Jason Fried, Co-Founder of wildly successful 37 Signals discusses “Why You Can’t Work At Work”… or why I can’t work at work.  Here’s my favorite tidbit…

… and managers are the biggest problem, because their whole world is built around interruption.  That’s what they do.  Management means interrupting.  ”Hey, what’s going on?”  ”How’s this going?”  ”Let me call a meeting, because that’s what I do all day.  I call meetings.”

Check out 37Signals’ new book REWORK and look out for a review in the next few weeks.

Source: Big Think

why not every other sunday? shouldn’t the celebration of Jesus’ birth be celebrated every sunday? shouldn’t the death and resurrection be something we take to heart when we serve every sunday? why is it that when a lot of us give our time it is centered and focused on a sunday in late march or early april or in late december when every retail outlet in america is excited about Christmas too?

what if you treated next weekend, which is neither Christmas, nor easter, with the same fervency, planning, dedication to excellence as you did your last “Christmas service” or “easter service”? you are reading this, so certainly you had a free moment this week to perhaps put in a little extra planning. what if you treated every guest at your church like you did the ones that showed up on Christmas Eve or easter sunday? i would argue that those that show up on a random weekend in july might appreciate that too. i would argue that it would be more beneficial to your church to focus on all those other sundays when you might actually notice someone new sitting alone instead of noticing the 100 people you last saw an easter ago are back.

i have, of course, made a gross generalization. flame suit on. but what if you showed up at church this sunday and put in the same effort you would on a “special” sunday? what if you made every worship service a “special” one? what if you realized that the God you worship died and rose again not just for sunday, but today, and everyday?… and with that… any given sunday…

go to Yahoo! Finance at 11:30am pst.  look at the center column and the second box down:

“Focus On Retirement
brought to you by Fidelity
10 Steps to Retire a Millionaire
For many, having a million-dollar portfolio in retirement isn’t just a dream — it’s a necessity. Follow these 10 steps to hit that six-figure mark.”

now ignore advice from people who think you only need 100,000 for retirement and wait until i launch my new finance site within the next few weeks.

i used to only recommend AMD chips.  now you’ve crossed the line and crossed in to my personal space.  i’m prouder now than ever to own the macbook core duo running, not one but, TWO intel processors.

great! now that we have proof that you’re a communist, let’s watch some computer!  hulu.com has the presidential debates, the most recent of which is here.  don’t have an hour and a half to watch political finger pointing and need a quicker fix?  google labs has come up with “In Quotes” which you can go to by clicking here.  basically it’s a search tool that compares quotes from both presidential candidates on selected issues.  once you’ve hit the “spin” to rotate quotes a couple of times, you may come to the same conclusion as i did.  both candidates, in their own way, sound ridiculous in quotes.

speaking of spin, just yesterday i read an AP headline that read “mccain linked to group in iran-contra affair“, while the article itself ended inconclusively.  i want my 5 minutes back, pete yost.  you should be ashamed of using your headline spin to title something most readers won’t sit through.  to be fair, one of my daily reads did their fair share of headline spin tying obama to a left-wing extremist.  i suggest avoiding some of the smear going around, but i’d also suggest heading over to factcheck.org and doing some research before making any firm conclusions.

sounds like a lot of work, huh? jobama or mcfey?!?  that’s ok, you can let stereotypes and your demographics decide for you.  are you from a blue state, and want to be hip and fit in with everyone else?  love a dreamer with charisma that looks cool smoking, even though some may think him the anti-christ?  vote obama.  pardon my cynicism, but i’ve not heard an informed argument of why i should vote for obama that isn’t based of the fact that he is not mcstain or gdubya.  from a red state or want to be cool by not thinking what the cool kids think?  love an old-school guy with maverick ways hocking inappropriate remarks.. or fear excommunication from your church for voting democrat?  vote mccain.  oh, by the way… others think him the anti-christ too.  same principal applies: voting for mccain because he’s NOT obama or because the bible belt is mostly republican, probably not the best reasoning for your vote.

so you know what… don’t vote…

… in California, october 20th is the deadline to register to vote. if you’re not going to vote… you’re lame. granted, if you’re an american citizen it is also YOUR RIGHT NOT TO VOTE.  exercising that right, however, tells me you don’t care, and again, that you’re lame.  so don’t vote.   unfortunately, this election season we may be picking the lesser of two evils, but there are other things on the ticket besides the president, even if you’re abstaining.  seriously, if THAT guy gets elected, i’m going to cry.

yahoo! finance… you’ve ruined the last good thing on your piece of crap site. your so called “expert opinions” are a bunch of recycled articles from a nonsensical blabber mouth by the name of orman… and a guy who thinks he knows everything about finance and making money when all he did was sell a book telling people how to get rich quick so that he himself could build a get rich quick franchise based on the books. what was his name again… kiyosaki? wait… no… kiyoSUCKY.

y! f, i knew you guys were stupid when you took the link to this column off of the front page last year. you must have gotten a ton of hate email since it went back up a week later. since then you’ve added even more unexpert experts to your list of pundits so that you can throw out even more litter on the information superhighway. i will be following peter weber and harold maass over to theweek.com for their individual articles and i am now in search of a new morning business summary. any suggestions?

despite the major market indices being more or less at the same level they were at last weekend, it was an insane week on wall street, leaving only two independent U.S. based bulge bracket investment banks standing. or… slouching. with lehman and ml falling this week to bankruptcy and a takeover and AIG taking a super-sized loan from bailouts ‘r us (read: the fed) you might have thought the worst was over.  you’d especially think that after the s&p jumped 4% after the announcement. but really the government has been putting spongebob band-aids over problems that equate to me taking a chainsaw to your arm.

shortly before i left the office on thursday i heard my COO step out of her office to exclaim “cox is speaking to congress! wsj.com newsflash!” when the british had just banned short-selling for the rest of the year, and your firm runs short and market-neutral hedge funds you can tell this means it’s going to be a LONG friday.

well, i call shenanigans! on principal i don’t personally short. it just feels like bad juju, but short seller’s have their place in the market.  if one of the missions of the SEC is to maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets i’m really not sure limiting market participants is “fair”, that you can call any trading done this week “orderly”, or consider your actions as moving towards “efficient”.  instead you alienate market participants that help bring RATIONAL valuations to the market.  shorting may not prevent a stock bubble, but sure as hell helps to keep prices sane.

FDR had “The New Deal”. secretary Paulson & Co have given us “The Raw Deal”. the market irrationally jumped friday morning on news that the government was planning to cover all the bad debt that banks had on their books.  wait, that sounds vaguely familiar.  kind of like this again, except it doesn’t just give banks the power to disguise their balance sheets for periods when they need to report… it gives banks the power to make the Fed’s balance sheet permanently look rather lehman-esque.

thanks a lot.  thanks to all the greedy bastard mortgage brokers who gave jumbo loans to people with no income and the investment banks that securitized and bought what was essentially investment-grade rated junk debt.  thanks to all you financially irresponsible americans for making it harder for EVERYONE ELSE to get a mortgage, or even a car loan.  and thank you america for NOT teaching them a lesson. laissez unfaire.

so who really owns AIG now?  YOU DO!!! (if you’re an american taxpayer).  we all do.  your uncle sam just took your money and bought stocks, or should i say, tried to catch a falling knife.  in the investment world we call these folks bagholders.  the ones that hold on to a stock that is surely headed under. so victoria, you are now a bag lady.  by the way, had AIG been bailed out over the weekend it would have only cost us $40 billion.  $20 Wonder Bread.  you’d probably pay $20 for a loaf of bread if you were dying from hunger… at $40 i’d probably just let myself starve.

in the process, treasury secretary Paulson ousted the current AIG CEO and put in his place former Allstate chief Liddy, who happens to be on the board at GS.  wait, didn’t Paulson come from Goldman Sachs?  i thought the connection purchasing was only done in China.  American International Group:  Comrad Paulson, surely you and your schemers could’ve come up with something less suspicious than “American International”.

and if you want a true sign of the times?  on tuesday the Reserve Primary Fund (not to be confused with the federal reserve), the nation’s oldest money market fund (MMF), “broke the buck”.  NUCKING FUTS!!! if you’re not familiar with money market instruments, they are touted as “cash equivalents” and are regulated under Rule 2a-7 to invest only in the highest quality short-term debt with the goal of preserving a share price of $1.00 and paying the rest out in interest.  the Reserve Primary Fund is priced today at $0.97.  this is only the second time in history a MMF has broken the buck, and only the first time a retail MMF.  to make matters worse, two other Reserve funds broke the buck as well.

so what happened?  i hope to answer that and more.  tomorrow i will cover how all this affects you and where you should put your money… i’ve been meaning to write about rollover IRA’s since so many of you have asked me in the past year.  friday i will revisit how our newly communist government made an example out of lehman bros. and recap the tumultuous week.  pretty much we all got screwed and we all got screwed a long time ago.  if you can’t understand this chart then you’re probably not alone.  the basic problem IS that most people can’t understand that chart and that is part of the financial engineering that is going on to mask how bad things really are.

our money is now stuck in a failing insurance firm whose balance sheet should be called an IMbalanced sheet.  this is on top of the bailout of Fannie and Freddie earlier this month where THE AMERICAN TAXPAYERS bought out mortgages, up to 40% of whom are set to default.  thanks a lot uncle sam.  i used to think you were my rich uncle.  now you’re just my lunatic uncle who we don’t even see at thanksgiving.  the fed launched a campaign to teach financial literacy on monday.  what a bunch of hypocrites.  your lose regulations got us here in the first place.  up yours, uncle sam, you commie bastard.

expert tip: to lose an extra 1.5 to 2lbs look down at the lovely present you’ve left your friend john. when you realized the $40+ you just spent on a steak is lying in a toilet you’re sure to yak again.  and in my case one more time after that.  but that’s only 2 to 3lbs. you say?  don’t worry.  you’ll spend the next 24-48 hours either diarrhea-ing it out or sweating it out from your awesomely high fever.

i spent the last 40 hours only leaving bed for a maximum of 15 minutes.  you feel rather lost when you go to bed on wednesday and wake up on friday.  my conclusion was that nothing has really happened.  cnn.com still stands for Crappy News Network.  my portfolio lost a few hundred bucks.  nothing new there.  oh, except i had a gift waiting for me from the gilt groupe when i woke up.  let me know if you want a personal invitation to gilt!

chrysler is a case study in what happens when trends are bucked.  carried by their light truck and suv sales and the ubiquitous dodge caravan, chrysler managed to trudge through a german invasion and a buyout… but with fuel prices soaring and everyone turning green they’ve certainly suffered.  through the years they’ve sought to regain market share by going retro, thinking a blast from the past would ignite memories in the minds of americans and help auto sales.  and while i love the challenger r/t i wouldn’t be caught dead in a pt cruiser.  i took the upgrade the agent offered me milliseconds after he uttered “retro hearst”…  for a dodge avenger.

my first impression of the avenger : boat.  the awkward pairing of a hotrod-esque choptop roofline and enough ground clearance to attack Moab makes for the driving dynamics of a Princess Cruiseliner.  pair the marshmellow-like handling with an anemic 2.4L I4 and you’re completely out of touch with the road.  it’s like using sandpaper on the john.  it does the job, but it’s so unnecessarily painful.  173hp doesn’t help as much when it’s pulling 3500lbs.

build quality: non-existent.  i could see the plastic leftovers from the molds on the instrument cluster surround.  mind you, this is a $21k car and not a revell model car.  the odd dodge placed on the right side under the vent reminds you that you’re cruising in (lack-of-)style.  dodge, baby.

as a 31″ waisted yuppie twenty-something, it becomes clear you are not the target market for this car.  if this offends you, i’m sorry.  well, not really sorry, because it should at least invoke a chuckle to anyone who lives on the two coasts.  glutinous americans, you either infuriate the world to the point of being bombed or are the laughing stock of the universe.   i guess what i’m trying to say is i feel kind of bad for saying this car is BUILT FOR FAT AMERICANS (i mean obese, but fat sounds easier to swallow).  i was swimming in the seats, as were all of my rear seat passengers who also were wise to the fact that “it’s for fat americans”.

so we played q&a on the way to bubble tea.  q/pistevo: “why are the buttons on the radio so big?” a/cw: “fat americans have fat fingers”.  q/pistevo: “what is that compartment?” a/cw: [sticks his hand in] “it cools your sodas for when you’ve drunk all of your big gulp”.  q/sw: “why is your turn signal clicker so loud?”  a/jc: “because fat americans forget to turn off their blinkers”.  in the meanwhile ac, sw, and jc are commenting on the fact that ac is sprawled out as the middle passenger in the rear seat as if she’s on a huge couch… with room to spare.

dear cerebus, i see that you are busy unloading an american icon from your portfolio.  that american icon was probably one of the most awesome cars your lousy investment has ever made and i hate to tell you this but you bought a piece of poo. and no matter how hard you try to polish this turd of an automaker… their products are still just that.  dodge avenger sxt : shiny [xpletive] turd.