As a stockholder of Google Inc. (I own three whole shares), I occasionally get e-mails and letters regarding all sorts of fun Google investor news. Lately a lot of that news has been “our shares are plummeting, you should have sold at $700.” One item in particular I recently read on the Google Investor Relations page caught my eye:

Consumption of alcohol is not banned at our offices, but use good judgment and never drink in a way that leads to impaired performance or inappropriate behavior, endangers the safety of others or violates the law.

My first thought upon reading this was “sweeeeeet.” So were my second through seventeenth thoughts. Eventually, after fighting very hard to resist the temptation to submit my resume immediately, I considered the implications of allowing alcohol consumption at work. First there are the obvious benefits:

• Alcohol can make co-workers easier to deal with. Oh man, I can think of a dozen people where I work that are fifty times more mellow and easier to work with when they’ve had a drink or five.
• Alcohol inspires creativity. If you don’t believe me, just keep in mind that the following things were invented by drunk people: electricity, computers, the internet, and reality television. Just make sure you’re not too drunk that you can’t remember your great ideas or at least write them down for later.
• Alcohol can benefit worker productivity. Allowing personnel to drink at work gives them one less reason to want to go home, so they’ll be more than happy to put in the longer hours today’s work environment demands.
• Alcohol helps with the Monday Blues. After drinking your weekend away, the last thing you probably want to do is go to work Monday morning. But if you can bring your friends Heineken and Captain Morgan with you, Mondays won’t be quite so bad after all.
• At least it’s not drugs. Employees who can drink at work will be far less likely to sneak out for a quick “smoke” break, and I ain’t talkin’ ’bout cigarettes. And while some people might argue that alcohol is a drug, I would argue that those people should shut the hell up and have a drink.

Of course, there are also some drawbacks to allowing employees to drink while working.

• Alcohol can impair judgment. “Should we buy out our competitor for $100 million when it’s only worth $5 million? No! That would be stupid! [Five drinks later.] Yes! That would be awesome!”
• Alcohol makes people tired and/or slow. While alcohol might keep your workers happier and working longer, they might spend some of those hours re-reading the same paragraph 47 times or sleeping under their desks. Counteract this unfortunate side effect of alcohol by blaring extremely loud heavy metal throughout your office building.
• Drunk people sometimes fight more. This one sort of speaks for itself, so I’ll also note that a policy allowing alcohol at work is not compatible with policies allowing guns and knives at work. One or the other, people!
• Alcohol can inspire all sorts of bad behavior. If your workplace already suffers from numerous sexual harassment or ethnic discrimination complaints, letting workers drink might not improve things.
• Other people might look down on your business if everyone’s drinking all of the time. Then again, Google seems not to mind if its workers get sloshed on the clock and it has at least 70 billion users worldwide.

In the end, the decision on whether or not to allow alcohol in the workplace should be made on a case-by-case basis and only after careful consideration of numerous factors including but not limited to employee diversity, workplace safety, and worker productivity. And if your place of business decides that openly allowing you to bring a six-pack to your cubicle for lunch isn’t a good idea, you can just pre-mix your booze and sneak it past security in a soft drink bottle like everyone else you work with already does.

Teaching your children proper money management skills at an early age is very important. Without being exposed to good financial habits at a young age, children can grow up to be reckless, greedy, or possibly even Federal Reserve Chairman. One of the best ways to give your children some experience with money is by helping them operate a small business. Unlike your typical kid-sized jobs like delivering newspapers or working for H&R Block, helping them run their own small business is a much better way to introduce your children to a wide variety of adult financial topics—everything from supply and demand to price gouging. It’s also a terrific method for bringing in a few extra bucks for yourself—I mean, your kids and their college funds.

One great small business that any set of kids can run almost entirely by themselves is a lemonade stand. Yes, the most cliché of all child-run money-makers is still one of the best. That’s because it’s a microcosm of the entire U.S. economy in one 2′-by-4′ wooden stand. For a startup investment of just a couple hundred dollars, your kids can experience all of the trials and tribulations of real grown-up finances—paying the bills, making ends meet, and mercilessly crushing the competition.

Of course, as with any business, it’s a lot easier to make more money if you’re the only lemonade stand on the block. So when the Joneses across the street read this post and decide to help their kids start their own stand to compete with yours, you’re going to have to take them down fast. Here are some tips that I stole from those brats three doors down for cornering the market in lemonade stands.

1. Advertising is key. If you live in the dreaded cul-de-sac or some other area without a lot of vehicular or pedestrian traffic, you’re going to have to find other ways to get the word out about your fine lemonade establishment. Flyers posted on telephone poles may work, but don’t stop there! Target any place that may see lots of hot, sweaty people such as home improvement stores, gyms, and the romance section of your local bookstore.
2. Cut down your expenses. Have you seen the price of lemons lately? Not to mention sugar, water, cups… You’ll have to be creative to earn a good profit in the lemonade business, and the best way to do that is to minimize your expenses. For example, go for paper cups over plastic. And instead of fresh lemons, use lemon cough drops.
3. Hire attractive workers. I hate to break it to you, but your children could stand some improvement in the looks area. So while you’re stuffing away that hard-earned lemonade money to pay for their plastic surgeries, consider borrowing better-looking kids from family or friends. Adorable little girls in cute dresses covered in bows are sure to melt the hearts of anyone passing by your stand enough to score a slew of sales.
4. Price competitively. If little Bobby and Jane next door are selling their lemonade for 20 cents a cup, your kids can sell it for 15 cents—even if it means taking a loss in the beginning. When Bobby and Jane don’t sell a single cup and run home crying to Mommy, your kids will be free to jack up their price 700 percent.
5. Offer a rewards program. Encourage repeat customers by setting up a rewards structure for frequent buyers. Punch cards that give clients a free drink for every five or six purchases will keep them coming back every day. Just be careful of that creepy guy down the street coming back twelve times a day to your kids’ lemonade stand; he’s not there for the rewards program, that’s for sure.
6. Don’t be afraid to play dirty. If your kids’ lemonade stand just can’t compete with the others in the area, then it’s time to pull out the big guns. After all, big guns are useful for scaring away other people’s children from their lemonade stands so your kids can sell their inferior product for twice the market price.
7. Find a way to stand out. Anyone can run a lemonade stand, but you can help yours “stand” out by offering additional services you won’t find at your typical beverage vendor. How about a lemonade and leg-waxing stand? Or a lemonade and iPod repair stand. The possibilities are endless, and soon so will be your profits!

Following these simple tips will help your children learn just how the adult world of money really works. Just be sure to share the responsibility of managing the lemonade stand with your children so they can find out for themselves just how stressful and aggravating it can be to have to manage their own finances. They’ll either become the most financially responsible kids on the block… or they’ll be too scared to ever move out of your house.

Hopefully you’re like me and are able to resist throwing yourself at all of the web startups du jour that keep popping up all over the place. A couple of years ago it was MySpace that drove all of the kiddies to hurl themselves like lemmings at a cliff. Now you’ve got websites with names like Fwurgle, Choopsey, and Hobnobble promising to do something to improve people’s lives when really all they’re doing is complicating them even further in order to make a quick buck.

So when I first heard about NotchUp a few months ago, I totally passed it off as another internet startup that would make a bang for a few days, maybe rake in a few dollars for its creators, and then make way for the next one-hit e-wonder. But then NotchUp resurfaced a couple of weeks ago, still alive, still promising to make people’s lives better, and (almost) ready to open for business.

So what is this NotchUp I keep talking about? Well, it’s a lot of things. On the surface, NotchUp is a service that connects prospective employees with businesses looking to hire. In other words, NotchUp is a headhunter—someone paid to help companies find good workers. If this were all NotchUp were, it would already be out of the picture because the world has more than enough headhunters already.

Where NotchUp distinguishes itself from your everyday headhunter is that 1) you don’t pay them a penny; the company looking to hire you does; 2) NotchUp passes on some (likely most) of the money it gets from prospective employers to you, the job candidate; and 3) you don’t even need to be hired by the company to get your money. In short, NotchUp helps you get paid to interview for jobs. And not just a few pennies per interview either. NotchUp claims that qualified candidates could demand in the neighborhood of $500 per interview.

At this point you probably just quit your sub-$30,000 a year job after doing the math that you could make your entire annual salary in a few months with just 60 job interviews at $500 apiece. If so, you may want to start interviewing for real because there’s a few things you should know about NotchUp:

• They haven’t really started operating yet. Yes, you can sign up for a NotchUp account today, but nobody’s getting paid for interviews quite yet.
• There’s a lot of competition. NotchUp recently hit all of the big social networking sites, so they’re probably already in the six figures for membership numbers. That said, I would expect that fully 90% of NotchUp’s current enrollment would be lucky to pass an interview for the position of 2nd Dishwasher Assistant. So if you have high-demand skills, there’s still hope for you.
• Nobody really knows how it’ll turn out. NotchUp may or may not already be in talks with prospective employers and interviewers, but its claims of “$500+ per interview” are really just conjecture at this point. Maybe a few high-demand positions could fetch that much when NotchUp first launches, but I would expect the actual returns to fall a good bit short.
• It’s just asking to be abused. When all you have to do to get paid is interview for the job, you’re opening up the possibility of people who become professional job interviewees—folks who sign up for interviews left and right while knowing full well they’re not really looking for a new job. If the abuse is bad enough, it could be the undoing of NotchUp.
• Your current boss might see you. While NotchUp appears to have some rudimentary filtering techniques designed to help you hide your NotchUp profile from unwanted attention (say, from your current employer), they may be easy to get around. So unless you think your boss will buy into your explanation that you’re “just interviewing for jobs for fun and profit,” beware that potentially anyone could see your profile and assume you’re looking for new work.

Right now, NotchUp has a lot of promise but not much more than hype and resumes to show for its efforts so far. But if you’re okay with putting yourself out there on the internet, then you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up with NotchUp for free and seeing where it goes.

Oh, and while anyone can sign up for NotchUp, if you get referred by an existing member, you don’t have to wait for your application to be reviewed and possibly rejected. So if you want an invite, send me an e-mail. Note that I do get a 10% bonus for interviews completed by people I refer, so I especially encourage top-level astronaut baseball players who will fetch $50,000 per interview to ask me for an invite.

It’s likely old news to everyone by now that electronic oddity store The Sharper Image is going bankrupt. You may have heard about it on the news or from a friend. Or perhaps you found out the hard way when you tried to use a Sharper Image gift card in the store only to have it refused. That’s right, as it flaps around like a fish out of sound fiscal waters, The Sharper Image will no longer take its own gift cards.

While I could easily talk at length about how wrong it is for a store to stop accepting its own gift cards, I have to say I’m quite amused by this situation. You see, The Sharper Image is the most perfect example of a store that needed to go bankrupt. I can think of no store, not even my arch-nemesis Wal-Mart, for which financial collapse is a more fitting fate. My anti-Sharper Image stance can be traced to the three characteristics of The Sharper Image that led to its demise:

1. The Sharper Image sells nothing but crap that nobody needs.
2. That crap is overpriced.
3. Despite the fact that Americans like to buy useless, overpriced crap, The Sharper Image couldn’t figure out how to sell their own useless, overpriced crap.

The fact that The Sharper Image is going under has slightly renewed my faith in the American shopping public. I’m shocked they were around for as long as they were selling dinosaur robots and other technological amusements that are about as fun as stabbing oneself in the face with the broken shards of a Chia Pet. Even I, someone who is easily amused by every latest shiny blinking contraption (fortunately I possess just enough financial restraint to keep myself from buying them… usually), have no problem passing by The Sharper Image every time I encounter one of their stores.

I think the best indication of just how worthless The Sharper Image is (was?) is the fact that some credit card issuers have reward programs that let you trade in one dollar worth of reward points for roughly $8,000 in The Sharper Image gift cards which is roughly enough value to get you one pack of used Sharper Image-brand AA batteries (batteries not included).

Now that I think about it, there is the possibility that The Sharper Image will emerge from its bankruptcy somewhat intact, still taking up shopping mall units that would otherwise turn into emergency backup Starbucks in case the mall’s primary or secondary Starbucks location ever had an espresso machine failure. If The Sharper Image does manage to return from the abyss, please… I implore you, don’t fall for its shiny blinking subterfuge. Stay far away from those robotic dinosaurs and roll-up piano keyboards like in that one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and hopefully The Sharper Image won’t make it very long into Round Two.

You’d think that with all of the negative comments I make about various evil, horrible corporations, there’s not a company on Earth that hasn’t earned my relentless ire. Not true! You only think that because I never say good things about the businesses I actually like. Well, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to give thanks to the following super-corporations for smothering orphans and burning kittens working hard to make my life a little easier and more enjoyable.

Amazon.com

Thanks to Amazon.com, my Christmas shopping will take about 90 minutes this year, and roughly 80 of those minutes will be spent deciding what to get people. That’s because Amazon.com sells everything. Literally. If I want a pink necklace, I go to Amazon.com. If I need a book about animal figures I can carve out of apples in my hands within 48 hours, I go to Amazon.com. If I want a Mexican hooker who juggles deli meats while singing Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits… you get the idea. Five years and dozens of orders later, I’ve never had a problem with the Big A. (Ooh, and my hooker’s estimated shipping date is tomorrow!)

Safeway

Growing up, my family bounced back and forth between various supermarkets, sometimes making two or three trips a week to different grocers to score the best deals on quality yummies for our tummies. Now that I’m a successful undercover agent for the National Agency of Robot Spy Librarians, I don’t have time to browse prices at multiple stores. That’s why I shop Safeway… or rather Safeway’s online ordering and home delivery service. In my area, Safeway has the best prices on average, their quality is superior, and their internet storefront is like a porn site for food.

Target

Target is Walmart with three notable exceptions:

• Target doesn’t try to sell every damn thing on the planet and do a miserable job at it.
• Target’s prices are a bit higher so it can pay its slave laborers slightly better.
• Target doesn’t cause me instant depression or make me want to cut myself the second I walk through its doors.

The main reason I like Target enough for it to make it on this list is that it’s as good of a shopping experience as you can get when you need pajamas, batteries, and Rice Krispies in a single store.

Nintendo

You need an explanation here? Nobody hates Nintendo. Even the Sony executives are playing the Nintendo Wii up in their offices right now. In fact, I’m going to go play with my Wii, Gameboy, DS, and Gamecube all right now at the same time instead of putting a fifth item on this list.

Nevermind. Heroes is on, so I’ll finish this during the commercials.

T-Mobile

At one time or another, I’ve been a customer of nearly every major wireless communications providers. The fact that I’ve switched so many times should serve as evidence that I’ve had problems with at least some of those providers. But for the first time in nearly a decade, I’m finally happy (enough) with a company who makes those magical far-talking boxes: T-Mobile. At least in my area, their reception is like a breath of fresh radio waves, and their To Go service is the cheapest pay-as-you-go package there is and perfect for someone like me who uses his phone 20 minutes some months and 200 the next.

What are your favorite companies? What makes them better than others?