Category: Uncategorized

I am up in Washington again for my friend Justin’s wedding and am staying with my grandparents. My grandparents are extraordinarily good people: my grandma makes great meals and has family all get together, and my grandpa gets the old Ford Contour all ship shape so I can have transportation when I visit. I hugely appreciate both of them and all of the help they have given me in life.… read more “Bestemor & Grandpa”

I took the Marine Corps Fitness test today. I ran three miles in 23:20 on a treadmill, did 17 pullups, and did 60 crunches.

I haven’t done any abs in a long time, so the crunches were the most challenging part. I feel like if I work on my abs that can improve significantly.

This would have given me a first class rating for the Marines, making me eligible for good promotions I think.

My Vistage chair John told me about Kraig Kramers and his CEO Tools. He mainly mentioned it in reference to using moving averages to help better judge how your business is doing. Some of the moving averages I am considering:

• # of salespeople 12 month moving average
• Actual billings trailing twelve months
• # of transactions per month, 12 mma
• $ realized per transaction 12 mma
• Customer happiness index
• Employee happiness index

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Ryan yesterday on the topic of conscience. He mentioned that he believed conscience was something all of us had… just some hear it more or less quietly. He thought it shared common principles.

I disagree. I think conscience has two parts:

• Genetic: this is the amity – enmity theory… basically people will take care of and love people in their “in” group, and not care if bad things happen to those in their “out” group.

California public employee pensions were negotiated by unions (who had representatives who STRONGLY and PASSIONATELY cared for their members) and politicians (who strongly and passionately cared that the union members vote for them, but did not care much about the taxpayer).

What was the result?

The union members got unfairly huge payouts at the expense of regular citizens and taxpayers, most of whom have never received remotely as good of benefits and the government workers did.… read more “California Public Employee Pensions Should Be Defunded”

Josh sent me this article.

Interesting.

Yesterday marked 6 full months of no drinking for me. I have felt very healthy and have made big advances in my business during this time. I have rebuilt my recruiting application to sell it to multiple companies. I’ve worked on a number of other business improvements.

Not drinking has been hard for me. At first, I would think about it each day, but now I probably only really want a drink once a week or so.… read more “6 Months Of No Drinking”

http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-ceo-krzanich-sold-shares-after-company-was-informed-of-chip-flaw-2018-1
He should be fired and possibly prosecuted. A CEO who sells all his shares obviously does not believe in the company and should be fired. One who does it under suspicion of insider trading should be prosecuted and serve jail time.

Interesting read here on different theories on why human technologies were slow to rise at first.

I think some core reasons why human technology was slow going at first in order of most likely to least likely are:

1. Not many people…. 30,000 years ago there were orders of magnitude less humans, perhaps a few million. We now have 7 billion brains at work on technology.

I believe that larger corporations and governments are separate thinking entities from any individual person that works for them. They act aggressively in their own interest to pursue a specific goal (for corporations this is profit, for governments it is survival and growth). Many times they will even get rid of their own CEO’s if the CEO is not contributing properly (look at Harvey Weinstein as an example here).… read more “Corporations and Governments are AI”