^ I hope you're not hatin' on the grandmas and grandpas who do that, though!
Lots of elderly people move to a foreign country to be with their children and to see their grandchildren. They don't get out of the house very often and find comfort in talking with fellow expatriates -- both because of the warmth it brings to hear one's native tongue spoken so eloquently and because of the ease with which conversation is then made possible.
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It pisses me off when great ideas, because they would lead to fiscal suicide, are aborted by companies. I'm not mad at the companies. I'm just frustrated by the fact that we live in a world where a genuinely inferior product can replace a superior one ("inferior" and "superior" in terms of craftsmanship, utility, etc) because the inferior one is
technically better (or "superior") to the superior product when it comes to balancing costs / making a profit. I wish we lived in a world where 99.9999999% of the time this statement was true:
"the better the idea, the better the profits." But we don't seem to live in that world, because there are lots of great ideas which are only considered "terrible" when you take into account the fact that they aren't financially sustainable.
It's because of this fact that we (as a society) have to occasionally shoot ourselves in the $$$-foot in order to make possible some pretty awesome stuff. Like (historically) the space program, which is a total failure when viewed from a business model perspective but has netted our planet some pretty awesome results.
