they'd be spending cubic dollars
No wonder I can't seem to get ahead, all this time I've been using rectangular or cylindrical dollars.
Why do you have to take a sick day to work from home? If you're healthy enough to drag yourself to work, your healthy enough to drag yourself to your computer and telecommute. You still get the work done, but you don't spread it to others.
If your office doesn't allow this, then that's something that needs to change. I'm not saying that you can change it - it's a whole cultural view that needs to change.
It's worse than pro-sports. In pro-sports, at least, there are amateur leagues in place that do a pretty good job at identifying and developing the best of the best. There's no doubt that Gates and Zuckerberg are talented, but they're talented in the way that pro basketball players were talented in the 1940s. When your selection pool starts out by excluding 99%+ of the population due to lack of wealth or connections, you severly limit the number of superstars you'll be able to find.
why in the hell does wikipedia have articles about the TV series, movie, and video game but not the damned books?
You mean like this?
You mean, similar to what would be required to build a Dyson sphere?
Similar, but orders of magnitude more - the summary cites
a hundred times larger than necessary
What would you get from a massive amount of accidental engineering?
You get cities.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach