Oink! Oink!

This entry was posted in Taxation on by

Do congressional pig ears and pork chops make you nauseous? To emphasize the feeling Citizens against Government Waste has released the 2006 edition of the Congressional Pig Book:

The 2006 Pig Book identified 9,963 projects in the 11 appropriations bills that constitute the discretionary portion of the federal budget for fiscal 2006, costing taxpayers $29 billion. A “pork” project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by CAGW and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition.

Go find a few to hammer your congress critters about!

Via Stateline.org.

Can Shareware Make Money?

This entry was posted in Economics on by

The answer is yes. Of course the product must have some specialized functionality that consumers want and that hasn’t been preempted by Microbloat $ware.
Take, for example, Winzip: in 2004 the company had $15.5 million profits on an income of $24.9 million. Pretty damn good!

Thomas Warfield has more here and here.

Hmm, Back to a MAC?!

This entry was posted in Technology on by

Looks like I will rejoin the Apple family when it is time to replace my current laptop:

Once you’ve completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (That’s the “alt” key for you longtime Windows users.) After starting up, your Mac runs Windows completely natively. Simply restart to come back to Mac.

Via Resurrection Song.

Update (4/6): Alex Tabarrok notes that Apple wasn’t first to the finish line in providing this functionality.


A Day in the Life…

This entry was posted in Technology on by

…of Bill Gates:

Days are often filled with meetings. It’s a nice luxury to get some time to go write up my thoughts or follow up on meetings during the day. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. So then it’s great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn’t get to. If the entire week is very busy, it’s the weekend when I’ll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they’ll see that I’ve been quite busy— they’ll have a lot of e-mail.

The rest of the article has some interesting comments on managing email, maintaining focus, communication and enhancing productivity.

Via Rex who thinks Bill deserves a day or two off.