Brian Gongol
Podcast: Updated weekly in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning. Subscribe on Stitcher, Spreaker, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or iHeartRadio
A little help, please? Can we ask for a little help? Cityview is taking votes now in their "Best of Des Moines" survey. On the fifth page, would you mind putting in a couple of votes for us? A little extra publicity about Des Moines' only show about making money and having fun would make a great Christmas present. Thanks in advance!
So...cold... It's going to be bitterly cold overnight here in Des Moines, but it could always be worse -- you could be in Minot, North Dakota, where the actual temperature overnight is expected to drop to 22 degrees below zero. Go a little farther north, and you could spend the night in Winnipeg, where Tuesday's overnight low is supposed to be 25 below zero. The wind is the real hassle here -- turning the wind chills brutally low. That was a reminder of a video of a wind turbine failing catastrophically due to a gear failure.
Another day older and deeper in debt. Your share of the Federal debt this week: $34,646.83. That's $10.597 trillion in debt, divided by 305 million people. If you received a bill for just $646.83 in addition to your regular income tax bill, you'd probably be upset. But that's just the rounding error on the actual per-person share of our Federal debt. Why the American public isn't on the verge of rioting in the streets of Washington is almost impossible to figure out -- unless the debt has just grown so big that we can't even comprehend it anymore.
As that debt goes up, a bunch of Americans are making really bad decisions -- pulling $15 billion out of stock-market mutual funds in just the last two weeks. That's at just the moment when people like Jack Bogle are saying stocks are the best deal we've seen in a long time.
15 million people and no ambulances? High praise is due to an organization called 1298, which is combining public service with private funding to deliver ambulance service to Mumbai -- a city of millions of people that's never had any sort of real ambulance service (if you can imagine that). What's neat is that it's a business, and yet it's also designed around delivering service even to those who can't afford it. 1298 (the number is just an Indian version of 911) has received investment dollars from the Acumen Fund, which is an American charity that invests in private-sector solutions to problems of poverty around the world.
Where's the beef? Some crooks really don't make logical decisions...like the burglars who stole 1,620 pounds of ribeye steaks from a meatpacking plant in Lincoln, Nebraska. That sure seems like a lot of heavy lifting. And how exactly does one profit from selling off "hot" ribeyes?
Leno re-ups. Bedtime is about to move a lot earlier for many Americans -- Jay Leno is moving to 9:00 pm (Central). It's a strange move, but it certainly spells a different future for television entertainment.
Google and the Old Gray Lady. Rumors are going around that Google might want to buy the New York Times. As discussed in one of this week's Wise Guys podcasts, that seems like a really bad use of Google's spare cash.
We're multimedia. Are you talking back to us via Twitter? Listening to our podcast? This week we have a double-dose of podcasting for you.
Keywords in this show:
Acumen Fund •
ambulances •
beef •
Bogle, Jack •
buyouts •
cash •
charity •
crime •
debt •
Federal debt •
Google •
investing •
Leno, Jay •
Lincoln, Nebraska •
Manitoba •
medicine •
Mumbai •
New York Times •
North Dakota •
private sector •
savings •
stocks •
television programming •
Twitter •
weather •
wind turbines