Tag: money
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On Publishing Your Salary
Kev Quirk observes that of folks who (like me) choose to share their salary online, there's likely to be a skew towards higher salaries. What can we do to better-contextualise that, I wonder?
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Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme
With thanks to Mark Palko for sharing: this seems like a spot-on observation of Musk's career. Wouldn't it be nice if the world's first trillionaire also happened to be the world's last trillionaire?
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Is AI Profitable Yet?
No surprises from this website, but it's interesting/staggering to see quite how LARGE the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies.
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£4,803.40 a Year for Water?
When we moved house, Thames Water failed to set us up an account correctly, and the hacky workaround they came up with claims that we spent our first 11 hours in the Chicory House perhaps pouring three tonnes of water into an ankle-depth 5×10 metre swimming pool.
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My Salary History
Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent.
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I guess I'm never paying DreamHost back
About 17 years ago, I stopped using DreamHost. They later decided I owed them money. I disagreed, but enjoyed watching them incredibly-slowly claw it back via the 'refer and earn' program, from all the people I ever recommended them to. But now, only a few months from the (alleged) debt being settled... they've killed the program, depriving me of the opportunity for... a more-humorous blog post, I guess?
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Today, for the first time ever, I simultaneously published a piece of content across five different media: a Weblog post, a video essay, a podcast episode, a Gemlog post, and a Spartanlog post.
Must be about something important, right?
Nope, it's a meandering journey to coming up with a design for a £5 coin that will never exist. Delightfully pointless. Being the Internet I want to see in the world.
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The Beer Token [Video]
A vloggy video version of my blog post about Beer Tokens, for those who'd rather watch than listen or read.
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The Beer Token
Thanks to the success of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, we can never forget quite how much beer you used to be able to get for a fiver (plus an exceptionally-generous tip). Nowadays, it'll get you one pint, if you're lucky... and that offers us an exciting opportunity...
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Halifax Shared My Credit Agreement!
Today, my partner's husband received a letter, addressed to him, about a change to his credit card agreement. Except the letter wasn't about his credit card... it was about mine! Halifax dun goofed.
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My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn't all technical work. It's also time to process the incoming postal mail.
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In front of a letterbox, an hand holds an open envelope and a (censored) Danske Bank cheque for £219.
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.
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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.
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We'll Pay You to Go (so we're confident in who stays...)
This week, Automattic made a very generous offer to employees who didn't feel aligned with the company and its leader: to pay them to leave. 8.4% of the company took it, and it's been a heartbreaking time, but we'll build back stronger, I'm sure.
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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.
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Screenshot from expenses system indicating that a purchase was made at loungeunderwear.com, with a photo showing an example of something sold at that website - a lacy bra - overlaid.
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?
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[Bloganuary] Not The Lottery
You already know what I'd do if I won the lottery: the same things I do now, just with more of the ones that don't pay. But before we talk about that, let me talk introduce you to game that's much more-satisfying to play than the lottery.