The Column

Motto: Just one. That's all it takes. I, Aaron Gillespie, self-proclaimed best-guy alive, along two other best guys alive, started a movie podcast! It's called "We Scene a Movie" - and it's available on a podcast player near you! We three often found ourselves discussing movies when we were together - and the heat coming off our hot takes was too much for we three to bear alone. We realized we'd have to distribute the thermal energy and use podcast listeners as heatsinks. By distributing these hot takes across the greater surface area afforded to us by those people who listen, we are more effectively able to maintain a rate of heat transfer to the ambient environment so as to keep our takes cool and performing nominally. For more strained and extended metaphor jokes, give our podcast a listen! We will put up new episodes every-other Sunday. Check in this  Sunday, December 2nd (or whenever you want after that, cause that's how podcasts work), fo...

Motto: BAAAAAAH This graphic took longer to make than it was worth - the dates are (obviously) approximations Some history (if you don't care about history and just want to read about Aaron & the iPhone, skip down to after the next photo in this post): My very first phone I got sometime around my junior year of high school. It was a flip phone with a VGA camera (in today's terminology, that's 0.3 megapixels). I thought it was so cool. If you took someone's photo with it, you could usually tell who it was! It had ringtones to pick from, you could call your friends on it, or you could text them using the T9 buttons (but who texts?). My first week with the phone it flew out the window of a moving vehicle onto a gravel road. It survived. Having this piece of technology of my very own was EXTREMELY exciting. I started reading about phones and other pieces of consumer technology using my parent's computer on Mozilla Firefox. After a year and a half, my pare...

Motto: I Voted I hated economics in school. It was a boring subject. The study of supply and demand was too demanding. Interest rates didn't interest me. The law of diminishing returns got less and less cool the more I learned about it. Then a dozen years went by. Things changed. Now I like economics, but it's it's not because I suddenly find supply and demand fascinating. Interest rates still don't interest me. The parts of economics I like aren't those communicated in the simple example problems teaching the fundamental truths of economics. I like to think about marginal cost and reward, the concepts of value and utility, and how economics applies to me as an individual, not a business. I just got a phone. It's expensive, but it's also the single device I use more than any other. If your phone costs $1000 and you use it 2 hours a day for 2 years, that's $0.68/hour. It also replaces any number of other devices you would otherwise need to spend ...