Hey there, would like to chat if you're open to it - jeremy goodrich linkedin, facebook, etc (the digital marketing, consulting, hookupJS, etc guy). Cheers.
-4 karma · joined August 28, 2012
This looks pretty awesome as well, thanks for sharing.
At the time, I had it all. Consulting firm was paying half the bills and the scalable, bootstrapped and profitable media business had hit north of six million visitors the month before the big move.
New location: Maldives. Sun, sand and surf. Want to see dolphins? Top five in the world. Coral reefs? Some of the best. That underwater restaurant Tom Cruise stayed at on his honeymoon at Conrad Hilton, when it was the world's first? It's an amazing place, quite special - I hit it up in 2008 the year before we moved there.
Unlike a lot of folks that move to random locations, or say Costa Rica, the first time I moved overseas with a startup (left the US to join a Costa Rican one), the Maldives trip was my second time.
A few exceptions about my move: * Father-in-law was Vice President, of the country at the time (I left before he became president) * Then president was family by marriage; personally, I thought the guy was a sh!tty father when we went to the first daughter's birthday. Imho, both parents, regardless of how busy, should make time. Eg, when it was my older son's b-day, only the first lady showed. She was cool. The president was a bit uptight. Long story.
Pros about moving to Maldives: * Any foreigner can get the "local," discount, like teachers, for example * The islands are amazing. Seriously. Try lounging on the beach where Madonna stayed...the resort owners is nice and well, the beach spectacular. They also have the largest array of solar panels privately owned in their region. * Fish is plentiful, fresh, and some of the very best tuna in the world. There are some amazing dishes.
Cons: * Everything is imported and subject to a 100% tax * Capital island is 1 square mile...most densely populated city in the world per square meter * Internet situation is abysmal.
I lack credibility here, as I have zero background in networking, but suffice to say after meeting multiple ministers of telecommunications, pitching the government to try to fix the situation AND lobbying after my father-in-law, at the time, was President of the Country...well, I know why in my home country, "Net neutrality," makes people confused.
This article is too light, too shallow on details for those of us who've done the globe trotting thing and worked in multiple countries overseas.
Second thing is as a creator, why not use Patreon, Indiegogo, Gumshow, or IndieAisle. Most of my books are on all the major platforms, outside of Google Play.
I can't see a compelling reason I'd list here, or shop here. The design is decent, but it feels a bit...generic.
We're building some similar stuff in node / mongo / js: https://github.com/jgoodrich77/hookupJS
User / group management in particular.
On the flip side, suppose I'm a terrible consultant and so bad, I can't even recognize my own failure. It's going to be a struggle to learn to accept the input, even from those who care, that I really suck at consulting. Ergo, it's a vicious cycle indeed.
Wouldn't one possible outcome of research like this be that only those dedicated to self improvement will eventually become competent, and all others are doomed to eventual incompetence in any given field where on-going learning is needed?
Is it so hard to publish the, "Rules of the road?" In my day, we called them, "Terms of Service," for private companies and public institutions have laws, etc, that govern their operation. All of that is how the system, near as I've ever been able to figure out, should function.
Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read the article.
My children have multiple passports and I know very well how restrictions work in multiple countries, having worked in three so far full time for long enough to need to know. The way the high school in the article is being run, as well as the opaque nature of the system administrators rules, is abhorrent.
Tax payer money being spent to...enshrine and embiggen the ego of some two bit hack who can't get a job in the private sector because their technical skills aren't up to par? From the sound of it, this may be the case. Sorry but regardless of public or private sector, a person needs to be qualified to hold the job they are hired to do.
Somebody, please, fire the webmaster and the director here. Then let's start implementing some transparent policies or dump the notion of, "Free speech."
Even more so, any American with children, like me. The treatment this guy received is unethical at best - if the adults in charge don't know what the (insert expletive here) they are doing when being paid for it, harassing an educated person, regardless of age, because they are smarter & better with technology is in no way a solution.
What we need to do is stop educating the Americans we have, "Free speech," if these policies are reflective of the modern nation state we've built. If that's not the case and we still value some form of, "Free speech," then the way this has been handled should be investigated and dealt with.
Not yet another Benghazi investigation. Seriously.
I already passed it to my CTO so we can figure out when and how to integrate it. Very cool stuff and thanks for sharing & building this. +10 internets to you.
Rule #10 I've seen tossed out the window too many times, as a consultant, to admit it. Thing is though, when I review my own performance, it's always when well balanced with actual life that I get the most work done, even if I'm putting in a paltry ~50 or less hours per week of work.
As an employer and manager, I've also seen the difference between people's engagement and output at peak and at "overclocked performance," where they put in an extreme amount of overtime. Perhaps I'm missing an instance, but I've yet to see the team win where they gave up everything that meant something in their lives in an effort to somehow make the business better.
When I review a site like Author Earnings dot com (no affiliation, other than being a huge fan of such an amazing amount of free and open data) it shows pretty clearly that, "An Indie author can make it." In fact, the bulk of the data shows Indies have as good a chance, or better, at cracking the best seller list on the site.
For free, on both sides of the interest pool for authors and readers, there is a ton of value and a growing amount of it. Then if you start looking at other models like Issuu (recently on the app store, after long absence) and Wattpad, it really makes you scratch your head at the tone of the article.
Without the preface, "For newbies to the publishing category," it reads like a poorly articulated puff piece. Sorry.
Immigration is a tricky, tricky issue. When living overseas, the ambassador from another country dropped a proverbial bombshell about the human trafficking in the country where I lived. To whit, when living in Costa Rica myself, I only found out on exit from the country my former employer never got me a work permit - eg, I was working there illegally. I'd love to say yes, no fault of my own, but I should have investigated the situation myself. Lesson learned.
So having worked in labor myself a bit (helping people get jobs) and been on multiple sides of various business disputes in various countries...well, the situation in US employment in Silicon Valley is quite puzzling.
This is because traffic, in general, is really caused by a small number of cars. It seems like it's everywhere but the root cause (there was a paper even on HN that talked about it) is that people can't follow each other at an even speed. This uneven speed then results in more braking, more backup, etc. A few cars in the lead who don't accelerate properly can have a disproportionately negative impact on traffic flow and average speed.
Another option is, given Math / CS, self publish an ebook. I make a few hundred from fiction, and on a good month, enough to buy lunch or more via my non fiction tutorial style ebooks on Amazon and elsewhere.
Scrivener to create, Amazon KDP and Smashwords to distribute (plus own website, etc) and you're golden. A technical book can sell for $100+ bucks per month at ten copies, $10 each, and if it's enough to save somebody 1/2 hour of work, it'll probably do very, very well.
Not a single one.
More than a dozen interviews, zero offers but I can find consulting offers (with far, far lower hourly wage than in 2006-2009 last time I did consulting). I have friends who have been unable to find work also, with skills, experience and blue chip, so to speak, resumes. Somehow saying we need more skilled workers when folks in Silicon Valley with a decade of experience who have worked for, and been given awards by, the biggest names in tech only means that employers want it cheaper.
A friend on an H1B who lost their job? Gainfully employed in less than a month after losing theirs, then again, they have to be seriously motivated else they get shipped away. Until the new immigration policy gets passed where we export jobless Californians to Oregon, my only option was to rebuild a consulting business.
Funniest thing is, now that I'm an "Agency," again, I've had a list of people wanting me to hire them. So it certainly feels like there is a lot more unemployment out there than what I read in the media, at least with my experience...of course, YMMV.
Agreed with the first comment - no fun at all for your friend indeed. The links are good at the end, I've read about a few of those tools even being relatively non-technical. I think more people should have a basic understanding of how to maintain security, but, this doesn't strike me as the best way to teach folks.
* Preferential payment terms - a large co will say, "If you offer better pricing than you offer to us, you'll automatically reduce our rate to the new low rate offered." This ensures you can't price gouge them, but it also ensures that if you price correctly, telling other businesses that's your lowest rate will potentially make them more likely to close.
* Large customers that are household names instills a trust with a firm that helps them close deals with companies that are smaller in the B2B space in particular (5+ years in sales doing professional services, friends who run similar firms, etc).
* It's not only sociopaths (per the first comment above, lol) who can close deals with name brand firms. I fully agree it's probable some who raise money are sociopaths.
The phrase, "Manage your own psychology," has really stuck with me after I heard from Sam Altman in that Stanford class - knowing more than a few people who've been under a lot of stress in their role over my life has really helped me understand that we all crack in our own unique ways when the pressure cooker starts to heat up. (edit, spelling).
* Ebooks - I publish under four different names; the big alias I've been making $100-$400 dollars per month for several years. A few months I made over a thousand, but I haven't published anything new in months, thus the drop. Sales via Amazon (90%), Smashwords, BN, etc - I'm not on Google Play yet but on Apple, which is about 5x bigger than BN now.
* Adsense - back in the day I co-founded a niche social network, peaked at nearly $60K per month in adsense, despite being 11 years old, the site still gets a few hundred thousand visitors per month - I sold my stake in 2012.
* I'd like to add a 3rd here, but there isn't at present. Hopefully soon, keep posting these, they are hugely inspiring for all of us who mostly lurk.