Hi, I'm Colin Lee. I'm a software engineer and entrepreneur in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.
I founded BidNear.Us, a Software-as-a-Service company that helps neighborhoods seek competitive bids for services like trash and lawn care.
I use this space to respond to pressing biz and tech issues which my inner nerd cannot ignore.
Some of you may know that I pre-ordered a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle over a year ago. What you may not know is that my brand new, $37,250 electric vehicle could cost much less than I once spent to purchase my used Nissan Sentra.
The numbers sound unbelievable, but they make sense. Let's compute my total cost of ownership to show why.
Recently, markets have been roiled by news of a national credit rating downgrade by Standard and Poors and by rumors of another recession. However, the full truth is not being reported by the media, as usual.
In writing their downgrade notice of the United States government, S&P cited difficulty making Social Security payments. They said this, in addition to political brinksmanship over raising the debt ceiling, caused the actual downgrade.
Social Security costs are growing. However, they are growing at a sustainable pace. Our national population is growing due to immigration, so the only thing that is needed to protect Social Security for the next generation is to make one of three choices: 1. raise the retirement age a few years 2. increase the income cap on Social Security taxes or 3. reduce benefits slightly.
Contrary to some conspiracy theories, there is still $2.6 trillion in the Social Security fund, slowly gaining interest as treasury bonds at about 4.642% including old, higher interest bonds. Here's more information if you're curious.
Here's the actual state of our Social Security program:
Many misconceptions exist about the nature of money and currency. Some of these misconceptions came out in a recent blog post panning the Bitcoin. I appreciate the author's criticism, but I disagree with him.
All money is symbolism. Gold represents both the glitter of heaven and something very difficult to obtain. Every nugget must be mined by manual laborers over days, weeks, and months. The value of gold comes not merely from its scarcity and its uses in jewelry, but also from its value as a representation of stored labor value.
All paper money in America represents debts. This makes more sense when you understand fractional reserve banking. The U.S. government decides by fiat that all debts in America can be created and paid in dollars. Although paper is not scarce, our government creates counterfeiting prevention measures and uses law enforcement to ensure its scarcity.
It's a common myth that gold and silver are real money and paper money is just fake money. Gold and silver are still symbols of stored value. Gold only has inherent value because our society assigns value to it. Just because Gold has uses other than currency, in wiring for example, does not make Gold coins real and paper bills fake. I can also write on paper bills. Germans in the Weimar Republic famously burned them to stay warm after hyperinflation from printing too much money had reduced their stored value.
In fact, gold can make substandard currency because it tends to be deflationary. It causes recessions for the very same hoarding reasons Tav cited in his attack on the Bitcoin. There is a limited amount of gold in the ground and on Earth. Years of mining have depleted the future supply to the point that hoarding can be a very effective means to consolidate wealth.
Every high tech investor today seems to share the same mantras. Fail often until you succeed. Launch fast and iterate. Invest in the people, not the idea.
I don't believe the act. It's not that ideas are all-important. Quite the opposite. Investors give lip service to studying each of the founders and believing in the power of iteration. Instead, most devote every ounce of energy to vetting the @$%! out of alpha version 0.1a of a business plan before a startup has ever had time to iterate their idea even once.
I should know. I've been programming and hacking since age six. I will readily admit that I've now been turned down now by around half a dozen business accelerators-- YCombinator, Techstars, Project Skyway, and others. It's only been a bit over six months since I started. That's when I first filed business papers with an idea so solid that I knew I could devote every minute of my day to it.
People want to pick a winner. To most investors, every good idea sounds like manure unless submitted by a founder of Facebook or Groupon. To some, this is really what they mean when they say “invest in the people.” Unfortunately for them, top founders like Zuckerberg and Mason were normal, tenacious people before they launched startups and created something so successful that they may never launch again. Founders are created by work ethic and sheer stubbornness, not born into success.
You might say I know something about stubbornness in the face of defeat. As a Junior at Saint Thomas Military Academy, I wrestled for the first time, earning Junior Varsity Wrestler of the Year as a rookie. As a senior, I wrestled varsity at 140 pounds, the most competitive weight class in my school. We simply had too many wrestlers to fill one spot. My coach's solution was simple. I would wrestle against varsity wrestlers twelve to twenty-five pounds heavier than me so that our team would never forfeit a single weight class to illness or injury.
New research proves something I have always known intuitively: you can train yourself to have higher intelligence.
Your intelligence quotient or IQ does NOT explain how many facts you know or how much memory you have. Instead, it is an assessment of how adept you are at learning. The new research shows one may improve one's ability to process and understand new information.
Arguing intelligence is inherited has religious appeal. If intelligence is determined by nature rather than nurture, then the most intelligent members of society are a chosen elite. Instead of simply being raised in an environment conducive to learning, they have been blessed and endowed by their creator with the unique power of creation.
New research indicates that entrepreneurship could, in fact, create an environment that increases your intelligence.
In the four years since I first began to run for Minnesota state representative, my web site technology had become dated. I chose to clear away all the old cruft and start fresh. For now, this new site will function as my personal blog for technology and social issues while I'm developing hoodbid.com. Today, I want to blog about the reasons WHY upgrading is so important.
Any good web administrator knows that badly outdated content management systems tend to have serious vulnerabilities. Popular security sites labeled remote buffer overflows the "attack of the 90s." We hardly ever see these attacks succeed today. Ever since AMD introduced the NX (No eXecute) bit to its AMD64 processors and Intel followed suit, these attacks have become quite rare.
Today, SQL injection attacks have replaced remote buffer overflows as the most exploited vulnerability of this decade. It seems like security patches come fast and furious against these attacks, but they do not arrive fast enough. While the most popular open source CMS programs quickly patch, many third party modules and proprietary CMS products stay vulnerable a long time. In the famous Anonymous attacks against HBGary, SQL injection was used against their custom CMS to gain access to their password database.
As hackers, we must never grow so enamored of our favorite products that we fail to provide constructive criticism. This applies to hardware as well as software. While there are valid complaints about web scripting languages, CMS systems, web servers, and database servers, I want to focus on something more fundamental--
Structured Query Language is becoming the Achilles heel of the Internet.
