J.D. Moyer

science fiction author, beatmaker, against fascism

Author: J.D. Moyer Page 57 of 104

J.D. Moyer is a science fiction author and electronic music producer from Oakland, California.

Pre-Order Contest for Momu – The Mission

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On March 21

In Creative Work/Career, Electronic Music

Momu - The Mission out April 8 (March 25 on Beatport)

Momu – The Mission out April 8 (March 25 on Beatport)

Loöq Records is sponsoring a pre-order contest for my new album with Mark Mark Musselman: Momu – The Mission. First prize is US$808 and lossless audio versions of all four Momu albums to date.

So who is Momu? Why is almost every track named after a location in San Francisco? What unique sound from a viral video was sampled and used in the track Google Bus? Why spend the entire promotional budget on a pre-order contest instead of a publicist or ad campaign or music video?

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Investing Mistakes I Have Made

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On March 14

In Advice for Young People, Money/Personal Finance

My first mistake: investing in bulk Scrabble tiles.

My first mistake: investing in bulk Scrabble tiles.

This post is difficult to write — I’ve been putting it off. It’s embarrassing to talk about mistakes I’ve made that have lost me 20%, 50%, or 100% of my principal. But I feel a sense of responsibility to share the gory details of my own foolish, greedy, and sometimes reckless attempts to grow money.

Here’s what I hope to accomplish by writing this post:

  • better understand the nature of these mistakes, so I don’t make them again in the future
  • help at least a few of my readers avoid making these same mistakes themselves
  • provide a little inspiration to younger people who are just starting off their careers and investment plans

I’ve been fascinated by investing since the day I learned at a young age that a bank would give you money (interest) for your deposits.

Since then I’ve made a some good financial decisions and some bad ones. The bad ones mostly all fall into the “classic” mistakes that inexperienced investors make, though a few of my mistakes required ingenuity and above-average foolhardiness.

Without further ado here’s my list of “greatest hits” investment mistakes, for your edification and entertainment. Maybe you can avoid some of the traps I waltzed into!

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Making Good Habits Easier — What Is Most Effective?

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On March 5

In Metaprogramming

Brain training!

Brain training!

I’m fascinated by the science of habit formation. Habits are a gray area where we don’t exert free will directly, but we have some choice in terms of how our habits are shaped. We can set up cues to trigger behaviors in ourselves and others, and reward desirable behaviors to condition and reinforce specific neurological pathways.

I’ve been experimenting with modifying some of my own habits over the past year or two. Here’s a short list of habits I’ve successfully implemented:

  • writing fiction every weekday, around 1000 words/day (or working on world-building, outlining, or revisions for about 2 hours), and keeping a work log
  • strength exercise every weekday (dumbbells or body weight exercises)
  • walking about twenty minutes a day
  • implementing a new dental health routine
  • upping my billable consulting hours from about 65 hours a month to about 80 hours a month (to cover increased costs helping a family member, but also increasing own expendable income and savings rate)

In terms of starting new habits and keeping them going, the two most effective techniques for me have been emotional commitment and tracking.

Other habit change methods, such as manipulating cues, understanding intrinsic rewards, and adding extrinsic rewards have been helpful, but not as instrumental as the former two.

Let’s Get Real. What Works?

The purpose of this post is to be clear about what the core of habit change is, and what is fluff or window dressing.

In my experience the single most important factor is the emotional intensity with which you commit to the change.

I’m not sure if this commitment can be rushed. For myself, sometimes I know that I’m going to need to change something in the future, but for whatever reasons I’m just not ready to commit. Maybe it’s because of fear, or a feeling that I don’t have enough time or energy to make the required changes, or just that changing will be too hard.

It’s often negative feelings that finally galvanize the change. Maybe I’m fed up with the old way of life, or tired of the poor results I’m getting from my current way of doing things.

I do know that it’s a very different feeling to consider doing something, or to dip a toe in a “see how it goes,” than to commit 100% to a new set of behaviors.

For me it helps to focus on both immediate rewards (the inherent pleasures of the new behavior) as well as future rewards (improved health, income, status — whatever it may be). At the same time, maintain a vivid picture of the pain and suffering involved with the “old way of doing things.”

The other most effective practice, in my experience, is tracking progress.

“What gets measured, gets managed.”
– Peter Drucker

When I’m trying to implement a new behavior, spreadsheets are my friend. For fiction writing, I use a daily writing log. For tracking my consulting hours and billable time, I use a spreadsheet that not only calculates how close I am to my monthly goal, but also generates other helpful numbers like remaining workdays.

If you are serious about changing your behavior, write down what you do and what the results are. This applies even to simple counts like “how many days without smoking.”

Everything Else

Everything else is fluff. Of course there can be value in motivational “tricks” like giving yourself rewards, or analyzing a behavior to see if the “bad part” of the behavior can be removed while still holding to part of the psychological reward (if you take outside smoke breaks, don’t forget to take breaks and go outside after you stop smoking).

Go ahead and make that public bet on the internet that you won’t drink for 30 days, or whatever. It can’t hurt, and might even help. Put your running shoes by the door so they remind you and are easy to locate and put on. That will probably help out a bit.

But for long-term change in your life systems, emotional commitment and behavioral tracking are the most effective habit change techniques.

Please share your thoughts (including disagreements, if you have had a different experience) below.

OUSD Teacher Contract Negotiations (and Cronyism at the Top?)

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On February 13

In Education, Oakland

ousd_logo_final_vert
As a parent of a child enrolled in an Oakland public school, I’ve been paying close attention to the ongoing teacher contract negotiations. Next week will be the 2nd week of teachers at my daughter’s school (Emerson Elementary) using “work-to-rule” as a means to protest the low salaries Oakland teachers receive as compared to neighboring districts.

OUSD (Oakland Unified School District) teachers have been working without a negotiated contract since 2008. From OUSD’s Collective Bargaining Agreements and Salary Schedules page, you can view the last full contract as well as the imposed contract implemented by the school board in April 2010 after several rounds of failed negotiations.

OUSD is offering teachers a 10% raise over three years (letter from current superintendent Antwan Wilson). The current average OUSD teacher salary is around $55K (starting teachers make around $40K). This may seem high to people outside of the Bay Area, but average rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in Oakland is around $4,000 a month. In other words average apartment rent in Oakland is approximately equal to 100% of average OUSD teacher after-tax income. Clearly Oakland teachers are underpaid. The statewide average is approximately $68K, while the neighboring city of Alameda pays an average of $65K.

[Correction: upon closer examination the link to Oakland rents includes neighborhoods with 10 miles of Oakland, which includes San Francisco. Oakland average rent is probably closer to $2500 — still very high for OUSD average teacher income]

To both attract and retain qualified, experienced, and talented teachers, Oakland needs to offer teachers higher salaries.

Negotiation Status

As of today OUSD and OEA (Oakland Eduation Association — the teacher’s union) have failed to reach an agreement. Here is the statement from the OEA. At issue are not only teacher raises but also Special Education class size caps and caseloads, student to counselor ratios, and benefits. The same page includes links to latest proposals from both OUSD and OEA.

Especially contentious is Article 12, which governs the rules for filling vacancies and assigning teachers. The district is pushing for changes that would reduce teacher job security and remove the role of seniority in placement and transfer rights.

Accusations of Cronyism

Jack Gerson of classroomstruggle.org has accused OUSD superintendent Antwan Wilson of hiring his pals from Denver with bloated salaries (including a husband-wife team), creating unnecessary new administrative positions, and giving all administrators pay raises that far exceed what OUSD is proposing for teacher raises. Reading Gerson’s post severely undermined my confidence in Wilson, and also the board that hired him.

Wilson states that he plans to “trim Central Office” but that does not seem to include the salaries of top administrators. What does this style of “pad the top, chop from the bottom” budgeting style really mean? According to Gerson:

So if Wilson is cutting the central administration budget, much of the cuts are likely coming from the lower paid administrative support. This would be a repetition of what Randy Ward did in 2003 – 6 when the state came in. He brought in all kinds of Broad Foundation graduates and residents at the high end (Troy Christmas; Jonathan Klein; and many others) and promoted some ambitious locals, while laying waste to central services — eliminating central copy services, almost annihilating maintenance (electricians, painters, window repair, etc.) and thus forcing schools to buy services from the likes of Kinko’s. Randy Ward made other cuts “away from the classroom” — of clerical, cafeteria, custodial, and other essential school classified staff positions.

Even if there is some central office fat to trim, and even if Wilson and his Denver team are a completely qualified and necessary team of brilliant administrators and deserve every penny of their sky-high salaries, Wilson should have deferred his own raise and the new top brass hires until a fair contract with the teachers was secured. It just looks bad.

I’d like to invite Oakland School Board members James Harris (President), Jody London (Vice President), Roseann Torres, Aimee Eng, Nina Senn, Shanthi Gonzales, Jumoke Hinton Hodge, and Antwan Wilson himself to respond to Gerson’s accusations, and either justify the administrative pay raises and new positions, or roll them back.

My Own Position

Originally I was sympathetic to points on both sides of the negotiations. Obviously teachers deserve a contract and a significant raise, but I can also understand the desire of the district to push for more flexibility in hiring and transfers, even if this comes at the cost of some job security for some teachers.

However in light of revelations regarding salary padding and fat new (and potentially unnecessary) administrative positions at the top, I believe the school board and the superintendent have lost all moral authority.

I don’t pretend to understand all the intricacies of the complex OUSD budget, but from what I can tell the teachers have put forward a reasonable proposal, which as a parent I fully support (I’ll be at Emerson later today to join an after-school protest supporting the teachers) .

The fault doesn’t lie entirely with the district; the district budget is closely tied with the state budget, and California lawmakers leave money on the table every year with absurdly low oil extraction taxes. Still, the district should move quickly to reach an agreement with OEA, and forget about changes to Article 12 for now.

Get the teachers the raise they deserve, and do it soon.

Let The Board Know

If you are an OUSD family member and you’d like to support the teachers in their negotiations, you may wish to send a “valentine” to the school board and the superintendent. A sample email and the board member’s addresses are below:

Jody.London@ousd.k12.ca.us
Aimee.Eng@ousd.k12.ca.us
Jumoke.Hodge@ousd.k12.ca.us
Nina.Senn@ousd.k12.ca.us
Roseann.Torres@ousd.k12.ca.us
Shanthi.Gonzales@ousd.k12.ca.us
James.Harris@ousd.k12.ca.us
Antwan.Wilson@ousd.k12.ca.us

“Dear school board member: This Valentine’s Day we are asking you to show our teachers that you love them by giving them the modest raise they are asking for – without contingencies. As an OUSD parent/member of the OUSD community, we want to attract and keep the best teachers, and we think the teacher’s request for a contingency-free raise makes good sense. Happy Valentine’s Day!”

Getting from Should to Must

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On February 2

In Creative Work/Career, Metaprogramming

Walking my tiger used to be in the "should do" category. Now it's a "must do" ... a pillar of my mental, creative, and cardiovascular health. OK -- I don't own a tiger -- but the walking part is true.

Going on long walks with my tiger used to be in the “should do” category. Now it’s a “must do” … a pillar of my mental, creative, and cardiovascular health. OK — that’s not my tiger — but the walking part is true!

One of the ideas that has stuck with me from Awaken the Giant Within is the subtle but powerful distinction between “should” and “must” when in comes to motivation.

Robbins makes this point many times throughout the book: we make things happen in our lives when we completely commit to them, when we move them out of the “should do” category into the “must do” category.

There’s a huge gap between ideas, hopes, and dreams and sitzfleisch (applying butt to chair, getting it done — and yes this applies even if you work at a standing desk).

How do we close that gap? Robbins would suggest associating massive pleasure with these “must do” activities (a vision of success) and massive pain with inaction (imagining regret, remorse, continued suffering, etc.).

Natural “Must Do” Areas

We don’t “look for motivation” in most areas of our lives. We do things because we have to do them. Our kid is hungry so we feed our kid. Work needs to get done so we do the work. Unless depression or some other mental issue has disrupted the brain, we don’t find a need to “find” motivation. We do things because they need doing.

The “problem” of motivation surfaces in life areas that we might consider “optional.” These might include exercise, artistic practice, meditation, or even playing with our children. These things aren’t necessarily putting money on the table, they can be put off to the next day without devastating consequences.

But if we rationally and carefully consider what is important to us we may find that these activities (you know what they are for yourself) are vitally important to our well-being, and to our future selves.

What belongs on your MUST DO list that currently isn’t?

What would you tell your past self should have been on the “must do” list? Is it too late to start?

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