Category: Uncategorized

A crucial business technique is to research what your competitors are doing to find good ideas you can use in your business. Sam Walton did this heavily as he built Walmart and wrote about it extensively in his autobiography. He would visit other retail stores and talk to their employees daily. The best ideas he found he would bring back to his own business.… read more “Competitor Research”

All weekend I have been working on a very challenging bug. I have Apache2 set up to reverse proxy my nginx server for the CT jobs site and everything seems to work okay except very large file uploads for the Youtube videos. Videos over 150 MB end up getting this weird error cast back. I have not yet figured it out.

I read an interesting article in the New York Times before bed last night that said they tested lab rodents to compare neurogenesis (new brain cell creation) when you do endurance exercise vs high intensity interval training vs weight lifting vs doing nothing. They found that you generate the most new brain cells when you do endurance activities and the more you do, the more your brain grows.

Laurel and I picked out my wedding ring yesterday. I got a rubber one for sports and a stainless steel one for regular life for $10 each. Good deal!

Below is the list of what I believe to be the most important problems facing humanity in the future that we must solve:

1. AI Safety – Artificial Intelligence is here and is rapidly surpassing human intelligence in many areas. We must figure out how to safely move forward into a world in which we create an apex predator above us.

… read more “Most Important Problems Facing Humanity”

The USA instituted a national minimum wage originally explicitly to protect white peoples jobs in the northern countries from the millions of unemployed black people in the South. The minimum wage continues to have the similar effects to this day.

Each little tweak you make to improve your life or business only makes a small difference at first. As the years go by, the little tweaks start to pile up into substantial change. Great achievements are rarely created instantly even if they appear that way.

Google was not built into a multi-billion dollar titan instantly. Larry Page had spent his childhood going to conferences and playing with computers and tech magazines with his dad who had a PhD in computer science.… read more “Tweaks”

Nicaragua had a serious earthquake in the 60s. US officials, in an effort to help, sent an enormous quantity of wheat to feed the people. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, earthquakes don’t damage wheat fields. Over the next two years, the farmers of Nicaragua saw their agriculture businesses destroyed.

Be careful when a politician says “let’s pass a regulation to fix…”.

I grew up in poverty. My dad was an assistant pastor of a small church in a poor area making marginal income and my mom stayed at home to raise four boys. My grandparents are wealthy and showed me flashes of a much better life, and fortunately scooped me out of a bad situation when my parents lives fell apart when I was 14.… read more “Poverty and Business”

I liked the Paul Graham essay today that life is short.