djm

Just thought I'd post a message to say "keep up the good work" to kale and "try it out if you haven't already" to everyone else. He does a great job of selecting interesting articles.

Reading the email I was quite surprised to see that it only has 368 subscribers.

Parents, government, and everybody in between seem focused on pushing as many young people into university education as possible. But it seems to me that we have pushed them too hard if they are cheating on this scale. Lots of them just don’t belong there.

I imagine a fantasy future world in which ageing professors tell stories of the dark ages of their early careers; a time in which most of their students were not really interested in the subject of their degrees. A brave new world in which young people who might like to get a job, start a business, write a book, or just study independently of any official course, can go ahead and do so without putting themselves through three years of painful essay faking and pretense because “that’s what everyone else does”.

If the object of the game is to learn how to feel comfortable being rejected by people then perhaps it's better to not include rejections that result from policy in your score.

For example, if you ask for a discount in a store and the clerk rejects you, they are just acting on store policy, not giving a personal reaction.

If you sell door to door the person who tells you to get lost is most likely rejecting what you are selling or rejecting the idea of being harassed by a salesman, rather than rejecting you personally.

I got the email notification about these upgrades this morning and it was poorly written. You might want to re-visit the text and look it over. I've deleted it now so can't quote you specifics but I remember seeing lines advising that services would be available until Jan 2010 etc.

It would have also helped having a line at the top simply stating what Mockingbird is for those of us who may have forgotten.

(great product though; I'll be trying it again now I've been reminded it exists)

I think you're basically right; it's already happening on a large scale with lower skilled jobs. Over the last few years lots of employers have switched to hiring people on short-term contracts and getting rid of them before they become entitled to redundancy pay.

About two years ago the benefits system was struggling to cope with this. A person would be claiming JSA, get a job and stop claiming, then get let go after a few months and replaced with another cheap unemployed person. They would then have to make a new JSA claim. I think the result was an increased load in new benefits claims and delays in processing them.

This way of conducting business is pretty bad imo - it just screws poor people. But there are some good things happening too - especially with trying to lower the cost of public sector employees (see the example on TV yesterday of forcefully retiring police officers with 30+ years service to reduce high salaries and pension contributions).

I'll look at some of the things you mentioned and see about trying them.

(thanks again!)

If your reading this Conrad do you mind me asking you about your art work? It's, hands down, some of the best cartoon drawing I've seen on the web. I'd love to know what tools you use to do the drawing and make the animations, and what process you go through when developing them.

Thanks to all involved in the event and justin.tv for showing them. I'm probably going to go through them all again at some point - there was so much good stuff and I was too excited to write notes as I watched.

AdFreeZone - There is (or was) money in this. Slashdot at one point allowed you to pay $5 to remove ads (still might for all I know). I think Kuro5hin.org did something similar. I don't know how this is still relevant with AdBlock though.

Or did you mean something more than a community in a website? Somehow I can't help but be reminded of the "walled city" in Tad William's "otherland" books.

AfMijn - There are a couple of auction sites that implement short bidding periods. Google just found me bidz.com for example. I think finding a way to verify users as serious in an affordable way is what would get in the way of somebody implementing this.

ArticleBody - There is a service doing something similar, but I can't remember what it's called. Actually, it might be a firefox extension I'm thinking about.

DeadMansKnob - In the UK knob is a slang term for penis. Saying dead mans knob out loud will cause a lot of laughs.

exes4all - I know I've come across something like this before. It turned into people telling each others secrets and trying to hurt their former partners.

FossBounty - Sites like Rentacoder have escrow services. I don't remember seeing this applied to FOSS code bounties & it would be interesting to see it happen.

hardhacks - See instructables.com and plenty of other niche electronics hobbyist sites etc.

NoSEO - I wonder what Gabriel Weinberg might think about this.

WeWatch - YC funded a startup that was doing this a few years ago. I don't know what happened to them.

By the way, thanks for sharing :)

That line stuck out for me. Writing is window into the minds of the people you might hire as well as the company doing the hiring though.

I was thinking the other day about the tests companies give prospective employees to do pre-interview. One idea I came up with in addition to giving them the usual fizzbuzz programming problems was to test their writing ability by:

(1) Giving them a page of simple code with comments removed and asking them to add comment headers to each function, and

(2) Asking them to write a description in plain english of how a moderately complex function works (make it a function that implements an algorithm rather than something that processes data).

I'm not in a position to do any hiring and try this myself but I think it would add a lot of value for the employer in filtering applicants. If I were looking for a job seeing an employer doing this would give me a lot more confidence in them also.

If country A wanted country B to do X then it's ability to make it happen through violence will be limited by the willingness of citizens of country A to let it happen.

That willingness will be affected by by the degree of how "alien" people in country B are to people in country A. TV, internet, increased population movement through technological change[1] and so on will decrease that alienness.

[1] I mean both in terms of technology enabling physical travel of people from A->B and technology making a person's origin less important in where they can live during their lifetimes (for example, a programmer can go to work anywhere there is work - they are not confined by location other than by arbitrary things like visas)

What Gibson is saying is that, (1) The rate of development of new technology is speeding up and that, therefore, (2) Humans experience an increasing amount of change in their lifetimes.

So, in a way, the future is getting here quicker.

As an aside, I can't wait to read his new book. I got it when it came out and promised myself I'll save it as a luxury to read in between getting my startups product ready to launch and actually launching. I've had to cellotape it back in the Amazon box to ensure I stick to my promise.

The basic process as I remember it was to bootstrap a system by making a new partition, setting up a minimal directory tree, building a new C compiler (& libs/associated tools) then chrooting to it and using it to build up the rest of the system.

It was a fun process but tiring and time consuming. I wouldn't do it again.

(1) Think about cost in terms of the work you had to do to buy it, not just the sale price. You are (most often) buying X with post-tax income so add your tax back on.

(2) Think about the opportunity cost of making the purchase, or "what can't I afford if I buy X?"

(3) Consider whether you are just buying X because it is a status object and whether there is a cheaper alternative (do you really need that merc when you can get from a->b in a honda? and so on).

In choosing what things are important to spend money on I'd generally echo others comments - people looking back over their lifetimes tend to value experiences they had more than junk they bought so spend your money buying experiences.

You don't think three cars is excessive? We'll have to differ in opinion there.

A lot of your costs depend on location obviously but, yes, I stand by my hunch.

What I wanted to say was that to learn about managing your finances you need to take an active role in learning how things work - whether by reading books, going on a course, whatever.

As a base level of financial literacy I don't think people need that much to make a big difference in their lives. Teach people budgeting, how to track their spending, and a basic understanding of savings and credit interest rates/compound growth etc.

Teaching people to live within their means and use credit for "needs" instead of "wants" will be one of the hardest lessons to impart. I don't know how you'd accomplish that.

I'm not trying to be sarcastic, just to point out the strangeness of it all. Most people wouldn't turn the ignition key and start trying to drive a car without taking some instructon first, but they are happy to whip out that credit card whenever the chance allows them.

The main problem with teaching financial literacy is that you have to be literate yourself in order to teach it. Sadly, most peoples parents just don't fit the bill.

In my original comment what I was really trying to get at is that, as an investment strategy, you would want to maximise your wealth by minimising your realisable income and that the typical way to do that over time has been to accumulate wealth in property. I guess I was wrong about this in the US but it's still a valid strategy in the UK.

Then again, your article was talking about startup founders, who (in general) presumably are quite willing to take risk!

First, for the rest of this comment I'll define income as 'what you've got coming in' and wealth as 'what you keep or what you grow'.

Most people fail to make this distinction (If you ask somebody if they are wealthy they will start talking about how much they get paid), but it's important, especially when thinking about how to optimize your tax situation.

Tony's article makes several assumptions:

(1) That you want to live a high consumption lifestyle. The $200k p/a first class lifestyle he quotes isn't necessarily what everybody wants. Even people with some wealth have to live within their means or they'll (as he correctly pointed out) lose it eventually.

I'd actually take a guess that a typical family wouldn't be able to spend $200k in a year if they did not make purchases whose primary purpose was to display status.

(2) That you would invest your $4m in a low-return investment.

(3) That you would invest the money in such a way that 100% of your income is realisable (subject to income tax).

The best strategy, imo, for somebody with a freshly minted $4m to play with is to put as much as possible into an investment where growth in their wealth is not realisable (which usually means buying property because appreciation is not taxed whilst it's happening [1]).

They have a balancing act to play because they want to invest as much in this way as possible whilst leaving enough in an investment that will provide them with an income substantial enough to live on.

As for Ryan W's article, I'd basically agree with what he said other than the part about buying a property with a mortgage. It would be better to buy a smaller property you could afford outright or partner with some other investors to buy the apartment complex (which has it's own set of problems).

[1] I might actually be wrong about this. I know I've read somewhere that there have been attempts to tax wealth directly in some US states. I've no idea how the govt would be able to do this in a workable way though - how to you value the appreciation in somebody's house when the only meaningful way to value a property is to sell it?

The best thing, imo, about this system is that you can forget about it for a month and then, when you try it again, you get back into it in no time. It definitely seems to have the edge over other systems I've tried in getting things into your permanent and automatic memory.

Mostly what I've looked at so far are cob/straw houses. With these you are basically looking at a rubble/concrete base (which you can hopefully scavenge for free), clay/straw/sand for making the cob, and wood for the roof/window/doorframes etc. The best budget option for a roof seems to be turf, although that cuts down on the amount of rain water you could collect if you wanted to independant from a water company.

The biggest obstacle in the UK seems to be finding suitable land and getting planning permission etc. I don't really know any solution to that.

Over the past few weeks I've been reading 'building with cob: a step by step guide" which covers both the technical and legal aspects of building one of these structures in the UK. It's a great book.

(1) Peace and quiet costs money. You may find it difficult to work if you stay anywhere that the backpacker crowd congregates.

(2) The longer you stay somewhere the cheaper it gets. An example from my experience - I spent a month in chaing mai in northern thailand where I rented an apartment. Per night it would have cost £18 if I was staying for a few days. Staying a month meant they gave me a tenancy agreement and it worked out as about £8 p/night plus electricity which was about £15 for the month.

You might want to try spending a few nights at different youth hostels in the city you intend to stay, then find an apartment for a month or two in the area you like the most.

(3) Food is both massively over-priced and pretty crap if you buy it in the hotel or nearby restaurants to where you are staying. Try and go further afield to eat where the locals do. Don't be put off by street food - it's good and cheap.

(4) Take plenty of time to just relax and go with the flow. try and put yourself out there and make friends. Avoid tourists attractions and guide books. I went to thailand intending to do exactly this but somehow didn't quite let myself go as much as I should have done. I've regretted it since.

Above all, actually go and do it. Most people who say they want to never really do.

I'm currently trying to build myself a money making web app that will allow me to get back on the road too. Good luck :)

Honestly, it seems like kids are expected to work flat out in school these days, killing themselves to get top grades and doing as much extra curricular stuff as they can schedule. It's as if taking a larger course load and burning out is a badge of honour.

If I went back to school now I would take a light course load in order to better spend my time on my own projects. I wouldn't worry too much about my grades as long as they were "good enough" and I would just try to enjoy myself and keep it fun.