As someone who works remotely a lot - I hate working at my apartment, so I usually coffee shop-hop when I'm getting things done. I like being around people, and a lot of the times I'll meet up with a friend and cowork, catch up, etc.
So, open question: What are good alternatives? (in SF)
-The libraries are full of actual hobos (i.e. they smell like piss)
-I researched coworking spaces awhile ago and most required an exorbitant subscription/startup/VC funding. Wix was awesome but then they pivoted into something else.
-Noisebridge is great for side projects and hanging out but I don't bring my professional work there.
"In a cheeky jab at the U.S. spying program that Snowden unveiled through leaks to the media, the South American nation offered $23 million per year to finance human rights training."
Open an account on thinkOrSwim (etrade, whoever), fund it, trade with small amounts of money and research everything as you go.
Arbitrarily, SLV, which is an ETF that tracks silver futures. If you want to play with fire (and learn a lot of cool stuff), trade options (that's what I used to do)
Websites: SeekingAlpha (side note: financial articles, SA included, are sophisticated-sounding babble put out by someone that has to meet their quota, not well-thought-out logical explanations by people in-the-know)
Make a list of terminology and learn directly what it means to your trading. Pretty much any trading term that has general meaning and isn't arcane and quant-y is googleable. I recall Khan Academy also having very useful videos explaining a lot of terminology (Salman Khan used to be a trader)
For example, in SLV:
Liquidity: How easy (read: cheap) it is to open and close a position. If the spread on an option is $33.00 (sell) and $33.33 (buy), you lose 1% (most people say $0.33 - I prefer to look at the percentages) just by getting in and out of a position regardless of your trade (I'm ignoring commissions), and assuming the trade reliably goes through instantly. The higher the cost (time, risk of nonfulfillment, money) of opening and closing a position, the more illiquid the position is.
In the context of houses, the time and effort and money put into maintenance and time and uncertainty involved in buying/selling, etc make them extremely illiquid investments. If you own AAPL stock and it crashes, you can hit a button and sell it. If you own a house and the housing market collapses, good luck!
If I were to invest the cost of a house in some high-volume stock with a tight bid-ask ratio and sell it two years later for the same price by hitting a button on my phone, my losses are just the bid-ask difference and I was never really at much risk of being unable to sell it instantly (during market hours at least). It's a very liquid position.
That's just one example, but there are plenty out there. Jump in feet first, google all the things, and don't wager stupid amounts of money.
I've actually had a different experience with commuting. Even with the downsides you can make a lot of use of that time for a finite time period.
Things I've done with the time (which otherwise would have never happened):
-Used Pimsleur I-III to learn some Mandarin, and more importantly, HOW to learn a new language(/other things). Spoken Mandarin is less intimidating than westerners think, and the grammar is simpler than English in a lot of ways.
(Caveat: My Mandarin is by no means good. I couldn't find any good systematic ways to keep going after Pimsleur III)
-Listened to podcasts on nutrition and got very in-tune with how what I eat effects how I feel, how productive I am, and what happens during my gym time.
-Neuroscience podcasts, ditto. That stuff is interesting. Especially relating to dopamine, if you're a heavy internet user and you check your email every thirty seconds on your phone.
-Developed a better idea of how successful freelancers operate and how they've transitioned into that (Kalzumeus podcast, Ruby Freelancers). Ditto for very successful startup founders (Techzing, Stanford's Innovation Thought Leaders podcast).
-Developed my musical taste.
-Developed my rock climbing grip by using a grip trainer.
-Learned to calm my mind and relax and not waste mental energy on situations I have no immediate control over. Shitty traffic is a great time to practice this specifically because it's so aggravating.
That said - the key thing is that this is for a finite period of time, and you have to act on stuff you learn. The eventual endgame is that you gradually run out of interesting things that you can pick up from a podcast and then do on your own. You want to use the time to work on something more specific.
In addition to the time cost, sitting in one position and staring in one direction for an hour destroys any kind of flow that you have. It doesn't matter whether you leave work energized and ready to rock - when you get home, sitting in a car for an hour will usually make you tired. If you work on complex side projects or like to go out after work, this has a pretty substantial impact.
Unrelated to topic, but for Mandarin you should check out chineseclass101.com. They have some cliched advertising, but they have a lot of audio lessons that range from zero to quite advanced, and the lessons themselves are much more entertaining and "real-world" than Pimsleur's imo.
Also, flashcards using Anki to memorize vocab and characters are effective, but not something you should be doing while driving!
I hop in a taxi cab and practice Chinese with the driver. Sometimes traffic is so bad in Beijing that I'm looking at an hour to commute 20km. I don't bother with the subway, which is cheaper and faster, but the time is entirely dead, it's too crammed to use my computer.
