TL;DR anyone? Time is money after all.
- be efficient at doing stuff
- automate stuff
- avoid time sinks
- be pragmatic about technology choices
This isn't article isn't about currency, btw.
Time is the only real currency we have
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Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has also been a thing at many US grocery stores for many years now, but inexplicably, many people don't use them.
I don’t use them because I just assume it’s going to be a personal information harvest fest, and it won’t work as advertised anyway. Like most other software-driven things these days.
It's basically the same technology that's used at the register. You pick up a barcode scanner, you scan your items, and the scanner produces a hash of your items that can be scanned at checkout to reproduce the list. Super simple technology.
The store could gather how much time it took you to scan between items and in which order, but you can pay with cash if you're worried about personal privacy.
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#73What about attention, attention is the real currency
Attention is time. They are interchangeable for the discussion.
Not at all. All moments are not created equal.
If you're stressed out, hungry, got the low-blood sugar, tired, distracted, etc. your attention is much less valuable (to you) than if you're relaxed, well-fed and -rested, focused, etc.
One of the greatest forms of "leverage" we have in the world is the capability of developing and focusing the quality of our attention, "concentration" or "one-point mind". That's why meditation is worthwhile (one of the reasons anyway) because, paradoxically, sitting and doing "nothing" for an hour makes the other 10~12 hours way more productive, due to the improvement in Q-of-A[ttention].
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#74I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time. Just some quick thoughts: - Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars. - Min…
Why these things don’t (always) happen is more related to the top sibling comment: there is a trade off in space or energy with each of the things you described, and the value in time saved must be less than the space and energy cost of the alternatives, or else they would happen.
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#75I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time. Just some quick thoughts: - Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars. - Min…
> replaced with more pedestrian overpasses,
vegas has pedestrian overpasses and they are a tremendous waste of time - much worse than crosswalks. A better approach would be to keep the pedestrians at grade-level and have car under-passes
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#76I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time. Just some quick thoughts: - Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars. - Min…
there are many pedestrian overpasses in some big cities (like the one I live in) but it's not so simple, because then you have to climb up stairs, which takes more time... you walk more steps add some heavy duty sun and people rather wait in the shade down below rather than climb up. Also pedestrian overpasses tend to be really narrow (read: uncomfortable) Also, why should we be so stingy with time? it's better (IMHO…
uncovered bridges and people being lazy... compared to saving lives and time, these sound like bad excuses.
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#77Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This doesn't work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves from any responsibility over the code that t…
This. I've been thinking about this for last few sleepless nights. I am at a start-up which has grown to 61 person. The tight connection of everybody's everyday contributions to company survival has declined. A rigourous accountability and incentives framework is still missing and there's no time and resources to build it now. Most of employees don't know what is more or less important and by how exactly much. I foun…
True. Having worked at many startups as well as big corporations, I definitely think that the environment inside big companies feels more like some twisted form of socialism than capitalism. The idea of internal markets sounds good. Having small teams which have a strong sense of ownership over different projects is a good strategy in my experience as a developer.
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#78Parameters of the universe are currency. Time is one of them, space (or area on earth’s surface) is another, and energy is a third. How these three things are used is what generates value to human beings. Each of the fundamental items can be traded individually, but money is used as a proxy for value . The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy. They produce some level of valu…
The only currency you're born with is time. The rest are acquired by the application of time.
Energy - or rather, the ability to convert it between various forms, like food > kinetic energy - is also a currency that we are born with. If you have grown very old, even having a week on hand will not help you lift a sledge hammer.
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#79This is great! In re: time is money, it's even worse than that: attention is money. The quality of time varies with the "self-remembrance" if you will. - - - - Take time to "pop the 'why?' stack. In practice many of us are "yak shaving" and wasting a lot of time and effort on "low-leverage" actions. > yak shaving > [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity…
Does xkcd even need attribution? I was sure most readers would recognise the art (if not the comic) :)
Point taken and corrected (noob blogger mistakes!)
Thanks!
Re: Time is the only real currency we have
#80I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just feels infinite.