Last week, I saw acai powder in the grocery store for the first time. I had considered buying some of this online in the past to assist the blueberry powder I have for various oatmeal experiments, but the price tag of $24 for roughly 8 oz scared me away, at least for the day. Having […]
Don’t Make a Giant List of Everything You Want to Buy
Every great now and then, annoyed by a scramble of checklists, I sit down and write out a list of all of the things I’ve been meaning, wanting, or considering to buy. In some ways this is great, because it pulls all smaller lists together, addressing both immediate needs and someday-kinda wants, and can be […]
Books on Global Issues
Several weeks ago, the book “Cobalt Red” came to my attention. It apparently details the slave-labor conditions that once again exist in the Congo, a chain reaction to the global surge in demand for lithium batteries, which employ components of cobalt. My gut reaction was to go out and buy it, but as I’ve mentioned […]
Diet Religions, Part 3: Reformation
I see a great deal of logical fallacies being used to persuade people toward one diet or away from another, toward one food or away from another, even from YouTubers whom I otherwise like, so I decided to put a little post together detailing some of my “theses” concerning how to approach food and diet […]
The Search for More Money
A lot of problems can be solved with money, far more than people often want to believe. At the same time, the human mind isn’t naturally wired to handle money well, and all of history has been plagued with crooks who will take as much as they can get from you, either by force or […]
Voting With Your Dollars Doesn’t Always Work
A week or two ago, I discovered that Amazon no longer lets you search product reviews without logging in. On the one hand, these reviews are probably being scraped constantly by web crawlers, driving traffic costs up, and no doubt that may have something to do with the market for fake reviews. But let’s be […]
California Burning: Reflections on Insurance
As many people know, several suburban housing areas near Los Angeles have burnt down as fires tear through the area. This sucks for all of those people – and hopefully they are otherwise okay – but what is maybe a little less talked about is how several weeks or months ago, insurance companies stopped insuring […]
A Few Principles for Monthly Budgets
December was an absolute bloodbath of spending for me, not even considering the Christmas gifts I bought. It all started with a few ill-reasoned purchases of vintage mainframe manuals, which ate a $50 chunk out of my budget, and then progressed to numerous “I’ve wanted this for awhile” items, including a few otherwise very fun […]
Meta-Politics: Conspiracies
The hardest part about trying to be an objective thinker is that you often find yourself sandwiched between your own bias and the bias of another person. If you can acknowledge the biases in both of you, that seems like an intellectually honest thing to do, but then you often won’t project the air of […]
Affording Three Years of Unemployment
It’s been almost 3 years since I quit my job, and as time continues passing, people have started giving me stranger and stranger reactions to the subject. This was especially notable last week visiting family when, over breakfast with my parents, my Dad mentioned I must be doing pretty good to still have money, and […]