Battery Stations Instead of Gas Stations?

Imagine if instead of pulling into a gas station, you pulled into a battery station that quickly swapped out your nearly empty battery for a fully charged one?

Those stations are being created now in Israel, with plans in place for Denmark, Australia, California, Hawaii and Ontario, Canada. The initial demonstration proof-of-concept took place in Japan.

With the already available lithium-ion batteries, fully electric cars (or perhaps with a range-boosting generator added a la the Chevy Volt) would be practical, affordable, and much less polluting than a traditional car powered by an endless series of little gas explosions.

I love that solution. Cars give people freedom impossible to match using mass transit, even at mammoth cost. And even though it's unclear how manmade and controllable global warming is, certainly air quality would be improved and the world would be freed from having its behavior dictated by oil-producing countries such as Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia.

For more on this, see the report in today's Economist. And here's a link to a video that explains how the Israeli company, A Better Place, is planning to implement the idea.

The World's Shortest Course in Time Management

Write a personal mission statement. That helps you decide what prioritize.

My personal mission statement is "Make as big a difference as possible regarding career advice, education advice, men's issues, gifted kids, exposing higher education as America's most overrated product, and encouraging an honest national conversation about race."

Have a time-conscious voice on your shoulder. I'm always asking myself, "Is this a good use of my time?" and "Am I doing this in the most time-effective way?"

Avoid time sucks. For example, could you get out of attending that meeting, especially a standing meeting? Also, of course, watch for after-work time sucks: TV watching, golf, trekking to a relative's bar mitzvah.

Delegate. It's often worth delegating even if the task won't be done as well. That frees you up to do other more profitable or pleasurable activities.

Hire a personal assistant. Even a few hours a week at $10 an hour will buy you significant time you could use more profitably than doing your laundry or getting your car's oil changed.

Get observed. Not sure how to get more time-efficient? Get someone who gets a lot done to watch you for an hour or more.

Class dismissed. Anyone wish this "world's shortest course" were longer? Want to suggest a tip I should have added?

All Influential Political Plays are Leftist

I just realized that all of our influential political playwrights are anti-capitalists.

Did they become the most influential because no right-of-center playwrights were worthy? More likely, leftist playwrights have been boosted because conservative plays (or books for that matter) rarely get selected for review let alone praise in such publications as the New York Times.

I worry about a society with inadequate intellectual checks and balances. Nearly all of society's mind-molders are leftist: the colleges, Hollywood, and the news media. And don't tell me about Fox News and right-wing talk radio. They have but a tiny mindshare of the public, especially among the intelligentsia--the people most likely to vote and to create policy.

Here is a list of the political playwrights I believe to be our most influential. All are leftist, what the media prefers to call "progressive."

Clifford Odets--e.g., Awake and Sing.

Sam Shepard-- e.g., Buried Child

Neil Simon--Where he is political, he is always anti-capitalist. For example, in Broadway Bound, the wisest character is a socialist.

George Bernard Shaw--e.g., Man and Superman

Lillian Hellman--e.g., The Little Foxes

Bertolt Brecht--e.g., Good Person of Szechuan

The current playwriting stars--e.g., Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Moises Kaufman, David Hare.

Even musicals have become infected. Leading musicals of the 21st century, Rent and Urinetown are both anticapitalist as well as my otherwise favorite musical of the '90s, Little Shop of Horrors.

And most famously, Arthur Miller--e.g., the ultimate anti-capitalist play: Death of a Salesman.

I cannot think of one influential playwright who wrote pro-capitalist/anti-socialist plays. Can you?

Inspiration for Ex-Offenders

Two-thirds of felons are back in prison within a year.

And that's understandable. It's tough even for a college graduate with a straight-arrow employment record to land a decent-paying job. Imagine what it's like for robbers, drug dealers, and murderers, many of whom are barely literate, have a poor work history, and are a threat to steal or be violent in the workplace.

It can be awfully tempting for an ex-felon to go back to robbing or selling drugs: If you get away with it, you make a heckuva lot more than McWages; if you get caught, you qualify for three hots and a cot plus rent and gym membership, and health care, all free, compliments of the taxpayer.

Career counselor Maureen Nelson wrote this great piece on how ex-offenders can find the motivation to stay the course until they succeed, legally.

A Career in Three Minutes

People often ask me how, on my radio shows, I help people find a career in three minutes. Here's an approach I often use:

1. Take 30 seconds to tell me what makes you different than most people?

2. What career fits your answers to that question? (Need ideas? Scan the careers in the Occupational Outlook Handbook or the 500 often more under-the-radar careers in my book, Cool Careers for Dummies.)

3. What does that career score on The Meter: 0 means you hate it. 10 means you love it?

4. What keeps that from being a 10?"

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until one or more careers score a 9 or 10.

Of course, you shouldn't make your final career choice in three minutes:

• Learn more about the career(s) scoring 9 or 10 in the Occupational Outlook Handbook and/or Cool Careers for Dummies. Or google the name of that career and the word "careers." for example, "electrician careers."
• If the career still sounds interesting, speak with or, better, visit a few (not one) people who work in that career to get a better sense of what it's like.
• If a career still scores a 9 or 10, congratulations. You've found what will likely be a well-suited career.

Careers Most Likely to Make a Difference

I had a fascinating conversation with an M.D. soon to be Ph.D. in physics. One topic we discussed is whether he thought he'd make a bigger difference seeing patients or working on the the next generation of medical imaging machines.

He reminded me that many patients, even when facing death, refuse to change their lifestyle, even modestly: "Please, eat fewer cheeseburgers. Not none, just fewer." Yet most heart patients don't. Indeed that is consistent with the findings of famed cardiologist Dean Ornish.

That reminds me of my experience as a career counselor. Nearly 100% of my clients walk out of my office with a plan they like, believe in, and know they should implement. Yet many implement their plan minimally if at all. When they come back for a subsequent session, the problem is rarely that the plan wasn't good nor that they didn't know how to implement it. They just couldn't make themselves change.

So I'm wondering whether, on average, the people who end up making the biggest difference are not those in the so-called helping professions, especially counseling and psychotherapy--because those require people to change. Rather, the people who are more likely to make a big difference are those involved in developing new technological tools that help people without requiring them to change much: for example: a better cardiac stent, a better search engine, a TV instead of a radio, a more efficient car.

What do you think?

Economic Armageddon, Here We Come?

The Obama administration admitted today that the federal debt will, over the next decade, grow wildly larger than it had previously said--so much for a recovery. Now the estimate is $9 trillion!

And that doesn't count the $1.0 to $1.6 trillion Congress is contemplating spending on ObamaCare.

Nor does it count the massive additional new spending Obama has promised, for example, legalizing the 13-20 million illegals, who will thereby become eligible for ObamaCare, increasing the debt further.

And Obama is considering "Stimulus" 3. For our trillion dollars, "Stimuli/Bailouts" 1 and 2 have resulted in the highest unemployment rate since 1983 and wildly accelerating debt, yet he contemplates Grandson of "Stimulus"/Bailout.

China owns ever more of America and the U.S. is becoming ever less creditworthy. Just the interest on the national debt is approaching the total budget for national defense!

And federal spending is accelerating?! Will we, not to mention our children and grandchildren, suffer profoundly from our government's profligacy?

Government programs (yes, Republican-initiated programs, for example, the Bush bailouts and the Iraq War, are equally at fault) are usually terribly inefficient. Think Amtrak, the Postal Service, the public schools, the nearly bankrupt Social Security and Medicare, the Bailouts, $85 hammers, the Bridge to Nowhere.

Many government programs are actually negative in effect. Consider, for example, Cash for Clunkers: dangling taxpayer dollars in front of people poor enough to own bad-gas mileage clunkers so they can go deeply in debt to buy a new car (80% of which have been foreign, by the way). And of course, dumping much of their toxic components and fluids into landfills is an environmental disaster. Plus, car dealers are screaming that they have laid out the $4,500 per car to customers and often have not yet been paid by the government, thereby killing their cash flow, a business's lifeblood. The government can't even write a promised check in a timely manner and it wants to run a "public option" health care system?

An individual and especially a nation in debt is at-risk. A nation that has assumed unprecedentedly, incomprehensibly mammoth debt is doomed. Even Keynes did not imagine this magnitude of government spending. To pay for its metastasizing number and scope of programs and interest on its soon-to-be $9 trillion debt, the government will, unchecked, continue to raise taxes and print ever more money, thereby decreasing the value of our life's savings and purchasing power.

As a result, American workers will likely end up joining most of the world's workers in earning a net $1 an hour. As reported in a recent blog post, we already work into August just to pay all the costs imposed by government. Does anyone really think we get fair value for the government's taking over half our money from us each year?

Our only savior is for us to demand that the government to return most our tax dollars to us and for government to live within its then more modest means: scale down so it can balance its budget and pay down its debt. Anything else is too likely to lead us to economic Armageddon.