Shanghai Building to be Demolished

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January 14th, 2023

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Today’s Automation Anxiety Was Alive and Well in 1960

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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What’s wrong with Matt Yglesias?

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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I was interviewed by Luban College, University of Wisconsin

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 Source

December 28th, 2022

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Buy versus Build: mistakes I have made

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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Truly Agile development revolves around one-on-one meetings, not daily standups

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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How to handle an engineer who lies to you about bugs

(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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Why Tumblr is great

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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What work can be done from home? What work needs to be done at an office?

(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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How aggressively does a manager need to manage an employee if another employee has a problem with them?

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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Should a company hire fast and fire fast?

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 Source

February 14th, 2022

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Widespread fraud among outsourcing firms

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 18th, 2021

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Interview with Lindsey Allard and Kristen Giovanniello

more soon

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December 10th, 2021

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Self-control is essential to pragmatic leadership

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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Fire more people, fire them sooner, don’t wait, fire them as soon as you know

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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Are workers doing well this year?

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

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The ethics of being a high level tech consultant (a Fractional CTO)

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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When A Quick Comment Is Worth $100 Million

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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Paul Graham has become a disappointment

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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Hanna Thomas says Agile is feminist, but is the essay critical enough?

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 22nd, 2019

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New managers often experience a vacuum of purpose

Interesting:

Ideally, individual contributors enjoy building products and solving technical problems. They get to spend most of their time doing just that, and they can concretely see their output. If they’re at a well-run company, their managers have also helped them connect their day-to-day work to some broader mission or impact. This provides them with a sense of purpose. New managers often experience a “purpose vacuum,” since it’s harder to connect their day-to-day work to progress with a larger goal that ...

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September 22nd, 2019

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Software developers often fail when they try to become managers

Interesting:

Rosie (all names are composites of multiple employees) is the strongest engineer on the team. She can navigate any part of the stack. And when people have questions about the code base, they ask her for help — after all, she wrote most of it. Sometimes she’ll patiently answer, but sometimes, if it’s faster, she’ll just roll up her sleeves and do it herself.

Rosie is fast. She gets things done. I can always count on Rosie.

So as the team grows ...

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September 22nd, 2019

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The subversive movements that fed modern agile business ideas

Interesting:

From the article:

Aren’t these principles incredibly close to the way that we talk about Lean-Agile? Compare Rule 4 (consider everything an experiment), and Rule 6 (nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make), with the lean concept of the minimum viable product.

….I use these examples to serve the idea that what we now call Lean-Agile principles are principles that are already taken for granted within progressive social movements, and which are deeply necessary to succeed. One ...

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September 19th, 2019

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How much longer can the Fed use QE to keep the economy going?

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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Caroline Calloway as the unreliable business partner

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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Caroline Calloway understood marketing

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 10th, 2019

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There is a lot of discrimination happening at Google

Troubling:

More than 20,000 employees around the world had walked out of the company’s offices to protest that Google had paid out over $100 million to multiple executives accused of sexual harassment in the workplace. In response, the tech giant apologized and said it would overhaul its sexual misconduct policies and that it would be more supportive of workers who raise concerns about problems at work.

But almost a year after the historic walkout, a dozen current and former Google employees told ...

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September 8th, 2019

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Any consensual activity allowed, even at a professional event?

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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Tumblr is literally a social experiment

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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Are there really 100s of thousands of unfilled positions in tech or is that an urban legend

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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Success is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you early in your career

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 31st, 2019

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Leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders

Interesting:

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that ...

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August 30th, 2019

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Bad behavior at Google

Interesting:

Once in the summer of 2014, David came over to visit our son and we got into an argument about his one-way terms for seeing him at my house at his convenience, especially when he had his own house(s) blocks away. He sat down at our kitchen table and, using my laptop, he pulled up a year-old article from the Daily Mail about Eric Schmidt’s philandering lifestyle. He then passed the computer over to me to read. I was so ...

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August 24th, 2019

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The CEOs who sabotage their own companies, and keep their workers from being successful

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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Why does Google always fail at social networks?

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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The fall of Tumblr

Occasionally I find intelligent comments on LinkedIn:

Source

August 13th, 2019

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Woman looking at horizon, a new cliche for book covers?

“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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August 8th, 2019

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The struggle to moderate Hacker News

Interesting:

“From our perspective, the big surprise is how little control we actually have. We have to play our cards very carefully and very wisely, or even that control will sort of evaporate,” Gackle said. “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with ...

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July 30th, 2019

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None of my neighbors watch porn

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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The decline of the middle class during the 1960s and 1970s

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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Inflation in the USA has been low, the increase in asset prices is not a form of inflation because you don’t lose the money you spend

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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The great, unwritten poems that took a backseat to polished floors

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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David Sifry failed

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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If you are going to talk to a group, you need to rehearse your speech many times

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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When talking to a group, move them to some goal, nothing else matters

Interesting:

Nancy Darling’s advice on giving a presentation is the best thing I’ve ever read on the topic. Here are her five steps to pulling together a good presentation:

Choose a goal;

Find a storyline that will help the group reach that goal;

Develop a series of activities or a method of presentation that allows you to develop your storyline. Don’t let your media determine your storyline!

Remember that your role is to facilitate the group reaching its shared goal. This is your primary responsibility!

Remember ...

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July 22nd, 2019

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People in business often use the word passion when anger would be better advice

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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The worst project manager ever

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

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Kelly O’Donnel: flat, non-hierarchical organizations do not work

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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The accelerating decline of the USA

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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Blurred lines. Ambiguous commands. Awkward social engineering.

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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Ambiguity is the mood coming from California, especially Silicon Valley

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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Technology is the new inescapable geography

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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I was completely wrong about the continuance of innovation in the tech sector

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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Will Machine Learning and AI improve advertising’s ability to target people?

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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The idealism that defined the early Silicon Valley is now dead

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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Facebook versus Tumblr

So true:

Post external references 1https://glixbitch.tumblr.com/post/184717455347/facebook-we-analysed-your-entire-internet Source

May 29th, 2019

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Why are video game companies so awful?

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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Computer says automobile is stolen, innocent people arrested

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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If a company is serious about security, then who in the company is serious about security?

[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 irony of Tumblr banning porn

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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The recurring cycle of online communities now catches up to Facebook

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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Can anarchism be commodified?

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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Creating Personas for User Experience Research — these need to be very specific

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.

Source

March 12th, 2019

In Business

6 Comments

Why are large companies so difficult to rescue (regarding bad internal technology)

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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The decline of the USA standard of living

Interesting:

Post external references 1https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/1/18246233/economic-growth-workers-wages-economy Source

March 3rd, 2019

In Business

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Do MBAs help business?

Interesting:

We found no statistically significant alphas — despite testing every possible school with a reasonable sample size. MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies, if performance is measured by stock price return.

We ran similar regressions controlling for industry and found that — even after controlling for industry — elite MBAs did not produce positive statistically significant alpha. Elite MBAs did perform relatively well as CEOs in healthcare and consumer staples, but relatively poorly in ...

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February 26th, 2019

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What is the difference between talent and cultural similarity, especially in human relationship jobs?

Interesting:

Pinsker: And once people get these sorts of jobs, you write about the importance of “sponsorship”—basically, when some senior employee informally takes someone younger under their wing and helps them advance through the company. What did you notice about how those systems of sponsorship worked?

Laurison: I think that a lot of people, on some level what they think they’re doing when they sponsor young co-workers is spotting talent—they called it “talent-mapping” in the accounting firm we studied. But a lot ...

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February 10th, 2019

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Always invest in real estate

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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Are hospitals allowed to sell my phone number to advertisers?

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.

Source

December 21st, 2018

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The end of the celebrity app?

Interesting:

The same three years were a wild time in the App Store. Just about every celebrity you could think of (Reba McEntire!) had an app of some kind; many were ill-advised ones that fell into two categories: 1) subscription-based blog-style apps that would provide more insight into the life of the celebrity at their core; 2) free social platforms specifically for fans, which involved collecting some kind of fake currency that could be most easily accrued by spending real currency, ...

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December 20th, 2018

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If you’re not the customer, then you are the product

Interesting:

Profiles for Sale

In May 2017 artist Joana Moll and Tactical Tech purchased 1 million online dating profiles for 136€ from USDate, a US-based company that trades in dating profiles from all over the globe. The batch of dating profiles we purchased included pictures (almost 5 million of them), usernames, e-mail addresses, nationality, gender, age and detailed personal information about all of the people who had created the profiles, such as their sexual orientation, interests, profession, thorough physical characteristics and personality ...

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December 17th, 2018

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The original Macintosh manual only had photos of white males

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/ Source

December 13th, 2018

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Cryptocurrencies are not money

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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Why are there less and less articles about technology on Hacker News?

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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Netflix is difficult to reach

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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John Kenneth Galbraith set the tone for the next 60 years

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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Hero stories about entrepreneurs are never true

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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What would it look like if the economy was running hot?

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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The USA is falling behind other Western nations when it comes to women working

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

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Sometimes I want information, not sexy photos

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 Source

November 6th, 2018

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Computers continue to degrade productivity instead of improving productivity

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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Jakub Holý: what I learned when I was fired

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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SmugMug understands why Flickr is important

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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Sustainable large debts in Japan

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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September 6th, 2018

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The stupidity of German policy toward Greece

Interesting:

The result was a slump which crippled the economy in a way that has few parallels in history. Most economists understand that in situations like this it is ridiculous to insist that the debtor pays all the money back. For basic Keynesian reasons this insistence just destroys the ability of the debtor to pay: it is not a zero sum game between creditor and debtor. This is why so much of German debt was written off after WWII, as we ...

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August 25th, 2018

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Can a YouTube influencer keep their income if they apologize very well?

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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If you think the economy is normal…

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.

Source

August 19th, 2018

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Experienced technical leaders greatly reduce the risk your project otherwise faces

Interesting:

In reality, there’s a balance between moving fast and and moving slow. It’s difficult to communicate that balance because every type of product demands a different balance. I suppose that intuition comes from experience, which is a terrible answer for someone trying to learn.

What’s a new developer to do?

The natural tendency seems to be asking the internet. It turns out that this is incredibly effective.

It’s also incredibly dangerous. Before I go any further, I’ll continue my story.

This company continued to ...

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August 18th, 2018

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How to pay your hires

Interesting:

Imagine that your recruiter manages to find a software engineer with all the credentials you need, and your team loves her, but she has an offer from your main competitor that’s $35,000 more than what you were prepared to pay. In determining what to offer, consider the difference it might make to the future of your business if you bring her in rather than settle for your second choice—who may be a distant second, and whom it will take three ...

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August 17th, 2018

In Business

1 Comment

How to deal with a psychopath

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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Terrible wage growth for computer programmers

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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Friends and enemies agree, Emily Weiss is a good storyteller

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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Why not do a blog that is just cosmetics review?

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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Why do so many salespeople forget the names of their customers?

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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If a struggling company gets kicked off the Dow, then is the Dow meaningful?

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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Increasing work from 1650 to 1850

Interesting:

Back in March, I posted a summary of some research by Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf on the onset of economic growth. Their paper documented annual labor contract terms in England over several centuries, and compared those to the typical day labor rates that have been used in economic history to study the onset of growth and the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The short version of that paper is that the annual labor contracts starting seeing sustained growth in ...

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June 14th, 2018

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Labor force participation remains at the same level as during the 1970s

Worrisome:

Post external references 1https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate Source

May 27th, 2018

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The long-term decline of real interest rates

According to this, the only real economic boom was the boom of the 1500s:

Post external references 1https://voxeu.org/article/suprasecular-stagnation Source

May 10th, 2018

In Business

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LinkedIn is so broken

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:

Source

April 30th, 2018

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Absentee leadership is the most common form of bad leadership

Interesting:

Researchers have studied managerial derailment — or the dark side of leadership — for many years. The key derailment characteristics of bad managers are well documented and fall into three broad behavioral categories: (1) “moving away behaviors,” which create distance from others through hyper-emotionality, diminished communication, and skepticism that erodes trust; (2) “moving against behaviors,” which overpower and manipulate people while aggrandizing the self; and (3) “moving toward behaviors,” which include being ingratiating, overly conforming, and reluctant to take chances ...

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April 30th, 2018

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Age and entrepreneurship

Interesting:

The stereotypical startup founder is a 20- or 30-something man, probably white, probably wealthy. He wears a fleece vest, rides electric scooters, and drinks Blue Bottle coffee. You could be forgiven for mixing him up with a college frat guy.

So we’ve been told by movies like The Social Network and shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley, and accolades like the Thiel fellowship, which hands out $100,000 grants to people younger than 23. Previous academic research has put the mean startup founder ...

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March 29th, 2018

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Teen Bo$$

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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Rapid hiring for a tech team is a warning sign

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 16th, 2018

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Fail at everything and get promoted

Interesting:

The U.S. Trustee in the Toys R Us bankruptcy case has filed a strongly worded objection to the company’s plan to pay between $16 million and $32 million to its 17 most highly paid executives.

“It defies logic and wisdom,” the objection by Trustee Judy Robbins states, that Toys R Us is proposing “multi-million dollar bonuses for the senior leadership of a company that began the year with employee layoffs and concludes it in the midst of the holiday season in ...

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March 13th, 2018

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Thoughts about school

Interesting:

8. Psychology matters much, much more than people think, and varies wildly based on socioeconomic background. People that don’t know many people that are middle class literally don’t understand what’s possible, and are unable to take the corresponding risks as a result of that. 9. 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix.

10. Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% ...

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March 13th, 2018

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Responsibility for diversity in tech?

Interesting:

Just as advancing the diversity conversation isn’t up to one company, it’s also not up to one person or group within a company to solve a diversity shortfall.

“Why do I—as the black woman—have to fix that?” Saint John said. “There’s 50 of you, there’s one of me. Ya’ll fix it… Everybody else needs to make the noise—I want white men to make the noise.”

With those 37 words, Bozoman clarified something that anyone working in an industry plagued by bias (read: ...

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March 11th, 2018

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NYU startup incubators: 3,200 jobs and $4 billion for New York

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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Very early digital development

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

2 Comments

Why do entrepreneurs engage in self-sabotage?

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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March 3rd, 2018

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Mistakes that lead to Brexit

Interesting:

1. Deindustrialisation The 1980s changed Britain, most of all above the line between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. Between 1979 and 1986, jobs in the manufacturing industry shrank from 7m to 5.1m. Of all the jobs lost, in services as well as manufacturing, 94% were to the north of that line. Deindustrialisation neither began nor ended in the Thatcher years, but it was under Thatcher’s premiership that shutting down factories, shipyards and mines began to seem like a perverse ...

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February 18th, 2018

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It is time for companies to close down their websites

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 16th, 2018

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The very sad decline of Barnes and Noble

Interesting and sad:

So, if you were trying to solve the problem – if you were trying to revitalize this business – what would you do?

“Oh, I know! I would tighten my belt at the executive level, then I would double-down on what we can offer that Amazon can’t: enthusiastic staff that can find and upsell books to suit each customer, and the largest in-store selection possible so that everyone who comes in can walk away with what they want. If ...

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February 15th, 2018

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When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style

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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Why doesn’t President Trump push for a huge infrastructure bill?

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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Group meetings waste time — my interview with Christian McCarrick

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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The formal versus informal question — how I answer email

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 attacks Steve Yegge over so-called privilege

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 18th, 2018

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Who is responsible for increasing diversity in tech?

Interesting:

We reject the idea that it is the “responsibility” of marginalized people to stay in toxic tech culture despite abuse and discrimination, solely to improve the diversity of tech. Marginalized people have already had to overcompensate for systemic sexist, ableist, and racist biases in order to earn their roles in tech. We believe people with power and privilege are responsible for changing toxic tech culture to be more inclusive and fair to marginalized people. If you want more diversity in ...

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January 8th, 2018

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Psychological benefits of worker democracy

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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Yegor Bugayenko: what motivates me as a programmer

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

In Business

4 Comments

Why are women being pushed away from the tech industry?

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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How you should talk about your team

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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Rules for company failure

Interesting:

29. An organization populated by a majority of incompetents has less than zero net-worth : it is able to destroy other adjacent organizations that are not similarly populated.

30. Incompetence is fiercely gregarious while knowledge is often fractious; the reason for this is that raw ideas transfer more easily through untrained minds than refined ideas transfer through trained minds. There’s a reason why large organisations focus so much on simple messages, pity that difficult problems often have simple solutions ...

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December 31st, 2017

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The New York University startup incubator at Varick Street is awesome

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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How to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs

From Alan Kay:

Most of the funding of research efforts I’ve been involved in since ARPA-Parc have been with various profit making companies — Atari, Apple, Disney, HP, SAP, Infosys, etc. And there have been various kinds of compromises involved. And some good work on smaller scales did get done. Others of my colleagues in the diaspora that started in the early 80s wound up at Microsoft, DEC, IBM, Bell Labs, etc.

These same people with the same big ideas, talents, more ...

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December 31st, 2017

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How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps (the intro)

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

In Business

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Discretion still matters — don’t ruin your career by sharing too much

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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Men have been leaving the labor force for 100 years, never got past agriculture

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 Source

December 25th, 2017

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What is the P/E ratio of Bitcoin?

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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Don’t assume that your business idea will be easy

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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4 Comments

Retail is suffering because the middle classes have lost $1,355 trillion in income since 1970

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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Commercially viable daydreams versus distracting fantasy

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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Buy this book for just $1,400 and the shipping is free for students!

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.

Source

December 16th, 2017

In Business

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Business productivity has been undermined by the hubris and power-grabbing of elite computer programmers

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 15th, 2017

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Globalization was oversold

Interesting:

Trump exploited understandable grievances among a large swath of American society, whose standard of living has stagnated for almost half a century. Defenders of globalization say that Trump has unfairly blamed globalization, when the real culprit is technology. Of course, Trump like so many demagogues prefers to blame others.

Though even without globalization, technological advances would have meant workers without a college education would be hard pressed, the reality is that globalization has played a central role: even without changes in ...

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December 12th, 2017

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My idea for a startup that standardizes the import of data through ML and NLP scripts

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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Why is LinkedIn so broken that it can’t do normal error messages?

I am constantly astonished at how broken LinkedIn is. And here is today’s reminder:

Source

December 7th, 2017

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Among farmers, the suicide rate continues to go up

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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The many ways to undermine a previously healthy online community

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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The sad slow dying of IBM

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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Twentysomethings say “I hate networking”

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 31st, 2017

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Amazon versus Apple: the complicated politics of ebooks

Interesting:

The convoluted interface is due to a stand-off between Apple and Amazon. When Steve Jobs was still alive, the companies competed to control ebook pricing, which led to an antitrust lawsuit between Apple and the US. Though Apple lost, it now requires vendors to fork over a 30% cut of in-app purchases of digital products like books and music. But Amazon already has to split its ebook sales with authors and book publishers, and the cost appears prohibitive to ...

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October 31st, 2017

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Twitter struggles to find a consistent policy towards abusive posts

Interesting:

As recently as Sunday night, I was the target of an unsolicited nude. A man tweeted his exposed penis directly into my mentions.

When I attempted to report the tweet, I wasn’t allowed to. There is no selection for “This guy sent me his penis and I don’t want to see it.” Instead, Twitter suggested I block him to avoid seeing his offensive tweets in the future.

This is not helpful.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump ally and confidant Roger Stone completely ...

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October 23rd, 2017

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A tide of ideas had started a new cycle, flowing from academia to an industrial laboratory and back to academia

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 26th, 2017

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France and Italy imitate the wrong things about Germany

This is good:

Three months after his commencement, Emmanuel Macron delivered last week one of the most important, and controversial, promises of his agenda. The loi travail that will become operational in the next few weeks mostly deals employment protection, which is weakened especially for small and medium enterprises. The aim is to lift constraints for firms hiring, and thus increase employment. This first set of norms should be followed in the next weeks or months by norms aimed at ...

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September 23rd, 2017

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Google is demonetizing YouTube sites

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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Helping kids from poor neighborhoods understand the world of tech

This is a great project:

Maurice doesn’t mind being different, and says he’s never cared about what people think. He tells a story about how he once cut off his eyebrows to see if he could withstand the inevitable ridicule he would face–a bold stand for any teenager to take. Maurice credits his parents for passing along these admirable qualities; his mother, who passed away earlier this year, was a strong role model for him, and he says she was ...

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September 21st, 2017

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Monopoly power in Germany in the 1500s

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 21st, 2017

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The USA government is struggling to figure out how to regulate Facebook

This is interesting:

Calls for more transparency and regulation governing the content and advertising on Facebook are suddenly coming from both the right and the left in Washington, and are likely to increase as more information emerges about how the company earns nearly all of its almost $30 billion in annual revenue. The attention has intensified since Facebook recently admitted that Russian buyers were able to purchase thousands of ads on its platform on hot-button issues like immigration and gay rights in ...

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September 18th, 2017

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Is there over-investment in media simply because entrepreneurs lack knowledge of more interesting fields?

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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Pixable, the life and death of a New York startup

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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Companies have replaced individuals in the area of design

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 Source

September 17th, 2017

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Google bias about reporting bias

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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If a programmer confuses the average for the 1% they deserve to be fired

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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The limit on open offices

I like this comment:

That’s the theory of why open plan is good. In practice it doesn’t pan out that way, because most 5 minute questions don’t save that much time (answer was a 2 minute search away), don’t take that much time (take much longer), and overall cost much more time (due to loss of flow). Most (if not all) programmers need a state of flow to write quality code. Achieving flow after an interruption can easily take 15 minutes or more. ...

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September 8th, 2017

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Danielle Morrill’s fascinating growth of Mattermark

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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FontForge was an evolution

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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I wish there was a company that allowed me to watch all the movies that I want to watch

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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September 7th, 2017

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The rich get richer

Interesting:

This is not just another chart. The data it uses directly answers conservative attempts to claim that middle-class incomes really have grown substantially, and that the rich aren’t taking all the economic gains. The conservatives argued that the standard data used to illustrate inequality is incomplete; Saez, Piketty, and Zucman have completed it, and demonstrated that income growth has been quite low for the middle class and very unequally distributed between them and the wealthy.

The background context for the new ...

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August 12th, 2017

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Extremely engaged readers will make or break careers

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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Parsely says no to $40 million, yes to $6 million, why not just get a bank loan?

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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The initial act of founding a company is an expression of nonconformity

I like this:

The initial act of founding a company is an expression of nonconformity. They must eventually convince others to join them, internalize that vision and will it into reality. But isn’t it counterintuitive to bring other originals—who may buck their ideas—into the fold?

“It’s true that every leader needs followers. We can’t all be nonconformists at every moment, but conformity is dangerous—especially for an entity in formation,” says Grant. “If you don’t hire originals, you run the risk of people ...

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August 4th, 2017

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StackOverflow retreats from its over-ambitious Documentation project

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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The ReThink post-mortem is among the best post-mortems ever

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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More chaos in the world of Bitcoin

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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China is investing in the USA

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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A novice can not be blamed for serious mistakes in your companies technology

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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Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have limits that few have yet appreciated

This is very good:

Now consider my most viral tweet so far:

Good CS expert says: Most firms that think they want advanced AI/ML really just need linear regression on cleaned-up data.

This got almost universal agreement from those who see such issues play out behind the scenes. And by analogy with the pipe innovation case, this fact tells us something about the potential near-term economic impact of recent innovations in Machine Learning. Let me explain.

Most firms have piles of data they ...

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June 29th, 2017

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The unwillingness to acknowledge the end of “learn a new skill” as a path to growth

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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Open Source is poorly funded

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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The changing demographics of the USA

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/ Source

June 29th, 2017

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Can the leadership simply order a group to be entrepreneurs, and then expect good results?

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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WalMart bought Jet and then immediately went to war against the culture of Jet

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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Mistakes are the currency of success

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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Marissa Mayer fails upwards, and wants her friends to fail upwards

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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Trump never thinks to export cars to Germany

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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Truckers have seen there wages shrink and automation can not be blamed

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/ Source

May 27th, 2017

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If Harvard University has information to sell, why don’t other countries build more Harvard Universities?

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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How to respond to people who lose wages because of interruptions in their career

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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May 2nd, 2017

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There’s a word that unites culture and the economy: politics

Politics:

Law and Justice MEPs sit in the same group as British Conservatives. Ashley Fox, leader of the Tory group in the European Parliament, came to the new government’s defence over the criticism it has received from Western media and from the European Commission. Even though Brexit threatens Poland with a significant cut to its EU funding, and means difficulties for Poles in the UK, Kaczyński has been energised by it, seeming to believe the shock of Brexit will force Germany ...

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April 26th, 2017

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Part of the Great Stagnation is simply a lack of power

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 26th, 2017

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Dick Costolo destroyed Twitter

So sad:

The roots of Twitter’s decline were actually established in the Summer of 2010–on the day the company’s board pushed Evan Williams out as CEO and replaced him with Dick Costolo, a man who looked at Twitter and saw a media company in the advertising business.

While the details of the events that led to that moment are fascinating and involve enough infighting, backstabbing, and subterfuge to make a Byzantine emperor proud, they aren’t relevant to this essay.

The abridged version is ...

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April 26th, 2017

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The crisis in retail will outlast the next few booms

Interesting:

the crisis of retail seems unstoppable for numerous reasons:

Obviously e-commerce and the rise of digital retail giants Amazon and Alibaba are said to have ‘disrupted’ retail and changed consumer expectations. It is accused of destroying the old retail models. It may be true. However when it comes to groceries, online retail still only accounts for a relatively small part (between 5% and 15% depending on the country);

Internet has brought about new business models that transform ownership into services: rather than ...

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April 23rd, 2017

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Workers reduce accidents when they point at things

Interesting:

Japan’s rail system has a well-deserved reputation for being among the very best in the world. An extensive network of tracks moving an estimated 12 billion passengers each year with an on-time performance measured in the seconds makes Japanese rail a precise, highly reliable transportation marvel.

Train conductors, drivers and station staff play an important role in the safe and efficient operation of the lines; a key aspect of which is the variety of physical gestures and vocal calls that they ...

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April 23rd, 2017

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Report a security problem to a bank and get threatened with the FBI

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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How to destroy a tech startup in three easy steps

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 13th, 2017

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Doc Searls: ad tech is destructive to brands

Interesting:

The New York Times said AT&T and Johnson & Johnson were pulling their ads from YouTube, concerned that “Google is not doing enough to prevent brands from appearing next to offensive material, like hate speech.” Business Insider said “more than 250” advertisers were bailing as well. Both reports came on the heels of one Guardian story that said Audi, HSBC, Lloyds, McDonald’s, L’Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Argos, the BBC and Sky were doing the same in the UK. Another Guardian story that ...

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April 8th, 2017

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Donovan Data Systems and the modernization of the ad business

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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Andy Grove does not understand why cancer research is so hard

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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Sometimes consultants are cheaper and better than full time hires

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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Svbtle was a final attempt to keep blogs alive

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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Anti-human technology

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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MSNBC surges ahead of CNN, what does Keith Olbermann say now?

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 14th, 2017

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Creativity does not pay

Interesting:

For one thing, most new ideas are bad ones: the replication crisis in academia reminds us of this. Creativity doesn’t arise from a high or spark of genius, but from the dedication to keep going through the failures until you find the success. Thomas Edison, one of the most creative capitalists of all, said: “I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” That was why he claimed that “genius is 1% inspiration and ...

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March 12th, 2017

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Business is dying out in the USA

Very interesting:

Startup rates, or the share of all companies formed within the past year, had exceeded closure rates every year since at least the 1970s — even during recessions. That all came to a halt in 2008 with the economic downturn. While it’s normal for growth to diminish somewhat during economic recoveries, it has been slower than usual: There were still 182,000 fewer businesses in 2014 than in 2007, according to the report.

Falling startup rates aren’t just confined to a ...

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March 9th, 2017

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The economy has been a disaster since 1973

Interesting:

The good times rolled on so long that people took them for granted. Between 1948 and 1973, Australia, Japan, Sweden and Italy had not a single year of recession. West Germany and Canada did almost as well. Governments and the economists who advised them happily claimed the credit. Careful economic management, they said, had put an end to cyclical ups and downs. Governments possessed more information about citizens and business than ever before, and computers could crunch the data to ...

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March 9th, 2017

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The economy still sucks

This is good:

How about US manufacturing? A friend who recently published a paper on manufacturing in a top 20 journal complained how hard it was to publish, despite being one of his better papers. For some reason, the topic seems to bring out the crazy in a lot of economists. Why? I’m not sure, but we economists like to think we know something about manufacturing, and now in the Age of Trump, many economists have a completely understandable desire to ...

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March 2nd, 2017

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This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help

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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Uber is not doomed

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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More dirt about Uber

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 28th, 2017

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What we lose when economists ignore people’s lived experience

So true:

The IFS has said (pdf):

Much of the burden of business rates is passed on from the occupiers of non-domestic properties to the properties’ owners (if different), via reductions in the properties’ market rental values.

I believe this. But I sympathize with business owners who aren’t convinced. The question is: how is the burden passed on? One way is through rents being renegotiated – a process which favours bigger businesses against smaller landlords. Another way is by firms moving to ...

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February 28th, 2017

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Allocating robots to knowledge work only demotes humans to having to do more of the menial work

Such a great essay:

From a capital investment perspective that’s a message that asks: why invest in costly capital intensive equipment when it’s so much more cost effective to hire low-paid humans to do the same job? That business model is well exploited by technology companies like Amazon.

As argued on Wednesday, the idea society should fear the invention of robots which would displace humans from low-paid menial work is laughable. Schumpeterian logic dictates that as long as overall productivity goes up ...

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February 28th, 2017

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Uber is unfair to its workers

Interesting:

In practice, Uber’s values were codified by its internal ratings and performance reviews, a process employees simply referred to as “perf.” Uber uses stack ranking, a system popularized by GE legend Jack Welch that requires managers across a company to assign their employees numeric ratings along a bell curve. The system, alternatively termed forced ranking and “rank and yank,” is highly controversial as it demands that high performers within an organization be offset by a certain number of low ...

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February 20th, 2017

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Sports writing shifts to the Left?

Interesting:

Of course, labels like “liberal” and “conservative” don’t translate perfectly to sports. Do you have to be liberal to call Roger Goodell a tool? So maybe it’s better to put it like this: There was a time when filling your column with liberal ideas on race, class, gender, and labor policy got you dubbed a “sociologist.” These days, such views are more likely to get you a job.

Donald Trump’s election was merely an accelerant for a change that was already ...

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February 9th, 2017

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Is Snap doomed?

Not a pretty picture:

One week after that filing, Twitter on Thursday announced fourth-quarter earnings for 2016. Twitter has been losing around $100 million a quarter for the past three years, and its user growth has been essentially flat. Snapchat’s IPO filings showed that its own growth has already started to taper off, and that it lost over $500 million in 2016. That leaves potential investors with a big question about what sort of trajectory Snap is setting out on: Will it ...

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February 9th, 2017

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Top leaders who let their personal prospects bias their world outview

Interesting:

Blankfein said in a video on the bank’s website that the market is shifting from a cycle of “pessimism about where we go” to “one in which it’s going to get growthier. More growth out there, more opportunity and one in which we are getting a bit more optimistic.”

If only Goldman’s own experts shared that view. As Trump has focused on restricting immigration and trade, the bank’s economists told clients last month that “the balance of risks is somewhat ...

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February 8th, 2017

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Marginalized groups depend on comics

Interesting:

One of my favorite things to do is to laugh at men who say that women don’t care about comics and then point them to the New York Times graphic novels bestseller list where Raina Telgemeier always has at least half of the top ten books (if not all ten) and many other women, including queer women and women of color, regularly appear. It brings me so much joy to see them have to scroll down past Sisters, Smile, Ghosts ...

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February 8th, 2017

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Gigster refuses to answer questions about its own contract

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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The decline of Delicious and the rise of Pinboard

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 19th, 2017

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Safeguards against Chinese imports were never used

Interesting:

Mark Wu argues, correctly, that the WTO accession agreement provided a set of provisions that were designed to help manage the risks associated with China’s integration: the “non-market economy” provision, which made it easier for U.S. firms to bring dumping cases against China; and the “special safeguards” provision, which lowered the standard required for imposing temporary tariffs against a surge in imports from China for the twelve years after China’s WTO accession.

The non-market economy provision was certainly used, notably by ...

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January 8th, 2017

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The big pivot at Medium

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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The decline of USA investment since 1964

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 Source

December 28th, 2016

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The lunacy of the Artificial Intelligence fanatics

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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No improvement in women in economics since 1986

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 Source

December 16th, 2016

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Tim Duy: I don’t absolve the policy community from their role in this disaster

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 16th, 2016

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More researchers? Less researchers?

Compare these two.

First this:

I recall John Cochrane once shrugging at bad macro models, saying something like “Well, assistant profs need to publish.” OK, but what’s the impact of that on public trust in science? The public knows that a lot of psych research is B.S. They know not to trust the latest nutrition advice. They know macroeconomics basically doesn’t work at all. They know the effectiveness of many pharmaceuticals has been oversold. These things have little to do with the ...

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December 14th, 2016

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Trump supporters who rely on Obamacare

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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The odd language of economists

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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Gender wage gap in tech versus other professional fields

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 9th, 2016

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People born in 1940 did much better than people born in 1980

Interesting:

The index is deeply alarming. It’s a portrait of an economy that disappoints a huge number of people who have heard that they live in a country where life gets better, only to experience something quite different. …

It begins with children who were born in 1940… The researchers went into the project assuming that most of these children had earned more than their parents — but were surprised to learn that nearly all of them had… About 92 percent of ...

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December 9th, 2016

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The average age of workers

Interesting:

Since 2008, the number of age discrimination complaints has grown to around 25,000 a year. Some may argue that everywhere we turn these days, someone is complaining about something being unfair. Alright. Let’s not just take complaints into account. But rather, let’s look at the average age of IT workers at well-established companies. Facebook: 28. LinkedIn: 29. Google: 30. To put that into perspective, the average age of all U.S. workers is 42. Well above the average age at these ...

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December 6th, 2016

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Engage with users?

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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Listen to the Gentiles

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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Simon Wren-Lewis is angry

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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How much should a President personalize the management of the economy

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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The Information Society and feminism

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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Facebook does not control what news people see

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 15th, 2016

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Japan has little inflation because women can’t get a raise

Interesting:

Japan offers a preview of future U.S. demographic trends, having already seen a large increase in the population over 65. So, how has the Japanese economy dealt with this change? A look at the data shows that women of all ages have been pulled into the labor force and that more people are working longer. This transformation of the work force has not been enough to prevent a very tight labor market in a slowly growing economy, and it may ...

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November 13th, 2016

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The astonishing rise of graphic novels

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/ Source

November 13th, 2016

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Money from self published romance books

Interesting:

Publishers took note. In the year after Ward published Damaged, she was offered a series of deals from various publishers totaling $1.5 million, by her estimate. She turned them all down, and by the time she said no to her last contract, she was making eight figures as a self-published author. “It would have been a colossal mistake to sign with them at that point, financially,” she says. Romance novels, home of heavy lids, hot breaths, and grabbed wrists, have long ...

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November 5th, 2016

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A set of interconnected ideas that have become commonplace in much of our discourse

Interesting:

I like to treat neoliberalism not as some kind of coherent political philosophy, but more as a set of interconnected ideas that have become commonplace in much of our discourse. That the private sector entrepreneur is the wealth creator, and the state typically just gets in their way. That what is good for business is good for the economy, even when it increases monopoly power or involves rent seeking. Interference in business or the market, by governments or unions, ...

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October 31st, 2016

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AirBnB lacks the power to fight discrimination

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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When we gather our identity from many sources we create a more diversified sense of esteem

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 28th, 2016

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Soylent is every stupid thing about the tech industry

A few good quotes:

Soylent made such a big deal of being a “tech company”, and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute. What they didn’t have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about “sending samples out” to external labs. It’s not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are production line testing machines for biological contamination and for ...

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October 27th, 2016

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We need perspectives on the startup scene

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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Is it useful to have a college degree?

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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Who talks about rigged elections?

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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What if we spent out money building businesses, instead of subsidizing houses?

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 Source

October 13th, 2016

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The corruption at WellsFargo

Interesting and sad:

Ashley, working for them and making only $35k per year in San Francisco, was continually harassed to sign people up for accounts they didn’t want. An old man comes in, pensioner, $200 in overdraft fees due to being duped into excess accounts. She dips into her own savings to get him back in the black. She reports the incident to the internal ethics line. Nothing. Tries again. Nothing. She refuses to fraudulently push excess accounts onto people. Fired. ...

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October 3rd, 2016

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Working hard: love of work or misguided hero complex?

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 30th, 2016

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After 1970, people had to spend more on rent

Interesting:

From 1940 to 1960 across 20 large U.S. cities, rental housing’s price fell, renters’ incomes rose, rent’s share in household budgets fell, and, as expected, renters’ real housing consumption increased. From 1970 to 2010, rental housing’s price increased, renters’ incomes decreased, but, unexpectedly, renters’ real housing consumption increased. We find neither demographics nor housing supply factors account for the anomalous post-1970 increase in renters’ housing consumption. We conclude that after 1970 there was a nationwide increase in renters’ preferences for ...

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September 29th, 2016

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Online beauty gurus have become much more reliable than brands

Interesting:

This seems to mirror general consumer consensus that online beauty gurus have become much more reliable than brands. The brands are, in turn, increasingly reliant on bloggers for marketing. … The beef stems from a Vogue roundtable published on Sunday in which several editors discussed Milan Fashion Week and denigrated style bloggers in the process. Vogue.com’s chief critic Sarah Mower turned a nose up, stating, “The professional blogger bit, with the added aggression of the street photographer swarm who attend them, is ...

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September 27th, 2016

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Andrew Montalenti: Ask a teacher, police officer, or firefighter if they are paid proportional to the value they add

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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The promise of equity no longer aligns the interests of workers and startup founders

This essay is fantastic:

Sure enough, companies like Snapchat and Palantir have adopted policies that either vest employee options over a longer period of time (five years in the case of Palantir) or back-weight the bulk of vesting later in an employee’s tenure (Snapchat vests only 10% the first year, 20% in the second, 30% in the third, and 40% in the fourth). Still, while this adjustment may strike VCs and founders as a reasonable tradeoff, lengthening the time workers are ...

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September 18th, 2016

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Petty Revenge Stories

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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Failing to expand cities will come at a cost

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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I am confused why large firms acquire smaller firms

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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Why insult your customers?

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 Source

September 16th, 2016

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For the USA economy, 2015 was the best year since at least 1999

Very interesting:

That is great news of course. Do note however the following (NYT):

The median household income is still 1.6 percent lower than in 2007, before the recession. It also remains 2.4 percent lower than the all-time peak reached during the economic boom of the late 1990s.

Even with this unexpected and quite remarkable income gain, America is close to having gone twenty years without a significant money pay hike for its middle class category.

And do note this: two days ago, ...

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September 16th, 2016

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The fraud at WellsFargo is historic

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 11th, 2016

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Are ebooks in decline?

Interesting:

And self-published “indie” authors — in part because they get a much bigger cut of the revenue than authors working with conventional publishers do — are now making much more money from e-book sales, in aggregate, than authors at Big Five publishers.

…The AAP also reported, though, that e-book revenue was down 11.3 percent in 2015 and unit sales down 9.7 percent. That’s where things get misleading. Yes, the established publishing companies that belong to the AAP are selling fewer e-books. ...

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September 6th, 2016

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When women’s entrance to the workforce had the most effect

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.

Source

September 5th, 2016

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Some blunt advice on management

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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What Gawker did well

Interesting:

What Gawker did at its best was stand up and say, “No, you’re right, these are lies, you are correct to think that you are being lied to” and for however long that assertion hung there in the air you were able remind yourself that you weren’t wrong to feel discomfort with what whatever narrative they were pushing at you. You weren’t alone. It did not make the world better but at least it pressed pause on the world’s becoming ...

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September 5th, 2016

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The nostalgia for old games

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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How Uber failed in Japan

Really interesting:

This strategy has been phenomenally successful in America, but has failed miserably in Japan for three key reasons. #1 People Trust Government More than Industry My libertarian friends in San Francisco find this baffling. They often dismiss it as brainwashing or propaganda when I explain it, but it’s not. The United States is unique in the free world for our visceral disgust for and distrust of our own government.

It’s not that people is Asia consider government motivations to be pure. Over ...

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September 5th, 2016

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Content on the web doesn’t pay, and giving up on comments will make everything worse

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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Progressive values in science-fiction and fantasy

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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Mena Trott did not understand the online world she was helping to build

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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Manila Social Club

I’ve heard good things about this place and I keep meaning to get dinner here.

Post external references 1http://www.manilasocialclub.com/ Source

September 5th, 2016

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Raj Bhakta is a pathetic loser

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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The 1990s were a golden age for paper magazines

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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Empathy overreaches when we can’t know and we can’t judge wrap themselves around each other so tightly that they become indistinguishable

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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More help for those who want to cheat school

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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September 4th, 2016

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Technology’s productivity shrinks the economy

Interesting:

But how will this technological progress show up in conventional economic statistics? Here the picture is somewhat mixed. Take GDP, for example. This is usually defined as the market value of all final goods and services produced in a given country in a particular time period. The catch is “market value”—if a good isn’t bought and sold, it generally doesn’t show up in GDP. This has many implications. Household production, ad-supported content, transaction costs, quality changes, free services, and ...

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September 4th, 2016

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Failure is everywhere

An interesting essay:

Which brings me to a paradox. Whereas our own eyes tell us that incompetence is ubiquitous, standard economic theory regards it as merely a temporary deviation. It thinks that agents are incentivized to optimize; that badly managed assets will be bought cheaply by people better equipped to run them; and that competition will drive incompetent firms out of business.

But this doesn’t happen – at least not fully. Even the best incentives can’t put in what God left ...

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August 25th, 2016

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Facebooks is aggressive about getting people’s data from any source that it controls

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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Where is the magazine industry going?

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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What did Gawker do?

“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 19th, 2016

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Is Twitter a common carrier or a community?

The debate continues:

Trying to be both a platform and a community are goals which are often in conflict, especially in terms of operations. Communities really need things like trust, reputation, moderation, rules, and enforcement. These are things that are hard to enforce programmatically, and often require a lot of customization. e.g. reddit started as a platform for communities, but the success of /r/all made it more a community of communities, at which point some of the more extreme communities became a ...

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August 16th, 2016

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All the ideas we never work on

This is funny:

Your day starts in Salesforce. You have to email a bunch of people. You briefly contemplate a business idea you have that will totally kill Salesforce and Facebook at the same time. But you need a technical co-founder. Eventually you’ll get to it — after all, you’re smart and destined for greatness yourself. And your friends all tell you how you should start something someday.

Your 27-year-old CEO calls an ad-hoc all-hands meeting and regales about company culture and how your ...

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August 11th, 2016

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A whole web site devoted to horror stories about Amazon.com

Wow, this is serious:

The next day I filed a complaint with HR and CC’ed my manager. This led to a phone call with HR asking me to allow them to investigate the situation and to keep the incident in confidentiality until the investigation was complete. (HR had trouble providing me with follow-up in writing— they preferred to keep everything face to face or over the phone.)

Naively, I agreed to keep it confidential until the investigation was complete. HR’s ultimate finding ...

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August 4th, 2016

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Even for successful writers, the traditional publishing industry is brutal

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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The IMF admits it has favored austerity at the wrong time and the wrong place

An interesting article:

It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.

The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way European ...

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August 3rd, 2016

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The importance of the blogosphere for economics

An interesting article:

A few weeks ago was typical. After some time off, my feed aggregator displayed 794 blog posts, 56 of them foolishly filed into the “must read” folder. Here lay a polemic blasting the FT for worrying about China’s debts; there a graph strewn post about US inflation expectations. Virtuoso “infovore” Tyler Cowen had dug up a fascinating passage on how China runs monetary policy. Another polymath, Brad DeLong (former Clinton staffer and tireless scourge of rightwing bunkum), had ...

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August 3rd, 2016

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Kent Beck suggests winter could come to the tech industry

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

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Crime is rising in the outermost suburbs

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

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Flossing does not improve gum health

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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Square Space offers marketing nonsense when I want actual facts

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

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Twitter is violence

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

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Romance writers lead the way regarding self-publishing

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

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Zach Tellman on the benefits of a senior engineer

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

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The problems at Reddit

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

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Strong law is stronger than strong code

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

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An app to pay women for emotional labor

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

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Brad Sester is writing in public again

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 am selling WPQuestions.com

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.

Source

July 10th, 2016

In Business

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The decline of entrepreneurialism in the USA

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

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I remember Remember The Milk

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

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The era of important Web based startups is over

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

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England was already a great success by the 1600s

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

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The problem with the Swedish housing market is that there are no houses and there is no market

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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Success hides your mistakes

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

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Writer vents their rage while quitting after 14 years with People magazine

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

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The tech elite of Silicon Valley are a surprisingly reactionary crowd

Interesting:

The second half of “Chaos Monkeys” takes place at Facebook, and it concerns the handful of dominant companies that have emerged from this start-up culture. These companies (in addition to Facebook, notably Google and Amazon), whose market values start at more than $300 billion, are approaching (or in the case of Apple and Microsoft, managing) middle age. In addition to contrasting their collective ethos with that of the start-up world, “Chaos Monkeys” touches on the also-rans like Twitter who failed ...

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June 30th, 2016

In Business, Technology

1 Comment

The Agile process of software development is often perverted by politics

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 30th, 2016

In Business

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The whole publishing industry depends on Barnes and Noble

Interesting and sad:

If Barnes & Noble were to shut its doors, Amazon, independent bookstores, and big-box retailers like Target and Walmart would pick up some of the slack. But not all of it. Part of the reason is that book sales are driven by “showrooming,” the idea that most people don’t buy a book, either in print or electronically, unless they’ve seen it somewhere else—on a friend’s shelf, say, or in a bookstore. Even on the brink of closing, Barnes ...

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June 29th, 2016

In Business

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If equity is compensation, can an employer ever take back compensation?

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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Niche content plays that I was not aware of

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/ Source

June 29th, 2016

In Business

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Why the public no longer listens to economists

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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Which groups of people benefit most from global trade

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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From John Carston on The ethics of being a high level tech consultant (a Fractional CTO)

"It helped when you mentioned that it is important to have a real connection with your consumer. My cousin ment..."

September 2, 2021 7:47 pm

From Mojavedfo on Where PHP regex fails

"55 thousand Greek, 30 thousand Armenian..."

August 7, 2021 9:53 am

From Colin Steele on The ethics of being a high level tech consultant (a Fractional CTO)

"Fantastic essay. Thoughtful, well-constructed, timely and applicable. I think every part-timer in the tech f..."

August 5, 2021 3:02 pm

From Rachiovwn on Where PHP regex fails

"consists of the book itself..."

October 19, 2019 3:08 am

From Bernd Schatz on Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end

"I really enjoyed your article. But i can't understand the example with the interface. The example is reall..."

October 17, 2019 4:50 pm

From Anderson Nascimento Nunes on The conventional wisdom among social media companies is that you can’t put too much of the onus on users to personalize their own feeds

"Can't speak for anyone else, but on my feed reader: 5K bookmarked feeds, 50K regex on the killfile to filter o..."

October 10, 2019 11:17 am

From روابط: البث المباشر – صفحات صغيرة on RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it

"[...] تاريخ تقنية RSS، مقال قديم ويلقي نظرة على الناس الذين طوروا التقنية [...]..."

October 9, 2019 3:08 pm

From Dan Campbell on Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end

"Object-Oriented Programming is Bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM..."

October 4, 2019 8:44 pm

From lawrence on My final post regarding the flaws of Docker / Kubernetes and their eco-system

"Gorgi Kosev, I am working to clean up some of my Packer/Terraform code so I can release it on Github, and then..."

October 4, 2019 5:14 pm

From Gorgi Kosev on My final post regarding the flaws of Docker / Kubernetes and their eco-system

"> Packer, sometimes with some Ansible. The combination of Packer and Terraform typically gives me what I ne..."

October 4, 2019 12:40 pm

From lawrence on My final post regarding the flaws of Docker / Kubernetes and their eco-system

"Gorgi Kosev, about this: "I would love if you could point out which VM based system makes it simpler and..."

October 4, 2019 7:31 am

From Gorgi Kosev on My final post regarding the flaws of Docker / Kubernetes and their eco-system

"I won't list anything concrete that you missed, because that will just give you ammunition to build the next a..."

October 4, 2019 1:39 am

From lawrence on My final post regarding the flaws of Docker / Kubernetes and their eco-system

"Gorgi Kosev, also, I don't think you understand what a "straw man argument" is. This is a definition from Wiki..."