A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets

As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency.

That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.

Recently, while doing some research on the carbon footprint of food, I ran across some studies that reported Americans ate, on average, 3774 calories of food each day.

Something about that smelled funny to me.

Sure, Americans eat a lot. But 3774 calories a day? I have family members who subsist almost solely off fried meat and various sorts of potatoes and I'm not convinced that even they hit that number on a regular basis. When I took my questions to the researchers, I found out that my hunch was correct. Americans aren't, technically, eating an average of 3774 calories per day. This figure is calculated by looking at food produced, divided by the number of Americans. It assumes we're eating all that, but, in reality, according to environmental scientist Gidon Eshel we really only eat about 2800 calories per day. That whopping 3774 includes both what we eatand what we waste.

And what we wastenot just at home, but from the farm field, to the grocery store, to our Tupperware containers full of moldy leftoversis a big deal.

We use a lot of energy producing, transporting, processing, storing and cooking food we don't eat. About 2150 trillion kilojoules worth a year, according to a recent study. That's more kilojoules than the United States could produce in biofuels. And it's more than we already produce in all the oil and gas extracted annually from the Gulf of Mexico.

Reducing that waste requires both changes in the way we eat at home, and systematic changes that address waste at every part of the food cycle. Right now, I've talked to a lot of researchers who can identify the problem, but don't have a lot of suggestions for concrete solutions. I'm sure they're out there, though, and I'll report back as I track them down.

Image: Olly Moss/A Life Well Wasted

Stop what you're doing and go listen to the latest installment of the Life Well Wasted podcast. It's 58 minutes well spent.

A Life Well Wasted is recorded and mixed by one man, Robert Ashley. He used to be a prolific game journalist, even covering such topics as World of Warcraft and Spore for Wired magazine. As of late, he's been pushing the boundaries of the podcast form.

Ashley goes out and finds the most interesting and unusual people working in and around games, and does penetrating and revealing interviews. Then he takes the audio back to his home studio, combining it with music he writes himself to create a sound collage that's unlike anything you've ever heard. It's so well-made and so endlessly fascinating that I often wholeheartedly recommend the podcast to people who have no interest whatsoever in videogames.

The latest episode, which Ashley worked on for almost six months, is incredible. The theme is Big Ideas, and it examines people who played a real-world version of Pac-Man using the streets of New York as a maze, the ways that the guy who made zillions off of Tetris is using his riches to better mankind, and the saga of a schlubby 39-year-old game blogger who lives with his parents and is reputed to be the most well-endowed man in the world.

But the pice de rsistance of the podcast is the first segment. Ashley invited listeners to send in audio of their dream video games, the projects they'd like to make if they could. The game concepts are mixed together into a hypnotically catchy single.

I sent Robert some questions via email to get a bit more background on him and A Life Well Wasted.

Wired.com: Can you talk a bit about your background in videogame podcasts before you started ALWW?

Robert Ashley: Back in the day when videogame magazines existed, I used to make my living writing about games as a freelancer. Somewhere toward the tail end of the magazine decline, everyone started doing podcasts. My friend Shawn Elliott was an editor at Computer Gaming World, and he kept trying to get me to guest on their podcast (which later turned into GFW Radio after a name change to the magazine). I was like, podcast? Who listens to podcasts?

Anyway, I went on the show, and it was just some dudes I knew talking about games and telling personal stories, kinda like hanging out at a bar or something. It was fun.

Afterwards, I got all this feedback. Like way more than I had ever gotten for anything I had written. Which is funny, because we never put any effort into that show, and meanwhile I was killing myself trying to become a legitimate writer. I ended up being a regular on GFW Radio. It had some huge number of listeners can't remember the exact figures. Big enough that when we had a live reunion at Penny Arcade Expo last year, we ran out of space, and there was a huge line snaking down the hall.

Wired.com: And can you tell me about your background in music and recording?

Ashley: I've been a musician since I was a teenager, but when I moved out to the SF Bay Area, I started working with a guy named Sam Frigard, and we got into recording. Eventually, that turned into our band, I Come to Shanghai. We're sort of a song-oriented psychedelic pop band.

I play lots of instruments, and so does Sam, so we've got all the fun toys. Sam just built a modular synthesizer, and it nearly destroyed his life. I'm still in love with the drums. Since we're moving to Athens, Georgia at the end of the month, we recently had to take stock of our stuff, and I realized that we have 16 guitars. I think we should put them all on one song sometime.

The things we do would be impossible without modern computer recording. We get to spend Pink Floyd time recording on a Black Flag budget. Over the years, I've become a pretty good audio engineer, and we recorded and mixed our first album ourselves, in my loft. That's definitely the big thing that made A Life Well Wasted possible. And the idea of getting to work with audio all the time appeals to me greatly. Being a writer isn't nearly as much fun.

Wired.com: Did you have any models in mind for what you wanted A Life Well Wasted to be like? Any existing radio shows or podcasts that you admired?

Ashley: I didn't actually think I could measure up to it or anything, but I definitely wanted to try to make a show like Radiolab. Jad Abumrad broke radio open for me by putting sound and music on equal footing with story. I also grew up listening to This American Life, which I think gave me an appetite for weird characters and funny/sad stories. And I was a big fan of Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything, which was a great podcast that really got outside of the polite space of NPR.

Wired.com: What's your take on the state of the games industry?

Ashley: I love games, and I always will, but there was this time in the early 00's right when I got out of college and started writing for magazines when everyone talked about games growing up. Grand Theft Auto III was out, and everyone on earth was playing it. Developers were getting more experimental with the kinds of situations and characters you could expect to find in a game. The buzz was that games were hitting a golden age. In some ways, we did end up getting a lot of great stuff that never would have happened in the 90's, especially if you include all the great games that have come out of the Independent Games Festival, iPhone apps, and the PC modding scene.

On the whole, though, I think games are stuck in an awkward adolescence, like most of the people who play them. I'm disappointed that games today would still be recognizable anyone who played games 15 years ago.

Wired.com: Is game journalism still your day job? Has doing the podcast changed your approach to writing about games?

Ashley: I haven't done any games journalism in a long while. The show is my main thing now. Beyond that, I'd like to do more radio work. I have a piece coming up soon in an episode of a new NPR show called Snap Judgement.

The show has changed my whole focus on games as a subject. I'm completely done with covering games themselves. I'm out to find something with a story and some human feeling. I think games today are a great window into certain age groups and types of people, in the same way that music was a great place to find stories about young people in the 70's. Games are where the twenty-to-thirtysomething American male lives today, and if you want to know what's going in his head, you should talk to him about the games he plays.

At the same time, games continue to serve as a refuge for people of all ages who don't quite fit into the real world, and I find those people really interesting.

Shared by Sean
"the last original thing that happened was the Big Bang"

The cost of waiting has gone up. Actions are measured in minutes, not months. Ideas are only as good as the speed at which they're deployed.

At the risk of disrupting a proper lede beyond all recognition, this is the message Lori Senecal of Kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners shared with a lunch audience at the Wired Business conference Tuesday.

And now, back to it:

Need another week for that project? Senecal argues that what you need is less time, not more. If you want to get it done, give it to the busiest person, she said. Or do it yourself. Eliminate process steps, pass offs and interruptions. And hire makers, not just thinkers. Or at least people who have a Makerbot, perhaps?

Senecal's partner, Nick McCabe on importance of customer intimacy and how poorly most companies foster it. The problem stems from the paradigm of the soul-killing sterile boardroom. To figure out what your customer wants, look at her texts for a week, he suggested. Also, embrace extremism. Find out what people love or hate and figure out why. Co-create with your customers, and track their behavior obsessively.

As the chief innovation officer of MDC Partners, Faris Yakob described his job as to channel the mindset of a five-year-old child by endlessly asking why? With a full head of dreadlocks, he was arguably the weirdest person in the room, but he insisted that originality is a myth. Nothing comes from nobody, he said, explaining that the last original thing that happened was the Big Bang. The rest has been a remix. Yakob thinks that distraction is fertile. Instead of taking a long walk to get away from it all, he suggested going to Twitter, and let the endless stream of data wash over you like a stream.

MDC and kbs*p practice what they preach. Two weeks ago, they had the idea for a smart phone app called Twit Hit. A cross between Bump and Twitter, the application will allow people to follow each other on Twitter with a bump of their phones. Today, they submitted the app to the Apple store and expect it to be available within one week. It's a simple, single-purpose technology based off of existing apps.

It's an exercise in what we're capable of, explained Edward Brojerdi.

As of May 30, in addition to the 1000th American GI casualty, the National Priorities Project calculates that we have past the one trillion dollar mark on the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. One TRILLION dollars, with a T. It's a hard number to wrap your mind around, as this Google Sketchup illustration demonstrates. It also begs the question: just what have we bought for all that money and what good could have been done with that money instead?

Brave New Films's ReThink Afghanistan has a new Facebook app that allows you to see other ways that money could have been spent:

You could choose to hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year for
$12 billion or hire 1 million public safety workers for a year for $46.5 billion, and still only have made mere drops in the bucket.

Personally, I opted to pay for four years of college for a million students, fund the clean up of the gulf oil spill, hire one million elementary school teachers and offer health care for 10 million Americans and guess what? I still didn't reach that one trillion mark.

Check out the app. Tell us how you'd spend the money. Then consider sending this to your congresscritter to ask him/her how much more blood and treasure need to be lost in the sands of the Middle East.

Irrespective of all the issues that continuously surround Facebook, it is growing beyond all expectation. The userbase is about to reach 500 Million and according to ComScore, Facebook served the largest number ad impressions to US based internet users in first quarter of this year. The 176 Billion impressions that Facebook served in the 3 month period represents 16.2% of the total ad impressions served to the US based internet users.

Facebook was followed by Yahoo! with 132 Billion impressions while Microsoft sites only managed to serve a meager 60 Billion impressions representing less than 6% of the total market share. The total number of impressions for Q1 in 2010 went up to 1.1 Trillion which is 15% more than the same quarter of previous year. This includes static and rich media ads but does not include video ads (no wonder YouTube didn't make it to the list).

Over all, these impressions cost $2.7 Billion which brings the average CPM to $2.48. Out of the 1.1 Trillion impressions, around 2.4% or 26 Billion ads were of AT&T followed by Verizon, Scottrade and Experian Interactive. The 15% growth witnessed in the last quarter is a strong sign of recovery for online display ads market which slipped into a recession in late 2008. If the growth continues, the US market alone will amount up to 4.5 Trillion impressions for the full year of 2010.

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This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, the former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, which was recently acquired by mobile app directory Appolicious. He is currently an advisor to Appolicious.

One of the most commonly asked questions we get from both developers and industry outsiders is: how much money can I make developing apps? It's a hard question to answer.

So we decided to conduct a survey. We asked for sale sdata from 124 developers that market applications ranging in price from 99 cents to $79.99. This survey was conducted on apps that ran the gamut of popularity, from wildly successful to barely breaking three figures. Developers were anywhere from funded companies with multiple titles under their belt, to first time, single-person authors. Both regular app developers, as well as game developers were included. This mining of data was intended to cover the entire iPhone app industry as a whole, without allowing outliers to skew the data too much in one direction.

There are many different metrics that must be taken into account just because product X sold well does not mean product Y will. As a longtime publisher of app reviews, I've always been a bit apprehensive about sharing cold, hard statistics because of this issue. Taken as a precise gauge for future iPhone apps, statistics can be completely misleading. Therefore, I strongly encourage you to interpret this information only as an overview of the industry, which, like any others, has its blockbusters, stragglers and everything in between.

The following financial information is pulled from 96 developers who provided in-depth sales data and pricing metrics.

The average total number of units sold was 101,024 copies within an average period of 261 days. The average number of units sold per day was 387. The average price was $5.49, although the data skews due to the $49.99 outlier. In most cases, the price point was $0.99. The average number of updates released was 3.89, with the average total development cost amounting to $6,453. Several developers omitted development costs and most did not include their personal time in these figures. It is safe to assume the cost would be at least five or ten times more when using a contracted team. But on average here, iPhone developers are seeing a return of more than 15 times their initial, albeit small, development costs.

Market success still top-heavy

However, when the top 10% of the most successful apps are removed from the data set, the numbers skew much lower, giving a far better impression of what the iPhone industry looks like for most developers. In this scenario, the average sales were 11,625 total units, averaging 44 copies/day. Approximately 23% of apps sold less than 1000 units from launch (ranging from 12 to 370 days in the App Store). Further, 56% of apps sold less than or equal to 10,000 units, while 90% sold less than 100,000 units, with the remaining 10% achieving sales of 127,000 3,000,000 units.

While industry wisdom states that application updates always boost downloads and sales, Apple has changed how updated apps are given exposure and this now doesn't quite hold true. Some developers reported that updating the app gave only a smalland briefspike in downloads. What did seem to have a larger impact on sales was a drop in price, although this also tended to taper off quickly.

Being featured by Apple is the greatest contributor to spiking sales. The level of Apple
promotion, as expected, reflected what sort of increase the developer would see. Areas such as New and Noteworthy produced slightly less gains than Staff Favorites or What's Hot. Generally speaking, it is safe to assume a 2-20X sales spike following being featured, with the effect lasting roughly a week or so before returning to average numbers. The key here is to use this dramatic spike to propel the app onto a top listbe it the universal top 100 or in a top list for a specific section or country. Once there, the app has a much better chance of moving up and reaching a higher plateau of sales.

From a marketing perspective, the same tactic could be applied. While not all apps have the likelihood of being featured, focusing promotional efforts within a tight timeframe can be the key. Instead of spreading out marketing and advertising over the life of a product, focusing efforts into a narrow window (preferably, in terms of days) can be much more effective in getting the app onto a top list.

Now, let's take a look at specific applications. I encourage examining the apps themselves to understand what exactly went into them. The production values, complexity, niche, and pricing determine why they produced either excellent or paltry sales results. The following list reflects 50 applications from the data set that covers the range of sales:

Common marketing techniques include Facebook, forum posts, Twitter, own website, press releases, LinkedIn, app Review sites, blogs, friends, contests, YouTube, advertising (Print, PPC, and banners), flyers, newsletters, Flash Demos, physical networking and podcasts. While each of these methods helped developers in some ways, the real marketing power to make or break an app product rested in the hands of Apple and their selection choices. Apps with successful products in other industries (tie-ins) gained a significant boost from that relationship. The same held true for developers with a known presence already on the web.

The iPhone app market is something that is still in its infancy when one considers what it will look like only a few years from now. Although we are at more than 200,000 apps released, one million doesn't seem so far fetched given the rate of growth thus far. These sales analytics should offer a starting point for understanding the general landscape, but are not necessarily indicative of one's own app success. We've seen apps made in a weekend earn millions and apps taking months or more earning next to nothing. Developers can either find a niche and get extremely lucky, or produce a fantastic product with high production values. In the end, the latter is the safer route to success. Time to get crackin'

Anyone who spends any time at all online knows how easy it is to waste that time on sites one might call the online equivalent of junk food. ProcrasDonate is a site that hopes to turn that wasted time into something good while also giving users an incentive to waste less in the future.

Users begin by downloading Massachusetts-based ProcrasDonate's free Firefox add-on and registering with the site, including choosing the charities they'd like to support and the amounts they pledge for each hour they waste. They then select the sites they consider their biggest time-wastersFacebook and Twitter are both obvious choices, the site notesand link their Amazon account for payments. There's also an option to highlight sites that are the opposite of time-wasters through ProcrasDonate's TimeWellSpent category; in that case, users can choose to reward those site owners for their worthy content.

Either way, users then go about their normal online activities, and ProcrasDonate records the way their time is spent. For each hour they spend on websites marked as time-wasters, a pledge gets recorded for their selected charities; every hour spent on those marked as TimeWellSpent, conversely, means a donation to those sites' owners. Whenever a pledge reaches a threshold of USD 10, a donation is made directly and in full from the user's Amazon account. Users can track their cumulative donations via ProcrasDonate's my impact page; they can also request weekly emails with progress updates. A meter bar in the browser add-on, meanwhile, shows how much time has been wasted over the course of the week, gradually turning red when that amount exceeds the user's set goal.

Much like Pledgehammerwhich turns resolution set-backs into charitable donationsProcrasDonate's win-win-win potential is what makes it especially compelling. Consumers waste less time; good sites get supported; and charities get helped along the way. Where else could consumers' ongoing challenges be turned around for good...? (Related: Wrist device rewards kids for exercising Learning site motivates kids with real rewards Appealing to gravanity of smokers who plan to quit.)

Website: www.procrasdonate.com
Contact: support@procrasdonate.com

Spotted by: Margarita Barry

Meetings can be one of the biggest time drains for you as an individual and for a business. A meeting with 7 people all making $20 per hour costs a business $140 per hour. If it is a once-per-week meeting and there are 15 minutes wasted at each meeting, the total yearly waste comes to over $1,800. I don't know about you, but a one hour meeting with only 15 minutes wasted is actually a pretty good meeting, in my experience. Half of a meeting being wasted is more par for the course, and entire meetings that are unproductive is fairly common.

Here are some ways you can facilitate more effective meetings and hopefully get more done in less time.

1. Make people show up on time

If people trickle in over a 10 minute period, that is a lot of wasted time. Often people come late because they know the meeting isn't going to start on time, anyway. This is kind of a catch 22, because if you start the meeting with no one there, it is hard to get anything done. If you wait for everyone, then you make it likely that people will come late to the next meeting. Here are a couple ideas:

• Email everyone to remind them a few minutes before the meeting starts.
• Call or run by the office of people you know are often late.
• Go ahead and start the meeting without everyone. When someone comes in late, ask that they catch up with someone else in the group to find out what they missed.
• Hold the meeting somewhere that being late will make them look bad or at least be more noticeable.
• Ask people to come on time. Depending on your role, this might be as simple as making a request, or a bit more strict, like pointing out that they are being rude to everyone else who came on time.

You can find creative ways to help encourage people to come on time, as well. Once I was having problems with a particular individual who always showed up late for our meetings. At one meeting, he was late again. I took everyone that was there down to the cafe, bought everyone a drink and we continued our meeting there. The late individual came in and didn't know where everyone was. The next time, he showed up on time.

2. Always have an agenda

Ideally, you want something with a specific amount of estimated time allocated to each item. This makes it easy for you to identify things that are starting to drag on longer than they should. Use the agenda to make sure you stay on track. This doesn't mean you can never discuss something that isn't on the agenda, but the agenda helps tell you where you should pick back up if you get side-tracked.

Give people the agenda ahead of time. For short meetings, it is probably best to have it in the body of an email. If you send it as an attachment, there is a good chance people won't read it before the meeting. If you have it in the body, they will probably at least skim it. At the very least, you want to get the meeting agenda into their subconscious mind before they show up.

Having an agenda also helps show that you are organized and have a plan. It sets the expectation that your meeting isn't going to be a waste of time. It helps put the meeting in the right perspective and makes it carry a more valuable perception.

3. Invite the right people

It is easy to get so many people involved that you can't get anything done. On the other hand you can't have an effective meeting if you don't have the right people there. If you are talking about something that needs to be approved by a number of people, it may be good to have meeting with a small group of people to hash out the ideas and recommendations for the decision makers to look at.

The number of people in a meeting is tricky. You want to avail yourself of everyone's talent, but you don't want to have a bunch of dead weight, either. Still, there are other considerations beyond just the contributions of people to the meeting:

• Political Sometimes you will need to invite someone so they feel important. You can potentially make them feel important without inviting them by scheduling the meeting for a time when they have another meeting scheduled.
• Buy in Related to the political point, sometimes you have to have people in a meeting because they won't support your conclusions unless they feel like they were part of it. Sometimes you can get around this by having a one-on-one session with them ahead of time to hear their concerns and make them feel like they were part of the process.

There are also some people you want to make sure you don't invite. I've worked in organizations that had high-level employees who never seemed to do much of anything. They seemed to feel that their sole responsibility in life was to play the devil's advocate and tell everyone why their ideas wouldn't work. These types of people can't make a decision, themselves, and usually have nothing to add. Occasionally they will help you steer clear of a potential pitfall, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so high that their input is worthless, for the most part. These are people you don't want to have at your meetings.

4. Use email effectively

Don't have a meeting for something that can be better communicated via email. If you just need to distribute facts, use email. If you need to argue about the best way to do something, don't try to do this in your inboxhold a meeting. Some people try to avoid distributing information via email because it makes them look more important to do it in a meeting. Giving the statistics from last month isn't the type of thing everyone needs to sit in a room to listen to. It might make someone feel important, but it is pointless unless the numbers are generating a lot of questionseven then email may be a more effective communication medium.

Have you ever noticed how science fiction shows have someone on the space ship whose job appears to be to repeat whatever the captain said to the computer again? Reading numbers off a spreadsheet is usually just as pointless.

5. Use meetings to argue

This sounds bad, but really, this is what makes an effective meeting. Meetings let you get people together and work through differences in person. You can pit various ideas against each other and come up with the best solutions. If you don't have any arguing going on in your meetings, then you are probably having meetings for the wrong reasons.

You have to learn to argue fair. You are discussing ideas, not personally attacking people. It may take a bit to get a team to open up to the point where they can passionately express their views, but that is what you need for meetings to really become productive.

One common problem is having someone at a meeting that is so important that no one will disagree with him/her. If no one is going to disagree, you might as well just let that person make all the decisions. I had a graphic designer working for me once who would never disagree with me when we were having meetings. I finally asked her about this. She said she didn't want to argue with her boss. I explained that I was paying her to disagree with me! If I didn't want her opinion, I wouldn't have hired her in the first place.

6. Record your decisions

Often decisions are made at meetings, but within a few months, no one remembers why. Taking good notes will help you easily remember not only what was decided, but why it was decided. It also makes it easy for new people to easily catch up and understand the history of a group. For taking notes, I like tools like SubEthaEdit or EtherPad that let multiple people edit the same document simultaneously. I like these tools because they help keep everyone engaged and don't require a bunch of time creating minutes after the fact.

Another advantage of having good notes is that it gives you a way to pass on the meeting's contents to people who need to know about the discussion, but can't come (or you don't want to come). Ideally, having the notes stored somewhere that everyone can search them is a valuable method of knowledge management for your entire company.

7. Kill the Powerpoints

Powerpoint can be a useful tool for doing training, but if you are spending a lot of time with someone at the front of a room flipping through slides, it is a sign that your meetings aren't very efficient. Powerpoint can be a good way to make sure everyone is looking at the same thing as the starting point for discussion. A good rule of thumb is seven minutes. If the person controlling the Powerpoint is talking for more than seven minutes without being interrupted or asked a question, then the information probably doesn't need to be presented in the meeting.

8. Get everyone talking

Don't let people be silent participants. If someone isn't participating, they may not be comfortable with the formateveryone else may be jumping in but they feel like they need to ask permission to talk or prefer something with more structure. These people need to be included. Usually it is just a matter of saying, Joe, what do you think? The point is, you need to make a conscious effort to include everyone. If they aren't being heard, then it is probably a waste of money for them to be there.

9. End on time

You want people to show up on time for your important meeting. You need to give them the same level of respect and end when you say you will end. If you keep on top of your agenda's time schedule, ending on time shouldn't be too difficult and ending early is always a good thing, too.

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Want to know the dent in superstition and other data and logic-free thinking left by more than a century of free public education, some of the nation's better universities, a great big space center, and a few pretty talented science journalists over the years?

• The Texas Tribune Ross Ramsey: Meet the Flintstones ;

The Texas Tribune, by the way, is a non-profit, online journalism project of the same general sort as discussed in a post a short scroll down, in North Carolina. This story's topic is a public opinion poll the outfit sponsored with the Univ. of Texas. Lots of mean snooty giggles here but, one is confident, Texans are hardly alone in their widespread certainty we didn't evolve from anything other than god's will, and that we even, probably walked with dinosaurs. One might find the same thing in, oh, Massachusetts. I'm not even sure how Berkeley would do. The hed's cartoon reference is explained in the story's last lines.

Other Stories:

• Seriously fighting words in this NewsBusters blog Brad Wilmouth: Olbermann Mocks Most Texans as 15 Million Wasted Minds ; Lefty Olbermann's big regret Dems are just about as clueless as the GOP crowd.

And just for the record, Texas is not at all entirely ignorant:

• University Texas, Austin, Press Release: UTA a Partner in Evolution Study Funded for $25 Million by National Science Foundation ;

- Charlie Petit

Company meetings are a nearly universally hated thing. No matter what line of work you're in, most are simply a waste of time. And even when they're important and necessary, they're still likely inefficient. A new startup aims to show you just how wasteful they are.

MEETorDIE is an online tool that asks you to put in information about your meeting, including what company you work for, what industry you're in, how big the company is, how long the meeting is, and who is attending. When you submit that information, you're taken to a page that shows how much money your company wasted with that meeting. Below that, you can see the aggregate statistics for how much money your company has wasted on meetings total.

Depending on how wasteful your meeting is, MEETorDIE's mascot, Goolah, will be shown in different precarious situations incorporating imagery from other popular startups, such as Foursquare and Twitter. More importantly, MEETorDIE suggests how the money being wasted during these meetings might be better spent, such as donating money for drinking water for Africa.

On the main page of the site you can also see other people around the world bitching about their meeting. And anyone can comment anonymously on these meeting notes.

MEETorDIE calculates the amount of money being wasted by pulling information from a number of online resources including the Department of Labor. If your company is in their database, they can also pull the average salaries for the people in the meeting to give you an accurate estimate on how much money your company is wasting.

MEETorDIE is the first project by the Mountain View-based bootstrapped startup Vaporware Labs. The company was started by former EA and Apple employees.

As an entrepreneur, blogger and the investor in charge of the Founders Fund seed investment program, Dave McClure knows the importance of a proven revenue model. In a recent blog post he makes the assertion that "subscription models are the new black," despite the fact that startup monetization has focussed heavily on cost-per-click advertising. He writes, "This Don't-Be-Evil-AdWords-Click-Happiness..It's made us a bunch of lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI...We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy & venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models." While we might not have chosen this exact phrasing, we cannot agree with McClure more.

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Nowhere is freemium model failure more obvious than in the streaming music space. Even with millions of users and licensing deals with major labels, Imeem was acquired by MySpace last year and quickly dismantled. The cost of licensing content to unpaying users was enough to put the company into serious debt. The company's subscription service just wasn't enough to offset the cost of the freemium business. Meanwhile, myriad music sites have come and gone, but Rhapsody's subscription-only service has managed to survive. Having learned from its predecessors, it's rumored that Spotify will only launch in the US with a subscription model, despite its free European offerings.

Says McClure, "There is a role for freemium, but unless you missed the TPS report the FREE part is only a loss-leader for the MEE-YUM part -- it's a test-drive before you buy something. If your users are just kicking the tires then you need to kick them to the curb eventually."

McClure is right. It's been a long time since eyeballs have automatically equated to dollars. If you've got a product that even a small number of users will pay for on a regular basis, establish that paid user base as soon as you possibly can.

Internet has definitely changed the way we communicate and meet people, write content, read them and more. 2010 is no doubt going to see far more internet activity than 2009? However, how did people use internet in 2009?

Royal Pingdom has some interesting answers to the above question with some mind-boggling stats. Here are few of the highlights on how people used Internet in 2009. These stats were compiled from several sources from across the internet.

• 90 trillion emails were sent on the Internet in 2009 with an average of 247 billion new messages per day.
• 47 million websites were created in 2009 taking the total number of websites to 234 million in 2009. 81.8 million domains were .Com
• Apache web server grew 13.9%, Nginx (which we use) grew 384.4%. However, usage for both IIS and Lighttpd dropped significantly
• As of September 2009, there were 1.73 billion internet users worldwide, the largest users were from Asia, followed by Europe and North America
• There are more than 126 million blogs which were tracked in 2009
• People tweeted 27.3 million times a day on Twitter
• 350 million Facebook users
• 4 billion images hosted on Flickr, 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook
• YouTube servers 1 billion videos per day, with 82% of US users watching videos online
• IE still has 62% market share, followed by Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari

Aren't these number mind boggling? However, it would be no surprise that 2010 turns out to be a much bigger year. How much time do you spend on the Internet every day? How do you access the Internet? It would be interesting to know.

Don't miss these Related Posts:

• Firefox Tops on Techie Buzz, IE Second, Chrome 3rd [2009 Stats]
• Number of Tweets Surpass World Population
• Mobile Internet & Advertising Conference 2009
• 8 Billion Minutes Wasted on Facebook, Everyday
• Hotmail Hosts Over 1.3 Billion Inboxes

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James Hopkins makes exactly the kind of art that I like.

Spirit Level

Forwards & Reverse

Wasted Youth

found at yatzer

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In an interview with C-SPAN, Justice Antonin Scalia once again graced us with his worldview. As usual, it is as beautiful and terrible as the dawn.

The WSJ Law Blog sloughed through the interview transcripts and pulled out this gleaming diamond of truth:

I mean there'd be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn't she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?

I mean lawyers, after all, don't produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That's important, but it doesn't put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

I have never agreed with Justice Scalia more than I do at this very moment. I ... I've ... got something in my eye.

I move that LSAC must send this quote to anybody that applies to sit for the LSAT. I further move that anybody scoring an IQ above 139 who does not receive a federal circuit clerkship or better must forthwith abandon legal practice and be forced into labor on renewable energy, cancer treatments, or summer blockbuster screenplay editing. Do I have a second?

Scalia: 'We Are Devoting Too Many of Our Best Minds to' Lawyering [WSJ Law Blog]

Earlier: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Hates Acronyms, Loves Marisa Tomei

Shared by Jesse Stay
My response: http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/05/07/questioning-the-need-for-college-watch-this/

As an entrepreneur, you have to make a lot of difficult decisions in your life. I've had to make many of those decisions for my business, but not until recently, have I had to make such a big decision that can affect my entire life to go, or not go to college. Even Louis Gray, one of Teens in Tech Networks advisors, and a personal mentor, has written a whole blog post on this issue: The Great Debate: Is College the Right Path to Succeed?

Here's my position. College is either the best four years of your live, or the four years of your life where you've wasted those four years, and wasted a lot of money. I don't want to look back when I'm 30 and say that I wasted four years of my life in college, when I could have been working on my next startup, or working with an awesome startup. I simply don't want to regret making such a decision like that.

On the other side, we have people telling me the some of their best friends, and partners for life where found at college. Also, that college is a great way to make connections. Seeing that I'm in Silicon Valley, and an active member of the tech scene, I don't feel like making connections is something that college is going to teach me. Another reason. Entrepreneurship. My philosophy is that entrepreneurship can not be taught. It is something that you learn along the way of your business as you grow.

Please leave all your comments below I really appreciate any comments and/or opinions.