Yikes, are you really only allowed to use "donate" buttons if you're a nonprofit? I use them as a "tip jar" on my blog. What's the options for for-profit when you're giving money for nothing in particular?
Can someone smarter than me explain how exactly 401k fees are assessed? My wife's 401k has $3 taken out of it as a fee once a quarter; my 401k doesn't even have that. Or are the fees built into the returns? (e.g., my 401k is up 5% for the year, but without the fees it'd be up 6% or something like that?)
The article mentions in passing that similar tech is used to price airline tickets, but the important difference is that airline tickets are now almost universally purchased through sites like Kayak or Travelocity, which allows customers to quickly and easily compare similar trips and make a choice (generally on price). This has resulted in airline ticket prices plummeting in real terms over the past 10 years or so. In apartments, on the other hand, this tech seems to give more power to landlords, unless some smart startup builds a Kayak-for-apartments.
I lived in Berlin for a few months some years ago and it's an awesome place to live generally. Plus relatively cheap for a city of its size and cool factor, especially if you get a place in the ex-East.
What would happen if corporate taxes were lowered to zero, but capital gains were taxed as ordinary income? Corporations are not people, etc., and maybe taxes should only be imposed when they actually enter a human being's possession.
If you're a Portugese citizen, you can work anywhere in the EU, right? Why not take advantage, I say. Better, could you take higher-paying freelance work from Germany or the UK but continue to live in relatively lower-cost Portugal?
How do "analysts" get interviewed by a major newspaper and then their opinions presented as if they're actual news? If the Times wants to run a "here are some opinions from people who are generally knowledgable about the industry but have no specific detailed information about the matter under discussion," they have plenty of on-staff writers who could do the job.
One hack that I definitely find useful for saving money is to create different savings accounts for different purposes and putting a set amount in each on each month. For instance, I have a vacation savings account that I put $300 into every month; it becomes a repository of of cash I can use when I travel, and I can spend it in big bursts when I do. If that $300 month just sat there in my ordinary savings account, I'd probably find something else to spend it on.
Well, there's debt and there's debt. Right now my wife and I have three major debts: mortgage (4%), student loans (4.5%), HELOC (1.75%) -- and those rates are all effectively lower because the interest is tax deductable. When you're talking those kinds of interest rates, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to put money into retirement accounts (especially if those too are tax advantaged and/or if your employer matches).
But yes, if you have any kind of credit card debt, you're probably paying 10% or more on that, and you should be paying that down (and not adding anything new!) with money you'd otherwise earmark for savings.
It's worth noting that the reason so many people routinely speed is that roads are engineered to be driven on faster than the speed limit. The best way to get people to drive 35 miles an hour in the city (say) is to build roads with narrow lanes, frequent stop signs/signals, roundabouts, etc.
One aspect of the experience in the Apple Store that Johnson doesn't mention is that all the gadgets there are powered up and you can play with them. I've never understood how cell phone stores and electronics retailers who almost invariably have dummy units out on display expect to sell anything to a casual buyer. This especially goes for Windows Phone 7; people who use it seem to love it, but it doesn't have much iPhone style mindshare so it seems like it NEEDS to be out there to fiddle with. But I've only seen dummy units in stores.
It's kind of amazing that the company that is finally standing up against insane, stupid patents is ... a bookstore. But perhaps it's because B&N doesn't have any mobile patents of its own to defend?
I do think that an important part of maintaining an exercise regimen is to trick yourself into making exercise a reward. Yes, the endorphin rush you get from working out can be a reward in and of itself but in my experience that doesn't always last over the long term and sometimes you need an extra boost.
My wife and I have a rowing machine and entertainment setup in the basement and we've both started working our way through TV shows that the other one doesn't want to watch (the relaunched Dr. Who for me, True Blood for her) while rowing. Both often feature cliffhangers and other incentives to keep watching, but the rule is that we only watch while we row. Makes us much more likely to do it.
Actually, pizza continues to count as a vegetable in US schools. The Obama Administration tried to change the FDA's classification system that determines the make up of federally subsidized school lunch programs, but the move was blocked by lobbying from companies that sell frozen pizzas to schools.
"The debators of the rules are more interested in satisfying the group than in definition or algorithmic simplicity or purity of concept."
This sentence is incredibly useful for understanding why modelling a process hammered out by more than three people will always be more complicated than you think it is.
The amount of entitlement on both sides of this debate is always pretty amazing/amusing to me.
1) Publishers (and I am a publisher with an ad-supported site): Nobody owes you an audience or a payday. If advertising is so annoying that people are going out of their way to block it, then you're in trouble.
2) Readers: Nobody owes you professional-grade writing/video/whatever. If it's impossible to make a living doing this stuff -- and in the first decade or two of the web, the way to make a living doing this stuff has been advertising -- then most people will stop doing it and your life will be worse for it.
I don't know what the solution is, but pretending that the other side of what ought to be a mutually beneficial relationship is your prisoner and that you have the right to demand they do things to meet your needs and your needs only won't get you far.
True enough at the moment but you'd be surprised how quickly (using "quickly" on a historical scale, we're still talking years or decades) that can change when economic forces start pushing.
If you had told most Americans just 30 years ago that China would be a land of millionaires and gleaming cities and high-skill factories, they'd be flabbergasted, not least because the country was run by an incompetent Communist dictatorship that had starved millions of its own people for no good reason.
The thing that most bugs me about this is that the Google chef somehow needs to have his rights defended. He was made a promise when he was hired and Google cheerfully fulfilled its obligation to follow through with that. Ditto on whoever is being screwed at Zynga. "Unvested" does not mean "maybe you will get this at a later date, who can say."
Hmm, but if I understand correctly how this all works, even if you vote and pay taxes in Smalltown, if Bigtown is the default placename for 12345, the post office will still happily deliver mail to your address even if the envelope says "Bigtown, EG 12345" on it.
Of course, humans care about this stuff more than you can imagine. There was a minor kerfuffle in the Buffalo area a few years ago when a woman bought a house in Lancaster (an upscale suburb) only to find that the default placename for her zip code was Depew (a working-class suburb). She somehow managed to get someone at the newspaper to write a story about her plight, which included a note that her copy of Gourmet Magazine came late because she insisted on putting "Lancaster" in the city name. I'm not sure why that would affect anything unless she was also deliberately giving them the wrong zip code though.
On a similar note, I've always found it kind of amusing/frustrating that forms in the US make you fill out city, state, and zip code, when in fact the zip code indicates a specific city and state. I realize that's a huge database of geolocation data to keep as part of the program, but I wonder if there could be some kind of lookup that goes on behind the scenes and fills in the city and state if the response is quick enough (and allows the user to fill it in manually if it doesn't).
One advantage of Tumblr that intrigues me, and is discussed in the article, is the community/social/sharing aspects. The nice thing is that so long as you don't want/need a ton of customization, you can set up a Tumblr blog and for anyone who doesn't participate in Tumblr it just looks like an ordinary blog and can be read and subscribed to as such (with RSS or the like). But then you also get the potential boost of reblogs and likes from Tumblr users. Seems like the best of both worlds.
True, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) if you're using a Wordpress.com blog you have to have a URL of the format yourblog.wordpress.com, right? Whereas if you want to go to your own domain you need to self-host. But you could set up a domain you own to resolve to a Tumblr blog that's hosted by Tumblr.
There's definitely room for both platforms in different scenarios. I run a self-hosted Wordpress blog that's fairly complicated and high-traffic, and that's the right choice for that platform. But I'm probably going to start a more stripped-down personal blog soon and Tumblr seems like the way to go for that.
The point is that article that newspaper folk produce using this method will essentially be along the lines of the Google-chasing Demand Media content farm stuff. Give people exactly what they're looking for at the top of their mind and a lot of important reporting goes away.
It's not your article he's complaining about, it's the articles that your article encourages people to write.
Anyone else find it weird that the illustration for this article is a group of Asian-American high school students at NYC's Hunter College (which is, despite its name, a high school, not a university)? If those kids are going to HS in the US, they're probably either US citizens (as the name "Asian-American" implies) or have permanent residency, and aren't subject to the constraints on starting a business here that are the focus of the article.
But, whatever, we need a picture for this article, let's just find one of a bunch of yellow kids, right? They're all the same.
Well, the assertion of the report in the main article is that, in essence, the economy revolves around debt, in one form or another. Remember, debt and investment are two sides of the same coin: you can't invest in something without someone else ultimately owing you money (i.e., being in your debt). And U.S. treasury bills are an investment/debt instrument that's hugely important to a lot of people and institutions, particularly the financial institutions that form the base for most of the economy.
Another way to look at it is that it's not just government debt that's important; there have to be some people who owe other people money or the economy doesn't function. The normal process of business institution-building is founded on the idea of loaning money (again, we usually call this "investment," but it's debt at its base). A good way to think about it is that if you are debt free, that's good for you, but if everyone were debt free, we'd still be living in an incredibly primitive economy.
Well, this is yet more evidence, as if anyone needed it, that budgeting for a sovereign nation -- particularly one whose economy the world revolves around -- is qualitatively different from budgeting for a household.
That's interesting. I was born in '74 and think of myself as being just past the "core" of Gen X (I voted for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as my prom theme!); my older step-siblings all were in their early to mid '20s in the early '90s recession. How much do people now in their late 40s (or just starting to turn 50, I guess) really identify w/Gen X? I know it's just a dumb construct, I've always associated it with people a bit closer in age to myself (no doubt because of my own biases).
I think he's talking about the (relatively mild) early '90s recession. The core of Gen X are people born in the late 60s and early 70s -- people who would have been entering the workforce in the early '90s.