Barack Obama is talking about re-building our infrastructure, such as schools, bridges, and roads, as a way to put people back to work and invigorate our economy. I have a better idea. What we need is something that will literally transform our nation, rocketing it well into the 21st century, and doing just as much for the physical world as the Internet did for the information world. If we did this, in the end we'd have USA 2.0 — a country far ahead of the world in terms of productivity, efficiency, energy efficiency, convenience, and modernization. By reducing our demand for energy, it would also reduce pollution. However, the primary benefit of this project that I have in mind, and the one that would justify its enormous cost, is how it would kickstart huge improvements in productivity — that's one of the fundamentals that determine how vibrant any economy is. As secondary benefits:

• It would reduce the need for roads and bridges — things that are so 19th century.
• It would enable police to provide much better protection at lower cost.
• It would enable businesses to rapidly expand, reaching far more customers than is currently feasible.
• It would save lives and improve health in many ways.
• It would save everyone hundreds of hours per year . . . perhaps giving them more time to read my books (most are free, by the way), spend more time with their families, or help our furry little friends in the wild.

This project would give investors something to get excited about, so money would pour into our economy, which would roar to life now and accelerate toward even higher peaks in the future.

You're probably wondering what I am talking about. It can be boiled down to a single four-letter word . . . but not one of the profane ones that many folks are uttering now that our economy is crashing! :-) I'll soon write a short book about this and offer it as a free download from one of my web sites (such as www.ER-doctor.com), but before I do that, I'd like to see if anyone can guess what my idea is. I'd also like to hear from anyone who has good, outside-the-box ideas for stimulating our economy. Our future is too important to leave to the politicians. What's especially notable about them is that even the brilliant ones — yes, there are some with high IQs — are characteristically hidebound, with a paucity of original thought.

While you have your thinking caps on, here is something (totally unrelated) else to ponder: How could we eliminate every cell phone company, and every cell phone tower, in the world while giving people MUCH better cell phone coverage at much lower cost? Hint: You and everyone else could make money off this idea, even while you sleep, eat, or browse my many web sites. Why haven't the geniuses at Google or Microsoft thought of this one?

On second thought, I know why Microsoft hasn't thought of this: for the same reason they can't do 10,001 other things correctly. I could fill a book with all of the bizarre Microsoft quirks I've encountered (wasting about one year of my life), but here is one: When you place your mouse cursor over the time in the bottom right screen corner, a date box should pop up, as shown below:

However, about 75% of the time when I mouse over the time, here is what I see:

As you can see**, the box appears, but most of it is obscured behind the taskbar. There is no consistent pattern to this anomalous behavior.

YIKES! I just discovered ANOTHER Microsoft blunder: I use their Windows Live Writer program to generate this blog. When I first inserted those two pictures and published them, they were magnified by about 50% and therefore distorted, because stretching small bitmap images always does that. So why did the geniuses at Microsoft make picture magnification the default behavior for that program? Why not just insert the image at a 1:1 scale? Every other program I've ever seen does that. I sometimes wonder — and I am not being facetious about this — if Bill Gates' real mission in life is to waste our time. If so, he is succeeding.

OH MY GOD! I DON'T BELIEVE IT! YET ANOTHER INEXCUSABLE MICROSOFT ERROR: After publishing those two pictures, I noticed that they replaced ALL of the images I'd previously uploaded that automatically cycle in the top right part of the homepage screen. Now, instead of seeing me, you see those two images alternate! I knew that Microsoft was incompetent, but this is ridiculous! Is sucking on lead lollipops one of their job requirements? (Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can permanently lower IQ.)

** UPDATE: Now you cannot see those two pictures. To restore the original photo album pictures that cycle near the top right corner of the main page, I deleted the photo album that had replaced it, which deleted those two pictures. Sheesh! The mental midgets at Microsoft strike again!

Here's another question for anyone who owns cell phone company stocks: Why would you invest in them? You could obtain a much greater return on investment by investing in my inventions, some of which are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Yes, really. If you have money and are not satisfied with investing in companies that are stuck in the 20th century, contact me.