I was having a friendly conversation with a sr. dev about thread safety. He said that it's all theoretical BS and in the real would you don't need such a thing. He qualified this with saying how he used to write ATM software for a large foreign bank and never had cause to synchronize anything ..."when you have so many transactions per second, synchronization is not necessary.". I was laughing for the rest of the day and though I'm glad I don't bank with them.