… because we’re a month or more away from our first frost. But after a rainy September we’re in the midst of mild, sunny days. Sunny days have meant only one thing to me all summer: Accomplish work on the house. We (and I) did enough of that to turn Ye Olde Wreck officially into the Mo Saoirse Hermitage, but there’s still a bit of this, bit of that. I’ve begun each dry morning with a to-do list. Yesterday I was good and did everything I planned. Today … well, I got started, though I ended up doing a different…
Category: Money
Posts about being frugal, getting out of debt, staying out of debt, spending practically and splurging joyfully. This category may also contain posts about hard money and what the government is doing to all that “soft money” it creates.
If you date the Great Recession from the collapse of Lehman Brothers (which is arbitrary but a satisfyingly dramatic point to hang the story on), it is 10 years old today. Of course we all know the recession “officially” ended ages ago, brilliantly conceived and executed government bailouts saved the global economy, and the whole world has put all that unpleasantness behind it for yet another era of Eternal Prosperity. But then, we also all know … otherwise. So here are 10 myths and misconceptions people still believe about the causes of the catastrophe. And here, from Daniel Lacalle via…
David French of the National Review calls Amber Guyger’s murder of a man in his own home “the worst police shooting yet.” I don’t know about that, but it certainly has all the elements, including favoritism and the typical cover story. From Wired: How to move a million people out of a hurricane’s way. Good luck, mid-Atlantean readers! She made it through Hurricane Harvey — though not necessarily well. Now Sara Cress gives advice on how to prepare for a flood. (NPR broadcast; not sure whether transcript will be online by the time this posts, but she mentions things people…
Tuesday I painted under the eaves. Painting, unlike most other tasks I’ve been doing, is a good activity for thinking. My random thoughts that day were circling around Nike having reignited the “take a knee” controversy, using Colin Kaepernick’s protest in the most cynically commercial way. Now, Nike may see Big Bux in buying the face of the millionaire athlete who can now make money off that greatest of all contemporary triumphs — personal oppression. But the thing that’s always mystified me about the entire “take a knee” flapdoodle is why — on the first hour of the first day…
I haven’t been paying daily attention to my Amazon Associates links since last year’s Great Nerfing. Commissions have fallen between 30-50%, not because people are buying less, but because of Amazon’s drastic fee cuts. But I finally took a look this morning and discovered that earlier this month somebody got sufficient high-tech desks to equip a small business. It also happened that this purchase fell into one of the (rare and highly arbitrary) categories that actually earns more than it would have before the Grand Nerf. In short: Dear Anonymous Somebody, you not only earned me the largest single-day’s commission…