Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Half of it is gone

Surprise! Half of 2026 is already gone. I hope you are able to look back and say the past six months has been time well spent. And if you cannot say that for yourself, then it’s time to get off your ass!

I would say my first half of the year has been rather uneventful. But that’s good, right? Boring is good. It is suppose to be boring. Novelty is great, but too much of it means a lack of focus. You pick something to do for a long time and there are for sure going to be dog days.

Much of my weekends in 2026 was focused on getting my new-to-me 2019 VW Golf GTI up to shape. It was exhilarating to wake up on Saturdays with the lastest thing to fix, or the latest item to install. If fairy godparents somehow bestowed upon me the endless money glitch, buying used cars and fixing them up would be something I genuine would do everyday.

Obviously that’s not how reality works. People speak of following passions, but as someone with an entrepreneurial business degree, passion is only the spark. The fuel to sustain the burn is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Often times people are unwilling to marinate in the minutiae of it all. How are you going to sell your talents? Putting down “it will work out” for the marketing section would have gotten you an F in class.

Or perhaps there isn't fuel to burn at all - the thing you’re passionate about is not financially viable. For me, there’s very little business in fixing up used cars to then not sell. So a hobby it remains. That means for five days out of the week, I have to put in time at a place I’m not nearly as enthused about, in order to be able to do the thing I am super motivated for. And honestly, that in between time can get mighty frustrating. Never mind the other parts of human living that gets in the way, like eating and self care.

Those afflicted with passion can attest to the times when you’re so into doing something, sleep is a mere suggestion. You just want to keep going. And you do!

I think I’ll spend rest of 2026 coming to terms with that fact that my ability to follow my passions is predicated on accepting that it will be cyclical. And that the days without will be way more numerous than the day with. No wonder artists of pre-modern times had moneyed patrons!

We're all paying for it

You know RAM prices have truly gone off the deep end when Apple of all companies is raising prices on their products. The same Apple that famously already charges a premium for extra storage and memory. It seems even those fat margins are not enough to swallow the hyper inflation of semiconductor chips due to the supposedly AI revolution. It now costs $1999 for the base MacBook Bro, up from $1699. Kind of insane.

I guess this M1 Max MacBook Pro of mine will solider on until it literally dies.

All eyes now turn to the annual September iPhone event. Will the iPhone get a price bump for the first time in a long time? Place your bets at your prediction market platform of choice.

AI has been cashing checks and making promises (still a solution looking for a problem if you ask me), and yet the downstream negative effects are burdened by everyone. We’re all paying for it, just so Silicon Valley can keep on minting fresh new millionaires and bilionaires. An iPad for grandmother is now $150 more expensive - thanks to AI-caused inflation, even though AI won’t touch her everyday life in the slightest. Our utility bills keep going higher thanks to data centers drawing energy the equivalent of entire cities.

Whether you use Chat-GPT or not, you’re paying for it one way or another. That’s not very fair, is it?

Waiting for the weekend

The thing about this car enthusiasm hobby is that you can only kind of do things on the weekends. The workday is where you put in the hours so that you can afford the enthusiasm. But it can be a challenge because for five days out of the week, you’re kind of anxiously looking forward to the other two. And my brain just can’t comprehend forsaking 70% of a week, being unsatisfied.

I can see how some people’s enthusiasm is so great that they make the thing into their career. They cannot fathom only focusing on their passion two days out of the week. Life is too damn sacred to be miserable for any amount of time.

There are tradeoffs, of course. There’s a chance that you will lose the passion if your actual livelihood is dependent on that thing. How enthusiastic can you be about photography when an angry bride is yelling at your face? Or you might have to turn in an end product that isn’t completely satisfactory to your standards. Because you absolutely need a monetary return.

I don’t think the passion pursuers actually factor in the tradeoffs. Their guiding star is that they are so enthusiastic that they must do the thing. No exceptions. Life isn’t worth anything if they are unable to do what they love for every single day of the week. They just kind of naively pray and hope the money issue will figure itself out. Not a leap of faith, but an insatiable will to follow the heart.

Thankfully, or unfortunately, I am not enthusiastic enough about anything to make career-level moves. A boring 9-5 job is exactly what I want and need to fund the few hobbies that gets me out of bed on weekend mornings, instead of wanting to sleep in. That’s good enough for me.

All about leverage

Looks like it doesn’t matter that I can deadlift 300 pounds. After a few hours of working on my car, bending and squatting, my lower back is barking like mad all the same. Though I’d be in even worse shape if I hadn’t been exercising the posterior chain at all…

While I do enjoy working on cars, the aftermath is always painful. The skinned knuckles, the bruised fingers, and soiled clothing. All part of the deal, of course. Like callouses on the hands for weightlifters. I can’t fathom being a mechanic for a living. Physical labor is really tough on the body. I’m gladly surprised my father came out of 30 plus years in construction with only some mild nagging joint pain.

These days it’s popular to invoke the trades as an alternative to university. Indeed it is! Having alternative options is a positive. However, the trades are hard to scale. You can only climb into so many HVAC ducts in a given day, or unclog so many toilets. The monetary upside is largely capped. Just about the only multiplier is branching out and being your own boss. Have people under you to climb many more ducts.

Going to college offers a higher ceiling. Knowledge work can continue working even when you’re done inputing. Simply look at the many software engineers making upper-middle class living. Or study to become a white-collar professional. Hours will be long on the outset, but the monetary compensation for careers like lawyers, bankers, and medical is high.

And what that high income allows for is compounding. It’s far easier for a $200,000 dentist to invest in the stock market than a $100,000 plumber. And that bigger initial pie will only grow larger faster. The law of large numbers comes into play.

The word here is leverage. Maximize the size of the output with the set amount of input. A job is a job, and power to those who are doing what they got to do to put a roof over the head and food on the table. However, if there is a choice? I’m thankful I am able to trade knowledge for money, rather than manual labor. The sore hours immediately after working on my car is a good reminder to not take it for granted.

Don't cry for Argentina

We’re all aware there's been a slew of tech layoffs in the past few years. The latest victims to the great culling is 10% of the META workforce. What I don't understand is how on earth then are rents in the San Francisco Bay Area still so god-damn high? You'd think with all the tech firings, there's got to be a net negative pressure on demand in the region. I guess not!

For those of us in the peasant class, it's difficult to muster sympathy for these highly-paid workers losing employment. It's simply math: a software engineer with a total comp of $250,000 getting fired is not the same as a Target team member losing all his shifts. Above a certain sustenance level, the amount of extra money earned allows for plenty of leeway. I would generally say that any laid off tech worker that don't have at least a year of runway money stored up is doing it wrong.

Of course that is predicated on spending discipline. A deep six-figure earner who lifestyle inflates is in no better position mathematically than someone making $50,000. However, it's far easier for the high earner to shut off the spigot and reverse the deficit. The high inflow is such a strong lever to tackle debt. $25,000 in credit card debt means differently for someone earning $250,000 compared to $75,000.

To quote Andrew Yang: "It's just math."

I'd argue that any software engineer, after a decade of work, who does not have at least $1 million socked away in equities, has done it incorrectly. You’ve got a generational opportunity at earning an outsized income! It's just smart of save a chunk of it for much later. Besides, isn't the FIRE movement largely made up of tech workers busting ass for a solid decade and stocking up enough to last for the rest of life?

The extravagant compensation comes at the expense of job security. This isn’t public government work, where you expect to stay all way to retirement on that sweet pension money. Therefore the onus is on the tech worker to absolutely save for a rainy day. And if you didn’t, and you got laid off in recent times? Again, don’t expect sympathy tears from the peasant class.

I don't have money

These days I am seeing a lot of FL5 Honda Civic Type Rs on the road. It’s a real curiosity because one, Honda does not produce many, and two, the Type R is rather expensive. A cool low $50K when it’s all said and done (got to pay the tax man, you know), and then there’s the super high insurance premiums. (Thanks to the totally not a war in Iran, gas is not cheap either.)

How are folks affording these cars?! The demographic of Type R buyers skews young, mind you. This isn’t a case of boomers buying cars they can easily budget for. I myself can mathematically afford an FL5, but I simply would not be comfortable plucking down that much money on mere transportation, even if it looks and performs awesomely.

Perhaps I’ve aged out of being irresponsible with money vis a vis cars. I’ve done it, thankfully financially recovered from it, and have no desire to do it again.

Or, my mother would say: “Everybody has money. It’s you who don’t have money.” That’s probably true. Sure it’s easy to run credit and get into debt in America for shiny things, but the fact is there’s also statistically a lot of people out there with money. The median income in the San Francisco Bay Area is mathematically apparent. So it actually should not be a surprise that I encounter a large concentration of FL5 Civic Type Rs on the road around here.

It’s just frustrating sometimes that my better financial senses are restricting the possible experiences that I can pursue as a car enthusiast. That is why, out of spite, out of jealousy, and simply as a cope: I’ve stopped watching YouTube videos of cars I cannot begin to afford. Another unobtainable special edition Porsche 911? Watching about it only brings sadness.

That's just your opinion

There’s some naysayers out there who say spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets to Guangzhou, only to not explore anywhere else in China, is a waste of money and time. These people’s vision of traveling is to do as much as possible and visit as many places as possible. PTO is a precious commodity, is it not? You can lounge around and eat right at home. No need to spend so extravagantly.

Good news is, I live for me. Forcing myself to travel differently just because of the opinions of others would be peak inauthenticity. It’s like wanting a child soon as your friend group start popping out babies. Memetic tendencies that served us well ancestrally - you don’t want to be the caveman that sticks out - are no longer necessary. We can and should live how we want to, unheeding the conscious and subconscious influence of others.

I travel because I want to spend time living in places that I like. I could spend two weeks in Seoul and do nothing but hang out, walk around, and eat. The touristy stuff isn’t a must-do. The goal isn’t to check as many boxes on the landmarks list. If it were, I’d have gone to Europe many years ago, instead of visiting China every single year since 2014.

Waste of a plane ticket? Absolutely not. That’s like saying renting a place - versus buying a home - is throwing money away. It’s all transactions that we simply don’t agree on the value in return. You maximizers out there surely cringe at doing relatively nothing in a foreign city for two weeks. I on the other hand reckon that’s a lovely time. Besides, anything is better than working, right?