Computing "In the Clouds"

Ever think of moving your company’s servers into the clouds? (This means leasing servers from companies that specialize in doing this and accessing them remotely.)

Advantages are:

• No more obsolescence. Competitive pressures make lessors keep their equipment state of the art.
  
  
• No more downtime. The lessors worry about equipment not working. Again, competitive pressures. If their customers experience downtime, a competitor will snap them up.
  
  
• In case of power outages, employees can just adjourn to their homes, or to the nearest coffee house, fire up their laptops, and continue working. Lessors will have elaborate backup plans in place, in case power outages hits them. Reliability is what makes their leases attractive, after all.

Google and Amazon are taking this idea of taking your company’s server to a new level with AppEngine. You upload your software application to them and they take care of providing sufficient servers, network capacity, and so on. You just pay them a usage fee of so much per million uploads/downloads.

One last idea is to keep your dedicated servers in-house but have a reserve server “in the clouds” to handle peak demands.

One Step at a Time

He writes that one should not try to accomplish everything at once. In the rest of his book, he writes about taking things one step at a time and in order, not skipping around. Sounds good to me; one must stick to a plan.

In the Rich Dad series, Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump deride the advice to live below one's means. They say that their approach is to expand one's means. I think that they're setting up a false conflict here.

Ramsay emphasizes getting one's expenses under control; RK and DT emphasizes expanding one's income. Both emphasize their areas but I notice that neither excludes the other. Hence, Ramsay mentions taking a part-time job in order to save $1,000; and Trump mentions cutting an expense and investing it.

It seems to me that one ought to be concerned about increasing income and decreasing expenses. I would integrate the two by saying this. While one ought to seek additional income, that income ought to be used to accomplish Ramsay's steps first. (Get an emergency fund and get out of debt.)

Quickbooks Makes Accounting Unnecessary?

If you have Quickbooks, do you need to know accounting? Well, if you have a car, do you need to know how to drive it?

Quickbooks, like cars, are just empty vessels which depend on human knowledge and judgment to work properly. One part is the essential mechanics – knowing what buttons to press. But the other part involves higher knowledge. Like knowing which way to turn at an intersection or knowing which landmark to look for.

Sure, cars of the future may be able to navigate to destinations without human intervention. Quickbooks may someday be able to operate without human accounting knowledge, too. But neither can do that yet.

Bismark on Success

Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war observe the rules of politeness.

- Otto von Bismark

More about Otto von Bismark.

Picture (cc by-sa 3.0) by SPBer.

The Importance of History

Everything that is in our minds die when we die. Whatever is left of our thoughts, either from the written word, memories of those still living, indirect evidence from clues we left behind, those are the stuff of history. History is the shared knowledge of real people great and small that came before.

Knowledge is power.

Donald Trump writes:

Give some thought to your roots and why you're doing whatever it is you're doing today. It's a good way to start thinking for yourself - and it's likely no one else but you will come up with the right answers.

- from page 84.

Ally With Other People

There is the old saying that two minds are better than one. I know that I seem to work better when I have someone around me who agrees with what I am doing. On the other hand, when people around me are against what I am doing, discouragement comes easily.

Napoleon Hill relates this to his principle of "harmony".

- from page 109.

The Consumerist

I see that a top rated blog is The Consumerist. It is visually attractive but its content seems to me to be shallow. Now a blog is not a book. I realize that posts ought to be short and they need to get to the point. Still, things ought to be explained, I believe. Also, there needs to be some indication where a person ought to go for further information.

Two posts troubled me.

1) Their top post as I write this is about short selling houses. The item contains an interesting story but does not explain what short selling homes means.

2) Friday Flickr finds highlight pictures to be used in future posts. These are just eye candy. They do not convey any additional information. Indeed, the publisher does not even identify what topic these pictures will be used for. This is a regular Friday feature of the blog.

It has interesting news items. I just note that this is the top rated blog on Wisebread at present. We all could do better (yes, I know "we" means me,too!) but I think the very best should be better than this.

New IRS Policies on Tax Liens

Exciting new policies for taxpayers who are about to get hit with tax liens or have already been hit with one.

• The tax owed the IRS is now $10,000 instead of $5,000.
  
• It will be a lot easier to get a lien removed. In fact, one may get it removed by getting a direct withdrawel agreement with the IRS, after a probationary period. (This makes so much sense one wonders why the IRS have not been doing this all along!)
  
• Small businesses with $25,000 in unpaid taxes can now get an installment agreement over 24 months. Earlier threshold was $10,000. At least this is a step in the right direction. One still wonders why businesses cannot get agreements based on projected ability to pay.
  
• On the Offers in Compromise front, taxpayers with incomes < $100,000 are eligible (versus < $50,000 earlier). Tax liability must be < $50,000 (versus < $25,000 before).

Many people may have just given up. They now have some hope of getting out of their tax debt.

More info from the IRS.

Status Symbols

Dave's was a Jaguar. He has a story about it starting on page 87. My take on that is why own an expensive thing you do not need if you cannot afford it?

From doing people's people's tax returns, I've seen the harm that status symbols can cause. People live in houses that they cannot afford, take vacations, wear clothes and play with stuff - all on borrowed money. Since, I do not have these things, I have hard time relating but I know that this is a real problem for many people.

A Basic Concept of Graphs

Graphs in business and economics visually tell you how two or more variables are related to one another.

In a line graph, the slope of the line tells you how. Remember "rise divided by run". Rise is the change in the verticle axis, while run is the change in the horizantal.

Here's a little homework assignment. On a piece of graph paper (or an excel spread sheet) draw a couple of x,y lines 10 squares across and 10 squares up. x (the horizantal line) = # hamburgers you can buy; y (the vertical line) = number of sodas. Here's your budget: slope = -2. How would you draw the line?

If x = 0, then y = 10. If x = 1, then y = 8. If x = 2, then y = 6. What's the maximum number of hamburgers in the budget? Extending the line to y = 0 will cross the x axis at 5.

Graph analysis get's way more complicated than this but is very useful!

Stevenson on Success

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

More about Robert Louis Stevenson

Financial IQ

Economics are important because they describe the environment in which we make financial decisions. They call it "Financial IQ". From Donald Trump:

To me, it means the ability to chart the economic waters nationally and internationally, to be able to look beyond the present and into the future, and to make decisions based on those assessments and insights.

- from page 83.

Finding Opportunities

Education gives knowledge but leaders need to know how to put that knowledge to use. Hill relates a long story which results in the moral that Henry Ford may not have known many facts but he employed men who could supply him those facts.

I don't think that he means that academic knowledge is useless; he means that successful people know how to put that knowledge to use. A teacher once told me that an expert does not know the answer; an expert knows where to find it.

- from page 100.

Management Overhead

All products and services that companies sell cost money. Management must know what it sells are generating profits and what do not.

So how can a company show a profit on everything it sells but still operate at a loss? - By not factoring in overhead. The cost of the managers, their offices, their support staff - indeed all the indirect costs of the company has to be allocated to products/services sold in some way, manner, shape, or form. Only when the products/services are burdened with their total costs can their profit/loss be truly evaluated.

Dyer on Success

Critics hang around and wait for others to make mistakes. But the real doers of the world have no time for criticizing others. They're too busy doing, making mistakes, improving, making progress.

- Wayne Dyer

More about Wayne Dyer

The Perfect Storm

They believe things are going to get worse, citing:

1. Growing trade deficit. This is like a family earning $5,000 per month, spending $6,000.
   
   
2. Growing national debt. G.W. Bush's administration borrowed more from foreign sources than all previous administrations combined, but he had at least eight years to do that in. Since the book was published before Obama was elected, it is silent on the present administration, but I'm sure he's closing in fast.
   
   
3. Falling dollar. This leads to inflation which causes wealth go drop.
   
   
4. Baby boomers without money. - And they're reaching retirement age.
   
   
5. The entitlement mentality. People look to the government to solve their problems instead of looking for opportunities.
   
   
6. Higher oil prices. There's a point where this could trigger the entire economy to implode due to those other factors.
   
   
7. Tax breaks for the rich. My reaction is "huh?" The facts they present do not justify this statement.

- from page 77

The Leader's Vital Creation Is Harmony

Hill defines "harmony" for purposes of life success as "organized energy". This strikes me as an interesting thought:

Success in life, no matter what one may call success, is very largely a matter of adaption to environment in such a manner as there is harmony between the individual and his environment. The palace of a king becomes as a hovel of a peasant if harmony does not abound within its walls.

Trouble is, fear of being kicked out in the street may inhibit what is otherwise a happy home.

The Jones Can Not Do Math

Don't worry about keeping up with the Jones. Generally, they appear to be more prosperous but they're not. Better to live within your means than to try to keep up appearances.

- From page 81.

The Federal Courts' Organizational Structure

Under the Supreme Court there are the Appeals Courts. These consist of 12 Circuits + a special Appeals Court in the District of Columbia.

Under the Appeals Courts there are 94 District Courts. In addition, there are Agency quasi-courts and the Tax Court. At this level, there's also the U.S. Court of International Trade and the U.S. Claims Court.

At the bottom of the heap lies U.S. Magistrates and U.S. Bankruptcy Courts.

- From page 43.

Honda on Success

Many people dream of success. To me success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents the one percent of your work which results only from the 99 percent that is called failure.

- Soichiro Honda

More on Soichiro Honda