voting with your dollars

Two useful and interesting resources are available for those interested in expressing the political views through their patronage (or, lack thereof) of businesses based on their political leanings:

This approach may excite folks on either side of the political aisle, esp., in an economy that is largely a consumer-driven one. Admittedly, some of the data may be outdated.

2ndVote is an app that lets consumers learn about the political values and leanings of companies.

In this article, we have an updated list of the companies that donate to Planned Parenthood.

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the World Cup draw -- an alternative proposal

The FIFA World Cup seeding and draw system has consistently produced groups of death and groups comprised mainly of teams that fail to invoke passion or imagination from fans around the world, except perhaps for such teams' own fans. The latest edition is no exception -- and may even be the worst ever on this measure. An outline of the draw system can be seen here . We have one group which contains Switzerland, Ecuador and Honduras and another consisting of Russia, Algeria and South Korea!! And, on top of this, we have at least three, if not four or more, groups of death. Depending on one's perspective, esp. given the recent rise of African powerhouses, all of the rest of the groups may even be considered Groups of Death!! This is a disservice to football fans around the world, not to mention the skilled and enterprising teams that worked hard to get here. To address this, I propose a simplified draw system : Randomize Pot 1 and assign to Groups Assign remaining Pots t...

Migrating from MS SQL Server to MongoDB

The following contains notes from various attempts at migrating 2.5GB of MS SQL Server data to MongoDB, on an 8 GB, quad-core, 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise machine. [TERMINATED] http://mssql2mongo.codeplex.com/ : Simple to use. Exponential slowdown observed in migration. For a total of the 50 million records spanning two tables, the following migration times were observed: 1 second for the first 100,000 records, 30 minutes for 1,000,000, 20 hours for 16 million (after which I terminated the process). [DID NOT WORK] http://rubydoc.info/gems/mongify/ : A ruby-based approach. Use Ruby 1.9.3 (tiny_tds dependency causes problems with Ruby 2.0). Install DevKit before installing the mongify gem. Also, use ' sqlserver ' as the adapter in the .config file. Then, before running ' mongify check <config-file> ', install the gems activerecord-sqlserver-adapter and tiny_tds . At this stage, it fails. ' mongify translation <config-file> ' fails as well. ...

Excerpts (with some annotations) from "Competition Is For Losers" by Peter Thiel

Source : http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 The above article by Peter Thiel is the best business + economics education I have ever received or can ever conceive of receiving. Something about "anti-trust" always rubbed me the wrong way -- now I know what!! In the following, I organize excerpts from his article into named sections and summarize, emphasize and/or annotate (minimally) along the way. ________________________ CAPTURING VS. CREATING VALUE Creating value isn't enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create . Airlines create value but run razor-thin margins and are unable to capture the value they create vs. Google creates far less value but is able to capture most of it. MONOPOLY VS. PERFECT COMPETITION Competition is idealized and monopoly is abhorred -- in academia and among the general public. "Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from...

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