Hail Of A Day

Flickr Photo Download: Resume infographic

If you’ve had even 5 seconds of involvement with copyright law you’ll be hilariously mortified by this. It’s almost too good to be true.

It took him a long time to find images he liked

This is not an article about celebrities.  it’s an article about Twitter.  As you may or may not know, Twitter has exploded onto the scene in the last 6 months on the back of celebrities like Shaquile O’Neal, John Mayer, and the king of Twitter, Ashton Kutcher.  The big debate that is raging is, “what’s the point”?  Business are scrambling to ascertain it’s future and value as a means of communication. 

Right now, Twitter is “pure”.  But it was only time till the commercialism comes in and the personal touch falls to the wayside.  Could this be the first big step towards the celebrity portion of Twitter imploding?  A TMZ of Twitter type show would surely scare off celebrities.  And people won’t stick around just to hear businesses advertise to them in 140 characters or less.

Ashton & Demi To Break-Up With Twitter? - omg! news on Yahoo!

I was told about this site by our IT director.  Anything Mac-related is too expensive straight off the showroom floor.  So this is a pretty good alternative for used but quality products. You can select a Macbook, for instance, and then add additional parts to it to make it a little more to your liking.  I’m impressed.

Gainsaver.com – Save hundreds on your next computer, Apple and PC brands available.

This is a fascinating demographic breakdown per the four top social networking sites.  I hate Linked In at this point, because it feels like a soul-less resume exchange.  I was a little surprised to see such similar gender and age numbers between Facebook and Myspace.  I guess I expected to see a more substantial number of visitors in the 35+ ranges in Facebook.

matrix-social_media_examples.jpg (image)

This is such disheartening news.  I really liked going there.  It used to be so wonderful to hit the trifecta of CompUSA, Circuity City, and Best Buy when I was looking for something.  Now, I only have Best Buy.  I’m starting to get panicked that Best Buy won’t survive and then I’ll be stuck with Radio Shack. 

How is Radio Shack still in business?  I can’t remember the last time I’ve purchased something from there.  Seems like the only thing they have are HAM radio parts and cheap RC cars.

Circuit City seeking to liquidate - Jan. 16, 2009

I despise cyber-squatting having had two major legal clashes with them in business endeavors.  Cyber-squatters think that they’re entrepreneurial and clever because they were able to spend $10 for a site because someone let it lapse.  It’s basically the equivalent of saying, “I’m so observant and shrewd,” after keeping up a wallet that you picked up after seeing someone else drop it.

Stories like this one fuel all the potential cyber-squatters out there, because they think it’s like buying a lottery ticket and hitting it big.  I hope this moron gets audited.  You gotta be pretty cocky to exhtort $35k from a sitting President.

Can’t you see this conversation going down in the White House…

Aide: President Bush, we unfortunately let GWBush library URL lapse and now some punk wants us to pay him a bazillion bucks.

President Bush: Pay him…
Aside to his secretary: Martha, please get me Commissioner Shulman (Director of the IRS) on the phone.  I need him to look into something for me.

Co. buys back Bush library domain name for $35K (AP) by AP: Yahoo! Tech

I love Coldplay.  Great music.  And the song, “Viva La Vida” off their new album is fantastic.  So fantastic, that Joe Satriani, famed guitarist is suing them for plagiarism of a song he wrote in 2004.  He is seeking “any and all profits” from the song, which is ridiculous, but he has a strong point about the similarity so the damages argument will make or break the case.  The thing is, Satriani is a very, very respected musician.  Someone produced an awesome youtube video, below, so you can determine for yourself if Coldplay ripped off Satriani.

Embedded Video

Some friends and I were having an interesting debate the other day regarding the legalization of marijuana. None of us were in favor of supporting it but we were discussing the merits of both arguments. The prevailing strategy for those who are “anti-marijuana”/ pro-legalization is to legalize it, but tax the bejeebers out of of it. That way, economics regulate rather than moral agents. I’ve always thought this argument was ridiculous based on the grounds that people refuse to see Marijuana as a gateway drug to harder more illicit drugs. I believe it is a societal buffer for us.

It is fairly difficult for the Average Joe to acquire marijuana (without a margin of severe risk). Unless, you’re a student or musician, you’re not around it all the time. If you walked up to your colleagues at the copier at work and said, “hey, where can I score some mary jane?”, you’d more than likely get fired once word got back to HR. Consequently, it’s infinitely harder to get truly destructive drugs like crack, cocaine, and heroine. There are many compelling arguments that Marijuana is not much more damaging than alcohol. Can a society survive legalized Marijuana usage? Yes. Can a society survive legalized alcohol usage? Yes. Can a society survive legalized Heroine usage? No. The point that marijuana should be legalized because it’s no worse than alcohol is irrelevant.

The biggest problem with marijuana is that it brings us one step closer to the cockroaches of our society. The black market world filled with con men, pornographers, opportunists, and self-destructive people. We need this buffer. Without it, we would start saying, “how bad is cocaine, really? It doesn’t kill you, if you use it in moderation.” The guy that sells cocaine knows full well that he’s destroying his clients, so he obviously has less empathy for his fellow human beings. Whereas, I would venture that the majority of marijuana peddlers inoculate themselves from guilt by saying, “marijuana isn’t that destructive”, and they’re partially right. So you get way more kids and young people that use and/or sell marijuana for awhile and then straighten up and get their lives on track after acknowledging that they might have made some bad decisions. But if you’re using and/or selling crack, you’re probably not going to recover.

And remember that the fuel behind all of this is rampant self-gratification. As a culture, we indulge ourselves in excess. We think that we’re entitled to whatever we want as long as “we’re not hurting anyone else”. But that fails to take into account that we’re all connected. No one is an island, except maybe Michael Jackson, he’s off on his own planet, haha. What’s wrong with restraining ourselves, legally, from some things that might not kill us but are just unhealthy and slightly destructive. Take morality and human responsibility off the table and just think about survival of the fittest and the argument still stands up that we should police ourselves in drug usage.

Take a look at the link below. Amsterdam, the city known all over the world as the icon of the legalization argument for prostitution and marijuana is tapping the brakes saying, “wait a minute, we didn’t sign up for all this collateral damage”. NOTE: It is technically illegal to sell marijuana, but they don’t enforce it so it’s, in practice, legalized. Kind of like speeding in Montana!

Amsterdam to close many brothels, marijuana cafes - Yahoo! News

Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers, he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20′, declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right’, exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair he got ten times more than I!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, University of Georgia
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

This is a clever article in the New York Times about hits and misses in advertising gimmicks.  I was particularly drawn to this ad in which Chevy made a billboard of pennies.  They say that it was picked clean in 30 minutes.  At first, I thought, What a bunch of cheapskates that would pick pennies off a billboard!  But then I thought, It’s gotta be people that are planted by Chevy.  Their campaign worked, because it got in the New York Times.

Advertising - Summer Silliness Brings a Pizza Field and a Giant Oreo - NYTimes.com

If you live in Texas you might find this interesting…

Wind Power Superhighway for West Texas
Written by Jaymi Heimbuch
Monday, 28 July 2008

Texas likes to do everything big, including wind farms and investing in clean energy. The states has been given the thumbs up for a $4.9 billion plan to set up transmission lines to carry the wind power generated in West Texas to surrounding urban areas.

The plan will account for enough lines to carry 18,000 MW – a serious amount of electricity. The state currently generates 5,000 MW, so these lines will leave plenty of room for growth, which T Boone Pickens will help to fill with this own wind plan.

The plan’s funding is coming (in part) from the people who will benefit from the electricity – citizens will pay and extra $3 to $4 each month on their electricity bills for he next few years, which is a pretty small price to pay for getting clean energy delivered to your home. The rest of the funding will come from other investors. Oncor, for example, filed with the Public Utility Commission to show it has its wallet on the table to help with a big chunk of the project. The lines would be up and running somewhere in the next 3 to 5 years, and after that, users would likely see some savings in their energy bills.

Since electricity costs are high, partly because of clogged transmission lines, the project really is practical, and will help out with energy costs as well as reducing pollution. Yet, the one person on the Texas Public Utilities Commission voting against the project, Julie Caruthers Parsley, said she worries this will delay other projects like the building of nuclear power plants. There’s always at least one…

Let’s just hope this project does exactly that. Should this plan come to fruition, Texas will without a doubt be the biggest contributor to wind energy, creating and distributing more than the next 14 states combined. The plan would also be the biggest investment in clean energy in US history. Everything’s bigger in Texas. With luck, more near-future investments in clean energy may soon overshadow even this project. With an investment like this comes more jobs, more trial-and-error knowledge, and much more public awareness for the need and potential of clean energy investments.
Wind Power Superhighway for West Texas | EcoGeek

Just because your business is small doesn’t mean you have an excuse to not run things better than a big company.

“Small is a weapon, not an excuse”.

Seth’s Blog: Should small businesses whine?

When’s the last time you’ve seen some good news from the energy sector?  To celebrate this historic moment, I’m having an Oil Party at my house this weekend.  We’re going to make plastics, run generators, and do Dyno tests on 70’s muscle cars.

Congratulations to humanity!

Stocks soar on drop in oil, Wells Fargo report - Yahoo! News

What do you think about this?  As an employee, I would definitely want to do this if my employer offered this.  As an employer, I hate it.  Three days is a lot of time for a company to have no activity.  Especially, if you work with other states that are observing 5 day work weeks, this becomes a real problem for scheduling meetings and calls.

BUT, can you imagine how wonderful it would be to have three days off every week?  What do you think?  Would you want to extend your days to 10 hour work days to get that extra day off every week?

Most state workers in Utah shifting to 4-day week - USATODAY.com