Unemployed Edition
Well, as of last Friday I am now unemployed (again).
Actually, it’s even worse than that. Due to a series of unfortunate events, I am now working for my wife full-time. Hoping to learn a lot and super-charge our school.
The Forum
The Forum is doing well (20,204 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:
This week’s books
Still crawling through the Reacher back catalogue: read 61 Hours and Worth Dying For, both of which I consider among the best of the series 🙂
This week’s item
I do quite a few Zoom/Google Meet/Skype calls now, and am hoping to add some more videos to the RetireJapan YouTube channel this year. While I was very happy with my mic I had been looking to up my camera game.
After a lot of research/procrastination, I took a chance and ordered the Elgato Facecam. So far, I’m very impressed. Quite a big upgrade from the (perfectly adequate) Logitech C920s I’d been using before.
This week’s links
- Baby steps in the right direction, but still baby steps: Tokyu railway to be 1st in Japan to run all lines on green energy
- Congratulations to Smart Money Asia! 2022 Q1 Roundup
- I’m partial to the Dark Forest theory myself: Fermi Paradox and the Risk to Wealth
- Relevant for the ‘do we need bonds’ debate: What Does a Bond Bear Market Look Like?
- Another short fiction piece by Scott Alexander: Idol Words
- This seems so so true. Will be taking steps soon: Smartphones vs. Science: On Distraction and the Suppression of Genius
- The key to avoid this is to have some flexibility in how you withdraw: Is your early retirement under threat from an unlucky sequence of returns?
- This is pretty cool. I would love to have an exercise bike or rowing maching hooked up to a battery for the house: How to Build a Bike Generator with Control Panel
- This sounds good but when I sat down to do it I found it didn’t make much sense for me. In my experience investing for amateurs is more a case of gradual hit and miss until you get comfortable: The First Thing You Need to Do Before Investing Your Money
- Really interesting detail on how to get to zero carbon: One Billion Machines
What do you think? Anything interesting in there?
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I think your forum is having technical issues.
Yeah, it went down last night. Should be okay now though!
#7 was a great and important read.
#10 it’s a shame it didn’t talk about embodied carbon. Until manufacturers start analysing and being honest about the manufacturing cost to the environment then we’ll never be true net zero. Some of the new heating technologies are very expensive and carbon intensive to manufacture. An electric panel heat is very cheap and if it’s running on green electric then that may be a better solution than a heat-pump, for example.
No comments on anything this week, but please know that I often go thru these readings more than once–a quick scan initially, and then back again when I have more time. And others’ comments on one or another item usually makes me go look again at the article being referenced. So thanks for getting these lists together. (As a retiree I have lots time to comment, but I also try to hold my tongue, and not become a nuisance! 😉 )
Re. #8, this something I’ve been interested in for a long time but have basically given up on, and this article kind of confirms why. Cycling is a great way to exercise but not very good at generating electricity unfortunately.
The article says that they could produce 100W during a short and heavy workout. IF they could do that for an hour then they would be able to save 100Wh of power in a battery (assuming no loss of power in getting it to the battery). As a comparison, my fairly cheap Suaoki portable solar panel produces about 120W when it’s sunny, and even about 50W when it’s fairly cloudy, which means I can usually fill up my 500Wh portable power station on most days. And that’s without doing any exercise at all. So I think I’d rather enjoy my cycling on the road in the fresh air and let the solar panel generate the electricity.
What about in winter when the snow and ice make it almost impossible to cycle? I thought that’s then I would really need such a machine, especially since solar is not very reliable in winter, but I’m finding more and more that clearing snow provides plenty of exercise in winter!