Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I don't invest, mostly because I don't understand it well enough, and it because it looks terrifyingly volatile right now. But I would love to hear your ideas on a strategy for hedging my cash against however many awful situations you can think of. Right now, I stupidly have all of it in Wells Fargo...

That looks like a good budget/travel light/TL;DR option. If anyone gets it, let me know what you think. I decided to pass on the bundle because I figured I could piece it together from the dictionary version, although I suspect it'll take me a year or two of piecemeal reading.

Caveman Chemistry will teach a novice the basics of chemistry in the form of 28 projects, from harnessing fire to plastics and pharmaceuticals. You'll do one hands-on project for each of what the author considers the most important achievements of mankind with regards to chemistry. Super fun. I am w...

$36 on Amazon with free shipping.

I wanted to give everyone a heads-up on this book since I'd never heard of the author before, but it's quite astounding. The reviews all suggested it's hard to categorize, and now that I have it in my hands, I'd agree. Without a doubt, it's over 600 pages of the kind of systems thinking that would a...

How can you say that determinism/determinist equals a happy life and a zen state? There are unhappy people. If everything is determined, your emotional state is determined already, and if that's the case, it's clear that suffering has also been determined and cannot be changed. The same is true of d...

No, it doesn't assume that humans have free will. It provides that if they do not have free will, then I had no other choice than to present that argument, and whether or not you believe in free will is determined outside of your control. And you're right, if that's the case, no one can act any way ...

I'm not sure it can be proven, and I might lean towards the side that argues no free will in the sense that we understand it. But it seems pointless to act as if there is no free will. If there IS NOT free will: -disbeliever and believer are both just responding to motives, stimuli, what-have-you, b...

Article about a series of studies on how much a company like Google can influence an election.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet ... r-thoughts

TL;DR: A lot. Researcher says Google has a significant Hillary bias.

You can fix a lot of cuts yourself with some veterinary super glue. It's basically the same as medical grade, but cheaper.

I second the idea to call an Uber or transport yourself when possible. Don't go to an ER unless you're liable to die. Urgent care would have worked.

@Jacob How's the grip feel on the plastic ones? I've only ever used wood and metal, and metal is too slippery/heavy.

@C40 if you decide to go with rings, let me know and I can point you to resources on what to do with them.

Re: exercise. Have you considered a pair of wood gymnastic rings? They weigh little, take up almost no space, and the ways you can use them are absurd. Instead of finding a good tree branch, any branch can anchor your rings and give you not only pullups, but whatever else you would want to do, inclu...

As Jacob and Dragline said, it depends on what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish. You don't need to eat unless you are shooting for the higher ends of performance, like endurance events or an intense lifting session designed to build lots of strength and muscle mass. If you want to b...

When I started homebrewing around 2008, I ran the actual numbers on brewing versus buying a craft beer of the same style. It came out that it's cheaper to just buy the lighter, less expensive styles like wheats, pale ales, ambers, and porters, and cheaper to brew your own high gravity or fancy style...

Ooh, fun. Lots of scenarios spring to mind, but I'll stick to one trend that I think will mark a big difference from the last two world wars and many of the smaller ones America has gotten involved in. Wars of the past century were globalizing. Either nations expanding and gobbling up other territor...

@ffj I mistakenly assumed his blog was well-kmown by this forum, since I've seen it mentioned, and I should have explained that he writes a thoughtful blog that started on peak oil and covers any number of topics relating to the decline of industrial civilization as he sees it. yiu need not be a Dru...

Great post, fmj. Did you read the Recent Archdruid Report posts about the Rescue Game? If not, check them out, because the Rescue Game seems to have been the media response to Trump (and a lot of people's response to a lot of things for many decades) instead of the questions you posed, which would h...

Thanks, very helpful.

The Trump hatred is in full swing here in rich, liberal SoCal, but absent is the Hillary hatred. It's as if they think "because I do not like Trump, I must like Hillary." If Jim Jones gave them a choice between red kool-aid and purple kool-aid, I'm positive they's enthusiastically snatch t...

Yeah, the symtpons seem to range in type and severity depending on the individual. I don't claim to understand the mechanism, though a lot of possibilities come to mind. One is the theory that your body is purging some waste products or deep imbalance. Another could be that, transitioning to ketogen...