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Hello, my name is Hector Sanchez and welcome to my personal blog. This blog’s name synthetizes the to things that I’m most interested in: Technology and Businesses , although I’ll use it to blog about other things that interest me as well such as the Economy, Politics and World News.
If you want to know a little bit more about me, you can check the “About Me” page where I go into more details about myself.
I’ve found that having a blog is a great way to keep track of the things that we do and the stuff that comes to our minds at a given point in time. Having blogged since mid 2007, it surprises me a lot how my thoughts, concerns and ideas have evolved as time goes by, so a blog is like taking a video capture of your mind so to speak, and you can always go back in time and check what crossed your mind in the past.
Welcome again to my personal blog, and stay tunned!
Tags: computer, Internet Business, success, Welcome
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The title of this blog post, “Income without time has no value“, comes from an interview that French blogger and entrepreneur, founder of “Seesmic“, Loic Lemeur did to writer and entrepreneur, Tim Ferriss, the writer of the famous book “The 4-hour workweek“.
Basically the idea behind such statement is that we all work hard to earn an income, so that later on, we can trade it for a posession, such like a house, a car, a trip, and other stuff, but he is right in the sense that, at the end, what we are all looking for, when we are acquiring things, is the experience that owning those things, can provide to us. But without time to enjoy them, there is no experience, so what is the purpose of making more and more money if there’s no time to enjoy them?
Time is the most precious non-renewable resource we have, so it makes sense to spend it wisely, specially if you consider that time is life. We can get more of anything, but not from time. I think ever since my two daughters were born, I’ve become more aware of the value of time, as I can’t go back in time and see my girls when they were babies, so the time that I don’t spend today with them, it’s time that is already gone, and no matter how much time I spend later on with them, I can’t recover it. To see my girls grow, and to be with them, on special occassions, it has no price to me.
I still haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve read comments from several successful bloggers and netrepreneurs and they all recommend the book. I’m going to read it this month, and post a review abou it when I finish reading it.
Below you will find an excerpt of the interview to Tim Ferriss by Loic Lemeur
Tags: 4-hour workweek, book, income, job, life, lifestyle, loic lemeur, tim ferriss, time
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...One of the reasons why I would like to become an Internet Entrepreneur, is because I can work from anywhere and decide how to invest the most precious asset I have: My time. Even if you own a brick-and-mortar business, it’s not always easy to have a good quality of life, sometimes as an entrepreneur, you end-up tied working more hours and suffering more stress, than if you had a day job. That’s why nothing beats the ”DotCom LifeStyle” as John Chow calls it.
John Chow is a famous, Canadian blogger, that according to his latest blog income report (October 2008), he made $32,350.93 only from his blog. Blogging is just one of the many business models that anyone can use to make money online. John Chow himself, earns more money from his other online businesses, blogging is just sort of a hobby to him, and the nice thing is the makes money while having fun.
Other ways to make money online, are via selling physical goods through an Online Store, sell stuff on Ebay, write Ebooks and sell them in Amazon, etc. As with the brick-and-mortar businesses, the best business models are the ones that get the most leverage of ourselves and from our resources. Blogging itself, is not necessarily the most leveraged Internet Business Model, but certainly far more better than having a job…. if you don’t work one day, you don’t make any money 
As I’m writing this blog post, John Chow has been almost a month away from his home in Vancouver, Canada, in a trip to China and Hong Kong, and, no matter where he is, as long there is an Internet connection, he can control his small empire from there.
I want to share with you two videos from John Chow, the first one, is entitled ” The DotCom LifeStyle” where he gives his thoughts about the benefits of having a “DotCom Lifestyle” on the second video he did, he shows all the gear and equipment he carries on with him when he is not blogging from home.
I wish someday I can enjoy that lifestyle!
“The DotCom Lifestyle” Video
“Mobile Blogging Gears” Video
My Mobile Blogging Gears from John Chow on Vimeo.
Tags: Blogging, china, Internet Business, john chow, lifestyle, money, success, time
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Last week, on Friday March 3rd, 2009, the U.S. Government released the latest figures of unemployment. Only in March 2009, the U.S. economy lost 663,000 jobs, raising the unemployment rate up to 8.5%, the highest in 25 years.
But, if you check the comparative that CNN prepared, in the video below, in only the first three months of 2009, 2 million jobs were lost, which are almost the same jobs lost, during the recessions of early 80’s and mid 70’s, that actuall lasted more than a year.
From July 1981 up to November 1982, the U.S. economy lost 2.8 million jobs and from November 1973 to March 1975, 2 Million jobs were cut.
These figures first, reveal the severeness of the current situation, and 2nd, it gives us an idea of how much time a recession may last, based on the lenght of these two recessions. The current recession, officially started in December 2007, it’s been more than year, and the recession doesn’t seem to have reached bottom.
A possible recovery without Jobs Creation
Recessions and bad economic times, like the ones we are facing now, makes us and corporations, think twice before spending a dime, so as bad as recessions are, they are good sometimes, because they help us rethink how and where we are spending our money.
The current recession, is happening, at times of fast and great technological advances, which help companies to reduce costs and become more efficient. This is probably the biggest difference of the current recession, compared vs. prior ones.
My feeling is that once companies realize that they can keep producing the same or more, with the same or less resources, (i.e. people, money, assets), and the recovery finally arrives, all the jobs that were lost , might have never come back again. This should make all of us think, that perhpas in the future, a financial recovery might not be necessarily directly tied to job creations.
Under these circumstances, we as employees, need to be prepared to survive to such a difficult environment, either by gaining more skills in order to become more valuable to our employers, or by embracing the possibilities that technologies like the Internet offeres to us.
Tags: Financial Crisis, global recession, Internet, jobs, Recession, unemployment
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Today’s post is about an almost unknown Afghan general, at least unknown to the West. I knew about him by watching the video documentary from National Neographic, that I’m placing at the bottom of this blog post.
Leading the resistance against the Soviets
Massoud was an engineering student of the University of Kabul, that turned into a military leader of the resistance against the Soviet invasion in 1979. The Soviets came to Afghanistan in order to support the threatened communist government, and due to the Cold War, the resistance received a lof ot help, weapons and financial aid from the U.S, that sent up to $10 billion dollars, to help them defeat the Soviets. Finally, the Soviet Union, withdrew their troops in 1989.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West lost interest in Afghanistan, and Massud became one of the key leaders of the new Government, where he acted as Defense Minister.
Fighting the Taliban Regime
But political rivals of new government, the Talibans, put Massud and the capital city of Kabul under siege, forcing the country into chaos again. By September 1996, the Taliban had forced Massud and his government out of Kabul and eventually the Taliban regime ended up controlling most of the Afghan territory.
Massud kept fighting the Taliban regime, leading a new resistance group called ” United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan“, which was a group that later on, became known in the West as “The Northern Alliance” because most of the factions were from Northern Afghanistan. He received little help from the West, as it was not priority due that the Soviet Union was already out of the country.
Terrorist Warnings to the West
The reason that Massud raised my attention is that, according to the video documentary by National Geographic, he had been warning the West, about the terrorist activities of Al-Qaeda, in his territory, but he received little help and attention.
In April 2001, at a news conference in Paris, he sent a message to president George Bush: “if he isn’t interested in peace in Afghanistan, if he doesn’t help the Afghan people to arrive at their objective of peace, then the Americans and the rest of the world will have to face the problems” .
Once Again, in August 2001, one month before the 9/11 attacks in New York, he released another warning to the U.S., he told an Indian film crew that the United States may face a terrorism beyond comprehension. Just a month later, on September 9th, 2001, two men posing as TV journalists, met with him. One of them detonated a bomb killing himself and Massud. Two days later, America suffered the terrorist attacks.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, is know a national hero in Afghanistan, and day of his death is a national holiday. He is also known by the nickname of the “Lion of Panjshir”, due to his courage in fighting the Soviets.
Perhaps, had the U.S. kept helping Massud and the new Governmnet, they could’ve thrown Taliban regime out of Afghanistan and maybe, the terrorist attacks in New York, could’ve been avoided.
Below is the video documentary from National Geographic:
Tags: Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Cold War, Panjshir, Soviet Union, taliban, terrorism
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This morning I found a very interesting quote from American scientist Richard Feynman (1918 -1988), famous for his participation in the development of the Atomic Bomb and for earning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. In his quote that tries to do an analogy of the U.S. debt with the number of stars in the Universe. Now, he died in 1988, so he probably came up with that quote, at a time when the U.S. debt wasn’t as big as it is nowadays, specially with the huge amounts managed in the most recent bailouts. Here is the quote:
“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” – Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988)
I guess his statement is more true now than ever, just the allocated money in the bailouts issued since the current recession started, in December 2007, amount up to $10.5 Trillion dollars! So he is probably right, when talking about a huge number, we shouldn’t say that it is an “astronomical” amount, instead we should say that it is an incredible “economical” sum of money. Don’t you think?
How big is a “Trillion” of dollars?
Since it appears we need to get used to using the term “trillions of dollars“, I think it is good to know how a trillion actually looks with all its zeroes. There’s actually two scales, the short scale, which is what Americans and the British, use, and the long one, which is what the rest of the World use.
1 Billion of dollars, in the short scale looks like this: 10^9 or $1,000,000,000
1 Trillion of dollars, in the short scale looks like this: 10^12 or $1,000,000,000,000
Bailout Tracker
If you want to see the full picture of what the U.S. Government has already issued in bailouts, to support the economy during the current recession, I recommend you checkout this page from CNN’s, as it has the complete bailouts and programs issued since December 2007, so you can have an idea of the seriousness of the problem we are all immersed.
Here is the current snapshot as of today:
Sources:
Picture: Nobel Price’s website
Bailout Table: CNN, as of April 1st, 2009
Tags: bailout, billions, debt, Financial Crisis, global crisis, money, trillions
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