Author: Leon

Categories
News

Pirates are to Boys as Princesses are to Girls

A direct mail piece from the local YMCA arrived yesterday. Among the classes and activities they were advertising for kids this Summer was “Princesses and Pirates”. I googled the site to figure out what this was. It’s not a mixed class of princesses versus pirates or even princesses and pirates working together. There are two different classes, one for girls and one for boys presumably. It didn’t say that girls couldn’t go to pirate camp, but I can’t imagine most boys wanting to go to princess camp…not when they’re five anyway.

The description of Pirate Camp is as follows.

ARRR!!! Join us for a week of adventure on the high seas where we’ll transform ye landlubbers into truly fearsome pirates! Go treasure hunting, learn how to sword fight, and navigate the perilous seas by learning about mystical creatures of the deep and mutinous crews in this camp of swashbuckling fun!

First of all, I appreciate that playing pirates is the equivalent of playing princesses. There are other things to pretend to be, but pirates are pretty modern. Yeah, yeah, 16th century. The truth is that modern youth, more than ever, needs to develop the skills of the pirate: to be independent, unafraid to defy the law in order to follow your moral compass. Today’s world demands a privateer, perhaps serving the interest of a large organization but always serving his own interests first.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the myth of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is associated with pirates and global warming. While the FSM fights the creationists with reductio ad absurdum, the pirates are doing the same against the first church of the warming globe. I just hope to hear my kids yelling, “I’m Captain Nemo!” and “I’m Ragnar Danesjold!”

Categories
News

Update your WordPress permalinks

I just figured out that after I updated WordPress a couple of weeks ago, it broke permalinks for pages. Ugh. The fix was to go into Settings, switch to another format for permalinks and then switch it back. 😐

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Personal

Going to SF New Tech Belly Up 4/2

I’ll be heading over the the City to check out the SF New Tech Belly Up tomorrow night, and hanging out with my buddy JJ Behrens.

Categories
Business News

Does Google Hate Businesspeople?

It’s April Fool’s Day, and out come jokes from popular Web sites. Google usually does a few things. This year they have something called Custom Time, a feature for Gmail that allows you to send the email with a date in the past. It’s mildly amusing, and probably feasible to implement, actually. But one thing stuck out to me: the fake testimonials feature an honest philosopher and a dishonest investment banker.

Fake Testimonials

What’s up with that? Isn’t it more likely that the philosophy professor would say something condescending and illogical, such as “Despite what your feeble mind might tell you, time travel must be real because we can imagine it.” The Investment banker should be saying, “In recognizing investments, timing is everything. With Custom Time, I can send that email to that Zuckerberg kid and tell him I will be helping him fund his silly dating site for college kids.”

All I’m saying is, it isn’t nice of Google to add yet another smear on businesspeople, perpetuating a false stereotype. It’s especially true since Google would not have been successful at all without the help of investment bankers. Epistemology Professors likely have had little or no impact on Google.

Categories
Business Politics Programming

Optimize the Most Significant Parts

There’s a general principle to optimization that many people miss, but seems so simple once you know it. I’m sure I first read about it in The Practice of Programming from Kernighan and Pike. You should optimize the most significant part of a program to get the most reward for your effort. The procedure is simple. Measure how much time the computer spends in each part of your program. There’s likely a loop that takes up a significant portion of the time. Optimize that part first. If you don’t follow this formula, you’ll probably spend a bunch of time optimizing what you intuitively think is slow, but it may not matter at all.

I’ve found that this approach applies equally well to optimizing money. For example, when you’re running a business, you have a range of expenses. Some of them are for tangible goods, some of them are for outside services and some of them are for salaries. Imagine an office with a fancy coffee maker. Everyone might think it’s a waste of money and a luxury, but the cost of that expense is likely minuscule compared to salaries. You’re usually better off figuring out how to improve efficiencies in your work process than going with cheapo amenities.

Of course, once you know how this work, you can use it deceptively. Politicians do it all the time. Watch how they talk about earmarks, or the apocryphal $100 hammer. You might agree that it’s not a good idea for a congressman to request a $1mil earmark for his wife’s employer, but even $1mil is nothing compared to the most significant costs to the U.S. budget: Social Security and Medicare. If you check the measurements, you’ll find that all the earmarks together total about 1% of the budget, which Social Security and Medicare are about a third. (Total federal spending is about $2.9tril, and Social Security plus Medicare is about $900mil).

I’m a relatively young person in my late 30s. I wonder if I’m not alone in counting on getting absolutely nothing from Social Security by the time I might need it. I’m not taking that chance. I’m saving money in a 401K plus whatever else I can beyond the annual limit of a 401K. I really wouldn’t mind if my taxes were 30% lower and I had to take responsibility for my own retirement.