the book "How to Read a Book" describes the technique in his conclusion in excellent detail. It is essentially about owning the information you are consuming.
Personally I think this applies to non-fiction works only. At least in my personal reading. My brain doesn't need to store the details of fictional works. It seems like it actively discards "entertainment" items in favor of knowledge I need to pay the mortgage and feed the kids. I am much more deliberate with that information.
Exactly. Perks are a method of control really, to make the employee dependent on the company for their lifestyle, knowing it will be hard to negotiate their salary up to an equivalent level at another company. Reminds me of one company some friends of mine worked for, fantastic perks (like the entire company being flown to NYC for a movie premiere) but the salaries were awful, none of them could have afforded that trip themselves.
My attitude is, look, I have friends, I have a life, I have things I want to do, I don't need the company to fill in these gaps. The only "rewards" I want are cash and time to spend it.
Um, does your cash lower your tax burden? You should look at your marginal tax rate. I'm personally pushing 40% marginally, which means that any "perks" that the company can offer me which don't show up on my final W-2 are worth almost twice as much as if I'd had to pay for them out of pocket. Once you reach a certain salary level, you're wasting money not negotiating down your salary for things you value more.
In your experience, is it actually as easy to get unpaid time off as you make it sound? Certainly, not being paid for not working is entirely possible, but it's much less desirable if you lose your job for it...
(My job allows you to "buy" extra time off, so it's not an issue for me; but I figured this was uncommon, especially in the States.)
If I make it sound as easy as taking paid vacation, then yes, but with a small sample size.
The much larger sample size I have for a related question: is it any easier to take vacation at a company which offers 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks annually? To this, I've found the answer is "no."
Both situations have a simple explanation, which is that, except for the smallest companies, the person(s) setting the PTO policy is not the same as the one approving absences. That is, my manager cares about my availability, whereas HR and/or Accounting cares about how much I get paid during such absences.
Hewitt is dead wrong on his definition of middle men. They are there to facilitate and earn a profit. Nothing to do with lowering cost. They increase cost. Period.
Frankly, I think he's being a bit of a whiner about the whole thing. There are what, 100k apps in the store? If they weren't QCing it would be 1,000,000 and the percentage of shit apps would be MUCH higher than it is now (and it is through the roof right now).
If the middleman brings more value to the end-customer than he increases the cost, then (s)he is a net win, and cutting the middleman out reduces the value to the end customer.
Note how that doesn't contradict what you say, which is still literally true; the question is whether your literal truth actually matters.
The Internet makes some of the old "easy" ways of being a middleman irrelevant and open the field wide open in a lot of ways, but it will never make it impossible for a middleman to bring more value to the customer than they cost. It's just that competing with "customer goes direct to the source" just got a lot harder.
I'm really sad for purely selfish reasons. My 11 year old really enjoyed hackety-hack up to the point that it worked. Likely it won't be finished now, which is a shame because it was a really great tool for introducing kids...
I've actually signed up my first beta customer, which will be a big step towards an actual product. We use the product for our business, but n+1 is challenging. I'm doing it though. I want those 500 customers and the freedom to work on my own IP.
Personally I think this applies to non-fiction works only. At least in my personal reading. My brain doesn't need to store the details of fictional works. It seems like it actively discards "entertainment" items in favor of knowledge I need to pay the mortgage and feed the kids. I am much more deliberate with that information.