Did you know that our bodies naturally caffeinate themselves? Or the best time to take a coffee break to make you more productive at work? This infographic explains some of the tricks to get the most bang from your daily cup of joe.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Detroit’s job market is good despite what the orange one says. Statista reports data from the New York Times, Detroit has posted a 27.2% increase in technology jobs between 2010 and 2015. I have written about the strength of the metro Detroit tech job sector as far back as 2011 here, here, and here.
This rate of job growth places Motown 8th nationally in tech job creation over the past five years. The Motor City came in only .01% behind Boston and out-performed cities like Atlanta (22.6%) and Chicago (18.7%) in creating tech jobs.
Not only is the Detroit tech sector a national leader, according to Crain’s Detroit, but Detroit is also a job-seekers market. The article says manufacturers are struggling to find entry-level employees and are being forced to raise wages to find talent.
The average advertised salary for local workers with zero to two years of experience has risen more than 16.5% to $52,729 in 2015 from $45,256 in 2011, according to an analysis by the Workforce Intelligence Network for Southeast Michigan. For workers with three to eight years of experience, that average has increased 13%; and for those with nine-plus years of work experience, it increased only 0.5 percent.
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This can be traced to the rejuvenated 
auto industry, which is increasingly dependent on high-tech skills. Manufacturing is an increasingly prodigious driver of tech jobs; games and dot-coms are not the only paths to technical employment growth.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Bitcoin is the name of probably the best-
known cryptocurrency or digital currency or digital gold or virtual money. A cryptocurrency is a medium of exchange, such as the US dollar, but is digital and uses encryption techniques to control the creation of monetary units and to verify the transfer of funds. Blockchain is the technology that enables the existence of cryptocurrency.
The cryptocurrency has populist roots. It made its debut in relative obscurity at the start of 2009, when the great recession financial crisis was still raging. A person or group of people known as Satoshi Nakamoto purportedly created the bitcoin protocol and reference software. The populist ideology behind Bitcoin is to take power out of the hands of the central bankers and governments who usually control the flow of currency.
Bitcoin is both a digital currency and a payment system. The basic idea behind Bitcoin is that you can use it to pay for things without a third-party broker, like a bank or government. The value of a bitcoin depends on the bitcoin market at the time. One bitcoin = 100,000,000 Satoshi like 1 dollar = 100 cents. There are no transaction fees and no need to give your real name. Merchants have to pay transaction fees on each credit card sale of 2.5% to 3.5% to the likes of Visa, MasterCard, or Discover.
Think of Bitcoin like one big ledger shared by all the users: When you pay for something with bitcoin or get paid, then your transaction is recorded on the ledger to ensure there is no double spending of the currency.
Members of the network collectively contribute processing power from their computers to maintain Bitcoin’s integrity. And every time a transaction is made, a record of it is sent out to be recorded in a public ledger where the transactions are effectively set in stone. Anyone can download and install the Bitcoin software for free so these records are distributed permanently across the entire network. This publicly distributed ledger is called the blockchain.
In order to get more Bitcoins, computers running bitcoin software compete to confirm the transaction by solving a complex cryptographic equation, and the winner is rewarded with more bitcoins. Currently, a winner is rewarded with 25 bitcoins roughly every 10 minutes. The process is known as “mining”. Don’t get too wrapped up in Bitcoin mining because only the computer powerhouses get their bitcoins this way.
The Consumerist explains that Bitcoin mining math is complicated and hard to forge, so the blockchain stays accurate. Because anyone can download and install the Bitcoin software for free, the payment processing and record-keeping for Bitcoin is done in a widely distributed way, and not on one particular server.
When blockchains are created, so are new bitcoins — but there’s a hard limit to how many will ever exist. The system was designed to create more bitcoins at first, then to dwindle exponentially over time. The first set of blockchains each created 50 bitcoins. The next set each created 25 bitcoins, and so on. New blockchains are created roughly every 10 minutes no matter what; when more computers are actively mining, the program they’re running gets harder (and therefore slower) to compensate. The Bitcoin FAQ estimates that the last bitcoin will be mined in the year 2140, bringing the permanent circulation to just under 21 million. (Currently, there are roughly 15.8 million bitcoins in the world.)
In order to use Bitcoin, you’ll have to install a “bitcoin wallet” app on your phone or computer, and then buy them from a bitcoin exchange. A bitcoin digital wallet is a kind of virtual bank account that allows users to send or receive bitcoins, pay for goods or save their money via an exchange of public and private security keys. Bitcoin wallets can exist either in the cloud or on a user’s computer. The wallets have all the risks of any other app on your device or in the cloud. Unlike bank accounts, the FDIC does not insure bitcoin wallets. CNN Money points out some of the risks in using bitcoin.
In order to buy bitcoins, you have to use a marketplace called “bitcoin exchanges” which allow people to buy or sell bitcoins using different currencies. These exchanges have a dubious history.
Bitcoin exchanges are vulnerable to hacking, collapse or a ”run on the bank.” A run on a bank occurs where customers are scared and demand to withdraw their deposits so fast that the bank makes payments and shutdowns. If something like that happens, good luck getting your money back: This isn’t like an FDIC-insured bank account.
Bitcoin can be used in a few places; Marketwatch says there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to where you can use Bitcoin:
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The use of bitcoins in Michigan has not really taken off. Last summer, according to the FreeP, there were only a handful of businesses in metro Detroit that took bitcoin included:
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
A new report (PDF) from charity Oxfam says American companies stash a significant part of their cash overseas to take advantage of more favorable tax laws in other countries. They claim that tech companies take particular advantage of this practice, also known as “tax havens.” Oxfam which is crusading to get the U.S. government to crack down on this practice says tax havens costs the United States more than $100 billion a year in lost tax revenue.
The Business Insider brought us this Statista chart, based on the Oxfam report. Tech firms are hoarding nearly $500 Billion in cash overseas. The chart shows how much money major US tech companies have stashed overseas, and how many subsidiaries they have set up in countries that Oxfam defines as tax havens, “which can be characterized by secrecy, low- or zero-tax rates, and the almost complete lack of disclosure of any relevant business information.”
While tech is the most prominent sector on Oxfam’s list, the article claims tech is not alone — large companies in other sectors like General Electric ($119 billion), Pfizer ($74 billion), Merck ($60 billion), and Exxon Mobile ($51 billion) also have lots of cash stashed overseas.
There’s nothing illegal about this practice. But Oxfam believes it contributes to income inequality. They are urging U.S. lawmakers to make it harder for companies to use international tax laws to their advantage in this way.
Overseas tax havens have been the focus of recent revelations about tax scams by wealthy people, based on the leak of the “Panama Papers,” documents from a single Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, involving 214,000 offshore shell companies. The firm’s clients included 29 billionaires and 140 top politicians worldwide, among them a dozen heads of government.
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This list looks a lot like the one for the top lobbying spender firms. I wrote about the tech titans lobbying efforts just a couple of weeks ago here.
| Rank | Firm | Cash $ held off shore | Lobbying rank | Lobbying $ spending |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apple | 181.1B | 10 | 4.5M |
| 2 | Microsoft | 108.3B | 7 | 8.5M |
| 3 | IBM | 61.4B | 11 | 4.6M |
| 4 | Cisco | 52.7B | 14 | 2.7M |
| 5 | Alphabet/Google | 47.4B | 1 | 16.6M |
| 6 | HP | 42.9B | ||
| 7 | Oracle | 38.0B | 13 | 4.5M |
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Tom Searcy posted some good advice for CBS News to improve your business networking even if you hate networking. The article is a couple of years old, but the suggestions her makes are still valid. He says:
It’s not all about you. Mr. Searcy explains that if you spend your time meeting people and trying to see if there is a way you can be of help to them, you put your mind in the right order and it is easier. Why? Because you may not be a great networker, but you are a great problem solver. If you can help someone else with an issue, idea, or contact, you are working in the sweet spot of your skills. Along the way, good things will happen for you, too.
Set your goals. When you attend an event, the author recommends you pick out 1-3 people in advance to specifically meet. If they are not there, or they are completely swamped, go to your backup goal. Set a number of new people, the article suggests five or 10, to meet, ask two questions, and swap cards with.
Once you have hit your number, you are off the hook. You met your goal and you can go home, see a movie, catch the end of the game at the bar, it doesn’t matter. You set a goal and you hit it. Networking events are not a prison sentence if you don’t make them one.
Ask good questions. “What do you do?” “Tell me about your company” and “How long have you been with your company/this industry/this association?” are all typical openers and they get typical answers. Boring. Try a few other questions instead:
“What business problem does your company solve?”
“What is the best example you have of how you are doing that?”
“What has been the biggest win for you/your company in the last six months?”
“What do you think it will be in the next six months?”
“What is the most interesting initiative you have planned at your company this year?”
“How will that change your company the most?”
The point is that you want to have thought provoking questions that start a conversation out of the norm. These questions should give you that. Once they have answered the questions, you have just one more to ask, “That’s great, is there some way I can help you?”
Exit gracefully. The article says to make the most of networking events take the initiative to introduce yourself, control the conversation with a few questions, and then exit gracefully.
There is a courtesy to be observed at a networking event that involves not monopolizing someone’s time. This rhythm that she set was the right tempo to accomplish what a networking event should do.
You should come away from the event with:
And just a few reminders…
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Congrats you’re there: do your job and go home. Have a process and some guidelines it takes some of the stress out of networking and tolerates it better.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
