The Air Force Is Tweeting?!?

Normally I think it is pretty lame when organizations think they need a Twitter account or a Facebook page just because it is the latest and greatest trend. In fact, it is this very mentality that has basically created a new market of internet nerds dedicated to helping companies "optimize their marketing on the web" and "communicating their brand through social networks." I would venture to guess that many Generation Y'ers would likely be broke if it wasn't for this large organization bandwagon mentality. I had heard that the Air Force was trying to integrate into the social networking world and honestly I thought the result would be comedic at best. However, after reading this article I think that the Air Force has actually actually selected a great platform to stream constant job updates and new services offerings to a potentially large audience.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr. The Web is fueling society's digital hunger for real-time information and dialogue, and officials at the Air Force Personnel Center and the Air Force Services Agency are serving up the first course.

Two Twitter accounts currently are being managed by the public affairs office staff here: AFCareers and USAF_Services.

Twitter is a free micro blogging site where users post messages, called tweets, in 140 characters or less, from a computer or mobile device.

In my previous BadskiBlog post entitled "Tweens, Emo Kids, And Why I Am Liking Twitter More & More" I laid out some of the reasons why I think Twitter is an incredibly useful tool. My main points were:

1. Information Pull - You receive tweets only on people you follow. If you don't think they add value to your daily dose of information consumption you don't follow them. You are no longer being bombarded with unwanted or worse unwarranted information. I only pull what information I want. For the newbie to Twitter who only view this as a 140 character status update for tweens and emo kids I am sorry to say that you are mistaken. Most bloggers, news outlets, etc. post active links to their content or other people's content they deem important and/or relevant. So instead of browsing five articles or blog posts in an hour I can now 'pull' hundreds of micro blogs or tweets to me with links to the full paged content.

2. Information Filtering - Of the information that I pull, I am obviously not going to read it all. If I read everything I wouldn't be able to do anything else, like some phone zombie (my wife probably argues that this is the case at times). More information is available today than ever before in the history of the world. Tomorrow will likely be the same given the absence of a massive catastrophe. As time goes on and technology continues to shrink the world by expanding our interconnectivity as a species, information overload will become an increasing problem. Your ability to navigate what information is valuable to you will become more and more important. Twitter allows me to do that. Just because I follow someone on Twitter doesn't mean that I am going to like all the content they distribute. I am sure if you are reading this there are probably plenty of BadskiBlog posts that aren't your cup of tea (insert any metal post here!). Twitter allows me to quickly scan a short description of the full length content and decide in a split second whether or not it is worth my time. If you do this on your phone you can literally fill your down time throughout the day with some information mastication. Your tweet inventory is likely to always have some information you deem important for you. Great for those trying to live the Pareto principle (book review to come on 80/20 Principle).

3. Information Sourcing - Well won't I just get stuck in a tiny microcosm of the world reading the same people's opinions over and over? Short answer is no. The transparency of Twitter allows you to see others who are following the people you are following. If you want you can follow them and navigate through some of their content. Or for the lazy people out there you can merely sit back and wait for the people you are following to acknowledge someone in a tweet. By replying to someone's tweet you will start your tweet with @randoguysnamehere which will allow others to know who you are citing as well messaging the person you cited. Kind of confusing but when you see it in action you will know what I am talking about. This allows you to see who people you are following deem important enough or relevant enough to interact with. Pretty interesting stuff going on and an opportunity to weave your way through peoples soft connections and into some new information or content.

Somebody on the Air Force staff gets it. And they obviously get it enough to know that tweeting job postings and new services is an incredibly effective and appropriate way to make use of the three principles above. I think I am actually going to follow them…

Braving The Storm: Screw Financial Experts, Stay The Course

I was perusing through Yahoo Finance while eating my lunch today and wasn’t really paying that much attention to what I was looking at. As I was skimming the headlines I almost started laughing at what I saw. Here are some headlines that I found all on the same site! Disclaimer: This post is not to bash Yahoo Finance. I like Yahoo Finance. It is merely to prove a point.

Stocks Rise as Profits at Banks Provide Boost- AP

23 states report higher unemployment in September- AP

Oil falls to around $78 as inventories weigh- Reuters

The Days Of 'Buy and Hold' Are Over, says John Mauldin- Tech

John Mauldin: Tax Hikes Will Kill the 'Recovery’, Which Isn’t Real Anyway- Tech Ticker

Housing Prices: Expected to Drop More in the Next Year?

Stimulus Push Is On, Even If It Isn't Called That

Recovery in Luxury Goods Still Out of Reach

Holiday Shopping Season Gets Early Start

Foreclosure Epidemic Reaching More Expensive Homes

Is the economy recovering? Recovered? Slumping? A Farce? Are we on the brink of another crash? With headlines like the ones above who knows what to believe? With an onslaught of daily information more prevalent now than in any time in history it is important to filter through the minutia to take what information you need while trashing the rest. Do I read articles like the ones above? Yes. But I do so more to stay familiar with the general positions of the articles than I do to develop an investing strategy. If you cannot brave the storm of financial and investing information that is thrown your way it is easy, as illustrated by the headlines above, to run in 50 different directions at once without accomplishing the life goals that are the reason you are investing in the first place. Here are a few things that I try to remind myself when I am doubting my strategy, feeling restless, feeling impatient, etc.:

1. Remember your life goals – You should already be enjoying your life. You should also want to make it better. You should be investing to make your ideal vision of life a reality and to secure your financial future. If your vision of a great life is based on values and those values are aligned more on the family, friends, experiences side of the house as opposed to the Lamborghini, having six pools, and a castle side then you don’t need to drastically earn massive amounts of wealth tomorrow. Live your life today and make gradual improvements over time with your financial decisions furthering those goals.

2. Think long term – Massive amounts of wealth are rarely made over night. Those that are made overnight are even more rarely made in the market. Chances are that person is not going to be you. A long term consistent approach to building wealth is never dead (as claimed above) because as investment vehicles, strategies, and laws change, a long term investment horizon can absorb the unforeseen consequences of the changes and will likely beat many of the speculators on the way back up. Time and asset allocation are the biggest determinations of success that you have. Run any compounding interest model and be amazed at the power of time! Besides all that, long term investing is a hell of a lot more relaxing.

3. You only suffer losses when you sell – When you operate on a long term investing horizon it’s much more difficult to pull the trigger at the wrong time. If you don’t like your unrealized gains just wait longer. When you operate your investment scope on days your time frame to make a wise decision (or to guess wisely) is measured in minutes or seconds. When you operate in terms of decades your time frame to make wise decisions is measured in days, months or even years. By stretching the scope of your vision you have effectively error proofed your decision making ability. And if you do make a decision that looks bad in hindsight you likely are only cutting into unrealized gains and not original principle.

4. Building wealth isn’t always sexy – An average person can accumulate large amounts of money over time simply by investing in a total market index fund or a life cycle fund. Will you outperform the market? No. Will you be able to talk hot stock tips with your neighbor? No. Will your life resemble a scene out of Boiler Room? No. Should you give a shit? NO! Who cares. Investing is the one ‘sport’ where being average, as in mirroring the market, will put you ahead of a great deal of investors whose potential gains are getting chipped away through fees, emotional decisions, and the next big fool proof investing strategy that doesn’t work. Don’t compete against others, compete against the goals you have set for your life.

Tweens, Emo Kids, And Why I Am Liking Twitter More & More

I must confess that I was one of the people who "got" Twitter right away. The social networking aspect of it's followers and following capability combined with the transparency to others just made sense to me when a friend introduced me to it. I have already written about why Twitter is great on BadskiBlog before:

I have been using Twitter for a few months and since I have started I have run into so many people who are talking about it and then they ask the same question. They always ask "what is the point of Twitter? I don't get it." Then I jump in like a huge computer nerd and try to explain what I think its all about, and from there its almost a perfect split. People either get it and think its brilliant or they still think its stupid. I don't think Twitter is about tweeting (140 character micro blog posts). I think Twitter capitalizes and makes visual our natural tendency as humans to group with other like-minded people. However, Twitter enhances this by allowing people who have never and would never have met to become linked. By allowing you to see who someone is following and all the people who are following them you can see how the cliched six degrees of separation begins to manifest itself online through this amazing social networking vehicle.

Honestly I don't really think I truly understood the power of twitter until I got a new phone. I recently bought the new Google phone available on T-Mobile. The G3 or MyTouch is a pretty badass phone. It is Google's equivalent of the iPhone, except it is "open source." Or at least that is what a phone nerd told me. Which basically means that the majority of the applications are free to download. Good for me I guess. The phone has more capability that I have ever had in a phone and I have pretty much been a pseudo-phone nerd for the past two weeks. I downloaded Twitter's application called Twidgit Lite which basically updates you of unread tweets and allows you to quickly tweet on the go. I thought maybe I would tweet something here and there and that would be the extent of my usage, but honestly it is way more than that. Here are the few key advantages I see to having, and being an active Twitterer, on your phone:

1. Information Pull - You receive tweets only on people you follow. If you don't think they add value to your daily dose of information consumption you don't follow them. You are no longer being bombarded with unwanted or worse unwarranted information. I only pull what information I want. For the newbie to Twitter who only view this as a 140 character status update for tweens and emo kids I am sorry to say that you are mistaken. Most bloggers, news outlets, etc. post active links to their content or other people's content they deem important and/or relevant. So instead of browsing five articles or blog posts in an hour I can now 'pull' hundreds of micro blogs or tweets to me with links to the full paged content.

2. Information Filtering - Of the information that I pull, I am obviously not going to read it all. If I read everything I wouldn't be able to do anything else, like some phone zombie (my wife probably argues that this is the case at times). More information is available today than ever before in the history of the world. Tomorrow will likely be the same given the absence of a massive catastrophe. As time goes on and technology continues to shrink the work by expanding our interconnectivity as a species, information overload will become an increasing problem. Your ability to navigate what information is valuable to you will become more and more important. Twitter allows me to do that. Just because I follow someone on Twitter doesn't mean that I am going to like all the content they distribute. I am sure if you are reading this there are probably plenty of BadskiBlog posts that aren't your cup of tea (insert any metal post here!). Twitter allows me to quickly scan a short description of the full length content and decide in a split second whether or not it is worth my time. If you do this on your phone you can literally fill your down time throughout the day with some information mastication. Your tweet inventory is likely to always have some information you deem important for you. Great for those trying to live the Pareto principle (book review to come on 80/20 Principle).

3. Information Sourcing - Well won't I just get stuck in a tiny microcosm of the world reading the same people's opinions over and over. Short answer is no. The transparency of Twitter allows you to see others who are following the people you are following. If you want you can follow them and navigate through some of their content. Or for the lazy people out there you can merely sit back and wait for the people you are following to acknowledge someone in a tweet. By replying to someone's tweet you will start your tweet with @randoguysnamehere which will allow others to know who you are citing as well messaging the person you cited. Kind of confusing but when you see it in action you will know what I am talking about. This allows you to see who people you are following deem important enough or relevant enough to interact with. Pretty interesting stuff going on and an opportunity to weave your way through peoples soft connections and into some new information or content.

If you haven't gotten on Twitter I recommend it. You might get some information out of the deal or worst case you become a tween emo kid.

The Real Problem With Credit Cards Is...You!

I came across this article in Time magazine today talking about some interesting events and trends surrounding the credit card industry. The gist of the article is that although it is easy to blame the credit card industry for America's debt problem, it is not very accurate.

Credit-card companies, though, may not be the only ones we need to be protected from. Every penny of Americans' nearly $1 trillion in revolving debt started with someone — some individual person — whipping out a piece of plastic and making a decision to use it. We could consider that free will and just call it a day, but there's plenty of reason to believe the story isn't so simple. There are piles of evidence that people are bad decision makers when it comes to how they use credit cards. Even when presented with full and fair information, they often make decisions that are not in their own economic best interest — a reality only partly taken into account by the new rules and pending legislation.

The reason this article caught my attention is that it does a great job of addressing the psychology behind our money decisions. The economic right answer isn't the answer we as humans always make. And when poor decisions are made where do we point the finger? Generally not towards ourselves which, as illustrated by this article, is a problem.

The lack of personal responsibility regarding credit cards (and/or most other issues for that matter) brings to light an inherent flaw in the way of thinking we have towards government. Whenever something happens socially we feel the need to add legislation to "fix" the problem. The problem is that legislating lenders does nothing to change the behavior of the consumer which is ultimately the root cause of the problem to begin with. A lender with atrocious terms and no willing borrows is pretty harmless. Much of the legislation seeks greater disclosure so people can make better educated decisions but that doesn't seem to help either.

"There have been a lot of disclosure policies over the past 20 years, but they've had a limited effect on improving the market," says the University of Maryland's Ausubel. "The problem isn't in the availability of information. The problem is in the processing of the information."

I think that most people suffer from information overload. If you step back for a second, all you really need to know about a credit card is that you need to pay back whatever you borrow or you will begin to pay interest. That interest can compound in just the same way your investments can, only in the wrong direction! APR's, teaser rates, etc. don't really matter if you pay off your balance.

Inherently people know this simple truth. As a kid not many people grow up taking more out of their piggy bank than they put in thinking they are becoming rich. However, knowing is not enough. It is doing that truly matters. If knowing how to stay out of credit card debt was the answer then I would argue that most people wouldn't have any credit card debt. It's a lot more difficult to do than merely to know.

Information Is Not Created Equal

I read this article the other day and thought I would share it with all the BadskiBlog readers. The article is about the number of motorcycle deaths amongst military members.

Pentagon brass got an eye-opener when they examined 2008 casualty figures: More Marines died stateside on motorcycles than were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

"That was a wake-up call," says Rear Adm. Arthur Johnson, commander of the Naval Safety Center. "It focuses your attention on what your real issues are."

Most people are probably extremely shocked by this article. I am, and I am not. On the one hand I am a little shocked that there are more deaths via motorcycles than there are from the war. Anyone who reads that is likely to be shocked. On the other hand I am not surprised by the large number of motorcycle deaths amongst military members. I have seen a ton of motorcycle riders at every base I have ever been at or visited, and the majority of them are crotch rocket riders. I am not saying people shouldn't ride motorcycles, I am just saying that there isn't much room for error on those things. The demographics of military members also lend themselves to being at higher risk of motorcycle accidents as discussed in the article. Most are male and young. Young males are more likely to ride motorcycles, and therefore there are likely going to be more deaths as a result of motorcycles.

What I find most interesting about the article is the disparity in attention that the mainstream media and people of our country place on different types of tragedies. Obviously one death is one too many during a time of war and I think that those who make the ultimate sacrifice for our country deserve all the attention and respect they get. With that being said I think that the media sometimes paints a picture that is more representative of World War II era warfare than that of today. This is not, I repeat not, to disrespect our fallen heroes in any way. I just think this article as well as any illustrates the power that the media has over what is covered. I think that influence is declining as I have mentioned in previous posts, but it is significant nonetheless. This articles serves as a reminder to me to research what you read and build your own view because all information is not created equal; profitable information will always get the spotlight and in turn will have a greater impact on society at large.