Category: Advice

For many years, cigarette companies fraudulently hid evidence that smoking causes a myriad of health issues. Cigarette company managers directly hid the evidence their research teams found, cigarette company boards of directors knew and hid the same information. Enormous human suffering and pain has been knowingly caused by these people. Why did they do it? The managers and directors received huge salaries and bonuses for many years and retired fat and happy.… read more “Make Managers, Directors & Shareholders Liable”

I had a fun day yesterday (Saturday):

• Watched several Laracast training videos on PHP
• Worked on fixing my importer from Time Doctor to Time Tracker
• Came up with ideas for improving my SEO team’s tracking
• Watched Oblivion, a fun sci fi movie starring Tom Cruise
• Finished beating Inside, a highly rated xbox one game.
• Watched parts of the Washington Huskies football game where they blew out the Ducks 70-21.

… read more “Interesting Day Yesterday”

How do you prevent burn out when you work 7 days a week? I generally work every day including weekends, and many days I’ll put in very long hours. This can cause physical effects like blurry eyes, sore / stiff back, lack of flexibility. It can also cause mental burn out where you struggle to get anything done productive.… read more “Preventing Burn Out When Working 7 Days a Week”

I attended the University of Washington and really enjoyed my experience there. I probably enjoyed it too much: I graduated in four years with a 3.5 GPA, but most of my time was spent partying or not really doing anything at all. Perhaps you could consider that learning about life, but I think I have learned far more about life out in the working world.… read more “Universities (Especially Online) Are a Waste”

I have worked “optimizing” search engines for my entire post college career. “Optimizing” is in quotes because I work to help companies that pay me show up higher in Google’s search rankings, perhaps occasionally against what Google would want ranking. I am probably more familiar with search algorithms used by Google than anyone outside of Google itself.… read more “The Mighty Power of Google”

Hanlon’s Razor states that you should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.

Many times I have made this mistake and thought that someone in my life who had mistreated me had cunningly planned a way to hurt my interests. In reality, I think that most of the time those people had no ill will… they just didn’t care and therefore allowed something bad to happen.

I would really love if someone made a game where you could play an MMORPG while walking slowly on a treadmill. If you had combat against another character though, you would have to run on the treadmill and that would affect the damage you could do – whoever ran fastest would do the most damage. If you had a higher level character, you would do a higher level of damage as well.… read more “Gamifying Workouts & Pokemon Go”

I was just in the gym of the hotel we are staying at on Kauai for our honeymoon and overheard a couple of doctors talking. The entire conversation was about how they generate revenue and how to get more. Neither of them mentioned quality of care or patient outcomes once.

Our healthcare system incentivizes doctors to perform as many procedures as possible at a high of cost as possible without regard to patient outcomes.… read more “Doctors Should Be Paid On Outcomes, Not Procedures”

Warren Buffet’s most highly recommended investment book is “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham. Warren Buffet’s essays and philosophy on investing sound like the best way to invest to me, so I use his value based approach. Warren Buffet advocates that you keep in mind that underlying each stock is an actual business with a true actual valuation.… read more “Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor””

When I worked as an employee at Visible Technologies, I thought to myself that if I ever owned a company that I would like to pay people based on actual work output rather than just for having their butt in a chair.

Now that I do run my own company, I have found this to be nearly impossible to do.… read more “Cost Per Unit of Productivity”