A cold rainy day spent quietly working while listening to the rain...

Last week with the Aperio sales team at our annual meeting already feels like a dream.  Now it is back to reality, a weeks' worth of emails to reply to, tasks to perform, decisions to make, reviews to conduct.

Powerline notes Obama's decline continues.  "In today's Rasmussen survey, Barack Obama's approval rating is down to 59%."  I guess the honeymoon is over, wow, that didn't take long.  I think the spendulous is responsible, with Americans everywhere tightening their belts to ride out the recession, it just doesn't feel right for the government to go on a wild spending spree. 

Not to mention, we can't even get the details; Geithner postpones unveiling TARP plan.  Instapundit opines "They won't tell you what they're doing with the money you already gave them until they make sure Congress is giving them still more." 

Scott Adams (Dilbert) says ignorance will save us.  Riight.

This doesn't help either - check out the graph at right comparing monthly job losses in the past two recessions against the current one; red=2001, blue=1991, green=today.  Yikes. 

Scott Austin in the WSJ blogs on the slow, quiet death of venture firms.  "The venture capital business is inevitably headed for an overdue shakeout, given that investment has outpaced returns for more than a decade. But it’s going to take some time, probably over the course of a few years, before we see large numbers of venture firms kicking the bucket."  Few will shed tears for VCs, and perhaps some Darwinian pruning was called for, but VCs truly fill an important need, literally fueling America's innovation by making it possible for ideas to get converted into companies. 

Here's some odd news: Did China fake its spacewalk?  Viewing the YouTube video, the evidence seems compelling, but who knows...  after the Olympics one could definitely believe they'd be capable of doing it, right? 

A pretty interesting article from Charles Platt who goes undercover at Wal-Mart.  Basically the company is taking care of its workers, the problem is that people can't be paid more than they generate in value, and uneducated workers aren't worth that much.  You come away feeling it's a good thing there's Wal-Mart, otherwise what else would these people do to earn a living? 

Here's some important research, just in time for Valentine's Day: Kissing feels so pleasurable due to hormone surge, find scientists.  Where I can sign up to participate in these trials? 

Joel Spolsky notes his new, faster Copilot.  "The new Akamaized Copilot seems to get about 100% more throughput going from Boston to Los Angeles. More importantly, our exhaustive scientific experiments using beakers and chemicals and graph paper and slide rules proved that the usability of Copilot jumped from 'tolerable' to 'pretty snappy.'"  Akamai, huh.  Interesting.