I just began running my quotation site on Google’s Page Speed Service. This is a new service Google offers to website owners. It makes their sites load faster. Two primary techniques they employ to accomplish this are:

• rewriting your served content to employ some best practice speed-ups
• caching some of your content on Google’s super fast servers.

My site is dramatically faster, even though I’d already applied all the easiest optimizations.

Setup was pretty easy. Just a handful of dns tweaks. The only snag I hit was in the third step. They asked me to create a txt dns record. I was naming mine incorrectly. The name of this txt record must be your domain name. So in my case, it should be quotationcollection.com. I was trying to use google-site-verification.quotationcollection.com. So don’t make that mistake.

If you host a website, I encourage you to check out this service. At least run a test to see what you can gain.

So far I’m very pleased. Stay tuned to see how I feel when they stop offering it for free.

Full disclosure: I am a Google shareholder. I also use dozens of their products and services including adsense and referrals.

Libya’s on fire; we attacked it.
With no declaration the Prez acted.
Constitutional concern?
Who cares? Let it burn.
Cause the bracket has us all so distracted.

Everyone’s angry at the TSA about the new airport search procedures. I don’t like it either. I normally prefer to argue from principle, but every freedom loving writer in America has that covered this time. So instead I’ll take a pragmatic angle that I haven’t heard yet.

1. How many people are now choosing automobiles over airplanes because they don’t want to be radiated or fondled?
2. As you know, air travel is safer than road travel. So how many injuries/deaths should we expect as a result of this increased car travel?
3. How much do the TSA’s new screening procedures reduce the chance of injury/death on an aircraft?

Soon, some economist will figure out the answers to numbers 1 and 2. I suspect number 3 is not quantifiable, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some bureaucrat has already made up an answer.

Regardless, I strongly suspect that the answer to number 2 is going to dwarf the most optimistic guess for number 3. Put another way, the Transportation Safety Administration is actually making transportation more dangerous.

I’m looking forward to putting some numbers to this.

Guess I’ll go for ‘Now’.

Your attention is a precious resource. Many people want some of it. They want to persuade you to adopt an opinion; they want to sell you something; they want to entertain you (long enough to sell you something).

Many of the people vying for your attention are professional, highly trained, highly skilled persuaders. Some have full-time staff devoted to grabbing and keeping your attention. And they may not have your best interest in mind.

In a world where information and entertainment choices are growing exponentially, how do you decide what’s worthy of your attention? How do you distinguish the valuable from the nonsense? You don’t have time to research everyone’s credibility. You need some heuristics to save you some time.

Below are some things you might consider when evaluating how to spend your attention:

• What is this person’s incentive? Does persuading me (or keeping my attention while an advertiser can attempt to persuade me) affect their bank account either directly or indirectly?
• Is this person asking me to apply reason? Or do they want me to react emotionally?
• Is this person emphasizing our differences and asking me to think in terms of us vs. them? Or is this person emphasizing our similarities and asking me to cooperate? One favorite tactic of infotainers is to divide people into groups, label them, and then pit them against one another. It sounds like this: “Group x believes ABC” or “group y wants to xyz”.
• Is this person screaming? Or are they speaking calmly and rationally?
• Is this person encouraging me to be a better, stronger, higher character person? Or is this person appealing to my base animal instinct?
• Does this person claim to speak for some other person or organization? If so, are they self-appointed?
• Does this person have any expertise on the subject in question?
• Does this person want me to feel empowered – able to help myself and others? Or do they want me to feel like a helpless victim whose problems are somebody else’s fault?

The next time you find your TV tuned to the news (although it applies to radio, magazines, newspapers, and the interwebs, too), ask yourself these questions.

Just can’t seem to find time to exercise?

I recently finished my latest web project. It’s an MD5 hash generator. It’s nothing fancy – just a quick and dirty MD5. But if you need something one way hashed, it will do the trick for you.

I need to build some links so it will rank on GOOG. I also need to add some ads so it will make me some $$.

If you’re a sw developer, please don’t store passwords in plain text. MD5 is one method many people employ to avoid this. It’s not the best, but it’s one of the most common.

Every time I spend money, I try to mentally place the expense in one of five categories. Those categories are:

• Helping myself and my family
• Helping other people
• Needs and material comforts
• Memory creation (experiences)
• Waste

Some expenses don’t categorize neatly. It’s not an air tight system. It’s just a useful way for me to think about money.

I don’t spend much effort on this. I just kind of casually consider it whenever I spend. I really only have one goal in doing this, and that is keeping the ‘Waste’ category as small as possible.

Waste

Waste is any expense that doesn’t fall under one of the other categories. The way I think about it, if I spend money and the result is not something in one of my four good categories, then I’ve wasted that money.

The whole point of this mental classification is to minimize wasteful expenditures.

Helping Myself and My Family

Helping myself and my family encompasses expenses that meet two criteria. First, it must improve my family’s condition. Second, it must compound.

If I buy an asset intended to provide us with money, that investment falls under this category. Examples are shares of stock or CDs. (The money that investment provides will compound).

If I spend money to develop some useful skill that enriches our lives, that expense falls under this category. Skills that increase earning power, make us more efficient or effective, or help us create memories qualify. (I’ll explain memory creation in a minute). Examples are learning to cook, fix cars, program computers, dance, take pictures, pick stocks, etc. (The money, efficiency, or enjoyment the new skill provides will compound).

If I spend money on something that helps me get more money, that expense falls under this category. An example is gasoline to get me to work. (The money I earn will compound).

Helping Other People

This is charity. This can be giving to organizations that help people or directly to individuals. I prefer that this money compound, but I don’t insist. One thing that I do insist is that this money be used for genuine help and not for enabling destructive behavior.

Needs and Material Comforts

Needs are food, shelter, water, clothing, healthcare – things necessary for survival. Material comforts are things like air conditioning and transportation.

This category is tricky for two reasons. First, it can be tough to distinguish between an acceptable material comfort and a wasteful extravagance. There is no clear rule. I have to be careful with these.

Second, sometimes it’s tough to know whether something belongs in this category or in the ‘Helping Myself’ category. For example, fuel to get to work belongs to ‘Helping Myself.’ I also need food and clothes to work, but I put those in ‘Needs and Material Comforts’. So what’s the difference? I don’t dwell on it. Neither of them belongs to ‘Waste’, and that’s really all I care about.

Memory Creation

Memory creation just means doing something fun that I and my family will remember fondly. Taking a family trip, going to a rodeo, or going to a concert are all examples. It just has to be fun and memorable.

An ordinary outing to the movies doesn’t count. Neither does sitting around and watching television. It has to create memories that me and my family will cherish forever.

I used to think that spending on fun, memorable experiences was wasteful. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned better.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying creating these memories requires spending money. The memories come from doing fun activities with the people you love. There are plenty of these activities that don’t require money. But I’ve learned that money can facilitate these activities, and when it does it is money well spent.

Incidentally, if you think (like I foolishly did) that these kinds of memories aren’t valuable, I have a couple of exercises for you. First, think of your fondest memory. It can be something from childhood, high school, wedding day, whatever. Now imagine that some scientist will pay you to allow him to erase that memory from your mind. It will be as if it never happened. How much would you charge him? I bet it’s a lot.

If that doesn’t make you appreciate fond memories, try this. Go talk to an old person whose health is declining. Notice her demeanor when she talks about ordinary stuff – the news, food, the weather, etc. Then notice her demeanor when she talks about fun times with her children. How much do you think she values those memories?

Conclusion

This is not a rigorous system, and it’s certainly not all that I do to scrutinize my expenses. It doesn’t say anything about the proportions among the categories. But it does give me a framework for identifying and eliminating wasteful expenditures. Of course, that leaves more money for spending on the four good categories, which is the whole point.

I hope this will be a useful framework for you to consider your expenses.

I like Stossel’s defense of Rand Paul.

This discussion illustrates a favorite statist power grab formula:

1. Have the state interfere with the free market. (In this case the method of interference was Jim Crow laws).
2. Observe and deplore the undesirable consequences.
3. Blame the imaginary ‘free market’ which the state has rendered un-free by its interference. (Seriously, how was the free market supposed to eliminate racism when it was the law?)
4. Enact more laws to compensate for undesirable consequences. Of course these laws interfere even more with the free market.

People and businesses should not be forced to use their property in a way to which they object. It’s important to defend this principle, even in those scenarios we find distasteful (or in the case of Jim Crow, disgusting). Once we accept the notion that government can tell you how to use your property – even if we deem the use desirable – we have no grounds to resist when they mandate a use which we don’t find desirable. Put another way, if some jackass wants to exclude some group of customers because he doesn’t like the way they look, that’s his right. We should defend it, even if we find it disgusting. (It’s the old principle vs. pragmatism tradeoff. If we’re willing to erode principle to achieve some expediency, one day we’ll wake up with the principle destroyed and expediency determined by whomever is the best armed.)

It’s sad that defending property rights gets one tagged as a racist.

Update: Dr. Williams says it better than I do.

Les Brown on desire.