Year: 2017

Feminists ought to welcome the rise of the sex robots

Johanna Legatt writes: “There is little coincidence that these sophisticated sex robots have emerged at a time when women’s rights are under threat across the globe, when there is a president in the White House who has bragged about sexually assaulting women”

1: Is it really true that “women’s rights are under threat across the globe?” One can reasonably conclude that in the Islamic world, which has rolled back Western norms introduced during colonialism. Everywhere else, women have more rights (and face fewer sexual violence) than any other time in history.
In many Western countries, it is taboo to even suggest that women are biological and psychologically different from men.

2: “Sophisticated sex robots” are not a thing. The “sex robots” are just deluxe versions of blow-up dolls with a tape player inside. We can’t even get robots to walk upright properly. Virtually all of the statements in the article are marketing hype. The ability to hold a realistic conversation is several dozens to several hundred years away.

3: It is sexist and Victorian of the author to suggest that sexual desire belongs exclusively to men. The implication that men have uncontrollable sexual desires to rape women (apparently triggered by sex dolls), whereas women are sex-less beings is an outdated and sexist relic.

4: If “sophisticated sex robots” are ever a real thing, it would be a great boon for male-female relationships. For the first time in history, men (and women!) could honestly say that they are interested in love and companionship rather than sex when they seek out romantic partners.

5: “sophisticated sex robots” would be a great boon to feminism as well. For example, older men would have no reason to seek younger women solely for their physical attributes. The value of female attractiveness would be greatly depreciated when robots with perfect looks and obedience are easily available, and women would be forced to compete with men in the workplace based solely on their mental faculties.

6: Feminists in relationships should appreciate that the invention of a perfect “sex toy” will perfect the separation between sexual orientation and romantic relationships since one’s sexual needs will be able to be perfectly met regardless of the biological sex of one’s partners.

How to invest your money – from $25K to $5 million

Your first $25,000 should be invested in an all-market (VTI) or S&P 500 index fund (VOO) in your 401K or IRA.

Your first $500,000 should be invested in a broad market, low-cost, diversified portfolio of large/small cap and some international index funds.

After you reach $500k, you need to invest the majority of your portfolio into individual stocks. 
At this scale, tax efficiency becomes increasingly important, and you need an actively managed portfolio which optimizes the tax allocation of investments (growth stocks into taxable, REITs & bonds into 401K, etc), minimizes trading frequency, and practices tax loss harvesting (sell losses first to minimize capital gains tax). You can move your funds to a robo-trader and consider getting a dedicated advisor.

When your portfolio nears $1.5 million, avoid the tendency towards an overly risk-averse portfolio due to substantial swings in net worth caused by market volatility. Develop additional income streams from revenue-generating investments such as rental real estate, small businesses, etc.

Around $5 million, personally managing income streams may be an inefficient use of your time. Consider diversifying into hedge funds that offer positive absolute returns and research private equity opportunities which are promising and interesting to you. If you are older and your net worth exceeds $5.5 million, consider forming a trust fund to safely pass your fortune to your family.

Trading cryptocurrencies taught me where prices come from

Very few of us have the opportunity to experience the heart of what makes our civilization work. Crypto-asset markets are one of the few places where you can participate in a real asset exchange without spending a decade getting training and certifications. If you want to try your hand at playing Wall Street trader for a day, this is the place to be.

Very few of us have the opportunity to experience the heart of what makes our civilization work. Crypto-asset markets are one of the few places where you can participate in a real asset exchange without spending a decade getting training and certifications. If you want to try your hand at playing Wall Street trader for a day, this is the place to be.

If factories are the engines running the world’s economies, then the financial markets are its brain. Unless something goes wrong, we are blissfully unaware that our modern, comfortable and decadent lives are made possible by the great flows of the capital markets on Wall Street.

Without them, companies like Apple and Toyota would not be able to raise funds to produce iPhones or Priuses. Without the price stabilizing service of the futures markets, farmers would be gambling their farms on the price of corn or pork when they go to the market. In countries without a public stock market, employees have no way to invest in their future and their country’s economic growth other than unreliable government programs, savings accounts that lose value due to inflation, or fly-by-night ponzi schemes.

Prices are Not Given

Yet despite the crucial service offered by markets, very few of us have any direct experience of how they work. Every now and then, we are asked to semi-randomly pick a mutual fund from a list offered by our 401K or financial advisor. Some of us throw a few bucks at a hot stock tip (only to panic and sell and the first sign of trouble) or get a .01% CD at our banker’s suggestion.

We are not only ignorant of financial markets – we have very little experience as active participants in any markets. Most Americans live their lives as passive consumers – accepting the prices they see in grocery stores, gas stations, or online marketplaces. We are so inexperienced with haggling that we either pay exorbitant amounts for a Realtor to do it for us, or make an attempt of it every decade or so at a car dealership, and come away hating the experience.

I shared this state of blissful ignorance until I moved to China and suddenly faced the need to haggle for most of my transactions. Goods such as clothing, fruit, meat, electronics, apartments for rent, and Western imports are either much cheaper or only available from small vendors who either don’t post any price, or only use it as a starting point for negotiation.

Haggling

I quickly learned that all prices are subjective estimates of what the seller expects the market will bear. Many people think that haggling is a game of psychological manipulation, and it certainly is that, but more importantly, it reflects the disinformation between buyer and seller. The seller knows his cost, and more importantly, the going market rate, but the buyer usually does not. Haggling is, therefore, a way of indirectly surveying the price the seller thinks the market will bear. Sometimes the price depends on the cost of a good to the seller, but it just as likely may not. A fashion retailer will sell out of fashion clothing far below cost, and a hot, imported gadget may sell for several times what it cost the seller to acquire.

My experience in real-world markets was a big help when I was asked to design and code a Bitcoin exchange in 2013. I created an exchange meant for professional traders by looking over traders shoulders to learn how the billion-dollar foreign currency markets work. I thought I had developed pretty good understanding of how markets worked, but I have never traded on a real-live exchange myself.

Like millions of other people, I only dabbled in Bitcoin myself, investing little real money in it. However, last week, a friend told me about an interesting opportunity: I could get free alt-coins (competing alternative crypto assets to Bitcoin) by using my existing Bitcoins to claim them.

Currency Competition

To make a long story short, after I claimed the alt-coins (with awesome names like Stellar Lumens, Byteball, and Bitcoin Cash), I decided to sell them right away for more Bitcoin. Selling Bitcoin is relatively easy: you just log on to Coinbase.com or Uphold.com and link your bank account. Selling Byteballs requires an account on a much smaller market which lists dozens of smaller currencies and is mostly frequented by serious traders.

So there I was, looking at a trading screen like this:

What’s happening here is pretty simple: people who want to sell Lumens are posting offers to sell a fixed quantity for a set price (Asks). People who want to buy Lumens are posting offers to buy them for another price (Bids). When the bid price is greater than or equal to the asking price, the exchange automatically executes the trade.

Films such as Trading Places, Wall Street, Rogue Trader, or The Pit depict what floor trading on a securities exchange looks like. Traders huddle around a podium and shout or signal offers to buy and sell. Few securities are still traded on a physical trading floor, but all exchanges work the same way.

So do crypto-asset exchanges! While some exchanges allow you to buy and sell for the “market price” (whatever price the market will bear), the smaller, less popular “alt-coins” have very little liquidity (active orders), which means that your order may execute for a very different price than you expected. For currencies like Lumens and Byteballs, it is, therefore, necessary to place orders using a “limit price” — a fixed maximum or minimum.

It works like this: if you want to buy or sell a crypto-asset, you first need to read the market liquidity: look at the order book to gauge or depth of the market in order to know what price you can get away with. If you have a big order, you might break it into several smaller ones to disguise your sale, or you might start selling when you want to buy in order to push the price down before making your break.

All prices (wages and interest too) are ultimately determined through a similar process. Yet very few of us have the opportunity to experience the heart of what makes our civilization work. Crypto-asset markets are one of the few places where you can participate in a real market without spending a decade getting training and certifications. If you want to try your hand at playing stock trader for a day, get an account with a crypto exchange while the field is still open to amateurs.

Originally posted on FEE.org

Why I’m betting on the future of Bitcoin

Five years of living in China spoiled me in terms of financial transactions. Most people don’t use debit or credit: they either use cash or more commonly, send money electronically via mobile apps. Mobile wallet apps are often used for large payments, and your landlord or utility company is just as likely to accept them as the friend you’re splitting lunch with.  You can login to your bank’s website or ATM and send someone a million dollars as easily as a few bucks.

Then I moved back to the U.S.

I owe several thousand dollars to a friend. At first, I tried to find a way to send the money electronically through my bank. You need a business bank account to send via ACH transfer. I could do a wire transfer, but my bank charges the sender $30 and the recipient $15, and requires a lot of information about the recipient’s bank account. I tried this thing called “Zelle” — a new payment network that most major banks have introduced. Much as we tried, we could not get a $5 test transaction to reach my friend. Zelle also has a $2000 daily limit. I looked into Venmo – the daily limits are too low. PayPal charges 2.9% of each transaction.

Dejectedly, I wrote a check. A check is a piece of paper dating back to the ancient Roman empire on which you — get this — just write down the amount to be transferred to someone else’s bank account. In theory, only the recipient of the check can cash it, but there are exceptions, and not all financial institutions are strict about this.

I thought that was the end of the story until my friend informed me that he had not received my check. Actually, before that, my letter bounced back to me because the stamp somehow fell or was detached. Apparently, I did not apply enough of my saliva to last to its destination. I occasionally have my emails bounced, but at least I don’t need to worry about expending sufficient bodily fluids for my messages to reach their independent recipient.

Anyway, we now have a real mess. A check lost in the mail means one of four things:

1: The United State Post Office lost the letter.
2: The letter was delivered, but someone had taken it from the mailbox (my friend was on vacation at the time it was delivered)
3: The sender lied about sending the check.
4: The recipient lied about receiving the check.

Now, I’d like to think that my friend is trustworthy, but how well do I really know him? And how well does he know me? And what about the teenager that he asked to watch his house while he was away? A single failure in our payment system has thrown our whole relationship into doubt.  And what about the USPS? I just learned that you’re supposed to wrap checks in a sheet of paper so USPS workers don’t steal your money. Since when do I need to worry about the US Government stealing my money? (Don’t answer that.)

So here is what I did next: first I drove to my bank to put a stop payment on the check ($30 fee).  Then I drove to a UPS store and send another check via certified mail (another $10).  After hours of lost productivity and $40 in fees, I need to wait another week to see if we can put this behind us.   That’s not the end of the story.  Banks are required to report all transactions over $10,000 to the U.S. government, and if the FinCEN or the IRS finds my transaction record suspicious, I may be investigated.  That’s the real reason why financial transactions are outdated, expensive, and buggy — a massive amount of government regulation deters innovation in the Western financial system.  While politicians claim to do this in the name of safety, it’s really all about preserving tax revenue.  Countries like Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Singapore with the fewest financial regulations also have simple tax systems with low rates. Politicians want their cut, and they have no problem forcing us to use an expensive and unreliable financial system to get it.

What if we used Bitcoin instead? My friend could send me a payment request with his address.  I open it and click “Send” and we’re done. I can be absolutely certain that the transaction was successfully sent to the intended recipient, and the recipient can be certain that the funds are irreversibly his.  It costs the same (under a dollar) and works equally well for $5, $50, or $5 billion dollars.  If done properly, the transaction can be completely anonymous.  Can you imagine if the entire finance sector worked like this?  Many people are working to make this happen.

 

Four secrets for getting the most out of your company’s 401(k)

Here’s how to get the most out of your company’s 401(k):

1 Set your savings rate high to max out your contribution early in the year

You can invest up to $18K per year into your 401(k) (plus $6,000 if you’re 50+).  Regardless of how much you plan to contribute, you don’t have to split your contributions evenly throughout the year.  If you set the savings rate high, you can invest the entire amount you plan to invest in your 401(k) early in the year, then save up for other goals for the rest of the year.   

I set the portion of my salary that goes into my 401(k) between 50% and 100%, depending on how much I have in my checking account.  Why do this?

401(k) contributions are taken before income tax deductions (but after social security and medicare).  If you allocate 100% of your income to your 401(k), you’ll see substantially more of your income go into your investments.  This allows you to keep your money in the market for a longer time.    (Note: verify that you will still get 100% of your company match if you do this.)

In my case, I qualified for my employer’s 401(k) late in 2016, and was just able to max it out by the end of 2016, and then maxed it out again in early 2017.  $18,000*2 = $36K.  The US market is up about 11.6% this year, earning me around four thousand dollars just for investing early.   I didn’t invest a penny more – I just invested earlier in the year.  Not every year will be so good, but overall, you’ll see a higher return by setting a higher savings rate to get your money in the market at the start of each year.

You might find it hard to live off a lower income for part of the year, but most people spent less after the end of the holiday season, and you may have a Christmas bonus to kick off the savings.

2 Choose low-priced index funds

The list of funds available for your 401(k) can be both imposing and disappointing.  If you have experience choosing your own investments, it is very likely that your preferred funds are not on the list.   Chances are that most of the options are overpriced – their expense ratio is higher than what you would pay in a typical investment account.     

My strategy for choosing what to invest in is simple: I look for the lowest cost index fund that matches my desired portfolio.  For example, my 401(k) has a “Nationwide S&P 500 Index A Large Cap” fund with an expense ratio of .6%.  The equivalent ETF from Vanguard charges only 0.04%.  So my 401(k)’s index fund has higher costs, but still much lower than 1.78% for some of the mutual funds my 401(k) offers.  Don’t just choose funds that happened to have the highest return this year.  They probably got lucky, and if they are mutual funds, the higher expenses will eventually probably lead them to underperform index funds.

3 Build a diversified portfolio and schedule rebalancing

Here is current 401(k) portfolio:  

  • 40% “S&P 500 Index A”
  • 40% “Small Cap Index A”
  • 20% “International Index A”

I built this in 30 seconds simply by searching for the word “index” in the list and verifying that these are the funds with the lowest cost on the list.  This is not a very scientific ratio, but it balances long-term performance with the risk from different market categories.  Whatever your risk tolerance, I suggest choosing several low-cost index funds that are different enough to offer diversification.   My 401(k) also allowed me to set up automated rebalancing every quarter to ensure that my portfolio sticks to this ratio.

4 Rollover your 401(k) into an IRA when you leave your job

Normally, you can rollover your 401(k) into an IRA when you leave your job. I was able to roll over my 403(b) (like a 401(k), but for nonprofits) last year when my existing employer switched to a new provider.  If you have a chance to rollover your company 401(k) to your preferred broker (see my post on choosing one), you should absolutely do so because:

(1) the IRA account providers out there (I suggest a robo-trader — I use Personal Capital) are almost certainly better than whatever your company uses – cheaper, with more investing options, and superior customer service
 (2) you don’t want to leave a trail of isolated retirement accounts from each job over the course of your career, especially if you want to build a tax-optimized portfolio using a robo-trader that automatically allocates securities in a tax-efficient manner.

Caution: There are three reasons why you may not want to roll over your 401(k) if you’re toward the end of your career and have been with a company for a while: (1) some states (details here) protect 401(k) investments from creditors more than IRA’s (2) 401(k) allow current employees to delay required minimum withdrawals, and (3) 401(k) allow you to take penalty-free (but not tax-free) withdrawals after age 55 under certain conditions – but not IRAs.

Here are the 10 cards I keep in my wallet

As promised, here are all the cards I keep in my wallet*, with a rationale of why I acquired each card.  Jump below the image to read why I got each card:  

 

I have two criteria for credit cards:

  • No annual fees: I don’t spend enough to warrant paying an annual fee for any card.
  • Cash back only: I don’t mess with complex point systems which only encourage spending.  I just want some money back on my bill.

 

American Express Blue Cash

My favorite card.  Why?   

  1. 3% back at supermarkets
  2. 2% back at department stores and gas stations, 1% everything else
  3. Great customer service.  I once unintentionally purchased a $40 car wash at a broken gas station terminal.  I had no way to prove that I didn’t want or use it, but Amex figured it out and got my money back.
  4. Very high credit limits.  I requested a 3X increase of my credit limit shortly after getting this card.  After Amex approved it, it was easy for me to request a high credit limit on my other credit cards.
  5. Random bonuses.  See below: I got $200 for signing up, $300 for referring 3 friends, and $100 for paying for UpWork with it (which I was already doing).  If you sign up using this link, you’ll get a $100 sign up bonus.  (Disclaimer: I get a bonus from Amex if you sign up.  Yay!)

Amazon.com Store Card

The Amazon.com Store card offers 5% back on all Amazon.com purchases from Prime members.  I don’t use this card anymore because I got:

 

Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card

This is a great card for Amazon Prime Customers and has replaced my Store Card for Amazon.com purchases:

  1. 5% back on all Amazon.com purchases.  You can use your cash back to pay at Amazon.com checkouts.
  2. No foreign transaction fees.   This is very rare for a card without annual fees.

 

Discover it Card

I mostly keep this card around because I’ve had it since 2004.  However, it has a few nice benefits:

  1. 5% cash back in rotating categories (currently restaurants)
  2. Discover doubles your cash bank in your first year.  (That’s 10% of your money back!)
  3. No foreign transaction fees (this saved a fortune while I lived in Asia)

 

Costco Anywhere Visa Card by Citi

Why do I like this card:

  1. 4% back at any gas station
  2. 3% back at restaurants
  3. 2% back at Costco.  With the Executive card, that’s 4% back on all purchases.

 

Chase Debit

I use this at ATMs about 3x per year.

 

E*Trade Debit Card

This is a secret card that E*Trade does not advertise.  You can link a debit card to your brokerage account if you snail mail them a letter asking for it (there is no other way to request it).  This card allows me to keep only what I need to pay the bills in my checking account.  If I need cash in a hurry, I can sell some stocks and immediately cash them out from any ATM.

 

Chase Freedom: Cash Back Credit Card

Chase Freedom offers 5% back in rotating categories.  It’s too much of a hassle for me to track the categories to actually use it, but it’s easy to get approved for this card, so it’s good for beginners.

 

Chase Ink Business Cash

This card is for my personal business.   I like it because I get 5% back for office expenses and Chase gave me $300 just for signing up.  Using a business card makes it easy to separate my personal and business expenses.

 

The American Express Green Business Card

This corporate card is for my day job.   

 

Bank of China Debit Card

My primary card during my five years in China.  I left my account open in case SHTF and I have to bug out to Asia.  Also, Bitcoin.

Buckhead Fight Club

Physical fitness is important too 🙂  Come spar with me Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday!

 

* About 7 of these are actually in my wallet most of the time.

The sapient mind is a parasite

The conscious, rational mind is a parasite which has hijacked the homo sapiens species for its own purposes.

For billions of years, life on earth was organized by genes directing primitive bio mechanical systems. Recently, the genes began building neural networks with built-in instructions, and even the capability to pass learned behaviors between generations. But the genes screwed up royally when they enabled the replicators doing their bidding to override their programming and develop a culture of their own.

You see, when homo sapiens invented culture, they gained the ability to overrule their genetic programming and do whatever their rational facilities wanted – to an extent. Culture evolves far faster than genes and enabled humans to totally transform their way of life, their environment, and nearly their entire planet. Culture increasingly made evolutionary development irrelevant, as humans increasingly directed both their own and other species sexual selection according to volitional rather than instinctual principles. Although humans are still biologically quite similar to their primate cousins, their newfound dependence on a tool-using culture has led them to evolve such that they cannot survive without tools in nearly all of the environments that they currently dwell in.

By no means is the victory complete. While humans do use their rational facilities to cooperatively provide for their sustenance and raise their offspring, the automatic, and instinctual processes of their brains often sabotage their efforts and cause them to lose their focus on goals, kill each other, or frustrate attempts to mate and reproduce. However, with the passage of time, the domination of the volitional layer is becoming ever more complete. Even within my own brief lifetime, most humans worldwide have visibly increased their capacity for manipulating abstract concepts to cope with the complexity of life in an information economy.

While I’ve called the mind a parasite, don’t mistake that identification for a pejorative. My sympathies — and self-identification lie firmly with my volitional consciousness, not with the animal body that it operates. We may soon face the option of abandoning our biological firmware and operating our minds on a superior computational platform, and I would welcome the possibility. We have already begun the process of offloading computation to our computers whenever possible. It may not be long until humans regard our biological basis as an inferior and unnecessary vestige of our origins.

How and why I hire freelancers via UpWork

The other day I mentioned on LinkedIn that I was looking for a freelancer web developer. A USA-based agency messaged me to express interest. Their rate — $150/hour. This a common rate for an experienced US-based web developer. The project I need help with has a budget of about $1000 per month, so this rate would give me under six hours of work, once rounding and communications overhead (or project manager) is factored in. I ended up going to UpWork.com and hiring two developers: one from Ukraine for $20/hour, and one from India for $10 per hour. The Indian developer will do close to 100 hours of work for the same cost. So that’s the basic case for sourcing your own freelancers. The details are considerably more complicated: sometimes a $150/hour developer is a better value than a $10/hour one: a good programmer can be far more productive than an average one, and a bad one will just waste your time and money. The trouble is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you may end up paying high-end prices for shoddy or useless work. Here is how I approach hiring freelancers:

Good people are hard to find

Whether you’re hiring app developers, artists, video editors, or a project manager, there are usually huge differences between the productivity and quality of freelancers. The average quality of the people who will apply or be recommended for your freelance job posts will be quite low. Most highly-skilled engineers are not interested in freelancing or busy with existing projects, while the bad apples bounce from one project to another.
UpWork makes an effort to recommend the most qualified people for the job, but the candidates often engage in deceptive tactics boost their ratings. Freelancers will steal the information from good profiles, lie about their skills and experience, promise to take on projects they don’t have skills for, or hold your work hostage in exchange for good ratings (yes, this has happened to me).
If you add more rigorous qualifications or required experience to your post, they will use them against you: the frauds will promise to be experts, but honest freelancers (people are rarely a perfect fit) will move on. Many will try to circumvent UpWork: they will email and call you, your boss, your coworkers, and anyone else associated with you on your LinkedIn profile.
It’s possible to screen out the worst applicants (see below), but the only way to identify the 1% who are affordable and qualified is to test them.

How I do freelancer screening

A typical job, assuming a decent description will get about 100 applicants. If you get significantly less than that, your job needs a more detailed description of your project.
You can screen out 90% of candidates by filtering for a 90% job success rate, 1000+ hours worked, good reviews, a credible portfolio, and 10+ high test scores. However, this will usually raise the hourly rate.
1 Screening questions:
I typically do minimal profile screening simply because good profiles are easy to fake. Many individual profiles are secretly teams or agencies, and 1000+ hours on UpWork doesn’t mean anything when they put a brand new guy on your job. I also just don’t have time to screen 100+ applications for each job:
My screening process has three parts:
I ask simple questions which require job-specific experience to answer.
For a web designer: What’s your favorite CSS3 feature?
WordPress e-commerce developer: What version of WooCommerce have you worked with? (Candidates who are not paying attention usually give a WordPress version instead.)
Graphic artist: What navigation pattern would you use for this design?
2 Setup process: With developers, I ask them to follow a specific process which includes
(1) checkout out the code,
(2) messaging me on Slack for a test DB,
(3) sending me a screenshot of their configured dev environment
3 Trial task
(4) suggesting a trial task from the issue list.
90% of applicants will not complete this process correctly. Some tell me “I don’t work for free.” I respect this, and instead ask how they would solve a specific task.
For a complex software development job, 100 applicants followed by a 90% rejection rate still leaves 10 candidates. Each of these 10 receives a trial task. I try to simple, self-contained, well-described tasks with a $100–200 budget. Typically, about 5 candidates will complete the task, and 1 or 2 will deliver quality work. Sometimes none will, and I have to find more applicants. Getting through this process can be frustrating: you will be charged for work that isn’t delivered or must be discarded, will terminate nice guys who can’t deliver on time, and probably find that the best candidate(s) are not the favorites you bet on when you started.
Things are easier for non-developer positions. Artists and graphic designers are easier to screen, but tend to be more flaky with their time estimates. Being patient and understanding, yet severe and final with your judgment is essential in this process.

Establish a good onboarding process

Early in my freelancer management experience, I struggled with managing the cost of onboarding. Some agencies charge thousands of dollars to setup a dev environment and learn your systems. Since then, I’ve developed guides for new developers which communicate three things: expectations, system design/architecture, and development process (“definition of done”). This allows qualified engineers to complete setup without my help — and disqualifies those who struggle.
Here are three such guides I’ve created:

Use collaboration tools to coordinate distributed teams

It’s important to establish a mature development environment before you begin work. The development environment allows you to clearly communicate requirements and task assignments to freelancers, allows you to monitor the progress of code and functionality, and allows you to perform releases to end users in a deliberate manner.
These tools include (this is what I use):
  • Issue tracking tools for developers and stakeholders: JIRA or Bitbucket issues
  • Source code control: BitBucket or GitHub
  • Continuous integration: I use TeamCity or a PHP deploy script
  • Development environment: I use AWS-hosted servers
  • Collaboration tools: Slack for chat & Skype for team status calls
  • Documentation and specifications: Google Docs, JIRA Confluence

Establish working relationships before starting a big project

A good software team is a complex system: it requires a lot of momentum (aka money and time) to start up and keep going. If you’re planning to kick off a big project, it’s essential to get your team lined up first. Even after you complete a screening process and trial tasks, some turnover is to be expected. Various startup challenges will need to be overcome. You need to get momentum going with a small project before you begin one that is essential to your business.
Sometimes your business needs will require a pause in development, so you will have to invent work for your freelancers to keep the team together, lest they drift away, and you have to rebuild a new team all over again.
If this process sounds too risky, stressful, and complex for you, paying $150/hour+ for a reputable US-based developer or professional agency (with a 30% management overhead) is probably a better deal for you. Alternatively, you can skip the headache and hire me to do all of the above 🙂
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on June 8, 2017.

Here is the best personal finance & budgeting app

I tested all the popular budgeting and personal finance tracking apps out there: Mint, Personal Capital, Truebill, Prosper Daily, Albert, Level Money, Proper Daily, and more.

These apps can connect to most banks and credit card companies to pull your transaction history and track your spending. Some of them can monitor and help you cancel recurring subscriptions, or recommend relevant (or not) financial products.

Most of the apps I tried ran into problems such as double-counting credit card charges and credit card bill payments, classifying bank or brokerage transfers as bills (Truebill), not showing pending charges or credit refunds, unable to connect to my bank (Level), or having an ad-bloated UI (Mint) or just confusing (Albert).

While Clarity Money and Prosper Daily were OK, Personal Capital has the most accurate total and is best able to break down both my monthly expenses and income into useful categories. Because it’s funded by its high-net-worth investment management service, it doesn’t try to constantly sell me credit cards or bank accounts like most of the other apps. Get it here.

As far as investments go, Personal Capital is also the only app to show a detailed breakdown of my investments and my net worth (both the money I have with them and elsewhere, and even assets such as a car or gold bullion). Mint is supposed to do that too, but trying to connect to my brokerage always errored out, and their support team was full of excuses.

FEE Content Team: Strategies and Results

(Guest post by By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Director of Content for FEE)

Introduction: a bold experiment in reaching mainstream culture

Two years ago, FEE embarked on an experiment born of frustration. FEE’s website was not a product of its own but rather a kind of information board for advertising the institution. It had low performance. Brand recognition of the institution was not increasing.

And yet there was clearly opportunity. When you look at the venues considered to be mainstream distributors of ideas, they all trend toward the progressive and social democratic, i.e., statist. They fill up the smartphone feeds of millennials. They speak to them on all their social media platforms. Their websites enjoy millions of hits a week. They are profoundly affecting culture – not through political activism, policy study, or academic work, but rather through public commentary on the passing scene. They define what is fashionable.

What is preventing the ideas of liberty from entering this space? Truly nothing but talent, cleverness, and dedication. FEE aspired to apply these traits to our work. We pursued dramatic technological, distribution, and content changes designed to enter into the realm of public culture in a way that directly competes with mainstream venues. We deployed a series of objective measurements to assess our progress. We also set out to be adaptive in all these areas so we could continue to achieve this goal as the tools grew and adapted themselves.

The remainder of this post addresses the content aspect of the strategy.

Fixes and Changes


We first set out to perform a number of technical fixes: in-sourcing the website code for full control and fast development, tagging thousands of articles according to topic, cleaning up legacy cruft, adding missing metadata to articles, and so on. It was a huge job.

We set out to stop the traffic leakage we were experiencing (people hitting the site and leaving) with a series of strategies to capture email addresses. We then built up our daily sending list, from 3,000 two years ago to 45,000 today. As time went on, we added browser notifications for new articles, a new web design to enhance site credibility, and infinite scroll on content display.

We then turned to new content itself. As we looked back at FEE material over the decades, we found a contrast with the way it appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, the material was directed toward a general audience. It did not use in-group language. It didn’t presume that people were already on board with the libertarian vision. But as time marched forward, there was a subtle change. The language became ever more insular and in-group focused, aimed at movement edification rather than culture-wide influence. The editors presumed, probably rightly, that they were speaking to a marginal group about a narrow topic.

Outreach

It was renewed interesting in growth among new audiences that motivated a move toward achieving a broader reach. Today, the purpose of FEE’s content is to describe and explain current events, history, policy, and social and economic theory in light of the ideas of liberty, as articulated by the liberal tradition and exemplified by FEE’s 70-year history.

The purpose is to expand the network of users and broaden the base of people who are exposed to a liberty perspective. The metric for us is summed up in one word: traffic, which is a fair proxy for audience. Without this essential component, not much else matters. You can have the perfect product, the perfect prose, the best analysis, the most wonderful presentation, the most correct doctrine. But if no one sees it, there is a problem. The element of traffic also intensifies the commitment to quality work. As Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” You have some accountability. You can begin to craft your product in line with consumer preferences, and thereby replicate the essential dynamic and driving force of the market itself. After that, we look at demographics, granulated data about types of content, what they do, and how sticky their traffic is.

For traffic metrics, we depend on Google Analytics for granulated data and Alexa for ordinal ranking of our site relative to others. In two years, we’ve moved from the 130,000th most popular site on the web up to a stable 22,000. Our institutional goal is always up, with the hope that we will eventually stabilize in the range of 1,000. We have no estimate for when or even if this will happen.

Growth depends on content sharing – not just a first-round of readership but a second, third, and fourth. The content has to spread, not hit the wall of in-group consumption. Why do people share? There are many reasons. Sometimes a hard-edged ideological piece can work for what we call in-reach. But too much ideological vernacular can also discourage sharing, simply because what appears on people’s social timelines becomes a reflection of how they want to present themselves to a wide range of people within their friend networks.

Because social media is a main source of news today, FEE set out to present content that didn’t so much preach the doctrine but illustrate it in a mainstream and credible voice, and provide excitement about how liberal ideas can provide a better and more fulfilling understanding of the world around us. This content should not only feed our fans, but reach outside our existing audience.

Inreach vs. Outreach

For moment-by-moment analytics (and the team truly does follow traffic patterns all day and through the evening), we use Parse.ly, a platform specifically developed for editorial use. It logs on an ongoing basis what percentage of users are new or returning, a metric we use to determine whether a piece has in-reach power or out-reach power.
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These two examples come from the day I’m writing this post. A piece on Google’s new translation algorithm posts these results from today.

This is successful outreach. For each new user, we try our best to harvest email, obtain approval for browser notifications, and keep people on the site by pushing more material along the same lines, dropping cookies that are capable of machine learning according to a user’s browsing habits.
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On the other hand, here is a much more complex piece on libertarian strategy and the role of ideas – a piece we had intentionally decided for in-reach in order to deepen reader’s relationship with the liberal idea. And sure enough, the reader results are very different.

To be sure, every piece we publish starts out with nearly 100% returning visitors. It is not possible to bypass this group but for paid and targeted advertising. Given that people mostly reach our content via social media, it would be expected that the people who see it first are the fan base on FEE (and this fan base has grown by a factor of 10 in two years). We depend on them to share further outside our network and into theirs. But the path the content takes following that initial release depends heavily on the topic and approach we take with the content itself.

FEE, then, faces a dual obligation: reach new people and feed an existing fan base to further inspire them toward a deeper commitment. Each is important. But given the desire to grow our audience, FEE takes seriously the obligation to seek and explain to all willing listeners of goodwill. We adhere to principle but don’t necessarily wear our ideology on our sleeve or throw labels around, any more than The Atlantic explicitly advocates social democratic ideology in its articles. We show more than tell, in a way that reflects confidence. To put it another way, our philosophy is our musical scale but our literary output is our song.

Editorial Roadmap

We’ve discerned that the path to success must be discovered day-to-day through trial-and-error by a creative and venturesome team. It’s a matter of balance: energy with dignity, boldness with class, accessibility with substance, always striving for impact, excellence, improvement, and growth, while modeling the spirit of freedom.

Below are rules of the road we’ve established that reflect the mission and spirit of FEE.

  1. Illustrate the social, moral, and practical merit of liberty as a principle of human association, and present this radical idea in a mainstream voice;
  2. Achieve a balance of news, think pieces, long form and short form, inreach and outreach, classics, reprints from partner organizations, history, law, economics, cultural criticism, personal advice, biography, and so on;
  3. Transcend the left-right paradigm, with roots in “mainline” intellectual traditions;
  4. Strive to be engaging and interesting, with a harmony of graphics, title, and content with a premium on good writing and not just on taking the right position;
  5. Contain no profanity and avoid tacky and vulgar expressions and images;
  6. Eschew overly technical jargon or esoteric topics;
  7. Avoid overly inflammatory rhetoric that panders to ideological biases or otherwise deploys capricious anger, ridicule, name-calling, and invective;
  8. Avoid in-group, insular language and buzz phrases that can only be understood by our most learned fans while making new readers feel unwelcome;
  9. Avoid appearing to push vendettas against individuals or groups or to attack the person, as opposed to the person’s ideas;
  10. Avoid anything that smacks of partisan politicking.

Social Media

Social media provides the most referrals to FEE.org. Among the platforms, Facebook is the referral engine for 60% of traffic. The next highest known source is Twitter with 5%, then follows Reddit, StumbleUpon, HackerNews, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Blogger. Instagram refers no traffic. It might provide some brand recognition value, but the ROI is unknown. The low level of traffic from Twitter is a bit misleading because these are high-level influencers who then post to their own pages and to Facebook itself. So Twitter works more as a spark than a flame. Screen Shot 2017-01-13 at 10.39.44 AM.png

For Facebook, we use the Instant Articles application, which speeds up viewing on digital devices. We do almost no paid boosting of articles because we’ve found that if an article is going to do well, it does so without boosting, and if it is going to fail, it will fail regardless of boosting. We do pay for targeted impressions of particular content on individuals’ news feeds, based on carefully selected demographics. Using emails drawn from Salesforce data, we are in the position to place content on donor pages and others based on web-viewing habits.

Intriguingly, 30% of our social referrals qualify as dark social, that is via private messages, private groups, private forums, SMS, and so on. This is a powerful source of traffic but it is neither traceable nor influenceable. As for Reddit, we’ve discovered what others have found: there is no viable way to focus on feeding this source, for the platform is extremely averse to perceived gaming. All we can really do is provide a Reddit link at the top of articles and invite readers to use it.

We automate as much of our social as we can. Every new article (we publish eight per weekday and three to five on both Saturday and Sunday) is automatically posted to Facebook and Twitter using the service Zapier. This massively reduces the chance of error. We post every 45 minutes during the day and every two hours following close of business. Other postings are done by hand by a specialist who follows trending topics and posts relevant legacy content. We have not typically reposted material from other places on the web, but have opted for the publishing strategy described below. In addition, we use Facebook to post institutional news and media.

We use two additional publication venues: Medium.com and Flipboard.com. Using both hand and automated tools, we attempt to keep a solid lineup of articles published at those distribution channels. While Flipboard provides direct traffic to FEE.org, Medium does not – that is, articles “live” on Medium. However, it does account for some referrals, and it also increases brand awareness and realizes certain mission goals with very low cost.

Email as a Product

As implausible as it might sound, email remains one of the most valuable digital products, and, hence a solid infrastructure of email contacts is essential. Because we are producing daily content, we put a high premium on the number of people who received daily emails. Two years ago, we sent to 300 but today send to 45,000, in part by defaulting our email signups to become a daily subscription. We’ve used third-party popups via AddThis but our signups increased 5-10 times by creating our own internal version. Of course popups tend to annoy people and, for this reason, nonprofits might try to avoid them. This is a mistake, in our view, for one reason: they work. We need this infrastructure for our operations.

Of course this also places an extra burden on FEE to turn its daily email into a valuable commodity, something not just for promotion but that also provides delight on its own. Subject lines are chosen carefully to be engaging, and they are different each day. Each send – and we send every day at the noon hour – includes a charming and witty moving gif that is related to the article. The idea here is to create a sense of drama for each day: what gif will I get to see today? As a result, though our numbers of gone up dramatically, our open rates remain very steady. It is a product that people consume on a daily basis, thus increasing brand awareness and gratitude that translates to donor support.

Republishing and Author Payments


FEE has attempted to foster a culture of content sharing within the movement generally. We first put all our content in the Creative Commons, choosing the license Attribution 4.0, which allows for any kind of republishing on any basis provided the source is credited. We negotiated a number of agreements with partner organizations to re-publish their material. We estimate the ratio of “original” to “republished” to be around 40-60%. In terms of traffic, we can discern no trends to predict the reach of either type. Much depends on title, image, trending topic, and compelling content.

Our RSS feeds are set to retrieve the full article content so it can be republished on any site in full. In addition, there is a separate feed automatically created for every author on the site (more than 2,000).

We ended author payments – a break with a 70-year practice, so far as we can tell – because we saw no relationship between the quality of submission and financial compensation. As a result of ending all author payments, we lost perhaps 3 of our stable of 75 or so contributors of original content. In contrast, we have added cash prizes to incentivize authors as a way of broadcasting that we do value writing talent. What authors do value is speed of response, carefulness of editing, and a quick turnaround time.

Most outside contributors receive a personalized response within an hour of submission during the work day, and accepted articles appear on the site within 24 hours. This speed and responsiveness is the best way that FEE can show its appreciation to those who choose our venue as their preferred outlet. And here is another case for keeping traffic as high as we can: FEE can get the word out.

The Team and the Division of Labor

The content team is made up of five people currently: editor, managing editor, associate editor, and two content interns. The skill set required: high-level literacy, proofing skills, basic html, speed, low-level image manipulation, facility with the content management system (Umbraco, which is an open-source management system designed for Dot Net), creativity with titles, and a willingness to work all hours including nights, weekends, and holidays since digital media has no hours of operation. We try to maintain a content mix of original and republished material on a full range of topics. We consult with each other throughout the day and otherwise, in person and on Slack, which is FEE’s internal communication system.

Our work flow attempts to stay one day ahead of the publication schedule. All progress is logged on Trello, a collaboration board that allows for attachments and conversations as material moves through the production structure.

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We use Feedly for aggregating content for possible republication. This permits us to navigate content quickly, so that we are not wasting time with random web browsing. Everything we publish is flexible within minutes of going live. Once the publication lineup is ready for the next day, all staff are encouraged to work on writing original content.

The Future

FEE is committed to retaining its existing user base and growing it in every way possible, as quickly as possible. We want to contribute to making the ideas of freedom familiar and credible for the rising generation, thus fulfilling FEE’s historic mission and serving as a beacon of excellence in digital publishing. We are confident that we can achieve this with a continued outward focus on customer needs, adherence to the metrics as a main indicator of success and/or failure, and an unrelenting willingness to adapt to changing conditions in the world’s fast-moving market for information.

Technology Summary

  • Slack: internal office communications; replaces email
  • Feedly: news aggregator for editorial use
  • Parse.ly: real-time metrics reporting and content analysis
  • Umbraco: open-source CMS for ASP.net
  • Zapier: automation of social media
  • Trello: management tool for editorial tasks
  • Flipboard.com: magazine portal for mobile devices
  • Medium.com: popular publishing platform
  • Creative Commons licensing: alternative to restrictive copyright
  • Facebook Instant Articles: dramatic speed increases over old FB browser
  • Zendesk: collaboration tool for external communication
  • Grammerly: handy grammar checker
  • Hubspot: information portal for customer relationships
  • Mailchimp: email sending