12/14/11

Today, President Obama spoke at Fort Bragg, NC, to welcome home soldiers returning from Iraq. In his speech he said, “You stood up for America; now America must stand up for you. Our commitment to you doesn’t end when you take off the uniform.”

I hope this promise is met with genuine and sincere interest and commitment by employers.

But to ensure employers KNOW WHO YOU ARE, here are my simple suggestions on what you need to put at the top of your resume, just below your name and contact information.

If you were wounded in combat, clearly state that you are a WOUNDED WARRIOR.

If you served in Iraq or Afghanistan, clearly state that you are an IRAQ or AFGHANISTAN VETERAN, or both if applicable. Don’t be bashful if your service goes back to Vietnam or even Korea.

I would prominently display this information above your clearance (if you have one).

Remember, most people reading a resume take less than 30 seconds to scan and reach an initial determination. So BROADCAST your military service!!!

1. Official CDC obesity estimates are lower than the actual rates because they rely on self-reported height.
Body mass index (BMI) is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Since both men and women say they’re taller than they actually are, the official obesity stats are lower than the actual rates.

2. Women not only lie about their height, they also lie about their weight.
They say they’re not as heavy as they actually are. As a result, official obesity rates for women are much lower than are the true obesity rates.

3. The 2009 CDC obesity rate estimate of 26.7% is 7.2 percentage points lower than the 2008 estimate of 33.9% from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
One explanation for the difference? Height and weight were measured rather than self-reported in the NHANES estimates.

4. People with less than a high school degree have the highest obesity rate (32.9%).
High school graduates (29.5%) have about the same obesity rates as college drop-outs (29.1%). College graduates have the lowest obesity rate of 20.8% in 2009. This doesn’t mean that the “freshman 15” is a myth. It just implies that those who don’t go to college probably gain more than the 15 pounds freshmen gain around the campuses in America.

5. Non-Hispanic black people have the highest obesity rate of 36.8%.

6. Hispanics have an obesity rate of 30.7%.

7. Non-Hispanic white people have an obesity rate of 25.2%. Other races (i.e. Asians) have the lowest obesity rate of 16.7%.

8. The overall obesity rate increases for older age groups until the age of 60.
18-29 year olds have an obesity rate of 20.3%. The rate is 27.8% for 30-39 age group, 29.4% for 40-49 age group, 31.1% for 50-59 age group. The obesity rate declines slightly to 30.9% for the 60-69 age group. Those who manage to stay alive past the age of 69 have an obesity rate of 20.5%.

9. Women really lie about their height and weight.
Their obesity rate is lower than men in the 18-59 age group. They probably stop lying after the age of 60 because among the people above 60 years old, women have a higher obesity rate.

10. Obesity is expensive to treat.
Annual medical costs of obesity are as high as $147 Billion. On average, obese people have medical costs that are $1429 more than medical costs of normal weight people.

11. The government declared that “Past efforts and investments to prevent and control obesity have not been adequate” and decided to start new initiatives such as the “Let’s Move!” campaign.
The government will soon force cheese companies to put pictures of obese people on their packaging, in the same way regulators require cigarette makers to put disgusting pictures related to smoking on cigarette packages.

12. Approximately 72.5 million American adults are obese.
Obesity is one of the factors causing heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Obese people are doing something the Obama administration can’t do: creating well paying healthcare jobs by eating themselves to death. Look at these two maps showing obesity rates and diabetes rates. They are almost identical. Do you think this is just a coincidence? Lipitor maker Pfizer (PFE), top diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk (NVO) and McDonalds (MCD) owe a big thank you to obese people!

13. Colorado, District of Columbia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Hawaii have the lowest obesity rates in the country.
Obesity rates are lowest in the Northeast and West coast. Obesity rates are highest in Midwest and South (See the list of top 10 states with the highest obesity rates).

14. Contrary to the recent trends, the obesity rate has declined in some states during the 2008-2009 recession
Obesity rates in Alaska and Oregon went down by more than 3 percentage points. DC, Georgia, Minnesota, New York, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Colorado managed to reduce obesity rates as well. Find out which states had alarmingly skyrocketing obesity rates.

15. The United States has the highest obesity rate in the world.
The US is also the biggest Big Mac consumer in the world.

Movies watched in 2011 via Redbox, Netflix, or the Movie Theatre and Cable TV.

9th Company
A Peck on the Cheek
Despicable Me
Megamind
Adventures of a Teenage Dragonslayer
Army of Crime
Black Swan
Carlos: Miniseries
Dreamcatcher
Elephant White
Emmanuelle 7
Grown Ups
Gulliver’s Travels
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
Hunter Prey
Inception
Jade Warrior
Legend of the Guardians: Owls of Ga’Hoole
Monsters
Mortal Kombat: The Movie
Ricky
Spartacus: Blood and Sand
Spartacus: Gods of the Arena
The A-Team
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
The Green Hornet
The Illusionist
The King’s Speech
The Resident
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
Trade
Vampires Suck

IDENTIFY

Very few people view themselves as angry. While anger can be easy to observe in others, we may think of it in our lives as frustration or stress.

ARE YOU ANGRY?

- Do you experience a physical response to conflict—tense muscles, clenched fist, glaring looks?
- Do you ever feel powerless in the face of disappointment or conflict?
- Do you find yourself lashing out in response to conflict?
- Do you catch yourself being verbally abusive?
- Do past hurts feel as painful today as when they first occurred?
- Do you feel you have a right to be angry?

DID YOU KNOW?

- One in five Americans has an anger problem.
- Couples that argue more than twenty percent of the time are unlikely to stay together.
- Each year in the United States, approximately 1.5 million people are the victims of violent crime.
- Sixty-three percent of boys and young men arrested for homicide (aged 11-20), killed men who were abusing their mothers.

You did your homework. You took full advantage of the available transition assistance services afforded you as you transitioned out of the military. In the process, you crafted an outstanding civilianized resume targeted to a specific job within a particular company. Now the only thing standing between you and a paycheck is the job interview itself.

Pull out your vuvuzelas. It’s game time.

In uniform, you were a bold, audacious risk-taking warrior capable of leaping tall buildings with a single bound. Understanding how your military-garnered skills and experiences could benefit a civilian employer may be obvious to you but it may not be as crystal clear to someone not knowing the difference between an MRE and a SOP.

No need to panic, however. The following tips can help you communicate more effectively, verbally and non-verbally, to civilian employers during your job interview.

Mentally, don’t confuse a job interview with a promotion board.

A military promotion board may be the closest thing to an actual job interview you’ve ever experienced, but there are notable differences.

If you were sitting before a promotion board, your posture would be rigid, your feet twelve inches apart and your hands, fingers outstretched, on your knees. Your steely eyes would focus on some speck of dust visible only to you, blocking out the rest of the living world at large. You would speak when spoken to and leave when told to do so.

Most job interviews, on the other hand, are far more relaxed than that and resemble more of a friendly conversation than an inquisition. Eye contact and overall body language is important, of course. More important however, is the existence of a real give and take conversation where both you and the employer can learn about each other.

Your goal in the interview is to create a positive impression. You want to learn as much as you can about the company and the job itself. You do all this in the name of creating future career choices for yourself.

Avoid using the military jargon you’ve come to know and love.

The only job you may have ever had was as a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine in the U.S. military. It doesn’t change the fact now that you’re trying to land a different job, one that doesn’t necessarily require that you wear a uniform or speak in a unique shorthand language understood only by someone else who wears one.

Notice the subtle differences below:

- Your job interview is at 2p.m. not 1400 hours.

- If you agree with the employer on a given point, say “yes, I agree with that” instead of “hooah” or “roger-dat” even if the latter feels more natural to you.

- When explaining your work experiences in different regions, avoid identifying the areas as AORs or in [specific] theaters of operations. Instead indicate that you worked overseas or simply name the country/countries.

- Quantify your accomplishments and responsibilities using words that don’t resonate with past military performance appraisals. For example, explain that while you were stationed overseas, you supervised 110 network technicians (not service members) working in round the clock communications center (not a 365/24/7 NOC) supporting worldwide telecommunications operations (not the Warfighter downrange). Every industry, in or out of uniform, has its own language. Now is the time for you to learn and use the one you’ll need for your next job. Even if you are transitioning from the DoD in uniform, to the DoD in a suit, there will be differences to learn and embrace.

Omit reference to the C-word (combat).

Your job might have taken you to the front lines of combat more times than you care to remember. Like it or not, most civilian employers won’t want to hear about it.

What they want to hear about is how you can make a positive difference within their organization using your technical skills and leadership abilities. Let them get to know you and what you have to offer them sans the scary, life-threatening details you may have come to know as business as usual.

Your next job, out of uniform, can be a thrilling adventure itself. Give it a chance and in doing so, realize that you have to leave the past where it belongs.

Maybe it’s because the country was raised on the Protestant work ethic. Or maybe it’s that our mother’s words still ring in our heads: “If you don’t work hard, you’ll never amount to much.” Whatever the reason, Americans think they need to work hard to make money and that’s not always true.

Sure, you’ve got to show up and diligently toil at the office. But when you save and invest, you’re better off being a couch potato. The lazy approach to portfolio management wins over “hard work” pretty much every time.

How much does it pay to be lazy? A conservative estimate is that it would pay an average investor somewhere north of $250,000. That’s right. You gain a quarter of a million dollars by doing less — ideally almost nothing. (I’ll explain how in a minute.)

The first time I heard this concept, it was at an investment conference back in the 1980s and Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Investments, was speaking. He talked about his academic research that proved that virtually no one could consistently beat the market over long stretches (like the 40 years we have to invest for retirement). The best you could hope for was to meet the market, which gave you returns that weren’t half bad.

The answer, he said, was invest in a broad swath of stocks and bonds through low-cost index funds and forget about your portfolio. Spend your time living your life instead of researching stocks and bonds. That’s much more fun than sweating over investments anyway.

A few years later, at another investment conference, I discovered Terrance Odean, a Berkeley professor who proved Bogle’s theory by coming at it another way. The more you trade, the more you lose, Odean discovered by examining the real-life portfolios and trading patterns of thousands of investors. His paper, Boys Will Be Boys, is a must-read for those who think they’re going to outsmart the stock market.

But I was reminded of the wisdom of the lazy approach this week by The Oblivious Investor, a neat little blog full of common sense advice. I had gone to read a post about paying for investment advice, but got distracted. (Does the web make everybody ADD, or is it just me?)The next thing I knew, I was reading a wonderful little piece about 8 Lazy Investment Portfolios. (In truth, the post is titled 8 Lazy ETF Portfolios, but that was so Wall Street-speak that I had to edit. ETF is short for Exchange Traded Fund and the only magic about this type of mutual fund is that they’re super-low cost.)

In the post, the Oblivious Investor outlines the simple portfolios recommended by 8 lauded experts, including MoneyWatch’s own Allan Roth, author of How a Second-Grader Beats Wall Street, and Steve Vernon, author of Live Long and Prosper.

All of these portfolios are low-cost; tinker-free plans. You buy them and leave them alone.

I even included a similar plan in the update of the book, Investing 101, called “The Lazy Man’s Portfolio Planner.” The only difference: You plug your own numbers into the portfolio planner to match your age and circumstances, so your tinker-free portfolio will meet your cash needs and suit your personality. That, presumably, will help you leave your stocks alone during volatile times like these, which could save you a fortune over the long run.

So how does being lazy pay you money? If you read Odean’s research, you’ll find that frequent trading costs you roughly 2.65 percentage points in annual investment returns. That means that, instead of earning an average of, say, 8 or 9% on a portfolio that you buy and leave alone, you’d earn between 5.35% and 6.35% by tinkering with it.

To see how that affects you in dollars and sense, we turn to “simple savings calculator” at BankRate.com. If we assume that you start investing $150 a month at age 25 and continue to contribute that same amount for the next 40 years, you’d end up with a portfolio worth $527,292 if you’re lazy enough to leave it alone and earn the average return of a diversified portfolio of about 8%. But, if you tinkered around — which triggers taxes and trading costs — you’d only earn an average of 5.35%, according to Odean’s analysis. That would leave you with $252,229 — some $275,063 less.

If you assume higher rates of return on your investments, or if you invest more on a monthly basis, the cost of tinkering becomes even more onerous. Let’s say you invest $250 a month and earn 9% on average. At retirement, the couch potato’s portfolio would be worth $1.179 million. The tinkerer’s portfolio (which earned just 6.35% on average) is worth $550,945 — an astounding $628,412 less.

The only tinkering you should do with your portfolio is to “rebalance” once a year. What that means is you look at the percentage of your assets that you have in each asset class — stocks, bonds, cash, etc. — and make sure that matches with the percentage that you think you should have based on your age, assets and goals. (If you have a planner, they’ll help with the numbers or you could do the worksheets in the Lazy Person’s Portfolio Planner — Chapter 13 of Investing 101 — to get the right percentages.)

But you just heard somebody say “This is a trader’s market! Buy and hold is dead!” Find out what they’re selling. It’s not impartial investment advice. Those who have nothing to sell you — the professors, the pundits and the cynical journalists like me — are going to tell you that you’ll make more in the investment world when you’re lazy than you ever could by trying to outsmart Wall Street.

It’s winter in Maryland
And the gentle breezes blow
Seventy miles an hour
At five below.
Oh, how I love Maryland
When the snow’s up to your butt
You take a breath of winter
And your nose gets frozen shut.
Yes,
The weather here is wonderful
So I guess I’ll hang around
I could never leave Maryland
Cuz I’m frozen to the ground!

Movies watched in 2010 via Redbox, Netflix, or the Movie Theatre. I’ve opted to omit those from Cable TV like TBS, TCM, AMC, FOX, BET, ABC, NBC, CBS, USA, TNT, and FX.

16 Wishes
Across the Line
After.Life
Alice in Wonderland
Amelia
Animals
Archangel
Arn: The Knight Templar
Astro Boy
Autumn
Avalon High
Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
Barry Munday
Big Fan
Birthday Girl
Blood Creek
Breaking Point
Brooklyn’s Finest
Casualties of War
Caught In The Crossfire
Centurion
Chloe
Chocolate
Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
City Island
Clash of the Gods
Clash of the Titans
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Coco Before Chanel
Command Performance
Crazy Heart
Crusade: A March Through Time
Daybreakers
Dear John
Death at a Funeral
Defendor
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Dolan’s Cadillac
Dragon Hunters
Easy A
Echelon Conspiracy Rental
Edge of Darkness
Enemies Among Us
Entre Nos
Escape to Witch Mountain
Extraordinary Measures
Face/Off (RR)
Fireball
Flipped
From Paris with Love
Gabriel
Gamer
Good Hair
Green Zone
Grown Ups
Hawaii, Oslo
Hogfather
Hot Tub Time Machine
How to Train Your Dragon
Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
If You Are the One 2 (Fei Cheng Wu Rao II)
Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
In the Dust of the Stars
Invictus
Iron Man 2
It’s Complicated
Jack And The Beanstalk
Jesse Stone: No Remorse
Jonah Hex
Journey to Promethea
Kick-Ass
Knucklehead
Leap Year
Legend of the Tsunami Warrior
Legendary
Lost in Siberia
Lottery Ticket
Lust, Caution
MacGruber
Me and Orson Welles
Men Who Stare At Goats
Moon
Mystery Team
Nanny McPhee
Oldboy
Operation: Endgame
Pandorum
Paranormal Activity
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Planet 51
Precious
Predators
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Princess And The Frog
Rain Fall
Ramona and Beezus
Red Cliff
Repo Men
Restrepo
Robin Hood
Saint John Of Las Vegas
Salt
Santa Baby
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Seventh Moon
She’s Out of My League
Sherlock Holmes
Shrek Forever After
Shutter Island
Skinwalkers
Solitary Man
Somers Town
Starquest: The Odyssey
Staten Island
Stone of Destiny
Surrogates
The Blind Side
The Book of Eli
The Bounty Hunter
The Box (2009)
The Burrowers
The Expendables
The Extra Man
The Fourth Kind
The Ghost Writer
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Grocer’s Son
The Hangover
The Hurt Locker
The Informant!
The Karate Kid (2010)
The Last Airbender
The Lawnmower Man
The Lost Tribe
The Messenger
The Missing Lynx
The New Daughter
The Other Guys
The Prophet
The Red Baron
The Road
The Secret of Moonacre
The Seventh Sign
The Slammin Salmon
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
The Stranger
The Ten
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Trial
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
The Twilight Samurai
The Warlords
The White Ribbon
The Young Victoria
To Save a Life
Tooth Fairy
Toy Story 3
True Grit (2010)
Under the Mountain
Under the Sea (IMAX)
Undercover Wife
Unthinkable
Untold Scandal
Up in the Air
Valhalla Rising
When in Rome
Where the Wild Things Are
Yesterday
Youth in Revolt

1. Thou shalt always wear CLEAN UNDERWEAR, in case thou art in an ACCIDENT.
2. Thou shalt telleth SECRET TALES of thy youth, for verily thy parents are better off in DENIAL.
3. Thou shalt not destroy NAKED BABY PICTURES of thyself.
4. Thou shalt REMEMBER thy parents’ birthdays.
5. Thou shalt not maketh the “CUCKOO” sign no holdeth the phone away from thine ear and thinketh “BLAH, BLAH, BLAH” while thou doth converse with thy parent.
6. Thou shalt not sell thy GIFT SWEATERS in sales of RUMMAGE, nor use them as OIL RAGS in thy garage.
7. Thou shall WRITE or CALL home or DROP BY so thou mayest keep parents in the loop.
8. Thou shalt not mocketh thy relatives, calling them neither “DEADBEATS” nor “PINHEADS”.
9. Thou shalt not avoid FAMILY REUNIONS by offering such false excuses as “FISHING” or “WASHING THY CAR.”
10. On thy birthday, thou shalt CELEBRATE thyself mightily, for verily thou art a GOOD GUY who DESERVETH a DAY OFF from, yea, these many COMMANDMENTS!

This is the new TSA check-in procedure developed in response to the latest attempted airplane bombing on Northwest flight 253 on Christmas day as it was approaching Detroit from Amsterdam. Definitely puts the fun back in flying.