Actually, I think the phrase comes from the Neal Stephenson novel 'Cryptonomicon'. Two of the characters imply that it is the amount of money that allows you to (when necessary) say "fuck you" to The Man, and go do something else with your time.
"We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode---we can predict that just by looking at age histogram---and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of "fuck-you money" at a glance." - http://www.cryptonomicon.com/text.html
from wglb in yesterday's discussion[1]: "In Soul of a New Machine, there is talk about the formation of Data General in 1969. The attorney advising the founders suggested that they set aside $1m each as part of any deal for the purpose of FU money. The usage may predate even that." (The book was published in 1981.)
That would definitely be before the first time I heard it.
My first recollection of it was one of Casey Kasem's tirades back in the 80's. I can't find the original on the web, but Bob and Tom spoofed it with "Mr Obvious - Too Hot for Radio" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vobd2qDpzU
I always thought it came from Robert Evans, the film producer. He mentions the phrase several times in his autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture that came out in 1994.
I recommend this book, by the way. It's strangely inspiring. Get the audiobook for the full effect.
I'm pretty sure he has a shorter buffer than that. My friend who works in enterprise development says Dilbert has often come out and satirized some new thing to the day when it gets hyped up at work.
I recall soon after the oil spill he published a comic directly on his blog, stating that if he published it through the normal route, it would take upwards of 2 months to get through the process, and would no longer be relevant. I'll post the link if I can find it.
Is this the same comic that (appeared in newspapers yesterday|will appear in newspapers today)? If so, he said in a blog post a few months ago that the normal lag is ~a month and the best he could do was like 2 weeks. (Those numbers are a little off, I'm sure.)
But if this is just an online version (it is /fast, whatever that means), it might be a different story.
AFAIK /fast is an URL to read just the comics "fast" without spending bandwidth loading all the additional information presented in the landing page of the website.
FWIW, the previous comic to this one in that website, labeled July 14th, was in yesterday's July 14th newspaper here (Yes, I'm from Sydney Australia, we live _in the future!_ aka UTC+10)
If you read his blog, he states that he has a pretty long lead time. He says relation to current events just happens coincidentally. When you think about it, he publishes one comic a day and they're often total non sequiturs, so it will happen by circumstance somewhat frequently.
If he even has the ability to get one approved and published quickly, which I'd say is doubtful given that it's print, it's probably a nuclear option that he wouldn't use for having seen a few threads here.
> He says relation to current events just happens coincidentally.
In one of his books, he talked about this in greater detail. One of the examples he cited was a comic where someone made a joke about a "dead nun in a snow drift" - that just happened to run the same day as a bus crash that left a whole bunch of nuns dead.
Like many here, reading Dilbert is a special daily event for me. In my case, I wait until my first cup of coffee is brewed. It must be awesome for Scott Adams to be able to give so much pleasure to so many people, and make a good living from it.
"We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode---we can predict that just by looking at age histogram---and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of "fuck-you money" at a glance." - http://www.cryptonomicon.com/text.html