Of course, once upon a time, (Linux-based) Maemo/Meego was the OS waiting in the wings, which they were going to migrate to after Symbian stopped being useful to them, and look how well that worked out.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No, just spots.”

If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relatively simple crime, then it’s also worth giving that person access to $100K worth of defense lawyering. If the government wants to spend $5M to prosecute an alleged mobster, that alleged mobster should have access to $5M worth of defense.

If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.

If his only reason for being dissatisfied with his current job was the money, why didn’t he just go to his manager and say “hello, I was looking at salary surveys and other information about the job market, and reviewing all the ways that I have made money for you guys over the past year, and I think I deserve such-and-such more than I’m getting right now”? Why is he finding staying in the familiar environment of your company less attractive than job-hunting in his spare time, possibly even burning vacation time for interviews, and then going out to work with a bunch of strangers?

For some reason, she was not convinced.

And they’re right! We are!

I think attitudes to being approached by strangers on the street vary by region. People in California and the South are chattier than people here in the frozen Northeast.

More likely: they have a database or some other kind of service that maps addresses onto “residential” or “not residential”, and either they put off upgrading the database or have some flakiness in their code, so that a lot of addresses get incorrectly marked “residential”, and, well, when you’re prioritizing which bugs you need to fix, the bugs that make your company more money than it deserves usually don’t end up at the top of the list.

“You are naturally short housing.” = “If the price of housing goes down, you will be naturally be better off.”

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent critique of the gold bugs in 1996: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...

The price of gold has had a nice run since Krugman wrote that column, but if you look at the longer-run historical data, you can see that it’s gone down before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_Spot_Price_per_Gram_f...

It doesn’t have exact numbers, but the tl;dr is that people from every income bracket were taking out subprime mortgages, including middle- and upper-class people who could qualify for prime mortgages but wanted to borrow even more.

The subprime mortgage crisis was built on respectable hard-working middle-class families that were persuaded to take on debt like this for their own homes.