My car is currently on its deathbed.  My 1990 Toyota Camry has been so good to me for so long.  However, I took it in to a repair shop a few weeks ago because I thought the rear cylinders were leaking.  I wasn’t too worried because rear cylinder repairs are only a couple hundred bucks.

Turns out I was right… sort of.   Not only were the rear cylinders leaking (slightly), but both front CV joints on my car are cracked, I have a bunch of “valve issues” and I’ve got oil leaking on my timing belt.  Total projected repair cost: $1800.  My car’s blue book value: sub $500.  So I’ve come to the conclusion, that sometime in the near future, I need to find another car.

I don’t like the idea that pro athletes in some sports are required to attend college for a certain number of years to compete in a professional sports league. I started thinking about this recently because the McDonald’s All American game is coming up soon, and there is lots of controversy over agents recruiting high school kids even though they have to go to college for a year before entering the NBA. The requirement that pro athletes attend college before participating in a professional sport is silly and paternalistic.

The argument generally made in favor of this requirement is pro sports leagues have to protect the pro athletes from themselves in case their sports career doesn’t pan out. I don’t buy it. First, these “kids” are 18 when they graduate high school (or will be soon). Hence, they are adults, and they deserve respect, so we should treat them like adults. If they want to bet it all on a sports career: so be it. That’s no different from a high-school graduate trying to become an entrepreneur: we don’t require a college education before starting a business, even though starting a business is inherently riskier than playing in the NBA for a year because if you fail, you’re generally going to be in big-time debt.

Dan Ariely was Bob Brinker’s guest on Money Talk last weekend.  Dr. Dan, as Brinker called him, is a professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.     Dr Dan was pushing his new book Predictably Irrational. I am going to give a rough summary of one of Dr. Dan’s experiments for the book that I found interesting.   He gave subjects a simple math test where the subjects would be able to able to figure out the correct answers but he made sure that the subjects did not have enough time to complete the tests. He then tested different variables to measure the impact of cheating.   He had testers tell the subjects that they would be paid $1 for each correct answer. The first group:  Once the time was up, they told the testers how many correct answers they got correct.   On average these subjects reported they got 4 correct. The second group:  Once the time was up, they shredded the tests and then told the testers how many they got right.  They knew evidence would not be there to verify how many they got correct and said they got 7 correct. 

The American Red Cross needs to do two things to attract more people to give blood.

First, give money instead of coupons/shwag/etcetera.  Everyone loves money.  Not everyone loves specific goods.

Secondly, and most importantly, market giving blood as a weight loss tool.  Apparently you burn something like 2,000 calories on average by giving blood.  For a lot of people, that is a day’s worth of food.  Since Americans will do all sorts of crazy things except eating right and exercising to lose weight, such as the cabbage soup diet, you’d think they would also try giving blood every now and then.  I think 2,000 calories is close to one pound of fat (I think one pound is 2,500).  So the American Red Cross should be saying: “Donate Blood - Lose a Pound!”

Hulu.com is the coolest website ever.  On it, you can watch full length episodes of a ton of TV Shows and some full-length movies for free.  They have lots of popular shows like The Office, The Simpsons, etcetera, but they even have one of my favorite obscure shows of all time: Jack of All Trades!  The website just launched today, but based on my test viewing of one episode of Jack of All Trades, it runs really smooth and is very easy to use.  When watching, the only interruption is a commercial once every 10 minutes or so, and the commercials are only about 25 seconds each, which is not bad at all.  I highly recommend checking Hulu out.