Haha, I like it. I have a weird pattern in my life where I push things to an extreme and then back off some distance from it. It doesn't work so well in life-threatening situations (crashing my car cost me months of my life) but for the rest of life it teaches me where the limit is.
Though I do have to say:
> If you’ve never hit the ground while skydiving, you’re opening your parachute too early.
If you've never hit the ground while skydiving, you're:
- in orbit
- travelling interstellar
- the pioneer of a new era of steampunk airship video games come to life
This reminds me of validation loss in machine learning: you push the practice until it gets a tiny bit worse than before -- then you know you had hit the sweet spot. Applied to everyday things, there is some Zen in knowing that you need this dent to perfection in order to know you had it.
> I've missed a flight once. From Europe to home Cost me $4K to get another.
>
> If Umesh can wear the cost of missed flights, well done.
Well, he might be balancing it against the time saved, no? Over 20 flights, missing one is a $4k cost, but being early for 20 flights is also a cost.
Assuming you're 30m early for each flight, you "lose" 10 hours by being early.
Comes down to personal trade-offs too (maybe missing a flight means you miss christmas with the family, in which case the $4k is irrelevant anyway).
My personal method is, the more important the journey, the more safety margin I assign it in terms of time.
Going on a 60m flight for in-office days to a destination with frequent flights throughout the day? If I miss it then no problem, I'll take the one 30m later.
Going to a destination with two flights per day, and it's for a court appearance? Cannot miss it unless i want a warrant of arrest issued against me.
You can be late for some things with small consequences as a result. Being late for other things might be a life-changing moment.
But it's not like many people are in a position to turn those scraps of time between 6am and 7am in the morning they could save from heading to the airport later, into a fraction of $4K or even valuable personal time.
Usually when I fly internationally, It is a whole day event that I already have taken leave for.
Probably not in that case. My flights cost around ~100e though so spending even 1 hour extra to reduce my risk of missing it by 5% is already not worth it.
I guess it depends on which flights you're missing - if it's a 1 hour flight that can be replaced with a 5 hour train ride (e.g., Munich to Berlin), then, after you take into consideration check in times, boarding times, waiting for your goddamn luggage at Tegel (glad to see they finally opened their new airport, they can remove that new future tense[0] they added to German just for explaining when the new one would open) then missing the flight isn't so bad.
But as I'm out of APAC and was working for people in EU, all my flights were very bad ones to miss, as in, the next available flight will be tomorrow, if you're lucky.
For my $4K example, I missed an Emirates flight (due to a calendar fuck up, entirely my fault, got timezone differences wrong) that ended up in my home city via Sydney, usually took about 19 - 21 hours, depending on delays in Dubai and Sydney.
The cheapest next available was an Etihad flight that involved a very long layover in their very badly designed airport in Abu Dhabi - there's bugger all space to sit and wait, so people just sit along the halls leading to terminals, but worst of all, it's shaped like a giant hamburger, and so are the terminals, and the dome ceilings amplify noise amazingly, at one point I thought people were going to lynch the parents of a 4 year old who wouldn't stop screaming, just because the terminal's design amplified the screams so damn much.
And then it was followed by a long layover in Brisbane (I think? I was somewhat in a fugue state by then, all I wanted was a shower, and I had no towel, Australian airports provide showers, but not towels, unlike Changi or München Airport do), so by the time I got home, it had been 36 hours since leaving Munich.
So, anyway, long rant done, I can conclude two things: 1) Umesh is privileged to have enough wealth or earnings that rebooking a flight isn't a significant cost for him, unlike the majority of air travellers, and 2) Umesh isn't flying half way around the world.
I'm not big on taking life advice from people who are more privileged than the general population, because well, life advice implicitly predicated on privilege isn't really applicable to the general population.
Yeah this one in particular is a symptom of some well-paid guys dividing their salary by hours-worked to determine how much their time is "worth" and applying that where really it shouldn't (like Matt Yglesias: https://twitter.com/sarahkogod/status/1346868669947768832?la...).
Why did he stop at flights though, surely there are other things you do more frequently you can save time (and therefore money) on? Why did he not say "If you’ve never shit yourself, you’re spending too much time walking to the toilet"
My turn! I missed a flight once. Cost me two hours to get on the next connecting flight.
Professors tend to fly the way I was flying, between major cities and frequently. Miss a flight, fine, but that extra 45 minutes of sleeping every business trip can't be made up at the gate, and they really add up.
This is basically equivalent to asserting that people's risk calibration is skewed too conservatively, and that you can't calibrate it properly until you've actually experienced the negative outcome you're worried about.
While probably true in general, there are some cases where it's obviously not true (like the parachute example - if you haven't hit the ground, you're opening your chute too early).
The more interesting question is then: how do you know whether you're in a parachute case or a frantically locking doors case?
> While probably true in general, there are some cases where it's obviously not true (like the parachute example - if you haven't hit the ground, you're opening your chute too early).
Yeah, it depends on the size of the downside in the risk.
I should nick myself shaving once in a while? Ok, fine.
I should miss a flight once in a while? You must be joking. No way, pal.
A person who travels for business twice a week on the company expense should miss a flight once in a while? Yeah ... ok, that might just work for them.
> I should miss a flight once in a while? You must be joking. No way, pal.
If the number of samples is very low then the saying wouldn't apply yet. If you do self-fund a lot of flights then yes way, pal. Wasted unpleasantly-spent time is money too, if there's enough of it.
Let's make it a direct tradeoff. How many extra hours in an airport is worse than missing a flight? I'm sure there's a number for that. I bet the vast majority of people would answer within an order of magnitude of 100 (so between 10 and 1000 hours).
At the airport I don't merely sit and wait. I catch up on email and paperwork, maybe start watching a movie. It's not wasted time so I don't mind being there 30 mins extra for safety.
The cost of "missing a flight" varies hugely. In some cases it just means I arrive 3 hours late to a meeting I wasn't that interest in being at in the first place. In other cases it means I miss my connecting flight, have to pay out of pocket for a new flight and a hotel and miss one day of my big holiday that I've been looking forwards to all year.
I also guess that people who hold those opinions mostly travel for work, don't pay for their own tickets and have the sort of job where showing up a bit late for meetings once in a while won't get you fired. So for them missing a flight is like me missing a buss.
For most people their 'median' flight is taking them to their special vacation they've been saving up for and planning for years.
Well again "If the number of samples is very low then the saying wouldn't apply yet."
If you'd trade x hundred hours for a missed flight, and cutting that close would have only saved you 15 airport hours in your entire life, then you're doing fine!
> For most people their 'median' flight is taking them to their special vacation they've been saving up for and planning for years.
If you go on at least one flight a year, you can name a number of hours. It'll just be higher than business guy.
If you don't even fly that much, then you're exempt from question.
> Wasted unpleasantly-spent time is money too, if there's enough of it.
Ah, but with access to a good airport lounge, the extra time there is quite pleasantly spent. And YMMV, but for me, time spent stressed about being late for a flight is extremely unpleasantly spent.
I think this is also like the whole "you learn that the stove is hot by touching it once" philosophy, which kinda discounts humans' abilities to learn through second-hand information in my humble opinion!
There's a huge amount of literature about people underestimating negative risk to problems, so the assertion seems to be scientifically incorrect. But there is definitely a strain of this in lots of successful business ventures (for better or for worse), so it's probably good advice if you want to make a lot of money!
Bonus points for being able to navigate the negative social consequences for being the person with this risk calibration without feeling too guilty about it.
> The more interesting question is then: how do you know whether you're in a parachute case or a frantically locking doors case?
Isn't it obvious most of the time? Just consider what the risk would be, and then consider if you're OK with that risk actually happening. Most people probably wouldn't be OK with a parachute failure or a robbery, but they'd probably be okay with missing a single flight or getting a speeding ticket.
I guess the really interesting question is what happens if you actually aren't even aware of what the risk you're taking is. It's hard for me to think of examples of that case, though.
Not everyone has juicy enough gossip to risk unemployment. And you have to really strike out to get a shadowban, so that one doesn't seem useful either.
Risking downvotes or being labeled a propagandist, that works well enough.
I think it's fair to say that if you chose to do risky things you ought to primarily limit yourself to stuff where the potential damage is on you.
I've always been fairly indifferent when my own money or time was on the line but when choices affect family or other people in general I tend to be more conservative.
This is why you should fly Delta from SFO - you can show up as the plane is boarding and still make it.
International maybe not. I don't think I've ever found an international flight that actually leaves from SFO, for some reason they're always much more expensive than the one that goes to LAX first.
> The squash player who runs back and forth to attempt every shot...
doesn't appear to be true of tennis. Rafael Nadal in particular is famous for trying to catch each ball and save each and every shot. Lesser players give up more easily.
Clearly there are more parameters than accumulated practice time, but I'm really getting at the point that some people (most people?) probably could manage to reach many of those tricky shots given enough practice. But they don't try every time and so sell themselves short in the long run.
Rafa had to start somewhere, and he definitely did not hit every shot when he was a young boy.
Tying this back to the OP - my criticism of the 'Umeshisms' described are that they're absurd when applied to a system where your strategy has fixed outcome probabilities. If you could improve your ability to get through airports quickly with practice, then it would be self evident that missing the odd flight is a consequence of improving your skill at the optimum rate.
Or maybe I just don't understand the frame of reference of the OP.
I think this is just generally a way to justify doing whatever it is you want, and implicitly deflect anyone telling you you are wrong by adding a criticism of those who don't do it.
Sometimes its good justification: if you have never failed you don't take enough risks. Fair enough.
But i'm sure an alcoholic would say something like: if you've never been fired for being too wasted to work, you don't know how to have fun (maybe they would be a bit more subtle, but you get the point).
I think its better to just be honest with yourself, drop the implied moral criticism. Instead of saying "if you never miss a plane you spend too much time in an airport", just say, "For me personally, i find it acceptable to miss a plane every now and then if it means i don't have to go to the airport 2 hours in advance" You're making explicit the trade off, and you're not going on some high horse that there is something wrong with people who make a different trade off or have different priorities.
I'm going to advise that, in general, one should never try to replace the former sort of sentence with the latter sort of sentence.
All the caveats are implied, people always speak from a personal perspective, all you're doing is weakening your rhetoric to no effect.
The general form of the Umeshism calls attention to situations where errors of commission are invisibly expensive, and errors of omission are dramatic but not necessarily more expensive. Waiting in an airport lounge is wasted time, and it doesn't matter if you're waiting for the flight you have a ticket for, or whatever they put you on; if the objective is to minimize time in the waiting lounge, as why would it not be, it's just the total hours which matter.
The opposite of an Umeshism is an easy riposte when they're being abused: "no, if you've ever been fired for being too wasted to work, you're not having fun, you're an alcoholic".
The "Umeshism" makes no sense to me, because I missed a flight once and it was pretty traumatic. We were getting back to London after a weekend break in mainland Europe. We were too casual getting through to the gate and got there a few minutes after it closed (still 25 mins before the scheduled departure). Ended up having to pay a tonne for another flight that night to Bristol, and phoning up my parents to ask them to make a four hour round trip to pick us up and let us stay at theirs, before making our way back to London in the morning.
I never want to experience this again and I now make sure I'm at the airport well in time.
You did it wrong. Had you instead just turned around, checked into a nice hotel, gone out for a nice dinner and caught the first flight to London in the morning it would have been far less traumatic.
The trick is not being traumatized by it and making a good time of the chaos. Although it can be complicated if you're not willing to sleep in an airport. Or ask strangers for help. Or be really, really late.
The "trick" is not putting oneself in a position where any of that is necessary! I have slept in an airport and it's pretty miserable, but the cost of a flight to the UK was going to be hefty whether it was that day or the next. And I was supposed to be in the office the next morning.
I missed a trans atlantic flight once. The most traumatic part was it cost me 2 grand to get a replacement flight.
Unfortunately no strangers helped me with that part.
Don't get me wrong, i could afford it, and at the end of the day, its just a funny story, no real harm done. But i still would have preferred to not have that happen.
Obviously you have to have an idea of the consequences of failure. In the U.S. 20 years ago, if you missed a flight and there was another one going out that day, they'd just put you on that one.
These days, most airlines want to charge you some very hefty fee if you miss your flight.
"If we've never had nuclear war, we're probably spending too many resources to avoid it."
In all seriousness though, it seems that we're starting to follow this philosophy too far and applying it closer and closer to the territory of black-marbles / unsurvivable-black-swans. Or maybe it's just politicians that know they have the risks externalized from themselves so are more inclined to play lethal force games.
But, even beyond this, there's great advantage in fully excluding a certain risk, because then you can totally stop thinking about contingency plans for it, and you gain mind-space that can be used for something else... Eg. if you're missing flights 10% of the time, then you need to dedicate mind space for knowing how to book a flight from the airport, or how to re-arrange your schedule to accomodate not arriving on time somewhere etc. etc. And these "contingency plans" add up and swell. Or you don't make them, but with a 1-10% failure rate of things you're living in constant stress and anxiety because things actually do fail/ break for you... Lower stress and freed mind-space may be worth it a lot, and this is way people do things over-conservatively and pay for non-crucial insurance etc.
Precisely. If i arrive an hour early, i spend an hour browsing the duty-free whisky shop. If i arrive a minute late, i spend an hour browsing the duty-free whisky shop, and spend three hours sitting in an uncomfortable seat, and have to spend the price of four of five bottles of that whisky on a new ticket.
Maybe I don’t travel enough, but I absolutely love airports. I’ll happily stay in an airport hotel the night before and spend hours reading and watching the world go by before my flight. Obviously if you’ve got other things that bring you joy that you want to be getting on with that’s fine, but it seems very stressful to be rushing about trying to strategise and optimise everything.
I actually enjoying sitting at the McDonalds or a lounge with my laptop quietly working with similar if not more focus than in the office. My mind is calm and not stressed about missing flight.
Missing a flight means your mind now needs to figure out how to get on the next flight, which is actually time and mentally consuming.
The low-order bits can have huge impact. This is what Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls "fat-tailed processes": processes which rarely yield occurrences outside nominal range ("tail"), but such occurrences have the highest impact ("fat"). This is the case for anything related to safety: seatbelt, smoke detectors, guardrail, vaccines, etc. And one could formulate ridiculous umeshisms when talking about fat-tailed processes: if you've never died in your car, it means you're caring too much about your seatbelt; if you never suffered from 3rd degree burns, it means you invested too much in smoke detectors; if you've never had smallbox, if means you waste too much time getting vaccinated; if you've never murdered someone, it means you're not having enough fun with knives; etc.
So the general principle should be clarified as: _concentrate on the high-order bits, *iff the low-order bits don't matter*_. This is arguably the case for the examples given by the blog post, as missing a flight isn't really the end of the world. Still, it's a huge waste of time _on a single trip_, so you benefit from not caring about it only if you travel often enough. This shows than even in case where low-order bits aren't dramatic, they still need to be taken into account into a cost-benefit analysis.
96 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadThough I do have to say:
> If you’ve never hit the ground while skydiving, you’re opening your parachute too early.
If you've never hit the ground while skydiving, you're:
- in orbit
- travelling interstellar
- the pioneer of a new era of steampunk airship video games come to life
if you've never [hit the ground while skydiving]
and
if you've never [hit the ground] while skydiving
are covered by: if you've never hit the ground while skydiving.
If Umesh can wear the cost of missed flights, well done.
> > If Umesh can wear the cost of missed flights, well done.
Well, he might be balancing it against the time saved, no? Over 20 flights, missing one is a $4k cost, but being early for 20 flights is also a cost.
Assuming you're 30m early for each flight, you "lose" 10 hours by being early.
Comes down to personal trade-offs too (maybe missing a flight means you miss christmas with the family, in which case the $4k is irrelevant anyway).
My personal method is, the more important the journey, the more safety margin I assign it in terms of time.
Going on a 60m flight for in-office days to a destination with frequent flights throughout the day? If I miss it then no problem, I'll take the one 30m later.
Going to a destination with two flights per day, and it's for a court appearance? Cannot miss it unless i want a warrant of arrest issued against me.
You can be late for some things with small consequences as a result. Being late for other things might be a life-changing moment.
But as I'm out of APAC and was working for people in EU, all my flights were very bad ones to miss, as in, the next available flight will be tomorrow, if you're lucky.
For my $4K example, I missed an Emirates flight (due to a calendar fuck up, entirely my fault, got timezone differences wrong) that ended up in my home city via Sydney, usually took about 19 - 21 hours, depending on delays in Dubai and Sydney.
The cheapest next available was an Etihad flight that involved a very long layover in their very badly designed airport in Abu Dhabi - there's bugger all space to sit and wait, so people just sit along the halls leading to terminals, but worst of all, it's shaped like a giant hamburger, and so are the terminals, and the dome ceilings amplify noise amazingly, at one point I thought people were going to lynch the parents of a 4 year old who wouldn't stop screaming, just because the terminal's design amplified the screams so damn much.
And then it was followed by a long layover in Brisbane (I think? I was somewhat in a fugue state by then, all I wanted was a shower, and I had no towel, Australian airports provide showers, but not towels, unlike Changi or München Airport do), so by the time I got home, it had been 36 hours since leaving Munich.
So, anyway, long rant done, I can conclude two things: 1) Umesh is privileged to have enough wealth or earnings that rebooking a flight isn't a significant cost for him, unlike the majority of air travellers, and 2) Umesh isn't flying half way around the world.
I'm not big on taking life advice from people who are more privileged than the general population, because well, life advice implicitly predicated on privilege isn't really applicable to the general population.
[0]: https://www.der-postillon.com/2012/08/neue-zeitform-futur-ii...
Why did he stop at flights though, surely there are other things you do more frequently you can save time (and therefore money) on? Why did he not say "If you’ve never shit yourself, you’re spending too much time walking to the toilet"
And you're spot on, why isn't there a Umeshism for "if you haven't shat in a bush..."
Professors tend to fly the way I was flying, between major cities and frequently. Miss a flight, fine, but that extra 45 minutes of sleeping every business trip can't be made up at the gate, and they really add up.
In any case, here's the follow-up with the winners: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=42
https://sarahmjamieson.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/true-focus-l...
Had read this above linked post long time ago, on the topic.
While probably true in general, there are some cases where it's obviously not true (like the parachute example - if you haven't hit the ground, you're opening your chute too early).
The more interesting question is then: how do you know whether you're in a parachute case or a frantically locking doors case?
> While probably true in general, there are some cases where it's obviously not true (like the parachute example - if you haven't hit the ground, you're opening your chute too early).
Yeah, it depends on the size of the downside in the risk.
I should nick myself shaving once in a while? Ok, fine.
I should miss a flight once in a while? You must be joking. No way, pal.
A person who travels for business twice a week on the company expense should miss a flight once in a while? Yeah ... ok, that might just work for them.
If the number of samples is very low then the saying wouldn't apply yet. If you do self-fund a lot of flights then yes way, pal. Wasted unpleasantly-spent time is money too, if there's enough of it.
Let's make it a direct tradeoff. How many extra hours in an airport is worse than missing a flight? I'm sure there's a number for that. I bet the vast majority of people would answer within an order of magnitude of 100 (so between 10 and 1000 hours).
For the purpose of the direct trade-off, pick a median flight.
For most people their 'median' flight is taking them to their special vacation they've been saving up for and planning for years.
If you'd trade x hundred hours for a missed flight, and cutting that close would have only saved you 15 airport hours in your entire life, then you're doing fine!
> For most people their 'median' flight is taking them to their special vacation they've been saving up for and planning for years.
If you go on at least one flight a year, you can name a number of hours. It'll just be higher than business guy.
If you don't even fly that much, then you're exempt from question.
Ah, but with access to a good airport lounge, the extra time there is quite pleasantly spent. And YMMV, but for me, time spent stressed about being late for a flight is extremely unpleasantly spent.
There's a huge amount of literature about people underestimating negative risk to problems, so the assertion seems to be scientifically incorrect. But there is definitely a strain of this in lots of successful business ventures (for better or for worse), so it's probably good advice if you want to make a lot of money!
Bonus points for being able to navigate the negative social consequences for being the person with this risk calibration without feeling too guilty about it.
Isn't it obvious most of the time? Just consider what the risk would be, and then consider if you're OK with that risk actually happening. Most people probably wouldn't be OK with a parachute failure or a robbery, but they'd probably be okay with missing a single flight or getting a speeding ticket.
I guess the really interesting question is what happens if you actually aren't even aware of what the risk you're taking is. It's hard for me to think of examples of that case, though.
> If you've not used a throwaway, you are afraid of unemployment
> If you've never been shadowbanned, you are not risking enough
> If you don't risk being downvoted, your comments are boring
> If you complain about downvoting, your comments are boring
> If you have never been labelled a bot or a propagandist, you are being too politically correct
> If you never submit articles, you are not contributing enough
some quick and rough ones, perhaps there are better worded and more accurate ones?
Risking downvotes or being labeled a propagandist, that works well enough.
The other two are true but don't fit the pattern.
>If you've never used a throwaway, you are not working for an interesting company
If you’ve never missed your kid’s birthday, you’re too focused on family.
I've always been fairly indifferent when my own money or time was on the line but when choices affect family or other people in general I tend to be more conservative.
International maybe not. I don't think I've ever found an international flight that actually leaves from SFO, for some reason they're always much more expensive than the one that goes to LAX first.
Unless the objective is something other than winning, this is by definition incorrect.
I don't know about squash, but this:
> The squash player who runs back and forth to attempt every shot...
doesn't appear to be true of tennis. Rafael Nadal in particular is famous for trying to catch each ball and save each and every shot. Lesser players give up more easily.
Rafa had to start somewhere, and he definitely did not hit every shot when he was a young boy.
Tying this back to the OP - my criticism of the 'Umeshisms' described are that they're absurd when applied to a system where your strategy has fixed outcome probabilities. If you could improve your ability to get through airports quickly with practice, then it would be self evident that missing the odd flight is a consequence of improving your skill at the optimum rate.
Or maybe I just don't understand the frame of reference of the OP.
Sometimes its good justification: if you have never failed you don't take enough risks. Fair enough.
But i'm sure an alcoholic would say something like: if you've never been fired for being too wasted to work, you don't know how to have fun (maybe they would be a bit more subtle, but you get the point).
I think its better to just be honest with yourself, drop the implied moral criticism. Instead of saying "if you never miss a plane you spend too much time in an airport", just say, "For me personally, i find it acceptable to miss a plane every now and then if it means i don't have to go to the airport 2 hours in advance" You're making explicit the trade off, and you're not going on some high horse that there is something wrong with people who make a different trade off or have different priorities.
All the caveats are implied, people always speak from a personal perspective, all you're doing is weakening your rhetoric to no effect.
The general form of the Umeshism calls attention to situations where errors of commission are invisibly expensive, and errors of omission are dramatic but not necessarily more expensive. Waiting in an airport lounge is wasted time, and it doesn't matter if you're waiting for the flight you have a ticket for, or whatever they put you on; if the objective is to minimize time in the waiting lounge, as why would it not be, it's just the total hours which matter.
The opposite of an Umeshism is an easy riposte when they're being abused: "no, if you've ever been fired for being too wasted to work, you're not having fun, you're an alcoholic".
One can spend the 30 minutes exactly the same as if they were in their office.
I never want to experience this again and I now make sure I'm at the airport well in time.
You know like normal rich people do. \s
Unfortunately no strangers helped me with that part.
Don't get me wrong, i could afford it, and at the end of the day, its just a funny story, no real harm done. But i still would have preferred to not have that happen.
These days, most airlines want to charge you some very hefty fee if you miss your flight.
In all seriousness though, it seems that we're starting to follow this philosophy too far and applying it closer and closer to the territory of black-marbles / unsurvivable-black-swans. Or maybe it's just politicians that know they have the risks externalized from themselves so are more inclined to play lethal force games.
But, even beyond this, there's great advantage in fully excluding a certain risk, because then you can totally stop thinking about contingency plans for it, and you gain mind-space that can be used for something else... Eg. if you're missing flights 10% of the time, then you need to dedicate mind space for knowing how to book a flight from the airport, or how to re-arrange your schedule to accomodate not arriving on time somewhere etc. etc. And these "contingency plans" add up and swell. Or you don't make them, but with a 1-10% failure rate of things you're living in constant stress and anxiety because things actually do fail/ break for you... Lower stress and freed mind-space may be worth it a lot, and this is way people do things over-conservatively and pay for non-crucial insurance etc.
I actually enjoying sitting at the McDonalds or a lounge with my laptop quietly working with similar if not more focus than in the office. My mind is calm and not stressed about missing flight.
Missing a flight means your mind now needs to figure out how to get on the next flight, which is actually time and mentally consuming.
So the general principle should be clarified as: _concentrate on the high-order bits, *iff the low-order bits don't matter*_. This is arguably the case for the examples given by the blog post, as missing a flight isn't really the end of the world. Still, it's a huge waste of time _on a single trip_, so you benefit from not caring about it only if you travel often enough. This shows than even in case where low-order bits aren't dramatic, they still need to be taken into account into a cost-benefit analysis.