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Showing posts from January 30, 2005

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
It is probably an urban legend. But in my world it is very believable. 1st place This year's runaway winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new Winnebago Motor Home. On his trip home from an OU football game, having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly,! the RV left the freeway, crashed &then overturned. Mr Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him, by reading the owner's manual, that he actually could not do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago Motor Home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit just in case there were any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.

Slicing up Large Transitions

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Sir Winston Churchill, November 1942
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I had a dream about aliens last night. We got up this morning and you can see what the aliens did around the house. Only in Berkshire.
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As Peter Drucker put the matter in a Harvard Business Review article, "Until a business returns a profit that is greater than its cost of capital, it operates at a loss. Never mind that it pays taxes as if it had a genuine profit. The enterprise still returns less to the economy than it devours in resources…Until then it does not create wealth; it destroys it." Very interesting. My new glasses, not much different.