21st century activism: refusing to spend money in defiance of the government.
263 karma · joined October 3, 2014
A new 150,000/month condo in Tokyo in 2014 has much better facilities than a then-new 150,000/month condo in Tokyo in 1994. Indeed, the latter is probably struggling to achieve rents of half that today.
Regardless, it is believed that you owe it to the people you leave behind to be clear with your intentions. People dying intestate is a massive drain on society, and it often brings out the worst in people.
Of course, the opposing argument is "yeah but I'll be dead so what do I care?" and to be honest it's hard to argue with this.
If I may give a couple of my own personal reasons:
1) It's not that hard. My first one was written at a "Will Writing Party" where no-one had kids, so we all just either left everything to our partner or to be divided up among our siblings. One guy had neither so his estate was bequeathed to his parents, and if they were no longer alive to everyone in attendance at the party (except one poor person who was to be the witness and therefore excluded from being recipient to the estate). For most of us the will we wrote at that party served us until we married.
2) It forces you to think about "the end." Stephen Covey first highlighted the importance of "beginning with the end in mind," and it's something that everyone just puts out of their mind as long as they are able.
Also in my case, I married someone for their child-raising skills rather than their ability to climb the corporate ladder (not that these are mutually exclusive), and sitting down to rewrite a will forced me to think about the added cost of term life insurance because I was taking her prime marrying years from her, and I don't want to leave her unable to remarry and only suited for unskilled labor with no cushion. My wife is also a basket case with investments so you can have some say in that regard too.
3) It forms evidence if you have to show proof of your commitment to someone. In my case our respective wills formed part of the evidence when applying for my wife's visa.
25% in physical PMs is hard to justify but generally speaking I think Browne's Permanent Portfolio is a good base. Perhaps 20% each of domestic equities, international equities, PMs, cash and long term bonds would be more realistic, with rebalance bands at 17/23.
I refer most people who ask to Dilbert's 9-Point Plan, which Scott Adams originally published in 2002 but has been reproduced many times all over the Internet eg
https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/PubVgiNews?Art...
If you can't click through, here's the list:
Everything you need to know about financial planning
1. Make a will.
2. Pay off your credit cards.
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
4. Fund your 401(k) to the maximum.
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum.
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and you can afford it.
7. Put six months’ expenses in a money market fund.
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement.
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues) hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.
"What to invest in" is only answered in #8, which you shouldn't even think about until you've worked through the previous 7 steps. Yes, write that damn will already!
I can't remember having a dream for at least 18 years now. So even if I have the flexibility to sleep once at dusk and then work for a couple of hours, I'm not convinced I'll see any benefit.
"Not pirating like foreigners" is actually a source of pride for some groups. Japanese anime otaku and Japanese adult video enthusiasts have respectively criticised their (self-styled) western counterparts who tend to pirate the anime and adult movies instead of supporting the creators.
A fax machine (or a landline for that matter) in the home isn't for me, but they're still moving down the development curve, releasing new features, improving quality and lowering costs.
I have heard on more than one occasion the popularity of the consumer-level fax is tied to the importance placed on skillful handwriting. I have pointed out that there was no way the skillfulness of one's handwriting could be relayed via fax, and noted that there was a certain twisted irony in the fact that a once-new technology remained popular because of something so traditional.
In the last 12 months I have required to use a fax machine about four times here. Twice for a group booking (baseball, riverboat cruise), and twice to send stuff back to my own government in Australia. In all these cases a scanned PDF was confirmed not acceptable.
The reason I ask is because that is the only way I could reconcile "The workload is unmanageable and it just never ends." It's hard for people who haven't experienced it to explain why you can't just start saying no to requests and leaving the office on time (even though this is possibly the only way to salvage the situation).
Also, I imagine there are massive benefits if people all around the world were pumping data into a system. Correlations that a group of specialists may not think to look for may start to appear.
> what doctor wants to facilitate the commoditization and automation of his or her profession
Agree in principle but it just takes one incumbent to go rogue and become rich selling his knowledge, and the entire market is disrupted. It happened in the securities industry - the knowledge of old-school pit traders has been almost completely transferred to algorithms. We're seeing the start of it in drug stores now too. angersock mentions the same concerns below with doctors' egos, but the thing to remember is that initially these systems are brought in to be operated by a trader/pharmacist; complete replacement is several steps down the line.
(and unfortunately I got "disconnected from server" about 15 levels in)
1) How far along are we in terms of those computers that were predicted in the 80s to one day replace doctors? Not trying to antagonize but I can't see any harm in having a row of booths with terminals that patients can log into and start answering questions about symptoms, being led through the "troubleshooting" steps, etc. There's a lot of time spent just waiting around in hospitals, waiting rooms, etc. Maybe you could have a swipe card that saves your progress on the terminal, combines it with the lab results. The system wouldn't replace a GP just yet but it would instead work alongside the GP.
2) Are there any crowd-sourced solutions available yet for these cases where doctors clearly have no idea? Someone enters all their symptoms and people discuss online and try to come up with some possible options.
3) How much are insurance companies responsible for the sorry state of health care in the US? I was speaking to my friend who says that he pays $850 bucks a month (up from $800 a month last year) on top of what his company pays. I've heard other stories about people basically being a slave to their company because they can't leave due to the generous benefits. I've also heard that insurance companies pay back only 60 cents in the dollar, so to make up the same $100 a doctor was previously earning he now has to charge about $170 (the other option is to be cut from the network of doctors used by the insurance company). And is this the logical conclusion for health care? Will Canada/Australia head the same direction? Seriously, there is a massive opportunity for the US to fix some of these problems now, yet it just seems that you guys are heading in entirely the opposite direction.
Another option would be to auction entire hard disks on Ebay with a description as per the above, not sure if this already exists. Then it's a kind of lottery, with massive potential payload for people willing to go through the data.
The horders I dealt with during my tour of duty had already passed to the next world, but you still had to protect yourself mentally each morning lest you go crazy/question existence/get depressed/etc (happened to a couple of people I worked with, although I don't rule out the possibility that crazy is attracted to this kind of work). For each item in every bedside table, every piece of furniture, every picture, every computer, you had to put aside the memories the deceased person may have had, the reason the deceased held onto the item until the end, the data contained within and make a split-second decision: box or barrel.
Barrels were massive rusted oil drums that we used for collecting garbage. Boxes were used to transport the salable "smalls" for auction. If you were caught considering the saleability of an item for too long you'd soon hear your boss's voice from across the room, "barrel it!"
One time I came across a pair of filing cabinets filled to the brim with research and lecture notes on Egypt and the hieroglyphics. I had already pieced together parts of this person's life to form an image of them - old-money spinster who traveled the world lecturing and having adventures, including sneaking in to China from Hong Kong in 1976 - and their life work was contained in these filing cabinets.
"We can probably get fifty bucks a piece for the filing cabinets; barrel the rest"
For a team of three, two hours per room was budgeted, so everything that was dear to a person over the course of their 70-year life would usually be processed within two days.
Regarding hoarders, the main differences between a dead hoarder and a living one are 1) the fact that you don't have to deal with the emotion as per the OP, and 2) there is no superficial "cleanup" the day before the cleaners arrive. The house is exactly as the hoarder left it as no-one thinks the day before they die, "If I were to die tomorrow I'd be aghast if they found this!"
I know this sounds ridiculous but I would expect a living hoarder would at least manage to dispose of the bucket of feces and used tampons next to the couch if they knew some cleaners were coming. Even hoarders have pride, y'know.
The house with the bucket of tampons was the stuff of legend. Even today, 15 years later, if I were to contact my former boss for a beer it wouldn't be long before the story of that place came up. Along with the tampon-and-poo bucket, the final defacation of the former resident in the sweat-crusted outline on the green velvet couch where the they had spent their final moments is still a vivid memory. The stench, using shovels to scrape up the person's life from where it was stuck to the carpet and fill barrel after barrel, my boss's sense of humour ("whaddaya suppose she used this for?!"), how quiet everyone was on the ride back to the office, showering for an hour afterwards.
Understandably, after working this job for a while I went through an extremely minimalist phase. Even now I pause before most non-consumable purchases. I keep nothing that I wouldn't want someone finding when I die.
I think while many hoarders fear the memories of the past being forgotten, HNers tend to fear being forgotten themselves.
Of course as per the OP, there were good parts to this job too! The pay, for starters, was decent. And discovering some bondage equipment or some naked polaroids of the former resident and their girlfriend was always good for a chuckle and a reminder to stop taking yourself so seriously and enjoy life a bit more.
Other "arrows" include the existence of a thriving black market, competition from other currencies (ie the US dollar), the $300 stipend, the barter system, etc. All these give the citizens a choice to not use VEF for transactions, and as demand for something goes to zero (especially in the face of ever-increasing supply), so goes it's value.
Regarding crypto-currencies specifically, if it is proven that there is a market for "Bitcoin plus alpha" (eg guaranteed convertibility for USD - probably not gonna happen but for example) tailored for the Venezuelan market then you can bet someone is working to make that "V-coin" a reality.
So don't look at Bitcoin as the silver bullet solution to solve Venezuela's woes, but rather as a significant step in the war against oppressive government.
For example, if you were strongly opposed to the policies or methods of The Greens then you may be turned off by the campaign in the OP as the Twitter mosaic is covered in Greens logos.
Another example, I had a friend who attended an Anti Iraq War protest back when it was all going down (the second time). The problem was, the majority of people protesting were far-left/resistance/socialists that were overtly trying to conflate the issues of boat people and I think Palestinians with the war in Iraq, two movements that my friend wanted nothing to do with.