Sunday: I have successfully defeated a four day weekend

It required only the finest slices of "not doing a damn thing," but I have not done those things at a championship level.  I did get my car washed, so I guess that counts as doing something.  Plus I'm doing laundry now, and am actually going to make my lunch for tomorrow tonight, so I don't have to rush to make it tomorrow.  I could probably claim the "made a ham" as a thing done this weekend as well.  I guess that brings me up to four things done in four days.

Now for the standard December crunch to get everything done before end of year vacations and early January conferences.  That'll be fun.  At least I'm doing a talk this year, and have a mandated limit of five minutes to talk.  I can make up six slides to fill five minutes without any trouble.

I don't think they even let tour guides climb up to the top of the pyramids anymore.  

"So you told Larry that there's a secret button on the side of bear's jaw that will 'turn it off'?" "Yeah." "That's not true, you know." "YOU ARE GOING DOWN MY MOUTH, TINY USELESS HUMAN!"

"Nom. Nom. Nomnomnomnomnomnomnomnom."

• I really think that should be some sort of test.  If you can't make money for a company that sells snack foods that everyone likes, then it's clear that you're fundamentally useless at your job and should simply stop.
• Chef John had really good ideas that I wish he'd brought up before Thanksgiving.  The roasted garlic/blue cheese green beans sound really good.
• Pika!
• "I see you, cat. Note however, that you are on the ground, scavenging on the detritus of this office.  I sit kingly upon the Gym Shorts Leg Throne.  You have been cast out, cat.  House Sciuridae rules this land now."
• I haven't read this yet, but the skim suggests it has the same kind of points that I've read elsewhere.  A) current high unemployment is not a symptom of workers untrained in useful skills.  Rather it's largely the case that a lack of job activities (building things, selling things, etc.) means that the current production/service level can be largely solved with the current level of the workforce.  If you want to improve employment, you need to force the system to broadly "do more stuff."  If I make and sell 10 widgets a day with X workers, then if I suddenly start having contracts calling for 30 widgets a day, I either need fantastic productivity increases, or I need to hire more people and have them make the extras I now need.  War does this nicely if it's large enough, but generally any large transfer programs from the government (which we're assuming here can borrow as much money as they can imagine) to businesses should flow out and solve the unemployment problems.  B) if a business can't hire a widgeteer at $10/hr, it may be able to at $20/hr.  This is especially true if the skills to be a licensed widgeteer require some sort of debt-incurring education.  The pay of the widgeteer is indirectly a function of the average debt incurred.  Otherwise, there are two cases; case 1: no widgeteers exist because no one will take out that debt without assurance that the pay of a widgeteer will cover it.  case 2: many widgeteers exist because the average pay adequately covers the debt incurred.  Therefore, a business that requires a skill set that applicants need to have beforehand will need to pay sufficiently to support the very existance of widgeteers.  C) if the public education system is fundamentally not educating students for the skills that businesses want, why do the businesses not push for higher funding of education?  Imagine a fictional company town where the only non-governmental job is to work at the widgetplex.  If the education in this town is not supplying graduates with the knowledge of Widget Appreciation and Widgetometry that are required to work at the widgetplex, then that suggests those should have a larger emphasis.  Maybe more classes in these subjects, requiring targeted new hires.  This increases the funding costs of the education system, but without this kind of infrastructure improvement in the future workers, the widgetplex is going to have the productivity limited by their own production.  Assuming increasing production also increases the profit of the widgetplex, any cost required to ensure that increase in production that does not exceed the expected profit should be paid to get that slice.  This kind of obviously leads to the conclusion that some sort of business tax to support education would be beneficial to pretty much everyone.