Dan Q
My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn’t all technical work. It’s also time to process the incoming postal mail.
Our time as volunteers may be free, but our servers aren’t, so the larger and richer charities that use our services help contribute to our hosting costs. Most send money digitally, but some use dual-signatory accounts that require they send cheques.
eBay UK have changed their terms to (a) remove seller fees for most private sellers, but (b) instead of paying-out immediately, payouts are four times a year (or on-demand).
That sounds like they’re trying to keep money in their ecosystem. The hope is, I guess, that by paying sellers in virtual “eBay Pounds” rather than actual money in the first instance they’ll encourage those sellers to become buyers again (either of other listings, or of eBay’s postage and other services). You can cash out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
You see the same technique used e.g. by the National Lottery, who pay out “small” winnings into your online account, knowing that the vast majority of winnings are on the order of only a few times more than the value of a ticket, and so players will be more-likely to “re-invest” if they’re not paid-out directly.
Or maybe I’m just being cynical.
This week has been a wild ride at Automattic. I’ve shared my take on our recent drama already1.
Off the back of all of this, our CEO Matt Mullenweg realised:
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It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.
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HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
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This was a really bold move, and gave many people I know pause for consideration. “Quit today, and we’ll pay you six months salary,” could be a pretty high-value deal for some people, and it was offered basically without further restriction2.
A 2008 Havard Business Review article (unpaywalled version) talked about a curious business strategy undertaken by shoe company Zappos:
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Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head spin. Zappos is one of those companies
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It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
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I’m sure you can see the parallel. What Zappos do routinely and Automattic did this week have a similar outcome
By reducing – not quite removing – the financial incentive to remain, they aim to filter their employees down to only those whose reason for being there is that they believe in what the company does3. They’re trading money for idealism.
Buried about half way through the Creed is the line I am more motivated by impact than money, which seems quite fitting. Automattic has always been an idealistic company. This filtering effort helps validate that.
The effect of Automattic’s “if you don’t feel aligned with us, we’ll pay you to leave” offer has been significant: around 159 people – 8.4% of the company – resigned this week. At very short notice, dozens of people I know and have worked with… disappeared from my immediate radar. It’s been… a lot.
I chose to stay. I still believe in Automattic’s mission, and I love my work and the people I do it with. But man… it makes you second-guess yourself when people you know, and respect, and love, and agree with on so many things decide to take a deal like this and… quit4.
There’ve been some real heart-in-throat moments. A close colleague of mine started a message in a way that made me briefly panic that this was a goodbye, and it took until half way through that I realised it was the opposite and I was able to start breathing again.
But I’m hopeful and optimistic that we’ll find our feet, rally our teams, win our battles, and redouble our efforts to make the Web a better place, democratise publishing (and eCommerce!), and do it all with a commitment to open source. There’s tears today, but someday there’ll be happiness again.
1 For which the Internet quickly made me regret my choices, delivering a barrage of personal attacks and straw man arguments, but I was grateful for the people who engaged in meaningful discourse.
2 For example, you could even opt to take the deal if you were on a performance improvement plan, or if you were in your first week of work! If use these examples because I’m pretty confident that both of them occurred.
3 Of course, such a strategy can never be 100% effective, because people’s reasons for remaining with an employer are as diverse as people are.
4 Of course their reasons for leaving are as diverse and multifaceted as others’ reasons for staying might be! I’ve a colleague who spent some time mulling it over not because he isn’t happy working here but because he was close to retirement, for example.
At work, we recently switched expenses system to one with virtual credit card functionality. I decided to test it out by buying myself lounge access for my upcoming work trip to Mexico. Unfortunately the new system mis-detected my lounge access as being a purchase from lingerie company loungeunderwear.com. I’m expecting a ping from Finance any moment to ask me why I’m using a company credit card to buy a bra.
One might ask why our expenses provider can (mis-)identify loungeunderwear.com from a transaction in the first place. Did somebody at some company that uses this provider actually buy some ladies’ briefs on a company credit card at some point?
This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:
What would you do if you won the lottery?
I know what I’d do, and I’ll get to that. But first, let me tell you about the lottery game I play.
I don’t generally play the lottery1. I’ve made interactive widgets (now broken) to illustrate quite how many losers there are in these games and hopefully help highlight that while “it could be you”… it won’t be.
But if I ever happen to be somewhere that the lottery results are being announced, I sometimes like to play a game I call Not The Lottery.2 Here’s how you play:
Want to play Not The Lottery retroactively? Cool. I’ve made and open-sourced a tool for that. Hopefully it’ll load below and you can choose some numbers (or take a Lucky Dip) and have it played through the entirety of EuroMillions history and see how much money you’d have won if you’d only played them every week. Or, to look at things from a brighter perspective, how much you’ve saved by not playing. It’s almost-certainly in the thousands.
But that’s not what the question’s really about, is it? We don’t ask people “what would they do if they won the lottery?” because we think it’s likely to happen4 We ask them because… well, because it’s fun to fantasise.
And I sort-of gave the answer away on day 20 of Bloganuary: I’d do my “dream job”. I’d work (for free) for Three Rings, like I already do, except instead of spending a couple of hours a week on it on average I’d spend about ten times that. I’d use the luxury of not having to work to focus on things that I know I can do to make the world a better place.
Sure, there’s other things I’d do. They’re mostly obvious things that I’d hope anybody in my position would do. Pay off the mortgage (and for all the works currently being done to
infuriate the dog improve the house). Arrange some kind of slow-access trust or annuity for the people closest to me so that
they need not worry about money, nor about having to work out how to spend, save, or invest a lump sum. Maybe a holiday or two. Certainly some charitable donations. Perhaps buy
really expensive ketchup: the finest dijon ketchup5.
But mostly I’d just want to be able to live as comfortably as I do now, or perhaps slightly more, and spend a greater proportion of my time than I already do making charities work better.
I don’t know if that makes me insufferably self-righteous or insufferably simple-minded, but it’s probably one of those.
1 I’ve been caught describing it as “a tax on people who are bad at maths”, but I don’t truly believe that (although I am concerned about how readily we let people get addicted to problematic gambling and then keep encouraging them to play with dark patterns that hide how low the odds truly are). I’ve even been known to buy a ticket or two, some years.
2 While writing this, I decided to retroactively play for last Friday, having not seen whatever numbers came up. I guessed only one of them. Hurrah! That means I saved £2.50 by not playing!
3 There are, of course, other possible outcomes. You could have missed out on winning a small prize – the odds aren’t that low – but the solution to this is simple: just keep playing Not The Lottery and you, as the “house”, will come out on top in the end. Alternatively, it’s just-about possible that you could pluck the jackpot numbers from thin air, in which case: well done! You’re doing better than Derren Brown when in 2009 he performed a pretty good magic trick but then turned it into a turd when he “explained” it using pseudoscience (why not just stick with “I’m a magician, duh”; when you play the Uri Geller card you just make yourself look like an idiot). Let’s find a way to use those superpowers for good. Because what you’ve got is a superpower. For context: if you played Not The Lottery twice a week, every week, without fail, for 393 years… you’d still only have a 1% chance of having ever predicted a jackpot in your five-lifetimes.
4 What if we lived in a world where we did use statistics to think about the hypothetical questions we ask people? Would we ask “what would you do if you were stuck by lightning?”, given that the lifetime chance of being killed by lightning is significantly greater than the chance of winning the jackpot, even if you play every draw!
5 Y’know, to keep in the fridge in the treehouse.
I’ve just launched EGXchange.org, a digital wallet for new currency Emma Goldcoin, which I’ve mentioned previously (including a discussion with the author in my comments section).
You can install it as an offline-first progressive web application, which means that this could be the first ever digital currency to have an app that works without an Internet connection. That’s probably something no other digital currency can claim to have, right?
Here’s what it looks like if I send 0.1 EGX to my friend Chris using the app:
Naturally, I wouldn’t be backing Emma Goldcoin if it didn’t represent such a brilliant step up better-known digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ripple, and Etherium. Specific features unique to Emma Goldcoin include:
Sure, it’s got its downsides, and I’d encourage you to read the specification if you’d like to learn more about what those are. Or if you already know what EGX is all about and just want to try a new way to manage your portfolio, give my new site EGXchange.org a go!
In the remote chance that @Facebook‘s #LibraCoin [Wikipedia] takes off, I suggest that the appropriate slang term for the currency shall be zucks.
As in: “I’ll bet you a hundred zucks that this new #cryptocurrency will be barely more-successful than Dogecoin, and far less-cute.”
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
£20 for a boiled egg, one piece of toast and a mug of tea?
The story of a modern London cafe…
(Read to end of thread before commenting!)
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An amazing thread well-worth reading to the end. Went in expecting a joke about hipsters, millennials, and avocado-on-toast… finished with something much more.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
The web’s founders fully expected some form of digital payment to be integral to its functioning. But nearly three decades later, we’re still waiting.
Back in the 1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee and his team were creating the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, they made a list of the error codes that would pop up when something went wrong. You’ve surely encountered many of them: “404 Not Found,” which pops up if you click on a dead link; “401 Unauthorized” when you hit a page that needs a password; and so on.
Here’s one you probably haven’t seen—and its absence from your life speaks to why the promise of the early web seems increasingly out of reach: “402 Payment Required.”
That’s right: The web’s founders fully expected some form of digital payment to be integral to its functioning, just as integral as links, web pages, and passwords. After all, without a way to quickly and smoothly exchange money, how would a new economy be able to flourish online? Of course there ought to be a way to integrate digital cash into browsing and other activities. Of course.
Yet after almost three decades, that 402 error code is still “reserved for future use.” So I still have to ask: Where are my digital micropayments? Where are those frictionless, integrated ways of exchanging money online—cryptographically protected to allow commerce but not surveillance?
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In response to this article being discussed on MetaFilter, I wrote:
The Web Payments Working Group published a specification for a standardised mechanism for the collection of card payment details online, a couple of years ago. It’s not quite the same thing because it’s done in the page application rather than at the HTTP(S) level, but it goes a long way towards solving a lot of the problems with our existing approach to payment processing online.
It’s already seeing adoption in browsers, but merchants and payment processors are unlikely to start rolling it out until adoption until later because (a) they want critical mass and (b) they’re wary of change. But within a few years, you’ll probably see it for the first time, and you might not even notice.
The idea is that instead of asking you to fill out an (arbitrary) form, a web page will ask your browser to get payment details from you in a standardised format. That might mean entering your card details if that’s how you prefer to work (but even if you choose to do this, the form you fill in will look the same every time) but it would instead allow you to use a payment tool built in to your browser, operating system, or password safe to do it for you. I know that browsers and password safes will offer to try to do this today, but standardising the format means that they’ll always be able to achieve it.
Once this technology’s in place, there’s nothing to stop HTTP 402’s implementation being completed: all the infrastructure will exist.
The thing about the future is that when it arrives, you don’t even notice. It’s never jetpacks and flying cars: it’s a series of iterative changes, each one predictable after the completion of the last but the entire ensemble seeming innovative and surprising when taken as a whole.
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Spectacular example of why when saving (e.g. for a pension) it’s often more important to save early than it is to save lots. So get saving! Even with an understanding of compound interest, these numbers can surprise you.
The only time better than today would have been yesterday, and you already missed that boat.
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The original link was: https://i.imgur.com/mzHhe1s.jpg
At the very end of last year, right before the subsidy rate dropped in January, I had solar panels installed: you may remember that I blogged about it at the time. I thought you might be interested to know how that’s working out for us.
Because I’m a data nerd, I decided to monitor our energy usage, production, and total cost in order to fully understand the economic impact of our tiny power station. I appreciate that many of you might not be able to appreciate how cool this kind of data is, but that’s because you don’t have as good an appreciation of how fun statistics can be… it is cool, damn it!
If you look at the chart above, for example (click for a bigger version), you’ll notice a few things:
What got me sold on the idea of installing solar panels, though, was their long-term investment potential. I had the money sitting around anyway, and by my calculations we’ll get a significantly better return-on-investment out of our little roof-mounted power station than I would out of a high-interest savings account or bond. And that’s because of the oft-forgotten “third way” in which solar panelling pays for itself. Allow me to explain:
As the seasons have changed from Winter through Spring we’ve steadily seen our generation levels climbing. On a typical day, we now make more electricity than we use. We’re still having to buy power from the grid, of course, because we use more electricity in the evening than we’re able to generate when the sun is low in the sky: however, if (one day) technology like Tesla’s PowerWall becomes widely-available at reasonable prices, there’s no reason that a house like ours couldn’t be totally independent of the grid for 6-8 months of the year.
So: what are we saving/making? Well, looking at the last week of April and the first week of May, and comparing them to the same period last year:
As I’m sure you can see: this isn’t peanuts. When you include the subsidy then it’s possible to consider our energy as being functionally “free”, even after you compensate for the shorter days of the winter. Of course, there’s a significant up-front cost in installing solar panels! It’s hard to say exactly when, at this point, I expect them to have paid for themselves (from which point I’ll be able to use the expected life of the equipment to more-accurately predict the total return-on-investment): I’m planning to monitor the situation for at least a year, to cover the variance of the seasons, but I will of course report back when I have more data.
I mentioned that the first graph wasn’t accurate? Yeah: so it turns out that our house’s original electricity meter was of an older design that would run backwards when electricity was being exported to the grid. Which was great to see, but not something that our electricity company approved of, on account of the fact that they were then paying us for the electricity we sold back to the grid, twice: for a couple of days of April sunshine, our electricity meter consistently ran backwards throughout the day. So they sent a couple of engineers out to replace it with a more-modern one, pictured above (which has a different problem: its “fraud light” comes on whenever we’re sending power back to the grid, but apparently that’s “to be expected”).
In any case, this quirk of our old meter has made some of my numbers from earlier this year more-optimistic than they might otherwise be, and while I’ve tried to compensate for this it’s hard to be certain that my estimates prior to its replacement are accurate. So it’s probably going to take me a little longer than I’d planned to have an accurate baseline of exactly how much money solar is making for us.
But making money, it certainly is.
This self-post was originally posted to /r/polyfamilies. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
Hi /r/polyfamilies. After much pestering by people who know us, I finally got around to writing about how my polycule and I organise our finances, and I thought that you might be interested to. The whole thing’s described behind that link, but I didn’t want to be seen to be gathering karma or self-promoting, so I thought I’d make a text post to briefly explain it:
Us: My partner, her husband and I are three adults sharing a home (plus, this year, their baby girl!). We rented together for several years, and now we’ve got our first mortgage together. We wanted to come up with a fair way to share our costs (rent/mortgage, bills, shopping, etc.) that wasn’t just “split it three ways”, which didn’t seem fair given that we all earn different amounts – variable even from month to month as my income fluctuates depending on how many days I spend looking after the baby and what kind of freelance work I get, and as my partner gradually returns to work (part-time for now) after her recent maternity leave.
Our system: We use a system of 100% means-assessment based on gross income. So in other words, if Alice, Bob and Chris live together, and Alice earns twice as much as Bob, then she’d be expected to pay twice as much towards their collective household costs, too. And somebody who didn’t earn anything wouldn’t be expected to contribute anything. We didn’t always use 100%: early on, we used 75% – in other words, a quarter of our costs would be simply “split three ways”, and three-quarters of our costs would be split in accordance with means-assessment. Make sense?
It’s really easy: The good news is, it’s really easy to do. I’ve made a spreadsheet on Google Docs that’s a simplified version of our sheet, and you’re welcome to take a copy and use it yourself. Just put in everybody’s salary and what percentage “means assessment” you want to use (0% means ‘simply split X ways’; 100% means ‘split completely according to means’; anything in-between is a balance of the two). Then put in each cost and who paid it (Eve paid the rent, Alice paid for this week’s shopping, Bob paid for last week’s shopping, etc.) and it’ll tell you who owes money to whom in order to square everything up again.
It’s universal: You don’t even have to be a polyfamily to make use of this, I reckon. It works with as little as two people, and it’d work with any household of multiple adults, if you wanted it to. It provides a simple, fair, and slightly-socialist way of splitting up the living costs of a group of people who live together and trust one another.
Let me know what you think!
tl;dr: My polycule and I use a use a spreadsheet to divide up our monthly costs in accordance with our relative incomes, which then tells us who owes money to whom at the end of each month.
This self-post was originally posted to /r/polyamory. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
Hi /r/polyamory. After much pestering by people who know us, I finally got around to writing about how my polycule and I organise our finances, and I thought that you might be interested to. The whole thing’s described behind that link, but I didn’t want to be seen to be gathering karma or self-promoting, so I thought I’d make a text post to briefly explain it:
Us: My partner, her husband and I are three adults sharing a home (plus, this year, their baby girl!). We rented together for several years, and now we’ve got our first mortgage together. We wanted to come up with a fair way to share our costs (rent/mortgage, bills, shopping, etc.) that wasn’t just “split it three ways”, which didn’t seem fair given that we all earn different amounts – variable even from month to month as my income fluctuates depending on how many days I spend looking after the baby and what kind of freelance work I get, and as my partner gradually returns to work (part-time for now) after her recent maternity leave.
Our system: We use a system of 100% means-assessment based on gross income. So in other words, if Alice, Bob and Chris live together, and Alice earns twice as much as Bob, then she’d be expected to pay twice as much towards their collective household costs, too. And somebody who didn’t earn anything wouldn’t be expected to contribute anything. We didn’t always use 100%: early on, we used 75% – in other words, a quarter of our costs would be simply “split three ways”, and three-quarters of our costs would be split in accordance with means-assessment. Make sense?
It’s really easy: The good news is, it’s really easy to do. I’ve made a spreadsheet on Google Docs that’s a simplified version of our sheet, and you’re welcome to take a copy and use it yourself. Just put in everybody’s salary and what percentage “means assessment” you want to use (0% means ‘simply split X ways’; 100% means ‘split completely according to means’; anything in-between is a balance of the two). Then put in each cost and who paid it (Eve paid the rent, Alice paid for this week’s shopping, Bob paid for last week’s shopping, etc.) and it’ll tell you who owes money to whom in order to square everything up again.
It’s universal: You don’t even have to be a polyfamily to make use of this, I reckon. It works with as little as two people, and it’d work with any household of multiple adults, if you wanted it to. It provides a simple, fair, and slightly-socialist way of splitting up the living costs of a group of people who live together and trust one another.
Let me know what you think!
tl;dr: My polycule and I use a use a spreadsheet to divide up our monthly costs in accordance with our relative incomes, which then tells us who owes money to whom at the end of each month.
This link was originally posted to /r/TrueReddit. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/oana-romocea/romania-rosia-montana_b_3920165.html
