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Time is the only real currency we have

blog.theboringtech.io

111–120 of 313 posts

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#112

Parameters 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…

You're using "energy" as a pseudoscientific gloss. A human being provides an extremely meager amount of energy in the physics sense of the word. That energy could be purchased much more cheaply. The economic value of human labor is more closely tied to human intelligence/dexterity. More reasons to think your comment is more about making the reader feel the insight is deep: there are other important conserved quantiti…

I like to think that the human work is to minimize entropy. So the currency would be entropy minimization.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#114
post #75

I’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

There's always the barbican approach: move grade 6 meters up

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#115

I’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…

> - Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. In Sweden, this has been a thing in most larger grocery stores for more than 10 years, e.g. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

They introduced these at the grocery store my wife and I frequent. We used them just once. As long as the lines aren't long, it seems just as quick to have the 2 checkout people (1 cashier, 1 bagger) do the work in a batch at the end, as opposed to fiddling around with bagging as you go.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using "energy" as a pseudoscientific gloss. A human being provides an extremely meager amount of energy in the physics sense of the word. That energy could be purchased much more cheaply. The economic value of human labor is more closely tied to human intelligence/dexterity. More reasons to think your comment is more about making the reader feel the insight is deep: there are other important conserved quantiti…

I like to think that the human work is to minimize entropy. So the currency would be entropy minimization.

Hah. You must be new to humans. Ordered destruction is a thing. (Alas, so is chaotic creation. Hail Eris!)

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#118

Interesting premise and article. I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools. re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing with a p…

This sounds like a good idea, and I’m planning to try it out. Thanks for sharing! I find that a lot of the time when I’m figuring out how to solve a problem, I need to read a lot of code. Is that something you do before you sit down with pen and paper?

I used to have the habit of printing out other people's code to read, and read it like I would a book. I stopped doing that a long time ago, but I used to get real value from doing that. I still like to read other people's code, but I am more likely to do it by browsing github on my iPad.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#119
> Learn to type Fast

Nah, IMHO the crux is not to type and still get stuff done.

If you have to type tones of overhead it's what hurts.

And with this I don't mean long method names (you have auto completion for that). But thinks like not using derives in Rust ;=) or not using annotations in Java.

Also for many of the more well established languages there are ways to "connect a remote server to your IDE" so that you _never_ _ever_ need to manually ssh into a server and change thinks there with some text only based tool (besides the fact that there are a lot of server setups where you ain't be able to do that anyway).

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. In Sweden, this has been a thing in most larger grocery stores for more than 10 years, e.g. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

They introduced these at the grocery store my wife and I frequent. We used them just once. As long as the lines aren't long, it seems just as quick to have the 2 checkout people (1 cashier, 1 bagger) do the work in a batch at the end, as opposed to fiddling around with bagging as you go.

There are no baggers in Sweden though.
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