Apple introduces their newest product to help you avoid paying taxes; The iRS. 

In reality, I’d be down for 100% of the corporations paying 0% tax. I’m just not a fan of the government cherry picking who gets to pay taxes and who gets to avoid taxes. 

thinksquad:

Learn Anything in 20 Hours with This Four Step Method

With just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice, you can go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. That’s the message from Josh Kaufman, author of The First 20 Hours. In the video above, he reveals the four steps to learning any new skill, fast.

It’s a long, 20-minute TEDx Talk, but entertaining and enlightening too.
The four steps in Kaufman’s method are:

Deconstruct the skill: Break down the parts and find the most important things to practice first. If you were learning to play a musical instrument, for example, knowing just a few chords gives you access to tons of songs. If you want to learn a new language, learn the most common 2,000 words and you’ll have 80% text coverage.
Self-correct: Use reference materials to learn enough that you know when you make a mistake so you can correct yourself.
Remove barriers to learning: Identify and remove anything that distracts you from focusing on the skill you want to learn.
Practice at least 20 hours.
20 hours amounts to just 40 minutes a day for a month, so what are you waiting for?

I think that both Kaufman and Gladwell are correct. 

You can learn how to be comfortable with a subject in about 20 hours. I work with different businesses all the time and it takes me about 2 to 5 days to be comfortable with what they do, how they do it and for me to slide in and work within their company. 

However, it takes a lot longer to master something. I think that’s the point that Kaufman misses. Gladwell’s book doesn’t hinge around the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to learn something, he says that it takes about 10,000 hours to master something. 

What’s the difference? The difference is someone who can play the piano and Mozart. The difference is someone who can play basketball competitively and Michael Jordan. 

Outliers also focuses in on the idea that we are all a product of our surrounds and our time. If Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were born in 1905 or 1995, there’s no way they’d be as successful in the computer world as they are today due to the fact that they were born in the 1950’s. Why is that? It just so happens that right when Jobs and Gates were entering an age where they are developed enough to learn computer programming and also old enough to turn that skill into a business, computer programming was beginning to take over. They just happened to be lucky enough to be born during a time when they could master it right as it became an important trade at which point, there they were, ready to lead the industry. 

While I can easily adapt and even fluidly function in any company with just a few days training, it would take me much longer to master that business or industry to the point that I can become one who can become a leader. 

I think the difference comes down to this; one knows how to work with something while the other knows how something works. To me, you haven’t mastered something until you understand it from a fundamental angle. 

- Sha

byulibertarian:

eltigrechico:

Obama Interrupted over murder of Innocent Americans 

Good for her, standing up to this sociopath, and shame on all those people who applaud this populist nightmare of a human.

He has no legal or moral ground to stand on. A 16-year-old American was killed with no trial, no nothing, and he has the gall to defend it and say that this woman wasn’t listening to what he was saying.

The man’s words don’t warrant any actual listening, because they don’t match up with his intent or his actions.

This video is all sorts of disgusting. 

Obama busts a joke to segue into talking about how he assassinated a 16-year old American citizen. 

More disgusting than that is how the press explodes into laughter and applause.

More disgusting than that is when Obama says that, “the voice of that woman is worth paying attention to” and very few people applaud. 

And to cap of the cessfest, Obama says that he doesn’t agree with the idea that signature drone strikes are wrong, that they cause blowback or that killing US citizens, including a 16 year old boy, without trail is wrong. And not a single member of the press questions it. 

We are doomed and we’re digging our own grave. 

anarchei:

Minimum Wage Business Realities

Why do some employers favor a raise in the minimum wage? Profit per employee plays a major role.

See Also

• Philosophy
• Economics

Costco is doing what Amazon just did, trying to play an ignorant public to help make the market more hostile for their own competitors. 

Costco would love for the minimum wage to go up to a point that’s higher than the average starting pay of their competitors but below the starting pay at Costco. It has zero impact on Costco’s business model but will severely hurt the bottom line of others, like Walmart or Target.

Costco plays this off as if they are trying to help the people, in reality, they are aiming to hurt or even shutdown their competition, and they want to do this not through better business models but through legislation that comes from misguided economical theory based solely on emotions. 

Amazon did the same thing when it lobbied for an internet sales tax. Many people thought that, “Oh, it must be a legitimate tax if the biggest online retailer is lobbying for it!”. What these people didn’t realize is that Amazon is building local warehouses and would now have to pay local and state sales tax and they wanted the government to levy an Internet Sales Tax so that they could ensure that their competition, who don’t have local warehouses, would have to pay taxes just like Amazon. 

No one is better at playing politics than the CEOs of giant corporations. Always remember that and take what they say with a cargo container of salt. 

utilitymaximiser:

Your Mass is NOT from Higgs Boson — 1veritasium

This is really cool and interesting. 99% of the mass of a proton/neutron (and therefore almost 99% of the mass of everything) comes from empty space, coming from the virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in the vacuum between the quarks.

Nicholas Carr on What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“This is your brain. This is your brain on the internetz.”

(via sagansense)

anti-propaganda:

The REAL Reason Israel Attacked Syria (by StormCloudsGathering)

‘There is much more to Israel’s recent attacks on Syria than we are being told by the mainstream media.’

Is there a joint effort between Israel, USA and NATO to create a reason to enter Syria?

The Truth about Savings and Consumption

We regularly hear how important consumer spending is for the economy. The story goes like this: the more consumers spend, the more money circulates in the economy, which stimulates healthy job growth and profits. If people could be encouraged to go out and spend a little more of their paycheck, we’d all be better off.

Keynes went as far as to say that individuals saving their money may actually be hurting the economy, as saving reduces “aggregate demand” and therefore company revenue. Sounds troubling, doesn’t it?

Fear not. You aren’t actually hurting anyone by filling up your piggy bank. In fact, savings help the economy, as they make lending to productive entrepreneurs possible. The consumption that we enjoy is only made possible by prior production.

And that production is only made possible by savings.

For more resources about the economics of saving versus consuming, visit http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/savings-fuel-for-an-economic-engine#axzz2SdcFUHti

Buying a Ferrari isn’t progress. Buying a better Ferrari is progress. 

TED-Ed: What Happened To AntiMatter? By Rolf Landua.

A crazy theory of mine: 

What if our universe is just a single ball of matter and we’re part of a larger universe, the megaverse, where universes like ours collided with universes made of antimatter and that most of them destroyed one another and we are one of the few left just floating in this vast space, nearly all alone. The Cosmic Radiation is from the “space” that all the universes float in. What if there are still antimatter-universes but we haven’t collided with them yet, but one day we will. And it will take out our universe in a sudden flash of energy. 

Obama officially jumps the shark.