Cheap Thoughts

Cheap thoughts.

There are 170 posts filed in Cheap Thoughts (this is page 6 of 17).

Cheap thoughts: hitting the restroom

Why do some men feel the need to hit the restroom? Why not use it instead?

I hear this all the time in the office: “hey, I’ll catch up with you. I’m going to hit the restroom.”

Cheap thoughts: the hallway pitch

A coworker noticed my Pandora shirt as we passed in the hall.

“Pandora … what’s that?” she said.

It took me a beat to answer. I was on my way to getting my first cup of coffee and wasn’t expecting a question.

“It’s a music service,” I responded.

“Oh, yeah,” she said as we continued in opposite directions.

It made me realize that this is a good exercise for entrepreneurs. In addition to an elevator pitch, where you get 30 or more seconds to describe your business, you also need a hallway pitch where you can summarize your business in the time it takes to pass in the hallway.

Update: looks like another extremely wise, successful, and attractive individual has thought of this, too.

Cheap thoughts: Sound museum

A few weekends ago I was visiting my parents when I thought to look for one of the 1970s-era telephones they had in storage. I had recently realized that my kids had never heard the sound of a real ringing telephone and I thought that was a shame. Modern phones all come with electronic ringers, which pale in comparison to the urgency that a bell provides. The closest they could get to hearing the sound of a ringing bell is a ringtone on an iPhone. I found the old phone I was looking for and made it ring a few times for the kids’ sake (and ok, for mine too). What a contrast it provided to today’s phones.
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Cheap Thoughts: funding highways through tolls

My friend Billy posed a question the other day that got me thinking. I was surprised at how such a simple question could set off an hour’s worth of pondering. His question was this: would you be willing to trade the federal taxes on gasoline in exchange for paying tolls on every interstate highway?

My first reaction was to think well, who would want to pay tolls all the time? Then I thought, wait a minute – why should everyone play for highway construction and maintenance if only some drivers use it? This led to me to conclude that if highways all had tolls, drivers would be encouraged to make more local trips.

Since the opening of the I-540 Outer Loop around Raleigh I’ve been thinking about the problem of sprawl. Traffic engineers will tell you that new roads don’t solve traffic problems: they just shift it to another place. And it’s true. If 50,000 vehicles get on a highway all 50,000 are going to get off somewhere. The traffic jam is simply shifted. The Outer Loop caught my attention because its opening encouraged lots of development where there was none before, causing sprawl and stretching the limits of vital city services.
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