I'm always amazed at how clean the Path train and stations are especially when transferring onto them from the subway. It's a completely different experience
Yup, the test is extremely easy too. Just requires a simple swab on the inside of the cheek. I know there are a decent amount of donor drives that you can find through the website that will add you to their registry
Shameless Plug: The football coach at the college I went to actually has a charity dedicated to getting more people to take the test and I think is associated with the Be The Match organization. One of his players (who now happens to be an outfielder for the Chicago Cubs http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/ct-matt-s... ) ended up being a match and ended up missing a good chunk of the baseball season even though he was expected to be drafted by a Major league team that year. Pretty cool story
As an accountant, 1/3rd of the auditing class I took in college was just reading about how different companies perpetuated fraud. It made an otherwise boring class, pretty fun.
I still currently work in public, and a couple of the partners are incredibly jaded because they worked on clients at some point in their careers who were committing fraud.
Also, with DTC there is a continuous net settlement system that basically nets a brokers transactions together for the day and basically lets them know which securities are credited or debited from their account and how much they need to pay or receive for the day. It helps solve the issue of high speed trading and nets each brokers obligations out at the end of each day. In its simplest form if a broker had two customers and Customer A sold a share of AAPL and Customer B bought 2 shares of AAPL. The CNS system would basically net those two transactions together and calculates that the broker is going to receive 1 share and that they will pay x amount of dollars.
There is definitely room for improvement because sales don't settle till T+3 (however the settlement cycle is shortening to T+2 as of Sept 5th)