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In 2011 its Hunter operations employed more than 2500 people and 1000 contractors, and spent more than $1.7 billion with more than 1300 businesses across NSW. Its community development funds have invested more than $11 million in 100 NSW community projects and partnerships, of which $3.6 million was directed towards education. It contributes to such things as Singleton High School, the Healthy Dads Healthy Kids program, Hunter Medical Research Institute, Cancer Council NSW and Aboriginal heritage conservation areas.

Commenter: Response to RepublicanRepublican, What of the many business ventures that fail, and as a result are unable to pay taxes, employees, small business loans? Should all of these entreprenuers be subjected to a permenant unsummountable debt load for the rest of their lives. What would that do to entrepreneurship in America? Is it only the rich that are allowed a way out? You make me sick in your refusual to acknowlege that the lendor and the debtor enter a relationship in which the debtors success is a risk, it may or may not happen. You wish to transfer 100% of the risk based on a promise, based on the expectation of success and income, to the debtor, and relegate him to a virtual debtors prison for the rest of his life. Is that really what Republicans think is the way to treat fellow Americans?

In the space of 12 hours and fifty miles he had left his pickup, his trailer, his horse and his girl scattered from one end of the Grapevine to the other.

It didn’t look anything like a press brake, the dominant bending machine of metal fabrication. It also wasn’t a leaf (also called hand, or box and pan) brake, long a staple of roofing and architectural fabricators. But its operation did resemble that of a leaf brake, with a leaf (or beam) rotating upward to bend up (and at first, it was always up) a flange.

I carried him to my neighbor’s house. Sure enuf, the last hutch on the end was cocked open and it was empty. I took that rabbit and folded him…into a rabbit position. Put a smile on his lips. all three of ‘em. Gave him a camel filter and leaned him up against the wire.

Mr. Lanham is to the age where he doesn’t worry about coddling people. He asked a few questions over the phone. Bruce, a grad of Fresno State, became impatient explaining he’d done all he could but the tractor still wouldn’t start. Would Mr. Lanham please come and check it.

Commenter: Permanently insolventMy education began before the changes in the law that made for this financial hell that I exist in. I never had a chance to make a different choice. I am the first in my family to graduate with a four year college degree. Not only did I finish my first four year degree, I went on to one of the nation’s top law schools and now I am working on a Masters in Health Administration I started my adventure in education in 1983. When I graduated with my four year degree, there was not a lot of opportunity in Hawaii, and I thought I was smart and I was definitely ambitious. So I took the MCAT (medical school admissions test). I matriculated into medical school. It was a small relatively inexpensive state school. However, I was not real good at biology, and I struggled for three years. In addition in 1986 everyone was saying that we do not need more physicians and that managed care would make Doctors all salaried employees. So I tried taking the LSAT and did phenomenally well. I was accepted into two of the top 15 law schools in the country. For a lower middle class/middle class person like me these acceptances seemed to be truly great opportunities. I read all their recruiting brochures, and it seemed anyone graduating with a decent GPA would easily get a job in a large or medium firm, or even some corporations and earn $70,000 to $80,000 a year which was good in early 1990′s. The promise seemed to justify the marginal appearing risk. I had no job waiting for me. You see we were in another recession and all the corporate merger and acquisition craze had just ended. The big firms did not need lawyers and the corporations were cutting back. What I did have was a total of 80,000 in Stafford, private, and school loans. So I stalled, I got into a post graduate law program for six months, which increased my student loan balance, but put off payments. Back then I was looking at a monthly payment of 700 to 800, and no job in the offing, I took my in laws advice and with their help opened up my very own law practice. I was able to find a way to make payments on all loans for several years (though only a year of profit). Then my in laws got sick, my mother in law and primary supporter of my practice died unexpectedly in 1997, my father in law, a renowned local dentist developed Parkinson’s and lost all his money to a scam artist; the housing market burst, and my wife left with everything of value in her mother’s estate. With no source of client referrals and without a continuing equity increase in the family real estate to create cash flow, my fledgling law practice crashed and burned in 1998 and 1999. No surprise I suffered depression and dropped off the grid for a couple of months, well maybe it was more like a year to eighteen months, working as a tour guide, car salesman, insurance adjuster and other such odd jobs. My entire life, family and support structure that I had relied on for ten years had disintegrated. In 2000 I got help at my church in the form of counseling, then saw a physician/pastor and began treating my depression. In 2001, with the help of a well meaning attorney who was older and beginning to loss his competence, I filed bankruptcy. Too bad my attorney did not see the legislation change coming down in 1998, he might have been able to help me file much earlier and avoid the mess I am now in. By then of course Student loans had become non-dischargeable. I remained under or un-employed for years, though I was seeking employment everywhere I could think (literally thousands of job applications and recruiters contacted). In the beginning of 2005 I finally landed a job with a struggling insurance carrier, which lead to my current position with a much more stable company. So this is how it is today. I remarried in 2005 to a beautiful woman, and have a beautiful son, I have no MD degree as I left that program early, I have no usable JD degree (with the financial collapse and resulting disarray of my office came disbarment (but first my "discipline" was buried for seven years)), surprise the law school I went to has been no help to me. I was allowed to consolidate my student federal Stafford loans with the Department of Education to avoid default status in 2003. So now I have a consolidated federal student loan of $250,000 , also there is a $30,000 private loan and there is $18,000 to the school. The big one is all Stafford with a fixed 9% rate, and thus the interest is $18,000 a year on the federal loan alone. Right now I have a deferment in place, meaning I do not have to make payments, but I still do pay something every month to all three loans separately. What started out as a $65,000 to $75,000 principal is now almost $300,000, despite thousands paid on the loans. I have a good stable job, but not six figures or anything, but it still has potential to grow. Even with this job, my prospects are limited by age and likely work life. Further the current economic climate has greatly lowered the likelihood that senior staff will retire and open up potential advancement opportunities. So still you can imagine that with my wife and two year old son to support, even though I have a salary, there is no way I will ever be able to meet the interest payments each year, much less effect the principal balances. So the loans keep growing and growing and growing. This is the absolute definition of indentured servitude. I recall reading history books of poor people in Europe being given passage to the US with the promise of a new life, only to find when they get here that the interest on their passage is so high that they are forever forced to work it off, and really only one in 20 get that new life. I now live in constant fear, that once my six years of hardship deferment expires next year, that the government or the private loan company will eventually just destroy my marriage and take every thing away I have worked to build these past five years. How am I going to retire (I am in my fifties now), how am I going to provide for my son’s education? I never want him to borrow for his education. Where is the difference in my borrowing that does not allow for discharge, than Terri, a private loan guarantee company that was able to file bankruptcy to renegotiate itself out of its bad decisions.

All Hail the Holy Bone by Maggie O’Farrell was originally published in Granta 145: Ghosts. Visit granta.com/guardian for a special subscription offer with a 25% discount for Guardian readers

Now put yourself in the place of the 500 pound suckin’ calf this fall. You spend all summer with your mamma drinkin’ cool spring water, eatin’ good green grass and mother’s milk. You got up when you wanted, slept when you felt like it and ate when you were hungry. Suddenly, over the rim come five mounted riders! The boss, his wife, the neighbor, the banker, the brother-in-law and eighteen dogs! Elbows flyin’, hats wavin’ and chaps flappin’. Scary? You bet your bippy! You take off to find mamma with the dogs nippin’ at yer heels. Mamma’s way down the trail. You catch up and travel five miles in her dust, chokin’ and coughin’. That night you spend in a trap with 240 other cows and calves. Next mornin’ here comes Custer’s Army again! Back on the trail, still scared, hungry and tired. All day you walk behind the bunch, walkin’ eye level with the dust. That night you’re put in a big corral. Mamma’s uneasy. You don’t get much to drink.

Opened by the NSW Minister for Public Works, Arthur Griffin, on November 17, 1914, as a replacement for Sydney’s Cockatoo Island Dockyard which had been taken over by the Commonwealth, the fledgling yard almost closed during World War I, but by 1920 had a workforce of 2500 and produced not only ships but buses, pipes, bridges, weapons, rail carriages and trucks. 

The cow was slobberin’ in Joe’s pocket when he raced through the gate. Rick undallyed as soon as the cow shot in behind Joe. Joe cleared the five foot fence from the inside and never hit the top rail!

When architects contact Kikukawa they usually hand over a drawing or a rough outline. Rarely are the requests straight­forward. It falls on Kikukawa’s team of designers and architects to come up with the exact measurements for the factory staff to work from. “We don’t paint metal – it’s aged or blasted — but the color has to be consistent within a narrow spec­trum,” says Tsuchiya. Figuring out how to mount every piece onto the building’s exterior is also Kikukawa’s job.