Candidate Experience: Fail!

At some point I applied for a job with Gallagher Insurance, but got ghosted. Many months later, I received their Global Impact & Career Insights- Q3 Newsletter; so clearly, they had my email address from their job application system.

Gallagher IT is probably unaware that their HR system exposes candidate information publicly. As, when I tried clicking on the "manage candidate profile" link at the bottom of the email, I was directed to Stephen Asshole's candidate page.

Well done Gallagher!

This is what web professionals would call, asshole design.

7% Capital Gains Tax and now a 9.9% income tax on high earners

In 2023, the WA state legislature passed a 7% capital gains tax on the sale or exchange of long-term capital assets such as stocks, bonds, business interests, or other investments and tangible assets (source). This led to the exodus of several very large companies and high net worth individuals relocating out of state.

All it would take for the WA state legislator to lower the income threshold for the 9.9% income tax (Senate Bill 6346) is to pass a new amendment bill through the standard legislative process.

Our state has an unhealthy appetite for spending with the pretext that it is for social causes.

Milton Friedman on spending money

"There are four ways in which you can spend money. 

You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. 

Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. 

Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! 

Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government." 

--Milton Friedman 

The US Tax System Described With Beer Analogy

I posted this on another blog site back in 2009, and it is still relevant today.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

Podcasts & audiobooks for the commute

Another year and a 3x/week commute to the office. I spend anywhere from 2-3 hours (avg 2.5, max 4) each day I have to drive work.

I have managed to polish off quite a few audiobooks since the beginning of the year:

Cabin Pressure: The Complete Series 1 (BBC)

The New One Minute Manager (1 hr)

A Blink of the Screen by Terry Pratchet (fiction)

Even More Laughs (standup comedy compilation)

Comedy, Volume 2 (standup comedy compilation)

Twelve Months by Jim Butcher (fiction)

Bayou Moon by Ilona Andrews (fiction, #2 in series)

On the Edge by Ilona Andrews (fiction, #1 in series)

The Law by Jim Butcher (fiction, #17.5 in series)

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson (fiction, #3 in series)

Wingfeather Tales by Andrew Peterson (fiction)

The Institute by Stephen King (fiction)

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (fiction, #1 in series)

The Original by Brandon Sanderson (fiction)

Food for Thought by Alton Brown (autobiography)

Legion by Brandon Sanderson (fiction, 1-3 in series)

Terciel & Elinor by Garth Nix (fiction, #6 in series)

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samrin Nosrat (nonfiction, cooking methodology)

Podcasts

The regular channels

• Marketplace
• Freakonomics Radio
• Unexplainable by Vox Media
• Gastropod
• Table Read

New in 2026:

• Once We Were Spacemen w/ Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk
• Voices from DARPA

Newly subscribed fictional podcasts:

• Incoming
• The Lovecraft Investigations
• Kakos Industries
• Mirror Falls (fictional Canadian slice of life)
• The Bardic Hearth
• Last Dance

7000 Subreddits go dark and nobody notices

By the time you are reading this, last week's effort of subreddits (imagine shareable links that can be commented on by many within a Reddit community) going private where only the Mods can see content and its subscribers can neither see nor access the subreddit). 

Reddit changed its API usage policy so that it now charges $0.24 per 1,000 API calls; whereas for the past x-number of years API usage was free to developers. Most for-profit companies will charge for API calls; sometimes this is baked into the service contract for enterprise platform licensing and sometimes API usage is charged at the per user per month/year/time period rate. It is not unusual to see online platforms doing this. Even Google charges for its Maps API.

Apollo is a freemium app; meaning that sure, there are features of the free version of it. But, to get access to other features, Apollo Pro costs a flat fee of $4.99 and Apollo Ultra has a subscription cost of $1.49/month or $12.99/year. The app's paid features allow users to manage multiple accounts (Reddit's app only allows one user account per current login session). Apollo has 1.3 million to 1.5 million monthly active users, and of that 900,000 daily active users. Each Apollo user consumes about 10,000 API calls per month to Reddit servers. The Apollo app makes about 50 million API calls per month.

App developers like to point out that Imgur's API pricing is much lower; but they fail to also disclose that Imgur is a free image hosting app. Imgur isn't charging customers to use their services for image sharing because the site is ad supported. 

Here's a thought. Why should Reddit shoulder the maintenance and server costs for all the API calls made by 3rd party vendors?

[insert chat AI name], what are today's top headline news stories

It would appear that Bard has a lot of trouble with:

• determining what today's (insert date) headlines are

• getting headlines from it's own news source, Google News

• relevant content when filters are requested (e.g., no politics, no war, no gun violence, no Trump, and no Congress)

When I asked Bard if it has access to Google News, it said it did. Then I asked it to get me a list of the top stories from Google News, but it just reiterated the news stories when I asked for news stories of the day.

Bard at least complied with the filters and did not give me any news stories that had vague interpretation matches to those topics.

The problem, IMHO, lies in that Bard does not cite its sources nor provide links to where it got its answers from; unlike Chat-GPT and Bing AI. 

For top news stories, Bard is not replacing Alexa any time soon. Bing AI is capable of performing this feat with link and source citations, its responses lead you to links that are chock full of ads. 

I'm not impressed by any chatbot capability and what Bard has isn't artificial intelligence. Today, this is no more than a fancy rebranding of machine learning. How can a machine learn on its own if it has to be told to learn on its own and told what sources to use from the Internet. Every response seems to have been coded into a specific framework, like how math problems are solved. There are univerally accepted formulas for how mathematics works.

Commuter Podcasts

When I use public transit to commute from Vancouver to Portland, I could nap.. or I could fill my head with other things, such as podcast content. It's a 40 minute ride in the morning (provided that I hop on a bus before 7am) and an hour ride home (if I leave downtown Portland at 4pm), of course this is the inflexibility of the express bus that C-Tran (Vancouver) has; however, with the plague of humanity outside, transit travel is bit disrupted with travel times. I aim for podcasts that are about 30 mins to an hour long. I typically listen to business podcasts in the morning, and something fiction/sci fi/horror in the afternoon. It's likely that Android smartphones have the function as well as iPhones, but with the Podcasts app, I can download podcast episodes and then just listen on the go without having to rely on cellular data for podcast listening when away from wifi. Links are to the show's website, if one exists.

Non-fiction, less than 30 mins:

• Indicator by Planet Money
• Planet Money
• The Journal (by WSJ and Stitcher)
• Negotiations Ninja
• StoryCorps

Non-fiction, 30 mins to an hour:

• Slate's Negotiation Academy: Negotiate Anything
• Hidden Brain
• How I Built This w/ Guy Raz
• Freakonomics Radio
• Special Operations Medical Journal (field medicine)

Non-fiction, about an hour or longer:

• Tactical Breakdown (this features Canadian law enforcement)

Fiction, 30 mins to an hour:

• Levar Burton Reads (sci fi/fantasy)
• Penumbra (sci fi/fantasy)

A side note: If you have financial or company data on your phone, don't connect to public wifi even if your bus or train has it. Just saying. Better be safe than sorry after the fact.

Supply Chain Disruption in Uncertain Times

What we are experiencing now is not the new normal. Uncertain times have always been around; some are triggered by macroeconomic factors (unemployment, inflation, economic output), others by the planet trying to kill off humans, terrorism, or poorly written/enforced retail and commercial <insert your industry flavor> industry laws at the state or national level.

Notable Supply Chain Disruptions:

• 20XX - global forest fires impacting raw materials sourcing and the construction industry
• 2007-2008 - residential lending banking crisis; LIBOR rate collusion and fraud; foreclosure filings increased by more than 81% in 2008
• 2011 - every company using Just-In-Time manufacturing was impacted, as well as all air travel within the US
• 2015 - Avian Flu outbreak in the US; millions of chickens destroyed, egg production drops significantly to cause egg prices to skyrocket
• 2017 - Cyclone Enawo struck Madagascar and wipes out 90-100% vanilla bean production in its Antalaha region and 80% of the crop in Sambava; price of vanilla skyrockets 4x its usual trading price; also, prior to the weather event, vanilla farms in other tropical countries had been cutting back on production in order to produce more lucrative crops such as coffee and palm oil
• 2019 - African Swine Fever - shrunk China's global herd by 55%, expected herd to decline by another 25%, and China pork production to fall by 10% to 15% in 2020;  impact to soybeans produced and exported by US farms for animal feed
• 2019-2020 - COVID-19 affects multiple industries everywhere

You might think that you're not impacted by vanilla bean production since you don't eat sweets, right? Natural vanilla products are in more than just dairy products (ice cream, yogurt, flavored milk), beverages, and baked goods. Vanilla flavor is in 18,000 global products including breakfast cereal, snacks, perfumes, skincare creams/lotions, and cosmetic products. Price per pound of natural vanilla was $300 in 2017, $600 per 2.2 lbs (1 kg) in 2018, and a slight improvement in 2019 as vanilla production gets better at $450 per kg. Remember when real vanilla extract was less than $10 per 16 fluid oz at Costco? Well that same bottle currently sells for $30 today. One ingredient can impact so many businesses.

2009-2019 Price of Vanilla
Image Source: Cook Flavoring Company

Fast-forward to today's supply chain issues among suppliers, distributors, and end-users (consumers, businesses).

What's up:

• companies that are deemed "essential"
• retail stores that offer delivery, take-out, or store pick-up (grocery stores, restaurants, 
• manufacturers of personal protection equipment (PPE) and ventilators
• companies that managed to pivot their production from whatever to PPE and medical supply (e.g., GE, Tesla, GM, beer/spirits manufacturing)
• subscription boxes w/ free or reduced delivery costs (e.g., meal prep kits, pre-made meals, DIY kits)
• Amazon - has now removed the product ban on non-essential products shipping to their warehouses
• Wal-mart - app downloads surpasses Amazon (14.4 mil in the US, 106 mil global uploads)
• software companies that create/support online learning platforms and video conferencing
• furniture and hardware companies that create/support remote office and work from home
• pharmaceuticals working on a vaccine for COVID-19
• distributed computing apps that rely on crowdsourced content, support, donations (e.g., Einstein@home, Folding@home)
• fabric wholesalers or retailers (e.g., JoAnn's)

What's down:

• everyone else not "essential"
• rideshare services (Lyft, Uber, etc.)
• homeshare/rental services (AirBnB, Vacasa, etc.)
• airport & travel services
• outdoor event venues
• movie theaters / entertainment industry
• live performances
• schools, churches, local government offices
• regional seafood supply & production - since dine-in restaurants and schools are shut down; seasonal seafood has nowhere to go
• consumer automotive sales (might have to transition to more online sales)
• ridership on public transit
• global oil demand & decrease in per barrel price
• amusement parks
• city/county parks that attract larger crowds
• trade shows and conventions
• indoor/outdoor festivals and parades (e.g., regional fireworks show)

A public transit commuter's podcast recommendations

Five years ago I acquiesced and got a smartphone, upgrading from nearly a decade of using an old flip phone whose only purpose was to send and receive calls. Anyhow, fast forward to today. The smartphone is also a media player, calendar, ebook/RSS reader, fitness logger, camera, video recorder, stopwatch, etc. 

On a typical commute into downtown Portland, an activity that typically eats up to two hours per day, I could catch up on some Z's, listen to music, something else relaxing, or learn something new via podcasts. Apple's Podcast app is one of the best default installed apps I have used.

I get burned out on genres and I almost never listen to the same podcast episode twice, unless I happened to have fallen asleep and forgot what happened in the podcast. These are sorted in order of what you should listen to first before the others. Not everyone that I admire from their non-radio works is good at both podcast scripting for audio listeners and are a good podcast host. These are just suggestions of what I think make for pretty good commuter listening.

Non-fiction

Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):

• Planet Money

Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):

• Freakonomics Radio
• How I Built This
• This American Life
• Agent Marketing Syndicate (for real estate but mostly business)
• The Tim Ferriss Show (mostly business and life-hacking topics)
• The Art of Manliness (really funny if you are a woman listening to this)
• The Moth
• S-Town (crime investigative reporting)
• Crimetown (crime investigative reporting)

Fiction / Fantasy / SciFi

Short podcasts (<30 minutes per episode):

• MarsCorp
• The Bright Sessions
• Lore (by Aaron Mahnke)
• Darkest Night
• The Deep Vault
• Welcome to Night Vale
• Terms
• Star Trek: Lost Enterprise

Longer podcasts (>30 minutes per episode):

• Star Trek: Outpost
• The Penumbra Podcast
• The Leviathan Chronicles
• The Cleansed
• Archive 81
• The Dark Tome
• The Bunker
• Drabblecast Audio Fiction
• Clarksworld Magazine
• Lightspeed Magazine
• The Black Tapes / Tanis / Rabbits

Bitly's Mobile App Refresh

Apps are suppose to make your life easier, not more complicated. You really know when an app's UI has changed before opening the app when you notice that its app icon has changed. And, Bitly's changed from an outlined orange logo to a dark orange background with the outlined logo in white. Certainly a noticeable change.

In the old Bitly app for iPhone, you really didn't have to do much to save, shorten, and share a link. You could be in another browser or in an RSS reader app and the order of operations used to be simple with few steps:

In a browser or RSS reader, copy the link
Bitly's app would automatically recognize that a link was copied, and take both the Title of the link and the link itself, packaged together on a screen that would allow you to edit or insert a new Title (if needed), then share the link to one or all of your connected social media accounts.

It was:

Copy link / Bitly app automatically shortens / Share link

Now, it is:

Copy link
In the Bitly app, you now need to hit the + symbol to create a link (sadly no automatic detect)
Oops, no title at all. Go back to the browser and copy the title from the article
Go back to the Bitly app, edit the link and paste the title
Then, LEFT swipe (left to right) to share
But, sharing no longer brings up a list of your connected accounts, it just shows the default sharing options that the Chrome browser shows
Share / Scroll sideways through the list of options / Post

Alas, no more Bitly convenience for me. Looks like it is back to long URLs and the Feedly share button.

With Feedly, it's Share / Post, and you're done. No analytics. Twitter has some analytics but they're not terribly useful just yet.

Those 4 extra minutes every $5 reward cycle with Bing Rewards, I think I gain them back each time I don't use the Bitly app to share links.

Customer Loyalty Programs: Bing and Starbucks

This year two companies revitalized their rewards programs. The rebranding is probably working out great for their advertisers, but it really isn't working out for me. I mean heck, I really didn't expect to do more work to get something for free. Although, for now, the perks of using these apps are still a nice to have. The two in this blog post are Microsoft's Bing search app and Starbucks Rewards app.

Google Analytics + Google Data Studio

Saw a promo email for Data Studio today and thought I'd check it out...

Google Data Studio: Start Here page

One of the help files for this web tool reads as follows..

"A Data Studio report is a collection of components that inform the viewer using data derived from one or more data sources. Components include charts, annotations (text), and graphical elements (shapes and images). Data Studio components can be styled and configured to present exactly the view of your data you want. Data sources get their data from a data set, such as a Google Analytics view, a Google Sheet, a BigQuery table, etc."

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think Google is trying to get onto even ground with Salesforce Dashboards. None of this point and click setup is all that hard; nor too complicated to understand. I don't think user adoption would be that big of an issue for companies. It  also looks like Google is competing with Tableau's ability to aggregate and visualize data.

Google Data Studio - Data Viz of World Population (orange),
Internet Users (blue), and Mobile Subscriptions (yellow)

The intro email says it succinctly:

"No more requests for data. No more emailing around CSV files and spreadsheets. No more static and outdated reports. Finally, a reporting solution that works the way you work."

It was rather amusing that we were doing just that in a corporate setting, mucking around with CSV exports and spreadsheets to get a report to look the way we wanted it to. 

Spot on, Google Analytics team.

Yelp: New restaurant search feature - PokeStop

Yelp shows it can be hip too by adding PokéStops as a searchable restaurant feature.

Brexit and Tourism

One might say that fear rules the global stock exchanges. Britain was and still is a great country and a leading economic indicator (not being a mere follower) of what we know as western Europe. For countries that cannot compete in terms of GDP, labor population, or sheer magnitude of the economic girth of first world nations; the concept of sharing labor pools (along with labor law restrictions), trade, and distributed wealth (in terms of country-to-country financial loans) seems like a really good idea...that is if the demand for products and services produced by your home country can keep up with all the other countries within that trading region.

In 1998, I took my first trip outside the US; specifically to visit a few countries along the western Caribbean. While food was ridiculously cheap on the eastern coast of Mexico, the same could not be said for the island nations that were still on the British standard of currency. A conch sandwich and a small bowl of turtle soup costed £16 (more than $25 US). 

The single biggest benefit to Americans is the rising strength of the US dollar against the British pound and the Euro; effectively making European goods/services cheaper to acquire. The closer we get to a 1:1 ratio, the cheaper it is for Americans to travel to the UK and Britain-managed territories. This isn't limited to travel. Foreign car imports will also be cheaper than they are now. Our domestic automotive dealerships benefit from the weakening Euro in this regard. However, it is still ridiculously expensive to travel from the US to Europe with air fares at more than $1,500/pp one-way.

Something else to consider are the other wealthy European countries that were never part of the EU and continue to flourish such as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Turkey, and others. 

At the time I wrote this, the currency exchange rate was::
$10 USD = £ 7.57 = € 9.08

In 1998, $10 USD = £ 6.50 
In 2008, $10 USD = € 6.50

If you are an infrequent international traveler, you might think to yourself: Meh, what's the big deal with paying a little bit more for the experience, for goods/services that are only available in the visited country, etc.

Year-end Post

I feel I should write something insightful, but alas, nothing really comes to mind.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

(...and watch out for fire monkeys slinging poo...)

Ad-hoc Flyers

This is probably one of the silliest things I have ever done while on the road at a tradeshow. I created a flyer based off a Pardot landing page. Then had it printed overnight and ready for pickup at a convention center's FedEx Office. It's a tad expensive to print flyers like this, but in a pinch it will do.

Landing Page as a Booth Flyer?

Nag or Nurture

I recently was subjected to a very aggressive call from a sales rep of a marketing automation solutions provider who denied knowledge any communications that their marketing team sent out; and during the call it was suggested that I should unsubscribe from their marketing materials if I wasn't interested. Clearly not a thought leader in marketing automation, just another tool in the shed.

IKEA Newsletter

Today I signed up for IKEA's customer newsletter...as an 120-year old person. Seriously! That's the earliest birth year (1895)  that was offered on their sign-up page. It's hard to imagine a 120-year old putting together anything from IKEA. It was the lengthiest, multi-page sign-up I have seen from a consumer catalog company.

IKEA newsletter sign-up, birth year start

IKEA newsletter sign-up, birth year end

It could be that when the e-newsletter sign-up page was first produced, back at the dawn of the commercial internet, 1895 was a possible year for a date of birth. But then, there is also a top range part of the birth year and for IKEA, it's 1997 (or you'd be turning 18 in 2015). It begs the question.. why not just have birth month and birth day like most consumer companies? Why would you target a specific demographic like 18-120 yrs old. 

I'll have to see if I can change my birth month from December to something earlier in the year like July to see if they have a birth year-specific marketing campaign. It would be really surprising to get a "happy 121st birthday!" note from IKEA as a result of this albeit flawed email newsletter sign-up form.

Thinking Out Loud

As I am thinking about where leads should nest, either initially in an email marketing platform or loaded directly into a company's CRM, I wonder about the best possible customer interaction for what we want recipients of our marketing messaging to do or respond in a favorable fashion.

In a situation where all leads are being entered into CRM regardless of the source, from a 3rd party list (bad idea), a hosted webinar, a tradeshow, or due to a non-transactional web conversion, often times the communication strategy is mixed for who is really a prospect (no expressed interest in your products or services) and who really is a lead (more than just contact information, but also a potential sales opportunity).

In either case, prospect or lead, neither party is really ready to buy from you after a few touches or website impressions. And, calling to qualify leads and prospects into a warmer lead may not be the best approach.

As a marketer, I'd say, sure.. let's load everything into our email marketing platform. If and when a prospect converts in a favorable way, e.g., multiple downloads of e-books or whitepapers, participation in the company's webinars or product demos, then the messaging tactics need to change. And then, you could push that prospect into being a lead.. and subsequently into a CRM where salespeople can call on it or nurture the process with more emails or calls.

How is this process in your company?