Category: Economics

I’m not a fan of collecting things for their own sake, but I have to admit that I have started to become a collector of old mining supply books. I have two books, one from the late 1800s which was an absolutely amazing, lucky find, being the first in a popular series, and another from […]

Software engineering involves the writing of code, but more than anything, it involves the management of complexity. Almost anybody can learn to write code – if you’ve had any interest in learning, you should try it out. But not as many people enjoy managing complexity, and that’s where the real challenge lies. Life is the […]

My hope is that everyone would have enough income to allow them to sufficiently treat themselves from time to time. I think there’s a lot of value sticking to the basics and not buying a bunch of stuff that doesn’t contribute to your life, but everybody is different and we all have non-essentials that really […]

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garage lately, and it has me thinking about the ROI of various automotive skills, which can be applied to other skills in life, too. I have this desire to be able to replace or fix anything and everything on my car. However, I am constrained by […]

My desk is kind of small, but it fits a 24″ monitor and a laptop docking station perfectly. I keep thinking it would be nice to have a second 24″ monitor, but this would require me to either have a longer desk and move my printer stand, or simply have the laptop docking station on […]

Oh, smart phones. What have you done to us? I used to have a slight tendency to be one of those self-righteous Luddites who resisted new technologies in defense of the old. I had a flip phone in high school, and I kept this flip phone well into my 20s. For my tunes, I even […]

All the thrift stores seem to have had the same bright idea: “Hey, since there’s a pandemic, let’s limit the hours during which people can bring donations!” I’m no virologist, but I suspect that keeping people inside at the cash register is more dangerous than keeping people outside, typically at great distance from other people […]

I went backpacking last weekend and found a new mining adit in a valley I frequent. The entrance was huge and monolithic and appeared to be very stable, but I didn’t go inside. I was alone, far away from people and trails, and I value my life. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t occur to […]

One of the biggest reasons people hold on to old junk is that “it could be worth something someday!” On very rare occasions, this can be true. One of my friends has mentioned that certain classic or otherwise limited-production cars go up in value, ditto for rare guns, and I don’t want to ignore this […]

When I was a kid, I first discovered video games in the basement of some friends’ house down the street, where they had a Sega Genesis. I would later receive one for Christmas because I wanted one so badly, and it wasn’t long before the first Playstation came out and I had one of those, […]