When you go to look for your next job -- hey, it happens -- they're going to ask you "what did you do at your last company?" You want to be able to say, "I wrote this amazing piece of software, way above my paygrade, that made the whole office purr like a well-oiled kitten," not "I did what I was told, I got paid, I went home."

Similarly, if you stay in your current position, you want to be able to show off the wonderful things you've done for your office. Giving them the software means job security, because you can say, "Look at this. I am your god. And oh, by the way, nobody really knows how to maintain this sucker but me."* It's also a tangible reflection of your work ethic.

All this can open doors for you. Don't blow it by coming across as lazy, small-minded, or ungrateful to your employer.

There's an economic principle here called "sunk costs." You've already done most of the work on this project, and it sounds like this company is the only one that could really use it. If the software never gets used, then its whole value is the joy and enlightenment you got from writing it.

* I don't advise getting into a situation where nobody can take over your position. I've been there.

That's 80% of programming right there.

Having a gay friend doesn't make you not-homophobic. Having a black friend (or voting for a black politician) doesn't make you not-racist, especially when that black politician is espousing views and policies that would hurt the impoverished (which is disproportionately black).

Herman Cain is what Republicans thought Obama was for white liberals: racial absolution on the cheap. "I'm not racist! I voted for a black man! I didn't even have to change a single one of my misconceptions about the black underclass to do it!"

There's a reason that the African-American community isn't rallying around Cain. It's not -- as you imply -- because of some misguided, unthinking loyalty to Obama. It's because they know that the right wing policies that Cain (and pretty much every GOP candidate minus Roemer and Huntsman) would implement would be disastrous for the poor.

Santorum. Eeesh. Have you *googled* him?

"The Tea Party wasn't trying to camp for weeks on end, they have jobs to get back to after all."

You mean the "job" of cashing their Social Security checks? The studies showed pretty thoroughly that the Tea Party crowd was -- despite their claims about representing a broad demographic -- predominantly white, old, male Republicans.

Woohoo! We have a better civil rights track record than North Korea! U-S-A!!! U-S-A!!!

Sadly, it's just the way mathematics works. Under a winner-take-all system like ours, third parties mostly just damage their nearest ideological allies. Something's ending up on that sandwich, and we have to eat it whether we like it or not.

In a parliamentary system, third parties can be great.

I would point out that neither Bush nor Obama are responsible for bringing our soldiers home from Iraq. The Iraqi government set the withdrawl deadline over our government's objections, and both Bush and Obama pushed for extensions (which they didn't receive).

What's challenging for certain other people to understand is that, as your income goes up, the fraction of your income donated to charity goes way, way down. Here in Utah, most of our state legislators are real estate barons or other successful businessmen who constantly write laws for each other. Their stinginess towards the poor probably shows up in their private life as well as their victim-blaming legislation. Hell, one of the bastards runs a payday loan business that preys on those who are in desperate financial straits.

If you're arguing against government-run charity, you can't just wave your hands about how private charity will pick up the slack. You need to show how private charity will do at least as much to combat poverty as government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, housing assistance, food stamps, etc. Otherwise you're essentially arguing that it's better to increase human suffering than to edge away from an absolutely pure capitalist ideology.

And as you point out yourself, private charities aren't immune to corruption.

The point isn't about minimum wage. The point is that "household" income combines the incomes of multiple potential workers. Over the last few decades, hourly compensation has gone down for perhaps the bottom 80% of us, but we've sent more adults into the workforce to make up the disparity.

The picture remains: people are working harder for less, even as per capita productivity has risen dramatically. Who gets the excess? Mostly the 1%. Not because they're working harder than they did thirty years ago, but because the laws are now rigged so as to privilege their work at the expense of ours.

That explains it. I wondered why the milk in my fridge is disappearing so fast.

Not by a longshot. The vast majority of subprime loans were bought up by banks that didn't fall under the Community Reinvestment Act, and anyways the CRA was underenforced by the Bush administration. It's also important to recognize that CDOs, default swaps, and all the other weird new financial "tools" were entirely private sector inventions. Nobody was making the banks do them. Nobody was making them "securitize" mortgages so that they could print out reams of worthless mortgages, bundle them together, and turn them into AAA rated financial instruments which got sold to grandpappy's pension fund.

More along the same line of thinking: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/bloombergs-awful-comment-what-can-we-say-for-certain-regarding-the-gses/

Let the people at the top decide the pay structure for everybody. What could poss... oh never mind.

Ah, how I wish I could assume you were being sarcastic. :)

Economically, they may be the same thing. Psychologically, we tend to take punishments more seriously than rewards, so the second structure might conceivably lead to the least risky behavior.

Thank you! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Another thing to keep in mind is that the law of diminishing returns applies to dollars as well as anything else. Moving from $500/year to $5000/year is a big friggin deal. A proportional move from $10M/year to $100M/year doesn't have much effect on how you personally live, since you can already buy pretty much whatever strikes your fancy. When you get above, say, $1M/year, money stops being about improving your quality of life and starts to be a way to keep score or control the behavior of others.

So you have to offer a lot of money to get the employee to perceive just a little bit of extra incentive. At some point, all that money might better serve to motivate lower-paid employees.