Category: Finance

  • CTRL ALTZ: The Tannery

    CTRL ALTZ: The Tannery

    Alternative assets are investments that aren’t stock, bonds, or certificates. Those are known as traditional assets, leaving everything else the “alternative:” antiques precious metals stamps coins baseball arts shares in privately held startups “An alternative investment is anything that you wouldn’t hear a financial advisor at a bank steer a client toward. These investments are…

  • Financial Civil Disobedience

    Financial Civil Disobedience

    PART 1: Onion Futures I bought The Futures by Emily Lambert because I wanted to know more about the Onion Futures Act, a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as motion picture box office receipts. This is a stupid law. A futures contract is simply a legal agreement…

  • If We Save Pizza, We Save America

    If We Save Pizza, We Save America

    America loves pizza. If we assume that pizza follows a traditional “Pyramid of Quality” ratio, which posits that there is always more bad than good, then the world of pizza can be split into five sections. Garbage Pizza is the quality of a school lunch cafeteria. Corporate Pizza is the major chains (Domino’s, Little Ceaser’s,…

  • How Much Control Do You Need?

    How Much Control Do You Need?

    Disclaimer: I love the concept of shareholder control so much I married it. Well, not really… But I did enact a system modeled on a market economy to give control of my romantic life to other people. I’ve been experimenting with the idea of “shareholder control” since 2008 when I allowed my friends to vote on my…

  • My Attempted Ether Binge

    My Attempted Ether Binge

    “There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.” Hunter S. Thompson In 2015 I was excited about crypto and I wanted some ether, the digital currency that powers Ethereum. We live in a consumer society, I thought, how hard can it…

  • Re-Thinking the Game of Monopoly

    Re-Thinking the Game of Monopoly

    It would be hard to simplify capitalism further than Monopoly. The game attempts to express the ruthlessness of raw capitalism by declaring that whoever has the most money at the “end” is the winner. While it’s true our culture proclaims the rich as our greatest heroes, the method of financial gain in Monopoly is not…