Conspicuous Leisure

A cold day and a canceled English lesson has me sitting in the kitchen, contemplating two grotesque jars of liquid fat. They look like grade school science projects. The briny, straw-colored liquid in each jar has a thick, white head, and I could almost pass the contents off as beer from afar were it not [...]

What do you do when you can no longer trust banks to keep your money safe? Many Latvians yesterday likely had to ask themselves this very question. The country’s banking-regulation commission shut down Latvijas Krajbanka, a medium-sized bank, after the commission found about LVL 100 million ($200 million) missing Monday night. Krajbanka’s majority shareholder was Snoras, the [...]

I spent some time reflecting over the weekend on some thoughts that may or may not converge into one coherent discussion. The best place to start is to give these meditations some context. It’s late fall in Latvia. The leaves have fallen and been raked, and the forecast for later this week calls for steady [...]

This is an image of a billboard I grabbed off my Facebook feed this weekend, and I think the message resonates for many, many people. Using a bicycle as a primary means of transport has so many benefits: It provides you with exercise. It doesn’t pollute the environment around you. It is space-efficient for crowded [...]

Every now and then, I am reminded that Latvia’s infrastructure rests on a shaky foundation. Case in point: A century-old water main outside of our building ruptured last night, and the local water company had to cut the water to all nearby buildings. In all credit to the water company, they worked on through the [...]

In my last post, I talked about the niche sites I created this summer. Now, I want to dig further into my financial hopes for this kind of hustle and how it fits into this lifestyle I’m attempting to create. A typical niche site with decent search-engine optimzation in a fairly low-competition niche should be [...]