Row, row, row your boat — On the law of comparative advantage

Published in April 8th, 2008

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!According to the economic law of comparative advantage two parties are economically better off if they both focus on their advantage and trade for everything else. For instance, if Adam can make 4 widgets/hour or 3 gadgets/hour while Bob [...]

Tap water

Published in April 7th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in ecological footprint

8 Comments

I’m blown away when a person is able to spend more than $20k a year on living expenses. But then I realize that they have little appreciation of the value of money [relative to what the money is spent on]. It’s treated like water and it slips through their fingers. Turn on a pressurized faucet [...]

Saturday Roundup - More book swapping

Published in April 5th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in announcements

4 Comments

Paperbackswap.com has turned out to be great for “upgrading” my personal library. I list books I haven’t read for a year and which I can not really imagine reading again. Since books are swapped one-to-one it has turned out to be less great for getting rid of books (and I have a lot of books [...]

Overtraining

Published in April 4th, 2008

Posted by Jacob in Health

6 Comments

Not relying on a car (other than the occasional lift from DW), one of the things I have to worry about is overtraining(*) especially given that I’m not 20 anymore. The fact that I’m mostly moved by muscle power means that I have a rather real sense of how far I can go and how [...]

Living aboard

Published in April 3rd, 2008

Posted by Jacob in Early Retirement, How to, Strategy

14 Comments

As mentioned in last Saturday’s roundup, I had some ideas regarding the future last week, specifically how to spend retirement and how to live. I’m the type that sees life itself as an adventure. I left my home country almost 10 years to go to grad school in another country. When I finished, I left [...]

My favorite writings of March 2008

Published in April 2nd, 2008

Posted by Jacob in announcements

3 Comments

I just saw a comment on another site that ERExtreme is really a minimalist blog claiming to be a personal finance blog. This is probably true. I have not been writing much about personal finance, since for me it is mostly a solved problem. Live in a consumer culture where salaries are high, but defy [...]

A salary veils economic reality

Published in April 1st, 2008

Posted by Jacob in Philosophy, Work

6 Comments

I just sent my first invoice as a freelancer. It turns out that I have covered all my cost-of-living expenses (and then some) for March by working just a few hours every other day. What an amazing proof of concept.
Being paid an hourly rate and being able to work whenever (when there is work available) [...]

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