If 60% of the costs are in materials and there’s a 6% sales tax on that, the government gets $342,000 in sales tax.  I think it is fair to guess that a large part of the cost to produce those components that get bought also gets eaten up in salaries, so let’s assume that these people are making money in the 28% tax bracket.  That’s another $1,276,800 that goes back to the government.

The remaining 30% goes to salaries and 10% to facilities.  (Yes, I’m pulling these numbers out of the air, but it’s a thought exercise.  I am hoping that Freakanomics will take on this question and address it for real.)  There has got to be some taxes associated with running the facilities, but I don’t know what they are, so we’ll stick to the salaries.  Assuming that these people make a little more than the poor suckers producing the steel that makes up the ship, we’ll tax them at 30%.  That’s $840,000.

So for every $10,000,000 the government spends, it gets $2,633,800 back in first-degree taxes.  Take it down another level and contemplate what the salaries are associated with what the people who are getting that first-degree salary are buying…  House and pedicures and grocery stores and malls and so on.  Because we know we aren’t putting that money into savings.

Does it change anyone’s view of government spending knowing that, at least roughly, for every $1.00 spent, $.30 comes back to it?

What.  The.  F*ck.

Correct me if I am wrong, but weren’t the first round of bailouts conceived and executed under Bush?  Not that it makes me particularly pleased to say this, but Obama just did more of what Bush did.  Imagine the GOP outcry if all that money had been divvied up and given to each American homeowner.  We would have all collectively paid down our morgatges and you would have gotten a twofer…  more stable American families and the banks would have gotten their money.  But no.  We didn’t do that.  We don’t give money away to American families!  We’re independent!  We are a country of bootstrappers!  We only like welfare when it is corporate welfare!

What the hell is wrong with expecting our companies to be functional adults as our citizens are, especially considering that the companies have fought long and hard to enjoy the rights of personhood.  You can’t have the good without the bad, @sshole.

And now Newt wants to posture like he’s for the little people?  That he would have done anything different?  Hell yes, he would have done things different.  He would have made it possible for more companies to make more money.  The only reason why he’s mad at Romney is because Romney made so much more money than he did.  After all, Romney’s made tens of millions, while Newt only made millions working for Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.

This whole group of GOP candidates is going to convince a whole slew of people that they are true fiscal conservatives.  Some of them are going to convince some of those same people that they are true social conservatives.  (Thank God for Christianity.  Jesus wipes your slate clean and all of a sudden two adulterous divorces just magically disappear.  Well listen buddy.  It’s Jesus’s job to forgive and far be it from me to stand between anyone and their true calling.  It’s my job to remember that past behavior is the best predictor of the future we’ve got and I don’t trust you….  well, I don’t trust any of them, GOP or Dem, but that is a different story.)

Why can’t we call it as it is?  Bullshit is bullshit, and I’m tired of people trying to tell me that the shit sandwich they’re serving up is really a BLT.  What’s done is done.  They gave the corporations a shit-ton of money and the corporations didn’t save the economy.  They’ve given corporations a lot of tax loopholes and breaks and all the privileged of person-hood, and the corporations have literally shit all over the country that enables them with pollution, discrimination, downsizing, fostering an ugly us vs. them mentality, and finally taking those crappy jobs overseas where they can’t be held accountable for labor conditions or acts of egregious pollution.  We’ve racked up a huge debt on foreign wars and then blamed Obama for the deficits.  Well no shit Sherlock.  War costs money.  And as previously pointed out, that money bought goods and services that employed a bunch of people at Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors.  Meanwhile Americans sit around and bitch mightily at the money spent and the deficit never recognizing that we have all profited from the money spent on the wars.  You want a trickle down economy?  The government buys a big ass boat and the systems to run that boat and suddenly a bevy of engineers, computer geeks, writers, accountants, factory workers, factory managers, proposal writers, middle managers, HR professionals, machinists, and janitors have a job to go to.  Which they pay taxes on, incidentally.

Anyway, it’s done.  Can’t go back, can’t undo it.  So what are any of these political criminals going to do differently?  Why are they all looking backwards for solutions instead of forwards.  ”I’m a Reagan Republican.”  Really?  That was 30 years ago.  Before the internet.  Before terrorism.  Before bad mortgages that corporate America put in a blender and resold as solid gold like a mom putting spinach in a milkshake.  I hate to break the bad news but Reagan is dead.  Now what are you going to do?

Can any of these idiots think their way out of a paper bag?  Are any of them capable of a thought no one has had before?  Of ditching their ideology for long enough to see the world clearly, not as they want it to be?  I haven’t seen it yet…  have you?

What I meant to say when I started this rant was that it’s disingenuous for any of the Republicans to be complaining about Romney making money or bankrupting companies.  And it is total nonsense for any of them to be trying to make the differentiation between vulture and venture capitalism.  Furthermore, Newt Gingrich is a very smart man full of a great deal of BS.  At least Perry isn’t bright enough to know better.  Gingrich *could* distinguish himself as the realpolitik genius that he is.  If they weren’t all so afraid of losing, then someone might get brave enough to think an original thought.

Show me the politician – Dem or GOP – that is brave enough to lose and that’s the one I’ll vote for.   (P.S.  Sweet Pomegranate-scented Jesus, please let Obama get brave enough to lose.)

• I have a big mouth.
• I have big convictions.
• I have a hooha.

That explanation, however, leaves a limited collection of choices, none of which I like.  1) shut my big mouth and become careful.  2) Lose my moral compass and abandon my convictions.  3) Get a sex change.

Let’s start with No. 3.  Even if I felt the impulse that would drive someone to a gender reassignment surgery, transgendered people are still discriminated against in the workplace.  Problem not solved.

Alternately, the advice I received from a friend that is ahead of me as a woman in the workplace by a generation was to minimize the fact that I’m a woman to become less threatening.  Adopt a more masculine form of dress (it isn’t like I’m prancing through the office in pink as it is), get a more masculine haircut.

No one gave me this advice, but it is also a possibility – play up my femininity.  Flirt, tease, bat my eyelashes, giggle, and fit into that stereotype where I elicit the work equivalent of the sympathy f*ck.

The problem with all of this is that I fundamentally object to the idea that my gender should be a factor at all in the workplace.  Who cares what my plumbing is?  I mean seriously, are we three?  Am I supposed to be somehow deficient because I’ve got an “innie” instead of an “outie”?  My friends that have been in the workplace for longer than me think my outrage is cute.  Like “aww, look at the idealistic young thing.  That will be beaten out of her eventually.”

Moving on to No. 2: lose my moral compass.  Frankly, I don’t want to.  If I don’t have my convictions, if I don’t stand for anything, then who am I?  I don’t know and I don’t want to find out.  Too much of my identity is wrapped up in what I believe.

And finally, No. 1: Be careful.  I’m more and more convinced that being careful is the fast track to getting old.  And by old I mean rigid in your thinking, inflexible, intolerant, and unable to see the world with empathy or compassion because you are so careful defending your little careful world that you can’t afford anything else.  I don’t want to be that person.

That last statement is the point:  I don’t want to be that person.

Digression: let me note that I recognize that everything costs something.  It all depends on what you are willing to pay.  Make no mistake, being careful costs something.  It costs big, but it takes it out of your hide in incremental ways.  Refusing to be careful also costs big and the costs are obvious.  But f*ck.  At least you see them coming.  At least you know what they are and can deal with them cleanly and honestly, as opposed to the cost of careful which gets taken out of your ass in your integrity and your self-worth and your freedom.

I just got done reading Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars.  He makes the point that I made a while back (but never turned into something that anyone listened to or bought).  We don’t buy stuff, we buy the story we want to tell about ourselves.  You don’t buy a jacket from Land’s End, you buy the idea that you’ve got a cabin somewhere and you’re going to chop wood.  You are buying an identity, not a coat.  Pick a brand, any brand.  You are not buying the brand, you are paying for what the brand says about you.  Brilliantly, Seth takes the story-telling story and runs with it, making the argument that whatever you are trying to sell, from a resume to a widget, you had better have an authentic story to go with it.

Maybe he’s covered this in other books – I’ve only read All Marketers… and We’re All Weird – but I want to talk about turning that notion a little and looking at it from a different angle.  By doing so, I also want to dig a little deeper into my own professional challenges.

As someone who, for various reasons, isn’t ready to strike out on her entrepreneurial future just yet, I need to work for someone.  Every company I’ve worked for thus far, for various and assorted reasons, has resulted in some friction.  Asking whether the companies have been broken (truth be told, there are far more dysfunctional organizations than there are functional organizations) or if the broke one is me is perhaps the wrong question.  Even if it is the right one, the answer isn’t helpful.

I propose that I have simply been pursuing the wrong thing in my employers.  I’ve looked at things like benefits, what the job duties look like, the salary, and the commute.  All very pragmatic, practical considerations.  What I haven’t considered is whether the story I tell about myself fits with the story the company tells about itself.  It’s a hard thing to figure out in a single interview, and I know I’ve got a particularly challenging self-story:

I value clear thinking, reserved judgment, choosing the long-term gain over the short term satisfaction, not panicking, deliberation, intelligent answers that bring the best outcome for the greatest number of people, pragmatism, substance over surface, and achieving as much as possible with as little resistance or fanfare as possible.  I don’t like shortsighted answers that create more problems later, I don’t believe in kissing ass or lying.  I believe in calling a thing by its name and dealing with the reality, not what I hope the reality will be.  I believe that I can see more clearly when I’m not stuck in the middle of something.  All this makes me something of a loaner, and observer long before I’m a participant.  I don’t fake it easily or well and yes, I am difficult to manage.

So…  Is the issue that I need to change who I am or what I expect?  Or is it that I need to find a company with the same values and a similar vision of what it is and what it wants to be.

Where is the disconnect between who you are and who your company says it wants to be and what does that say about how you’re going to look for your next job?

If “sugaring” makes you think of sexy times, you’ve got the wrong idea.  Sugaring is the Egyptian bodily hair removal process / technique.  You cook this stuff up at home, let it cool, then use it to rip your body hair out by the roots.  Fun!

Economically, this has to make sense.  In my assessment, I break even at three hours of time invested.  Allow one hour for getting to and from the salon and parking.  One hour for the appointment itself, and pay yourself an hour for the $60 saved.  If I can create similar results at home in three hours, I’m breaking even.  If not, I might as well go to the salon.  At least that’s my calculus.

Recipes are easy to find and basically come down to three ingredients:

2 cups of sugar
1/4 cup of water
1/4 cup of lemon juice

If you wanted to get fancy, you could use some kind of tea in place of the water – Chamomile comes to mind for its soothing properties.  Put everything in a heavy sauce pan and boil it.  The highest temperature that the mixture reaches is going to determine its consistency and usability when you’re done.  This is where your body hair removal intersects with candy-making.  The temperature range corresponds with a consistency that has been defined by candy making chefs.

Your next consideration is whether you want to use this stuff with the same technique as waxing – spread it on your skin, use a strip of cloth pressed over and tear off in the opposite direction of the hair growth.  Personally, I don’t see much benefit to that if tearing in the opposite direction of the hair growth is likely to cause more pain and the strips mean you’re tackling a bigger area at a single time.  If you are aiming for that, you probably have a wider range of ending consistency that will work.

The other general technique can be found on youtube.  You get a handful of the stuff, smear it against the skin against the grain of the hair, then pull it off in the direction that the hair grows.  You want to rip it off quickly, not drag it out slowly.  This is the method that I’m interested in, because if I’m going to be doing  anything around my bikini line, I want to be able to use as much or as little sugar paste as seems right.

Some consistencies are clearly ruled out:  Thread, Soft-Ball, and Hard Crack are all clearly out.  Thread means syrup and that’s not going to work so well.  I’ve been cooking this up without the benefit of a candy making thermometer, but I do not recommend this, because I can only guestimate what the stages are that I’ve tried and if you want a repeatable process, guestimation isn’t your friend.

The first time, I ended up with syrup.  No good.  So I reheated the batch and got to what I believe is probably the soft ball stage.  I did use this successfully, but with an improvised technique that requires longer hair.  Essentially, the sugar made it easier to grab and hold the hairs which I flicked off with a pinch and pull motion.  Effective, but not ideal.

I reheated the stuff a second time.  I think I got it to the firm ball stage…  again, no thermometer = guessing.  I got myself a big old glob of the stuff and went after the hair on my legs.  It worked.  Sort of.  The problem was with the consistency.  I could get a little bit on my finger and work it as a trial run on my arms and that worked ok, smearing against the hair growth and ripping in the direction of the hair.  On the legs for some reason, that sh!t stuck to my legs.  In trying to rip it out, I broke capillaries so now it looks like I’ve got hickies on my thighs.  They haven’t healed up yet, (God, I hope they heal) but I can imagine that doing this repeatedly will end up badly and could cause more permanent damage, like spider or varicose veins.  Don’t do this to yourself.  If you can’t flick the sugar off your skin cleanly, rinse it off.  I’m not a dermatologist or any other kind of expert, but this seems like common sense.

I gave up on that batch, bought a thermometer at Target, and decided to make a new batch last night.  Being the impatient girl that I am, realizing that my thermometer wasn’t going to cut it because it stopped measuring at 220 degrees and I needed to measure up to 265 degrees didn’t stop me.  Now I have a Soft Crack batch.  I’m thinking that’s not going to work so well.

Instead, I’m going to wait until my candy-making thermometer and I’m going to aim for 265 – 270 degrees, right between Hard-Ball and Soft-Crack.  I want the stuff malleable enough to grab the hairs, not so sticky that it grabs my skin.

Anyway, I thought I’d write this up because it might have been helpful to know all of this before I began rather than figuring it out – complete with broken capillaries – along the way.

Having read and loved “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” I really want to argue with the basic premise of the discussion, which is that it is better to be rich than it is to be poor.  Which brings me to something that I’ve been contemplating anyway.  Do we (collectively) want to be rich because we love money or do we want to be rich because money = freedom?  (see also Tim Ferris) If it is the former, than carry on in peace with your conviction that it is better to earn $100,000 for an 80-hour work week and estrangement from your family and/or community than to earn $50,000 for a 40 hour work week.

Understand, I have little skin in this game.  I make a generous salary that I’d tie back to a much earlier economic theory which I wrote about here.  But I also recognize that I would probably have a higher quality of life were I to halve my salary (I’d still be doing ok) and increase my contact with a community.

Let’s also not forget that not everyone wants to pay for Joseph A. Banks suits and wrap a noose around their necks for the majority of their waking hours.  Not everyone is interested in graduate school.  Lots of us get intrinsic satisfaction out of working with our hands.  Happy should be part of the measure too.

So again, is it money for the sake of money that we want?  I’m not sure that it is.  I think it is freedom that we are after.  How many of those 6+ figure executives would love to give up the stress and the long hours?  I know one who makes a boatload of money and must continue to do so to maintain a lifestyle decorated in what looks like freedom: the ability to buy whatever whenever.  It’s the known devil vs. the unfamiliar one.  The accumulated artifacts of all that purchasing power, in the end, don’t make anyone happy.  They just strengthen the ties that bind.  They end up equaling less freedom, not more.

Again, I’m not in a position to throw stones.  I’ve gotten fond of walking into The Body Shop and buying whatever potions seem likely to make me pretty or smell good or whatever.  My pleasures are reasonably small thus far.  Shoes bought on sale, for example.  Which reminds me…  I have a grandmother who was infamous for her conviction that the secret to good health was walking barefoot in the grass a little every day.  Which would add to my freedom?  Another pair of shoes that promises to break my poor little foot bones?  Or an extra hour to walk in the grass?

We’re asking the wrong questions.  And it seems to me that, as the media works itself into a bigger and bigger frenzy about what is wrong with Government, what’s wrong with America, and occasionally, what’s wrong with the media itself, the questions just push further down a path justifying the very things that are counterproductive to fostering a grounded society.  It’s an ongoing masturbatory panic attack that serves no one.

Let’s hope it is.