Something really set me off this morning, and it’s still setting me off. It came from reading a book by James Altucher, Choosing Yourself. I picked it up because of a glowing review from someone I respect and admire, Patrick Rhone. The book has some good points, especially around health (physical and mental) and well-being as a foundation for success.

It’s bad points come as some of the examples James Altucher upholds as examples for success. When I got to this description of how a friend of his made $300,000, I came as close to closing the book and throwing it across the room:

He basically looked at about a dozen other databases keeping track of all housing data and scraped specifically the rent-to-own houses off of them… Since people could potentially spend hundreds of thousands on the right house, they were willing to spend a few hundred on a subscription to his database…

In other words, he’s scraping someone else’s data, someone else’s work, and charging for access. This is data that a prospective home owner could get free with a cursory Google, or Craigslist search. The reason I didn’t throw the book across the room because I was reading it on my Kindle, on the subway. After discussing my indignation with Patrick on App.Net, I calmed down, and then later in the day I read this about the same friend’s current business:

He just launched a rent-to-own laptop product. He bulk buys the laptops for $200 apiece and rents-to-own them out for $20 a week for a year. BAM! Huge margins. He started just a few months ago. He’s bringing in $300,000 a month now…

I went back to re-read that passage to make sure I didn’t read “$20 a month” as “$20 a week.” Upon checking, I went from merely angry to outright infuriated.

Why does this make me angry? Because James Altucher is holding up as an example someone who’s business practices are shamefully exploitive. The rent-to-own business is part of a whole industry that exploits the poor in a shameful, disgusting way. It’s in the same bins as subprime credit cards and loans, tax refund loans, “opportunity pricing,” [1] and the granddaddy of them all: payday loans. These are business models that prey upon the poor, exploiting their difficulty in meeting basic needs, and extracting grotesque amounts of money from it.

The exploitive nature of rent-to-own is illustrated as follows: a laptop that costs James’s friend $200, costs the poor person who is renting it $1040 dollars before they get to own it. That is an over 500% markup. A brand new, 11" MacBook Air costs $899 from Apple, and Apple doesn’t make nearly as much in margin (approx. 33%). If this were an ordinary loan, the interest rate would violate the usury laws in near every state in the entire United States. Not my idea of someone to be holding up as an ideal in a self-help book.

So, I’m angry.

I’m angry, most of all, at the implication that it’s all right to sell out your morals and ethics if it means you’re “choosing yourself” to get rich. I’m angry because it’s possible to do such a disgusting, exploitive thing, and not only get away with it, but be praised for it. This person is making money by actively causing harm to people, and that makes me angry enough to bang out 800-plus words about why.

If you have about fifty minutes, please watch Mike Monteiro’s excellent talk, “How Designers Destroyed the World.” If you do not have fifty minutes, the takeaway is this: “You are directly responsible for what you put into the world.” Mike rails against designers who actively, or passively, let things out into the world that cause harm to people. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re putting something into the world, too. The money may be rolling in, but you’re responsible for what effect it has on far more than your bottom line.

These are things we all need to think about. Making money is great, provided the people who are giving it to you get something of equal value in return. I do not begrudge anyone who makes their money by making people’s lives better in some small way. We’re in this together, and it’s possible to “choose yourself” in a way that doesn’t put other people further in the hole.

James Altucher has an email address set up to contact him if you read the book and want your money back. I reached out to him there, while writing this. I don’t want my money back. I don’t need to quibble over a dollar for an eBook. Life is too short, and I’ve probably gotten my money’s worth from the real advice in the book. I just explained my concerns over his choices of example, and how angry it made me. I hope he responds, and if he does, expect a follow-up.

I’m a lot less angry now, having explained myself.

I’m still new to the whole Quantified Self thing. The only wearable I have is a FitBit One, and I track all my food and water intake manually (when I remember). I use RescueTime to track what I do on my Mac. [1] I have Moves running to see where I went each day, and how I got there. I use Datalove to track how many words I write each day, and the numbers aren’t great. GoodReads tracks my books—and not well. That’s about it. I still end up collecting a lot of data about myself and my activities, but why? Data alone is useless. If RescueTime says I was 41% productive last week, but 24% productive this week, what does it mean? [2]

Data without context is meaningless. One of the reasons why personal fitness and Quantified Self applications go so well together is that if you’re trying to get healthier, knowing how much you move around during the day helps. If you get home, plop on the couch, and see you’ve only made 3238 steps during the day, it might motivate you to try and move around more. When I step on to the treadmill after work, or even just go for my post-lunch walk, I know it’s having an effect better than just returning to my seat and decomposing. I have a goal, and the data lets me know if I’m getting there or not. There’s no better measurement than how I feel—and writing this after a trip to the gym, I don’t feel great—but data helps back things up.

But correlating “steps taken” and “calories consumed” to general health is a lot simpler and easier to understand than a lot of other massive data-focused endeavors. So much of the talk around “big data” reminds me of Max Cohen’s assumptions in the movie Ï€. The idea that if we have enough data, set enough sets of eyes on it—or enough algorithms to parse it—we can discover patterns and gain insights into the future of whatever the data is about rings true. It plays to the innate human prediction for pattern recognition. We’re good at it, and by extension computers are good at it.

There’s just two problems. One: we often read patterns where no real patterns exist, as do our computer programs. Two: This can often lead us down the wrong rabbit hole, as we overgeneralize the pattern we discover, without being aware of its changes. By way of example, look at Google Flu Trends, and how it’s become increasingly out of whack with reality. The “big data” hypothesis, much like the “quantified self” hypothesis, is that the more information we have about something, the more insight we get into it. The problems above prove that this isn’t the case. Data alone does not lead to understanding. As a wise man once said, “You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.” Algorithms are just as subject to biases and ignorance as the people who make them. As long as that’s the case—and it will always be the case—we’ll have to do a lot more interpreting to find the answers, if they exist.

When a publication like Infoworld is talking about ethics in technology, it's a sign something is up. ¹ While Peter Wayner hits the nail on the head about the questions we need to be asking about the technology we make and use, he's quick to note that “…ethics courses have become a staple of physical-world engineering degrees, they remain a begrudging anomaly in computer science pedagogy.” I'm sure he's right, but we live in a world where GitHub is considered to be a résumé. One can get a programming job, and even start a new company by self-teaching yourself programming. Adding ethics to the CS pedagogy is a great idea, but doesn't help those who lack a formal education.

These ethical dilemmas, especially “Whether – and how – to transform users into products,” and “How much should future consequences influence present decisions” should be part of the dialogue. It seems, rather than try to figure out answers to these dilemmas, we go for the easy assumptions. Yes, we should transform users into products, and no, we shouldn't think about future consequences. The former is easily explained as a side effect of what drives returns on VC investments, the only thing close to a reliable big bet you can make in this market. The latter is an extension of the “fail early, fail often” ethos of the modern Silicon Valley and its children.

“Fail early, fail often"is dangerous, as it leads to extreme short-term thinking. It's often spun as incentive to try new ideas and refactor them if they don't pan out, which is a good strategy. However, when the bar for failure is set too low, a company can abandon a good idea for the new and shiny, even if there is potential for success by just giving it more time and effort. Some of this is an effect of the push for returns on VC investment if a company doesn't become a runaway success after a few rounds. In other cases, it's a get-rich-quick mentality on the part of the founders.

The lack of long-term thinking is also baked into the culture of some of the giants in the technology space. Google and Facebook alike put little thought into the ethics of what they have to do to drive more people into their ecosystem, collect data, and sell ads. Their bottom line is tied to it. Facebook expanding their company into virtual reality through the purchase of Oculus may imply Mark Zuckerberg wants to expand the possibilities of what Facebook can do beyond their current monetization strategy, but who can say? Google's various pie-in-the-sky projects seem to be more about goodwill in the tech community than finding a way improve what it tries to present as a core business. How do military robots help "organize all the world's information?”

We're living in a dangerous time. Heartbleed is a high profile example of the risks we're facing giving up so much of our data to these fast moving systems that spend far more time convincing us to disgorge our lives into them than they do protecting our data. It's easier to focus on getting us to surrender our information than it is to protect it, and the business case is stronger, too. I don't buy the argument that it's the “nature” of the network that things are how they are. We all define what this network is, whether we are a creator or a consumer—a line that is becoming increasingly blurred. We all have a voice in the debate over these ethical dilemmas, and it's time we actually had a debate about it.

Apple is officially letting ordinary users run their beta software. While it’s not the first time Apple’s launched a public beta, they haven’t done it since the move to OS X back in 2000. Siri has bee the only Apple product since OS X released to the public in “Beta” form. Apple’s a very different company now, one that’s “double[d] down on secrecy” to quote Tim Cook. It’s clear this news took a lot of people by surprise.

It’s easy to speculate why Apple’s taking the route of a public beta. Some speculation online has been that it’s to get more diverse bug reporting to prevent some of the same issues that plagued the launch of 10.9 and iOS 7. (Some in the know claim Apple will be making the iOS 8 beta public, but we’ll see come WWDC.) That’s a good reason, but I think there might be another issue at play. iOS 7 got a lot of attention at its announcement, and there were plenty of ordinary users circumventing the developer restrictions to get it on their phones. Enough to spawn an angry editorial from Rene Ritchie at iMore. Even I downloaded the GM of iOS 7 before the official release. [1]

So, if ordinary, clueless users are installing this stuff anyway, why not legitimize it and get some bug reports and data out of it to make the final better? Makes sense to me, and there’s enough disclaimers on the Beta Seed Program page to hopefully scare off some people. It’s necessary, because in recent years, the word “beta” attached to a piece of software has become irrelevant. Flickr, gMail, and Siri were all shipped out as “beta” to consumers who almost certainly were unaware of the connotations. Many online services live in a perpetual beta, constantly changing features, fixing bugs, and introducing new bugs.

The dream for a lot of Apple users would be for the Beta Seed Program to be the first step towards a move away from annual, iterative software releases to regular, ongoing updates, at least to their backend services. It’s probably too soon to say that this is the case, but recent updates to iWork for iCloud suggest they might be moving that direction. Apple’s a small company compared to a lot of their peers, but they’re still a big ship, and they’ll be hard to turn. I might be reading a bit too much into the tea leaves, but I can hope this is the start of a new, more agile and responsive Apple that won’t have their newest flagship mobile OS crash to a white logo every hour.

Saturday, April 19th, was Record Store Day, the annual celebration of all forms of audio pressed on to vinyl platters and sold in physical stores. It’s a day which sees the release of a metric crap-ton of limited edition vinyl releases and re-releases (along with some CDs and cassettes). The collectors, obsessives, and completists come out in droves on Record Store Day, and I’ve done my share of waiting in line to buy limited edition releases in years past. My Record Store Day experience has always been low-key: get up reasonably early, head to my reliable local indie record store (AKA Music on North 2nd Street in Philadelphia), get what I want, return home, give it a spin, and then relax.

This past Record Store Day wasn’t quite as simple. First, I now live in New York City, a town with a large population of music fans, and a large selection of indie record stores. Second, Record Store Day has become a huge thing, with way more limited releases, and way more people chasing after them. Also, way more people flipping their purchases on eBay. I was unprepared for just how insane it would be, but I knew it would be insane, and had built a plan of attack. First, I would hit Rough Trade NYC, in Brooklyn. I’d called ahead the day before to see if they had what I wanted, and figured if I got up at six, I could make it there by eight. My plan was stymied by a broken down E Train, but even if I’d made it there at eight, there were people waiting since 3:30 that morning. After waiting an hour, I got into the store to find my quarry sold out. I purchased a consolation split 7", and a couple regular CD releases I’d wanted, and made my way into the city in a frantic search.

Despite the difficulty and frantic nature of trying to find a limited edition needle in the haystack of New York City record stores, buying in person had the benefit of a social element that you don’t get with your Spotifys or your Last.fms. In fact, a chat in the (slow, almost stationary) line outside Other Music on 4th Street, a guy said he’d found a stack of one release I was searching for at Academy Records on 18th. I ran, and snagged a copy of DEVO – Live at Max’s Kansas City, November 15th, 1977 for $20 (after tax) and was content with that. [1]

There are plenty of reasons to hate on Record Store Day, and I experienced some of them directly. However, the fundamental principle of RSD is sound: it gets music fans out of the house, and into the stores. It gets us buying real, physical product with packaging, liner notes. It supports the artists we love, keeps music nerds employed, and has us interacting with our fellow fans. There’s ample opportunity to bond over our shared loves, the shared success of finding that one rare gem, or the used disc we need to complete our collection. It’s a chance to just to pick up a disc out of curiosity and give it a try. It’s how we used to buy music, pre-iTunes. Okay, yes, there’s also surly record store clerks judging your every purchase, but screw ’em. There’s gotta be someone else in line who shares your love.

As long as we can stop the bastards flipping the limited edition stuff on eBay, I’ll be happy. And if we can stop by the record stores more than one day a year, they’ll be happy.