Becoming The New Rich

a stub for further work...

I've been reading Timothy Ferriss's "The 4-hour Workweek" http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/ in the hopes of getting some insight into developing an alternate stream of cash.  Although $40k a month sounds amazing, it's not my objective.  I'd be happy to just replace my existing monthly income (plus a bit extra), mainly to eliminate the dependence I have on my present employer.  I want to be self-sufficient; but at the same time, I don't want to create more (negative) stress for myself than I already have.

So you hear about these people who make so much money each month... But is it really possible?

I've been pondering this subject for a while and have come to a few conclusions.

1. I believe in the existence of really wealthy people, people who will always have more money than I can possibly imagine having.
2. From the anecdotes I've heard, these extremely wealthy people have the ability to spend my annual salary on a whim.
3. I've heard of or read about people who claim to make $40k a month.

I ask myself:

1. Why do these people have so much money, but I have so little?
2. What makes these people different from me?
3. What is the consequence of having this kind of wealth?
4. How can I become this wealthy? 
5. Do I really want to become this wealthy?
6. What responsibilities come with this wealth?

Weight loss and physical health relegated to the world of business?

OK, I don't have the time to explore this issue fully, but the question has crossed my mind a number of times:

"Why has weight loss, nutrition and general physical health become the domain of business and not public, freely available, information?"

Everywhere I go there are adds for losing weight... "I cut down 10lbs of stomach fat in just 1 week by obeying this 1 Easy Diet Rule".  or improving your appearance.  "You too can have biceps like Arnold if you buy my book.."

But why do I have to pay for this information?  Why doesn't our education system take care of this for us?  Why don't our governments provide this information for free?

It's counter-intuitive.  A healthy society is a productive society.  Isn't the measure of a country's success its GDP?  Won't healthier people produce more and thereby increase GDP?

I can understand that the "health industry" has become big money -- but why do we allow this? 

Italy September/Octorber 2009 蜜月

Everybody has been bugging me to show them some photos of Italy. But it's one of those irritating things about technology: things that are supposed to be made easier by it have in fact become even more irritating and arduous than the manual methods previous generations used. Case in point. Maria and I recently went to Italy for our honeymoon. During that trip we took a few hundred photos with our digital camera. Those photos are now all on my harddrive, invisible to everyone -- it's like we never even went anywhere! -- and now I've got to figure out the easiest (i.e. least time consuming) way of sharing those photos with friends and family. So what's the problem?, you may ask. Well, those few hundred pictures are taking up about 1 GB of space on my harddrive, and there is no way that I can upload all of those photos in any reasonable amount of time. So now I have to sort through a few hundred pictures and choose the most representative photos of our two week trip. But the trouble doesn't end there -- each photo is going to be about 2MB in size. And that's too big for convenient web-viewing. So for my viewers to have quick access to the photos, I'm going to have to reduce their filesize. Which means using another piece of software. The engineer in me is shaking his head in disgust at all of the manual, unproductive, work that's going to be involved in doing that. He's tempted to find some way to automate the whole thing. But of course knowing what he knows, he knows that's not going to be a simple task, either. So what's he doing instead? He's complaining about it :) OK, so enough complaining. Here's a few photos for you all to look at. Vatican City by night.

Piazza Novona: Statue comes to life for 2 euros