Well, you have a point - but the risk associated with developing real property is substantial and not necessarily foreseeable or controllable by the developer (e.g. September 2008).

Moreover, the risk is spread - typically a bank makes a construction loan that is paid off very quickly after the completion of construction - and that, in turn, means that the developer has a major incentive to line up buyers for the condo units so that they pay the developer and the construction loan issuing bank at the closing. Once the construction loan has been retired, the rest is profit.

Of course, the potential for default - or a chain of defaults - is always present where a prime contractor or a sub creates the first default in the domino chain that takes the project south. Liens, breach and litigation are the stuff of a construction project gone bad.

Wanna bet? Trade has driven human intercourse for millennia. The "economy" is not going to disappear any time soon.

It may be seriously twisted by the unregulated banksters - but not killed.

Oh, we simply eliminate the world economy and devolve back to barter?

Quoting Glenn Beck for anything is entirely revelatory. Nixon took the US off of the Gold Standard and allowed uS Currency to "float" against other nation's currencies. The price of gold has *nothing* to do with the value of US Currency.

Gold is grossly overpriced today and the fools who buy at the top of the market will lose big.

So, we know the intellect of the target market for Glenn Beck's show.... you know, people who believe the things that a Vick's Vapo-rub crying lunatic whines as he plays with chalk. My God, what a fool he is. Even worse are the total tools who watch his BS.

Good luck with your

Well, perhaps we ought to consider lifetime revocations of trader certifications - or, where a fraud has been committed that costs more than $1meg - consider death penalties. These well educated investors/brokers/traders/managers would be deterred if a few were executed. Unlike the fools who rob and murder who can't conceive of the consequences of their acts.

Imagine the crowd outside the prison if the law mandated Bernie Madoff pay the ultimate price. Would we even have had a Madoff embezzlement if Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken had been subject to the death penalty twenty years earlier.

If we are ever going to hold these traders accountable - then I am for an effective death penalty for financial mis/mal/nonfeasance in excess of $1meg. Cull the herd.

Or, it was intentional. Who says that the initial drop wasn't strategy?

That nails it. The synthetic instruments in trade now exceed the GNP of the entire planet. Smoke and mirrors - vast investments in products that have no intrinsic value - we are playing dice with the planet's economy.

They don't sell for much on ebay....

The problem with the question is the verb "use."

I have a 286 box running household tasks (A-to-D sensing & control of homemade interfaces with HVAC, sump pump, deep freeze, fridge, water heater, etc.) from a piece published back in the late '70's or early '80's in Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar. There is a bootloader and a Forth interpreter running on a skinny DOS implementation. I pay very little attention to it and it has been humming along for at least 18 years without my having to do much. Is that "use?"

I also have a 15" FP iMac on one of those rolling stands that is the exclusive plaything of the grandkids (2002 vintage; 768 Meg RAM and 700 MHz clock running Tiger). That machine sees a lot of use, but I only use it to clean up any problems that a 4 year-old and a 7 year-old can introduce. Is that "use?"

FWIW I also have a LISA in perfect shape with all manuals an all original guts (never did the Mac 512 lobotomy). I turn her on once in a blue moon. That's not so much use as checking her vital signs....

Agreed.

I have an Order in my DPOA/HC that my corpse will have a tag on my toe that says, "He finally got into medical school."

You load them into one big file and then follow testimony (privately) during trial. When the witness changes his/her story, you mark the changed component and then during cross examination you request the witness to repeat what they said about question X, then ask if they recall testifying at deposition, then play the clip and ask how the change came about.

So, the entire depo record is necessary to follow through trial, but only select portions - that become relevant due to the witnesses' changed testimony at trial - are played. It is grueling duty to track because (1) it is non-linear and, (2) it can be 20 hrs or more of real-time tracking and marking. We trade off....

You haven't created synched video & text depositions for a trial that runs more than five (5) days. You have to follow along with the live testimony at trial and drop the segment that impeaches the witness on cross examination.

Nothing gets a jury's attention like projecting the witness, his/her verbal testimony with text synchronized at the bottom of the window and put the exhibit (usually a document, but it can be a video walkthrough of a workplace, etc.) in a new window.

Most depos run 6-8 hrs and are 12 gig +. If I have 12-20 deponents and exhibits and I can easily hit 500 gig. And, yes, I have 3 copies on 3 different external drives in the event of a file error or drive failure. Trials are "mission critical" events.

That would really be a bummer, Brother Jonathan.

Look at all of the ATM menus out there. Why, it's a veritable fiesta of variations on a theme, no two alike (just like apps running under Windoze). Each one of these menus was created by somebody who knew better than anybody else how the ATM should interact with the average human.

That kind of concrete thinking makes for a committed terrorist.

Rand had no royalties at the end of her life. The copyrights had run on her books and plays. She lived on her Social Security check and married a man named O'Connor and the two lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's upper west side in the late 1960s-early 1970s. I would see her at the deli on Broadway between 98th and 99th street from time to time.

She was a favorite guest of a conservative club located in the basement of a brownstone at 92nd St. between Broadway and West End Avenue. The area was full of political clubs in those days, I belonged to the Hudson Independent Democrats, a FDR democratic club. When James Buckley was elected NY Senator on the Conservative Party Ticket, it was because the Republican and Democratic candidates split the vote.

I did see quite a few engineering students at NYU (just before NYU dumped its engineering department) in the early 1970s reading Atlas Shrugged - but, they were square in the middle of The Village and such nonsense was acceptable in that free-for-all part of the city.