141–150 of 348 posts
I think the intelligentsia do better when they have some manual labor in their lives too. I posit that the gig economy is just a modern take on classism and indentured servitude. We would be better served to improve robotics, automation and efficiency rather than grow a servant class (again).
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Don't underestimate the value in a multitude of skills. When Argentina's economy collapsed in 2001, I'd prefer to know how to write code, do laundry, and wash toilets than only knowing how to write code.
>Don't underestimate the value in a multitude of skills. I'm sure pretty much everybody who hires a cleaning service knows how to clean a toilet.
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I'm spending over $100 a week per person right now on groceries. Really goes to show how expensive food is in Canada.
After the last Soylent discussion here, I reevaluated my diet and ended up going with emeals to do breakfast/lunch/dinner plans. Food went from $300/mo to $450/mo. It go to show that there's a lot of variance!. I don't feel like the old meal plan was worse, it certainly felt adequate. (But I am getting 2 more good meals a day.) Edit: I just realized that's your per-person figure. Mine is for two. That is quite expens…
$450 a month is definitely a lot by my standards, where/what do you tend to buy?
But comparing it to his $60/w, $240/m, isn't quite fair. His meal plan is for 6 meals at $10 a meal. Considering you'll want a meal everyday, that's $300 a month and that's just for dinner. If you add breakfast and lunch he's either paying as much or more than you.
$10 a meal is just crazy expensive for a cooked meal. If you look at recommended servings of say 100g of vegs, 100g of rice or potatoes, 100g of meat or fish, you're looking at about 30c, 10c and 60c. With seasoning, oils, onion, garlic etc, you're looking at a $1.50 meal. If you double the servings for example, and get more expensive ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to top $5. But again, a $2 meal is very doable, meaning you can do dinner for $100 a month ea-si-ly. Another $100 for breakfast (oatmeal with milk & a piece of fruit is a 0.5$ meal at most, or $15 a month) and lunch (make any sandwich, another piece of fruit, a salad) and some snacks here and there. It's hard to top $200, and this'll get you a really healthy 3-meal a day.
Curious how you spend $450. I mean don't get me wrong, I easily could, if you buy oatmeal with banana chips instead of oatmeal and a banana you pay $2 instead of $0.20, and you can get that 10x price increase for 'processed food' everywhere, but if I were planning my meals and cooking myself, $450 is really unnecessary.
I enjoy interacting with family, friends and colleagues, but less so random people passing on the street.
We evolved in groups in which you might recognise or know detail about everyone around you. People often talk about tribes or townships of 150 people.
We're shutting in not from everyone, but from those outside that circle of 150 people.
I think our future virtual lives (building on current social networks) will allow us to very carefully manage our interactions with others. We will be somewhat insulated from the masses whether they are abroad or down the street.
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I wish more people knew this. The entire "chemical imbalance" shtick is a myth. If you are ever told this, your response should be, "What chemical? What level am I at? What level should I be at?".. But, alas, there is no blood test, or any other kind of test, which can yet determine this. That's not science.
> That's not science. Science is sometimes harder than a single test. For example, there's no blood test for autism. There's no blood test for PTSD. But my best friend's brother took years to talk to me, and sometimes still goes into rages; one of my partners would wake up in the middle of the night convinced I was trying to kill her. Brains, minds, reinforcement learning systems, are complicated. By entirely abstrac…
> Many services promote themselves as life-expanding — there > to free up your time so you can spend it connecting with > the people you care about, not standing at the post > office with strangers. Rinse’s ad shows a couple chilling > at a park, their laundry being washed by someone, > somewhere beyond the picture’s frame. A case of letting the destination (free time for socialising) overrule the journey (social int…
> For example, if you go to a laundromat regularly or > catch a bus regularly, you eventually end up seeing the > same people and might even end up making friends with > them. Maybe even good enough friends that you coordinate > your journeys/tasks in order to catch up? You can make friends anywhere. Even in stores! My mother met one of her best friends when she was a customer at the supermarket where her friend work…
For five years I lived in a rundown SF unit with no laundry on site. Every week my wife and I would drop our clothes at a nearby family run wash and fold. Over years of little interactions we started to develop a semblance of friendship and real fondness for the owner. Twice a week I got a nice pleasant/personal experience, and that was from outsourcing a single chore.
I also use services like Sprig/Google Shopping Express/Amazon Prime, because they are awesome, convenient, and cheap. But as a result I rarely buy from the nearby corner store, and have not developed personal connections from any of these transactions. I have saved money and time, but it has cost me in social satisfaction. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
As you point out, there might be active interventions to try and replace this connection (e.g. volunteering), but the default has shifted from "get to know the people around you through transactions" to "receive goods and services anonymously."
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I think we're afraid of being wrong. We live in a society where access to information is greater than it ever has been in history, and everything we may take an interest in doing has been done before, and someone has already pointed out all of the flaws and how it's wrong. We see that first and focus in on it, and we let it destroy something that a previous generation would've seen as imperfect yet beautiful.
Information overload can be worse than none at all. I recall someone did a study of employee 401K participation, and above a certain point, the more choices they were given the fewer people ever signed up. Our limited capacity for "decision-making" is at least as real a limitation as time or money.
For me it has to do with opportunity costs. Take a strawberry milkshake instead of banana, no biggie if it tastes bad. Take a career path and end up regretting it, and it's a really big deal, usually. And even if your career path wasn't a bad choice per se, again, opportunity cost, perhaps the alternative had been much better. At the end of the day you just have to choose, try it, and if it appears nice enough you double-down, and that choice can be really difficult.
One of the most frustrating things for me had been having to decide on the bulk of my professional education before ever having worked in the field. I think programming is to some extent an exception in that many programmers get a decent experience on what programming is like as a kid, as a hobby. Being an engineer in an office is a whole different matter of course, but the notion of programming for hours on a daily basis is something you can grasp by age 15 or 18 when you decide on a focus in high school and a major in college.
But for so many professions, you have people age 17 having to decide if they like being a dentist or a lawyer, or a sales person or a government worker, while having near-zero experience, and fleeting ideas on what it is from movies and magazines.
Not sure what it's like in the US but in the Netherlands at age 11 you get tested and go to a certain level of secondary school. The lowest gets you entrance to community college at age 16. The middle to vocational school (e.g. university of applied sciences). The highest to university ('research uni'). There's some opportunities to switch after age 11, but it's very tricky for multiple reasons and generally rare. And then at age 13 or so you decide on a focus which gets you different subjects. e.g. Physics & Science, or Culture and Society or Economics & Society. And those give entrance to your tertiary education. So if you chose at age 13 or so that you liked Culture, you'd have gotten things like art history and French, and you couldn't go on at age 17 to pick Computer Science. You'd have to do an extra program, again difficult for various reasons and rare.
Now at 24 looking back this structure was really frustrating. I liked economics as a subject, chose that path, always did Computer Science as a hobby (which wasn't a subject in any of the paths), but couldn't do CS unless I did Physics (which was a subject I had for years regardless as everyone gets it, but not to the full extent supposedly required).
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This isn't criticism, just curiosity: do you feel guilty when you pay someone to cut your hair or dispose of your garbage (assuming the latter service isn't included in your housing... that varies, of course). Those are both things that would have been done by servants in the past, but that most people still have done today rather than doing themselves. One advantage of having a buzz cut is that it's easy to cut my o…
I can't speak for the GP, but I think some of the guilt from realizing that the people who perform these jobs often have a very low standard of living and very little job security or life prospects. Of course there have always been poor service workers in that situation, and as a society we've haven't really cared much about it (i.e. decades long minimum wage stagnation). People are talking about it now because of th…
I haven't bothered having anyone cut my hair in years, but yeah, people working at SuperCuts make crap, in much the same way and for the same reason that people working at McDonalds make crap.
Slowly, it turned the other way round - I got shut-in. Started from not having to go to local store daily - because it was a waste of time. I could not relate to a calendar-day. Sometimes I would start my work at 6pm in evening and sometimes at 3am in the morning. I tried to discipline myself, but it did not work out for valid reasons. And I started introverting due to lack of social contacts. Health wasn't an issue - because home gyms were good enough and I think those kept me off any depression. The shut-in introduces pretty bad habits. The "freedom" was out, I was working most of the time - it almost felt like a self-imposed prison in the name of discipline and saving time. Sometimes I have wondered if my life was any better than placing my brain in a box bionically connected to a computer.
Now, I make it a habit to go out once every day or couple of days, same time for 45 mins-1 hour a bit after the busy day starts for most. It is a HUGE waste of time but it acts as a tether for my work day, makes me feel grateful for what I have and surprisingly, results in better productivity.