A sweater in a department store is marked up in price by 20% on Monday. The sweater doesn’t sell, and on Friday it is marked down 50%. Relative to the original price, what is the total discount offered on the sweater on Friday?

A) 20%
B) 30%
C) 40%
D) 50%
E) 60%

Answer after the jump.

How many of you said (B)? The answer is (C), but if you picked (B) or even if you wanted to pick (B), you’re probably suffering from the same confusion relative to your 401k or IRA account balance as the rest of us.

In this economy, if you guys are anything like me, you’re checking your portfolio only when the market is heading up. Maybe you keep a portfolio on sites like Marketwatch or your online brokerage. Maybe you checked once in a while when the market started to tank. Also if you’re anything like me, you probably are staring at numbers like “-50%” under “Performance.” Here’s the thing, though: if the market somehow goes back up 50% from where it is now, you’re still going to be 25% in the hole.

This is not brain surgery, I realize, but it’s also an incredibly common mathematical mistake. Percentages are relative to the starting number, which means if you lose 50% of $10,000 (to $5,000), and then regain 50% from $5,000, you’re only getting $2,500 up. Just like how the sweater was marked up 20% to 120% of the original price, then marked down 50% from that price to a total of 60% of the original price. Many people forget to reset the original value and say that 100+20-50=70, or down 30%. That’s the scary thing with this market. For people to regain their 50% losses, the market needs to go up 100% from its low point. 50% might seems reasonable, but 100%? That sounds impossible. Or at least like it’s going to take a really, really long time.

At the end of the segment, Bill promises to apologize to Courtney if she can show she publicly defended Sarah Palin. It turns out, our equal-opportunity feminist did. Email Bill if you want to hear an apology.

Just to stir up the pot for a moment though, I have sympathy for Bill. Which is to say, if I were at a party of him and he did an impression of Helen Thomas like that, I might laugh. Just like if I was at a party with Michael Phelps, I might have done a bong hit with him. Actions and words that are fine in the private eye take on an entirely different shape in the public one.

And to another one of his points, Courtney defended Palin in public, but did the Women’s Media Center? We all remember their touching video on sexism in the media highlighting attacks on Hillary. Was there any kind of effort around Palin? I’m asking, ’cause I don’t know. If not, I think Bill’s hypocrisy charge might have something to it (again, on the WMC, not Court).

So it turns out that in the audio version of Dreams From My Father our new president does an impression of a childhood friend of his, Ray, making off-color remarks.

Full story from the Boston Phoenix here.

Is it just me, or could the average white guy sound more ebonical than the good Mr. Obama?

In absolute terms, the two movements must remain in perpetual war or a compromise must be reached. The compromise is one state for all, an “Isratine” that would allow the people in each party to feel that they live in all of the disputed land and they are not deprived of any one part of it.

I find this column highly suspect, a rhetorical Trojan horse. On its surface it sounds peace-loving and rational–can’t we all just get along? But there are reasons why the “right of return” is a complete non-starter in negotiations from Israel’s perspective.

Simply put, many Arabs believe they can out-birth the Jews. If Palestine and Israel became one–Qaddafi’s “Isratine”–then the population of Israel would become majority Arab immediately. Furthermore, based on the birth rates of Israeli Jews versus Israeli Arabs and Palestinians (20 per 1000 versus 25 per 1000), the Jews would see their minority shrink significantly every year. In the end, what you would have is yet another country where Jews are a hated minority–exactly the situation that the creation of Israel was intended to avoid. What cannot by taken by force would be taken by demography. That’s no solution at all.

And make no mistake: Muammar Qadaffi knows exactly what he is suggesting.

The snow cat had turned back up the slope, its lights pointing in our direction. Trent and I dropped flat into a small depression, our bodies hopefully obscured by the shadows. The snow was cold and hard, but I was wearing plenty of padding. We were at the top of Vail Mountain at night, and it was pitch black save for the snow cats grooming the ski slopes for the next day. We looked around for our third, but Matt’s tall, skinny shape was nowhere to be found.

The lights passed us over. “Go!” Trent cried. In the crunching snow at a full sprint, we covered the last open expanse, then slid baseball style down to the catwalk, fully out of view. Matt reappeared a moment later, clutching a square of folded black plastic to his chest. “I dropped my trash bag,” he explained.

The sledding we were about to do was not smart, legal, or safe. In fact, we were probably the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night. But that’s what made it great.

We started out with a blue square, an intermediate run down the middle of the mountain. Trent handed me a trashbag with two leg holes cut out of it, and I climbed in, feeling like an overdressed hobo. Trent gave me a quick primer: wear goggles, tap with your arms to steer, and get up as fast as you can so as not to be bowled over by the next sledder. Then he and Matt, veteran trashbag sledders, took off down the run.

I could not decide which was scarier: standing atop a ski slope on a moonless night, waiting to get arrested by a snowmobile patrol, or sliding into the impenetrable darkness in a waste receptacle liner. I thought I heard voices, so I chose the latter.

I had forgotten the goggles. I became a moving cloud of snow crystals, an arctic Taz zooming my way to the bottom (and hopefully not into a tree). I couldn’t see a thing, and I barely missed taking Matt out as he stood up from his run.

We kept going like that, running, sliding, jumping up and running again, till we came to the end of the blue. Thrilling, I thought, but more for the James Bond antics than the actual sledding. The trashbag was easy enough to slow down by sitting up instead of lying flat on one’s back.

And we kept hearing voices. Our codeword was “Red,” as in the color that ski patrollers wear, and we whispered it to each other at least several times on the running, stopping dead in our tracks. We couldn’t decide if it was ski patrol or other trashbag sledders on a parallel run.

Then we came to the top of International, a steep, mogul-y black diamond. Trent looked over the top of it. “I’m not saying we should try it,” he explained. “I just want to see.”

Matt seemed hesitant, too. I didn’t see the big deal. “Dude, go for it,” I said.

Trent shrugged. A Vail native, he didn’t need to be told twice. From a sitting start, he slid down the face. We lost sight of him in a cloud of snow after twenty feet, but his cries did give us a roadmap for the run.

“Whoa…”
“Whoop!”
“HOLY SHIT!”
Giggles.

Matt and I went next. Sitting start, hands digging into the snow to slow down, but it made no difference. After the first mogul launched you airborne, the speed was too much to control, and the second and third one knocked us so high it made you wonder if you would have a functioning ass the next morning. My goggles had completely stopped fogged up, so I was flying blind at uncontrollable speeds down a mogul run. If my senses weren’t so overloaded by rushing wind, ice, and the sensation of weightlessness, I probably would have feared for my life. When I stood up, my beard was so encrusted with ice crystals that I looked like Santa Claus.

I called my girlfriend Jen from the bottom of International and told her what we were doing. “I’m imagining you guys as cartoon characters because I can’t imagine real people surviving that!” she exclaimed.

We had one last slope to consider: Pepe’s Face, the steep strip at the bottom of Vail Village that après-skiers sipping margaritas love to watch beginners fall down. We weren’t idiots; we took the catwalk around. But we did notice boot prints leading up to Pepe’s, getting deeper and deeper as if someone was running headlong, and then a single butt-sized trail heading off the cliff into the darkness.

I guess were weren’t the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night after all.

[Referring to Joe the Plumber]

“Joe’s with us today!” Mr. McCain shouted at a cold outdoor rally at Defiance Junior High School. “Joe, where are you? Where is Joe? Is Joe here with us today?”

Nothing.

“Joe, I thought you were here today,” Mr. McCain continued, with dimmed enthusiasm.

Still nothing. The crowd murmured.

“All right,” Mr. McCain said, realizing that Joe was nowhere to be found. “Well, you’re all the Joe the Plumbers!”

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

It’s like a Chapelle’s Show skit come to life. Besides laughter, I didn’t know how to react at first. Finally I decided that it was a measure of where we stand in this country on race: there may be racists out there, but maybe the force of racism isn’t what it once was.

The first segment of Obama’s appearance on the O’Reilly Factor

I have two points about this. One, Obama comes off looking pretty good. O’Reilly even said: “Obama’s a tough guy… I looked at him eye to eye. He’s not a wimp.” The interview came about after Obama sat down with Roger Ailes several months ago to discuss Fox’s coverage of the campaign.

Two, I can’t help but wish a liberal pundit or an independent pundit or a neutral pundit had the balls to push a presidential candidate in this way. Interviewers too often let candidates get away with lines like “I’ll take Osama out if we have him in our sights.” I may not agree with his ideology, but sometimes I do admire Bill O’Reilly for speaking (his) truth to (potential) power.

Then energy independence. The McCain campaign is touting Palin’s energy experience because of her pervue over one of our biggest oil-producing states. But of course, the Democrat’s idea of energy independence looks a lot different, focusing on wind, solar, etc that McCain voted against extending tax credits for.

So we’ve got a whole lot of energy flying in different directions. Which is always good. Or is it?

If we think about it further, energy issues become downright creepy. The fossil fuels that this world depends on is no less than the decomposed organic matter of all lifeforms that have ever lived on this planet. We are sucking liquified dinosaurs out of the Earth and burning them up, destroying our environment. Who thought this was a good idea?

Of course, for younger and/or more liberal folks, we instantly equate energy independence with the environment and the fight against global warming. We see solar panels and spinning wind farms on every building, energy from renewable sources. The Republicans have picked up the refrain, but for them it means natural gas (which is working well in Utah), nuclear energy, and of course more drilling for oil. McCain and Palin did both mention clean coal (as do the Dems), but is the solution really capturing a whole bunch of dirty smoke and shoving it underground, hoping we’ll never hear from it again?

The future of our country may well rely on which party is right on energy and which one can capture more of it this political season.