Whether or not a business can lavish employees and owners with huge bonuses, paychecks, dividend checks, and profits on a sustainable basis depends upon one metric and one metric only: operating profit per employee.
Pension costs and calculations are one of those areas a lot of people don’t think about in their day-to-day lives but it can be really interesting if you love investing and are mathematically inclined. It’s also important as a voter given the political implications should your municipality find itself in a pension funding crisis.
A family member came by today and the course of the conversation got me thinking about the reasons that I have managed to achieve everything I set out to do with far less effort than should be required, and succeed, whereas most people never do. One of the secrets, I think, comes down to the way I frame questions.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been toying with paid search at our e-commerce businesses. We’ve always had great success with organic search and, in many cases, dominate our keywords leading to terrific sales at a very low cost. However, with paid search, we weren’t as familiar with the mechanics and the best way to get a high conversion rate. We approved a budget to test out the process and learn in a trial-by-error format.
Those who talk about “the left” or “right right” when it comes to politics or political theory are often missing a very important point. The best illustration comes from horseshoe political theory, which states that opposing sides of an issue are more like the ends of a horseshoe. In other words, their belief in the right to force their will on the populace is just as strong with the only difference being the specific beliefs they are espousing. Instead of being complete opposites on a spectrum, they sit side by side.
Aaron decided to make a vanilla cake with strawberry drizzle, fresh blueberries, roasted peaches, and whipped cream for our guests from Ohio and it was enjoyable. I got a serving of it tonight and took a picture of it with my iPhone. The recipe came from a cookbook I picked up at Borders that specialized…
How to Make Money in Fable 2 – Or, How I Made My Fable 2 Character a Millionaire in a Few Days Without Cheating It’s remarkable that the same concepts that allowed me to be effectively retired by my mid-twenties allows me to frequently become rich in video games. That’s the nature of compounding. It…
One of the first things I did when my original company became successful was to order a Douwe Egberts coffee machine for the breakroom. For the uninitiated, Douwe Egberts coffee is the best in the world. There are no exceptions.
For a long time, I wanted to be a video game programmer. When I was still in elementary school, I saved up the $200 or so dollars for an entry-level version of Microsoft Visual Basic, went to trade shows to buy software on 5″+ floppy disks, and worked on creating my own version of the original Legend of Zelda in Microsoft Basic. At some point, however, my obsession with finance overcame everything and the idea of sitting in a skyscraper, reading stock reports, and compounding money for the sheer joy of building something eclipsed the video game dream.
By Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway) Speech at Harvard Law School (1995) Transcription of The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, comments [in brackets] by Whitney Tilson. Note from Joshua Kennon: I’ve written a lot about Charlie Munger over the years, especially the influence he has had on my life and how we run…