Not The Solution
The Segway didn’t spawn a transportation revolution because what it’s trying to replace is walking, the simplest, cheapest, most convenient and most environmentally friendly transport there is. Walking is the preference. If it can be walked people want to walk it.
The same goes for these kinds of tiny electric cars unveiled every six months or so and sold as the “answer to urban stress and pollution”.
A better (i.e. smaller, electricity powered) car is not the solution to transportation and social problems in urban centres which have been designed around the car but don’t need them.
These cars barely carry two people, never luggage and they only have a range of around 100km (which actually means a range of 50km if you want to get home). There’s much better ways to transport a single person that kind of distance with no luggage through a city. They feel like steps towards the future imagined in Wall-E:
We’re so car dependant/absorbed that we can’t even look away from cars as a solution to our car problem. It reminds me of that Henry Ford quote (possibly joke?): “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” There are a lot of problems with cars in cities, just as there were with horses 100 years ago and everyone thinks the solution is a faster horse.
Blake Wexler phones in a Christmas message for the Daniel Kinno and Rory Scovel episode of The Todd Glass Show.
Not for everyone but I think this is hilarious.
"As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?"
YES!
It seems completely bizarre that Arthur Brisbane has to ask this question but I see this constantly at work. It’s especially prevalent during election campaigns when it’s a constant barrage of reporting on what he said and what she said with zero verification on whether there’s any truth whatsoever in those words.
Via Daring Fireball.
How I Manage Personal Finance
- Every transaction I make gets entered into Quicken Essentials with meta data. If it’s an online transaction I do it immediately. If it’s away from the computer I keep the receipt and enter it when I get home.
- All recurring transactions including regular bills and my salary are stored in Quicken and fall into view automatically as the date arrives.
- Each week or two I login to my bank account or credit card website and reconcile the transactions. Confirming there’s no anomalies between how much money I think I should have and how much I actually have.
There’s a number of advantages to my approach:
- At any time, without logging into any websites I know my complete financial situation across all my accounts and cards.
- I have descriptive and consistent meta data which if you’ve ever looked back at the cryptic list of transactions in your bank statement you know is valuable.
- I can use the meta data as criteria in live reports like how much cash I withdraw at ATMs, spending on alcohol, bike stuff or more boringly, to help me complete my tax requirements.
- I always know what my balance is going to be in the near future plus income and minus bills.
- “Doing my finances” is never a chore. It takes a few seconds to enter each transaction as they happen and only a few minutes to reconcile each week or so.
I also think there’s a less tangible benefit of “dealing with” every transaction I make. Without looking back through the history I always feel like I’m across where my money is going and even if I’m going through a period of spending a lot, it never feels out of control.
My financial situation is purposefully simple and this may not work for everyone but it works very well for me.
Side Note
Quicken Essentials is a bit rough around the edges. I’d love to switch to Koku but it’s missing scheduled and recurring transactions, an important requirement.
Pearls Before Breakfast
This is almost 5 years old now but was recently brought to my attention again and I want to talk about it.
Short version of what happened: one of the world’s greatest violinists, playing one of the world’s most intricate pieces of music on one of the world’s most expensive instruments posed as a busker in a subway for an hour and on the whole he was ignored.
I’m partially playing devil’s advocate as I agree with the point they’re trying to make, that people are too preoccupied with their meaningless, mundane, routine existences to experience something truly beautiful, but…
It is not a surprise to me that people unlikely to be fans of classical music (because it’s not very popular in general), by definition on a schedule either to catch a train or get to work, in freezing cold temperatures, in a place designed around moving people through as quickly as possible, in a place with a lot of atmospheric noise aren’t stopping to listen to this guy.
Do the same “experiment” in a park on a weekend with lovely weather and I’m sure you’d gather a decent crowd.
How To Buy Things
- When you see something you want don’t buy it.
- Instead add it to a list.
- Every few weeks review the list, remove the things you no longer need or want.
- If you have the urge to impulse buy something because it’s on special, don’t buy it if it’s not on the list, optionally add it to the list.
- If something on the list is on special or has remained on the list after multiple reviews, buy it.
I’ve used this system for a couple of years and it works well. Over time I’ve avoided buying 1000s of dollars worth of stuff that, as time has passed, I’ve realised I don’t need or want.
- Anyone can enter whatever they want, they’re just text fields.
- This is a website on the internet, drinking age varies between countries.
- Why would you have to be drinking age to view a website about alcohol anyway? It’s not like it’ll turn your USB port into a beer tap.
What a waste of time.
Escalators
The way people behave on escalators fascinates me. When faced with an escalator with minimal obstacles you have two options:
- Keep walking. Get double the speed for the equivalent effort.
- Stop walking. Go the same speed, or slower for zero effort.
It blows me away to see people walking briskly through a shopping centre only to stop dead on an empty escalator. To choose doing nothing and maintaining speed over making no extra effort and doubling your progress says something greater about a person I think.
Last Place Aversion
This has been sitting in my drafts for a few months and now I can’t remember what I wanted to say about it. It’s a sad phenomenon.
Via Daring Fireball
"Whether to expand recurring events into instances and only return single one-off events and instances of recurring events, but not the underlying recurring events themselves."
"If the US government responded to the Occupy Wall Street movement by implementing a large policy program that Australia already has – Occupy Wall Street would declare victory and go to the pub!"
Pollytics in an incredibly well researched and visualised article on just how well Australia is doing despite the general perceived hardship.
Beautifully demonstrates the ridiculousness of the occupy movements in Australia.
New Twitter
I’m seeing lots of talk about whether it actually is a simplification, who it’s for, which direction they’re going, what’s been demoted, what’s being emphasised, the confusing iPhone app, how horrible it is and how great it is.
Personally, I interact with Twitter exclusively via the API and third party applications (Tweetbot on iPhone and Twitterrific for Mac) where these issues don’t exist.
Getting Bought
Preface: I’ve never used Gowalla but apparently it’s a better foursquare (which I also haven’t used and don’t get).
Anyway, they got bought by Facebook just the other day. MG Siegler said:
I’m really happy for the Gowalla team.
This seems to be the vibe whenever one of these small companies gets bought by a big company. I say “vibe” because I avoid actually following this kind of news and only see reaction to it on Twitter.
If you’ve started a small company, working with great people (which I would assume because you’ve hired them), making something great that lots of people enjoy and you’re making money I can’t see how getting bought by a huge company would be anything to be happy about.
But I guess that’s the classic (and ridiculous) problem for these kinds of startups: everything’s great except they’re not making money, they have no plan to make money and that can’t possibly be sustained. I’d imagine Gowalla would have much preferred to find a way to make money themselves. It’s bizarre that people would be happy for and congratulate a company for doing the only alternative to eventual bankruptcy at the expense of all their control and identity.
Will Little Printer actually pre-print a face on every print out you make? That’d be kind of annoying. Also, I can’t imagine anyone having the desire to read news headlines or Foursquare updates on a piece of receipt paper. This solves no problems but look how cute it is.
