After all, you don't have to be a growth stock. As you said, the value is in the dividend then.
If the dividend doesn't grow, then you might as well just buy a bond - they're a lot safer because the "dividends" (actually interest payments) are guaranteed as long as the company doesn't go bankrupt. If the profits don't increase, then the dividends won't increase, and stock won't increase.
This is obviously an oversimplification, but for the most part it's true...
People do collude at "brick and mortar" poker tables as well.
Yeah, but word gets out pretty quickly who those people are, and they can't just change their name and gather that reputation back (actually, once they know you know, they won't pull it on you, and it can actually be an advantage). At B&M casinos you see the same people all the time. If you see a new face, 9 times out of 10 they're a fish. Sure, there's always that 1 time out of 10, so you've gotta be careful (I don't play no-limit), but it really is a lot like that scene from Rounders where they play at the casino.
The biggest problem online probably isn't the outright cheats, though, and bots are consistent but they can be beaten (and as long as you're not playing against *all* bots, you don't even have to beat the bots anyway). My biggest beef with online poker is that it seems like all the good players are getting assistance from computers. The computers track your every move, they even have computers that lurk in games recording the actions of every player, without the computer actually playing. Online poker has thus become a different game - a good memory is no longer much of an advantage, and even if you're playing someone you've never played with before, they might very well have a history of nearly every hand you've played.
I can kind of see that. I mean, personally I don't need very much money to be happy in life, but reading all these posts about these high salaries makes me jealous.
And how would I characterize the job market in the area (S CA)? Actually, I would say that it is pretty healthy. Healthiest that I've seen since 2001.
Hopefully Allen Greenspan won't go and screw it all up again. I really hope he takes this New Orleans thing seriously and actually cuts rates at the next meeting. If he raises them, we're going into a major recession. If he keeps them the same, we still might, and considering that there hasn't been an emergency meeting to lower rates, that's probably what's going to happen in the best case.
Unless your skills involve laying bricks or picking up dead bodies, you can probably expect demand for your profession to go down a bit.
Actually you get around 1000 credits for US$1. Pennies aren't small enough for decent micropayments
Fine, tenths of a penny, same basic concept.
naming it after real money has possible legal ramifications
Actually, naming it after real money takes the legal ramifications aways. If you're dealing with "credits", then you've gotta worry about being classified as a barter exchange, and required to collect social security numbers and give out 1099-Bs. If you just handle it like money, which you hold in trust in a bailment transaction, then I believe the reporting requirements fall upon the people transferring it.
I don't want the system tied to US currency as I might want non-US users
Heh, so use the Euro:). I'm in the US, and I'd have no problem keeping a small Euro-denominated account to pay people in Euros. Of course, you could go the e-gold way and use gold for the currency.
With credits though, it sounds too much like you're trying to avoid taxation, and the government isn't going to like that.
Software patents (as stupid as they are) are the law of the land. Several places I've worked at file them as a defensive measure, not as a way to extract royalties from competitors.
I've never understood (or really believed) this one. What is the purpose of filing for a patent "as a defensive measure"? Why not just publish the details of the patent and thus release the ideas into the public domain? You can't patent something that someone else already invented and published, can you?
However, the idea that you can't use GPL software at all if you patent software or use DRM, well, that's nuts.
I kind of like it. I thought about creating a license where basically I agree to never sue you for copyright infringement if you agree never to sue me for copyright infringement. But I wasn't sure how to make it legally enforcible.
I guess things are still too antiquated in some banking circles to reduce the transaction overhead enough to allow micropayments. However since their communication is already 100% digital, one would think they could make this happen if only they really wanted too.
Check-21 is a step in the right direction. You can write a check for as little as a penny, all that's needed now is for a single bank to be bold and allow online deposits. Scan your check, front and back, and they'll make a substitute check and deposit it into your account. Of course you'll have to have good credit with them and they'll hold the money until the check clears, but it could very well work today, under the current system.
Of course, creating the substitute check costs money, but probably not more than a tenth of a cent, in bulk.
The core challenge for small micropayments is the high cost of dealing with disputes.
The best solution to that problem, for small micropayments, is not to deal with disputes. It's not like you can call the federal reserve when you drop a quarter in the gumball machine and a gumball doesn't come out. When you're dealing with micropayments you've gotta treat it like cash.
Think about it -- what do we have in the real world that works in micropayments?
Newspapers are pretty cheap. Maybe not micropayments, but smaller payments than is feasible with paypal. Soft pretzels, snacks, soda machines, laundry machines, video arcades, there are a lot of small payments now that I think about it. But for the most part, we don't need micropayments as much in the real world, especially for services. In the real world there isn't time to deal with even ten thousand people a day. Online, it's trivial. Also, in the real world it's a lot easier to trust someone, at least to some extent. And that's really what money is about in the end, it's just a distributed trust mechanism.
So if we accept all you've said, we have to ask: why has nobody tried to do this?
Actually, a bunch of people have tried it. No one has really succeeded, unless you count e-gold. The problem is getting the people together, for one thing, but...
There are dozens of online content providers struggling to make a living off of advertising and subscriptions.
I don't think micropayments are a good substitute for advertising, and don't have much of an advantage over subscriptions. People want to know what they're getting before they pay for it, especially if they're paying for it on a piece by piece basis. And in the time it takes to click "OK, send the $0.01", you could have turned off the ad anyway if it was that annoying.
Where micropayments have their real advantage is in person-to-person payments, and to a lesser extent in site-to-person payments. For the latter, e-gold is already being used by a number of "make money by reading email" sites and the like. I don't think there are nearly as many people who would be willing to pay $0.01 to read a Slashdot article as those who would like to be paid $0.10 for submitting an accepted Slashdot article (or $0.01 for one of the first 10 Score:5 posts). And with person-to-person payments, the possibilities are even greater. Need help with a bug you just got running a Makefile? Want a search engine expert to help you find the answer to a difficult problem? Micropayments could be great for this.
The problem is, it's a lot harder to get the critical mass for these things.
That last one is my pet theory -- though I should hasten to say that I have absolutely no evidence to back it up. Banks make huge profits off of credit/debit card transactions.
Well, there are a lot of regulations, most of which were pushed through by the banks, and which Congress was happy to oblige in these terrorism days. But AFAIK the regulations don't really start to kick in until the transfers are more than $600. I'm not sure, though, I mean even Paypal requires you to give a lot of detailed personal information, and last time I checked (a long while ago), they weren't even a bank.
If there were a working micropayment system with transaction fees low enough to make penny transactions feasible, it would soon be adopted by retailers on the non-micro scale.
I'd say e-gold qualifies. Maybe not penny transactions, but it's definitely feasible to pay a nickel with. The problem is getting your money into the system, and the fact that just about no one accepts e-gold once you've put your money in there.
Remember, in terms of millions and billions, half a day of floating is still a lot of money.
Actually, half a day of floating is almost always either nothing, or equivalent to a day of floating. Interest is charged (to banks, and pretty much universally) on an overnight loan. The account is reconciled once at the end of each business day, credits and debits from any time of the day are all put in at the same time. This is one of the advantages of daytrading. As long as you close your positions by the end of the day, you don't have to pay any margin interest.
So you stick $20 on your PayPal account. [....] Your $20 sits there for days, weeks, months, years!
...earning 3.5% interest. And that assumes you use your Paypal account for nothing else. Personally I run hundreds of dollars through my paypal account every month. I'd barely notice a few pennies here and there. And $20, at 3.5% interest, is...$0.70/year. (3.5% interest happens to be pretty close to the US dollar LIBOR, so you're not going to get much better for a liquid investment which is pretty close to risk-free.
Man, I keep hearing bad things about Paypal, but I've never experienced any of them. And I run hundreds of dollars through Paypal every month - I use my Paypal debit card for just about everything, and get 1.5% cash back. Just paid $302 to my car insurance company yesterday through Paypal - got $4.53 debited(*) back immediately.
(*) Yeah, yeah, Paypal calls it a credit, but on my side of the ledger it's called a debit.
Except perhaps a license to play a music track once or something...
Along the same lines, how about about a seed for a torrent file? What about websites paying you? $0.01 for every Score:5 slashdot post? $.05 for being the primary author of a featured Wikipedia article? $0.02 for answering someone's search query?
Actually, when it comes to websites paying the person using the site, I can think of a lot more uses than vice-versa. For content providers ads are usually preferrable to micropayments. Especially if the ads aren't too pushy (I'd much rather have Google ads than pay even $0.001 a search, in fact, even if I could turn off Google ads I probably wouldn't; Slashdot ads on the other hand are annoying as hell, but I wouldn't pay to remove them because I'd feel like I was being extorted or something).
Of course, we already do have micropayments - eGold is the most popular site for them. But it's somewhat expensive getting money in and out of eGold. With Paypal, on the other hand, it's free to add money (using ACH transfer from your checking account). In fact, I put money into my Paypal account about once a week (I use my Paypal debit card for just about everything).
I still can not understand why the average pay of a well-seasoned applications designer is still no match to that of a recently-graduated MBA.
The average MBA is much better at dealing with people than the average well-seasoned applications designer. As someone else said, "selling a product is more important than having a product to sell". While I don't buy into that (both are equally important), it is true that MBAs are better salespeople, and that includes selling themselves.
I kind of wish there was more help out there for us techies who aren't that good at negotiation and such. Sure, there are headhunters, but my experience with them has been much like my experience with real estate agents - they didn't really seem like they were working for me.
Ultimately I moved out of the software field and got into accounting. I wouldn't mind making what I used to make, but now that I've been out of the software biz for a few years it's probably too late to get back in, especially now that I'm living in Tampa. It's really just another case of not being able to sell myself. I know I can do the job, I just don't know how to convince someone that I can do it.
I don't mean this as a personal slam, but that exact attitude keeps salaries low.
Not discussing your salary on Slashdot? I mean, if you're talking about not discussing your salary with coworkers, then yeah, you might have a point. But not putting your salary on Slashdot, to be forever archived, I can see the point in that.
Personally, I'm not divulging my salary because it's ridiculously low and I'm embarrased by it. But I'm an accountant, not a "programmer" (at least for bill-paying purposes), so it's really not that relevant anyway. When I was a software engineer, first year out of college, I think I made $56K. Of course, that was 1998, things have changed a lot since then.
Oh, and plus, you can make those changes to a postgresql table IN A TRANSACTION (however, this may extend the time the lock is held, so don't do it and sit there staring at the screen drinking a diet coke and contemplating the sunset)
I thought everything was done in a transaction. Maybe that's why this didn't work before, I should have turned transactions off or something. I'll have to look into that. (I know you can turn autocommits on and off but that's not the same as turning transactions on and off).
Oh, *that* outage. I thought you were talking about the more recent one. IIRC, that one in February was a matter of the log files taking so long to replay, and no data was actually lost.
I don't know the details of the schema change you're describing, but I don't know why you'd expect downtime in general.
*I* wouldn't expect it, because *I* would do it right. But if you just go in there and alter the table, then all your writes are going to stall, and I believe in Postgres (and MySQL with InnoDB, but not MySQL with MyISAM) your reads will stall too. Thus why I'm saying it was an incompetancy that cause the latest Wikipedia downtime (which wasn't the one in February).
More recently, we've done it at work with multiple hundred million row tables by creating a new table and renaming the old one, then placing a view where the old table was and having all of the inserts start going against the view (all in a transaction).
That's a nice solution. I'll have to remember that one.
Perhaps you don't remember their recent outtage that took the entire thing off the internet for a day or two while they had to completely rebuild their database from backups.
Believe it or not, they actually did that on purpose. They wanted to modify their database schema, and if you do that on a live database in MySQL you're going to block everyone else from using the database for a long time (I think with MyISAM you still have read access but with InnoDB you have nothing). Anyway, Postgres has the same problem (I doubt Oracle does, because this is just something that comes up way too often with really large and long running databases).
Anyway, they could have come up with a solution to keep the database live during the transition (transfer the db a row at a time while it's running, mark each row completed when it's completed, keep a list of anything that gets deleted, and maybe take the db down for 5 minutes when you're done instead of 2 days). But instead they figured "hey, we're not paid, so don't expect competence."
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that if I bought a stock now, it went up in X amount of dollars/share in 10 minutes, and then I sold it I would earn money.
You would, but that's not interest, that's a capital gain.
After all, you don't have to be a growth stock. As you said, the value is in the dividend then.
If the dividend doesn't grow, then you might as well just buy a bond - they're a lot safer because the "dividends" (actually interest payments) are guaranteed as long as the company doesn't go bankrupt. If the profits don't increase, then the dividends won't increase, and stock won't increase.
This is obviously an oversimplification, but for the most part it's true...
People do collude at "brick and mortar" poker tables as well.
Yeah, but word gets out pretty quickly who those people are, and they can't just change their name and gather that reputation back (actually, once they know you know, they won't pull it on you, and it can actually be an advantage). At B&M casinos you see the same people all the time. If you see a new face, 9 times out of 10 they're a fish. Sure, there's always that 1 time out of 10, so you've gotta be careful (I don't play no-limit), but it really is a lot like that scene from Rounders where they play at the casino.
The biggest problem online probably isn't the outright cheats, though, and bots are consistent but they can be beaten (and as long as you're not playing against *all* bots, you don't even have to beat the bots anyway). My biggest beef with online poker is that it seems like all the good players are getting assistance from computers. The computers track your every move, they even have computers that lurk in games recording the actions of every player, without the computer actually playing. Online poker has thus become a different game - a good memory is no longer much of an advantage, and even if you're playing someone you've never played with before, they might very well have a history of nearly every hand you've played.
I can kind of see that. I mean, personally I don't need very much money to be happy in life, but reading all these posts about these high salaries makes me jealous.
And how would I characterize the job market in the area (S CA)? Actually, I would say that it is pretty healthy. Healthiest that I've seen since 2001.
Hopefully Allen Greenspan won't go and screw it all up again. I really hope he takes this New Orleans thing seriously and actually cuts rates at the next meeting. If he raises them, we're going into a major recession. If he keeps them the same, we still might, and considering that there hasn't been an emergency meeting to lower rates, that's probably what's going to happen in the best case.
Unless your skills involve laying bricks or picking up dead bodies, you can probably expect demand for your profession to go down a bit.
Actually you get around 1000 credits for US$1. Pennies aren't small enough for decent micropayments
Fine, tenths of a penny, same basic concept.
naming it after real money has possible legal ramifications
Actually, naming it after real money takes the legal ramifications aways. If you're dealing with "credits", then you've gotta worry about being classified as a barter exchange, and required to collect social security numbers and give out 1099-Bs. If you just handle it like money, which you hold in trust in a bailment transaction, then I believe the reporting requirements fall upon the people transferring it.
I don't want the system tied to US currency as I might want non-US users
Heh, so use the Euro :). I'm in the US, and I'd have no problem keeping a small Euro-denominated account to pay people in Euros. Of course, you could go the e-gold way and use gold for the currency.
With credits though, it sounds too much like you're trying to avoid taxation, and the government isn't going to like that.
Software patents (as stupid as they are) are the law of the land. Several places I've worked at file them as a defensive measure, not as a way to extract royalties from competitors.
I've never understood (or really believed) this one. What is the purpose of filing for a patent "as a defensive measure"? Why not just publish the details of the patent and thus release the ideas into the public domain? You can't patent something that someone else already invented and published, can you?
Picture a world in wich Linux could not be used by the Fortune 500.
Copyright doesn't restrict use. There's no way the next version of the GPL is going to restrict anyone from merely using the software.
However, the idea that you can't use GPL software at all if you patent software or use DRM, well, that's nuts.
I kind of like it. I thought about creating a license where basically I agree to never sue you for copyright infringement if you agree never to sue me for copyright infringement. But I wasn't sure how to make it legally enforcible.
This marks the end of any relevance the GPL has. I wonder what will replace it?
Hopefully CC-BY-SA.
I just let users buy credits (that can be used on any site supporting my system) and let users transfer credits from that pool.
How many credits do you get for $1.00, 100? Why not just call them pennies?
I guess things are still too antiquated in some banking circles to reduce the transaction overhead enough to allow micropayments. However since their communication is already 100% digital, one would think they could make this happen if only they really wanted too.
Check-21 is a step in the right direction. You can write a check for as little as a penny, all that's needed now is for a single bank to be bold and allow online deposits. Scan your check, front and back, and they'll make a substitute check and deposit it into your account. Of course you'll have to have good credit with them and they'll hold the money until the check clears, but it could very well work today, under the current system.
Of course, creating the substitute check costs money, but probably not more than a tenth of a cent, in bulk.
The core challenge for small micropayments is the high cost of dealing with disputes.
The best solution to that problem, for small micropayments, is not to deal with disputes. It's not like you can call the federal reserve when you drop a quarter in the gumball machine and a gumball doesn't come out. When you're dealing with micropayments you've gotta treat it like cash.
Think about it -- what do we have in the real world that works in micropayments?
Newspapers are pretty cheap. Maybe not micropayments, but smaller payments than is feasible with paypal. Soft pretzels, snacks, soda machines, laundry machines, video arcades, there are a lot of small payments now that I think about it. But for the most part, we don't need micropayments as much in the real world, especially for services. In the real world there isn't time to deal with even ten thousand people a day. Online, it's trivial. Also, in the real world it's a lot easier to trust someone, at least to some extent. And that's really what money is about in the end, it's just a distributed trust mechanism.
So if we accept all you've said, we have to ask: why has nobody tried to do this?
Actually, a bunch of people have tried it. No one has really succeeded, unless you count e-gold. The problem is getting the people together, for one thing, but...
There are dozens of online content providers struggling to make a living off of advertising and subscriptions.
I don't think micropayments are a good substitute for advertising, and don't have much of an advantage over subscriptions. People want to know what they're getting before they pay for it, especially if they're paying for it on a piece by piece basis. And in the time it takes to click "OK, send the $0.01", you could have turned off the ad anyway if it was that annoying.
Where micropayments have their real advantage is in person-to-person payments, and to a lesser extent in site-to-person payments. For the latter, e-gold is already being used by a number of "make money by reading email" sites and the like. I don't think there are nearly as many people who would be willing to pay $0.01 to read a Slashdot article as those who would like to be paid $0.10 for submitting an accepted Slashdot article (or $0.01 for one of the first 10 Score:5 posts). And with person-to-person payments, the possibilities are even greater. Need help with a bug you just got running a Makefile? Want a search engine expert to help you find the answer to a difficult problem? Micropayments could be great for this.
The problem is, it's a lot harder to get the critical mass for these things.
That last one is my pet theory -- though I should hasten to say that I have absolutely no evidence to back it up. Banks make huge profits off of credit/debit card transactions.
Well, there are a lot of regulations, most of which were pushed through by the banks, and which Congress was happy to oblige in these terrorism days. But AFAIK the regulations don't really start to kick in until the transfers are more than $600. I'm not sure, though, I mean even Paypal requires you to give a lot of detailed personal information, and last time I checked (a long while ago), they weren't even a bank.
If there were a working micropayment system with transaction fees low enough to make penny transactions feasible, it would soon be adopted by retailers on the non-micro scale.
I'd say e-gold qualifies. Maybe not penny transactions, but it's definitely feasible to pay a nickel with. The problem is getting your money into the system, and the fact that just about no one accepts e-gold once you've put your money in there.
Remember, in terms of millions and billions, half a day of floating is still a lot of money.
Actually, half a day of floating is almost always either nothing, or equivalent to a day of floating. Interest is charged (to banks, and pretty much universally) on an overnight loan. The account is reconciled once at the end of each business day, credits and debits from any time of the day are all put in at the same time. This is one of the advantages of daytrading. As long as you close your positions by the end of the day, you don't have to pay any margin interest.
So you stick $20 on your PayPal account. [....] Your $20 sits there for days, weeks, months, years!
...earning 3.5% interest. And that assumes you use your Paypal account for nothing else. Personally I run hundreds of dollars through my paypal account every month. I'd barely notice a few pennies here and there. And $20, at 3.5% interest, is...$0.70/year. (3.5% interest happens to be pretty close to the US dollar LIBOR, so you're not going to get much better for a liquid investment which is pretty close to risk-free.
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
e-gold has been doing it for nearly a decade. (yeah, that's a referral link, I'm shameless)Man, I keep hearing bad things about Paypal, but I've never experienced any of them. And I run hundreds of dollars through Paypal every month - I use my Paypal debit card for just about everything, and get 1.5% cash back. Just paid $302 to my car insurance company yesterday through Paypal - got $4.53 debited(*) back immediately.
(*) Yeah, yeah, Paypal calls it a credit, but on my side of the ledger it's called a debit.
Except perhaps a license to play a music track once or something...
Along the same lines, how about about a seed for a torrent file? What about websites paying you? $0.01 for every Score:5 slashdot post? $.05 for being the primary author of a featured Wikipedia article? $0.02 for answering someone's search query?
Actually, when it comes to websites paying the person using the site, I can think of a lot more uses than vice-versa. For content providers ads are usually preferrable to micropayments. Especially if the ads aren't too pushy (I'd much rather have Google ads than pay even $0.001 a search, in fact, even if I could turn off Google ads I probably wouldn't; Slashdot ads on the other hand are annoying as hell, but I wouldn't pay to remove them because I'd feel like I was being extorted or something).
Of course, we already do have micropayments - eGold is the most popular site for them. But it's somewhat expensive getting money in and out of eGold. With Paypal, on the other hand, it's free to add money (using ACH transfer from your checking account). In fact, I put money into my Paypal account about once a week (I use my Paypal debit card for just about everything).
I still can not understand why the average pay of a well-seasoned applications designer is still no match to that of a recently-graduated MBA.
The average MBA is much better at dealing with people than the average well-seasoned applications designer. As someone else said, "selling a product is more important than having a product to sell". While I don't buy into that (both are equally important), it is true that MBAs are better salespeople, and that includes selling themselves.
I kind of wish there was more help out there for us techies who aren't that good at negotiation and such. Sure, there are headhunters, but my experience with them has been much like my experience with real estate agents - they didn't really seem like they were working for me.
Ultimately I moved out of the software field and got into accounting. I wouldn't mind making what I used to make, but now that I've been out of the software biz for a few years it's probably too late to get back in, especially now that I'm living in Tampa. It's really just another case of not being able to sell myself. I know I can do the job, I just don't know how to convince someone that I can do it.
I don't mean this as a personal slam, but that exact attitude keeps salaries low.
Not discussing your salary on Slashdot? I mean, if you're talking about not discussing your salary with coworkers, then yeah, you might have a point. But not putting your salary on Slashdot, to be forever archived, I can see the point in that.
Personally, I'm not divulging my salary because it's ridiculously low and I'm embarrased by it. But I'm an accountant, not a "programmer" (at least for bill-paying purposes), so it's really not that relevant anyway. When I was a software engineer, first year out of college, I think I made $56K. Of course, that was 1998, things have changed a lot since then.
Oh, and plus, you can make those changes to a postgresql table IN A TRANSACTION (however, this may extend the time the lock is held, so don't do it and sit there staring at the screen drinking a diet coke and contemplating the sunset)
I thought everything was done in a transaction. Maybe that's why this didn't work before, I should have turned transactions off or something. I'll have to look into that. (I know you can turn autocommits on and off but that's not the same as turning transactions on and off).
Seriously, try it. Build a table with 10,000,000 rows in each database, then alter the table and look at the speed difference in those changes.
I certainly will. I swear I tried this before and it didn't work, but maybe it's fixed, or I'm wrong.
Here's the slashdot article to jog your memory.
Oh, *that* outage. I thought you were talking about the more recent one. IIRC, that one in February was a matter of the log files taking so long to replay, and no data was actually lost.
I don't know the details of the schema change you're describing, but I don't know why you'd expect downtime in general.
*I* wouldn't expect it, because *I* would do it right. But if you just go in there and alter the table, then all your writes are going to stall, and I believe in Postgres (and MySQL with InnoDB, but not MySQL with MyISAM) your reads will stall too. Thus why I'm saying it was an incompetancy that cause the latest Wikipedia downtime (which wasn't the one in February).
More recently, we've done it at work with multiple hundred million row tables by creating a new table and renaming the old one, then placing a view where the old table was and having all of the inserts start going against the view (all in a transaction).
That's a nice solution. I'll have to remember that one.
Perhaps you don't remember their recent outtage that took the entire thing off the internet for a day or two while they had to completely rebuild their database from backups.
Believe it or not, they actually did that on purpose. They wanted to modify their database schema, and if you do that on a live database in MySQL you're going to block everyone else from using the database for a long time (I think with MyISAM you still have read access but with InnoDB you have nothing). Anyway, Postgres has the same problem (I doubt Oracle does, because this is just something that comes up way too often with really large and long running databases).
Anyway, they could have come up with a solution to keep the database live during the transition (transfer the db a row at a time while it's running, mark each row completed when it's completed, keep a list of anything that gets deleted, and maybe take the db down for 5 minutes when you're done instead of 2 days). But instead they figured "hey, we're not paid, so don't expect competence."