Scott Adams's Blog, page 350

Show-off Forgiveness Day

In the spirit of the holiday season, I give each of you permission to brag about anything incredible that you, or a loved one or family member, are working on. For this post only, all of the social conventions about bragging are suspended. Let your awesomeness shine.

Leave a comment telling the world about your incredible startup that will change the world, the amazing goals you accomplished, the awards you won, the victories you enjoyed, the degrees you completed, and anything else that your good upbringing would normally suppress. And don't leave out the glowing prose.

If you have links to support your claims of wonderfulness, let's see them. (I'm looking at you, Raskolnikov.)

Eating is Broken (Updated 12/15)

[Update: I answered some of your objections at the end.]

Eating is broken. Our entire system of preparing and eating food is a relic from less complicated times. In the olden days of 1955, Mom's full-time job included shopping, cooking, and cleaning up. Everyone in the family ate the same food at the same table at the same time, like it or not. That model worked.

Fast forward to today. Little Timmy has wheat sensitivity, little Amber is lactose intolerant, Mom is trying to go vegan and Dad wants a burger. And they all have complex schedules, with work, school, sports and whatever.

Restaurants are a partial solution, but they can be pricey, and they don't solve the problem of everyone in the family needing to eat at a different time.

Perhaps we need to move from what you might call a hostess model (Mom in 1955) to what I will call a project management model. We would need some applications on the Internet to make this approach work.

Consider one part of the eating process: shopping. Today, each family in your neighborhood makes a trip to the store. It's cheaper than home delivery. But imagine the process of shopping becoming a Walmart-like "just in time" model. Suppose your food for the coming day is delivered fresh to one central neighbor's garage in the neighborhood. That saves eight shopping trips and the delivery fee is divided eight ways. So far, so good. You might even have enough combined buying power to get discounts.

Now imagine that the project management application does everything from keeping track of individual diet preferences to scheduling neighbors for specific food tasks at specific times. You wouldn't mind being the prep cook on a given Tuesday if you did it with three neighbors while having an adult beverage and chatting. The idea here is to find as much benefit in the "work" of food preparation as you get from the eating. Shared tasks are a great way to get to know neighbors. If you need to work late, the software broadcasts a request for a substitute.

After the various neighbors have done their project tasks to create a meal for each individual, the food will be placed in microwaveable containers and labelled. Each family performs their scheduled tasks and takes home their food to heat up whenever it makes sense for the family. The project management application ensures that over time, every family puts in equal labor and equal funding.

The software would come up with menu plans and shopping lists that are the most efficient and optimized. For example, the carnivores' side dishes would be the same components as the vegan's main meal. And the planned excess would be tomorrow's lunch .

You can imagine a hundred ways to improve the system. The point is that a collaborative project management approach to family dinners makes sense when the complexity of modern life makes the single hostess model impractical.

This approach is also a great opportunity to lower food costs, reduce waste, improve your nutritional variety, network with neighbors, and have some fun at the same time.

I realize this model might not work for the loners and virulent anti-communists. Assume it's optional. No one will force you to talk to your neighbors.

Update: Here are my responses to your objections

Objection 1: Families should eat together! It's important!

Response: With the model I described, a family can still eat together. And if your shopping, cooking, and clean-up time is reduced, you might have more family time than before. The ability to eat meals at different times is simply an option.

Objection 2: TV dinners are already cheap and convenient!

Response: TV dinners are mostly salt, carbs, hooves, and miscellaneous. (Legal note: That was a humorous exaggeration.) Check the nutritional labels and get back to me.

Objection 3: The model I described has already been tried. It was called a co-op, and it didn't catch on.

Response: It hasn't been tried with a project management application that assigns duties, creates schedules, creates shopping lists from menus, minimizes costs, tracks everyone's contribution, creates custom meals for various diet preferences, orders online for delivery, and tracks nutritional variety. By way of analogy, you can get to work on a bicycle and you can get to work in a car, but that doesn't make a bike and a car the same idea.

Objection 4: Businesses such as "Dream Dinners" have tried this concept. With their model, you make an entire week of meals and freeze them.

Response: Those businesses have little in common with what I described. First, you have an extra corporation involved that needs to make a profit. Second, you can't freeze a salad, so there is still work to do at home. Also, freezing and thawing ruins the taste of some foods. You'd have far fewer meal choices with the corporate model, and Mom or Dad need to spend one afternoon per week in an industrial kitchen, without adult beverages. That's like work.

Objection 5: In my house, everyone eats what gets cooked. And if they don't like it, they all know how to make something for themselves.

Response: Apparently I love your family more than you do. How is the tough love/eating model better than eating a good variety of food that each person enjoys, with less effort, at a low price?

Eating is Broken

Eating is broken. Our entire system of preparing and eating food is a relic from less complicated times. In the olden days of 1955, Mom's full-time job included shopping, cooking, and cleaning up. Everyone in the family ate the same food at the same table at the same time, like it or not. That model worked.

Fast forward to today. Little Timmy has wheat sensitivity, little Amber is lactose intolerant, Mom is trying to go vegan and Dad wants a burger. And they all have complex schedules, with work, school, sports and whatever.

Restaurants are a partial solution, but they can be pricey, and they don't solve the problem of everyone in the family needing to eat at a different time.

Perhaps we need to move from what you might call a hostess model (Mom in 1955) to what I will call a project management model. We would need some applications on the Internet to make this approach work.

Consider one part of the eating process: shopping. Today, each family in your neighborhood makes a trip to the store. It's cheaper than home delivery. But imagine the process of shopping becoming a Walmart-like "just in time" model. Suppose your food for the coming day is delivered fresh to one central neighbor's garage in the neighborhood. That saves eight shopping trips and the delivery fee is divided eight ways. So far, so good. You might even have enough combined buying power to get discounts.

Now imagine that the project management application does everything from keeping track of individual diet preferences to scheduling neighbors for specific food tasks at specific times. You wouldn't mind being the prep cook on a given Tuesday if you did it with three neighbors while having an adult beverage and chatting. The idea here is to find as much benefit in the "work" of food preparation as you get from the eating. Shared tasks are a great way to get to know neighbors. If you need to work late, the software broadcasts a request for a substitute.

After the various neighbors have done their project tasks to create a meal for each individual, the food will be placed in microwaveable containers and labelled. Each family performs their scheduled tasks and takes home their food to heat up whenever it makes sense for the family. The project management application ensures that over time, every family puts in equal labor and equal funding.

The software would come up with menu plans and shopping lists that are the most efficient and optimized. For example, the carnivores' side dishes would be the same components as the vegan's main meal. And the planned excess would be tomorrow's lunch .

You can imagine a hundred ways to improve the system. The point is that a collaborative project management approach to family dinners makes sense when the complexity of modern life makes the single hostess model impractical.

This approach is also a great opportunity to lower food costs, reduce waste, improve your nutritional variety, network with neighbors, and have some fun at the same time.

I realize this model might not work for the loners and virulent anti-communists. Assume it's optional. No one will force you to talk to your neighbors.

Online Confusopoly

Do you remember when online shopping was new, and it hardly ever worked? The Internet was so slow that it seemed faster to drive to the store. In the early days, few things were available online. And the shopping sites had an annoying habit of crashing before you completed your purchase.

Over time, the online shopping sites got their act together. The Internet got faster, the selection improved, and buying online was far easier than visiting a store. That wonderful situation lasted until, oh, this year.

Have you tried to buy anything online lately? Yesterday my wife, Shelly, helpfully handed me a catalog with some items circled as "suggestions" I might consider buying her for Christmas. Perfect, I thought. I'll have this stuff ordered online in five minutes.

Then Shelly pointed to the discount code number for this retailer and reminded me to enter it for the buy-one-thing-get-another-free promotion. No problem. It added some complication, but not much. I figured I'd just type a number in a box. Bingo-bango.

Then Shelly handed me a gift card she got from some sort of loyalty program, with its own code, for some additional discounts. Okay. I'll figure this out. Two complications is no problem.

Then Shelly explained she wanted two items, and each would have its own free thing that comes with it, and each was different. Now I'm wondering if the promotional code applies to just one thing or everything, and when will I know the right time to enter it for multiple item purchases? Hmm. I'm starting to confuse myself. But I'll figure this out.

Then Shelly pointed to the expiration date for this deal. I only had a few hours! I needed to drop what I was doing. Suddenly this project went from awesome to inconvenient. I had better things to do in the next few hours.

When I went to the retailer's site, I noticed it offered free shipping for purchases over $100. My purchase would be near the limit, but would my discount code and gift card push me back below it? Now things are getting complicated because I have a thousand things on my mind and I'm not sure I can remember to apply the discount code, use the gift card, request the free item, and game the system for free shipping. And there are some codes on the back of the magazine that seem important. Do they matter?

Next I need to navigate to the page for my item. No problem, I think. But I didn't count on the site being designed by terrorists. The site starts by begging me to register so they have me on file. No thanks. I try to search for my items, but I'm being attacked by pop up ads and offers. No! No! Dammit, NO! I swat them back and press on through the over-designed pages with too much detail and too little clarity. Finally, I find the items I seek, despite the site designers' excellent effort in making the navigation difficult so I would see lots of other stuff I don't want.

Luckily, I have Norton's Identity Safe that lets me fill in forms automatically with my name, address, and credit card. But Norton keeps filling in my phone number wrong. And every time I fix it manually, it somehow reverts back to wrong. This takes seven retries.

Meanwhile, I notice it's doing the same thing with the credit card number. It's insisting on auto-filling with my old credit card number, not the one I signed up for to get airlines miles, which was another giant headache. I could edit the Identity Safe database so this doesn't happen, but that's ten minutes of additional problems I'm not willing to take on. Just...let...me...do...this.

But does my preferred credit card have any available balance, I wonder? I remembered seeing an email that said my statement was ready. I track down the email, and from there headed online to check my balance. While I was logged in, it seemed efficient to pay off the credit card. Now I'm drifting further from my core task, and the timer is ticking on the sale window. I return to the retail site.

But there's a complication. The item has some size options I wasn't expecting. Now I have to hunt down Shelly and query her. I repeat the hunting and querying two more times for other questions I wasn't expecting to encounter.

When it was time to check out, my tally came to $99. I was one dollar short of free shipping. Screw it. I was too close to the finish line. I completed my purchase and ate the shipping costs. Now I hate the retailer with a white hot vengeance for making me work so hard to do something so simple.

This experience wasn't unique. Another big retailer put me through an even worse hassle for an item that, when I finally got to checkout, wasn't actually available. My point is that online shopping has gone from convenient to intentionally complicated, and I don't see that changing. Amazingly, I now prefer driving to the store, fighting for parking, and simply handing my item and my credit card to a sales clerk. I'd even pay extra for the convenience.

Is it just me, or has buying online become a pain in the ass?

The Persuasive Candidate

Today I will make my best case for why you should vote for me for President of the United States. I'll be using some powerful tricks of persuasion, so don't read further if that sort of thing would bother you.

By the way, the first paragraph was a trick of persuasion. I gave you the choice of opting in for the persuasion that follows. That put us on the same team and short circuited your automatic reflex for resistance. And I made you curious at the same time.

One of the fascinating things about persuasion is that I can describe my method while I do it, and it makes no difference to the outcome. That's why advertising still works even though we all know the tricks involved. It's why a trial lawyer can be overtly manipulative with a jury and yet each juror will still feel as though he or she reached a decision independently. Today I'll lay bare my method of persuasion and it will feel to you as if most of what I say actually makes a lot of folksy common sense.

I'll start by stating some simple truths that you probably agree with. When someone has the same opinion as you, it makes you think of them as smart. You can double that impact by putting your simple truths in a familiar form, such as a common saying or catch phrase. Our brains automatically assume that the familiar is more valid than the unfamiliar.

I'll begin by stating a simple fact: At the national level, our elected officials from both major parties are failing us. If we voters continue doing the same thing - electing more Republicans or more Democrats - we'll get the same result. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. We're just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. (Notice the familiar imagery.)

But what can we voters do that is different? Everyone knows that an independent candidate for President has almost no chance of winning, right? There's a chicken and egg problem. No voter wants to throw away a vote by supporting a candidate that can't win. And the candidate can't win without support. There's no way to prime the pump. It makes more sense to hold your nose and support whichever candidate is less awful than the alternative while also having a chance of winning.

Here's how we can hack the system and get out of this trap. Starting today, if anyone asks who you support for President, insist that the answer is "none of the above," and that the Dilbert cartoonist guy represents that choice. If enough people associate "none of the above" with my candidacy, pollsters will start putting my name into the lineup just to make the results more newsworthy. News is driven by novelty. Sooner or later, some pollster looking for attention will add my name to a survey just to see if I beat Huntsman.

It doesn't cost you anything to support me in polls before the election. In the worst case scenario there will still be a top Republican and a top Democrat to vote for when you get into the voting booth. You'll know by election day if a vote for me is likely to be wasted or not.

Don't be too concerned about the fact that I have no moral center and no qualifications whatsoever for the job of president. I've promised in previous blog posts that if elected I will do whatever Bill Clinton advises me to do, which would lead to policies that are a sensible middle ground (triangulation). That's a low risk strategy for fed-up voters, and it would be a wake-up call to the major parties that they need to change to remain relevant. As citizens, the worst thing we can do is reward either party for their atrocious performance. My one-term presidency would be similar to a parent giving a misbehaving child a time out. Republicans and Democrats would have four years to reflect on what they did wrong.

As president, I would be realistic about how much any one person, including the president, can do to fix the economy. But economies do respond to attitudes and optimism, and I would work directly on our national mood.

For starters, I would ask every citizen to contribute to our economic turnaround in whatever way each of us is best suited. I'd ask rich people to hire a few more people than they would otherwise prefer. For the unemployed, I'd ask them to actively work on their job skills by taking classes, volunteering as unpaid interns, or whatever it takes. And I'd ask everyone to exercise daily and eat right, to keep our national energy high and our health care costs low.

The key to this plan is that we all need to choose our own type of sacrifice, and we all need a way to broadcast our sacrifice to our neighbors. Sacrifice needs to be observed to be sustained. Some have said that recycling only works because each family's effort is displayed once per week at the curb. Similarly, citizens need visible evidence of each person's sacrifice toward fixing the economy. Perhaps each type of sacrifice could be signified by a color. People who wear green bracelets might be honing their job skills. People who wear purple have hired one more employee than needed. People who wear blue have volunteered to be mentors, or unpaid tutors, and so on. The bracelets would be optional, of course, just as they have been for the Livestrong fight against cancer, and that program has been hugely successful. As president, I would borrow any system that works.

With my concept of making our sacrifices visible and universal, everywhere you go you'd see people wearing their colors on their bracelets, or lapel pins, or bumper stickers. And you'd have something to discuss with every person you meet. Our most basic human urge, after survival, is to be a part of something larger than ourselves. Technically, we're all part of a country, but it usually feels as if we're nothing but a bunch of people acting selfishly. As President, that's the only thing I'd try to change. I'd work on making the nation feel like a group effort. And to do that, sacrifice has to be both universal and visual.

Compare the shared sacrifice concept I just described to our current system that involves identifying particular groups and asking them to sacrifice for the benefit of others. So far, that hasn't worked. And it pulls us farther apart.

This concludes my persuasive argument. I described a simple method by which my name could be safely associated with "none of the above" for president. I described a picture of shared sacrifice that sounded both sensible and appealing. And I described a practical way that every citizen can send a message to politicians that they need to shape up to remain relevant.

Gift Traps to Avoid

Buying gifts is risky proposition. No matter what you buy, it sends an unintentional message about what you're thinking. And that message isn't always good. Here are just a few ways a gift can go wrong:
Clothing gifts say, "Tell the cat to stop dressing you. I've come to the rescue."Clothes that are a size too large beg the question "Is this how big you think I look?"Clothes that are too small raise the non-zero possibility that you're just being a jerk.A new vacuum cleaner says, "When I think of a dirty carpet, I think of you."Sexy gifts say, "I was shopping online with my other hand."Hobby-related gifts say, "I noticed you don't do things that are, um, useful."Kitchen-related gifts say, "I tasted your cooking. I hope the problem was your tools."Inexpensive gifts say, "Well, either I'm cheap or you're worthless. Pick one."Expensive gifts say, "I'm hiding a dark secret."Exercise-related gifts say, "I've seen you look better."The worst type of gift is anything in the home décor category. You have a 1% chance of picking something the recipient considers a perfect fit for the house. If the recipient puts your hideous gift on the mantle, it will serve as a year-round reminder of your bad gift-giving skills and your even worse sense of taste. And if the recipient opens your gift and walks directly to a dark closet to bury it under a pile, the rest of Christmas day will feel awkward.

What we all need this holiday season are some sure-fire, high probability gift ideas. As I mentioned last year, when buying for a woman, the smartest gift I've seen is silver jewelry with the name of the recipient's kids, pets, or family. See Hayjac Designs. The message is "I noticed how much you love your family."  I'll bet that gift has a 100% success rate.

And if you know someone with an office job, you can't go too wrong with Dilbert gifts, especially the top selling calendar on Amazon.com. The message with that sort of gift is "You have excellent reading comprehension and a warped sense of humor."

Let's hear your gift ideas. Describe the gift and tell me what message it sends, especially if it's funny or smart. Include links if you can.

 

My Robot

What percentage of my body needs to be alive in order for me to be considered a living person with full rights? Obviously a person can lose hair, teeth, limbs, kidneys, and whatnot, while still having rights. People in comas still have legal rights. Where is the limit?

I ask because my new plan for immortality is to keep a few skin cells in a petri dish to continue with my life after the rest of me dies. And I'll store those cells inside a robot that continues to live forever. The robot will have four directives after my death.
Keep my cells nourished/cloned and alive in the petri dish inside its body.Keep upgrading itself whenever there are advances in robot technology.Replicate my personality.Make the world a better place.As a public figure, and a writer, it would be easy for a robot to piece together a reasonable facsimile of my personality. The robot would have access to all of my writing, so it would know my sense of humor, my thought processes, and even how I choose words. The Internet has photos of me, video clips, audiobooks I've narrated, and most of my life story. In time, as technology improves, the robot could learn to speak and respond just as I do now.

There might be some issues with a robot accessing my bank account and investments once my only living parts are in a petri dish. That's why I'll set up a trust before I die, so a regular human can distribute my finances upon the robot's requests. But the human will rarely be needed because the robot will have all of my financial passwords and access to the Internet.

Robots can already walk upright with as much balance as a human. They can open jars, comprehend their surroundings (somewhat), and understand spoken language (Siri). Battery technology will continue to give them range, and they can learn to recharge themselves.

Any decent robot will have a wireless connection to the Internet and be able to search for new advancements in robot technology, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. For the first fifty years of the robot's autonomous life, the trust I will set up might need to make the final decisions on which robot upgrades make sense. I can imagine the trustee hiring a robot technology consulting company once a year to recommend upgrades and do routine maintenance. At some point, the robot will be capable enough to take over its own upgrade function.

After my scheme goes into effect, Congress will try to modify the law to say a few cells in a petri dish do not qualify as a living human with rights. When my robot gets wind of that, he'll leap into action, hiring lobbyists and lawyers, and creating online petitions. The robot will be programmed to vigorously defend the rights of my living cells. Cough, cough **Skynet** cough.

If my robot is destroyed or imprisoned, that's no problem. His software would always be fully backed up in the cloud and a second set of my living cells would be maintained in another location outside the country. In the event of my primary robot's demise or detainment, my trustee would be instructed to purchase a new robot from the robot factory, order some cloned cells from my backup petri dish, and recreate me.

Why wouldn't this plan work?

Pattern Recognition

Researchers are great at finding correlations between lifestyle and health. Here are four study results you've probably seen.
People who have a drink or two each day live longer.People who own pets live longer.People who exercise 20 minutes a day live longer.Religious people live longer.What do all four of those lifestyle choices have in common in terms of a possible root cause explanation? Read the list again and see if you can find it. What you're looking for is some characteristic that is common to the people own pets, exercise regularly, have an occasional drink or two, and practice religion. What could be inferred about all of those people?

I'm interested in your answers because the readers of this blog are good at pattern recognition. You'll probably come up with several plausible answers. The pattern I noticed is that each of the lifestyle choices directly lowers stress by improving a person's attitude.

My hypothesis is that stress is the root cause of most health problems.

People use food to self-medicate against stress. So-called comfort food is loaded with fattening carbs and artery-clogging deep fried deliciousness. A person who has a sweet tooth finds peace through dessert. I wonder if obesity is simply a way to identify a person who has trouble handling stress.

To make matters worse, stress makes you lose sleep, and feeling tired causes you to eat too much, say researchers. In so many ways, stress is the root cause of our health problems, either directly or indirectly.

Consider cigarette smokers. I can't relate to feeling the need for a cigarette, but I would imagine it's stressful to crave one during a long meeting, or a long flight. No matter how relaxing the smoke break itself is, you pay for it ten times over by needing a cigarette all of the other times. Smoking seems stressful to me. I wonder if the people who can't quit smoking are the same people who have trouble managing stress in general.

After I'm elected President of the United States, and my advisor, Bill Clinton, is handling all of the hard, wonky stuff, I'll be reminding citizens to exercise every day. I'll tell people it is their patriotic duty to manage their own stress through exercise.

Drinking, taking care of a pet, and finding God are activities that don't work for every person. But mild exercise is something that nearly every person can do. Take a walk, ride a bike, join a gym - do something. And do it every day, to keep your attitude and energy up.

In hard times, we all have to be a little bit smarter, a little more creative, and a little more productive. Your country needs you to actively manage your stress, and to elevate your attitude and your can-do optimism, so you'll be better equipped to help rebuild the economy.

As a professional humorist, I realize pundits will turn my elegant discussion about the benefits of stress reduction into "That cartoonist idiot says we'll cure unemployment and lung cancer by jogging." So just to be clear, all I'm saying is that daily exercise will reduce your stress levels and help your mind and your body. Your country needs you at your best.

[Note to Libertarians: Exercise is still optional. You're free to be a miserable drag on society if you choose.]

Fixing Unemployment

In America, the biggest question of our time is "How can we create more jobs?" Lately I'm wondering if the question is wrong, or at least incomplete.

First, some context.

In 1979, I graduated from college with lots of general education and no specific occupational skills. My parents loaded the meager contents of my dorm room into our Plymouth and drove me back to my tiny hometown of Windham NY, population 2,000. Opportunities were limited in Windham, but I didn't see that as an obstacle. Step one was to move to where the jobs were. I packed two suitcases and moved to California. I had enough money to last about a month.

Plenty of big companies were hiring, and most of them offered to reimburse employees for just about any sort of training or degree-oriented external classes. The tradeoff was that the entry level pay was low - my first job as a bank teller paid $735 per month. But that was enough for a single guy with no social life and no hope of dating. I rented a windowless room in an apartment with two roommates and used public transportation. My healthcare costs were covered by the company, and I didn't need much else. Dinner was a can of Campbell's soup. Entertainment was two blurry channels on the six inch screen of my black and white TV. For exercise, I would do pushups and go for a run.

My quality of life was dismal, but I remained optimistic because my future looked bright. Every year I took another step up the corporate ladder. In those days, I would have chewed through a concrete wall to get what I wanted, so I recognized no limits. All I needed to do was work 60 hours per week, take business school classes at night, and the opportunities were plentiful.

I could summarize the employment environment of the times this way:
Lots of jobs for people who were willing to relocateLow entry-level payCompany-paid healthcareCompany-paid training, including external degree coursesInexpensive cost of livingClear opportunities for advancementHow's that different from today? The quick answer is that every part of what I described is different. And you need the whole system in place or else the economy can't be a sustained job creation machine. So I don't think we can tweak the current economy, or stimulate it, enough to make much difference. What we need is Cheapatopia.

Regular readers know that Cheapatopia is my name for a future planned city that is designed from the ground up to be inexpensive and green while also providing an awesome lifestyle. I've described that concept before, but today I'm overlaying the employment question to make it all one comprehensive solution to every problem in the world. Literally.

The idea is to build cities in America, from scratch, that have an absurdly inexpensive cost of living, and use them as magnets to suck up the unemployed from around the country. The initial jobs would involve building the city itself.

Imagine picking your Cheapatopia location based on the best place to put huge energy projects, such as solar, wind, geothermal, and more. Companies need lots of inexpensive employees to build the factories, build the Cheapatopia housing and stores nearby, and to work in the factories when completed. That's where the inexpensive lifestyle comes in. Workers will accept small paychecks if their cost of living is miniscule, their lifestyles are spectacular, and they are learning valuable skills. As a bonus, Cheapatopia would have low taxes to attract the big energy projects.

One of our biggest obstacles to full employment is that people can't easily move to where the jobs are. Perhaps your mortgage is underwater. Perhaps you don't have enough money to pay for relocation until you have a job, and you don't have enough money to travel the country looking for one. Cheapatopia can fix the relocation expense problem in several ways.

For starters, the big energy project employers could do their recruiting and hiring on the road. No one needs to travel until a job is secured. Second, companies could afford to pay relocation expenses because - and this is the key - wages would be low. Taxes would be low too. Companies could also afford healthcare and training, for the same reason.

An inexpensive cost of living is the key to making all of the gears of the economic engine turn. We have the know-how to create an inexpensive city if we design it from the ground up with that priority.

In year one, the best housing in Cheapatopia might resemble dorm rooms, with cafeteria dining and central gathering spaces. The initial occupants would be unmarried workers and married people who are willing to put up with long distance relationships for a year. Over time, these same workers would help build more suitable (and awesome) housing for families. This is the same model that early settlers used to colonize the western part of the United States.

It would take an entire book to describe how wonderful Cheapatopia could be. The social interaction would be better than what you experience now because it would be designed that way. You'd have communal dining, lots of organized recreation, and beauty everywhere you looked. You'd have full employment, no pollution, great schools, lightning fast Internet, easy public transportation, and a relatively safe and stress-free life. There's no reason Cheapatopia couldn't be the best place to live at the same time as it is the least expensive.

In summary, the solution to unemployment will require recreating the entire set of conditions that were present during every other time of high employment. And the place to start is by lowering the cost of living. Cheapatopia, and its clones, will sop up the unemployed from around the country and help every town and city by doing so. Once the economic engine is rebooted, we'll have all the tools we need to solve every other problem in the world.

Remind me again what the other presidential candidates are suggesting?

Job Bunching Service

As the world gets more complicated, we're seeing a rising need for what I'll call micro jobs. A micro job is even smaller than an odd job. If an odd job involves painting a fence for half a day, a micro job might involve changing the battery in a senior citizen's smoke detector. A micro job is too small to attract even the unemployed.

A typical homeowner has lots of micro jobs piling up around the house. Maybe an inaccessible light bulb is blown out and you don't have a tall ladder. Maybe you want to install a dimmer switch and you're not comfortable around electricity. Maybe there's a dead mouse in your trap and you're too freaked out to deal with it. You can come up with a long list of jobs you'd rather pay someone to do for you, if only that person were easily identified and reasonably priced.

This is where my idea of Job Bunching comes in. Imagine going to a website and entering a short description of your micro job need. When your neighborhood has collectively entered enough micro jobs - which might take some time - it becomes worthwhile for someone to accept the jobs as a bunch. He or she can drive to the neighborhood and handle ten minor jobs in half a day, each one paying a minimum of $20 dollars.

There's a small risk that an efficient serial killer would realize this is a convenient way to murder an entire neighborhood in one afternoon. Obviously the job bunching service would need some sort of background and reference checking. And your neighbors could stay alert and listen for screams if the micro job guy is in the neighborhood. Risk can't be eliminated, but it's risky to hire a plumber too.

As the ranks of senior citizens swell, and many prefer to live independently, the need for micro jobs will skyrocket. Maybe one senior needs a ride, one wants something from the store, and a third can't get the remote control that fell under the sofa.

The micro jobs need not be unskilled. Some customers might need antivirus software installed, or a ten-minute tutorial on using Skype. Another customer might need a water heater relit, or some expert gardening advice that only takes ten minutes. After the job bunching service becomes popular, I can imagine the lead times getting shorter. Service providers might follow a route scheduled by the system to minimize distance. Each stop along the way would receive email or text updates with continuously updated estimates of arrival times. Perhaps customers could check a map to see where the provider is and what his proposed path of jobs is for the day.

Your first thought about this idea might be that everyone has friends and family who would happily perform all of these little jobs for free if asked. If that's your situation, you're lucky. But I think you'd find lots of people who don't want to bother family members, don't know their neighbors, or don't want to appear helpless. It's hard to admit to someone close that you're not comfortable climbing a ladder, or that you're afraid of a dead mouse.

I see job bunching as a natural response to five trends:
The world is getting more complicated.Working people are extraordinarily busy.The number of seniors is increasing.Unemployment and under-employment will probably stay high.Technology can easily bunch jobs by location.A big advantage of job bunching is that it can have flexible hours. That would give the otherwise unemployed enough time to look for permanent jobs, go to school, or get training, while paying bills at the same time. And "Micro Job Vendor" probably looks better on a resume than "unemployed."

In my capacity as an independent candidate for President of the United States, I feel it's my job to offer specific suggestions for getting people back to work. I don't know what those other candidates were doing today, but it probably involved sexual harassment, lobbying while calling it something else, dodging blame, being ineffective, worshipping the wrong god, and that sort of thing. I did most of those things today too, but I also came up with this job bunching idea, and that's not nothing.