Badger Crossroads

Engineering Studies, Careers, and Transitions

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Engineering Your Financial Assault Vehicle

Like the protagonists of Damnation Alley (a contender for best science fiction film of 1977), you will face in your career a long, deadly journey across hostile terrain in a vehicle that hopefully will allow you to reach your personal goals. I recently attended an excellent retirement planning seminar which described many of the things I should have been doing over the past decades. This seemed like sub-optimal timing: like explaining to someone how to drive after the trip is virtually complete. How better it would have been to outline some key features on how to engineer your Financial Assault Vehicle in your 20-30s, where you can take advantage of lessons learned and the compounding of time to have far greater impact. In that spirit then let’s set out some tools for younger engineers that may not have had some of these aspects explained to them to date.

To illustrate these concepts, we’ll do a walkaround of the magnificent Landmaster vehicle from Damnation Alley. Like you and your assets, the Landmaster is a rugged, multipurpose and resilient vehicle capable of handling all manner of threats. Like us, it faces challenges at times – internal and external, but with a flexible approach to problem solving and access to scrapyards it can convey its cargo to a refuge. These observations and lessons learned are from my experience with a specific country and company, so they may or may not be broadly applicable, but should be useful for those folks navigating similar terrain. Let’s step through each of these seven aspects of the Landmaster, with some actionable tips.

Your Landmaster

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Five Concepts Project Site Work Reinforces

“When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.”

Quote by Henry David Thoreau; a favorite writer and life experiencer. What does this have to do with engineers on business travel, especially to construction sites?

The Man

Thoreau highlights the importance of nature, simplicity and living in the present. You non-arguably could do no better than immediately throwing the electronical device you are reading this with against the wall and instead picking up Walden. If you persist in this insanity however, let’s talk about gritty business travel for engineers and how it waits with life lessons.

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Lyn Alden, Energy and You

There’s a writer out there whose work might be worth following, though her topics are often way over my head. Lyn Alden is a young engineer that appears to also have a fairly intense financial bent, and produces a blog at the following link.

Found here. She also has a newsletter apparently.

She recently had an article that might appeal to students of renewable energy, but at a meta level, there might be a few broader aspects about her that would be of interest to you. Let’s contemplate Lyn related to:

  1. your professional energy
  2. a case study herself
  3. your personal energy

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Approaching Donor-Advised Funds: Tuning the Engineering

So it has been a while since establishing a Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) through Vanguard, and in the process I discovered a few techniques for harnessing these beasts that seem worthy of note. As for all things in life, if I’d known a bit more earlier, there would have been considerable gain/pain avoided, so perhaps others can learn a few things from this experience.

Týr learns a few things setting up his DAF (Bauer 1911)

DAFs are a great tool, so the opportunities for improvement are really more about refinements rather than a vicious critique; don’t let this commentary preclude you from advancing. Here are a few topics for consideration if you are contemplating a DAF:

  1. Looking further ahead – charge the “Converter”
  2. Looking further abroad
  3. Sandboxing your SWR

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