Fortuitous Oddity

Web Worker Daily talks about setting your hourly rate.  He highlights several things I’ve learned. 

Those new to web work often want to set the lowest possible rate, so as to attract business. I personally counsel against this, for three reasons. First, if your rate is too low, people will be suspicious that you’re not really professional (would you trust a doctor who offered to perform brain surgery for $12.95?). Second, the clients you get at low, low rates tend to be the biggest nuisances, who demand rework of everything and take forever to pay their bills. Third, it’s a lot easier to offer a discount than it is to raise a price you already quoted. To my mind, it’s far better to quote a fair rate than an artificially low on in the first place.

This is mirrored in my own experience.  It’s about profit maximization, not revenue maximization. 

The FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator is very useful for helping with this.

UAW prepping for a strike… just in case, says Autoblog. Just in case they strike, making revenues go down, meaning less money for their precious pensions and too-high wages?

Autoblog adds but if the domestics can’t close the $30/hr labor cost gap with their Japanese competition, there’s a chance none of the active or retired UAW workers will have a retirement to look forward to. Thirty dollars an hour differential. Unbelievable.

Reason has much more on UAW health care. Excerpt:

UAW workers still enjoy a health-care deal that no one else in America
or Japan—or quite possibly the planet—does. Yet Mr. Gettelfinger said
last week that the 2005 health-care givebacks were the toughest
decision he ever made in his entire career. This is a startling
admission that reflects the depth of the UAW’s entitlement mentality,
and its detachment from the world that its fellow Americans inhabit.

Note to self - get nixie clock for new house.

Scobleizer’s Top 35.

Digg? Ugh. The Tech feed is alright, but the rest is just garbage.  All that stuff about the wisdom of the masses ignores that a good portion of the masses (and especially the masses that read digg) is stupid.

NoFoodHere looks promising, once they eliminate the “The backend search API is limited to only 5,000 queries per day (by Yahoo!), and that limit has been exceeded” problem.

20 megabit down for $60 a month? Yes, please. We pay $45 for 8M/512K cable. DSL is ~$35 for 1.5-3M/768K.

Who knows what this will do for P2P? Video sharing just got a lot easier. Music sharing will become trivial. 20 megabits means an average mp3 in under 10 seconds. The torrent scene will explode even more.  Too bad torrenting isn’t really a viable busines plan, or we’d have some nice IPOs.

Hopefully, moving to Qwest’s home city will get me in early on this.