Category: Economics

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 […]

A number of people even in the FIRE community will often sing the praises of not paying off your mortgage. The idea is that if you can lock in a low interest rate, you can pay the minimum on it while investing the rest in something like the stock market, which will likely have higher […]

I had a coworker at my first software job who, despite being a friend, was also insensitive and demeaning on more than a few occasions, not just toward me but also toward others. He was very technically capable, and for that reason it was hard to dismiss his technical criticism. However, one day I was […]

A large portion of the software and IT industries have refocused in recent years on “cloud computing”, a term that refers to running things over the internet instead of on premises. I believe this buzzword originated from the practice of representing the internet as a cloud on old network diagrams. I’m not a huge fan. […]

I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve accomplished this past year, and while I read several books that were great, I also feel that I didn’t focus enough on the books I had, as several remain unfinished. Most interesting of these books were a few I had on the Tibetan language. After my first trip to […]

I would love to learn how to rebuild an engine. I think it would be an excellent educational experience. But it’s also not to be taken lightly, as it requires space and several very specialized tools, such as an engine stand and a valve spring compressor, to name just a few. It has occurred to […]

I think this is a good case study in downsizing. I told myself this past year that I’d like to do one or two Lego projects, somewhere along the lines of finishing a mech I started building years ago and maybe building a house or two based on designs from the 1920s. Neither has happened. […]