Many years ago, I traveled with my parents back to the Land of Corn to visit relatives. While there, we stopped by the house of an older couple. While my dad talked with the husband about guns (one of the least interesting subjects in existence, IMHO), I took a look at the man’s bookshelf and […]
Author: risky
Spending: Judgement, Envy, Arrogance
My first year in college, I lived on campus, and one of my friends in the apartment stairwell went out and spent $1,300 on a sound system for his junk ass car. It made me angry because I couldn’t believe so much money could be spent on something so unnecessary, but only years later would […]
Phone Joys/Woes
I just spent about $500 on a new phone. I’m kind of excited for it, but I also kind of want to throw up. My first smart phone was around $330. It overheated a few times while hiking, and started acting up. Known motherboard issue. My second smart phone was also around $330. It worked […]
Good Spending as a Value System, Not a Dollar Sign
Late last year I sat down to ask myself what it actually meant to be “good with money”, and following an approach that takes various ideas and attacks them, was able to kind of see that most of my hunches were wrong. After all, one might think that somebody who spends very little is “good” […]
Thoughts on Goals, Time, and the Shortness of Life
I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that I would someday like to complete a masters degree. The subjects I prefer to study are not practical, likely will not make a dramatic impact on the world, and are not especially lucrative, but I simply can’t get over the fact that I […]
The Struggle for Purpose
I’ve spent the past week getting my arms shot full of Terminator juice, even one such to protect from a mysterious illness known as “typhoid”, because apparently where I’m planning to go next month, everything wants to kill you. Several years ago, I went moonlight snowshoeing in single digit temps with two of my friends. […]
Types of Knowledge and Their Limits
I used to think that knowledge was unilateral and could be acquired primarily through books. This was instilled in me by the education system, and only once I was out of the education system did it become much more apparent that books can only confer a very specific kind of knowledge. If you traveled the […]
Perfectionism is Expensive: Reflections on Car Projects
Strong preferences can severely limit your opportunities to save money, but a special form of this – perfectionism – has even greater power to limit these opportunities. I would not describe myself as a perfectionist, per se, but I have some “perfection-istic” dispositions, and one of those is in relation to my car. For the […]
The Difficulty of Providing Public Goods
I occasionally hear people talk about housing and food as basic human rights, but there are some philosophical complications with this, not the least being the fact that we live in a world of specialization and that self sufficiency is largely impossible without some prior investment. The entire concept of human rights is complicated, but […]
Housing Ecology: New Perspectives on Rent vs. Buy
When considering assets and capital, we tend to group things based on their general characteristics, and we name these groups by what we call “class”. So when talking about investments, we break them down into “asset classes”, often real estate, stocks, bonds, or commodities, and this makes it easier to talk about these things based […]