How I Fell Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole

I’ll be updating this blog with the questions i ask on my journey along with the answers i find. It all started in November 2020. I had stumbled onto Dustin Walper’s twitter, and learned that he was the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. Since he seemed to be a trustworthy and intelligent person, I figured that I would not lose all of my money if i used it. During November and December, I added in $100 and watched it growRead More→

Don’t Share Your Vaccination Status

Notes from “Warren Buffet and the Interpretation of Financial Statements”

How do you invest in a way that isn’t pure speculation or group-think, and which also prevents you from being fooled by randomness? Well, apparently value investing is one way to do this, so I’m going to learn about it. To put it simply, value investing means that you should buy and hold a stock when its price is below its “true value”. You can also sell it if it’s crazily overvalued. It’d be nice to know whether a companyRead More→

A Side Effect of Lying

It seems like lying to people you don’t know in your own self-interest to is generally socially acceptable. A person who receives one job offer, accepts, then receives a better offer, then rejects the first offer, is one such example of a lie. It’s hard to pick between two opportunities. But one thing’s for sure – lying makes whatever choice you go with 10x worse. One consequence of lying that I’ve found is that any good faith in a newRead More→

Here’s what =VLOOKUP() does in Excel

Great day! I learned how to use vlookup in excel. Here was the problem. I had sent out a cold email to ~2500 podcasters last week. The list of leads I used had a podcaster’s name, email, show id, and show name. Around 40% of people didn’t open the cold email, so I wanted to send a follow-up. Sendy, the emailing platform, let me download a new list made up of the 40%. But the list only had the lead’sRead More→

The Problem of Too Many Ideas

What do you do when you have too many interests? You can try to pursue them all by splitting your time into chunks and devoting a chunk to each interest. In theory, if I want to learn Latin, produce a podcast, and start a cooking business, I’ll do an hour of latin in the morning, 3 hours of podcasting on the weekend, and 1 hour of cooking in the evenings. It turns out that this never works. Stretching your focusRead More→

How to Price Yourself as a Freelancer

A new friend of mine gave me two ways to value yourself on the market. The first is your hourly rate. The second is the value of the service you provide (usually the opportunity cost). To calculate your hourly rate, you can use your last job’s pay as a reference compare yourself to what freelancers on the market charge, calculate how much you’d need to live your dream life. Charging hourly tends to prevent you from making big gains though.Read More→

Cruella (2021)

Cruella is a disappointing movie. It had suspense and glamour. However, it fell a bit flat on the plot, on the plot twist, and on the message. I didn’t like a couple of things. For one, the plot twist. The plot twist is that Cruella is the daughter of the Baroness. But I didn’t like it because it wastes the great tension and suspense that the director had created by pitting Cruella against the Baroness. It seemed like the conflictRead More→

Democracy, Cancel Culture, and Western Values.

There are a couple of ideas running through my mind today. One is the shifting of our democratic institutions from one of representative democracy to one of direct democracy. Why can’t we all vote for every issue on our phones? Why shouldn’t we? Two is that cancel culture and mobbings are here to stay for as long as the technology which enables it continues to exist. Social media facilitates cancel culture and mobbings. The two go hand in hand. Three,Read More→

How much of an activist should one be?

Lockdowns, police brutality and violence, curfews, a loss of freedoms, student loans. These are a few things that deeply bother me. So far, I’ve been using instagram as an outlet to vent, because I “have to do something.” And yet, there was a question within me: how much of an activist should I be? To be an activist is to be someone who “campaigns to bring about political or social change.” And in my own way, I was being anRead More→

My Personal Vaccine Hesitancy

I had an appointment booked for this Thursday to get the vaccine, but cancelled at the last minute. I don’t feel confident about the jab just yet. There are two reasons for why. First, I can’t properly weigh all of the risks. Second, I don’t trust the leaders who are deploying the vaccine. When you don’t know what a course of action’s risks are, you generally don’t take the action. If you’re about to take an international flight and suspectRead More→

Style Fundamentals

By Tim Dessaint. Alright! Let’s learn about fashion. It’s very stressful for me to shop for clothes. The stress comes from worrying about how other people view you. But despite the stress, looking good is a virtue that must be cultivated. So I will try to learn about fashion, whatever that means. One video I watched by Tim Dessaint gave me a taxonomy which I could use to help me evaluate and understand clothing. I can ask myself about theRead More→