dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Good help is apparently hard to find. Family peers now in manager-class roles occasionally humblebrag about recruiting staff. Moans about finding a 'good fit for the culture' or the oxymoronic 'autonomous team player' are in essence a rehash of, "It's so hard to find good help these days." In Japan, good help finds you! As an aside, practising the lingo is vital to materialise upper-class aspirations. It's called 'affirmation'. In case you haven't heard, ' fake it till you make it ' is now complimentary. Leaving aside the views of managerial wanna-bes, how much should the business itself care about ill-suited recruits, or in fact turnover as a whole?

How much does having children affect net wealth? "You're so lucky you don't have to pay for childcare." "I bet you're glad you don't have to pay for [baby car seats] [nappies] [gynecologists]." "I could retire like you if it weren't for the kids." Yours truly is tired of the assumption that his wealth is due to being child-free. Although children imply expense, they do not as such prevent saving. And yet, the sheer weight behind the 'children are expensive' narrative stifles me. The latest beat-up on spiraling costs is this News Corp piece in which the authors bemoan breaking proof that child-rearing in Australia is costlier than in even America. Parenting dreams shattered. Children out of reach. Oh boo hoo.

How wealthy should you be? In the book " The Millionaire Next Door " and its sequels, Stanley and Danko study the feeding habits of American millionaires. Among various insights into the millionaire mind, they propose that millionaires have a higher 'wealth index' than the vast majority of people. That is, a higher net wealth relative to age and gross income. The formula to calculate your wealth index is: Wx = Net Wealth / (0.1 x Gross Annual Income x Age) Most peoples' wealth indices - I hazard to use the term 'average' - fall between 0.88 and 1.84 and so are, according to the authors, AAWs, or 'average accumulators of wealth'. Lower and higher values respectively indicate 'under' and 'prodigious' accumulators of wealth (UAWs and PAWs). How broadly does the index apply? That is, how well does it fit the real world?

If you could go back in time, what would you trade with your parents? Although we like to boil down inflation to a single figure, cost of living is not as simple as CPI. Prices of different goods and services change at different rates. Something that may have been cheap in the past may be more expensive now. Conversely, expensive items may become cheaper. Add monetary inflation - the overall weakening of currency's purchasing power - into the mix and it gets confusing. Ultimately, we are not all affected the same way by price changes because we don't all buy the same things. What if we could use the differences in price changes to inform our purchasing, increase our savings, and thereby our wealth? I term this 'maximising cheap, minimising costly' expenditure strategy - spurred by my first question - 'Temporal Arbitrage'.

So you'd better treat them right . The reason I have so far avoided discussing the disproportionate wealth held by the Baby Boomer generation (1945 to 1964) with my parents is that I know how they will cut me down. "We worked hard for it." They'll sniff dismissively at me (Gen X, 1965 to 1984), further implying that I do not have 'it' because I have not worked. I could throw up many reasons for my generation's relative failure: relatively insecure employment, declining public benefits, the opportunity cost of education instead of early entry into the workforce. But they would seem like excuses to those who recall times when they could walk out the door of one employer straight into another. So what exactly is the wealth premium on a life of stoic employment?

If you've followed the first part, you should have extracted from your places.sqlite copy a fairly large CSV file full of website visits. What are you waiting for? Double-click it, or File -> Open in LibreOffice Calc to launch the Text Import dialog. Importing Correctly You'll note from the last post that the export contains 5 columns: url,  host, rev_host, title, and timestamp. By default, columns are imported as 'standard' text. But it is critical that you import any timestamps as a date/time field, so right click the column and choose the appropriate format.

If you want to take a look at Firefox surfing activity, the about:me add-on is a good start. However, it presents only one view of data and is thus limited in its ability to present more detailed statistics. We will view that data in a different program. So let's first extract it from the browsing history stored in the Places.sqlite file into a CSV file using a Firefox add-on. Step 1 - Locate and copy Places.sqlite to a working location On Windows machines, Places.sqlite is found in a directory similar to: C:\Users\User1\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ .default\places.sqlite Copy the file to another location. The database will be locked while using Firefox, and the SQLite plugin we will use to open it.

Is it rational for unemployed and discouraged workers to return to or stay at the family home? This boy's too young to be singing the blues Lost generation , discouraged worker , hikikomori . We view them with pity if not derision, as if they, and the millenial/Gen Y/X-er we know still living with their parents just aren't trying hard enough . We'd love to help them but we have no time left from our busy professional lives except to throw them some tips, proof read their C.V.s, and feel a little smug that at least we're on the right side of the dole queue. But money is money and unless explicitly disclosed, it is impossible to distinguish between corporate largesse and family indulgence. Who is to know whether your salary, work, or your uncle got you that smartphone? Lest we forget, patronage existed long before employment. Neither Da Vinci nor Michelangelo were subjected to psychometric evaluations by HR.

Is having children to care for you in old age a good strategy? The social contract, particularly in Confucian societies, is that adults are expected to care for their elderly, reciprocating the care received as children. But how well is this expectation played out in fact?

Will having children make marriage last longer? Children, it is supposed, so enrich a marriage that it is more likely to endure over time. They bring a unique stimulus, necessitate close teamwork, and foster intimate communication. While some would argue that they could seek such stimuli elsewhere, and others would say that they can do without that sort of personal development, the naysayers are not strong enough to displace a nuclear family ideal that has persisted despite change in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I have been asked to consider returning to further education to break out of my current vocational malaise. Several of my peers have done precisely that, hoping to capitalise on a future demand for medical services, and an immediate demand to not appear like unemployed bums to their family. I take it as given that people with degrees command better salaries than those who do not. But does this make a very expensive degree worthwhile? We have heard of professional elites who are also skint. Poor doctors, lawyers in hock. How well does a professional degree translate to increased net wealth? There are plenty of internet articles on soul-searching to find the answer. There are not so many on the hard finance of tertiary education. By far the best I have found is the College Risk Report , which compares the value of specific U.S. degrees with that of a high school education and a 2-year generic college course. As comprehensive as it looks, the model has (to me) some weaknesses.

Source: Handbrake 0.9.9.5530 64-bit edition Target: (Phat) Playstation Portable PSP-1000 , System Software: 6.60 Many internet articles on how to transcode video to PSP using Handbrake have not worked for me. Even the most helpful are incomplete. I hope this post will help fill in the blanks. There is no longer any PSP preset for Handbrake, but from what I can gather, the preset had only limited success as the x264 encoder would change syntax and settings between versions. Other presets that may have worked before, like 'iPod' and 'Apple-Universal' now do not. Here is what worked for me, step by step: