First of all, let’s not call what she was doing a “science experiment”. She made a toilet cleaner bomb, just like I did when I was a kid. I didn’t even have Google back then and I knew what was going to happen.

A science experiment, to borrow a definition from Wikipedia, is “an orderly procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis.” She made a toilet cleaner bomb, got busted, and said it was for science.

I did the same kind of stuff when I was in high school, though I was at least smart enough not to do it on the playground. She doesn’t deserve two felonies for it certainly. She maybe deserves the expulsion, if for no other reason than being dumb enough to do it at school.

I’m just upset that I keep seeing what was obviously a teenager dicking around reported as a science experiment. There’s a big difference between “teenager excessively charged for toilet cleaner bomb” and “teenager arrested for science experiment” and it’s sad to me that even mainstream news outlets resort to the latter for ratings.

I suppose if I used this blog to lament every instance of bad journalism I came across I’d never get anything else done (and I would publish more words than the New York Times) but this one just seems especially heinous.

A little known fact, before we started Blue Frog Gaming I had decided I was going to do a software startup of some kind, and the first idea I started working on was to be an alternative to Google Reader. I wanted something with a lot more social functionality. Sort of like what Twitter has morphed into for a lot of its users, sharing articles, etc., but without the inane celebrity drivel and outdated character limits. This was well before the invention of the Facebook platform, or Twitter and to be honest it may have been ahead of its time had I gone through with it.

What’s the point? Not much, other than to say I can understand why people don’t want to lose Reader. Especially since most mobile-based reader clients sync with Reader. I haven’t played around with some of the alternatives yet, but I’m not sure there’s another one that’s free and of acceptable quality.

That said the reactions have been ridiculous. Half of the commenters I’ve seen have said something like “I’ll never trust Google again!” Trust them to do what? Run a free service that they feel isn’t of a higher value than the cost to maintain? If you trusted them (or any other company) to do that in the first place, you’re an idiot. Google has a responsibility to do what’s best for Google.

Also what are you going to do about it? Start searching on Bing? Ditch Gmail for Yahoo? Leave Android for iOS? (That one you might do anyway.) Drop Google Docs for Zoho? All because they shut down an RSS reader?

Then there are the people arguing that Google is being stupid. Maybe, but I doubt it. Google has much more of an idea of what Reader is worth to them than I do. I’m just a guy who has no real information other than I like it, and that’s true of almost everyone complaining. All the crackpot theories about how valuable the “influencers” are that Google is about to lose have me in stitches. If you’re so damned influential, how come you couldn’t get anyone to use the product you’re so pissed is dying? Google should really be terrified of you being upset! And to what end are you going to use that massive influence now? Talk everyone into switching to Apple’s phones where there will also be no Google Reader?

Thinking about it from a business case, I suspect the only reason Google Reader ever got out the door, way back in the dark days of the internet, was to get people to log in. If you remember back in 2005, there really wasn’t much reason to give Google any personally identifiable information. Before Gmail, which pretty much nobody had back then, I don’t even think you could create an account with Google. You just went there and searched and moved onwards.

Google realized early on that having more information about customers let them tailor ads to customers and therefore make more on ads. That’s why they launched AdSense, which not only monetized traffic outside of Google, but gave Google a good idea what their users were doing online to improve ads on Google.

And while cookies and IP addresses are great, there’s no better way to get information about someone than to have them give it to you. A logged in user not only gives you basic demographic data you’d otherwise have to guess at, they give you their name (which there are all sorts of ways to find other data from, including income) and they let you track them easily across browsers and devices.

So in 2005, putting out a product that netted zero revenue but got people to log in was well worth it. Nowadays Google has no shortage of people logged in. Gmail’s one of the bigger email providers. They’ve got YouTube, Wallet, Android, Drive, Docs, etc. A lot of their products are still second rate, but some of them aren’t, and when you add them all together you’ve got enough that most of the net is logged into Google all the time. There’s probably not one Reader user who won’t stay logged in on some other service.

And for someone who uses an RSS reader, this is probably the best thing that could happen. I’ll be surprised if 10 services that are better than reader don’t replace it in a year. Reader has barely been updated in a long time. It’s mobile clients suck. It’s adequate and popular, which is a combination that prevents any real improvement in RSS readers and has for years. It’s Internet Explorer 6 all over again.

So let it go. It’s a little acute pain to alleviate a chronic one for both us and Google. In the end we’ll both be better off.

Overall I thought the article was pretty well-received. The audience it was aimed at is sort of infamous for being very opinionated, even when not very knowledgeable, so I expected some ridiculous replies such as “you don’t need a whisk” or “boiling meat is a perfectly acceptable way of cooking,” which, I suppose, is true if you’re an 18th century Englishman. But overall the level of discourse was good.

There were a lot of intelligent comments that were repeated often and that I thought are worthy of addressing, so I figured I’d write a quick post here to do so.

First up was my advice to buy a set of pots and pans. I said to just get a decent 10 piece set in your budget range, and a lot of people said something like “just buy pieces individually as you need them.” Those people mostly don’t realize that cookware sets count lids as pieces. You don’t need 10 different pans for sure, but you’re really getting 6, which is at least really close to what you do need. A typical 10 piece set is something like:

• Large Sauté Pan w/lid
• Large Skillet
• Small Skillet
• Large Saucepan w/ lid
• Small Saucepan w/lid
• Stockpot w/lid

I suppose you could argue that the large skillet is redundant and that you could use the sauté pan instead. A professional would tell you that they are different tools used for different purposes,  but even if we concede the point (which I’m inclined to for home users) if you were buying pieces individually you’d end up with the other 9 for sure and you’d pay more for having done so.

One caveat though, budget 10 piece sets often skimp on pan sizes. Make sure you get one with a 12” skillet as the large, a similarly-sized sauté pan, and a 4qt saucepan, not the 10” and 3 qt you often see on cheapo units. Sam’s Club has a decent 3 ply set for under $150 that meets the proper dimensions.

Anyway, I’ll stand by the original advice because I bought a 10 piece set awhile back and rarely does a week go by where I don’t use every pot and pan in it. And I’ve never needed to buy another, though I did buy a couple more saucepans because you so often find yourself multi-tasking with them. I have a 1, 2, 3, and 4 qt, and some dishes use them all.

Some commenters said to pick up aluminum pans at a restaurant store. That might make sense. There are some people who object to aluminum for health reasons, but they are cheap and heat evenly. The good stainless steel sets have aluminum in the middle because of that. That may be good advice if you live near such a store (I never have) and don’t believe it will give you Alzheimer’s. I’ve read that aluminum also deforms easily and doesn’t last long, but again, I’ve never purchased one, so I don’t know.

Another one I heard a few times was to buy a cast iron skillet. That’s probably not bad advice, and would be one advantage of not purchasing a set. The thing about cast iron is that it’s not really necessary, and it’s a pain in the ass to take care of. I do have one cast iron piece that to be honest I’m like as not to get too wet and have to scrub rust off of and re-season every time I clean it. Your mileage may vary, and it’s quite possible I’m just too dumb to use them properly, but I just don’t find them worth the trouble generally. I consider that one a matter of personal preference.

Almost nobody argued with my objection to non-stick pans. Good! 70% of all cookware sold in the US is non-stick though, and this confirms my suspicion that’s because 70% of people don’t know what they’re doing.

A common objection, mainly due to price, was the electronics. The mixer, blender, and ice cream maker were deemed unnecessary. I added them because I felt my initial definition of a gourmet kitchen required them. Many soups use a blender. Almost every dessert uses either a stand mixer or an ice cream maker, and the cookbooks I said I wanted to be able to make over 75% of do have dessert sections. I probably eat fewer sweets than 95% of people, but I still find myself making desserts for holidays, entertaining, etc. Still you could leave them out and still make lots of great dishes and save a couple hundred bucks.

Some people said to get a food processor instead of a blender, but I feel that’s terrible advice. These people, without exception, are the ones who think it’s ok to chop vegetables in one. It’s not, at all. The result will be uneven, and culinary school 101 teaches that you want the ingredients to be evenly chopped so they cook at the same pace. And perhaps worse, the processor macerates cell walls. Ask anyone who has chopped parsley for tabouleh in one. The result is much soupier than if done by hand, and kind of gross looking.

Sure, you might be saying I’m being overly perfectionist on that point. But isn’t that the point of gourmet cooking? Loving detail is what separates Spiaggia from Olive Garden. 

If you want to save time chopping, get a mandoline. It’s a lot cheaper than a food processor, and will give you even cuts quickly without liquefying your veggies.

I have a food processor and I use it for one thing, which is making pie crusts. I use my stand mixer and blender quite often, and generally not for desserts. But your mileage may vary. Except for the whisk. You need the whisk.

What it comes down to in the end is what types of food you’re making.  Do you have a family that loves ice creams and sorbets? That $40 ice cream maker will pay for itself, and the stuff you make at home (especially with sorbets) will be much better than the stuff you buy. Find yourself making lots of soups? Spring for a good blender.

My goal was to leave the door open for just about everything. Sure, many recipes will require something specialized (and usually inexpensive). Want to make a quiche? You’ve already got the stand mixer (crust), the blender (aerating batter), and the baking sheet. Now you just need a 9”x2” cake ring for $16. Want to make Thomas Keller’s famous cornets? Get the cream molds for $7. John Besh’s crawfish pie? Grab a set of 8 oz. ramekins for $11.

I did miss a few things. Measuring cups being most noticeable. It’s hard to follow a recipe without those. If you made it through the first article and this far in this one, you might like a book I’m reading that explains, among many other things, the history of measuring cups and other forms of cookware called Consider the Fork. It’s far more interesting than I’ve likely made it sound.

Anyway, I’m always interested in what people would have done differently. I’m still nowhere near an expert in the kitchen. I’m just a guy with a lot of really good cookbooks and the equipment to make the stuff in them.

Last year was a bit of a rollercoaster for me. My divorce was finalized and a silly legal battle ensued that is still ongoing. I went through a tough breakup, made much tougher by the fact that those are new for me and I had no idea what I was doing. I learned another valuable lesson about choosing acute pain over chronic.

On the other hand, things were good too. The aforementioned breakup lead, quite surprisingly, to a new relationship that’s in many ways the healthiest one I’ve ever had. My company had a rough 2011, but managed to rebound a bit in 2012, keeping us in decent shape. We spent the entire year working on a project that is yet to launch (but coming soon) which is a first for us. But the longer development cycle, though frustrating at times, wasn’t due to mistakes or ever moving goal posts. It was just because we were building something awesome, and sometimes that takes time. It is, I think, the most well-managed project we’ve had, and a good game too.

I’ve continued with my hobby of cooking and taken it to a new level. Some techniques I’d struggled with came together. I’ve gone from basically just cooking other peoples’ recipes to also experimenting on my own with a reasonable degree of success. Sure, I’m no Thomas Keller yet, no matter how many of his dishes I cook (dozens at this point) but I’m a hell of a lot better than I was in 2011, and I’m confident that I’ll be even better by the end of 2013.

My goals for this year at work are centered around making the new project a success. For me personally that means mostly doing a good job of hiring a couple key people, filling the roles until we do, and helping the great people we already have (and we do have a top-notch team) make the product I know they’re capable of.

My personal goals are two-fold. One is to take better care of myself physically. I actually had that goal last year and did a pretty good job of it. I’d say about 8 months out of the year I made it to the gym regularly. This year I want to get there even more. I know that’s the most cliché resolution ever, but there you have it.

I also want to improve my financial picture a bit. I know I’m doing much better than the average 32 year old, since most people my age are in debt and I couldn’t live that way. But I could do better with what I have. Perhaps I’ll talk a bit about it as I implement the plan.

Overall I expect it to be a good year. I’m feeling refreshed and my motivation is renewed.

We landed on a Saturday long before check in time so we had to wander around the French Quarter for a bit. We ended up stopping at the Royal House Oyster Bar for lunch. The oysters fresh off the gulf might have been the best I’d ever tasted. The gumbo confirmed my suspicion that the stuff I’d made the previous weekend had way too much roux in it.

Dinner Saturday night was at Cochon. We started with fried boudin balls. I had one of the daily specials, a boneless piece of goat wrapped in house made pancetta. Juliet had a braised pork shoulder with mushrooms and cheesy polenta. We debated dessert (the pineapple upside down cake with coconut lime sorbet was very tempting) but decided it’d be better to just put our drinking caps on.

We hopped in the cab and aimed for Bourbon Street but the cabbie told us the place to go for live music was Frenchmen so we hopped around there, listening to an eclectic mix of zydeco, jazz, and hard rock, drinking local beers and some excellent bourbons I’d never heard of before.

Sunday we took a nice walk down to the Aquarium, then checked out the French Market District. We strolled around the park looking at art and had beignets at Café du Monde. I got both a math and English lesson from a street urchin who forcibly cleaned our shoes and tried to charge us $40. Trust me, if you’re in New Orleans and someone tells you “I bet I can guess where you got those shoes,” remind them that the word “got” is not synonymous with “have”. You’ll have more fun correcting the hobo’s grammar than you will explaining to him why you’re not paying $40 for a very bad shoe cleaning.

Dinner was at Emeril’s NOLA. Despite his reputation of being more of a TV personality than a real chef I’ve had dinner at a couple of his restaurants and have always had good food. That night was no exception. Swordfish was on special and was excellent.

After that we headed to Bourbon Street. Again we bar hopped, listening to different jazz musicians. Our favorite was probably Jamil Sharif at the Maison Bourbon.

Monday was a mellow day. It was raining so we went to the movie theater. Not very touristy, I know, but we saw Hitchcock in this great theater at Canal Place. There are maybe 30 seats in the whole place, and they’re more like leather couches. Waiters take your order for food that’s actually pretty decent. Not a bad way to spend part of a day when the weather is bad.

Dinner that night was at August. I had the best turtle soup I’ve ever tasted (by far) and  specialty cuts (not sure which) of Two Run Farms beef on mozarella whipped potatoes with gremolata and marrow crust. Dessert was a satsuma creamsicle with mandarin sorbet and a yogurt meringue. I’m a sucker for citrus, so even though I was overly stuffed after that and the gratis desserts at the end, it was worth it.

Since it was close to our hotel and we were leaving the next morning we spent our last night in town drinking a couple too many hurricanes on Bourbon Street and listening to local jazz musicians once again.

Around that time I came down with a cold. It was fortuitous that we had a couple days of quiet time scheduled on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The place was quiet due to the off season, but the weather was really rather pleasant. Not going for a swim pleasant, but walking on the beach was a nice way to clear my stuffy head. Again I ate some local oysters, and not a whole lot else since I was feeling ill. We spent three days mostly just decompressing, which was nice after the craziness that is New Orleans.

Then we had one last night in New Orleans. We ate dinner at an unremarkable restaurant and then headed to Frenchmen. A porter at our hotel had told us that his uncle Ellis Marsalis was playing at a bar there called Snug Harbor. “Wynton’s dad?” I’d asked. Sure enough, it was. I’d listened to his stuff since high school, and I love jazz piano, so I had to go check it out. The show was brief but of course fantastic. Despite his age, Mr. Marsalis seems sharp as ever.

And that was pretty much our trip. We grabbed some beignets and souvenir pralines on the way out in the morning. Overall it was a blast and I’d definitely love to get back there one day.

The pro-gun ideologues think now is always not the time. But I really can’t think of a more apt time to question whether, when drafting the horribly ambiguously-worded Second Amendment, an AR-15 was what James Madison had in mind. It’s unlikely men of that era could have foreseen weapons with that much power to kill, and that little power to do anything good.

Which is not to say I’m anti-gun. I’m not naïve enough to think making something illegal solves the problem.  Republicans seem to get that when it comes to guns and forget when it comes to drugs, and Democrats do the opposite. But I have a hard time believing that making it a little harder than it is to get an assault rifle wouldn’t help.

Here’s a neat little study showing that of the last 62 mass shootings, there were 142 guns and about 3/4 of them were obtained legally. Of course, even with gun laws matching most of the rest of the world, a good chunk of those crimes would still have occurred. But it seems hard to argue that they all would have, and that they all would have been as severe.

People like to “say guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” That’s true. But they do it rather better with guns than without. Newtown would have been significantly less gory (though still tragic) if the killer had only a machete.

People also like to say “the bad guys will still have guns, but the good guys won’t.” I’ll take my chances. The notion that if more people carried guns we’d all be safer is wishful thinking. We’re already the most well-armed country in the world. We have about 9 guns in our country for every 10 people. (Second place goes to war-torn Yemen with about 5 guns per 10 people.) We also have the highest rate of gun-related fatalities in the first world. If you have a gun, it’s 22 times more likely that you or a family member will die of it than an intruder or mass murderer.

And a lot of people who read too much Orwell seem to think we need guns to keep us safe from our own government. Maybe that made sense when we lived under a monarch whose army had the same weapons we do. In the era of tanks, helicopters, and drones even AR-15s aren’t going to be of much use.

At the end of the day there’s just no practical rationale for the system of gun ownership we have.

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

This seemed a little off to me immediately. I don’t think I’d define Facebook or Google as something "few others realize are worth doing". Facebook launched around the same time as a score of other social networks, so lots of people realized it was worth doing. When Google was born, people also realized search engines were worth doing (Google was probably not even among the first 20 launched) they just didn’t realize Yahoo! was beatable. Or how lucrative they could be.

It made me think there are basically two classes of startup here. One that people think can’t become a real business because their industry doesn’t exist yet (Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo!) and one where people think the industry has been won prematurely.

A lot of people, myself included, thought Facebook would never overtake MySpace. MySpace was adding more people each day, for awhile there, than Facebook had. I remember around the time of my high school reunion in 2008, I had something like 40 classmates on MySpace and 5 on Facebook. MySpace was a juggernaut in a niche protected, by definition, by the network effect.

A lot of people thought building a search engine was a fool’s errand because Yahoo! had such a huge market share. A good chunk of the people on the internet at that time thought that to get to a web page you had to go to the URL bar of the browser, type in “yahoo.com”, hit enter, then type the name of the site you wanted to go to into Yahoo!.

What was missing in both cases? Everybody underestimated just how big the market was.

In the case of Yahoo!, most Americans just weren’t online yet, and even when they were it was merely out of entertainment. The web hadn’t been entirely integrated into everyone’s life. Blogs hadn’t been invented, or Twitter, or social media. The number of sites on the web was small enough that a group of humans could essentially shoehorn it all into a directory.

We all know what happened there. In 1998, when Google launched, I remember buying what was then a low-end desktop for $1,500. Now everyone has a $200 computer in their pocket. The number of internet page requests is probably at least 3 orders of magnitude higher now than it was then.

In the case of Facebook, while MySpace had big numbers in the U.S., most people still weren’t using social networking. You might not have believed that if you were between the ages of 18 and 25 at the time, but for most of the population it was still a curiosity.

I’m also reminded of online poker circa 1998. A site called Paradise Poker had the market all but sewn up. Some competitors appeared, ones that were better in almost every respect, but in poker you want to play where the other people are playing, so they seemed unbeatable.

But then poker on television happened and a couple other sites, most notable one called Party Poker, started advertising. Just like social networking the market grew rapidly. I remember someone telling me at a live game that there were over 50 $10/$20 limit hold’em games going on Party Poker the night before and I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even believe them. I had a DVR so I never even noticed the commercials while watching the World Poker Tour.

Apple’s iPhone launched into a smartphone market dominated by RIM. At the time smartphones were expensive objects primarily used by businessmen and paid for by companies. By eventually getting the price down to $200 subsidized, and making a consumer friendly phone and OS, they blew the market up.

I think the salient thing all of these markets had in common was that they were in store for massive growth. When your market is only 10% of what it’s going to be, the dominant player is entirely beatable, even if they’ve got a near monopoly.

So perhaps one way to make a startup successful is to find a niche where you think the market is in store for massive growth. Facebook grew the market by appealing to people outside of the early 20’s demographic, which is most of the population. Google did it by offering search results so good, and, due to being algorithmic rather than human-edited, so plentiful, that it made the industry and the web significantly more useful. Party Poker did it by advertising in the right place at the right time. Apple’s coup of the phone industry was due to a lot of variables (hardware prices falling, availability of new materials, engineering solutions where current ones didn’t exist, software prowess, etc.). But they all had one thing in common, which was that they launched at an inflection point in their market.

So where can we look for the next markets that are about to explode? I have a few ideas.

1. Retail. I think online retail in 10 years is going to be much, much bigger than it is today. The problem here is that the current market leader, Amazon, thinks so too. That’s extremely impressive, as market leaders almost always grow complacent. Amazon never does. Their acquisitions of Quidsi and Zappos show that. Their push into digital media with the Kindle e-ink and tablet readers show that. And don’t forget their foray into groceries with Amazon Fresh (which I’m surprised I don’t see more of) and their investment in Living Social. Plus their launches of My Habit and Amazon Local Deals (which is admittedly their least good product and never seems to contain any deals that are actually local.)

Still, retail’s wide open. Groceries are the largest segment of the retail market by far, with the average American spending about 8% of their income on it. (Next is clothing at about 3.5%). Yet I still have no options at all for grocery shopping online, and the few people who do have crap like PeaPod.

Then there’s the artsy segment of the market. Etsy and Fab are two examples of people killing there. High end has competition from Gilt and One King’s Lane.

And still, after all that, people are still buying most of their clothes at the mall and groceries at Safeway and housewares at Target. That’s not going to last.

2. Mobile. I know, I’m not breaking any ground with that prediction. But it seems to me that the world we live in now, where everyone has an internet-connected computer in their pocket, still resembles the world of 5 years ago where only 10% of us did far too closely.

It’s strange to me that I still have to carry a wallet for instance. I’ve got an app on my phone that will let me pay, using any credit card I own, at anywhere that has an RF-enabled credit card reader, yet that’s still surprisingly few places. Digital loyalty cards exist, yet I still can’t scan them at a lot of shops.

Why do I need a health care card that is just some numbers printed on a cheap piece of laminated paper? Why isn’t that just an app that can be accessed from my phone in an emergency?

I think part of the problem is people are making apps to share photos, which, while great, I think we’ve already got covered. Instead make an app that unlocks my front door or lets me drive my car. Or does lots of other things my phone could do but doesn’t yet.

What else am I missing?

The second is there’s just nothing left to say. As I’ve gotten older I’ve blogged less, probably, more than for any other reason, because I’ve grown less conceited. It isn’t that I can’t say something insightful, or well-written. It’s just because you’ve already read the same thing ten times, probably by people who are at least as insightful and better at writing. Ten years ago that was probably equally true, but I just didn’t know it yet, and sometimes I wish I still didn’t because I’d probably write more.

I’m also just not so sure the election matters anymore. To be totally honest, the Republican Party scares me a bit. The rest of the world is horrified at the thought of a Republican winning the Presidency, and it shocks me that half of America isn’t. This is a party whose policies have seemingly no relation to reality. Their answer to every problem is tax cuts for the rich, despite 30 years of that failing in America, and thousands of years of that failing around the globe. They attempt to stay in power not by doing what would best serve the middle class, but rather by disenfranchisement and convincing poor middle-Americans that whether or not gay people can marry is not only up for them to decide, but is also more important than their own economic welfare.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is no prize. They’re the sort of party that would win elections in Europe, and I don’t think that’s a compliment. They’re willing to accept scientific facts like global warming, and they remember history and read papers written by economists enough to know what happens when you let the income gap get too wide. But on the really big picture items, like global warming, financial industry regulation, or the deficit, they either don’t have a clear solution, or if they do are unable to explain it to the country well enough to get it done.

The Republicans have chosen staying in power at all costs over sound decision making, and the Democrats have chosen statistics over leadership. We need a party with policies both firmly rooted in reality and practical enough to become law, and that party needs majorities in the House and Senate as well as the Presidency to get anything done. And if there’s one thing we can be sure of it’s that nothing that happens at the ballot box today is going to make that a reality.

Take, for instance, our financial sector. Republicans are, on the whole, opposed to bailouts of any sort. (Never mind that Bush started the financial bailouts and signed TARP into law.) They’re opposed to government regulation of any sort to. (Never mind that the Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, and who probably was not a fan of government bailing out and nationalizing banks before the shit hit the fan on his watch was Treasury Secretary when the meltdown came and led the bailouts). Their policies, when you add them together, seem endorse letting banks grow too big to fail, then not bailing them out when they do fail, which is a surefire way to bring about a depression. 

(If anything, though, I’m glad that when the meltdown did happen the people in charge chose what was best for the country over party ideology, and when you know your name is going down in the history books you’ll make that call every time.)

Democrats are in favor of regulation. And they’re smart enough to realize that a $700 billion bailout, while odious, has to be compared to the alternative, which could have been trillions of dollars worth of losses to the economy. What they’re not smart enough to do is explain to the American populace why the economy melted down (most people still don’t know) and as a result we’re still in danger of losing the Volcker Rule the minute a Republican sets foot in the Oval Office.

I’ll be the first to admit that I find nothing more trite and annoying than the fifty people you’ve already seen say “All politicians suck” in your Facebook feed over the last month. That’s armchair quarterbacking at its worst. And it’s a flat out denial of reality which is that politicians, just like the people who tanked our financial industry, are merely responding to their incentives.

We ask them to provide more services and tax us less, so they do, then we’re hit with a deficit (which is the only possible result) and we complain. Our country’s financial behavior is pretty much identical to that of the families that vote those politicians into office. Coincidence?

We ask them to make everything we don’t like illegal, then complain when they trample on someone’s civil liberties. We ask them to stop “redistributing wealth” then complain anytime someone threatens to cut Social Security. We allow corporations to spend money lobbying and buying political ads, then are shocked when they get away with whatever form of malfeasance.

And so in the end our politicians do what exactly we elected them to do and we say “these guys are all douche bags.” But in reality we have met the douche bags, and they are us.

In my opinion there are exactly two things our country needs to do, and neither of them are on the ballot. Neither politician from either party will enact them because both have a vested personal interest in the opposite.

#1. Campaign finance reform. This is the root of all American political evils. The funny part is most research seems to show that campaign spending has a negligible result on the outcome of an election. But politicians think it matters, and as a result we get Republicans who deny the existence of global warming and Democrats who are too afraid to hold teachers to any sort of measurable standard.

Laws like SOPA would never even be dreamed of by a politician who wasn’t getting campaign contributions.

Interestingly we have a bit of a Mexican standoff going on between our parties about this. Neither party wants to give up hundreds of millions of dollars. Piss off corporations and unions too much and fail to enact sweeping change and you might be handing the other party a huge campaign spending advantage. And Citizens United made it clear that we need nothing short of a constitutional amendment to enact real change.

And both parties take donations from major beneficiaries of current campaign spending. Regardless of who wins the popular vote, the real winner in an election year is whoever owns a television station in Ohio.

#2. Giving Americans a good fiscal education. It’s shocking how little the average American understand about economics, despite it being the driving force in the voting booth. Why do high schools not require 4 years of economics classes?

Again, neither party has a real interest in fixing this because neither advocates a sensible fiscal policy. Our deficit is so large that the only way out is clearly a cut in spending and in increase in taxes, and both parties hold one of those sacred and refuse to do the other regardless.

If I ever find myself an idle billionaire, these two, in order, will be the first things I turn my attention toward fixing. I believe that campaign finance reform alone is enough to get our country on the right track.

So that’s why I’m no longer even optimistic enough to feel like it matters anymore. Either way I think we’re looking at a rough twenty years. And don’t even get me started on the shift to post-scarcity economics. I’ll save that for my next long-winded, unedited rant.

Here’s a good example. I used to have a deal with my roommate. She did the outdoor work (mowing, shoveling, etc.) and I did the indoor cleaning. This was back when I was playing poker for a living, a job in which the amount of money I made was directly proportional to the amount of hours I worked.

With poker, let’s say you make an average of $50 per hour. You can always just work an extra hour and make an extra $50. I’m speaking theoretically here, as poker has a good amount of variance, but replace this with any job where overtime is available and you get the picture.

A maid, on the other hand, charges about $20/hr (for a good one through an agency, often less for a lady off Craigslist). So if you can make, $50 working an extra hour, you can use that money to hire a maid for 2.5 hours.

Also, a maid will get more done in 2.5 hours than you will, because they clean professionally. Admittedly cleaning isn’t rocket surgery, but anyone who has hired a maid will tell you, there is some skill to it. Your maid will do a better job than you and do it faster. And you’ll be happier because you probably like whatever it is you do for a living more than you like cleaning.

So really you’re working one hour to save yourself from cleaning for 3 hours, and even still getting a cleaner house than if you did it yourself instead. Your total profit is 2 hours and a few dust bunnies.

I was talking to an older gentleman not long ago and a similar theme came up. He is the old school sort who does everything himself. While I admire that, I made the joke that I come from a long line of men who called the plumber when the pipes broke.

I mentioned my dad, who, for a very long time, worked long hours as a postmaster. His job paid more than a plumber makes as well, so it made financial sense for him to work hard at his job and outsource the plumbing. In fact it really wouldn’t have made much sense for him to do any sort of menial work for himself.

All of this comes, of course, with a few caveats. For one, it probably doesn’t work if you have a job that’s strictly salary and in which working an extra day nets you $0. Again you maybe should outsource just for peace of mind. You can’t take it with you when you go, after all. But doing so won’t be a source of profit.

And it doesn’t work if you would simply do both. My dad, despite working a lot of hours, kept a really clean home. So for him a maid would simply have been a luxury. When I work that many hours my home will get gross as I’ll spend my off days in what medical professionals call a “persistent vegetative state”. But if I’m working a reasonable week, I’ll just spend a few hours cleaning myself. Though you better believe I’m still snagging all of the cheapo ones on Groupon.

Finally, you have to either make more than the people you’re outsourcing to charge, or simply hate the work they do (or suck at doing it) enough that you’d be willing to work more at your job than at theirs. Plumbing fits squarely into that mold for me. Even if I made $10 an hour, I’d rather do almost anything else for 5x as long because there’s a pretty good chance I’d end up with severe water damage from even the simplest job.

Some no-brainers for outsourcing are:

1. Moving. Moving companies work relatively cheap. They’re not that much more expensive than renting a truck and doing it yourself really. They charge you something like $30/hr for 2 people, with the truck included.  Those 2 people can do as much as you and your four friends, who you’re inconveniencing and probably buying pizza for anyway. They’ll box up your stuff and unbox it for you, saving you hours worth of time.

2. Lawn work. You can get a kid to mow your lawn for $10/hr with little effort. Work one or two extra shifts and you can not touch your lawn all summer.

3. Anything brainless that involves phone calls. I use Fancyhands for this. I’ve routinely had them make dozens of calls in the middle of my work day for what amounted to $5. If you’re an executive at a small enough company that doesn’t have the budget for a full-time assistant, you’d be baffled at how much work they’ll get done for you for an insignificant price. and they’re not limited to business tasks either.

4. Home repairs you can do. Home repairs you can’t do yourself are obvious but not really the point here.

I’m still learning on that last one. I’m trying to figure out how to use outsourcing virtual assistants more profitably. I suspect there’s a goldmine there, but I just haven’t figure out exactly how to integrate it into my work/home life yet.

Any others?

First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something.

What baffles me is that what everyone is upset about is the fact that he said “legitimate rape” because it implies there’s a such thing as illegitimate rape.

Really? That’s what we’re pissed about here? It seems like this is clearly just a verbal gaffe. I think we can all give Rep. Akin a break and assume that he isn’t pro-rape, and doesn’t really mean rape is ever “illegitimate”.

What we can’t give him a break on is the fact that he clearly thinks medical science has come to the conclusion, or at least has some evidence to support the idea that women naturally abort pregnancies that come from rape. A claim for which, by the way, a cursory Google search shows there’s no evidence. Not that you really needed to search for that one to know it’s idiotic.

I’m all for having Congressmen who sometimes put their foot in their mouth. It’s makes for good Daily Shows, and shows they’re human. I don’t think I could do as many interviews and public events as one of them does without something coming out wrong every now and then.

But the idea of a Congressman who actually believes in bogus medical science that any 12 year old would laugh at, a guy who can actually vote on health care laws, just offends me as an American. And the fact that the media is focusing entirely on the gaffe rather than the underlying stupidity makes me afraid for my country.