“All of these early retirement articles are the same. They all say things like, “Make it a goal”, “Track your expenses”, “Establish a system.” Blah. Blah. Blah. But none of these things are the actual reason for how they retired early. Because the actual reason is either (1) earning a high income or (2) having an absurdly low level of spending, or both.”
….
As a public service, the article includes more realistic headlines for retiring early, “Wanna retire at 27? Marry rich” and “Foregoing Procreation, Living Like a Hermit, and 4 Other Ways to Retire in Your 30s”.”
To end plastic waste simply make fossil fuel plastic more expensive than recycling plastic. QED
No more plastic bag bans, no more plastic garbage everywhere, reduce or eliminate plastic in our food chain, improve impoverished nations, etc. There are a lot of advantages.
Total cost to consumers on a soda bottle is a quarter of a cent to half a cent.
Full TED talk here “A radical plan to end plastic waste”:
Men like it cold, women like it hot – it’s a zero sum game. At 80F (27C) women get a 10% productivity boost while men lose 3%. Men prefer high 60s (20/21C).
The ideal temperature for 50% male/female office? 75F (24C)
AHHH!!! SAVE US ALL! (men) In a 75F office, men will be dressing in tank tops and mini skirts.
Click here to read more from the Podcast entitled “The Battle For The Office Thermostat”.
Education and Experience explained only 8% of the gender pay gap according to the “Progress on the Gender Pay Gap 2019” study. Occupational differences, e.g. the career that was chosen, explains 56%. Not “who you know” or specifically targeting women. “I think what’s important to recognize there is that women and men don’t randomly sort into occupations, partly because of influences early on: what kind of jobs get taught to people as being a male job or a female job. And some jobs, frankly, just aren’t friendly to family lifestyles.”
The kind of jobs with a large part-time pay gap are generally in areas where it’s harder to divide up hours and be flexible. Any job where relationships need to be maintained with clients are especially bad; e.g. careers in sales, lawyer, banker, etc. There are jobs that pay a part-time premium and these tend to be jobs where it’s easy for people to swap shifts or work as a team. E.g. Nursing, waiters/waitresses
“When an occupation pays less money per hour to its part-time workers than to its full-time ones, it’s known as the part-time penalty. That penalty tends to be higher when occupations have less flexible hours. Here’s the catch: the jobs that tend to be more flexible — and ones that many women and mothers gravitate towards — pay less.”
So how can the gap be reduced? “…[E]ither men would also have to increasingly choose those flexible occupations or the rigid, inflexible occupations would have to become less rigid and inflexible so that women and mothers could join them, perhaps by, you know, embracing more of a team approach at work.”
Considering how much office workers use email it’s appalling how bad we are at it. Luckily there is a resolution and it doesn’t take more than a couple minutes to review the productivity tips and start writing emails effectively.
For the email body, as long as it’s appropriate to your subject, keep it to between 50-125 words, use a 3rd grade reading level and do not include more than 3 questions.
Always consider the intended audience and adjust TO:/CC: lines. Consider if “reply-all” is appropriate and if changing audiences, consider if the subject needs to be modified in order to take the conversation in a new direction (thus avoiding the “grouped conversations” stack).
Happiness is elusive but it helps focus an individual with their life design if they consider what metrics contribute to happiness. These metrics might be in error, but at least they are something. The 6 measures, as explained by NPR’s “The Indicator” podcast, are:
These measures have been found to be highly correlated with people’s overall happiness. Of these measures social support and GDP per capita are the most important. But at some point, GDP per capita stops mattering; the Easterlin paradox. “It’s the idea that wealth adds to people’s happiness only up to a point. And at some point, for some reason, getting richer stops making you happier.” There are many working theories and here are some of the more prominent ones:
GDP per capita (a rough idea of how wealthy people are in a particular country),
healthy life expectancy,
how much people trust the government and businesses in their country (is corruption a problem in the government? In businesses?),
social support (do you have somebody to count on in times of trouble?),
generosity (has a person been generous in the last 30 days to others) and
freedom (did you feel a sense of freedom to make your key life decisions?).
(India #141, China #94) Social support has declined even though GDP per capita is rising. Stuff like moving into cities, decline of the extended family.
(USA #19) “People overestimate the happiness they’re going to get from more income or a bigger house. And they underestimate the happiness they would get from more time with the family and less time spent commuting. So, they end up finding themselves in circumstances where they’ve chosen to go for too high an income, too much consumption, not enough time to spend with family and friends. And they end up being anxious, harried, stressed.”
It could just be that the measurements are wrong.
Regardless, the researcher shares that he’s changed his behaviour as a result of this research and recommends “…[T]o start conversations with strangers, to smile at people in the streets, to assume the best rather than the worst about them is a win-win situation. And so, I do it more than I used to. And that’s improved my happiness. And I hope it’s improved somebody else’s, as well. …”
Canada is just 6% behind Finland and USA is 12.72% behind (5.6% behind Canada). South Sudan, #156, is 272% behind Finland. Surprisingly Australia is at #11 with all it’s sunshine and most goods being locally sourced.
“…sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned…So about 30% of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags…. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year. paper bags are actually worse for the environment. … They require cutting down and processing trees, which involves lots of water, toxic chemicals, fuel, and heavy machinery. … the huge increase of paper, together with the uptick in plastic trash bags, means banning plastic shopping bags increases greenhouse gas emissions. That said, these bans do reduce non-biodegradable litter.”
Organic cotton tote bags need to be used 20,000 times before its use is better than a plastic grocery bag. “…the best reusable ones are made from polyester or plastics like polypropylene. . Those still have to be used dozens and dozens of times to be greener than plastic grocery bags, which have the smallest carbon footprint for a single use.”
“As for bag policies, Taylor says a fee is smarter than a ban. She has a second paper showing a small fee for bags is just as effective as a ban when it comes to encouraging use of reusable bags. But a fee offers flexibility for people who reuse plastic bags for garbage disposal or dog walking. … The best policy, Taylor says, imposes a fee on both paper and plastic bags and encourages reuse.”
15Apr2019 update: Another economics podcast on plastic packaging (Cellophane). It presents the data and decisions that have made the modern plastic world and illustrates nicely the counter-intuitive conclusions that come up all the time in plastic packaging. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz2w3
It’s terribly confusing that Bandwidth and Speed terms are used interchangeably as they are not the same thing but what it really comes down to is this question: Does bandwidth increase speed? Let’s explore what bandwidth is to see if we can answer this question.
Bandwidth is the number of “lanes” available to your computer. It is typically measured in Megabits/second of Mbps or Gigabits/second or Gbps. Do the number of lanes affect the speed of your car? Typically no, unless it’s rush hour.
What matters is how fast you can drive right? That’s “latency” in the internet/networking world. It is dependent on a lot of different factors, including but not limited to, the speed of your computer, the speed of your network card, the speed/how busy your local modem/router is, the speed/how busy your local internet provider’s infrastructure is and then all these factors on the other end of the connection as well. The “bottleneck” in the equation defines your latency at that particular time to whatever particular service.
So yes, bandwidth can increase speed but only if there is congestion. A sane person usually doesn’t seek out congestion so this is really only a problem in certain rural situations where congestion can’t be avoided. So, in a normal situation bandwidth will not increase speed.
So how do your measure your internet connection? Well, take those “bandwidth” sites with a grain of salt – they are best for measuring the bandwidth received to match up with the internet plan your paying for. The best measurement test I’ve found to determine “quality of experience” is the Cisco Webex Network test: https://mediatest.webex.com.
It measures a bunch of different things for a video call, which is the most demanding application for most people. If you get all green, then you’re in good shape. It means you could run all applications from that location without issues (as long as the opposite party doesn’t have a bad connection of course).
Any speed test should be completed by a cabled computer. That is, not using WiFi. Also, typically, no other devices should be used, so only the testing computer is using the Internet connection. That is because all devices are aggregated to go out the Internet connection and will spoil the results. Even browsers may affect the result so try different browsers; more about that here.
M-Lab, the platform/data behind CIRA and Google speed tests, has a visualization tool for average speeds located here (if it doesn’t work, try a different browser): https://www.measurementlab.net/visualizations/
Fast.com is Netflix’s internet speed test. You can access it by clicking here. Although it has the limitations I’ve previously identified (as with other speed tests), Netflix explains how they designed their speed test which may make it more accurate than other speed tests: https://netflixtechblog.com/building-fast-com-4857fe0f8adb
An ISP technician is the best person to be doing a proper line speed test. This will remove any complexities with the customer equipment and prove what the service could be capable of; irrespective of plan limits. Here’s what a test looks like. The tester is on the line and technician uses their phone to interact with it:
What can you do about it? Android users can install a no-root firewall called “NetGuard”. I’m not sure if Apple users can do anything. I did a quick search and nothing came up.
If you’re not too technical, use my NetGuard import file (link below) to auto-configure the app for you. I had to troubleshoot some google system apps to make it run seamlessly. The app works basically by stopping anything from using your data plan unless you say so. You can set apps up to not use data unless you are actually using them as well (screen is on and actively interacting with it). It’s pretty slick. We use about 200MB a month just by using this app. We still get maps/GPS, email, etc. Things we try to avoid doing while on data is using a web browser and video. That doesn’t mean we don’t watch videos. We just indicate that the video is downloaded for offline viewing only while on Wifi (you can do this with Netflix and Plex).
NetGuard link: https://www.netguard.me/ Link to import file: Right click this link and select “Save link as…” netguard_20181128 – If it says “zip can’t be downloaded securely”, click the “arrow up” and select “Keep”. Download to a desktop/laptop and unzip this file with password “1234”. Due to wordpress security it doesn’t allow .xml files so using password zip to get around this. Then transfer this file to your phone (e.g. maybe by emailing or certainly via USB transfer).
