A Great Post on Failure, Writing and TV

Warning: For the more sensitive readers, there is language of the less than clean type within.

But this is a great blog post by the guy who wrote the best selling book Sh*t My Dad Says. It's an example of how failure is an important part of any successful person's history. It demonstrates a spirit of gratitude. It gives insight into an industry we all have enjoyed, namely TV. And it's pretty darn funny.

Well worth the read.

Some great passages:

"After eighteen episodes we were pulled off the schedule and cancelled, but it was hard for me to be upset. I had just launched an entire career off a Twitter feed. It’d be like winning the lottery and getting pissed off because they only give you the money in increments of fifty thousand dollars a year."

"Generally, studio executives try incredibly hard to be jovial when addressing writers. They understand that we don’t tend to enjoy their company because spending time with them means we’re going to get “notes,” and notes are like Yankee fans; not all of them are bad, but all of them are annoying."

"TV writers sit around a room seventy hours a week trying to make our friends laugh, have access to more bottled water than entire African countries, and we get paid handsomely for our efforts."

History

Minimum Wage Strikes Again

As I tweeted, San Francisco is raising its minimum wage to $10.24 on Jan 1st (HT to my dad for bringing my attention to this story).

The minimum wage is probably one of my most despised government interventions. Like most other policies, it purports to help those most disadvantaged yet does the exact opposite, all to the benefit of politicians. Amongst other factors, it's like a slow acting poison to those in business.

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and reporter John Stossel have excellent basic explanations of how poor a policy the minimum wage is.

A Few Freedom Resources

Here some excellent resources to check out if you are interested in academic studies on how free different countries or states are.

This one, the Economic Freedom of the World, by the Fraser Institute is global in scope and is great "big picture" stuff. Canada is freer than the United States according to their analysis.

The Mercatus Center puts out a Freedom in the 50 States that garners attention.

Rich States, Poor States by the American Legislative Exchange Council offers a more detailed index on what states are more business friendly compared to others.

In these reports, especially the Freedom of the World report (which is 2009 data, no less), the United States is sliding down the scale of freedom toward statism, i.e government control. While we are no Soviet style nation, we should not take for granted the liberty those before us fought to obtain.

Top 100 Global Thinkers 2011

Foreign Policy has a fascinating list of those people with short bios and interviews. If you haven't seen it, check it out.

Also, there is a reading list of the top 20 books recommended by the top 100 thinkers. How could you pass that up?

Surfing...On Lake Tahoe

This is crazy! It looks absolutely frigid though. But I've never heard of this happening.

We've All Been There

A Bigger Deal?

Operation Fast and Furious emails released last night. It's amazing how more people in the DOJ and administration haven't lost their jobs over this.

I'm not necessarily a G.W. Bush fan but anytime something sketchy like this (Solyndra, et al) happens in the Obama administration, I can't help but see how differently it is handled by the media and others than were it to happen in the Bush administration.