Craig Tatham

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Courtney Carver of Be More with Less.

I never thought I would laugh at how busy I used to be. I was serious about my ability to be superwoman. I could work 40+ hours a week, raise a child, volunteer when anyone asked, exercise, travel, cook, and clean. I could do it all, and then some.

Everyone was doing it all, so I did too. I didn’t want to do it all. Doing it all made me exhausted. Doing it all cost me friendships. Doing it all cost me my health. My busyness wasn’t even a little bit silly.

Becoming less busy was not an accident, but a decision I made on purpose. I made the decision that a busy life wasn’t a life for me. Being a good person, loving wife, mother and friend…that was the life I wanted. Next to that, I wanted the freedom to do things that made my heart sing instead of things that weighed me down.

Until I intentionally left a life of chronic busyness, I couldn’t see how silly it really was. The silliness of busyness is that sometimes you are so busy, you can’t recognize you are in trouble. You are so overwhelmed that you can’t figure out how to change. You are so used to being busy that you create more work to make your life even busier.

You may be lost in the silliness of busyness if…

• Your usual response to “how are you?” is “so busy”, “crazy busy” or “busy but good”
• You spend time worrying about how busy you are going to be tomorrow
• You get angry when your spouse or friends aren’t as busy as you
• Your busy life keeps you up at night thinking about everything you didn’t get done
• You make a point of letting people know that you stay at the office after hours
• You check email several times a day
• You zone out during conversations thinking about everything you have to do
• You volunteer for things you don’t care about
• You spend time complaining about how busy you are
• You make list after list to make sure you don’t forget anything during your busy day
• You allocate time each day to clean your desk or organize your stuff
• You regularly eat in your car
• You use a phone in the car because “it’s the only time you have to talk”

If you are anything like me, you are busy because you want to be or because you don’t know how to be un-busy. You are busy out of misdirected guilt because you think if you do enough, you will be enough. When you decide that it is ok to live life your way, you can stop being busy and start doing things that matter. You can talk about your meaningful day instead of ranting about your busy schedule. Decide today that you are enough, even if you never do anything, accomplish anything or produce anything ever again. You are enough.

How to be less busy

• be unproductive on purpose
• only check email 2X per day
• delete email and toss mail that you don’t need to read
• turn your phone and computer off when you aren’t working
• turn everything off in the car (except the car)
• put your ipad down
• read The Power of Less
• help someone
• do less, be more
• stop trying to keep up, measure up or catch up

While you may think that you are making sacrifices for others by being busy, you are likely sacrificing the same relationships you think you are saving. Get real, make time and consider what is most important to you. Then do that first. The rest can wait.

Courtney Carver is the author of Simple Ways to Be More with Less. Read more from Courtney at her blog, Be More with Less, or follow her on twitter.

Our son was born March 12th, 2009. He's a little over two and a half years old. Now, I am the wussiest wuss to ever wuss up the joint, so take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt – but choosing to become a parent is the hardest thing I have ever done. By far. Everything else pales in comparison.

My feelings on this matter are complex. I made a graph. You know, for the children.

That one percent makes all the difference.

It's difficult to explain children to people who don't yet have children, because becoming a parent is an intensely personal experience. Every child is different. Every parent is different. Every culture has their own way of doing things. The experience is fundamentally different for every new parent in the world, yet children are the one universally shared thing that binds our giant collective chain letter of human beings together, regardless of nationality and language. How do you explain the unexplainable?

Well, having children changes you. Jonathan Coulton likens it to becoming a vampire.

I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling – I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don’t feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. Eventually you just fall in love and forget about everything else, but it’s not a very comfortable transition. I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated.

Maybe tongue in cheek, but not that far from the truth, honestly. Your children, they ruin everything in the nicest way.

Before Henry was born, I remembered Scott Hanselman writing this odd blurb about being a parent:

You think you love you wife when you marry her. Then you have a baby and you realize you'd throw your wife yourself under a bus to save your baby. You can't love something more.

Nuts to that, I thought. Hanselman's crazy. Well, obviously he doesn't love his wife as much as I love mine. Sniff. Babies, whatever, sure, they're super cute on calendars, just like puppies and kittens. Then I had a baby. And by God, he was right. I wouldn't just throw myself under a bus for my baby, I'd happily throw my wife under that bus too – without the slightest hesitation. What the hell just happened to me?

As an adult, you may think you've roughly mapped the continent of love and relationships. You've loved your parents, a few of your friends, eventually a significant other. You have some tentative cartography to work with from your explorations. You form ideas about what love is, its borders and boundaries. Then you have a child, look up to the sky, and suddenly understand that those bright dots in the sky are whole other galaxies.

You can't possibly know the enormity of the feelings you will have for your children. It is absolutely fucking terrifying.

When I am holding Henry and I tickle him, I can feel him laughing all the way to his toes. And I realize, my God, I had forgotten, I had completely forgotten how unbelievably, inexplicably wonderful it is that any of us exist at all. Here I am with this tiny, warm body so close to me, breathing so fast he can barely catch up, sharing his newfound joy of simply being alive with me. The sublime joy of this moment, and all the other milestones – the first smile, the first laugh, the first "dada" or "mama", the first kiss, the first time you hold hands. The highs are so incredibly high that you'll get vertigo and wonder if you can ever reach that feeling again. But you peak ever higher and higher, with dizzying regularity. Being a new parent is both terrifying and exhilarating, a constant rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows.

It's also a history lesson. The first four years of your life. Do you remember them? What's your earliest memory? It is fascinating watching your child claw their way up the developmental ladder from baby to toddler to child. All this stuff we take for granted, but your baby will painstakingly work their way through trial and error: eating, moving, walking, talking. Arms and legs, how the hell do they work? Turns out, we human beings are kind of amazing animals. There's no better way to understand just how amazing humans are than the front row seat a child gives you to observe it all unfold from scratch each and every day, from literal square zero. Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

I wasn't sure how to explain meeting new people to Henry, so I decided to just tell him we've met a new "friend" every time. Now, understand that this is not at all the way I view the world. I'm extremely wary of strangers, and of new people in general with their agendas and biases and opinions. I've been burned too many times. But Henry is open to every person he meets by default. Each new person is worth greeting, worth meeting as a new experience, as a fellow human being. Henry taught me, without even trying to, that I've been doing it all wrong. I realized that I'm afraid of other people, and it's only my own fear preventing me from opening up, even a little, to new people that I meet. I really should view every new person I meet as a potential friend. I'm not quite there yet; it's still a work in progress. But with Henry's help, I think I can. I had absolutely no idea my child would end up teaching me as much as I'm teaching him.

Having a child is a lot like running a marathon. An incredible challenge, but a worthwhile and transformative experience. It leaves you feeling like you truly accomplished something for all that effort. After all, you've created something kind of amazing: a person.

Bob: It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids.

Charlotte: It's scary.

Bob: The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born.

Charlotte: Nobody ever tells you that.

Bob: Your life, as you know it... is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk, and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.

It's scary and it's wonderful in equal measure. So why not have another baby? Or so we thought.

Turns out, we're having two babies. Both are girls, due in mid-February 2012.

I've been told several times that you should never be crazy enough to let the children outnumber you. I hope to ultimately win the War of the Lady Babies, but when it comes to children, I think all anyone can ever realistically hope for is a peaceful surrender.

Your daily commute costs a lot more than what you pay each trip to the gas station. Personal finance blogger Mr. Money Mustache details the true cost of commuting, walking through how to calculate the time and financial burden of a "not too bad" commute, breaking down some of the most common misconceptions about what you sign on for with your daily drive to the office.

It was a beautiful evening in my neighborhood, and I was enjoying one of my giant homebrews on a deck chair I had placed in the middle of the street, as part of a nearby block's Annual Street Party.

I was talking to a couple I had just met, and the topic turned to the beauty of the neighborhood. "Wow, I didn't even realize this area was here", the guy said, "It's beautiful and old and the trees are giant and all the adults and kids hang out together outside as if it were still 1950!". "Yeah", said his wife, "We should really move here!".

Then the discussion turned to the comparatively affordable housing, and the other benefits of living in my particular town. By the end of it, these people were verbally working out the details of a potential move within just a few months.

Except their plan was absurd.

Because these two full-time professional workers currently happen to live and work in "Broomfield", a city that is about 19 miles and 40 minutes of mixed high-traffic driving away from here. They brushed off the potential commute, saying "Oh, 40 minutes, that's not too bad."

Yes, actually it IS too bad! … But this misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor.

Let's take a typical day's drive for this self-destructive couple. Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS's estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there's $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. It is possible to drive for less, but these people happen to have fairly new cars, bought on credit, so they are wasting the full amount.

Next is the actual human time wasted. At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week – so they would now effectively be working 6 workdays per week.

After 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel*.

That's EVERY ten years. And that's with a commute that most Americans claim is "not too bad".

You'll note that most 30-year-old couples today, about 10 years into adulthood, don't even have $125,000 in net worth. And they probably drive around quite a bit in expensive financed cars, mostly as part of a self-imposed commute. These facts are directly related!

The alternative I would have recommended to this couple, if they had asked my opinion, would be to make sure their house is within biking distance of both jobs, immediately sell both borrowed cars and replace them with a single ten-year-old manual transmission hatchback, and finally, let the good times roll. Setting aside $10k to keep the new car on the road, they will certainly enjoy their $115,000 of extra cash after ten short years, and if they combine this trick with a few of the other MMM classics, they'll be able to move to historic old-town Longmont as EARLY RETIREES within ten years, instead of being broke wage slaves still commuting out of here each morning when the year 2021 rolls around.

Now, I will admit that it is of course possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. That's one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile.

• Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile
• Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents
• Oil, at $25 per 5,000 miles is 0.5 cents
• Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent

And there are also ways to live in the town of your dreams without signing up for a commute – get a new job! (There are plenty of them here in my own city, many being worked by people who commute from other towns).

But despite the availability of both of these options, the idea of living close to work still seems to be completely alien to most people I've met. While I would personally consider it far more important than even the salary or the work performed, most people put commute distance below house price, perceived school quality, and neighborhood preference.

To put things back on par, let's whip up a couple of quick commuting equations. Let's assume the average person's marginal driving cost is halfway between the Ultra-Mustachian driver figure of 17 cents per mile, and Uncle Sam's generous 51 cent allowance. So, 34 cents. Let's also assume the value of a person's time is $25 per hour, since this is close to a median wage for a suburban commuter. (If you don't think you'd use your newfound leisure time that productively, you need to think more like an Early Retiree. I used mine for plenty of learning and domestic insourcing).

For each mile you drive across two times on your round trip to work daily, it multiplies to 500 miles per year, or a $170 annual fee
For each of these miles, you waste about 6 minutes in the round trip, adding to 25 hours per year ($625 of your time).

So each mile you live from work steals $795 per year from you in commuting costs.

$795 per year will pay the interest on $15,900 of house borrowed at a 5% interest rate.

In other words, a logical person should be willing to pay about $15,900 more for a house that is one mile closer to work, and $477,000 more for a house that is 30 miles closer to work. For a double-commuting couple, these numbers are $31,800 and $954,000.

Adapting the numbers for a $7.50 minimum wage earner, each mile of car commuting cuts $1.43 from your workday. If you drive 10 miles to go work a 5-hour shift at the Outback Steakhouse, your effective hourly wage is more like $5 per hour after subtracting car costs and adding drive time.

And these are all numbers for the United States, where cars and gasoline are much, much cheaper than they are in almost any other country. In Canada, you can add 30% to the gas prices and 50% to the car prices. In the UK, still more.

If these numbers sound ridiculous, it's because they are. It is ridiculous to commute by car to work if you realize how expensive it is to drive, and if you value your time at anything close to what you get paid. I did these calculations long before getting my first job, and because of them I have never been willing to live anywhere that required me to drive myself to work**. It's just too expensive, and there is always another option when choosing a job and a house if you make it a priority.

And making that easy choice is probably the biggest single boost that will get the average person from poverty to financial independence over a reasonable period of time. I would say that biking more and driving less was the trigger in my own life that started a chain reaction of savings and happy lifestyle changes that led my wife and I to retirement in our early 30s.

Now, all this doesn't mean you have to set up a tent on your employer's front lawn to avoid going broke. Public transit, although an afterthought in most of the US, is great if it's available to you, because you get your brain and your hands back for the purpose of getting some of your day's work done while enroute.

But if you can walk or bike to work, it will cost you virtually nothing. And it also doesn't count as using up your personal time because it is adding something that nobody except Olympic athletes is doing enough of anyway – exercise. You can take your time spent riding your bike ride directly out of time you would have otherwise spent in the gym, or waiting in the doctor's office for prescription medication.

So there's my answer for this potential new set of neighbors. I'll see you in ten years!

And now that the truth has at last been revealed about the foolishness of commuting, I'm looking forward to reading about the empty interstates and bicycle-filled streets tomorrow morning.

* Note that I wrote this whole rant without bringing up that whole pesky "destroying the entire Earth" issue, since that part is controversial in the United States, so I figured it's best just to focus on making you rich.

** For the Record, I grew up in the Great Lakes area, on the Canadian side just a 30 minute drive North of Buffalo, NY. Then I spent a few years in an area much colder – Ottawa, Canada, with a climate just a bit worse than Minneapolis. Biking year-round in these conditions was completely feasible (and even fun), and I'll do a post on how to enjoy winter bike commuting later this fall!

*** Also for the record, my wife and I still bike year-round, including for grocery shopping and dropping our Kindergartener off at school – thanks to the magic of a bike trailers. Do a search on your local Craigslist and change your biking life. Photo by epSos.de

The True Cost of Commuting | Mr. Money Mustache

Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to educate the world on how it is done.

Chrome: Not all web pages have a built-in print function to print articles without the filler, so if you're looking to cut out ads or images, Print Plus lets you pick out exactly what gets sent to the printer.

You'll pick blocks to print by clicking the Print Plus icon next to the URL bar, and then you'll be able to click on the sections you want to highlight. You can extend the selection by clicking it again, or clicking another paragraph or image.

Print Plus | Chrome Web Store via Addictive Tips

The products you buy will not make you smarter.

They will not make you successful.

They will not make you more attractive.

They will not make you popular.

They will not make you a better person.

They will not fill your hours with joy.

There is only one thing that can do all of these things, and that thing isn’t found at Amazon.com or on the shelves of your local grocery store.

That one thing that can achieve all of this is you. Not products. You.

If you want to be smarter, don’t buy a product. Instead, head to the library and pick up some books to read on the topics you want to know more about, then spend some evenings actually reading them. Take things you don’t understand in your life and take the time to understand them. Ask questions and seek answers to those questions.

If you want to be successful, don’t buy a product. Instead, work hard. Be reliable. Produce results. Try to look at everything you do through the eyes of your employer (or client or customer) and ask yourself what you would need to do to appear valuable to the situation.

If you want to be attractive, don’t buy a product. Instead, get some exercise. Go for a walk each day, for starters. Practice good hygiene and bathe daily.

If you want to be popular, don’t buy a product. Instead, talk to people. Don’t let your fear of making a fool of yourself hold you back – everyone makes a fool of themselves sometimes. Strike up conversations. Go to meetings of people with similar interests and ideas to your own. Invite people over to your home for dinner. Most importantly, when you’re in a public environment and you see someone you know, go over and talk to them.

If you want to be a better person, don’t buy a product. Instead, make a concerted effort to help others and be kind to them. Watch yourself for cruel remarks and actions and focus on cutting them out of your life and your thoughts.

If you want to fill your hours with joy, don’t buy a product. Instead, do whatever it is that really makes you happy. If you can’t do that, then spend an afternoon completely in the service of others who really need your help, like working at a food pantry or building a Habitat for Humanity house.

Notice how nothing described above involves buying a product, yet they all result in the kind of change that you want in your life. Even more important, products you buy won’t achieve those kind of changes.

You can’t simply buy the person you want to be. You can only achieve that through your own actions. Keep your money in your pocket and work on yourself instead. You’ll find that, before long, you have the best of both worlds.

Is the age of the infrastructure engineer over? While I was at VMworld 2011, I listened to a speaker talk about how people like me—people who are conversant in virtualization, networking, storage, servers, and data center hardware—are going to have to evolve/migrate into the application development space in order to survive in the “new cloud world” (my phrase, not the speaker’s). This speaker isn’t the only one, either. This started me thinking. Are infrastructure engineers really a relic of the past, like punch cards?

I think we can all agree that the heavily-specialized infrastructure teams of the past—the networking team, the server team, the storage team—are no longer sufficient in the brave new world of converged infrastructure that blends networking, virtualization, and storage all together. I’d agree, in general terms, that IT infrastructure folks need to broaden beyond their core strengths into adjacent technologies in order to remain relevant. Storage engineers need to learn some networking and some virtualization. Virtualization engineers absolutely need to know storage, and networking is becoming a necessity as well. Networking engineers need to embrace virtualization and understand the impact of storage on their networks. Whether or not the silos ever come down fully or whether we’ll just “install sliding partitions,” as one colleague of mine said, isn’t yet clear. It is clear, though, that some blurring of the lines between these teams is a given.

Is it a given, though, that infrastructure engineers have to move up the stack into the application layer(s)? From an awareness perspective—meaning becoming more aware of the applications running on their infrastructure—I’d agree. Application development, though? That one I’m not so sure about. Yes, it will be/is helpful to understand what goes into application development and the infrastructure dependencies that are the result of the development choices. Again, that’s awareness, and yes—infrastructure engineers need enhanced awareness of adjacent technologies and the relationships with their core technology strengths. Awareness, though, is fundamentally different than being well-versed in application development.

Maybe I’m just being naive or ignorant, but regardless of how many layers of abstraction are inserted into the stack—and virtualization, in its simplest form, is another layer of abstraction—someone still has to manage the infrastructure. OK, so you’ve built a “private cloud” and you have highly virtualized infrastructure, pooled resources, self-service provisioning, etc. Someone still has to manage it. Someone still has to ensure that there is sufficient capacity, and that someone needs to understand the core technologies that make the private cloud tick. If we’re all moving “up the stack,” who’s left behind to manage the infrastructure?

This is why I’m not yet convinced that the age of the infrastructure engineer is over. Even if you have virtualized your servers, virtualized your network, and virtualized your storage, management of this infrastructure is still necessary. People who understand this infrastructure—both virtual and physical—are still necessary. Engineers who know the relationships among the virtualization layers and the various technologies are still necessary. Yes, the infrastructure engineer will change, grow, and evolve, but I think that the death of the infrastructure engineer is greatly exaggerated. We can’t all move up the stack into application development; someone has to stay behind and make sure everything runs the way it’s expected to run.

What do you think? Speak up and share your thoughts in the comments.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

The End of the Infrastructure Engineer?

• Cloud Computing Interview with Dave Malcolm, CTO of Surgient
• Virtualization Congress 2009 Sessions
• Technology Short Take #8
• VMware Addressing Virtual Security Concerns
• Cliff, I’ve Used VMware in Production

Wow. Someone is making a video game featuring the original Super Mario Bros worlds but Mario is outfitted with a Portal gun. Watch the demo:

More information on the game's development is here.

Yes, this is an actual game being developed - it is not a mod of any existing one. It's coded with L"ove (info at the bottom of the left menu) and will be released for free (so we don't get stabbed by lawyers)

All the source code of the game will be available after release

The game will have mappacks, which will be downloadable from ingame. Users most likely won't be able to publish maps directly, but will be able to send them in and we'll add them for everyone to use.

The primary maps will have a story and some portaly puzzles. What kind, well, we'll figure that out as we go

Level editor will be embedded in the game so you can edit the level while you play

Original SMB levels and Lost levels will be included

Simultaneous Multiplayer

This one’s weird.

Life beyond HTTP 1.1: Google’s SPDY – igvita.com

A while back, Google Chrome dropped the http from its location bar. This seemed like a decision based on cosmetic and usability concerns.

Maybe not, since now Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik) who joined Google from the PostRank acquisition in June is saying that Google’s web services are not running over HTTP, but rather over SPDY (SPeeDY), Google research project and an application-level protocol for transporting web content.

In other words, SPDY is a replacement protocol for HTTP, and Google’s servers are using SPDY to serve content to Chrome-based browsers.

This is all happening transparently to the user. If you copy a Google URL from Chrome’s location bar and paste it, the http is added. This makes sense, given that other browsers wouldn’t understand a spdy-based URL. I can’t find any evidence that SDPY is in use.

All this makes sense given Google’s obsession with speed, but somehow this feels a bit odd and fracturing, given the centralized nature and adoption of the HTTP spec.

Thoughts?Possibly Related Posts:

• Copy and Paste for the iPhone? Sort of . . .
• I’m switching back to IE6 and why you should too
• Browser Wars: Chrome vs. Android
• PubSubHubbub: Cool, but Hard to Say
• Chrome Books Are Not for You

Made by scientist Paul Vallett for his Electron Cafe blog, this funny cartoon is essentially about the differences between how science happens in the movies, and how science happens in real life.

On the one hand, I like it a lot, because the speed and ease of movie science does lead people to expect major breakthroughs to happen quickly, and makes them less critical of the sort of PR and journalism that tries to paint every new paper as a game-changer. In fact, you could probably make a case for movie science being one of the drivers that helps to create that bad PR and journalism to begin with. If decades of film and television have trained people to expect easy "Eureka!" moments, maybe they're likely to have less interest in nuanced results, or the fact that not all published science is correct. Unrealistic expectations matter.

On the other hand, well-done fiction is bound by reasonable constraints. There's not time for a "and then they do real science" montage in every movie. To a certain extent, I think this particular complaint might be a bit like wondering why nobody in Star Wars ever stops to pee.

This guest post from Nick Rothacher, the self-taught economist, is part of the “reader stories” feature at Get Rich Slowly. Some stories contain general advice; others are examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success — or failure. These stories feature folks from all levels of financial maturity and with all sorts of incomes.

Six months ago, my wife and I sold our two-bedroom, two-bath condo located in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City. We saved close to five thousand dollars and sold the property without much stress, frustration, or wasted time. Here’s how we did it.

Starting Early
Life changes fast, and when my wife started applying to graduate schools across the country, we knew we needed to be flexible with our housing situation. We started talking about selling our condo over a year in advance of when we would be moving. This extra time was invaluable because we weren’t stressed about reducing our price in order to make a quick sale. When you sell real estate in a depressed market, time is your friend.

Exploring Options
Initially, we tried selling the condo “For Sale By Owner”. The primary benefit of selling For Sale By Owner is to avoid the commissions and fees paid to real estate agents. We took digital photographs, created our own fliers to market the property, and started advertising on free sites like Craigslist and local online classifieds. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to work.

After three weeks with few prospects, we escalated our marketing attack. From my yearlong stint as a real estate agent, I learned that many buyers (especially Baby Boomers) prefer to use a real estate agent to help them purchase a property.

We needed to get our property listed on the MLS (the Multiple Listing Service). We paid a local discount brokerage $175 to list the property. This service is considered a “discount” or “flat-fee” brokerage and the fee covers the following services:

• Property is listed within 24 hours
• Six month listing period
• Property is advertised on multiple websites
• Six photo listing

But in order to really market the property, we needed to go beyond the services listed. My wife and I took the initiative and did the following:

• Adapted our flier to direct people to the MLS listing.
• Used our own pictures that highlighted all parts of the property — inside and out.
• Provided property tours to folks that called to schedule a walkthrough.
• Held two open houses and advertised with yard signs, the MLS listing, Craigslist, and other online media.
• Communicated regularly with our broker to update the MLS listing.

After another three weeks had passed, we received a low offer. We submitted a counteroffer with a price closer to our listing price and it was accepted! Property sold. Many dollars saved.

Crunch the Numbers Yourself
Conduct a simple cost-benefit analysis to see if an agent is really worth it. Typically, you pay 6% of the sales price to have an agent list your house, which is divided 50/50 between the buyer’s agent and the seller’s agent.

What this means is that the remaining 94% of what an agent can get for me better be worth more than 100% of what I can get for myself!

I listed my property at $165k, which means I would have paid 3% to the buyer’s agent ($4,950) and another 3% to the seller’s agent (another $4,950), for a combined cost to me of $9,900.

But because I used a discount broker, I paid $4,950 to the buyer’s agent and only $175 for the seller’s (our) agent.

Total savings = $4,775.

The Death of the Real Estate Agent?
Did you know there are over a million real estate professionals currently affiliated with the National Association of Realtors? (And that’s down from 1.2 million at the peak of the housing boom in 2006.) I’m bound to upset a majority of them with what I say next, but my sole intention is to educate GRS readers.

There has to be value to justify hiring a real estate agent. If my wife and I believed that a full-service real estate agent would have provided $4,950 worth of services in the following areas, then we would have hired someone to:

• help with paperwork
• help with advertising
• help with knowledge in a variety of areas
• help provide access to the property
• help to sell the property more quickly
• help fix the cosmetic changes to help the home sell
• help us to understand current market conditions and the value of comparable homes in the area

Thanks to the internet, most of these services are no longer as valuable as they once were. Every one of the topics listed above can be found with the help of an online search engine. The buyer/seller can learn about all of these topics in a matter of minutes.

In our case, it just didn’t make sense to hire a real estate agent to list our home. We live in a busy metropolitan area and we knew our buyer audience was large. We ended up selling to some parents that wanted an investment and a safe place for their two daughters in college.

The Future of Real Estate Agents
The internet continues to change the way we access information about real estate. For buyers and sellers, this is a positive change that can save us money, but for real estate sales agents and brokers, it presents new challenges to the profession.

As the quality of information on the internet improves, many of the “gatekeepers” and the “knowledge holders” will be unable to keep their expertise out of the hands of the general public. I’m not saying that doctors, lawyers, and other professionals will no longer be valuable. But believe me, getting your real estate license is not exactly the equivalent as going to law school or med school.

Don’t Believe Me?
Look around. Agents are posting properties on Craigslist and free classifieds because that’s where buyers are looking. I definitely don’t need an agent to post pictures on Craigslist — I can do that myself.
 
The MLS is the last stronghold that real estate agents cling to because their livelihood depends on it. But don’t be surprised when someone develops a database that is fully accessible to the public, making the MLS obsolete.


My last complaint about real estate agents is that they get paid based on the market price of your home. From the graphic above, you can see that the values of homes in the U.S. have increased (look at the red line) tenfold from 1975-2005.

Did the amount of work increase tenfold? Did it become ten times harder to sell a home? No and No. This 6% “tax” really hurts Americans because on average, people sell their home every 5-7 years. If you want to read more about the negative effect this has on the economy and how full-service brokers are working hard to eliminate discount brokers, here is a great article.

So next time you buy or sell a property: explore your options, educate yourself, and save money!

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly - Personal Finance That Makes Sense.:

• Reader Story: What My Father Taught Me About Debt
• Ask the Readers: Save More or See the World?
• Ask the Readers: Should I Sell My Home to Pay Off My Debt?
• Follow-Up: Save More or See the World?
• Ask the Readers: Buy a Home, or Max Out Retirement Savings?

A Redditor called “i_luv_ur_mom” posted this math teacher’s amusement, an equation that draws a lovely Bat-signal.

Do you like Batman? Do you like math? My math teacher is REALLY cool

What Shakespeare’s unanswered questions have to do with Einstein’s unkempt hair and Britpop.

Israeli illustrator Noma Bar, he of Negative Space fame, is a longtime Brain Pickings favorite. Turns out, our friends at Mark Batty (previously) have had a soft spot for him for a while as well. In 2007, they released a fantastic volume of Bar’s most iconic negative space portraits of cultural icons. Guess Who?: The Many Faces of Noma Bar features over 50 minimalist vector illustrations that encapsulate, with brilliant subtlety and visual eloquence, the essence of famous politicians, philosophers and pop culture legends — a masterpiece of capturing character and sentiment with uncanny precision.

The book is divided into four parts — Cultural Icons, Hollywood Heads, Political Figures, Britpop Stars, and The Musicians — with an introduction by Steven Heller. (Previously: I II III.) Though the captions for each image leave much to be desired in tone and style, they do give an appropriate context of allusions and symbolism, making Bar’s creative feats all the more palpable.

CULTURAL ICONS

['The Search for Shakespeare'] revolved around new biographical discoveries and all the questions these raised. I received this commission about 5 hours before a flight to Italy. All of a sudden the question mark idea linked the theme of the program to one of the most significant philosophical questions of all time: To be or not to be? I chose ‘to be’ and sent the final portrait off about two hours after receiving the assignment.” ~ Noma Bar

HOLLYWOOD HEADS

POLITICAL FIGURES

BRITPOP STARS

THE MUSICIANS

Delightful and timeless, Guess Who? captures some of modernity’s most famous and infamous characters through the eyes of one of the most original artists of our time.

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Shared by Craig Tatham
I think the real question (for me) is ... how many of these can identify you? I'd probably say 14-15 for me at one point or another.

Are you a geek? Walyou is about tech and gadgets, but also geek culture. Let’s take a look at the Evolution of the Geek to see where you fit into our community.

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Fallows flags this NYT chart:

It's based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its significance is not partisan (who's "to blame" for the deficit) but intellectual. It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit, namely the Bush-era tax cuts.

Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait echo Jim's argument.

Nicholas Carlson / The Business Insider:
Here's The Presentation That Inspired Google+  —  Why is Google+ designed the way it is?  —  Back when he worked at Google, Facebook product manger Paul Adams did a bunch of research that he says “formed a cornerstone of the Google social strategy.”  —  That research culminated …

On the day before the 1996 US presidential election, the NY Times ran a crossword puzzle that correctly predicted the winner.

Click through to see how they did it.