lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

one relating to, belonging to, or resembling lunatech

Your spending power is less than what you think

Your income is not as much as you think it is.  Let me show you why  using the numbers from the US Census Bureau for Santa Clara county

Median household income (in 2013 dollars) is $91,702 .However, note that this is not the amount that comes into the bank.  The employer deducts the  federal tax from this. A rough estimate of the income tax would be 27% (standard deductions, no dependents). This leaves $66942.46 .

After the Federal government takes its cut, the state government levies the state tax on the income. For California this would be 8%. This leaves $61587.06 .

Now let us calculate how many hours someone needs to work to get $61587.06 into the bank. A workday is 8 hours. Mean travel time to work in(minutes), is 25 minutes. Let us assume that he/she gets 21 days of vacation. This means that including the commute hours, subtracting vacation hours and assuming 5 days a week, he/she work 2069.55 hours annually.

So, your hourly earning rate is 61587.06/2069.55 = $29.75. Read that again: the median hourly earning rate is $29.75 . If you do not account for the tax cut and the time you spend in commute, you will believe that your hourly earning rate is 46.65 . However, that is not what an employee earns.

Next, let us see how this converts to buying power. Suppose someone with median income wants to buy shoes with a sticker price $100. The sales tax in California is 8%. What this means is that he/she end up spending $108 on the shoes. To earn $108 , this person needs to work for 3.6 hours.

I have made a spreadsheet to make this calculation easier. . If you want to figure out your spending power, create a copy of the spreadsheet and fill in the cells with numbers that apply to you.

Some ballpark numbers (for California):

  • if your annual income is $50,000 , you need to work 6.7 hours to spend $100
  • if your annual income is $100,000, you need to work 3.3 hours to spend $100
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Heuristic to determine the safety of your job

Here is a heuristic that can give an idea if your job can be automated and might eventually become non existent :

  • can it be done by a software that has the ability to reason about "maybe" secenario. For example : is it time to replace the light bulbs and in what order should the light bulbs be replaced. Or is this change in the code base dangerous.
  • Can it be done by a software that can read an ordered list or report (for example: a bug list) and create an accurate representation of the project in a human readable (more precisely, a manager readable) format: are there any blockers for the completion or are there any tickets that can delay the whole project

Faster setup of virtualenv with devpi

Setting up the virtualenv can take a significant amount of time because it pulls down packages from PyPI. I was surprised that it does not try to use the locally installed packages. One way to speed up the rebuild is to use a local caching mirror of PyPI. This can be accomplished by using devpi.

Step 1: Install devpi package

sudo pip install devpi

Step 2: Add the following lines in your /root/.pip/pip.conf file

[global]
index-url  = http://localhost:3141/root/pypi/+simple/
extra-index-url  = https://pypi.python.org/simple/

From now on, pip will first try to get the package from devpi-server running on your localhost first and if you do not have devpi-server running, will fallback to pypi.python.org .

Step 3: Start the devpi-server on your localhost: devpi-server. Try installing a few packages or build a virtualenv. The command devpi-server -start will start the server and put it in background.

TODO - figure out how to start this from init.

some thoughts on tattos

Not my original words, but I agree with them
the more 'ornamented' a person is today, that necessarily detracts from their energy (however insignificantly) to either improve themselves or contribute something new. Not as a rule, but in general the people who have tattoos did not get them to demarcate a significant emotional or symbolic event, but because they need to bolster an otherwise weak sense of identity. It's not just physical markings, either; it could be tattoos, humblebrag facebook statuses, endless numbers heavily filtered selfies on instagram, short-but-intense passion for some political cause, armchair activism, etc. Truly remarkable people tend not to care what others think of them, by virtue of the fact they are fulfilled by the fruits of their precious time and energy.
Tattoos used to mean, ‘get away from me.’ Now they mean, ‘Ask me about my tattoo`

Dinner at Ethiopian cafe

image

A typical dish consists of injera accompanied by a spicy stew, which frequently includes beef, lamb, vegetables and various types of legumes such as lentils.

Ethiopians eat exclusively with their right hands, using pieces of injera to pick up bites of entrees and side dishes.

The best part for me though is that the meals are eaten from a communal plate.