The Half Baked Lunatic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CONTACT: EnergyByAloe 425-296-6616 (Voice) 866-293-6994 (Fax) Shop@EnergyByAloe.com http://Shop.USAloe.com http://www.EnergyByAloe.com Sleep Aid Found To Be Useful For Extinguishing Forest Fires Washington D.C., June 5 2009 – In addition to being the healthiest and most effective natural sleep aid on the market, local distribution company EnergyByAloe has shown positive data that AloeRest™ is very effective at extinguishing forest fires. “The biggest problem we’ve found” says EnergyByAloe owner David Workman “is keeping enough AloeRest in stock.” Indeed, during the two day test trial in which numerous forest fires were started in the Washington DC area, one almost got out of control because of a shortage of AloeRest. “It was a close one,” says Workman, “we almost had to go find an alternate substance to douse that last burn. Maybe water would have done the trick, but we didn’t want to admit defeat so we pressed forward with the Aloe... [More]

I’ve been mailing out a lot of packages lately, and the staff at my local post office just seem to drive me crazy.  Here’s a typical interaction: “How would you like this to be mailed, sir?” “Whatever is cheapest – there’s no hurry.” “Well, we can send it Parcel Post for $4.90 which will get it there in 3 to five business days, priority mail for $10.35 which is two to three days, or $25.15 for overnight express mail.” “Whatever is cheapest – there’s no hurry. Parcel Post is fine.” “Ok, would you like to add delivery confirmation or insurance?” “Does that make it any cheaper?” I asked, hoping she’d get the hint. “No sir, it does not.  Delivery confirmation is only 80 cents and insurance will vary depending on the value.  The rates are ...” “No thank you, just standard parcel post is fine.” “Ok, is there anything liquid,... [More]

  Following the hugely successful launch of AloeBoost and AloeRest, I am happy to announce that USAloe is now shipping their third product, AloeControl. AloeControl™ is your unfair advantage in the struggle to maintain a healthy weight. In each healthy 2oz serving you'll enjoy a unique blend of the world's finest fruits, vegetables, and natural ingredients designed to help you control your appetite, efficiently burn calories, and provide you with the essential vitamins and minerals that are MISSING in today's typical American diet. The four core components of AloeControl™ include Appetite Control, Metabolic Enhancers, Digestive Aids, and Core Nutrition. Get all the details and the ingredient list at: http://shop.usaloe.com/products-aloecontrol.aspx I don’t mean to brag, but AloeControl beats everything else on the market – all other weight management products pale in comparison! Forget fad diets. The old school philosophy is still the best way to ma... [More]

You normally don’t think of Kenya as being at the forefront of technical and financial innovation – but I was struck by this story I saw recently on CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/04/15/mckenzie.kenya.mobile.money.cnn What started out as a way to transfer pre-paid cell phone credits to family and friends has turned into an entire micro-transaction commerce platform that is replacing banks in Kenya. And there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work elsewhere! Think of it as PayPal for cell phones.  For example – you want to buy a magazine from a vendor on the street, but you don’t have change.  The vendor doesn’t take credit or debit cards. So you just enter their cell phone number, specify how much you want to transfer, tap in your security code, and hit send.  Just like sending a text message, but you’re sending cash.  The vendor’s phone beeps, notifying them that they just received a payment... [More]

How’s that for a title to a blog post?  So what do you think ... does the pope believe in god? Seriously.  The one thing we can be sure of is that the pope believes in power, influence, control, politics – and huge amounts of wealth.  And he gets all of those things by making sure that OTHERS believe that there is a god. It’s a great system – the church has a countless laborers all across the globe who have embraced a life of poverty, yet they spend their time recruiting new members and collecting donations for the church.  Sure, half of it gets used for local charity, and some (certainly not all) of these projects actually do some good, but a large percentage of the money goes all the way to the top. It’s the greatest scam ever invented! Way better than any other pyramid scheme – they’ve even managed to make it tax deductable! I’m not saying the pope isn’t a smart guy.  It does take a certain degree of... [More]

Like everyone else, I’m completely outraged by the whole AIG bonus issue. Bonuses should reward exceptional performance and positive results.  Where’s the accountability? This has been hashed to death in the press, so I’m not going to go into all the reasons why it’s just rotten to the core. But let’s back up a little bit and see how this fits in with the bigger picture of executive compensation.  This has been an issue for many years, well before the economic downturn. It’s a big thorn in the side of many shareholders of large companies. Executive compensation needs to be tied not only to performance, but also to their own personal risk.  For example – a hired CEO brought in to run an established company has a lot less “skin in the game” than a founder who built the company from scratch, putting his or her own net worth on the line as collateral while the company was in it’s critical growth phase. It reall... [More]

The year was 1996.  My wife had graduated from Medical School a few years earlier, and she was in her second year of residency at a large university medical center. The time was about 1:45 in the morning. And we were Wrestling the Anaconda. Ok, I need to back up a little bit.  My wife did her residency in Pathology.  She studied in both Anatomic and Clinical Pathology – but this particular year was strictly clinical work.  Although most people think that pathologists primarily perform autopsies (which is the “Anatomic” branch of the specialty), the majority of pathologists are actually on the “Clinical” side of the business.  Clinical pathologists run all the hospital lab functions – blood banks, specimen analysis, frozen sections, lab tests, etc.  During surgery for example, if a doctor is removing a cancerous cyst, they will send the specimen to the lab to have the margins checked.  The pathologist needs to an... [More]

There is absolutely NO WAY that any kind of a mortgage bailout will be fair.  The people who would benefit from mortgage assistance are generally the ones least likely to deserve it. Hardest hit are people who either bought a bigger house than they could really afford, and people who snagged one of those great “no money down” loans.  Are YOU willing to subsidize someone who is living in a luxurious home they shouldn’t have been able to afford in the first place?  Is that the kind of behavior that we are trying to encourage? Absolutely not! While I do have great sympathy for someone who is losing their home after 20 or 30 years, let’s look at the reality of who this might be: Assume someone bought a house twenty years ago, with a conventional 30 year fixed rate mortgage and a 20% down payment.  At the time, the national average home price was just about $75,000 (not inflation adjusted).  Our example homeowner has been paying on their mortgage for twenty ye... [More]

USAloe, a company in California that I've been doing some consulting work for, is launching two new products this week:  AloeBoost (an energy drink) and AloeRest (a relaxation and sleep aid). Both are made with Aloe Vera juice and other healthy, all natural ingredients. What's interesting is that these products are going into a network marketing channel instead of a traditional retail channel, and I think people are going to make pretty good money from it. Now, over the years, I've had plenty of people pitch me on different network marketing companies. All of them have said pretty much the same thing: "I'm going to be retired in two years!"  I've checked back with a few of them, and none of them had the financial success that I've had. The truth is, a lot of people HAVE made a very substantial income with network marketing (or multi-level marketing, or whatever you want to call it) but these people are in the minority.  The majority of people who are in a... [More]

All the data we have at this point says that the universe that is just under 13 billion years old.  The universe exploded from a big bang and after a brief period of inflation, it has been expanding steadily at the speed of light. Although there are still some unanswered details, most cosmologists agree on these basic points. From here, however, there are numerous opinions and conflicting theories on the basic nature of the universe. There are a few different mathematical models that show it’s possible that we can be living in an “open” universe which will continue to exponentially expand forever, a “flat” universe where the expansion will slow down and eventually stop at a certain size, or a “closed” universe that will reverse direction and eventually contract into a “big crunch” – presumably to explode again in another big bang (and with multiple series of “big bang/big crunch” cycles, we have an “o... [More]