Wednesday marks the first anniversary of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. If you don't live in the Gulf it might be a distant memory, a news story eclipsed by more recent disasters in Japan and unrest in the Middle East. But, for people living on the coasts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana the disaster continues. During our recent week touring the region many residents say life there hasn't returned to normal. Tourists haven't returned and many businesses still feel anger towards BP and frustration towards the Gulf Coast Claims Facility.

Video reports from "Revitalizing the U.S. Gulf" will be added this week.

Industrial conglomerate General Electric earned 31 cents a share, up from 17 cents a share and ahead of analyst projections of 28 cents. GE also raised its quarterly dividend by 1 cent to 15 cents (effective in the third quarter of 2011) so it would be logical to assume that the market treated it very well that day.

Indeed, the stock opened nearly 2% higher than its previous day's close and the stock market in general opened nicely higher, too.

But that's where it ended. The stock gave up that gain and fell an additional 2.3% to score a technical reversal to the downside.

After teaching himself at age 11 to play the guitar thanks to courses on YouTube and online guitar tablature, C. Harley Ellis has become a self-proclaimed skilled musician. He also taught himself to play the harmonica, jaw harp, bass, the drums, and the mandolin. Through formal training, he has also learned to play the piano. Being naturally gifted with his hands, it should come as no surprise that the now 14 year old is also an inventor. What started as an 8th grade school project for his Life Skills class has evolved into an entrepreneurial journey.

C. Harley is the visionary, inventor and founder behind 'Micro-Kites™', which as the name implies are - 'small handcrafted' kites. The Micro-Kite™ was originally conceptualized as a full size recyclable kite, made from a plastic grocery bag, straws and finishing line. C. Harley estimates that it took him approximately 20 minutes to rapid prototype his first kite, unfortunately, it did not pass beta mode in its first test flight. In the famous words of C. Harley 'it failed miserably'. A true entrepreneur and innovator, he quickly realized the first idea is seldom the best one and spent the next few days trying to figure out how to improve on his original idea. After a few days had passed, he had his AHA moment and creative breakthrough when he noticed some kids struggling to control a 'full size' kite. He would create a small kite that anyone could use, yet was simple to fly and easy enough to be managed by a small child. This genius idea led to the design of a 5.5 x 5 inch kite.

With the masses descending on Omaha this weekend to hear Warren Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, it is a good time to take a look at the stock. Investors are expected to ask why the stock has been lagging the Standard & Poor's 500, among other issues.

But one look at the chart tells us that lagging performance depends on the time frame examined. Over the past 10 months, a time span chosen for the reason discussed below, then yes, Berkshire Hathaway only gained 1.9% vs. the S&P 500's gain of 26.6%. But if we look farther back, it is not quite so bad.

The Obama administration has jumped into the never-ending debate between parents, children, and eyes that are too big for tummies. It is clear we are a nation of over-eaters. It begins in childhood, which is why the President wants to limit advertising of unhealthy foods to kids, putting at risk the job security of many an animated cereal mascot.

We live in an age of cut backs. Drive less, spend less, and now, with luck, our kids will eat less too.

To anyone following the debate over kids and food advertising, the discussion about the value of the dollar will sound familiar. For decades, our economic eyes have been too big for our collective tummies. Our trade deficits over the last 18 years total an obscene $7 trillion dollars.

What this means is that we have been living way beyond our means, buying from the rest of the world far more than we can afford. Just as those sugary cereal bowls adds up, so do the debts we have accumulated overseas.

Since things that can't go on forever stop, this too has to stop. But how? One way to stop our foreign buying binge is through protectionism. We can stop trading with the rest of the world. That's not in the cards considering how global markets are now, though polls show Americans are not eager to expand free trade deals. Another way to stop buying more than we can afford is to let our currency depreciate.

A weak dollar acts like a spending diet. The price of consuming foreign goods goes up. An instant economic diet. No advertising censorship needed. That's what is happening now.

The Federal Reserve gets a lot of heat for keeping interest rates low, a policy which discourages investment in the U.S. and weakens the dollar. But the latest readings on the economy show that we are not growing strongly enough now to tolerate higher rates.

The only choice is to go on a dollar diet. We have to live within our means again. That applies to cereal and sugar snacks as well as foreign vacations and fancy imports.

1. Negotiate Your Job Offer.

B. Research your salary at PayScale.com and Salary.com.

C. Watch my in-depth videos on negotiation here: www.IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com/negotiation.

Let's start out with this: Economists were expecting a soft jobs number for April. Somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs. We got 268,000 private sector jobs and hiring for previous months was revised upwards. Hours were up, a good sign that employers might have some incentive to bring on new workers.

But! There are two sides to an employment report. The government surveys employers to figure out how many people are hiring. And then the government surveys people to figure out how many are looking for work, how have given up looking for work, and how many say they have a job. Divide the number of people who say they are unemployed by the number of people in the labor force and you get the unemployment rate.

If the economy is creating jobs, why did the unemployment rate tick up to 9%? Some of this appears to be statistical noise. Here's what I got back from Daiwa Capital Markets' Michael Moran when I asked him about this:

"I view it as just a random shift. To me, the surprise was how fast unemployment was declining given the growth of the economy. The economy grew only moderately in Q4 and Q1, yet the unemployment fell a full percentage point from November. The quick decline was probably an aberration, and now we are coming back to reality."

The Household Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the number of jobs in the economy fell by 190,000 last month. Unemployment went up by 205,000 jobs. Should we believe it? Well, consider that the Labor Department surveys about 50,000 households, but 400,000 employers.

There is a lot more information in the April employment report from employers. Which is why Mark Zandi at Moody's Analytics is taking this view:

"The Household survey results are very volatile month to month due to the small number of households that participate in the survey. Since the job recovery began at the start of 2010, the job gains in the household and payroll surveys are very similar."

Bottom line: Don't worry, be happy -- a little. We still are in a deep hole and there are still 5.8 million people who have been unemployed for more than six months. We need to dig out faster, but we are digging.

House Speaker John Boehner this week called for "honest conversations" about Medicare.

Fair enough. Let's begin this honest discussion by admitting no one knows for sure how to reduce Medicare costs. And that's a problem, because Medicare expenditures are projected to grow almost 6% a year for the rest of the decade.

To understand why program costs are exploding, you just have to look through the annual Medicare Trustees report on the financial condition of the program. The 2011 report comes out on Friday, but it will surely have the same analysis you can find in all the other reports. If you want to engage in this honest discussion, a good place to start is on page 45 of the 2010 report. There you will find the four trends driving Medicare costs:

• Growth in the number of beneficiaries
• Increases in the prices paid per service, which reflect both higher wages for health care workers and higher prices for the goods and services purchased by health care providers
• Increases in the average number of services per beneficiary ("utilization")
• Increases in the average complexity of services ("intensity")

Let's take these one at a time. The number of Medicare beneficiaries will soar over the next 25 years, rising from almost 49 million this year to 85 million in 2035. The only way to cut costs here is to kick people out of the program. I don't see that happening.

Wages and prices are the next cost driver. Only two things can be done here. Lower wages for doctors and nurses or make them more productive -- meaning get more work out of doctors and nurses then you get today.

Congress tried to lower wages. It capped payments to physicians using a formula. But when the formula became too tough, forcing deep cuts in wages, Congress relented. Thus the "doc fix" was born. Meaning, Congress voted to pay doctors more. I am not arguing the merits of the formula here, just pointing out that the effort failed.

What about productivity? No surprise, it is harder to measure productivity in a hospital than it is in an auto plant. The hospital's product is good health and an outcome like that is hard to quantify. There is no dispute though that if you could accurately measure health care productivity, it would be low and perhaps even negative!

Some studies found as much as one-third of the spending in our health care system does not improve health, adding up to a staggering waste of more than $700 billion.

What can be done about this? The President has created a panel of experts to study ways to use new payment systems to reward innovation and more efficient treatment of disease.

A worthy goal, but as the Trustees Report points out, efforts to eliminate waste and increase productivity through payment and delivery system reforms:

"These outcomes are far from certain . . . . Many experts doubt the feasibility of such sustained improvements and anticipate that over time the Medicare price constraints would become unworkable and that Congress would likely override them, much as they have done to prevent the reductions in physician payment rates otherwise required by the sustainable growth rate formula in current law."

Republicans want to give consumers more power to choose efficient plans on the theory that this will reward innovation and efficiency. But what happens when the "premium support" payments that Republican propose fail to keep up with the cost of health care? The same thing that happened to physician payments. Congress would likely override them too.

The real problem in Medicare comes when we get to cost drivers three and four. Health care costs are driven by people using more services and more complicated services -- utilization and intensity. In other words, Medicare beneficiaries see health care providers more often and those health care providers are performing more expensive tests and surgeries using new technologies.

Now we are at the heart of the Medicare cost problem. If we're being honest, we must change the way we deliver and consume health care. This is not something that happens overnight or because a bill is written in Washington. It will require constant innovation and reform. We will have to get better at determining which treatments improve health and which do not.

The Brookings Institution's Barry Bosworth put it well in an email: "I think the basic problem is that we cannot say no."

Are we willing to change that? And if not, are we willing to pay for Medicare's rapid growth?

You can having an honest conversation on Medicare means confronting some very difficult questions.

The Medicare and Social Security Trustees released their 2011 report today and the outlook is marginally worse. Social Security will run a cash deficit of $110 billion between 2010 and 2014. And Medicare's Hospital Insurance Fund will run out of money five years earlier than expected.

One surprise was the change in life expectancy in the Social Security report. The actuaries now assume men will live six months longer and that women will live about three months longer. That's good news for older Americans, but it also means Social Security has to write more checks to beneficiaries. The change in life expectancy accounted for half of the change in the forecast.

Other than that, the big news was in the Disability Insurance program. That program has a separate trust fund that is now projected to run out in 2018. 10 million people get disability benefits from Social Security. Congress is going to have to address that sooner rather than later.

Watch the video report.

Clarkson University (Pottsdam, NY) has established a Young Entrepreneur Award program, which will identify a limited number of entrepreneurially-minded prospective students annually, who have demonstrated success in operating business ventures.

The award recipients will have an opportunity to attend Clarkson through a combination of merit-based financial aid and the acquisition by the University of an ownership interest in their business ventures in lieu of tuition payments.

The unique initiative is in furtherance of the educational mission of Clarkson, which has a long-standing tradition of educating successful entrepreneurially-minded business leaders who understand how to grow a business, harness innovative technologies and seize opportunities in the marketplace.

By now you have probably hear that the "Gang of Six" senators -- three Democrats and Republicans -- who are trying to strike a grand budget bargain is getting smaller. A spokesman says Sen. Tom Coburn, (R) OK, decided to "take a break" from the Gang yesterday. Others say he left after a shouting match over the deeper cuts he proposed in Medicare.

Budget wonks everywhere were counting on the select six to pull a grand bargain out of their talks. What happened?

In my experience, gangs don't do well in the Senate and for a few good reasons:

1. 1) They wear the wrong tattoos. Street gangs make sure you know who's friend and who is foe. Party ties are the only real gang tattoos that matter in the Senate.
2. 2) The task is always hard. Independent, bipartisan "gang" agreements are not easy to reach on tough issues.
3. 3) The gangs are trying to usurp the legislative process and that creates tension with the real gang leaders who can actually cut deals.
4. 4) Gangs are often used for cover -- to show bipartisan leanings, without actually acting on them.

Of all these, the key reason the Gang of Six failed is #3. When it comes time to declare whether you are "in or out," senators go with the biggest gang there is -- their party.

Consumer and investor expectations for inflation are so important that Federal Reserve Chairman
Ben Bernanke mentioned them 17 times at his first-ever news conference. Congress has charged
the Fed with maintaining price stability, so it is understandable that the Fed Chairman would
watch inflation expectations closely.

The problem is that economists are not certain how inflation expectations are formed, which
stymies efforts to influence those expectations.

Research by Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw found that consumers and investors
often have widely different expectations for inflation and often base those expectations on only
narrow aspects of economic news. Even with these limitations, many experts contend that these
expectations cannot be ignored

In an email, Mankiw writes, "[Inflation expectations] matter because they affect behavior, even
if people are not fully rational in forming their expectations. But it is surely a topic about which
reasonable economists can disagree."

One of those disagreeing economists is Wrightson ICAP's Lou Crandall. Crandall says, "One of
the biggest criticisms of the way the Fed talks about its policies is that it seems to have this very
rigid, unrealistic notion of what inflation expectations are and how they operate. I don't think
they are inflation expectations, I think they are only inflation anxieties."

Crandall says Bernanke and others should factor inflation expectations into their decisions in "a
general way," rather than relying on a specific number derived from a survey.

However inflation expectations are set, Chairman Bernanke is determined to see that they
remain "well anchored," even if it is not always clear what they are anchored in.

On May 9, shares of banking giant Citigroup (NYSE: C) began to trade after its shares were reverse split 1:10. Investors holding 100 shares at roughly $4 then held 10 shares roughly $40. But while portfolio values remained exactly the same right after the split, prospects going forward were not so rosy.

Typically, companies split their shares the other way. For example, in a 2:1 split, holders of one share of a $50 dollar stock end up with two shares of a $25 stock and again their portfolio value is the same as it was before the split. But history shows that stocks that are split from a higher to a lower price tend to perform a bit better than they had been before the split.

In the movie "Duck Soup," Chico Marx poses the politician's most important question: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

In 2010, voters looked at the President's plan to overhaul health care and rein in Medicare spending and decided, by and large, they did not like it. Newspapers and broadcasts were filled with details of the plan. Yes there was lots of misinformation, but there was lots of information out there too.

Voters decided with their own eyes on "Obamacare." And yet, many Democrats still argue, if only the law was better understood, it would be more popular. In other words, Democrats asked many voters, "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

Now it is the Republican's turn. Prompted by concerns about the Ryan budget's cuts in Medicare, voters in a safe Republican district in New York elected a Democrat. For perspective, this is the fourth time in 150 years New York's 26th has sent a Democrat to Washington.

How are many GOP lawmakers reacting? They argue their plan is misunderstood. Voters are subject to a campaign of demagoguery. Sure, the messages on Medicare in the campaign were subject to hyperbole. But, there was lots of coverage about the Ryan plan. Rep. Ryan had many opportunities to explain why Medicare is in trouble. Voters who wanted to know what's going on had ample opportunity to study the Ryan plan and learn about it.

And, when voters in New York's 26th did that, many decided they did not like what they were seeing. Now it's the Republicans who are asking voters, "Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

by Alex Taussig

This was originally posted in Alex Taussig's blog, infinitetoventure.com

If you're an entrepreneur, you're probably going to screw up at some point. That's ok. Entrepreneurship is a constant process of quickly testing hypotheses, failing, refining and testing again. If you're not failing, you're not learning, right?

Well, not all fails are created equal. Some are wholly unnecessary, and I'd like to list my top 15 here. Note that many of these are based on advice from actual entrepreneurs who would rather you learn from their mistakes than repeat them.

So, without further ado, here are 15 mistakes you don't have to make as a young, first-time entrepreneur. Enjoy!