Personal blog on early retirement and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Are you tired of your marketing efforts falling flat? Do you want to know the secrets to create compelling ads that actually convert? Look no further than “Cashvertising” by Drew Eric Whitman.
As a seasoned copywriter with over a decade of experience, Whitman knows a thing or two about crafting messages that resonate with consumers. And lucky for us, he’s shared his expertise in “Cashvertising”, a must-read for anyone looking to up their advertising game.
The six W’s are six questions — who, what, when, where, why and how — that you ask about a problem before you try to solve it. They come out of journalism, where a reporter has to establish the facts of a story, and they got adopted into continuous improvement work for exactly the same reason: you cannot fix something you haven’t described properly.
I spent most of my working life as an operations research analyst, building models for manufacturing and supply chain problems. And the honest lesson from all of it is that the modeling was rarely the hard part. Getting a straight answer to these six questions was the hard part.
Continue reading “The 6 W’s Explained: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How”
Mathematical programming is a field of mathematics that deals with the optimization of complex systems and processes. It has a rich history that dates back to the 1940s when George Dantzig, an American mathematician, developed the simplex method for solving linear programming problems. Since then, it has grown into a vast and dynamic discipline that has found applications in various fields such as finance, transportation, engineering, and operations research.
In this blog post, I will explore the origins of mathematical programming, provide an example of a problem that can be tackled and list some classical problems. I will also discuss some of the software products used in mathematical programming, both open-source and commercial.
Early retirement extreme is the name of both a book and a philosophy — Jacob Lund Fisker’s take on FIRE, built around a savings rate so aggressive it makes the rest of the FIRE community look relaxed by comparison. The core pitch: cut spending down to something close to a student budget, save the rest, and you can be done working in roughly five to seven years instead of the standard four decades. I retired early myself, on a much less extreme version of this math, and I’ve got genuinely mixed feelings about ERE — some of it I think is the most useful idea in the whole FIRE space, and some of it I think oversells how many people can actually live it.
Continue reading “Early Retirement Extreme: What I Actually Think”
Not an Italian luxury car.
No. Pareto was the Italian economist that came up with the 80/20 rule. He figured out 20% of the richest families held 80% of the wealth (this is probably worse nowadays). More generally stated, the 80/20 rule says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs, you spend 80% of your time doing 20% of your tasks, etc, etc.
