A pure number crunch generally tells us that is not worth it but it is all the other benefits that backyard power grants that is at issue. Extra power can be sold back to the grid, or you have a backup power source in case the grid goes down again.
A great resource is Home Power http://www.homepower.com/ they have lots of articles discussing the pros and cons of all the various kinds of alternative power and building technology. (no affiliation) They go into it in far more depth then any of us can.
Re:These kinds of discussions make me sick.
on
On Point On Slacking
·
· Score: 1
The issue that I keep seeing is that the "productivity numbers" that the bosses rely on almost always seem to measure something that is almost but not quite completely unlike what they want to measure.
So the numbers that they have to report to their boss are abstracted again and long before it reaches the top are completely meaningless.
The saddest part is on one seems to know who came up with the metrics or how to change them to better reflect what the company is trying to do.
Sure something like attendance is an easy stat to get but is it really helping matters to have people sitting around doing nothing in particular.
My company has started raffling off flat screen TVs for perfect attendance. How nuts is that? Rather then focusing on their top producers they are trying to boost their bottom producers.
It isn't as though they aren't measuring all kinds of things but that is just stupid. But then there are those companies that still use metrics like thousands of lines of code as a performance metric.
We all get laidoff eventually. His Ideas make a lot of sense if you are not expecting to be booted next month. Not everyone can or wants to move because of a job. I've moved because of a job enough times to know that it isn't really worth it. You lose too much of your network and support to be offset by the money.
You don't say what a substantial chunk of money is. A typical job search will take 1 month/$10k you made. So if you had a $60k job you need to save enough for 6 months of the basics and cost cut as much as possible in cost saving when you learn that the ax is falling.
Once you have that, wiping out debt is a big thing and the mortgage is the biggie. If I didn't have the mortgage I could support my family on an $8/hr job. That is a big deal if there are a lot of layoffs and the market is flooded.
Food storage is a great idea, as long as it is stuff you eat. You have to store food an awfully long time before it goes bad nowadays.It is also cheaper then a lot of the junk we tend to buy. A freezer full of meat is a great source of peace of mind. and that is where solar can come in handy.
A basic solar system can cost only a few hundred bucks and is very handy when the mains go down as they do from time to time. A panel, battery and inverter can be mounted to a handtruck and is big enough to run a freezer or laptop for a while.
My goal is to build my investments to be able to support the family and home at least minimally without any other income. This requires different skills them engineering but is fun to learn too.
Now if you are expecting the ax to fall then doing all kinds of cost cutting and converting assets to cash is a good idea.
I am doing the job search thing and having being going to various employment places for help and advice. One very interesting statistic has been that it that about 1 month/$10k salary to find a new equivalent job. For example, if you made $60k last year as a developer, it should take you about 6 months to find a new job as a developer making $60+k/year.
You don't need to save a whole months salary. Figure out how much you really need to spend each month to keep up you home. Sit down and evaluate everything you spend money on. Dial back on the utilities as much as you can. Don't renew subscriptions. As another poster mentioned have some food stored away for that much time as well.
Also don't be afraid of taking a minimum wage job. It will only be temporary but how long could you last if you had to on a minimum wage job?
Finally, budget for a brand new interview outfit: top-to-bottom everything--from a suit to shoes and socks to a watch. It might be overkill or it might be just enough. Think of it as a job search emergency fund, sort of like a home appliance fund enough money to replace a major home appliance at any time.
One of the biggest boosts to my writing has been to do a lot more of it and getting feedback on it quickly. Just like my photography got better with a digital camera where I could see results quickly my writing got better the more I did it with others telling me what went right as well as wrong. this is a writing class the first thing you should have them do is start writing: a quick 50 words about themselves.
One of the best classes I had in college was a creative writing class focused on science fiction; first off it was interesting to me while teaching me elements of proper writing. The reading we did was about the technical side of writing like plot and character. But we had to have something writing for almost every class, just a page or two and we would pass them around to comment on. With one or two read in front of the class and discussed.
Creative writing is a bit different than technical or business writing and in this case you might want to focus on those. Doing oddball projects like write a history of the world in one page for CEOs, and nuclear physics for 3-year-olds help focus your writers on length and audience limitations.
One of the best pieces of advice I've gotten on business writing was from my father-in-law who used to work for Ford. It was-Business people are busy, so fit it on one page and leave the details to an appendix.
LOL, That is rather likely, but I said LEARN to run a business not necessarily to own one.
That said, if you business has you on-call 24/7 then all you own is a job, it isn't really a business.
I had to shutdown my business after a drunk driver decided to cross the median of the interstate. Something I learned from that is that if the business is dependent on just one person it isn't really a business it is just a job that you own.
It is almost funny the big argument against homeschooling is socialization.
Yet in high school and such the big thing is to study hard and get good grades but to do that you tend to not do other things like hangout with friends.
Or you form into cliques and clubs. And the worst part about that is the tendency for the B-list cliques victimize the C-list and lower groups to make themselves feel superior and that is just harms everyone. And you can't really call a Lord of the Flies situation like that good for socialization.
I am more and more considering keeping my children out of the school system.
I would rather guide them in knowledge and help them make it interesting for themselves rather then stick them in a classroom that will only get through half the book in a year.
I would rather have them meet good and successful people rather then the luck of geography.
I would rather have them learn how to run a business then just be an employee.
Well, Steve Jobs talked the RIAA into the iTunes store. Maybe he'll be able to do the same with the MPAA.
Maybe the Mac mini is a product test to see what people do with it and maybe a Mac iCinema is on the way in a couple of years.
It doesn't have to be all movies either. A catalog of sit-coms would be great. There are a lot of old TV shows that I would love to be able to download and watch as the mood hits.
You are in charge of your destiny, not them, they don't even care.
You have to stop thinking as though companies are to take care of you, they are not they are here to take care of their shareholders. You are a just means to that end.
You are your own personal service company. You are a business in any case, start thinking like a business owner.
Learn to take core of yourself financially. Whether or not you go for the contract you need to talk to a tax accountant, an asset protection lawyer and a business lawyer (these are wildly different specialties so look for the specialists, you wouldn't have a dentist do brain surgery on you would you?)
You need to set up a legal and financial structure that is to _your_ benefit not the government's which is the default.
"Is this the highest and best use of your time right now?"
You cannot afford to do work that someone else can be paid less to do. You cannot be paid $100/hr if you are doing work that someone else can be paid minimum wage to do. You don't have time to waste dinking with the computer or making coffee or taking out the trash when you need to be creating value for the company. Do high value work in a distraction free place.
Get 2 computers at least so you can keep working if one dies and let someone else fix the broken one. Keep one off the net so it won't get infected so easily, but backup daily.
Take responsibility for your own training. Learn as much as you can as fast as you can.
There are some books you HAVE to read:
PeopleWare
The Mythical Man Month
The E-Myth Revisited
Getting Things Done
Flow
Victory
Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Influence
I've seen word processors used for kinds of things that they don't really do very well.
There need to be two products here. A Word Processor that focuses on just getting words into the computer and another program that is a Page Layout program.
The word processor should be able to do lots of text layout manipulation, spell check and word counting, grammar checking would be nice but not necessary. The primary audience should be people who write a lot of text, i.e. journalists, academics and novelists.
The page layout program should be strongly linked to it but as a separate program it forced the user to think in a different mode. The page layout program should take the data from the word processor and allow you to add images and create graphs and those non text items and make it output well to any format, email to tabloid to coffee table book.
One things I love about OS X is with the built in spell checker I use a fast text editor rather then a slow and bulky word processor to do most of my writing. I know a few people who use TextEdit and InDesign to do most of their writing.
I did an informal study once where I recorded how often my PC or network died and how long it took to get back to where I was.
A reboot generally took about 5 minutes, then email, browser, word processor and development environment, was another 10 minutes to get everything back to where it was before. Then 10 minutes dealing with email and checking headlines. And finally about 15 minutes to get back to the flow of the problem.
It turned out to average about 30 minutes a day of lost productivity per day. Generally it was a few good days followed by a meltdown of some sort.
So if a job pays $35/hr, it would cost the company about $70/hr to support that job with benefits, equipment and infrastructure, at half an hour per day that would be $175/wk or $8,750/year.
So somehow buying a cheap white box saves the company money? The problem is that the computer is a real cost that shows up on the asset sheet while lost productivity time isn't called out anywhere except in missed deadlines.
I now also have a Mac and I have noticed that it only goes down about once every 2 weeks so I am not losing nearly $315 in lost productivity. That is significant to me.
A PC vs Mac study once said that Mac users earn $24,000 more in productivity per year, I thought that was unbelievable. Then I ran some numbers. That works out to only $12 an hour. If a reboot takes 2 minutes and getting back into flow takes 15 min, then it cost the company $19.82 for those 17 min if they pay me $35/hr at their $70/hr rate. Now so unbelievable any more.
In conclusion, it would make a lot of sense and be cheaper too, to give each worker two PCs, one for communications: email, web, IM that can be knocked out by a virus without affective productivity and another for work: the programs that make money, that is NOT hooked to the network and transfer data back and forth with a flash drive. Or just get one mac:)
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A pure number crunch generally tells us that is not worth it but it is all the other benefits that backyard power grants that is at issue. Extra power can be sold back to the grid, or you have a backup power source in case the grid goes down again.
A great resource is Home Power http://www.homepower.com/ they have lots of articles discussing the pros and cons of all the various kinds of alternative power and building technology. (no affiliation) They go into it in far more depth then any of us can.
The issue that I keep seeing is that the "productivity numbers" that the bosses rely on almost always seem to measure something that is almost but not quite completely unlike what they want to measure.
So the numbers that they have to report to their boss are abstracted again and long before it reaches the top are completely meaningless.
The saddest part is on one seems to know who came up with the metrics or how to change them to better reflect what the company is trying to do.
Sure something like attendance is an easy stat to get but is it really helping matters to have people sitting around doing nothing in particular.
My company has started raffling off flat screen TVs for perfect attendance. How nuts is that? Rather then focusing on their top producers they are trying to boost their bottom producers.
It isn't as though they aren't measuring all kinds of things but that is just stupid. But then there are those companies that still use metrics like thousands of lines of code as a performance metric.
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
We all get laidoff eventually. His Ideas make a lot of sense if you are not expecting to be booted next month. Not everyone can or wants to move because of a job. I've moved because of a job enough times to know that it isn't really worth it. You lose too much of your network and support to be offset by the money.
You don't say what a substantial chunk of money is. A typical job search will take 1 month/$10k you made. So if you had a $60k job you need to save enough for 6 months of the basics and cost cut as much as possible in cost saving when you learn that the ax is falling.
Once you have that, wiping out debt is a big thing and the mortgage is the biggie. If I didn't have the mortgage I could support my family on an $8/hr job. That is a big deal if there are a lot of layoffs and the market is flooded.
Food storage is a great idea, as long as it is stuff you eat. You have to store food an awfully long time before it goes bad nowadays.It is also cheaper then a lot of the junk we tend to buy. A freezer full of meat is a great source of peace of mind. and that is where solar can come in handy.
A basic solar system can cost only a few hundred bucks and is very handy when the mains go down as they do from time to time. A panel, battery and inverter can be mounted to a handtruck and is big enough to run a freezer or laptop for a while.
My goal is to build my investments to be able to support the family and home at least minimally without any other income. This requires different skills them engineering but is fun to learn too.
Now if you are expecting the ax to fall then doing all kinds of cost cutting and converting assets to cash is a good idea.
I am doing the job search thing and having being going to various employment places for help and advice. One very interesting statistic has been that it that about 1 month/$10k salary to find a new equivalent job. For example, if you made $60k last year as a developer, it should take you about 6 months to find a new job as a developer making $60+k/year.
You don't need to save a whole months salary. Figure out how much you really need to spend each month to keep up you home. Sit down and evaluate everything you spend money on. Dial back on the utilities as much as you can. Don't renew subscriptions. As another poster mentioned have some food stored away for that much time as well.
Also don't be afraid of taking a minimum wage job. It will only be temporary but how long could you last if you had to on a minimum wage job?
Finally, budget for a brand new interview outfit: top-to-bottom everything--from a suit to shoes and socks to a watch. It might be overkill or it might be just enough. Think of it as a job search emergency fund, sort of like a home appliance fund enough money to replace a major home appliance at any time.
One of the best classes I had in college was a creative writing class focused on science fiction; first off it was interesting to me while teaching me elements of proper writing. The reading we did was about the technical side of writing like plot and character. But we had to have something writing for almost every class, just a page or two and we would pass them around to comment on. With one or two read in front of the class and discussed.
Creative writing is a bit different than technical or business writing and in this case you might want to focus on those. Doing oddball projects like write a history of the world in one page for CEOs, and nuclear physics for 3-year-olds help focus your writers on length and audience limitations.
One of the best pieces of advice I've gotten on business writing was from my father-in-law who used to work for Ford. It was-Business people are busy, so fit it on one page and leave the details to an appendix.
LOL, That is rather likely, but I said LEARN to run a business not necessarily to own one.
That said, if you business has you on-call 24/7 then all you own is a job, it isn't really a business.
I had to shutdown my business after a drunk driver decided to cross the median of the interstate. Something I learned from that is that if the business is dependent on just one person it isn't really a business it is just a job that you own.
It is almost funny the big argument against homeschooling is socialization.
Yet in high school and such the big thing is to study hard and get good grades but to do that you tend to not do other things like hangout with friends.
Or you form into cliques and clubs. And the worst part about that is the tendency for the B-list cliques victimize the C-list and lower groups to make themselves feel superior and that is just harms everyone. And you can't really call a Lord of the Flies situation like that good for socialization.
I am more and more considering keeping my children out of the school system.
I would rather guide them in knowledge and help them make it interesting for themselves rather then stick them in a classroom that will only get through half the book in a year.
I would rather have them meet good and successful people rather then the luck of geography.
I would rather have them learn how to run a business then just be an employee.
Well, Steve Jobs talked the RIAA into the iTunes store. Maybe he'll be able to do the same with the MPAA. Maybe the Mac mini is a product test to see what people do with it and maybe a Mac iCinema is on the way in a couple of years. It doesn't have to be all movies either. A catalog of sit-coms would be great. There are a lot of old TV shows that I would love to be able to download and watch as the mood hits.
You are in charge of your destiny, not them, they don't even care. You have to stop thinking as though companies are to take care of you, they are not they are here to take care of their shareholders. You are a just means to that end. You are your own personal service company. You are a business in any case, start thinking like a business owner. Learn to take core of yourself financially. Whether or not you go for the contract you need to talk to a tax accountant, an asset protection lawyer and a business lawyer (these are wildly different specialties so look for the specialists, you wouldn't have a dentist do brain surgery on you would you?) You need to set up a legal and financial structure that is to _your_ benefit not the government's which is the default. "Is this the highest and best use of your time right now?" You cannot afford to do work that someone else can be paid less to do. You cannot be paid $100/hr if you are doing work that someone else can be paid minimum wage to do. You don't have time to waste dinking with the computer or making coffee or taking out the trash when you need to be creating value for the company. Do high value work in a distraction free place. Get 2 computers at least so you can keep working if one dies and let someone else fix the broken one. Keep one off the net so it won't get infected so easily, but backup daily. Take responsibility for your own training. Learn as much as you can as fast as you can. There are some books you HAVE to read: PeopleWare The Mythical Man Month The E-Myth Revisited Getting Things Done Flow Victory Rich Dad, Poor Dad Influence
There need to be two products here. A Word Processor that focuses on just getting words into the computer and another program that is a Page Layout program.
The word processor should be able to do lots of text layout manipulation, spell check and word counting, grammar checking would be nice but not necessary. The primary audience should be people who write a lot of text, i.e. journalists, academics and novelists.
The page layout program should be strongly linked to it but as a separate program it forced the user to think in a different mode. The page layout program should take the data from the word processor and allow you to add images and create graphs and those non text items and make it output well to any format, email to tabloid to coffee table book.
One things I love about OS X is with the built in spell checker I use a fast text editor rather then a slow and bulky word processor to do most of my writing. I know a few people who use TextEdit and InDesign to do most of their writing.
A reboot generally took about 5 minutes, then email, browser, word processor and development environment, was another 10 minutes to get everything back to where it was before. Then 10 minutes dealing with email and checking headlines. And finally about 15 minutes to get back to the flow of the problem.
It turned out to average about 30 minutes a day of lost productivity per day. Generally it was a few good days followed by a meltdown of some sort.
So if a job pays $35/hr, it would cost the company about $70/hr to support that job with benefits, equipment and infrastructure, at half an hour per day that would be $175/wk or $8,750/year.
So somehow buying a cheap white box saves the company money? The problem is that the computer is a real cost that shows up on the asset sheet while lost productivity time isn't called out anywhere except in missed deadlines.
I now also have a Mac and I have noticed that it only goes down about once every 2 weeks so I am not losing nearly $315 in lost productivity. That is significant to me.
A PC vs Mac study once said that Mac users earn $24,000 more in productivity per year, I thought that was unbelievable. Then I ran some numbers. That works out to only $12 an hour. If a reboot takes 2 minutes and getting back into flow takes 15 min, then it cost the company $19.82 for those 17 min if they pay me $35/hr at their $70/hr rate. Now so unbelievable any more.
In conclusion, it would make a lot of sense and be cheaper too, to give each worker two PCs, one for communications: email, web, IM that can be knocked out by a virus without affective productivity and another for work: the programs that make money, that is NOT hooked to the network and transfer data back and forth with a flash drive. Or just get one mac :)