I made the mistake yesterday of watching a YouTube video detailing the business lessons one guy had learned over the past decade. He wasn’t otherwise (quite) arrogant, readily admitting that most lessons he had only learned in the past few years, after many more years of experience, but there was also a certain “hustle bro” […]
Things I No Longer Care About: Tax Hacks
I can’t believe how many years it’s been since I was first introduced to the FIRE movement. After reaching a 50% savings rate, I pretty much tapped out trying to increase this number further – and I think that was good for me – but now that I’m 2+ years into unemployment, I’ve realized something […]
Rustic Appeal
Just today, I learned about a medieval town that hired inspectors to test the quality of the saffron being sold in their marketplace. Saffron was expensive then, and it’s still expensive now. Apparently, the spice dealers had started spiking their saffron with various other ingredients to increase profits, but some paid for this deception with […]
Reflections on Burnout and Self-esteem
Several days ago I found myself going down a YouTube rabbit hole which landed me at the channel of a guy who really loves his long-standing career in the Army. I can’t say I’ve ever had much interest in the military, but his passion for it was cool to watch, and he had some very […]
Diet Religions
Food used to be food, and I’m not sure people spent much time worrying whether it was “healthy” or not, but in a world full of diseases specifically caused by diet, people have attempted to ease their existential understanding of food by subscribing to various diet religions, accompanied by their own prophets, rituals, and dogma. […]
DIY vs Supporting Small Businesses
In 2022, I was fully expecting to move out of state in 2023, so I went to my barber for what I thought would be the last time, and left him a rather large tip to thank him for being a great barber for the past 8 years. One month passed, and it became clear […]
Wasting Your Life Learning the Wrong Things
Today, I finally fixed my network homelab so that one of my servers can host web applications using the Django framework. Mind you, my professional experience has been more along the lines of the .Net framework, and I even spent about 4 years building a fairly complex open source web application using it. As I […]
Identity, Community, and the Desire to Fit In
I’ve meant to write this for some time, but I’ve continually put it off. It is, first and foremost, a story, but it is a story with a deeper message that I think can be valuable to others. I have always gotten along well with people. In grade school, I was something of a chameleon […]
Buying “Healthier” Foods
For the past few months, I’ve been buying the expensive “pasture-raised” eggs from the grocery store. I had heard that they generally contain more nutrition, since the diet of the chickens is more varied and natural, and the eggs themselves are therefore greater sources of omega-3s, etc. I also learned to watch out for green-washing […]
Imbalances in Power: You vs. Insurance, Warranties, and Property Management Companies
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 […]