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I’ve been an observer to a debate about the pros and cons of Dave Ramsey‘s approach to paying off debt.

The arguments basically come down to “Ramsey’s plan is not the most efficient way and you’d be better off paying down the highest interest rate first” versus “You are able to build momentum by paying off the small debt first so even if it costs you a little more over time it works better.”

I’m not actually a huge proponent of one method or the other; both make plenty of sense. However, I do know that people are horrible at making rational decisions (a few examples for you) so just saying “this makes more sense so it’s what we should do” is not good enough.

I think it would actually be a really interesting study to take two similar groups of approximately equal total debt load and see things like which strategy had a higher churn rate, which strategy paid off the most debt cumulatively, and which strategy reduced interest payments by the most. You could run this over a 24 or 36 month time frame

Anyone can become angry – that is easy.

But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.

                                                                             - Aristotle

I like that quote. I like it a lot and hopefully you do too.

Once you’ve finished thinking about that, check out this awesome blog post.

Give it five minutes – Jason Fried of 37Signals

As my new year’s resolutions may have led you to expect, I’ve been cooking a lot more lately.

With this has come (and I know this will shock you) looking at a lot of recipes. Recipes on my iPhone, recipes on my MacBook Air, recipes in some of the various cook books I have. Lots and lots of recipes.

And you know what? Recipe design sucks.

They’re just lists of lists (here are the ingredients, here are the tools you need, here are the instructions) which probably made sense back in the print days where physical space was at a premium but honestly they serve no purpose in the modern digital environment where storage is essentially free. We’ve been able to improve the interface of so many things we’ve taken for granted (check out Clear for what to-do lists are capable of. TO DO LISTS!) and yet recipes are the same as they were in the 1800′s.

So what could recipes be? I’ll be honest, I don’t know. I have limited design skills, and much less experience making a user interface than a ton of people out there. But here are a couple mockups I did in GIMP with ideas of what recipes COULD be.

This is a single step of a recipe on an iPad. It clearly shows each of the items you need for this step, has a link to a video explaining how to chop an onion and has very simple instructions for what you need to do.

And here’s another option that takes a lot of those same ideas but focuses on getting a little more information on the screen. In this world you could scroll up and down between the steps and also see how long you had left in the recipe.

Obviously neither of these is perfect. Maybe it’s ideal if there could still be a full ingredient on screen at all times. Maybe you want to display everything more like those dreaded project plans most of us have dealt with at work.

I’m not saying these are the answer, but hopefully they’re a step in the right direction.

Unless you’ve been lucky enough to have been bashed over the head with a giant rock and in a coma for the past few weeks, you’ve undoubtedly heard the uproar about Mitt Romney’s sub-14% tax rate. If you haven’t, keep it that way. Close this browser window now and be a better person for not getting sucked in to this disaster of partisanship, hyperbole, and misleading statistics.

First of all, my personal feelings? I understand the rational behind the 15% capital gains tax meant to encourage investment and help grow companies. However, I also agree with Fred Wilson that it’s silly for carried interest to fall in the 15% designation, and with Mark Cuban that high freqency trading shouldn’t count as capital gains income since you’re not actually investing.

Now, on the the ridiculousness of the WSJ oped by John Berlau and Trey Kovacs.

The former Bain Capital CEO and Massachusetts governor caused a brouhaha last week when he estimated the tax rate on his investment income at 15%. “How unfair!” pundits exclaimed, noting that the top marginal rate for wage income is more than 30%.

The tax rate on investors is unfair, but for the opposite reason. Our tax code layers taxation of dividends and capital gains on top of a top corporate tax rate of 35%—which even President Obama acknowledges is one of the highest in the world.

This is ironically the embodiment of the “corporate personhood” legal doctrine otherwise so decried by the left. The law taxes corporations as if they were separate beings from the shareholders who own them and then levies a separate tax on shareholder payouts and gains. This double taxation brings the effective tax rate on investment income to as much as 44.75%.

Well, here are a few problems with that analysis (outside of the common argument by anti-corporate tax folk that “corporations don’t pay taxes anyway, they just pass it on to the consumer!”):

1: It assumes that capital gains income from stock prices matches up 1-to-1 with profit earned. So if the profits for a company were $10 per share, it assumes that the stock price would go up and by exactly $10.

2: It assumes that corporations are actually paying a 35% effective tax rate (hint: they’re not).

So let’s break this down a little using Apple since they just blew the stock market up. A few links that may be helpful: Apple’s Q1 press release, Apple’s 2011 10-K filing, and the Google Finance chart for AAPL.

Now, AAPL just posted a quarterly profit of $13.87 per diluted share. Since the start of their quarter (10/1/2011) shares have risen from $381.32 to a current price of $446.10, or $64.78 in capital gains.

So already stock gains are 467% of profit. Capital gains tax on that $64.78 increase would be $64.78*15% = $9.72 in personal taxes.

Also, according to their most recent 10-K, AAPL’s effective tax rates for 2010 and 2011 were 24.2% and 24.4%. Assuming it stays at 24%, on that $13.87 AAPL is paying $13.87*24% = $3.33 in corporate taxes.

So actually, for that $64.78 gain to the investor, the government as a whole is receiving $13.05 in tax, or 20.15%.

Math is hard.

Not that this is some kind of accomplishment or anything (granted it was really dirty)

I had been falling in and out of sleep all evening. Read a little finishing up the Steve Jobs biography before going to sleep, and then suddenly was in the midst of an hour long cleaning session. I’ve picked up, done laundry, dusted, de-cluttered about a garbage bag full of stuff, swept, and even made the bed just so I could get back in it and write this post.

And all the while all I was doing was lecturing in my head to some imaginary class of students.

I want to say “Strange” here, but I actually think I understand it a lot more than I would’ve expected.

In 2010 I went 2 for 4 on completing my resolutions. I came up with 5 new ones for 2011, each focusing on a category of my life. They were:

1. Health – Run a half marathon
2. Mind – Create a mobile app
3. Business – Get paid by 20 people
4. Friends/Family – Stay closer to those important to me
5. Other – Figure out my life goals

How did I do?

1. Yes! And I actually enjoyed it enough to make a resolution to keep running.

2. Nope. I could try to stretch the truth here and say that “Oh, but I redesigned some of liquid for a mobile browser interface” or “Well I completed a couple tutorials that worked on HTML5 or the Android SDK” but I’m not going to do that. I didn’t create anything myself that I would qualify as a mobile application. But I do have a couple ideas, and I’m looking forward to working a couple out, especially now that I have a Mac and can develop for iOS.

3. Nope. The final count will be in the single digits. I believe it’s 5, but I could be forgetting 1. Getting a real job and turning the focus off of selling was a big hurdle to overcome. That and not trying to create something else that was easier to market to it’s target audience are what doomed me.

4. Yes! Except in situations where I have purposely avoided someone (which is an unfortunate but necessary part of building strong relationships with others, I only have so much extrovert to give) I was much better about staying in touch with people. Whether it’s the simple things like texting someone happy birthday, or writing a couple emails to catch up, I’ve made an effort and while I’m still not great at it, hopefully I kept some people closer.

5. Nope. Who knew that coming up with life goals would be such a daunting task? Almost every time I sat down to try and type some out I was overcome by a feeling of fear. What if I pick the wrong goals? What if I don’t accomplish them? Suddenly making life goals felt more like a trap than a way to inspire myself. While I think it would be a cop-out at this point to say I’m of the mindset that goals are pointless, I may be moving along that path.

I’ll do a post tomorrow probably that discusses what I did and didn’t accomplish from my 2011 resolutions, but suffice to say that I have decided I need to simplify them a little. So just three this year, and all are much more defined than the last set were.

1. Never go 3 days without running
If I run on a Monday, then I have to run again on Thursday at the absolute latest. I chose this rather than a mileage goal, or another distance goal like my half-marathon this year, because I’m more concerned about making it a habit than hitting any specific goal.

2. Cook one new dish every week
My Christmas gifts included a couple new knives, a dutch oven, and a cast-iron skillet. So now I need to use them. No limitations on what kind of food I have to cook, or where I have to find the recipes. Just that every week I have to cook something that I’ve never made before.

3. Do 3 things every day: Create, Laugh, Learn
Pretty simple stuff, but something I know I take for granted way too often. Each day is something special and I need to make sure I’m taking advantage of that by creating something (art, programming, whatever), enjoying myself enough to laugh, and learning something new. I think if I can do that, then I’ll end 2012 a much better person than I start it.

I’ve linked to a couple things Evan has done before, but this is probably my favorite to date. It’s titled Data visualization is, itself, data so you can probably figure out what it covers. My favorite piece of the post is the graphic of web traffic to WordPress using a computer and using an iPad.

WP traffic

WP traffic with iPad

The inverse of these two pictures by days of week and hour of the day is awesome and incredibly pronounced. Evan talks about it a little more in his post, but anyone can get the gist of what’s going on here just by the graphics.

In the age of infographics, lots of people have been moving towards displaying pretty data versus displaying helpful data. Do the colors look cool? Can you use some funky icons on a bar graph? Are all the fonts absolutely perfect? Not that these things aren’t important, but too many infographics nowadays don’t actually TELL you anything.

I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte and his writings on how to best display data. This was the book that a former boss gave me to introduce Tufte’s concepts to me and I’ve been hooked ever since.

So be more like Evan and make nice graphics that actually tell you something. Don’t just try to make a good looking infographic.

From one of Fred Wilson’s latest posts entitled The Amazon Tablet, commenter G’lan nicely sums up the tablet ecosystem.

G’lan
Almost… It’s like comparing “apples” to “mixed fruit cup”

Danny Meyer is the restauranteur behind a whole host of great NYC restaurants, including the beloved burger joint Shake Shack. I think I ate there for lunch every single time I worked from home while I was doing my internship summer.

The article is a great look at his story and how he slowly grew from one restaurant into a business that employs 2,200 people. You think there would be all sorts of options for a “favorite quote” from this x-thousand word article, but this one won going away.

Meyer, mouth full, declared, “It’s not cooked, but the beef is mighty good.”

Swinghamer: “I like the shiitake.”

Me: “Maybe I should tell them the meat’s not cooked.”

Meyer, solemnly: “If they asked, I would tell them. But as Napoleon said, ‘Part of brilliance is winning and part is leaving your opponent alone when he’s losing.’ ”