Category Archives: Economics

Bike Angels – Citibike Gamification

Economics, Incentives, NYC, , , ,

Well, friends, I just found myself seeking points. I’ve become a Bike Angel.

I love CitiBike – being able to grab a bike whenever for a short trip is just magic.

And then I saw a video about Bike Angels, and it grabbed me. It’s genius.

CitiBike has a clumping problem. Bikes flow like tides across the city, and they clump in popular destinations. Some docks end up with lots of bikes and some end up with very few.

They already have some overhead – the electric bikes need someone to come out and swap fresh batteries for dead ones. Repairs need to happen. They also have vans that pull up to overweight docks and transport them over to underweight docks. That’s not great though, using a motor vehicle to move bikes around. Better if people just did it cheaper on the bikes themselves.

That’s the bike angel program. It gives you points for moving bikes from crowded docks to emptier ones. More extreme docks give you more points. Doing it a lot is a streak and racks up your points. It’s all very silly and the very base rate of it all has a point worth around a dime. But it’s enough to make me OK with walking a little farther when I’ve got the time and riding a little farther to drop off at a dock that needs it.

And then I got a streak. And then I got to triple points. And then I found myself taking a ride between two docks to just not break my streak.

They got me!

Pitfalls of the Ops Developer

Dev, Economics, Incentives, , , , ,

This is another post my work asked me to opine on. I’m a big fan of developers that aren’t focused totally on making software – folks who make their own tools to solve their problems. However, it’s definitely possible to get yourself into a real pickle where you can build yourself into a corner you don’t have the time and skills to get yourself out of.

Pitfalls of the Ops Developer is about how to recognize when your group wants to transition from home-grown solutions to something more standard. It’s HARD to know and it’s hard to anticipate when you are about to hit one of those inflection points. As always, there’s a ton left out, but I love hearing from folks about their stories around the topic. I was just talking to a client in London and they brought this one up as being helpful and describing exactly the place where they are right now. Soooo… I thought I’d share it with you!

Are the Robots Really Coming for My Job?

My work asked me to write about Large Language Models and some of the hype around them. I take a pretty nuanced view on Large Language Models being able to actually replace human effort in most cases.

After hearing from both my Mom and a friend at AWS that they found this article really helpful in thinking about the topic, I thought I’d share it more.

It’s intentionally a short article and there’s a TON left out. For example, even if a robot can’t do your job well, that doesn’t mean your job won’t try to replace you with one – and you can’t wait to eat while they figure out they need a person in the loop.

go read

Economics, Incentives, Save.the.world, , , ,

From this Gizmodo’s How a lone coder cloned google reader.

Go Read is a web-based RSS reader.It is designed to be as useful as Google Reader.

When you built your house on sand and then you find your house collapsed, it doesn’t seem so smart to rebuild your house on sand, but taller. So I just wonder about writing your google reader clone in a language designed by google and hosting it on a hosting platform run by google, where the only way to sign in is to use google.

Is your internet provider cheating you?

Economics, Incentives, Money, security, ,

The FCC has a tool you can use to find out if your broadband provider is advertising better speeds than they provide.Check it out over at Broadband.gov.

This seems like a nice crowdsourced way to catch cheats. It will work better the more people participate, so go over and take the test.

Also of interest is that they are using open source software to provide the tests – software that can be independently verified.

How to make money from market volatility

Economics, Get.rich.quick, Money, Pals, , , , , ,

A friend recently wrote me about a strategy he heard for exploiting market volatility.  I get these questions sometimes because I’m in finance, and because I’m in finance let me be up front.  I’m not giving you financial advice here.  I’m not an advisor, I’m not competent, you should probably close this page now and burn your computer.  Past performance has no correllation with future performance, as everyone should have learned in, oh, 2008.

That said, let’s have a little fun with these ideas.  To paraphrase my pal’s email:

Apologies in advance for what I hope is a not-too-complicated financial question.  So you ever heard of something called volatility drag?  Something to do with how over time double- and triple-leveraged ETFs always lose money. I found an investment opportunity that uses this principle to make money.  The pitch I heard says that the strategy is sound and has data to back it up since the 90s.  I find it hard to believe that something that automatically mints you money (admittedly at a “watching paint dry” pace) exists, yet it seems so from what I can tell…

I hadn’t heard of volatility drag before but it was fun to learn about.  Under the fold:  Charts! Definitions! Sage Advice! Links to books!

Continue reading How to make money from market volatility →

Some good advice to my friends who are terrified of this job market

Economics, Get.rich.quick, Incentives, Pals, , , , ,

Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school.. Many of my friends are considering this sort of move. It’s a sucker bet for a number of reasons that Penelope outlines. My basic argument is her last one.

Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.
In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated. You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is a steep investment for such a short period of time.

You put in many years of avoiding adult life and prolonging adolescence, then commit to a career you have no real idea about. When I thought I might want to be a lawyer, I worked for a law firm and was firmly told by many lawyers that this is the worst job ever. When I thought I wanted to be on the news, I became a news reporter and learned why the news structurally has to be terrible. You learn more by doing.

Of course, that’s coming from a guy who hasn’t gone to graduate school. I still think though, that if you are lost, or unsure, the general best bet is to say yes to lots of opportunities and ditch the ones you hate. You will get somewhere by staying in motion, and learn more things.