I was emailing a friend about these cool little bitty methanol* fuel cells, and she said “should I buy stock?”
and I realized that if my social security funds were handed to me for investment i.e. “personal funds” I would totally use that money for speculative investment. Like, very risky investments that I didn’t research very well, but I liked because they promoted groundbreaking technologies that I personally forecast as the Next Big Thing, or maybe The Big Thing That Will Save America From Herself.
and while that might be fun, and exciting, and interesting,
it’s not the right way to save for retirement.
* I consider methanol fuel cells to be, by the way, so much better than hydrogen fuel cells. For one, I don’t really consider hydrogen a RENEWABLE fuel. All hydrogen is currently obtained by cracking natural gas, which is a fossil fuel, albeit one with lower tailpipe emissions than gasoline or coal. But it’s going to at least get awfully expensive, at worst run out pretty darn quick if we keep using it for heating, and for chemical production, and for electricity generation, and ALSO to power a hydrogen economy? Methanol, on the other hand, while produced primarily from natural gas now, is a byproduct of lots of industrial processes and also can be refined from methane, aka, landfill gas and cow farts. It’s a fuel with a sense of humor!
