Speedo Training I

The gauntlets have been laid down.  My best friend Isaac and I have decided to try and lose some weight together.

The stakes:
The loser will have to buy a jersey of the winners choosing.  This will likely be a Broncos jersey for me and a Chargers jersey for him.  The loser will then have to wear that jersey for the entire day both times the Broncos and Chargers play.  There will be pictures to document this.  In addition, the loser will have to change their Facebook profile image to be one with the jersey on.

The rules:
-  We are starting with a weigh in April 7, 2010.
-  Final weigh in is May 29, 2010.
-  A loss in weight of more than 2lbs in 1 week will reset the initial weight down by the amount over the 2lbs lost.
-  The competition will be void if the winner does not get below 175 for me or 199 for Isaac.

I have setup a shared Google spreadsheet to track our progress.  It's rather unimaginative now, but maybe it'll improve as the competition goes on.

Fundraising in Schools

When I was a kid, I remember having to do fundraisers for my elementary and middle schools.  I'm not sure what exactly that taught me, but now that I have kids of my own, the subject is really irritating to me.

I think in general education is a very important subject to Americans.  There is an ideology at work that I think most Americans would agree with.  Everyone should have access to education, and no publicly funded schools should receive more or less money based on their social status, race, or any other factor.  I think many people would even say that children of illegal immigrants should receive education even though opinions as far as other services for illegal immigrants are usually negative.

The problem I have is that you still end up with public schools that are much better off than others.  One reason for this is that schools are constantly asking kids to participate in fundraising activities.  The money these kids raise is not coming from a general pool of people that is available to everyone.  This money is coming from those kids families and friends.  This generates a distinct advantage to schools in affluent or upper middle class areas as their families and friends are likely to shell out more cash for that child's fundraising.  In effect, this process is creating a social structure amongst our public schools that ensures that rich kids will grow up better educated and poor kids will receive a poorer education.

I believe that either this practice should stop, or that we should require all fundraising to schools to be put into a pool for the district or state.  I believe this is the same practice used for property taxes.

Immigration and the Economy

I'm pretty sure none of what I'm saying here is ground breaking, but I'm surprised people don't talk about this more often.

It seems to me that economies are built from the ground up.  So, you need tons of minimum wage workers, then you need a lots of trade workers, and then some specialized technical workers, and then a very few executive type workers.  I know I'm oversimplifying here, but the point is that you need to make sure your base is solid or the rest of the pyramid will not fill out.
What I see in the US historically is that there has always been a healthy level of immigration to our country, whether that is legal or illegal.  This immigration produces a large number of minimum wage workers that help support our economy.  I think that because of this historical immigration, the US economy has always been one of the strongest in the world.  The funny thing is, that as soon as the economy shows signs of weakness, the government goes after illegal immigrants and tries to deport as many as possible to theoretically improve the job market for US employees.  My theory is that many of the people who are deported are not actually replaced and overall, this hurts our economy.  In addition, when economies are down, it's not the minimum wage jobs that we really care about, it's the trade jobs and specialized technical jobs that are most important to us.

Company Travel Policies

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I'm curious about what other people do for this, but from what I can tell, my company is pretty normal as far as sending people on trips and then reimbursing expenses.

I recently went to Europe and then spent at least an entire day compiling receipts, organizing them, entering them into spreadsheets, and requesting reimbursement.  What I find interesting about this is that my wasted time in requesting reimbursement is valuable, and I can only imagine how many people across the company are doing this every day.  Are we saving money?  Is the employee stress and attention to expenses worth the effort?

The Solution:  I think instead of worrying about every little expense, receipt, and justification, set a per diem for employees for meals, and then have them keep track of major travel expenses and hotel only.  This way, the costs for the company are set as far as meals go before the trip is even taken, and the employee should not end up spending much time working on expense reports instead of making the company money.  Each destination should have a specific per diem and if an employee can eat cheaper than that, then they benefit.  It's a win-win.

What does your company do?

Bad Marketing and Pharmaceuticals

Ok, really what I'm talking about is clever marketing, but I also consider it somewhat evil.  What I'm referring to is cholesterol lowering drug makers.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I was recently diagnosed with high cholesterol (very surprising since I'm vegetarian, but that's a different story).  I start searching around for how to lower cholesterol and I mention it to a few friends.  And you know what I hear over and over again?  "High cholesterol is in my genes."  "You might not be able to do anything about it if it's genetic."  I understand that this may be true in some cases, but what the marketing departments
 at these big drug companies have done is instill a belief that cholesterol isn't your fault.  You are probably pre-disposed to having high cholesterol so you'll probably need medication.  I think this also has the effect of dissuading some people from trying too hard to lower their cholesterol through eating right and exercising.  Overall this is brilliant advertising and these drug companies are probably making $Billions as a result, but I think they're doing us a disservice and are being somewhat evil.  Pay attention to what you believe, it could be marketers giving you your opinion.

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Good Quotes

I've always wanted a site where I could find great quotes that are well organized. I've also wanted a way for me

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 to submit my own quotes that other people could rate and use and that I would get credit for.  Someday I'll build that site.  Until then, here's my quote of the day:

"All those not in favor of world peace please raise your hand so the rest of us can beat the crap out of you!"
-  Ben Gomez  1/26/2010

Democracy fails us

So, I generally like democracy and I love living in the US, but there are some things that Democracy is very slow to fix or do right.

One good example is the way the US deals with the global warming problem.  Because of the self serving nature of Democracy, it is really slow going in fixing any problems we might be causing.  People are generally concerned and want to fix things, but it seems like nothing is really happening.  I believe that if we really wanted to do something, we could.

If we were to add a $2 or $3 tax to each gallon of gas in the US, I would wager that our emissions as a country would plummet to the levels we need very quickly.  However, politicians are not going to support this because they care about being re-elected (self-serving) and the people that vote all care about not having to pay too much (again, self-serving).

I know we would need support from the rest of the world to really solve the problem, but at least we could do our part and be a leader in the world.