edcastano

A friend wrote this and I thought it very fitting to be discussed here. I think it's compelling but curious to hear other takes.

Congrats on your success. I'd love to learn more. Please DM if you would entertain selling or just open to a conversation.

I am a PM with LinkedIn. DM me and I can try to funnel this to the right channels. I'll be the first to say that there are a lot of problems with LinkedIn, but the company's "heart" is generally in the right place.

Interesting to think about how deep-seated incentives keep people from following the values they claim to espose. Would also be curious to see the Red state version of this analysis.

I've recently seen some great hires at LinkedIn. We've also lost some great candidates because we were too slow (due to covid era freeze). Overall I'm excited that were bringing in talent that looks like the users we're serving.

In our family I use the Gryphon router/app combo and Apple Screentime to monitor and enforce limits and Rooster Money to create incentives for kids to do chores and make good choices. Twenty years from now, this could make a big difference as to whether my kids are disciplined, independent, employable adults, or screen junkies. As a society, I believe screen addiction is creating a reversion to the mean scenario where mean focus and productivity is decreasing over time as companies continue to optimize how they manipulate people for profit. This is another case of socialize the costs, privatize the profits.

Let's hope this isn't a replay of the Mint acquisition. Purchased and left to stagnate for a decade.

Who is the PEO? Some PEOs have very stringet legal teams that would make a big fuss about this. Depending who your PEO is, you might just reach out directly to their legal department.

Source: I worked for a large PEO.

Who is the PEO?

Fake success is simply failure waiting to happen at best. At worst, it's fraud.

Check out www.writegreen.org to help find and write a letter to your elected officials.

Try www.writegreen.org to write a personal letter to Congress in 4 minutes instead of two hours. Personal letters are 20x more effective than form letters.

I built www.writegreen.org in 2011, specifically to channel my own energy and angst around this topic to drive policy change (don't change your lightbulbs, change your laws). Unfortunately, the realities of having a family to feed kept me from fully promoting and developing it. Would be great to get feedback and partner with others looking to make a dent on this problem.

...not to mention murdering Native Americans and taking their land. Surely that was illegal (not to mention immoral) from the Native American point of of view. I agree with your point that the entire US is founded on illegal activity. It's "might makes right" applied to the logical limit.

Your talking points are all really good. Along the same lines, I built www.writegreen.org to help people express their support for sustainability from a variety of ideological perspectives, including conservative, religious and economic opportunities.

This was written by a friend and former classmate of mine. I found it to be very compelling and as opposed to much of the material about Trump, it provides strong advice for interventions to take.

In my experience having a well structured program with good content is more important than it being an in person program. This is especially true if there are ways to reach out to live help when a student is struggling with some aspect of the program.

The great irony: http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/yesware.com.html

I couldn't agree more, and am ecstatic that there are other like minded people. I believe my response to this Quora question, is one way to get this outcome. Would be curious to get your reaction to the idea.

https://www.quora.com/In-your-opinion-what-should-the-United...

The only good tax…a tax on “bads”

The U.S. federal government first imposed a [temporary] personal income tax in 1861, in order to pay for the Civil War. The tax was later made permanent in 1913. In other words, our country is stuck on a nineteenth century tax model, collecting 95% of our revenue from labor and investment. I believe government slaps taxes on income and investment out of sheer momentum. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If we were designing a tax framework from the ground up, it would surely look different. In its simplest form, I’d say it would entail taxing “bads” instead of taxing “goods”. Let me explain.Of the $2.4 trillion in federal tax receipts collected every year in the U.S., 95% comes from taxing labor and investment. These are activities that generate social benefits; jobs, goods, and technological progress. Economists call these positive externalities, but we can simply call these “goods”. On the flip side, less than 2% of the $2.4 trillion in federal revenue comes from taxing—waste, pollution, and resource depletion—activities that generate social ills like obesity, heart disease, cancer, urban sprawl, materialism, and resource wars. Economists call these negative externalities but we can simply call these “bads”. A sensible tax policy would entail taxing “bads” instead of “goods”. Today we have it backwards, with the bulk of the federal tax burden, (95%) falling on taxing “goods” like labor and investment, instead of “bads” like resource depletion, waste and pollution.

Some will argue that such a system would be regressive and punish those that can least afford it. However, this system can be combined with a monthly federal stipend of a couple of hundred dollars for every single man, woman and child in the country to make the system progressive. In this scenario, those who save energy and resources, make money, and those that waste it, pay. Nonetheless, everyone, rich or poor would have a strong incentive not to be wasteful. More importantly, it would eliminate the disincentive to work.

This approach would help solve some of our nation’s largest problems. People would be healthier since the prices we pay for food would reflect the energy and resource intensity of meat vs. produce…thus leading people to consume more produce. We’d start seriously investing in energy efficiency, not because of government mandates, but because it would make financial sense. The approach might even help put our fiscal house in order since it would imply eliminating corporate welfare and all subsidies, including those for clean energy. Market forces would take over without all the loopholes that inevitably skew our personal decisions and ultimately the national economy.

Families would have a strong incentive to save and invest, instead of waste and consume, reversing a century of falling savings rate. It might even help reverse the last 60 years of cultural decay…combating materialism, consumerism, and the decline of the family.

I won’t argue at what level our economy should be taxed. My point is that if we will have any tax what-so-ever, it should not come from the work of; the policeman protecting our streets, the agent insuring our home, or the entrepreneur creating new industries and jobs for society. If nothing can be said to be certain except for death and taxes, then let’s use taxes to help us live longer, richer lives, and leave a world for our children that is not worse off than the one we found.

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This led me to create this site http://www.writegreen.org. Might have to give is 30 seconds or so to load (I've got it hosted on slow Heroku tier) The idea was to empower citizens to use their own philosophy to advocate sustainability with our politicians. The ideas is, change your politicians, not just your light bulbs.

@shoo Have you seen http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/? Also, message me if you want to collaborate on an environmental advocacy platform. http://writegreen.org/ Unfortunately, it's not currently working because I need to migrate the app to Cedar 14 on Heroku. I haven't been hacking since 2011 (http://mbahacks.com/), so not feeling confident I could successfully migrate myself. Here is the old writegreen site that talks about the idea a bit more: https://writegreen.wordpress.com/problem/ . The Nature Conservancy and NRDC were interested in the tool, but I wasn't able to invest any more time into it at the time (I had a family to feed).

Anyhow, I'm looking to get back into trying to make a dent on this topic. Would love to connect with others to collaborate on something. Writegreen, or otherwise. I'd like to leave this world to my children better than I found it. Right now, it's not looking that way. You can message me directly via ed dot castano at gmail.com

We're a lean team located in Palo Alto. Send me an email if you'd like to learn more ed.castano at bluevine dot com.

Nice point. You can build a great ruby site without Rails, but Rails gives you a nice framework to make the process easier. Similarly, you can build a business without an MBA, but an MBA gives you a convenient framework to help with important decisions.

Great point. I've been accused to being dogged in the past. Truth be told, it helps to be both focused and determined.

@stfu There are two ways you could try to go about it:

1) Try sticking to one technology and working on a project you're really passionate about.

2) Work on a tutorial from start to finish.