Category: 401k and Personal Finance

My old daughter Serenity is a sweet girl. She is so sweet so that she doesn’t like competition. I get it I don’t like competition either but if I don’t compete I probably won’t be here. Lots of smart kids in my class of probably 40 in the village elementary school in China in late 70s/early 80s: only two attended college (I was one of the two). Another two attended technical / vacacional school, one became nurse, another eventually became entrepreneur and I heard he is quite successful.

Back to Serenity. She played basketballs in last few years, but again competition is not really her thing. I explained to coach that she is not afraid of competition, or game but it’s not really her nature. So here is the spelling bee competition, I asked her to participate, and she said she already did it when she was 4th grade. Anyway, she is 6th grader now, and I offered rewards for her participation, she said she only need to watch the “home economics” at Hulu (ABC 🙂

The self checkout at grocery store and warehouses. Personally I think Costco $COST got it right, they have plenty of staffs to assist: for scanning as well as alcohol overwrite. Sam’s Club has one staff helping multiple lanes, but it also has a #scanandgo option in its app. /1

The scanning feature in the app works fairly well in my opinion. Local grocery stores Dierbergs and Schnucks have self checkout lanes too. I go to Schnucks more often and have used it’s self checkout many times: and yesterday evening I made a blunder as I had too many items /2

Their self scanning system was not designed to handle more than 10 items, also sometimes it’s hard to scan the bakery 🧁 items in plastic box, as well as meat 🥩 items /3

Now I recall Walmart $WMT has this self checkout feature too. It works fairly well when I used it recently (fewer than 10 items). Last but not least, it doesn’t appear that the self checkout is replacing cashier’s job with machine. For example Costco again, they are relentless/4

On customer service and they have plenty of staffs to cover the self checkout lanes. And I overheard two people talking their hourly pay is $22 per hour. This number is in the high end in St. Louis Missouri /5

Full disclosure: I have some $COST and $WMT shares.

感觉这个市场还是有些泡沫的. EV 就不说了：昨天傍晚🌆的时候开车时我的七岁小女儿说看到一个Tesla. I was thinking buy a share of $TSLA just now, but I changed to $F instead [呲牙] || Separately I noticed NerdWallet the personal finance / credit card 💳 bonus website went public last week. I worked in the credit card rewards space in the past and I used to get some sign on bonus. But the credit card bonus is a bit like snake oil. But it cannot compare to ev, green, esg, climate action and space x etc.

Btw, some engineering blogs from NerdWallet that I like.

VersionAlchemy: Tracking row changes with SQLAlchemy (VersionAlchemy at GitHub; also the original SQLAlchemy website. Note the former is based on the latter.)

Building a product platform at NerdWallet – Part 1

Building a product platform at NerdWallet – Part 2

For most Americans, Zoom meeting probably becomes the hottest potato in last few weeks, as we saw the pandemic situation got worse: New York, New Orleans, Detroit, Dallas, and so on. I started to using Zoom about a year ago when I started my new job, and the product experience was good. Note I have used many meeting software in the past, from Webex, Skype, GoToMeeting to google hangout, Slack, Microsoft Teams. Before Zoom GoToMeeting was my favorite. Skype probably is the worst. This is not a scientific comparison, mostly my gut feeling. Zoom is pretty standard in technology companies as well, even for interviewing (no more airplane ride, and uber ride, and hotel stay). Couple more points on Zoom. Zoom is not perfect in terms of security and privacy. And yours truly owns a few shares of Zoom. Last but not least, I do like Zoom’s founder, Eric S. Yuan (wiki English; wiki Chinese). It looks like he came to the US the same year I came. He is very much grounded person, even though is a billionaire now. I think he came from a humble background in China, which is common in China in those days (he was born in 1970, one year earlier than me).

But my point here is while Zoom is important, we should not equivalent zoom = learning or communicating or working. For that I am very much appreciative of this tweet by @DHH.

A more important task, in nowadays’ always-on culture, is the basics: reading, writing, thinking and so on. Otherwise we will end like this. Everyone makes mistakes, my point is not that Brian Williams makes stupid math mistakes. It’s more the issue two people talking about the talking points without realizing that their math is totally wrong. This is more issue in the America right now: the guy or the girl who have the microphone (in some sort of public facing position) usually don’t know what they are talking about. If in doubt, just look at the white house.

Last but not least, here is a stimulus check calculator developed by OmniCalculator.

Stimulus Check Calculator

Hank: about Hank Paulson, available at Netflix

Too Big To Fail: on Amazon Prime

I am only curious about Wall Street and movies by Michael Lewis

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI was thinking about this as we are at least expecting one month of distance learning for our two kids (K and 4th grade) due to the lockdown of Coronavirus pandemic. Ladue School use google suite and I think they may use google classroom for some or most teacher / students interactions. I was thinking about Zoom as Zoom recently announced free usage K-12 due to the pandemic. Many tech companies have similar initiatives. Not sure how my two kids will handle this. They are not super confident or outspoken in the class: I was hoping they could be a bit more confident (or a lot more) and be a bit more assertive.

This remind me one thing when I was already graduating from middle school. I called my classmate, at that time it’s not the direct phone, it’s like operator assisted phone. The classmate came online, and I did not know what to say (I was shy at the time too), and just freaked out in the end. I don’t think I would freak out in person. So there is my 2 cents on the distance or online learning. It may create some challenges to students who may not be comfortable with microphone or public speaking. For myself, I tried to improve myself on this aspect, I made some progress: and it was still working in progress. 🙂

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe news coming from Italy is heartbreaking: Italy lost nearly 800 people in one day due to Coronavirus. Overall Italy lost more people than the epicenter of outbreak in China’s Hubei province (Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei, with 11 millions people). I think Italy has a population comparable to Hubei’s. In my high school years, a while ago, I watched quite a bit Italian soccer league, from Maradona to other Italian and International players. Milan has two teams: AC and Inter. And I know a little about Italy from the world history class. They are some explanations of the higher death rate in Italy. I hope things can get better from here. Besides the difference in terms of social distancing and lock down, Wuhan / Hubei did have one advantage that Italy does not have: that is China poured help from many other provinces: in total there were more than 40,000 doctors and nurses coming from all over China to help, that was about 10% of the relevant healthcare resources in China. Here is an article talking about the people in Wuhan sending off the medic teams leaving Wuhan when the mission is completed.  This kind of arrangement is difficult to accomplish in Italy, if not all possible. But note China did send some help in terms of advisors (doctors) and medical supplies to Italy, Iran, Spain and other countries (Serbia, Czech), also neighboring Asian countries too.