Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vanity activities

quarter--mile.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: Vanity activities

#51

Post by danilafe »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #36
danilafe wrote: post #9

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Both ethical consumption and going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact, and they're independent of one another. So, while someone "truly" optimizing for environmental impact would better spend their time avoiding meat, someone who enjoys meat can still reduce their environmental impact without becoming miserable. Variables like "income" and "environment" are just parts…

> going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact Mmm, yes and no. It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes. If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock. If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock. The whole thing breaks down…

You might be right, but I was taking that as a given since the article made that claim. I think the general point (of taking smaller actions in lieu of more effective but costly ones) matters more so than the individual "vanity activity".

Re: Vanity activities

#52

Post by fastball »

danilafe wrote: post #50
fastball wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not free because they consume your time, which is valuable.

Yes, but only if you would spend that time on something that is more valuable (according to your happiness+ heuristic).

Right, but I think that was the author's point: many of these activities are seen by their participants as "productive", rather than just "this makes me happy". That was a specific point of the post.

Re: Vanity activities

#53

Post by californical »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #36
danilafe wrote: post #9

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Both ethical consumption and going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact, and they're independent of one another. So, while someone "truly" optimizing for environmental impact would better spend their time avoiding meat, someone who enjoys meat can still reduce their environmental impact without becoming miserable. Variables like "income" and "environment" are just parts…

> going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact Mmm, yes and no. It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes. If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock. If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock. The whole thing breaks down…

The amount of livestock that we actually would need in that case is probably around 5% of what we actually have (in the US). So it’s still valid if half of all people became vegetarian, and the remaining amount cut their meat consumption to “special occasions only”.

Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.

Re: Vanity activities

#54

Post by nkrisc »

wavemode wrote: post #16
mooreds wrote: post #4

Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees. Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet. What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?). From there, it follows that…

"Networking", in the abstract, can be good for finding a job. As they say, it's who you know not what you know. That being said, industry networking events , like conferences and such, are almost not at all useful for that purpose. In my experience they're mostly used for B2B sales (which is a kind of networking, I guess).

That’s still networking. Companies often have referral bonuses for open positions so if a lot of salespeople know you, when there’s a referral bonus available they might just put your name in. It’s something.

Re: Vanity activities

#55

Post by erelong »

This reminds me of something slightly different but of "not reinventing the wheel"

It feels like there should be emerging "optimized solutions" to certain problems that are widely accepted, but rather instead it seems like people just keep re-doing things that I thought we would have already "solved" and moved on past

For example, if you simply want to consume the cheapest caffeine source, I thought someone figured out it was powdered caffeine... versus paying maybe like 100x more for a coffee from a "coffee chain store". Now, granted the experience and maybe the same antioxidants or chemical makeup may not be the same in caffeine powder versus coffee, but the point is I feel like a lot of problems aren't "solved for optimization" which would enable us to make progress on some other unoptimized problem in society

I guess this "reinvention of the wheel" feels like a "vanity activity" to me?

Re: Vanity activities

#56

Post by Nevermark »

throwforfeds wrote: post #42
satisfice wrote: post #10

To call reading the news “vanity” exposes the true vanity of this kind of post. What is the logic of assigning the word “vanity” to my interest to know what’s going on in the world? It’s vanity because I have no important decisions to make about the war in Ukraine, or the perfidy of my government? It’s not vanity, it’s a desire to understand my world and my place within it. What IS vanity is imagining that one’s own…

Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here, but I do think they have a point that there are diminishing returns with staying up on the news cycle. For instance, I think there is a difference between reading some news daily and consuming only news. My father was in the latter category growing up -- I never really saw him read a book, but he was always reading a paper or listening to/watching a news prog…

> Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here

“Recreation” is perhaps a good word.

But I also use “vanity” for doing serious things, for a non-serious purpose in a similar way. I.e. one day I would like to be able to afford to have some “vanity businesses”, regardless of profitability, like bar I have designed, a winery, etc.

Pretty common hobbies for the wealthy.

Those are not things that drive me, and not for appearance sake (I.e. not that kind of vanity). But if I had enough to throw in this direction without any risk to myself, I would enjoy that.

Re: Vanity activities

#57

Post by soupfordummies »

balamatom wrote: post #25
sebastiennight wrote: post #3

On a related note: I've run businesses for close to 20 years, most of those spent selling to other businesses, and I still fail to understand what the entirety of LinkedIn is for and if there is any of it that wouldn't fall under the author's definition of "Vanity activities". If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.

>what the entirety of LinkedIn is for Signalling allegiance.

To?

Re: Vanity activities

#58

Post by sfpotter »

mooreds wrote: post #4

Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees. Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet. What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?). From there, it follows that…

Networking involves more than just letting people know you exist. I'd say that's borderline useless. Actually networking requires building real relationships with people. For me, that means continually meeting new people who do the same kind of thing that I do, having pleasant or exciting conversations with them, learning as much as I can about them (showing a real interest! asking serious questions! listening to their answers!), and demonstrating to them that I'm hungry and I want to do Big Things. It's hard to do this effectively. I'm sure it depends on your field and it certainly requires continual practice.

Re: Vanity activities

#59

Post by toast0 »

fastball wrote: post #49
toast0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, churning is clearly profitable if you pay off your card every month, will hit the spend requirements organically and are organized enough to cancel to avoid annual fees in the second year. Some people dive into manufactured spending to hit the required spending, but then you really need to consider the time invested. The question is more about if the rewards are meaningful. I think it's actually worth doing a b…

What's wrong with Chase?

Bonkers fraud checks that flagged my ISP charges every month for several months in a row. And some other stuff I don't remember, but I'll continue to hold the grudge anyway because there's 9 other top 10 national banks. Or at least 8, cause I'm not using Wells Fargo either (they dinged me a phone teller fee when I called in to let them know I was fixing an overdraft) ... Wells Fargo doesn't do a lot of attractive credit card offers though, so that's less of a hardship than ignoring Chase.

Re: Vanity activities

#60

Post by pclmulqdq »

sfpotter wrote: post #58
mooreds wrote: post #4

Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees. Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet. What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?). From there, it follows that…

Networking involves more than just letting people know you exist. I'd say that's borderline useless. Actually networking requires building real relationships with people. For me, that means continually meeting new people who do the same kind of thing that I do, having pleasant or exciting conversations with them, learning as much as I can about them (showing a real interest! asking serious questions! listening to the…

In general, going to a single networking event with the purpose of networking is kind of silly, but going to the same conference year after year to see the same people and have deep discussions opens a lot of doors. I imagine the point of "networking events" in general is to be a modern take on a country club: You go to see like-minded people who want to meet people like them, and you keep going over and over again to develop relationships.
Post reply on HN