Many, many years ago, I bought a 20-ton press for changing wheel bearings. I had this idea in my head that I wanted to be able to do as much as possible on my car, and since I already had experience removing knuckle assemblies to change captive rotors (look it up, it’s horrible), I figured […]
Category: Economics
Life Engineering: Entropy Management
Stuff breaks down. Stuff wears out. And fixing stuff costs money. What’s unfortunate is when people invest in complex things, only for those things to break, leaving the owner to deal with the hassle and expense of repair. Entropy is all around us. Your car will stop running. Your TV will break. You will die. […]
Philosophy of Car Ownership – Part 2
A car is one of the most expensive things you will ever own, but it is deceptively easy to take for granted. If you drive a car around for several years, this becomes a normal part of your life, and the loss of this can cause some pretty severe stress. Much of this can be […]
Philosophy of Car Ownership – Part 1
Some people think you should always buy new. Others think you should always buy used. Some would never pay to rebuild an engine on a car that is more than 10 years old. Others pay to rebuild engines on cars that are 25 or 30 years old. Our society’s Kantian ethics tends to fall apart […]
The Polished Product
I believe our culture has a strong bias against improvisation, and I have mixed feelings about this. With a few carpentry skills, the majority of furnishings in our lives could be created instead of purchased, but it takes advanced skills to stain, polish, or upholster furniture, and the average person does not possess these skills. […]
Quality vs Expense
In theory, the price of a thing is a function of its labor cost and the capital required to produce it, with a markup for profit. Sellers usually seek to maximize this profit, but competition drives it down. If the expense of labor and capital cannot be covered, the company goes out of business or […]
Simple vs Robust Solutions to Money Questions
Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. I feel this applies quite succinctly to most of the money decisions a person can make in their life. The greatest challenge with the subject of money is just how subjective and pliable it can be. Every person is different, every history is different, every preference is […]
In Defense of Skepticism
If you only knew me from my blog, you might think I’m a fairly negative person. At times in my life this has actually been true, but it usually doesn’t take me long to pick up on this, and during those times I’ve had to ask myself exactly where that negativity comes from. But other […]
Gimmicks
In middle school, we had an annual fund-raising event where the school tried to get all of the students to sell magazine subscriptions to friends and family. I guess the school got a cut of the proceeds, while some organization got the rest. They brought in a motivational speaker to get us pumped to win […]
Stay Away from MLMs!
Multi-Level Marketing companies. We’ve all known somebody who has been involved in one. Sometimes they are advertising these products on Facebook, sometimes they are giving you awkward presentations in your living room. These people are not bad people. They are usually just trying to increase their income. But the MLM companies themselves are scams, and […]