For the past few days, I’ve been taking walks around the neighborhood during what would have been my morning commute before my company switched to working from home. This has been very relaxing, and has also given me food for thought. These walks are one of the big reasons I hope to retire very early. […]
Month: July 2020
Poor-enomics
The basement of this house has a little bit of a spider problem right now. It’s strange, because most of the pipe spaces going outside appear to have been sealed, but this house was built in the 70s, so it’s tough to know how those seals are holding up. There really isn’t very much stuff […]
Risk Surface
Risk Surface is a way of thinking about all the things that could go wrong. It’s a strategy for reducing present and future expenses, both perceived and theoretical. You can kind of put a dollar amount on it, but it’s also more involved than that. Risk Surface, in so far as it can be calculated, […]
Brief Thoughts on Escape Velocity
For most of the working years of my life, I believe I have made reasonably good decisions with money. But this was all put to the test four years ago when I found myself out of a job for 3 months. I thought my emergency fund was fairly large, but it was scary just how […]
Strategic Underachievement
I have to admit, this title is sort of click-bait because it’s unexpected and is likely to trigger my achiever friends. But there is some merit to it in this short post. These thoughts came to me as I was thinking this morning about career selection and the economics of career growth. Standard weekend morning […]
The Tyranny of Outdoor Gear: Part 2
Gear hell is real. I really enjoyed my first backpacking trip several weeks ago, but my setup was all wrong. I was using a 36L backpack because that’s the largest I owned and I had heard it was just large enough that some people use it for backpacking. In retrospect, I’m convinced that only serious […]
The Lost Roads
Between the 1950s and the 1990s, the United States Geological Survey undertook the massive task of surveying the entire United States, producing over 55,000 topographic maps. These maps attempted to provide a comprehensive record of United States land, and as a small part of this effort, they attempted to reproduce the locations of mines, mine […]