Category: Economics

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Just as with my food budget, I give myself $400 every month for discretionary spending, which consists of everything from clothes, to books, to paper towels, to restaurants. Things like annual vehicle registration, gifts for my nieces, and expensive car parts are outside of this budget, but I’m still frustrated how I exceed this $400 […]

I budget about $400 every month for groceries, and this seems to be a realistic target. But not all too many years ago, my goal was $200 every month, although I rarely achieved this, typically spending closer to $300. Then the pandemic happened, and everything has gone up since then. This still kind of shocks […]

In my previous post, I defended buying pre-mixed foods, but I wanted to also present an argument against these, for the sake of completeness. The argument is that the food supply has largely become corrupted as companies cut corners, introduce harmful chemicals and pesticides, and otherwise rely on deceptive labeling to trick consumers, and this […]

There’s often a financial benefit to preparing your own food in bulk, but preparing everything is a chore and doesn’t always offer the benefits you might think. I am a lazy cook, and any food that takes me more than 30 minutes to prepare has my immediate suspicion. The only exceptions to this rule are […]

I have finally figured out a decent custom setting for making einkorn bread in my Breadman bread machine, but while making my most recent loaf, the machine started producing an annoying squeaking sound. For awhile now, I’ve been finding some grease at the bottom of the pan, so I decided it was time to replace […]