Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
1. Buy experiences instead of things
2. Help others instead of yourself
3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones
4. Buy less insurance
5. Pay now and consume later
6. Think about what you're not thinking about
7. Beware of comparison shopping
8. Follow the herd instead of your head
Number 8 is especially interesting. Via Coding Horror: Buying Happiness.
Small-company edition:
When pressured on the business by employees, CEO always starts with, "I need you to stay focused on..."
You have more than one MBA on the team.
You have a Chief Strategy Officer.
Your CTO just came out of a Phd program.
Your CEO sells instead of listens.
You have a launch party, and no customers attend.
Customers hate the product and vision, so the sales guy is fired.
You are not told the terms of the last funding round (5x liquidation preference?)
You never hear how much cash you have in the bank or see board meeting notes.
You complain about how the customers "just don't get it" and aren't "visionary."
Your CEO says revenue is coming in in two weeks, just after he gets a meeting with the buyer, negotiates price, gets it approved, agrees on terms, writes up up contracts, negotiates them, signs them, and invoices the customer on net 30 terms.
You add features because board members want them.
Your CEO calls himself a "visionary" in his bio.
The CEO keeps everything secret because, "that is how Apple does it."
The CEO approves all of the design decisions because, "that is how Apple does it."
You are selling a platform.
Co-founder agrees to bring in experienced execs but thinks they will report to him.
You are selling to schools, hospitals, or non-profits.
You are commercializing a technology.
Your value proposition is that you help workers break down organizational barriers and work cross-functionally.
Your business model assume you will become one of the 7 websites that the average user visits every day.
Your site is going to be ad-supported, and you have 1500 users.
CEO avoids eye contact.
It gets really quiet.
You get free lunch but have no customers.
Your free lunch is taken away.
You get asked, "how much do you really need to live on?"
You get a pay cut. Your co-worker disappears.
Your CEO still doesn't make eye contact.
You get laid off and become a creditor to the company because they didn't reimburse your last 5 expense reports.
The company declines to buy your unvested shares back.
The liquidation yields 5 Aeron chairs and an espresso machine, and Ashton Kutcher's stock is senior to yours.
via What are telltale signs that you're working at a "sinking ship" company? - Quora.
The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a gay and lesbian think tank, released a study in April 2011 estimating based on its research that just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent -- predominantly women -- identify as bisexual. Far from underestimating the ranks of gay people because of homophobia, these figures included a substantial number of people who remained deeply closeted, such as a quarter of the bisexuals. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of women between 22 and 44 that questioned more than 13,500 respondents between 2006 and 2008 found very similar numbers: Only 1 percent of the women identified themselves as gay, while 4 percent identified as bisexual.
Higher numbers can be obtained when asking about lifetime sexual experiences, rather than identity. The Williams Institute found that, overall, an estimated 8.2 percent of the population had engaged in some form same-sex sexual activity. Put another way, 4.7 percent of the population had wandered across the line without coming to think of themselves as either gay or bisexual. Other studies suggest those individuals are, like the bisexuals, mainly women: The same CDC study that found only 1 percent of women identify as lesbian, for example, found that 13 percent of women reported a history of some form of sexual contact with other women.
"Estimates of those who report any lifetime same-sex sexual behavior and any same-sex sexual attraction are substantially higher than estimates of those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual," the Williams Institute's Gary J. Gates concluded.
...
Of course, gays aren't the only minority population that has an outsized place in the public imagination. Americans also "vastly overestimate the percentage of fellow residents who are foreign-born, by more than a factor of two, and the percentage who are in the country illegally, by a factor of six or seven," according to a 2012 Wall Street Journal report on the social science of estimating minority groups. In 1993, a group of political scientists reported in Public Opinion Quarterly that "The extent to which minority populations are perceived as a kind of threat is ... related to perceived proportions, though the direction of causality cannot be determined." Correcting the misimpressions about the size of a minority group hasn't been proved to have much impact on beliefs about them in the short-term, but that doesn't mean that they might never.
One thing's for sure: it's hard to imagine the fact that so many think the country is more than a quarter gay or lesbian has no impact on our public policy.
via Politics - Garance Franke-Ruta - Americans Have No Idea How Few Gay People There Are - The Atlantic.
One of the first things that stands out is anti-foreign bias. When they contemplate economic interaction with foreigners, the general public gets unreasonably negative...
A second major pattern in the public's economic illiteracy is make-work bias...In the long-run, blaming technology for unemployment is just silly. As the mechanization of agriculture beautifully illustrates, when machines replace people in one line of work, they switch to another...
a blanket anti-market bias...In the minds of public, prices apparently go up when businesses suddenly start to feel greedier. Economists, in contrast, expect businesses to be greedy year-in, year-out; but depending on market conditions, greed may call for prices to go up, go down, or stay the same...
A final catch-all category of economic illiteracy may be called pessimistic bias. Conventional wisdom has it that conditions are going from bad to worse. Most Americans think that real income has been falling for decades, most new jobs are low-paying, and doubt whether the next generation will have a higher standard of living. Economists think that this conventional wisdom is dead wrong.
via Economic Illiteracy, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.
... if D-Day had failed, Stalin would have ended up occupying almost all of German, which would have significantly changed the balance of power in the Cold War. Had the Allies invaded France in 1943, rather than invading Sicily, they probably would have made faster progress than they did in 1944. VE Day would have come a year earlier, with the Allies capturing most of Germany.
My unending thanks to all the men and women who fought this day, and the entire war, in 1944. Via The Volokh Conspiracy » D-Day thoughts.
Fat Head is a highly entertaining and informative (albeit zero-budget) documentary by a guy named Tom Naughton, who decided to try Spurlockâs experiment for himself. Naughton ate nothing but fast food for 30 days, but with two important caveats:
1. He didnât eat whatever the clerk suggested, as Spurlock did. In other words, no super-sizing if he didnât want to.
2. He kept his carbs to under 100 grams a day and his calories to under 2,000, using publicly available nutritional information about all the national fast-food chains.
Why these two important differences? As Naughton puts it, âBecause I have a functioning brain.â
via Fat Head: the movie Michael Bloomberg doesnât want you to see | The Daily Caller.
Earlier today, the PHP Framework Interoperability Group accepted two standards recommendations:
PSR-1, “Basic Coding Standard”, passed with 17 in favor and none against.
PSR-2, “Coding Style Guide”, passed with 13 in favor and 4 against, 1 abstaining.
There’s been a lot of commentary about these proposals over the past two weeks, some of it positive and some of it negative. Here’s a taste:
http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/10784/psr-1-and-psr-2/p1
http://phpmaster.com/psr-1-and-psr-2-to-be-approved-as-standards
http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/05/open-standards-better-way.html
I’d like to address some of the negative commentary here; I don’t expect to change many minds, but I do want to make sure the comments are answered.
(Full disclosure: I’m a voting member in the group, and have been since its beginning. I did not introduce the original measure that led to PSR-1 and PSR-2; that honor belongs to Klaus Silveira, a non-voting member. However, I did shepherd the PSR-1 and PSR-2 recommendations through the voting process to their acceptance by the group.)
Q: What the hell is the “PHP Standards” group? I’ve never heard of it before now.
The name isn’t “PHP Standards” any more; it’s the “Framework Interoperability Group” (FIG). We did start off as “PHP Standards” because, well, we all worked in PHP, but realized pretty quickly that the name was too broad, and renamed it the “Framework Interoperability Group.” (That name turns out to be too narrow, as the group now has representatives from library and CMS projects as well.)
The idea behind the group is for project representatives to talk about the commonalities between our projects and find ways we can work together. Our main audience is each other, but we’re very aware that the rest of the PHP community is watching. If other folks want to adopt what we’re doing, that’s cool, but it’s not what we’re focused on.
Q: Then why is the mailing list called “PHP Standards” instead of “FIG Whatever” ?
The Google Groups mailing list does still bear the original name of “PHP Standards.” It’s a legacy issue. To reduce continued misconception, we need to change that to the reflect the new name, but I don’t know when that will happen. (The Github repository for the group does use the new name.)
Q: Why are you guys so secretive and closed?
Just because you haven’t heard of the list, doesn’t mean we’re keeping it a secret. There’s a lot of discussion groups out there. ;-)
We did start out with a closed list years ago, but we opened it up pretty quickly thereafter. Anyone can join in and make their voice heard.
There’s nothing “closed” about the list or the decision-making process. Anyone who wants to drive the group to open even further is free to join the list and make suggestions for doing so. (I’m looking at you Anthony Ferrara. ;-)
Q: So once I join the list, I can vote on PHP-FIG Standards Recommendations? Sweet!
Sorry, no. The only people who can vote on a measure are the voting members. But anyone can discuss the measures on the list.
Voting is reserved for people who represent a member project. If you want to vote, then participate on the list for a while, and submit your project for membership. If enough other existing members vote in favor of your request, then you’re in and can vote on measures thereafter.
Q: I knew it. You’re a bunch of self-appointed elitist jerks.
“Self-appointed” is probably accurate; “elitist jerks” we can discuss. ;-)
Regardless, the group is currently composed of representatives who have volunteered from the following projects:
Some of these projects are large, and some are small (for various definitions of “large” and “small”). They’re all very different from each other in lots of ways, and have very different ideas on how to approach various problems.
Q: Whatever. I don’t need you guys telling me what to do. If I don’t want to follow your so-called “standards” then you can’t make me.
We’re not trying to make anyone do anything. Hell, not even all of the member projects subscribe to all of the standards recommendations. What we’re trying to do is find commonalities between the projects so that we (the members) can all eventually share similar practices and techniques.
Q: Who the hell are you to define a “standard” for coding style?
It bears repeating: the primary audience for the recommendations is the group itself. If others in the wider PHP community want to adopt the recommendations, I think that’s a positive outcome, but it’s certainly not mandatory in any way.
Q: Coding style is all personal preferences. How can you make a “standard” out of them?
On one hand, you’re right: a style guide is a collection of preferences. On the other hand, it’s not exactly personal when a lot of different projects run by a lot of different people indpendently arrive at a similar set of rules.
Q: How did you come up with this stupid “standard” ?
Somebody on the list mentioned that it would be nice to have a single style guide for member projects, code in different projects would look similar. He included an initial set of guidelines. Several of the voting members agreed that it was a good idea, and we expanded on that initial set of rules.
After some back-and-forth, someone else brought up the idea of doing a survey among the member projects, to see exactly how many projects are following which points of style. We ended up with 22 projects in the survey. The results made it pretty clear what the majority of projects were using for their standards.
Q: Only 22 projects, out of the whole world of PHP code? That’s not a valid sample size!
Recall that our primary audience is the group itself. If you have the time, energy, and inclination to do a survey of defined coding styles across the entire PHP community and analyze the results using a statistically valid methodology, I will be very interested to see your report on it.
Q: Where’s this survey at? I bet you’re hiding it so nobody can see the results.
Here is the original Google spreadsheet. It is also incorporated into the PSR-2 document as an appendix.
Q: Oh my God, you’re saying we MUST use spaces and not tabs? But I hate spaces!
If the majority of surveyed projects had used tabs, the recommendation would have been to use tabs. A super-majority (two to one!) use spaces, so that’s the recommendation.
Neither tabs nor spaces has any moral superiority over the other. If you hate spaces so much that you simply cannot adjust to them, that’s fine. Your project won’t adhere to PSR-2, but then, nobody says you have to.
Q: Why can’t the rule be “use either tabs or spaces, as long as you’re consistent within a project?”
The focus of these recommendations is not “indivudal projects by themselves.” The focus is on “working with/on lots of different projects.” If one project wants to use tabs, cool; if another wants to use spaces, fine; but if you end up working on both, you want the rules to be the same for each one. Thus, we have to pick something to apply identically across lots of projects at the same time.
Q: The standard is inconsistent: braces in one place sometimes, and in another place at other times. Dumb!
I’ll refer you back to the survey; the brace rules are what the majority of member projects have already picked for themselves. (A minority of projects consistently put braces on the same line, and a different minority consistently put braces on the next line, but there was no majority that consistently put them in the same place.)
Q: Wait, you mean the rules are defined by a survey, and there’s no design involved at all? Brain-dead!
The “design” portion happened in the individual member projects. The survey identified common elements of design across those projects. The follow-up discussions refined the broad commonalities, and the proposal codified them.
Q: There are lots of other standards out there. Why not just pick one of those?
In a way, we did, although in a very roundabout way. The survey revealed that the majority of member projects are already adhering to a large subset of the PEAR standard (itself the oldest existing common standard in PHP land.)
If you have other questions or comments, please leave them below. I know this kind of topic inflames passion, so please, follow the example of the FIG members: be civil and constructive. I reserve the right to police comments according to my own whims. ;-)
Police state. Tar and feathers. Lawsuits.
What actions can we lawfully perform *at the time of the incident* to discourage such behavior from police?
An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
The amendment would âstrike the current ban on domestic disseminationâ of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee's official website.
The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts--the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987--that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own governmentâs misinformation campaigns.
When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail.
She used part of her disability payment and her tax return. Joel Greer's wife also chipped in, as did his brother and two sisters. On Feb. 29, a judge set Greer's bail at $7,500, and his mother called the Brown County jail to see where and how she could get him out. "The police specifically told us to bring cash," Greer says. "Not a cashier's check or a credit card. They said cash."
So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she'd be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.
Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers' cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills -- and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.
"I told them the money had just come from the bank," Beverly Greer says. "We had just taken it out. If the money had drugs on it, then they should go seize all the money at the bank, too. I just don't understand how they could do that."
via Under Asset Forfeiture Law, Wisconsin Cops Confiscate Families' Bail Money.