Worst. Persuasion. Ever. Someone needs to do an intervention. This is officially embarrassing.
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Coincidentally, a good way show an audience the changes in healthcare coverage and expenses over time is my startup, WhenHub.com. It’s the best way to create and share visualizations of events over time. If someone builds one, let me know and I’ll publish it on this blog.
0 CommentsI’ve been saying in this blog for some time that we can’t tax and budget our way to a better future. We need to work on dramatically lowering the average cost of a high-quality lifestyle. Technology can make that happen if the right startups are nurtured.
0 CommentsOver the past eighteen months or so my girlfriend Kristina Basham grew her Instagram following from zero to 2.5 million followers. She adds about 10,000 new followers per day.
That’s ten thousand new followers per day.
You might think this kind of accomplishment is easy for her because of her extraordinary attractiveness. Sure, that helps. But there are lots of attractive women on Instagram – most of them showing more skin than Kristina – and almost none of them are adding followers at Kristina’s rate. There’s a reason for that. I call it the Talent Stack.
0 CommentsTrue story: Yesterday I was talking to a friend who invested in Gilead stock right before Hillary Clinton started giving speeches about forcing companies in that space to lower their prices. The stock dropped and my friend lost money. He blames Clinton.
Over the summer this same fellow sold off his entire stock portfolio to avoid the risk of a Trump win followed by what he assumed would be a catastrophic market downturn. If Clinton won, he figured he could buy back in at about the same prices. But Trump won, stocks zoomed higher, and my friend lost out on the rally. Hillary Clinton cost him money for the second time this year.
But don’t feel bad for my friend. He reports that since the election his phone has been ringing off the hook with new job offers. He’s a residential contractor. Apparently the country got optimistic right after the election. Normally this would be his slow period. He’s swamped with work.
I love a happy ending.
0 CommentsI’m hearing a lot of chatter about President Trump potentially creating a “Muslim registry,” which, as it turns out, already exists. The current system only registers non-residents from certain countries. But how hard would it be for the government to figure out all of our religious beliefs – citizens and non-citizens alike — without asking?
My guess is that the government already uses Big Data to determine our religious beliefs and more. Consider all the information they have.
1. Your cell phone leaves a trail in the cloud of where you have been. If you have been to a Mosque, the government can know that.
2. Your banking and credit card records would tell the government if you buy any products associated with Islamic culture or beliefs. That could include food, clothing, and more.
3. The government can search all of your social media, text messages, and other digital communication for keywords and other clues about your beliefs.
4. The government knows who you associate with on social media and what websites you visit.
5. Census information.
6. Non-governmental forms you might have filled out with your religious preferences or ethnic background.
7. Health records might have clues too. For example, a hospital record might specify a halal diet.
I know the government doesn’t have explicit legal authority to snoop into all of the information sources I listed, but I’d be surprised if they aren’t doing it anyway in the name of national security. We wouldn’t know if they had backdoors into the major corporate networks. I assume they do.
So don’t worry too much about a Muslim “registry.” We’ve probably had one for years. And the rest of us are probably on lists of some sort too. So far, all it has done is reduce terror attacks (I presume).
I agree that society needs to keep an eye on this sort of “registry” to prevent abuse. It is frightening to even read the language about it. But once you see it in context, it probably isn’t much change from the current situation.
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On another topic…
Are You Divorced with Joint Custody?
If you are a divorced parent with joint custody you know how frustrating it is to manage the hand-offs of the kids once or twice a week. One parent is always waiting for the other, and getting angrier each minute because of lateness that seems intentional (because exes are like that). You don’t want to text your ex, especially when the ex is driving with your kids in the car. So how do you solve this annoying child exchange tension that you have EVERY week?
Try my startup’s new app, WhenHub. It allows any group of two or more people to TEMPORARILY geostream their locations on a map as they head to a meeting spot. (Like the Uber app without the Uber car.) That way you know your ex is on the way without talking to them. And if your ex is not cooperative, you can put the app on your kids’ phones because they will be in the same vehicle.
No more frustrating texts back and forth asking “Where are you???” The geostreaming in the app is always temporary and times-out whenever you specify, so your ex can’t track you.
If you try it once, you’ll never go back to the old way.
WhenHub app for Apple: http://apple.co/2eLL3Oh
WhenHub app for Android: http://bit.ly/2fIb6L7
0 CommentsPrior to President Elect Trump filling the Secretary of State job, I blogged here that Bolton’s mustache would be a problem.
Today I see this:
Trump rejects John Bolton not because he’s deranged but because he has a mustache. You can’t make this up. https://t.co/nimhTU60U4 pic.twitter.com/hjQHsu0Q4m
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) December 22, 2016
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Have you seen WhenHub yet? It does so many things I can’t even describe it.
0 Comments26 years ago I wrote this comic.
It’s official now! 26 year later. @ScottAdamsSays @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/uDVNzK7Lqn
— ThomasTheTrumpTrain (@ttannerut) December 20, 2016
And today this was the headline.
About half of the citizens of the United States think they elected a president who will “drain the swamp” in Washington DC and negotiate good trade deals for the public. But the other half believes they are living in 1930s Germany and the next Hitler just came to office. Those are very different movies, yet we all sit in the same theater at the same time. It’s trippy.
As I often say, the human brain didn’t evolve to give us a clear understanding of our reality because we don’t need it to survive as a species. All we need to do is survive long enough to procreate. As long as we can still make babies, it doesn’t matter that we are all experiencing different movies. You can be living in 1930s Germany in your movie and I can be living in 2016 trying to make America Great again, yet the population of humans is still growing. So living in different movies doesn’t matter as much as you’d think.
Immediately after the election was decided, protests against Trump popped up in several cities. Protesting makes perfect sense if you think Hitler just came to power in your country. You must stop Hitler!
But the days went by and the protests fizzled out.
Huh?
0 CommentsOne way to look at the recent election in the United States is that Russia (allegedly) subverted our democratic process to ensure that Trump would win. The facts seem to point in that general direction, although we can’t know how much influence Russia really had.
0 CommentsI’m watching the mainstream media have fits over so-called “fake news.” The theme they are pushing is that fake news stories are more damaging to society than normal news that includes the following:
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