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TANSTAAFL
(redirected from There's no such thing as a free lunch)

   Also found in: Acronyms, Idioms, Wikipedia 0.03 sec.

TANSTAAFL

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." See digispeak.


TANSTAAFL - /tan'stah-fl/ (From Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress") "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".

Often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of free software, or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom.


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THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH, WE'VE ALL been told, but in the near future there may be no such thing as lunch, period.
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but if you play your cards right, business conducted in a restaurant setting can hold rewards far beyond the cost of a meal.
There's no such thing as a free lunch and most of the government grants involve quite a bit of "tit-for-tat" where, in return for the money, the business has to provide some kind of service or product that in some way benefits the government (for example, a construction company may have to build affordable housing).
 
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