Being Capable vs. Being a Tool

I’ve been watching a channel on YouTube that talks a lot about socialism, and although I don’t think anyone will ever convince me that socialism is a good thing, the guy who runs the channel has some pretty fascinating criticisms of ‘capitalism’, or at least, how this appears to function today. Several of his points […]

Self Investment and Career Path ROI

It frustrates me when people choose not to invest in themselves. It doesn’t frustrate me from a moral perspective, as if productivity or achievement was some weird moral obligation, but from the perspective of hoping people can realize more of their own potential. I gave up on cyber security years ago because I was afraid […]

Meta-Politics: Lifting Others Up

The other day, a friend made a long post on Facebook regarding women’s rights and and how trans rights have skewed several important issues regarding women. I was inclined to agree with what was being said, and was going to “like” it, but I was also too lazy to read the whole thing and as […]

Life Strategy and Ecology

There are so many different temperaments and circumstances among people that I don’t think it makes sense to take any one financial strategy and hold it up as the one, true way. The investments that are available to you are also specific to your country, its laws and institutions, and the time period in which […]

Life and Money: More Reflections

In an effort to organize my thoughts, I’ll break this down into three categories: updated thoughts about my mom’s condition, reflections from the job search, and other. Updated thoughts about my mom’s condition I don’t think it would be wise for me to cash out my 401k to pay off my mom’s medical debt. This […]

Reflections from a Rough Patch

Things haven’t been great lately, but while talking some of this out with friends can be helpful, some things are simply easier to write. I’m going to try to organize these thoughts, but they could still be scattered. The day before my first certification test in December, less than a week before Christmas, I got […]

Contributions to History

Over the past few years, I’ve managed to scan several dozen old mining catalogs, bulletins, and pamphlets and have uploaded them to the Internet Archive. But the thought of doing more makes me sick. It started with trying to build a PVC scanning rig in a manner made popular by David Landin, known frequently as […]

Questioning Economic Progress

It’s often said that competition is good for consumers, as businesses will compete based on price, quality, or both, which leads to better goods or better prices for society. Efficiency is seen as being good for economic progress, too, and increases in technology are said to make things cheaper for individuals over time. But I’m […]

Wasted Time

For all of the positive things I can say about taking a year off, there’s one negative thing that has become abundantly clear to me: I suck at time management. I don’t completely know what goes into this. On the one hand, I really despise the obsession with productivity that reduces the value of people […]

Excessive Professionalism

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, […]