Posts

For about 6 weeks in November and December of 2023, my primary project was a website called MySolarBudget.com. The idea was simple: when I wanted to get my head around solar battery sizing and power budgeting for an off grid solar installation, most of the Google results were shitty content marketing operations. But for something like this, you really want a tool, not wall of text. There were a few decent ones embedded in the shitty content, but I thought I could do better, so I built one....

Even if you have a credit card that has no foreign transaction fees, you’ll often be charged extra for foreign credit card purchases in Chile. This is on top of the fees of roughly 3-5% that credit cards which do charge foreign transaction fees will charge for currency conversion. Typically your credit card will first be declined, then when you try again, you’ll need to accept a charge of a few hundred or even thousand Chilean pesos to continue the transaction....

This post is a slightly modified version of an essay I submitted as part of an application to a fellowship run by the very cool RadicalXChange foundation in December 2020 (I wasn’t accepted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). It definitely helps to understand what a quadratic matching fund is before reading it. Stable, liquid, usable money is a public good. Currently, central banks operate with the goals of keeping inflation steady and, in some jurisdictions, keeping the economy at full employment....

An Argument for Buying to Reduce Risk Without Cost I’ve been against home buying for purely financial reasons for about as long as I’ve paid rent, since the financial reason people usually give for home buying is that rent is purely an expense, whereas a mortgage builds equity. This argument to me intuitively smells like a $20 bill on the ground, but it’s also pretty easy to work through and debunk more formally....

Anyone who commutes to South San Francisco by bus or by car knows the lurch of stop and go traffic heading east off the highway in the morning and getting back on in the afternoon, and has gazed longingly at the deserted road on the other side of the median. Well, that’s about to get worse now that Genentech’s plan to add up to 4.3 million square feet of office space to its headquarters was approved....

My highlighted charities for the year and why I think they’re great: Rainforest Trust, Un Techo Para Chile, Ocean Conservancy, Health in Harmony, Gideon’s Promise, FairVote and others…