Get a little financial education ....

Take a couple hours and get yourself some education. At a minimum look at the first link to get a real grasp of what it means when you move orders or magnitude from million, to billion, to trillion.

See what $1,000,000,000,000 (One trillion) physically looks like.

Learn how money is created through debt.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
  

Watch I.O.U.S.A - One Nation. Under Debt. In Stress.

This has been my argument against Democratic policies all along ...

CNN Money Article on Obama tax plan to fund health care.

It's really a simple question I'm asking, when catastrophe strikes, who helps more ? ... the government or private individuals ? Heck, even when it's not a catastrophe, who helps more ? ... people or the government ?

When Katrina struck, who gave their time and helped those in need and rebuilt ? I'd argue that Oprah helped out more than any government agency. And how are those individuals or collections of individuals able to help so much ? They became successful business people and individuals, and now they have the resources to help out.

If we taxed Oprah or Bill Gates to death, how would they be able to amass fortunes and now be in a situation to help out as much as they are ? On top of that we all know how backwards the government is and when you run a business like a business you get efficiencies and not bloat.

Just had to get that off my chest. You don't have to "incent" people to give, they do it already, but surely don't hinder. The top 1% earners already pay 40% of the tax burden. People just don't see that or refuse to believe it.

I'll never forget the day when I helped a young single mother do her taxes when I was in college. She wanted me to double check all the figures because she was only getting $1,200 back on her tax refund. I looked at her return and she had only paid $900 INTO the system. She was complaining that she wasn't getting enough back !

Yes she was struggling, yes her neighbors were always there to help out, yes she was already getting government assistance in the form of programs ... but to COMPLAIN that the system somehow OWED her MORE money than she PAID IN.

Played with Dmitri Nobles tonight ...

Yeah, another "famous" player to add to the list of people I've played with, including Huck Seed and Phil Gordan. You should remember him from the 2006 WSOP main event. He had a monster chip lead on day 2. Here's a reminder of how he plays :-)



He was very friendly, except when he was physically trying to steal my chips :-)

I seem to have left some money in Vegas ....

.. so I'm off this weekend to see if I can find it. I think I know exactly where I left it, so just a quick trip to go and pick it up :-)

I'm bringing these three tools to help find it ...



Can not highly enough recommend Harrington on Cash Games, great books. I hate that there is so much great information on poker these days. I just always hope that my friends at the table have not consumed too much of it, or that I can always deduce how much they have consumed and what level of thinking they are on. So much work just to have a little fun :-)

Going to keep some detailed notes this time, and good/bad/ugly I will share them all.

MicroBlogging Addict .....

I've become a micro-blogging addict. Twitter started easily enough at work as a way to get the word out to fellow geeks. Stuff from trade shows, blogs, whitepapers, demos, etc. The more I used it, the more I found myself communicating over it rather than email or phone.

So if you really want to know what I'm doing at any given moment, follow me on twitter. Go ahead, give it a try, you only have all the free time in the world to lose ! :-)

And here's a quick script that someone wrote that shows you all my current followers, cool !