One Thousand Dollars an Hour

I don't get why everyone is so up in arms about this. I come across folks every day who say they charge "$x" or "$y" and think it's way above market rate for what they say they do.

The reality is that perhaps this guy and his todo app might score some work at that rate or he might not, it's his prerogative to decide what he wants to charge.

I might look at someone elses folio today and when they tell me they want $500 a day I'd look at their work and think good luck.

There's a massive difference between saying what you charge and what you actually charge on the invoice at the end of the day.

"In most legal systems, confidentiality is part of hiring someone."

I assume you're talking about European systems, in which case it's not true, at least not to a significant extent. And when you hire a contractor it's even less defined - a contractor can freely talk about what kind of work he did for a company, right down into quite specific detail, without a proper NDA or clause to that extent in the contract.

I don't think that is the point at all. His own projects are so important to him that unless someone offers him $1,000 per hour to work for them, it isn't worth his time. He isn't trying to get new business: he's trying to keep business away, unless it's so lucrative ($10,000 for 1 days work) that it's nonsensical not to take it.

Are we talking about $X000/hr for a single finance/consulting professional's time? That rate seems rather unbelievable, but maybe only senior folk in the top-tier firms get to charge that? Are market conditions in finance/consulting just that skewed towards the suppliers?

I don't like the singular they. I find it far more annoying than the generic he or the construct of he or she.

The generic he actually has an interesting history. In Old English, the word wifman (-> woman) is a masculine noun and wif (-> wife) is neuter. This is because man though meaning basically "human" is a masculine noun so any compound of -man is also masculine. If one wants to specify a male man in Old English one either uses wer (counterpart to wif, survives in werewolf, which is why I joke that all werewolves are by definition male) or wapman which is the counterpart of wifman.

This led to an interesting problem. If you are talking about a specific woman and have perfect gender agreement, then "he" has to be used to refer to "woman." That makes things hard to read and so Old English has a rule which is that you ignore the grammatical gender of the word when you refer to a specific person. If we applied this to modern English we'd have amazing constructs like:

"I went to the store and the woman at the cash register told me that I needed to give her an extra $5."

vs

"Any woman thinking about getting married should make sure that he has some level of financial independence first."

The first is specific while the second is generic. He in the second refers to "any woman" not her prospective spouse!

Similarly "My wife says she isn't up to coming to the party this weekend" but "A wife today still finds it has to do a majority of the housework."

I don't like mixing numbers though. If "they" is an acceptable singular why isn't "it's" an acceptable possessive?