[deleted]
Trading Time for Money
111–120 of 159 posts
Re: Trading Time for Money
#112> By comparison, my grocery bill is 5€ a day. Do you live on rice and beans? That sounds like you're trading enjoyment for money. We (2 adults) spend about US$150 a week on groceries, and still eat out about once a week. Those groceries include three meals a day, with the leftovers of the night before being taken for lunch the next day. How on earth do people eat healthily and only spend $5 a day?
Groceries in most of Europe are much higher quality for a lower price than in the US
Is this true in urban areas too? When I last visited prices seemed higher than the Midwestern US by at least 30%
Re: Trading Time for Money
#113[deleted]
Re: Trading Time for Money
#114I don't agree with the point you made about groceries. These costs are always fixed. No matter how much you earn. And therefore they are irrelevant to the opportunity cost.
For reference, if you earn 20k a month, your grocery expenses will roughly stay the same to earning 5k a month. They won't be 35% of your income (that would be 7000€ of groceries for 20k of income). Working more hours does not result in higher grocery costs.
Re: Trading Time for Money
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you give everyone a fixed amount of money, won't the cost of things just rise accordingly? I hear this argument a lot but I don't think it necessarily follows: - The supply of low end goods (the sort which you can afford with your UBI) is highly automated and will increase rapidly for any small price increase, making their pricing fairly inelastic. - The demand for these goods won't rise greatly (except for low…
That's probably true, except for one important category of goods that has a tendency to suck as much income from people as they can bear - housing. It is true that with UBI people have the option to move somewhere where housing is inexpensive, but I don't think it's desirable to have people already dependent on UBI move to places with lower economic opportunity - cementing their dependence on it. That being said, exp…
One of the reasons to use housing as a financial source for UBI. An LVT-like approach could capture the full market value of housing (land really) and tunnel it back into the economy as a public dividend, an UBI.
It would be a bit different from the current inheritance based land value extraction since it would go to everyone instead of the lucky owners. I think it could be positive change though.
Re: Trading Time for Money
#116I suggest finding something you like, and do it. I like gardening and cleaning so I do those, but don't like changing oil so I outsource that. I would change my oil it I could stand up doing it!
you could stand up and change the oil if you have access to a car lift
Re: Trading Time for Money
#117So roughly, the author is saying something like: if ( outsourcing_cost * alpha > opportunity_cost ) { outsource(); } and discusses how that alpha should be calculated. The author also mentions some side benefits of doing some tasks and getting better at them. Does HN have any thoughts about living a smaller life by doing fewer things and having more time to just live and enjoy life? If spending time figuring out how…
"In other words, are there any real life hacks that are not obvious that result in significant quality of life improvements?"
Get a comfy bed. Buy comfortable shoes. Spend more money on things that make you happy and less money on things that others tell you should make you happier. Housing is a great example, there is a lot of evidence that housing size doesn't improve happiness but living close to work and minimizing commute time increases happiness significantly.
Re: Trading Time for Money
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The idea behind outsourcing is that you can spend additional hours doing paid work There's a whole section of the article that argues that this is not possible. You can't scale your income up and down on a whim. > Of course, it also assumes that people can choose exactly how many hours they work at their regular hourly rate, which isn't usually the case, but that's a separate quibble. It doesn't. There's a whole se…
> Of course, it also assumes that people can choose exactly how many hours they work at their regular hourly rate, which isn't usually the case It can be the case, but then the trade-off is even worse: This article suggests calculating your net income as an average rate across all your hours worked. If you have chosen to increase your hours, you are taxed at the marginal rate on these increased hours, i.e. the highes…
even worse, while some folks have access to a second job or overtime, very few can scale their hours below 40 without angering their employer
Re: Trading Time for Money
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we are going by numbers, how many talented artists are indeed there? Of this how many are talented enough to be both artists and stock brokers AND are overwhelmed by stock broking so much that they give up on their Picasso like talents? 0.0001% of the general pop? May be if we count every one with massive world class but oppressed talents, will they account for 0.1% of the world pop? As much as it would liberate t…
Choosing to pursue a practical career instead of one’s passions seems like a universal thing to me. That doesn’t seem particularly controversial of a thing to say, but apparently for many, “producing invaluable goods” is more important than their fellow humans achieving self-actualization. Not to mention that said goods are by definition not invaluable if the jobs to produce them don’t exist anymore.
A lot of the goalposts got moved there :)
You mentioned talented artists, not self actualization. You are calling goods from jobs as invaluable - few may be. An iPhone is expensive but not invaluable. But art from Picasso is.
I think by moving the argument to self actualization - you’re essentially proscribing a wallE like lifestyle - the above talented artists might go ahead and produce greatness, but I don’t think majority is going to be doing any self-actualization. It’s going to be a party of consumption for most. But we are both guessing here.
That argument also assumes a post scarcity world which we aren’t even close to.
Finally succumbing to the myth of everyone chasing their passions while AI keeps up our lifestyle essentially is writing the end of our civilization as it is. If you buy that it ever happens, you should also buy that one day it will turn off. That day humans will be surrounded by magic machines they have no idea how to fix / work and in essence die off. Or at best, they get back to today.
Re: Trading Time for Money
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably true, except for one important category of goods that has a tendency to suck as much income from people as they can bear - housing. It is true that with UBI people have the option to move somewhere where housing is inexpensive, but I don't think it's desirable to have people already dependent on UBI move to places with lower economic opportunity - cementing their dependence on it. That being said, exp…
One of the reasons to use housing as a financial source for UBI. An LVT-like approach could capture the full market value of housing (land really) and tunnel it back into the economy as a public dividend, an UBI. It would be a bit different from the current inheritance based land value extraction since it would go to everyone instead of the lucky owners. I think it could be positive change though.
What is LVT?