I only listen to podcasts while on road trips, but I love catching up on Freakanomics when I’m traveling. A few years back they had a great episode called Should Kids Pay Back Their Parents for Raising Them? The introduction dealt with a football player who got an NFL contract and, at the party to celebrate, […]
Book Review: Early Retirement Extreme
A few years ago Nelson Smith at the, sadly defunct, Financial Uproar posted a pretty funny review of Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Fisker called “I Read Early Retirement Extreme So You Don’t Have To”. I read this book myself, and never wrote up my thoughts on the book, so I figured it’d be worth adding my $0.02 to […]
Are Dividends Magic?
It’s interesting, especially after reading investing history, to live through a period of “irrational exuberance”. I’ve been investing throughout the dot-com boom, the subprime meltdown, and the continued Canadian real estate bubble. One enthusiasm, which seems to be limping towards an end, is the wild enthusiasm for dividends. What Is A Dividend? Equities – stock […]
Delaying Consumption
There have been numerous posts about Sean Cooper’s feat a few years back of paying off his quarter-million-dollar mortgage in 3 years. While this may or may not be interesting to people by itself, I think it’s a concrete example of a more abstract concept, namely delaying consumption. Everyone has the option between using resources they have in the present […]
In Praise of Middlemen
Eliminating the middleman is never as simple as it sounds. ‘Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated. Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly) Doing business through an intermediary, a middleman, evokes strong feelings in people. Most are passionately for it or against it. In spite of these charged feelings, few people […]
Book Review: Never Split The Difference
I heard about “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depends On It” by Chris Voss when he did a Reddit AMA. Chris Voss was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator and having the possibility of people dying when he didn’t do a good job motivated him to improve his negotiation skills. The FBI historically tried […]
A Humble Proposal For Future Olympic Games
The Beijing Olympics are set to begin on Friday, July 26, 2024. For every Olympic game, there is a fight by cities and countries around the world to host it. The cities promise extensive municipal improvements along with the construction of appropriate facilities for the various events. Why Would Anyone WANT To Host The Olympics? The […]
Analyzing Opportunity Cost in Entrepreneurial Ventures
A Reddit user asked an interesting question about an analytical method for calculating opportunity cost in a car transaction he made. I felt like the commenters kind of blew it with their suggestions, often only offering “rules of thumb” or general principles in a situation that was quite tractable. What is Opportunity Cost? Opportunity cost is […]
Writing Contests
Soon after someone starts writing, they’ll come across “writing contests”. If the writer doesn’t discover these themselves, well-meaning friends and family will start sending them links. The contests themselves are offered by a broad array of organizations. Some you’ll have heard of, others you won’t. They prominently advertise the prize, usually a small sum of […]
Execution is Everything
One of the big, abstract, philosophical debates is which is more valuable, the inspiration or the execution? Is Google a two-trillion-dollar company because of the clever PageRank algorithm the founders came up with or because of the wise business decisions they’ve been making since? Was Harry Potter a global phenomenon because J.K. Rowling thought of […]