Why plain water isn’t always the best drink in the heat
For workers sweating through a shift outdoors or in a hot plant, the most surprising hydration advice is that plain water is not the drink that keeps the…
Author: Rick Good
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader's money, real estate, and business coverage.
A budget you can build with one sheet of paper
The bills that wreck a budget usually aren’t the monthly ones. They’re the expenses that don’t arrive every month but always arrive eventually — car…
Can government help when rents are too high?
Rents feel too high in a lot of cities, so governments worldwide keep stepping in to push them down. The results have been mixed, and rarely what the…
A historic boom, and no one knows where it ends
The same giant companies that dominate the stock market are pouring almost unimaginable sums into artificial intelligence, and the figures are hard to…
Are you as diversified as you think?
Giant technology companies have grown so large that they now dominate the S&P 500, and that is changing how some investors think about index funds. As of…
How to get AI to recommend your business
Ask an AI assistant where to find a good plumber or a marketing service, and it no longer returns a list of links. It names a few businesses outright –…
What happens when ideas can’t be protected?
If intellectual property (IP) protections weakened or disappeared, would innovation grind to a halt? The answer: it depends on the industry. In…
The patent bargain is broken, CEO says
Patents are Chinese instruction manuals, say Palmer Luckey, founder of defense company Anduril. “The founding fathers never predicted a world where you…
Luck on the frontier: The superstitions settlers couldn’t do without
Little House on the Prairie showed the wagons, the blizzards, the fevers. It left out the horseshoes. Frontier settlers packed everything they owned onto a…
Ask the Expert
A builder is offering us a “2-1 buydown” on the new house we’re considering. The first year’s interest rate sounds great, but I’m not sure I understand…