Operation Improvement Inc.

To the politician, Business exists to provide jobs and pay taxes. But, as one economist noted, important jobs with life or death consequences (and presumably a correspondingly high employee self-esteem) could be created overnight by placing the unemployed in charge of busy intersections and turning off the automated traffic lights. This easy change, if mandated, would create many jobs but would destroy wealth. “Broken Window” economics creates jobs in the short term, but what about tomorrow?

P.J. O'Rourke attributed one of my favorite jokes to President Reagan in this article.

A traveling salesman stays overnight with a farm family. When the family gathers to eat there's a pig seated at the table. And the pig has three medals hanging around his neck and a peg leg. The salesman says, "Um, I see you have a pig having dinner with you."

is not the same as thinking for oneself.

Excerpt:

"Beginning on Jan. 1, 2009, the standard mileage rates for the use of a car (also vans, pickups or panel trucks) will be:

• 55 cents per mile for business miles driven

• 24 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes

• 14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations

Christmas Past

First it was punch cards - one card per line of programming that could be entered into the OS/360 mainframe at the rate of about 7 cards per minute. Then it was paper tape and pricey pizza pan sized hard drives that fed machines with system names like ¨RT-11¨, ¨PDP-8¨´ ¨RSTS¨.

Next came the era of TSO, mainframe virtual machines (VM/CMS), and drives the size of large cake platters that held a whopping 200 megabytes. Along came GE timeshare, MCI mail, Compuserve, and the legendary VAX/VMS.