Remember to delete history on that kiddos.
If this history makes it onto a disk, you've already lost.
History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.
There is a huge correlation between borrowing more money and the level of employment. Borrowing money and spending it (and why would you borrow if not to spend?) creates income for other people and thus jobs. The reverse is also true, paying back or defaulting on debts destroys income and jobs.
Sure, there's currently a huge imbalance in who gets that income. But looking at the raw data, this relationship holds quite well.
Great, so lets just borrow more money, that will fix everything right? Well, no. Paying interest reduces the amount you can spend, so the higher the level of debt, the more we have to borrow just to cover the interest and keep the economy stable. And we've collectively borrowed a ridiculous amount of money over the last 60 years.
So first we have to reduce the level of debt, then monitor and stabilise the rate of borrowing so it has a much smaller effect on the economy.
This cycle has happened a number of times in recorded history. The distribution of debt is different this time when compared to the 1930's, the immediate impacts of reducing our debts have been different. And through the continual invention of various financial instruments, we dug ourselves into a *much* bigger debt hole.
He's been in the local paper a few times as a human interest story during his life, but there's nothing available online that I can find. Though he has told me a fair number of anecdotes from work over the years.
Once he turned up to a job interview after being referred by an old colleague. The interviewer hastily excused himself to call the guy; "You didn't tell me he didn't have any hands". "I didn't think it was relevant to his ability".
After discovering that a Y2K compliance project was starting (ie using 4 digit dates everywhere), with an estimate of 8 people for 2 months. He came back after about 2 hours with all the changes checked in.
I haven't RTFA, but I'd guess his biggest gains came from scripting things that were annoying to say. If you invested the same amount of effort in automating things that you would normally type, you can get very big productivity gains.
My father is a (retired) software developer. When he was a kid he lost both of his hands in an accident. So how does he type? By holding a pen between his arms. How does he code efficiently? Lots and lots of domain specific vi macros. For example, with less than 10 key presses he can insert a well formatted SQL Insert statement, with all columns from the requested table pre-filled.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion