You can be clever with capital expenses and still get killed by your variable costs if you don't know how to hold them down.

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The unions say their case is based on years of low pay increases - highlighted, they point out, by the prime minister among others, and used as a prominent argument to get through legislation on variable tuition fees.

BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Unions praise pay strike response

Make sure you take into account your variable costs to get to a gross profit and then fully allocate all of your fixed costs associated with that account.

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The Nets get a Chicago team that is wildly variable.

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Also, mortgages have a duration (a calculation of the time it takes to get paid back) that is a variable, hypothetical duration that varies with prepayment speeds, so a short duration mortgage portfolio is not protection against a sudden increase in interest rates, because if interest rates rise the duration will rise which hurts the value of the bond.

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Add in the variable of geography, and those numbers get even worse - on average 60 people apply for every secretarial job in London.

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Citi Investment Research and my organization Ceres recently issued a report finding that, under the strictest mileage standard being considered, carmakers in general would increase their variable profits and the Detroit Three would get a bigger profit boost than others.

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To get out ahead of nature, the WOF will, to begin with, offer instant access to almost every environmental variable that science can measure, from points scattered all across the face of the planet.

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