Structureless

Lacking the motivating force of school as a timekeeper is making it difficult for me to coalesce my thoughts into an actual blog post. I still have plenty to write about, but it’s less natural to write about it. I think this will be responsible in part for some shifts in the way I approach this site in the coming months.

That being said, I do have some pretty interesting stuff to write about. Today me and my friend presented our honors project to the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class back at high school (remember that place?). It was cool to be back there for the first time since graduation. I felt out-of-place already. I’ve moved on, and new people have taken my place. And that’s as it should be. People shouldn’t waste their time and effort hanging on to lingering memories. I want to be remembered, but I don’t want to be canonized (not that I expect to be) or overly retained. So I sort of felt as though I was injecting myself back into the lives and routines of people who I should be leaving alone. But it was nice to see them, and people were happy to see me, so I felt okay about it. Also, the presentation went really well. Originally, it was going to consist of a lecture by the two of us, and a simulation we designed to demonstrate some of the economic principles we dealt with in the project. However, we ended up doing the project later than we had expected, and we only had about an hour for the whole thing. So, last night we designed an extremely stripped-down version of the simulation with the intent of demonstrating Gresham’s Law, a simple but extremely important principle. The simulation worked PERFECTLY. We hadn’t had time to test it out on our own by playing it a couple times, but it went exactly as we had hoped. We created a small system for buying and selling commodities (corn and iron [represented by corn kernels (intended for burning for ethanol) and steel hex nuts]) and a system for switching between gold and silver bullion (raw metal). The commodities could be bought and sold in either gold or silver, creating a ratio between the two (simulating the effect a government-regulated currency would have), but the bullion exchange forum (representing goldsmiths, a historically accurate and important figure), operated on its own terms (historically speaking, according to the amounts of bullion available). This creates an imbalance, and allows people to make a profit by exchanging currencies. By manipulating the prices of the commodities and the bullion ratio available at the goldsmith station, we were able to force one currency entirely out of circulation. We did this both ways; we first started with silver being hoarded and gold spent, and within the span of about two turns, we turned it around entirely. We also employed paper currency for silver at the commodity stations, adding a twist, as it could be used to buy and sell, but not to exchange for bullion. Also historically accurately, the winner had an extremely wide margin, almost three times the amount of money as the loser. Our simulation elegantly proved Gresham’s Law, and also sort of proved capitalism too; that the more money you have the more you can make. So that was a great success.

Also speaking of money, now that I have a debit card, Mint.com, which I was already using, has become vastly more useful. I am starting to be able to track how much money I spend on what, and set budgets. Within the next few months, I think I’ll gain a lot of insight into where my money goes, and how to spend it more effectively. I also figured out that you can add your PayPal account to Mint, which is nifty.

I have been submerging myself in resources on investing. Right now, I’m leaning towards ShareBuilder for a brokerage, because of their low fees. Since I’m doing long-term investing, it doesn’t matter that they’re executing trades only once a week at maximum. However, I’ve realized that I should research direct investing before committing to a brokerage account. If I can do that effectively, I can avoid a lot of fees. I would then have to keep track of my own investments, but with the help of Google Finance that shouldn’t be too hard. I hope to have a substantial amount of money invested and in my planned Roth IRA within a few weeks.