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Busyness leads to bad decisions

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Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#71

Post by larnmar »

twoquestions wrote: post #21

Can personally confirm. A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now . I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies. EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can't drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it. I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay…

> One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor.

On the other hand, consider — poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses, so they can drive around in a beater. If I had a dirty 1999 Camry then my rich neighbours would look askance at me.

If you think it’s expensive to be poor, try being rich.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#72

Post by shantly »

larnmar wrote: post #71
twoquestions wrote: post #21

Can personally confirm. A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now . I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies. EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can't drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it. I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay…

> One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor. On the other hand, consider — poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses, so they can drive around in a beater. If I had a dirty 1999 Camry then my rich neighbours would look askance at me. If you think it’s expensive to be poor, try being rich.

> poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses

Neither do the old-money (or socialized to behave the same) rich. That's the behavior of someone who's worried about being mistaken for poor.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#73

Post by minikites »

larnmar wrote: post #71
twoquestions wrote: post #21

Can personally confirm. A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now . I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies. EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can't drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it. I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay…

> One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor. On the other hand, consider — poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses, so they can drive around in a beater. If I had a dirty 1999 Camry then my rich neighbours would look askance at me. If you think it’s expensive to be poor, try being rich.

Sounds like a really tough life watching poor people have all the luck.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#74

Post by twoquestions »

throwaway07Ju19 wrote: post #68
ryandrake wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

Does anyone know if there is existing terminology for Class A/B ? Investor class / working class ? Or maybe capital class / labor class. The typically discussed classes in the US are lower, middle, upper which I always took to be one std below the mean income (lower) and one std above mean income (upper). Perhaps if we used mean days until $0 dollars in the bank if you stopped working it would be more useful.

They're generally referred to Bourgeoisie (for Class A) and Proletariat (for Class B). I can understand the hesitation in using those terms directly, as they're quite politically charged.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#75

Post by riantogo »

afarrell wrote: post #24
DarwinMailApp wrote: post #23

I could not agree more. For years I was just doing things for the sake of being busy.. crossing tasks off my todo list on a daily basis. I felt so accomplished, however, I was not really getting a lot of useful work done! -------------------------- What did I do? - I started thinking about the tasks I needed to do, assessing if they were actually important to begin with. - I often found that they were not adding valu…

> assessing if they were actually important to begin with. I've found answering "Is this important?" very hard. I find it much easier to answer "What is the impact if I do this?"

“What is the impact if I don’t do this?”, is a stricter filter.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#76

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #61
alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

[deleted]

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#77

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #61
alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

[deleted]

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#78

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

larnmar wrote: post #71
twoquestions wrote: post #21

Can personally confirm. A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now . I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies. EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can't drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it. I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay…

> One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor. On the other hand, consider — poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses, so they can drive around in a beater. If I had a dirty 1999 Camry then my rich neighbours would look askance at me. If you think it’s expensive to be poor, try being rich.

Instead your buy a beat up old Camry, which was in poor maintenance condition, and keeps breaking down, so pretty soon you have to to either replace it or repair it, and that's not cheap, so you go to the cheapest options available, and because of that, those burn out sooner too, and the cycle continues.

Regardless of the hit it would take to your social status, you CAN choose to opt out of a rich neighbourhood or a rich car, if you need a car, you can't opt out of that choice. There's nowhere to opt out to.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#79

Post by leggomylibro »

gerbilly wrote: post #52
leggomylibro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about feeling idle with nothing to do but consider your own mortality? Not many people enjoy that, and Pascal wrote an interesting paper about it: http://stmaryvalleybloom.org/pascal-diversion.html Personally, my main takeaway can be summarized by this passage: >And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, sca…

> The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities The irony is not lost on me that the man in this anecdote is bringing untimely death to the hare, to distract himself from his own. Death probably feels just like you felt before you were born. Why not celebrate that there is anything to experience at all? It seems so improbable.

Haha, yeah. But hunting is just one of the examples that Pascal uses because of the times, along with gambling and war.

Metaphorically, that passion project or artistic pursuit that you can't quite explain a practical use for is more or less the same idea.

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