be paid out for the few. Or, if you prefer: corporate-sponsored Socialism, if you subscribe to the popular conceit that the only thing that socialism is good for is taking and giving.
The second dimension is time. Just because you didn't get hit by a truck, fall down a manhole, have an aneurysm or whatever last week and probably won't this week doesn't mean that it can't happen next week. "Being healthy" only goes so far. So in part, you "pay it forward", amortizing projected expenses from the past, while you're still financially solvent to pay for the possible future when you aren't. And insurance companies have made it a fine art to try and predict if and when such things will happen. That's what actuaries are for.
Since catastrophe is subject to statistical bubbles, insurance companies are required by the goddam meddling gubbmint to maintain a certain level of reserves, so that, for example, when another Hurricane Hugo hits North Carolina, the money will be there to pay. The insurance companies further hedge their bets by taking some of their spare cash and investing it, which can lower premiums.
At least that's how it started. In more recent times, anything more than 3 months in the future doesn't exist for most people/companies and sophisticated analysis tools have resulted in cherry-picking/lemon-dropping so that the pools are often very shallow, very narrow, and very profitable. Until the statistical bubble hits it and it gets wiped out entirely. Which is essentially what happened to the mortgage investment market.
For all its numerous warts, one thing Obamacare does attempt to do is reverse this focussing trend and make the pools wider and deeper again.
Obviously he took a leaf from the Computer Science book, specifically the chapter on compiler bootstrapping. How do you compile a compiler?
You build by hand a crude compiler and use it to compile a more complex one, use that to compile a more complex one, use that to compile a more complex one, etc
Obviously he started with hooks and worked his way up to full hands from there.
The hard part was getting past the stage where he had scissors.
No it isn't. No country should make deals with a criminal to get him to face justice.
"Assange is being very reasonable,"
Funny how only a 3rd world dictatorship sees it that way.
Ah, an Edwin Meese Guantanamoid: "If the police arrest you, then you're (almost) certainly guilty". Said shortly before they investigated him. Right up there with "Innocent people have nothing to hide" when it comes to excusing abuse of authority.
It is quite possible that Assange is a total jerk, guilty of "rape", as defined by Sweden, which has a different definition than most countries do to begin with. Just because you're controversial doesn't make you a saint. However, back before Meese and his buddies were in business, America used to have this concept of "innocent until PROVEN guilty". I realize Reagan took a match to this concept with his pre-employment drug testing and proof-of-citizenship requirements, and its been going downhill ever since, but at one time, at least, the USA - and officially, at least - most of its citizens would demand a fair trial before it hanged him.
One thing no one has mentioned. WikiLeaks revealed a lot of dirt on a lot of countries. What did they say about Ecuador?
Not that it matters. It really is true that politics makes strange bedfellows.
This goes out to all those hippies who flew Viet Cong flags and were oh so sure that if the Evil Wicked Americans would just lose the Vietnam War that the peaceful VC would make a wonderful People's Republic and everything would be rainbow shitting unicorns... OK ASSHOLES, you got your wish. It has been a generation now, where is the paradise? Or you you ready to admit you were just traitors yet and that it wasn't even in a good cause? Eh? I can't hear you.
More like LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU, isn't it?
What I remember is that if we let Vietnam go, there would be a Domino Effect that would turn all of Asia Communist, followed by invasion of the USA and we'd all end up listening to some fat clown on the radio telling us how to think so we could echo it back.
And, BTW, I hope you're not wearing Nikes. Vietnam won the war, but the capitalists have been doing a pretty tidy job of subverting their goals, I'd say.
And yet you can blithely say that, posting logged in to your account, with full knowledge that your IP address and user agent string are being logged, and yet still have no fear that the US government will ever come hunting you down for your disparaging remarks.
Who needs to hunt? They can collect all they need to prosecute you courtesy of secret intercept rooms in the AT&T offices, etc. The only time they need to do any actual hunting is when someone decides you've said enough to be annnoying and wants to bring you in. By then it's a bit late.
Remember. Innocent people have nothing to hide, but they're not going to be asking YOU what determines who's "innocent".
When the revolution is authoritarian, I'm proud to be reactionary. I want to take us back to a time when the Constitution was respected, and the law applied to rich and poor alike. When warrantless anything was unconscionable. When torture was punished no matter who the torturer was. When the rule of law still meant something.
Did you read History from Little Golden Books? There was never a time when the country resembled your fantasy.
True, but we used to at least try to pretend it was that way. Now we don't even bother.
"If the manufacturer has the burden of paying that cost and they have to build it into the price, then devices that will last longer can be priced lower and better quality devices will be able to compete"
Excuse me, you are just re-stating the OP statement that "If manufacturers have to go to the trouble of recycling their goods they might be tempted to make them more reliable", so again I ask how is this logical?
The state is not incentivizing efficiency, it is simply adding a cost to production. That is all.
The cost is there, regardless, and the consumer will pay most of it in various ways. If the manufacturer has to pay it up front, there's at least some incentive to make it more efficient from the start, since there's only so much you can pass on before people start complaining.
On the other hand, the traditional way, where factories spew out goods and someone else ends up paying for the waste disposal and/or toxic waste cleanup doesn't give the manufacturer any incentive. So unless you get "free" garbage collection (and I don't, since they made it a separate bill now so that they could "keep my taxes low"), you're going to pay either way and you might as well get value at the end of product life as well as at the beginning.
Hey, even lawyers, traditionally the lowest of the low, do pro bono work. Most people I know who use computers for a living (myself included) do free work for good causes. I help out high school and college students working on projects that catch my eye, the web design place down the road has adopted a couple of charities and provide free design/hosting, there are all sorts.
Small mismatch on meanings, that's all. Even "pro-bono" work is worth something (possibly a tax deduction). You're counting their absolute cost, I'm counting what it would cost for someone else to do the same thing, minus donations. Which is to say, value versus tangible cost.
1) Nobody makes money making sub-prime loans. It's trivial for any idiot to understand that loaning money to people who can't pay it back is a dumb idea.
This is why Mitt Romney won't be inviting you to his inauguration. You don't know how to think like a high-flyer. I know a bank that specialized in subprime loans. They, in fact, sold off the good ones because the subprimes were their cash cows.
Banks don't make money off the principal. They make it off the interest, which on a 30-year mortgage would typically exceed the principal and more. In fact, one of the old Carter-era loans at 10% on 30,000 would end up costing the mortagee over $100K.
But what good does that do when people don't pay back? No good at all, if, in fact, they don't pay. But few people actually take out a loan with the express intent of defaulting on it and trashing their credit rating, they try very, very hard to keep paying. But if they're closer to the bottom 1% than the top 1%, they will frequently fall behind and that's where the subprime advantage kicks in. ZING! Late fees and penalties. Even MORE income on top of the returning principal and the mortage interest and servicing fees. Suddenly subprime doesn't look so bad after all. The same old story. The richer you are, the cheaper you can live - no need to resort to payday loan roulette or usurious auto title loans if you're a 1-percenter.
It's only when the economy completely tanks and people give up on repayment entires and the (foreclosed) home prices deflate that subprime actually starts to look bad from the loan servicer's point of view.
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I do not want to down-play her role and importance but in accordance with what you said, I honestly doubt she constantly works 12-16 hours and is actually creative during all of that time. A lot of management work is just long hours, repetitive drone-work like meetings, summing stuff up in emails or just shaking hands, meeting people and the like. I cannot imagine she actually creates stuff and solves problems 16 hours a day, each day, for years on end.
I worked for a true workaholic. She had a pallet in the closet so that around 2 am she could take it out, have a short nap and resume work. Even her fellow execs thought she was off the deep end.
After a while I noticed that a lot of this "work time" was spent in moving icons around on the desktop, prettying up files, jumping into the middle of other people's work and making a wreck of it and - most unforgivably - ordering clients around to the point that they used to beg us not to let her join in the discussion (as if we had a choice). They respected her talents immensely, but preferred to enjoy them secondhand.
.. the answer is no.
And now that seems very valid.
I've read somewhere that out of a regular 8-hour working day, people are at the peak of their productivity for about 4.5 hours. Somehow it doesn't make sense to me that to prolong a working day when you're already tired could be better in term of actual work getting done than giving it a few extra hours in the weekend. But it may be a good way of getting paid for hours spent by staring vacuously at the screen, that much I'll admit.
Wow. You are the first person that ever made me feel like an over-achiever. I always estimated my productivity day length to be about 6 hours.
Actually, my true productivity day is in 2 parts with a long rest in between them. But hanged if I'm going to do that one at an office where your "productivity" is calculated based on how much time your butt is in a chair when the commute is half an hour each way.
Granted, the cube was better than the current desktop switching mechanism, but Gnome 2 is so dated it made Windows 7 look innovative. I think Gnome 3 expanded the usability gap between Gnome and Windows, (i.e. Gnome is winning handily) and completely left OSX behind, whereas Gnome 2 was merely an competant alternative.
(Yes, I know that OSX has hotspots and works similarly to Gnome 3. But Gnome 3 is better, if only because it lacks Apple's old usability mistakes, and is the perfect layout for laptop, tablet or phone. (Not that I ever expect to see a Gnome 3 phone).
It's a DESKTOP, not a multi-media show. Looks are secondary to function here. A lot of us can go long periods of time without ever even seeing the desktop. In my case, the only parts that I regularly saw were the applets and status messages in the toolbars.
If they really felt the need to improve it, they should have spent more effort on making it aware of how we work so that it could tune itself to the user's needs. Instead, they went the opposite way: ignored users altogether and made it "cool". Even if cool meant removing common popular functions.
You're an idiot.
Longer version: You're an idiot. You don't take into account the fact that self-lit sources mess with your focussing mechanisms. As far as it goes, shining too much light in your eyes can be a strain whether it's attached to a computer or not, but computer screen images exacerbate the problem because they make you try and focus on the apparent image and not the real one.
I will very definitely start crying if I spend too much time staring at a desktop LCD panel. However, as I've said elsewhere, the 7-inch tablets I can read all day long with no strain even though they're both basically the same idea. I can't speak for 10-inch tablets one way or the other - not enough time logged on them.
I prefer the Kindle because it doesn't have a backlight. I find it tires my eyes much less, like reading a regular book. Try one of each and see which one works out better for you.
I had reservations about self-lit displays, too, having spent many a long hour reading from a desktop display while my eyes water. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Nook Tablet is, if anything, easier to read than their eInk displays. YMMV, of course. I don't read in direct sunlight so I don't know how well it would do there.
The Arabic word for "peace" is "salam". And yes, it's the same root as "islam".
Roots can have a lot of different meanings, I've yet to meet a Muslim who would translate "Islam" as "peace", though, same root or not. The conventional translation is "submission" (to God). I've met one quite devout Muslim who made a point of always translating it when he talked about it (which was, ahem, a lot), and that was the translation he used as well.
Thats what I got as well; 'peace' meaning 'not struggling against the will of God', which is a bit different from the English meaning of the word.
You just haven't been dragged to the same churches that I was, that's all. No Jesus, No peace, etc.
A sensible approach to this would be to keep drawing Muhammad and whatever else until these mud people completely exterminate themselves.
Unfortunately, our culture has its own major flaw: "tolerance."
Of course Islam describes itself as 'a religion of peace and tolerance' but I'm not sure exactly what Arabic words get translated as 'peace' and as 'tolerance', there seems to be some... misunderstanding involved.
The Arabic word for "peace" is "salam". And yes, it's the same root as "islam".
There are probably many more peaceful/tolerant muslims in the world than there are Christians, but it's the "Fred Phelp's" groups that get all the attention, not the Lutherans down the block.
A sensible approach to this would be to keep drawing Muhammad and whatever else until these mud people completely exterminate themselves.
Unfortunately, our culture has its own major flaw: "tolerance."
So... we should make our culture more like theirs?
The Taliban work around the drone problem by infiltration. They send recruits into the enemy government, where Predators do no good at all.
Never underestimate what determined humans can do.
Sadly, the closest thing to infiltrators we get are the Tea Party.
Exactly what I thought. Dumb rules to placate dumb people.
Curses be upon them!
That argues for getting guns yourselves. Guns are tools from which political power flows.
If you are not competent and willing to use firearms, that's your weakness.
You can keep your guns. As long as I can have the Predator drones.
Stupidest is a perfectly cromulent word. Normally I'd be on your side, but it's a lost battle, just as "begging the question", "octopuses" etc. are lost now. (Specifically, most dictionaries list "stupider,stupidest" as the comparative and superlative forms of stupid, including spellcheck dictionaries). It may be painful to witness, but language evolves...oops, I mean, language is (un)intelligently designed.
Indeed. I long for the days when we "showed disrespect" instead of "disrespected", and "pro-active" wasn't used because "active" was sufficient.
And while we're at it, bring back the letter "thorn". Why should we have to spell "the" with 3 letters just because centuries ago, English typesetters bought their type from Gemany?
Legislators want ACT to make a Kentucky-specific ACT test
Sorry, hillbillies. We're not making a separate test for you just because you're a bunch of bible-thumping idiots.
Why not? They could make a test where the right answer to every question is "Jeebus" and just flag the results correctly. Good luck getting into a college outside of Central Dumbfuckistan with that test score, though...
Just give them the same test that Texas mandated. And Kansas.
One of the ugliest buildings in the world was removed, and a lot of stock brokers and lawyers died. How is this not a good thing?
Because, unfortunately, so did a few computer geeks. I found this out when I sent an email to a guy who'd been active on a project of mine and his widow wrote back.
Mandatory insurance was forced through by the insurance companies.
Sort of like Obama's mandatory health insurance. The only people who truly benefit are the insurance companies as they rake in the money from the healthy people who don't use it.
You do not understand insurance. Insurance - as originally designed - is 2-dimensional. It covers a lot of people at one time so that the vast majority of the people pay in so that benefits may be paid out for the few. Or, if you prefer: corporate-sponsored Socialism, if you subscribe to the popular conceit that the only thing that socialism is good for is taking and giving.
The second dimension is time. Just because you didn't get hit by a truck, fall down a manhole, have an aneurysm or whatever last week and probably won't this week doesn't mean that it can't happen next week. "Being healthy" only goes so far. So in part, you "pay it forward", amortizing projected expenses from the past, while you're still financially solvent to pay for the possible future when you aren't. And insurance companies have made it a fine art to try and predict if and when such things will happen. That's what actuaries are for.
Since catastrophe is subject to statistical bubbles, insurance companies are required by the goddam meddling gubbmint to maintain a certain level of reserves, so that, for example, when another Hurricane Hugo hits North Carolina, the money will be there to pay. The insurance companies further hedge their bets by taking some of their spare cash and investing it, which can lower premiums.
At least that's how it started. In more recent times, anything more than 3 months in the future doesn't exist for most people/companies and sophisticated analysis tools have resulted in cherry-picking/lemon-dropping so that the pools are often very shallow, very narrow, and very profitable. Until the statistical bubble hits it and it gets wiped out entirely. Which is essentially what happened to the mortgage investment market.
For all its numerous warts, one thing Obamacare does attempt to do is reverse this focussing trend and make the pools wider and deeper again.
Obviously he took a leaf from the Computer Science book, specifically the chapter on compiler bootstrapping. How do you compile a compiler?
You build by hand a crude compiler and use it to compile a more complex one, use that to compile a more complex one, use that to compile a more complex one, etc
Obviously he started with hooks and worked his way up to full hands from there.
The hard part was getting past the stage where he had scissors.
"That is the human rights violation"
No it isn't. No country should make deals with a criminal to get him to face justice.
"Assange is being very reasonable,"
Funny how only a 3rd world dictatorship sees it that way.
Ah, an Edwin Meese Guantanamoid: "If the police arrest you, then you're (almost) certainly guilty". Said shortly before they investigated him. Right up there with "Innocent people have nothing to hide" when it comes to excusing abuse of authority.
It is quite possible that Assange is a total jerk, guilty of "rape", as defined by Sweden, which has a different definition than most countries do to begin with. Just because you're controversial doesn't make you a saint. However, back before Meese and his buddies were in business, America used to have this concept of "innocent until PROVEN guilty". I realize Reagan took a match to this concept with his pre-employment drug testing and proof-of-citizenship requirements, and its been going downhill ever since, but at one time, at least, the USA - and officially, at least - most of its citizens would demand a fair trial before it hanged him.
One thing no one has mentioned. WikiLeaks revealed a lot of dirt on a lot of countries. What did they say about Ecuador?
Not that it matters. It really is true that politics makes strange bedfellows.
This goes out to all those hippies who flew Viet Cong flags and were oh so sure that if the Evil Wicked Americans would just lose the Vietnam War that the peaceful VC would make a wonderful People's Republic and everything would be rainbow shitting unicorns... OK ASSHOLES, you got your wish. It has been a generation now, where is the paradise? Or you you ready to admit you were just traitors yet and that it wasn't even in a good cause? Eh? I can't hear you.
More like LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU, isn't it?
What I remember is that if we let Vietnam go, there would be a Domino Effect that would turn all of Asia Communist, followed by invasion of the USA and we'd all end up listening to some fat clown on the radio telling us how to think so we could echo it back.
And, BTW, I hope you're not wearing Nikes. Vietnam won the war, but the capitalists have been doing a pretty tidy job of subverting their goals, I'd say.
And yet you can blithely say that, posting logged in to your account, with full knowledge that your IP address and user agent string are being logged, and yet still have no fear that the US government will ever come hunting you down for your disparaging remarks.
Who needs to hunt? They can collect all they need to prosecute you courtesy of secret intercept rooms in the AT&T offices, etc. The only time they need to do any actual hunting is when someone decides you've said enough to be annnoying and wants to bring you in. By then it's a bit late.
Remember. Innocent people have nothing to hide, but they're not going to be asking YOU what determines who's "innocent".
Ever read the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)? It was quite high-minded.
Sometimes a constitution is just a piece of paper.
When the revolution is authoritarian, I'm proud to be reactionary. I want to take us back to a time when the Constitution was respected, and the law applied to rich and poor alike. When warrantless anything was unconscionable. When torture was punished no matter who the torturer was. When the rule of law still meant something.
Did you read History from Little Golden Books? There was never a time when the country resembled your fantasy.
True, but we used to at least try to pretend it was that way. Now we don't even bother.
"If the manufacturer has the burden of paying that cost and they have to build it into the price, then devices that will last longer can be priced lower and better quality devices will be able to compete"
Excuse me, you are just re-stating the OP statement that "If manufacturers have to go to the trouble of recycling their goods they might be tempted to make them more reliable", so again I ask how is this logical?
The state is not incentivizing efficiency, it is simply adding a cost to production. That is all.
The cost is there, regardless, and the consumer will pay most of it in various ways. If the manufacturer has to pay it up front, there's at least some incentive to make it more efficient from the start, since there's only so much you can pass on before people start complaining.
On the other hand, the traditional way, where factories spew out goods and someone else ends up paying for the waste disposal and/or toxic waste cleanup doesn't give the manufacturer any incentive. So unless you get "free" garbage collection (and I don't, since they made it a separate bill now so that they could "keep my taxes low"), you're going to pay either way and you might as well get value at the end of product life as well as at the beginning.
Hey, even lawyers, traditionally the lowest of the low, do pro bono work. Most people I know who use computers for a living (myself included) do free work for good causes. I help out high school and college students working on projects that catch my eye, the web design place down the road has adopted a couple of charities and provide free design/hosting, there are all sorts.
Small mismatch on meanings, that's all. Even "pro-bono" work is worth something (possibly a tax deduction). You're counting their absolute cost, I'm counting what it would cost for someone else to do the same thing, minus donations. Which is to say, value versus tangible cost.
Where are you going to find that much labor for $0? Or are teachers - and their time - really as worthless as some people claim?
Holy shit you're a brainwashed idiot.
1) Nobody makes money making sub-prime loans. It's trivial for any idiot to understand that loaning money to people who can't pay it back is a dumb idea.
This is why Mitt Romney won't be inviting you to his inauguration. You don't know how to think like a high-flyer. I know a bank that specialized in subprime loans. They, in fact, sold off the good ones because the subprimes were their cash cows.
Banks don't make money off the principal. They make it off the interest, which on a 30-year mortgage would typically exceed the principal and more. In fact, one of the old Carter-era loans at 10% on 30,000 would end up costing the mortagee over $100K.
But what good does that do when people don't pay back? No good at all, if, in fact, they don't pay. But few people actually take out a loan with the express intent of defaulting on it and trashing their credit rating, they try very, very hard to keep paying. But if they're closer to the bottom 1% than the top 1%, they will frequently fall behind and that's where the subprime advantage kicks in. ZING! Late fees and penalties. Even MORE income on top of the returning principal and the mortage interest and servicing fees. Suddenly subprime doesn't look so bad after all. The same old story. The richer you are, the cheaper you can live - no need to resort to payday loan roulette or usurious auto title loans if you're a 1-percenter.
It's only when the economy completely tanks and people give up on repayment entires and the (foreclosed) home prices deflate that subprime actually starts to look bad from the loan servicer's point of view.