The main problem is that a college education does not make people smarter. Hence, the consequence of sending increasing numbers of kids to college and demanding that they get degrees has been to dumb down the levels, reduce the number of challenging courses, and inflate the grades to allow people to pass. This hurts the smart students who do not get challenged and it hurts the stupid students who exit college with a useless degree and spend months and years before ending with a job that actually matches their abilities. In turn it also hurts the people who did not go to college as they have to compete for jobs with people with “college degrees”. I think it is generally accepted that a college degree is now so prevalent that it is practically equivalent to a union card for the white collar job market. Hence, employers use this as a first screen for potential applicants. Hence, what used to be “high-school” jobs are now “college degree” jobs: “Must possess a minimum of a bachelor degree and be able to lift 50lb”. And thus even people who know that they don’t need to go to college to learn the skills for a particular job, realize that they better go anyway to have a shot at getting their foot in the door of the job market.

The effect of government sponsorship and the fact that university administrations have willingly played along (after all, more students mean more income) have not resulted in higher education. It has merely resulted in longer education leaving students with more debt and taxpayers with more expenses. Also, it deflates the credentials of the present workforce. For instance, a 1990 “A” is worth more than a 2000 “A” but less than a 1980 “A”. As such grade inflation may put pressure on people with older degrees and transfers credentials from the haves to the have-nots (just like ordinary inflation).

Now, personal finance experts like to talk about good debts and bad debts. Since most personal finance has to do with consumption and not capital investment(*), I am personally not able to draw the line and I think all personal debt is bad debt. However, in general student debt is often considered a “good debt”. However, I think that in many cases, in particular for the multitude which SHOULD NOT have gone to college, such student debt is quite insidious in that it does not generate a corresponding return in terms of money and opportunity losses compared to going for a more suitable job like machinist, mechanic, chef, etc.

(*) For many people a college degree is not an investment in human capital. It is simply akin to an extended vacation with room and board.

So who needs a college degree? Except for a select few in highly technical fields and those who desire to be professors, I submit that most middle managers, technicians, etc. can be suitably and much more efficiently trained on the job. The colleges may cry out about the value of education, but I say from experience that you find very very few intellectual students on a college campus. Maybe 1 in 20 read the newspaper (the entire newspaper) and even fewer read books outside the assigned curriculum (some don’t even read that much). Thus as I see it, colleges provide very little educational value for most of its attendants and thus most people don’t need to go there.

The way to correct the situation is two-pronged. First, the government needs to stop subsidizing the education industry so that the price signals of higher/longer education are not distorted. This means student loans at market rates and tuition at market rates. That way people can better evaluate whether a 3 year degree in basket weaving is economically sounder career strategy than the $80,000 salary available to a precision machinist (it’s not). Second, companies need to be less lazy in their screening process. It just may be that the person who does not hold a college degree, but rather started his own company or travelled to another country and found employment (rather than backpacking around and wasting time) might be a better asset that someone who partied for 4 years courtesy of the parents of the taxpayers.

End of rant.

Originally posted 2008-07-14 07:22:36.

Today there are more people than ever before working on generating information. Information is in a sense any piece of non-random data that you can put down on paper or in a hard disk. The prime drivers of information generation are university workers. In the university the ability to generate information is a prerequisite for promotion and hence much effort is expended on publishing information both on paper in the form of the exploding number of journals but also orally in terms of the exploding number of conference talks and press releases. This is clearly an inflationary trend that nobody seems to recognize as such: Organize a conference,publish a paper, etc. so that you may get promoted before the promoters find out that everybody else is doing the same thing and thus raise their prices accordingly. This results in a steady push towards higher “prices”: It takes longer and longer CVs/resumes to do essentially the same job.

You can not write knowledge down on paper, nor can you relay knowledge to other people in a talk or a lecture. Knowledge strictly exists inside people’s heads. Knowledge is therefore a private matter and all a teacher can do is to facilitate the student’s process of forming this knowledge in his head. The idea that teachers pour knowledge into students heads as if it was some kind of product is founded on a complete misunderstanding of how the human mind works. Brains are not computers.

The social aggregate consequence of this is that the amount of knowledge is strictly proportional to the amount of time people spend thinking about information. It is interesting, thus, to note that knowledge directly depends on the ability of people to have sufficient resources to spend their time thinking instead of say working. Knowledge is thus a positive function on the amount of energy input into society. In other words, if, say professors, as the supposed carriers of knowledge did not have enough time to think about their knowledge (because society could no longer afford their grants), this knowledge would evaporate. The information would be left in the books and journals, but it would be useless. If you don’t believe me go and pick up a random scholarly article and see if you understand anything of it right away, that is, anything without first learning the jingo — that will take years, even in fields one should think were quite adjacent.

Unfortunately, the process of acquiring knowledge stops right there. I think this is because the scientific method, which has been very effective in generating knowledge, has not been matched with a comparable advance in terms of wisdom. In our knowledge based society we know how to build factories and cars, we know how to build plastic bags and airconditioners, we know how to genetically modify plants and build guided missiles. We just go ask some expert that has dedicated his entire life to such pursuits. However, nobody seems to know or even ask why and if we should build
factories, cars, GM plants or guided missiles. The wisdom is lacking and there is an implicit understanding that all knowledge is objective and value neutral. Perhaps it is but knowledge without wisdom is as dangerous as wisdom without knowledge is impotent.

Originally posted 2008-12-24 10:58:48.

I used to be interested in anti-consumerism. I read adbusters, verdant.net, Naomi Klein and others. People are anti-consumers for a variety of reasons. One is environmental. Making all this stuff and throwing it away next year requires a tremendous amount of resources, raw materials, land, forests, animals – they all gotta go in the name of the latest and greatest. Another reason is political. Since people pretty much spend their money in the same way, people are inevitably divided into classes according to their earning power resulting in political tension. My original rebellious tack was mostly environmental, but presently I think of myself as a poor aristocrat.

It would seem that the values of early retirees are completely different from most people. Whenever I have a problem, my first thought is not to drive over to Walmart and buy a gadget that will solve my problem. Rather, I sit down and wonder how I got this far without spending money and then I find an alternative solution using creativity rather than credit cards. In many ways, my possessions – my stuff, is quite old, but also selected for high quality to last many years. Good stuff ages well. “Fashionable” stuff ages poorly and thus has to be thrown out and replaced with new stuff to the detriment of the environment, financial independence, and leisure time.

The asset/income ratio of early retirees is also completely different from most consumers. It’s not that assets necessarily are very large (you’d be surprised) – rather it’s the income that is relatively low. For instance, I have learned to live quite well on less than $10000 a year. In other words, I am wealthy by definition, but not rich, hence “poor aristocrat”. I don’t have/spend a lot of money, but what I do spend, I think I spend very well.

What are your spending values?

Originally posted 2007-12-07 03:42:00.

I submit that your expected life span greatly influences your actions and that those actions in the aggregate greatly influences the behavior of civilization. In nature, there are different kinds of sea animals, fish, whales, turtles, that all live more than 200 years. Mollusks have estimated life spans of more than 400 years. On land california redwoods live for more than 2000 years. Some bristlecone pines have recorded ages spanning over 4000 years. A healthy human generally lives for 70-80 years and thus about 3 generations of humans are concurrently alive at all times.

My hypothesis is that societies with 3 concurrent generations are different from societies with 2 concurrent generations which again are different from societies with close to 1 concurrent generation. A one-generation society constantly starts over in terms of social understanding and civilized behavior on all aspects. A two-generation society will have some two-generation long cycles because one generation is present to advise the next generation. A three generation society will have three frequencies.

Another way of looking at this is that in a one-generation society, the wisest advisors are 25 years old. In a two-generation society, they are 50 years old, and in a three-generation society, they are 75 years old.

We do not have the benefit of 100, 125, …. or 500 year old advisors. Consider, for instance, that a 250 year old advisor would be fully able to tell us whether industrialization was a good idea. He would be able to tell us whether increasing the human population on the planet by ten fold was a good idea. Even a 150 years, such a person would have the experience of several major wars and have much more experience rather than facing each new conflict as something that has never been “felt” before.

In a room with 100 people, more than 95 of them see civilization as a endless progression of growth. Very few holds a longer perspective. The 95 are like a person born in January and upon noticing that the temperature goes up as the months progress to May concludes that the temperature grows, always. Suppose that the lifespan of our fictitious group is 4-5 months and the source of this thinking becomes clear.

But what are the longer cycles of civilization. Is it even possible, beyond academic research, to bring an understanding of cycles out to the general civilization so that people start living according to such a mental framework rather than the and extrapolation of the current situation (growth) to the eternal situation (endless growth).

Readers may practice changing their framework by thinking about the current stock market.

I think religions provide a framework for most people mainly because the corresponding intellectual understanding requires a vast effort to cover the same bases (no wonder science came last) . Now, consider the difference between a religion where people believe that they are going back to Earth in some form after they die and a religion where people believe that they are going somewhere else after they die. How do these different philosophies align with the idea of not fouling your own nest (in particular the nest of your children’s children). Which one aligns best with the idea that humans are an integral component of the environment? How do religions transfer good behavior where intergenerational communications, as per above, fails?

Originally posted 2008-10-28 07:36:19.

The ERE book was intended to read as a textbook and not as an easy fun story. As a result, it makes demands on the readers. Frankly, I can’t really tell what level of demands it makes. Hence this survey. Having gone through school, what level would you expect students to be able to follow the concepts at. In other words, if you were a teacher, at which level would you use the ERE book (as compared to another book, like, say, Your Money Or Your Life) as a text book if there was a class in ERE. Keep in mind that the aim is not to find out ‘how smart you think people should be’ but ‘how smart you think people actually are’.

Results are given on the ERE book page.

Originally posted 2011-07-05 13:52:52.

Of course, in science and academia as a whole, citations act as the social currency. The idea is that the more citations you have, the better your work is. It’s kinda like thinking that the best literature can be found on the NY Times bestseller list. It’s far from perfect, but it’s what we have. Citations are also helpful for complete beginners so they can look things up. However, once one knows the material, one no longer looks up citations. Also, while it was once very difficult to find a relevant article on, say, X-ray scattering in thin plasmas or whatever, search engines and online archives has made this a lot easier. Hence, even from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know anything about the field (e.g. first year grad students), citations are no longer as useful as they once were.

However, traditions die hard. Why do people still listen to lectures when the original reason for their creation was that students could take notes on their own because it would be too expensive to print books and copy machines hadn’t been invented? We’re talking a tradition that’s outdated by several hundred years. Why do people still go to conferences to disseminate new research despite the existence of web technology that could broadcast new research instantly? Tradition! It’s because people in academia get promoted based on how many talks they’ve given and how many papers, they’ve published; not the popularity of their website.

Now that I’m retired from physics, I don’t bother with citations any more. I feel that in this day and age, statements are extremely easy to verify. I don’t see the point of citing a source if I, for example, say that unemployment numbers in the US were 9.1% in August 2011. It is so easy to look such factoids up on the internet compared to the old days where a statement like that would have been a nightmare to verify.

Furthermore, being an independent writer whose success doesn’t depend on the number of citations I collect, I don’t see the point in mutual back patting and citing people to connect my work to theirs hoping they will do the same(*).

Also, very importantly, since I don’t write “review articles” of the type “He said this, but she said that”, which I believe constitutes the very foundation of research in the humanities (*zing*) but rather present ideas that are original, or perhaps more accurately an original mix or rather well-known ideas, I just don’t see the point.

(*) Uh, blogging is actually often like that. Ack!

Writing a piece with citations in it for the first time is a lot of work. It requires keeping track of two pieces of information: What was said and whoever said it. Write a piece without citations and you only have to remember what was said. If you get in the habit of the latter, you can now remember and control twice as many facts!

This is a huge boon to a generalist. It’s much easier to keep track of things in a narrow fields. Many authors will write multiple papers and one develops a deep familiarity with present and former colleagues and their writing. When writing about interdisciplinary things, the problem is that one only has a shallow understanding of what is a vast area of knowledge(**).

I could draw a curve here, but hopefully you see what I mean. Dealing in citations and references reduces the efficiency and one’s ability to make connections between facts (because there are fewer of them). You can think of it like this. Suppose I have 20 memory cells. Between those cells I can make 20×20 = 400 different connections. Out of those 400 connections, maybe 5% are relevant, thus I get 20 “good ideas”.

(**) I have written close to 900 blog posts on ERE. I definitely do not remember all of them! There may be some kind of equivalent principle to Dunbar’s number operating here.

However, suppose I use my 20 cells to store 10 pieces of information and 10 citations. I can now make 10×10=100 connections. Supposing 5% are relevant, that gives me 5 “good ideas”.

I just dropped my effectiveness by a factor four! This is the main reason I don’t bother with remembering exactly who said what and where.

On a general note, this is important if you try to support a social network like academia or a high school clique. It is not important to me.

Of course, one could have a computerized database to keep the citations. It is grunt work to maintain such a database and thus it only works in a specialized field where one can indeed read everything.

In conclusion, there’s a reason there are no citations in the ERE book. There won’t be any in the INV book either. It is presumed that statements can simply be verified by googling them. Of course that’s not to say that I don’t acknowledge that “I stand on the shoulders of giants”. This is why I favor rather large bibliographies. I just don’t bother to connect every piece of information with that bibliography.

I’ll leave that for someone else to do if they’re so inclined. It has no value to me.

Originally posted 2011-09-19 10:16:51.

Now, ordinarily, you can go to the bike shop and have them fix it for $15, you you can buy a truing stand for about $100. Alternatively, you can make your own truing stand out of an old bicycle fork.

However, you can also just fix it yourself in about 10 minutes for free.

You need

• A sharpee or similar (something that will paint a mark on metal)
• A spoke wrench (an adjustable wrench will do in a pinch)

Put the bicycle upside down and spin the wheel. Move the sharpee closer and closer until it starts hitting the wobbly parts of the rim as it spins. Do this on both sides.

If you did it correctly you will eventually have drawn a line on parts of one side and the exact negative image on the other side. If not, you went too close with the sharpee. Most likely one line will span only a few spokes. This is the part of the rim which extends too far out. To move this part in, you have to tighten the spokes, which are over the line, on the other side by doing a quarter turn counter-clockwise so they pull the rim towards them. Similarly, you must loosen the spokes on this side by a quarter turn clockwise. If you tighten both of them, you will make the wheel less round. If that is you problem and your wheel is out of round, this method will not work – in this case, you need to take the tube and the tire off and use the sharpee on the top edge of the rim and either tighten or loosen both sides where applicable.

Try to see if it worked by holding you nail (don’t worry, you have twenty of them) closer and closer to the rim to see if that straightened the wheel. If not, do another quarter turn and so on.

Originally posted 2009-04-26 04:27:29.

Stop drinking milk!

Let’s face it sucking on the teat of a cow is simply unnatural unless you are a calf. Since you are reading this, I’m willing to bet that you walk upright on two legs at the very least. Thus you are not a calf.

Doing some due diligence will reveal many counter arguments to drinking milk. Many people are lactose intolerant for starters. If humans were evolutionary conditioned to drink milk that would not make sense. In fact the few lactose tolerant people in the world are those who genetically/culturally have been drinking milk for many many generations e.g. Northern Europeans and a few others.

Actually, I did not give up milk many years ago in order to save money. I gave it up because I was too lazy to go shopping often enough to keep the milk fresh. This was before hormones and preservatives became a natural ingredient. Back then milk turned sour in 5 days! Who knows – had I not been lazy and had I been unaware of the chemistry of modern cow fodder, I would probably still be drinking milk “to keep my bones strong”. (Food for thought – what do cows drink to keep THEIR bones strong?).

Anyway, lazy won, and I got used to doing without milk. Admittedly DW buys it anyway from time to time – it makes her happy – so I get off the wagon and use some on my cereal. I never drink it though.

However, water works fine with cereal. I usually mix some oatmeal in with the rest, corn flakes, raisins, nuts, seeds, sometimes a dab of honey. This gives the water a nice taste. When it comes to bread, I use water. This will change the taste slightly – I actually like water-based bread (bread classic!) better than milk based bread (bread post agricultural – support your farmer – revolution). Try it out. Just use the same amount of water instead of milk. In fact you can substitute milk for water in almost any recipe except maybe ice cream.

Originally posted 2007-12-08 08:03:00.

The original retirement plan was to move to some cheap place to live that didn’t suck too much. Preferably it would be within walking distance of many things but it certainly did not have to be big. In fact smaller would be better as it would leave more time for more interesting things than cleaning and housekeeping. One potential problem is that I am not comfortable with stagnation – at all. There has to be a learning curve, and for a house this learning curve would naturally have to be found elsewhere. Therefore I was never quite satisfied with the idea. Being the home-owner of a generic cookie-cutter seems like a non-scary nightmare. I am NOT a homemaker.

The second idea was to get an RV, specifically to build an RV. I quickly found out that unless one drives a $100,000 RV bus, one is just a few steps removed from the homeless on the persecution scale. This may be wrong but all the sites I read about stealth camping suggested as much.

The third idea was a combination of the former two. Get a tumbleweedhouse and park it in an RV or trailer park. This could even be done as a snowbird. If people didn’t understand (I’m so used to this that I have come expect it), the house could simply be driven away. Of course this came with its own problems. Aside from building the house, there is no learning curve.

Now I don’t know how I came across the idea, but how about living aboard a yacht in a marina, anchored of a tropical island, or just cruising on blue water. Sounds unreal, but apparently many people do this and they’re not all full of money. Boat living can cost as much as you want but frugal estimates rank at $600-$1000 per month which are very familiar numbers to me. While some people never leave the slip (harbor), others spend time cruising. Some people even sail around the world. I am quite taken by the fact that one can take a $30,000 boat and sail it across the Pacific or the Atlantic, just like one would take a car and drive it across the US (only somewhat harder). Skippering a boat also has some aspects that I have been missing from modern life, namely, accountability and self-reliance. If something goes wrong, it is plain clear where the buck stops. In “real” life, the buck is often passed along. As I read in some boating forum, sailing is actually closer to reality, because unlike this world, there are immediate consequences for mistakes, and one can not talk or pay one’s way out of mistakes. It also fits a lot of my other values. On a boat there is no clutter and so consumerism becomes so irrelevant that it would be considered crazy. The focus is on functionally, personal ingenuity, and skills rather than appearance. Sailing is physically demanding. If one can’t hoist a main sail, well, then the boat doesn’t move. Forsooth, one’s body actually becomes more than just a sloppy vessel for carrying one’s expert brain around between the job, the car, and the couch/bed like on our present (degenerate) world.

The only problem. I have no clue as to how one sails!

I have also learned how to sail. In that regard, I have learned that I am perhaps not as adventurous as I thought I was. Facing 10+ foot waves in a 30 feet boat in near gale conditions teaches one things that are hard to grasp intellectually However, while sailing around the world is out of the picture (maybe until I become vastly more experienced), I am longer wary of buying a boat afraid that it might sink if I don’t operate the marine toilet properly.

Originally posted 2008-04-03 07:32:47.

If you ask whether you can retire with $10 million, the answer is still no.

The problem is essentially scale-less. Asking the question implies that one has accumulated X dollars without any thought towards expenses and jobless income. I posit that if those things are considered, the answer would be obvious and the question would not have to be asked.

However, until one figures out one’s expenses and jobless income, the question can’t be answered.

So I can only give a very general answer (provided you don’t ask the question ).

Yes, it is possible to retire with $2 million. It is possible to retire with $1 million. It is also possible to retire with half a million or a quarter million. $50,000 is also solution. And so on. The more you know, the less you need.

Originally posted 2008-06-27 07:24:48.

Perhaps, a designed game?

ProgressQuest is a spoof on the MMORPG habit of “grinding” for experience points, that is, engaging in a non-entertaining behavior (killing non-player monsters) to achieve some other end, specifically an increase in levels, wealth, special weapons.

Just stop me, whenever you get the point of this analogy

ProgressQuest requires very little interaction from the player. If it does require interaction, the interaction is meaningless. For instance, you can choose an affiliation—it doesn’t matter though.

In the game, which plays itself (the spoof is on the autokill function which relieves the player from going through the self-similar repetitive motions of trivial combat), you head out to the “killing fields”. Here you slay monster after monster (serve customer after customer, write report after report, take phone call after phone call, …) each time collecting a small reward (something the monster drops (an affiliate bonus, a sales commission, a mark on your resume or publication record). Once you have enough rewards, you automatically head back to town to sell them for a level upgrade (career rise, home upgrade, …) or a special weapon (vacation, new car, … ). Then you go right back to the killing fields.

I’ve been playing it for half an hour now. I can’t help to admit it’s kinda fascinating in a comatose kind of way—like watching TV—to follow along. It’s “engaging” to watch what you’ll kill next or what kind of “level” you’ll advance to or what “special weapon” you’ll be able to purchase.

Much like real life…

Bartleby divided online gamers into four categories: achievers, explorers, killers, and socializers.

In short…

• Achievers play to gain points, rewards, levels, weapons, etc. (they act on the world).
  
• Socializers play to interact with other players.
  
• Explorers play to interact with the world, discovering new things.

• Killers play to act on players, that is, killing them.

ProgressQuest is a spoof on achievers. Achievers care mostly about advancing in the system. Most people are actually achievers, and so most online games, computer games—and dare I say the real world—is designed with achievers in mind. You can get them to do anything (specifically, hand over their time in the real world, and/or hard earned money in the gaming world) simply by making up titles, small rewards, special things, stuff that they can hold out demonstrating to the world of their achievements.

Try to click on the link and play it for while. Now, suppose you got $50,000 per year just to watch it or maybe it wasn’t fully automatic, but you had to click A to attack, and occasionally go back to town to convert loot and experience points into status symbols, that is, do something mentally unstimulating on autopilot. Would you take the job?

Have a red pill Swallow hard.

What is most fascinating to me is that this grand piece of social engineering works beautifully. I am an ‘Explorer’, which I suppose allowed me to figure out how the game works and adequately ‘hack’ it to get out the back door. I “retired”—looking for ways to spend my time that does not involve “achieving” and “being all I can be” by collecting levels, gold, and trinkets.

Using the Gervais analogy, the Killers are the Sociopaths, the Achievers are the Clueless, and the Socializers are … well, the analogy kinda breaks down—or at least I don’t see it anymore. In the gaming world, Killers frequently attract followers who look up to them. I do in some sense look up to Killers (maybe because they kill achievers… muhahaha ). In the real world, Killers work on Wall Street and in the top floor offices. I kinda see Socializers as Eloiburgers and the Achievers as Morlocks. The Explorers are the “hackers”. Killers can’t touch them, and the other groups don’t care about them. They exist outside the system, because they have gone beyond it.

Here the system we know is that of a college degree followed by 40 years for 9-5 jobs followed by a retirement home. This system is but a part of the world. Luckily, there’s still much of the world left to be explored. The tricky part, from an early retirement perspective, is how to explore it. Much of the world is built around achievement in the sense of amassing experience points. Been there, done that; life is too short. The challenge, now, is to find a different quest.

Originally posted 2010-08-13 22:04:27.

Go into the arts and letters department and you need not venture far to find someone who will claim with some pride that they were never any good at math. At this point more people will gladly admit that they were never good at math either. I remember one of our high school teachers who admitted to not being able to solve a quadratic equation. Her reason was that she never needed to do that. Well, she had a point there, but at the same time I overheard her discussing with her colleagues how exasperated she was that none of her “uncultured” students knew which year Marx wrote Das Kapital. Well, I guess, we never needed to know that either.

Now, go into the science department. Having been a member of such departments for quite a few years, I think I can guarantee that you will never ever hear anyone smugly claim that they are illiterate or that they are not good with words. However, what many will admit to is an ignorance of economics and personal finance. The reason is again that they consider finance to be somewhat beneath them. The general opinion is that finance is simple and that “I could if I would, but I prefer to focus on more interesting subjects“.

This is of course a big mistake. In an economic society a basic knowledge on retirement savings, stock markets, tax vehicles, and mortgages should be required knowledge on par with putting on one’s clothes, cooking a meal, and filling up the tank. But it’s not!

Having started this financial blog a few weeks back and having done more research on the topic I am amazed at stark difference in personal finance awareness between those who are actively interested in personal finance issues and those who are not. I mean, I was almost getting used to being one-of-a-kind in terms of net worth until I found those guys. This convinced me that having a six digit net worth at age 30 was possible for anyone with sufficient focus. It is not for lack of intelligence that many people are in financial trouble. Personal finance is not rocket science. It should be common sense not to buy things you cannot afford, not to spend everything you earn, and to save for a rainy day and in particular to save for retirement.

Now looking around, I see that there are personal financial advisors, personal eating advisors (dieticians), and personal trainers (about 40000 presently in the US and counting) and even personal “how to dress” advisors – at least on TV. Now I certainly do not question the current need for these professions. My question is why did we come to depend on professionals to solve problems that should be simple in the first place. Could it be due to excessive specialization in which we delegate more and more responsibility to other people (and sue when we don’t get what we expect)? Anyone? I believe the answer is yes. We don’t have to go back more than 2 or 3 generations to find a culture where people took personal responsibility for many more areas of their life than is currently the case.

I am all about taking some responsibility back for our personal finances rather than outsourcing this very important and decisive factor in our life. Start reading or find a mentor, but by all means think for yourself and don’t trust anyone. One thing I have learned is that each person’s financial situation is unique. It is not just a question of crunching numbers but just as much a question of matching your financial values to your emotional values. If you accept this, then you might also accept that financial advice, exercise advice, and diet advice and practically any kind of advice that depends more on self-control than on actual talent frequently reads like someone’s autobiography. The important is not so much the superiority of the plan or the method but the consistency by which it is applied.

There are only two rules.

1) Don’t keep changing the game plan.

2) The greater the effort, the greater the reward.

These rules can be summarized in one rule: Pick a direction and keep walking. The faster you walk, the sooner you’ll get there. It should be obvious that if you are changing directions, you suddenly find yourself walking towards a new goal. Some of the effort that went towards the old goal is therefore lost. Another point to note is that it is wise to pick a goal that is compatible with you as a person. If you don’t like real estate and like Wall Street, then don’t do real estate but consider stocks. Don’t pick an area on a whim. It is a learning process and you should consider yourself very lucky if you dive into an area that fits your personality from the get go. The second rule is that the more effort you put into it, the greater results. I call this the anti-easy rule. If something is easy, it is generally not worth having. Since we live in an interconnected society, the size of the reward is generally measured by how much effort you put into it relative to other people. Average efforts result in average rewards e.g. no rewards relative to the average. Extreme efforts do result in extreme rewards. In other words, if you are interested in extreme rewards, you got to make your goal part of everything you do. It should be the first thing you think about when you get up in the morning and the last thing you think about when you go to bed. If you want above average rewards, which is also okay of course, you should still be thinking about your goals more often than the average person does. It is as simple as that. Taking pride in not thinking about something is the dumbest goal possible.

Originally posted 2007-12-29 04:25:01.

Warning: this is a contrarian post and as such it may question some deeply held beliefs. If you keep going you might not like what you read.

The education industry has successfully installed the meme that not going to college (buying their product) putatively leads to a life in poverty. A common selling point is a piece of shoddy statistics that demonstrates the correlation between average income and level of education. For whatever reason education takes longer and longer while getting more and more expensive at rates way above inflation level. This has promoted counter studies questioning the monetary value of going to college compared to just getting a job and avoid incurring sometimes massive student debt. To alleviate this problem (and perhaps help the education industry) the government has introduced 529 plans to allow institutions to charge even more for their degrees. All in all this is a great deal for the educational institutions but is it a good deal for you? Is it a good deal for society?

If car companies had only been half as successful in convincing people that it is impossible to live without a car … hey wait!

This post was actually inspired by Brip blap, wrote a post called A clear and present danger: the humanities. One of his points was that the government should encourage educational programs that result in higher salaries (such as engineering) and discourage degrees that tend to lead to lower salaries (such as English Litt. and ancient Egyptian algebra). Also financial aid should be cut for people who take longer than 4 years to finish their degree. The result would be for the government to subsidize students that will keep the US at the forefront of technological innovation as opposed to the forefront of publications of deconstructionist studies in incomprehensible sociology journals(?) I found myself agreeing until he said he was being sarcastic . I guess this means we disagree then. Hence this post.

The idea suggested in the article above has actually been promoted by a number of European governments. With the lower birth rates of an affluent and “older” culture, manpower (in particular in science and engineering) is a genuine problem in Europe. With the higher birth rates of the US, manpower is not as dire a problem. Europe has to get the most out of their youth and thus they desire to steer students towards building bridges and computers and away from writing yet another study on suicidal poets of the 18th century. Also getting them out of the door fast helps too.

I’ll take this one step further.

I think the idea that college education leads to a more productive society is wrong. Hard work and intelligence leads to productivity. What happens when we send 70% to college instead of 30% on the false presumption that education makes people more productive and talented is simply that the levels are dumped down. To keep getting the cream of the crop, education is extended for the smarter part (the 30%). The other 40% get a degree that no longer means a lot. Hence we waste 4 years by sending 100% to highschool, 70% to college and 30% towards a masters instead of sending 70% to high school with higher standards, 30% to a college with higher standards and only a few to higher educations.

Your talents helped you earn your degree not the other way around.

The problem is that higher education does not make people smart or more intelligent. Rather it serves the functions of

• separating the rich parents’ kids from the poor parents’ kids with some monetary allowance made for exceptionally bright kids of poor families and a lot of intellectual allowance made for less bright kids from rich and influential families.
• getting money from students’ parents to fund the university sports center, domed buildings, and professors that are researching increasingly specialized and often irrelevant subjects. If it weren’t for grad students who are mainly admitted to serve as TA’s rather than for their bright ideas, the show would be even more expensive unless professors would be paid less or universities would be built like barracks rather than expensive imitations of medieval castles or modern architecture.
• regulating entry to the job market. This is the their most important function. The more young people there are demographically speaking the higher the degree is required. There is a negative feedback mechanism here. Prolonged education helps decrease growth as it allows people to spend multiple years attending lectures, playing varsity sports and being generally unproductive.

Increased education does not lead to more productivity. Rather it is increasing productivity that leads to the country being able to afford parking their young in essentially unproductive endeavors for increasing amounts of time.

Modern education reads like an intellectual travesty. There are four reasons why this is so. These are: 1) … 2) … 3) … 4) … On the test: List the four reasons why modern education is an intellectual travesty. Thus any person with reasonably well developed intelligence and short term memory can get a degree.

Unless you need highly specialized knowledge (researcher, brain surgeon, accountant,…) a college degree is little more than an admission ticket to get your foot in the door of the white collar work force.

I predict that a more accurate study that corrects for this effect should show that the cause of higher wages is in having an office job rather than having a degree. This would eliminate the two main financial reasons for going to college. It would relegate college to be a place of higher learning and thinking. I think it is naive (I used to be highly naive) to expect these qualities amongst the student population in modern universities.

I TA’ed for a couple of years. Maybe 1 in 10 of my students were actually interested in learning something. The rest just wanted their degree so they could go out and get banking jobs under the illusion that people with hard science degrees are smarter than average. Well, maybe, but if they are, why do they need a degree to prove it?

What smart students care about is economically maximizing their GPA. Studies in economics even uses this idea as a text book example. I can’t think of a better example that demonstrates the cynicism of modern education.

Most office jobs don’t require an understanding of history, biology, medicine, … they just need a modest amount of intelligence and an effective short term memory. It should not have to take 4 years to figure out who has that and who hasn’t.

I suggest return to a gilded system of masters and apprentices. That way people can feel like productive members of society much earlier and does not have to go through the lord of the flies experience of high school. I think this would work. I am positively convinced that if you give me a 13 year old with an IQ of 135+ and a sense for numbers I can teach him how to perform my work in 3-5 years. The counter argument is that a 13 year old would not know whether he wanted to be a carpenter, a dentist, or a research scientist. However, some 22 year olds don’t know either. In any case it would not be harder for someone to change apprenticeship than it is to change career today.

One may argue that this is strictly training (focusing the mind) and not education (broadening the mind passing a bunch of multiple choice tests) as I will only be teaching exactly what is useful. However, I submit that you can not educate a person that is fundamentally uninterested in a topic (the GPA maximizers). I have forgotten many things I learned through HS and college since these subjects were useless to me other than contributing to (and mostly lowering) my GPA. On the other hand a sufficiently clever and voracious person can learn things on his own at any time.

With the perfection of the printing press books are so cheap that one no longer have to go attend lectures to copy down the notes from the professor (the high price of books was the original intent of lectures and the difficulty of communicating new research was the original reason for seminars – talk about institutional inertia!). It is also possible to get lectures and curricula from places like the teaching company, the personal MBA, the self made scholar, and many others. Oh, and the library!

Of course this does not solve the problem of the “admission ticket”. Only a few trades like programming and certain financial subjects focus on certifications rather degrees. On the other hand college degrees are getting so diluted that employers have started testing potential employees because they can no longer trust the quality of education – with so many being admitted it had to happen, market forces right?! Possibly such companies will outsource this testing. This will result in a new breed of institutions that test whether students actually learned anything at the other institutions. At this point one could skip the education and just go for the certification.

What to do until then? You could either do the tried and true and spend a ton of money (and opportunity cost) on getting a degree or you could be entrepreneurial and try to get your foot in the door in some other way. As long as you can get your foot in the door, being autodidact practically puts on you on equal grounds with a college grad.

Disclaimer: I have a MS in one area, a PhD in another area. I have spent most of my life in the educational system. This could lead to the conclusion that either I’m a hypocrite or that I’m bitter and not too smart.

Originally posted 2008-02-17 07:55:29.

Excuse me, but WTH happened?

I realize that this must be the world consumers want, or at least the world they have been told that they want. But seriously, if living in a world where you spend 8-10 hours a day trying to distill liquid cheese, flipping burgers, manipulating financial risk factors, creating drug ads, or simply pushing paper and filing reports to maintain this system just to go to the cinema to see some cleaned up remake of an old movie and later spend $50+ to enjoy a good meal is your idea of a good life, you probably got bigger problems, the least of which is a lack of cooking skills.

If you fit this profile, your main problem is that you have not thought about the world itself—thinking was never part of your education. You have simply taken the world for granted and applied yourself to fitting into it. If we use the rat-race analogy, it is like rat who navigates a maze but which does not see that the maze has been intentionally constructed and that the rat is part of an experiment. I am not saying that the world above has been intentionally constructed. I see the “maze” more as the systemic outcome of the effects of many small self-interested decisions.

Several people have asked me how they can make the world a better place. A common strategy works under the assumption that there is indeed “someone/something” in control of “the system” and so they work to target that “something” in a top-down approach: Let us invent a new technology, let us write a new law, let us educate people, let us just sit here and complain about it and write manifests. Did anyone bring the Cheez Whiz?

The biggest challenge in doing this (and why you will most likely fail) is that you are competing on the same terms and being heavily outgunned, you will fail. To change the world, it is a waste of effort to engage the sharks on their turf. Fortunately, most people learn like children, that is, by emulating others. Not by listening, nor by thinking, but by emulating. That is your edge.

Hence, to change the world, simply “be the change”. If you got a good thing going, people will naturally want to emulate you. Your change must be viable (not utopian) and desirable. I think a combination of synergistic frugality and investing in the companies of the “current” economy (regardless of whether it is selling selling burgers, spray cheese, cholesterol lowering drugs,…) to leave the system is viable. With sufficient numbers, a new system will emerge bottom-up.

Originally posted 2009-12-07 12:30:31.

When I hang a load of wet clothes out to dry I bend my back exactly three times; because I’m smart, you know

Instead of transferring all the clothes to the hamper and bending down each time to get a new piece of clothes, I fish the clothes up and put them on my shoulder if it’s a shirt or a pair of pants or in my hand if its a small item. I do either one or the other on a trip. Then I walk out to the clothesline and simply transfer it from my shoulder or hand to the line. This happens at the speed of a slow walk.

I don’t use clothes pegs. It’s not very windy around here, so I merely hang the clothes. If I hang it right, it will have few wrinkles too. Another advantage of not using clothes pegs is that once the clothes are dry, a slight puff of wind will blow some of them to the ground. That way I know they’re dry without having to walk over and check (I can see the line from my bedroom window).

Originally posted 2009-09-09 10:03:16.

Thomas recently asked me about how S-curves apply to pro-blogging. Making money with a blog usually involve selling advertising space a`la AdSense or becoming an affiliate (amazon.com is popular) and get a cut when somebody clicks through to a product. I have not done much deep research on optimal monetizing yet. Suffice to say readership is important to monetize a website, so in the following I will talk about how S-curves apply to attracting readers.

Content is ultimately what drives a site. Just like a company a blogger provides a product. This product can take many shapes. It can be novel, useful, regular, personal, concentrated, etc. but it must appear on a regular basis as it forms the backbone of a blog. Without steadily provided content, it would no longer be a dynamically evolving blog but rather a static archive of writings.

However, good content means little if nobody reads it. Presumably blogs are intended for someone to read them. Otherwise one might as well put one’s thoughts in a diary or a doc file on the computer.

I think of a blog or any business as aggregate of many S-curves (read my recent article on S-curves and goal setting). In the beginning you may only have one S-curve but always keep the aggregate in mind.

You growth in the beginning will be exponential as determined by the S-curve. However, it will depend on the growth rate just like a savings account grows at different rates depending on your interest rate. The main drive should be increase your growth rate or interest rate.

One way is to use SEO and write posts filled with keywords that search engines will latch on to. As more posts are indexed, search engine traffic will increase. The reason is that each post increases the chance of a visit. Ceteris paribus SEO writing will increase traffic as fast as the posting rate which is likely linear. If this traffic sticks, the growth will be exponential.

Social networking also works like an S-curve. Leaving a comment on another blog is like a seed that somebody might click on and thus find your blog. It goes without saying that spamming or “me too” comments do not work. Comments should be thoughtful and relevant. If people like your comment, they might click through. If not, they won’t. This kind of exposure grows exponentially for the same reasons. The more you interact and comment on other blogs, the greater the rate of incoming traffic. As long as you keep commenting, this kind of growth is exponential.

Once people arrive at your site it is obviously important that they like what they see. Therefore you should first and foremost focus on good content. I think this goes for everyday life as well. Good content also means that other bloggers might pick up on your posts and promote them. This will make the growth super exponential. The same effect arises if your post gets stumbled (*). For the geeks this means exp(a*exp(b*t)).

The linear part, that is, the middle of the S-curve, kicks in once a traffic source is saturated. This is the case when the rate no longer increases but stays constant. This is the case if you are no longer visiting new blogs and sticking with the same old. If you have a short attention span like I do, that should be no problem though.

(*) I think stumbling your own posts is unethical. It is not really for me to decide what other people like, and if everybody stumbled their own posts, there would be too much noise in the system (like spam), so I don’t do it.

There are only so many blog readers in the world. Furthermore many readers might not be interested in reading more than a few blogs daily. Therefore the rate will start decreasing when many potential readers have already subscribed. This could turn into a fight for “market share”. At this point it would probably be more exciting to start on a new project rather than trying to keep pushing the envelope on a stagnating project. Of course at this point one might feel a certain responsibility for all the readers. This is something that many pro-bloggers apparently struggle with.

Originally posted 2008-01-29 06:40:49.

The SP “player” personality has been sold on the desire for instant gratification. Seize the day. Live in the moment. Just do it! Carpe Diem. They need to buy whatever they want when they want it without any comparative shopping or consideration of prices. Usually they are good for a laugh, but personally I think they should stop taking the present so seriously and start living a little for tomorrow

Either way both these lifestyles are expensive. Very expensive.

The SJ and SP Sensors comprise more than 70% of the population. Therefore the NT and NF iNtuitives tend to be drawn towards this lifestyle as well. Humans are sociable animals. We exhibit herd behavior to some degree.

However, many NF “pleasers” are drawn away from the herd and towards causes: Save the animals, save the planet, stop consuming. There are a lot of nut cases in this group of very nice people, but generally NF “pleasers” are the ones most in tune with the fact that the lifestyles above are causing harm as a side effect.

The NT “planners” have it all figured out. Many personal finance bloggers are “planners”. On the street, you have a 15% chance of running into an NT. On a personal finance blog the odds are almost 50%! I used to think I was an oddity by having a six figure net worth before ever making more than $45k and before turning 30. Yet for NT personal finance bloggers, this is apparently the norm. We have solved the riddle of personal finance and thus we spend time telling people how to play the current system with its ROTH IRAs, 401ks, emergency funds, college degrees, career tracks, etc. so as to maximize expenses and consumption.

NFs are like the canaries in the coal mine. Whenever they are not happy, things are bound to change. Therefore NTs should not only solve the present personal finance problems but try to predict and plan for the future that the present will transform itself into given the interhuman tension. If history is any guide things will look much different fifty years from now just like they looked quite different 50 years ago.

Those who have planned ahead will be ahead. Whereas those who have optimized according to the present standards will eventually be beached and struggle.

Thus henceforward I will also try to cover what I think the mid-term future (2030) will look like and how to prepare for it. I think the focus on 401ks,.., home ownership, and conspicuous consumption is the financial equivalent of preparing for the last war e.g. running the best and most impressive cavalry horses against the early tanks of the mid-century. Current strategies work for those who are 50+, but for those who are younger, things will be different. Perhaps much different.

Originally posted 2008-02-26 07:22:41.

I apologize for all the publishing posts lately, but it is pretty much all that has been on my mind. Thanks to everybody who has written me by email and suggested various solutions. I’m sorry I have not gotten back to all individually, so I figure I would do a general response here.

According to the informal book store survey, I think I can (tentatively) conclude that bookstore distribution (by a publisher) works a bit in the same time-limited way as an ebook. Books older than a year or so do not exist any longer. Thus they must rely on either the publisher’s marketing or the author’s marketing. Since my last name isn’t King or Rowling, it would probably fall on me.

Now, this blog’s growth rate is about 120%/year, but on an absolute scale it is still small. By the time the book comes out by a regular publisher, something which I’m told can take around 18 month, the blog would by 3–4 times bigger. I must admit though, that I can not guarantee that I will still be sufficiently excited to write another 500 posts before seeing action.

Furthermore, traditional publishing requires signing over publication rights. Uh oh! I don’t like that.

This leaves print on demand. I can do this two ways. I can either act as a writer in which case I am currently very much favored towards createspace.com which seem to have the best terms as far as I am concerned. In particular, they will only have nonexclusive rights to publish. Or I can act as a publisher.

Writer first. If I go into this as a writer, it would be published under createspace’s ISBN which would make the book available on amazon (it would look like any other book up there) and on their estore (where I would be able to offer coupons). They also have extended distribution packages allowing people to order from order places but likely the book will never be in stores. I already have the business infrastructure to do this.

I can also go in as a publisher. This requires me buying and using my own ISBN numbers and setting up as a business. (This would cost about $500 total in various fees.) In this case I can submit the book to several places. Createspace could handle amazon. I could use Lightning Source to handle orders to bookstores via Ingram. I could submit the book to Barnes&Noble, Borders, or even Walmart. In principle, I would be no different than a traditional publisher, except I would score the money which would otherwise go to the publisher. At least this is how I see it.

Now, and here’s the kicker. I could do, first one, and then the other. In other words, if the first book proves popular, I can pull it and reissue it as my own publication. Frankly, I think being my own publisher of just one book is overkill. If I do a second book (like a work book similar to how the Fifth Discipline has a mainbook and a work book), this could work.

Otherwise I think the best marketing strategy for me is the online approach and keep growing it. The message is just too complex to fit into soundbites. Consumers (97% of the population) can relate to getting a deal or using coupons and salaried people can relate to index funds and mutual funds. No way can I make a convincing point about an alternative to everything they hold dear in 2 minutes. A better approach would be a slow approach rather than a buzz strategy.

Originally posted 2010-05-21 09:57:07.

After learning the language to describe thing, attaching values and priorities become important. Initially, you would not pay attention to what people wear and you would think that it is unimportant what they wear as long as they are not too cold or too warm. After all, you can feel the associated discomfort on your own body, so you can relate.

But now you see a few clothing catalogues, and you see advertising on TV, and you notice that people change the length of their pants and the color of their shirts every wear and you realize that pant length and shirt color must somehow be important. And you notice that people treat each other differently if they look different. Almost like rats would do; maybe you notice that too. And you hear your friends talking about the new shirt they just got and you learn what is important and you start to spread this information to your friends as well.

In school you do your best and you’re learning new things and it is interesting, because you are curious. And you’re probably curious and ask questions, but somehow the grownups get tired of your questions and you learn that it is better not to ask questions if you want to do well. Then your teacher starts assigning homework and the homework consists of endless repetitions of what you have already learned. You notice that homework is not making you smarter, but everybody tells you it is important that you do your homework and if you don’t you will get in trouble. And some of your friends who don’t do their homework do indeed get into trouble.

When you get your first grades, it’s kinda neat, but soon your friends start talking about how important they are and you look up the grade requirements for college and so the grades become important, more important than the homework. And the curiosity was long killed by homework. After all, you were too busy to really ask questions.

And so you go to college and do the same thing all over learning to present the appearance of being learned and educated by getting high grades but effectively just pumping and dumping information back at the gatekeepers. After all, learning is for suckers and nobody earned a living being curious. Meanwhile, you’re living in the dorm and having fun. You have everything you need, a bed too sleep in, food, and fun. You’re “studying” hard, that is to say, you’re actually just memorizing facts without really understanding them because there is no time to think but that is irrelevant on the test anyway. Besides you’re getting rather good at memorizing facts and since you have been doing it for ten years or so already, you’re becoming rather numb to the whole concept of learning.

And so you graduate with a degree and you start making more money than you have ever seen before but having learned little about money, you do the only thing you learned to do. You spend it. After all, that is what your friends do and what you saw your parents do. Very likely, you never saw your parents talk about saving or bills and so you sign up for anything that is thrown at you. Your friends start buying houses and though you feel way to young to own your own house, you feel driven to buy a house even though it’s only been a few years since you lived in a room in the attic at your parents house. But you see these shows on TV with huge apartments and people having fun and hanging out and these people are your age, so somehow this must be the thing to do. And so you go to your banker and he tells you that you should spend 30% of your income on a house even though you do not know quite why it should be 30% and not 10% or 20%. But you trust him because he is an expert authority and you have noticed that obeying authorities is more important than asking questions and thinking.

If you still can, then imagine having no immune system…

Originally posted 2009-11-25 04:32:22.

MG: About 7 years ago, at the age of 35, I decided to take a sabbatical from my work in a fast-pace corporate environment. Initially, I traveled a lot and visited friends that were at that time scattered across the globe, then, I decided to park myself in one location and decide what I wanted to do next. Since the first day of the ‘sabbatical’ I have been inundated with calls and emails of suggestions and invitations to participate in a wide array of interesting things.

A couple of years ago, after interacting and consulting for a non-profit organization off and on, I decided to increase my hours with them and take on a number of projects which probably equates to a full-time job. I love the mission of the non-profit and feel that it is making a large difference in the world in ways that my corporate life did not. While many people would not consider me retired today, the savings that I accumulated during my corporate work gives me the flexibility to choose the areas that I want to work on independent of the compensation. Perhaps a better name would be Career 2.0.

Compared to my former corporate salary, the non-profit represents an 80% pay cut. In a year or two (after completing some large projects) I will likely shift to full-time free-lancing which I view as staying intellectually engaged and living off dividends.

Q: How aggressively had you saved for early retirement during your work time?

MG: Initially, being a freshly out of graduate school on a relatively low salary, I saved about 15% of my earnings. In the final 3 years of working, when I knew I would not stay at the high salary job for too much longer, I was saving around 45% of my after tax income. I probably could have saved more, but I did feel pressure given the nature of the job to maintain a certain lifestyle (such as the dry cleaned business suits, cellphone, entertaining clients).

Q: How frugally do you live today?

MG: By Jacob’s standards, probably not very frugally, by the neighbors standards, shockingly so. My husband and I rent instead of own, share a car, and don’t have cable TV. We do travel, eat out about once a week, and live in a relatively expensive part of the country.

Q: What inspired your frugal tendencies?

MG: My parents were always frugal and I can remember as a kid times when stress over money caused a lot of arguments in the household. I think growing up in that environment had a profound effect on me and my brother where we are both showed an early interest in saving and investing and not having a lack of savings dictate important decisions.

When I lived outside of the United States for a few years, I became aware of how differently many people live overseas, whether rich or poor. Rather than buying as much stuff as possible, I observed smart purchases that were durable and of high quality. At present, as I’m learning more about climate change and environmental sustainability, I am becoming more interested in seeing that my purchasing patterns reflect my genuine desire to be less wasteful. I have been intrigued by the recession-triggered popularity of frugal behavior recently.

Q: What are your biggest financial concerns?

MG: Health care and rampant inflation. My health insurance premiums (private policy) have increased by about 25% each year for the last several years. I am also concerned that we may be moving into a big secular (not just cyclical) shift toward inflation.

Q: What has been the biggest surprise since ‘retiring’?

MG: That I don’t miss my former work life, at all. Sure, at times it would be nice to have the stream of paychecks again, but I don’t miss the office, the people, the clients, the business travel, or the environment. I was called by a headhunter about 4 years after leaving asking if I would consider returning, and I started laughing out loud.

Q: What advice would you give to people contemplating early retirement?

MG: The amount you save will never be “enough.” You simply have to bite the bullet one day and extricate yourself and make reasonable plans from there. And only after extricating, can you really put your mind to contemplating what to do with the rest of your life.

Q: Why did you start a blog?

MG: I started blogging at Modern Gal last December after envying other bloggers for all of the fun they were having. My original intent was to blog about my experiences of leaving corporate life, discuss investment strategies that create long-term income streams, and to explore living in a more frugal and sustainable way. Also, in my initial travels where I caught up with several friends, I noticed that many of them had suffered from a myriad of health issues that I thought were at least partially due to lifestyle considerations related to over-work and over-stress. I became interested in healthy eating, exercise, and stress management and thought that might be of interest to blog readers.

Interestingly, since launching the blog, I have a much larger percentage of posts related to food than I originally intended. My husband accidentally revealed me to his father, and after my first couple of posts, I started to receive the gentle in-law queries to see if we were having money troubles. This has resulted in a level of discomfort of discussing specifics regarding savings and investment, although much of that concern has abated. I will be the first to admit that I have not yet found my blog voice.

Q: What are your future plans?

MG: I ponder that one regularly. I would like to try my hand at completing a book-length piece of writing. In addition, I am interested in the policy dimension in the areas of climate change and innovation.

Originally posted 2009-04-20 09:50:47.