May 8, 2019
Like you, I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I’m going to have to buy a Tesla at some point. I can tell because I have read every last scrap of Tesla news and inadvertently memorized every last technical detail about the company and their cars and energy storage systems that has ever…
If you have more money than you need, you should start giving some of it away. That’s the lesson I learned about a year ago, when I took a gamble and donated $100,000 to a variety of charities, centered around the Effective Altruism movement. More on Effective Altruism: The Life You Can Save website,…
Here’s a little quiz: Suppose you are living an extremely happy life – all your material needs and wants are met, and there is still money to spare. Then suddenly, you get even more money. Do you: For many people, this might seem like a trick question. After all, needs are cheap but how…
For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of making an annual trip to the equator of our planet, spending a week or two absorbing the very different world of South America. One of the unexpected benefits is that I get to converse occasionally with Mother Earth herself. Of course, we all know her…
In my half of the Earth, we’ve recently drifted past the Winter Solstice – the shortest, darkest, day of the year and usually one of the coldest too. Some might consider this a depressing time, but for me it is cause for optimism. After all, if life is already this great right now, can you…
Well, I’m almost done rebuilding that house I have been working on since last fall. There was a big push through the electrical and insulation stages, and then I happily handed the place off to Agustin and his crew for drywall*, which is now in its final days as well. Insulation was a big step…
Early in the life of this blog, several readers wrote to me to recommend a book called Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. I quickly biked to the library, checked it out, read it cover-to-cover, and found that I agreed fully with its premise. It has been part of this blog’s Book List ever…
I’m pretty sure we’re all being scammed. I have been collecting evidence on this for over 15 years now, and it’s starting to look pretty compelling. If you’re skeptical, see what you think of these stories: Happily Oblivious In my own life, I’ve rarely had much occasion to think about cleaning. Sure, if a surface…
The other day, the lady and I were biking through the parking lot of the fancy Natural Grocers food store, when I suddenly screeched to a halt, without even realizing why I had done it. It turns out the reason was that one of these things had caught the corner of my eye: “What’s going…
This is a special bonus follow-up to yesterday’s article on Cash-Efficient Cars. There seems to be widespread confusion about the value of hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius. Are they worth the extra cost? Are they reliable? Do they explode when they crash or actually have a higher environmental footprint than a Hummer? In the…
Last week I wrote up an article about cutting your home heating costs. The discussion that followed in the comments section was full of more great information, and it even led to me making a small change in my own house that should work out to surprisingly large savings. This rather simple trick was: Changing…
The Triple M Family enjoyed a rather enlightening movie night tonight. These days, we tend to watch all our movies together, and we usually let the kid make the viewing choice, using the nicely organized browsing system on Netflix. Fortunately for us parents, our boy has graduated from the Pixar movies we’ve all seen a…
