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American Politics

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re ‘exotic, different.’ Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim. Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you’re a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable. Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you’re well grounded.

If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience. If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian. If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society. If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant , you’re very responsible.

If your wife is a Harvard graduate laywer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America’s. If you’re husband is nicknamed ‘First Dude’, with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

Wise financial advice

Warren Buffet always has advice on finances.  Considering his personal net worth, I think it’s probably a good idea to heed it.

Buy American. I Am.
By WARREN E. BUFFETT

THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary. So … I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities. Why? A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now. Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.
A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price. Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. You might think it would have been impossible for an investor to lose money during a century marked by such an extraordinary gain. But some investors did. The hapless ones bought stocks only when they felt comfort in doing so and then proceeded to sell when the headlines made them queasy.
Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts. Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”
I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities.

Project Management Jokes

Project Planning

  • A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected – a well planned project only twice as long as expected.
  • The more you plan the luckier you get.
  • It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It cannot be done in one month by impregnating nine women.
  • If you don’t plan, it doesn’t work. If you do plan, it doesn’t work either. Why plan!
  • The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.

Project Team

  • Everyone asks for a strong project manager – when they get them they don’t want them.
  • If you’re 6 months late on a milestone due next week but really believe you can make it, you’re a project manager.
  • Managing IT people is like herding cats.
  • The person who says it will take the longest and cost the most is the only one with a clue how to do the job.

Project Stakeholders

  • A project is one small step for the project sponsor, one giant leap for the project manager.
  • Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.

Project Communication

  • The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale.
  • Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.
  • Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient is the correct one.
  • I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
  • What is not on paper has not been said.
  • A user will tell you anything you ask about, but nothing more.
  • What you don’t know hurts you.
  • A problem shared is a buck passed.

Measurement and Control

  • Good control reveals problems early – which only means you’ll have longer to worry about them.
  • For a project manager overruns are as certain as death and taxes.
  • Quantitative project management is for predicting cost and schedule overruns well in advance.
  • No project has ever finished on time, within budget, to requirement – yours won’t be the first to.
  • Warning: dates in a calendar are closer than they appear to be.

Timing

  • You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.
  • The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.
  • Overtime is a figment of the naïve project manager’s imagination.
  • The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.
  • Some projects finish on time in spite of project management best practices.
  • The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of making a date is forgotten.


Project Implementation

  • If you don’t know how to do a task, start it, then ten people who know less than you will tell you how to do it.
  • If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven’t understood the plan.
  • There is no such thing as scope creep, only scope gallop.
  • Activity is not achievement.
  • The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situatee.
  • A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.

Change Management

  • Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.
  • Feather and down are padding, changes and contingencies will be real events.
  • A change freeze is like the abominable snowman: it is a myth and would anyway melt when heat is applied.

Delivering Results

  • Fast – cheap – good – you can have any two.
  • There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again.
  • If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.

Project Reports

  • If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.
  • When the weight of the project paperwork equals the weight of the project itself, the project can be considered complete.

(as originally found on http://www.1000advices.com/guru/project_mgmt_50rules.html)

Financial Meltdown – some levity

What’s the difference between a broker and a medium pizza?
The medium pizza can still feed a family of four!

A man walks into a bank and tells the manager that he wants to buy a small business.
The manager says “That’s easy.   Just buy a big business and wait.”

Government Job

A guy goes to the Post Office to apply for a job.

The interviewer asks him, “Have you been in the service?”
“Yes,” he says. “I was in the armed forces for three years”
The interviewer says, “That will give you extra points toward employment” and then asks, “Are you disabled in any way?

The guy says, “Yes, 100%. A mortar round exploded near me and blew my testicles off.”
The interviewer tells the guy, ” O.K. I can hire you right now. The hours are from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. You can start tomorrow. Come in at 10:00A.M. ”

The guy is puzzled and says, “If the hours are from 8:00 A.M.to 4:00 P.M., then why do you want me to come in at 10:00 A.M.?”
“This is a government job” the interviewer says.” For the first two hours we stand around scratching our balls. No point in you coming in for that.”

Who needs a BMW?

A horse and a chicken are playing in a meadow. The horse falls into a mud hole and is sinking. He calls to the chicken to go and get the farmer to help pull him out to safety.

The chicken runs to the farm but the farmer can’t be found.  So he drives the farmer’s BMW back to the mud hole and ties some rope around the bumper.  He then throws the other end of the rope to his friend, the horse, and drives the car forward saving him from sinking!

A few days later, the chicken and horse were playing in the meadow again and the chicken fell into the mud hole. The chicken yelled to the horse to go and get some help from the farmer.

The horse said, “I think I can stand over the hole!” So he stretched over the width of the hole and said, “Grab for my penis and pull yourself up.” And the chicken did and pulled himself to safety.

The moral of the story: If you’re hung like a horse, you don’t need a BMW to pick up chicks.

The cure

After about four minutes in the examination room with a new, younger doctor, Mrs Reid burst out, screaming as she ran down the hall.

An older doctor stopped her and asked what the problem was and she told him her story. After listening, he had her sit down and relax in a room.

The older doctor marched down the hallway to where the young doctor was writing on his clipboard.

“What’s the matter with you?” the older doctor demanded. “Mrs. Reid is 62 years old, has four grown children and seven grandchildren -and you told her she was pregnant?”

The younger doctor continued writing and without looking up said, “Does she still have the hiccups?”

What Men Want

A tall well-built woman with good
reputation, who can cook frogs
legs, who appreciates a good fuc-
schia garden, classical music and tal-
king without getting too serious.

Oh, wait, you misread it…

please only read lines 1, 3 and 5

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