January 14th, 2023
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A fantastic bit of history about how much the earliest computer automation was hated:
Hoos studied 19 San Francisco Bay Area-based organizations across industry types and sizes for two years, beginning in 1957. All had recently introduced EDP into their daily work. She focused on “the changing structure of organizations, shifting lines of authority and communications, effects on decision-making processes, and a variety of other administrative and industrial related questions.” Ultimately, she aimed to “promote a better understanding of the real ...
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January 14th, 2023
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This is a very good take down of everything that makes Matt Yglesias so stupid:
Matt Yglesias performs as a big-brained public intellectual, but what he really is is a volume blogger, and a social media provocateur. Yglesias’s gimmick is the appearance of rigor and rationality, which he accomplishes mostly by affecting a tone of patronizing superiority. But his real talent is for triangulating positions that will be maximally annoying to what he has identified as a liberal consensus, and then ...
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January 14th, 2023
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Check out this podcast, where I talk about the importance of one-on-one meetings, and strategies for figuring out who to talk to, in large organizations, when you cannot possibly talk to everyone. I also talk about the importance of mentoring employees, to discover what talents exist in your organization.
Post external references
1https://www.buzzsprout.com/948151/11897265-the-simplest-and-most-important-skill-a-leader-must-possess-to-be-successful
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December 28th, 2022
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I saw this question on Hacker News and thought I would share my own mistakes. I wrote about this at length in my book, and the following is an excerpt.
What I got wrong: I thought this work needed to come in-house, but in the end “in-house versus outsourcing” was not the crucial issue. The crucial issue was building a trusting, long-term relationship with the team, and that team could have been an out-sourced team.
Open Verse Media
When I first started, in ...
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October 6th, 2022
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Robin Rendle wrote a good essay “I don’t believe in sprints.” Everyone in tech should read that. My only criticism is that the title is focused on what he’s against rather than what he’s for.
I’ll focus on what I’m for: real agility involves spontaneous one-on-one meetings. I say “spontaneous” because these meetings are not planned, people simply talk when they need to. Large meetings, which often waste the time of at least some participants, are discouraged. If you’re looking ...
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September 25th, 2022
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(This is an excerpt from my book.)
In 2011 I was working at a travel site that gathered up travel deals from the major air, cruise and hotel companies and then promoted them on the site. The whole tech team was just six engineers, and Sonia was our project manager and also our entire QA team.
One week, after we pushed out some new code, Sonia tested the web site – informally clicking around, looking for any mistakes.
Sonia: I don’t think I’m seeing ...
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April 22nd, 2022
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This is funny (I have a screenshot):
Seen on Tumblr:
i think absolutely the funniest thing about like, the adfree tumblr subscription coming with the option to turn ads back on anyway so you can see the weird ad everyone is talking about, or the new promoted post feature and everyone immediately thinking about what kind of stupid shit to put on other people’s dashboards. is that for years execs have been struggling for a way to make tumblr profitable when its ...
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April 4th, 2022
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(UPDATE from 2022-05-13 — this post made people angry. I am not trying to upset anyone. I want to emphasize, where I make a personal assertion, my experience is limited to New York City. If you live somewhere else, then you might be seeing a situation very different than what I describe here.
Some people thought I was saying that less work should be done from home, but that is incorrect. I think businesses are happy to have workers work from ...
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April 3rd, 2022
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An interesting conversation on Hacker News:
I don’t think OP is advocating for having no tolerance for low performance. He’s just saying that it’s the manager’s job to do something about it when it occurs and can’t be resolved otherwise, else it negatively impacts the rest of the team. “Do something” could be training, coaching, shifting scope of responsibilities, whatever. Doesn’t necessarily mean firing people. Mentoring and leading by example are great things to do, but they do nothing to solve ...
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April 3rd, 2022
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I’m on the record as advocating for hiring fast, training where possible, and then firing when someone is a problem and they don’t improve. But there is an interesting debate on Hacker News about this.
Post external references
1https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30889019
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February 14th, 2022
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A fascinating read:
The day at the office began with David giving a motivational speech to all the new trainees. Work hard, and the company will take care of you. He was unsure at first too, but now, he’s interviewing at Fortune 500 every day. We must have faith. We can all succeed.
To this day, I still feel that David’s speech was genuine. It felt like he was really speaking out of gratitude.
After the lecture, while eating a bowl of cup ...
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December 10th, 2021
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Consider this, an example of terrible leadership, an email full of non-specific anger:
Better.com CEO Vishal Garg publicly accused hundreds of staffers he laid off on Wednesday of “stealing” from their colleagues and customers by being unproductive.
“You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”
https://fortune.com/2021/12/03/better-com-ceo-attacks-laid-off-employees-blind-message-board/
As both George Orwell and Margaret Thatcher have emphasized, incorrect ...
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August 31st, 2021
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Anyone who has read my book “How To Destroy A Tech Startup” is aware of my advice on this issue: if one person is holding back the whole team, then it is important to fire that person before they destroy the whole team. Here is another take on the same basic idea:
3) Remove Bad Influences
People don’t like to talk about this, but one of the most effective ways to change culture is to fire people.
There’s a probably apocryphal story about ...
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August 9th, 2021
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My sense is that a lot of companies are using the current work-from-home moment to push through a stealth pay cut. The thing is, many people got very small pay increases in 2020, so if they now make anything above their 2019 level, they feel like they’ve moved forward. But most of my clients are handing out large increases to get software developers who show up at the office. If the folks at home get a 10% pay increase they ...
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August 5th, 2021
In Business
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Let’s say you write code for most of two decades, lead some teams, and have your own startup for a few years. Eventually you decide you want to be what Jon Williams calls a “Fractional CTO” — that is, you want to share your wisdom with CEOs so their companies can do well. Perhaps you want to specialize in helping startups, especially during that long phase before they need a full-time CTO.
What are the ethics of such a role? ...
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August 4th, 2021
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What is the difference between a Fractional CTO who charges $200 an hour versus one who charges $2,000 an hour? Simply a factor of 10. But what is the value of their advice to a small firm versus a large firm? Easily a factor of 1,000. How should this difference affect the behavior of Fractional CTOs? I’ll suggest there is only one happy answer and that is “Not at all.” If you consult with clients who make you happy, you’ll ...
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October 3rd, 2019
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I first read Graham’s essays way back around 2005. Before he created Ycombinator, he used to write interesting things. But he started Ycombinator in 2005 and his writing went downhill quickly. He lost all perspective. These last few years, I’ve disagreed with just about 100% of what he writes. So for instance:
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September 22nd, 2019
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Everyone understands that the West saw a sweeping cultural revolution in the mid to late 20th Century, and that many of the new practices were incorporated into the customs of business. Women entered the workforce, sought higher education, postponed marriage and children. Dress became casual. Modes of address became casual, with even nations such as Germany beginning to allow address by one’s first name. In terms of business, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented ...
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September 19th, 2019
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Responding to something on Hacker News.
People are not having many children. This has a long term effect, which will last decades. QE will become more and more necessary, as the decades go by, if birth rates remain low. Of course, we could, instead, have the government build things. I live in NYC, I would like to see the government build a new subway system. I’d like to see a system of walkways above the streets, where people can ride their ...
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September 12th, 2019
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I’m not sure anyone else will understand this, but Natalie Beach’s story about working with Caroline Calloway very strongly reminds of some of the business partners I’ve had. The style of writing is more personal, maybe because they were young, or because they were friends first, or because they were women, but when I say that my experience of startups has been chaos, I’m using a euphemism for events like this:
I’d always known she couldn’t arrive at the airport at ...
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September 12th, 2019
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My life would be infinitely better if I’d grown up with such an intuitive understanding of brands:
Her account was called #Adventuregrams. “You can have an adventure anywhere, if you’re curious,” she told me as I took pictures of her balancing on a stone wall. “That’s what the brand is about. It doesn’t matter where you live or how much money you have. You could be a teen from Nebraska and by following me you can feel like you’re here.” But ...
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September 8th, 2019
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As a point of comparison, if a straight married couple shows up at a convention, and has a public and messy fight, they should assume that will affect how people think of them in the future. What’s odd is that this should be totally okay, even at a professional event:
Larry Garfield, a Drupal core contributor, was demoted and no-platformed from all Drupal events, ostensibly due to his participation in “Gor”, a sci-fi subculture which features consensual slavery (it’s not real ...
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September 6th, 2019
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True, but why do social media companies refuse to give users what they want?
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September 2nd, 2019
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Nikema wrote:
Are there really 100s of thousands of unfilled positions in tech or is that an urban legend? There’s a lot of gatekeeping bullshit for an industry that claims to need new people. Also, if that’s the case what’s stopping companies from providing training and financial support…
In 1998 I had an older friend who was experienced. They did freelance work for $125 an hour. Adjusting for inflation that’s almost $240 today. Today I know senior devs that get $125 an ...
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August 31st, 2019
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https://medium.com/s/story/four-lessons-after-eleven-years-in-silicon-valley-d87507b7a4f6:
Success is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you early in your career. When you’re on a so-called rocket ship, you’re likely drinking from the fire hose daily, making things up as you go along. If you’re given responsibilities that exceed your experience, you’re probably plagued by self-doubt. Then, at some point, if you’re lucky, the company you’ve helped build is declared a success. And those many bumps along the way are ironed out into a ...
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August 24th, 2019
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It is surprising how common this kind of self-sabotage is among CEOs:
There is a version of the story of this company in which idealistic journalists, unconcerned with profit, are posed against ruthless business-doers, concerned about profit above all else. That would be a convenient story, pitching me and my colleagues and friends as people who just care too much about The Truth to yield before the gale-force winds of Capitalism, but it wouldn’t be a true one.
The real and less ...
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August 20th, 2019
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This is a pleasant summary of failed social networks. It does not touch on the subject that interests me most, which is why this space consolidated. But it does offer some interesting tidbits. In my novel How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer I spend some time making fun of Google+, and I’m pleased this description of its failure so nearly matches mine:
Google’s next stab was a dreary jumble of boxes evoking a digital fulfillment ...
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August 20th, 2019
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Occasionally I find intelligent comments on LinkedIn:
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August 13th, 2019
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“A woman stares at a distant horizon, viewer only sees her from behind.” I saw this at Barnes and Noble tonight. There are trends in book covers, as in all things. I actually like most of these book covers. I don’t think this is a terrible motif, but seeing these 6 books together made me think this particular idea is being overused.
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July 30th, 2019
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I live on 98th street in Manhattan and I’m lucky enough to have a rooftop terrace. I’ve put a picnic table there and I often sit there and drink coffee, late at night (I also have many parties there ). Maybe it is the warm weather, but my neighbors have had their drapes up lately. I can look across 98th street and see televisions or computer screens in perhaps 20 apartments. And another 5 apartments in the building immediately west ...
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July 29th, 2019
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This was written in 1982:
People who came of age in the forties and fifties enjoyed the good fortune of having their expectations shaped during the worst of times and their achievements realized during the best of times—an unbeatable match. And for young professionals, starting a family on a low budget was not a wrenching experience. “When you’re moving up, even the bottom doesn’t look so bad,” says Herbert Gans. For their children, it is just the reverse. “It’s not downward ...
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July 29th, 2019
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I was engaged in a very disappointing conversation on Hacker News, where most people don’t seem to understand even basic economic facts.
Inflation is low, so the Fed should consider cutting rates. Lower rates means lower unemployment, which should eventually lead to higher wages. As a model for what the Fed rate should be, assume that it should always be 0% plus whatever amount is needed to limit inflation. Since inflation has been low and stable, the rate should remain ...
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July 24th, 2019
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I think of this often, the civilization that could have been, had gender relations been different:
Unlike the male artists, who moved through life as if unfettered time to themselves were a birthright, the days and life trajectories of the handful of female artists featured in the book were often limited by the expectations and duties of home and care. George Sand always worked late at night, a practice that started when she was a teenager and needed to take care ...
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July 22nd, 2019
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With the Web, it was common that the inventor of an idea failed to be the one who commercialized it. The team behind Friendster failed to build the social network that took over the world. Overture invented the idea of selling keywords for searches, but only Google turned it into a successful business. And apparently David Sifry was an early pioneer of looking for spikes in sharing:
Addendum: #David Sifry, creator of the Technorati.com, has created the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List, ...
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July 22nd, 2019
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This is advice that I’ve always followed. It’s why I’m very good at talking to large groups. Interesting:
I hope I’ve convinced you at this point that it’s not about the slides, it’s about the words you speak. My number one piece of advice to people doing presentations is “Write a script.” Know exactly what you’re going to say before you start. Improvisation is insanely hard. People spend their whole lives studying the art of improvisation, and even then usually only ...
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July 22nd, 2019
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This is good, but I would change one word:
Passion – if you haven’t got it, kill your talk: you’re going to be mediocre. If you find the material tedious, imagine how monstrously dull it will be for your audience. Don’t settle for a subject you should be passionate about; you need to have real passion that the audience can pick up on. Software testing is the kind of thing that everyone ought to care about in the same way that ...
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July 4th, 2019
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Let’s start by talking about terrible project managers. I was working at a web design agency in 2006 and the project manager was not very intelligent, though he was a spiffy dresser. Stylish shoes. If I looked down at his feet I almost always felt envy. He traveled in Europe, and acquired a collection of fantastic dress shoes from various fashion capitols. But he was a bad manager. His disorganization would come across in conversations like this:
THEM: Hey, uh, you ...
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July 1st, 2019
In Business
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Thesis: Every time an organization claims to be flat and non-hierarchical, it is actually hierarchical, but the chain of command is invisible and based on the personal charisma of particular people, or sometimes based on their ability to bully and manipulate others. An organization without a formal structure will have an informal structure made up of various cliques. Is this better? Formally hierarchical structures can be frustrating, but they are transparent about who actually holds power, which is an important ...
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June 29th, 2019
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I sometimes think that a lot of focus is given to Silicon Valley so the public won’t notice how much the USA has declined:
In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent’s new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek “margin” by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers ...
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June 27th, 2019
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I wrote about the general topic in Ambiguity is the mood coming from California Modern business culture seems to love blurred lines. Awkward social encounters tend to work out for those at the top, not those at the bottom. Here is a specific instance:
A few days after I hung out at babe.net’s offices, the staff went out to drink together to toast departing team members; Rivlin, the CEO, had decided to shutter the U.S version of The Tab, in order ...
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June 24th, 2019
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Blurred lines. Ambiguous commands. Awkward social engineering.
Modern startup culture is, to a small degree, being defined in a number of dynamic centers, such as Stockholm and Berlin and New York City and Austin. But the current culture of startups, and the jargon around them, is disproportionately being influenced by the culture of California, especially Silicon Valley. A number of influential books have come out of California business culture, and certainly all the main innovations of VC finance.
One thing that strikes ...
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June 24th, 2019
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It is possibly a bad look for me to link to someone who is praising me, but in this comment is a truth that has nothing to do with me: that technology has become the new inescapable geography. The implication is the business leaders of the future can ignore tech only about as much Caesar or Napoleon or Rommel could ignore geography. Tech is the battlefield that future businesses will fight on, it can not be treated as a minor ...
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June 15th, 2019
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Back in 2010 I wrote “Excessive praise marks corporate peaks” and I was taking aim at Facebook. I wrote:
Circa 1991/1992 there were articles about how Japan was taking over the world and nothing could ever compete with them because they were relentless. But the early 90s marked the beginning of global retreat for many Japanese companies (with a few exceptions, like Toyota).
In the late 90s nothing could stop Microsoft, yet the late 90s marked the beginning of the era ...
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June 11th, 2019
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Despite much talk about Machine Learning and AI improving advertising results, what I’m seeing is getting worse and worse. Despite billions invested, the ads shown to me are much less relevant than that ads that I saw on the Web 10 years ago.
Check out this disaster on Vox:
or how about this at Goodreads:
I hired 3 developers from Fullstack Academy. They were all great, so I went and checked out the website, curious about the curriculum. And now, every website ...
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June 7th, 2019
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From the 1930s to the 1990s, Silicon Valley generated a lot of slogans that suggested a certain kind of idealism that inspired hopes of a better future. Think of early Hewlett Packard, and the phrase “management by walking around.” There was an emphasis on informality, there was a doubtfulness about bureaucracy, there was the belief that a company could do the right thing and also be profitable. All of that now seems to have died.
Interesting:
Stapleton is a marketing manager ...
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June 6th, 2019
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So true:
Post external references
1https://glixbitch.tumblr.com/post/184717455347/facebook-we-analysed-your-entire-internet
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May 29th, 2019
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This would be a bizzare exception in most industries, but the video game industry seems rife with abuse. Very concerning:
Bundschu estimated he had three drinks, adding that he remembers everything that happened. (“I want to be clear—I remember this so clearly. I wasn’t so drunk that my memory is impaired or anything.”) Barrera moved to the end of the table, Bundschu says, and then asked who wanted to go to the dance floor. Bundschu volunteered, and then, he says, things ...
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May 27th, 2019
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We continue to pay a high price for our increased reliance on broken software:
In 2017, Magalie Sterlin also rented a car from Hertz and found guns drawn on her at a checkpoint. The cops told her that the car she was driving had been reported stolen, which was news to Sterlin because she had rented it. She got arrested and was held for half a day.
In her police report Sterlin told officers “she did not return the vehicle despite the ...
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May 23rd, 2019
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[Originally from a longer essay]
Let’s talk about EquiFax. They were hacked and data regarding 145 million people was leaked. When the CEO was hauled before Congress to explain himself, he emanated a nonchalance that offended people. John Oliver had a nice take down:
After this disaster was well known to the public, EquiFax hired ReliaQuest to manage their server security. I have friends who work at ReliaQuest, and I know it is a great company full of great people. If ...
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April 16th, 2019
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The first startup that I founded ran from 2002 to 2008 and it was focused on weblog software. I spent that time writing code and adding features because I thought we would win by adding features. Towards the end of my time at that startup, in 2007 and 2008, Tumblr emerged. Tumblr boasted a lack of features, which is to say, they were proud of their simplicity. I was irritated to realize that this could be a winning move.
Over ...
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April 14th, 2019
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All online communities die, but Facebook’s slow obsolescence seems entirely self-inflicted. They could go back to have a simple Wall, which is all that people actually want. But that would mean accepting less money for advertisements. Apparently that is not an option? Remarkable that they will chase the money straight up to the moment they are doomed.
Interesting:
Instagram is designed to be used as it is actually used: as a posturing tool.
On Facebook you could share a moment with friends. ...
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April 5th, 2019
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As the big tech firms increasingly consolidate their hold on the Web, they are increasingly trying to clean it up and make it look presentable. For instance, many of my favorite LGBQ writers on Tumblr have recently been banned, presumably because they occasionally post photos of a sexual nature.
Google is having a problem with YouTube. Too many of their content creators are creating stuff that advertisers don’t like. So Google is now promoting conventional work from television. And the ...
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March 23rd, 2019
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I really like this video (created by friends of mine). It makes clear that you have to be very detailed when you talk about a persona that you want to design a product for. The goal is to create empathy, within your company, for this persona.
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March 12th, 2019
In Business
6 Comments
Why are large companies so difficult to rescue?
Studying a bloated, sluggish, rigid behemoth helps you understand what your real advantages are when you’re small. In particular, moving at high speed requires a team where every member trusts the other members. This is possible when everyone in the company fits in a single room, but it is impossible when you have several thousand people spread across multiple countries.
I worry there is a lot of glib, superficial rhetoric ...
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March 3rd, 2019
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Interesting:
Post external references
1https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/1/18246233/economic-growth-workers-wages-economy
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February 10th, 2019
In Business
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My great-grandmother Nanny came over from Europe and invested in real estate. She taught my grandparents, and my father, to invest in real estate. Avoid the stock market. Apparently economists now have evidence that this is a very good idea:
In general, economists would expect that assets with more risk–that is, more likely to rise or fall over time–will tend to have higher returns on average. From the standpoint of investors, the higher returns are needed to make up for the ...
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January 8th, 2019
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My mom was recently in the hospital. I gave the hospital my cell phone number, as the official point of contact between the hospital and the family. Suddenly I’m getting spam robots calling my cell phone, with messages about how I can get low cost health insurance. Someone sold my number. Maybe it was the hospital or maybe it was a related 3rd party, but someone sold my number. I am very irritated about this.
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December 17th, 2018
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This says a lot about the ways the culture has changed. Apparently, the original Macintosh manual of 1984 only had photos of white males. These are some of the photos:
Post external references
1https://www.peterme.com/2007/08/27/thoughts-on-and-pics-of-the-original-macintosh-user-manual/
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December 13th, 2018
In Business
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It’s been sad to watch the rise (and partial fall) of cryptocurrency mania on Hacker News. Even now, I’m still seeing stuff like this:
“Beanie Babies are collectibles, cryptocurrencies are money.”
It’s been established over and over again that cryptocurrencies are not money. They are a collectible like Beanie Babies. Cryptocurrencies vary too much in value to be used as money. Would you go into a Starbucks and spend $4 USD dollars to buy a coffee, if there was a chance ...
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December 12th, 2018
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Someone on Hacker News asked why there were less and less articles about technology.
There are 2 obvious answers:
In the first place, as Ycombinator became famous, more and more entrepreneurs began to hang out at Hacker News. The percentage of non-technical people reading the site is probably a lot higher now than in the past.
Also, there is the changing technology.
Once upon a time there were huge differences in major web frameworks. Compare Zope 2.0 to Ruby On ...
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December 1st, 2018
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For a few years, Netflix has been showing me this message, which says they can not reach my email:
I don’t know why they show me this message. They have a valid email. I receive their email. It’s an alias but it works. I can’t imagine what problem they are having. I wish I could talk to Netflix about this. But Netflix has no place I can send an email. In theory they offer live chat, but for the last two ...
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November 29th, 2018
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I actually read this book, back in the 1990s. It was published in 1958. Reading about it again I’m reminded that it really set the tone for the modern era. These last 60 years of Democrat politics have largely followed the agenda he set, at least on economic matters.
Whether the problem be that of a burgeoning population and of space in which to live with peace and grace, or whether it be the depletion of the materials which nature ...
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November 28th, 2018
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To my mind, the problem with the article is the nostalgia, and the desire to turn ordinary business people into community heroes. If you engage in this particular vice, you should expect to be disappointed.
The criticism of the article is worth reading:
But Alexander does not talk to Stanich’s wife, who—as the Willamette Week reported on Wednesday—had managed the restaurant for 19 years before being diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. He does not mention that she and Stanich divorced ...
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November 25th, 2018
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President Trump has argued that the economy is doing well under his leadership. And Brad Delong, who has positioned himself as a mildly left-of-center economist, seems willing to agree:
Nick Bunker has a very nice piece from late last month on wage growth and employment, as it bears on the question of whether the United States is at “full employment.” My take is that the U.S. economy probably is because at current unemployment and employment rates, if no additional shocks were ...
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November 17th, 2018
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Back in the 1930s and 1940s the USA lead the way regarding women working. Although absolute numbers peaked in the 1980s, however, at the second derivative (I mean the rate of the rate of the change) the biggest uptick were the years 1933 to 1944. But since the end of the 1980s there has been nothing but decline in the USA.
To get some sense of the changing tone with which the USA talks about this, it is worth comparing some ...
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November 14th, 2018
In Business
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I’d like some actual information about Volvo fleet sales, and how the process works. Leaving the marketing team in charge of the website means that I mostly get pages full of sexy photos, with only a few dozen words of actual information.
Post external references
1https://www.volvocars.com/intl/buy/purchase/fleet-sales
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November 6th, 2018
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As an aside, the German courts seem to produce less false imprisonment than Anglo-Saxon courts, in part thanks to the Schöffen, the lay jurists. I suspect that the medical profession would be greatly improved by a combination of Schöffen and doulas, who could work out a great many patient issues without needing to escalate issues to the attention of a doctor.
Interesting and a sad commentary of the failure of both the tech world and corporate management:
Burnout seemed to vary ...
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November 5th, 2018
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An interesting story from Jakub Holý about the day he was fired:
When I came to the office one late autumn morning in 2005, I have been shocked to find out that – without any warning signs whatsoever – I hd been fired. That day I have learned the importance of communication. Their criticism was justified but the thing is, nobody bothered to tell me anything during my 11 months in the company. I received exactly 0 feedback about my ...
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November 4th, 2018
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I’m torn between thinking Yahoo is just fundamentally stupid, and Marissa Mayer especially, and thinking that Flickr, at its best, is simply a small business that can not support the kind of giant returns that venture capital, and then later public investors wanted. So perhaps Yahoo could only destroy Flickr, by demanding it support more than it could. But that simply goes back to Yahoo being stupid.
SmugMug is a successful mostly family owned business, looking for normal business returns, ...
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October 4th, 2018
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The math here is a bit tricky:
Moreover, the Bank of Japan owns government bonds worth 90% of GDP, and ultimately returns to the government as dividends all the money it receives from the government as interest on the bonds it holds. Deducting both public financial assets and all the debts the Japanese government and people effectively owe to themselves, the debt level is only about 60% percent of GDP and not rising. This level of debt could be sustainable even ...
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August 25th, 2018
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This bit of melodrama reveals a lot about how to keep an online audience even after one is caught up in a scandal, as well as how to do this badly. The discussion in the comments is also interesting, regarding other people affected by the scandal, and how quickly they were able to regain their audience.
Still, the consequences hit hard and fast. Zamora and Dragun have bled subscribers since the incident; Dragun, alone, has lost at least 1,500, SocialBlade ...
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August 23rd, 2018
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Anyone who thinks the USA economy has fully recovered from the Great Recession should keep this in mind:
CR Note: Currently the target range for the federal funds rate is 1.75% to 2%. With inflation running close to 2% by most measures, the real Fed Funds rate is still negative.
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August 17th, 2018
In Business
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Monday, November 2nd, 2015
I woke up and got ready for work. Still at my apartment, I checked our team communications. I saw that Milburn (a member of the Board Of Directors, and possibly the secret founder of the company) had sent me a short email:
“Why did you send those emails over the weekend? Please call me as soon as you get to the office.”
I was surprised. Did he really want to start the week with another argument? And why did ...
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July 23rd, 2018
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This has been going on for 30 years, but once again, computer programming is seeing a relative decline in wages, compared to most other professions:
Legal occupations are the only occupations that come close to potentially hinting at a shortage, with wage growth of 3.7 percent over the last year and an unemployment rate of less than 2 percent. Computer and mathematical science occupations, which require skills that are often mentioned in conversations about skills shortages, do have a relatively ...
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July 15th, 2018
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If you need to know how marketing works, consider these two essays, which are entirely opposite in how they talk about Emily Weiss, yet both agree she is able to tell a powerful story about her own experience with cosmetics.
This essay is a positive sounding puff piece:
Before Emily Weiss became the powerful business and marketing mogul we know today, she was a writer. She was a beauty columnist for Teen Vogue, actually. So yeah, she was a big deal ...
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July 15th, 2018
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Increasing specialization has been a theme of content sites on the Web, for much of the last 20 years. It’s interesting to realize that both readers and writers have an interest in cosmetics diaries. The comments on that post, by Sophie Kleeman, are interesting, and reviewing cosmetics is exactly how Emily Weiss launched her empire. I’d write something like “I’m surprised Jezebel doesn’t spin this off as its own blog” but Jezebel is now owned by Univision, which is run ...
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July 6th, 2018
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My friend Susan Wentworth, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, sent me this in an email:
I do think entrepreneurs are a special kind of crazy for sure. I guess you need a little crazy to do something no one has suceeded at doing before. The risk of failure is so big, you’d have to be a little crazy.
I am often surprised at another aspect of entrepreneurs and also salespeople that I have have noticed a few times. They ...
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June 19th, 2018
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General Electric is getting kicked off the Dow because of its financial struggles. But how meaningful is the Dow if it keeps getting rid of companies when they run into trouble? Some people point out that the Dow has mostly gone up over the last 120 years, and they see this as evidence of an expanding economy. But if they hide all the bad news, and only keep the good news, is the index really meaningful? If you only ...
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June 14th, 2018
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Worrisome:
Post external references
1https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate
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May 27th, 2018
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According to this, the only real economic boom was the boom of the 1500s:
Post external references
1https://voxeu.org/article/suprasecular-stagnation
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May 10th, 2018
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One of many example’s of how broken LinkedIn is, I can not figure out who “walter” is, nor can I click on “walter” to go see that profile:
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March 29th, 2018
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It’s probably good that teens today are producing stuff for YouTube, rather than just passively consuming whatever is on television.
Interesting:
The magazine Teen Boss, styled as Teen Bo$$!, débuted in September of last year. It publishes quarterly, like an earnings report. The title is aimed at girls aged eight to fifteen, and it has a bright, pink-heavy, clamorously cheerful aesthetic to match. September cover lines included “how to make money online right now!” and “turn your piggy bank into ...
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March 20th, 2018
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Although rapid hiring suggests that something good is happening (money is coming in) when a tech team expands 100% in a year, it is likely that the short-term growth will undermine the long term growth. Every since Fredrick Brooks published “The Mythical Man Month” we’ve understood that rapid hiring in a tech team leads to very difficult communication issues.
And yet somehow, these problems are still normal in the game industry:
The culture of the company changed dramatically as a result. ...
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March 11th, 2018
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The book I wrote is about events which occurred at one of the NYU startup incubators.
I was interested by this article about the economic impact of these incubators:
“In the last year, the Future Labs and our companies reached significant milestones. We started with news of Uber acquiring Geometric Intelligence, and throughout the year, significant rounds of investment closed by current and graduate companies. In this single year, the Future Labs economic output totaled $1.2 billion,” said Steve Kuyan, NYU ...
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March 8th, 2018
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I likely this because it is an example of how innovation sometimes comes from unlikely people. The wife, in particular, does not initially seem like the type to revolutionize part of the computer industry.
The story concept was certainly innovative, but it wasn’t the sort of innovation that would immediately appeal to a guy like Ken, with little interest in game design in the abstract. He was rather interested in products he could sell, operating intuitively by a rule he would ...
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March 5th, 2018
In Business
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Just to get this out of the way, entrepreneurs engage in all of the self-destructive habits that non-entrepreneurs sometimes engage in: drug addiction, denial, blame shifting, perfectionism, depression, mania, laziness, etc. I’m not going to write about that, because all of that is too obvious, and great essays have already been written about those subjects. Instead I’m going to write about the self-destructive habits that are unique to entrepreneurs. There are 3 patterns that I have seen a lot ...
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February 18th, 2018
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On the Internet, the house always wins the bet, and by “house” I mean Google, Facebook, Amazon — the dozen top online tech companies. Everyone else is a sucker. (This is more true for consumer apps than business apps.)
I strongly agree with this:
Now, almost every website looks the same — and performs poorly. Offline, brands try to make their store experiences unique to differentiate themselves. Online, every website — from Gucci to the Gap — offers the same experience: a ...
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February 15th, 2018
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This was initially inspired by an article posted to Hacker News, regarding Google’s mismanagement of its communication tools.
————————-
When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike?
I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that ...
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February 14th, 2018
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If President Trump passes a huge infrastructure bill this year, it will go into effect in 2019, and have full effect in 2020, before the elections. Trump will be re-elected, and serve a full 8 years.
So why doesn’t Trump fight for this? Apparently he is only proposing $200 billion over several years, which is a joke. The USA is in urgent need of at least $2 trillion in repairs, and an infrastructure bill would be extremely popular with blue ...
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January 30th, 2018
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Christian McCarrick is CTO at Global Tel*Link and he has also created the SimpleLeadership podcast. SimpleLeadership is designed for both new and experienced software & technology managers who want to build high-performing teams, better motivate & mentor their employees, reduce attrition and advance their career. It is for people who want to go beyond just being a manager and become a true leader.
McCarrick interviewed me a week ago, and we spoke about the issues of productivity, and especially how group ...
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January 30th, 2018
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Because I interact with people from many countries and cultures, I’ve adopted the rule that I tend to let them set the tone and style of our interactions. I try to minimize the number of cultural faux pas I commit (speaking of which, should I follow English or French rules of pluralization when I went to pluralize “faux pas”?) . Most of the time, I simply mimic the style they set.
So a few rules I follow:
If they address ...
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January 27th, 2018
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Sarah Kessler has a post on QZ, the goal of which is left unspecified.
The title is “Writing 5,000 words about why you quit Google is the ultimate privilege”. I’m pretty sure the ultimate privilege is cheating your workers, sexually harassing 20 women, and then getting elected President Of The United States of America. There are other great privileges in this world, such as the ability to avoid paying taxes because you keep most of your assets in overseas ...
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January 8th, 2018
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This democratic experiment sounds good, but the lack of structure sounds bad. The lack of structure won’t scale to large enterprises, and I believe large enterprises will always be with us. I wonder if the same psychological benefits can be gained by allowing workers to elect their CEO at large firms? The firms would have to be highly structured hierarchies, but the workers could still be allowed to vote for the leadership. That must bring some change of attitude, yes? ...
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January 6th, 2018
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Bugayenko has a very good list of things that motivate him. I find myself in agreement, with most of these things applying to me as well.
Here is two that I like very much:
Career path. I have no problem starting as a junior developer, but I have to know exactly what my future is and when it will happen. I want to become a CTO, no matter what. And it’s not about the title. It’s about the amount of technical ...
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January 5th, 2018
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Back in the 1970s, when my mother was in graduate school, she studied computer programming so she could build simulations of the urban transportation issues that she was researching. Her computer science professor was a woman. At the time, that wasn’t especially surprising. If you’ve seen movies like Hidden Figures, you are probably aware that the computer industry was initially welcoming to women (at least, relative to other industries at that time).
Over the last 30 years, women have been ...
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January 1st, 2018
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This is the correct tone to take when talking about your team:
The team’s commitment to this was profound. Many individuals spent multiple weeks, multiple times, living in China working with our suppliers. They were creating precision parts and designing a manufacturing line that would assemble, test, and package Otto units at scale. After a long day at the office, a dozen or so people would get on a nightly call to support the team in Asia. They then worked to ...
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December 31st, 2017
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I’ve been the technical co-founder at three different startups and so I associate startups with long hours, grinding stress, and near total isolation from normal life. The loneliness of startup life is one of the things that contributes to their frequent downfall, since a common path to failure is simple burnout.
In 2015 I was at a startup that was in the New York University startup incubator at Varick Street, and it was fantastic. The room was full of brilliant ...
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December 31st, 2017
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This is the intro to my book:
Ninety percent of all new businesses die. Even when based on brilliant ideas, the hard work and creativity of the team often comes to naught. Why?
Emotions can hinder or uplift. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress.
Each person ...
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December 28th, 2017
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I’ll share this story. The year was 2006, when I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. We needed to hire a Flash programmer. I put out a notice, got some responses, and then did some interviews. I eventually found a woman, who I will call Lisa, who was a little less experienced than some of the other candidates, but she seemed highly motivated. She was in her early 20s and just barely out of college. Her ambition was to become a great ...
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December 26th, 2017
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This chart shows that men have been leaving the economy for over 100 years. This suggests that the disappearance of agriculture is leaving some men out of the economy. We should consider the fact that some men were stupid but very strong, and therefore they used to be valuable. But most of the jobs that reward “stupid but strong” have disappeared. These men have been permanently left behind.
Post external references
1http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/GenderGap.html
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December 25th, 2017
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There is no P/E ratio for Bitcoin, because Bitcoin has no revenue. Bitcoin has no fundamental value. I’m a bit surprised that it caught on at all, since there is no foundation under its value. Buying Bitcoin is therefore the ultimate expression of the speculative spirit. Which apparently is bigger than I knew.
There are three main activities that contribute to the value of Bitcoin and other alt-coins:
1.) crime — this is certainly the bulk of all activity that happens ...
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December 25th, 2017
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In my book “How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps” one of my clients (I call him Milburn) had an idea, and they assumed it would be easy, so they left it to their assistant. Assuming a business idea will be easy often leads to disaster. I offer this bit of advice in the book, and I repeat it here:
If you really want to destroy your startup, you should assume that you know everything about the ...
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December 25th, 2017
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Nowadays, there are a lot of articles being written about the collapse of retail in the USA. Some people blame Amazon and online shopping, but that is only a trivial part of the problem.
$1,355,610,000,000 of consumer spending is missing from the demand side of USA spending, and that should be kept in mind whenever you read an article about retail going through hell. The big boom in retail in the mid-20th century was thanks a strong middle class. ...
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December 22nd, 2017
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When is the best age to become an entrepreneur and create a new company?
Experience often matters, though not always:
The collective summary of their learnings is: the average entrepreneur is 40 when they launch their startup. People over 55 are twice as likely as people under 35 to launch a high-growth startup. The average age of a successful startup with over $1 million in revenues was 39. Age was less of a driver to entrepreneurial success than previous startup and industry ...
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December 22nd, 2017
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I’m sure all poor starving students are grateful that their shipping is absolutely free on this $1,400 book.
I am not a poor starving student, so I’m going to spring for a new copy, cheap at just $36,535! I was worried a book like this would set me back $37,000, or something crazy like that.
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December 16th, 2017
In Business
2 Comments
For many years, I had a refrain which I gave as advice to each client I worked with: “Your software developers are expensive, so try to shift work away from them.” Ideally, software developers should only do work that relies on skills that no one else has. If a task can be done by a graphic designer, then it should be done by a graphic designer, because generally graphic designers are paid less than software developers (obviously not in all ...
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December 12th, 2017
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Suppose I were to quiz you about this paragraph:
“In December 2012, MoonEx acquired one of the other Google Lunar X-Prize teams, Rocket City Space Pioneers, from Dynetics for an undisclosed sum. The new agreement makes Tim Pickens, the former lead of the RCSP team, the Chief Propulsion Engineer for MoonEx.”
Proper nouns which NLP can discover:
1.) MoonEx
2.) Google
3.) Rocket City Space Pioneers
4.) Dynetics
5.) Tim Pickens
6.) RCSP
7.) Chief Propulsion Engineer
Suppose I were to ...
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December 8th, 2017
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I am constantly astonished at how broken LinkedIn is. And here is today’s reminder:
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December 7th, 2017
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I think of all the women I know for whom it was an urgent life goal to escape Eastern Europe and live a free life in New York. Part of what drove them was the desire to escape farm life. The stress and loneliness and poverty of farm life is a world-wide problem. It happens everywhere, and it is getting worse in the USA:
“Farming has always been a stressful occupation because many of the factors that affect agricultural production are ...
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November 28th, 2017
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Two examples.
Here is a mistake made on Tumblr that is undermining the income for artists:
please go to “General Settings” then to “Dashboard Preferences” and turn off “Best Stuff First”. This is killing artist exposure! Please, please, PLEASE, turn it off if you really do love the artists you follow! You’d be helping us so much!
Please reblog this so that more people may know!
Artists and writers are losing a lot of exposure over this new feature. Someone recently posted ...
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November 19th, 2017
In Business
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IBM decided that Sam Ruby is expendable. One more nail in the coffin of a dying company. Yes, you can boost short-term profits by firing all of your best people, and yes, the uptick in profits allows a big bonus to go to the CEO, but this obviously will render IBM a corpse. If you push your best people away, what is left of the company? It’s tragic and the USA not only allows this kind of corporate sabotage, but ...
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November 13th, 2017
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A big issue, and the resistance to diversifying one’s social circle feeds into almost all of the other problems that the USA faces, including racism and the concentration of wealth. Maybe the problem is that when folks are in their 20s any mixed gender get together feels like a date?
When I encourage twentysomethings to ask their weak ties for favors or coffee dates, there is often a fair amount of resistance: “I hate networking” or “I want to get ...
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October 23rd, 2017
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This particular virtuous cycle seems like something that the government should do more to encourage. Interesting:
The excitement of those days is captured in this quote from Douglas Comer: “Many universities contributed to UNIX. At the University of Toronto, the department acquired a 200-dot-per-inch printer/plotter and built software that used the printer to simulate a phototypesetter. At Yale University, students and computer scientists modified the UNIX shell. At Purdue University, the Electrical Engineering Department made major improvements in performance, ...
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September 23rd, 2017
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This has a lot of effects for LGBTQ content:
Not only was it not communicated when or why the videos were demonetized, but it also affects Dunn and Raskin’s respective bottom lines by removing an important revenue stream, she said.
“It paid my rent and went towards paying our crew, who obviously deserve to be compensated for their labor,” Dunn said.
A Sept. 18 article in Forbes magazine calls the situation the “Adpocalypse,” because several controversies have apparently made advertisers nervous, causing some ...
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September 21st, 2017
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An amazing bit about the politics of fighting monopoly in Germany in the 1500s. I can imagine the merchants did a lot to keep Germany fractured as it helped them. No united government to impose strict rules on them.
The end of the fifteenth century witnessed Germany’s high noon of prosperity. Old and insignificant towns like Augsburg Nuremberg and Ulm blossomed forth into wealthy and populous cities. The great merchants vied with princes and kings in magnificence and luxury. Their ...
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September 18th, 2017
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Vocativ is dead? The most recent post is from August 25th. For a news site, that is a long time ago.
In June they announced “Vocativ Announces Exclusive Focus On Video” which might have been a desperation play. Unless they post something else, I will assume they are dead.
I did a job interview there back in 2014. They were created by some guys who had just gotten their Ph.Ds in Machine Learning. That seemed like a very positive thing. ...
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September 17th, 2017
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I was reading “Is The Varick Street NYU Poly Incubator The Best In NYC?” by Jay Bhatti, written on Oct. 10, 2011. I stumbled across this mention of Pixable, which I had never heard of before (an interview with Micah Kotch):
In terms of highlights, we love the story of Pixable. The Varick Street Incubator’s first graduate company, Pixable, is a great group of immigrant entrepreneurs and MIT grads who create tools to share and categorize photography within social media. ...
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September 17th, 2017
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Interesting. All of the old designs are attributed to an individual. All the new designs are attributed to a corporation, or the source is unknown.
Post external references
1https://medium.com/@fvo/your-logo-is-copied-710ac4604258
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September 17th, 2017
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How to lie with statistics which are true:
On the surface, this seems to suggest that significant gender discrimination just doesn’t show up in the data. BUT…and this is important…this example highlights the difference between doing math and doing data analysis (or, more charitably, data science)- while this conclusion may be mathematically correct, it’s basically a “garbage in, garbage out” use of econometric tools. Simply put, if you’re trying to isolate gender discrimination, you can’t just blindly control for things that ...
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September 11th, 2017
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A guy at Google wrote a long rant about how there were too many diversity initiatives at Google, and it was all a waste of time, because women don’t like computers. Google fired him. Some people think Google should not have fired them, but I would ask you, do you know what business Google is in? They are in the business of fine-grained market segmentation. That’s what advertising is all about.
The guy deserved to be fired for calling his ...
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September 8th, 2017
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This is a great story from and about Danielle Morrill, and the way she moved from one idea to the next until finally she was building Mattermark and the growth of the company was explosive.
The Research Lab
Byproducts of work are a gold mine. In the process of writing articles I created hundreds of spreadsheets to research markets, compare companies, and come up with unique angles. I published raw spreadsheets in many of my posts, and received a lot of ...
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September 8th, 2017
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I like this history of what became FontForge. It sounds like a very slow process; a side project which got out of control.
In the early ’90s I was working at a little web start-up company, called NaviSoft, which was almost immediately bought by AOL. My product was an html-editor (best known as AOLpress). As I was working to convert it to handle Unicode I became concerned about the lack of Unicode fonts. I began working on my own Unicode ...
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September 7th, 2017
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The movie industry is one of those markets where the interests of customers are the exact opposite of the interests of the corporations. Whereas every person would like a service that would let them watch all the good movies, in exchange for some appropriate fee, that would, by definition, mean treating movies as if they were a commodity, and this is exactly what the creators of movies hope to avoid. So we get an increasing number of streaming services.
The ...
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August 12th, 2017
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Worrisome. I suspect this will be most intense for authors of Young Adult novels, since the target demographic is just figuring out its identity, and tends to define the boundaries of that identity in vivid terms. The authors should, of course, ignore the momentary furor, and keep doing good work.
But a growing number of critics say the draggings, well-intended though they may be, are evidence of a growing dysfunction in the world of YA publishing. One author and former ...
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August 12th, 2017
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It’s interesting that Parsely said yes to $6 million. They are basically profitable, but they need some money for expansion. In all previous eras, they would have applied for a bank loan. That is what profitable companies do when they want to expand. But somehow, we now have a business culture where it seems to make sense to sell equity to finance expansion, even when profitable.
I am not for or against this, I’m simply noting how much this is ...
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August 4th, 2017
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Anyone’s who has tried to write a book about computer programming (as I have attempted and failed) can tell you that writing good code examples is very hard work. But this is interesting:
Will anything come out of this experiment?
Yes! As Shog pointed out, we’ve already learned quite a bit from doing things we couldn’t do otherwise. It’s too soon to know exactly what we’ll be able to port over to Q&A, but I’m excited about the possibilities of CommonMark, ...
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July 22nd, 2017
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Such an insightful post-mortem:
There is one more level of root cause analysis that we can do. Why did we pick a bad market and optimize the product for the wrong metrics?
When I was a little kid I wanted to build my own radio. I made a box out of plywood, threw some metal junk inside, and connected the box to a power cord. I had books on electronics at home, but didn’t think I needed them – I had unwavering ...
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July 18th, 2017
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Apparently having a currency that is outside of the control of the government means dealing with endless bickering and petty politics. Some of these comments are very informative:
This is a fight for control of Bitcoin. It is business interests on both sides fighting for a position of authority. SegWit2x is an attempt to remove control from the core dev team, which while technically strong is full of zealots with questionable motives and terrible management skills. Bitcoin ABC and Unlimited have ...
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July 8th, 2017
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I don’t think this article says much more than “China is investing in the USA”. That’s about what I’d expect as growth in China slows down. Still, there hasn’t been a big surge of investment, like when Japan began buying up the USA in the 1980s.
Wages aren’t the only costs in China that are rising. The price of electricity has increased 15 percent since 2010, and industrial land is becoming more expensive too. Taxes are high as well: Dewang, ...
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July 8th, 2017
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Another write up of this story:
As subRedditors saw it, cscareerthrowaway567 made one mistake. The company made several. It didn’t back up the database. It had poor security procedures and a sloppily-organized system that encouraged the very error cscareerthrowaway567 made. Then, rather than taking accountability for those problems, the CTO fired the rookie who revealed them. Of all the errors this company made, that last might be the most destructive to their future success.
An extensive review of employee teams at ...
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June 29th, 2017
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Probably written by someone with no experience in business, or a very large reason to distort the truth. This is very stupid and detached from reality:
It won’t be long before “skilled in machine learning” becomes the new “proficient in Excel” as a standard bullet point on your resume. The only difference? What you bring to table will be more valuable than a pivot tables or color-coded pie charts.
The day when any average Joe can train an algorithm along with ...
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June 29th, 2017
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With a few exceptions, Open Source is starved for resources:
Why should open source software development require “huge sacrifices?”
But why have “huge sacrifices” been necessary to produce and maintain these projects? And why are sustainable funding and resources so difficult to come by?
The answers to these questions touch upon a host of challenges related to open source software development in general: burnout, overwork generated by the tragedy of the commons, and the mistaken notion that critical open source work can be ...
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June 29th, 2017
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Since white people are old, and non-whites are young, we can expect the next wave of babies will bring a rapid end to the white majority in the USA.
Post external references
1https://qz.com/1013714/one-metric-shows-that-race-in-america-is-about-to-experience-a-dramatic-shift/
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June 29th, 2017
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Chris Lord on his time at Mozilla:
Unfortunately, as soon as it started to show some promise and as soon as we had freedom from carriers to actually do what we set out to do in the first place, the project was cancelled, in favour of the whole Connected Devices IoT debacle.
If there was anything that killed morale for me more than my unfortunate time on the graphics team, and more than having FirefoxOS prematurely cancelled, it would have ...
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June 29th, 2017
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This suggests that the WalMart leadership team did not understand what they were buying when they bought Jet, or they think they can break the culture without breaking the company. I like this comment:
I’m not going to even address whether drinking and swearing in the office should or shouldn’t be allowed – it’s irrelevant. Walmart basically decided that they wanted to buy Jet because Jet had capabilities and talent that they wanted in order to compete with companies like ...
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June 29th, 2017
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The people most comfortable making mistakes and learning from them are the ones who do the best in life:
Here’s an excerpt from Principles, a brilliant (and freely available) manifesto of Dalio’s rules for life and business:
…the popular picture of success—which is like a glossy photo of an ideal man or woman out of a Ralph Lauren catalog, with a bio attached listing all of their accomplishments like going to the best prep schools and an Ivy League college, and ...
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June 29th, 2017
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Pathetic. What justifies the regard that people have for Marissa Mayer? She was an utter failure at Yahoo. No one should take her seriously.
So it is telling that Marissa Mayer, the CEO who failed to fix Yahoo, has stepped out to defend Kalanick, telling attendees of a conference at Stanford Law School June 27 that the Uber founder probably didn’t know about the toxic culture he created. Mayer was not only forced to sell Yahoo after failing to create ...
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May 27th, 2017
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This is a good point. Trump wants to block German cars from coming to the USA. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the USA and Germany might both be better off if the USA exported more cars to Germany.
But this is also true:
A more direct, and certainly effective way to reduce imbalances is to reduce the excess surplus (deficit) of domestic demand on GDP in deficit (surplus) countries. This is where more American cars in Germany would help. ...
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May 27th, 2017
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Interesting:
Trucking used to be a well-paying occupation. Here are wages of transportation and warehousing workers in today’s dollars, which have fallen by a third since the early 1970s:
Why? This is neither a trade nor a technology story. We’re not importing Chinese trucking services; robot truck drivers are a possible future, but not here yet. The article mentions workers displaced from manufacturing, but that’s a pretty thin reed. What it doesn’t mention is the obvious thing: unions.
Post external references
1https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/trucking-and-blue-collar-woes/
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May 27th, 2017
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Now that we have the Internet, information is abundant. So if something like Harvard is scarce, I think it must be selling something scarce, such as prestige, rather than information. I don’t think this last paragraph can be justified:
But after 1980 America began to lose the race between education and technology.
The expansion of American higher education slowed massively. Higher education for native-born males simply froze in its tracks. As a result, in the world in which we have worked for ...
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May 27th, 2017
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In the West, we are lucky to face two problems that have one solution:
1.) Motherhood contributes the gender gap
2.) Middle age men lose their factory jobs to automation, and never again get as good a job
In short, any interruption in one’s career causes wages to go down, and if you are over the age of 40, there is a good chance your wages won’t catch up to where they might have been if your career had never suffered an ...
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April 26th, 2017
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Literally, a lack of electricity:
In an article published in the Electricity Journal in 2015, former Lawrence Berkeley energy researcher Jonathan G. Koomey, now a consultant and a lecturer at Stanford, and Virginia Tech historian of science Richard F. Hirsch offered five hypotheses for why electricity demand had decoupled from economic growth (which I’ve paraphrased here):
State and federal efficiency standards for buildings and appliances have enabled us to get by with less electricity.
Increased use of information and communications technologies have ...
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April 23rd, 2017
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It is a bit frustrating that banks show so little interest in increasing their online security:
The next day, I phoned the Zecco office with message to Jeff Chamberlain, and Jeroen Veth to arrange a phone call.
During the week of 2008-01-06 I held phone conferences with Jeff Chamberlain (Fraud Prevention Manager), Jeroen Veth (Founder and CEO), Michael Raneri (then CTO, later promoted to CEO and now Managing Director – PwC), Phil (Penson Bank, their software vendor), Greg (VP of Engineering) Loren ...
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April 17th, 2017
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I created the rough draft for this book by copying and pasting all of the relevant corporate emails and Slack messages. Then I added in much of the text I’d written for the blog post “What happens when the Board Of Directors begins to panic”. Then I wrote out a several scenes that were not covered by either of those three sources.
This gave me 100,000 words, which was far too much. Corporate email tends to be the dullest kind ...
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April 8th, 2017
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I just stumbled on this story from 2008. It makes me sad to think that Donovan Data Systems has had a tough time dealing with the modern ad market. I knew Michael Donovan, one of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th Century. He was a friend of the father of my business partner, and the father asked him as a favor to come and advise us.
But it is tough for a company to remain agile, after a long period ...
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April 5th, 2017
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Interesting:
Andy Grove: The fundamental tenet that drives us all in the semiconductor industry is a deeply felt conviction that what matters is time to market, or time to money. But you never hear an executive from a pharmaceutical company say, “Before the end of the year I’m going to have xyz drug,” the way Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be out on schedule. The heart of every high-tech executive has been, get the product into customers’ hands and ramp ...
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April 3rd, 2017
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Sean Hull makes this point, and I’m surprised that more CTOs don’t get this. As I make clear in my upcoming book, sometimes it is better, smarter and cheaper to hire a real expert for 2 weeks, rather than hire someone fresh out of college and allow them to thrash around for 3 months.
4. Halftime need
Smaller demand? Perhaps your capacity isn’t a full 40-hour week. Then an on-demand hire is really ideal.
Also: Is the difference between dev & ...
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March 29th, 2017
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I find it very sad that the era of experimentation on the Web has come to an end. We won’t be seeing much like Svbtle ever again:
Dustin Curtis is a developer, designer, and blogger who has accomplished the rare feat of getting a blogging platform off the ground. Called Svbtle, it launched in early 2012 as a sort of application-required Tumblr — a few tech thought leaders using a uniform minimalist theme to publish long posts. But it’s grown ...
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March 27th, 2017
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This goes beyond bad design to being actively uncomfortable for humans. Even when such a device is operating normally, there is still the fear of it being hyper active – the lack of reliability becomes a stress factor for its users.
“No… it’s a magic potty,” my daughter used to lament, age 3 or so, before refusing to use a public restroom stall with an automatic-flush toilet. As a small person, she was accustomed to the infrared sensor detecting erratic ...
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March 17th, 2017
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Does anyone remember “Keith Olbermann Takes Swipe At Rachel Maddow Over Twitter“?
This is from 2013:
MSNBC has had some rough ratings months as of late, falling into third place in primetime viewers for the second quarter of 2013. In total viewers across daytime programming, MSNBC fell to fourth place behind Fox News, CNN and HLN.
When Olbermann responded to a tweet about the network’s ratings performance, another Twitter user asked if he was criticizing Maddow.
Olbermann responded, “It’s about the collapse of that ...
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March 2nd, 2017
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This is crazy. How is that leaders can be held to such low standards? How is that they can admit in public that they lack the skills to do their job, but then they will continue in that job? Why do we have such low standards for people in leadership positions, whereas we have such high standards for people in lower positions?
There’s a lot to say about the conversation. There’s the lack of empathy Kalanick clearly reveals for ...
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March 1st, 2017
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Here is an article that offers a long laundry list of reasons why Uber is doomed. A lot of the article consists of silly stuff like “The employees don’t like it there.” But come on, there have been a million companies where the employees hate the place, and the place still does well. Just recently we learned of the extremely abusive and sexually predatory nature of Kay’s Jewelry. And yet that company has been doing great, for decades. Sad ...
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March 1st, 2017
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I wonder if these have any effect? Another story about sexism at Uber:
However, one day last summer, long after joining Uber, things changed. This is where Mike#2 enters the story. Mike#2 is a man in his 40s who was pulled from another silicon valley tech giant just two years ago with a multiple six figure salary. Apparently, Travis personally interviewed him and liked his combative style. Married with two children, he is well known for being abusive towards anyone ...
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February 8th, 2017
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Frustrating:
Andy Chase writes to Gigster with a question about their contract:
Some questions I have about with this contract: (allowed for by section 11.5):
“including source code developed by Contractor … generally applicable to other Customer projects”
I’m more then willing to sign over code that applies to projects I do for gigster, but not stuff that might possibly apply in general to gigster projects, since that would be literally everything else.
Particularly since this clause survives forever according to 4.2 and confirmed no ...
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January 27th, 2017
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This is a great story about the crisis when thousands of people moved to Pinboard, when Yahoo announced they were closing Delicious.
We charged money for a good or service
I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project *sips daiquiri*. Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn’t involve repackaging them as a product.
If Pinboard were not a paid service, we ...
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January 8th, 2017
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So long as they sell ads, then their model is the same as everyone else’s:
Our vision, when we started in 2012, was ambitious: To build a platform that defined a new model for media on the internet. The problem, as we saw it, was that the incentives driving the creation and spread of content were not serving the people consuming it or creating it — or society as a whole. As I wrote at the time, “The current system causes increasing amounts ...
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December 29th, 2016
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It’s all been downhill
Post external references
1https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-27/why-low-rates-failed-to-boost-business-investment
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December 28th, 2016
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The tech world is getting strangely obsessed with the notion of Artificial Intelligence, and its ability to boost productivity.
I wrote on Hacker News:
In recent months, there has been a large number of posts on Hacker News extolling the coming robot (and/or AI) revolution. I’ve read that we are facing a jobless future because all the jobs will be automated.
All of that might be true, at some point in the future. The future is a very long time. I ...
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December 28th, 2016
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Sad and interesting:
no leaking pipeline as in other social sciences, but “tiny” pipeline. Female undergrad won’t study econ. Number of ♀ PhD > ♀ econ BAs
Post external references
1https://twitter.com/Undercoverhist/status/812443144138719233
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December 16th, 2016
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Except for the strange focus on the 1990s, and the strange focus on China, this post that says exactly what I was hoping someone would say:
Is this the right narrative? I am no longer comfortable with this line:
…for the most part we’re talking about jobs lost, not to unfair foreign competition, but to technological change.
Try to place that line in context with this from Noah Smith:
Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S opened its markets to Chinese goods, first ...
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December 14th, 2016
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This is a sad story. There were apparently a lot of people in Kentucky who voted for Trump, even though Trump has said he will get rid of Obamacare. And these people rely on Obamacare. Why they voted for Trump is, of course, a complex question. How much did their racial identity influence them, and how much were they simply desperate for an improvement in their economic prospects? Trump won’t be able to help their economic situation, but I understand ...
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December 14th, 2016
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Obviously I support the professional jargon that each profession needs to be successful. Computer programmers have a tendency to engage in games of “If we take this to its logical extreme…”. Economists engage in “Assume a can opener…” and “Let’s pretend only individuals exist”. As thought experiments, these are fine.
I do have a big problem when people switch modes and try to make their thought experiments political. The economist who starts with “Assume a world with homogenous preferences…” and ...
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December 10th, 2016
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Apparently the tech field is uniquely resistant to women:
Using the National Science Foundation’s SESTAT data, we examine the gender wage gap by race among those working in computer science, life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering. We find that in fields with a greater representation of women (the life and physical sciences), the gender wage gap can largely be explained by differences in observed characteristics between men and women working in those fields. In the fields with the lowest concentration of ...
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December 6th, 2016
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So, the leadership team could not think of a way to get readers to filter the best stuff to the top, which the writers could then engage with? This is why so many content sites die. They have such a stupidly narrow understanding of what they do. I don’t blame Lindy West at all, I put 100% of the blame on the leadership.
Lindy West: But I also wasn’t a very good Gawker Media employee. I didn’t go in ...
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December 6th, 2016
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My god, this is frustrating to watch. A large group of professional economists are struggling to find the words to understand the anger in the USA. And so they are translating into their own language things that others have said repeatedly for the last 40 years. What a privilege it is that your intelligence can be taken for granted, even though you are nearly the last person in the room to understand what is happening.
For all that, there is ...
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December 4th, 2016
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He has a right to be angry
Shrug your shoulders and move on? If it had appeared in the partisan press that would be a sensible reaction, but this was written by a widely respected journalist in the UK’s internationally renown financial newspaper. Furthermore – lest my motives be misunderstood – written by someone whose knowledge on the Eurozone is beyond dispute and whose views I often agree with. Well on this occasion this particular member of a discredited profession who ...
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December 4th, 2016
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Interesting:
Peggny Noonan offers a bit of history:
It was 1961 and the new president, John F. Kennedy, had been trying to signal to big business that they could trust him.. His impulses were those of a moderate of his era: show budgetary constraint, keep costs and prices down, prevent inflation…..
That September Kennedy asked the industry to forgo a price increase. He asked the steelworkers union for wage demands… Early in 1962 his labor secretary, Arthur Goldberg, put together a ...
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November 24th, 2016
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Remember that the late 1930s saw the largest change, ever, in the rate of women going into the workforce. Absolute numbers were low, but the rate of change was at its peak.
Contrary to prevailing views, which locate the origins of the information society in WWII or in the commercial development of television or computers, the basic societal transformation from industrial to information society had been essentially completed by the late 1930s.
Microprocessing and computer technology, contrary to currently fashionable opinion, ...
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November 22nd, 2016
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If Facebook stops promoting viral content, it will quickly disappear, just like MySpace disappeared:
First, there is no incentive for Facebook to do any of this; while the company denies this report in Gizmodo that the company shelved a change to the News Feed algorithm that would have eliminated fake news stories because it disproportionately affected right-wing sites, the fact remains that the company is heavily incentivized to be perceived as neutral by all sides; anything else would drive away ...
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November 13th, 2016
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When I a teenager I read comic books, and that was a very unpopular thing to do at the time. Things have changed radically. I’m amazed to see how high on this list graphic novels have risen:
Post external references
1http://qz.com/711924/maverick-women-are-upending-the-book-industry-and-selling-millions-in-the-process/
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October 31st, 2016
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I suppose it does some good for them to go on the record as being against discrimination. But I also agree with this:
Airbnb can do whatever they want in property they own/lease. However since they ‘share’ (funny word that) people’s private homes they will have to live with the fact that those people will refuse guests for whatever reasons they feel like, this is the flip side of the coin of not having a relationship where they are ...
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October 30th, 2016
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Interesting and raw and honest:
I understood his situation all too well. I found it nearly impossible to escape my identity as a founder. I built a narcissistic fortress around that identity. It’s the inescapable pending doom scenario. Money will run out, investors won’t continue to write checks, slowing growth, big companies will sue us to the point of oblivion, founders kill each other, you name it–somehow the founder has to step in to do whatever it takes to save ...
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October 27th, 2016
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This is a woman talking about the startup scene in Bangalore, but I think this is true everywhere, and on many fronts:
We need more voices — voices who are unknown AND/OR don’t speak because of shyness — of women in leadership positions in Bangalore startups. For instance, rarely have I heard from Leena SN about her experiences of being the ‘woman’ CTO of Multunus and raising two daughters at the same time. Leena has spoken at several HasGeek events, conducted workshops and is one ...
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October 27th, 2016
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In the USA, since the mid 1970s, a college degree has offered an increasingly important economic benefit. Partly this is because working class wages have declined. The median male wage has declined since 1973, but not for those who have a college degree. A college degree protects a person from economic hazard.
At least, that is how things worked till 2008. But since then? Consider this chart:
It’s possible that it is still useful to have a college degree in the ...
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October 27th, 2016
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Interesting and worrisome:
The first major test of Trump’s inflammatory language about a stolen election will come on Election Day itself. Trump has been encouraging his supporters, who are heavily white and non-urban, to “go around and watch other polling places.” He has specifically told his supporters to watch polling places in urban areas; the racial subtext isn’t exactly subtle.
“I hear these horror shows, and we have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is not ...
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October 23rd, 2016
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One can see the influence of tax subsidies, and the boom in home ownership:
That is trillions invested in buying homes. What if those trillions had been invested in businesses instead? What would the USA economy look like now?
Post external references
1http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2016/10/will-us-become-nation-of-renters.html
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October 3rd, 2016
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Interesting, and very American, with the long need to explain why working 80 hours a week might be bad:
In March of 2011, I was in the depths of burnout. I had been working 80+ hour weeks at least twice a month since the previous fall. My design studio, Metagramme, had an ongoing project that grew beyond all reckoning, swallowed the majority of our billable time, and crippled our ability to pursue new work.
I developed vision trouble. Distant objects refused to ...
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September 27th, 2016
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It’s an interesting essay, but I can’t go along with the complacency that’s implied. If people are paid unfairly, then we should try address that. Programming might seem to be reasonably paid when compared to doctors or lawyers or teachers, but there is the larger issue, are workers, as a group, being paid fairly? Anyone who reads history is aware that during the Gilded Age monopolists bribed politicians to enrich themselves to the detriment of the public. The ...
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September 18th, 2016
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I am thinking of launching yet another blog service, so I am studying existing blog services.
I am curious how certain Tumblr blogs manage to attract enough of an audience that they get a steady stream of submissions. Petty Revenge Stories, for instance. How did this get famous enough that now it gets a steady supply of submissions.
As near as I can tell, the owner of Petty Revenge Stories never speaks. They do not offer a performance of their ...
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September 17th, 2016
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This article does not do much more than remind us that automobiles have been the primary transportation mechanism of the last 100 years, and therefore growth and autos are linked. A different technology would generate different results. But we should also the cultural and political paralysis that contributes to this. Ideas about private property work well when we discuss unsullied fresh ground way out in the middle of nowhere. Ideas of private property break down when we are discussing Manhattan. ...
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September 17th, 2016
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It is well known that most mergers are failures. Hundreds of good studies have been written on the subject. And yet large firms continue to acquire smaller firms.
There are other ways that large firms could behave:
1.) A large firm, with mature markets and steady cash flows, act as venture capitalists, funding hundreds of small firms and setting them free
2.) A large firm, with mature markets and steady cash flows, could simply give the money back to investors
So why acquire? ...
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September 17th, 2016
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This seems like an unnecessary self-inflicted wound. I get defending one’s work as an artists, but there is a conflict between asserting a vision as an artist and being a businessperson who has a comfortable relationship with one’s customers.
Post external references
1http://themuse.jezebel.com/marc-jacobs-doesnt-get-it-1786730679
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September 16th, 2016
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So you might have bank accounts that you don’t want and you never asked for? You might be charged fees on these accounts? Reasonable people should find this terrifying:
If you Google the phrase “bank cross-selling,” you don’t get many hits about the recent Wells Fargo scandal, in which thousands of bank employees were fired for the most blatant sort of corporate fraud. “Team members,” as Wells Fargo prefers to call its employees, had strict mandates to sign existing customers ...
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September 6th, 2016
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I am surprised that women’s entry into the labor force was no longer a driving power as early as the 1970s. The big surge is entirely in the 1960s.
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September 5th, 2016
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This is an interesting essay:
Managing people at startups is different because you have no safety net. You may think, having spent a few years at a big company in a management position, that you know how to manage already. You’ve given performance reviews, done interviews, dealt with project timelines, played politics. You know the basics. Right?
Here’s what you don’t see until you leave the safety of a big company. You don’t see the millions of invisible systems all around you ...
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September 5th, 2016
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Interesting that someone brought back Runequest:
Thanks to your overwhelming support during our Kickstarter, we are proud to announce that RuneQuest 2 (and 1) are Back in Print and back with Chaosium!
Just in time to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Glorantha.
This is the game that started it all. It defined the d100 role-playing experience, with skills instead of levels and having a game tied into a deep mythic background: Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha. Steve Perrin and Ray Turney worked with ...
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September 5th, 2016
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It’s a failure of leadership when a content play can not figure out how to make money off of comments.
All the money goes to the systems that collect the comments (Twitter, Facebook).
NPR is making an announcement today that is sure to upset a loyal core of its audience, those who comment online at NPR.org (including those who comment on this blog). As of Aug. 23, online comments, a feature of the site since 2008, will be disabled.
With the ...
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September 5th, 2016
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Interesting to see this change happening now and not in, say for instance, 1975.
The three fiction longer-fiction categories were each won by a woman of color: N.K. Jemisin (Best Nove), Nnedi Okorafor (Best Novella) and Hao Jingfang (Best Novellette). Additionally, Michi Trota, one of the editors of Uncanny Magazine, noted that she was the first Filipino to win a Hugo.
Jingfang, who hails from China, won for her story Folding Beijing, and is the second Chinese science fiction authors in ...
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September 5th, 2016
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This has been common, with the technical and business leaders having no understanding of the implications of what they were building. This is the norm, not the exception.
Trott has an interesting golden rule that she would like to see bloggers adopt. “If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it,” she says. “It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives ...
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September 5th, 2016
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I’ve heard good things about this place and I keep meaning to get dinner here.
Post external references
1http://www.manilasocialclub.com/
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September 5th, 2016
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This fellow Bhakta sounds like a lot of the wealthy people I’ve had as clients and as business partners. Immune to normal reality because of their wealth. They “fail” by doing something embarrassing, but they are incapable of failing in the Greek Tragedy sense: of falling out of their social class. Their family won’t let them fall.
Actually, I don’t know anything about Bhakta, but he does remind me of my ex-business partner:
1.) parties too much
2.) wants a glamorous life
3.) believes ...
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September 4th, 2016
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Even if the big profits were for the weeklies (Time, Lucky, Life) back in the 1950s and 1960s, for originality and dare, the magazines in the 1990s were amazing.
In the early ‘90s, one magazine helped change the scope of alternative publishing during the unpredictable era of print media with a simple question: “Would you chew up a nasty-tasting vitamin B-12 for $5? Yes or no?”
The question, though random, seemed innocent enough. What no one predicted though, was that this ...
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September 4th, 2016
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I love the part at the end:
Here’s an example of guilt I have felt over earning a living: Back in May, I asked one of Gawker’s writers, Jordan Sargent, to write up a blog post as word spread that the music writer Sasha Frere-Jones had resigned from his job as a pop critic at the Los Angeles Times. I felt some self-reproach doing so, even though it was Frere-Jones who did the Bad Thing, and not me.
The Bad Thing was ...
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September 4th, 2016
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Wow, this is eye opening:
On any given day, thousands of students go online seeking academic relief. They are first-years and transfers overwhelmed by the curriculum, international students with poor English skills, lazy undergrads with easy access to a credit card. They are nurses, teachers, and government workers too busy to pursue the advanced degrees they’ve decided they need.
The Chronicle spoke with people who run cheating companies and those who do the cheating. The demand has been around for decades. But ...
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August 25th, 2016
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This is ugly, the aggressive way that FaceBook tries to seize information from people who do not want to share their information with FaceBook:
This is an incredibly ugly dark pattern.
The ‘share information with Facebook’ nugget is hidden behind a toggle at the bottom of the screen, and will be guaranteed to be missed by the 99% of users who just want to talk to their friends.
Then, once you’ve agreed to the terms and conditions, you’ve got a completely arbitrary 30 ...
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August 23rd, 2016
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A very interesting take on all of the dead magazines:
The landscape that the early Gawker was teleported into each day afresh, always with little memory of the blog-day prior, was dominated by the stark shadows of three sunward-facing editors who were largely famous for extremely failed magazines. The 102 weekly issues of Adam Moss’s 7 Days made his reputation as the best package-man east of Aaron Spelling’s house. He took over New York magazine when Gawker was a bubbly infant. ...
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August 23rd, 2016
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“Performative ignorance” is a great phrase. I like this assessment:
When I think about the demise of Gawker, I cope by viewing it from a remove and as a narrative. If nobody starves and this somehow manages to leave freedom of press unscathed (the latter obviously being the bigger if than the former), what has been crafted is a tale that would seem too outrageous as fiction. Each chapter in Gawker’s trajectory, particularly the last few feverish, increasingly mad entries, has ...
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August 4th, 2016
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A sad story and it raises the puzzle, yet again, of why publishing is such a strange disaster of an industry:
That novel was called Lightning Rods, and it came out two months ago, with the much smaller press New Directions. She tried at various points over the past decade, but Ms. DeWitt could not get the book published before then. The book should have seen the light of day almost 10 years ago, when it was bought—after lengthy negotiations—by Jonathan ...
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August 3rd, 2016
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Very interesting, especially since this is Kent Beck:
As a new millennium dawned, I was riding high. Extreme Programming was the flavor of the month, my price for consulting was crazy high and rising, XP Explained was a big hit. Two years later I was battling depression, I was burning through savings, and I couldn’t get a gig to save myself. In between I made bad decisions in a panic.
It’s not the bad times that wipe you out, it’s the bad ...
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August 3rd, 2016
In Business
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For a few decades after WW II the middle class of America operated under the rule “The cities are dangerous, the suburbs are safe”. Apparently that began to change after 1990:
The violent crime epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s was concentrated in big cities, and the crime decline that followed was concentrated there, too. As someone who lives in a big city and remembers the 1980s, I can attest that the change has been dramatic, almost miraculous. But if ...
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August 3rd, 2016
In Business
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The British point of view:
The enthusiasm with which American dental professionals promote flossing despite the evidence, has raised the notion of a conspiracy with floss manufacturers. I don’t believe for a second that American dentists are in cahoots with floss makers, but why do they cling to the notion that floss is a good idea and keep recommending it? Perhaps because, like flossing, it’s a habit and after over a century of promoting the use of floss, it must be ...
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July 31st, 2016
In Business
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Frustrating. Square Space offers a page remarkably free of any facts, which I suppose is meant to work as marketing, though it is so general and far removed from reality that it actually repels me from the service. I believe the line of reasoning was “Square Space exists to protect people from the technical details of building a website, so let’s avoid mentioning any specifics on the page about blogs” but in the end, a service does need to offer ...
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July 27th, 2016
In Business
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A very controversial idea, that is interesting nonetheless:
The root problem with Twitter is that the product is carefully engineered to cultivate maximum violence.
Not intentionally, of course, but rather through a combination of early product decisions that were not re-visited, together with blind optimization of Twitter’s game mechanics toward vanity metrics.
Twitter’s cultivation of violence, in turn, affects user engagement, user churn, the demographics of Twitter, and numerous other factors that have resulted in Twitter’s total failure to become a behemoth ...
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July 22nd, 2016
In Business
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And self-publishing offers both money and artistic freedom:
According to the nonprofit Romance Writers of America, around 82% of US romance book buyers are women, and 41% are between 30 and 54 years old. Most romance authors are female. Yet for a long time, the link between writer and reader was broken by a long chain of agents, publishers, promoters, and retailers.
Perhaps one of the most shocking revelations of today’s romance renaissance is that readers aren’t crazy about those raunchy ...
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July 22nd, 2016
In Business
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Tellman is interesting as always:
senior engineers choose companies with the right risks
Every company has different risks, and so every company expects something different from their senior engineers. An engineer who has spent the last five years making small, continuous improvements to the processes in a larger company may not enjoy or even understand the sort of role expected by a three person startup. The expectation that “senior” is a fungible title is both widespread and harmful, leading to unrealistic expectations ...
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July 22nd, 2016
In Business
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Three bits jump out at me from this article:
One individual speculated that the reemergence of the company’s drinking culture was to blame for the uncomfortable environment. Under Pao’s reign, Reddit tried to eradicate the bro-like amount of alcohol consumption at the office, but that went right out the window following Pao’s departure in July 2015.
“During all the leadership regimes, there were multiple incidents where employees would drink too much and end up in embarrassing and inappropriate situations,” a source ...
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July 22nd, 2016
In Business
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I have been following with interest the conversations regarding crypto-currencies. These seem to have a strong appeal to people of beliefs that might be described as “libertarian”. These people believe there is some way to escape the need to engage in political struggle with their fellow humans, some way to avoid all the mess of life and instead go away somewhere else, and build an alternative system with an alternative currency. But these people are always a part of this ...
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July 20th, 2016
In Business
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The modernization of the economy constantly brings forth new specialities that are at first astonishing, and in particular, previously unpaid work joins the wage economy. That trends is 500 years old. Women used to create all clothing at home, now clothes are created in factories, and sold in exchange for money.
So what about the emotional labor of trying to make a date work? Here is a type of work that somewhat overlaps with therapists and prostitutes.
Getting exactly what ...
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July 20th, 2016
In Business
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Brad Sester wrote a column on the world economy, all through the build up to the Great Recession. I read him all through 2007 and 2008. Then he went to the Financial Times and his writing was behind a paywall, and I didn’t have a subscription. But now he is again writing in a place I can read him:
Turkey has long ranked at the top of most lists of financially vulnerable emerging economies, at least lists based on conventional ...
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July 13th, 2016
In Business
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I haven’t had the energy to make a successful business out of wpquestions.com, so I am going to sell it. Anyone interested should contact me.
I am selling the domain and the software and the datbase — the whole site.
$5,000 or best offer.
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July 10th, 2016
In Business
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Sad news about this 30 trend away from startups:
Yields on 10-year U.S. Treasuries hit an all-time low yesterday. Before you spin a story using recent events: remember long rates have been trending down for thirty odd years. And that’s true in most advanced economies. So think bigger than jobs day or Brexit or liftoff. And while I’ve got you thinking in decades not data releases … also consider that the share high-growth young firms, aggregate productivity growth, and general satisfaction ...
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July 10th, 2016
In Business
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I liked I Remember The Milk. We used it a lot from 2007 to 2009. It’s interface was simpler than Basecamp, but slightly more than Tada lists, so it fit a niche perfectly for me. But I no longer use it. The only todo software that would work for me is software that has total integration with my email, yet all such solutions tend to be heavyweight. So I’m still waiting for something good to show up. Perhaps it now ...
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July 7th, 2016
In Business
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This says exactly what I have been thinking:
The reasons people shift startup founding and investing patterns at the end of the cycle include:
Everyone is searching for the next thing.
The period of 2004 to the 20-teens will be viewed as the era of network driven business, developer & B2B SaaS infrastructure, and the lean startup. This rich vein of innovation is not over, but appears to be slowing. As this happens, entrepreneurs and VCs go into search mode, trying to ...
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July 6th, 2016
In Business
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An interesting bit of economic history:
There are some signs of changes in relative productivity that might undermine this assumption. In Clark’s
wage data, building workers’ incomes start to pull away from the 1620s, and from the 1680s masons
consistently earn around a fifth more than agricultural labourers. In Allen’s wage data, the early
seventeenth century is a period of relative prosperity for agricultural workers, and it is not until the 1680s
that their earnings fall below those of building labourers. However, it is hard ...
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July 5th, 2016
In Business
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This seems a bit exaggerated:
In January, the government sat down with the centre-right opposition, hoping to reach an agreement on how to increase building. But the centre-left – wanting more state funded rental accommodation – clashed with the centre-right, which wants more deregulatory measures to encourage private construction.
“The problem with the Swedish housing market is that there are no houses and there is no market,” said Emil Kallstrom, a spokesman for the opposition Center Party after the centre-right pulled ...
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July 2nd, 2016
In Business
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This is a great interview with Tim Brady of Yahoo:
Craig : After you closed those first ad sales were you all still freaking out over if this would be viable to not?
Tim : It was probably a full year of discomforting uncertainty. Even after we brought Tim Koogle in, it wasn’t a sure thing. The Internet was a sure thing but Yahoo wasn’t a sure thing. It probably took until the end of ‘95 to guarantee that.
Craig : Interesting. ...
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July 2nd, 2016
In Business
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This is funny and also a kind of interesting look at the modern magazine industry:
This is just what the entitled stars and their bat—t crazy publicists put me and many other talented, hard-working reporters through. You people, as it turns out, are worse. Stupidly, we expect loyalty and support from you after years of service. We are naïve. Despite your nicey nice, glossy and chirpy veneer, some of us think of you more as the Leo DiCaprio of magazines, ...
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June 30th, 2016
In Business, Technology
1 Comment
For those of you who don’t want to read this whole essay, here is the summary:
The word “agile” has a plain meaning in standard English, and that meaning was considered something positive by software developers, so much so that the most successful new development process of the last 30 years calls itself “Agile”. However, at many of the companies that I have worked, actual agility is suppressed because of various political factors. Fear wins out over trust. Instead of actual ...
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June 29th, 2016
In Business
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This is a very emotional point that comes up when a company pays workers with equity:
Scott’s post genuinely makes me angry. It uses subtle language to imply that employees are inferior individuals who are lucky that the owners of capital deign to share anything with them.
In Scott’s worldview, choosing to leave a company before it has exited is inherently disloyal. Even if they’re paying you under market. Even if you could contribute more value elsewhere.
I wonder if he would accept ...
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June 29th, 2016
In Business
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I stumbled upon this site and it seems like a Tumblr blog, but apparently it is business that tries to make money.
. My first reaction is “There is no way this will work”. I will check back in a year. I like to track these things, because I learn so much when it turns out that I am wrong.
Post external references
1http://www.yourtango.com/
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June 29th, 2016
In Business
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Another interesting article:
One reason for the lack of faith is the failure to predict the Great Recession, but the public’s dismissal of macroeconomists is based upon more than the failure to foresee the dangers the housing bubble posed for the economy. It is also due to false promises about the benefits to the working class from globalization, tax cuts for the wealthy, and trade agreements – promises that were often used to support ideological and political goals or to serve ...
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June 29th, 2016
In Business
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This is an interesting article:
Economists have long predicted this sort of convergence. Observing how U.S. states tended to have more similar income levels over time, economists such as Robert Solow built models in which fast catch-up growth eventually leads to a more equal world. But the stubborn failure of global incomes to converge defied the theory, and economists were forced to accept the idea that countries’ differing institutions created differences in their long-run economic potential. That was a somewhat unsatisfying ...
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February 8, 2022 9:33 am
From Michael S on How I recovered from Lyme Disease: I fasted for two weeks, no food, just water
"Did you have Bartonella, too? Seems it uses autogenesis..."