> Treat fines like payments
> e.g. park illegally and let yourself think of the (expected value of the) fine as a parking fee
This doesn't seem like something you're "allowed" to do. Maybe more like "able" to do, in the sense that you can violate other laws, and maybe the payoff or the risk/reward ratio makes it worthwhile. My understanding of "allow" is that it means people will accept you doing something. The existence and enforcement (like fines) of rules that prohibit doing things seems exclusive to something being "allowed".
I did something like that in college a couple times. $10 fine for parking in the wrong spot on campus, only risk was being unable to register for a parking permit the next term if you didn't pay it off. It (on the few occasions I did it) beat the alternative of a 20- to 30-minute walk due to conflicting schedules (like having a medical appointment that got me to campus after most others had arrived). They'd only ticket once as long as the car was only there for 2-3 hours. Perfect for a class, drive to lunch, park properly after. Certainly not something to do frequently, and it wasn't illegal parking, it was just not permitted parking.
It's insane that any college would be set up in such a fashion that you'd have to drive to class. (Unless I'm misunderstanding this, and you're talking about driving to school?)
I lived at home because it was cheaper (free other than yard work, housework, and doing my own laundry), campus was 3 or 4 miles away depending on which end I needed (and roads were just dangerous enough I wasn't going to cycle, tried it, didn't like the assholes throwing shit at me). Most students lived on campus, but many (including locals like me) lived off campus.
But even those who lived on campus, the furthest dorms were where I'd have had to park on those mentioned days. I did that sometimes, but it really was a 20- to 30-minute walk depending on where I was going on campus because they decided a mile long parking lot made more sense than a parking deck (later built, after I graduated).
Also it had a bus service, but it really only covered connecting the business school, psychology school, and main campus. The massive parking lot was not covered by the bus service, which didn't make sense.
It wasn't literal shit, fortunately, but it was cans. This was in south Georgia and yes. Also my experience in middle Georgia. Assholes in trucks being assholes in trucks. I'm in Colorado now and I've seen a lot of cyclists so I'm planning to test out the roads near my home in the spring. From talking to coworkers the attitude is better here.
Strangely I found when owning a smallish truck in college, strangers would apparently decide to use my truck bed as a trash bin for their various drink cans.
Very strange and annoying.
Random beer and energy drink cans would fly out on the highway.
People just have too many cans, I guess.
Maybe it's just us southern states.
If the driver in front of you loses a piece of trash from their truck bed, consider it may not even be theirs!
Well, this was obviously thrown, and on multiple occasions. I will agree that trucks get used as trash bins too much by strangers, and sometimes debris flies out. But that wasn't my experience on these occasions.
Well, that may also have been a penalty but it wasn't one I faced. The only one I knew was the risk of being unable to register your vehicle in the next term.
But some people just never registered their vehicles, which was also an option. There was no electronic tool for the ticket givers (fellow students working for the school) to look up a vehicle. So instead of towing every violation, they just gave up. I knew a guy who had accrued a couple hundred tickets by the time he graduated, car wasn't under his name (his parents) so no penalties for him (from the school) if they'd tried to find the owner, and the school never pursued his parents for it.
It was not an effective system. The only people who actually had to pay for a parking permit were those who lived on campus because their cars would be there overnight, that's when cars would be towed if they lacked a current parking sticker. (I worked or studied on campus until 10 or 11pm most nights so I was paying for a permit.)
In this context "you're allowed to" means "this didn't necessarily occur to you as part of the solution space, but it is."
For example many programmers have it in their heads that their only two activities are writing production code and staring at/thinking about log output. Sometimes it's helpful to be reminded that you are "allowed" to write scripts to analyze log output. No one is worried that they will be punished for this. But a surprising number of programmers will stare down a programming-shaped problem and fail to put two and two together.
This is actually a well known thing in psychology.
Instituting a fine can actually cause the undesired behavior to increase.
E.g. daycare adds a late pickup fee, then it becomes, "Oh well, I can <get thing done> for $20" instead of something the parent feels really guilty about, thus actually INCREASING late pickups.
I worked at the college radio station located in the on campus student center, which also had a hotel attached. It was, like all campuses, annoying to find parking / work out transportation.
Then one day I just needed to run get something, so I parked in the hotel loading zone. I ran into someone and chatted for about close to an hour and then, remembering where I parked, freaked out and ran outside.
Car was still there, no problems.
In true hacker fashion, I went and sat in the car and waited to see when someone would a campus metermaid would come along.
They never did!
And so for the next 2 years I parked there every day.
In the end I did receive 6 $25 tickets and, ingloriously, I was towed once which cost me $250.
Compared to a parking pass it was an absolute steal, and in true "things you're allowed to do" form, it helped me realize the risks of transgression are lower than you think.
I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free ones).
There certainly is something weird about the relation of the title of the blog post to its content: the content is mostly about services, a lot of which seem quite costly. I'm not saying the post doesn't make sense, but it would be good if the author added a background/motivation to it. Or maybe just if they didn't use the word "allowed".
Maybe if you try to do all those things, but a lot of these are options for the upper middle class. It'd be rich people if it said "fly in a private jet."
> park illegally and let yourself think of the (expected value of the) fine as a parking fee
It seems that (in San Francisco) it can be cheaper to pay the ticket fines than pay for the parking upfront like one is supposed to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24796412
I have specifically taken devices apart to disable the LED inside. I also either put gaffer tape or black tape over the logos or use an angle grinder to clean them off.
I also remove logos and go out of my way to avoid buying things that have obnoxious not-obviously removable logos. My home is not a billboard for your products, thank you very much.
An astonishing amount of this list amounts to “spend money”, so while these things may play well here I think it’s worth pointing out that a large majority of the population is not allowed to do those things because they can’t afford to.
Not sure what Median Mortgage payment tells you without looking at health insurance payment, retirement savings, college saving for kids, college debt, auto payments etc.
I would expect a median family with median mortgage to have little money left over if they have children.
Yep. Rich people can hire experts to validate and spot check their ideas, even write articles and what not about it. I wonder how much money do I need to be able to do that. A few things in the list that cost money are worth it if done at the right time. Tutoring with the the right resource can be the best investment sometimes and of course rich people will afford more of that.
Yep, $1M is not going to attract people to do things for you just because. The $50M+ people will have people flock to do small things for you for free.
I saw it with my old boss. People would always be asking if they needed help or would just offer free stuff in hopes of getting something later.
Correlation may not be causation though. Do people flock to him because he's rich, or is he rich because people flock to him? (or ... something in between?)
This is clearly directed at people with some amount of disposable income. Also many may value their time and money differently. I used fancyhands for a bit when I was on a grad student salary and I thought it was worth my time even then.
Last year I saw a C level exec in a mid size startup spend 20 min on hold with a credit card company to dispute some booking. I was wondering why they would not offload that.
More specifically, I think it's directed at people (like me and apparently the author) who grew up, and maybe even spent a while as an adult, without much or any disposable income, but now are lucky enough to have some. It is taking me years to unlearn habits that no longer make sense for my situation, simply because when you're poor, so much of your life revolves around optimizing for money that it takes many, many reminders that it's ok to place value on time as well.
I have a bunch of friends that grew up working class, and they still, consistently, value their own time at 0. Regardless of their actual adult income. Which means they often spend ridiculous amounts of time and effort to save tiny amounts of money.
I grew up lower middle class instead, so I have other stupid frugal habits. Growing up, my parents never, ever, ever replaced a thing that was working. The only time you were allowed to replace a thing was when it was irredeemably broken.
I know what you mean, but I've come to understand that some people subconsciously enjoy that kind of 'penny wise' behavior. My wife does a lot of things I consider to be a huge waste of time when it comes to saving small amounts of money (like making specific combinations of orders because they're a deal and so on) but they perceive it differently. It's like part hobby and part pathological addiction.
> "Growing up, my parents never, ever, ever replaced a thing that was working. The only time you were allowed to replace a thing was when it was irredeemably broken."
That just sounds like common sense to me. Why replace a washing machine that still works just fine? For some gimmicky features or a shiny modern industrial design?
I fall firmly in the camp of not replacing stuff that works, clothes that still fit and aren't worn out, anything that still serves its purpose. Obviously I will repair or modify things to the extent of my skills to keep them going, clothes and computers are what I'm best at.
My TV is a 42" LG LCD that I picked up for $20 ages ago when my company was moving to a new office building. It works perfectly, supports 1080p and the picture quality is good after the usual adjustments I would have to do on a new TV anyway. None of the new TVs I can buy offer any real tangible improvements that make them worth the additional cost.
Sure, when this TV eventually breaks, I'll probably replace it with one that's slightly larger, 50-55" would be ideal for the space I have on the wall. But there's no need to rush that upgrade.
Consumerism has broken people's brains, they're stuck in an eternal loop of trying to keep up with the Joneses, never happy with what they already have. It's unhealthy and wasteful.
My current laptop is an X220i (with upgraded RAM, SSD, WLAN and battery), which is a ~2012 vintage machine. It runs openSUSE with no issues and plays 60fps YouTube videos smoothly.
My desktop machine is 2011 vintage hardware (Phenom II X6 with 16GB RAM), upgraded piecemeal to an SSD and a Radeon RX560. It plays the games I like to play (currently GTA V and Mudrunner) in 1080p on max settings and it's obviously plenty powerful for ordinary desktop applications.
If a PC does eventually become too slow to be practical in daily use, then I would say it's no longer really fit for purpose. That happened with my old Chromebook, which couldn't even play Youtube videos smoothly after they changed the codecs. It happened with my old P4-based PC, but the person I gave it to kept using it for years for basic desktop stuff.
I just don't replace stuff for the sake of upgrading, so I buy very little new stuff and keep what I have for a long time. I prefer spending more up front for something I know will last, and based on how much use i expect out of it. I'm not going to buy a super fancy drill, since I only need to drill holes a couple of times per year, so a basic one is fine. On the other hand, I prefer walking to get around, so I buy good quality footwear that lasts and can be repaired.
Great example from yesterday for me: wife complained about our toaster oven and that it is a pain (burns food among other things) and misses an older one we had that died. Old one ~$100, current one $35. She said we will just have to wait for this one to die and then get a good one. This was a good mentality when we were pinching pennies but I make FAANG money and told her it is totally fine to toss the toaster oven. She is still chewing on that idea as it feels wasteful.
Edit: I fully agree with you on all your examples. Just wanted to give a counter example.
Just the fact that you're discussing it and not just buying a new one as a reflexive action is good. There's a good argument to be made that your current toaster oven is not fit for purpose.
while i agree on tv, switching from 8ms response time monitor to 1ms with 100% srgb coverage and proper contrast made me able to skim on text much faster.
> Growing up, my parents never, ever, ever replaced a thing that was working.
Same, but I think that's a good thing. The culture of throwing things away and buying new ones just for the fun of it is bad for the future of humanity. I only replace things that are working when I have certainty that the still-working thing can be useful to someone else.
just curious, but (how) would it be possible to offload this with a financial service like a bank or credit card company? don’t they check your identity? can you really authorize someone else to do it without sharing sensitive details with them??
(I guess the super rich can have very trusted employees with such access, or banks provide white glove service at some point, but that’s clearly different)
In theory the owner should have a better relationship with their bank so they don't deal with that sort of thing.
You can add a signatory to a bank account (and I'm guessing to a credit card as well). I don't know of any services that specialize in nit-picking through the use of an authorized signer however part of said hypothetical service could be to bond / insure that the secondary signer doesn't take some sort of negative action that leaves the account/owner in bad standing.
But again you're running into the ultimate question of why isn't your bank / credit card taking care of you...maybe it's because the bank / CC just make money off of the fiduciary mishaps of the owner when they don't have 20 minutes to wait on hold.
If you have a net worth of a few hundred thousand dollars you can engage in "private banking" services with many major banks. You will be paired with a banker who can work as your advocate, bend internal rules, and cut down the amount of time required to deal with disputes. If your card happens to be issued by that bank, I would imagine they could assist with aspects of that.
If you have substantially more money than that then you can enlist financial professionals to legally act on your behalf and settle disputes for you.
There is an absolutely massive marketing industry out there contending for discretionary income. It is worth pointing out options which may have high utility for the buyer, but where the sell side doesn't spend billions on pumping awareness into the culture.
Definitely noticed that, and it is certainly a privilege to be able to trade time for money; but it is also something that many people don't stop to consider. It makes sense to be thrifty when you're younger and poorer but it can become a blind spot when things change and your time starts becoming more valuable.
Especially when it gets tangled up with moral judgments or self-image: "why order something at restaurant that you can make at home?" "what kind of cyclist can't change a flat" "only a loser has to pay to get dates" etc...
None of those things are absolute right or wrong, but it should be based on a honest assessment of the tradeoffs, not emotional associations or ingrained assumptions.
regarding: 'trading time and money'.
My simple rule has always been, if I can hire someone to do something by the hour less than what I get paid by the hour then I should do that. This is 'trading money for time'.
To offset the money spent, I should then reverse and 'trade time for money' either by increased work or training and education for an increased pay rate.
In my own experience, I've found that reasoning that way has some real downsides:
- Just because my hourly rate is $X, it doesn't follow that I can always work an additional hour to make an additional $X.
- After working 40+ hours/week doing paid work, working an additional hour at my day job to avoid doing something else does not make for a happy life. In fact, it makes life quite dull, and made me a very narrow person.
It also makes you dependent on other people. Finding the right people and matching schedules has a cost.
I can repair my motorcycle any day I choose. Delivering my motorcycle to a mechanic during office hours has a cost. Finding a good mechanic has a cost.
I also find that eating at restaurants is more time-consuming than cooking at home. I have to go there, order and wait, then head back home after.
Your time is only worth money if you’d otherwise be working. You can’t just say, well, I make $100/hr so I will outsource any task I can that costs less!
I make a salary, not hourly, so it really doesn’t make sense for me to hire someone to do a task I can do myself. Just tossing $$$ away.
> Just because my hourly rate is $X, it doesn't follow that I can always work an additional hour to make an additional $X.
this is a good point for salaried employees. in any case, your pre-tax hourly rate is sort of a meaningless figure for comparison. if you want to do this kind of comparison at all, you should probably think in terms of disposable income. for example, if you make $30/hr post-tax and half of your budget is fixed costs, a $30 discretionary purchase is two hours worth of work.
If you see this list only as "spend money" I think it's the perfect article for you.
The overarching point of the author is that most of his target audience (and those reading HN) are used to being thrifty and not spend money at all, even when they get older.
They fail to realize that at some point, it's worth your time to spend the X amount either because the value of investing X down the line is so great, or because the time saved by spending X is now so much greater than before, because of something changing in your life (career has progressed, valuation of free time has changed).
I definitely see this myself daily, ending up wasting few minutes each day on trivial things that add up, while it could be fixed by paying a small amount.
Or for example trying to wade through a free course to learn something, but ultimately just dropping it out of no motivation. Compared to paying for a course, which makes you more responsible s you paid for it and usually also offers more effective training.
I agree, and the spin that I would put on it is that I find the framing of this article to be particularly helpful. The sense of "wait, you can do that?" For me, it has often been the case that b I've encountered new concepts that I've never clearly thought about in my own head before, but that once I hear stated openly, are as clear as day.
For the longest time, I had not encountered a concept of "self-care" but then I started seeing that term pop up around the internet and it seemed quite obvious that it was an important thing. That might seem silly, but if your timeline for these things reaches back to the '90s, like mine does, a notion like self-care is relatively recent on the historical timeline as a familiar concept.
I've also seen this in writing, with how you handle plot and character development. Or even some things that are silly but obvious like the fact that you can just go out and go on hikes if you want, and there are tons and tons of places to do that.
I feel like there's all kinds of hidden mental blocks that you can go your whole life not knowing that you have, and I appreciate this idea of elevating the concept to its own genre and targeting it with articles such as the one posted here.
Yes, definitely. Unfortunately this all is usually buried behind heaps and heaps of people trying to sell you something that won't work (either because it just doesn't work for you or because it's a scam! Or maybe both!)
Quite a few in the list amount to "Hire someone to do some optional service for you." I mean, I know I can do all these things. Who doesn't know this? It's not that we don't know we can do these things, it just seems so wasteful to hire someone to do some thing that you (assuming you are able-bodied) can do yourself. Hire someone to "stand in line for you" or "run errands"? Are you kidding me? It's like the Anti-Frugal.
I'm a bit of a DIY obsessive, so maybe I'm just all the way on the other side of the spectrum, but I don't hire someone to do something unless I feel the task is so far outside of my comfort zone that it poses a danger to me. I usually only do it after I've tried the task myself and utterly failed. You'd be surprised what you can do yourself with just a few YouTube tutorials and a decent collection of tools. As a side effect, I've gotten pretty good at being handy around the house, managing the family's finances, repairing our cars, doing major home improvement projects including building barns and sheds, building furniture, lawn care, tree trimming, electrical, plumbing, etc. I consider developing these skills a better investment than the alternative which is perpetually needing to pay someone to do them.
I also like to DIY so what you are saying makes sense to me. However I also realize that there are things I don't know how to make and I have no interest in (for me it's taxes, administrivia and co). Those things I am gladly paying somebody to do that for me as I am effectively buying free time. And someone who is not into DIY is also buying free time if they hire someone for trimming their trees.
Well my time is definitely not free; people pay lots of money for access to it.
The problem with "muh welcome to upper middle class prosperity" lists like this is it doesn't account for the management time and mental load involved in something like "Hire a researcher or expert consultant." For that matter "Cleaning services" or "Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into ..." require significant cognitive overhead and time to hire and manage unless you or your spouse or close friends are already doing such things for your day job. If you're already doing such things for your day job you probably already thought of these things.
Some of them are pretty insane: people who need a maid to chuck their clothes into the washer and dryer, then put them away: if it takes you longer than 15 minutes a week to do this ... I have to wonder at your wardrobe. I mean, I understand some people deeply resent performing such menial tasks, or maybe they have large families, but it's not that big a job compared to feeding yourself and getting some exercise.
For myself, hiring experts to assist with my day to day life has been a fairly mixed bag, and my education, hobbies and lifestyle is such that DiY is usually the win.
> if it takes you longer than 15 minutes a week to do this ... I have to wonder at your wardrobe
Consider a large family with multiple children, a humid environment where towels have to be washed often or they smell, plus the safety precaution of washing outside clothes more often to eliminate any possible coronavirus, then you have the recipe for a full load of laundry almost every day. It easily adds up to way more than 15 minutes a week.
> Well my time is definitely not free; people pay lots of money for access to it.
Your working time is worth money, but your free time is free. Your time is only worth money (opportunity cost) if you'd otherwise be working on some money-making opportunity.
If it's 1. Hiring someone for $25/hr to mow the lawn while I work on a contract that's making me $200/hr, I'd choose to hire the gardener. If it's 2. Hiring someone to mow the lawn while I play video games, I'm better off if I mow it myself.
I charge by the hour, so my "free time" is billable too. Focuses the mind knowing whatever you're doing when you're not working is billable hours (hence no vidya). I still mostly make my own food, coffee and wash my own clothes. Hell Paul Krugman washes his own clothes in his sink, while he's travelling, and I'm pretty sure he bills more than I do (I actually do use laundry service when I travel for work).
Anyway, maybe that's why I don't see a lot of those things on the list as desirable; if I have to spend two hours managing the graphic designer to make a chart/plot/figure, I may as well fiddle around in xfig or whatever to get it done myself.
DIY for its own sake is often a "penny wise, pound foolish" approach. I recently needed a new TV stand, but I didn't feel like paying even what a cheap ikea version would cost. thinking myself quite clever, I bought a bunch of cinder blocks and a piece of particle board from home depot instead. the total cost was about $12, mostly for the board. it makes a very stable platform for the TV, but it weighs at least five times as much as the cheap ikea stand. it takes four trips to move the damn thing and it leaves cinderblock dust everywhere. I regret that decision every time I move or even rearrange my room.
> I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free ones).
I grew up not poor by world standards, but somewhat poor by Western standards. What really resonated with me was the point about buying a comfortable mattress. It wasn't the mattress in my case, but the bed I slept on. I bought it used 8 years ago. I fixed it twice. It was creaking again. It's not that I couldn't buy a new one, it's just that I was used to not buying furniture. After all it's only comfort.
Last year I bought a new bed and it improved a lot of things for me. It's simple, but if you grow up thinking about every penny you spend you get weird habits.
Yes, there are certainly a few core areas where spending money can greatly improve quality of life. A solid bed and chair (if you work a desk job) are two of them.
I relate to 100% of this. I guess I should clarify that I’m not saying it’s bad advice to people with means to say “you’re allowed to spend money to [achieve some life comfort or progress]”. And owning a nice bed is definitely one I can relate to (and when I have the disposable income again I intend to get a better mattress than the one I currently have).
I guess my objection to the article, as presented, is it’s kind of tone deaf particularly at a time when many people are financially struggling to just assert that you’re “allowed” to hire people for a long list of tasks, at a cost that many people wouldn’t even dream of being able to afford or justify.
It's true money can buy a lot of them, but you can barter too. E.g. make a deal with your housemate to clean the house if they'll do a few hours research for you.
So you have to spend/trade something, but (for me) it's harder to think of what's worth spending/trading for. Hence the post.
So they can just ignore the advice in the article if it doesn't apply to them. What's your point? People should only write articles from the perspective of extreme poverty?
I live in Texas, a good chunk of the year, it would be nuts to try to live without A/C (We're not quite Death Valley, but it can get pretty hot here ...). So, I'd amend that one to:
"Open the windows and turn off the A/C"
I really like the few months a year where I can do this and not get cooked!
Certainly you are _allowed_ -- but if it's for an economically meaningful service, like renting an apartment, the follow-on suggestion that it's "only weird if you make it weird" really fails to capture how likely it is that it _will_ change the nature of your relationship as soon as someone decides not to pay, or whatever other irreconcilable issue comes up. Just be careful when going into business in any way with people you otherwise like.
I remember I got a new job just outside of the city, my first day I got 3 fines for parking within 3 meters of a postbox, There was no yellow lines to say you could not nor was it signed. they fined me every 2 hours. cost me $1400 AUD. I never even knew this was a thing. I lived the next 3 weeks on soup. welcome to the city.
You can also contest just fines. In the US fines are used as an undemocratic, regressive tax to raise extra revenue for the government. Everyone should contest every fine so they are unprofitable.
It definitely never hurts to ask. I recently, very absent mindedly, parked in a disabled parking spot and got a $250 fine. Wrote in with my sob story and that I truly do care about this kind of thing, was only there for ten minutes during which time several of the adjacent spots were open, and of course I’m willing to pay the fine as those are the rules... they forgive the whole amount.
Not something I’d abuse, but second chances can be had.
Oh, interesting. Which country? I'll have to keep that in mind. In the <$local> highway code that I had to memorize , it's actually legal to use an unoccupied disabled parking space as a loading/unloading stop (for 10 minutes, say). You're just not allowed to leave your vehicle there -unoccupied- for an extended period of time.
Depends on if the fine is punitive vs compensatory. If the fine is just to offset an inconvenience you’ve caused, there is no reason for it to go up with income.
Specifically, parking. If I park in an illegal place, get a fine, and mentally consider it a fee, that feels alright by me. But if I park in an illegal place with the same intention as above, and don't get a fine, I'm a jerk. It's tough to decouple those two.
Bill Gates doesn’t care about a $200 double parking ticket, in fact it’s probably worth it for him if if saves him time. He has no incentive to abide by that rule. If you scale it with income then everyone actually has skin in the game.
He also could easily avoid the direct fine by having a driver drop him off and idle outside, or just not directly own the vehicle in question.
The point of raising the price accessing any shared asset is to optimize usage of that asset. Otherwise you end up with private enterprises like non-street parking lots eating the profits with nothing going to the rest of the people.
You're not optimizing the usage though, you're just making it so that people who cannot afford won't be able to park. Sure, if you raise the price enough more spots will be open. What purpose could that possibly serve..?
If you don't want non-street parking lots to funnel in all the profit, then you provide efficient and wide-spread public transport.
Abundant free parking as a transportation strategy has not been especially wonderful for low-income people, who among other things:
- Often don't have cars at all, and have to walk that much longer to get across all the parking between places they want to be
- Spend a large portion of their incomes on cars, maintenance, fuel, insurance etc. when they even can
- Are required to live further away from productive places by the high cost of e.g. minimum parking requirements and low density ceilings "because traffic"
- Suffer the brunt of air pollution
Parking in a central business district should probably be as much of a luxury as living in one is today, and vice versa.
Oh I agree parking is a bad strategy overall. It shouldn’t be a luxury though, we should just provide better means of public transportation in dense cities.
It’s a solved problem, look at European cities like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and many more... But in America robust public transport never gets done for many reasons including that special interests don’t want it to.
More importantly: parking illegally often endangers or harms other people (e.g. by blocking fire hydrants that might be needed in an emergency, or by impeding the flow of traffic).
If the firefighters need to get to a hydrant, they will get to it, car or no car. I think we should do away with fines and just let people assume the risk that if there's a fire, your car windows might be smashed to run a hose through it.
Likewise, if the car is impeding traffic, tow it out of there. The fine does nothing to fix the problem.
I’ve never understood this. The number of parking spaces that can’t be used because of fire hydrants is enormous, most of those hydrants will never be used, and it seems like a car in front of a hydrant would only be a very small delay for firefighters.
Every fire hydrant is thirty feet of unparkable space. Some streets "double up" by putting them at intersections (so it's only ten additional no-parking feet), but that's enough to fit three or four cars.
On the other hand, I'm not sure it's proven that having more parking spaces translates to better outcomes, namely less pollution caused by lowering time spent to find a parking space.
Considering that, then the fine should be the monetary equivalent to the worst thing that happened or could happen because of the infraction.
Parking illegally in a specific spot could result in the death of 8 people? then the fine should be 8 * value of life. the value of life is ~ $9M in the US, so the fine should be 72 million dollars.
Well things are way worse about this in europe than in the US. US justice system is selectively varied compared to others. Europe you just pay the flat fee. In the US you can get a little popular/street justice into it.
I appreciate how nordic countries have a somewhat income balanced fines and practices and they still have decent amount of wealth inequality (much less than US however)
Actually if you look at wealth inequality, the Gini coefficient is higher for the Netherlands and Sweden than for the US. Denmark is pretty close as well. The benefits these countries have is the better life for people at the bottom and less income inequality.
It's challenging to prove who is driving the car at the time of the fine (i.e., parking fine). Therefore, it would be difficult to tie fines to income.
Except the fine is for the car (and hence the owner), so it still works out.
An acceptable middle ground is for fines to scale with the value of a car at registration. And if you can't afford the fines, then don't lend your expensive car to people who don't know how to park.
So then the poors won't be able to afford cheap used cars because the rich will drive up the prices because they will want to buy them as commuter shitboxes. And then the fines will scale up in reaction to that increased value. And then everyone will be worse off than we currently are.
I'll be fine, because I already own all my shitboxes, but this is just bad policy.
Coming back to this... People lend their cars all the time - siblings, children, parents, etc. So you cannot pin who was driving the vehicle at the time of the fine. This is why red light cameras are a flat fee. They do not scale based on the number of tickets the car received. You would think that if someone received 30 red light cameras, it is time to increase the fee, but this is not cannot be accomplished without proving who the driver is.
>acceptable middle ground is for fines to scale with the value of a car at registration
The type of car one drives is not at all an indication of their actual finances. Many people, unfortunately, feel the need to impress others by spending money they don't have.
They need to pay it right? Just require everyone to either show their income or look up their tax info while processing the ticket. They could also off set the cost of processing the info onto the ticket it's self.
But why? The true cost of an action is usually independent of personal wealth.
If I keep my car parked in a space and the street sweep needs to miss that spot, the trash that remains has the same negative societal impact whether I'm rich or poor.
If that trash "cost" society $100, why would society subsidize a poor person to park illegally who could only afford to pay $20?
You said it wasn't clear from the context that a fine is punitive. I pointed out that context isn't necessary to determine that, as it's clear from the definition of fine.
Do you now agree that fines are punitive?
If so, do you agree that fines need to be set high enough to provide a disincentive, even if that is higher than the average negative externality created by an infraction?
astrea said "Because the fine is punitive, not cost-based.", and I said it is not clear that the fine is not cost based due to lack of context. I don't think any reasonable reading of my comments would lead anyone to believe that I ever thought fines were not punitive, and I feel like you're arguing in bad faith, so cheers.
I thought you were saying it wasn't clear that the fine is punitive. I quoted the comments I read that led me to believe that. If you think I was arguing in bad faith and/or that my reading wasn't reasonable, then that's of course your prerogative, even though I don't agree.
Maybe the average amount of the fine needs to be more than the value of the societal impact.
The purpose of a fine can be seen in at least two ways:
1. Provide recompense to society for the production of a negative externality.
2. Create a disincentive against the production of a negative externality.
If fines could be levied perfectly, automatically and without administration cost, then perhaps you can see the fine as #1, and set the fine at the societal cost.
But, because it costs money to enforce regulations, there's usually some sampling done: if you park illegally, you might not be caught. Because the chance of getting caught is not 100%, and because those who are not caught do not contribute their share of enforcement costs, the fines for a single infraction must be a multiple of the actual harm caused. (Assuming that can even be measured.)
Let's say the harm caused is $20 per infraction, and this is normally enough to disincentive a poor person from parking illegally. If they make a mistake and are subsequently caught, is it better for them to pay $100 (for the harm caused, plus paying for those who weren't caught), even though this may be equivalent to their family's monthly food budget?
As long as $20 fine is enough to:
- provide a strong disincentive, and
- provide recompense
... then that should be enough, no?
The rich person, for whom a $20 fine is not enough of a disincentive, should pay more ($200?). And the money raised can be used to cover negative externalities for those who weren't caught, and overall enforcement costs.
Taken seriously, this would be a very complex system and it would fail to realize its claimed potential.
It only sounds good in low resolution.
Depending on a bunch of hard questions, devils in the details, you’ll end up with dilemmae where neither option is good:
Is parking income net worth, or taxable income? Previous year or trailing? Can you deduct your charity donations before deciding what you’ll pay for parking? What about a company car; is it the company’s income or the driver’s?
We are techies, we can always build a more complicated system; it is our nature:)
A more simple system off the top of my head: you have fine modifier based on your previous year taxes. Your accountant now tells you you have a fine multiplier of 6. When the ticket comes in, it is always addressable to a given entity. Can it be gamed? Of course, just use a car registered to your broke ass cousin. Progressive fines could work just like progressive tax.
Interesting opinion: Fixed fines are inherently unfair to the poor. But prison sentences are inherently unfair to the rich. After all, if you already live in a crowded slum much like a prison cell, and your life is prison-level boring and oppressive already, then going to prison barely costs you anything. But if you live in a mansion and spend all day indulging in the finest luxuries on offer, going to prison is a massive decrease in your quality of life. (source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-dif...)
depends on what the fine is for. I'd guess most parking fines are simply for parking in legal paid parking without actually paying. in this case the purpose of the fine is the same as the fee itself: to increase the availability of parking. I don't see any reason to scale the fine here unless you just hate rich people.
in more serious cases (eg, blocking a fire hydrant or alley) simply towing the vehicle seems like penalty enough.
I think it's in that genre, but also has some fresh ideas. I actually really like this line of thinking. It seems "wrong" on the surface but really is just non-normative. If you can buy dinner for 2, you can also hire somone for a small job off fiver. One is seen as normal and the other as elitist and out of reach. I hired a genealogist once and absolutely got my money's worth and they were a world expert on records in that particular geography.
Is this such good advice? Relationships are hard work, and can be made (or mended) given sufficient effort. But sometimes, it just doesn't work and can't be made to.
* Modify your stuff
* * Rotate your monitor to portrait
...and write a script to do this, along with rotating your drawing tablet to match (which may actually involve rotating it the other way depending on where the cable is and what works with your desk. Because poking around in the prefs with just one of monitor/tablet rotated is a major pain in the ass.
I am able to help you how you can find ways to help with your preparation, without specific difficulties and difficulties now, and then of course you have to refer to experts who can easily compose various essays and other works. See http://homework-writer.com/ right now. Soon, people write complicated tasks, so that you can't think about the outcome. A lot of people are concerned about plagiarism, but there is no plagiarism in this area.
> Follow up many times | You won’t make people mad if you’re polite.
I am getting lots of emails from outsourcing companies. I ignore them. I find their follow up emails extremely frustrating.
"Thanks for taking the time to read this email. After I sent my previous email (See below) I had put a reminder in to check-in with you to see how things were going with the need of a Data Engineering."
Is there any service which allows you to share a personal assistant among many people? I would love to offload many of my menial tasks but I don't have enough to cover the time of a decent assistant. And anyone who is okay with sitting with their twiddling thumbs turns out to be not that good!
While I agree with the sentiment, most of the tasks I want to offload involve PII that I would not want to give to some random person. I would love a personal assistant who is able to do things like that, but I haven't seen a good model for a trustworthy one that would be cheap enough that it would still be worth hiring out for.
Definitely not gonna hand over my tax returns but other than that, I'm not generally worried about it - granted they will still know reasonable amount of detail about me, that's the price you pay I suppose. Which is why I wasn't comfortable with fancyhands and other such services- I still want ONE person to handle my stuff, and have some ability to screen them for trustworthiness.
Share multiple flats with multiple people (i.e. live in multiple places, but cheap)
Study 10 years.
Make your own iced tea in the fridge.
Buy food in bulk.
Drink tap water.
Create your own dishes by mixing ingredients.
Cook/fry/bake food you would usually eat raw.
Eat food raw that you would usually cook/fry/bake.
Sleep everywhere in your home.
Learn languages, instruments, or sports after you turned 30.
Drink no alcohol at a party and still have fun.
Start/stop smoking and drinking after 30.
Found a company like you would buy a game console.
Take no VC money.
Take muliple years and tries to create a good product.
Write music/give concerts for yourself or your friends only.
Don't wear shoes outside.
Don't have an opinion on a topic.
Overall:
Don't play pre-defined games in your life, but ask if they make you happy. You only have one life, make the most out of it.
Sometimes you have to play by some rules made up by other people to get into a better place, but look at them closely, it could very well be that they are more open to interpretation than they first seem.
I've tried it, but probably I don't have that "you are done sleeping" signal. When I'm awake from "long enough" sleep (10-12hr), I'm tired and lazy. When I sleep 8 hours flat, I'm still sleepy when I get up, but I'm functioning normally after morning routines (washing, breakfast etc).
One beauty of a smart phone is just before laying down to sleep, just ask your phone to set an alarm in eight hours, and put it well out of your reach. And don't get back into bed (or the couch) when you get up to cancel the alarm. Just get moving.
I have done this when I got caught up in a really good book and read until 4:00 AM. Generally, I wake up on my own, before the alarm goes off, but it is a safety valve.
I know exactly what you are talking about. It took me months to develop a proper sleeping pattern that doesnt depend on alarms. IMO thats something you need to learn, especially when you never were used to it.
Do those "multiple romantic partners" know about each other? If the answer is "no" then yours is a very jerky suggestion (I know "jerky" is a harsh word for this forum, but I can't come up with anything else to describe this).
I agree, that being open about that is completely key. When I was very young (1970s) I had a few female friends that I had no interest in dating, and they had no interest in dating me, but we agreed we were available to each other during times we were single and needed some sexual attention. It went both ways, and we always practiced safe sex. I would say any one of them hit on me out of need, over those few short years, as often as I hit on them. It was always discrete, and polite, and quite frankly, quite fun, because there was no romantic baggage. No expectation. Other than pleasure and release. And it made it clear to me then, that sex was as important for women as it was for men, but more fraught with risk. And if you could be cooperative on the risk (one word, condoms) and open about what the physical needs and desires were (learn how to use your hands, gentlemen) the physical aspect of it could be mutual and joyous.
Those years ended for me a long time ago, but they were important, for me, and for my partners at that time.
I doubt the marginal gains from sending followups on cold emails can make or break any business, it's rude, and it's mildly illegal.
Maybe I'm just grumpy, but... if you send me a cold email, I'll either respond or delete it. Then, if the original didn't have an "unsubscribe" link, plus you follow up on it, I'll tell gmail to block you.
I did think cold email wasn’t the best example, as that tactic is overused. Though if it is extremely well targeted and personal it could make sense.
However, one thing people don’t do often enough is follow up when the other person has expressed interest. This kind of followup is usually welcome, as inertia and distraction lead to things not happening. This is especially true in commercial context. Eg someone may express strong interest in buying, get busy, drift off, then enthusiastically buy when you ping them a bit later.
If it short circuits, the circuit breaker on that circuit will open up and cut power within a couple of milliseconds, before anything has had a chance to catch fire. Though I definitely second the sibling comment about the multimeter.
He's entertaining,but a little more research would have shown that radiant toasters are still common in catering. Those conveyor-toasters in hotel restaurants are an example.
Sounds too risky to do on your own, without any activist structure behind you that can come to your help if things go south. At least prepare a lawyer contact.
It's funny. His conclusion with the "life is cheap to save" was that he could save lives. Mine was that I don't care that much about the arbitrary life.
Be very careful about this. Surgery in the modern age is safe, but there is always a risk, whether from the surgery itself, the anesthesia, or from infection.
Be sure that you are really sure that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Minimalism, abstention, freganism, hand me downs, barter, begging, and luck.
Make websites which work in any browser, including 25yo classics, in the spirit of the open web.
Sleep without a schedule.
Ditto kay on multiple parallel romantic partners, with a whole larger than the sum of the pieces.
Travel somewhere without any lodging plans, only a sleeping bag.
Think for yourself and don,t do unhealthy things even if they are normalized. This is a whole other list.
Maintain your health and sanity as top priority over anything else.
Abandon materialism and attachment.
Harm no living being on purpose.
Make friends with mammals, plants, insects.
Meditate any time of day for any length of time as many times as see fit.
Be effective and happy while doing all this.
Tailor your own reality based on your intent.
Not eat for 72 hours comfortably and be better off for it.
Sadly, I am seemingly not allowed to have a reasonable Web browser with a view source button and unstupid address bar on a small form factor device. I,m looking, though...
Actually I started living pretty much like this after my startup sold four years ago. I saw a dramatic increase in my happiness and life satisfaction. All my friends back home complain about how everyone seems so increasingly unhappy. Karen as I understand her is a prototypical suburban soccer mom. By definition she couldn't be bohemian. I'm not sure quite what is being said here.
> Actually I started living pretty much like this after my startup sold four years ago. I saw a dramatic increase in my happiness and life satisfaction.
Wow, all that's holding back my life satisfaction is a major windfall! Thanks for the useful tip.
That's what I mean though, even as a wishlist you'd just come across as entitled.
The kind of person who thinks rules don't apply to them because they're 'free' but they're just blissfully inconsiderate of others.
"Don't walk on the grass." "I will quietly ignore this rule, because ME ME ME, freedom!" - Later, the groundskeeper: "I have to roll out new sod everywhere those people were stepping..."
Or can you imagine being a bank teller and trying to help this person? "Sir, I need a signature." "I don't like, DO signatures." "...Sir?" "It's like, freedom, man." "...but to execute your request..." "Get me someone else who will bend the rules for me and my freedom!"
I am entitled. I,m entitled to make my own choices, just as you are entitled to make up stories about why something is impossible or does not agree with your fears or morals.
I don’t know op, but if they don’t do paperwork, maybe it means just that. They wont use a bank due to requirements that violate their code. People can and do live without using a bank. Maybe they have a loose definition of paperwork that allows for a checking account.
Instead of using your base assumptions and ruling out what they said, ask probing questions to validate your understanding. At the end, you may just come to the same conclusion as before (but this time with data!) or you may learn something.
As for “the rules don’t apply to me,” there are many rules that really don’t apply that many folks just assume to be required. It is ok to eat breakfast for dinner for a silly example.
I agree that rule breaking should not involve pissing in someone’s cookie jar, but if you are not inconveniencing others, it seems all fair game to me.
It was not really a silicon valley startup. I would have made 4x more at a cushy corporate gig over that time. But it was a good adventure. After, I realized that instead of paying $6000 a month for living expenses, I could restructure my life and pay just $1000. So I sold everything and left. The stress disappeared and the freedom to do what I want each day is great.
Everyone is eager to judge you, but I'm just curious. Why xo you think it made you happier?
I'm in a similar situation, and I'd say the main contributing factor to my happiness is not having to work 40 hours a week. Everything else is just sugar on top.
I still take contracts from time to time and do other work, even just because I find it interesting. I think it made me happier because, I'm free to follow things I like and enjoy.
I thought it was targeted more towards the general population. I was a bit too harsh.My apologies.
The harmful bit was because I read it as though you were preaching rather than talking about intensely personal choices. With that qualification, my statement of it being harmful was unwarranted.
It,s kind of like launching a successful startup. It used to be a struggle for me as well, but having more open time has given me more opportunities to work on it.
It,s still a shitton of effort, not a walk in the park, but it,s also fun and rewarding.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadThis doesn't seem like something you're "allowed" to do. Maybe more like "able" to do, in the sense that you can violate other laws, and maybe the payoff or the risk/reward ratio makes it worthwhile. My understanding of "allow" is that it means people will accept you doing something. The existence and enforcement (like fines) of rules that prohibit doing things seems exclusive to something being "allowed".
But even those who lived on campus, the furthest dorms were where I'd have had to park on those mentioned days. I did that sometimes, but it really was a 20- to 30-minute walk depending on where I was going on campus because they decided a mile long parking lot made more sense than a parking deck (later built, after I graduated).
Also it had a bus service, but it really only covered connecting the business school, psychology school, and main campus. The massive parking lot was not covered by the bus service, which didn't make sense.
If the driver in front of you loses a piece of trash from their truck bed, consider it may not even be theirs!
That surprises me. I would have thought that most colleges had a rule saying that they wouldn't give you a diploma until you had settled all arrears.
But some people just never registered their vehicles, which was also an option. There was no electronic tool for the ticket givers (fellow students working for the school) to look up a vehicle. So instead of towing every violation, they just gave up. I knew a guy who had accrued a couple hundred tickets by the time he graduated, car wasn't under his name (his parents) so no penalties for him (from the school) if they'd tried to find the owner, and the school never pursued his parents for it.
It was not an effective system. The only people who actually had to pay for a parking permit were those who lived on campus because their cars would be there overnight, that's when cars would be towed if they lacked a current parking sticker. (I worked or studied on campus until 10 or 11pm most nights so I was paying for a permit.)
For example many programmers have it in their heads that their only two activities are writing production code and staring at/thinking about log output. Sometimes it's helpful to be reminded that you are "allowed" to write scripts to analyze log output. No one is worried that they will be punished for this. But a surprising number of programmers will stare down a programming-shaped problem and fail to put two and two together.
Instituting a fine can actually cause the undesired behavior to increase.
E.g. daycare adds a late pickup fee, then it becomes, "Oh well, I can <get thing done> for $20" instead of something the parent feels really guilty about, thus actually INCREASING late pickups.
Then one day I just needed to run get something, so I parked in the hotel loading zone. I ran into someone and chatted for about close to an hour and then, remembering where I parked, freaked out and ran outside.
Car was still there, no problems.
In true hacker fashion, I went and sat in the car and waited to see when someone would a campus metermaid would come along.
They never did!
And so for the next 2 years I parked there every day.
In the end I did receive 6 $25 tickets and, ingloriously, I was towed once which cost me $250.
Compared to a parking pass it was an absolute steal, and in true "things you're allowed to do" form, it helped me realize the risks of transgression are lower than you think.
I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free ones).
Shameless plug: if you're looking for a productivity monitor I can (personally) help: https://coding-pal.com/
It seems that (in San Francisco) it can be cheaper to pay the ticket fines than pay for the parking upfront like one is supposed to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24796412
Also yet another use for BluTac
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-census-idUSKB...
Median mortgage payment is $1550/mo. 40% of US homes are free of mortgage.
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-mor...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2019/07/26/nea...
There are a lot of folks in the US that are just scraping by.
There are a lot more folks with enough disposable income to pursue one of these strategies. Not everybody.
[And this doesn’t include wealth and savings.]
I would expect a median family with median mortgage to have little money left over if they have children.
I saw it with my old boss. People would always be asking if they needed help or would just offer free stuff in hopes of getting something later.
I grew up lower middle class instead, so I have other stupid frugal habits. Growing up, my parents never, ever, ever replaced a thing that was working. The only time you were allowed to replace a thing was when it was irredeemably broken.
Took me a while to get rid of that habit.
That just sounds like common sense to me. Why replace a washing machine that still works just fine? For some gimmicky features or a shiny modern industrial design?
I fall firmly in the camp of not replacing stuff that works, clothes that still fit and aren't worn out, anything that still serves its purpose. Obviously I will repair or modify things to the extent of my skills to keep them going, clothes and computers are what I'm best at.
My TV is a 42" LG LCD that I picked up for $20 ages ago when my company was moving to a new office building. It works perfectly, supports 1080p and the picture quality is good after the usual adjustments I would have to do on a new TV anyway. None of the new TVs I can buy offer any real tangible improvements that make them worth the additional cost.
Sure, when this TV eventually breaks, I'll probably replace it with one that's slightly larger, 50-55" would be ideal for the space I have on the wall. But there's no need to rush that upgrade.
Consumerism has broken people's brains, they're stuck in an eternal loop of trying to keep up with the Joneses, never happy with what they already have. It's unhealthy and wasteful.
My desktop machine is 2011 vintage hardware (Phenom II X6 with 16GB RAM), upgraded piecemeal to an SSD and a Radeon RX560. It plays the games I like to play (currently GTA V and Mudrunner) in 1080p on max settings and it's obviously plenty powerful for ordinary desktop applications.
If a PC does eventually become too slow to be practical in daily use, then I would say it's no longer really fit for purpose. That happened with my old Chromebook, which couldn't even play Youtube videos smoothly after they changed the codecs. It happened with my old P4-based PC, but the person I gave it to kept using it for years for basic desktop stuff.
I just don't replace stuff for the sake of upgrading, so I buy very little new stuff and keep what I have for a long time. I prefer spending more up front for something I know will last, and based on how much use i expect out of it. I'm not going to buy a super fancy drill, since I only need to drill holes a couple of times per year, so a basic one is fine. On the other hand, I prefer walking to get around, so I buy good quality footwear that lasts and can be repaired.
Edit: I fully agree with you on all your examples. Just wanted to give a counter example.
Yeah, but that's now what I wrote.
There's a long, long, infuriating way between "works just fine" and "irredeemably broken". Trust me, I know.
Obviously, if a washing machine doesn't complete the washing cycle or a toaster doesn't toast right, it does need to be fixed or possibly replaced.
Same, but I think that's a good thing. The culture of throwing things away and buying new ones just for the fun of it is bad for the future of humanity. I only replace things that are working when I have certainty that the still-working thing can be useful to someone else.
(I guess the super rich can have very trusted employees with such access, or banks provide white glove service at some point, but that’s clearly different)
You can add a signatory to a bank account (and I'm guessing to a credit card as well). I don't know of any services that specialize in nit-picking through the use of an authorized signer however part of said hypothetical service could be to bond / insure that the secondary signer doesn't take some sort of negative action that leaves the account/owner in bad standing.
But again you're running into the ultimate question of why isn't your bank / credit card taking care of you...maybe it's because the bank / CC just make money off of the fiduciary mishaps of the owner when they don't have 20 minutes to wait on hold.
Most of the virtual assistant services have you store your spending details for this exact scenario.
If you have substantially more money than that then you can enlist financial professionals to legally act on your behalf and settle disputes for you.
Especially when it gets tangled up with moral judgments or self-image: "why order something at restaurant that you can make at home?" "what kind of cyclist can't change a flat" "only a loser has to pay to get dates" etc...
None of those things are absolute right or wrong, but it should be based on a honest assessment of the tradeoffs, not emotional associations or ingrained assumptions.
- Just because my hourly rate is $X, it doesn't follow that I can always work an additional hour to make an additional $X.
- After working 40+ hours/week doing paid work, working an additional hour at my day job to avoid doing something else does not make for a happy life. In fact, it makes life quite dull, and made me a very narrow person.
I can repair my motorcycle any day I choose. Delivering my motorcycle to a mechanic during office hours has a cost. Finding a good mechanic has a cost.
I also find that eating at restaurants is more time-consuming than cooking at home. I have to go there, order and wait, then head back home after.
I make a salary, not hourly, so it really doesn’t make sense for me to hire someone to do a task I can do myself. Just tossing $$$ away.
this is a good point for salaried employees. in any case, your pre-tax hourly rate is sort of a meaningless figure for comparison. if you want to do this kind of comparison at all, you should probably think in terms of disposable income. for example, if you make $30/hr post-tax and half of your budget is fixed costs, a $30 discretionary purchase is two hours worth of work.
The overarching point of the author is that most of his target audience (and those reading HN) are used to being thrifty and not spend money at all, even when they get older. They fail to realize that at some point, it's worth your time to spend the X amount either because the value of investing X down the line is so great, or because the time saved by spending X is now so much greater than before, because of something changing in your life (career has progressed, valuation of free time has changed).
I definitely see this myself daily, ending up wasting few minutes each day on trivial things that add up, while it could be fixed by paying a small amount.
Or for example trying to wade through a free course to learn something, but ultimately just dropping it out of no motivation. Compared to paying for a course, which makes you more responsible s you paid for it and usually also offers more effective training.
For the longest time, I had not encountered a concept of "self-care" but then I started seeing that term pop up around the internet and it seemed quite obvious that it was an important thing. That might seem silly, but if your timeline for these things reaches back to the '90s, like mine does, a notion like self-care is relatively recent on the historical timeline as a familiar concept.
I've also seen this in writing, with how you handle plot and character development. Or even some things that are silly but obvious like the fact that you can just go out and go on hikes if you want, and there are tons and tons of places to do that.
I feel like there's all kinds of hidden mental blocks that you can go your whole life not knowing that you have, and I appreciate this idea of elevating the concept to its own genre and targeting it with articles such as the one posted here.
I'm a bit of a DIY obsessive, so maybe I'm just all the way on the other side of the spectrum, but I don't hire someone to do something unless I feel the task is so far outside of my comfort zone that it poses a danger to me. I usually only do it after I've tried the task myself and utterly failed. You'd be surprised what you can do yourself with just a few YouTube tutorials and a decent collection of tools. As a side effect, I've gotten pretty good at being handy around the house, managing the family's finances, repairing our cars, doing major home improvement projects including building barns and sheds, building furniture, lawn care, tree trimming, electrical, plumbing, etc. I consider developing these skills a better investment than the alternative which is perpetually needing to pay someone to do them.
And all it costs is my time, which is free.
Well my time is definitely not free; people pay lots of money for access to it.
The problem with "muh welcome to upper middle class prosperity" lists like this is it doesn't account for the management time and mental load involved in something like "Hire a researcher or expert consultant." For that matter "Cleaning services" or "Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into ..." require significant cognitive overhead and time to hire and manage unless you or your spouse or close friends are already doing such things for your day job. If you're already doing such things for your day job you probably already thought of these things.
Some of them are pretty insane: people who need a maid to chuck their clothes into the washer and dryer, then put them away: if it takes you longer than 15 minutes a week to do this ... I have to wonder at your wardrobe. I mean, I understand some people deeply resent performing such menial tasks, or maybe they have large families, but it's not that big a job compared to feeding yourself and getting some exercise.
For myself, hiring experts to assist with my day to day life has been a fairly mixed bag, and my education, hobbies and lifestyle is such that DiY is usually the win.
Consider a large family with multiple children, a humid environment where towels have to be washed often or they smell, plus the safety precaution of washing outside clothes more often to eliminate any possible coronavirus, then you have the recipe for a full load of laundry almost every day. It easily adds up to way more than 15 minutes a week.
Your working time is worth money, but your free time is free. Your time is only worth money (opportunity cost) if you'd otherwise be working on some money-making opportunity.
If it's 1. Hiring someone for $25/hr to mow the lawn while I work on a contract that's making me $200/hr, I'd choose to hire the gardener. If it's 2. Hiring someone to mow the lawn while I play video games, I'm better off if I mow it myself.
Anyway, maybe that's why I don't see a lot of those things on the list as desirable; if I have to spend two hours managing the graphic designer to make a chart/plot/figure, I may as well fiddle around in xfig or whatever to get it done myself.
This is specially important to me now that I have children and very little time for stuff that I care about besides my family.
> I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free ones).
Last year I bought a new bed and it improved a lot of things for me. It's simple, but if you grow up thinking about every penny you spend you get weird habits.
The average human spends (or should spend) 8h in bed every single day of their life. The next 8h is the place you work, the ergonomics should fit you.
Spend money to have quality sleep. Spend money to work comfortably.
I guess my objection to the article, as presented, is it’s kind of tone deaf particularly at a time when many people are financially struggling to just assert that you’re “allowed” to hire people for a long list of tasks, at a cost that many people wouldn’t even dream of being able to afford or justify.
So you have to spend/trade something, but (for me) it's harder to think of what's worth spending/trading for. Hence the post.
I live in Texas, a good chunk of the year, it would be nuts to try to live without A/C (We're not quite Death Valley, but it can get pretty hot here ...). So, I'd amend that one to:
"Open the windows and turn off the A/C"
I really like the few months a year where I can do this and not get cooked!
Certainly you are _allowed_ -- but if it's for an economically meaningful service, like renting an apartment, the follow-on suggestion that it's "only weird if you make it weird" really fails to capture how likely it is that it _will_ change the nature of your relationship as soon as someone decides not to pay, or whatever other irreconcilable issue comes up. Just be careful when going into business in any way with people you otherwise like.
This is why all fine-based penalties should scale progressively with income.
Contest unjust fines.
I’ve received 4 parking fines in my life, all were for parking somewhere that had no signage or had signage that permitted my behaviour.
All 4 were successfully contested with photo evidence and a minimum of fuss.
Not something I’d abuse, but second chances can be had.
Specifically, parking. If I park in an illegal place, get a fine, and mentally consider it a fee, that feels alright by me. But if I park in an illegal place with the same intention as above, and don't get a fine, I'm a jerk. It's tough to decouple those two.
The real alternative is jacking up the cost of parking to the point where there’s always an empty spot.
And somehow making that number scale with income makes that better?
The point of raising the price accessing any shared asset is to optimize usage of that asset. Otherwise you end up with private enterprises like non-street parking lots eating the profits with nothing going to the rest of the people.
If you don't want non-street parking lots to funnel in all the profit, then you provide efficient and wide-spread public transport.
- Often don't have cars at all, and have to walk that much longer to get across all the parking between places they want to be
- Spend a large portion of their incomes on cars, maintenance, fuel, insurance etc. when they even can
- Are required to live further away from productive places by the high cost of e.g. minimum parking requirements and low density ceilings "because traffic"
- Suffer the brunt of air pollution
Parking in a central business district should probably be as much of a luxury as living in one is today, and vice versa.
It’s a solved problem, look at European cities like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and many more... But in America robust public transport never gets done for many reasons including that special interests don’t want it to.
Likewise, if the car is impeding traffic, tow it out of there. The fine does nothing to fix the problem.
Parking illegally in a specific spot could result in the death of 8 people? then the fine should be 8 * value of life. the value of life is ~ $9M in the US, so the fine should be 72 million dollars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
An acceptable middle ground is for fines to scale with the value of a car at registration. And if you can't afford the fines, then don't lend your expensive car to people who don't know how to park.
I'll be fine, because I already own all my shitboxes, but this is just bad policy.
>acceptable middle ground is for fines to scale with the value of a car at registration
The type of car one drives is not at all an indication of their actual finances. Many people, unfortunately, feel the need to impress others by spending money they don't have.
If I keep my car parked in a space and the street sweep needs to miss that spot, the trash that remains has the same negative societal impact whether I'm rich or poor.
If that trash "cost" society $100, why would society subsidize a poor person to park illegally who could only afford to pay $20?
"a sum imposed as punishment for an offense"
Do you now agree that fines are punitive?
If so, do you agree that fines need to be set high enough to provide a disincentive, even if that is higher than the average negative externality created by an infraction?
The purpose of a fine can be seen in at least two ways:
1. Provide recompense to society for the production of a negative externality.
2. Create a disincentive against the production of a negative externality.
If fines could be levied perfectly, automatically and without administration cost, then perhaps you can see the fine as #1, and set the fine at the societal cost.
But, because it costs money to enforce regulations, there's usually some sampling done: if you park illegally, you might not be caught. Because the chance of getting caught is not 100%, and because those who are not caught do not contribute their share of enforcement costs, the fines for a single infraction must be a multiple of the actual harm caused. (Assuming that can even be measured.)
Let's say the harm caused is $20 per infraction, and this is normally enough to disincentive a poor person from parking illegally. If they make a mistake and are subsequently caught, is it better for them to pay $100 (for the harm caused, plus paying for those who weren't caught), even though this may be equivalent to their family's monthly food budget?
As long as $20 fine is enough to:
- provide a strong disincentive, and
- provide recompense
... then that should be enough, no?
The rich person, for whom a $20 fine is not enough of a disincentive, should pay more ($200?). And the money raised can be used to cover negative externalities for those who weren't caught, and overall enforcement costs.
It only sounds good in low resolution.
Depending on a bunch of hard questions, devils in the details, you’ll end up with dilemmae where neither option is good:
Is parking income net worth, or taxable income? Previous year or trailing? Can you deduct your charity donations before deciding what you’ll pay for parking? What about a company car; is it the company’s income or the driver’s?
A more simple system off the top of my head: you have fine modifier based on your previous year taxes. Your accountant now tells you you have a fine multiplier of 6. When the ticket comes in, it is always addressable to a given entity. Can it be gamed? Of course, just use a car registered to your broke ass cousin. Progressive fines could work just like progressive tax.
If interested in actually keeping access open, parking kiosks and aggressive towing make up the effective solution.
in more serious cases (eg, blocking a fire hydrant or alley) simply towing the vehicle seems like penalty enough.
Basically: Outsource your personal life to accomplish things that you want to do. Ferris was using Brickwork India at the time if I recall.
[1] https://www.brickworkindia.com/
There is so much excellent online content that, given a public library (beside the library itself) one can gather as much knowledge as one wants.
Three other recommendations I give all youngsters:
- stay sober
- minimize debt
- remain married
Is this such good advice? Relationships are hard work, and can be made (or mended) given sufficient effort. But sometimes, it just doesn't work and can't be made to.
Most people seem to choose their SO for bad reasons and then stay in it due to sunk costs.
If your SO proves a sociopath, you may be forced into unfortunate measures.
Turns out a year in you don’t have a lot in common.
Should you stay together and have kids together because you made a stupid decision based on sex?
Your partner doesn’t have to be a sociopath for someone to decide marriage was a mistake for both parties.
For a guideline to be helpful it needs to be true in most circumstances.
“Remain married” can be actively harmful as much as it can be the right thing. That makes it useless as generic advice.
It supports propagation of the species, sure.
In the individual context of this thread, anecdotally, marriage is a forcing function that drives maturation.
Or not. Punt on the SO, and let one's humanity stay stunted.
Note that I am stipulating a non-abusive relationship here. Merely kids gaffing adulthood off.
...and write a script to do this, along with rotating your drawing tablet to match (which may actually involve rotating it the other way depending on where the cable is and what works with your desk. Because poking around in the prefs with just one of monitor/tablet rotated is a major pain in the ass.
I agree with most of the stuff in this list - they’re at least things to consider.
https://zalberico.com/essay/2017/02/21/asking-questions.html
I am getting lots of emails from outsourcing companies. I ignore them. I find their follow up emails extremely frustrating.
"Thanks for taking the time to read this email. After I sent my previous email (See below) I had put a reminder in to check-in with you to see how things were going with the need of a Data Engineering."
Why should I care about your reminder?
Sleep until noon every day.
Work only as much as you need.
Work from home, or anywhere else for that matter.
Have multiple romantic partners in parallel.
Have platonic friends of the opposite sex.
Share multiple flats with multiple people (i.e. live in multiple places, but cheap)
Study 10 years.
Make your own iced tea in the fridge.
Buy food in bulk.
Drink tap water.
Create your own dishes by mixing ingredients.
Cook/fry/bake food you would usually eat raw.
Eat food raw that you would usually cook/fry/bake.
Sleep everywhere in your home.
Learn languages, instruments, or sports after you turned 30.
Drink no alcohol at a party and still have fun.
Start/stop smoking and drinking after 30.
Found a company like you would buy a game console.
Take no VC money.
Take muliple years and tries to create a good product.
Write music/give concerts for yourself or your friends only.
Don't wear shoes outside.
Don't have an opinion on a topic.
Overall:
Don't play pre-defined games in your life, but ask if they make you happy. You only have one life, make the most out of it.
Sometimes you have to play by some rules made up by other people to get into a better place, but look at them closely, it could very well be that they are more open to interpretation than they first seem.
To the window, to the wall.
You can go further though: sleep when you're tired. wake up when you're done sleeping.
for me sleeping until well rested led to sleeping till noon.
It literally makes me sad how few people actually can experience this.
I have done this when I got caught up in a really good book and read until 4:00 AM. Generally, I wake up on my own, before the alarm goes off, but it is a safety valve.
> Share multiple flats with multiple people (i.e. live in multiple places, but cheap)
I've never even heard of people doing this. How does it work? What's it like? It sounds fascinating, and like something I should've tried in my 20s.
You can also rent a room in a shared flat, which is cheaper.
From the money you save, you can rent another room in another flat.
Some of my friends even let their rooms to other people while they were out of city to save money.
it's like Airbnb without the middleman ;)
Carry a pad and pencil and do sketches of strangers.
Walk or take public transport in random directions.
Put a chair outside and spend all day there.
Sleep on the balcony.
Draw graffiti.
Experiment with clothes, hair color, face paint.
Work out outdoors.
Tell people funny lies.
Go hungry just to feel hungry.
Bake cookies and give them away.
Talk to people nonverbally and see how much you can express.
Modify/deface objects to make them look funnier.
Just not in my city please...
Do those "multiple romantic partners" know about each other? If the answer is "no" then yours is a very jerky suggestion (I know "jerky" is a harsh word for this forum, but I can't come up with anything else to describe this).
I feel this is nitpicky, but considering the GP's point about entering predefined games...
Some people don't want exclusivity, but also don't want to know what you're doing with other people.
Those years ended for me a long time ago, but they were important, for me, and for my partners at that time.
Maybe I'm just grumpy, but... if you send me a cold email, I'll either respond or delete it. Then, if the original didn't have an "unsubscribe" link, plus you follow up on it, I'll tell gmail to block you.
I gave advice to many people who cold emailed me.
But in my personal experience, most cold emails I wrote wouldn't lead to much, because my inquiries were too specific.
However, one thing people don’t do often enough is follow up when the other person has expressed interest. This kind of followup is usually welcome, as inertia and distraction lead to things not happening. This is especially true in commercial context. Eg someone may express strong interest in buying, get busy, drift off, then enthusiastically buy when you ping them a bit later.
Pick from your spices at random when cooking and resolve to use whatever you get
Schedule working sessions with remote coworkers where you share a zoom room but just work
Shave your head and donate your hair
Volunteer to speak with elderly (maybe by phone for now) and collect their life stories
Learn who is building what in your neighbor hood (e.g. https://dbiweb02.sfgov.org/dbipts/)
Picket things by yourself
Find a big mud puddle and jump in it until you look like a monster
Climb trees as an adult
Play music on street corners
Go to church and ask questions until you're asked to leave
Knock on people's doors and introduce yourself
Troll craigslist for free ceramics (plates dishes etc) and smash the heck out of them
Take apart your toaster and put it back together again, don't stop until it works again
I find entry interesting. But what happens if it short circuits.
Are there any tests which we can do on things to know that before turning them on?
Yes. Buy a cheap multimeter and test current flow on cables.
(When you google for those, combine with the term "DIN" or "Rail Mount")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
Sounds too risky to do on your own, without any activist structure behind you that can come to your help if things go south. At least prepare a lawyer contact.
Haha, maybe in about 6 months from now...
Be very careful about this. Surgery in the modern age is safe, but there is always a risk, whether from the surgery itself, the anesthesia, or from infection.
Be sure that you are really sure that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Minimalism, abstention, freganism, hand me downs, barter, begging, and luck.
Make websites which work in any browser, including 25yo classics, in the spirit of the open web.
Sleep without a schedule.
Ditto kay on multiple parallel romantic partners, with a whole larger than the sum of the pieces.
Travel somewhere without any lodging plans, only a sleeping bag.
Think for yourself and don,t do unhealthy things even if they are normalized. This is a whole other list.
Maintain your health and sanity as top priority over anything else.
Abandon materialism and attachment.
Harm no living being on purpose.
Make friends with mammals, plants, insects.
Meditate any time of day for any length of time as many times as see fit.
Be effective and happy while doing all this.
Tailor your own reality based on your intent.
Not eat for 72 hours comfortably and be better off for it.
Sadly, I am seemingly not allowed to have a reasonable Web browser with a view source button and unstupid address bar on a small form factor device. I,m looking, though...
Wow, all that's holding back my life satisfaction is a major windfall! Thanks for the useful tip.
> Refuse to fill out paperwork of any kind.
I'm joking, of course. I know he doesn't actually follow most of the list. More of a wishlist probably.
The kind of person who thinks rules don't apply to them because they're 'free' but they're just blissfully inconsiderate of others.
"Don't walk on the grass." "I will quietly ignore this rule, because ME ME ME, freedom!" - Later, the groundskeeper: "I have to roll out new sod everywhere those people were stepping..."
Or can you imagine being a bank teller and trying to help this person? "Sir, I need a signature." "I don't like, DO signatures." "...Sir?" "It's like, freedom, man." "...but to execute your request..." "Get me someone else who will bend the rules for me and my freedom!"
i devote time daily to ponder how to be more considerate of others, so i,d like to know.
Instead of using your base assumptions and ruling out what they said, ask probing questions to validate your understanding. At the end, you may just come to the same conclusion as before (but this time with data!) or you may learn something.
As for “the rules don’t apply to me,” there are many rules that really don’t apply that many folks just assume to be required. It is ok to eat breakfast for dinner for a silly example.
I agree that rule breaking should not involve pissing in someone’s cookie jar, but if you are not inconveniencing others, it seems all fair game to me.
I spend around $380 a month for rent and I know a bunch of people in shared flats who spend even less.
Also, money can often (sadly not always) substituted with good ideas, time, or good social connections.
I'm in a similar situation, and I'd say the main contributing factor to my happiness is not having to work 40 hours a week. Everything else is just sugar on top.
Unlike the OP, I DO do paperwork though.
What does ditto kay mean?
Especially the "not eating" part.
Have you looked into it at all before commenting?
" Imagine there's no countries , It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too,
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you"
A lot of these sound a bit naive and even harmful.
I thought it was targeted more towards the general population. I was a bit too harsh.My apologies.
The harmful bit was because I read it as though you were preaching rather than talking about intensely personal choices. With that qualification, my statement of it being harmful was unwarranted.
That's pretty much in the same category as "win the lottery and live off the interest"
Many people struggle and fail to achieve one romantic relationship, let alone several simultaneously.
It,s still a shitton of effort, not a walk in the park, but it,s also fun and rewarding.