Make me money and make me laugh

Ideas to combat obesity

2009-04-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

1) Make the dessert aisles at the market really thin. This way if you're fat as holy hell, you'll have to slim down before sucking down more ice cream.

2) Make all fast food free. But install exercise equipment. You can have a mega super quadruple whopper, but it'll cost you 45 minutes on the treadmill.

3) Post a large photo of a sumo on all menus to inspire people to eat carrots.

What're your ideas??

New bubbles

2009-04-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

Every time a bubble bursts, the goverment is desperate to create a new one.

The .com bubble was replaced by the housing bubble. The housing bubble has been replaced by the treasury bubble.

"Keeping people in their houses" means that housing prices won't reach fair market prices. Irresponsible people are subsized to keep them in their houses, and these subsidies are making houses artificially expensive, which keeps responsible people like me from being able to afford them.

If only I had been irresponsible enough to rack up huge amounts of home equity debt, I would be living really well right now.

Bailing out who?

2009-04-09T21:14:00.001-07:00

Since I'm one of 300 million or so Americans, the federal government has spend over $100,000 on my behalf in bailouts. How much of that money have I received directly, or indirectly? Zero. Zilch. Not a single penny.

But what have I received? Tax increases. (I live in California.)

So it seems that I'm paying more taxes to subsize greedy and irresponsible people.

I am financially responsible. I have nothing that I cannot afford and I have no debts of any kind.

What I have learned in the last two years is that the next time I have a chance, I should be as irresponsible as I can. I should buy far more house that I can afford. I should rack up credit card debt buying toys. Why shouldn't I? The government has decided that it's a good thing to keep fools in their houses and to provide me with debt relief. How will the goverment pay for me? By taxing other people who were stupid enough to be responsible, of course. Stupid responsible people.

Immoral taxes

2009-04-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

Money is forceably taken from me by the goverment in the form of taxes and spent on things that I believe are morally reprehensible.

Government support for abortion means that money is taken from me by force and is used to kill people. And there is nothing I can do about it. My choices are

1) Stop paying taxes, but then the goverment will throw me in jail for following my conscience by not supporting its evil actions

2) Allow the goverment to steal money from me to kill people on my behalf

There was a reason for the Boston Tea Party and if politicians don't wake up to what they're doing to us Americans, there will be another one. It may not come in my life time, but it will come.

Personal responsibility

2009-04-07T21:51:00.001-07:00

I heard a woman on the news telling the interviewer that she thought that a local animal was a good cause and that she woudn't mind people paying a touch more taxes for this cause and to hire someone to take care of tasks that present funding wouldn't allow.

Now I didn't mind the cause; in fact, it seemed like a good idea. What's bothersome is her thinking are the following things:

1) Why should she advocate hiring someone else?

2) Why should she want the power of goverment to compel other people to pay for her cause?

If she believes in this cause enough, why not organize a bake sale, car wash, auction, etc... to raise money? I might even contribute cash to her cause. Why did she instead absolve herself of responsibilty by asking other people to pay to hire someone to do something she wanted?

This is one things that's wrong with people here in California. They have no sense of personal responsibility, they want to compel others to pay for their causes, and they want to bend the power of goverment to their advantage.

Obama & Bush

2009-04-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

So it seems that Obama has adopted many of the military policies of George Bush. When an enemy and a friend of the left do/say the same thing, doesn't it suggest that what they do are the right things?

Is it possible than when someone becomes president, they have access to more information than the rest of us, and that this information suggests that what the current and previous president have done vis-a-vis Afghanistan and Iraq are the correct things to do?

Maybe both Bush and Obama know what they're doing. Sorry to those on the left who figured Bush was an idiot/moron/fool/immoral idealog.

Obama & spending

2009-04-07T21:43:00.001-07:00

Obama has spent and promised spending more money in his few days in office than all other presidents combined, and noone seems to care.

Steve Ballmer & Google

2009-04-06T21:09:00.000-07:00

Steve Ballmer said recently that one advantage of *not* being the dominant player in search is that Microsoft can experiment more than Google. This may be true but it makes very little sense to consider it a positive thing.

Google has found a formula that works. If you're Coca Cola and sell the most popular beverages on the planet, are you really going to experiment with your formulas? If you're Michaelangelo, are you really going to consider taking up singing instead of painting and sculpting just cuz it might make you more popular, or are you going to stick with what you know works?

Google's website has changed very little over the years and Ballmer has expressed wonder that Google thinks search sites will remain the same extremely simple sites in the future.

For some reason Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to stick huge piles of stuff into everything. I can load Google's site, do a search, and go to what I'm looking for, all long before Microsoft's monstrosity has even finished loading. I love that!

T.P. Stainer, Esq.

2009-04-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

Great name for a lawyer:

Terrence Pierre Stainer, Esq.

The name's TP, TP Stainer.

Why is spending so popular?

2009-04-06T20:54:00.000-07:00

Why is a politician's popularity judged by how much spending he/she brings to his/her district? Why is a politician's popularity proportional to the amount of pork barrel spending he/she sponsors?

People grumble about pork barrel spending and know that long-term it will be extremely destructive to our country, but amazingly they keep voting for the fools who are responsible for the stuff.

I hope that one day the American public will realize a far better system is for a politician's popularity to be proportional to the amount of wasteful spending, bureaucracy, and taxes he/she cuts. Hopefully one day politicians will campaign based on how much they reduced the size and scope of the government, not on how much they plan to increase it.

Metaphors for taking a dump

2009-04-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

Blasting a log.

Firing out a log.

I just made someone at the sanitation department have a really bad day.

Pardon me while I destroy the oxygen supply in here.

Don't light a match!

I want flipping profits

2008-02-29T17:39:00.000-08:00

Hey, let's all become real estate investors! Let's flip a flipped property to a flipper for a flipping flippy profit!!

Now, how many bad puns can you count in that line?

An argument against reinvesting dividends

2008-02-18T19:52:00.001-08:00

I do my own taxes partly to save money and, more importantly, for the chance to soberly review every transaction I made during the year. I have noticed something interesting that doesn't seem to be talked about much concerning the reinvestment of dividends.

To me reinvesting dividends only makes sense if the trading price of a stock at the time of the dividend is considerably less than its intrinsic value; that is, if reinvested dividends will be purchasing shares at a good price. If that's the case, why would I want to increase my holdings in a company the amount of a small dividend? If the stock is that much of a bargain, I'd rather pile in with new money.

If the price of a stock has risen to its intrinsic value or considerably above, why would I purchase more shares through a dividend if I wouldn't buy the shares with new money? In other words, why would I overpay for a stock through dividends just because I'm using "free" money?

Isn't it better to use dividends for better, newer ideas instead of potentially overpaying for old ideas?

Here's another aspect of reinvesting dividends that has irked me. Through my own folly I have bought stock, seen the prices rise, reinvested dividends, and then sold all the shares later for a loss, including shares bought with reinvested dividends. Shame on me for losing my capital through my own foolishness, double shame on me for paying too much for shares with reinvested dividends, and triple shame on me for losing my portion of the company's earnings through poor buying and selling decisions.

I would have been better served to have bought the shares I wanted, KEPT (!!) the profits of the company that were due me, used that money wisely, and also to have chosen a different stock!

Here's one more wrinkle: At the time of sale, shares that were purchased through dividend reinvestment in the last year of ownership will be taxed at the higher short term rate whereas older shares will be taxed at the lower long term capital gains rate. It could be a better use of your dividends to invest them in another long term investment. And it makes doing your taxes by hand a great deal easier.

I have learned these principles through the courses of hard knocks and I believe they are sound. Your thoughts?

I also resolve to do a better job of picking stocks :)

Butt gas filters

2008-02-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

I think underwear should be called "Butt Gas Filters".

That gets across their function more clearly than "underwear" and it also is more fun to ask your spouse to hand you a pair of BGFs than to ask for a pair of underwear.

Another fun phrase:
Are you dressed yet = "Are your butt gas filters properly attached and engaged for maximum filtration?"

Fat transplant surgery

2008-02-13T16:04:00.001-08:00

Here's one way to help with world hunger.....just redistribute the fat!!

America is full of fat people, and we have liposuction, so why not invent "reverse liposuction"? Here's how it would work.

Send someone like me into a donut shop to fill up on maple sour cream donuts (hey, I KNOW you want that job too!!), have them head over to a liposuction clinic every so often, suck out some flab, then ship the flab to a 3rd world country, and install the fat in someone who's starving! That way people here can continue to eat junk food, get paid for it, have the satisfaction of eating for someone else, get paid to painlessly lose weight periodically (maybe there's a charitable tax donation lurking around here), and someone starving can have a few extra pounds installed!

This is an even better concept that putting a fitness center right next to a donut shop. And you know there are people who would love this job.

Fat people on a stick

2008-02-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

Another business idea:

How about hiring sumos/fat people to jump up and down on broken sidewalks and cracked streets instead of using loud jackhammers? They could get the job done just as well and the exercise would be good for their health. I might even sign up myself!

Diversification or, di-worse-ification

2008-02-11T21:12:00.001-08:00

Why would a serious investor who is interested in putting serious time and thought into stock picking diversify (di-worse-ify)? Consider the following.

If you want your portfolio to appreciate by 20% per year, how hard do you think it is to pick a single stock that will appreciate by 20% per year?

Now, how much harder do you think it is to pick, say, 10, 20, 50, or 100 stocks that will EACH appreciate by 20% per year? I'd say that's DAMN HARD, much harder than putting all your efforts into picking just one or two stocks that will appreciate by 20% annually.

Now, if you're going to pick 10 stocks, you can't give each one as much attention as you can give to, say, 2 stocks, so you're probably going to make more mistakes than you would if you picked fewer stocks. That means that in order to get your portfolio to appreciate by 20% annually, you need to be able to pick many stocks that will, on average, appreciate by MORE than 20% in order to make up for the shortfall by your losers. Now that's even harder than picking just one great stock!

But mutual funds do it all the time, diversifiying all day long into 50 or 100 stocks. How can mutual fund managers honestly think that they can do their due diligence on 100 stocks, each of which ought to do better than their target rate of return, when it's hard enough to do it on 1 or 2 stocks? Is it any wonder than the VAST majority of mutual funds far underperform simple market index funds?

Keep it simple, Slick, and focus on what you know, concentrate your efforts on finding the best assets you can find, and hold those assets for long enough to reap huge rewards.

The joys of being fat....and laughing about it

2008-02-07T18:56:00.001-08:00

Laughing is good for the soul and the body, right? So ponder these....

Do fat people have to rotate their tires more often? Or have to change their shocks more often?

Idea for a business: Hire a bunch of sumos/fat people to repeatedly jump into a swimming pool to drain it. This would be more fun than waiting a day for the water to go down the drain and the splashing might clean the house's windows too!

Are there extra wide caskets for fat people? Or do they suck the gut out before burial? I've yet to see a good answer to this one....