Good habit formation can't hurt, but don't neglect the fundamentals. The thing that's pulling your shoulders forward is not some mental weakness on your part, it's an imbalance in muscle tightness and weakness, like a tent pole with regular guy wires on one side and yarn on the other. You need exercises to strengthen the lower traps like floor Y's and chest supported dumbbell row, plus face pulls and scapular wall slide.
Fed Hoyle write astro books for kids and mine starts "you are marooned on an island with a piece of string..." and leads through simple trig to astronomical trig, the equinoxes, time, distance..
If you meet your SoW, you will get paid. The FAR is very, very clear on this issue.
1) All of my resources are committed to the gov and I am not an idiot.
2) This is simply not true. It doesn't matter what flavor of contract you have: time and materials, cost plus fixed fee, etc. You have milestones and deliverables that are defined by your SoW. If you don't meet the milestones, you will not get paid. There is no incentive to "do nothing and wait for the last month of the contract"
3) This is an especially idiotic statement. These are called ECPs, which are a contract mod, which if there are enough of, the contract can get re-competited. Adding ECPs is a very, very bad idea.
You clearly have no idea what you are posting about wrt to gov contracts
Source: I own a small R&D company that works for the DoD and IC
Registering a company in the UK, and keeping it running, is both simpler and cheaper than in the US.
Registering a company takes a few minutes and costs less than $30. Compulsory annual filing costs less than $20. If your company's revenue is below some threshold, you don't need to register for VAT (similar to sales tax). And there's another (even higher) threshold below which you can file very simple annual accounts (unaudited, and including neither income statements nor cash flow).
I manage 6 figures a year of profitable Google Ads spend, and while this article isn't bad, it's a bit vague. Its strongest point is "don't hire an agency to scale." Its second strongest point should have been keyword selection, but that's buried at the bottom of the article.
Specifically, the things that have gotten us to profitable ad spend in the 6 figure range are:
-- VERY tight campaigns going to tight landing pages. The more specific campaigns you can run, the better. The keywords on your ads AND landing pages need to match the keywords people type in. Most common mistake is driving traffic to a vague landing page. We have 200+ landing pages, all matched to specific keywords. I built out an entire custom framework on top of WordPress to manage this for our company.
-- Manage negative keywords. Every 2-3 days, I log in and add negative keywords. Good ones to start out with: free, diy...I have hundreds now. Maybe thousands. It takes a while to scroll through them.
-- Track sales back and add more negative keywords. There were some items we were getting a lot of clicks on, but didn't make any sales with. I blacklisted a common keyword on one of our campaigns thanks to this insight. Google's recommendation algorithm complained that by blacklisting this keyword, I was getting fewer clicks. YUP. Tracked it for a month, 3-4 clicks per day and 1 sale that entire month. Negative keyword!
-- Start out with 3 ads per ad group minimum. Every week, log in and pause any ad that's not getting good CTR and add a new one. Repeat. After several weeks, you'll be in the "holy ____ I didn't think that was possible" range of CTRs.
It takes a LOT of effort to get to the point where we are now (highly optimized keywords, 12-20% CTR, half the price of most of our competitors.) Still, every couple days I log in and tweak even more things. And I hired a consultant on an hourly basis to get us even better. Totally worth the $ to hire him for a few hours just to see where I could improve!
If you are technical and think you can outsource this to an agency, DON'T. Consistency is key.
One of our partners decided to take the campaigns I'd written and send them to an agency. Their sales dropped 30%. They fired the agency and went back to me. And I'm the business owner, not an agency. No one cares about your money more than you do.
And, being technical, you can do fun things like customizing landing pages based on keywords entered (something most agencies can't or won't do, even though it boosts sales.)
While I didn't have microsoft apps on my S9, if you install netguard (firewall) [1] you'll see that most samsung apps are constantly trying to get a connection with facebook servers and Samsung HQ.
Apps that have no reason to have internet connectivity, like the dialer, clock app, the finder (search functionality within the stock launcher) are phoning home [!] Unfortunately Samsung phones have locked bootloaders, so there's no easy way to 'take control'.
side note: I recommend installing this on all [un-rooted] android devices. It's an easy way to block most "telemetry" apps & devices collect, from the Amazon Firestick to apps running on any given device, including Google apps.
Notably, NNG uses a more 'real world' methodology, testing realistic user tasks in browsing websites. For the unfamiliar, 'Nielsen' is Jakob Nielsen, an authority on usability, working and writing on it for two decades now, and he's a big advocate of usability testing in design process. (BTW, “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity” of his is an excellent writeup on how websites should function—I'd bet it's as valuable today as it was in mid-2000s for me, because the functioning of humans doesn't change.)
They also noted that flat design has made some steps back to the immediate recognition of the olde pseudo-3d interfaces, notably with 'Material design': https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ But not many steps.
I was talking to a very intelligent Chinese friend of mine who was struggling to describe scenes in English. My first thought was "Gee, maybe he should memorise passages from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, since that has some of the best scene descriptions I have ever read".
No shortage of students like that. You can imagine my hopeful start at seeing Peake's name on the list at the start of this article, then my slump on discovering that that was for death+50 years countries, and Australia/US are death+70.
This stuff kills culture. I can't even propagandise great English literature to someone trying to learn English. He'll have to go with Jane Austin like every body else, and he can chuse something more modern if he's got more money than sense. Thank goodness she died 200 years ago, or I don't know what I'd do. Maybe learn how to read Chaucer.
I suspect there's actually quite a market to develop such UI for. Given a service that standardizes UI over a wide array of applications (web apps, mobile apps, desktop apps), I bet there's a large enough market for it.
Implementation would be interesting and most likely quite hard to achieve, though.
Back in the 1980's Martin Seligman analysed the speaking styles of baseball team members to determine if their optimistic/pessimistic attitude correlated with success on the field. In his book "Learned Optimism" he claimed that this kind of analysis had some predictive power in who would win the game.
Here's some more information on the design of SimCity:
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)
A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winnograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
>Unfortunately I didn’t type the notes from this part of the talk in, but it’s been well covered elsewhere. Chaim Gingold’s PdD dissertation on “Play Design” has some excellent in-depth analysis of SimCity as a cultural artifact, its code, algorithms and design, the story of open sourcing SimCity, his SimCity Reverse Diagrams, and many interesting quotes from interviews with Will Wright and other game designers. It includes a fascinating chapter about Doreen Nelson (who wrote the original SimCity Teacher’s Guide) and her lifelong work on Design Based Learning (formerly City Building Education):
Gingold, Chaim. “Play Design.” Ph.D. thesis, University of California Santa Cruz, 2016.
>I did my Ph.D. research on play and the history of computing. My thesis argues that it is productive to consider playthings, playmates, playgrounds, and play practices as constituting a set with shared design characteristics. SimCity, a software plaything that confounds game-centric approaches (e.g. game studies and game design), is the keystone in an arch of case studies that takes us from some of the earliest examples of computer simulation all the way to model cities enacted with children, cardboard, and costumes, and unusual playgrounds made of junk.
Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.
Any metric or KPI is going to get gamed in harmful ways if it's prioritized too highly. So the answer is to use A/B testing to make sure you're not regressing on the goals of a design change, and judiciously, to validate whether your change is moving things in the right direction.
But beyond that you have to do the hard slog of mastering the discipline of UX, real, human-centric design, and accept that not everything important is measurable.
We have plenty of examples of how doing real UX instead of playing a numbers game can differentiate your business, Apple has applied this philosophy consistently over many years.
The root of the problem is a "fuck you, market share at all costs" culture that has come to permeate Silicon Valley. And you can argue (somewhat cynically) that this philosophy makes sense in a blue ocean where you have no competition and just need to gobble up people and turn them into cash before someone else does. But I think going forward this mentality may actually become a liability as more humane alternatives to heavily despised products emerge. Many of the current crop of giants seem to have forgotten that a company's most valuable asset is always its brand.
I want a search engine that deprioritizes results based on the number of trackers or ads on the page. Like, rank = (relevance * 1.0) + (trackers * -0.5) + (ads * -0.5).
Samsung's $130 million investment over years, sold out to Chinese firms for $14 million.
To the Chinese, theft of IP is just business as usual.
Every single firm I've personally encountered that has done biz in China has either already had their IP stolen and sold in competition with it (or just products sold out the back door w/o label), or fully expects that it would happen and takes strong defensive strategies, e.g., sending pre-mixed materials to China where they only do the final process.
This is not sustainable. While the West thinks that we were exploiting China for it's cheap labor, the Chinese had a much longer range view -- they were exploiting our myopic lust for short-term profits to get our most valuable assets and gain long-term strategic advantage, both in both commercial and military technology.
This is likely to go down as one of history's greatest strategic blunders.
I wonder if it has already gone too far for us to recover.
I'm a big fan of western/piedmont of NC for remote workers. It's not the absolute cheapest compared to the midwest, but the weather is better if you don't love snow, and it's still extremely cheap if you're in some non-hip parts (Greensboro, High Point, Winston Salem are very affordable small cities that have universities, and other less-connected mountain towns like Morganton/Wilkesboro/Marion/Hickory are even cheaper, but less vibrant), and there are plenty of roads connecting you to airports and bigger cities with more robust economies (Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte). Asheville is probably the nicest remote work city in NC, and would definitely beat Dayton culturally, but it's nowhere near as cheap.
It's possible that what we're witnessing is behavioural sink[0]. It's been observed in other mammals that overcrowding leads to social degradation and eventual total failure of the population.
There was a study which I cannot locate right now which discussed that one of the substantial impacts of a Walmart moving into a town was that all the "community leadership" type jobs left. Things like accountants and office admins and other business professionals. This was because the small businesses Walmart replaced were the ones that used these services locally. Walmart did these things at it's corporate office far away from the community.
So those who did mid-level things like accounting or office administrative work could no longer find work locally and either had to move or take a lower paying service worker position at Walmart.
Essentially what that reveals is that most of these mid-level jobs are susceptible to the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect [1]
Which means that most jobs that do not require physical labor onsite are either being rapidly outsourced to cheaper markets or automated if possible. This ends up being that group in the middle of the pay range and likely accounts for the reduction in overall wages for that group.
They're pulling a Google...they've started to eat their tail. Google, for those that don't know, started with the goal of sending you to the best site. Today, oh well, it's virtually all ads /google products. They're trying to make you click their most profitable ads
I'm not sure it's exactly the coaching or books you're looking for but YC itself did a series of interviews called Employee #1 about how different people in different roles navigated being an early employee of a successful company to varying outcomes. I found it helpful if not directly instructive.
Backing this up, here's my personal journey:
I had back pain for a few years that has been basically gone for six months. A combination of these helped:
* daily inversion (Teeter Gravity Boots on a pull-up bar—I actually pull down on the door frame while inverted for extra decompression)
* daily yoga (at home, from YouTube videos)
* using a standing desk most of the time
* Rolfing about once every eight weeks (type of massage focused on aligning fascia. It's pricey and a little pseudoscience-y but actually works really well)
If there's one thing of all those that's made the most difference, it's inversion. I feel so tall now. Seriously, invest in an inversion table or inversion boots if it's safe for you to do this exercise.
My posture is still not where I want it to be, but it's much better than it used to be. I still get tight in the neck (likely due to poor sleep posture). I had chronic pain in my left foot (likely plantar fasciitis) that disappears but comes back about once every two weeks. Both have gotten much better with some targeted yoga exercises, but it's a journey.
I'm slowly going through the book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back by Esther Gokhale (https://www.amazon.com/Steps-Pain-Free-Back-Solutions-Should...). The author studied posture in industrial vs. non-industrial societies, and she concluded that most pain is not inevitable. We have just forgotten about the importance of posture in industrialized societies. The book gives you eight sessions to practice primal posture for sleeping, standing, and sitting. I'm thinking about investing $400 in the Gokhale Method in-person course.
I now prioritize flexibility over strength. 20-40 minutes of yoga per day is a large commitment, but it's worth it. I'm still basically as strong as I was when I did CrossFit, even though my "exercise" is limited to yoga, basic bodyweight exercises like pull-ups and inverted sit-ups, and long, meditative walks.
Finally, I make some lifestyle choices around posture. For example, always getting an aisle seat for flights longer than 3 hours, so I can easily get up to stretch and walk around. Choosing a more-supportive chair at a restaurant over a slouchy booth. Not reading in bed often.
If you have back pain, maybe something here will be worth trying to you. Keep at it!
https://1h6wllf3f4qfut1832zlo21e-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... (upper cross syndrome diagram)
https://www.t-nation.com/training/top-priority-for-lower-tra... (prone Y)
https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a19521507/chest-supported... (chest supported dumbbell row)
https://www.t-nation.com/training/whats-your-weak-link (scapular wall slide)