gbronner

under the argument offered by the company, they can lower your salary, and you can choose whether or not to take it. If you keep working, you have a new job at a new salary.

Under the employee's theory, they have the option to keep working, and then sue the company for constructive termination. From the employer's perspective, this is a disaster, as legal fees overwhelm any reduction in salary.

So given that salary reduction is off the table, the employer now has to fire all employees that are drastically overpaid, or make everyone sign a release. This is not good for the large number of employees who would prefer to keep working at a lower salary rather than be unemployed -- it produces a worse outcome.

I did get a sense of who was extremely motivated and smart, and, by and large, those people have been the most successful, not the ones who came from money. The ones who came from money were more likely to take 'interesting' vs lucrative jobs, but most of the advantages of networking are knowing other highly motivated people who are at the top of other fields, but knowing rich people.

Apart from that, classes at top schools go faster and teach you more, and if you want to, you can take more of them for free. So many students get 5-7 years of mid-tier college content in 4 years, which tends to produce a better trajectory for lifetime earnings.

If you have a solid background in C, it is not very hard to learn. It seems to show up at older companies, and is fairly good at moving and reformatting records where you want to address each field on a character by character basis.

Unlike more modern languages, there's no encapsulation, polymorphism, local variables, etc., so you can write tangled code quite easily, though the code I've seen has been very well written. Everything is in capital letters, and the character set is often ebcdic. Most numbers are fixed decimals, which leads to some unusual math results.

As a result, it can be maddeningly verbose -- I've seen 100+ lines of code that would just be a single printf statement in most other languages.

An axe and a broadaxe and a chalk line (though people originally just used charcoal).

Making beams is not that hard, especially if you have lots of wood and not a lot to do in the winter.

This allows you to produce post and beam beams for personal use quite cost effectively -- they don't take that much time to saw, and the transportation cost is basically nil because you are going to use them on-site, and you don't pay the monster weight penalty to put them on a truck. You can't kiln dry everything, but you can air dry it, and it tends to be extremely good for construction. The waste can be burned in a wood boiler.

chop tree -> hew it on-site -> haul to building area is very cost effective.

If you have infinite wood (remember, clearing land requires removing the trees anyway, and people would often burn them just for the potash), it is both cheaper and better to use post and beam.

1) Nails were expensive. Timber framing does not require any nails -- it uses dowels which can be made cheaply with a drawknife.

2) Unlike @simonsarris' wood, most wood available to post and beam constructors was not particularly straight. Post and beam is very tolerant of faults in lumber.

3) With post and beam, you don't need to square all four sides of a beam. You can get away with squaring off one(the external one) plus the spots where any corner braces go. If you are hewing with a broad axe and an adze, this is a huge time saver.

4) In rural post and beam construction, the beams do not all need to be the same size. You can use whatever tree you have lying around, as long as it is big enough. This is an advantage, as you can use a local tree and save the extremely laborious trip to the sawmill

So to summarize, you can have a bunch of low-skill farmers harvesting and preparing trees for beams. Then you need a high-skill carpenter to put the mortises in and assemble the whole thing.

Likewise, 7/8 group winners defeated the #2s in the round of 16.

But the lower ranked teams have excelled in getting nationals from higher ranked associations, and as they play together with less turnover, they might be better teams, if the players themselves aren't as good individually. E.g a large chunk of Morocco could have played for Spain.

Not nice.

They should have maximized happiness of the users by limiting the pace at which money could be lost, and the odds/ spreads at which it was lost

As an FYI, I sold a car this spring for 8% over what I paid for it 6 years prior, i.e. it was worth about 85% of orig price adjusted for inflation. Today, edmunds appraises it for 45% of orig price adjusted for inflation.

That is an insane move on a durable asset.

Or you leave it vacant and still lose money, but you don't have to work as hard doing it

You can get a floating rate loan, however, it if you want your payments to follow the market.

The footings are there, there are no pesky weeds to grow and block the canal, the workers probably don't have to worry as much about rattlesnakes etc

I found going from a 5 speed to a 6 speed annoying -- it added a lot more shifts. After 26 years of driving a manual, my car got totaled and I pretty much had to get one with an automatic.

The new car has hill descent mode, which is pretty similar to what a manual does, and it has some more sophisticated limited slip traction control modes, which eliminates the only other real advantage of a manual.

The only remaining advantage of a manual now is cost, which matters far more in developing countries than in the USA.

* Assuming that they never sell, they never pay capital gains taxes. Meanwhile, if I move and sell, I get hit now. * Ability to cross-collateralize a bunch of houses lets you tap into institutional capital. No pesky appraisal fees, no payoff for a mortgage broker, etc. Result is that their cost of capital is way below an individual's. * Better management -- ability to hire a bunch of actual skilled handymen to work across multiple properties means that they have specialization/ gains from scale. Typical homeowner is a jack of all trades who has to hire specialized talent which is vastly more expensive. * lots of pricing data with which to price as optimistically as possible. * ability to write off expenses

So basically, tax regime changes have created the rise of the REIT.