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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

A wife is a useful thing to have in this respect, not because they tend to profligacy, but because this kind of thing is much easier to detect and fix in someone close to you than in yourself. Both my wife and I have lived frugal lives at various times[0] and I feel much happier with the degree of spending we have now.

I'm reminded of the intelligent corvids in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory where the sum of the two birds forms a being with intelligence in a way that the individual segments do not. The frugality is a deeply embedded piece of our being and undoing it seems hard, but together we financially operate in a place that leaves us both feeling comfortable.

0: In the US sense of the term, not in the sense of the term as known in Taiwan or India.

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My experience has been that it's easy to say, "oh, it's just me", but much harder to subject someone you care about to the same standard that you would yourself. I'm in a similar position with the thermostat, even though something we initially bonded over was that we both kept our thermostats at a low temperature that was outside the window of being socially acceptable.

In the winter, I keep the thermostat at frigid temperatures when I am home alone and jack it up to warm just before any one else gets home. My thinking is that it is wasteful to warm up the entire house when it's just me since I can put on a sweater but I don't want to subject others to my, shall we say, quirks.

I keep meaning to calculate how much I am actually saving by freezing my butt off. My guess is it'll work out to something like $0.75 a day or something equally trivial.

Depending on the kind of heating system you have and the temperature differences you talk about it can be cheaper to heat the house to a constant temperature (because your heating can run more efficiently under lower load).

Correct, or the people doing this for environmental reasons... it's probably not better to do this. It would be better spending money on better insulation (assuming it isn't up to date).

I once got a programmable thermostat and went through the trouble to set it up for the times we were normally at home and away, and my energy bills went up.

Now I just set a temperature that everyone can tolerate and I forget about it.

It probably costs more to do that than to maintain a constant temperature. When you turn the setpoint down, everything inside your house and also your house itself starts losing heat. When you turn the setpoint back up, the cooled off house and items inside of it will suck up most of the heat until the stuff is warm again, and then the air warms up.

This is much more noticeable when you go into a freezing cold building and turn on the thermostat, it takes almost an entire day to heat up the stuff and building.

Thermodynamically, the heat lost to the outside is roughly linear with the temperature delta between inside and outside.

All else equal, setbacks do reduce energy lost to the outside; whether that saves money depends somewhat on the recovery strategy of your equipment; whether it’s desirable depends on your individual preferences.

> A wife is a useful thing to have in this respect, not because they tend to profligacy, but because this kind of thing is much easier to detect and fix in someone close to you than in yourself.

I think what you mean is, a wife/spouse can help you see maladaptive patterns that you're blind to?

I don't think you propose that you can "fix" your spouse's behavior?

Spouses can "fix" behaviors in each other (up to a point) if they are each ammenable and open to it.

You can't "fix" someone who doesn't want to be fixed, however. And you really can't change deeply engrained personality traits. This will just lead to conflict and stress. This is what pre-marital counseling will try to discover, and it's too bad more people don't do it, as it would go a long way to reducing the number of unhappy marriages.

This doesn't mean that opposites cannot have happy lives together, but they need to accept each other for who they are and not be unhappy that the other person cannot change "for them."

A lot of spousal disagreement tends to come down to issues about money though, so a frugal person paired with a spendthrift will probably have a tough go of it.

Should all women seek out wives then, so they can have two great minds to put to the task of living frugal and fulfilling lives?

s/wife/spouse/

Just a reminder that since a couple of centuries ago in most Western societies, wives are not "things" anymore, but rather human beings on the same level as husbands.

"... tend to profligacy" was really bothering me as well, until I figured OP probably meant "tend" as in 'take care of', and not 'inclined to have'.

No, "tend" means "incline" here, but the normal grammatical reading of the sentence does not suggest wives have profligate tendencies.

Ah, I misread. Thanks.

It's "incline", the subtext is: "Reader, you might start thinking of a certain common stereotype at this point, but don't do that, because my argument is very different, and that stereotype is irrelevant or possibly untrue."

Compare to: "A pick-up truck is a useful thing to have, not because you are insecure about your genitalia, but because you can take home bigger products from IKEA."

Thanks, I misread entirely.

This usage is fine. "A dependable friend is a rare thing to find."

While the underlying intent behind bringing awareness to microaggressions is likely pure, it has a tendency to promote a level of hypersensitivity which is a net negative for society.

It’s often more beneficial to bring an open mindedness to a conversation that allows for benign usage of words that could otherwise be intended to slight. Constantly worrying about if everyone is being sensitive enough can also just be exhausting. To everyone.

Whatever happened to the idea that one should assume someone else is speaking in good faith, and that you should chose the most charitable interpretation of someone's words?

You seem to forget, we're all just squishy meatbags to our future AI overlords. Whom I welcome, by the way (1).

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKx3JlTnHbc

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