Everything must be paid for twice (2022)
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
50 years later I can't unlearn this even though it makes little sense in most cases in an age when things have no repair affordances or are so cheap (socks) that the "cost" of repair is greater than the effort to replace it.
The consequence is that I really dread buying things and have no ability to make an impulse purchase. Every purchase feels like a burden: did I really get the best one that will last the longest? How will I look after it? I can't understand people who go shopping for fun. A gift also feels like a burden has been handed to me (I have to look after this and use it appropriately).
It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything -- though the rational part of my mind wonders if they might be making the right call.
Donate it immediately, unopened. It can be resold.
With any luck, it will be obtained by someone who wants it, or be passed around as a currency totem forever, and never become waste.
I'm almost 40 years old and have barely bought any items of clothing in a decade -- my parents keep gifting me things (some I've finally started giving to Goodwill), but much of my clothes I care for well so it takes many years before they are bad enough to throw out. It's an unpleasant feeling - I feel pain buying more when I have so much, so I haven't been able to buy things I like (or clothing that I feel expresses my style) in years.
It feels so nice when I think of something that I know someone needs or will use.
That's very difficult to do for everyone I know closely all on the same date.
I can see knowing how to repair things but choosing not to: Maybe your high income means the time you might use to repair it could be better spent making money. Maybe you're busy with something today, and are willing to pay for the convenience of having someone else do it. Maybe you're getting old and just can't get on your back and do complex auto wrenching anymore.
But, I see people (mostly younger than myself) who never even learned to do even basic, basic home/auto repairs. I'm not talking brake jobs and kitchen remodels, I'm talking they can't change a flat tire, replace a leaking sink supply hose, or hell even vacuum their own apartment. They pay people to do everything. That's shocking to me. I kind of just naively thought everyone just gets taught this stuff when they're teenagers.
As social inequality increases, people with more money start being able to afford services much more easily. Do you think British nobility used to vaccuum their own homes? Ask someone with money how the Brazilian upper middle class used to live. Or ask people in India.
Doctors can afford to have people to clean up their houses, to cook their food, everything.
Medicine pays well, but it’s all W2 or 1099, not something like getting stock and long term capital gains.
I personally am of the low-income, do-as-much-myself-as-possible and pinch every penny crowd. But HN has always seemed to me to be the opposite, given it's well over average income skew.
How does this sound backwards for you?
The scale is the only thing that is different.
When I was young I had time but no money.
Now that I am old I have money but no time.
Like you, I did a lot myself when I was young/poor, pinched pennies etc.
It got me to the point where I was successful. Now that I am older I value the things I am running out of time to do. So the money is well spent on maximizing my time left.
I get where you're coming from. People in the US mostly don't put in time to learn the ins and outs of vehicle maintenance. They want turnkey personalized transit and turnkey maintenance. I've just accepted that as the state of how things are.
A disk brake job is an almost ideal first DIY repair IMO. It seems daunting and risky, but there's fairly little chance that someone who is trying to do a good job will end up with a brake job that, undetected, leaves the car unsafe. (There is a higher chance you'll somewhere get stuck unable to complete it or need to ask for help, but that's not a safety issue.)
It's a hard line to draw. Consumerism/throw-away culture isn't (and can't and shouldn't be) a historic norm so participating in it will ultimately alienate people from most people who have and will exist across time. On the other hand, not participating at all will alienate you from a lot of people now.
One of our team is an anthropologist. She once mentioned that there's a lot of trash around in many agricultural communities in "developing countries". And indeed, earlier the culture was that when you ate a piece of fruit you just tossed the rind into the bushes or on the field and went on your way. There aren't public rubbish bins in these small villages, so what happens is plastic bottles and chips bags fly around.
> However, cultures that produce "beneficial" waste have a moral imperative to produce more
To me "throw-away" culture very much implies with it that what you're throwing away something toxic without considering the about consequences -- maybe you could say "composting" culture as an alternative. And in that context, there isn't really "waste" at a system level, only on an individual one. It's a good point that there is all the difference between just managing waste (repair) and recycling it. Both are independent skills and good in their own way.
It was taken as completely normal that you’d assume anyone would repair their toaster if it stopped working. Made me realize it’s been a long time since it would seem reasonable to self repair any home appliance.
"I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust."
It drives my wife INSANE that... I have nice brand new pair of shoes from 5 years ago I never ever wear, because I refuse to put wear on them and instead use the cheap shoes from 8 years ago. Same with shirts and sweaters - the nice ones she bought me over last few years are waiting in the closet until my old shirts and sweaters die - and some are getting close to 20yo.
Nothing wrong with it, as such. But it's not always rational behaviour either - more of a left-over compulsion from leaner time (I come from eastern europe and then 2 years of civil war).
As for people repairing anything - much as I love his writing, I disagree with Heinlein's "specialization is for insects". I can help a friend with computer or fix our network. There's weird things I can do like watches and whatnots. There's any number of things I can do well. But I'm probably better off doing the thing I do well, getting paid for it, and then in turn paying plumber or electrician or mechanic for things they do well.
If fixing a car or your washing machine makes sense or is your hobby / pasttime, brilliant. But sometimes it doesn't, and it's OK to keep the circle of life/economy going :).
There is also a skin in the game effect that even a paid random plumber is not actually that invested in doing a good job and, while you cannot compete in terms of speed of executing a fix, or possession of special tools, you can compete - and exceed - on final quality simply because you really care about the final outcome.
I have experienced this recently, as I have been making the rounds through various lawn care companies. I'm on my fourth one in the past four years, and I just have not been able to find one that truly cares about the lawn with the same love and detail that I would. And why should they? I am just one of many lawns they take care of each month.
Although I still generally lean towards the parent commenter's philosophy of paying the experts to do what they are good at, there are just some areas where the extra level of care and attention is worth the decrease of efficiency in getting the thing done.
And honestly at the time the two felt kind of similar. Both were super scary, black boxes. But both were things that normal human beings learned to do. You didn't have to be some crazy genius. And a lot of times you really are debugging a car, except since it's physical, it's a lot more intuitive.
I once tallied up all the repairs vs what I would've paid mechanics and it came to 18k. Nowadays that's a price I can swallow and it no longer makes financial sense for me to do my own repairs.
But I now have a garage full of "free" tools and I can tell very confidently when mechanics bullshit me. But that happens less than just simply talking the lingo and having the mechanic appreciate that I know what's going on and can commiserate on how shitty a repair is gonna be.
I think most sw people can enjoy and go into the physical world. I think there's so many similarities and never understood certain people's reluctance or even badge of honor of being bad at working with physical stuff
I had given up doing my own auto maintenance for a number of years. I picked it up again this year. Auto Shop hourly rates are more than mine and I can do it myself, already have the tools.
It’d suck if no one knew how to repair anything, but it’d also suck if everyone repaired everything all the time. But we have both and it makes society a little more vibrant.
That said, I repair some things and don’t others. “Is it worth my time?” is what I ask, and not purely from a financial dimension — also from an enjoyment aspect.
Having also grown up with limited means, I am deliberate about purchases. Unlike you however the lesson I learned growing up was that I don't need to buy "the best" of flashiest item, because that often was out of our reach.
> It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything
I hate wasting money on new "toys" (things I don't need but enjoy), and I also enjoy repairing stuff. My solution to both is buying Thrift store or garage sale electronics, perform repairs if necessary, put them to use and sell them off when I acquire a better replacement.
Many people selfishly give obligations as gifts - often small things where the purpose is to be a placeholder for remembering them. also see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tchotchke
Personally I try to give consumable items or give experiences (that are high quality or rare or have other specialness) I recently bought 27kg of good bush honey, and have been giving it to friends - but aiming for zero social obligation: so far everyone has been very happy to get some - but it is really good honey and there are colds going around at the moment (winter in New Zealand)
But friends seem to think so, so they are happy!
I’ve learned to repair things here and there: home, auto, woodwork, sewing, etc. and so I’ll make a repair purely out of the sense of obligation not to create waste.
But I haaaaaate it. Every minute that I’m performing a repair, I’m bored to death. My brain is screaming at me to find any alternative occupation. I wind up spending the whole repair time drinking and/or distracting myself with podcasts to make the experience suck less, but then my results take a hit.
You would think that the gradual accumulation of skills is something I would find satisfying, but I can’t see the process as anything but a chore. Does anybody have advice on how to cope with this in a healthier manner?
If you really hate it and can afford not to, just don't do it. If you have to justify it somehow, find something else productive to do and use the money or savings from that to offset that you aren't fixing your car or whatever.
Reminds me of some Smarter Every Day videos where he covers farm life and the varied skill sets that benefit people in that domain.
>Every purchase feels like a burden
hah, I'm in my 20s but feel the same way. This tends to also happen when you grow up in a less prosperous country where you can't just purchase stuff on a whim.
I've recently discovered how large the price of getting rid of something can be. Usually these costs are hidden because you just throw something into the trash and it's gone. But not always the case.
A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and it's too big to fit in my car anyway. Having someone come to our house to repair it would cost more than buying a new one. But... how do you get rid of a broken generator? It weighs 45 kg and it has four gallons of gasoline in the tank. You can't just chuck it in the trash.
(FYI, I decided to take it apart and was actually able to get it running again. It turned out to be an easy fix -- broken fuel valve. But success was far from guaranteed, and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?)
You need to decide for yourself what is more valuable to you.
I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it.
Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.
In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you.
If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x.
Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing.
Obviously these things change with tax regimes.
If we assume I'm a contractor charging $100 per hour and take the cash as salary:
(100/1.3142) * 0.5 = $38 left after payroll tax and the top income tax rate (50%).
So if I'm just as fast and good as a professional, the professional needs to charge $38 per hour or less for it to be worth it. But in reality, a professional is probably at least 2x as fast as me, making it $76. That's probably less than they charge, so it's worth paying for a professional.
Then you also need to add some cost of doing business.
Said in another way: The 100SEK you earn becomes 25SEK the contract can use (assuming 50% tax rate) – that's the first factor of 4. The last factor can be found in the details.
After all, if the contractor had some strange anomaly where he pays 100% of his income in tax, why would that matter to you?
Do it yourself: Miss out on that hours worth of salary
Subcontract: 2 times tax is paid.
Obviously this has implications on negotiation. This is exactly the reason why services are considered very expensive in the Nordics (as in 80USD to get your hair cut).
Note that this needs to be compared with a company getting their stuff fixed. Their contractor costs are fully deducted from their income.
In my example, a contractor who's twice as fast needs to cost $76 or less per hour . Thrice as fast is $114 or less.
You're right in principle though, just not on that calculation. In Sweden we have tax deductions for private citizens exactly to combat this issue: up to a certain amount per year can be deducted from your income, just like a company can, for certain services (such as cleaning or house repairs).
Said in another way: you don't pay income tax when you paint your own house.
(Also discussed recently on HN.)
I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.
If you would have to do it again, would you do the same errors, and the paint job would turn out equal? Or would you do better second time?
That is why I never painted an entire house before having painted a bedroom at least one time. And I've never painted a bedroom before I painted a small piece of furniture at least one time. One needs to learn gradually, hopefully with someone who knows how to do things. Last year I built a terrace and room with the (paid) help of a contractor. I started just carrying the trash, then breaking things, then putting cement of the walls, etc. etc. Now I can quite complex things by myself..
The key is to do things gradually..
Firstly, in most cases we are just DIY'ing the final "craftsman" step of the work, we still depend on the materials being available.
Second, if more and more people that actually care about work quality go DIY it leaves people who can't or won't be as involved. Over time unscrupulous tradespeople will take over the market.
I wouldn't work saturday afternoon anyway because my head is already useless for programming. So I do need to change line-of-work somehow. I can either go for a walk and learn something about nature. Or I can self-repair something and learn something about construction.
Of course spending all free time on self-repairs would be exhausting. But I don't feel like lying on a couch entire weekend either.
This is the key! I do these kind of things on my spare time!
On my spare time I could (1) do nothing; (2) try to cram more screen time into my life, and give the money earned to someone to do my repairs for me or; (3) do some things by myself, learn while doing it, and feel like a super-human that can control is own life (well, some of it). I prefer number 3!
So it is more comparable with the work rates, since I do not have a lot time time to tinker
Yes, using power tools while kid is napping is no-go. But after few months kid is not napping that much. And there’re many relatively silent jobs. It’s easy to silicon a window sill while kid is sleeping in another room. Or assemble a drawer with an old good screwdriver instead of a drill. And after a couple years there’re endless learning possibilities. Sure, it goes slowly, but it does happen eventually.
Full disclosure - I did hire handymen for a good portion of jobs for various reasons. Mostly because we were burning a lot of money in rent or some jobs require too many special tools and knowledge to be done right (electricity, drywalls, etc).
Not necessarily. It depends on the job and other factors. How much time does it take to find a competent person to hire? And what if you fail, and they do a bad job; how much time does it take you to deal with the situation and fix it (or do you end up paying twice, once for the bad job and again for someone else to redo it)? Do you need to be on-site to supervise them (so they don't steal stuff)? That's more of your time. If it's something portable or that needs to be transported to the professional, how much time and money does that cost?
So for me, I'll always spend time on this sort of stuff if it's within my reach to do a decent job.
As far as disposal goes... yeah, most stuff I sell on Marketplace or Gumtree would be a net loss after wasting time dealing with people (and scammers, who belong in their own category). But I hate to have things I used and enjoyed just die alone in landfill.
Solution: find a very thin pin and ream out the buildup in the carburetor, and all the steps leading up to being able to do that. The sense of personal (horse)power I felt after reviving that engine was palpable.
It's funny cause now, just based on that experience, I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I am saying if I encounter any small engine that won't start I will eagerly start trying to figure it out. It looks fun now. The brain is weird.
That way you can be 100% sure it’s fine if you’re concerned.
We really shouldn’t discourage people from trying to fix thins because of fear.
If you need to try a repair again checkout YouTube, the small engine guys on there are really, really good. They've got tricks even I'd never heard of before.
I refuse to believe someone who is attempting to repair an internal combustion engine does not know that gasoline is flammable and the working area should be ventilated (or outside), particularly if they’re working on the fuel system.
Sure. But people do occasionally ignite gasoline by accident. It's uncommon, but the consequences can be very severe.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-opt...
Funny thing, the replacement batteries are much larger in capacity now, but the price of a single replacement battery is the same cost of a new powered tool. So, I wound up getting a new tool that I didn't have with a new battery. I have a few LiPo batteries for my cinema camera gear that have died as well. I'm going to try to find someone that can just replace the batteries packs inside the custom housing.
Very few exceptions to this rule for me, and I generally avoid anything with a Micro-USB charger like the plague if I can, as I can't help but see it becoming e-Waste in 3-5 years.
Labour in the west is much more expensive than energy, so it's only natural that your time was worth more than a new unit.
But that's an accident of geography and politics. Someone in a poor country, in the same line of work that you're in, might actually break even on this.
I believe there's value in this sort of self-sufficiency. Especially considering that, as recent years have shown, we're one global supply chain breakdown or war away from plain unavailability of some goods.
Improve my HN karma.
;-)
I still think it was the right call to give it a shot. Save my uncle and myself, nobody I know will try to repair anything themselves.
Don't forget to also factor in the hidden cost of depriving the CS field of many great works during said hours which is incalculable imo.
Don't forget the value of the satisfaction from having fixed something yourself and how good fixing stuff helps with recovering after spending hours in front of a computer
My wife doesn’t understand how I spend my whole day complaining about fixing things (sys admin) for work then seem genuinely happy to work on a car, bike, random electronic thing, etc.
Completely different.
On the selfish side, I might actually get to enjoy what I fix at home.
On the brains are funny side, anything physical hits different. Turning a wrench, busting knuckles, burning myself triggers a satisfaction a screen does not.
I’m not a masochist either. Why is a soldering iron so hard to hold? Probably a me problem.
All those skills transfer around too.
Also, if you have kids who learn along with you the value is multiplied.
But I kept telling her that she doesn't want these complex mechanical things hanging around. I tried to impress on her (pace Technology Connections) how abysmal that air conditioner is going to be. I also tried to explain to her that if she gets a generator, she'll have to maintain it and fire it up once in a while, and that will not be easy. I explained that I have at least one other friend who decided that owning a truck and an inverter was way easier, because the truck has wheels that you can use to drive it around, the truck is easily maintained by the auto shop on the corner, and the truck will provide plenty of power just the same as the generator.
She really has a prepper streak, though, and I couldn't talk her out of it, especially after the sales lady got talking to her. She doesn't have a car and her roommate doesn't drive either, so I don't know how they'll transport/maintain these machines, but oh well.
Cars are an immensely inefficient platform.
My comment was more in line with using cars as energy storage infrastructure. I think most car owners don’t want to use their car batteries as grid infrastructure.
Furthermore, only expensive late model trucks even have high capacity inverters built in that are capable of running a separate air conditioner. The little portable inverters that plug into a 12V vehicle outlet can only do about 150W.
Well in an emergency scenario (what generators are for generally) the troubleshooting/repair knowledge you gained will be invaluable
You don’t, constantly comparing time to money is a bad way to live.
If you learned something, tried something new, and maybe even enjoyed it? That’s good enough.
I started rebelling against the idea of "I might as well buy a new one". The way I see it, if (say) my phone screen breaks I have two choices: I spend $150 fixing it, or I spend $150 buying a new phone. In either case I end up with a working phone, but the second case has generated one phone worth of electronic garbage.
For example if you are an employee and establish your rate that way, you probably can't work more to get more anyway.
So repairing things for yourself is just cream on top in that case.
How easy is exporting the data you care about if you want or have to change platform? Not seldom it's so labor intensive you'll never migrate to something better.
This is how I ended up discovering Obsidian and I have not looked back since.
The same argument can be made with regard to finite space. Say you are a collector of diecast model cars, but have limited space in your house to store them. Acquiring a new model limits you from acquiring a potentially more desirable model in the future.
But there is a deeper topic behind these: what value foundations do we use to estimate what comes to our awareness. Without valuation judgment, there is no cost and no gain.
For someone putting above all immediate serotonin peaks, an endless disposal of affordable first price might be enough.
For someone that is striving to realize some daunting task that will catch most of other people in awe, it’s obviously mostly the second price that will matter: the more expensive the better.
For someone driven by a sense of sustainable community of life forms, the emphasis will be all on recycling through virtuous loops.
Of course I do have my own tropes that one might be guess from the way this points where formulated, but I recognize there is no absolute true accessible to human beings that will prescribe some categorical imperative between them.
If I have the option to choose between two gadgets, the acquiring prince of one may be far less (assuming lower quality and everything else equal) and even usage is kinda the same, modulo a bit of frustration if the lower-quality thing is not as smooth to use, but if it breaks, then cheap stuff tends to be harder if not impossible to repair, and if you can't fix it then you need to dispose of it and possibly get a replacement.
Too much hassle. If I have the money, I optimize for quality above everything else.
(Sadly, since manufacturers know this, the premium quality version usually costs disproportionally more cause market -- I'm ok with paying more. Not just a bit more, but much more.)
Or four times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, and disposal price
Hong Konger who rents here:
Or five times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, moving price and disposal price
repairing >> replacing > buying ...
I'm not sure where maintenance fits, I guess that's what "painting" is.
> companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal
The curent approach is fraudulent offloading of responsibility.
The only solution is to charge manufacturers and importers complete cost of disposal / recycling for a given item. They can be asked to provide evidence of recycleability, they can be fined for lying. Manufacturers have incentive then, to improve recycleavility - costs willvbe lower. This issue should be solved between manufacturers and government.
Three reasons why current approach will never work:
1 - A consumer cannot evaluate suitability of a given item for recycling or disposability, that information is only avaliable to the manufacturer. A consumer cannot evaluate government's ability to recycle - UK has over 100 different local authorities and each has different rules for which kind of plastic goes where.
2 - Manufacturers routinely commit fraud - and there is no way for consumer to get compensation if they were told something is recycleable but 5 years later it turns out it's not. Recyclers themselves regularly commits fraud - people are told their item was recycled but actually it gets dumped in africa. There is currently a system in UK where recyclers get paid by government for recycling plastic, they claim they recycle 2x as much plastic as exists / gets produced/ is imported into UK. A significant portion ends up illegally exported to philipines, not recycled.
3 - Individual disposal is unpoliceable - you can't police millions of idividual people. You have to move to policeable entities - manufacturers.
Case in point, Adobe Creative Cloud. Never have I encountered more anti-consumer behavior. For yearly subscriptions they only allow you to "not continue subscribing for another year" during a brief window of time right before your renewal date.
Mind you, I'm not talking about cancelling the service and backing out of obligations that you've agreed to, I'm talking about Adobe engineering a situation in which they implicitly assume that you want to continue being a customer, while removing the ability for you to tell them that you no longer wish to be a customer.
Maybe even a fifth: storage price.
Funny enough, I actually have noticed this with my books. More books require more bookshelves. More bookshelves require more real estate. It's a straight-line arrow of causation from picking up a copy of Moby Dick to house-shopping for a place large enough where I can have my own private library.
So for the sake of simplicity, and to invoke thought, I think the two prices are good enough.
If money saves transaction costs, then it can't be neutral. The introduction of money becomes an essential part of the economy. It's not like there are good alternatives to money.
Don't think this further and wonder if interest is just a monetization of the transaction cost savings. Then it would turn out that interest payments negate the benefits of the division of labor entirely.
Seems very wrong, but my current plan of action is to hack it up with an axe and slowly feed it out through the bin each week.
I'd add a 4th: storage price. Having lived in the city, space is at a premium. We have found ourselves unable to go into specific (smaller) apartments in the past just because we had too much stuff. This goes especially for kitchen items.
I'd offer another that has to be paid before the price in money:
Research cost.
Increasingly I don't need "things." I need the best/right "thing" for the job. And for hobbies or high cost/risk purchases (think car, house, big dollar contracts) I find I need to invest substantial time into researching my problem and then my options for solutions, which takes lots of my time. Because the cost of getting it wrong often means even more time, money, and headaches that I don't want to deal with, I sometimes find myself over indexing on the up front part to avoid the pain of getting it wrong.
In many cases the cost of time invested eclipses the cost of the object because the cost of the time to remedy it is more than the cost of replacing it.
I think you're right! I wish our society did recycling better. In Japan, to get rid of a computer (for example), you don't throw it in trash - you must pay a recycler to handle it correctly.
Got a broken doodad? Throw it in the recycler and print a new one. 99% of the necessary feedstock ought to come from the broken one, so the only costs should be energy and the part that failed its tests and had to be replaced. Hopefully it's something small like a single capacitor.
There's probably some fundamental limit on how good such a system can get. Like, even if you recover 100% of the solder, you're going to need new flux every time. Or maybe you fill the chamber with argon so you don't need flux, but then how much of that can you recover. Or maybe you just leave it full of argon, but then how lossy is your doodad-in-out mechanism...
If your recycling scheme involves condensed matter physics, it might as well be magic. But if it's just known-robotics and reusable parts and good design taken to the n'th degree... that's the kind of thing that could feasibly inspire action in a reader--which is the kind of sci-fi I want to read.
Besides, there's something inelegant about breaking something all the way down just to build it all the way back up. A system that understands that the shortest path from here to there means something other than a full molecular disassembly is far more impressive than one that's just a decomposer.
It'd also be a nice springboard for an AI's first go at manufacturing and going out of spec lol
My friends find it weird when I buy a used car and I've already budgeted for the repairs, they find it a downer.
I'm happy because then when it happens I've already mentally spent the money!
The same is true of the time investment.
In the past it's never really been the ICE parts that fail on my cars anyway. Rusted suspensions and frames, tyres, etc are the main service items.
Now, the thing with EVs is, they have tons of electronics...
Regardless, as soon as EVs hit a price range, accounting for size and so, that is within budget we are going to switch.
Some new apartment blocks have charging in the car park that is at-cost. And ofcourse if you own a house with a driveway, that allows you to access cheaper rates.
Additionally, the current energy crisis should be temporary, normally electricity is 1/3 the price of petrol. At least if the tory government, that constantly harps on about growth, stops blocking construction of every windfarm and solar panel they can.
In personal experience, in iur famioy BMW it was the engine that failed.
I had an EV for a period and used on-street charging 90% of the time for that reason. It was a tremendous pain.
What, electric don't ever break?
Outside of around 30 euro per year of maintenance bits, the engine and gearbox don't need a lot of work. Simple combustion engines that are not put under stress can last a long time.
There's a 3rd cost that you're sorta glossing over. The work you're doing (and the speed you're capable of doing it in) means you've had a non-negligible amount of experience. Depending on how fickle we're going to get, there's 4th costs of the tools you own allowing you to do that work. Perhaps other costs for your living situation allowing you to have a place to do such tasks.
I do my own maintenance work too. But I think it's foolish to gloss over those aspects of the work. They don't come for free.
I spend 20 euro on the yearly oil change, including the crush washer. And about 10 euro on miscellaneous parts. A set of spark plugs were €9,28 last time.
Gear box doesn't need much. Oil gets changed when I do clutch, which isn't often. Just like how you don't need to change the differential or motor fluid on an EV motor often.
One person once told me "urgency has no price." i.e. time is priceless, as cliche as it looks like. For me in the long run, the cost of time I invest in the "consequence" of my decisions dwarfs all other costs.
I have felt like every item I own is a burden, and when I live in a house where the vast majority is "owned" by the both of us, it can be overwhelming.
I've learned to cope though by simply internally "letting go" of ownership. They're just inanimate objects and they're not "mine". I simply possess them as a mental/legal construct.
I think this activity can be good therapy to help people to stop and think about their "stuff accumulation".
The biggest thing I struggle with is keeping it organized in a useful way.
This is starting to get to me. Everything I buy I now have to store somewhere, and/or is then something that I need to throw out. And everything I throw out seems like such a waste to me.
Something changed in my mindset over the last couple of years.
I'm in Los Angeles now. While I miss biking dearly, I look at drivers around here and just think it's a matter of when, not if, I'd get into a cycling accident if I tried to ride within a few miles of my home.
I first learned about half a year ago the concept of adding work time to driving time in "Ivan's Car": https://www.deautovanivan.nl/eng.html
> How fast is your car?
> The effective speed is calculated on the basis of the price of the car (costs per kilometer) and income (net income). The amount of hours you have to work to drive your car (taxes, insurance, fuel, etcetera) is added to the average speed of a car driver in the Netherlands.
Yes, of course. I am somewhat embarassed that I made such a simple mistake.
> People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.
I can resonate with this one. Over the years I have learned that things a person NOT do, is more important compared to what they do.
Thanks for sharing.
Because of plummeting manufacturing costs, we're essentially cash rich and time poor. But our habits around purchasing haven't caught up with that fact and it's very easy to find yourself only calculating the money cost of something when determining if you can afford it, without incorporating the time cost too.
I make music and this problem is endemic there where you see people with walls of guitars they can barely play and racks of synthesizers whose functions they don't know.
It's really hard to fight against this because marketing is constantly trying to downplay the time commitment for stuff to get you to buy it.
I think this is a bit too much of an absolutist take. One that turns too many people off from reading, and can add an unnecessary air of elitism around it. If you pay $14.99 for a book, you aren't seeing returns only after ten hours of dedicated reading. Even reading one chapter can yield returns that are equivalent to $14.99, if it's a good book. With non-fiction, you can also pick chapters that strike you as the most interesting and start directly from those, getting faster 'returns on investment'. Then going back and reading the whole thing if you're sucked in.
It's very common for sites to publish curated segments of books, whether were talking science related things or not. And even getting double the amount of that text by purchasing the book (compared to the short excerpt) can be worth the price of admission.
I get that there are different reasons for reading a book, but even then, it also seems overly simplistic and absolutist to me.
I think it’s trying to remind people that before you get the utility you wanted out of a (non-decorative) book, you need to pay not just ($14.99), but ($14.99 + 10 hours), or indeed ($14.99 + 1 hour).
I understood the article to encourage more thoughtful budgeting of that second kind of cost, and that we are tuned to automatically mostly consider the first kind of cost.
I (mostly) value (many of) the points of view provided by (some of) the HN community, and it would be nice to see more of them.
Everything must be paid for twice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30013025 - Jan 2022 (241 comments)
Do I pay for Netflix, and then I pay again by spending time watching movies?
Wouldn't a pay-per-song scheme destroy independent bands so that only the biggest and most shared get listened to?
Same as when dialup Internet access was billed by the minute. Most people would limit their time online to reduce the bill, and didn't feel free to browse for hours every day if they found something interesting. Email and to some extent Usenet were popular because you only needed to go online for a few minutes to download and upload your messages; you could read and write offline for free. When unmetered "always on" connections arrived people's habits changed radically.
Intellectual property with respect to recorded media is weird.
Some books are immediately rewarding, like fiction, some are rewarding at multiple moments later in time, like fact books. (Not saying face books can't be rewarding in the moment as well though.)
In game design this doesn't seem like a far fetched concept. You often talk about grindy games for example.
Also, how else do you explain why we tend to buy books and then not read them? Maybe for books the cost is often the initial cost before you get into it enough to enjoy it?
It's of course not transactional in the real life, but I think it's valuable to think things through this lens. So you have some time, how you spend it, what you gain from it, etc. For the same time investment, some shows are better than others, and sometimes, reflecting on the person's needs, another show is just a diminishing return compared to other ways of spending time.
However, I still find this a strange analogy... time is not like money, you can't save it... that time spent reading the book was going to go away whether you read the book or not. You can't save up that time to spend it on something better later.
Time is not money, but it is opportunity cost.
Time allocated to X is time you have lost the ability to allocate to Y.
Paying 1$ at a yard sale for Moby Dick would be it for me. No need to read, I will simply enjoy having the book around me, just like having a new friend at home
Is a great cookbook for mere mortal with cooking skill juste above beginner. A few recipes became once a week classic and helped me improve my cooking skill and taste. Highly recommanded! #1 is good too.
I've learned that there are so few things that I genuinely feel an itch to buy, that should I come across one (say in a shop window, or a stall in a craft market) I should buy it. So many times I've seen something interesting, thought "okay I'll take a picture and research it and decide later", and I don't think I've ever actually returned a single time -- although I have regretted not purchasing it. Sometimes in life you have to capitalize on the moment - it may not come again!
Drugs also only have the first price, once you use them it is just fun.
(yes there are some positive third prices down the line).
If I paid $20 for a plate of food at a restaurant, eating it is the second half of the price. If I eat too much (don't take a box) I pay the second price. If I only eat just enough, the second price is much lower.
I also take issue with the statement early in the article that only paying the first price is the same as putting money in the garbage. It's not wrong but that mindset will lead you to becoming a victim of the sunk cost fallacy. If you've already paid for the thing but you no longer want it, get rid of it.
It is an interesting idea, and a good thought experiment.
If we are going to quantify everything, we could also quantify the enjoyment of the item as a negative cost, saving us from stress or health or other expenses through its enjoyment. We do it with opportunity cost, so why not in the other direction.
In this case, from the top of my head. Buying a book and not reading it yet:
- Can provide value by showing that book on my shelf (despicable, but true for some)
- Can make me feel good by knowing I am contributing to the author income, or by knowing when I am bored I can reach for the book without intermediate steps. This benefit is immediate.
- Can be one step in a chain of steps bringing one closer to a set goal: preparing to find a new job by learning something explained in the book.
- Can help build long lasting beneficial habits like focus or language mastery.
- If buying the book in a shop, it can bring opportunities for social interaction, that are difficult to quantify.
So the value of buying a book is not necessarily the one explained by this model. We can choose other models where the book provides "some" value immediately.
IMO what we quantify is not objective, but a reflection of a perspective in itself.
I think this is the thing people miss when saying open source software is given free and people shouldn't complain. Yes, but it requires effort to adopt and it's a liability. So when a free piece of code is published, even marketed and touted, it can create some expectation of commitment, even though the author is not obligated to provide it.
There is also a feel good factor, which the time component is 0. e.g. I have a bad habit of buying books not to be read, but to put on bookshelf because it looks good. Sorry Knuth, I am at maybe page 10 of the your 4 volumes of TAOCP. It looks good on my shelf.
And then there's delivery terms if you're on a rush to have something usable in your empty housing.
It's not a binary because sometimes you want things for the future, or just in case, or just because you like having them - and maybe showing them off.
But sometimes none of those are true. So what did you buy? And why?
Only if you didn't buy it for the psychological effect. There the point is not paying the secondary price.
This is also something which is usually unheard of in a consumerist society, where most things are bought because of utilitarian consideration and not "because ownership makes you feel better".
That said, we rarely get such a thing in anything we can acquire with only money as a price. For example it’s well known and documented that taking time into meditation sessions will give us many benefits, but no amount of book or titles like "special contributor of the temple" that we can acquire by throwing money at it will give us these same benefits.
Money can buy us the prestige and some kind of social obedience, but it won’t auto-magically cultivate our mental flow into sane dynamics.
Also let’s remember that there is no ownership outside of a society that recognizes us some form of prioritised policy implementation over some limited matter. So we can’t own anything without paying some price to remain included in this society. That’s the 0th price of any ownership, could we say.
The middle two are (ideally?) recurrent costs and storage costs in the age of consumerism grow linearly throughout life.
At some point, people "see the light" and start aggressively downsizing. This usually happens when storage cost vastly exceeds usage cost.
Wow, at first I was about to stop reading and thought this article was drivel.
Then that line came up and it was like the breaking bad news scene in breaking bad. Tunnel vision and static as my mind was blown.
Purchasing a copy of Moby Dick at a garage sale for $1 means you have purchased the option of reading it for as long as you want to keep it on your bookshelf.
There is a slight possibility you could sell it for $1 in the future, or $0.50 or $2. But that would probably take more effort than you want to put into the enterprise.
But mostly what that $1 buys you is an option on use value. You are free to use the book after paying for it. But you are not obligated to use it.
The author's point was, I believe, that there's a difference between exchange cost and use cost, which is certainly true. But if you're going to use this parable as an analogy for some business process, you may be better served by thinking about a larger scope: a scope that admits the possibility of value in options.
When I was a kid we used to say: "You always pay for what you get. And if you're lucky, you only pay in cash."
When someone chooses to spend a buck buying Moby Dick at a garage sale, the value they get is based on calculating that they will also read it. If they spend the cash but not the time, they've basically just thrown a dollar away.
I'm gonna go sell or donate some of my 2nd price debt items now. They're now a good reminder that time is finite and you need to curate your hobbies and attention carefully.
But it does create a massive tax loophole: because I'm a software developer, I can deduct the costs of any computer I buy, but nobody is checking whether I actually use it for work or for gaming. I can deduct work lunches, but employees can't. I know someone who deducted his motorbike because he also used it for work. I can deduct phone and internet costs because I also use them for work.
I find the way I can avoid some taxes that others can't, rather questionable. Frankly, everybody should have their own company to avoid this inequality. And the stuff I can deduct is small potatoes compared to the stuff I'm sure some other people are deducting. I'm no tax expert, but I'm sure this is a big part of why billionaires pay so little tax.
Also, companies on the edge of the health care system have a problem, because health care is VAT free, so health care companies cannot get the VAT back they have to pay to their suppliers, which makes suppliers of services to the healthcare industry effectively more expensive than they should be. I think this whole system is in dire need of an overhaul.
And I'm certainly not going to look up tax laws; that's exactly what I'm paying my accountant for.
Your accountant keeps bringing deductions up because he wants you to feel he's worth his fees. That's why literally every accountant I've ever worked with has told me that "a good accountant pays for himself". Accountants compete with each other based on how much they can lower your tax bill. So yes, of course they'll help you make unlawful tax deductions, and they'll reassure you that it's perfectly fine and that they have many years of experience etc etc.