The Power of Outsourcing

Outsourcing can be enormously powerful for either an organization or an individual. I personally use Elance.com to outsource my copywriting, certain types of programming, and even business needs. Elance is basically Ebay for services… You post a project that needs to be done and various providers bid to offer you their services. You then choose the best bid and put your money into an escrow account and wait for the project to be delivered.

A short list of examples of outsourced work:

• Scheduling assistant to call people
• Research to find 1,000 blogs in a target industry
• 100 500-word articles for a website
• Accounting work
• Basic bookkeeping
• Programming in any language you can imagine
• Translation in most spoken/written languages
• School work
• Legal work
• Public relations campaigns

… and many other types of jobs.  The limits are only your own creativity.

Howlings of a Jackal

Had drinks with an old friend, Rachelle, yesterday. We met at Barca on Capitol Hill for a martini and a talk about her writing and “epic dreams”. Later we moved to Quinn’s and feasted on frog’s legs and salad. My Bloody Mary was not a good idea in combination with the spiciness of the toad’s hindquarters, but trying new things isn’t always a blast. Found out later that another friend who sorta stood me up actually was at Quinn’s at the same time. Odd coincidence.

Four Questions:

• How can the military-industrial complex be stopped without sacrificing security?
• Should I write a novel and post it to my blog?
• Skinny or muscly?
• As the future King of America, what policies would you advise I enact?

My second shot at Swiss Cheese Potato Casserole ended up being rather richer than intended.‚  The casserole is actually more of a very tasty dessert.‚  A very manly dessert.‚  A single small bowl is enough to satiate my behemoth appetite.

Not much is sweeter than making money while I sleep.

Will Barack Obama’s popular policy proposal to change college football from the current BCS format to a playoff system become reality?‚  If so, how long will it take? How many Texas/USC fans will gnash their teeth till then?

Other than a sincere hatred of Microsoft, is there any reason to focus on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technologies rather than the ASP.NET architecture?

The refrigerator in my apartment has been harboring a lonely Budweiser Clamato beer for over two months now.‚  No one wants to give it love.‚  Can you be that person?

Financial Firms “Staring Into The Jaws of Hell”

The title of this post is a diirect quote from Martin Fridson, the leading expert on junk bonds, speaking of financial firms and buyout companies.

I hate being right.

The private equity kings and warlords who for the past decade have been making monster paychecks are suddenly seeing their investments sink. The Titanic was a rubber raft compared to what’s happening to these guys. Blackstone, KKR and others are seeing their buyouts, which were financed by cheap credit, suddenly change into multi-billion dollar losses. I actually think that a lot of these private equity guys saw this coming ahead of time, which is why they went public with their companies last year. The kings of finance saw the warning signs and got their money out of the investments and now everyone who was too slow, too optimistic, or too stupid to do the same is about to get slapped in the face by a boulder.

In the last few days, the stock market has dropped toit’s lowest point in two years. Word on the street is that there is a bigtime Wall Street bank about to be in deep, deep doo-doo. Blackstone’s earnings have crashed 89% in the last three months and there is no sight of bottom.

First, the subprime market crashed. Then the credit market for corporations completely froze up. Now private equity banks are gazing into the eyes of death. Companies that have been purchased by the private equity banks have their loans and junk bonds trading at rates so ridiculous that investors are obviously betting that they will go bankrupt. Many of these businesses, while still current on their debt, have investors trading it at 70 cents on the dollar- investors think there is a very good chance the companies won’t pay.

Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers are currently holding $130 billion dollars in leveraged loans supporting their private equity deals… and a lot of that money could be worthless. This is just symptomatic of the larger market right now- things are looking very dreary indeed. Even the chairmen of the major Fed banks have been making statements that, coming from them, sound like a desperate plea to avoid the falling axe.

The president of Blackstone, Hamilton James, has publicly stated that “Our view is that things will get worse before they get better”.

Our economy has many strong signs of trouble ahead: rising fuel prices, energy and water shortages, massive debt load, financial markets that are drying up and slowing consumer spending. My recommendation to everyone out there is to prepare for the worst.

Scientists Working on Confirming that Joel Is Always Right

For a long time now, I have thought that I solved many of my problems during sleep and during college I firmly held the theory that extra sleep the night before a test was more valuable to me getting a good score than was extra study time. Now proof is coming out that my theory wasn’t based just on laziness, but on facts.

During REM sleep, humans break down their memories and analyze them and put them together in different ways to help us gain a better understanding of the big picture. When I am facing an especially difficult problem, I go to sleep and by morning I have several very good solutions. It’s amazing. And now I can show the science behind why it is true and disprove you superstitious folk who insist that anything you don’t understand was done by a god.

Business Revolution

I think that we are about to see another dramatic shift in the way business works. Wal-Mart changed the way most of America purchased it’s products a couple of decades ago from having to go to lots of smaller stores to purchase pricey goods, to going to one giant supplier to get most goods at low prices.

Right now, there are tens of thousands of small ecommerce websites and a few larger ones. I think that over the next five years we are going to see a massive shake up with a few monster websites that best manage logistics taking over most sales business done online and greatly expanding the amount of people who purchase items online. The most efficient shipping companies stand to benefit from this- FedEx or even Wal-Mart’s supply chains are the most obvious immediate beneficiaries. Invest in them.

My Theory on Why Religious Folk Marry Young

People with strong religious convictions tend to get married much younger than those without religious affiliations. Most of my friends without religion are unmarried and probably won’t get married for several years at least. My friends who are strongly religious, such as Jordan and Mark Rody have already been married for over a year. I have a theory on what happens inside these peoples head that causes them to get married so early; they are horny and full of hormones but are not allowed any form of release with another person or with themselves. So all these chemicals build up in their brains and they mistake this intense pressure for release for love. After they finally get married and have regular sex for awhile, the need to reproduce gradually reduces to normal levels and they are left thinking, “Why the hell did I marry this ugly, nagging pig?”.. Which is why the divorce rate among religious people is higher than it is among the general population, even though they believe they will burn for an eternity in a lake of fire for getting divorced.

If you think my theory is false, I have an experiment for you to try: don’t have sex or masturbate or have wet dreams for 2 months and then see how you feel. Faryar and I had a competition once to see who could go without longer and we turned into crazy bastards. I remember lying in bed at night sweating and staring at my ceiling and laying on my twitchy hands… Now imagine trying to do that for a LIFETIME… I don’t know how they last as long as they do.

Actually, that leads into my other theory: 99.9% of unattached men masturbate regularly. Anyone who says they don’t is a liar. Even one of the strongest Christian men I know can’t resist the powerful pull of reproductive brain chemicals… Jesus loses to Jenna Jameson every time.