adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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theunitofcaring:

I wrote a while ago about my baby roommate and novelty. The idea is that people find things interesting and exciting when they have the right amount of novelty. Things that are too predictable, like a children’s book you’ve read to a demanding kid ten thousand times, are boring. Things that aren’t predictable enough, like a long novel in a language you don’t speak, are also boring. It’s the process of forming expectations that are often right but sometimes surprised which makes something fun. So for a baby, repetitive play is fun, because every time the duck lands in the bathtub is slightly surprising; for an adult, those variants all make perfect sense and aren’t a source of thrilling novelty anymore.

But I think adults also vary tremendously in how much novelty they enjoy. There are people who reread books all the time, and people who never reread books, both of whom tend to regard each other with total incomprehension. There are people who like their nice simple job doing mostly the same thing every day, and there are people who’d die of boredom. And people are often attuned to different kinds of novelty – for me, ‘sewing dresses’ sounds like doing the same boring thing over and over again, but I bet anyone who actually does it would tell me that different fabrics and threads and stitches and fittings and other constraints make every project different.

I think we tend to talk about jobs as if everyone wants high novelty (art! research! acting! travel!) and some are forced to settle for the mindless drudgery of accounting or marketing or human resources or middle management. But that’s not how it works. Things that are an exciting and satisfying amount of novelty for some people are above the satisfying threshold for other people, and they’re just stressful and demoralizing. Things that would have some people grinding their teeth with tedium have lots of hidden novelty of just the right type for some other people.

But we don’t give kids a lot of opportunity to discover if they’re someone who would find accounting delightfully rewarding minute-to-minute. We don’t even tell them that anyone finds accounting delightfully rewarding. There isn’t really a chance, ever, to try forty things and figure out which one of them hits the right spot in your brain. Which is too bad, because I suspect that getting this right (and noticing when your job has ceased to offer it) is a major contributor to day-to-day happiness.

 

gnomer-denois:

Why do people think accounting is boring? Learning it is boring. Doing the day to day job… you don’t just do the same thing all day. Almost everyday it’s a juggling of what’s normal important right now and in 30 mins or an hour that’s going to change and you have to shift gears because something else has come up. The part I like the most but find the least rewarding is reconciliation projects for accounts that are years old. I can spend hours digging through tons of information to figure out what caused the problem and when it’s resolved, I solved the puzzle! But all I have to show for all that work is a couple of sentences or *maybe* a spreadsheet showing what I found. But I almost never get to really dig in on those problems because there’s always so much to do that has to be done Now.

Maybe it’s more boring in companies that have sufficient staffing.

 

brin-bellway:

I have really been feeling that lack-of-opportunity-to-figure-out-if-you-would-like-doing-accounting lately. *Specifically* regarding accounting.

There’s a draft I never got around to posting that talks about how I’ve been considering the possibility of changing my major from computer science to accounting, but that it’s hard to tell whether that’s a good idea because I have so little sense of what accountants actually *do*. (I interact with enough programmers that at least I have some sense of what *they* do.)

I enjoy making my family’s financial spreadsheets and gathering and crunching the numbers on what possible frugality-efforts would get us, but I don’t know how suggestive that really is.

@gnomer-denois (it won’t actually let me ping you, but since I’m reblogging directly from you you’ll probably still see it), if I may ask, what made you decide to become an accountant?

 

gnomer-denois:

Um, well. My degree in floral design (BS in Horticulture) wasn’t proving very useful since I didn’t have the equity to open my own store. Then I realized that, despite my rebelling against my math teacher mother, I do actually like math. I was on the fence between engineering and accounting but I prefer the more basic number manipulation to the higher level math.

My grandfather was an accountant after he retired from the Air Force, but a bunch of uncles and cousins are engineers, so that part could have gone either way. I had already taken an intro to accounting course during my first BS, and while it was confusing at first, once it clicked it made sense and I knew I could do it.

Also, at the time I started my BS in Accounting, most job listings for accountants required a BS and most for engineers required an MS. Since then there were stricter requirements put in place to sit for the CPA exam that mean I’ve needed to go on to a Masters of Accountancy, though I suspect if it was worked right that might not be necessary for everyone, depending on state/country. Recently I’ve been considering going on for my PhD and becoming a professor.

It sounds like you enjoy doing cost-benefit analysis and some other things that might lend well towards managerial accounting. Www.imanet.org has information about that if you are interested.

 

brin-bellway:

Thank you! That sounds promising.

Traditionally I take two consecutive days off from school-related tasks after finishing a semester, but I will look through that website after I’ve had a chance to recover.

I have one intro-level elective slot left in my computer-science major, so I can take intro to accounting without any sunk costs (the credits will still count towards my degree even if I continue with CS). I’m planning to do that next semester, and we’ll see how it goes.

 

justice-turtle:

@tigerkat24 I can’t recall if our housemate the accountant does tumblr (or I’d just message her directly), but perhaps you could ask if she’d be interested in talking to Brin about what-accountants-do?

Tags:

#(November 2017) #(this bit never went anywhere) #(but in any case my sense of what accountants do has improved enough since this post to think it worth pursuing) #((though if any accountants would like to talk to me about what their job is like I remain interested in hearing it)) #conversational aglets #adventures in University Land #adventures in human capitalism

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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theopjones:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

wtf-viz:

Shattered distribution.

i’m sorry i understand this is trying to make a point but literally all i can think is “what the shit kind of graphic design is this”

Recently, I had a practice exercise for Critical Thinking class (Unit 7: How to Lie with Statistics) in which I had to find a terrible graph in a news source and explain why it was terrible.

As such, my reaction to this post is “*sigh* howmuch.net is at it again”.

(In the case of the post I linked, the article was even worse than the graph taken in isolation. Fun fact: as far as I can tell (and admittedly it’s not all that clear), the original data source uses “housing” to mean everything involved in maintaining a residence (such as utilities), but the article strongly implies that “housing” = “rent”. And they casually assume that a household with average income will also have average expenses, and at one point actually conflate income and expenses!)

—

On the bright side, the OP is wtf-viz, which means that the point this post is trying to make is “what the shit kind of graphic design is this”.

Side note, a lot of the high concentration of bitcoin ownership in a handful of accounts is due to the fact that early in the history of bitcoin, when bitcoin mining was really easy but bitcoin was not very valuable, a number of people mined a lot of bitcoin but then left the network presumably losing the private key for their wallet.

Tags:

#(October 2017) #conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #embarrassment squick

On matched betting

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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jbeshir:

brin-bellway:

jbeshir:

reasonableapproximation:

I decided to do a little bit of matched betting to earn a small amount of money. I used the guide at https://matchedbettingblog.com (and their calculator.

So far:

  • I made about £10 profit from Coral, which is lower than it should have been but partly because I misread their odds for my qualifying bet and lost ~£3 on that instead of ~£0.50. This was a few weeks ago, now I’m doing a second bet.
  • I chose ComeOn for my second because they had a £10 free bet, and small bets require less stake. They aren’t a very good website. I had trouble finding things to bet on and they don’t seem to offer very good odds. I expect to make about £6.50 profit from them. (I’m betting on France v Paraguay which started a few minutes ago.)
  • My betfair liability is ~£40 to make £7 on a £10 bet. To extract closer to £10 (well, £9.50 thanks to commission), liability needs to go up crazy fast. Also, if my free bet was x times larger, liability would also need to go up x times. (“Liability” here is not how much money I risk losing, but how much I need to have in betfair. If I lose that money it just means I gain money somewhere else. But betfair is the convenient place for it to be.)
  • This does not seem a very time-efficient way of earning money, though I do expect to get faster.
  • When I withdrew money from Coral it went into my paypal account. I think I can use that money as partial payment when I make charity donations, maybe? I’m not entirely sure how to use it if not, I can link a bank account to my paypal account but effort.
  • I should probably sign up for Smarkets, but I already had a betfair account so I’ve been using them.
  • It looks like I have a free £5 bet from betfair? I’m not sure where that’s from. Presumably it’s stake not returned, so… I’m not sure how to calculate my optimal strategy using it. I could do the arithmetic, but I might just use it to place a bet, for simplicity.
  • It’s possible to do this as an ongoing thing, but it doesn’t seem very convenient. It looks like you need to do things like “place bet on this game while it’s in play”, which is only like a two hour window (and ideally you place at half time to avoid odds moving, which is even shorter), and you only get a few pounds at a time.
  • I’ve heard that this does bad things to my credit score. I don’t know how much I should care.
  • I have not received noticeable amounts of annoying emails from Coral or Betfair. Or ComeOn, but too soon to tell with them.

I made upwards of a grand from this during the last year and a bit; I did it fairly intensively for a while farming easier/larger signup bonuses, and then just settled into collecting money whenever any of the betting sites I’d signed up for sent me an email offer I could turn into free money readily.

A common thing is that I get an email offering me a free in-play bet of up to £50 if I place a same-size pre-match bet, which means by being around at the time of the match and jumping on it I get a free £30-£35ish. Just today, though, I woke up to an email offer from Betfair for a refund on losses up to £100 on bets settled today or tomorrow, and set myself up with them against Smarkets to get a free guaranteed £75-£80ish out of that. The annoying emails are not really annoying! They are actually quite handy. They think you are a potential gambling addict and will offer you free money, and you can be like “sure thank you I will take your free money”.

Smarkets is better for any markets with enough volume; I would sign up, it’s worth it for the 2% commission vs 5%. You will still need to use Betfair for any markets where volume is low. You also will need Smarkets to match Betfair; if you try to match Betfair with themselves they will get angry and refuse to give you the offer, and maybe bar your account if especially pissy. Betfair never used to send out offers, but this is the second I’ve had from them in the past few months so maybe they’ve shifted strategies.

The biggest individual profits I made were from large signup free credit offers, which were in the region of £200 but had to be turned over lots of times so it only nets to about £120ish. /do/ account for accumulating losses to cycling; things which have to turned over more than ~5 times are liable to either be a lot less profitable than they look or actually a net loss, because each matched pair makes a small guaranteed loss leaking your profit.

Matched betting really does work! The big limiter is that you need to do a lot of research to understand what you’re doing, and you need to stick to common sports or else deal very carefully with differences in adjudication between markets, so we’re talking this being for quite clever people, and you need upwards of a grand in capital for any of the bigger things; to jump on that offer I got today, I had to have £800ish around to tie up for the next week or so (withdrawal is reliable and safe, but takes days, unlike the instant deposit) and I had to have it immediately on hand.

This limits the people who do it enough that we’re an acceptable business expense to hook the potential gambling addicts they’re after. It does emphasise how often they must hook people and how much they must get, though, that they will put so much free money out there as bait. That said, I’m not sure how many of the big signup offers are still around, and I get the impression an increasing number of offers are designed to be hard to match.

…are British gambling companies more trustworthy than American ones?

Word in American supplementary-income circles is, if you think you’ve found a loophole in a set of gambling rules that will allow you to get risk-free money out of it, the loophole will usually turn out not to exist. If necessary, casinos will straight-up lie about what they will and will not do, in order to prevent you from exploiting it. (I’ve heard so many stories of casinos that just *didn’t pay* a promised sign-up bonus, and didn’t respond to messages about it.)

*Sometimes* you get places that actually give you the bonuses they say they will, under the circumstances they say they will. But because a significant portion of them don’t, and you don’t know for sure which category any given instance will be in (and you can’t necessarily trust that it will at least be consistent person-to-person), the money is no longer risk-free: you’re meta-gambling.

Trustworthy to do what they said they will when they said they would, yes. There’s regulators that insist on it.

In general if they pick up on you as probably pulling matched shenanigans your account can get closed after, or much more commonly, flagged as no longer eligible for offers (I think two of mine have been?), but they cannot arbitrarily rescind an offer that brought them trade AFTER extending it, and in the rare cases of smaller iffier companies which have done that, threatening them with the regulator has brought them to behave.

In general, the terms they have do forbid guaranteed win betting, so if you find one of the rare offers which can be exploited within that single provider without pulling in an exchange for a guaranteed profit you are liable to have your account closed and money refunded (this happened to me with Sky Bets about two years before I got into matched betting, they ill-advisedly put out an offer which included roulette, so you just turned your money over on that and withdrew. they cancelled everyone who did that).

In theory, those terms might preclude matched betting- however, they do not have access to the betting exchanges and can’t see that you are doing it, and without the ability to prove you are doing it they must do what they said they were going to do. So matched bettors are just a cost of business they have to bite.

Much more common in the smaller iffier companies are terms which are impossible; a free bonus that must be bet 20 times before any winnings can be withdrawn or something, at minimum rates and overheads that prevent it ever being profitable. Or a huge list of conditions that in practice you are going to struggle to meet. Those you just don’t touch.

Some of this is because of gambling’s unambiguously generally legal if regulated state in the UK and much of Europe; the bigger betting companies are big brands; Sky, for example, is the big satellite TV company, and Sky Bets is a betting subsidiary they made, comparable to if the US had a Verizon Bets or something. Discourages scumminess. I think some of it might be that casinos are just plain bad relative to other kinds of businesses even within gambling for this, though; I would be leery trying it in person for the first time. I am not sure where that intuition comes from.

(I would also note that the exchanges generally don’t care if you are doing matched betting. They profit just fine- you are effectively taking the offers and “selling” them on the exchange to other exchange participants, and they get their commission in the process. It’s only the end extending the offer which cares.)

Tags:

#(June 2017) #(I was actually referring to online casinos but I didn’t bother to clarify) #conversational aglets #gambling #adventures in human capitalism

Revolutionary Cooking Methods

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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smilodonmeow:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

ilzolende:

sinesalvatorem:

Mum: …And then you have to move all the stakes around in the sauce so that the flavour gets distributed evenly.

Me: What’s with this talk of “even distribution”? That’s Communism! Do you want us to get invaded again?

Mum: Yeah, yeah. Just keep turning them. Move the ones on the bottom to the top.

Me: For how long? How long must we indulge these revolutionaries?

Mum: For as long as possible. The ideal would be permanent revolution, but I think 10 minutes should suffice.

Me: *takes an icepick out of the draw and brandishes it* You take that back, you Trotskyite!

Mum: *rolls eyes*

Me: Ugh. Why do I even care if the flavour is evenly distributed?

Mum: Because you never know which piece of meat you’re going to get.

Me: ….That is the sanest argument for economic leftism I’ve heard all year.

Mum: Alison, it’s the second of January.

Me: Well, yeah. It’s just that the leftists were hung over yesterday from celebrating the long-awaited overthrow of 2015.

…one wonders why a resident of [Redacted] has an icepick, and in the event that a different object was used, what said object was.

….We have icepicks for breaking ice. Like, I know we’re poor, but did you think we didn’t have freezers?

Oh, is that how people with one freezer get rid of condensation buildup? In my family, we eat enough of the frozen food that the remainder fits into the freezer not being de-iced, turn the freezer being de-iced off, put a bunch of towels in front of the open door to catch the water, and let it melt.

(Mind you, only our secondary freezer gets significant ice buildup. The primary freezer seems immune. If we only owned the primary, freezer ice buildup wouldn’t even occur to me.)

(Owning multiple freezers is a big help for anyone aiming to be on the good end of Vimes Boot Theory (specifically the “buying food in bulk” manifestation), and I recommend it to anyone who can pull it off.)

Some freezers have autodefrost so ice buildup is never a thing.

(of course, the downside of having a lot of freezer space is you have more to lose if it gets thawed *accidentally*…)

Tags:

#(January 2016) #conversational aglets #food #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

i’m not actually awake enough to go Deep with this so i’ll attempt to keep it brief

so the barnes and noble thing where they fired all their full time employees recently. obviously, terrible thing, sympathies, fuck capitalism, etc, but like.

for me specifically, that’s like “welp, another timeline shot”. cos if i had not quit my job there due to snow and crazybrains, one of me in the multiverse was still working there and probably full time or managerial at that point, so like… that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

and like. the thing i’m trying to say is. that’s capitalism. you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same. you have to give your life to people you can’t trust.

and i’m so *bad* at not trusting. and that’s why i’m so bad at capitalism. actively not trusting takes a lot of spoons and fucks me the hell up. my default state is trust, and in a lot of timelines that’s killed me already, and it’s going to get me in a fair number of the rest.

and i hate that. i don’t know what to do with it, trying to be less trusting is… it’s different than trying to be less empathetic? it’s not “if i do that it will make me a Bad Person”. it’s that i *forget*. i don’t have a… a dimmer switch for trust. it’s all or nothing. and that just utterly does not work for capitalism and i *hate* it :-(

>>that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.

[…]

you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same<<

Hmm. I’m having a hard time verbalising my thoughts here…like, there’s generally only so much that somebody can fuck you over financially if you’ve had some good years to prepare in. But I guess the ability (or lack of) to go “I should use these good years to prepare for the inevitable fucking-over attempt” is in fact the problem (or a large part of it, anyway)?

(It seems like costs of living vary a *lot* from one set of circumstances to another, and figures that seem unrealistically high to one person can seem unrealistically low to another. But in the circumstances that *I’m* familiar with, a full-time minimum-wage job is enough money to support two pretty-careful people or 1.5 moderately-careful people. So if one *doesn’t* have dependents (but does have roommates for the bulk discounts), for every year one can hold on to a full-time job, one can live for 6 – 12 months after getting laid off. Longer, if one manages to obtain a job that pays more than minimum wage.)

(I guess it’s a variant of the idea of fuck-you money, one that focuses on the possibility of *them* telling *you* to fuck off rather than the other way around. “Fuck-me money”?)

—

I was just talking to Mom earlier today about how I’m not sure I’m ever going to be *able* to trust that an income won’t just disappear one day, that even in the better possible scenarios for a decade from now where I’ve gotten some cushy job in an accounting firm or something, I’ll probably still be living on the 2028-dollars equivalent of $1k – $1.5k/month and agonising over every expenditure and squirrelling away every spare cent for the winter.

Which is the opposite of the psychological issues you usually hear about poor people developing (and which you have yourself, right?), where they feel like there’s no point in saving because *savings* always disappear no matter what you do. I think this is because those people tend to have spent an extended and/or formative time as living-paycheck-to-paycheck!poor, whereas I spent mine as living-primarily-off-of-dwindling-savings!poor. Different kinds of poverty lead to different adaptations.

*nods* Yeah, basically. There’s the paycheck-to-paycheck versus dwindling-savings thing, there’s the fact that I just plain tend to be a little more interested in buying shinies than you do (as demonstrated on Flight Rising), and… like, the trust thing from my OP, it’s not just that it’s exhausting and takes spoons I need to work. It’s that… *tries to word*… It’s almost a cognitive dissonance thing. The whole way I’m wired around trust is either/or. Working for The Man while simultaneously distrusting The Man is a fundamental skill of late-capitalism millennial life, and it – it fritzes me out. It’s not something I can maintain for more than a few months. It’s – you know more about thought experiments than I do, there probably is one about this, but it’s like trying to actively believe two contradictory thoughts at once, “Black is black” and “Black is not black” or something (I don’t know, I’m not terribly coherent), *all the time*. If I… if I let myself notice that my employer is not trustworthy, that they’re a capitalist entity and therefore going to fuck me over as soon as it suits them to do so, I can’t… I go straight to “well fuck them first” and I quit. I can’t seem to do a headspace where they’re going to fuck me over but I can stay and work till then. :-(

#fuck everything #i dont know that this is surmountable #because i do know that i always fundamentally *want* to trust people and think the best of them #(in topics for a separate post its so infuriating that these characteristics are always mentioned as making me a Good Person) #(i did not choose them and if i could choose i would not have them) #(its just brain wiring like my ability to feel awe) #(fucking brains can i just have a robot body now and reprogram myself) #:P

Tags:

#now that I’m thinking about this here is another conversational thread I was in for which the last comment was not mine #(note: thread is from March-April 2018) #I actually *do* have a spare copy of this but it would be weird to have to go digging around in my tumblr-utils output just to #finish reading this thread #no other such threads come *immediately* to mind but there probably are some #if I come across any while formatting the WordPress archive and they haven’t rotted yet I will reblog those too #adventures in human capitalism #venting cw? #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #I’m going to tag these reblogs #conversational aglets

Accounting terms as a metaphor for life

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

swimmer963:

I just had a conversation about the difference between conceptualizing your own life as something like a balance sheet, versus something like a profit & loss statement, and I’m finding this a surprisingly fruitful analogy. 

Balance sheet: You are tracking assets and liabilities – a snapshot overview of your position in the world. Assets might be literal money and stuff, intangibles like skills, youth, attractiveness, family ties, or even more nebulous, like memories of good experiences. If you’re looking at your life from a balance sheet perspective, you are a collector, trying to gather and hold onto as much of the good as possible. Surveying your life and noting that you’re holding a good-sized pool of equity (of all types) will feel safe and successful. Giving up possessions, forgetting childhood memories, or drifting away from friends and family, might feel like losing a part of yourself. I associate this model with a diachronic sense of self. 

(There is probably some possible analogy here re depreciation on assets, that I’m too tired to unpack right now). 

Profit & loss: You are tracking revenue and expenditures – the rate of change over time, and whether your trajectory is positive on net. Recent good experiences, learning and personal growth and skills gained, and literal money-earning potential feel like success and safety, as does having more than enough energy and motivation to fuel your ongoing day-to-day life; putting in unsustainable amounts of effort, spending yourself to stay afloat, feels like the worst kind of failure. Your absolute position, and where you were five years ago, both matter less. Noticing that you’ve left something behind (friends, family, an old sense of self) in your race for forward momentum, probably doesn’t hurt as much. I associate this viewpoint with being more episodic. 

I tend toward the profit & loss (which makes sense, I’m more episodic than many people I know), and I think I’ve moved even further in that direction in recent years, an adaptation to the life I’ve chosen – it doesn’t feel like I have the luxury to sit around accumulating assets and stability and a comfortable position to survey my life. The categories of revenue I’m currently pulling in are totally different from what I was tracking five years ago, when I was a nurse in Canada, and that seems fine. I’m not the same person as I was then. 

I think this does make me more vulnerable towards vicious spirals in bad times, and over-updating on how things have gone recently. 

I was unfamiliar with the terms “diachronic” and “episodic” sense of self, so I looked them up and found this [link].

The post mentions diachronics often “pitying” episodics, but I find my main emotion is not *pity* but *defensiveness*. The web of associations I’m getting is mostly people (they usually call themselves Buddhists; I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know how central an example they are) who think that [lacking a sense of a cohesive, continuous self] is both the objectively more true and subjectively superior way to live, and that the highest goal in life is to obtain it. IME, the one being pitied is usually *me*. I wonder what kind of circles 2012!RONBC travelled in.

Interestingly, given your examples, for much of my life “how much money do I currently have saved up” has been a *much* larger factor in the strength of my financial position than “how much income am I likely to make in the near future”. I’ve spent a *lot* of time over the years living primarily off of savings, and these days I do sometimes tend to view income, not as directly going to expenses, but as a way of acquiring savings that one then *actually* uses.

And come to think of it, this isn’t even the first time that someone has connected that with me having a stronger continuity of self [link], though not in quite the same sense that you’re talking about.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting stuff.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw?

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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serinemolecule:

brin-bellway:

theopjones:

brin-bellway:

somnilogical:

brin-bellway:

@somnilogical, I wanted to thank you for your efforts in being a Tumblr Purge News Network. I’ve found it very helpful.

i like to do lots of meta when thinking of changes. im kind of using my tumblr to pinboard possibility-space of where humans could go

im also downloading every app and signing up for every website someone mentions and poking around in them to see what theyre like

Yeah, it’s bedtime for me now but tomorrow I’ll be doing some poking around too.

And researching backup methods for all the potential sites, because fuck having a mere single copy of anything.

(If I parsed the jargon correctly, this Mastodon backup program [link] is compatible with Pleroma? *If*. I’ll test it soon, probably tomorrow.)

If you self host Mastodon you could just back up straight from the database on your server.

Even if I get a handle on how to do that on a technical level, I’d need to rent a URL for it, right?

If I decide to settle down in the Fediverse I will seriously consider self-hosting, but I’m not ready to drop money on it yet.

Renting a domain for a URL is around $10/year.

Renting the shittiest server possible is already around $60/year, and I’d be surprised if the shittiest server possible would be enough to handle Mastodon. And the effect on your electric bill of using your own computer as a server is around $200/year

There also exist free domains, but like in no universe is $10/year not a drop in the bucket compared to the overall price of hosting a server.

Pleroma boasts that one can run an instance on a Raspberry Pi [link], but again this is really not my area and I would be unsurprised to learn that this is far less impressive than they are trying to make it sound.

Probably the figures I’ve encountered over the years about domain costs were actually varying levels of package deal.

I had some further details here about cost estimates, but honestly I think they’re beside the point. There exist *some* financial costs to self-hosting, and I could tell that much even without having any experience in such matters, and that was enough to dissuade me from jumping straight into the deep end. When and if (*big* if) I decide that I am willing to pay money for a server, *then* I’ll research exactly how much it would cost me and compare that figure to the amount I am willing to pay (not to mention the amount of effort involved in determining which knowledge and skills I would even need, and then acquiring them).

Tags:

#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #Fediverse #adventures in human capitalism #discourse cw?

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

So much adulting today.

—

Got up a bit early for an appointment at the doctor’s office, because starting a few months ago most of my menstrual periods have been significantly worse than usual, and after the 2.5th bout of debilitating dizziness (the .5 was a time where it felt like it was *going* to happen but never quite got bad enough that I couldn’t stand up) I figured there was enough of a pattern developing here that I shouldn’t bet on it going away on its own.

The first-line treatment is daily iron supplements, plus two naproxen twice a day around the onset of menstruation (apparently, in addition to the painkilling effect, higher-dose naproxen can also make periods lighter). If the OTC stuff doesn’t cut it, the next step is to “”sample”“ some birth control pills. (She is one of those doctors who, when possible, keep their poorer patients supplied with enough ”“samples”“ of a medication that they never actually have to spend money on it.)

—

Then my brother and I went to the bank and signed up for index-fund RRSPs [link]. It’s not so much that I’m planning for retirement per se (though my brother might be thinking of it that way, I’m not sure), but after many hours of very stressful research regarding which forms of investment fall in the intersection of “non-awful returns”, “low fees”, and “won’t piss off the IRS [link]”, this is the only entry that I am sufficiently confident is on that list.

(I came scarily close to buying some non-RRSP index funds this autumn–even set up the account for it!–and only found out that doing so would incur the IRS’s wrath because my brother mentioned he was thinking of getting a TFSA, and this inspired me to read the Wikipedia article on them [link] (they are also terrible, for some of the same reasons). Thank you for telling me this extremely important information, Wikipedia, because nobody *else* fucking did!)

It looks like we are allowed to have *some* ETFs [link] under *some* circumstances, but I don’t have a clear sense of which ETFs/circumstances those are. Once we’ve reached a point in our lives where [18% of all the post-immigration income we’ve ever had] isn’t enough room to keep our savings in, we will have to find an appropriate specialist to consult about exactly how to tell when an ETF is permissible.

Tags:

#sometimes I wonder if I should go into U.S. tax preparation so maybe one day I can actually fucking understand what my own taxes are doing #but I think I’d rather do something more in the realm of bookkeeping or cost-benefit analysis #this stuff does not seem to *quite* be my style #but it’s even less everyone else’s style so I took the research upon myself #(at least I get to cost-benefit-analyse the various types of investment?) #adventures in human capitalism #oh look an original post #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #medical cw #menstruation #the more you know

I’m in a new demographic now.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

Age 25 – 34.

(haven’t taken any surveys since, but I’m sure I will soon)

I had a good birthday!

  • Went exploring in some shopping plazas I had previously only visited with specific purposes in mind.
  • Learned about the existence of 3.5mm-to-cassette-tape adapters (examples), wooden sudoku boards, and little grocery stores both expensive (but organic!) and actually very cheap (since Mom insists on having brisket for holiday feasts (except the ones where it’s turkey instead), I figured I ought to tell her about the butcher I found with brisket on sale for $5/lb; she later picked some up and put it in the freezer for the next non-turkey feast).
  • Picked up another free mango smoothie, and a cookie from Subway that I didn’t even know was coming. (I haven’t had any good opportunities to buy anything from Starbucks since they instituted their “must buy at least one thing per year to receive birthday presents” rule, Giant Tiger failed to record my birthday properly and so sent me nothing, and the other freebies I haven’t had a chance to pick up yet without going far enough out of my way to make it not worth the fuel. I expect to be in the correct areas before the various vouchers expire, though.)
  • Ate homemade macaroni and cheese, and later birthday cake made with almond meal instead of flour (I like my chocolate to be mixed with nuts, and it turns out almond-meal chocolate cake is excellent at this).
  • Got the solar-powered phone battery. Have not had a chance to try it out yet, except the flashlight function.
  • Also a gift card for the restaurant I work at (some of our stuff is actually reasonably priced even by my standards if you have an employee discount, so I eat there a couple times a month), and–because Mom has a thing about wanting to give people surprise presents–a variety pack of differently flavoured Kit Kats. (I haven’t yet had any of the caramel, mint-cookie, or green tea, but I did eat the strawberry one. It tasted a bit artificial, and I don’t think I’d bother getting it again, but nor was it bad.)

Tags:

#oh look an original post #birthday #food #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

theunitofcaring:

A weirdly large share of productivity advice is about increasing how many hours in your day you spend doing work. 

My current job is not a good example here because it doesn’t come in discrete little units, but my last job did. My last job was to write profiles of software engineers. They took about 15minutes to write when I was in the swing of things, but it was often hard to get myself into the mode where I could work on them. Sometimes I’d spend the whole day slowly slogging through them. Sometimes I’d procrastinate all day and then do all of them with two hours left in the day. 

The maximally productive day, for that job, would have been to finish all of my work by 10am and then spend the rest of the day relaxing. 

Nearly all productivity tools and apps would consider the ‘most productive’ day to be the one where I spent ten hours working on profiles. 

I get why they do this. You have more volitional control over how much time you spend working than over how much work you get done when you do, and it can be discouraging to strive for something that’s not really in your control. For many people and many tasks, how much time you work and how much you get done are pretty strongly correlated. And it’s easier to track time spent than progress accomplished.

But nonetheless, it seems pretty damaging for this to be the focus of nearly all productivity advice. The rare things which are instead results-oriented seem to do well. Duolingo rewards lessons completed, not time spent doing them. 4thewords rewards words written. The people I know seem to like them and stick with them a lot more than with time-trackers or strategies to squeeze more workday out of their lives. 

I think most people trying to be more productive should try both a ‘track how much time you spend working! spend more!’ approach and a ‘here’s how much you have to achieve today! try for the earliest possible completion time!’ approach, so you can give yourself a chance at hitting on whatever works best.

I find that what works best for me is neither “spend as much time as possible” nor “do a set amount” (mind you, I don’t think I’ve tried the particular variant “do a set amount *as quickly as possible*”; that might work a little better), but rather “you have this much time available, do as much as possible within that period”.

Both more-time and result-based methods tend to make me work more slowly because it feels like there’s little reason not to, whereas if I only have a certain amount of time I want to make it count. My job pays by the hour, and I actually do really well under that system: it motivates me to make myself useful, because I want my employer to get his money’s worth.

Meanwhile, with university, it’s unfortunate that my schedule is not as conducive to “spend Exactly Four Hours working on school assignments” as it used to be, and I *am* pretty sure that I go through schoolwork more slowly now that I’m not doing that. I’ve been considering ways I might tweak my approach to allow for rigid school times while still being able to fulfil my duties as my workplace’s emergency fill-in person (that is to say, while having a somewhat unpredictable work schedule).

Tags:

#yes I do best with strict scheduling but signed up for a job with an explicit condition of ”must be able to show up on short notice” #look local minimum wage is super high compared to my cost of living #so by my standards even this fast-food job pays *very* well #most weeks I work 16 hours and make very nearly enough to support myself #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in University Land #in which Brin has a job #adventures in human capitalism