travisstoliker.com

Learn how the US government is bought and sold by politicians, corporations, special interests and lobbyists. “Government is used as a weapon.”

Google is getting closer to the bilateral voice translation that I referred to back in July with Google Translate Conversation Mode.

In the 2011 Google Shareholders meeting question and answer section, Eric Schmidt dropped a hint about a new google feature they are working on that would allow instant voice translation. Incredible…

“The good news from your perspective is that we’re building bilateral voice translation phone to phone, so you will be able to call your friends in Ukrainian, speak in English, and it will come out Ukranian on the other side.” Here is a link to the time in the video where it was said.

If we eliminated language barriers, how would the world radically change? If we eliminated language barriers, how many wars would be prevented?

I tried to rent a house on Lake Lansing for 2 weeks in August and had an absolutely terrible experience with the owner. Here is my Lake Lansing rental house nightmare:

Julia, the renter, can not be trusted. I worked with Julia via email for more than a week. We agreed on pricing, dates, and all details. I came out to tour the cabin to make final arrangements. At the end of the tour, Julia agreed to send the contract over that night or the following morning. When I awake the next morning I have an email from Julia saying “unfortunately this home will not be available for your time i am sorry for any inconvience. julia” (notice the misspelling?) — No explanation. Nothing. Now my group has to scramble to find another cabin at the last minute. Julia cannot be trusted. Let this be a warning to others.

Beware of this Lake Lansing rental house and owner:
6383 east Reynolds road
Haslett, Michigan

Amidsts all of the talk about unemployment I thought I should point out something. At the company I work for - by far - our largest challenge at the moment is finding qualified people to hire.

We have built an amazing team but it is incredibly hard to find people.

I just thought I should point that out since all the talk today seems to be about people unable to find jobs.

I was quoted in the Lansing Business Monthly recently.

Full Size Image

Apparently I was in a video for Delta Township Economic Development.

My Opinion: Lansing City Council denied tax incentives to Gillespie group for two new projects in Lansing. To be very clear, I think Mr. Gillespie is one of the most important visionary developers in our town and I support his plans for these two projects. However, I hate group think. So I had to speak up.

I want to be clear on one thing. City council did NOT deny Mr. Gillespie’s plans for these two projects, as many have suggested. What they _did do_ is refused to give millions of dollars in loans and tax abatements to the project.* As I understand it, Mr. Gillespie is still completely within his rights to continue each of the projects. He would just have to do it without millions in forms of Government money. (Sure he’d still have to do the normal permitting, zoning and whatnot, but every single development has that requirement.)

I am NOT in favor of Government mandating the use of Union labor. That is deplorable.

HOWEVER, the real problem here is the tax incentive system and tax abatement system in the first place!

Most people have absolutely no idea what is involved in receiving a tax abatement. I’ll let you in on a secret, the Government has MANY strings attached to every single tax abatement/incentive. (Food for thought: Why do most Lansing companies walk away from MEGA Fund tax incentives?)

I just wanted to clarify this issue because there is far too much group think going on and too many people commenting on a process they know little about.

—-
Summary:
- I am in favor of Mr. Gillespie. I think he is a fantastic developer and an asset to our community.
- I am NOT in favor of mandating union labor.
- I am NOT in favor of making a “prevailing wage law”.
- But Most Importantly: I am NOT in favor of tax incentives and abatements. This is exactly what happens when you put government in between progress and business development. The answer is NOT finding creative ways to change the minds of the city council. The answer is addressing the completely terrible things that happen when Government is allowed to “pick-winners”.

*Jeff Hicks correctly pointed out that 100% union work was off the table at this point and was only proposed. I was incorrect in an earlier post. My apologies.

Jevons paradox - More efficiency doesn’t always mean less usage.
The Mythical Man-Month - “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
Dunbar’s number* -It is hard to maintain stable social relationships in groups over 150.
Diminishing returns - The point at which an additional unit of input doesn’t produce the expected unit of output and output progressively decreases over time.
Opportunity Cost - When presented with mutually exclusive choices, choosing one means sacrificing the other. “The basic relationship between scarcity and choice.”
Correlation does not imply causation - Pretty self explanatory. If you think “correlation proves causation” - you’re an idiot.

*hat tip to Chris T Reinhardt IV

I’m finally (almost) recovered from suffering through over a month of terrible shingles pain and that got me thinking. How does this compare to all of my other injuries?

List of Injuries that I can remember:
Shingles - 2010
5 Staples in Head - 2010 - Bottle broken over head
Broken Ankle - 2009 - Fell off Curb
2 Broken Ankles - 2005 - Jumped off truck outside of Crunchies
Broken Jaw - 2000 - Puck to face - roller hokey
Broken Nose - 1998 - Hockey injury
Neck cut by hockey skate ~1997
Broken Thumb - 1997 - Ice Hockey Injury
Broken Tail-bone - 1996 - Home made elevator broke
2 Broken Wrists - 1994 - Fell down stairs roller-blading
Broken Toe - 1990 - Ultimate Frisbee, ran into mailbox
Hip Infection - 1987 - Surgery & 2 weeks in Sparrow
Concussion - 1987 - Fell off gymnastics rings on my head
Broken Arm - 1984 - Fell of slide on my arm

And out of all of these….. Shingles was the most painful and annoying.

Kinda addicted to this song. (Rick Ross - B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast) (feat. Styles P))

By now you’ve certainly seen the television ad from “Pure Michigan” encouraging people to buy from Michigan companies. No question, a laudable goal. However, if you were to type in “PureMichigan.org/BuyMichigan” into your web browser your request would be routed to servers hosted by IBM in Denver, Colorado. The irony and hypocrisy is awesome.

Here is a screenshot of my tracert to puremichigan.org

Fired up the metronome, laid down a drum track, played some guitar over it. This is the result. Tumblr

I just saw a new version of the “ADHD Roadmap” TV advertising campaign that secretly pimps crack-cocaine for middle-class white people of all ages. The new TV AD talked about “ADHD Cross Roads”. Instead of marketing this one to parents taking care of their children, this was marketed towards encouraging parents to take it themselves. ~ Strange culture we have.

I can’t believe Shire is still getting away with this. Invent the drug; then invent the disease.

Background Information:
September 8th, 2008 - ADHDRoadmap.com does an endrun around Pharma TV Commercial law

My favorite local magazine, The Capital Gains, asked to interview me about why I use foursquare. Only two or three sentences of my interview are going to be printed so I figured I would post the entire transcript here.

[Capital Gains Media] - Why do you play foursquare?
[Travis Stoliker] - I don’t “play” foursquare really. The points and mayorships are not the reason why I use Foursquare. I use foursquare as a means to track my activity, share it with friends, observe my friends activity and engage with others based on their location.

How does foursquare help you discover local venues, bars, and cafes?
This is an important part of Foursquare. While it is unlikely that your morning breakfast will be memorable enough to take the time to mention it on Twitter or Facebook, my friends will check-in on foursquare repeatedly at their favorite establishment and it is often somewhere I had never heard of. This lets me discover the places that my trusted group of friends frequent often so that I may uncover gems within my own community that I was previously unaware of.

What have you learned about your neighborhood via foursquare?
People love to drink. A lot.

Do any Lansing businesses offer incentives for foursquare players? Which?
None that I am aware of but it is only a matter of time. This is a missed opportunity currently.

About mayorships…
Are there particular places that you are often the mayor?
Honey Baked Ham, Los Tres Amigos in East Lansing and sometimes Liquid Web data centers.

Do mayorships general rotate weekly between a couple of people in a friendly competition or do they tend to be more random?
Foursquare is still a brand new technology and it is growing fast. It’s too new to have trends in my opinion

How often can/do you hold a mayorship?
Pretty much the whole time since I joined, but I am generally an early adopter. I should state that I don’t care if I’m the mayor of anything. I do it for the social aspect’s. I have never been fond of games.

Who’s playing foursquare in Lansing?
Thats a pretty easy answer, early technology adopters. In general it is the same crowd that was on Twitter with me 3 years ago. There is just a certain personality that is passionate about understanding new tools constantly.

What benefits do you think this type of competitive neighborhood exploring could bring to the tri-county area?
I disagree with the premise that it is competitive. It’s more like Boy Scout Merit badges, or whatever those things are. I wasn’t a boyscout as if that was a surprise. It’s not like you’re competing against other people, it’s more like you’re competing with yourself. The point, the badge, whatever, is it’s own reward. I do not see it as a comparative metric to quantify my social status.

Who are your foursquare friends? Are they friends from the 3-D or met via foursquare?
They are all my friends from real life. Mainly coworkers from LiquidWeb and twitter friends that are tech savvy.

Have you ever, say, met up with other foursquarers at a locale because they saw that you’d checked in there?
Absolutely. Several times after work a group of co-workers have met at a particular location and other co-workers joined simply because they saw the foursquare check-in. I have also had several occasions where multiple groups of friends were at the same location but only knew it because of the foursquare notification. This is by far the most personally valuable aspect of foursquare that I have found.

What has been the biggest surprise about foursquare?
How fast adoption has been. This is not the first “geo location social media” or whatever you want to call it. Google has one, Latitude. Twitter has geo-location enabled in their API. Facebook has some Geo features in development and it, in general, was started as a Geo product by being limited to College campuses. Here is the most important part of what I am going to say, Geo Location is the next big opportunity. Hyper local news, hyper local advertising, hyper local social media - these things all exist in some form currently but they have been limited due to price, availability (how many people have them) and distribution (was hard to sell mobile apps). These things have all converged. I am going out on a huge limb and I am not qualified to make predictions, that being said, I believe that where we sit right now with technological progression of mobile technology is similar to the the point of progression in Internet technology when most people had broad band access in their homes. After everyone had broadband in the home, everything was possible. It was “always on”, gave access to Audio, Video, large email attachments, high quality photos, and everything else we take for granted now. This, in my unqualified opinion, is where we are with mobile technology. Most people have a data plan. Most people have some version of a browser on their phone. Camera, video, GPS, truly high speed internet, and 3rd party app delivery. All this technology - always on them. This is gigantic. Foursquare is just the beginning of location aware technologies.

When we are growing up descriptions of events and people are always simplified into a neat story that is memorable and clear. Any fine details that deviate from the simple message we are trying to deliver are ignored in an effort to keep the story simple and easy to understand for the child.

We tell our children stories in simple terms of Good Guys & Bad Guys with clear winners and clear losers. We set out with a moral message that we want to instill into our children and we tailor the details of the story to meet that objective.

When a child asks a question, we give them a simple answer:
Who discovered America? Columbus.
Why did we fight the civil war? To free slaves.
Who free’d the slaves? Abe Lincoln.
Why do terrorists hate us? They hate our freedom.

For children we do this because we feel that kids will be unable to comprehend a story that contains subtlety and nuance. We tend to believe that the added details will only confuse the “moral of the story” and the “message” will be lost.

We recognize and accept this blatant dumb’ing down of information for children, but it astonishes me how much we continue to do it for adults.

Just today I heard several news pundits on television dumb it down for adults. Tiger Woods was a hero. A perfect champion and because he could hit the ball well and had a terrific smile, we created a story that he was an alter boy. Of course soon after we find out he’s like most other married people on the planet and he cheated. Now we are supposed to be shocked???

We dumb down politics too. If you believe in low taxation - you are a republican. If you believe in helping others, you’re a democrat. Yet, in real life, I have never met a single person that is all republican or all democrat. Everyone is a mixture of something in the middle.

We say things like “sports figures shouldn’t be role models” — oh really, who then _should_ be our kids role models? Our hypocritical pastors like Ted Haggard that claim to be a righteous believer in god that hates gays, yet turns out to be gay himself?

Or maybe our children should have polticians as role models? Politicians like Mark Sanford (or the many others) that regularly cheat on their spouse?

Or maybe our children should worship Teachers? Teachers like Debra Jean LaFave that had sex with her 14 year old student.

We like to prepetuate a myth that things can be classified neatly into clear Black and White categories. That either a person is bad, or good. That a person is either right, or wrong. That in any event there is a good guy and a bad guy.

This is a dangerous myth.

You will never find a person that is all good, or all bad. This simplistic and childish act of categorizing everything into neat classifications is a futile effort that attempts to help a simple mind understand complex situations.

I have never met anyone that can be classified neatly.