Source = Paul Graham's blog

I am just citing the entire article...I am amazed to find other people understand and have defined terms for my work life!

"One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule. But Y Combinator runs on the maker's schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten into sync with us.

I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to "grab coffee," for example.

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.

Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.

Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost."

Source = Yahoo News

"Federal prosecutors hit Pfizer Inc. with a record-breaking $2.3 billion in fines Wednesday and called the world's largest drug maker a repeating corporate cheat for illegal drug promotions that plied doctors with free golf, massages, and resort junkets."

This is a very good article based on *FACTS*

Source = Washington Post

"As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad: "

Sorry to say this, but America is falling further and further behind in the World because we have brainwashed our citizens into believing what they are "told". People are not encouraged to think critically, do research, and come to a rational and realistic understanding of many issues especially healthcare.

Source = Huffington Post
This is really disturbing news. Of course, there is no "official" word either. The Obama administration making a deal with the money/power hungry healthcare industry to get them on their side. Then, the healthcare industry is sooooo huge, they have so much money they are pouring into destroying any type of public healthcare option. At least, destroying any chance a public option has of being realisticly affordable and reformed - as long as they (healthcare industry) make their cut they are happy. I wonder if really was/is the administration just trying to get the dogs off long enough to pass a bill that actually reforms the system.

"Obama is walking a tightrope here. He wants to keep PhRMA from opposing the bill, and benefits by having its support, which now includes a $150 million advertising campaign. That's a fortune in politics -- more than Republican presidential candidate John McCain spent on advertising during his entire campaign -- but it's loose change in the pharmaceutical business.

Opponents of the deal with PhRMA hope that Obama is playing a multilayered game, making a deal in order to keep the drug makers in his camp for now, but planning to double-cross them in the end if he needs to in order to pass his signature initiative.

Big Pharma, however, is still comfortable. "As far as the pharmaceutical industry, PhRMA and its member companies, yes, they say a deal is a deal. We'll see what happens," said the health care lobbyist."

Then we have the conservatives and Republicans where a good half of them are turning to violence and outrageous, misleading lies and mistruth about what is going on in washington. BECAUSE, there are uneducated people, and then there are the Republicans that make all their money through these private healthcare industry companies who make billions off of poor people.

Source = alternet.org
Republicans have resorted to instigating and organizing mobs through mis-information and disrupting any type of rational discussion and collaboration on solving the health-care problem. Here are some points leaked from the intimidation campaign:

- Be Disruptive Early And Often: "You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early."

- Try To "Rattle Him," Not Have An Intelligent Debate: "The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions."

Here is some good quoting from the article (there is much more, follow the source link):

"I used to know Dick Armey quite well. One of my sons even worked for him as an intern. I knew Armey in the context of his being a fan of my late Evangelical Religious Right leader father Francis Schaeffer. (Back in the day when I was a right wing "pro-life" organizer who has long since quit the Republicans in disgust at their -- our -- descent into extremism and hate.) Armey was once a decent guy, whatever his political views. How could he stoop so low as to be organizing what amounts to America's Brown Shirts today?

I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more -- and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.

The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson) "broke their brains." What else could explain their embrace of intimidation -- rather than discourse -- over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they'd just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?
...
Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can't win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!"

Source = Reuters

"National security adviser Uzi Arad, in comments to Haaretz newspaper, appeared to allude to what is widely believed to be Israel's own nuclear arsenal and a standing policy of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD). He warned other countries they could bring about their own devastation if they launched an attack."

"In excerpts on Haaretz's English-language website of an interview to be published on Friday, Arad said he feared that if Iran became a nuclear power, five or six other states in the Middle East would follow suit. He called such a prospect a "nightmare" for Israel."

I thought Jews were supposed to be intelligent, etc. My god, how about electing some intelligent leaders?!? How about working out your differences with your neighbors instead of just saying you will kill anyone and everyone who opposes you!!?? Form some alliances...oh wait, they have the U.S. backing up their hysteria.

I have no sympathy for Israel.

Source = Commondreams.org

"At a hearing in Washington today, the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan is releasing a 111-page report that represents its “initial investigations of the nation’s heavy reliance on contractors.”"

The Bush administration has caused so many problems and totally screwed-up whatever it has touched. This "WAR" has been a nightmare. So many people do not know what has really happened here. All the TONS of cash and weapons/ammunition that have disappeared and gone to supply the enemy is just the first outrage. The report this article is about points out all the corruption with the government using contractors.

"The single greatest beneficiary of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary. KBR has been paid nearly $32 billion since 2001. In May, April Stephenson, director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, testified that KBR was linked to “the vast majority” of war-zone fraud cases and a majority of the $13 billion in “questioned” or “unsupported” costs. According to Agency, it sent the inspector general “a total of 32 cases of suspected overbilling, bribery and other violations since 2004.”"

Source = Techworld

Wow, it is about time some regulatory agency (European Commission) stepped up and took action against this ridiculous problem of phone chargers changing with EVERY damn phone. Obviously, that is one way the cell companies are making their money back from offering near free phones deals combined with a phone plan. However, it is extremely annoying to the consumer and just plain non-commonsense. The motivating reasons are still money and not customer satisfaction...in the cell phone business.

Source = everydayhealth.com

Okay, I have read about this issue over and over again in the last couple years. It has been shown that exposing children to animals and living in non-sterilized (exaggeration) homes will actually help children build the needed defenses against the bad bacteria and help keep them from obtaining allergies, sickness, etc. Problem is, if you raise a child in an always cleaned (with today's chemical cleaners especially) environment, they will not develop the needed defenses against certain sicknesses and their immune system will be weakened so that they develop allergies. Do not forget that using today's chemical cleaners can contribute to causing allergies and weaken your body's defenses.

Makes sense to me.

Source = Christian Science Monitor

"In terms of the ultimate outcome, what the court's action does is it reminds us that nobody else is going to resolve this question," says Mr. Rosenblum, who advocates repealing the law. "It has to be the Obama administration and the Congress that takes this on."

I love this quote: "Members of the military, who tend to be more socially conservative..."

HAHA, I guess this means that being "social conservative" coincides with male chauvinism, intolerance, ignorance, simple-mindedness, violent/abusive mentailities...

oh wait....i already knew that!!!