Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the UK, on the connection between action and satisfaction: "Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's a day you've had everything to do and you've done it." Source: Quoted in "As I Said to Denis: The Margaret Thatcher Book of Quotations" ​II. Philosopher Alan Watts on mistakes: "Regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh, because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But, if you will, treat yourself for a while as a cloud or a wave and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do. Because even if you do something that appears totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or another. Then through this capacity you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition." Source: Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking​ ​ ​ 1 Question For You Think of the best coach, teacher, or leader you ever had. What can you learn from them? Think of the worst coach, teacher, or leader you ever had. What can you learn from them? Continue reading

Google has released a reference guide for journalists that provides some really fantastic resources. They include a DDOS service as an alternative to Cloudflare for those running political sites, Tilegrams for those who want to build cartograms for map data, a fast fact check explorer, a Google Data GIF maker, and Flourish a data visualization tool for data with pre-set templates. Will be interesting to see articles online from the NY Times, Washington Post, ESPN, Politico, and other places where you recognize these solutions that Google has provided. For more information check out the journalists studio. My favorite section that a stats nerd can really got list in is the Public Data Directory For access to the WTO, ICT, IMF, and other stat databases visit: https://www.google.com/publicdata/directory - Richart Ruddie Continue reading

A super exciting article about how scientists are learning more about the brain to make positive affects on our future lives. If we put this much focus and $'s in resolving the issues and problems discussed in this article than there's nothing we can't accomplish. Read MIT review from 8 different scientists here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1031458/scientific-mysteries-human-brain Continue reading

After talking with a private equity advisor the advice to follow when doing a roll up is be ready to commit at least 5 years to the venture, building high growth and high value business where you can increase margins & operating efficiencies. If you are working in or buying a software as a service business you can get multiples of revenues that are 10x or greater especially if you can show consistent 20% growth margins. Services or public relations businesses you are looking at more of an 6-12x especially if you are selling to a global agency. Good to showcase 15-25% operating margins in a standard business and 15-30% margins in a public relations agency model. Notes for the future. Continue reading

This is a doozy of an article with Spain taking the lead and suing Google and loses over 10 million Euro's because they are sending the right to be forgotten removals and requests overseas to the Lumen Project in a sneaky but creative effort to keep the stuff they really don't want to delete online. This time they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar as their usual protection with the Irish DPC taking years to handle and review a case is also being sued by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties over its slow movement on issues relating to Google complaints which may or may not be on purpose but from my friends who work at Google they sound off that the company isn't so "Don't Be Evil" anymore... Full article can be found here: https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-protection/spain-hands-google-e10-million-gdpr-fine-for-violation-of-right-to-be-forgotten-rules/ "Spanish data protection authority Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) called the two infringements that led to the GDPR fine “very serious.” Both relate to Google’s transfer of EU citizen data to an academic research project based in the United States. The decision centers on the Lumen Project, an ongoing study conducted by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The project, which began in 2001, collects cease-and-desist letters related to online activity with an eye to determining any effect they might have on free speech. Google has contributed to the archive since 2002, first motivated to action when the Church of Scientology filed bad faith takedown requests in order to silence websites critical of them. The Lumen Project has typically focused on takedown requests made under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but has also begun collecting data deletion requests made by EU citizens under the rights granted by the GDPR. The first of the Spanish regulator’s findings was that Google could not demonstrate a legal right to pass these requests on to a third party, as it was not providing users with notification or a choice. The AEPD also found that Google tripped over the “right to be forgotten” granted by Article 17 of the GDPR by putting the deletion request itself, and the attendant details, beyond their reach. The form that users were asked to fill out to request removal of their data from Lumen Project was also found to be faulty and confusing in its structure. While AEPD has little recourse directly against Lumen Project, the organization has said that it has honored a request by the AEPD (via Google) to delete the data of users found to have been communicated to it without a legal basis. Google has said that it is reviewing the AEPD’s GDPR fine and that it is re-evaluating how it shares data with Lumen Project in light of the decision. One of Google’s two prior GDPR fines also related to the right to be forgotten, but in that case a de-indexing stipulation for search engines that was first established in 2014 (and later incorporated into the GDPR terms). Sweden fined Google the equivalent of about $8 million in 2020 over failure to keep up with de-indexing requests in a timely manner and failure to remove the full range of web addresses attached to certain requests. Jurisdiction and efficiency of GDPR fines called into question by Spain decision The AEPD judgment is noteworthy not just for being a rare GDPR fine for Google, but also for shining a spotlight on a bottleneck of cases created by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC)’s lead role in regulating cases involving the tech giant." Continue reading

Always interesting when digging up old artifacts and materials about family members you never knew. In this case my grandfather Robert Miller whom I am named after worked at Bethlehem Steel Company in Baltimore City at what was then known as the Baltimore Yard. The photo with the Navy Stamp on it shows him being 6 feet tall and with an accompanying U.S. Navy moniker. Now 80 years later would he have expected to end up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his grandson Richart? Continue reading

I was watching an educational video on the California High Speed Rail project and how it was announced in 2008 and here we are in 2022 with no sign of a high speed rail but yet billions of dollars spent already. So outside of thinking the hyperloop may be a good fiscal alternative I was wondering what the top flights in the USA are as it said that the second busiest flight in the country is the Los Angeles to San Francisco route linking the city of L.A. with 19,000,000 people with San Francisco's 9,000,000 people. So an online lists says that JFK to LAX is the number one route with 26,198 wide-body aircraft used to serve the two cities in passengers transporting 3,531,613 transcontiinental flyers over the last 12 months there are bigger aircrafts being used transporting more people but less overall flights taking off versus the LAX to SFO flights. So the real answer is Los Angeles to San Francisco is the busiest flight. If we didn't have the Amtrak on the east coast linking Boston to Washington and every city in between than it may be DC to NYC as the most flights to and from. Drop me a line for more fun facts and quotes. Continue reading

If you follow my thought philosophy you'll recognize that I often talk about the importance of finding what works for you. In many cases those with the most potential don't achieve it due to being distracted by other wants and desires. Whether it be their own or their families pressure to point them in a direction they may not be meant to flow in. So follow your efforts and follow your groove and flow where your energy and talents reside. Here's a quote that resonated that made me think of that: "We all of us have limited amounts of energy, and I am sure the people who are successful have learned, either by instinct or consciously, to use their energies well instead of spilling them about. And this has to be different for every person, writers or otherwise. I know writers who go to parties every night and then, recharged instead of depleted, happily write all day. But if I stay up half the night talking, I don’t do so well the next day. Some writers like to start work as soon as they can in the morning, while others like the night or—for me almost impossible—the afternoons. Trial and error, and then when you’ve found your needs, what feeds you, what is your instinctive rhythm and routine, then cherish it." Husband and wife combo, Benjamin Zander, a longtime conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and Rosamund Zander, a family therapist, on the power of point of view: “Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.” Continue reading

Richart Ruddie shares what impacts his end of year donations had around the globe. Continue reading

For people who claim they can see the future and make predictions you need to laugh them off. For that is hard to predict over the long term. Short term guesses in less than a year are a lot easier but here's an excerpt from NY Times best seller Adam Grant who lauds how the Kansas City Star in Missouri rejected a cartoonist named Walt Disney for a job. 30 NFL teams passed up Tom Brady the best NFL player of all time and record labels said no to Kayne, Ed Sheeran, The Beatles, and Madonna just to name a few... "For decades, managers have bet on the wrong people — and rejected the right ones. The Kansas City Star once rejected an application from a cartoonist named Walt Disney. Record labels said no thanks to the Beatles, Madonna, U2, Kanye and Ed Sheeran. A hotel, a police department and a Kentucky Fried Chicken all denied Jack Ma a job. And 30 N.F.L. teams decided not to draft Tom Brady." For hiring advice and hiring the best people read this scientific study: A META-ANALYSIS OF WORK SAMPLE TEST VALIDITY: UPDATING AND INTEGRATING SOME CLASSIC LITERATURE "Work sample tests have been used in applied psychology for decades as important predictors of job performance, and they have been suggested to be among the most valid predictors of job performance." Read the whole research paper here & the New York Times Adam Grant piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/smarter-living/how-to-fix-job-interviews-tips.html Continue reading

Sam Zell shares his wisdom in Am I Being Too Subtle and here are the top take aways from the biography. Continue reading

Listened to a 2011 story and interview with a very young looking Jason Calacanis of The All in Podcast doing episode 180 of This Week in Startups interviewing Travis Kalanick. So a fun fact that comes up is that Travis Kalanick scored a 1580 on his SAT's and got only 2 questions wrong on the verbal part of the college admissions test. So interesting to learn that the founder of Meta/Facebook Mark Zuckerberg who got a 1600 and Travis Kalanick who co-founded Uber were both college dropouts and aced their SAT's. Maybe there is a quality behind high SAT scores and startup success? For the interview from 2011 see below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=550X5OZVk7Y Continue reading

The Ivy's weekly series sends over a recap of great advice for real life practice and psychological thought patterns. Below are the notes and advice from this weeks series on mastering superior management skills broken down into 5 easy to read points. How can you elevate performance and decision-making across your organization? A successful strategy in today’s business landscape requires managerial behavior that is different from what is traditionally taught. It used to be that if you are the manager or leader, you make all the important choices because you’re the boss; you do strategy, and then other people execute. Yet, in reality, there is no difference between strategy and execution – both requires good choices to be made. Nowadays, a CEO or manager in any sizable organization simply isn't going to be able to make all those important choices. There are important choices at every level. The most important thing you can do as a leader is to make clear A) the overall strategy B) what choices you will be personally responsible for, and C) “chartering” your colleagues for the choices that they will be responsible for to ensure the overall strategy is met. In short, successfully chartering a strategy requires you to make sure your people own the choices that will feed and support your strategy. When I was working on improving Rotman’s EMBA program, a tool I relied on was to ask the people working under me to write, in their own words, what goals and actions they thought they needed to execute on to achieve our overall strategy. My number two, Beatrix, translated my strategy vision into her own thinking and style–that gave me a lot of important information. If there was no trail of breadcrumbs between what she wrote and what was in my mind, then I would need to fix that problem, but if it was close enough, then that to me was a success; she’s giving herself her own set of instructions based on what she heard from me and I agree. Procedurally, this is a very effective way to manage talent. Decision making is aligned at every level with the strategy, and people are empowered to interpret it and make decisions on their own. Does your organization’s strategy pass the can’t/won’t test? When designing a strategy for your organization, you must A) decide what playing field you're going to play on as a business and B) how you’re going to be distinctive on that field–how you’re going to be the best. You have to have a very clear view of where you can win with your business model. Your strategy choice must pass what I call the “can’t/won’t test”–meaning your competitors simply can’t or won’t match what you’re doing. In other words, they could do it, but they won’t because they have a conflict of motives. For example, they won’t get into that distribution channel because it’d be channel conflict for them. Or they can’t match you because they lack critical ingredients to be successful. If you don’t have a definition of where you’re playing and how you are going to be distinctive and best in-class, then you might as well not have a strategy. How can you ensure you reevaluate your strategy regularly and course correct? A great tool for strategy is an approach I call “What would have to be true?” If you have three strategic options to choose from–we could go left, we could go straight, or we could go right–you ask the question, “What would have to be true for left to be good?” You ask this of each different strategy option. What would have to be true about the industry, customers, our capabilities, our cost structure, our competitors–what would have to be true about all those things for strategy A to be a good idea? Do the analysis for each option, and you will find your optimal strategy path based on your organizational strengths. Then, take that “what would have to be true” analysis for your chosen strategy, and tack it up on the board in front of your desk. Every morning, come to work and look at the chart and ask yourself, “Are the things that... Continue reading

Looking at the chart below from Knight Mortgage the best time to buy a house is when the Mortgage Payment to Income Ratio is between 15 and 20% if you followed that guideline you would have bought at great times in the market over the last 20 years. As mortgage rates rise now we are in a unique environment with sky rocketing demand in Florida and a lack of housing supply so that dictates that even with increased mortgage rates prices are not dropping drastically as of now we are seeing strong demand for housing and bidding wars on the properties we developed and are coming onto the market soon. Continue reading

CEO and Sales Trainer talks about how you can master the sceience of sales with the right traits, mindset, and behaviors that can create a dynamic sales floor. David Hoffeld's top take away and quote is: "One mindset that seems to matter more than others in sales is a growth mindset. So this is the idea that you treat your sales skills and abilities like a muscle that must be continually developed. This makes you more resistant and resilient when bad things do occur on lost sales calls. It also gives you an unfair advantage over others because no matter what happens, you're focused on growth." Jousha Yaffa an award winning Moscow correspondent top quote and take away is: "It's been common knowledge for several years that many journalistic and academic articles, often cite the high degree of popularity for Putin, himself, who see approval ratings of well above 60%, often above 70, even into 80% range. It's my argument that this is actually passive support and people are really in favor of the status quo and stability. They don't necessarily have any great affection or enthusiasm or loyalty to Putin, himself. That it's more about a lack of credible alternatives, as most Russians see it." Continue reading

Dazed and Confused is a cult classic that I remember watching in middle school and high school as a kid. With the famous line "It would be cooler if you did" and so many other memorable moments in the coming of age film it's wild to hear that the film only grossed $7,000,000 and was 9 million to make and grossed more than that in the home video market to the tune of $30,000,000 but yet the director of the film was never ever paid. Hollywood accounting they call it and there are many scams and fraudsters out there to watch out for. Studios take advantage of small time directors but even in the comments in the AV Club they talk about other cases of studios scamming directors from Kevin Smith to The Lord of the Rings director. So to bookmark this scam to warn others of Hollywood accounting fraud in case somebody ever asks you to invest in a film you should know about this risk https://www.avclub.com/richard-linklater-not-paid-dazed-and-confused-1848756324 Continue reading

Thank you to the wonderful and weird city of Austin, Texas and SXSW for putting on a great event. If you call it a conference to the attendees they may give you a sly eye like one who calls Burning Man a festival. Grit Daily a startup and business news website hosted thousands of in person guests throughout the week and live streamed to hundreds of thousands more who were able to stream the interviews and virtually attend the first SXSW event in three years. During the event Rich Ruddie was able to discuss about brand and reputation protection services, do's and dont's and covering detailed questions about the influence of artificial intelligence and deep fakes. To watch the video of Rich Ruddie speaking at The Grit Daily House in Austin discussing reputation resilience click here. About SXSW South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly and has been one of the biggest events in the great state of Texas. It was cancelled due to covid-19 in 2019, suddenly in 2020 due to it being a mid March event, and again in 2021. It was welcomed back in 2022 but attendance is still well below it's peak years earlier. Continue reading

Art Films are a growing trend. As an art collector and a burner I'm happy about this trend. Sotheby's just launched an art interview with the film director who came to the 2018 Burning Man Festival and is releasing a film all about the art. While the burn is not commercial and needs to abstain from any commercial influences to retain it's alter-universe perfect world it has been nice to see the Art of Burning man outside of Black Rock City. From art around Reno, Nevada and the Smithsonian in 2018 (I believe was the year) had previous art pieces that survived the burn so others that haven't made it out to the desert experience can get a small piece of what it's like out there. It's a way to help expand BRC for the normal people of the world and helps expand the world's interest in art. For more information on the Sotheby's interview see it here: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/art-on-fire-behind-the-scenes-at-burning-man-with-documentarian-gerry-fox Also for art fans the JR Chronicles interview at the Groning Museum in the Netherlands: https://www.groningermuseum.nl/en/art/exhibitions/jr -Richart Ruddie Continue reading

For those of you saw that Chris Rock joke making a sly comment at Jada Smith that GI Jane 2 is coming out soon based on her current hair style. What followed was Will walking up on stage and punching Chris in the shoulder and the sound going out so many couldn't hear what transpired after. What Will Smith said was "Keep My Wife's Name Out of your fucking mouth" Continue reading

One of those things you may see on a late night show or news blooper reels is Bloomberg News accidently calling native inuits "Intuit" like the quickbooks software. See the news blooper below. Inuit is not the same as intuit but honest mistake that I hope didnt offend anybody. "Intuit people's Arctic. Science in the Arctic..." Continue reading

Climate change accountability is coming for companies who will be enforced to disclose their risks. Continue reading

ward of the court, law, learning Continue reading

Company comes up with a creative name for long distance calls. Continue reading

Reading this story from the BBC about Jewish Ancestors who were saved by a tip from an insider in the Third Reich to help Jews escape Denmark at Hitlers request to round up the people there is a story to help restore faith in humanity. In todays attack on Ukraine by Russia we must wonder were there tip offs that helped families escape before Putin invaded that we will be talking about in 80 years from now? https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-tip-off-from-a-nazi-that-saved-my-grandparents Continue reading