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The Shut-In Economy

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Re: The Shut-In Economy

#191

Post by wutbrodo »

ForHackernews wrote: post #142
tsotha wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I went to university with a girl who didn't know how to operate a dishwasher. At first, I assumed it was because her family had not been wealthy enough to own a dishwasher; later, I found out it was because they were so wealthy they had servants who loaded and ran their dishwasher for them.

The problem I have with people who say things like this is that these things are easily Googlable. I didn't "know" how to do laundry until I went to college (my sister and I had specific chores and laundry was one of hers). During a fight with my sister when I was still in high school, I recall her using that as an insult: "You don't even know how to do LAUNDRY".

I needed to do laundry my first week of school: I couldn't (and to this day can't) even fathom what the phrase "know how to do laundry" meant. Separate whites and colors (or don't), put the clothes in the machine, and press the button.......what kind of mental deficiency is required for someone to think there's an actual gap between "knowing how to do laundry" and "not knowing how".

Loading a dishwasher and cleaning a toilet would seem to be similar. The only gap between "knowing" and "not knowing" is perhaps three seconds of Googling (in case there's some pitfall about what you can and can't put in there).

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#192

Post by wutbrodo »

physcab wrote: post #129

I think people are vastly over-estimating how much time they are saving using these "on-demand" apps. For a mom who is trying to juggle 2 children, yes, I can see this as a huge help. But for the vast majority of the target demographic (young, single-ish, urban upper middle class folks), we're not gaining hours in a day. We're experiencing instant gratification. We're stimulating the reward centers in our brain that…

> For a mom who is trying to juggle 2 children, yes, I can see this as a huge help. But for the vast majority of the target demographic (young, single-ish, urban upper middle class folks), we're not gaining hours in a day.

Wat. The mom in this example may find apps like this more _necessary/useful_, but how does it save her more time than it saves the single person? I got back from the symphony a couple of hours ago and need to get some laundry detergent and other sundries: instead of wasting a good chunk of the part of my day that overlaps with regular hours (when concerts, restaurants, parties, parks, meetups, shows, etc are all open), I spent 4 minutes at 11 pm ordering that stuff before going to bed. Perhaps if your free time consists of sitting on your couch staring at a blank wall, then maximizing free time is not particularly useful, but for those of us who actually do things in our free time, making chores more efficient is a no-brainer. (Though in my case this particular example is a little less salient because I live within half a mile of multiple walgreens so I can usually pick sundries up on my way home. The general principle still applies).

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#193

Post by lfowles »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #143
lfowles wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Edit: I just realized that's your per-person figure. Mine is for two. That is quite expensive :( $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…

An aside: I'd really like to see you do this with actual prices and see how it compares to your guesstimates.

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#194

Post by wutbrodo »

sowhatquestion wrote: post #7

I don't have the historical knowledge to do it myself, but it would be fascinating to read an in-depth comparison between these services and the economy of servants in the 19th or early-20th century. The image in my head (from movies and books and reading [about] Piketty) is that the wealthy in earlier eras were more idle, living off rents rather than incomes. I imagine servants would have been more of a status symbo…

> whereas today's upper-middle-class strivers see them as more of a necessity "to dedicate more time to working."

I don't understand HN's tendency to swallow this claim whole. If you convert any increase in free time immediately into more work time, that's a problem with your work/life balance, not with whatever is increasing your free time.

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#195

Post by wishpishh »

eigenvector wrote: post #157
JohnBooty wrote: post #91

I don't feel like ordering things online makes me a shut-in at all - just the opposite. I work a lot, and by spending less time on the drudgery of brick-and-mortar shopping, I have more time to spend on the things that matter to me. Including socializing. Yeah, maybe I leave the house less, but are those trips to the store really "quality time?" Making a run to Wal-Mart or the supermarket to buy toilet paper is time…

> Retail shopping is usually freaking depressing - the employees and customers are often rude, and you're bombarded from all angles with sights and sounds designed to entice (or scare) you into buying things you don't need. No thank you. That's not about retail, that's about urban life. I live in a town of less than 2,000 people. There's one grocery store, and when you go there you recognize at least half the people…

I find the exact opposite. Sure, in a very small town you'll constantly recognize people and be constantly recognized. But you don't have a choice. There's little chance you'll find anyone who shares your interests, and there will be little chance of spontaneity. Everyone either does know you or will think they know you when they don't. There's a lot of social cohesion and apprehension. I find this really suffocating. In an urban environment I find it easier to socialize because I know that whoever I talk to doesn't have a lot of preconceptions about me.

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#196

Post by zaroth »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #143
lfowles wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Edit: I just realized that's your per-person figure. Mine is for two. That is quite expensive :( $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…

$1.50 a meal? In what country?

Where are you buying your protein for $3 per pound? Ground beef costs more. 100g before cooking is a pretty small serving.

My local Safeway wanted $7/dozen (!!) for store brand eggs last week. I walked away shaking my head. Dollar isn't what it used to be. This week it was a "more reasonable" 5.49.

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#197

Post by zaroth »

gress wrote: post #145
tedks wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

All this is not relevant to the fact that there is no evidence for depression being caused by a chemical imbalance.

Never mind a chemical balance being caused by depression!

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#198

Post by robryan »

ryanSrich wrote: post #167
tomphoolery wrote: post #97

So for all of you people who withstand the bullshit of the bay area but stay in all the time...why are you wasting all your money living in a city and not taking advantage of being urban? You could, instead, move a bit further outside the city and live around trees, grass and the best part? There's like no people around! It's great! I mean...you don't even need to live in the bay area. You could just move to, oh I do…

> So for all of you people who withstand the bullshit of the bay area but stay in all the time...why are you wasting all your money living in a city and not taking advantage of being urban? You could, instead, move a bit further outside the city and live around trees, grass and the best part? There's like no people around! It's great! Right!? When I saw that the concierge said they have a lot of "work from homers" I…

I would imagine that a lot of them have jobs that may be from home but require frequent meetings in the area.

Other than that it might be for networking, or they might have all their friends in the area.

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#199

Post by xux »

bkjelden wrote: post #72
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Live in a beautiful city, cool friends, lovely girlfriend. Plenty of things exist here of which I can objectively say they're awesome, and in many things I'm genuinely interested, and so I avidly read and follow the news, whether it's social topics, economics, politics, tech etc. Yet I hold very little interest in experiencing anything personally. If I had to describe it succinctly; I've become a dedicated…

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.

You might be interested in reading this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...

Re: The Shut-In Economy

#200

Post by ZeroGravitas »

JohnBooty wrote: post #91

I don't feel like ordering things online makes me a shut-in at all - just the opposite. I work a lot, and by spending less time on the drudgery of brick-and-mortar shopping, I have more time to spend on the things that matter to me. Including socializing. Yeah, maybe I leave the house less, but are those trips to the store really "quality time?" Making a run to Wal-Mart or the supermarket to buy toilet paper is time…

Regarding your aside about frozen meals, I'm sure I read a comment on this site from a food scientist who claimed that very high quality frozen meals were technically possible, but no one could overcome the consumer perception that it wasn't worth spending money on frozen food.
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