SWCAMBORNE

Being in the present is difficult with your cell phone constantly urging you to be somewhere else.  Now someone in New York has invented an idea that gives answering your phone during a shared meal consequences.

The Phone Stack

Basically when you sit down you put your phone in the stack.  The first person to pick up their phone from the stack during dinner picks up the check.

Read the article

Good Idea!

The annual federal deficit is lingering at about a trillion dollars.  Yes that is Trillion with a “T”. I have a way to solve a big part of this problem.

• Cut the pay and benefits of all federal employees about 10%.
• This would save the federal govt. about 200 billion a year. (see the math below the fold)
• It would also signal that we are serious about cutting the size of government.
• The cut could be progressive.  About 25% for the best paid and 5% for the lowest paid federal workers.

Government workers are by all accounts better paid than those in the the private sector and have higher benefits and much higher job security.  This change would have the effect of getting their pay back in line with the private sector and would solve a substantial part of the deficit issue.

How popular would this idea be with the voters? the media?  Could it be a strategy for winning the presidency?

Read the rest of this entry »

In The Rational Optimist Matt Ridley make a terrific case that what make human’s special is our propensity to share, specialize and trade.  As a result of this propensity we have created a virtual shared brain that has allowed us to build a world of freedom and prosperity for humans that was inconceivable even two hundred years ago.

The book is easy to read and is chock full of quotes and ideas that will cause latter day Malthusians to cringe.

Examples:

• It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.
• The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.
• Never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
• There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference – their collective brains.
• The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation.
• The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero.
• The lesson of the last two centuries is that liberty and welfare march hand in hand with prosperity and trade.
• Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, ‘You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?’
• Indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last.
• The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity.
• I Highly recommend this book!

Last Thursday on Thanksgiving we had a traditional sit down Thanksgiving Dinner with the extended family and it was wonderful.  And then on Saturday we had a non-traditional, gourmet, small bites Thanksgiving celebration courtesy of Lillian and Rebecca.

Lillian and Mary Ann

It was amazingly good.  I only took a few pictures because I was to busy eating, drinking and grousing about how badly USC was beating UCLA (final 50 – 0).

Food

The food was super and the small bite part of it made it possible to taste everything without getting stuffed.

Album Here

Rebecca and Nurit

There is an opportunity here for rethinking Holiday food away from quantity and towards superb taste.  And I think the small bites idea makes it possible.  For instance Lillian made a wonderful Pumpkin Bean Soup but instead of serving bowls of it, she served it in stemmed wine glasses.  It was just a taste that was easy to hold and it was amazingly delicious.  I them still had an appetite for the rest of the meal

There is talk about taxing financial transactions as a way to punish those in the finance business and to raise revenue.  Without taking sides I discovered today that this idea has been tried before with varying results.  I was looking through a baggie of 1930′s stamps that I bought at a yard sale and came across this one:

It turns out that from about 1909 to about 1930 New York State did charge brokers a stock transfer tax.  There was also one in the 1960′s and for some of that period the Federal Government also had a transfer tax.

I’m not sure what the rates were in the past but there is no question that if you make something more expensive by taxing it you will have less of it.  Financial transactions would move to where they were treated better, maybe Singapore or Belgrade.  Is this the result we want? Here is a link to an article that strongly opposes the transaction tax.  And another one on the pro side.  I’ll have to think about this one some more.

Way cool video of blasting a dam on the White Salmon River in Washington State.

Explosive Breach of Condit Dam from Andy Maser on Vimeo.

It appears that there is a wonderful remediation opportunity here and in the hundreds of other small dams that are going to be taken out in the next few decades.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

This skycap at the Atlanta Airport built a cup holder onto his baggage cart.

Excellent!

Nobody visits Maryhill Henge

and even less people go to Carhenge.

So few in fact that according to this story in a local (northwestern Nebraska) newspaper Carhenge is for sale.  Why not move Carhenge to Maryhill and build the critical mass of both.  I imagine a blend of Area 51 and Storm King Art Center.

One of the Passover rituals is to dip parsley in salt water.  I’m not sure why.

At every Seder I have ever been to the salt water was made at the home.  It is easy to do but sometimes it is done wrong.  Usually not enough salt.  My suggestion is to sell premixed salt water in a beautiful bottle with a connection to Israel.  It could be purified Red Sea or Dead Sea water.

A test market could be done by having a youth group like United Synagogue Youth try to sell it in one area.  The unique selling proposition is: Convenience, Purity, Connection to Israel and Tradition.

The Honey for Rosh Hashanah promotion from Temple Or Hadesh in Memphis shows how a small company could get this started by private labeling for Temple gift shops.

At Rosh Hashanah to celebrate and/or insure a sweet new year in our Jewish tradition we dip apples into honey and say a blessing.  This year our friend David Julian and his family  in Tennessee sent us a beautiful gift of honey for the new year.  He is who the Rabbi/Cantor of a new congregation, Or Chadesh, in Memphis.

It is an excellent gift as a way to stay connected to old friends and as a fund raiser for Jewish organizations.  It has given me a new idea for my old Tears of Affliction Passover product idea.