Category: Economics

People often think they can get something for nothing, and while this can be true on rare and isolated occasions, it is not true in the long run, and it is not true reliably. This is nowhere better illustrated, perhaps, then in how people often relate to insurance, warranties, and property management companies. Insurance As […]

Several months ago, when I started making major dietary changes, one of the key changes I made involved replacing the frozen cheese pitas I used to eat for breakfast with boiled eggs from pasture-raised chickens. A week or two ago, I tried those cheese pitas for the first time in over a month, and I […]

I’ve spent an ungodly amount of money on groceries this past month. Without going into too much detail, I finally went to a gastroenterologist last month to talk about some of the heartburn issues I’ve had for a long time, which got much worse this past year, and when she explained to me some of […]

Sometime in the early 2010s, I was introduced to the double-edged safety razor, which consists of a solid handle, razor head, and extremely cheap double-sided razor blades. The hype was real, and although it took me awhile to find the right brand of blades to work with my skin, the shave is absolutely superior to […]

Most of our possessions can be categorized based on several generic types. These types can tell us a lot about whether our possessions are working for us or against us. I’m sure one could come up with additional categories, but I think these account for the vast majority.

This title might not be accurate, but I think it gets the message across. I realized the other day that the only reason I keep video games I don’t want to play is that I don’t want to pay for them again if I change my mind. When I bought my Switch, I made the […]

I don’t believe in grand conspiracies, but I do think that the various people in power employ similar tactics to maintain their power, and the collective effect of these tactics over millions of people can easily create an unofficial alliance of opinion. For example, it is rare for society to endorse a high savings rate. […]

Some people really have a heart for business, worker conditions, training, and education, and that’s something the world needs. However, there is a widespread disease of excessive professionalism that has invaded everything. For whatever reasons, this seems to be very prominent in Asian countries. In China, the “996” lifestyle means working from 9am to 9pm, […]

Last night, I stumbled across some new social media site in which a lot of people were talking about their layoffs or fear of future layoffs from big tech companies, and some were pretty detailed and terrified. It got me thinking (“always a dangerous thing!”). First of all, I’m not unsympathetic. I have friends who […]

I made the mistake of starting to reread Jacob Fisker’s “Early Retirement Extreme”, and it has me fired up on a few things. One of the best points made in the book, in my opinion, is that specialization can be represented as a narrow but tall curve on a grid where the x axis represents […]