Currently I work at a startup that does some brilliant technical things with software security. Honestly, I would not have thought of the idea the founders came up with in a million years. The funny thing is that no matter how powerful or brilliant of an anti-hacking software product we create, we can’t prevent the physical theft of machines from datacenters with it. It is basically impossible for our software to jump out and club a thief on the head. This means that companies still need to hire security guards at sensitive datacenters to prevent the physical attacks of information thieves. I think what is interesting is that the idea behind a physical security firm doesn’t take a PhD to understand, but these security firms are just as vital as my company in preventing data theft.

So what I have realized is that many thriving businesses are actually based on fairly simple ideas. As long as there is a need for a service or product, there is money to be made. The problem with simple ideas is that they are easy to copy so there might be a lot of competition, but with enough research and great execution they can still be very successful.

When it comes to execution of a simple business idea, technical ingenuinity and techniques could propel the business quite a bit. For example, many steps in a retail business can be automated, and having a good online store gives the business a huge competitive advantage. Great internet marketing also helps many small businesses make their presence known in the entire world. These technological advances make simple ideas easier to implement and become profitable.

Another great advantage to simple ideas is that the business could be very easy to duplicate and having a few simple businesses that run off the same infrastructure is easier than working on a complex business idea with a high barrier of entry. So even though there may be more competition, as long as the amount of available business is huge there shouldn’t be any problems to making a simple business profitable.

I am looking into starting a business or two that can be easily automated and generates recurring income. I have a couple ideas, and they may seem silly, but I think as long as I follow through and execute them well they can be quite profitable. Ultimately, I will need to be selling something that people want, and it is my job to create a product that helps people at a great price point. We will see if anything pans out and I will definitely announce my progress as I get to it.

I spent a lot of my time in college in the computer science and electrical engineering buildings of UC Berkeley -  Soda Hall and Cory Hall.  I preferred Cory Hall because the computer room actually had windows and it was just slightly less depressing than the dungeon in Soda Hall.  I also had a locker in Cory where I kept the textbooks .  Anyway, one day I overheard someone saying that Cory is where the Unabomber AKA Ted Kaczynski sent one of his bombs and once upon a time he was a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley.  It happened before I was  born, so I didn’t think much of it.  Recently while surfing Wikipedia I somehow landed on the page about the Unabomber, and I ended up reading his manifesto titled .  I am not totally done reading it, but I find myself agreeing with many of his points.  It is tragic that he felt that he had to promote his work through cold blooded murder, but I really think that he said a lot of things people are afraid to admit. So today I shall highlight a few points  in his manifesto that really stuck in my mind.

best viagra dosage – Kaczynski lays down something he calls “the power process”, which has four elements: goal, effort, attainment of goal, and autonomy.  The problem he sees is that many people do not need to exert a lot of effort to attain their goals of physical needs these days, and that brings boredom, depression, and a variety of other problems.  Another point is that many people do not have autonomy to achieve their own goals so they align with a larger organization.  One passage that really hit me was this section of paragraph 73, “An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.”  I think this lack of autonomy or freedom is a big reason why so many people hate their jobs.  I don’t believe that my calling in life is to work for someone else for 40+ years, but many people think that is the correct and right path to take because they are indirectly forced to do so. Kaczynski goes on to explain how people attempt to go through the power process and why some people seem perfectly content, but I won’t discuss those details here.

best viagra dosage – Kaczynski talks about “indirect coercion” by the media fairly early on.  He says that the advertising and marketing industries “make many people feel they need things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed of.”  In the footnote he writes, “Is the drive for endless material acquisition really an artificial creation of the advertising and marketing industry? Certainly there is no innate human drive for material acquisition. There have been many cultures in which people have desired little material wealth beyond what was necessary to satisfy their basic physical needs (Australian aborigines, traditional Mexican peasant culture, some African cultures). On the other hand there have also been many pre-industrial cultures in which material acquisition has played an important role. So we can’t claim that today’s acquisition-oriented culture is exclusively a creation of the advertising and marketing industry. But it is clear that the advertising and marketing industry has had an important part in creating that culture. The big corporations that spend millions on advertising wouldn’t be spending that kind of money without solid proof that they were getting it back in increased sales. One member of FC met a sales manager a couple of years ago who was frank enough to tell him, ‘Our job is to make people buy things they don’t want and don’t need.’ He then described how an untrained novice could present people with the facts about a product, and make no sales at all, while a trained and experienced professional salesman would make lots of sales to the same people. This shows that people are manipulated into buying things they don’t really want.”  I think this is a point most personal finance bloggers try to preach, but I think the Unabomber is more eloquent than me in stating this observation.

best viagra dosage – In a , I expressed my fear of bioengineering, and Kazyncski shares that same concern.  He wrote in paragraph 123, “If you think that big government interferes in your life too much now, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous.[19]“  This is just one detail in the many ways technology could potentially limit our freedom.  Kaczynski also made the point that in the past when people lived within a natural environment the environment did not change very much and thus it provided security, but our modern society is changing rapidly because of technology.  Older workers have to be retrained and this constant change brings more stress and despair to people.  Ultimately his conclusion is that we have to absorb all the good and bad things technology brings, and it is impossible to separate the benefits and detriments.  I agree with this hypothesis because I feel that technology is changing our lives so rapidly that sometimes it is hard to keep up. I also work in a software security firm and through the training/propaganda of my own employer I have a good idea of how technology can be misused to harm others.  It is much easier for an entity like the government or a ruthless criminal to control your life through technology in present times.  So in that aspect, technology does limit freedom.

Overall, it is a pretty depressing document because I can just feel helplessness and frustration ooze out of it, but its observations about our modern society  are not without merit.  I think anyone who works in science and technology should read it and truly examine why they are doing their work. Also, anyone who is confused about their direction in life should also read it to see if their problems are simply stemming from a lack of autonomy. Kaczynski’s choice to  bomb  his fellow scientists is definitely criminally insane, but he is also brilliant in his observations.  If he didn’t kill people, perhaps he could have been a respected philosopher and mathematician akin to a modern Henry Thoreau. Then again, we are in a society where people are more interested in  the breakdowns of Britney Spears than the presidential election and Kaczynski knew this as he wrote, “If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.” It is chilling to read these words, but I find it hard to argue with his logic. Would I be reading his essay if he weren’t the Unabomber?  Probably not.

Have you read the manifesto? What are your thoughts?

Recently I have seen a few blog posts about stating that women have a pretty tough time working in science and technology due to a “pervasive macho environment”. Ironically, this article was published in the “Fashion and Style” section of the New York Times, and that raised the ire of some more women. The article stated that 53% of the women surveyed said they have to “act like a man” in order to succeed and that 63% of women experience harassment on the job. Sadly, as a woman working in technology, I have to say that this really isn’t news. Here are some of my thoughts and experiences surrounding this issue.

I have to say that I am pretty used to “acting like a man”. When I entered the EECS program at UC Berkeley, my class was only 18% female and I remember that in one particular class there were only two girls. Consequently, all my friends and project partners ended up being guys. I think one thing that makes being a man easy for me is my name. You can’t really tell whether I am male or female from the name Xin (in Chinese it’s a name appropriate for a man or woman). It is funny to me when people assume that I am male from my resume, though. One time a recruiter called me and I answered, “yes, this is Xin”, and he actually said, “Oh, I’m pleasantly surprised that you are a woman”. I think my name makes people who read my resume and emails comfortable because they generally assume that I am another faceless immigrant man working in technology.

Another thing that helps me is that I am pretty immersed in the geek culture so I have common interests with the guys and I know how to communicate with them. For example, at my first company I met guys that watched the same SciFi shows as I did and played the same games. Then I made friends at work at the second company I worked for because I posted a list of games I liked. Suddenly some engineers that never spoke to me before started to talk to me. It has been my experience that most women are not as nerdy and dorky, though, so they tend to be outsiders in a majority of game loving and young hackers and alienation is never a nice feeling. For most of my school and career, men have treated me like one of the guys, and I am pretty sure that has spared me a lot of harassment. So once again, I think I am validating the original article’s point that you need to be like a man to be accepted in a man’s world.

Finally, another point in the article that I have thought about a lot is the attrition rate of women from science and engineering jobs. I wrote in a that female engineers with children are somewhat disadvantaged because they are supposed to work the weird hours like everyone else, but their kids don’t allow them to, and as a result resentment brews. Just as the article pointed out, a lot of women drop out of science and technology between the ages of 35 to 40 because these women don’t have the luxury of a wife that takes care of the kids. This is actually one of the reasons why I want to and quit working full time in the tech industry.

Right now I am actually in a pretty good company where approximately half of my team members are female engineers. The company seems to be really supportive of its employees in taking care of their personal issues.  When a teammate went through a personal tragedy everyone allowed her to have as much time as she needed to recover.  I find this quite rare and somewhat endearing. It gives me hope that perhaps I would stay a long time here and more companies will work on retaining their female talent with flexible schedules and moral support.

It has been three years since I graduated from college, and it certainly has been interesting. I made quite a few friends, and also picked up a hodgepodge of technical skills . Oh yeah,. So now what? Well, my grand goal is to become financially independent in 7 years because by then I would have served corporate America for a total of 10 years, and I think that is enough. Is this doable? Well..

I know it’s doable because my parents earned enough to retire together in the past 10 years despite having more financial challenges than my husband and I. Ten years ago my parents were more than forty years old and their salaries were much lower than our current salaries even after adjusting for inflation. They had pretty much no savings because they just graduated from grad school and they spent what money they had on the relocation from Hawaii to the Bay Area and bought a car. They also put me through college and weathered the dot com bubble, but they managed to do quite well. If they wanted to retire now, they really could do it. My mom doesn’t think so, but actually the numbers are in their favor. So I really see their success as an inspiration and a mark of certainty that my husband and I can do the same.

My mom once said that I can’t use them as a benchmark because they are much older than us so we need a lot more money for retirement. She also said that I was a very cheap child to raise so maybe we won’t be so lucky with our future kid(s). Additionally, inflation is running wild now and the buying power of their money was greater than ours. Another thing is that their Social Security benefits will be much better than ours. I have considered all of those things and I still think it is possible for me to quit my job in seven years because we are currently of our income. Additionally, I will keep on writing so I will have some income and the hubby doesn’t necessarily have to quit his job. Though he did say that if we were financially secure and he did not need to work he would design and program games on his own rather than work for a company where he doesn’t have total control over the process of creating a game. He also loves kids so he said that if he has the opportunity to be home with our future offspring he would take it. So I take those comments as an indication that if we could both “retire”, he would join me.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate my job and I don’t hate working, but I hate the fact that society makes us believe we are supposed to stop working at age 65 or 67. At that age, you don’t have that many years left to enjoy life. I think ultimately retirement for me and my husband means that we can pursue our own passions rather than whoring our talents and adding to someone else’s bottom line.

Seven years is really a stretch goal for our financial independence because we would only be 32 by that time and we would have to support ourselves for many years. I calculated that we probably need at least a portfolio worth $1.4 to $1.5 million with the based on an assumption that we live on around 4% of the portfolio and our side income. Some people think I am a bit crazy, but I really believe that it is possible even with children. Anyway, we will see in seven years, and hopefully is still around then so all of you can see if this grand goal has been achieved.

Well, it’s another milestone at !  This is the 200th post, and all of you kind readers have made over 1100 comments!  In my I briefly mentioned that I would like over 1000 visitors to this blog daily by the end of the year, and now I am up to 300 to 400 per day so it seems highly likely I could reach my goal.  Since then,   I also  joined a great community blog named and started a new blog about .  Between the three blogs now my writing gets over 2000 views per day.  That’s a huge improvement from just 100 to 200 visitors daily 5 months ago!

In terms of blog income, I have gone from  to nearly $600 this month.  All of the money I collect from blogging is currently donated to various charities.  It makes me happy when I see my articles earning money every day now, even when I am not writing.

With the growth of my blogs, I finally wrote  a to showcase all the mentions my writing have gotten on top blogs and other press.  Check it out for some of the most amusing and useful articles I’ve written.

I want to say thank you all for reading my writing.  It really makes my day when I hear that my random thoughts have helped you or made you laugh.  I know that I piss people off, too, but getting any kind of reaction means that I made someone read and think a little bit and that is also rewarding.

The more I write the more I think that my writing could be the best legacy I could leave.  I would love for my future descendants to read my stories and my parents’ stories to get a glimpse of how we lived.  I know I love to hear my mom’s stories about  my grandmother’s family. So hopefully I will can preserve this blog for those that come after me.  I also think it is amazing that the internet allows this rapid sharing of ideas and lives.

With that, I leave you with some great Blog Carnivals in the recent weeks:

– I didn’t really submit to this carnival but they included my article under Four Pillar’s name.  Sorry Mike, I don’t know what happened there.