• Portabello mushroom (grilled)
• Zucchini (grilled)
• Red onion
• Mustard
• Pickle or relish
• Possibly ketchup
  

The basil leaves are from the garden I have to figure out how to bake the burger buns myself. I believe the store bought ones are made of plastic.

(*) I finally found a very easy way to transfer pictures to the blog, so expect more pictures in the future.

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Except, I do not think these truths are self-evident to very many anymore. Those rights are now more like privileges. My creators, which in a wider sense is my parent’s generation, the baby boomers, certainly have not set up a society where liberty is a prime value. Happiness is not a prime value, unless you count the happiness of the prozac variety. But material goods is a prime value as is consumption of services. And people work themselves to death to get those. So much for life.

Granted, it is often said that modern people live better than kings of old age. What they mean is that the average man has more stuff and better stuff than most anyone in any previous generation. However, in terms of liberty, I say the average employee has as much effective freedom as a slave; while his body is no longer in chains, his mind is. He can not leave his job for long—the very idea of leaving employment is crazy to him. He goes to college, not to learn, but to get a good job. He is not free to express his opinion—if such an opinion is disagreeable to his career prospects. He has to please his masters, that is, his employer. Not only does he depend on institutions, that is, the aristocracy for shelter, he depends on them for everything else in his life, his food, his clothes, his entertainment, his meaning in life (ask anyone who they are, and most will reply with the job title). Modern man is a serf.

If you prefer material comfort to freedom, that is the default option and that is your prerogative. The privileges (unalienable rights) have to be earned, and few people choose to earn them. Yet, I did. In a capitalist society, you can pay your way out by saving enough money and become a capitalist. [In a socialist country, you get a government job; you still have to show your face, but you don't have to work very hard.] Capitalists, the owners of capital (producing assets), are the modern aristocracy—you no longer need to be born to the title, in fact being self-made, new money, is now considered more honorable than inheriting your way to wealth, old money. I am a modern day aristocrat (call me an elitist snob if you well), but I am one nevertheless even if it is a very poor one.

I have lived in three different countries, all some of the richest countries in the world. This has allowed me to gain a certain outside perspective on specific cultures, at least the wealthy ones, and traditions that can not be gained from tourism. Cultures ARE slightly different. Some are reserved. Some are civilized. Some are moral. Some are friendly. Some are lazy. Some are hamfisted. Some are hardworking. Just like people.

However, on the whole, national cultures are far more similar than people. If you are a carpenter, you will find you have more in common with other carpenters regardless of their nationality than you do with their neighbor. There, I just saved you a lot of travel time — however, perhaps this has to be experienced to be fully realized. I still run into people who should be smart enough to realize that their nation is not the best because its people are somehow chosen.

If you want to learn something about people, I suggest you talk to your neighbor rather than someone from another country.

Perhaps my perspective is clouded by being concentrated in developed countries. However, this is where most tourism go anywhere, so why are people going?

I know people that buy the tour guides and plan out which landmarks to see. I note that most locals never go to those landmarks. This suggests to me that the landmarks are irrelevant to the culture despite being promoted as being the essential part of the culture. Why do people go to see the views if they don’t care about the views where they live?

Sometimes it’s about the shopping, but seriously. Global trade means that you can now buy the same limited number of goods all over the world. Why go to Paris, when you can buy the same things down at the corner store. Similarly, sometimes, it’s about the food. But really, I don’t need to go to Greece to eat at a Greek restaurant. Yes, maybe it’s not the same, but it’s pretty damn close.

Sometimes people travel to get away from it all? My question then is, what are you running away from? And why are you running? I have never felt a need to get away from my normal life that could be cured by a one week getaway.

It used to be that travel meant something. Like an expedition you would work to go somewhere. Nowadays, you just hop into an airplane and 12 hours you are in another country on the other side of the world that is almost identical to your own. I suspect this is just “consumption of places” similar to consuming food or things. Is modern tourism just yet another consumer experience?

Have you ever considered traveling slowly? Moving from city to city until you get to the destination? I submit that you do not really know a place unless you have worked a job there, opened a bank account, and lived as a native rather than just briefly passed through while taking pictures.

That’s how I see it; I realize that I might be missing a few genes, so please enlighten me why travel is so popular?

1. Specific how to – articles, like fixing my bicycle, recipes, etc.
2. General how to – articles that specifies different ways of doing things like owning less stuff.
3. Motivational rants, e.g. “This is how great your life could be”, “It’s not that hard to change”, .etc.
4. Demotivational rants, e.g. “This is how much consumer life sucks, you just didn’t realize it”.
5. Anecdotes, like … when I was your age, I lived in a box and ate rocks, …
6. Personal stuff, like what I ate for breakfast and what else I do in my life.
7. Models, philosophy, and strategy, that is, big picture posts, typically quite academic in nature. I notice that these do not get very many comments.
8. Me interviewing other people.
9. Other people interviewing me, like this.

In terms of advertising, I would also like to know how many of you are really interested in advertising links to debt relief, payday loans, credit cards, etc. or posts about paying off debt, etc. My guess is close to 0%?

In investing ratings are a lot more interesting that absolute numbers as they provide a means of scaling the numbers relative to the size. Nobody in their right mind would think that a company trading at $100/share would be worth twice as much as a company priced at $50/share. However, by dividing with the earnings, say the former has $10 in earnings and the latter has $5 we find that both have a P/E of 10 and thus they are similar in terms of earnings efficiency. In investing you can build many more ratings than that to try to tell companies apart. You will find that companies in the same industry tend to have the same P/E values. If not, something interesting is going on and you want to look closer.

However, nobody seems to be doing it for blogs. Yet I’m sure advertisers would like to know some of these numbers, so here’s a business idea for some enterprising entrepreneur.

• Total eyeball time per day. To calculate, we use sitemeter’s summary page. Today, I have 682 visitors on average per day and they stick around for 4:26 minutes (266 seconds). I calculate 682*266/3600 (3600 seconds in an hour) to get 50.4 hours per day. This is how much time people have spent reading this site each day on average for the past week. I think this is a better measure for total impact than unique visitors.
• Page views per visit. This shows how sticky your blog is. Do people stay around after coming to your site. If the number is high, it could indicate that your content is interesting and that you have dedicated readers. It could also indicate a growing blog, since new readers tend to spend more time reading old posts. Or it could indicate that readers visit rarely and then have to read backposts for the past few days. If the number is low, your core readers are either dominated by google searches or they simply don’t stick around, which of course could be because they visit often instead like on heavily crosslinked blog networks. Regardless, this number does say a lot about reader behavior. My number is 2.5 views/visit.
• Visitor growth. Growth can either be organic or explosive if you get on digg or get a mention in a major newspaper. Here I tend to look at the histogram for visits and pageviews for the past 12 months. For my blog, you will see a spike for Sep08. That is when I got mentioned on MSNBC’s blog, twice. However, it seems few of them came back and the other months show a steady progression. To calculate the growth, you take the geometric average. I’m lazy, so I just take the first month and the last and calculate monthly growth as the twelfth root of 19996/10022 minus 1, that is, exp(log(19996/10022)/12)-1, so 5.9% growth/month. You can use the law of 72 on that. I have a doubling time of about a year.
• Feedburner numbers?. I do not find feedburner numbers that enlightening, primarily because I do not believe the numbers from the google reader component. As far as I understand google reader numbers are cumulative. Once someone subscribes via google that count never goes down. You have the person counted for life even if the person no longer reads along. You can get some insight in the impact of this, because occasionally feedburner fails to count google readers. You will then see the feedburner numbers drop substantially, like 30-50% for a few days. This is a better reflection of the true number of subscribers.
• Comments/post. I think this is a reasonably good way of gauging active reader “reach” or the intensity of your community relative to your writing. In other words: Are readers getting it? I get my numbers off of my dashboard. I have written 494 posts and they have gotten 4058 comments. Hence, I get 4058/494 = 8.2 comments per post.
• Comments/subscribers. This better gauges the form of your fan base. Do readers actively engage with your content or do they just click, read half of it, and then go away again. I use the 4058 comments from above and divide with my feedburner number of 1369, so I get 3.0 comments/subscriber.

Keep in mind that ratio building is not an precise science at all. You are not interested in knowing whether 2.9 is higher than 2.7. These are effectively identical. However, 7.4 is an outlier compared to 2.9. That is interesting.

For those bloggers who are reading this, let me know your stats either in a comment or by sending them to jacob@early… and I will put them in a list and link to you.

You are only investing if

• You consider valuation.
• You buy to realize an expected a positive return.

From this, it follows that anyone with a dollar cost averaging stock “investment” plan is not really investing. They are simply saving in a “currency” denominated in stock. It also follows that those who buy with no idea of the internal valuation of an asset are merely speculating.

Hence we conclude that there are far fewer investors among us than we used to think.

In “these trying economic times”, incidentally an expression which I hate, sacrifice has come to mean giving something up, rather than exchanging something to gain a better position, like in chess.

That said, I sympathize with the idea that being frugal beyond your means sucks. When I decided to become financially indendent, I did not know all the little money saving tricks to get full value for a quarter of the price and all I could do was to spend less and get less. Conversely, now when I read list of frugal “tips”, I find myself shaking my head and mumbling “Isn’t this stuff obvious!?!”. Once frugality becomes second nature, frugality no longer feels like deprivation. Conversely, not being frugal feels stupid or ignorant, which it kinda is.

However, having the “means of frugality” is worth a lot, as previously noted. Thus, frugality is key to early retirement, if you want some certitude in achieving it (you can probably forget about “making it” in leveraged real estate for next decade). After all, in the end, wealth is not about how much you have, but about what you can get.

Recently, a new term has entered the field of personal finance: Sacrifice.

Originally sacrifice means

• Giving something up to gain a better position. For instance, a chess piece can be sacrificed for a better position that leads to later material gain.

However, lately sacrifice has come to mean

• Giving something up. Period.

This has cut the original point of sacrificing out of the equation and thus the average man is now giving things up with no particular plans of gains. This is excusable during shock events like job loss when spending is cut. Yet, if this new meaning of sacrifice becomes adopted, the thought that a better position is obtainable by sacrificing consumption is eliminated.

1. A reduction in cost, that is, something was $50 off.
2. Something that is put away, e.g., $50 was saved in bank account.

There is a substantial difference between these two meanings:

Suppose you have $50. You could

• Spend it on a $100 item that was $50 off for a savings of $50.
• Put the $50 in a bank account

In both cases, you have saved $50, but in the latter case, you actually have $50, whereas in the former you have $0.

Now, it will very often be the case that classics retain or even increase in value. My Hanwag shoes (now more than a decade old) cost more today than what I paid for them back in mid 1990s. My Norroena backpack costs more today than what I paid for it around the same time. I note that my HiFi system costs substantially more for essentially the same components, only digital components are generally better today than they were ten years, but analogue components matured long ago.

Another way that classics are cheap to own is that you will be able to pay the lower used price, which admittedly is close to the new price if it’s still in production. However, should you decide to sell again a few years from now, you will be able to sell again at the same price or even perhaps slightly higher or at worst slightly lower. The difference can be thought of interest or rent depending on whether the return is positive or negative.

Accumulating classics require slightly more knowledge than driving over to the mall and swiping the credit card, but it is really not that hard. I have little interest in furniture, but a few weeks on internet research will certainly reveal what I should or should not buy. $1000 for a lamp, that’s crazy, you say?! Well, first, remember that you can probably sell it for the same price, so the cost is really much smaller than replacing it with the latest $100 atrocity every other year for the rest of your life. Second, you can consider this a kind of diversification, like investing in art, stamps, gold, or classic motorcycles. Third, I tell you the joy of using a superior product is quite superior to that of using an average product. Fourth, you do not need to accumulate everything at once. Get one when you can afford it keeping in mind that you are not going to replace it again for a long long time and after 10 years or so you will see that the pain of handing over the money will have gone while you still have the item (and the possibility of selling it again). Furthermore, fifth, rather than getting 10 lamps, when you’re only using one or two on a regular basis.

But what about opportunity costs you ask. Shouldn’t you put the money in an index fund and let the supposed magic work. Well, my question to you is, what are you going to spend the million dollars on fifty years from now? Contemporary junk? No, I’d say using at least part of your money and paying 3-5 times above the average or typical price for something is worth it if it has those “classical” qualities. There’s no point in hoarding money for the sake of just having large numbers in your bank account. Consider your savings and investments to be assets that pay for your food, rent, and other fixed costs, and then spend your “working-money” on really good things that last a lifetime.

Here’s a short list to get started: shoes, fishing reel, binoculars, pocket knife, wristwatch, music instruments (non-electronic), clothes (filson, barbour, burberry, etc.), pens, furniture, silverware.