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  • Web Analytics: First Steps

    Step 1: Find the best rated “Google Analytics” book on Amazon Search

    OK, I found a couple books: Web Analytics 2.0, and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, both by Avinash Kaushik.  Looking good, but really old in internet years. I remember making a point to study the first book a long time ago…

    Step 2: Google him!
    I found a few interesting things: 1) his website is called Occam’s Razor. It formed the basis for his books, so I should be able to get a lot of info from them.

    Next I found: “5 Avinash Kaushik blogs every digital marketer should read” in google search. Why not?! I’m getting distracted.

    In signing up for Avinash’s newsletter, he refers me to an article featuring an icon of the design industry: Dieter Rams: Ten Principles of “Good Design”, one can’t go wrong studying Dieter!

    So, time to do the “hour a day” in reading up on this. (Only problem, I’m already overbooked!)

  • Everything Altogether is Trying to Be a Revelation for you

    Everything altogether is trying to be a revelation for you. It is just that you are not sensitive to it in your ordinary habit. The shaman, you see, has entered into a discipline to make himself sensitive. It is not that he is making the magic happen. The magic is already there. He is just not sensitive to it, not in a position to observe it. Thus, he must engage in a discipline that enables him to participate in what is already happening. Then all of a sudden he sees all kinds of magical things.

    –the World-Friend, Adi Da, from The Transmission of Doubt, Talks and Essays on the Transcendence of Scientific Materialism through Radical Understanding, page 239

  • FUD Vs Foresight


    Today on March 16, 2018 bitcoin is sitting at $8,550 USD. Here we have a couple of my favorite investors throwing shade at bitcoin. What’s interesting is that the crypto industry is actually going thru the necessary growing pains of regulation and use scaling. Because both bitcoin and ethereum are testing their scaling solutions (to compete with banks & visa/mastercard, etc), both are poised for more use adoption this year.

    So here’s the FUD:

    In February, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. (BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman Charlie Munger had harsh words for bitcoin at the Berkshire annual shareholder meeting.

    “It’s just disgusting. Bitcoin is noxious poison,” Munger said. Billionaire Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett once famously called bitcoin “a mirage.”

    And the Foresight:

    Still, bitcoin has plenty of supporters on Wall Street. Fundstrat Global Advisors co-founder Thomas Lee[WD] says Fundstrat’s bitcoin misery index suggests the sell-off is an excellent buying opportunity for long-term investors.

    “The BMI is telling us to keep the negative headlines in perspective,” Lee said, according to CNBC. “When the BMI is at a ‘misery’ level, future returns are very good.”

    Fundstrat has a year-end price target for bitcoin of $25,000.

  • CoinPuffs Vs Coinmarketcap

    CoinPuffs Vs Coinmarketcap

    Coinmarketcap’s homepage.

    One day I noticed that the bitcoin price dropped alot, and the coinmarketcap as a whole also dropped $50 billion. What?! It turns out someone running coinmarketcap.com decided to drop South Korea off the market index because it’s prices were higher than other countries without telling anyone in advance. What?! Their prices are higher because South Korea makes it hard to move money in and out of country on purpose–that shouldn’t bar the country from being part of of the general index. Anyway, in the process of discovering this info, I found out that CoinPuffs works like CoinMarketCap, but not as capriciously. It seems more like a community site, and it has over 2000 coins listed. Article on coindesk.

  • So What does the Federal Reserve Do?

    I like to listen to economic news at night and recently heard this lady, Nomi Prins, who was a Goldman Sachs manager, then journalist, talk about the history of the Federal Reserve in America. Her book, All the Presidents’ Bankers is a telling of the relationships between US Presidents and powerful bankers from 1907 to the present.

    In 1907 there was a potential stock market meltdown, (caused by some bankers (some people are always trying to game the system)) and Teddy Roosevelt called on his friend J.P. Morgan to fix it. That led to the creation of the Federal Reserve in America. So basically the Fed (the US version of a “Central Bank”) acts as a bridge to do what the Government wants in the economy, via handling Government money. Unfortunately, it seems that printing money (called “fractional reserve banking” and “quantitative easing”), and thus devaluing the currency, is what the Fed tends to do, because it’s easier to flood the economy with money than it is to actually solve the economy’s root problems.

    And right now, in 2018, it seems like the US is in the middle of a bigger bubble than it was in 2008 when the banking bubble burst, because the US is over 20 trillion in debt, and is at the point of not being able to make interest payments on the debt if the bond market rates keep going up. So buckle your seat belts!