How to dispose of household waste ... v2

I live in a 1600+ sqft house with a 5 cents compound and 1 coconut tree. Thus most of this post is relevant to me. Take what is useful to you.

We all have a lot of organic and other waste lying around in our house. Most of the time it is thrown into the dustbin or drained down the washbasin or sink. This waste can be classified essentially for the purposes of this article into 3 categories - Decayable Waste, Burnable Material and Indestructible Stuff.

Decayable Waste

Remove all organic matter after you have finished cooking or eating and throw it at the foot of the coconut tree. This does not include paper and other burnable material. Ignore Organic Chemistry lessons from school for now :-) ...

Don't leave food particles and waste - both from processing [cooking & cleaning] and leftovers - lying around in your house for the cockroaches, geckos, rats, ants and other pests to feed on - even in the waste basket. Use it as manure. Let the food rot at the foot of the tree. This prevents the stench of decaying matter from building up.

Do this EVERYDAY. Do not keep it for the weekly waste clearance people or the municipality to clean it monthly [?] from the streets where you surreptitiously abandon it. If you have a compost pit or if someone nearby has it, talk to them about dumping it there regularly.

Burnable Material

This is about increasing your carbon footprint.

Remove all possible traces of food from the plastic and paper used to pack the food item. Keep them in a separate container in your garage or any other dry place that is safe from rainwater.

Once a month or when the volume is large enough, make sure that they are dry and incinerate them in a safe location. Throw the ashes at the foot of the tree. Do not burn these at the foot of the tree but somewhere safe.

Mix the plastic and other burnable material according to a plan. Make sure you have dry paper [closely packed with dry plastic] at sufficient intervals. They should be spaced evenly between the slow burning material. The paper will catch fire easily and transfer it to the plastic [preferably thin sheets]. The plastic will melt into the paper and together they will burn longer, hotter and more destructively ensuring that the waste is ALL burnt and nothing but ashes are left.

Indestructible Stuff

After similarly cleaning the Aluminium foils, glass bottles and indestructible plastic keep them in a safe place. Crush all plastic bottles as well. There are recycling scavengers who will buy this material from you. Even if you do not charge any money for it at least you are helping in recycling and contributing to someone's income.

Do try to categorize and sort them. Trust me it is not too much trouble. You might be wondering why spend extra time on garbage. But once you have a system in place which you follow religiously, it actually saves you time.

Is increasing gold prices making India rich or depreciating rupee making India poor ?

This appeared as a Yammer Post in my company's network. My reply to the above question is given below.

If your life depends upon consuming gold then increasing prices makes you poor. Your costs will go up and you will have to reduce expenditure in other areas.

If your consumption depends upon exchanging rupees for the gold then a depreciating rupee [against what? the $?] will be one of the reasons for an increasing price of gold.

Fiat currency is a farce and will always depreciate due to

1. Deficit spending by governments all over the world. A policy they learnt from the scamster John Maynard Keynes.

2. Nixon's delinking of the $ to gold and the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system.

The price of Au makes no difference to the economy since

1. Gold is a store of value and not usually a raw material in the economic ecosystem. Therefore we do not have to constantly consume it like Petrol or Food or any other source of energy.

2. It is not as widely used as a medium of exchange like the rupee which is fiat currency - both can be easily represented in paper or electronically.

Fiat Currencies depreciate due to their increased numbers. More paper (money) chasing goods. The law of "Demand and Suppy" demands this.

Due to the overuse of government and forgery printing presses the number of "notes" increase. Over time this is reflected as inflation. Right now we have huge inflation and a depreciating rupee. This is observable anywhere. Just look at what happened recently in Zimbabwe.

Governments all over the world practice deficit spending to pander to their electorates. Those who do less of it will see their currencies depreciate at a lesser rate. This is reflected in the varying currency rates in the forex markets.

Genesis ... In the beginning there was the verb !

This post is to explain the other aspect of this blog. Besides the practical and utilitarian purpose stated in the earlier post I also intend to delve into the Philosophical here. I will also write about my views on economics and my opinions of the economic policies of various governments.

These are my musings on the concept/notion of wealth/money. As someone who is fascinated by the nebulous and/or ambiguous concepts of Wealth, Money, Prosperity, Success, Failure, Expectation, Happiness, etc; I ponder over how these affect us and our behaviour. Someday I hope to finish reading "Human Action" by Ludwig Von Mises of the Austrian School of Economics.

I aspire to someday do a PhD in 'AI applications in Finance'. Here I stash my observations, thoughts, ideas, experiments, successes and failures. I hope it will benefit you and teach me more about money and the things it can [and cannot] buy. I also like Mathematics a lot and hope to find ways in which I can illustrate to you [and in the process myself] how we can use it to better our lives financially and otherwise. I at the least hope I succeed in simplifying things.

I am unable to decide between Rand and Kant regarding the nature of our existence, reality and perception. You will see this reflected in subsequent postings on this blog.

Of This Blog or the Strength of Hind-Sight Bias

This blog is dedicated to my financially illiterate father and my own miserly nature. It is a description, nay a celebration of and about how I like to save money and optimise or minimise expenditure. I take great pride in my propensity to scrounge and find ways to cut cost in my personal life. Whether this is due to - a lack of sufficient income or an inherent nature or a learned behaviour from circumstances or a combination of all - I am not sure.

The insults the hypocritical hypercritical elders of my tribe and my pater rained on me when I was called a miser, a jew, shylock etc despite not recieving any pocket money from him and not being allowed to work to earn my money when I was underage, made me unsure of myself for a while. As I ponder over the true nature of my fiscal personality, I am still not sure if the lack of pocket money benefitted or harmed me as the subsequent blogs will illustrate.

By "underage" I mean < "legal age to work" and/or < "an age considered acceptable to start working" in the social circles I was born into.

The term "pocket money" is a nebulous concept in itself but my perception is that I have had far less than my friends who were the children of parents who earned or possessed far less than my own.

The title of this post is inspired from this treatise by Baruch Spinoza. Here I have imitated Maugham who named his masterpiece along similar lines.