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Dec
03 |
By Jason Moore So you're slogging away at a 9 to 5 job, paying off that student loan, doing all the things The Man said you had to do to succeed. Then one day you stop and think to yourself: there has got to be an easier way to make money. And that's why you're in jail now. Which is too bad, because it turns out there are a number of completely legal ways to make money--good money--without setting foot in an office or putting on a uniform or even learning a single skill. And people do it every day. #5. Sperm Donors Potential Income: $12,000+ per year (depending on the sperm). Finally, it's the job you've been training for since middle school! The opportunities are only as limited as your own libido and genetics. For just a couple minutes of your time you can net around $100 for each donation, depending on the bank. Some even offer up to $500 a shot--but that's only if you agree to do it "Open ID" style so that your offspring can come knocking on your door years later. No matter what career you're currently in, this should be the easiest job interview you've ever been through. There will be some basic health screenings to prove that you can physically handle the gauntlet of porn they're about to throw at you. Also, be ready for a background check on you and your immediate family to make sure that you aren't Charlie Sheen. Did we just mention the porn? Yeah, they put you in a nice quiet room with a bunch of porn. Do the deed, drop off your semen at the desk and make an appointment for later in the week (you can donate every three days). A hundred bucks, every three days, that's $12,000 a year. And that's just entry level. If you're really serious about this, why limit yourself to one sperm bank? You can hit as many as you want, multiplying your yearly haul with each one. The "Open ID" method specifies that you're limited to two pregnancies per state. But they distribute your sample for you, so assuming you don't mind having a brood of 100 children scattered across America, you're literally sitting on a potential $50,000 at this moment. Even if you don't go "Open ID," your earning potential is only limited by your ability to deliver the goods. The sperm count tends to decrease with the volume, but your guys can handle a few workouts a day, right? Ladies, we're not leaving you out of this one. You can donate eggs and--get this--you can wind up with $5,000 or more per cycle. #4. Street Entertainers Potential Income: $25,000+ a year. We've all seen the guy with a guitar hanging out by the subway station with his case open to accept donations. And you've probably dropped a quarter in feeling sorry for his poor homeless ass. But don't be fooled by that sad song about his wife leaving him for someone fitting your general description. He's just doing his job as a "busker." And that job can pay anywhere from $10 to $20 an hour depending on the performer's choice of location and level of talent. There's even a book on the subject by long-time busker Johnnie Mac, covering all the basics from the choicest locations to where to put your tip cup. Mac spent almost 20 years as a street musician and says he was, "making a fortune... in fact, more than triple what I was making in the job I left behind." And there's plenty of room for advancement. The Blue Man Group, Jimmy Buffet, Pierce Brosnan, George Burns, Bob Hope, Jewel, Jimmy Page, Penn and Teller, Rod Stewart, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and Robin Williams all started their entertainment careers on the streets. Sure those people all had talent, but you can also make money miming, fortune telling and standing totally still while covered in silver paint (though we're guessing that last one involves lots of smart-ass kids walking by and punching you in the nuts). Street performances are perfectly legal in most places as long as they don't interfere with traffic and business. But you do have to deal with the other buskers who are trying to horn in on your racket. After all, your sweet saxophone playing isn't going to get you any cash if there's a dude noisily plucking at his banjo five feet away, drowning you out. Luckily there's a sort of "Busker Code" that street entertainers follow which basically states, "I got to this corner first, and if you try and set up shop here, I'll stab you." #3. Human Guinea Pig Potential Income: $50,000 a year (if you survive). The key to science is trial and error. This occupation offers offers the excited opportunity to get paid to be one of the two. Anyone can do it and, if you get involved in enough studies, man can it add up. For instance here's one that pays up to $1,500 for just two days of your time (granted, you have to be in chronic pain to qualify, but who isn't?) or you could get paid $15 an hour to be a test patient for medical students to poke at. And best of all, it's perfectly safe! Okay, that's a lie. A couple of years ago 11 people got tuberculosis after participating in a study that was apparently trying to find out what happens when you stick 11 healthy people in the same room with one guy who has tuberculosis. Sure, that sounds horrifying. But we know at least one of their symptoms was prominent swelling. Of their wallets.  
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Dec
03 |
By John Timmer | Published: December 02, 2008 - 02:03PM CT Just when it seemed that the press has exhausted all the possible rumors the could exist regarding the future of Yahoo, another one is making the rounds. With mergers, buyouts, partnerships and purchases all proposed as the company's salvation, a new report is suggesting that Yahoo's fate might involve a stint as a privately held company. Unfortunately, the very conditions that make this rumor mildly plausible mean that any deal of this sort is unlikely to go through. Yahoo's had quite a year in the headlines as it is. The company was targeted for purchase by Microsoft, but Redmond offered a price-per-share that was below what the company's management thought it was worth, so that deal was rejected. This failed deal acted as blood in the water for Carl Icahn, who waged a proxy battle for control of Yahoo's board, with the intention of resuscitating the deal with Microsoft. With that challenge beaten back (and Icahn on the board), Yahoo's management turned to their plan for future viability: an ad-sharing deal with rival Google. Unfortunately, the government wasn't happy with this deal, and Google walked away. Rumors have also persisted that Yahoo could potentially purchase Time Warner's AOL division. That brings Yahoo to the present: an economic crisis, plummeting share prices and ad revenues, and Jerry Yang resigning as CEO, leaving no obvious plan for increasing future revenue. Not exactly an ideal situation for a publicly-traded company. Which is why the new rumors, reported by The Wall Street Journal almost make sense: a turnaround artist is looking to buy the company out at $22 a share and take it private. Yahoo is clearly in need of a long-term plan but, while it comes up with one, the company is being harmed by the public perception that it may be inviable, or at best a very poor bet in the long term. This has the pernicious effect of dropping its share price, which leaves it fewer options (it makes buying other companies through stock swaps much harder, for example) and makes it harder to retain skilled staff as working for stock options becomes less appealing. This situation is likely to get worse as the recession continues in the coming months. Taking the company private eliminates a lot of these concerns. Without a focus on quarterly income, stock price, etc., the company could have a better chance of attracting the people it needs: those who can figure out how to turn Yahoo's huge population of regular users into a source of new revenue. The company could reorient itself as it rides out the current economic storm, and reward its owners through a new public offering when conditions improve. Alternately, the new owners could divide it up and sell off the parts for profit at that point. The rumors also make sense in terms of the supposed white knight: Jonathan Miller, former head of Time Warner's AOL division. Miller sampled several strategies for making AOL a viable concern after it became clear that it had a finite lifespan as an ISP, eventually settling on a portal strategy that has a lot of parallels with Yahoo's current situation. Miller's fit for the position goes well beyond his familiarity with AOL and portals, however. He was one of Carl Icahn's initial candidates for Yahoo's board during the earlier proxy fight, and The Journal reports that he's been working behind the scenes to smooth the Microsoft-Yahoo negotiations. Miller has also been working in a venture capital firm, so presumably has some sense of how to drum up the money to get a deal to go through. That, unfortunately, is where the rumors make the least sense. Right now, investment cash is extraordinarily hard to come by, and Miller almost certainly knows that. Supposedly, he's working with sovereign wealth funds from a number of nations, but the appeal of this deal, at least at the moment, has got to be limited. Yahoo will need a lot of work, making it a risky bet, and most economists expect rough financial times to continue for months, so the buyout price is likely to only get better if they wait. Other than coming up with the cash for the deal, however, this is one of the rare rumors about Yahoo that largely appears to make sense. Unfortunately, that cash issue is so significant that it raises the question of whether this might be another strategic rumor, leaked to pave the way for some other interested party to swoop in with a deal. SOURCE: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081202-report-white-knight-wants-to-take-yahoo-private.html
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Nov
24 |
A senior citizen drove his brand new BMW Z4 convertible out of the car saleroom. Taking off down the motorway, he floored it to 90 mph, enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left.
=======NEVER DRIVE WITH YOUR WIFE========
A police officer pulls over a speeding car. The officer says, ' I clocked you at 80 miles per hour, sir.' The driver says, 'Gee, officer I had it on cruise control at 60, perhaps your radar gun needs calibrating.' Not looking up from her knitting the wife says: 'Now don't be silly dear, you know that this car doesn't have cruise control.' As the officer writes out the ticket, the driver looks over at his wife and growls, 'Can't you please keep your mouth shut for once?' The wife smiles demurely and says, 'You should be thankful your radar detector went off when it did.' As the officer makes out the second ticket for the illegal radar detector unit, the man glowers at his wife and says through clenched teeth, 'Dammit, woman, can't you keep your mouth shut?' The officer frowns and says, 'And I notice that you're not wearing your seat belt, sir. That's an automatic $75 fine.' The driver says, 'Yeah, well, you see officer, I had it on, but took it off when you pulled me over so that I could get my license out of my back pocket.' The wife says, 'Now, dear, you know very well that you didn't have your seat belt on. You never wear your seat belt when you're driving.' And as the police officer is writing out the third ticket the driver turns to his wife and barks, 'WHY DON'T YOU PLEASE SHUT UP??' The officer looks over at the woman and asks, 'Does your husband always talk to you this way, Ma'am?'
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Nov
18 |
WASHINGTON | Finally, the outlines of a coherent debate on the federal bailout. This comes as welcome relief from a campaign season that gave us the House Republicans’ know-nothing rejectionism, John McCain’s mindless railing against “greed and corruption” and Barack Obama’s detached enunciation of vacuous bailout “principles” that allowed him to be all things to all people. Now clarity is emerging. The fault line is the auto industry bailout. The Democrats are pushing hard for it. The White House is resisting. Underlying the policy differences is a philosophical divide. The Bush administration sees the $700 billion rescue as an emergency measure to save the financial sector on the grounds that finance is a utility. No government would let the electric companies go under and leave the country without power. By the same token, government must save the financial sector lest credit dry up and strangle the rest of the economy. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is willing to stretch the meaning of “bank” by extending protection to such entities as American Express. But fundamentally, he sees government as saving institutions that deal in money, not other stuff. Democrats have a larger canvas, with government intervening in other sectors of the economy to prevent the cascade effect of mass unemployment leading to more mortgage defaults and business failures (as consumer spending plummets), in turn dragging down more businesses and financial institutions, producing more unemployment, etc. — the death spiral of the 1930s. With almost 5 million workers supported by the auto industry, Democrats are pressing for a federal rescue. But the problems are obvious. First, the arbitrariness. Where do you stop? Once you’ve gone beyond the financial sector, every struggling industry will make a claim on the federal treasury. What are the grounds for saying yes or no? Second is the sheer inefficiency. Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. Bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping shed fatally unsupportable obligations. The point of the Democratic bailout is to protect the unions by preventing this kind of restructuring. Which will guarantee the continued failure of these companies, but now they will burn tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. It’s the ultimate in lemon socialism. Liberals have always wanted the auto companies to produce the kind of cars they insist everyone should drive: small, light, green and cute. Now they will have the power to do it. If you think we have economic troubles today, consider the effects of nationalizing an industry of this size, now run by bureaucrats issuing production quotas to meet politically mandated fuel-efficiency standards — to lift us to the sunny uplands of the coming green utopia. Republican minimalism — saving the credit-issuing utilities — certainly risks not doing enough. But the Democratic drift toward massive industrial policy threatens to grow into the guaranteed inefficiencies of command-economy maximalism. In this crisis, we agree to suspend the invisible hand of Adam Smith, but not in order to be crushed by the heavy hand of government. http://www.kansascity.com/273/story/895779.html
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Nov
12 |
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 3:03PM - By Mike Payne
Across 46 years, 22 films and six leading actors, the James Bond film legacy has featured some of the world’s most luxurious and iconic sportscars. From the signature Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger to the Lotus Esprit Turbo in For Your Eyes Only, 007 has spared no expense in choosing his wheels. To celebrate the release of the Quantum of Solace, here’s a list of the 007 hottest cars from the James Bond Legacy…
001: the BMW Z8
In the 1999 film The World Is Not Enough, James Bond piloted this bad little Beemer before it was officially produced by BMW. Apparently, those are the kind of perks that accompany a license to kill. During filming, the crew actually used a series of working mock-ups of the Z8 that vary a bit from the official production car. After the first model rolled out of the factory, all 5,703 of the original BMW Z8’s sold out, going for a starting price of $128,000. 002: the Alfa Romeo 159
The Alfa Romeo 159 is among the latest James Bond sportscars, as featured in the 2008 Bond film Quantum of Solace. This one, however, isn’t driven by 007– but a chase scene rival pitted against Bond’s Aston Martin. During the production of the film, the set was closed down due to a third and terrible accident where a stuntman driving the 159 crashed into a wall. The stuntman was airlifted to a nearby hospital where he lay in a coma for days– the same hospital in which he was treated for injuries in shooting the same scene days prior. If you perform your own stunts and want a piece of the Bond villainy action, you can get your hands on an Alfa Romeo 159 for around $33k before import costs… 003: the 1971 Mustang Mach-1
In 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, 007 took to the streets of Las Vegas in a Ford Mustang Mach-1– in hot pursuit of the Las Vegas Police. Diamonds was Sean Connery’s last film, but also the first film in history to feature the now-famous “two-wheeled stunt”, where a car is lifted off the ground, balancing on two wheels on one side of the car. The ‘71 Mach-1 featured plenty of muscle in its 429hp V8 option, which will fetch you around $25,000 well-restored on today’s market. 004: the Aston Martin DBS
Bond’s Aston Martin finally got itself a facelift. Like the BMW Z8, the Aston Martin DBS was featured in a Bond film before it hit the public. This $265,000 Aston Martin features a 6.0L V12 pushing 510 horses to hit 62mph in 4.3 seconds. The DBS was pitted against that Alpha Romeo 159 above, and this one didn’t escape without bruises either. During filming, a stuntdriver reportedly lost control of the Aston Martin– which wound up in Lake Garda in Italy… 005: the Toyota 2000GT
Produced between 1967 and 1970, the Toyota 2000GT was built in very limited numbers, designed to show that Japanese autos could compete with the sportscars of Europe. Apparently James Bond took notice, as the 2000GT was famously featured in 1967’s You Only Live Twice. However, Bond’s 2000GT had a slight problem– Sean Connery was too tall to fit in the Toyota, so a convertible version was made to compensate. While the original 2000GT sold in the U.S. for $6,800, it can be found at auction today for as high as $200,000. 006: the Lotus Esprit
In 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me featuring Roger Moore, the Lotus Esprit became one of Q’s most impressive sportscar mods. In a long chase scene between 007 and the infamous Bond-villain Jaws, Bond’s Lotus Esprit makes a cunning escape by transforming into a fully-diveable submarine. While a submersible version featuring that bikini blonde above are not available today, a similar Lotus Esprit could be originally purchased for around $16,800 at the dealer in 1977. 007: the Aston Martin DB5
Last but certainly not least– the original Bond-mobile, the 1963 Aston Martin DB5. In the 1964 film Goldfinger, 007 was provided with a weaponized DB5 by Q Branch himself. Aston Martin, however, wasn’t so keen on the deal. After much negotiating, Aston Martin finally agreed to a product placement deal that made automotive history for the brand. The DB5 was the latest-and-greatest sportscar to be produced in the UK, initially selling for $13,000. Its inline six engine produced 282hp to hit 62mph in 8.1 seconds. Bond’s version, however, was outfitted with an array of gadgets from smokescreens to heavy machine guns. Its not the weaponry that makes the Aston Martin DB5 a legend– it is its design which symbolizes the class and cool that has made James Bond the legend he is today. If there is one car that fully explains what StyleCrave is about, you’re looking at it, front and center. http://stylecrave.com/2008-11-11/the-007-hottest-cars-from-the-james-bond-legacy/
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Nov
11 |
Thinking of getting a tatoo, take a look at this new awesome 3D tatoo @_@ 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 
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Nov
03 |
A man escapes from prison where he has been for 15 years. He breaks into a house to look for money and guns and finds a young couple in bed. He orders the guy out of bed and ties him to a chair, while tying the girl to the bed he gets on top of her, kisses her neck, then gets up and goes into the bathroom. While he's in there, the husband tells his wife: "Listen, this guy's an escaped convict, look at his clothes! He probably spent lots of time in jail and hasn't seen a woman in years. I saw how he kissed your neck." If he wants sex, don't resist, don't complain, do whatever he tells you. Satisfy him no matter how much he nauseates you. This guy is probably very dangerous. If he gets angry, he'll kill us. Be strong, honey. I love you." To which his wife responds: "He wasn't kissing my neck. He was whispering in my ear. He told me he was gay, thought you were cute, and asked me if we had any vaseline. I told him it was in the bathroom. Be strong honey. I love you too!!" ====================================================== "Every-Vote-Count" go support your candidates by casting your vote and reminder to vote yes on prop 8 *_^
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Oct
31 |
             
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Oct
30 |
Here's the Democratic Fairness Fairy Tale Once upon a time, on a farm in Virginia , there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered quite a few grains of wheat. She called all of her Democrat neighbors together and said, 'If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it?' 'Who will help me reap my wheat?' asked the little red hen. At last it came time to bake the bread. 'Then I will do it by myself,' said the little red hen. And they all painted 'Unfair!' picket signs and marched around and around the little red hen, shouting obscenities. Then the farmer (Obama)came. He said to the little red hen, 'You must not be so greedy.' And they all lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, 'I am grateful, for now I truly understand.' But her neighbors became quite disappointed in her. She never again baked bread because she joined the 'party' and got her bread free. And all the Democrats smiled. 'Fairness' had been established. Individual initiative had died, but nobody noticed; perhaps no one EPILOGUE Bill Clinton is getting $12 million for his memoirs.
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Oct
24 |
THIS IS A NONPARTISAN JOKE THAT CAN BE ENJOYED BY BOTH PARTIES! While walking down the street one day a US senator is tragically hit by His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance. "Welcome to heaven," says St. Peter. "Before you settle in, it seems "No problem, just let me in," says the man. "Well, I'd like to, but I have orders from higher up. What we'll do "Really, I've made up my mind. I want to be i n heaven," says the "I'm sorry, but we have our rules." And with that, St . Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes Everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet him, shake his hand, and reminisce about the good times they had while They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster, caviar and champagne. Also present is the devil, who really is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that before he realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a hearty farewell and waves while the elevator rises... The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him. "Now it's time to visit heaven." So, 24 hours pass with the senator joining a group of contented souls "Well, then, you've spent a day in hell and another in heaven. Now The senator reflects for a minute, then he answers: "Well, I would So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, Now the doors of the elevator open and he's in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and The devil comes over to him and puts his arm around his shoulder.
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male, 25 y/o Anger Management Irvine, CA United States 
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Tyson commented on:
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