Roughly $350/mo at this point, and I’d love to 10x it this coming year.
I have an Etsy business that I set up last year that doesn’t require much input from me and uses third party fulfillment. I average about 30 sales per month including the holiday season and about $10/order profit.
Dividend stocks currently pay around $50/mo, which buys more stock every time (DRIP), so that should increase nicely over the next 30-40 years. I also buy more on a regular basis, but that does take some effort/research on my part.
I’ll leave out stock, bond and mutual fund growth on its own since that’s not really income per se.
I’m also working on a YouTube channel that I just started last month. It doesn’t even have 10 subscribers but I do point people to product recommendations, which has already gotten me a $45 referral payout. Could be a fluke, but I’m in it for the long term, so we shall see.
> Think about all the possibilities if everyone can go learn whatever their heart desires without worrying about paying something back?
They can do that online and or in a library. Once you start paying someone to teach them, it starts costing money and that money has to come from somewhere.
Most of these are agreeable enough. "Unconscious bias training" seems like a bit of a stretch, but I haven't taken it to know whether it's helpful. 2, 3, 4, 6 are fair, I'd say.
> 5. Consider salary transparency
This is a double-edged sword. While good for some things, it is not without cost. For instance, seeing a top performer's pay can be motivating for some and demotivating to others. And others' performance isn't always immediately clear so it may be that other workers don't see higher pay as 'just,' which will cause them to devalue their own work because, "what's the point?"
To resolve this, you can flatten pay but then you remove the incentive to perform well. You can separate people at different paygrades into different physical locations, but now you're segregating performance groups while harming overall open communication.
> 8. Don’t force female coders behave like men to be successful
I'd say success is acting like a good coder -- regardless of gender -- just like it says in the conclusion:
> “Overall, to become a female developer, you only have to do what any other smart dev would do. Spend weekends and late nights in front of your computer, laying down lines of code, debugging and developing your personal projects. Follow tutorials, read articles, and learn on the fly. Master the lingo. And, if you are curious enough to go deep down to the core of what you are trying to build, you will need to acquire a large and useful understanding of computer science. In a nutshell, spend time to learn all you can.”
I don't see a lot of places discussing the concept of trial hiring (i.e. giving someone fair pay for actual work to skip the bias inherent in interviewing and judging them based on some preset metrics). I feel like this would get around the problems highlighted in this study: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas.... At my company, we use trial hires and we have a lot more women involved as a result.
Right, and I get that your counterpoint is against the person above you. However, that doesn't change the context of Damore's argument, which is saying that interests may differ due to differences in cognitive ability and that the difference may help to explain the gender gap.
And a lot people are ignoring the context, instead pulling straw men out of the text to fight, rather than arguing the substance of the memo itself, context included.
It's a great read and the sort of lead-out at the end yields some more useful insight:
> Prior art aside, I would like to leave off on a high note. I mentioned earlier that men are doing a lot better on the platform than women, but here’s the startling thing. Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren’t great, I’m massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix.
To me this is more useful than "women are less interested in tech on average," or "there's a hiring bias in favor of men over women."
> Affirmative Action does not require having quotas (and, in fact, they are in mlst contexts explicitly illegal, even in venues required to have Affirmative Action policies).
Fair enough -- quotas aren't the issue, but affirmative action is the issue.
> So, insofar as it “causes” the that result, it is largely by interaction with false information deliberately spread by its opponents.
That's a concrete conclusion based on unprovable/shaky reasoning.
And even if that were true and you could prove it, it wouldn't change the fact concerning affirmative action (in this case, lowering hiring standards for certain groups) causing bias for both coworkers and the employee. How do coworkers know an individual got there on their own merit? How does an individual who is on/above par, yet who happens to belong to an affirmative action group, shake the internal/external stigma that they got there based on the lowered bar? These things contribute to bias whether or not we like the overall idea behind affirmative action (which is to level the playing field). Nothing comes for free.
> His reaching out to alt-right media and having a "Goolag" shirt on the very first interview suggests that he was kind of ready for it.
Which alt-right media did he reach out to? I've been paying pretty close attention and I saw him being interviewed by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, but they are not alt-right media. They are both classical conservatives.
> As anyone who's worked for Google (I have) will tell you, that's highly discouraged. You don't want to put Google or yourself into a weird legal position for posting publicly about this (for example, Google would have to track you down and make sure to archive all your internal emails moving forward for possible discovery, etc.)
Then all we have to go on are theories and the question: what's to be gained from him lying about this?
Well, I agree with the spirit of your argument. However:
> So if I say "the average women is shorter than the average man", am I now liable for being fired for creating a hostile environment for my female coworkers?
You wouldn't just be saying that. You'd be saying, "we know about implicit/explicit biases, but maybe short people are less interested in tech and that helps to explain the hiring gap." That and a series of studies about how short people, on average, have biological qualities that differentiate them from taller people, which you use to bolster your supposition. In effect, you'd be saying that, on average, short people are possibly just less interested in technology because they like other things, respond differently to stress and don't have the drive for status that tall people do.
So, while you wouldn't necessarily be _wrong_ for supposing that and people would be wrong to impute any further meaning than is represented (such as, short people aren't fit for tech, short people are not as good as tall people, etc.), you might be at least partially wrong for not being as clear as possible in your phrasing ... but not much else. Mainly, because his intention isn't to say women aren't fit for tech, but to point out why they might, on average, be less interested in tech, which would help to explain the gap in STEM interest.
> Damore's memo states a lot of things about Google's recruiting practices that are still to be proven truth. Lowering the bar is one of them.
That's true and an excellent point. If he's lying about Google's recruitment practices, either by misunderstanding or by outright false accusation, then large parts of the memo are moot.
On the other hand, I would make the counterpoint that the only reason his honesty has come into question is because of the negative reception his memo has had. Also, what are the odds that Damore misunderstood things? I'd say low.
Additionally, I have yet to see any fellow Googlers publicly calling him a liar, but we shall see.
Exactly. Affirmative action causes everyone, including the person, to question whether they got there on merit or based on filling some quota. Multiple biases are created.
Yes, but this raises the issue of affirmative action causing bias about innate abilities, and that's absolutely true.
If you knew there were a lower bar for people who had red hair, for example, because there's a pay gap and their population ratio isn't represented equally, every time you'd have someone on your team with red hair, you'd wonder if they were there because of the exception made for them or if they got there on pure merit. Thus, affirmative action causes people to question that merit (bias).
Worse, the redhead who got in never knows if they got accepted based on merit or based on some quota, which contributes heavily Impostor syndrome, negative self image and confirmation bias based on that negative self image.
You combine these two things over time and there is absolutely an impact.
Damore's ultimate points were: let's discuss this and, by the way, please don't ignore me just because my opinion is unpopular.
For what it's worth, he did run the document by others at Google and -- based on what I've read -- they were the ones who spread the document, not he. That's not to say he didn't intend to do it at some point, but that it was through his efforts to get said feedback that the fire started.
I know this is unrelated to the post but I am genuinely/respectfully curious (since you left it as a bullet) as to the chain of logic that makes it okay to tax higher income people more. I've never understood that.
Full disclosure: if it were up to me, we would go with either a flat tax or something more sensible that an economist has proposed (i.e. Friedman's negative income tax). But that would, of course, largely abolish the need for the IRS and the thousands of jobs tied to figuring out taxes each year. In other words, I am definitely more keen on a strong vector toward Libertarianism.
One, because without writing them down, my thoughts seem to take on actual weight in my head. Putting them into my journal seems to remove the weight while helping me to sort through things, sort of like talking to myself in real time.
Two, because it helps me to stay practiced with Vim. I started just one single file called journal.md, separated by markdown headers/dates and keep it in a folder that gets backed up instantly (though I'm thinking of moving it to Dropbox so that it also gets versioned in addition to immediate backups).
Three, because it keeps me writing. As someone who is continually writing short stories, it's important to keep the words flowing out of my head, even if I'm not writing about something that happened to someone else, real or imagined.