I’m pretty sure I could pass a high school history test about the Civil War armed with only the knowledge that was dropped on me from watching this highly entertaining 10-minute animation from John D. Ruddy. I’m actually halfway certain I would do better on that test after watching this YouTube video than I would have if I read a sterile textbook.
The kids just have it so easy these days. Enjoy the history lesson, folks. The cartoon drawings are fun too.
Several years ago, my wife and I were in a bit of a personal bind. We lived together in what was about the tiniest two-bedroom apartment you can imagine, with a small baby and another one on the way. We were already forced into being pretty creative with arrangements with even one baby in the home, but two? It was pretty clear that we needed a bigger place.
We considered a bigger apartment, but there were honestly none available that were even remotely reasonably priced in the location that we wanted (roughly midway between our two jobs), and my wife didn’t want to live in the city near either of our jobs. With that, we started house hunting. And, to be honest, we somehow managed to stumble into a pretty good house for our needs at a fairly reasonable price.
Looking back, however, I recognize that we were able to find that house due to pure, unadulterated luck. We did many things wrong during our house search, our move, and our early days of home ownership.
If I somehow had it to do all over again, I would have made some smarter decisions and considered some things that I didn’t pay any attention to. But, unfortunately, I don’t have a time machine.
Instead, here are the 12 things I most regret not considering or doing during the whole process of moving from an apartment to a house. Perhaps they’ll find their way to someone in the same situation I was in 10 years ago.
1) An Apartment Offers More Benefits Than You Think
It is really really easy to get caught up in the glow of all of the potential benefits of home ownership. You can build equity! You don’t have a landlord skulking around! Once you pay off that mortgage, you won’t have any kind of monthly payment any more (well, you’ll still have property taxes and association fees and insurance…)! You can do whatever you want with the property–if you want to knock out a wall, go for it! If you want a fuchsia room, go for it!
The thing is, there are actually a lot of benefits to living in an apartment that people tend to overlook due to a “grass is greener on the other side” effect.
For starters, when you live in an apartment, you don’t have to do maintenance on the property. If something goes wrong, call the landlord. If it’s your house, you’re either going to be fixing it yourself or calling a repairperson and, in either case, you’re going to be spending money on parts (at the very least) and labor (if you bring in help).
For another, rental insurance is far cheaper than homeowners insurance on even the cheapest of properties, and you don’t have things like property taxes or association fees, either.
For another, tasks like mowing the lawn and cutting weeds and trimming trees aren’t even on your radar. They’re just taken care of. You don’t have to spend the time on those tasks or pay for the equipment required. Those things all mean expenses when you’re living in a home, expenses that people often don’t look at when they compare a mortgage to apartment rent.
Before you ever consider buying, you really should spend some serious time looking at a good “rent versus buy” calculator, like this one from the New York Times.
You need to run the numbers over and over and over again and make absolutely sure that the financial benefits you’re getting from buying a home are greater than the financial benefits you’re getting from renting. Looking at the raw numbers removes the emotions and the “grass is greener” factor from the picture.
2) A 20 PercentDown Payment is Incredibly Important
If you don’t have a 20% down payment, you are going to wind up handing a lot of money to the bank to make up for it.
Here’s the reality of the situation: If you come to a bank without 20% of the cost of the home you want to buy already in hand, the bank is going to see you as a risk, as someone not serious about buying a home, as someone who might dump a house on them after not making many payments which leaves them swallowing almost the full cost of the house if they have to foreclose.
What the bank will do is not give you a loan unless you sign up for mortgage insurance. Mortgage insurance will amount to about 1% of the total balance of the mortgage each year; it will be tacked on to your mortgage payment. You can essentially think of mortgage insurance as adding a +1 to whatever the interest rate is on your loan–if it’s a 3.5% loan, you’ll effectively be paying a 4.5% interest rate.
That mortgage insurance is going to stick around until your remaining principal on the loan is less than 80% of the value of the home–and the bank won’t exactly be friendly about this, because they won’t let you remove the interest rate until they’re absolutely sure it’s less than 80% of the lowest possible value of your home.
Why do they do this? It’s insurance for them against a homeowner–you–who might not necessarily follow through on the mortgage. Why would they think that about you? It’s because you tried to borrow a lot of money without bringing much of your own to the table, as demonstrated by not having that 20% down payment.
So, the real impact of not having a 20% down payment is that for the first, say, third of the time you’re paying off the mortgage, you’re going to be effectively tacking on an additional payment each month, one that will add up to 1% of the value of the home over the course of a year. If you’re buying a $250,000 home, that means your mortgage insurance will cost you $2,500 a year until you get rid of it. It’s just gone–poof.
You can avoid this entirely by just saving up a 20% down payment, which you can do by being a little bit smart with your money. That’s actually really good practice for the realities of home ownership, because to be able to make home ownership a success, you need to be smart with your money. Home ownership is very rewarding, but there are a lot of costs involved, and if you’re spending money without much organization, simply learning how to save and make better choices with your money is vital preparation for home ownership and that 20% down payment savings project is a great way to learn.
3) Location Is Incredibly Important
This is something you likely already understand, but I’m putting it here to re-emphasize it. Location. Is. Very. Important.
Wherever you decide to live, you’re going to be commuting from that place to wherever it is that you work. That commute is going to have a cost in the form of both money and time, a cost that is going to be repeated over and over and over again as long as you have that job (and, likely, jobs similar to that one which will probably be in the same area).
If you live close to that area, great! You can walk to work or take a bike to work, which means your commuting costs are practically zero.
If you’re a bit further away, you can probably take the bus to work or the subway. You’ll have to pay some mass transit fees, but it’s still pretty cheap in the big scheme of things.
If you’re far away from work, you’re probably buying a car. A car is expensive. The AAA estimates that the average annual cost of owning a car, including all of the expenses (fuel, maintenance, registration, insurance, parking, depreciation, etc.), is $8,698 a year. Ouch.
If you pick a poor location, your commute cost goes up from $0 per year to $8,698 per year. That’s effectively tacking $700 a month onto your monthly housing expenses–and we’re not even talking about the time eaten each and every day.
This isn’t to say that this should be a deal breaker, but that it should be part of your math when figuring out whether to move.
4) Shop Around for Your Mortgage and Get Pre-Approved
Sarah and I did shop around on a very limited basis for a mortgage, but our “shopping around” mostly consisted of looking at a few advertised mortgage rates and then quickly selecting a single financial institution to work with.
What we should have done is actually meet with several different banks to discuss mortgage options and see what kind of mortgage offers they were willing to pre-approve for us.
Pre-approval is important. It gives you a dollar amount with which you can safely house hunt without having to go back and get approved. It’s effectively your budget for the house hunt.
It takes some time, but spend that time now. It will pay off enormously for you if you are able to find a bank that will shave 0.25% off of your interest rate while pre-approving you. Just getting that little amount is worth many, many hours of bank meetings.
5) Go Minimal When You’re Choosing a Home
When you’re in the process of house hunting, it’s very easy to get blown away by the bigger homes with nicer decor and furnishings. They look good. They’re roomy. They shine in comparison to smaller homes with lower quality decor.
The thing is, you’re paying for that extra space. You’re paying for those nicer elements. You’re paying a lot, in fact.
My advice? It’s similar to my advice when shopping for anything. Start at the bottom and inch your way up. Don’t start by looking at homes at the high end of your preapproval. Start by looking at a bunch of homes at the low end and see if any stand out to you for your needs.
Then, very slowly start lifting the ceiling on your price and looking at more expensive homes if you don’t find anything that really stands out to you.
If you start, as we did, by looking at homes that are on the very upper end of your price range (or even out of your price range), you’ll find yourself naturally predisposed against lower-priced homes. Your basis for comparison becomes that expensive, gorgeous home that’s going to be like a financial weight around your ankle, a home that doesn’t represent the best bang for the buck for you (which is what you’re really looking for).
Start cheap. Look at cheap homes, then inch upward. You’ll know a good home for you when you see it.
6) A 15-Year Mortgage Is Virtually Always a Better Idea Than a 30-Year Mortgage
Over the course of a 15-year mortgage, you’re going to end up paying about a third of the interest to the bank that you would pay over the course of a 30-year mortgage. That’s because not only is a 15-year mortgage much shorter in length (meaning you’re paying more principal each month), it also comes with a lower interest rate.
If that tip is true, why do people get a 30-year mortgage, ever? The reason’s simple: 30-year mortgages virtually always have a lower monthly payment. Even though it’s a poor long-term choice, people often look at the bigger 15-year payment and back away, believing that they’re not going to be able to afford it.
Here’s the truth: If you’re scared of the monthly payment of a 15-year mortgage, then a 30-year mortgage for the same amount is probably also a poor idea. It means that you’re buying more house than you can really afford.
Unless you have some sort of incredibly compelling and unusual reason for preferring a 30-year mortgage, you should be getting a 15-year mortgage. If it looks like you can’t afford the payments on the 15-year mortgage, then you need to be looking at a lower-priced property to buy.
We got a 30-year mortgage. We managed to pay it off in four and a half years (because we were making triple and quadruple and quintuple payments to try to become debt free). If we had a 15-year mortgage, we would have paid the whole thing off even faster, with even less mortgage given to the bank.
7) Never Go Above Using 40 Percent of Your Take-Home Pay as Debt Payments
This is a good rule of thumb for financial sanity. Take your monthly debt payments for your already existing debts. Add to that your monthly mortgage payment for a 15-year mortgage. If that adds up to more than 40% of your monthly take-home pay, then you’re putting yourself on a very dangerous financial tightrope and you should strongly reconsider buying that home.
This is an example of a foolish move that we almost made, except that we were directly saved from this by a loan officer at the credit union we were working with. The number one figure she worked with in terms of determining our preapproval was our monthly budget and she would not allow us to go above a 40% total debt payment. She preapproved us only for an amount that translated into a loan that was below that 40% threshold.
Without that careful loan officer, we could have found ourselves in a serious mess, as we had been willing to borrow more for a bigger house. We had our eye on a home that was almost $50,000 more than what we were preapproved for; buying that home would have been a giant mistake.
Keep your debt payments below 40% of your take home pay. If you can’t do that and also get the house you want, keep saving or turn your sights lower.
8) Flipping Requires a Lot of Sweat Equity; It’s Definitely Not Just Pure Profit and Reality Show Fun
One potential avenue of home ownership that Sarah and I discussed was the idea of “flipping” a house. This was during a period where the concept of “flipping” a house–buying it, putting some work into it, then selling it for a profit–was very much in vogue.
It can be a moneymaker, for sure, but it’s also a very big time sink. You are going to be putting a lot of hours into such a project if you take it on, and if the house you’re flipping is also your primary residence during the process, you’re adding even more challenge to the equation.
My later experience with house renovation and flipping taught me a simple lesson: it can go well and be profitable if you know what you’re doing and have some good carpentry and handyman skills. If you’re lacking those, it’s not going to go well–you’re going to vastly increase your invested hours and vastly cut back on your profits.
9) You Are Going to Want a Healthy Amount of Cash in Hand When You Move
In the months prior to your move, don’t just throw everything into a down payment or into closing costs. Keep some aside for the inevitable bundle of expenses that you’re going to discover when you move in.
You’re going to find that you need lots of things, particularly items that were previously provided by your landlord. You’ll need a mower (or a mowing service). You’ll need lots of various tools. You’ll probably need some furniture–even if you buy super low-end stuff, you’ll still need some. You may need appliances. You may need little things for minor home repairs. You may need food and beverages for the people who help you move and settle in.
Those costs are going to add up, no matter how you slice it. It’s a bad move to start off your new period of home ownership with a lot of credit card debt.
So, during those last few months in the apartment, direct some of your savings to be used for those expenses when you first move in. You’ll be incredibly glad you did, because if you don’t, your credit card will melt.
10) ‘Fill’ Rooms With Very Basic Furnishings and Upgrade Slowly From There
Your first home will probably be substantially larger than your apartment and you’ll find that, when you move in, some of the rooms are awfully… sparse. It will be very tempting to go fill them up with furnishings, particularly places to sit.
There’s nothing wrong with that temptation. Just do it smartly.
I highly recommend starting with very low-end furnishings, even secondhand stuff, to fill spaces in your rooms. This will enable you to eliminate that “empty” feeling as inexpensively as humanly possible.
Then, after that, slowly upgrade the furnishings as you see fit and as necessary. If you do it slowly, you can do it out of pocket, without the added expense of credit card interest and without putting your emergency fund or other savings at risk.
11) Adopt a ‘One in, One out’ Policy From Day One
Once you’ve settled in just a little and have purchased a few true essentials for your home–basic furnishings and such–adopt a “one in, one out” policy for everything in your home. If you bring in an object of some type, you need to get rid of an object of the same type by selling it.
If you bring in some clothing, you have to get rid of some clothing. If you bring in a book, you have to sell a book. If you bring in a gadget, you have to get rid of a gadget.
Seem strict? Well, the problem is that if you don’t do this, you’ll rather quickly fill up all of the additional space in this home and you’ll be just as cluttered as you were before you moved. You’ll also find yourself in a position where it is much more difficult to move, to rearrange things, and to nave a non-cluttered home, and you’ll be spending lots of time on maintaining your stuff and finding individual things you need.
Another big benefit of such a policy is that it keeps money in your pocket. You’ll become very selective with the things that you buy. You’ll spend less overall, and when you do spend money, it will be for quality upgrades, not just mass quantities of stuff.
Keep things simple. Stick with a one in, one out policy. I certainly wish we had done so.
12) Put in the Effort to Know All of Your Neighbors
This is a final, but powerful tip for any new homeowner. Get to know all of the people in your neighborhood–at least within several houses of your own. Stop by if you see them outside and introduce yourself. Once you’re settled in, invite some of them over for a cookout in the back yard. Built at least a minor positive relationship with them.
How is this beneficial? A neighbor is a person who can lend a helping hand in a pinch. You can borrow things from them when needed. They can keep an eye on your house when you’re traveling. They can be a friendly face and a conversation partner at home and can even become a close friend. Of course, you’ll reciprocate these things, but the cost for you is much lower than the value of the benefit you receive.
Your neighbors are a lending library, a source for advice, an intruder alarm, a package retrieval aid, an emergency babysitter, a potential lifelong friend, and so much more. Don’t let that slip by just because of your own busy schedule.
Final Thoughts
In various ways, we bungled almost all of these strategies while purchasing, moving into, and settling into our current home. They weren’t conscious mistakes, just errors made because we didn’t yet know what we were doing.
After years as a homeowner, I’ve managed to overcome and fix some of these things. We eventually built good relationships with our neighbors. Our house is cluttered, but we have a “one in, one out” system that’s largely in place now. Our house is wholly paid for (though we could have paid for it much sooner).
If I had it to do all over again, though, I wouldn’t try to fix these things afterwards. I’d try to do them right from the start. I hope you’ll do the same.
Trent Hamm is a personal finance writer at TheSimpleDollar.com. After pulling himself out of his own financial crisis, he founded the site in late 2006 to help others through financially difficult situations; today the site has become a finance, insurance, and retirement resource. Contact Trent at trent AT the simple dollar DOT com; please send site inquiries to inquiries AT the simple dollar DOT com. Image by Malte Mueller via Getty.
It’s becoming abundantly clear that the lessons of the cord cutting age are not sinking in at Comcast/NBC Universal headquarters. Last Friday night, NBC aired the Olympic opening ceremonies, but spent the weekend being mercilessly ridiculed on social media for a broadcast that was not only showy and hollow, but absolutely slathered with not just ads — but the same ads shown over and over again. Viewers, many of which were already annoyed by NBC’s refusal to show the opening ceremonies live, made their displeasure abundantly clear:
NBC clearly bringing home the gold medal in number of commercials. #Rio2016
In 2011, Comcast agreed to pay $4.4 billion for exclusive US broadcast rights to air the Olympics through 2020. It shelled out another $7.75 billion for the rights for the games until 2032. To begin recouping the costs of this deal, Comcast/NBC was quick to brag about how it nabbed $1.2 billion in national advertising in the games. But lost in this conversation, as usual, was what paying customers actually wanted. What consumers repeatedly told NBC they wanted was less blathering, more live events, and a live broadcast of the opening ceremonies. They got none of those things.
What they got was a one-hour tape delay so NBC could try and shovel as many advertisements at consumers as possible (under the guise of needing to add "context"), and some incoherent rambling from hosts that often went hysterically out of their way to avoid addressing any of the volatile realities surrounding the games in Rio. Previously, NBC execs tried to justify this tone deafness with all manner of excuses, ranging from absurd to relatively insulting:
"The people who watch the Olympics are not particularly sports fans. More women watch the Games than men, and for the women, they’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey. It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and mini-series wrapped into one. And to tell the truth, it has been the complaint of a few sports writers. It has not been the complaint of the vast viewing public."
As the complaints bubbled over among the viewing public, NBC started playing defense, telling industry news outlets like Ad Week that the Rio games ad load is "very similar" to the 2010 London Olympics; it’s the public perception that’s to blame:
"As we did for London, we inserted a few more commercials earlier in the show so that we can afford time later in the show to present as much of the ceremony as we can, including every single country in the Parade of Nations," said an NBC Sports spokesperson. "Given that the commercial load was very similar to London, we believe that consumption habits, such as binge-watching and ‘marathoning,’ have changed perceptions among the viewing audience regarding commercials."
That’s NBC admitting that modern consumers are finding over-advertising and other legacy cable habits more annoying than ever. Something NBC should have already known as consumers slowly but surely either cut the cable cord or trim back on their viewing packages because the game has changed. And what did NBC do armed with this information? It doubled down on being annoying. The result was a 30+% decline in the 18-49 demographic, with people trying harder than ever to explore Olympics streaming alternatives (or even use a VPN to watch live international streams if necessary).
This isn’t just inflexibility and tone deafness, it’s almost a celebration of it. And it’s just one more example of how the traditional cable and broadcast sector isn’t just ready for real disruption, it’s absolutely begging for it.
Meet Coleman Sweeney, a natural born douchebag. He went through life being rude to everyone, except for the guys who make tasteless bumper stickers. But even he wasn’t evil enough to keep his body to himself. Thomas Jane stars in this strange PSA for Donate Life.
The path for SaaS domination of a market segment has historically followed one of two routes: bringing previously offline workflows online, or moving on-premise software processes online.
In short, SaaS would take over segments that previously were not SaaSified. As hotbeds of net new SaaS activity consolidate into market winners, widespread innovation within a segment gives way to incremental innovation. The focus of entrepreneurs and investors mostly moves on.
Yet, the current wave of HR SaaS innovators entering the market over the past few years is proving that there can be more to the story even after a segment has been SaaSified. As we assess the market, product, competitive and talent dynamics, we see a perfect storm of enabling characteristics pushing beyond incremental innovation into the widespread disruption of the firmly established HR SaaS category.
We believe HR SaaS is one of the first clear cases of a third, newer path of broad SaaS innovation — next-generation SaaS (SaaS 2.0) disrupting established previous generations of SaaS (SaaS 1.0). HR 2.0’s success, playing out over the coming years, will be a catalyst for increasing entrepreneurial and VC attention into the platform potential of this third path. We will begin to see waves of future SaaS innovation focused on attacking established SaaS categories.
As the poster child for SaaS 2.0, how successful will HR innovators be? Our rough assessment of Next World Capital’s HR Innovators NextScape reveals a few $100 million of the $13-15 billion of annual HR software spend shifting to HR 2.0 innovators in 2016 (see the graphic at the end of the article). Over time, the strengthening force of key enabling dynamics discussed below will enable HR 2.0 innovators to battle for nearly all of the HR software market.
Market dynamics — the shift from a goods-centric economy to a talent-centric economy
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), manufacturing jobs in the U.S. peaked in summer 1977 at 19.5 million, then gradually waned over the next 23 years. Measured by decline in manufacturing employment, the full-scale transition from a goods-centric economy to an information or talent-centric economy occurred over the last decade, with manufacturing jobs dropping below 12 million by 2009 and remaining roughly at these levels today.
Underscoring this shift, the cost of talent per unit of economic output has risen by a factor of nearly 3x from an indexed value below 40 in 1977 to over 110 today, according to Trading Economics. Said another way, the U.S. economy has firmly progressed to an information economy, where talent has replaced goods as the most significant and important determining factor.
The U.S. economy has firmly progressed to an information economy, where talent has replaced goods.
The past generation of HR SaaS platforms were all founded before the absolute shift to a talent economy began. They were largely products of a transitional economy where talent was but one piece of the equation.
HR 1.0 placed a premium on administrative versus talent-centric value propositions, i.e. moving offline tasks online, automating processes and delivering compliance. But with the transition to a talent-centric economy, the market now has moved beyond a focus on administration and process. It desires a new breed of HR SaaS, one which aligns business goals with talent versus aligning business goals with process.
A few examples help highlight the shift. HR 1.0 facilitates online application submission, progress tracking and record keeping; HR 2.0 facilitates locating, attracting and hiring the best applicants. HR 1.0 facilitates user-friendly, templated and streamlined performance reviews and company measurements; HR 2.0 focuses on growth, collaboration and goal alignment through review and feedback mechanisms. HR 1.0 enables users to query records and report on KPIs; HR 2.0 enables users to drive decision-making based on past results and, over time, promises to leverage data science and deep learning techniques to recommend, even automate, decision making.
Product dynamics — a focus on millennials
In 2015, millennials became the largest generation in our workforce per BLS. It’s millennials penetrating middle management on their way to upper management, it’s millennials responsible for purchasing decisions and it’s millennials who must be the product focus for software developers. But millennials, the first completely online generation, prioritize specific elements in their software that, coincidentally, are not often focuses within older software offerings.
Clean and performant user experiences, intuitive processes that require little training, mobile-first, collaboration-first, try before you buy/freemium, APIs and integrations, powerful analytics, flexibility/configurability and consumerized interfaces can all be buzzwords that are thrown around when describing software.
But for millennials, many of these traits are table stakes for positive software experiences. HR 2.0 innovators are effectively exploiting perceived weaknesses in 1.0 offerings as millennials look not so much for one single buzzword but rather for an overall software experience with which they relate.
Competitive dynamics – a triple opportunity
Before SaaS 1.0 arrived, only the most mission-critical client-server software made economic sense for mid-market buyers given the high up-front costs. SaaS 1.0 offerings initially battled in this largely greenfield mid-market. Here, they bulked up with functionality and enterprise chops before eventually moving up weight classes into the enterprise, where client-server offerings dominated. As successful SaaS 1.0 vendors increasingly focus up market, emerging SaaS 2.0 innovators emerge in their wake to take on a somewhat orphaned mid-market.
HR software has followed this playbook with many HR 1.0 platforms almost exclusively focused on the enterprise opportunity. Yet, HR 2.0 innovators enjoy a second beneficial competitive reality. In 2012, the dominant HR 1.0 vendors were acquired — Taleo by Oracle, SuccessFactors by SAP and Kenexa by IBM. As a result, HR 2.0 is stepping into a landscape largely devoid of independent 1.0 vendors.
2.0 offerings, on the other hand, uniquely enable organizations to attract, hire and maximize talent.
“No one ever gets fired for buying IBM” is a commonly heard phrase with the general idea being that buying servers, storage or even commodity applications from an established platform company is safe. These technologies are not a competitive differentiator for the buyer’s business, so why take risks on upstarts? HR2.0 aims to flip this script.
HR 2.0 argues that Oracle, SAP and IBM are not a fit in a talent-centric economy precisely because they are not aggressively advancing innovation and differentiation. 2.0 offerings, on the other hand, uniquely enable organizations to attract, hire and maximize talent, a central competitive advantage in today’s economy.
Talent dynamics — strong and crystalizing
BetterWorks, Checkr, Culture Amp, Greenhouse, Grovo, Gusto, Justworks, Lever, Namely, Reflektive, SmartRecruiters and Zenefits are a few examples of HR 2.0 innovators that received Series A financings between 2012 and 2015. It’s no surprise that these emerging companies, which have forward-looking entrepreneurs and strong VCs, have recently stepped in. Together, the enabling dynamics and entrepreneurial community have converged to usher in the first widespread wave of SaaS 2.0 innovation against an established SaaS category.
At Next World, we actively track 80+ HR SaaS players within our HR Innovators’ NextScape. This NextScape is not exhaustive, but rather focuses exclusively on players that are driving the HR 2.0 wave. We break down the market into the core HR functional areas of talent acquisition, talent maximization and HR administration.
With innovators still commanding a small fraction of HR spend and new market entrants continuously emerging, we are perhaps in the second inning of this wave. Given the sheer breadth of activity, consolidation is inevitable. New market entrants must carefully consider the mission criticality and depth of workflow and use cases that they subsume. However, the foundations are in place for a new breed of enduring HR SaaS platforms. Their continued momentum will bolster the entrepreneurial community’s willingness to attack other established SaaS categories.
I’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday, August 10, to hold a night of pitches and open mic shenanigans so bring your guitar and pitch deck. The event will be at O’Toole’s 4796 W Broad St, right off I-270.
We’ll start at 7 p.m. sharp with pitches, so get there after work. And at 8 p.m. we’ll have an open stage with live music – I’m going to play with my friend Rick so bring your phones – and networking.
We could also use a few sponsors for beer and what not. Get in touch if you’re interested. Also if you can think of any cool people who’d like to be judges, please let me know at john@techcrunch.com.
Special thanks to the folks at Kinsta for grabbing the first round of beers!
Himmler inspects a prisoner of war camp in Russia, circa 1941. (Image: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)
Work diaries chronicling the daily activities of Hitler’s henchman Heinrich Himmler have surfaced in Russian military archives. The recovered texts speak volumes about a key figure behind the Holocaust—a man who could orchestrate mass killings at one moment and then casually switch to mundane family matters the next.
Three books consisting of a thousand pages of Heinrich Himmler’s wartime diaries were uncovered by Russian historians in the small town of Podolsk. The texts, which read more like a daily agenda than a personal diary, were written by Himmler’s assistants. They had languished on a shelf for 70 years after being seized by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War. The diaries correspond to the years 1938, 1943, and 1944, which complements previously discovered diaries. The texts, which the German Historical Institute of Moscow describes as “a document of unusual historical significance,” will be make available to the public next year.
Damian Imoehl, a reporter for the German magazine Bild, managed to get a copy of the diaries, and they offer deep—and often disturbing—insights into the daily life of the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.
During the Second World War, Himmler formed the dreaded Einsatzgruppen and oversaw the construction of extermination camps. His role in the Holocaust cannot be understated, having directed the killing of some six million Jews and other ethnic groups during the war. But as his diary makes clear, he went about his daily business in a ruthless yet cavalier manner.
Himmler killed himself at the end of the war, and avoided standing trial. (Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild)
When visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, he “took a snack in the cafe of the SS Casino.” Later, when visiting the Sobibór extermination camp in occupied Poland, he witnessed the gassing of 400 Jewish women and girls. That same day he attended a banquet with SS men. Another chilling entry reads, “Landing in Warsaw. Reception by a senior colonel. Lunch at the SS. Drive through the ghetto. Take inventory.”
Writing in The Times, Imoehl notes: “One day he starts with breakfast and a massage from a personal doctor, then he rings up his wife and daughter in the south of Germany and after that he decides to have ten men killed or visits a concentration camp.” In another excerpt, Himmler passes on instructions to equip the Auschwitz concentration camp with guard dogs capable of ripping their victims “to shreds.”
At the same time, Himmler was an attentive husband and father—oh, except for that affair he was having with his secretary. As Imoehl wrote, “He takes care of his comrades and friends,” adding, “The most interesting thing for me is that combination.”
Indeed, it’s that combination—a genocidal killer at one moment and a caring friend the next—that truly encapsulates what Hannah Arendt described as “the banality of evil.”
While there is a plethora of videos showing how common centerfire ammunition is made, 22LR and similar rimfire ammunition has been kept relatively close to the chest. CCI had a video out a few years ago, but it disappeared from their official YouTube outlet and was not saved anywhere that I remember. The general process […]
The MySQL Document Store functionality allows developers to use a relation database with or without SQL (structured Query Language), also known as NoSQL. The example in this blog is hopefully a simple look at this new feature of MySQL. The example data used is from JSONStudio.com and is a JSON formatted data set for US zip (postal) codes (656K compressed). So download your copy of this data set and lets get to work.
Create a collection
Collections are tables and below we create a collection name ‘zip‘ in the test database in the Python dialect.
mysqlsh -u root -p --py test Creating an X Session to root@localhost:33060/test Enter password: Default schema `test` accessible through db.
Welcome to MySQL Shell 1.0.4 Development Preview
Copyright (c) 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Type '\help', '\h' or '\?' for help.
Currently in Python mode. Use \sql to switch to SQL mode and execute queries. mysql-py> db.createCollection("zip")
Is it there?
As soon as most of use create a table we want to see if it is there.
So it is there. But what is the underlying structure of this table. Switch to SQL dialect (or open a mysql client.
mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE zip; +-------+--------------------------------+ | Table | Create Table | +-------+--------------------------------+ | zip | CREATE TABLE `zip` ( `doc` json DEFAULT NULL, `_id` varchar(32) GENERATED ALWAYS AS (json_unquote(json_extract(`doc`,'$._id'))) STORED NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 | +-------+--------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql>
If you peeked at the zip code file you downloaded, you may have noticed that it has an _id field already. But what if your data set has no _id or you want to use another key/value pair from the data as an index? Simply use a stored generated column on the field of your choice. Remember good indexing practices still count as the underlying relational database still has to keep the infrastructure underneath up to date.
Loading data
I will skip over the loading of the zip code data (I can address that in a later blog post if there is any interest. For now lets take it as a given that the data has been moved into the new collection.
Finding a Rainbow
So lets look for a particular zip code. For out data set the zip code corresponds with _id field.And remember that this column is a generated column using that field from the JSON document.
Lets look for the state of Texas, or TX in the JSON data. Previous we had the _ID field as a materialized column extracted from the JSON data. Now we are asking the MySQL server to read all the records and return the ones meeting the criteria. This does perform a full table scale of the data (not as efficient as as index) but, thanks to the relatively small amount of records, it does return fairly quickly.
. { "_id": "79935", "city": "EL PASO", "loc": [ -106.330258, 31.771847 ], "pop": 20465, "state": "TX" }, { "_id": "79936", "city": "EL PASO", "loc": [ -106.30159, 31.767655 ], "pop": 52031, "state": "TX" } ] 1676 documents in set (0.06 sec)
mysql-py>
Wrap Up
So now we can create a collection and search it. But what happens when we add records and especially records without our index-able key? That will be covered in another blog soon. PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN
via Planet MySQL MySQL Document Store — The NoSQL Zipcodes
Fourteen skeletons of victims killed by earthquake at Cave dwelling F4 at Lajiia site excavated in 2000. (Image: Cai Linhai)
Chinese legend tells of a great flood, and how Emperor Yu drove back the floodwaters, founding the Xia dynasty and giving rise to Chinese civilization. Now an international scientific collaboration has discovered the first geological evidence that such a flood may actually have happened—and the founding of the Xia dynasty may have happened hundreds of years later than historians previously thought. They describe their findings in a new paper in Science.
“Great floods occupy a central place in some of the world’s oldest stories,” the University of Washington geologist David Montgomery wrote in an accompanying commentary on the new findings. “Emperor Yu’s flood now stands as another such story potentially rooted in geologic events…. How many other ancient stories of intriguing disasters might just have more than a grain of truth to them?”
There are different versions of the Great Flood myth, handed down through oral tradition for hundreds of years before finally being written down around 1000 BC. But all feature the heroic Yu, who figured out how to dredge and channel all the flooded rivers and tributaries to control the floodwaters—a task that purportedly took decades to accomplish, even with the help of a dragon to dig channels and a giant turtle to haul mud. (Myths have their fanciful elements.) This led to him becoming emperor and establishing the Xia dynasty in China.
The Jishi Gorge on the edge of the Tibetan Peninsula. (Image: Wu Qinlong)
Whether or not the Great Flood actually happened has been a longstanding bone of contention among scholars. After all, the historical record may have included the story of the flood and Emperor Yu’s role in driving back the waters as propaganda to justify imperial rule. History is written by the victors. This new geological discovery is the first real evidence for such a flood taking place.
In a press conference yesterday, lead author Wu Qinglong of Peking University in Beijing described the accidental discovery of unusual sediment in the Jishi Gorge of the Yellow River. He hypothesized that it might be linked with the great flood and the founding the Xi dynasty. It was Wu who brought together the members of the collaboration, hailing from different disciplines, to find evidence to bolster that hypothesis.
According to co-author Darryl Granger, a geologist at Purdue University, they found that evidence by mapping and dating the distinctive sediments deposited downstream from Jishi Gorge. They also examined bones from skeletons of children who died in an earthquake, found at the archaeological site of Lajia. Radiocarbon analysis of the skeletons gave a date of around 1922 BC.
From this, the collaborators were able to reconstruct a sequence of likely events occurring around this time along the Yellow River. First, there was a devastating earthquake that caused a massive landslide. This dammed the Yellow River in the Jishi Gorge, located right at the edge of the Tibetan plateau. According to Granger, quake-caused landslides are quite common to this area. The resulting lake eventually spilled over the top of the dam of debris, weakening it until it collapsed catastrophically, sending a deluge of water downriver and flooding the lowlands.
The houses of that period would have been more like caves dug into windblown sediment, according to co-author David Cohen, an archaeologist at National Taiwan University, which collapsed when the earthquake hit, killing the people inside.
“We know [the earthquake] happened the same year [as the flood] because fissures in the ground caused by the earthquake are filled with flood sediment, as are pottery jars [at the site,” said Granger. “So the people killed in the quake and the flood are intimately related.” Had it been more than a year, the annual rains would have kicked in, filling those fissures and jars with finer sediment.
The flooding would have significant enough to devastate the region. In the Book of Documents, Yu describes the flooding:
“The inundating waters seemed to assail the heavens, and in their extent embraced the hills and overtopped the great mounds, so that the people were bewildered and overwhelmed.
That’s in line with the Chinese collaboration’s estimates based on their mapping and analysis of sediment the site. Granger estimated that the flood waters may have risen 38 meters (around 124 feet) above the usual river level—about one-third the height of the Empire State Building, per Cohen—with flow rates between 300,000 to 500,000 cubic meters (79 million to 132 million gallons) of water per second. “That’s equivalent to the largest flood registered on the Amazon River, and the largest known flood on Earth in the last 10,000 years,” he said. The pile of debris that dammed the river would have been somewhere between the height of the Three Gorges Dam that spans the Yangtze River and the Hoover Dam in the US.
This timeline also coincides with a major cultural transition, as the late Neolithic Era gave way to the Early Bronze Age, although Cohen describes this as more of an interesting parallel, with no evidence as yet for direct causation. There is evidence that the system of smaller chiefdoms in place before that time suddenly collapsed, and after a transitional period, larger cities, with more complex administrative structures, a writing system, and bronze manufacturing emerged around 1900 BC.
In that sense, “The story of Yu taming the flood is the story of a new political order emerging out of the chaos of the flood,” said Cohen.