A thought experiment on various November matchups…
Most Happy with Either: McCain vs. Obama
Least Happy with Either: Huckabee vs. Clinton
Most Lopsided Democratic Victory: Paul vs. Obama
Most Lopsided Republican Victory: McCain vs. Clinton
Your picks?
For a long while things weren’t going well in Iraq, and seemingly getting worse. We would take over an area, stabilize it, but shortly after moving to the next area, find it fall back into disarray.
We had a troop “surge.” Things got better. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths falls each month by 45%. It’s fallen 70% in Baghdad. Sunni’s are starting to turn against al-Qaeda in Iraq. — apparently cutting the heads & hands off children for smoking didn’t go over well. Car bombing & suicide attacks are down. And so on.
Things are slowly getting better.
So what do you next?
Naturally, go back to the plan that didn’t work & demand reduced troop levels.
*sigh*
With the recent fuss about the Unabombers personal effects, I heard on the radio about an online quiz testing to see if people could tell the difference between Al Gore and the Unabomber:
http://www.crm114.com/algore/quiz.html
I scored a 33%. What’d you get?
Hearing that Exxon earned near record profits of 10.5 billion, I wasn’t sure of what to make of the news. In general, I think it’s great when companies — big or small — reach that kind of success. (I.e., I’m the kind of guy who likes Walmart, not hates it.)
On the hand, we’re in a state of war. Americans have been suffering through higher gas prices through much of the War on Terror. Is Exxon taking advantage of the situation to shake down the American consumer for a few more bucks at the pump?
Which is it?
I realized what I wanted to know was how their profit translated into terms that affect the average consumer. How does it affect prices at the pump?
The math is obvious, but how many gallons of gas are sold in America? Quite frankly, I had no idea, so I didn’t know if 10B in profit works out to something like 1/10 cent per gallon (in which case, nice job Exxon) or is it something like $1 per gallon (in which, Rex Tillerson and the rest need to be publicly drawn and quartered for treason. It’d be just like the end of Braveheart, only instead of screaming “Freedom”, Rex would yell “Petroleuuuuuum!”).
Before going further, any guesses? How many gallons of gasoline does American consume per day?
Answer after the jump.
(more…)
Like most rich people, it turns out that Al Gore does not live a very green lifestyle. Which boils down to one of chief complaints with a lot of Democratic politicians: The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do hypocrisy.
True, a lot of Republican politicians indulge in environmentally unfriendly lives as well, but then again, in most cases they don’t profess to, let along make a movie exalting such activities & promoting themselves as such. As Malcom X said, “I have more respect for a man who lets me know where stands — even if he’s wrong — than one who comes up smelling like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”
Blatenly stolen from Jimmy:
With a wave of the hand, 100,000 protestors as if they never existed.
This does make wonder, however. Google has said they don’t hand-tune their results and rely exclusively on algorithms, hence the persistance of google-bombs like miserable failure, Jew, and waffles.
If that is the case, surely some google bombs could be arrange by the rest of world to leak things through to the people of China?
Dave, like many others, is annoyed that firms related to connected to Bush are getting Katrnia deals:
So what’s not mentioned in either of those articles?
That, J. M. Bernhard, Jr., CEO of the Shaw Group is Chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party.
Bias? You be the judge.
A coworker lent me the CD versions of Getting Things Done Fast. Listening to the CDs is fun in that it’s a lot like having David Allen personally cheer you.
There isn’t much new there that isn’t in his book, but having read the book sometime ago, it was a great refresher. There’s a lot of good stuff in the GTD methodology and it’s unlikely you’ll incorporate it all in your first fell swoop. (I know I didn’t.) It’s a bit like the Perl of time-management. You can learn as you go, it makes you more efficient, it’s practical and people look at you a little crazy when you tell them how much you love it.
Three big things I got out of this go round:
However, after only a few days of giving it a go, I’m convinced. I spent this weekend getting an inbox for home, organizing the various pieces of paper, receipts, books lying around my apartment. Aside from having a cleaner house, I’m also better organized, meaning more efficient, meaning I have more unstructured time.
2) There’s a big temptation & natural tendency to combine collection & processing. E.g., in a meeting, I would attempt to place next actions on my next action list as they came up, etc. Inefficient, as it requires bouncing around multiple contexts, hunting for the appropriate one, etc. These days, I just make a quick note in my spiral notebook and move on. Some simple notation (a ! before to call attention to action items, etc.), helps when reviewing notes for collection at the end of the day.
I believe Allen says you can throw your notes away at that point, but I’m a little too paranoid for that.
3) Like notes in a meeting, I’ve taken to make it a point to quickly jot down any random thought. From the trivial to the big, it’s quickly out of my head, and in written form, waiting to be collected and process latter in the day.
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