In old times Kings had strange requests and they had advisors whose jobs was to fulfill them. Failure to do so results in punishments that varied from imprisonment, demotion or in severe case even death penalties. (more…)
Time is the most limited commodity that any successful person have & time management is one of the most sought after skill for majority of us. Urgent & Important are the two major parameters used in prioritizing where to focus our resources on.
Eisenhower matrix is ever-green cheat sheet for any one looking to help prioritize their day. Biggest issue we struggle with is “urgent” taking priority over “important”.
If you give some one two tasks with following
– Task A is urgent
– Task B is important
99% of the times, they will go with the urgent one. There could be multiple reasons for this behaviors, but following two are the most common one.
– Urgency creates emergency giving you the adrenaline rush for the day
– It is easy to get motivated while accomplishing a task that is time driven because it could be quantified
The most urgent decisions are rarely the most important ones.
– Dwight D Eisenhower
However, while focusing on urgent task, we oversee important tasks requiring our attention. It could be a business goal as well as personal goal. Such as joining a gym, going on a vacation, spending time with your family, calling an old friend or be by yourself. Even in business, we mightn’t have updated our website or done a SWOT analysis or the most important one – sitting down with the team over dinner.
So next time, there is a choice between Urgency or importance, chose wisely!
Yesterday, FOMC announced that they are not making any changes to the interest rate. Later last year, they made an upward move after almost a decade.
They also changed their stance on frequency of changing the interest rate. Earlier they indicated that they would change interest rate 4 times in 2016, but it was not well received in the market. Now they have backed-off to resonate with their counterparts. While it’s not as exciting, this will bring stability to the economy. Stable interest rates are boring but it is good in the long run. Feds assurity about the stable interest rate will bring confidence to investors so they can plan and forecast better. Low interest rate acts like a catalyst to economy by encouraging people to rotate the money and invest rather than just leaving it in fixed deposit.
The new stanceis similar to what European Central Bank ( ECB) and Bank of Japan are taking to boost their economy. This however would affect the USD strength against other currencies. People will prefer to invest in alternative assets, making USD less in demand as an asset class. There are both pros and cons of weaker currency, but overall there are always advantages for a stable currency. So if you are an importer, you should be unhappy and if you are an exporter you should be happy. Historically, Fed movements can be well predicted in advance, which is a good indication of them being more realistic with the economic condition. In near future, we should be assure that interest rates are going to be stable and FOMC meetings would have no exciting news to share.
I recently had an honor to meet Mike Janke ( Co-founder & Chairman Silent Circle – Encrypted Communication Firm), which prompted me to write over this issue.
Mike’s some one who I admire a lot & I am baffled by the fact that he’s recognized as much as he deserves it. He came to me as some one who’se really passionate about the cause & value & I feel myself lucky to be present in same room as him. He’s a hero !
From Wikileaks to recent open letter by Apple in response to request for a backdoor in iOS , there are arguments on both sides on privacy and surveillance acceptability. While there is no denial that better information leads to better decision making which will be helpful for the agencies to protect us, however it might violate the citizen rights which includes privacy. There is a reason why we have private house rather than sharing a big house. While I live in an apartment and like people around me, most of the people have economic reasons to live in shared housing.
People in favor of allowing security agencies to access personal data are making a very strong argument that if there is nothing wrong, why do I need to hide? As popular as it looks like, this is not as simple as it looks like.
Many people have camera or stage phobia. As perfect they are in their job, when asked to perform the same job in front of people, they get nervous or are unable to reproduce the same results as they would individually. This is not because they are bad at what they do, it’s because of the external pressure that they have to be extra cautious. Now take the same example and apply it on your daily life.
Imagine a person watching everything that you do; Every word you spoke and every action you did is recorded in an archive which is saved for decades and is accessible by a person unknown to you. How would you feel about it?
Not taking it to an extreme where you are also observed while you are singing in your bath tub, but imagine being watched in your living room. While there is nothing wrong about watching a hockey game with your friends at your home, but would you be able to enjoy it with a camera over you? Taking example of house might turn off a lot of people, even recording the conversations at a dinner-date is totally awkward as well. Next time when you are having a conversation over a phone, imagine an unknown 3rd party listening to it or even worse recording it.
Here is Obama portions from SXSW’16 on encryption
Cell phones, laptops are very personal now and we spend most time with them than any other living or non-living object. It’s no longer the phone that the entire house shared to communicate, but it’s like a private diary.They possibly have the most amount of data or attachment than anything else and allowing it to be watched all the time makes me uncomfortable. Law enforcement is a difficult job and I am thankful to all the wonderful people who are working day and night to ensure our safety but liberty is what allows us to enjoy it the fullest. There should be no absolute stance from either parties & I hope there would be a good balance between liberty and security as we transform into a more progressive society.
I wish the world have more people like Mike who’re taking this challange & one day I am able to contribute to the cause. Though I am deeply involved with cryptographic items, my engineering major is telecommunication so you never know & if that happens, I hope to replicate the lessons I learnt from Mike
From Acuras to iPhone applications, suits to sweet potatoes, Canadians will be paying more for imported products, on account of the loonie’s fall against the U.S. dollar. It has dropped by almost 10% in last 12 months which is a significant drop in a short horizon of time. Although it’s not the highest one, but certainly rank among them.
“Who wins and who loses when the loonie gets hammered”
Obviously it’s the end customer who will be paying more. Increasing costs are passed on the end customers and if they are earning in CAD, too bad. It’s now happening . Food costs have been expanding for quite a long time. Attire, while regularly made abroad, has a tendency to be evaluated in U.S. dollars and has additionally been getting more costly. So too a first-class thing that Canadians are purchasing in record numbers. Automakers have begun to raise sticker costs on Canadian vehicles.
The Automobile Protection Association says Toyota and Honda, among others, brought costs up in the primary week of January. A few extravagance brands, including Lexus, Acura, and BMW have additionally rolled out improvements to their valuing, with Audi purportedly set to follow in mid-January, the affiliation says. The APA says the greater part of the expansions are unassuming, an additional couple of hundred dollars for every vehicle. Be that as it may, it says Honda has raised the proposed retail cost on its 2015 CRV Touring, all-wheel-drive model by an amount of $750.”Auto organizations will take each open door that they can to expand exchange costs or minimize their introduction to the conversion scale,” says Jason Stein, distributer and supervisor of Automotive News.”We do see costs expanding. We’ve seen costs expanding crosswise over North America. Will they build a smidgen all the more quickly north of the fringe, because of the conversion standard? I believe that is presumably the case.”
It doesn’t cut both ways. Stein, a Canadian who lives in Windsor, and goes for work in Detroit, echoes a portion of the disappointment of some Canadians, who feel automakers were much slower to drop costs in this nation when the Canadian dollar was high. “Interestingly, when the Canadian dollar was over the U.S. dollar, a year, 18 months prior, you didn’t see costs dropping.” Loonie oil costs could fall much even further, Don Pittis said.
A week ago, Apple brought costs up in its Canadian App Store. The 99-penny applications will now cost $1.19 Canadian, a 20 for every penny increment. Different applications under $10 went up by around 15 for every penny. Apple says the expansion is connected to the conversion scale. Different countries feel it as well
However, it’s not every terrible new. The loonie isn’t the main cash falling against the greenback. “This is not imagination of a powerless Canadian dollar story. Some of it is a solid U.S. dollar story,” says BMO’s Porter. “The U.S. dollar is inclining against a considerable measure of monetary standards. So a few things we won’t not be paying significantly more for. For example, a few things from Europe or from Japan, won’t not be going up that much in cost in light of the fact that their monetary forms are additionally debilitating.”
In any case, with the U.S. representing about portion of all Canadian stock imports, the dollar’s doldrums will hit most Canadian shoppers in the wallet.