In 2005, Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University after surviving his first fight with pancreatic cancer. There were four lessons that really spoke to me in his message. These are: Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to make the big choices in life because…
Aaron and I went to high school with Kyle Kurz, who penned two new verbs today. They are awesome because they work so well. Plus, it isn’t often a verb (or two!) can be added to the English language to fill a previously unmet need. But these are situations we all know and now can…
The odds are good you won’t read this entire post. The reason? It has to do with confirmation bias. If you think what I am going to say conflicts with your belief system – whether you are a scientist or a Christian – you won’t finish it to avoid cognitive dissonance even though you aren’t…
I love population statistics and studying them. I would have been content (provided I was financially independent) being a sociologist. Back in September, I shared with you a few surprising facts about the population of the United States. Today, though, I was thinking about population and its implications for our understanding of history and economics.…
Tell me what you think of the following statement: “American manufacturing has been destroyed over the past 20 years? Going back further, it’s nothing like it was in 1960. Everything is made in China now.” [mainbodyad]If you agreed with the statement, congratulations! You failed. Miserably. Start thinking for yourself and stop watching the news commentators…
I love lemon cake, as you learned in the post about Duncan Hines trying to break my heart when we stopped eating it because of the trans fats. I’m working from the home office tonight, responding to all of your comments and submissions, and Aaron comes in to tell me he is making lemon cream…
For those of you who prefer visual data, watch this BBC video, which is up to 3,757,003 views after going viral on the net a few days ago and has been lighting up the economic blogs. In 4:48 seconds, you will see 200 years of human economic and health records, organized by country. I…
One way to begin making money is to create and own synthetic equity in other companies. This technique is one that Aaron and I used early in our career and was very lucrative for us, providing a stream of profit and cash for us to fund our other investments.
I found some of our old tax filings from last decade! It turns out that around our college days, living together in the apartment complex next to the Quakerbridge Mall in Princeton, New Jersey, our combined household income was somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000 even though neither of us had full-time jobs and we were both students attending school on music scholarships. (This is the same apartment that I showed you a few months ago.) The difference between the two figures depends on whether you count unrealized capital gains as “income” since our net worth was increasing but it didn’t reflect in our taxes at the time.
This upcoming week is going to be busy. I have to finalize the accounting approval for last year before sending off all of the records to the firm that prepares our taxes, I have to drop off the finalized terms contract for the attorneys that are helping me explore launching my own financial vehicle, I have to write two or three new pieces of About.com content, I need to continue studying CSS because I love it, and I have to work on a lot of other stuff that you probably don’t really want to hear about – I’d like to get through the technology sector annual reports, finalize the list of stocks I plan to buy through my pension plan once the upcoming contribution is finalized, etc.