There is also a strange element of faith that has developed around the government.

The credit problems and the various bubbles are rooted in a few generic problems: 1. People taking part in the markets are often poorly informed and irrational. 2. Over a short period some people can cheat a market for higher profits and often escape the consequences of doing so.

The credit problem and the various bubbles are rooted in one thing: the federal reserve. As long as our money is based on the ridiculous joke of fractional reserve banking (i.e. banks are allowed to lend out more money than they have in cash deposits) the existence of the boom-bust cycle is guaranteed. Faith belongs in religion, not in our banking system!

How would you feel if you were resurrected by some other primates as one of a handful of your kind 50,000 years hence? Be just a little alienated, don't you think?

Alienated, sure. But it would beat the alternative.

Well, humans are still around so the answer to your question would be no. But at least we now have the chance to make up for our mistakes.

His answer presupposes that there is no such thing as a soul, no creative spark, only emerging properties of complex systems.

Not really. The "soul" is just a cheap cop out by those who have no creativity. Nobody is born creative, it's something that comes from the right combination of experiences and memories, i.e. it is a feature of personality, not some magical soul.

Well, if we get QM involved in this then everything is deterministic. Even though it isn't.

Atheism does not lead to rationality, however rationality does lead to atheism (or at the very least agnosticism).

Are you joking?

Ron Paul?

That's correct too, but I actually meant McCain. As in, getting or not getting donations from PACs means squat.

Did you check the figures adding up to the total? He received $126,349. Of this, $6,000 was from PACs while the rest includes contributions from individuals employed by the two companies. If someone contributes $20 to his presidential campaign, it will go in that total. Since he raised record amounts from individual contributions, I'd be surprised if he wasn't near the top of that list, and I'd expect it to be the same from any employer picked at random in the USA.

Guess who got $0 from those PACs?

And no, I'm not a McCain supporter, both candidates sucked.

I think you're taking the wrong angle. Obviously having an IT-department is cheaper than doing everything "the old way", but what you really have to consider is the alternatives to having an IT-department.

Outsourcing IT-services is an reasonable alternative for organizations that aren't large enough to justify dedicated personnel and hardware. There are of course some cons like no control over downtimes (which is why you don't outsource to some one-man sweatshop that is one heartbeat away from IT meltdown) and slower reaction times unless the company is located nearby, but all in all it is a good idea for smaller companies.

I realize now that this probably isn't what the person asking the original question wanted to hear. My advice would be to estimate roughly how long it would take and how much it would cost to recover from e.g. a server meltdown (which your actions of course prevent), and then calculate how much income would be lost because of it. You could do something similar to other aspects of your work.