Category: Money
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Buy art from artists
Our culture would literally fold in on itself without people who are willing to devote their lives to making art. Supporting these people is supporting the fabric of society.
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Happiness is an inexact science, and not a science at all
Your present self doesn’t quite know what will make your future self truly happy and fulfilled, which makes this business of living a pretty tough one. We sort of go around doing things right now that our in-five-seconds-or-hours-or-months-or-years-self will appreciate and be grateful for, and this is natural and expected.…
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Play It Again Sports, skipping Halloween, and the importance of family rituals
Despite the wonderful reality of having a Piggly Wiggly and a public pool and a library all within a two block radius, the town I grew up in had fewer homes than my current neighborhood in Raleigh, and it was a big deal when they built the strip mall with…
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What’s the coolest under-$10 purchase you’ve made?
I have, on my keychain, an odd looking piece of metal. I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but whenever I see it I think of a Lego figure’s arm and hand. It’s a bottle opener, and it says PEABODY’S on it, and I think it was somewhere in…
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What if your gym membership isn’t actually “invaluable”?
Being healthy is very important, first of all, so please don’t read this and go away telling everyone that Jared Korver is breathing lies and contributing to America’s health problems. But I have a story to tell: I once joined, on a trial basis, a gym that I will not…
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Maybe you shouldn’t invest like a billionaire
Barry Ritholtz (one of the good guys in finance) wrote a great piece yesterday at Bloomberg about all of the recent calls from a number of billionaires to essentially “sell everything.” Barry’s main point is that you shouldn’t much bother about these calls unless you, too, are a billionaire and…
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Christian Laettner and amateur hour investing
Christian Laettner is undisputedly the most despised college basketball player of all time, and plus he played at Duke, and I despise Duke basketball with every fiber of my being. I say all this only as a matter of disclosure, and as a matter of principle. I was, therefore, interested to see a…
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“Raleigh’s richest ITB streets”
Here’s a slide show I found yesterday on the Triangle Business Journal’s website with the somewhat misleading title of “Raleigh’s richest ITB streets.” Basically it’s “Raleigh’s most expensive ITB streets,” which is another thing entirely, but oh well. For the uninitiated (I didn’t say plebeian, but…), “ITB” stands for “Inside…
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Throwing bad money after good
There is a term in social psychology which describes the subconscious phenomenon of humans justifying systemic negative or immoral actions by referencing isolated positive or moral actions that too place prior. This term is “moral licensing,” or “moral self-licensing,” and the reality it describes is really pretty disturbing. (You can find moral licensing…
Meaningful Returns 