Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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Joined

2 yr. ago

An interesting realization was that "saving money" and "reducing waste" are often competing optimums. I live in the developing world where there people waste a lifetime sitting at home doing nothing to save money. I am one of two or three people in my neighborhood with a job -- the rest "save tons more money than I do" but don't have jobs so their real income after inflation is negative.

Anyway, I figure out what my time is worth (based on what I estimate I could earn by grabbing extra contract work). Then I don't spend my time saving money unless it saves something at least comparable to my hourly rate, or it's in a context where working would be impossible, or there's a nontangible element (e.g. repairing a thing I like a lot).

I prioritize not wasting my time first (it's the only resource I can't buy more of), and spend most of my spare effort finding ways to make more money (I regularly cram-study 2-3 hours per day for this purpose, usually tech). Then with the extra money I make, I can save 80% of my income on a good month.

When I started this habit, I made about 135 USD per month and had zero savings. Even if I saved 100% of my earnings, it still amounts to essentially nothing -- so it became obvious that the best way to save more money, was to earn more money. When I had a little money, I didn't put it in the bank -- I invested it in myself by buying tools to learn more things and provide more services to accelerate my gains.

Anyway it's not the right advice for everyone, I'm just another fool like the rest of us, but I hope it's maybe useful to someone out there.

I don't think I have the emotional range to "get angry" the way most people describe it (as some overcoming urge). It's an alien concept to me. For me, anger is a quiet loosening of my moral obligation towards someone, a re-tallying of social contracts, something done consciously and with purpose.

If I should appear angry, but just "go with the flow" instead, it doesn't mean I'm not angry -- it means I no longer feel the need to be honest with you about my thoughts or feelings. I've found that by and large, people fail to notice the difference.

So if it is any consolation, at least some of us who appear easygoing are actually furious internally.

A pocketwatch manufactured in 1889. I keep it running as a memento mori: the watch may outlive the watchmaker. Build things well -- they may be all people remember you by, one day.

I also have a slide rule at my desk at most times, to remind me of false-precision.

I guess the oldest though, is a Wu Zhu coin from the Three Kingdoms period (currency is a technology, too?). I keep it to remember that all empires arise from chaos, and must return to it; that all assets eventually have no value. That the things that endure, are stranger currencies still.

I'm a bit sleepy and ate far too much seafood to process all you've written here presently -- but the specific thing I was referring to is called Zermelo's Theorem. Which is up there for top 10 theories with cool-sounding names, as far as I'm concerned -- here it is in case you're interested (I periodically forget about this theorem and it's always neat to re-find it -- which you could call an... optimally suboptimal move)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%27s_theorem_(game_theory)

Truth be told, I'm terrible at chess (so... you're not wrong). Games where I have perfect knowledge of the state of play, and where one player moves first, I don't enjoy much. For each of these games, there provably exists a strategy where the first player that moves can only win or draw. This strategy is trivial for tic-tac-toe, known for checkers, but unknown for chess (although we know it exists). Anyway, just knowing that sort of ruins it for me.

Anyway, I know that feeling well! I'm not that smart, I just study a few subjects a lot. There are just so many things I don't know, that it's easy to find people I can learn from.

It is unsurprising that taking any situation to ridiculous extremes makes it ridiculous :P

I think that perhaps a lot of wisdom is taking things away from ridiculous extremes and understanding them in the context of the world that is, rather than the world that is-not. It's pretty easy to come up with contrived situations where nearly any given thing is absurd.

...but yeah lets do it anyway for fun, because this is the Internet, and what's even the point if we can't be weird. Usually the most efficient way to do reduce moral decisions to absurdity is to make it into a trolley-problem. So for example, the puppy ate the disarming codes for an armed nuclear weapon at a puppy farm, and is slowly getting away on it's cute, stubby legs. So you can either passively allow thousands of puppies to die, or actively stomp one.

The reality of course is couples arguing about trifling things, like minor expenses, housework, small behaviors, or whether to put a toilet seat down. We make our lives miserable for such petty reasons sometimes. I've realized I'd rather be wrong and make my partner happy, than be right and make her unhappy -- if at all practical. My mind is fairly rigid by nature -- it's just so easy for me to be an idiot-by-default in these matters.

As an aside, we eat dog in my country -- although I don't, it smells weird, it's expensive, and looks sketchy.

If I married someone who wanted to harm me, I have bigger problems.

Thankfully, I did not :)

Ah yeah, that was me as a kid too. I read whatever I could get ahold of, which was mostly English and French from 50+ years ago (yay, secondhand books and copyrights expiring). So my vocabulary in both languages was (and occasionally remains) antiquated. My pronunciation fixed itself some time after university, but was weird in my youth.

I've since de-prioritized human language, for practical reasons. Communicating with machines efficiently is simply much more productive (and lucrative)! My shorthand also is it's own language, where there is no distinction between letters and numbers, of which there are 16, and they phonetically map to English. Hexadecimal English, or Hexen for short. It's optimized for writing quickly (every character is precisely 1 stroke).

Quite handy for taking notes around people I don't want reading them, too.

I once knew a Thai national with a legal name, through some quirk of the system, legally became Mr. Smith.

First name Mr.

Last name Smith.

Getting him through airports was always an... experience. He was a talented guy though!

We live in rented honeycomb-like structures to extract maximum rental value, performing all our work in VR offices managed by social media companies. The concepts of "home" and "alone" no longer exist.

Historians rediscover the original movie Home Alone, and over the course of 16 academic papers, explore these antiquated notions. The first four papers cover the economics by which noncorporate entities have legal rights and may own land. The next four the idea that some places could be different from others, making leisure travel relevant. After that, the idea that physical goods could be owned (and therefore "stolen" by "thieves"), not only leased as a DRM-protected service.

The final four papers are just screaming.

Yup, that makes sense!

I've cornered the market on Latin-Vietnamese cross-language humor though. Stay off my turf :P

Ah, that works much better in Italian!

One related word I have mixed feelings about is 'antediluvian'. On one hand, it's got a nice ring to it. On the other hand, there are enough floods in my area that it translates to "more than a short time ago", which feels contrary to it's intended usage.

Some people might require a flood of biblical proportions. We get those less frequently, but in practice, still too often for the word to be used as intended.

On a semi-related note, I accidentally stumbled on a temple the other day that looked Buddhist, but the symbology had far too many tentacles and various statues had... unusual numbers of limbs. Perhaps the core issue is that I apparently live in R'lyeh. Still... affordable housing on land risen from the deeps, not much pollution or traffic. Google maps can be a bit glitchy. Fresh (if highly unusual) seafood.

Yup, that was the case for me too. I think I only figured it out when I was like 30.

We can also compoundwordly languageweird!

Oh in English -- I used to say renumerate (numerate a second time) instead of remunerate (pay someone for a thing).

My wife asked me to stop worrying about whether I was right, and instead focus on being helpful. Changing the way your mind works is quite difficult, but in cases like these, worth doing.

I lived for the better part of a decade in Vietnam thinking "đại lý" was a loan word from English meaning "daily".

It actually indicates an agent (like a reseller) -- e.g. a lottery ticket seller, news stand, and so on. "Daily" just worked in all those contexts by coincidence.

I also mix up "in stock" (in a warehouse) and "available". So an analogy is I often ask people if they have "a clock in their warehouse" instead of if they "have the time".

Also probably two dozen equally weird things I'm not even aware of. People are pretty chill about it, mostly because the number of people without Vietnamese heritage that speak the language in any capacity, rounds down to zero.

Verbing weirds language.

One of my professors would regularly use the word antepenultimate, "before before last".

I don't know how hard adoption paperwork is here to be honest!

However culturally, I find we have a somewhat of an aversion to getting lawyers or filling out official forms, or waiting. I'm not sure why this is, but it might tie in to old-fashioned ideas about pride, honor, and respect. So a lot of things have 'no paperwork', and when it finally needs to be sorted out, tempers flare and you've got a blood feud on your hands.