Category: Things
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Buying a car
Assuming you are starting from scratch and don’t have the pile of cash already sitting around, is it better to: Some more questions: The most important questions:
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Goalpost drift
It’s hard to keep the goalposts of your life and lifestyle from moving at all, but limiting the movement to intentional, incremental steps rather than upheaval that “just happens” will make contentment easier to choose. Goalposts that move for no other reason than they can will keep moving and are…
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Cabinets and plumbing
If you want custom kitchen cabinets you don’t go hire someone who’s says they’ll replace the plumbing and do the cabinets. That wouldn’t make any sense. The plumbing is important! More important arguably than custom cabinets. But someone advertising they do both equally well is likely to do both with,…
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When to change your mind
Information is everywhere. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, much of it is open to interpretation. And the hardest thing to do with all of this information is to intentionally gather it from a wide swath of reputable sources, consider it carefully, and be willing to…
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Why do we go to the dentist?
I sat in a dentist’s chair for well nigh an hour this afternoon, fearing that my jaw muscles were going to start cramping, and cursing whatever gene I got that makes my teeth highly sensitive to the cold water they insist on spraying directly on to my teeth every five…
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The un-usual way to make it as someone who spends money
Farhad Manjoo, the inimitable tech-writer at the New York Times, wrote a wonderful piece last week about MailChimp, the tech company responsible for helping lots and lots of small businesses do email marketing. The title of the piece is “MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up,”…
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How much money do you make?
Maybe a better question is: How does money make you? Seriously, what does it do to you? And what do the things you spend it on do to you? I’ll be honest. I wish my wife and I made more money. I wish the prospect of one of us staying…
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Following rules no one taught us
“The English language is a rascal.” I came across a post over at Kottke today that blew my mind in a way that was at once disturbing and fantastic. The whole point of the post was to show that there is a very specific order for adjectives when we string more…
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Biggie and emergent properties
Sometimes complex systems–like the human brain, or the universe that quantum physics studies–display what are called “emergent properties.” The phenomenon the term describes goes something like this: Suppose you have a widget that seems to be doing something fairly simple, and then you get a bunch of those widgets and put them together. You might understandably…
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Sentimental couch
Did you know you can have a sentimental attachment to a couch? Of course you did. You probably have a sentimental attachment to something even more ubiquitous than an old couch. I have a pair of Nike athletic socks that fit me just right, and they should have been in the…
Meaningful Returns 