I love fountain pens, and use handwriting as a kind of superpower to remember everything I need to at work.
So I started an online fountain pen shop: https://www.bottleandplume.com - it's focused entirely on all the stuff I love: fountain pens, fountain-pen friendly paper, bottled inks, and everything else you'd want or need if you were getting into the hobby, playing with .
I got lucky with timing a few marketing things and it's grown considerably, with lots of repeat customers (I'm really active in the community, not as a business strategy but as a result of my fountain pen addiction, so that helps).
I have a tech job that pays the bills so I'm more focused on having fun and building the fountain pen store I wish existed than on squeezing every last dollar out of my customers and business. It's a lot of work but I'm really enjoying it.
If anyone wants to test nomad/consul on AWS, and you just want to type 'terraform apply' and then have a consul cluster, nomad cluster, and example app to play around with: https://github.com/groovemonkey/tutorialinux-hashistack/
It's a work in progress but might be helpful to someone!
From one of my absolute favorite articles about this, and about finance in general. The most entertaining thing I've read this month: Matt Levine's "How do you like We now?"
Masayoshi Son: What does your company do?
Neumann: We lease office buildings, spruce up the space and sublet it in small chunks.
Son: Hmm I invest in visionary tech stuff, this doesn’t really sound like my thing.
Neumann: Did I mention we are a state of consciousness. A generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs.
Son: Okay yeah that’s more like—
Neumann: The world’s first physical social network. We encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds.
Son: You’re crazy! I love it! But could you be, say, ten times crazier?
Neumann: You’re going to invest $10 billion in my company, which I will use as kindling to light the whole edifice on fire, and then when we are both standing in the ashes you will pay me another billion dollars to walk away while I laugh at you.
Son: All my life I have dreamed of meeting someone as crazy as you, but I never really believed this day would come.
Neumann: I’m gonna use your money to buy a mansion with a room shaped like a guitar, where I will play the world’s tiniest violin after all your money is gone.
Son: YES PUNCH ME IN THE FACE.
Neumann: Also I’ll rename the company “We” and charge it $6 million for the name.
Son: RUN ME OVER WITH A TRUCK.
> Neumann: We lease office buildings, spruce up the space and sublet it in small chunks.
> Son: Hmm I invest in visionary tech stuff, this doesn’t really sound like my thing.
> Neumann: Did I mention we are a state of consciousness. A generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs.
> Son: Okay yeah that’s more like—
> Neumann: The world’s first physical social network. We encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds.
> Son: You’re crazy! I love it! But could you be, say, ten times crazier?
> Neumann: You’re going to invest $10 billion in my company, which I will use as kindling to light the whole edifice on fire, and then when we are both standing in the ashes you will pay me another billion dollars to walk away while I laugh at you.
> Son: All my life I have dreamed of meeting someone as crazy as you, but I never really believed this day would come.
> Neumann: I’m gonna use your money to buy a mansion with a room shaped like a guitar, where I will play the world’s tiniest violin after all your money is gone.
> Son: YES PUNCH ME IN THE FACE.
> Neumann: Also I’ll rename the company “We” and charge it $6 million for the name.
I signed up for Matt Levine's newsletter after that and was surprised to receive well written serious information in addition to this sharp wit.
An example of one such pieces was on the relationship between institutional investors and proxy advisers. Not a single joke or funny sentence unfortunately, but very interesting.
As long as the two types of content he writes are well written information about how the markets work or humorous viewpoints tinted with a mild amount of rage, I am a fan.
The other important tidbit from the article that I think is critically important is that a huge part (most?) of Son's fortune, after the .com collapse, was a single investment in Alibaba.
So, basically, Son got lucky. Of course, "luck" of this sort isn't possible unless you are willing to take big risks, which Son did, but so often, especially in the VC world, you see folks whose really sole main skill is a penchant for outsized risk-taking, and they got lucky, and then they are hailed as a "genius", where the only difference between them and thousands of others who failed is one lucky event, and of course, stastically, someone will get lucky.
When I first heard about Neumann's ridiculous platinum parachute, it made me angry about the state of capitalism, but honestly, if you are going to be a grifter, can't think of a better group to take it from than Son and the Arabian oil shieks.
I'm making a video series on DevOps interviews right now. I haven't seen the questions above much, but for non-technical 'warmup' questions I see these repeatedly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mIkRM7ytWc
Things like "what's your favorite software environment," "what tech hobbies have you played around with," "what's the most complicated infrastructure you've ever had to work with," "talk about a difficult outage that you were a part of diagnosing and fixing."
I guess I've chosen to stay technical, so I haven't seen a lot of the questions mentioned in the original article. They seem pretty like fairly easy behavioral questions to game, I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative ratio looks like there. Although I guess you can say that for any interview question.
I respect your comment, and your viewpoint. But I often hear versions of this: "I had it hard, so we shouldn't let these soft youngsters get off any easier."
I'm not saying you don't have a point (college education has a cost), but on some level it's really just an argument for never making anything better.
I prefer to think, "Are we really so backwards and impoverished as a society that we don't even have the resources to educate our citizens?"
>"I had it hard, so we shouldn't let these soft youngsters get off any easier."
No, they are presumably angry because they are still paying for being responsible enough to pay off their debt in the form of opportunity cost. If they paid 100k off in debt in the past, that's money they don't have now to invest or spend.
Also, having taxes imposed on you for something you didn't get to benefit from at all (but easily could've) is pretty angering.
Yeah, I totally get the sentiment. It's absolutely valid and reasonable. But at some point we have to get to a place where newcomers to the system start getting a 'better deal' then the people came before them.
That's good news! That means the system is improving!
Well, the sentiment aside there's also the issue of the fact that you are subsidizing people that made less financially sound decisions and punishing those who made financially responsible decisions. What about the moral hazard?
i.e. if two people had identical student loan balances with $500 minimum payment per month and one person decided to pay $1000 monthly to pay it off quickly and the other person paid $500 and YOLO'd the other $500 monthly into instagram vacations, takeout food, Bitcoin at 19k, etc, you are effectively subsidizing the second group of choices.
Look at it another way. In the case of universities, the costs are the tuition/fees and the value is the income earned from skills obtained. The reason we are in this student loan crisis (and it is a crisis) is because universities charge too much and the value of what they provide is too low.
So the fact that students are not able to repay the loan is telling you something important -- university education is too expensive.
All of this is above and beyond our existing subsidies of 10K/FTE -- which in many OECD nations would be enough to fully fund university education.
So like healthcare, this is a cost crisis rather than a government funding crisis. You do not decrease costs by increasing subsidies. That is not making the situation better for anyone. Subsidies may be part of the solution, but we are already subsidizing enough, what we are not able to do is control costs and increase the value of the education for our students.
And the fact that in the past, students were able to go to university and pay off their loans without it being a national crisis but now they can't does not mean things have gotten better, it means things have gotten worse.
We need to get back to a state where university education can be provided cost effectively, rather than continuously increasing subsidies, because as long as universities can charge whatever they want and know the government will step in and pay for it, then that is a recipe for declining value, not increasing value.
I know at least a few upper-middle class families whose children went to get some easy, "artsy" degrees at $70K/year.
The parents had their children take on student loans, and bought themselves BMWs at the same time.
Now these kids graduated, are (predictably) struggling to make ends meet, and they may not be able to pay back their student loans.
Should the loans be forgiven in these case, as well?
Who decides when and when not?
Also, the loan money did not only go to pay for tuition - I saw students doing homework on their top-of-the-line MacBooks sipping their $4 lattes all day long. Expensive vacations in some cases, too.
I don't think this slippery slope style reasoning captures interesting disagreement. Imo we should look at the majority of cases and not get lost in edge cases. Which category does what you describe fall into? My intuition says the latter.
This is so true. Another thing I've seen great NCOs do:
When someone has to do something boring/dirty/ugly, never let them do it alone. Sometimes having a buddy help you with shit work can actually turn it into something fun.
So true. When I served, the occasional crap job would come around and everyone was expected to chip in.
We had to field day the barracks every Thursday night. There was no liberty until it was done and inspection complete. As an NCO, I made sure that myself and other NCOs took turns on the buffers, mops/buckets right alongside the Privates and Lance Corporals. There is no "I" in team. This is one thing about the Marine Corps I miss. A very few people could move mountains. The Corps is able to do so much with very little.
I really think there's something magical about beginners typing in whole projects by hand (instead of the modern copy-paste). It really helped me when I was getting started with programming.
To me, it feels like typing each character manually cements the knowledge in there much deeper than 'oh, I think I understand what I'm copy/pasting.'
Maybe that's a shallow truism by now, but I still see people struggling to learn programming via copy/paste from examples.
Learn Python the Hard Way is often blasted for adhering to that sentiment. I think it has value. I think LPtHW perhaps attracts ire first for other things, like a now dated bias towards python 2 over 3, but whenever I recommend it to beginners, people always get mad over its emphasis on memorization.
I get what they're saying (probably from dealing with too much rote school work in the past), programming is more about critical thinking than memory, but it really helps to have the core constructs memorized in a language. If you have to google "loops in python" every time, it's not going to go well.
That's a smart take. Even today when I'm learning something new I try to do as much physical typing as possible from the example because I feel like I learn it better.
The other day I had the thought of "all memory is muscle memory" - it's not literally true, but memorizing in an associated form builds up so many cues that it's worth applying to any study: do warm-ups and repetitions, speak, move, and think in sync.
I tend to think of it is holistic memory or whole body memory. The more functions you can involve subsystems in your body the more it hangs together in your brain for longer terms I think.
I'm only through the first chapter. Might be a good read, but harder to implement. So far it's, you gotta say no to things that aren't important. How often has your boss asked you to do unimportant things, and would you be able to say no to any of them? Maybe try to push it off to someone else... But to say no would be harder.
So I started an online fountain pen shop: https://www.bottleandplume.com - it's focused entirely on all the stuff I love: fountain pens, fountain-pen friendly paper, bottled inks, and everything else you'd want or need if you were getting into the hobby, playing with .
I got lucky with timing a few marketing things and it's grown considerably, with lots of repeat customers (I'm really active in the community, not as a business strategy but as a result of my fountain pen addiction, so that helps).
I have a tech job that pays the bills so I'm more focused on having fun and building the fountain pen store I wish existed than on squeezing every last dollar out of my customers and business. It's a lot of work but I'm really enjoying it.
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