It's not just creating the lines of code. It's unit testing. It's system testing. Full regression testing. It's bug fixing. It's documentation. All the things necessary to get something production ready. And that stuff takes time. So 100 lines of code per day is actually a decent measure of a productive employee.

well Mars is an improvement to living in your Mom's basement

I was in Beijing last fall and the air quality there was horrendous. It seemed 10x as bad as the worst smog I ever saw in Los Angeles. During my visit a huge dust storm blew in with tremendous winds. It was almost strong enough to knock me over at times. The next day the air was as blue as could be. Just beautiful clear skies. Our guide says it was the first time he had seen blue sky in Beijing for many months. Sad . . .

I can't see how dropping finals is a good idea in academia. Sure you'll have occasional classes where large projects are submitted in the place of finals. But for the vast majority of classes, (especially lectures) finals serve a very useful purpose. They force students to reflect on all components of the class and to see how they fit together. And obviously one can't do that until the end of the course. I remember many times during my undergraduate years learning a great deal in preparation for the final exam. Not so much specific details but in recognizing "the big picture" of the course. By eliminating finals, Harvard is robbing its students of this important process (though I'm sure the students are thrilled at having to do less work).

I'm not an electronic trader but I do work in a data-intensive tech job on Wall Street. And the above mindset is very common - that business guys are super smart and everyone else is a glorified office assistant. All of the senior managers at my company have MBA's and give only minor thanks to the computer scientists and statisticians that keep them employed. My supervisor only has a vague idea of the data and that's only because I keep him informed. Without me the guy would be completely lost. The techies definitely don't get much respect.

I think the above example is a great reason why you should always over-engineer your storage capability somewhat. Demand for space can come up unexpectedly and stop the whole show if it's not there. Also if you don't use the storage today, you will definitely make use of it tomorrow. Data usage always goes up, not down. So there's ROI for the next fiscal year when you can make use of the extra capacity.

He threw a chair at one of his staff. What's he going to do when they come to fire him ? Throw an entire office set ?