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Hooray! After 27 years of suffering through being Really Really Fat I have FINALLY been given the answer I was looking for - it is NOT my fault and my fatness is a disease with a name! No, it's not diabetes or hypothyroidism. Those have been around for many years and all Really Really Fat people have been tested for those at least twice in their lives. The new disease is Metabolic Syndrome. It's symptoms are:

• Obesity (particularly around the waist)
• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol
• Insulin resistance

OMG I am so stoked. The Mayo Clinic says if I have any one of these symptoms, I'm totally in the running for Metabolic Syndrome. Now my obesity can be attributed to my high blood pressure and high cholesterol and not the other way around! This Syndrome was brought to my attention by the latest issue of Wired magazine, which usually just tells me about science I can't understand, technology I'll never be able to afford and biological & environmental achievements the government can never get behind. So why are they talking about my Fatness? Well, this new Metabolic Syndrome is a big hit with "Big Pharma" (and Wired loves to write about Big Pharma). Give a group of symptoms a fancy name and the pharmaceutical companies will find a miracle drug for it. Apparently the old name for Metabolic Syndrome - obesity - was just not.....selling. In the Wired article, they cite business owner and Kentuckian Karen Cunningham who gained weight after her pregnancy. She "couldn't shake the weight" and went to "various specialists" to tell her what was wrong. Apparently "lose weight and you won't feel like shit anymore" was NOT the answer she was looking for. Her answer was "Metabolic Syndrome."

The breakthrough came last December when her new endocrinologist diagnosed her with something called metabolic syndrome. She'd never heard of it. As she Googled to learn more, her chronic ailments – the weight, the high blood pressure, the lack of energy – started to make sense. They even seemed treatable. She's now on Glucophage and Avandia (which both regulate blood sugar) and has lost 20 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates. "Getting a diagnosis was a relief," Cunningham says. "I have hope now, whereas I didn't have any before."

Wow ok so you have....the beginnings of Type II diabetes and eat too much sugar and starch. That's pretty much what Dr. Robert Atkins was telling the world for 30 years before he died in 2003. Some people - not all people, but a good chunk of them - have bodies that just can't deal with insulin-raising carbs. Some are diabetic, some are just plain fat. People went berzerk over this claim. Doctors yelled and screamed, scientists wagged fingers. Me, I lost 90 lbs. But fuck all of that healthy eating stuff. I mean, "going on Atkins" means cutting our sugar and starch, eating more low-sugar fruits and veg, and eating whole grains. Yeah, and eating meat too (but not gobs of butter rolled in bacon smothered in cheese). Why should I have to eat like that if there's a PILL that will "cure" me of my new-found disease? You bet your sweet bippy there's a pill, too. Now that Atkins has died things have gotten awful skeevy on the "low carb" frontier. His company is pretty much a manufactured crap food warehouse now. Doctors and scientists are taking his ideas seriously now. But instead of having to claim he was right while he was alive and giving people the non-pharmaceutical way to fight your body's stupidity, they waited until he was dead so there'd be no one around to tell people "just stop eating sugar" so they could instead say "try this magic pill." The new pill is rimonabant. So far, human trials have shown that the only side effects are depression and anxiety. But those also happen to be side effects of being Really Really Fat. So what's the harm? It doesn't quite matter, because now Big Pharma has a disease and a pill to combat this disease. Without a disease, HMOs aren't likely to let you get the pill. And like any drug, doctors are going to be eventually pushed into prescribing it - to quell the pushy pharm reps and to quell their fatass patients who say "nothing I do works." I will come clean and say that while I did lose 90 lbs, I am still fat. I lost 90 and put back on 50 (truth be told, I was still fat after losing 90). Why? Well my body sucks. It's high maintenence. And I am too lazy to maintain it. It's my lot in life that I have a high maintenence body. Some do, some don't. I'm living proof that "get up off your butt and move" doesn't really mean the same for everyone. I could eat and move the same as someone else and probably still be fat. But I recognize the difference. I do have to watch what I eat and I do have to bust my ass. C'est la vie. I didn't gain weight because what I did didn't work for me. I gained weight because I stopped doing what worked for me. Duh. So now it seems that I have a choice. Get back on that high-intensity workout regimen again, or go with the "Metabolic Syndrome" wave and get a pill to fix me. I don't think I'm ready to give up the fight just yet. Maybe it's the Puritan in me that feels like I should be punishing myself for my "failing" instead of taking the insta-cure. The lack of serious side effects (such as bleeding from the eyes and exploding diarrhea) is pretty tempting if you consider some of the side effects of previous "fat" drugs like uh...speed and phen-phen. All you get is some depression (which, like I said, most of "us" already have). But the side effects of ass-kicking exercise are lack of depression and a good night's sleep. Perhaps some weight loss along the way. For now, I'll stick with that and not let myself be pigeonholed into some "disease" which has caused my "affliction." What would you do it you could take a pill and cure your "fat"? Would you do it? Would you even believe it could be possible? Check with me in 20 years, though. If I'm in my late 40's and still fat and single, perhaps I will have changed my mind.

Todd started the discussion with his post about reforming education in America and Tracy added her two cents. Tracy agreed with me about the less-than-impressive track record of charter schools, but both thought market-style competition were the solution.

I disagree that bringing up charter school problems is a pot shot, since charter schools are exactly what many reformers and proponents of privatizing public education want. My main point is not that I think privatization is morally wrong or doomed to failure, but that we should take a more scientific approach to charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of privatization.

Here are five slow, difficult steps for reforming education in America.

1) We should try more than one alternative model. A lot of people are big on for-profit companies running schools with public money—why not non-profit organizations instead? We have some evidence it works, since many private schools and colleges are non-profits. Looking at colleges, the non-profit model has apparently been more successful than the for-profit one. Why don't we try just privatizing some aspects of school systems, like facilities? Many large corporations outsource their maintenance work. How many advocates for “choice� and “freedom� are willing to try charter schools run directly by teacher's unions?

2) We should make reforms systematically such that results can be compared in some meaningful way. If we privatize the cafeteria in a middle-class suburb and costs go down, we cannot conclude that private charter schools will be effective and save taxpayers money. If we have a successful charter school in a wealthy suburb we cannot conclude the same model will work in the inner city. We need to be able to get comparable metrics in order to make comparisons.

3) When trying to reform school systems, raise test scores, or otherwise improve education, we should base our attempts on some kind of actual research, not just ideology. For example, are we even reforming in the right place? Let's see a cost/benefit analysis - where can changes make the largest difference? Programs like Raising a Reader and First Book have followed the numbers pointing to early childhood literacy intervention. From this FastCompnay profile of JumpStart:

By kindergarten, on average, a child from a middle-income background has received up to 1,700 hours of one-to-one reading time while a child from a low-income background has received only 25. As a result, at first grade, the middle income child will have a vocabulary that is four times greater than his low-income peers. Since a child's knowledge of the alphabet in kindergarten is the strongest predictor of reading ability in 10 grade, this discrepancy is telling.

4) We should learn some lessons from the current experiments with charter schools and other approaches and do better. I think it might be worth looking into increasing oversight of these schools and investigating the role political connections and campaign contributions play in how contracts are awarded. There's strong evidence that charter schools affiliated with a district are much better than completely independent schools. This is not just about finding bad news. What are some school doing right?

5) More pizza parties. I'm only half kidding here. How often have we heard that “throwing money at the problem� isn't a solution? Granted I haven't done a lot of research, but I don't think there have been many cases where too much money was given to a school system. Let's add this to our list of alternatives to try: spending a ton of money on a poor school district to improve the building, the materials, the library, the competitiveness of teacher salaries, the nutrition of the food, the before- and after-school programs and activities, etc.

It turns out electric lawn mowers are better for the environment and would take some hassle from my schedule.

I have a small yard, with a lot of shade – depending on the weather, I only really need to mow every two to three weeks. When I bought the house, it seemed silly to buy a new lawn mower for such a small yard, so I accepted a hand-me-down instead. The hand-me-down has always been hard to start, and now no amount of cord pulling seems to help.

What could be wrong? Simple. It could be bad gas, old gas, water in the gas tank, sediment in the fuel filter or the bottom of the tank, a gummed up carburetor, not enough air, too much air, a dirty (or just dead) spark plug, a problem in the ignition system, or it could need an oil change. Of course I should have done more regular oil changes, changed the filters, and drained the gas before last winter.

Add to all that the time I spend pushing this loud, heavy thing around and this does not sound like an appropriate amount of effort for my tiny, wimpy lawn. Buying a new gas-powered mower will only alleviate the immediate problem, not the gas, oil, filter, etc., hassles.

And guess what? Gas-powered lawn mowers are horrible polluters! Apparently cutting for one hour is about the same as driving for 100 miles! I have a hippy-treehugger hybrid, so I can probably drive two hundred miles on that emissions budget. There have been moves to add pollution controls to small engines, but they are often blocked by industry lobbyists, or valiant crusaders against evil regulatory expansionism, depending on your point of view. I'm always interested in living more efficiently, so I think it's worth considering.

Let's add this up:

Things I like/don't mind:

1. Being outside, even if it's cold.
2. Walking
3. Pushing things

Things I don't like:

1. Adding maintenance of some device to my already busy schedule
2. Polluting, apparently much more than I would have guessed
3. Pulling and pulling and pulling and goddamn you why won't you start!

As I see it, I have three options:

1. A manual push mower, just like grandpa used to have. Apparently modern reel mowers are not like grandpa's, since they are light and easy to use in many yards.
2. A corded electric mower, just like that one neighbor used to have in the 80s. Corded mowers are apparently about as good as gas mowers with the drawback being the cord.
3. A battery-powered mower. Although they don't last long enough for big lawns (not a problem for me), there are even robot models available.

I haven't had a chance to really look into manual reel mowers, but I did a little searching about electric mowers and came up with some ideas.

• As corded mowers go, the Black & Decker MM875 19" Lawn Hog Electric Mulching Mower seems to get mentioned a lot, and it has a number of good reviews on Amazon. It's about $220, which seems like a reasonable amount to spend.

• For cordless, battery-powered mowers, some recommend the Black & Decker Cordless CMM-1000 but it's pretty expensive – around $420. I would have a hard time justifying that expense for the amount of mowing I actually do.

• There's another cordless by Bully (their 16" Cordless Lawn Mower) that is comparable in price to the Black and Decker corded and has mixed, but overall good reviews on Amazon.

• Then, of course, there is the Friendly Robotics RL850 RoboMower. At well over $1000, it doesn't meet my budget, which is a shame because I'm very happy with my Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Anyone have first-hand experience with these, or other manual and electric mowers? I might even buy one just for the emissions savings, I'm that lame. But it sounds like any of the choices above would be more convenient, too. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

As you've probably heard, Google has bought Youtube.

There has been a lot of talk about this on the web over the past few days. Now that the deal is done, some people are just glad it's over. Om Malik still thinks it's not a good idea in the long run. others think that only Google has the advertising muscle to make Youtube profitable.

But I don't think it's just a matter of plastering YouTube with Adsense ads, at least I hope not for Google's sake.

Think about it this way: why didn't advertising on the Internet work before Google? Well, the banner ads were repetitive, uninteresting, and eventually became an animated, distracting annoyance. The popup ads were worse, and worse still were those disgusting Flash travesties that covered up what you were trying to read. I talk about these ads in the past tense as if they are gone, but they still lurk all over some sites.

The point is that Google took something that was a ubiquitous annoyance and turned it into something that created value for both users, site owners, and advertisers. They made ads that were:

1. Not hideous—basically they don't detract from the browsing experience.
2. Actually relevant to what a user is looking for. This is an important point, because it means that adding these ads to your site might actually provide value to your users. If they got to your page by searching for “how to get a good divorce lawyer,� they are in the market for a divorce lawyer and might find one through the ad.
3. Measurably effective for advertisers, without all sorts of “mindshare� vagueness.

Now, lets look at television advertising—is this a similar situation? If the number of TiVos and DVRs sold is any indication, people are sick of commercials. People are willing to pay money for a device that lets them skip ads. Part of the reason DVD box sets of entire seasons of television shows are so popular is that they have no ads.

Why do people hate commercials so much? They are repetitive—if you watch two hours of prime time TV you're bound to see the exact same thing 6 or 7 times. They are annoying, employing tactics to try to grab your attention, or played at a higher volume than the shows. And despite marketers best efforts, most commercials do not directly interest you.

So here's what Google can do:

Make deals with networks, studios and content producers. Google is already doing this, and it must be done to make the fun steps below possible without thousands of lawsuits.

Now, imagine you want to watch the Colbert Report. You go to YouTube, find today's episode, and watch it. At the end, there are a few commercials. They are:

1. Polite. The ads don't pop up over the video you want to see, they don't interrupt at inopportune moments of the plot, they don't jam up the volume, and they probably don't play before the video at all – most likely after, with a break or two in the middle of longer shows.

2. Relevant. It's not just a matter of targeting video ads toward keywords – like text ads, Google weighs better ads that get more responses more than crappy ads by deeper pocketed advertisers. Google might use their knowledge of your search patterns, but I doubt they will, just because they won't need to. They'll be able to mine enough from user discussions to make very good guesses about what you might be interested in seeing next or buying.

3. Measurable. Not only does YouTube have much better data on viewership than the Neilsen ratings could ever dream of, but the actual user response to the ads is trackable by clickthroughs and conversions.

If Google understands this, then they will make their 1.65 billion back and then some. If they don't understand this, I'd be more than happy to come explain it in person, just drop me a line.

So far we have talked about world population, smoking and death rate, how Greenland has no discernable population and how balconies are not meant for smoke breaks. So, moving on, today we will talk about the sin tax. The definition of sin tax, according to investorwords.com:

A tax levied on products considered vices.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, says the following:

Sin tax is a euphemism for a tax specifically levied on certain generally socially-proscribed goods - usually alcohol and tobacco. Sin taxes are often enacted for special projects - American cities and counties have used them to pay for stadiums - when increasing income or property taxes would be politically unviable.

Either way, what we discover here is that there is a negative connotation to sin taxes. And there should be. Sin taxes can be applied to anything. Every state taxes things that "may potentially hurt people." Basically I have learned thought my intensive research for this article that sin taxes were created by the purtians to help control sin using fines and prohibitions. Sin taxes can tax just about anything: tabacco, alcohol, pop, food, gentlemen's clubs, entertainment such as movies and sports, and pornography. It's a travesty folks, I know. Either way, the whole point of applying a sin tax is to raise revenue quickly in a manner that people can't really complain about. I don't think that any politician is going to be reelected if his/her campaign statement is "I oppose a sin tax on pornography!" versus the politician who's statement is "Let's tax the hell out of pornography!" I think that the first politician will lose just because the people who would support him are too lazy to vote. It's a sad, sad world. Oh, and all of the uptight Americans who wear granny panties and can't mind their own business. If you don't like it, don't do it. Don't try to tell me what I can do. I am an American. I should have that choice! But, wait, we are off topic. So, anyway. About smoking. Yeah. And the sin taxes. What good can sin taxes do? In Oklahoma City the sex industry is being taxed and the proceeds are going to "support domestic violence and sexual abuse programs with a portion set aside to help self-employed Oklahomans buy health insurance" and that "the tax's proceeds to domestic violence and sexual abuse programs would actually result in a net decrease in state spending on such programs by 100-thousand dollars a year". So, where is this extra money each year going that they are saving? To the schools perhaps? Probably not. Anyway, it's not so easy to find out where this money is going. Most programs are set up to allocate the money back in to a program that would stop it from making money, such as the one we saw above in Oklahoma City. Others fund things that would make the public happy, very similar to bribing a small child, such as stadiums or other entertainment. For example, the new Browns Stadium in Cleveland, OH. See, in this way, even though a sin tax is never a welcome thing, especially to those who are being taxed, politicians try to sweeten the deal with a nice little reward. Honestly, I always thought that the money was being returned to the public school systems, but if it is, I have found no evidence. I wonder if people even realize what a sin tax is or why it is there. My assumption is: NO. Because the public is ignorant and they like it like that. Take a look at the following poll: Now, where was the choice for "let's not sin tax anything". And now they are bringing fast food into it. If America is being sin taxed on it's foundations, what is next? Sin taxing drinking water and taking a poo? But, I do want to help you understand about the website that is taking these polls. To sum it up, here is this week's poll: "Should the families of the children killed by accidental overdose accept Methodist Hospital's offer of restitution? Yes or No" So that's the kind of crap stand that they run. On your right, an idea to tax entertainment in general. Are you having a good time in your own home on that awesome wii you just bought? Not without a 10% tax hike you aren't. The good people of Reno, you should just lie. They are going to keep taxing you if you say it's okay. "Well, yeah, sure, I don't mind payin' an extra 10% to go and see naked mud wrasslin. As long as it's not for homos, that is." Silly, silly Renoians. Oh, and apparently the Scots have no idea of what a sin tax is or they wouldn't think the best idea is to tax necessities: Ah, hell, let's just let the government add a sin tax to everything we buy, maybe then we will get a pretty red fire truck and a new marina just like in Sim City! I am not saying that a government can run off of no tax money. I am just saying that labeling something a sin tax and charging twice as much for it is wrong. And that the public doesn't care enough to fight back for things that they enjoy; that is wrong. I mean, yeah, you get a pretty stadium or a nice program that trys to stop kids from doing drugs, but are you willing to continue to be taxed on all of your entertainment and, if you're Scottish, your food and essentials?