How much to make you happy?

UPDATE: the video is here. If you skip forward to 17:15 or so the announcer walks on to the stage and he brings up the 60k number. Of course, the whole video is probably worth watching.

So I'm really looking forward to this TED talk from Daniel Kahneman.

The choice quote from the link:

Psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman says millions of dollars won't buy you happiness, but a job that pays $60,000 a year might help. Happiness levels increase up to the $60K mark, but "above that it's a flat line," he said.

"Money does not buy you experiential happiness but lack of money certainly buys you misery," he said. But the real trick, Kahneman said, is to spend time with people you like.

So why $60k? My initial suspicion (having not seen the presentation yet, it's not up), is that this has to do with some 80/20 math. In particular, that above $60k / year puts you into the top 20% of income earners which is probably all it takes to make most people happy. It's enough.

The numbers from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States

A US job that pays $60k puts you almost exactly in the top 20% of US income earners. (assuming that you have a job and are over 25) In fact, it puts you in the top 40% of household incomes. So if you make $60k+ and your husband stays at home and watches the kids, you're still making more than the average family. And you probably have a University degree or better.

If you exclude some of the outlandish parts of the country (NY, LA), then $60k + health benefits provides you a very comfortable quality of life. And if you're like most earners in this category, there's a very good chance that your spouse also works which bumps you up even higher. If you make 60k and your spouse makes even $10 / hour (i.e.: 20k), that puts your family into the top 20% of US households.

So is that going to make you happy? Why don't we "imagine the life"?

You can probably afford to travel once / year, own a relatively new car, maintain a mortgage (at 2000 rates), kids a pet and a hobby or two (if you have time).

You go to a church with 100 families and you're in the top 20 for income. In fact, your top 20 group probably makes up 50 to 75% of the church funding b/c you have more disposable income. It sounds selfish, but living in such a peer group is very comfortable feeling.

Your kid is likely one of the richest 4 or 5 kids in their class. When the kids want to hang out, they want to hang out at your place b/c you have the good TV, the good games, the good snacks and the space. Your kid gets the coolest presents or at least nobody get toys that are significantly cooler. That tends to make a parent happy.

I know these are shallow definitions. But these things would probably make most people happy.

Is 90k better than 60k?

Again, I haven't seen the presentation, but I have some postulations as to why it isn't. Mathematically, the 90k is 50% "better", but it doesn't necessarily "give you more". Remember that at 60k, you're making more than 80% of the working population (let alone those out of work). At 90k you're making more than 85 or 90% of the population, but you've really only jumped a few "notches" in the "final rankings".

In most parts of the US you already have access to a very good and healthy life at 60k. You've pretty much covered everything commonly deemed as a necessity and you probably have some money left over for "entertainment". So the jump to 90k really just gives you a little more "entertainment" and maybe some bigger stuff, but that's it.

And if you're the type who's not happy with being in the top 20%, then how much further do you need to go? Top 10%? Top 5%?

Really, 60k for one job is far enough "ahead of the game" to keep happy those that can be kept happy. And that's probably why this is true.

Where the stimulus money is coming from

I've said this to many people in several different ways, but what this recession really means for most North Americans is that they won't retire as early as planned or that they'll have to continue working at least part time to buffer their savings.

Well, here's some talk from Calculated Risk with a great quote courtesy of the NY Times.

“What the average citizen doesn’t explicitly understand is that a significant part of the government’s plan to repair the financial system and the economy is to pay savers nothing and allow damaged financial institutions to earn a nice, guaranteed spread,” said William H. Gross, co-chief investment officer of the Pacific Investment Management Company, or Pimco.

Of course, this basically screws over fixed-income retirees, but it also damages prospects for those close to retirement. If you're 60 and planning to retire at 65, you're basically making no money in safe investments, but you also don't have any time to "ride out" highly volatile investments like stocks. Unless, of course, you wait until 70 or 75 to retire.

It sounds absurd, but what else are you going to do? We've put ourselves into a really tight spot here. The Obama plan (for better or worse) is to inflate the money supply, which is going to be done at the expense of those people who want to retire. To be fair, the McCain plan wasn't really any different.

I guess the big question is really if this is simply to be expected? Personally I think the whole concept of everyone retiring at 65 and living to the ripe old age of 90 is also pretty absurd, so though I blame the US for making some pretty bad financial decisions over the last 3 decades, I also think that we have to get over our delusions of multi-decade retirements for everyone.

The Times they are 'a-changing

Well, we know that Newspaper are going to die, and we'll have to see about print media in general. In fact, my current guess is that the next decade of iPhones and Blackberries and Kindles and podcasts and audiobooks will signal a "paper reversal". In no way do I expect "paper" copies to go away, instead I expect them to slowly be limited to only specific, revered content.

But hey, I'm already receiving my bank statements and pay stubs electronically. So the amount of paper-only content is fast diminishing.

However, I have two great links about paper today.

Time Magazine talks about the End of Excess. Which opens with a great line:

Don't pretend we didn't see this coming for a long, long time.

A few other choice quotes:

We cannot just hunker down, cross our fingers, hysterically pinch our pennies, wait for the crises to pass, blame the bankers and then go back to business as usual...This is the end of the world as we've known it. But it isn't the end of the world.

Which echoes things I've been saying for a long time. The US is going to change and it's going to change very dramatically. The "middle-class" is no longer going to be the center of this giant bell curve, things will tier much more. The US will need a broader base of producers, of people working dirty jobs.

Of course, with such a small population (on a global scale), the only way the US can stay ahead of the curve is to become an intellectual mecca for the new generation of problem solvers and thought leaders. Of course, with such a small realy population base and an underfunded education system, there will be a need to import these people.

Further increases in productivity and prosperity require ingenuity and enterprise applied at the micro scale... As China and other developing countries finally achieve the industrial plenty that we enjoyed 50 years ago, the U.S. can stay ahead once again by pioneering the next-generation technologies that the increasingly industrialized world will require...And no other nation assimilates immigrants as successfully as the U.S.

Those are just my choice quotes, the whole article is a good read.

And here's a good summary about the death of the newspaper. I think this one quote really sums it up nicely:

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

He goes on to mention that we don't really have a good replacement model for all of these journalists we're putting out of work. Personally, I get the feeling that between ease of publisher, ease of search/aggregation and ease of rating, it's quite probably that the future of news will be a truly distributed network. Not an Associated Press style of "distributed network", but rather a loose network of data collectors and aggregators and researchers. Each of which can produce data for the next set.

In the article he makes a mention of reporters attending a town hall meeting "just in case". But in this new era of data, it's quite possible for one to film the event, have it edited for highlights, transcripted and then reviewed, blogged, twittered & pod-casted by multiple people all within hours. And unlike the previous model, these people don't even have to be the same the same people or the same group.

Of course, none of this is very conducive to being done with paper, which may be why Time is calling for changes and the Times will be changing.

Academia is doomed in the wired world

OK, so we start with the mandatory link;

Student faces Facebook consequences

Basic premise is simple. The University wants to ban the student for managing a Facebook user group where students helped out on Chemistry homework assignments. The interesting thing about these assignments, is that they actually weren't even given the same questions!

So here's a kid facing suspension for making a virtual study group where people can't even really share answers b/c they have different questions.

There are two big problems here:

1. Study groups have existed forever and are a fundamental part of university, especially sciences. However study groups are prone to cheating.
   
2. Online access to resources have made learning more accessible, but they've also made "cheating" far easier. Universities are mildly scared about the accessibility part as they are financially vested in remaining the key holders. Of course, they're also publicly funded (especially in Canada), so they have to maintain some openness. But what Universities are really scared about is cheating. Credibility is ridiculously important for Universities and "cheating" undermines that credibility.
   

So cheating is the common factor here. From the academic mindset, the math is simple:
Study Groups = maybe cheating
Online = maybe cheating,
therefore Online Study Groups = definitely cheating

The logic is clearly flawed, and in this case it's pretty clear that no wrongs were committed. In fact, if people were using the group to cheat, it would have been trivially obvious to prove. If two students really wanted to cheat, posting up answers to a Facebook group is the worst possible way to do it.

Of course, the problem runs much deeper than that, this type of behaviour demonstrates a deep-seated fear in the academic halls. And it stems primarily from problem #2.

In all reality, the University should be providing and managing groups for this type of "study grouping". My wife graduated from the University of Manitoba last April and they had a "WebCT" system (now Blackboard). Systems like this increase transparency and provide quality resources for students, but even today it's tough to get full support from the older academics.

I personally love this concept of openness, but maybe the older academics are on to something. They have long been the private gatekeepers of the secret academic world. By increasing accessibility and allowing things like on-line study groups, they've increased their burden of work while reducing the value of their time.

The wired world is a connection tool for everybody. The web is a democratizing tool in an academic world that is far from democratic. This whole concept of suspending a student for managing a virtual study group is nothing but a demonstration of a deep-founded academic fear.

The irony here is that kicking out our hero will likely cause a backlash that will cause the university to lose credibility in the eyes of the public.

It's a bad place to be, of course YMMV.

4 Pillars Reply: Dave Ramsey

Quest for 4 Pillars, just put up an interesting post about Dave Ramsey Methods.

The main points are simple

1. Make a commitment to get out of debt
2. Start a cash emergency fund
3. Pay off debt using a debt snowball
4. Save 3-6 months of expenses in savings
5. Save 15% of household income into retirement savings accounts
6. College funding for children
7. Pay down mortgage quickly
8. Build wealth and give

And the conclusion from a Financial blogger's perspective is equally simple:
...these things that I do go against the “Ramsey” way but that’s ok because I’m not in need of any kind of financial rescue...I believe that for a lot of people, Ramsey’s methods can be very beneficial.

But I personally think that we're missing something really big here: Dave Ramsey is pimping a diet change and not a lifestyle change. This thing reads like a draconian weight loss plan and asks you to do things based on what he believes. He's imposing his lifestyle beliefs and telling people to save vast sums of money b/c that's what they should do.

Really, why should you save 15% into retirement savings (#5)? What if you don't plan to retire? What if you want to take mini-retirements? What if you want to invest that 15% into educating yourself? If you don't have a college degree, shouldn't that be a priority before retirement savings, how about before saving for your kids' education (#6)?

Paying down your mortgage quickly (#7) could turn out to be a horrible decision. What if you live in a mining town or a factory town? Throwing money at your home could leave you light on cash and investment money when the plant closes down and crisis hits.

Making a commitment to get out of debt (#1), is like making a commitment to losing weight without making a commitment to keep it off. The commitment here to live within your means.

This sounds like the "Wealthy Barber" plan of "Save lots of money so you won't be poor." The only two novel concepts here are #3 and #8. Giving, addresses the karmic nature of money which seems to be that those who give don't have trouble finding. And the debt snowball addresses the psychological aspects of debt payoff that some number-crunchers seem to forget.

But really, this is all just a diet plan for debtors. I know several people in debt and I wouldn't package up this advice with my name on it.

Of course, YMMV.

Java dying?

Interesting link from InfoWorld, worth at least a brief read.
Java increasingly threatened by new app dev frameworks

I can't really disagree with his supposition and he pulls a lot of numbers to support his case. But from a high-level view, what the heck is happening?

I remember 1998, when Java was still a fledgling "web" language. I was around in 2000 when I became the last class at my University to use C++ for first year courses. And here we are in 2008 talking about the "death of Java" and comparing it COBOL. The article explains that Java is effectively being supplanted by .NET, Ruby on Rails and PHP, but I don't think that it's capturing why?

Here's my theory: languages are alive but Java hasn't really fought to survive. Microsoft's .Net is a comparable technology, but the last few years have seen several innovations from MS: WCF, WPF, LINQ (and and everything underneath it), MVC (i.e.: struts) and all kinds of other things that seem to be just around the corner. Even VS 2008 doesn't feel done. Most people are barely rolling out .Net 3.0 and MS is already pushing around 3.5 and elements of future versions.

But Java just doesn't have that developer backing. Sure IBM evangelizes the stuff and educational institutions like to use anything they can find for free, but it's still "behind the curve". Eclipse is definitely becoming competitive, but I just don't see the whole framework of tools/language/support being pushed as hard or as fast by IBM/Sun as MS is doing with their tools.

Of course, we'll see how PHP and Ruby (the apparent heirs) actually perform over the coming years. All of the arguments I've heard for/against the technologies seem mostly ideological. People don't like tools that make them uncomfortable.

But at some point the language becomes just as relevant as the tools around that language. And I'm not convinced that Java is really dead, so much as Java needs a better toolset.

Of course, YMMV

The annual Gift Card debate

So the war is now raging, Violent Acres has weighed in:
Fuck the Cheerleader; Buy a Gift Card, Save the World - Violent Acres

And so has Liz Pulliam Weston, already the reason I don't read MSN money, she now claims to know that Gifts cards are not gifts. Now I don't think she's totally off-base, here's a great quote:
A gift, ideally, says, "I thought about you. I considered your likes and dislikes, your needs and wants, your dreams and desires, and found you this token of my esteem that I hope will delight you."

But she really takes the whole thing one too far with some other notable quotes:

Would a lover, in the flush of romance, lean close to the object of his affection and present . . . a gift card?...

Heaven forbid that givers use their own judgment and spend a little time picking out small items that might give the recipients pleasure. Just give us the cash and get out of the way.

Followed-up by some interesting advice:
1. Make certain events off limits.
2. Combine a card with a real gift.
3. Think twice before giving one to someone you love.
4. Don't add to the recipient's burdens.

V of course has some strong views the other way:
Every year for my birthday, I always get a gift or two in the mail from someone I haven’t spoken to in months. I find it incredibly insulting. All year long, these people couldn’t be bothered to call me on the telephone, shoot me an email, or meet me for dinner. Yet, they feel as long as they mail me a fucking candle on my birthday, our friendship status will remain.
...
And yes, I’m giving out gift cards this holiday season. Merely because I know most people aren’t yet at a place in their life where they can look into a box and simply say, “This is just an object. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Idea #4 is actually pretty key to giving a gift card, giving a $50 gift card to Banana Republic is like saying: here have a pair of expensive socks. But it's really no better or worse than just buying a bad pair of socks from BR and giving them as a gift.

Idea #1 is tainted by the adding that weddings should always receive gifts, which is exactly the opposite of what couples want. Most modern couples are paying for their own weddings and they're already living together long before they wed. So why do they need another toaster? Weddings are expensive gatherings, so basically every couple that I've known that married in the last 5 years (and that's like 10 of them) would have preferred cash or a good gift card over anything else.

Heck the fiancé and I were saving up about 10k to pay for our wedding expenses, the best gift (other than something hand-made and personal) would've been straight cash to help pay for the catering and the rental. Of course, this isn't true for everyone, some couples really are moving out right after marriage and for these guys, I'll buy a gift off the registry.

As to the rest of the advice and the raging debates, I figure that Liz has some useful advice it's just mixed in with being a little extreme. V of course, is practical as always (if a little evil), but doesn't always think highly of people.

I'll draw a line in the middle and say that gift cards are a fine gift as long as they're as thoughtful as the gift you would've purchased. Buying a GC is like buying a night out for friends or buying a week of morning Starbucks or a freebie nail job or a couple of reams of fabric for your next quilt. Buying a $50 GC to a $50 / plate restaurant is just as bad as buying diamond studded earrings for a girl who doesn't have pierced ears or giving a crisp, red $50 to your independently wealthy friend.

The nature of the GC is not inherently that it's a bad gift, it's that it's gift that requires thought just as much as any other gift. Bad gifts are bad gifts, cash, cash-equivalent or wrapped in a big box. So just buy gifts that are appreciated (and take the time to wrap them, it shows that you care)

Of course, YMMV

What is Your Tipping Policy?

This one is in reply to a post on Million Dollar Journey:

Ask the Readers: What is Your Tipping Policy? Million Dollar Journey

Wow man, didn't you read the MyMoneyBlog post on this thing? It was a S***storm, you've just opened a giant can of worms :)

Cabs
As a guy who's never owned a car, I've taken a few cab rides in my life. I talk to all of them, most of them don't own their cab (in Winnipeg or Edmonton). It's typically closer to one guy who owns 5-10 cabs and all of the cab drivers are on for 12 hours b/c they can't make a living wage on 8 hours shifts. This may be different in TO or Montreal, but I always give a good 10-15% (sometimes more for short rides). You're trusting your life to these guys and they don't get paid very much.

Fast-food
The standard McPolicy is that tips go in the charity bin. The only exception is when the patron insists, then you can take the tip just to get rid of them.

Me I don't tip my Starbucks baristas, but when I go to the Gourmet Cup across the street, the one that charges me a buck less for my latte and always has top-notch fresh-baked goodies and is clearly run by the guy who serves me... well he and his staff will get a tip. Often I'll just give them the buck they saved me :)

Delivery Drivers
Are intentionally underpaid, so I throw them a couple of bucks. Around here, the pizza place tacks on like $2 for delivery which is clearly not paying the driver very well, so I throw him a few extra. If the delivery charge were $5, then he'd get nothing.

Waitresses
Waitresses are like the annoying black hole of tipping. My sister's a waitress and she makes great money (her best gigs made more per hour than I did as a computer consultant!), of course, I've watched her work and she's amazing... most waitresses don't meet that quality bar. But I'm still iffy on the tipping thing.

What annoys me at a deep level, is that I don't really go to a restaurant just to be waited on, I go there to talk and to eat great food. For my night to be good, I don't really need a good waitress, I just need one that isn't inept. Heck, if I could replace the waitress with a computer ordering system and just have someone drop off drinks, that would be just fine.

Personally, what makes my night is great food, and if anyone deserves the tip for great food, it's the cooks. At least around here, the people I know working the kitchens don't make great money. Unless they're independent or "high end", they're pushing just above 30k and they're working weekends and holidays and all kinds of crappy shifts. If anything, these are the people that make my night, why don't they get the tip?

And (400 words in) this is where things get really complicated. Different restaurants and chains have different procedures for tips and tip distribution. Now to start, if it were up to me, everyone involved in the services industry would make a fair working wage and the managers would simply be responsible for paying more money to good waitresses (just like everyone else does in every other industry). But barring legislation, that's pretty much just a pipe dream, so here are the details.

Waitresses at most places are required to "tip-out" based on their total receipts. Cooks will get 2% and the bar will get 2% and hostesses will get 1% at like a typical Earl's, Montana's, Boston Pizza, etc. This may or may not be after total receipts after taxes based on who's calling the shots (of course including the taxes just dilutes the tip even more and it's pretty shady). So the passive-aggressive 1-cent tip is not just insulting, it's financially damaging (yet somehow legal).

And that's where things get funny: financially damaging. Where I live in Edmonton, there is no minimum wage (or at least nobody works for it) as we have a massive boom and a big people shortage. So even with a 10% tip, the waitress can still take home $2.50 on my $50 order and she makes $11/hr (base) + $2.50 * number of tables which can easily push her into $25 range for handling like 6 tables (of which $14 is marginally taxed). Now that's just an average joint, even in Winnipeg, renowned for its cheapness (not frugality, just outright cheapness), a quality waitress can make $23+ / hour even with a base wage of $7.

Of course, once you factor in that $16+ of those hourly dollars are cash tips and are mostly untaxed, then your waitresses end up making the equivalent salary in the $30+ range. That's $30+ dollars / hour for an entry-level job with a small amount of responsibility. A lot of waitresses are making more than the guys who prep and cook the food.

So we come back to my previous thought, don't the guys cooking the food deserve most of the money? I mean, isn't their job just a little bit harder? So here's the math:

• Your meal cost: $100
• Waitress salary: $7
• Cook salary: $15

If you tip 15%, the waitress keeps 10% and ends up with $17, the cook gets 2% and ends up with the same number. As you add money to the cost of the meal, the waitress makes more and more relative to the cook. In fact, the only salvo here is that the cook should be able to cook more tables than the waitress is waiting and will therefore catch up (a little). But you're still throwing a lot of money at the person who didn't really do much that you couldn't have done yourself...

If you're like one of the crazy MSN writers and you figure that 20% is the new 15%, then the waitress ends up with $22 and the cook is still stuck at $17. (Of course, she's writing from the US where the minimum wage for wait staff is typically 50% of the regular minimum wage)

*sigh*

After this whole bit, I basically don't want to starve anybody, so when I'm tipping for a night out, I tip 12-15% and that's it. If I get really good food (better than expected for the price), then I'll add tip money specifically for the cooking staff (as written on the receipt), but this seems to happen pretty rarely.

It's not a perfect system and I have to vary slightly for specific places (i.e.: family-owned joints), or for when I'm sucking up a table for a long time (i.e.: watching a football game at the Boston Pizza). However, I think that it correctly accounts for the way services staff are paid and the amount that I feel they should be paid.

Of course, YMMV.

A reply: Why Isn’t There Universal Personal Financial Education?

Why Isn’t There Universal Personal Financial Education?

I think that there's something else here to consider Tim. And I think that it's the fact that we can't all save 10% or 20% of our income.

Picture a world where everyone saved just 10% of what they made and lived completely within their means. And I mean everyone. What happens?

Nothing... in a literal sense. If everyone has money and nobody needs it (b/c they don't borrow, they live within their means), then who pays out the interest? I mean, maybe a mortgage or an education might be funded in the first generation, but after that, everyone would just be able to gift their money down, so who's paying interest in a world where nobody is borrowing money...

So have I got you thinking here?

So what do you do to get ahead in this world? Well you run out and borrow tons of money, then you start building businesses and paying it back. Of course, so do other people, so the interest rates move up, but only to some equilibrium point.

Of course, now these high-rollers either go broke or make it big and at some point they stop, b/c they need to do something with their money. So the wealth gets shifted down or around and everyone but the businessmen are saving their pennies and living "risk-free". Well at some point, people in the middle (not broke or rich) are bound to say "Heck, I want a bigger car, so I'm just going to save 5% instead of 10% what do I need all of this money for."

And this is where we get "keeping up with the Joneses". Eventually the people in the middle all fight to be like the rich guys and the other people in the middle and then everything just churns at a higher rate.

Is it good or bad? Well short-term we produce more (don't know that this holds longer term), but people living check to check are definitely the lifeblood of the economy. These are the grunts who need to show up each day or they won't make the rent, these are the producers. For the rich to be "independently" wealthy, they need to leverage all of these grunts. Our stock dividends are built on the back of these people.

If the grunts all had enough money that they didn't need to go back to work, then they probably wouldn't. And of course, stuff would stop. The economy, to some extent, is driven by consumables. Now admitedly, we've created a lot of consumables in our "disposable society", but even under the cruft, we still need food and new shelters and medecines and condoms and tools and replacement parts, etc.

We PF bloggers are wrecking the curve, we're trying to to break the paycheque to paycheque lifestyle. But what we do simply does not scale infinitely.

So this:
in the end we need stupid people to make money off of so you and I are the reason there is no universal financial education
is basically correct, but it ignores two "big-picture" issues.

#1. More knowledgeable citizens are capable of making more fiscally responsible decisions. If the populace in general had a better understanding of monetary issues, our government would be held to a much higher standard. As it stands right now, I can't trust most people to understand an RRSP let alone understand the vast implications of inflation, the central banking system and just government spending in general.

#2. Productivity Lost to Overhead
If you consider many banks, insurance cos and mutual fund salesmen as useless overhead, then increased financial knowledge would lead to overall increases in productivity. Instead of selling unnecessary contract, these people could build more roads or research new products.

End of the day, I figure that Canadian Dream would agree with me that it would be nice to provide more people with the personal finance knowledge that they need. Of course, the very people suffering from this lack of knowledge are the people that don't know what they're missing. And of course, it will never become part of the public school system, b/c the voters don't know that it should be there.

Of course, as always, YMMV.

Sofware IS a Service

Here's a quickie reply to Jeff Atwood's blog posts on the decay of software:
Why does software spoil?
Are Features the Enemy?

Of course, what he's talking about in these last two posts is basically endemic to the way in which packaged software is sold. It's not the very nature of software, packaged software is sold as a physical good, but it's not.

All of this feature bloat is an attempt to justify future sales, but sometimes problems arise from below as well. For all the "stableness" of packaged product it's all running on shaky ground. Hardware and software are evolving so quickly that even stable software will die. But that's the fundamental problem!

Building and then packaging software is analogous to building a house on top of a sand-dune and then selling the house. When the house inevitably crumbles we run out and sell a new house. Of course, the crumbling may have nothing to do with the quality of the house itself, it's just that you built it on a fricken sand dune!

This is why we need to move to subscription-based software services. I can't buy software for $100 today and simply expect it to function correctly on my new computer 10 years from now. Software isn't like a shovel or a bed or a fridge. Software is organic, it grows, it evolves, it lives within an eco-system of other related software.

For software to grow correctly, we need to move to a subscription model so that we can afford to keep programmers as tenders of the garden as well as tillers of the new land. Right now, we're not tending our gardens. The packaged software guys are being constantly forced to till new soil with no one left behind to tend gardens. But again, this is because we're pretending that selling software is like selling a shovel.

Good software doesn't need to spoil, instead it needs to be sold in a way that will allow it grow and to be tended. Maybe I'm just a dreamer, but imagine a world where Quicken charged an annual software fee? Then instead of "sun-setting" features, they'd just extract cash for keeping their software up to date and ensuring that it satisfies current/future customer needs.

It'd probably be a better software world, it's just a long ways off.

10 Clichés to live by

Here's quick link to some good material:
10 Clichés to live by :: Discursive Monologue :: Blog Archive

I don't think that I could describe my existence as eloquently.

#2 (Pick your battles) has been a long-term challenge for me, I'm still learning to pick my battles. Of course, being a perfectionist is the direct cause of the difficulty.

#4 (Don't be a hog) has also been a big issue on my list. Which is funny b/c I think that the whole "global warming" deal is just bad math and I firmly believe that most "environmentalists" are pretty clueless (the whole "save endangered species, but only if they're cute or useful" thing). I'm just a follower of the mentality b/c it's simpler and fairer :) This one paragraph starkly reminds me of Violent Acres and her Americans are Fat because they're broke concept. I live in Canada, but my region (Edmonton) is the land of the truck, with city-slickers driving F250s to and from work. We're one of the least dense major north american cities which means that we spend lots of resources just getting around town.

#8 (Never stop learning) is one of my personal rallying calls and one of the reasons I love to blog. You learn a lot of stuff reading blogs, writing blogs and jockeying back and forth in the comments.

#10 (Don’t do something that you will regret) is probably the strangest but most simply useful piece of advice. Consider the whole is the key component that's generally just missed. We makes lots of decisions without regarding as much relevant information as we can. So you see people who take up sub-prime mortgages and really don't know that won't be able to afford them when interest rates go up. You see people start up unhealthy diets or go to the gym to lift weights and then do it completely wrong (i.e.: dangerously). You see smart people putting their RRSP investments in all of the wrong things. You get people who walk into the Welfare office complaining that they can't buy milk for their kids while they hold an over-priced pop that they just bought in lobby vending maching (true story).

People make all of these bad decisions, sometimes by lack of planning and sometimes just by default (I have nothing better to do, guess I should...), and then they spend time lamenting all of their failed actions and "missed opportunities". Yeah, don't do shit that you know you'll regret; you'll probably end up regretting enough stuff already, why aggravate the situation?

Drive vs Natural Ability

A old friend of mine posted a great discussion the other day and I think that I have a reply.

I told her about a friend of mine who, while average in terms of natural ability, has always managed to get by (and sometimes even excel) because of her amazing drive. A friend of my roommate's, however, is imbued with talent, intelligence, creativity and vision - yet is rarely able to finish what she starts, due to lack of drive.

Which therefore begs the question: which is worth more, drive or natural ability?

Hey Georgia, I like this question, to which I'll respond with a quote from a UFC fighter, GSP: "The only thing that beats hard work is talented hard work".

I love the question, which is worth more, but I'm thinking that it really hinges on what is actually defined as success. Take the old classic movie Rudy. No "talent", quite "simple", not really bright at all, worked like mule. His success? One play on a college football field (University degree)? For another look, take Boxer from Animal Farm. Not too bright but does the work of two horses and several other animals, talented and hard-working. Of course, Boxer basically gets taken to the cleaners and worked thanklessly until he dies.

So there's some hardwork and some hardwork + talent (but no brains either way).

What about hardwork + little bit of talent? Take Charles Schulz (Peanuts fame). Guy is a workhorse, does 50 straight years of iconic comics. But really, he's not that great, I mean how many times does Charlie Brown miss kicking the ball? Don't get me wrong he's really popular, has some classic stuff, but I read Pearls Before Swine now and my top 10 Peanuts comics (in 50 years) don't come anywhere near my top 10 Pearls comics (in like 5).

So what's up with Pearls? Writer Stephan Pastis is a lawyer by trade. Writes comics in his free time and finally lands a contract with comics.com. Quits his day job and then goes national when Scott Adams (Dilbert) makes a post on his blog about the comic. Hooks up with Darby Conley (of Get Fuzzy) picks up on the biz in months and now outshines his own mentors. Oodles of hard work combined with a bunch of talent (though I don't think he'll be writing for 30 years :)

So what's my point? Well, I really respect Pastis (Pearls), but the other guys not so much. You can supplant a certain measure of talent with hard work (and vice-versa), but at best you just end up "slightly-better-than-average". Now Peanuts was good at what it did and Schulz made a wonderful life of it, I'm sure. But it was never a Far Side or a Calvin & Hobbes or a Pearls.

The way I see it, Rudy and Boxer and Schulz were all "successful", but maybe at the wrong things.

So I think the answer is that talent is the most important thing to start with, b/c it seems so pointless to hinge a living on something you're bad at. Rudy blew all this time to play football for one shot on the field. For the time he invested, he could've been a star greco-roman wrestler of maybe a pugilist. Boxer at least worked where he had talent, but then that's all he did so he took talent, applied hard work and then completely left out ingenuity. Charles Schulz succeeded based solely on hard work with a little talent thrown in, but he just produced 50 years of the same 20 gags.

But Rudy will never be Michael Jordan and Schulz will be never be Gary Larson. So I'm not saying "don't try", I just think it's really important for people to figure out what they can do passionately AND relatively well before dedicating oodles of hard work.

One of my heroes: "Crazy" Dean Karnaze, an ultra-marathoner, runs 100+ miles at a time. Took him until 30 to realize that he loved doing this stuff, but the guy has a will of steel that pulls him through. His same "will of steel" and work ethic pulled him through university and into a top-paying sales job. But nobody in the sales field will know him, not like the runners who put in 50 miles at time, they know him. He now runs professionally, his records will stand for decades.