Sometimes when you’re walking around the city, questions come to mind. These are questions Google can’t answer. So I thought I’d give them a shot.

In New York City, you know when an approaching taxicab is available because its center light with the medallion number is lit. When the side lights are lit, it is off duty. When no lights are lit, the cab is already occupied.

Boston cabs have lights. Why don’t they let us know when they are available?

There’s a reason, said Mark Cohen, director of the licensing division of the Boston Police Department, which includes the hackney carriage unit. In New York, taxicabs cannot be called by a dispatcher to pick up a fare at a certain address because they have no radios. The cab is either cruising for passengers or not.

Boston cabs have call radios. At any one time half of all Boston cabs may be cruising for passengers, but the other half are typically headed to pick up a passenger who has called in. Cohen and the cab drivers have been trying to figure out what signal lights would show, given the circumstances.

Signal lights are also a cost problem. It used to be that a driver or a cab company could by an old car with a hundred thousand miles on it and license it as a taxi. But now taxis now have to be bought new, with no mileage on them. Taxi drivers have also had to install credit card machines, which increased their costs. “We’ve forced a lot of technology in the last 15 months,” said Cohen. “This just got back-burnered.”

I’ll suggest a way out of this mess.  We don’t need to know if cabs are out of service, on their way to pick up someone or already have someone inside. All we need to know is the information lights on London cabs show:  If the light is on, the cab is available.

Problem solved, and it’s cheap too.

GlaxoSmithKline paid $750 million to settle criminal and civil complaints that the company sold baby ointment it knew was contaminated and an antidepressant it knew was ineffective. Wells Fargo paid $24 million to stop eight states from investigating whether lenders acquired by the company made risky mortgages to borrowers without disclosing those risks.

AirTran, Delta and Continental Airlines all paid fines for dishonesty in fees or in reporting. Rick Scott, the Republican who is Florida’s new governor, was head of Columbia/HCA when it perpetrated the largest case of Medicare fraud ever. The company had to pay a $600 million fine. I guess the people in Florida can’t wait for politicians to become felons—they prefer to elect people who are already felons.

But the question I’m sure you’re asking right now about these fines is simple.

Who gets the money?

State treasuries and the U.S. Treasury sometimes, said Charles Miller, spokesperson for the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. If the fraud involves Medicare, the money would go back into Medicare. With Medicaid especially, states might get a share of the fine. In the Glaxo case, states shared in the take. In several cases involving Wells Fargo, the bank had to pay not only individuals who were harmed by the actions of its new acquisitions, but also federal and state governments.

When the FAA fined Southwest Airlines $7.5 million in 2009 from flying planes that had not been inspected, that money also went into the U.S. Treasury.

Some money goes into a “Judgment Fund” for use in court judgments against the government or compromise settlements, said Miller. But the Justice Department generally doesn’t lose.

So that gave me an idea.

All these people who complain so gratingly about the deficit, yet don’t want to raise taxes, ought to pay attention. Fund these federal government entities lavishly so they can go after big companies and conglomerates who, we’ve found out, prefer to defraud us rather than sell us a safe or legitimate item.

With all the fraud out there perpetrated by the private sector, we’d reduce the deficit in no time.

The way we phrase the names of certain international locations has changed. The Sudan is now Sudan. The Ukraine is now Ukraine. The Congo is now Congo. As these regions changed from being governed by an outside entity to forming their own country they apparently decided to drop the “the.” But “The United States” follows the exact opposite pattern. What’s going on?

I actually have no idea and no one else seemed to know either until I contacted Marvin Kalb at the Kennedy School. He knows a lot about many parts of the world. He had a theory:

“ ‘The’ United States of America is the same as ‘the’ United Kingdom. No need to change the name or drop the ‘the,’ because so many people all over the world choose to continue to call both countries by their full name.

“Ukraine meant ‘in the borderlands.’ ” (Me: Who knew?)

“If you lived in the borderlands, but with independence wanted to achieve a certain status and recognition you dropped the ‘the’ and made it seem as if Ukraine meant something like France or Germany. They are now big boys and want to be treated like big boys. Likewise for Sudan and Congo, which used to be places within a bigger entity and now are countries. It would be as if “The Great Plains” peeled off from the U.S. to form its own county and became “Great Plains.” No more ‘the’s.’ ”