Ask any delivery operation where its money actually goes and the honest answer is almost always the same: the last mile. Trucks leave the depot full and efficient, and then it all unravels at the end — one driver zig-zagging across a neighborhood, doubling back for a stop they rolled past twenty minutes earlier, idling outside an address that doesn’t open until noon. Last mile route optimization is the work of squeezing that final leg down to the least driving, the fewest miles, and the most stops actually served. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool. Here’s why the last mile is so stubborn, and how a solver beats a map every single time.
Continue reading “Last Mile Route Optimization (Free Tool)”Chase Sapphire Reserve Authorized User Benefits
Chase Sapphire Reserve authorized user benefits come up a lot when someone wants to share their travel perks — or quietly hopes adding a family member will lift that person’s credit. Both are reasonable goals, but they pull in different directions, and the answer to “is it worth it” depends entirely on which one you’re chasing. I sold authorized user tradelines for years, so people still bring me the credit version of this question all the time, and the honest answer is more interesting than the card’s marketing.
My Free Vehicle Routing Optimizer Just Got Smarter
I’ve been turning twenty years of Operations Research models out of dusty Excel files and onto the open web, one at a time. The vehicle routing one — the free vehicle routing optimizer that lives at routing.kindoflost.com — just got a round of upgrades that make it a lot less fussy to actually use. None of it changes the price (still free, still runs in your browser), but it removes most of the friction that used to make people bounce off it.
Pickup and Delivery Route Optimization (Free Tool)
If you’ve ever tried to plan a pickup and delivery route by hand — grab a package here, drop it there, then double back across town for the next pickup — you’ve felt how fast it stops being a map problem and turns into a logic puzzle. Every delivery depends on a pickup happening first, every vehicle has a limit, and every stop has a window when it can actually happen. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool anyone can use. Here’s what makes pickup and delivery routing genuinely hard, and how to stop solving it by guesswork.
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Barista FIRE vs Coast FIRE: Which Half-Exit Fits You?
I retired early, and I still work — which sounds like a contradiction until you learn the vocabulary. The FIRE movement splits the “quit your job before 65” idea into flavors, and the two that generate the most confusion are barista FIRE vs coast FIRE. Both are half-exits: you leave the career, but you don’t fully unplug from income or from math. The difference between them is what does the heavy lifting afterwards — your part-time paycheck, or compound growth you banked years earlier. Having lived on the far side of this decision for over a decade (boss-free, but rarely idle), here’s how I’d explain the two to a friend deciding which door to take.
