Best Business Commentary

Considering nuclear energy. The benefits of goofing off at work.

Going nuclear

“I am addicted to electricity,” and so are you, says Christine Todd Whitman in BusinessWeek.com. “And so is your business.” Finding clean ways to power our “always on” world is “the critical challenge of the new century.” Yes, conservation would help, but we need a “practical, rather than emotional” mix of solutions. “Enter nuclear energy.” It is clean, reliable, and efficient. And even if you lived next to a nuclear plant, you’d get less radiation than on a New York-L.A. round-trip flight. “Love it or not,” it's our best hope.

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“I bet you're reading this at work—and feeling guilty about it,” says Eric Weiner in the Los Angeles Times. Well, don’t. For the U.S. “to stay strong, we need to goof off more at work, not less.” A recent survey indicates the average U.S. worker wastes two hours a day, but this is still 19 percent less than a few years ago. “We must stop this dangerous trend.” Loafing at work seems fair, given that work is “now sloshing over into personal time (think BlackBerry).” But also, we need to be idle in order to come up with our “big ideas.” So slack off. “Be creative, be happy, and waste some more time.”