How We Fail: Middle America’s Inability to Gauge Wealth

We’re taught to think of wealth in absolute terms. But doing so prevents us from understanding the relative difference in the costs of living between ourselves and the fantastically over compensated.

Instead, we’ve got to think of wealth in relative terms.

You know what stuff costs you relative to your salary. What you don’t know is what stuff would cost you if you earned double (half), triple (1/3), ten times (10%), one hundred times (1%) your current salary.

So, I did the math for you.

If you earn $50,000 a year, gas costs you $4 a gallon. If you earn $5 million a year, gas costs just 4 cents a gallon. Relatively speaking, why would the rich care if it goes up a dollar a gallon. To the wealthy, that’s only a penny more.

That Harley you want? $20k. A $5M man pays just $200.

That $400,000 dream house you’re looking at? Super affordable at $40,000.

Why’d I pick $5M to compare? Because the CEOs of 171 publicly traded companies all earn at least $5M a year in 2010.

The best-compensated CEO earned $84.5M. Relative to someone earning $50,000 a year, he pays 2/10ths of one cent per gallon of gas. This guy will only start to feel your pain when gas reaches $2000/gallon! But of course, he’s an insider sitting on boards of directors and leveraging his obscene salary to build more, so his wealth has ballooned beyond imagination long before that’s happened. Meanwhile, you’re still waiting on that cost of living adjustment that adds $85/month to your takehome.

PS. You’re what we refer to as the middle class.

Add MySQL to terminal shell in Mac OS X

Mac OS X 10.6 snow leopard uses the bash shell by default. If you install MySQL from the disk image (dmg) from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/, you can make it easy to access the mysql binary from the command line by adding it to your bash path.

Here’s how:

Open terminal, and type:

echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

This adds the default location of the MySQL binary to your shell environment.

Then, you need to force the system to reload your .bash_profile file. Again, from terminal, enter:

. ~/.bash_profile

You can check your environment variables by typing in terminal:

env

Now, to access MySQL from the command line, you only need enter:

mysql

Install memcache and APC on Mac OS X Server (snow leopard 10.6, Lion 10.7, Mountain Lion 10.8)

Looking to speed up your SocialEngine, Drupal, or other PHP/MySQL web site? The combination of APC and Memcache can really speed up sites based on these platforms. If you’re an admin of a server running Mac OS X Server (10.6), here’s how to install APC and memcache on Mac OS X server:

Download and install MacPorts from http://macports.org.

Continue reading

Install and run Maya 2009 on Snow Leopard

Did you upgrade to Maya 2010 because you found that you couldn’t install Maya 2009 on Snow Leopard 10.6? Are you finding that Maya 2010 on Snow Leopard is flakey, giving you lots of rainbow beach balls? No worries. Ian Herzog over on MacLearning.org has the answer, and it’s simple as tweaking the Maya 2009 installer to work on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Check it out.

HD streaming on Roku fails

Recently my Roku, attached to a new Airport Extreme 802.11n Dual Band II router, started having problems streaming HD content from both Netflix and Amazon video. It also had intermittent quality problems with SD content as well. In the past, it performed flawlessly.

Network tests (ranging from the obligatory Speed Test to ping and traceroute) seemed to work. Hard wiring the Roku to my router didn’t make a difference, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t my router.

But then, amidst my disgust, I remembered something I changed not so long ago… I changed my DNS on the router from InsightBB to Google’s new public DNS. I did a traceroute to Netflix’ content distribution host (traceroute cdn.netflix.com) and lo and behold, I saw that my requests were being routed from Cincinnati to Atlanta to Washington. Oy! (see output below)

traceroute cdn.netflix.com
traceroute: Warning: cdn.netflix.com has multiple addresses; using 208.111.168.7
traceroute to netflix.vo.llnwd.net (208.111.168.7), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1  10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1)  1.243 ms  0.850 ms  0.715 ms
2  74-136-176-1.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.136.176.1)  10.292 ms  7.530 ms  16.441 ms
3  74-128-22-49.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.128.22.49)  14.362 ms  6.205 ms  11.816 ms
4  74-128-19-33.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.128.19.33)  9.586 ms  28.300 ms  40.123 ms
5  74.128.9.233 (74.128.9.233)  14.796 ms  15.419 ms  14.436 ms
6  te-9-2.car1.atlanta2.level3.net (4.71.252.37)  30.392 ms  32.277 ms  32.545 ms
7  ae-72-52.ebr2.atlanta2.level3.net (4.68.103.61)  26.019 ms  23.410 ms  47.447 ms
8  ae-63-60.ebr3.atlanta2.level3.net (4.69.138.4)  37.086 ms  23.687 ms  35.168 ms
9  ae-2.ebr1.washington1.level3.net (4.69.132.86)  41.345 ms  53.264 ms  48.131 ms
10  ae-81-81.csw3.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.138)  38.460 ms  41.296 ms  55.540 ms
11  ae-41-89.car1.washington3.level3.net (4.68.17.135)  43.551 ms  47.695 ms  45.433 ms
12  te3-4-10g.ar2.dca3.gblx.net (64.212.107.61)  39.097 ms  39.573 ms  38.241 ms
13  limelight.tengigabitethernet6-2.ar2.dc3.gblx.net (64.215.26.126)  39.358 ms  42.771 ms  97.640 ms
14  tge9-3.fr3.lga.llnw.net (69.28.171.158)  44.475 ms  44.565 ms  46.384 ms
15  tge1-2.fr4.ord.llnw.net (69.28.171.193)  49.194 ms  50.696 ms  51.392 ms
16  cdn-208-111-168-7.ord.llnw.net (208.111.168.7)  48.165 ms  47.922 ms  45.886 ms
17  * * *

So, I decided to change my DNS to OpenDNS instead (it’s great…try it out! Great set of features). Voila! Now my requests to Netflix’s content delivery network are routed directly to Chicago!

traceroute cdn.netflix.com
traceroute: Warning: cdn.netflix.com has multiple addresses; using 208.111.168.6
traceroute to netflix.vo.llnwd.net (208.111.168.6), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1  10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1)  14.704 ms  1.160 ms  0.603 ms
2  74-136-176-1.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.136.176.1)  12.129 ms  15.592 ms  12.027 ms
3  74-128-22-49.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.128.22.49)  12.657 ms  8.135 ms  13.160 ms
4  74-128-16-133.dhcp.insightbb.com (74.128.16.133)  20.713 ms  9.090 ms  12.973 ms
5  74.128.8.233 (74.128.8.233)  149.239 ms  226.148 ms  239.229 ms
6  4.71.250.29 (4.71.250.29)  20.493 ms  22.167 ms  21.960 ms
7  vlan51.ebr1.chicago2.level3.net (4.69.138.158)  22.478 ms
vlan52.ebr2.chicago2.level3.net (4.69.138.190)  27.008 ms
vlan51.ebr1.chicago2.level3.net (4.69.138.158)  22.622 ms
8  ae-5.ebr2.chicago1.level3.net (4.69.140.193)  27.992 ms  27.293 ms  39.074 ms
9  ae-23-56.car3.chicago1.level3.net (4.68.101.167)  32.908 ms  24.086 ms  20.232 ms
10  glbx-level3-te.chicago1.level3.net (4.68.110.194)  22.624 ms  25.286 ms  25.018 ms
11  64.215.29.250 (64.215.29.250)  39.314 ms  26.946 ms  23.569 ms
12  tge7-1.fr3.ord.llnw.net (69.28.172.41)  25.630 ms  29.050 ms  22.004 ms
13  cdn-208-111-168-6.ord.llnw.net (208.111.168.6)  22.039 ms  22.772 ms  23.608 ms
14  * * *