I suspect that the 'calculator age' has caused kids (and kids that have now grown up to be parents) and maybe educators to over-value an increase in significant digits in calculations. It's interesting that the method of multiplication illustrated in the article is referred to as 'new' since when you use a slide rule, you operate in this way anyway. And to echo Hans Bethe, this is often "good enough".
If it makes you feel any better, the guy is talking about 1982. If you were 'in' to computers at all as a hobbyist during that era, it typically meant low-level tinkering. Not at all unusual. My own personal stories from that period sound today like I was a young engineering genius, but I wasn't. The same kids who learn Rails now were the ones doing assembly back then. And plain ol' luck is still as relevant today. And, of course, persistence.
Assembly was how you coded many applications back in the 1970s and into 1980s, and tasks such as displaying output onto a serial terminal console could require as much as fifty lines of assembler on some systems.
On a "nicer-architecture" box and OS and while still coding assembler, it was still ten or so lines of assembler with a system call for the core of the output.
Why assembler? Well, you either didn't have a higher-level language around, or a C or Fortran compiler could cost you US$5,000 for a license, and US$36,000 for a memory upgrade from 4 to 8 megabytes.
Modern environments and tools are vastly more capable. And cheaper. And the tasks and applications that are now ubiquitous are massively more advanced. Debugging state by reading the front-panel accumulator lights (because you couldn't get the debugger to work) Stinks Large.
Would I trade knowing assembler? Donno. Probably. I just don't code assembler that much any more. Modern languages are vastly more capable. What you can do now with a couple-dozen lines of Objective C or Ruby code (and all the underpinnings) is massive in comparison.
Yeah, I caught the 'tort reform' misdirection as well. Also, I think earns north of $170,000 a year, which made his turning down the insurance 'on principle' a bit ridiculous.
Something to add to the discussion: She says "my recent M.R.I. cost $1,300 at the “retail” rate, while the rate negotiated by the insurance company was $700."
I have insurance and the insurance company (BCBS) will only pay what it thinks is appropriate for a service, not some negotiated rate. That is, if the doctor, hospital, or lab says that it costs $1,300, but the insurance company wants to pay $700, I'm stuck for the other $600. The result is that in order to meet the high deductible (at which point I no longer have to pay out of pocket like this), I pay way beyond the amount of the deductible since only the approved rates are applied. In practice, I end up paying out 175% or more of the deductible amount.
I suspect that our experience will soon become the norm, if its not already.
Also, this is of course over and above what my company pays in premiums. Altogether it is a significant amount of money for a family of four that has no major medical problems. For a small business, the overall burden is problematic.
No it isn't. Different service organizations have wildly different $/headcount ratios with wildly different concentrations of clients and wildly different turnover rates.
A gigantic slice of the economy is services work. This blog post is not that slice's Rosetta Stone.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This kind of analysis is required for any service business. Having done so for our company, I have the following observations on 'What to do?":
Scale -- Bingo! The goal is to make the fixed overhead (incl employees) an increasingly smaller percentage of revenue. But to handle the increased revenue (ie, workload) you have to concentrate on increasing efficiency/productivity. This has a lot of influence on decisions about process. Obviously, the more routine those processes are, the cheaper (and more easily replaced) the labor can be. Also, if the work is done under a fixed price contract, you can achieve a greater effective hourly rate if you are efficient and manage risk well.
Charge more -- "charging more pushes away your existing client base". This is not such a bad thing if you have your eye on 'scaling' (ie bigger projects). Bigger clients have deeper pockets (although they also have more unique needs, which introduces more risk).
Build a product -- See Nassim Taleb's discussion about 'scalable work' in "The Black Swan". The odds aren't good that this will pay off.
I'd add to that having already been paid for it and needing to hand off to others to maintain. I guarantee that the next project you do will be at a whole new level.
I'm sorry I don't have time to go through your app more, but here some things that occurred to me (I have 17 month old and 3 yr old, so just out of your target):
1) Try to collect data and offer up suggestions
2) Try to get a good Facebook presence. (etsy.com). Your target market lives on Facebook now.
3) Can you email your registry?
Not to mention that they can inherit 'assets' other than wealth: connections, experience, confidence, cushion, as well as less consequential financial support that just makes their lives a bit more fulfilling.
I suspect that the 'calculator age' has caused kids (and kids that have now grown up to be parents) and maybe educators to over-value an increase in significant digits in calculations. It's interesting that the method of multiplication illustrated in the article is referred to as 'new' since when you use a slide rule, you operate in this way anyway. And to echo Hans Bethe, this is often "good enough".