MrApathy

I've been a FastMail customer for about four years and overall I'm really pleased with their service. Like you I have my own domain, previously used Gmail, and provide custom email addresses to every site I register with. Interesting to see who has sold my email or may have been hacked when a rogue email ends up in my inbox (hi, Sunspel!).

I have one issue with FastMail that I didn't have with Gmail. Every few days/weeks I'll get a wave of backspatter from someone spoofing my domain to spam. I've researched and it doesn't look like there's anything I can do about this. Most of the backspatter ends up in my spam folder, but not all of it does. I don't know if Gmail automatically removed backspatter -- not even sending it to my spam folder -- or if this only started after I transferred my domain.

> What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me.

The Google shopping that exists today is not the same service that was originally launched. It used to function more like a standard search, but limited to all online stores. So long as there wasn't a robots.txt, Google was index the site and include the product in their shopping results. So basically like standard search, but with logic to determine if a site represented a store.

Then Google modified shopping so that it was opt-in for the retailers, meaning a large number of stores were no longer included. To be included in Google shopping now a retailer must have a Google merchant/adwords account. It's more of a curated search now.

Nothing wrong with it now, but it used to be great for finding hard-to-find items or items that were mispriced by less sophisticated retailers.

There's a TV show called "Mighty Ships" that profiles various larger ships (mostly commercial, though some passenger or military). One episode focuses on the Tyco Resolute, a cable laying ship:

http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/mighty-ships/tyco-re...

The full version used to be on YouTube.

It's an argument that's highly dependent on how high rents and purchase prices are correlated. In many markets the two are somewhat aligned, but on occasion the two diverge significantly. For example, if the cost to rent is $3k and the monthly mortgage on a comparable place (including insurance, RE tax) is $4k, then in the longer term it may make more sense to purchase. Over time the $1k difference will grow smaller and equity will be built up. But what if there's a "frothy" market where investors are bidding up the price of an apartment and after taking ownership they're renting them out rather than living in them. So it's $3k to rent, but $1.2M to purchase, meaning the monthly mortgage is closer to $6k. Well now it makes sense to rent and invest the difference outside of your local real estate market. This obviously looks like an extreme example, but during the housing boom and happened in Miami, Vegas, and many other cities, and it's arguably occurring in many localized markets today.

What about an EB-5 visa? Isn't that somewhat similar? This doesn't directly buy a US passport, but it does allow for citizenship within a few years (and then, by extension, an American passport).

The Manhattan standard for landlords is 40x annual rent, or $119k.

Your comment is based on the presupposition that lower income kids have:

(1) An internet ready device.

(2) Reliable internet service.

(3) A quiet environment where they're able to study undisturbed.

(4) Have the time available to study, no younger siblings to watch over, and don't have a strenuous paid job.

For many lower income kids studying for the SAT isn't practical, even if the material is available at no cost. Khan Academy certainly helps a lot of students that can't afford expensive tutors or private classes, but it's by no means a complete solution. We need to do more as a society to help disadvantaged students prepare for college.

Their coverage maps offer a good indication as to what to expect in a general area, but they lack the precision necessary to perform due diligence before making a switch.

I work in Manhattan, where I've twice had the misfortune of occupying a cubicle in the exact center of a building. Both T-Mobile and AT&T report full coverage for the entire area, but the many micro dead spots in homes and offices can be a real problem. T-Mobile in particular licenses spectrum that can't penetrate walls as well as some other parts of the spectrum.

I'm sure there's a startup for providing user sourced coverage data at a very granular level, though it would be difficult to deal with the constant changes the carriers are making to their networks.

Spotify is not like Netflix. Spotify is solely dependent on content creators who know exactly how profitable Spotify is at any time, and therefore how far they can be squeezed for royalties.

Netflix has two major advantages: (1) consumers are far more likely to accept a limited video catalog than they are a limited music catalog, and (2) Netflix has spent a lot of money developing their own content. Could Spotify do the same? Possibly, but probably more difficult to do so.

I think Spotify will in the future generate consistent low profits, much like a utility, and their valuation will likely reflect that.

So agree with you completely.

Most chronically homeless people suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, but there's a distinction between the long term homeless and those who are temporarily down on their luck (like one woman mentioned in the article, who moved to Seattle for employment reasons and was thrown off when her state based certification didn't transfer).

I don't think it was Amazon's intent to reach out to individuals whose present condition included serious untreated mental illnesses.

Generally, but not always. An article in The Atlantic a few years back explained how one whale took a trio of casinos for $15M:

Johnson did not miss the math. For example, at the Trop, he was willing to play with a 20 percent discount after his losses hit $500,000, but only if the casino structured the rules of the game to shave away some of the house advantage. Johnson could calculate exactly how much of an advantage he would gain with each small adjustment in the rules of play. He won’t say what all the adjustments were in the final e-mailed agreement with the Trop, but they included playing with a hand-shuffled six-deck shoe; the right to split and double down on up to four hands at once; and a “soft 17” (the player can draw another card on a hand totaling six plus an ace, counting the ace as either a one or an 11, while the dealer must stand, counting the ace as an 11). When Johnson and the Trop finally agreed, he had whittled the house edge down to one-fourth of 1 percent, by his figuring. In effect, he was playing a 50-50 game against the house, and with the discount, he was risking only 80 cents of every dollar he played. He had to pony up $1 million of his own money to start, but, as he would say later: “You’d never lose the million. If you got to [$500,000 in losses], you would stop and take your 20 percent discount. You’d owe them only $400,000.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/the-man-...

Yes, many economics papers are at the intersection of economics and psychology with a focus on human behavior. One of the broad assumptions of economics is that individuals are largely rational, but controlled experiments sometimes show that people don't always act in their best interest.

But at a macro level, there are no controlled experiments. We can look toward "natural" experiments (e.g., wages and the labor rate of two border towns, where one is in a state that has raised minimum wage and the other has not), but there's nothing like the gold standard double blind randomized trial that you'd find in a drug study.

Given the shift in your responsibilities over the years it may be worthwhile to take the effort to put together three or four slightly different resumes, each highlighting a different aspect of one of your prior roles. When submitting a resume select the one that most closely matches the responsibilities outlined in the description. Even if you feel like you're master of none, doesn't mean your resume can't have focus.

I have made the below recipe before and it came out very well. With a cup (uncooked) of rice it makes five servings. Two possible shortcuts: (1) use a store bought rotisserie chicken and (2) leave out the cilantro, so that instead of having to blend the sauce you can simply stir it in a bowl.

http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/ch...

Good luck!

I prepare most of the meals that my wife and I eat. I find that having a routine is highly beneficial and keeps me on track. Here's what works well for me:

* Each week I make one meal from each of the following three categories: soup (or chili), meat oriented (usually chicken, sometimes beef), and pasta (or risotto). I make four servings, so we'll have the same meal for two consecutive nights. Each category has four to six different dishes, so even though we eat the same dish two nights in a row we're not making it too often. The limited number of dishes means I don't have a lot of ingredients in my kitchen that I'm using infrequently. On the seventh night we'll eat out or order in.

* A significant number of recipes come from a few different(don't laugh) Real Simple books that we own. The recipes are typically, well, simple to prepare, relatively healthy, and don't require a lot of time. They call for ingredients I can find without having to go to a specialty grocery store. I also have a few recipes from blogs and NY Times Cooking, which has a back-catalog of thousands of recipes.

* Lunches are usually sandwich based, though sometimes extra leftovers. Sandwiches can get boring quickly, so I find adding a lot of ingredients helps. A typically sandwich may be two slices of low sodium turkey, bacon, cheese, broccoli sprouts, and a slice of tomato. For a side I may add in a piece of fruit or a handful of almonds (sometimes plain, sometimes chocolate covered). Usually twice a week I'll go out for lunch. Makes it a little more special when it doesn't happen every day.

* I live in a smaller apartment with limited kitchen space, so I try to use recipes that don't require specialty equipment.

* I make a list of food I'll need for the week on Sunday mornings and make one trip to the store. No going back until next Sunday.

* I try to find recipes that will last for a few days in the refrigerator. Most Sundays I'll make two recipes, providing us with food for four nights. This means I'm usually cooking only one night during the work week. Start at around 4:30pm on Sunday, done eating and cleaning up by 7pm.

Tonight we're having broccoli soup, one of the more "challenging" dishes on my list:

http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017010-seared-broccoli-a...

I have variously seen the upper boundary for Gen X as 1976, 1979, and 1982. Having been born toward the end of 1980 and comparing myself to those born in 1970 and 1990 (squarely in the middle of their respective generations), I find myself having far more in common with the latter. Hence why I consider myself a millennial.

But never will I give up the skinny jeans!

As an even older millennial (35), I have very fond memories of Yahoo.

I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of magnitude web pages to crawl and SEO/spam hadn't yet taken off, but even still the AV results weren't always useful. Without page rank or a decent sorting algorithm, I remember often going through pages of results.

Yahoo had it all: games, continuously updated stock quotes (at a time when I would look up share prices in the morning's paper, priced to the nearest eighth of a dollar), weather, news, and hand picked results from around the web. It was all I was previously getting from CompuServe/Prodigy, but at no cost.

But now I haven't visited Yahoo in years. It's like when your favorite teenage band breaks up. You're a little sad, but you've moved on. The fond memories are for life.

Edited to add: we all used a home page back then because tabs hadn't yet been invented, meaning the restore previously opened tabs option that we all use today also didn't exist. One's home page had a much greater importance back then.

Very likely the offer is contingent upon the successful completion of a background check. A thorough background check (criminal, education, credit) can cost a few hundred dollars, so firms won't proceed until an offer has been accepted.

Even though he was exonerated, his prison stay and other convictions may show up. He can explain, but a firm can rescind an offer for whatever reason they want (outside of protected statuses, which does not include criminal background). For a security position firms may want perfectly clean backgrounds.

Not just business:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509

In most cultures co-pilots are encouraged to speak out when the pilot has or is about to make a mistake. There were several Korean Air crashes where the co-pilots knew the pilot was wrong and did nothing, in some cases costing them their lives. After recognizing this there was a strong push to change the culture at Korean Air, but I don't know that this was a lesson brought over to other industries.

Could you provide a source for your anecdote? I find it hard to believe that the FDIC would look at a mere six loans when their own guidelines [1] call for at least eight, and that's with a population of a mere ten loans. For a higher level of precision on any decent loan portfolio the sample size will be at least 50.

Furthermore, having dealt with regulators before, there's always an opportunity to provide written responses with requests for data or an appeal process. Not hard for a bank to argue that a sample size of six isn't representative of their overall lending practices.

[1] (Warning: PDF) https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/compliance/manual/11/XI-10....

Munroe recently wrote a book full of these explanations, "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words."

Bill Gates' review is here: http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Thing-Explainer

Quite a lot, actually. Certainly relative to almost all other areas of the country the rate of car ownership is low, but the streets are so packed with parked cars that many vehicle owners are willing to pay for private storage with monthly rental rates that are typically between $450 and $600.

My impression, though, is that most car owners are not using their cars for intra-Manhattan travel, which is what Uber is doing a lot of. Rather they're using their cars to travel to NJ, upstate NY, Long Island, or other areas where taking an Uber isn't practical.

Some years back NYC [1] (under Mayor Giuliani) instituted a policy whereby drivers suspected of driving while intoxicated would have their vehicles seized by the police. Unlike unlicensed limos, DWI is a real public safety problem.

The problem with what NYC did, however, was that a driver could be found not guilty of DWI and still have his car seized. There were many complaints regarding due process, uneven applications, etc., and eventually the city abandoned this policy.

I mention this not because I sympathize with drunk drivers (I don't), but because it's not the first time the city has done something like this.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/24/nyregion/drive-drunk-lose-...

One solution to this is to create a plain text resume to be used when submitting through an applicant tracking system. You can still perform some basic formatting in plain text (e.g., string of hyphens for a horizontal line, asterisk for bullet, carriage return at 60 characters to prevent erroneous line wrapping, etc.).

At the top of the plain text resume include a line stating something like "MS Word/PDF formatted resume available at http://ExternalWebsite..."

Yes, QlikView can do histograms easily. They're basically bar charts where the expression is counted, not summed, with the width between bars set to zero. They're not labeled as histograms in QlikView, which may be why there was some confusion.

Regarding the statistics portion of your comment, QlikView has built in functions in the load script for chi squared, t and z tests (including confidence intervals), linear regression, least squares, residuals, r squared, F statistic, etc. It doesn't offer the breadth that you may get from SAS or R (especially with R's CRAN packages), but it should be sufficient for dashboard level reporting.

QlikView is similar to Tableau, though more powerful and with a steeper learning curve. But if Tableau is too expensive, likely that QlikView is, too.

Another option is Looker, a relatively new product that relies more heavily on existing transaction/DW infrastructure. Dashboards are not ugly.

You can also look at d3, though by comparison development time will be much slower than the other two I've named.