BenBuckman.net (Blog only)

Experiment in Outsourcing (part 1)

ben — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:58:18 +0000

I've been reading Tim Ferriss's book "The 4 Hour Work Week", about a "New Rich" system for cutting out the 80% of your time that produces 20% of the value (in a nutshell). It's sort of a practical counterpart to the inspiring-but-useless book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad".

One of the chapters is about "Outsourcing your life." He talks about outsourcing ordinary tasks to "virtual personal assistants" in India, outsourcing production of specialized products, outsourcing pretty much anything. (On the macro scale, I'm fairly convinced that in a global economy where labor races to the cheapest providers, American workers are fucked, but I'll leave the politics of this issue to other posts.)

Anyway, I read the chapter and thought about how I might be able to apply the concepts myself. Most of the actual work I do is highly specialized, and I subcontract parts of it (so far) only to people I already know and trust to do great work. But I did have a list of other stuff I needed done that I haven't had time to do, such as:

Research car insurance policies. (I've been burned several times by Liberty Mutual and need a new provider.)
Research some growth affecting our tomato and spinach plants.
Researching and/or scheduling various appointments.

Coincidentally, while thinking about this, I was reading fellow Drupaler Chris Shattuck's blog, and he had posted a list of "Stuff I own and like a lot," including 4 Hour Work Week. So I asked him about the outsourcing chapter. That prompted him to try an ongoing experiment in outsourcing his own life.

I've been reading his posts with interest, and trying the same on my own. I posted a job on eLance (a global freelancing/outsourcing connector) for a "Virtual Personal Assistant." In the job description I specifically mentioned the car insurance and plant research.

I got half a dozen responses, with hourly bids ranging from $5 (in India) to $10 somewhere in the US. I rejected the $10 bid as too high, and rejected the $5 bid because it was filled with generic gibberish and typos. I narrowed the rest down to 2, a woman at $7/hr that seemed good for the insurance research, and a student in MA on summer break with a bio background for $8.50/hr that seemed good for the plants.

I asked the $7 person for an estimate of how long it would take to get 5 competing policies and got a quick response (1-1.5 hours). So I hired ("selected") her for the insurance research: I took the crib sheet for my insurance policy, blacked out personal details (last names, ID numbers, address) - leaving just the car info, ages, and coverage amounts - and asked for all the details she could get and a summary of pros/cons, with some guidance like "if you're on hold more than 5 minutes, hang up, I don't want to work with companies that have bad customer service."

I'll select the other guy for the plant research in a little while and send him photos I took of the plants. If it takes him 1.5 hours as well, all this will cost:

$15 for the premium job listing
$10.5 for 5 insurance policy bids
$12.75 for a prognosis of my plants' affliction

(Total $38.25)

Plus the time involved, a few hours probably to sign up on eLance, post the job, read the bids, send back details, and read the final reports... 4 hours maybe. (The biggest cost if I consider this lost work time.) Much of that is one-time only, though: if these people are good, for instance, it'll be easy to go back to them for later research. And while the concept of outsourcing is to save money, this exercise isn't so much for that as for the experiment. If I do get great results, it'll be worth the $38.25 and I'll write off the cost as learning time.

Of course a true "4 Hour Work Week" system means outsourcing pretty much everything, which this does not come close to doing. But with my line of work, for the foreseeable future, outsourcing/hiring out my work means I'll be spending most of my time managing other people, which is not necessarily less time-consuming, and isn't what I want to be doing right now. In the long run, since time isn't scalable, I'd like to switch to a product model, but that's a whole different ballgame.

I'll post updates here when I get some concrete results from the experiment. Stay tuned. (Also keep an eye on Chris Shattuck's blog for the results of his similar experiment.)

Everything I Learned in College (...fits in a blog post)

ben — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:51:23 +0000

The outline of this post came to me last week late at night when I couldn’t sleep. I jotted the bullet points in my phone and promptly fell asleep. Otherwise, since I graduated two years ago, this is apropos of nothing.

I majored in philosophy, which was mostly useless for practical wisdom (particularly Ethics). One thing that stuck was a metaphor a professor used for Aristotle’s virtue of Magnanimity: “Don’t run to catch a bus.” (Nassim Taleb makes the same point regarding trains (paraphrased from first person): “Snub your destiny... be in control of your time, your schedule, and your life.”) College itself is in many ways an expensive bus we all run after.

Economics was one of the most beneficial departments for my thinking. I was no good with the graphs, but some concepts stuck:

Opportunity cost: the cost of doing some activity including the lost potential gain of the alternatives. Essentially a measure of tradeoffs (which, also learned in Econ 101, everything is).
Externalities: all the things we do that have costs or benefits not “internal” to our own balance sheet. This is the premise behind most good public policy, and is key to understanding policies for the environment, education, and health care.
Sunk costs: What’s already spent is gone, and therefore irrelevant to future planning. If doubling down on a bad bet won’t bring positive returns, move on.
Diminishing returns: illustrated by a college degree, which might have immediate value (first job salary) but then matters less and less as past work experience becomes more important.

One other lesson I particularly remember from political philosophy was John Stuart Mill’s argument for women’s equality. Writing around the 1860s against the common wisdom that women were inferior (and therefore could not work or participate in politics), he made an out-of-the-box, almost counter-intuitive argument that no one could refute: even if women, on average, were worse than men at some activity, there was no way the best women were worse than the worst men, and the latter were not excluded. Ka-pow. (I liked the classes where my brain “clicked” often.)

Grad school reading is a sham. Every grad student I spoke to said they were given hundreds of books to read in a semester, and by necessity could only skim them. They had mastered techniques to figure out what an author said without reading the words. This fed the textbook industry, itself a scam, with thick tracts written by academics for academics that were re-released every year with the page numbers shuffled just enough to require new copies. The whole scenario smells of fraud, and anyway, no one can retain so much information when it’s consumed that way.

History was a string of accidents. The United States conquered the Philippines in 1898 - a turning point in American imperialism - because the message saying the war was over took too long to reach the fleet. (This fascinated me so much that I wrote a paper studying the history of naval communication.)

Calculus is rarely, if ever, taught well.

There is more truth in great fiction - which requires hypothetical thought experiments - than most nonfiction. The best class I took consisted of reading science fiction novels about utopia and dystopia, which generated far more deep thinking and insights than the thick treatises in other classes.

If you’re paying for college (or will be later with student loan debt), you might as well get your money’s worth. That means participate, ask questions, do the work, get good grades, join the clubs, use the free gym. Your grades will hardly matter after you graduate (and won’t matter at all after your first job), and you don’t need to have a 4.0 GPA to get your money’s worth (the cost/benefit is probably not worth it) - but barely graduating with a C average just seems like a waste of time and money. Put differently: if your goal in college is to focus on something else, like starting a business, and the degree is a nice side benefit, then save the money, put 110% into what you really want to do, and you’ll come out far ahead.

Skills matter far more than studies. Millions of students are graduating from college in this recession with liberal arts degrees and no marketable skills and can’t find work. Basic skills like learning how to communicate in an office, how to present a plan, how to network, are learned from experience (and academic classes don’t teach them), and more advanced skills like computer programming can open huge doors. So get a job in college even if you don’t need the money, as interesting as you can find but not necessarily along your imaginary long-term career path. Also, find a niche if you can, but build a diverse skillset. Knowing a little about a lot opens more doors later (and doesn’t preclude knowing a lot about a little in addition). Your CV doesn’t need to have a 1-10 proficiency scale next to each skill, it just needs to have more skills than the next person’s.

A corollary of the skills point is that you don’t need to know what you want to “do with your life.” You just need to be positioned to find and grab opportunities. Long-term plans can inhibit you as much as they motivate (if they prevent you from going on tangents that are actually more valuable). Unless you really have your heart set on a particular field or career (and most of the students I knew did not, and still don’t), skills and positioning are more important than planning.

Management theory is bullshit. In a Management 101 class I signed up for one summer, we did a case study involving some problem in a factory. The professor’s (a former factory manager himself) guidelines were to never do the work yourself, but rather instruct other people to do it. To my mind, that mindset is the root of the management-labor struggles of the last two centuries, and fundamentally flawed. (I dropped the class and worked instead.)

Take time off. I took a semester off in my junior year (after getting a semester ahead with summer classes) and it was more enlightening than the 3.5 years in class combined. Taking summer classes, incidentally, does not need to diminish the enjoyment of summer (especially if the summer term is divided into two semesters). If you don’t have good memories from college after you’re all done, then you wasted your time.

Looking back, I doubt my degree from BU was worth the cost. My work now evolved from the work I did to pay room and board in college, not the degree I happened to be getting at the same time. Friends who went to much cheaper state or community colleges seem to have gotten the same long-term value, especially if they are entrepreneurial. And students graduate every year with an expensive piece of paper and do nothing interesting (particularly ironic for business school graduates). Of course, it’s mostly a sunk cost and therefore irrelevant, except that I’ll be paying the price for another twenty years (to SallieMae), so it doesn’t feel sunk.

So my two cents of advice if anyone wants it, is take the money (real or imaginary) you’d spend on a private college and save it for something else. If you have $200,000 in a college savings fund, buy real estate, start a business, or put 75% in an IRA and travel the world for a year with the rest - and then be the most well-rounded student at a state college. If you don’t have the cash (and would have to take out loans), be cognizant that long-term debt (with no appreciable asset to balance it - a degree has diminishing returns) is a chain around your neck.

(Of course if you want to be a doctor or lawyer, then a BA is a prerequisite, though the benefit of one school vs another is still questionable. Your cost calculation is also different then - if your starting salary out of law school is $180,000 a year, you can pay off your debts pretty quickly. So this advice isn’t for you.)

Finally, read Seth Godin’s post on “the coming meltdown in higher education.” Something has to give eventually (the ROI can’t keep dropping forever), but in the meantime, we can be smart and avoid playing an overpriced game.

Keynes vs Hayek, in rap

ben — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:38:08 +0000

My brother's new album, "Keep Walking, Kid"

ben — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:39:39 +0000

My brother, Mordechai ("Mory") Buckman, released a new album of original classical/new-age-y music on the piano, entirely for free on his website: Keep Walking, Kid. It's really good stuff, if I may say so myself.
If you only have a few minutes, I'd recommend "A Lonely Journey" (track 8), it's one of my favorites.

Here's the full track list:

Keep Walking, Kid

Original music by Mordechai Buckman

Innocence (3:18)

The Wanderer (3:09)

Classical Framework (1:35)

Dots & Curves (3:45)

Standing Up (3:16)

Dominance (5:12)

Daydream (1:51)

A Lonely Journey (4:56)

The Joy of Life (2:23)

If you like it, share it with your friends, it's totally free!

Random Show episode 11

ben — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:28:15 +0000

Another great Random Show with Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss:

Trying GoToMeeting Alternatives

ben — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:26:02 +0000

I occasionally need to have virtual meetings with clients where I share my screen. I've used GotoMeeting (from Citrix) and WebEx (from Cisco) as a participant in meetings and webinars, and WebEx once as a host, but they're pricey at $50+ per month. I don't need the service frequently enough for that to be worth the price. (Citrix has day passes for GotoAssist, but not for GotoMeeting, unfortunately.)

So I did some research and found two alternatives that seemed good: DimDim and FuzeMeeting.

I tried DimDim first. They offer video conferencing via Flash and screen sharing via a separate plugin/app that runs outside the browser. The option to download that app didn't exist in Chrome (my default browser), however. It was available in Firefox. I wrote to them (first via Live Chat and then email) to report the Chrome issue. They were very prompt: someone called me within an hour to walk me through it. He tried to help me by insisting it already worked. We did a screen share, he showed me how it worked for him - on Windows XP - and suggested I reboot my computer. Sorry, I'm not using Windows, I shouldn't have to reboot to get a web service to work.

DimDim also doesn't seem to have HTTPS/SSL login (even though they say the video itself is encrypted). And the screen sharing app (run from Firefox) is buggy: I pressed the Pause button, for instance, and it closed (not what the demo video said it should do). And most importantly for the particular meeting I needed it for, DimDim doesn't offer a call-in number (it's all VOIP).

So I tried FuzeMeeting instead. They don't have videoconferencing ("on the roadmap for Q3" I'm told), but their screen sharing is much slicker. The app generally (all in Flash) is a little complicated at first but very feature-rich. For audio they have VOIP, phone (including toll-free, paid by the host obviously), and Skype call-in (which I used). Unlike DimDim, though, its under-$50/month plan doesn't include meeting recording.

Fuze seems a more solid product generally. But it needs videoconferencing and recording in the cheaper plans to be definitely more cost-effective than GotoMeeting and WebEx. And adding recording to their $9.99 day passes (for infrequent users like myself) would be great too.

I'm not sure what I'll use for my next virtual meeting, maybe I'll keep looking around. Skype is supposed to start offering group video soon, too, so I might just use that.

"Future-proofing your passion" by Merlin Mann

ben — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:22:05 +0000

Merlin Mann offers a fan some advice about how to really follow your dreams:

By starting adult life with an autistically explicit “goal” that’s never been tested against any kind of real-world experience or reality-in-context, we can paradoxically miss a thousand more useful, lucrative, or organic opportunities that just…what?…pop up. Often these are one-time chances to do amazing and even unique things—opportunities that many of us continue to reject out of hand because it’s “not what we do.” [...]

Be the curious one who soaks in all that “irrelevant” stuff. And, even as you stay heads-down on the “now” projects that keep the lights on, remember that the guy who invented those lights made hundreds of “failed” lightbulbs before fundamentally upending the way we think about time, family, industry, and the role of technology in how we live and work. But, yes, ﬁrst he “failed” a lot a lot at something which more than a few of his contemporaries thought was pointless in the ﬁrst place. [...]

If we embrace the fact that no one can or should ever care about the health of our passions as much as we do, the practical decisions that help ensure Our Good Thing stays alive can become as “simple” as a handful of proven patterns—work hard, stay awake, fail well, hang with smart people, shed bullshit, say “maybe,” focus on action, and alwaysalways commit yourself to a bracing daily mixture of all the courage, honesty, and information you need to do something awesome—discover whatever it’ll take to keep your nose on the side of the ocean where the fresh air lives. This is huge.

Anything else? Yeah. Drink lots of water, play with your kid every chance you get, and quit Facebook today. No, really, do it.

Read the whole post.

Reflections, One Month In

ben — Mon, 31 May 2010 03:02:33 +0000

It’s been a month since I turned over a new leaf in my working life, and I’d like to share some thoughts.

First, I am writing this on my personal blog and not on my business site because, when I created that site, I knew that every business website nowadays has a blog, and that seemed a good reason to leave one out. That’s not a permanent decision: I’ll probably start a blog there when I have a unique and coherent point of view, as a business, to share with the world, but that’s not quite yet.

Time

It’s been a very busy month. I wanted to hit the ground running, so I deliberately took on a larger work load for the immediate term than I probably want to sustain. (I was also a little surprised and very encouraged by the amount of demand there was so soon out of the gate.)

I’ve [re]-learned a few things about time. Halfway into the month, after working most of my waking hours for two weeks, I left my laptop at home and took my Kindle to a coffee shop in Cambridge to read Seth Godin’s Linchpin for an evening. My work involves constant mental energy by its nature, but I got more thinking done between the lines of the book in an hour there than in the previous week. Being head down in work all the time may be good for productivity but is not conducive to new ideas or reflection. (If hygiene didn’t matter, idea-generation alone would be a reason to shower every day.)

Valuing Open Source

I decided early that certain principles should be deal breakers. One in particular that’s been challenged several times already is respect for open source. I work primarily with open source software that is valuable because so many developers and organizations released their contributions for free to the community. Learning and adhering to best practices and new techniques (in any context) involves reading what other people have done, and that’s only possible because they share it. “Giving back” skills and code to the ecosystem makes the world richer for everyone. (As a side benefit, it can also be good for marketing.) Most businesses still think in zero-sum terms - open source saves money, but don’t let anyone else benefit or add to anything we created - and I think that’s short sighted. It’s one of the reasons I left my corporate job.

So it’s been interesting, in nearly every client agreement I’ve been involved with, to have to defend my right to re-use or release any original code serving a general purpose back to the community. The standard consulting contract still has absurd intellectual property clauses - everything you bring to the project, even if it was yours before, is now solely ours, etc. That’s a 20th century mentality and the lawyers need to catch up with the times. On one project I decided to conduct a requested audit/review of a site but not write any original code because the client (or their lawyers) were so adamant about code ownership. (My thought: if a brand-new competitor could beat you simply by using the same general-purpose additions to an open-source framework as you’re using, you should rethink your value proposition.)

(If you’re dealing with the same issue, check out CivicActions’ contract template, released under a Creative Commons license, which is a great model for upholding open-source values.)

Failure

I spent a little time today reflecting on a failure of mine at the job I recently left (in the context of Linchpin). One of the company’s sites that I worked on was an old site on an old server and the code wasn’t version controlled. Deploying new code involved downloading, modifying, and uploading in duplicate to the staging and production servers, hoping no one else was working on the same files. I thought this was backwards and insisted on putting the code in SVN like the rest of the sites, and took it upon myself to do so.

Only a fraction of the code could actually go into SVN, however; the vast majority of the site’s many static files (accumulated over years) were generated by a separate application in a way that would make SVN unusable. Separating and deploying them became a nightmare, the solution to which was more about office politics than systems administration. Editors and designers had to change their workflows so files would be tracked and in the places they belonged. But they were comfortable with the way they’d done things for years, and the sysadmin team didn’t want another automated process to worry about.

So I got the technical work done, but the “process” stuff (the human part) lagged, and deploying code became a full day’s work that only I could do. Months went by, we had meeting after meeting to figure out a long-term solution, I proposed a complex solution that was rejected, then simpler ones; the sysadmin proposed a solution no one understood; the editors didn’t show up at the meetings. I likened the situation to walking through a swamp - you’re better off on the other side but drowning if you stay in the middle. A week before I left, I took the code out of SVN, and left it to the other developers just as it was when I came in.

I did a lot of good work at that job, but that was one failure worth reflecting on as I develop my business. Being good at the actual work is critical, but it’s not the whole game. The “art” as Godin calls it involves the social/emotional work as much as the technical. I made the conscious decision (in leaving) that corporate politics were not the best investment of my time and energy, and I don’t regret not staying around to fight more battles with entrenched cubicle dwellers. But I do need to constantly work on my inter-personal skills, and think about the human side to infrastructural change, and be sure I can follow through on both sides of the coin if I commit to something.

Working at home

I’ve been working mostly at home. Pro: the cats like having me around. Con: I don’t have an ergonomic setup yet. (I’m looking into getting an adjustable sitting-standing desk, preferably before I develop tendinitis or carpel tunnel. The MacBook Pro is a beautiful thing but the sharp front edge tend to pinch the nerves in my arms and make my wrists numb.)

I really enjoy working at good coffee shops, and being a T ride away from some amazing ones in Cambridge and Davis Square is great. Over the next few months I’d like to explore working at least part-time in a coworking space. I do miss the camaraderie (and Nerf gun fights) in the office, though I don’t miss the cubicle.

Well this is quite a long post. Congratulations if you’ve read it all the way through. Thank you, and stay tuned.

Humans are Purpose Maximizers

ben — Fri, 28 May 2010 05:10:19 +0000

Robert Scoble posted this video today, an animated presentation by Dan Pink on motivation and purpose. People need to be paid enough to take money off the table, but beyond that, autonomy, mastery, and purpose are much more important. It's a great video:

Ride yesterday

ben — Tue, 18 May 2010 01:04:19 +0000

This was the route map of my bike ride yesterday, on which this photo was taken. I recorded the route with SportyPal on my Droid, but on my way back home, I stopped by the beach for a little and it must have thought I was done, because it stopped recording. A few minutes after that, incidentally, I got a flat tire, so I got to replace my inner tube by the beach too.
This was my first ride in good weather this season, it wasn't very long, but there were some nice climbs, and it was a good start.

Discomfort and Showing Up

ben — Sun, 02 May 2010 05:09:54 +0000

Craig Harper offers the following hypothesis: "There is a positive correlation between how uncomfortable an individual is prepared to get and their likelihood of success – irrespective of the field of endeavour."

There's definitely truth in that.

I was listening to an interview on Fresh Air the other day with the actor Sean Hayes, and heard this great exchange:

GROSS: So if singing scares you a little bit, and you're out on a Broadway stage singing, that's got to be scary with a capital S.

Mr. HAYES: Yeah, that's what life's about, though, isn't it? Isn't it about getting out of your comfort zone and getting off the couch and challenging yourself and forcing yourself to do things you wouldn't other do, otherwise what are you living for?

GROSS: Comfort.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HAYES: Well, actually, I'm realizing that now. Comfort never sounded so great.

Friday was my last day at my "day job" with a corporate employer. Monday I officially begin my new era of freelancing. (In practice the era started a few weeks ago, but this is the clean break.)

Someone told me today, switching from a job to freelancing means you go from working some time to working all the time. Definitely truth in that too. It'll be a few months until I get a good work-life balance back, and that's fine. Maybe I'll work for 6 months and take a month off. I couldn't do that before.

A colleague asked me the other day how I've gotten work so far. I didn't have any particular secrets to share. Mostly I just showed up. (As Woody Allen said, that's 90% of life.) I show up at Drupal meetups, share what I'm learning and working on, we get pizza and beers afterwards, and I get work. I saw a proposal for a panel discussion at DrupalCon that I wanted to participate in, I "showed up" and asked if I could join, that led to a gig with ImageX Media. I laid down the cash to show up at DrupalCon, and it was exhilirating. None of these were calculated, "if I show up here, I'll get this gig." It just works out that way. Showing up just seems like a good idea in itself. (What's the worst that can happen? I'll decide not to show up next time because it's a waste of time, lesson learned.)

I've noticed several people recently who don't seem to be getting anywhere, because they don't show up anywhere. Because it's sometimes uncomfortable to meet a bunch of strangers or write something on a subject in which you don't have a PhD, or try to get involved with something unknown.

One thing I'm worried about for the next year is that I'll get into a comfortable groove, establish steady habits, feel like I'm doing really well, and stop learning from others. That'll be one of the biggest challenges over the next year, maintaining that open-mindedness and humility. That, and maintaining a work-life balance. I have to make sure not to ever get [too] comfortable.

(Added: I Google'd "90% of life is showing up" to find the source of the quote and stumbled on this great blog post by P Morgan Brown.)

Startup case study: Dropbox

ben — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:49:03 +0000

DropBox is one of my favorite apps, and one of the most ubiquitous today among techies I encounter. This is a presentation on their story and some lessons they learned. It's could be a case study out of 37Signals' ReWork, with some tweaks: Build something you want for yourself. Forget conventional wisdom. Focus on the fundamentals. Do a core function extremely well, don't overload with feature cruft. Build a community, invite valuable feedback, encourage sharing. They didn't release early, but they "learned early, and learned often." Now they have a must-have product with millions of users.

Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv

The New Yorker Explains Resolution Authority

ben — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 01:15:33 +0000

Via Paul Krugman, the New Yorker explains resolution authority:

Profile of the Tea Party

ben — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:34:44 +0000

A poll of Tea Party members shows are "wealthier and more educated," mostly not too upset with their individual tax burden, and overall pretty mainstream. They're just mad as hell about the government, about too much help to the poor, and about health care reform.

The demographic profile suggests that despite their spokespeople (Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, etc), these aren't just rambling idiots, they're people with good standing in their community, mainstream lifestyles, financial stability. People who can make things happen and sway elections. I'd much rather have the Tea Partiers be a bunch of rambling morons in a tent city. These guys could actually be dangerous.

Launching New Leaf Digital

ben — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:21:17 +0000

Last week I wrote that I was turning over a new leaf in my life, leaving my corporate job at the end of April to become an independent/freelance web developer. A combination of factors, including turning 25, reminded me that this was something I wanted to do eventually, and there's no time like the present.

So today, I officially launched the website for my new business, New Leaf Digital, at newleafdigital.com.

I've also joined the development team at ImageX Media in Vancouver, starting May 3rd. ImageX will be a pillar of my new track, and in the rest of the week I'll be working for my own New Leaf Digital clients and pursuing other interesting projects.

The good news is, I'm already swamped for the next few months. The last few weeks have been exhilarating (and exhausting), as I take on new clients and set up New Leaf Digital, while still working 9-5 an hour from home.

Next weekend I'm headed to San Francisco for DrupalCon.

Big News For Me

ben — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 04:52:30 +0000

I've got some news about a major change I'm making in my career. I've been doing web development in various capacities for around a decade now. My last two jobs on this track included a year with a Drupal consulting shop and the last seven months with a large publishing firm.

I've recently decided to leave my job and go independent. The next few weeks will be very busy, transitioning out of my day job (ending April 30th), attending DrupalCon in San Francisco (April 19-21), speaking to potential clients, and freelancing in the evenings.

I'm turning over a new leaf in my life, going in a direction I've wanted to pursue for a while. So it makes sense to call my business New Leaf Digital, and I'll have more details about that soon.

I've been inspired by so many people and ideas lately. By Jason Calacanis' talk about "Samurais and drones," Andrew Warner's incredible Mixergy.com interviews, 37Signals' ReWork, Seth Godin's Linchpin, and so many others. (I'm going to devote part of the soon-to-launch NewLeafDigital.com to these inspirations.)

I want to thank all those who have encouraged me and given me great advice. I also want to thank everyone who has not encouraged me: those who have my best interests at heart, because they care, and those who don't, because they brought clarity.

This is an incredibly exciting and (in a good way) terrifying move. Really the only thing to fear is failure, and fear of failure is a terrible reason not to do something great. James Cameron said it right at TED:

Don't bet against yourself. Take risks. Failure is an option. Fear is not.

Stay tuned.

Is This Your Customer?

ben — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:26:03 +0000

From Cory Doctorow's piece on why he isn't buying an iPad:

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

The Old Economy has been dead for 30 years

ben — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 05:03:08 +0000

Read Tom Friedman's op-ed from yesterday. First paragraph:

Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

When I first read this, I wondered, why has this statistic never been mentioned before? Why is this not the most important observation of the economy's collapse touted on every evening news program? The article is primarily about immigration reform, but it speaks to so much more.

The statistic seems to mean, in aggregate, that the GM's, GE's, Microsoft's, factories, coal mines, farms, fast food chains, TV networks, print publishing companies, Wall Street giants, and every other 20th century corporation contribute nothing to the gainful employment of a growing population, and haven't for years or decades.

It reminds me of an intellectual history course I took in college, in which we studied early 20th century sociologists (whose names I won't drop because I'm hardly an expert on them) who argued that every institution is inherently obsolete to some degree because it was created in the past. The world changes, yesterday hasn't caught up with today, so yesterday's world is wrong for today. It was probably true of most institutions in the early 20th century, and it was most certainly true of the economy at the turn of the 21st century. (It probably helped the status quo that the sector touted as the Next Big Thing for the economy crashed in those same years.)

I would also assume that most companies younger than five years are unlikely to be very large (relative to their older competitors). Each one individually is unlikely to have many employees, it would only be in aggregate that they create so many jobs. That means there are no economic giants anymore: what's good for any individual company is no longer automatically good for America. Politicians who want to tout job growth necessarily can't get away with a single press conference with one big employer anymore.

What does this mean? One of two things, it seems. Either,

1) Old companies tend to stagnate as a matter of principle. They establish a secure business model, reach a peak early on (when they're still innovating), then they coast with the same work force for years, growing by becoming more efficient (or not growing).

Or,
2) All the big companies in the American economy are operating with obsolete business models, staying alive because the alternatives haven't matured yet, or from bailouts.

Imagine for a moment a counterfactual, in which the barriers to creating new businesses suddenly increased exponentially around 1980 for whatever reason, so the only companies that could thrive were those already established. In such a world, there would have been zero new jobs created for thirty years.

So it's great that didn't happen. Twenty years of growth and ten years of faux-growth were possible because it was easy for new businesses to rise. But what does it mean going forward? Even without adding jobs, all those big old companies still have millions of employees, so we can't exactly wish for their collapse. But it would be fair to assume that the next twenty years of recovery and growth won't be coming from companies built pre-1980. (At best, they'll hire back most of the people they used to employ, and keep coasting.)

What I want to know is: does the rule apply historically as well? Did most of the jobs created throughout the twentieth century come from companies younger than five years? If so, shouldn't all our economic policies be geared toward new businesses, and minimizing the friction of employee movement between jobs, especially from old businesses to new? (That friction includes, for example: non-portable health insurance plans and 401K vesting.) Shouldn't the whole notion of [established] corporate interests as national economic interests be turned upside down? What's good for today's and tomorrow's businesses is far more important than what's good for any existing one!

I'm going to spend a bunch of time this week following the conversations around Friedman's article. The implications of such a simple statistic are incredible.

The Random Show ep 9

ben — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:00:34 +0000

From two very smart people, Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss, comes episode 9 of The Random Show. Lots of good stuff.

Socialize, don't commute

ben — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:58:22 +0000

David Brooks has a good column on happiness research:

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year. ...

The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.

The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.

First bicycle ride of the year

ben — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:47:05 +0000

I took my bike out for the first time this year. The weather was sunny and cold this morning, but started to get very windy and cloudy when I went out. I rode along the ocean a ways in each direction.

Poem: What Teachers Make

ben — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14:40:27 +0000

From Seth Godin:

Design Tweaks

ben — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 05:19:11 +0000

First: if you're viewing this site in Internet Explorer and everything looks off, it's because IE sucks, and I'll try to fix it tomorrow.

For everyone else... after playing with some ideas for a totally new design for this site, I decided I don't have the time for a redesign and instead went for some tweaks around the margins. Visible changes include moving the post metadata to the right side and tightening up some margins.

I also turned tags back on for all posts (where available). I've only been diligent with tagging on my tech posts, so the tags for everything else are probably sparse and inconsistent, but I'll try to improve on that going forward.

Later on, I'd like to figure out a way to better separate the tweets from the blog posts, or at least highlight the blog posts. If you have any suggestions, please send them along.

(I'll try to fix the IE styling tomorrow. Internet Explorer is the bane of every web designer/developer's existence.)

Broken Bells: Live from SXSW

ben — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:02:03 +0000

I'm loving this album.

Digital nomads and 19th century business laws

ben — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:27:28 +0000

I've been taking on more freelance work lately, and would like to operate under a business name, New Leaf Digital (website coming soon). I don't want to become an LLC just yet, because it's not worth the $500 annual fee for part-time, but I do need to file (as far as I can tell) a Doing Business As application. LLC's are filed at the state level, but DBA's are by city, so I called the city hall where I live, in Quincy, to ask about the details.

Unfortunately, I learned, they don't really have a concept of the kind of business I'd be setting up. To register a DBA in Quincy you need a fixed address, not a P.O. Box. So I could use my home address. But then an assessor would come and determine how much of my apartment is for business use, and tax that [for my landlord] as commercial real estate. That's not gonna fly. And while I do some of my work from home, my home isn't really my business location. I work wherever I have a laptop and a wifi connection. My office could be a coworking space, or a table in Panera Bread, or an airport terminal, or a park bench off the highway. How does the city tax that? They have no idea.

Where do digital nomads fit into the legal structures set up centuries ago? (Actually LLC's are relatively new but DBA's aren't.) People in similar situations tell me they've sort of fit between the cracks: they file Schedule C's with the IRS for instance, but don't bother with the local paperwork. I'll probably just have to hire someone who specializes in this stuff to sort it out.

Update: I posted this question to Mahalo.

Hopping Mad Republicans

ben — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:12:36 +0000

Timothy Egan writes about the "rage-filled partisans with spittle on their lips" as health care reform passes into law, "powerful and lasting scenes of a democracy gasping for dignity":

Most of these vignettes are isolated incidents — a few crazies going off in a vein-popping binge. But the Republican Party now has taken some of the worst elements of Tea Party anger and incorporated them into its own identity. They are ticked off, red-faced, frothing — and these are the men in suits. ...

“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”

Indeed there will. But as the party of the hissy fit, Republicans are playing with fire. ...

But it’s always better to be building something than destroying it. John McCain had a positive campaign slogan in 2008 — “Country First.” This week, he vowed “no cooperation for the rest of the year.” This is an adolescent living in the shell of a former statesman.

He took his position, he said, using the same justification as the Texan who yelled “baby killer,” because “the American people are very angry.”

Having welcomed Tea Party rage into their home, and vowing repeal, the Republicans have made a dangerous bargain. First, they are tying their fate to a fringe, one that includes a small faction of overt racists and unstable people. The Quinnipiac poll this week found only 13 percent of Americans say they are part of the Tea Party movement.

But consider the policy positions. Do Republicans really want to campaign in favor of insurance companies’ right to drop people when they get sick? Do they really want to knock the 25-year-old graduate student, living on Top Ramen and hope, off his parents’ health care? Are they going to deny tax credits for small businesses?

It was the ancient Greeks who gave us a sense of what Republicans will be living with under this pact with rage. Many people are afraid of the dark, the saying goes. But the real tragedy is those who are afraid of the light.

November is going to be very, very interesting.

How to get an influencer's attention

ben — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:09:57 +0000

Techipedia has a very good post on "how to get an influencer's attention." Very short version:

Do something inherently interesting, then you don't need to ask for their attention.
If you do ask, be direct and honest, don't use industry/marketing jargon.
Participate, don't dive-bomb in with a PR stunt.
Skip the BS.
Try, try again.

Letter to the ACLU: Focus on ACTA, not Google

ben — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:46:27 +0000

I have been donating monthly to the American Civil Liberties Union for several years and get their email newsletters. The last several letters have been focused on Google's (self-proclaimed) relationship with the NSA following the China hacks. I think the ACLU's focus on that issue is misguided and wrote the following to tell them:

Hello,
I'm writing as a longtime supporter, a continuing monthly donor, and an IT professional deeply concerned about online liberties generally:
I believe your recent focus on Google and the NSA is misguided and a sub-optimal use of the ACLU's resources. This is for a number of reasons:

1) Despite certain statements by its CEO Eric Schmidt, I believe Google has a fundamental self-interest in preserving the privacy and liberties of its users. The company's recent actions in China speak to this: whatever ulterior motives may be imagined, at the end of the day they've given up a huge market (which their US-based competitors will be happy to fill) because their presence in China enabled government spying, censorship, and human rights abuses. The move doesn't jibe with a company that would willingly lets any government abuse its users' private data.

2) That said, I don't doubt that US law (or pseudo-law) requires Google to give certain backdoors to the US government and the NSA. (Indeed, it was alleged that the Chinese hackers entered precisely those backdoors.) But to ensure that the US government's use of our data is limited, subject to due process and the 4th Amendment, and used solely for legitimate purposes, the ACLU should be demanding transparency and reform from the NSA as its own entity, and the legality and consequences of the NSA's actions broadly, not the NSA's relationship with any particular corporation.

3) We know about Google's work with the NSA because they have been more transparent about it than their competitors. I am sure the NSA gets the same kind of data ("legally" or not) from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, AT&T, and a thousand other companies. Google is the most honest about their relationship (and about attacks on their systems by governments in general); targeting them specifically therefore seems almost perverse.

4) Most importantly, I believe the gravest threat to online freedom, and creative freedom generally, is the secret ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) Treaty being negotiated by the US and its allies. From leaks we know that ACTA would impose a "Three Strikes" law restricting all internet access to people without any due process, for "crimes" which harm narrow corporate interests and no one else. ACTA would force ISPs to monitor all traffic, making any additional surveillance the NSA wants to conduct much easier. And ACTA could be enacted by executive treaty powers with no Congressional or public involvement.

By all means, keep an eye on Google's relationship with the NSA, and make sure our data is not being abused. But I believe it is a poor use of the ACLU's email newsletters and campaign resources to focus on Google, when the real dangers to our online freedom lie elsewhere.

(I will be posting a copy of this letter on my blog, BenBuckman.net.)

Sincerely, and continuing to donate monthly,
Ben Buckman

What do you think?

Tim Bray on moving jobs

ben — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:36:53 +0000

Tim Bray left Oracle for Google. What he said about Apple is well worth reading, but this caught my eye for personal reasons:

I’d had an offer to stay with Oracle which I decided to decline; I’ll maybe tell the story when I can think about it without getting that weird spiking-blood-pressure sensation in my eyeballs.

I know that feeling too well.

Work vs a Job

ben — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:21:31 +0000

"The less a project or task or opportunity at work feels like the sort of thing you would do if this is just a job, the more you should do it." - Seth Godin

The patent system is broken

ben — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:09:19 +0000

It seems like every time a tech company files a patent dispute these days, my immediate reaction is, that's ridiculous.

Facebook filed a patent recently for the "news feed." There was a great discussion on the latest TWiT about how ridiculous that is, basically how Mark Zuckerberg stole everything he's ever built. Apple filed a patent dispute against HTC for Google's Nexus One, and Nokia has done the same against Apple.

The purpose of patents is to incentivize innovation by giving inventors special rights to their creations. But none of these patents, if upheld, would spur innovation. There are several problems here:

1. The whole system is too slow. It takes years for patents to be approved, by then the patented innovation is not only in common use, it's been copied by every competitor and maybe even made obsolete. So if patents were upheld, countless products and services already purchased or used on a regular basis would legally (I presume) have to be thrown away. Maybe if patent review took a month, patents for brand new innovations would make more sense. But time-to-market has dropped significantly over the last century; the days when an inventor could conceive of an idea and successfully bring it to market five years later are long gone for most of the tech industry.

2. Tech today operates in an open system. Everyone benefits from copying, stealing, open-sourcing, and value-adding to their own and everyone else's innovations. Ideas succeed or fail in the market (of products or ideas) by winning over supporters, fans, customers, etc. The patent system seems to function as a kind of arbiter of great innovation, but in that role it's terribly outdated.

3. A lot of this stuff seems, especially by the time the patents are approved and litigated, to be obvious or inevitable. People imagined touch screens decades ago at least; to patent them (and prevent anyone else from building them) is absurd. Tools like RSS feeds may not have existed twenty years ago, but in the progression of the open web, they became an integral component. To restrict the use of such innovations by allowing one implementer (whoever filed a patent first) to monopolize its production, would only stifle true innovation.

4. It's not necessary. Apple would have made the iPad with or without any patents. They lock in intellectual property by building proprietary chips and closed-source software, and that's their prerogative. Other companies choose to innovate with open architectures, and that's great for them. Is there any player in tech (by which I mean broadly computing/internet/mobile/etc) that wouldn't innovate without patents?

It seems like patents do make sense, on the other hand, for products like the Bloom Box, and new energy in general. Billions of dollars of R&D go into these products, their time to market is years or decades, they would not exist if they could be legally reverse-engineered and copied a day after launch.

What about the in-between cases like new Blu-Ray type specs? Hard to say there, but I'm sure society would benefit more from open architectures in those sectors as well.

Patent law has a long history of which I know very little. I don't claim to be any kind of expert on these matters, and I'm sure a patent lawyer could dispute all my four points above with a stack of legal precedents. But it seems that the system as it applies to "tech" as commonly known is fundamentally broken and harmful to true innovation.

If Apple's patent dispute against Google is upheld, then I stand by my tweet from the other day:

I think either holders of absurd patents will be deterred by public shame or we'll just stop obeying. Something's gotta give.

Woodworking with Sketchup

ben — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:19:29 +0000

I recently took a 4-session class at the Eliot School in Boston on Woodworking with Google Sketchup. Sketchup is a 3D modeling program that Google acquired largely to supplement Maps with accurate city models. It's like a CAD program but much easier (though it does have a learning curve, hence the class), and in Google fashion there's an open Ruby-based plugin architecture and public 3D warehouse of everything from doorknobs to the Eiffel Tower.

I had used Sketchup before, but never very effectively, and I've done a fair amount of woodworking before, but never with good preliminary design. So I took the class to fix that, and this weekend I built my first Sketchup-designed piece, a craft table for Tristyn (in time for Valentine's Day).

This was the design (exported from Sketchup):

I built the table on one "layer" and on others added the surrounding room. (The doorknobs, bed, and easel are components from the 3D warehouse.) Using "scenes" I could see different perspectives, like whether the table fit with the door open:

On another layer I added angle and measurement guides, which I used while building the table to get the pieces right. (I could rotate, zoom, pan, etc on each part as needed, so I didn't have to print anything.)

This was the table in progress:

Of course it's much harder to cut angles in wood than to sketch them. To simplify the construction, I used dowels instead of 2x4s for the cross beams. The joints I improvised as I went along. I hadn't accounted for warped 2x4s (the wood's from Home Depot), so the legs are a little twisted. But overall, it came out almost perfectly:

Now it just needs some paint and polyurethane to protect it from liquid spills.

The class was definitely worthwhile, I highly recommend it to anyone else interested in this kind of thing. I'm hoping to take their woodworking classes next, to improve my skills on the actual building process.

Bad Vibes in Iraq

ben — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:32:10 +0000

Iraq has been off my radar for a while now. But this warning from the field (via Andrew Sullivan and Tom Ricks) suggests it'll be back soon:

I'm afraid things are coming to a tipping point here. If the Chalabi-Iranian faction succeeds in keeping those 15 pro-Alawi Sunni parties off the ballot all bets are off. I can see a Shiia-on-Shiia civil war (with the Sunnis backing the Alawi faction) or a military coup as real possibilities. At this point, the best thing to happen would be to postpone the election. If they go ahead toward March the way they are heading, all bets are off. I don't think Washington is fully engaged with Haiti and Afghan distracting them. A lot of bad vibes here.

Andrew bemoans the pattern:

So what do we see now? Purging of key Sunnis from the electoral process, growing restiveness in Anbar, no solution in Kirkuk, and a population armed to the teeth and trained by the US for another round of civil war. And at that point, of course, the neocon right will insist on staying there for another five years, because the alternative is so awful. And we will have this discussion as frequently as we discuss how to reform healthcare and entitlements, with the same result: nothing will ever be done because the US system cannot agree on what should be done.

Maybe we can avoid this fate. Maybe Iraq's Sunnis can come to terms with a Shiite government. Maybe the Kurds can come to some deal over Kirkuk. Maybe the election can be rescued. Maybe. I sure hope so.

But doesn't this feel like a chapter from a text book on how empires implode? Paralysis at home, over-reach abroad, mounting debt, and the disappearance of any political center. And we remain trapped in mistakes we cannot undo and yet cannot abandon.

Until even the borrowed money finally runs out.

Constitutional Pragmatism

ben — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:05:49 +0000

Andrew Sullivan on the theoretical constitutional argument that the 1st Amendment covers unlimited corporate political spending:

The notion that there is no difference between an individual's inviolable right to speak or publish his or her own views and a corporation's right to flood the marketplace with advertizing to advance its own economic interests and to effectively buy off politicians' votes seems willfully perverse to me in the real world. I see the principle. But I'm pragmatic enough to believe this can be balanced by some good faith attempts to avoid the wholesale purchase of democratic speech by moneyed interests.

"Beneath the anger, the reality"

ben — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:22:57 +0000

Andrew Sullivan:

David Leonhardt explains why the rage against a "leftist" Obama is baloney:

The current versions of health reform are the product of decades of debate between Republicans and Democrats. The bills are more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 proposal. For that matter, they’re more conservative than Richard Nixon’s 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn’t get it through their job.

More conservative than Nixon or Clinton - and yet it's a threat to the meaning of America. This is claptrap. Hooey. Hysteria. And wrong. If the Democrats give into this FNC/RNC campaign to smear Obama as something he is not, they will miss the only chance of real, imperfect but meaningful reform. They will have blinked after being psyched out.

Pass the Senate bill and then defend it loudly, strongly, proudly. And call the opponents' bluff.

Gunstock, Day 3

ben — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:00:40 +0000

Last night's storm left several inches of fresh powder and continued on and off throughout the day. The morning skiers quickly turned the power to "crud," as they call it, the bumpy, ungroomed powder that can be pretty hard to traverse. I took an advanced class (supposed to be a group but I was the only one), where I learned some techniques to minimize strain on my quad muscles (I was doing it wrong all along), and turn better. I still fell on my face several times but except for some neck strain I'm unhurt. I finished the day with a hot wax for my skis (the bottoms were all worn down) and a final run before the lift closed.

All in all, it was a wonderful three days up here, and I'd definitely come back.

(In case you missed it, check out my route map from yesterday.)

Gunstock 1/18/10

Skiing at Gunstock, Day 2

ben — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:44:18 +0000

The weather was colder and grayer today, and it started snowing around 1:00, reducing visibility to less than 100ft for most of the day. I got almost six hours of skiing in, though, and the weather meant it was less crowded. It's supposed to snow through the night, hopefully stop by morning, so tomorrow the slopes should have a few more inches of fresh powder. I'm going to look into doing an advanced course tomorrow morning to improve my technique.
Tracked again with My Tracks:

Skiing Gunstock NH 1/17/10

Skiing at Gunstock, Day 1

ben — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:37:53 +0000

I'm spending the long weekend skiing at Gunstock in NH.
I logged the first half of the day with Google My Tracks:

Skiing Gunstock NH 1/16/10

Imagining public libraries, and another real estate crash, in ten years

ben — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:33:50 +0000

The Boston Public Library asks, "Imagine the BPL in 10 years and it’s the best possible public library - what does that mean to you?"

Commenter Diane K. Danielson imagines the library as a place to rent work space by the day:

By 2012 it’s predicted that more of the population will work from home than in an office, I envision more “rentable” workspaces where you could rent for $5-10/day a workspace with internet access, etc. (or pay a monthly pass).

I find that idea very interesting. I've never seen $5/day workspace, except university cafes ($5 worth of coffee and bagels), but the idea can be taken a lot further than public libraries.

I was musing to colleagues today that in a few years, when we have fully immersive 3D virtual reality interfaces, working from home will have a whole new meaning - you'll have a virtual cubicle (or seaside deck, as one prefers), and colleagues will be walking and talking with you in real time just like an office - sitting at a console at home, or in Panera Bread, or the library. And then companies won't need to rent office space anymore - they'll subscribe to a virtual reality cloud software service instead - and the market for commercial workspace real estate will shrivel up, i.e. crash.

Retail stores will become virtual as well; Radio Shack will have all the size, sights, and sounds of the real deal, but exist only as electrons. (Our two-dimensional "e-commerce" that has flipped retail upside down will look like child's play then.) There will be no point in local branches anymore; one or a dozen virtual versions of each chain will be available anywhere at any time. Obviously that doesn't bode well for employment, so how an economy of this sort can possibly work, I don't know.

Food will still need physical space - you can't buy a cheeseburger in a totally virtual McDonalds. And some stores will be able to offer some edge that invites and requires a physical experience. But most won't need or be able to do that.

Only residential real estate will be vital forever - we'll still need a structure to sleep in - though possibly a much smaller one, augmented by virtual expansion. And to support all this virtual commerce, distribution of goods will be more critical than ever: imagine whole highways, air routes, underground tunnels, etc built solely to move things to distribution nodes.

What happens to "local" in this future? The demise of the mom-and-pop store is an old story, accelerated in this recession, but this would be a whole new level. It could be in reverse, however: in a virtual world, location is irrelevant, so every store is on 5th Avenue and a bad store on 5th Avenue might as well be underground. Imagine if eBay were a physical mall. Technology flattens the terrain in both senses of the word. But physical local - your street, your town, your community - could become even less meaningful. If the person in a chat room today has a realistic virtual presence next to you tomorrow, why talk to your neighbor? And what keeps us from becoming the sedentary blobs like the people in Wall-E?

"Trees" on Mars

ben — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:04:45 +0000

Incredible.

Penny-pinching psychology and mobile price matching

ben — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:39:12 +0000

On the way home from work yesterday, I stopped at a mall to pick up two items. Home Depot had the drill bit I needed, a 35mm Forstner bit (for installing a hinge on a cabinet I'm building) for around $16. That seemed expensive, so I pulled out my Droid, opened the ShopSavvy app, and scanned the bar code on the back of the package. The app correctly identified the product, and within 20 seconds of finding it on the shelf, I had a list of competing prices in my hand - all lower than $16, most closer to $11.

So I brought the product to the customer service desk and asked if they matched competitors' prices. Yes, but not online stores. How about True Value? (The list included one of their franchise's prices, $10.11, and they were a "real" store.) Yeah, they'd honor that. So the item was marked down $5 and change, I bought it, and tweeted "Score 1 for the tech-empowered consumer!" as I left.

Across the parking lot in Best Buy, I needed two cable couplers. I explained what I needed to the salesmen in the Home Theater department, he gave me the items (6" connector cables), it looked right, $8 each. I scanned the barcode again and it came up at $3.82. Customer service marked it down again, somewhat angrily: the manager marked it down 20 cents below the lowest price, I said "I don't want to cheat you, it's actually X," and he said "I don't give a damn."

In the parking lot, I took a closer look at the items and realized the connectors were wrong. I went back inside, picked out the right items - these were $3 for 2 couplers - and returned to the customer service desk. But this time it didn't seem fair to haggle about $3, so I didn't check the competitors, I just returned the others and paid list price for the new one.

Coincidentally, on the ride home I was listening to Marketplace on WBUR, with an interview of behavioral economist Dan Ariely on The Price of Free. His research led to a fascinating observation: when something has a price on it, any price, people buy as much as they want/need/afford. In his example, if you bring cookies to work and charge 5 cents apiece, a few people will buy them all fast. Make something free, on the other hand, and other, non-financial factors come into play: we think more about the welfare of those around us. Bring a plate of free cookies to work and most people will only take one or two, leaving some for their co-workers. (He relates this to cap & trade: he's concerned that the price will be set too low and non-financial environmental concern will be tossed aside, causing more net pollution.)

So: It's a good deal to bargain $16 down to $10. It feels cheap to bargain $3 down to $2.50. 5 cent cookies are a great deal to the point of inviting hoarding. Free cookies are a valuable public resource to be equitably shared. Fascinating.

The implications of the tech-empowered consumer taken to its full extent is an amazing and frightening prospect in itself. Home Depot's $16 tag is presumably set to compete with Lowes, Sears, etc. Maybe they figure Forstner bits are a specialty item, so they can mark that up while keeping large appliances competitive with Amazon. But I'm not a construction contractor, and $16 to drill two holes is a lot of money. (At $10 I rationalize that I'll have it for later, should I ever need that size again.)

How long is it before a critical mass of shoppers in every retail store is price-matching everything? (Barcode scanning will certainly be part of my shopping routine from now on.) I suspect if the last decade's online competition threw brick & mortal retail into a shock, they ain't seen nothin' yet. Consider the ramifications of that broader trend, and the past (and future-expected) patterns of growth through more spending, on the prospects of recovering from a recession and long-term growth.

Relieving the pain, prolonging the disease

ben — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:05:06 +0000

Newsweek has a piece on Israel-Palestine this week, Who Needs Peace, Love, And Understanding, Anyway? (subtitle: Why many Israelis now believe that pursuing peace with the Palestinians is passé).

Conclusion:

On some level, the changes Israel is undergoing are part of the normal evolution of a Western democracy. It makes sense that Israelis over time would become less obsessed with politics, more cynical about their neighbors, less trusting of their leaders. But for Palestinians next door, nothing is normal. Hamas has rebounded from the Gaza war and is once again smuggling in weapons. In the West Bank, Israel's one reliable peace partner, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has vowed to resign. Farther off, a conflict with Iran looms. Many Israelis know it's just a matter of time before another bomb blows up in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. But as one Israeli put it to me: the medication has become so effective at relieving the pain, there's little incentive to actually cure the disease.

Also this week, This American Life's latest episode, of semi-whimsical predictions for 2010, includes an Israeli forecast for the breakout of a third Intifada.

Whatever one thinks of Netanyahu, the Gaza war, the peace process, or whatever, I think it's pretty clear that despite the current calm (which is undoubtedly a huge tactical victory), nothing fundamental has improved between the Israelis and Palestinians. Which goes to the observation from Andrew Sullivan that I quoted recently (which several people reacted to out of context)... if one acknowledges some legitimacy (or more cynically, the mere existence) of the Palestinian struggle, then one has to wonder where the energy formerly devoted to violence has gone; have they given up, have they shifted to other methods, or is this just a lull before the next storm. On the other hand, if, like the extreme right in Israel, for whom "Arabs are non-persons; they do not exist in their narrative so they are utterly invisible" - rejecting any claim of grievance and considering their whole movement a fallacy to be corrected - then short-term victories are the only kind possible, and peace will only ever be a lull between battles.

I see the conflict with two premises: First, the Palestinian struggle in many ways mirrors the Israeli cause pre-1948; the arguments made for a Jewish state apply similarly to a Palestinian one, and the arguments for Israeli democracy apply equally to the neighbors. Second, eventually the Palestinians will outnumber the Israeli Jews, and will realize a non-violent drive for full representation is the best strategy, and that could destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Given those two premises, and the prevalence of apathy/complacency on the one hand and grievance-rejection on the other, I think the "painkillers" now aren't doing anything good for the patient in the long run.

Google pushing for data-only mobile plans

ben — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:55:52 +0000

Reading jkOnTheRun's review of the Nexus One "Google phone," I think he's hit the nail on the head: the objective (or likely outcome) is to pressure the cellular providers into offering cheaper, data-only plans. (Currently getting that is nearly impossible.) Rather than offering a package of call minutes and SMS with data added as a feature, the networks need to focus primarily on data, with voice being simply one of many apps that utilizes bandwidth. And of course, Google is directly in the VoIP game now, with Google Voice and the acquisition of Gizmo.

It's remarkable how well positioned Google always seems to be. Because they're driving the curve.

The Long View

ben — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:50:54 +0000

Andrew Sullivan predicts the impact of the HCR bill on Obama's approval rating (assuming it passes the conference):

I don't think this is about a short term five point bump. Here's what has happened: a liberal Democratic president has just passed universal health insurance. No Democratic president has done something like that since Johnson. It is designed to show that government can do something real and tangible for the working poor. And in that respect, its impact on the political culture will be deep and lasting, unless the opposition can stop it, demonize it, or jump up and down enough to make it seem as if Obama is out of step with the times rather than them.

My suspicion is that they will fail in the end to achieve this; and that this new landmark for liberalism will reorient American politics the way Reagan's first year did - profoundly. I may be wrong and I will be accountable for this judgment. But the age demands government action. And Obama is doing as much of it as consensually and as civilly but as ruthlessly as he can.

Why so pragmatic and centrist? Because he wants it all to last.

Visualizing driving tracks

ben — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:54:43 +0000

I've been experimenting with GPS tracking apps on my Droid recently. My interest in trip tracking started with my motorcycle trip in '06, where I wrote a custom ASP app to (manually) log waypoints. Tracking technology is much more readily available now, and the next time I do a road trip, I won't have to manually enter waypoints.

This set is from a few days ago, driving from work in Framingham into Boston. (I usually go south on 95 toward home, but that day I took 90 east.) It's logged with the GPS Tracker app by Instamapper. Their service isn't ideal: they claim to have KML export but I don't see it anywhere, for example. I think to use it properly I'd need to code an app on my end that pulls tracks from the API in real time, so I'm scouting for easier alternatives.

In the meantime, this is a screenshot from my Instamapper account, (with the map enlarged via Firebug), showing the heavy traffic that day. Each track is 30 seconds apart, with the trip taking a little over an hour:

instamapper-tracks-1210.png

Health care reform: the case for pilot programs, not a master plan

ben — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:32:12 +0000

I just finished reading Better by Dr. Atul Gawande. It's a meditation on the challenges facing medicine on all levels: the stakes and concerns of a doctor, the expectations of society, eradication of diseases around the world. In exploring how doctors and medicine gets better, he writes truths that apply to most human endeavors: that results, as much as we don't like to admit it, are graded on a bell curve; that change is difficult; that perfection is usually impossible, that "good enough" is never good enough; but improvement is always possible.

His arguments about medical malpractice are persuasive: even doctors recognize that mistakes happen and sometimes patients deserve compensation for them, but that the way such compensation is determined (and its effects on the system as a whole) is perverse. He focuses on the local and individual level: medicine improves more by sharing knowledge, learning from results, and developing skills than from buying the latest technology or the latest brand-name drugs. (The case stories of doctors improvising in India drive those points home.)

The book doesn't deal with health care reform directly, but his ideas lend a lot to the reform conversation. More directly to the issue of reform is his piece in the latest issue of the New Yorker, about the hodgepodge of pilot programs which have received so much criticism (for lacking a money-saving silver bullet). He brings in the history of American agriculture as a case study: in the early 20th century, costs were rising, production was stalling, a crisis was looming, and the government worked with the farmers, starting with hundreds of pilot programs, to turn it around. Some excerpts from the article:

The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front. Government has a crucial role to play here—not running the system but guiding it, by looking for the best strategies and practices and finding ways to get them adopted, county by county. Transforming health care everywhere starts with transforming it somewhere. But how?

To figure out how to transform medical communities, with all their diversity and complexity, is going to involve trial and error. And this will require pilot programs—a lot of them.

Pick up the Senate health-care bill—yes, all 2,074 pages—and leaf through it. Almost half of it is devoted to programs that would test various ways to curb costs and increase quality. The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be.

The bill tests, for instance, a number of ways that federal insurers could pay for care. ... There is a pilot program to increase payments for doctors who deliver high-quality care at lower cost, while reducing payments for those who deliver low-quality care at higher cost. There’s a program that would pay bonuses to hospitals that improve patient results after heart failure, pneumonia, and surgery. There’s a program that would impose financial penalties on institutions with high rates of infections transmitted by health-care workers. Still another would test a system of penalties and rewards scaled to the quality of home health and rehabilitation care.

Other experiments try moving medicine away from fee-for-service payment altogether. ... The bill has ideas for changes in other parts of the system, too. Some provisions attempt to improve efficiency through administrative reforms, by, for example, requiring insurance companies to create a single standardized form for insurance reimbursement, to alleviate the clerical burden on clinicians. There are tests of various kinds of community wellness programs. The legislation also continues a stimulus-package program that funds comparative-effectiveness research—testing existing treatments for a condition against one another—because fewer treatment failures should mean lower costs.

There are hundreds of pages of these programs, almost all of which appear in the House bill as well. But the Senate reform package goes a few U.S.D.A.-like steps further. It creates a center to generate innovations in paying for and organizing care. It creates an independent Medicare advisory commission, which would sort through all the pilot results and make recommendations that would automatically take effect unless Congress blocks them. It also takes a decisive step in changing how insurance companies deal with the costs of health care. ...

Which of these programs will work? We can’t know. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t credit any of them with substantial savings. ... But, in the end, it contains a test of almost every approach that leading health-care experts have suggested. (The only one missing is malpractice reform. This is where the Republicans could be helpful.) None of this is as satisfying as a master plan. But there can’t be a master plan. That’s a crucial lesson of our agricultural experience. And there’s another: with problems that don’t have technical solutions, the struggle never ends.

Cynicism about government can seem ingrained in the American character. It was, ironically, in a speech to the Future Farmers of America that President Ronald Reagan said, “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Well, [Athens, OH agricultural extension agent] Lewandowski is from the government, and he’s here to help. And small farms in Athens County are surviving because of him. What he does involves continual improvisation and education; problems keep changing, and better methods of managing them keep emerging—as in medicine.

Getting our medical communities, town by town, to improve care and control costs isn’t a task that we’ve asked government to take on before. But we have no choice. At this point, we can’t afford any illusions: the system won’t fix itself, and there’s no piece of legislation that will have all the answers, either. The task will require dedicated and talented people in government agencies and in communities who recognize that the country’s future depends on their sidestepping the ideological battles, encouraging local change, and following the results. But if we’re willing to accept an arduous, messy, and continuous process we can come to grips with a problem even of this immensity. We’ve done it before.

Full article here.

ACTA

ben — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:10:24 +0000

The future of copyright & net privacy laws is being negotiated secretly under the ACTA treaty framework. Leaked details are bad: among other things, ACTA includes a global "3 strikes" law for online copyright infringement that would require every ISP to spy on their users. (So basically kiss the idea of online privacy, or of the internet expanding intellectual property definitions goodbye.)

Sadly I have seen close to zero coverage in the news here. The EFF has been tweeting about it occasionally, including today when they linked to a great timeline by Canadian internet legal professor Michael Geist. (See his background on the threat here.) I don't see a section devoted to the issue on the EFF's website, however; maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

Jesse Brown of the great Canadian podcast Search Engine has been covering ACTA for some time now. He was criticizing Canadian Industry Minister Tony Clement for inviting public feedback, then negotiating secretly behind everyone's backs. So Brown tried to get him on the show and asked listeners to submit questions, but the minister silently declined. (Clement finally responded to the Canadian public a few days ago, saying any law is still subject to ratification by the legislature, but if I understand Brown correctly -- and the U.S. would be similar -- treaties can be adopted without the legislature in Canada.)

When will it start getting news traction?

Team of rivals: how good policy is made

ben — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:27:01 +0000

Peter Baker in the NYT has an in-depth story of the Obama administration's Afghanistan review. It's bound to disappoint those who want a pullout from Afghanistan immediately - Obama ruled that out early - but the quality of the deliberations covering the whole rest of the policy options spectrum instills a lot of confidence. Every voice was heard, considered, analyzed, cross-examined. Leaks were strongly rebuked. Obama kept his own views to himself until the very end. When the final decision were made, he got total buy-in, even from those who originally disagreed.

There were no great options, but I feel even more confident now that the policy chosen was the best possible one. But even that is a crap shoot; there are so many factors that could mess up this best-of-the-bad plan. (And the cost is still troubling: at one point in the narrative, Baker describes Obama getting "sticker shock" from an OMB memo implying the cost of an Afghan surge would derail his domestic agenda.) There isn't necessarily a correlation between good policy making and ultimately good policy, judged in retrospect by good outcomes. But there was clearly a correlation between bad policy making - the groupthink, idealogical, demagogic processes of the Bush administration (especially in the first 6 years) - and bad policy, causing bad outcomes. So the odds of success here have to be better. If this plan fails, it will be fair to say, no reasonable plan would have worked. That's the best that can be done, in the end.

Apple buys Lala

ben — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:32:21 +0000

I've gotten most of my new music lately from Lala.com and I'm a huge fan. So given the company's apparent inability to turn a profit, I guess it's good they're getting bought by Apple rather than folding! I just hope Apple doesn't mess up the model and make it more like iTunes (i.e. more expensive).

Sr Oracle Wanted

ben — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:46 +0000

From 1-800-Magic:

Sr Oracle needed at Bank of America

...presumably so that they could predict the bursting of the next bubble ahead of time.