Bret Victor just put out a great post about various projects one could work on as a technologist to help with the climate crisis. Many of these are great suggestions for an individual’s ~5 year project, but it might be hard to see how a normal engineer working in the industry could start working on climate change problems. I’m here to show that you can help fight climate change even if starting a clean tech company or working on a…
Last week I visited my sister and her fiancee in Kitchener, a little over an hour outside of Toronto. There were some things I immediately noticed when traveling around, for instance that: – Toronto doesn’t smell like urine or weed, which was strange to me – The chip-and-pin system for credit cards is way better than our swipe system – The American Dream is alive and well in Canada in a way that it is not in America. If I…
Hi fellow Swattie, I’m glad you’re here. I know that you care about the world, and that you care about the well-being of Swarthmore. You’ve probably heard a bit about fossil-fuel divestment at Swarthmore, and it sounds like an issue you should know more about, but let’s be honest – it seems complicated and you’ve been super busy. Don’t worry, by the end of this post you’ll understand what’s going on and the arguments for either side. This is an…
Just sent this letter to Swarthmore’s board (managers@swarthmore.edu), exciting things are happening around divestment! For those interested, here is: An article arguing that divestment is fiscally prudent An article arguing that divestment is tactically useful A great article by Tim Burke arguing that divestment is not the right course of action for balance Dear Mr. Kemp and Swarthmore Board, I know you are busy people, and I will try to be brief. I understand your concerns and truly appreciate your…
The latest debate about divestment in the New York Times brings up some very familiar points. However, there is another reason divestment is powerful and useful, and it relies on our weakness as humans. We should divest not to force a corporation into action, but instead to clear our own minds on the issue. Humans are notoriously afraid of loss. When those invested in the university (via having attended and donated, or by receiving monthly paychecks) have an opportunity to…
TL;DR: Like every other article who’s title is a question, the answer is no – we have a skewed view of cars and transit. When you look at the issue, increasing road capacity doesn’t help, and transit is proven to make a city more affordable. Recently I was discussing my Limits of Acceptable Terribleness post with a coworker and we disagreed about my assertions about highways. My argument there is that building more highways with the goal of decreasing travel…
So I think about personal finance a bit more than most people, which you can tell if you look through the archives on this blog. Because of this, sometimes people ask me for advice, and instead of copy-pasting the same email over and over again, I’m just going to link to this post: First, there’s a mindset Which I think is more important than anything else. That is: Humility in being able to beat the market / everyone else with…
It’s cold. Damn cold, at least here in San Francisco (although the weather maps show a lot of blue and purple shading in the rest of the country as well!). My apartment, while costing the equivalent of sending two kids to college for a year amongst the four of us, has neither heat nor window insulation. That means it’s super cold inside as well! Getting up in the morning is definitely tough… To fix this, we have some space heaters,…
This week I came across a very interesting report. Theda Skocpol (a totally badass Political Science professor at Harvard) took a look at the reasons why liberals were successful in passing Obamacare but not with Cap & Trade for carbon emissions. It’s quite a read at 133 pages, and I figured my post this week could take a look. However, in my research for this post, I ended going down the rabbit hole of debates on Grist about this article- somehow I missed…
So you are an activist trying to keep a pulse on the community you’re serving. Unfortunately, you have little time and a lot of web pages, groups, and updates to keep track of. Luckily, by using a few simple tools, you can automate away much of your busy work, leaving you more time to tackle the hard stuff. This post will show you how to use these tools to automatically monitor any web page to notify you when there are…
Note: I am not a financial expert, and while I have invested using the Mosaic platform, I do not get commissions of any kind for blogging about it I was recently telling a friend that he should consider investing via the Mosaic platform, a sort of crowdfunding platform for solar installations. Similar to Lendingtree or Prosper, investors see vetted projects with varying rates of return based on the riskiness of the loan, as determined by Mosaic. Mosaic takes a 1% cut, as…