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!

• 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?

How I did my admittedly very rough math:

• The Federal budget is about 3 trillion dollars.
• Most of it is transfer payments (grants to states, Social Security, Medicare etc.) or salaries of employees.
• I’m assuming that 2/3′s is salaries of employees and contractors.
• Ten percent of 2 trillion is 200 billion.
• Yes I’m including the military.
• Yes I’m including direct and indirect contractors.
• Yes I know this would take a lot of money out of the economy.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

Excellent!

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.

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.

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.