[deleted]
The most precious resource is agency
121–130 of 340 posts
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Bubbles of comfort" are not unique to Western countries, that is true. Every country on the planet offers a subset of their population a great life style, the only variable is how much of the country actually gets a) to partake in that lifestyle b) has the tools to reach that lifestyle when starting outside of it Doesn't matter if you are talking about North Korea or the United States. And yes, you can find abject g…
> The fact you could post your comment puts you in the top 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet access). I have by now traveled pretty much to all the continents and at this point smartphones and internet are ubiquitous. They are litterly now throwing away working second hand ones in developing nations.
Doesn't that still put them within the western bubble of comfort in a sense though? It isn't much of a defense of an alternate way of life if that way of life required westerners to work hard in a different (i.e., consumer-product-based, highly-skilled, high-stress) way of life as a prerequisite.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went and did the other side, living nontraditionally and trying to be what I wanted. I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money. My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters. The work can be the most boring, crud-type work. As long as you’re working with people you like on something vague…
I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money. You will never have FU money working a regular job.
You can, if circumstances allow. Have no debt, make a software engineer's salary, and live on half of it. Put the rest in mutual funds. Repeat for some number of years and your investments' passive income eventually surpasses your budget, at which point you're free from the rat race.
The part people find unpalatable (and sometimes impossible, depending on circumstances) is the "live on half of it" part (but even if half is impossible, it's still worth investing what you can).
I'm not even making US software money and my budget says I can reach FU money (which, to be clear, means matching my current low-budget lifestyle, which is why it's achievable) in 5 years if no other major expenses come up.
I did decide to prioritize charitable giving because of the reasons elsewhere discussed about service being its own reward, but that only pushed it out to ~11, which is still a couple decades earlier than the typical retirement age.
Plus, when I'm gone, I can pass that income generator on to someone else and free them from the rat race, giving the next generation an even better headstart than I had.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#124I think I found school tolerable, or even fun, because I was able to figure out the proper way to exercise agency within the confines of the system. As an analogy, as a kid when I played with Lego or K'NEX, my favorite thing to do was not assemble kits but instead come up with my own designs from the parts therein. Working within the system, but being a creator rather than a consumer. At school, I wasn't just trying…
I exercised my agency by annoying my teachers. That tended to lead to me having much lower grades in subjectively graded classes. It was a lot of fun, but I cringe sometimes in retrospect. Here's one example: Slashdot posted a link to a place that would let you search all graduate thesis papers at about the same time I was starting an English class taught by a grad student instructor. I looked up the instructor's Mas…
Quite the fragile instructor...
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money. You will never have FU money working a regular job.
You can, if circumstances allow. Have no debt, make a software engineer's salary, and live on half of it. Put the rest in mutual funds. Repeat for some number of years and your investments' passive income eventually surpasses your budget, at which point you're free from the rat race. The part people find unpalatable (and sometimes impossible, depending on circumstances) is the "live on half of it" part (but even if h…
That's a great goal, but you're confusing simply having money with having FU money. They're not the same. The "FU" bit is important. It means something.
To be honest, even your strategy there sounds tremendously flawed because you're assuming that you'll even want to live that life. What happens if you meet someone, get married, and have a couple of kids after you 'retire'? Suddenly your retirement fund is nowhere near enough. A simple example - how do you pay for your kids to go to college? You think you've got "FU money" so surely you can do something as straightforward as saving your kids from college debt. What if they're brilliant and get places at Stanford? Is your 'live on the interest from half the earnings of 11 years as an engineer' going to cover $500k in 20 years time? Of course not. You'd need to dip in to the capital, and then your whole retirement plan falls apart.
Having FU money, as opposed to just plain simple money, means you will be able to afford all those things and more besides because you are genuinely FU rich. You don't get there by having a normal job, even if it pays a lot and you can invest half your income. That just gets you a nice middle-class retirement, which is lovely, but you won't be rich.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went and did the other side, living nontraditionally and trying to be what I wanted. I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money. My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters. The work can be the most boring, crud-type work. As long as you’re working with people you like on something vague…
I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money. You will never have FU money working a regular job.
15 years ago a young engineer i worked with overheard me say "getting rich is a pretty easy formula if you are patient."
he came to me later and asked me to expound. i told him "the formula is: spend less than you make and invest the left over. you do that long enough and you'll become wealthy."
i also told him "from what i can tell, it will happen so gradually that you'll barely notice a difference in your lifestyle. you will just realize one day that you are part of the maligned upper-crust but noone around you will know that."
he called me 2 years ago to let me know that he took my observation to heart and he's now in the millionaire club. he also said "the books say i'm a millionaire, but i certainly don't feel like it."
his next million will be much easier to get now and he just turned 40.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just nonsense advice. The entire point of retirement savings is that at some point you can stop working. FU money is just about timing. You can change that timing. 1. Reduce outgoings. It's easier to have FU money if the amount you need to be able to say "FU" is smaller, because you've perfected the art of living on a little less than most. Most people's outgoings grow to meet their incomes: resist that. You d…
Is this not FU money yet? You're the problem, not the regular job. I think we have very different ideas of what "FU money" means. FU money is literally enough to be able to do what you want. It's being able to stop asking "Can I afford this?" because you definitely can. It's being able to stop making a choice between two sports cars because you can afford both. It's being able to buy the exact house you want because…
> FU money is literally the ability to say FU and do something anyway when someone says you can't.
So how much does it cost to travel to Alpha Centauri and back?
There are always things you can't afford, no matter how rich you are. So that's a bad definition.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the argument Hubert Dreyfuss advances to postulate Artificial General Intelligence can never be achieved - because computers are not “in the world.” > One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4
Just raise them as you would a child? Give them a body, upgrade it so they grow every few years. Lets see where we end up.
> Just raise them as you would a child?
That could only work even in theory if you've programmed in all the innate behaviours/desires human children have. And in practice raising superintelligent children who can clone themselves and rewrite their minds is not a thing we know how to do.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#129Water is our most precious resource. We drink on average around four litres a day, and it is an irreplaceable element of our industry and our agriculture. Indeed it is at the very heart of our existence.
Re: The most precious resource is agency
#130I suspect if Leonardo da Vinci stayed in school a few more years he'd still be alright.