adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

did i even mention that my aunt threatened to unplug the wifi at night in order to make me job hunt faster because “I’m not trying to force you to become a morning person, but job hunting is an eight to five thing”? or did that get lost in the FUCKING AUGEAN STABLES HERE

…that is a thing you do to small children, not housemates in their thirties.

Also, it didn’t work when my parents did it (I just stayed up all night reading and playing Nethack), and I see even less reason why it would work on someone who has a mobile data plan. All it would do is…oh, I see, it lets her complain about how dependent you are on Internet access, that you’re still willing to use it even when she jacks up the price by limiting you to mobile data.

(although I suppose you could go over to the McDonalds or something and use theirs, which would probably still get you some aunt complaints but might be cheaper, depending on transportation cost vs number of mobile-data MB saved)

And anyway, job hunting should be done at the hours you are available to work. If a job requires you to come in at 8 AM for the interview, they’re probably going to want you to routinely come in to work at 8 AM, and if you can’t do that you shouldn’t waste your time interviewing with them. (Not that I would expect her to listen if you told her that.)

(Everyone in my family works evenings for a large percentage of their shifts, and ¾ of us *never* start work before 10:30 AM! My dad’s job interview with the delivery people was at 6 PM! It can be done, even (maybe especially) with low-tier jobs! My parents used to joke with the other weirdly-sleep-scheduled homeschool families that they were raising the next generation of second-shift workers, and they were kind of right!)

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#I mean I’ve drifted back some so I’m in an in-between schedule where 8 – 4 is too early and 4 – 12 is too late #of course with the New Economy and all that I might never have to pick one of those to orient myself around #I’ll work when work is available so long as I can arrange to be reasonably awake #(I think if I had to choose) #(4 – 12 would be much easier to adjust to but 8 – 4 would be a bit more pleasant after I eventually got used to it) #(not sure which I’d pick) #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #abuse cw? #(fun fact: back when we had metered home Internet I used to save up large downloads) #(and do them in batches at the nearest coffeeshop) #(sometimes I had so much to download (and our Internet was so expensive) that I could buy a bagel there and it would *still* be cheaper)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Last workweek, for the first time, I made enough money to live on!  :D  o/

(it’s still a very useful supplement even when I get fewer hours than that, and while I have been known to push for (and usually receive) more hours, I’ve never presented it to my boss as being of vital importance)

(“Enough money to live on” is here defined at a relatively high level of abstraction: “if each individual in my household made this much money every week for a year, the total amount earned would equal the amount we spent in the previous calendar year (minus some things we’ve since cut)”. For 2018 (which uses 2017 data), this is about 17 minimum-wage-hours.)

(Hmm…*calculates*…ooh. Looks like ever since my most recent request for more hours (which was granted), most weeks I make right around the threshold for “enough to live on if no unusual expenses occur” (about 11.5 hours). Mom tries very hard to at least keep herself above that threshold (and encourages Dad to do the same), because she feels better about asking Brother for additional money if it’s only for occasional expenses, and she suspects it might cause less resentment in Brother too.)

Tags:

#the idea of feeling resentful about having to maintain the household *feels* ridiculous to me but there’s a good chance she’s right #I’ve grown pretty collectivist over the years of gradually increasing hardship #which is supposedly part of the standard coping mechanism for this and yet nobody else here exhibits nearly as much of it as I do #(the pathogen-stress people might say my potential for collectivism was closer to the surface and so more easily activated) #intuitively I think of individualistic approaches to budgeting as something you grow out of around puberty #but then I also intuitively think of shooter games as something you grow out of around puberty #so I guess I’m a terrible judge of these things #anyway I have to go get ready for work soon #(I think I’m getting 15 hours this week so still not bad) #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #tag rambles #in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

My aunt will never realize that “having the spoons to traipse all over town looking for deals” is a luxury in itself. But she’s paying for things I do genuinely need, and I happen to actually have the spoons at the moment, so I will do the traipsing.

(I think she thinks I have squandered all my money. I will let her think this, so as actually to save some money. ETHICS. ;P)

I think there’s also the aspect where deal-hunting takes more spoons from some people than from others. A lot of the time I can get my brain to treat deal-hunting as a game, which makes things somewhat easier.

(I get something like the opposite of this sometimes, where Mom is really impressed by some cost-benefit analysis I’ve done and how hard that must have been, and meanwhile my brain did not see it as a fundamentally different thing from, like, the spreadsheet I made last month that calculates the most profitable thing to do with Baldwin’s cauldron.)

(I’m the sort of person who responds to “Let’s traipse all over town looking for deals!” with “Hang on, first let me calculate some fuel costs so we can see how much traipsing is worth it for how much saving”.)

—

P.S. I don’t know if this helps with the particular deals you’re hunting, but here is an app that shows you the local sales flyers for a (U.S. or Canada) postal code of your choice, and has a search function so you can do things like “show me all sales on potatoes”.

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#…there’s no way I’m not changing my major is there #how did I ever think I wasn’t gonna end up as an accountant #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism

Anonymous asked: guess that could be what’s behind paying someone by giving them a prepaid gift card, too–the gift card is as good as cash (assuming it’s to a place they want to spend money at) but you can buy it with a credit card

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

another-normal-anomaly:

argumate:

please don’t ever say gift cards are as good as cash, for gift cards must be cleansed from this earth by fire and the sword

Yes. With the exception of Amazon gift cards, which are as good as cash.

Nah. After a lot of analysis† and searching†, I *eventually* managed to figure out a way to make Amazon gift cards *90%* as valuable as cash, if you ignore the extra effort involved in buying electronics off of Amazon and reselling them for 90% value.

(Now, if Amazon started carrying Wegmans gift cards, I might consider Amazon credit as good as cash††. But not before.)

—

†Am I the only one for whom Tumblr links are often no longer distinguished from non-link text? I think it only happens on Chrome, but my choice are Chrome and Firefox, and Firefox Quantum is unusably slow.

††At least until we started making more than $2,000 or so in Amazon credit per year, which we might actually manage if we re-optimised our menial-Internet-labour payouts under an assumption that Amazon credit was as good as cash.

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#I essentially had to pay a fifty-fucking-dollar exchange fee to Amazon #but I *did* manage to wring $450 out of the $500 in menial-Internet-labour credits #planning to do it again next time we get enough credit built up #adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

teach coders how to truck

Tags:

#to improve their ability to make their way in the modern economy #(so my dad’s a delivery driver now) #((it’s not actually a *truck* but calling it a car wouldn’t let me make that joke)) #(unlike every programming job available the delivery people were willing to give him part-time hours) #((he doesn’t have the stamina for a full-time job anymore)) #(the pay’s not all that good but the most recent estimates suggest it’s *just* about enough) #(god I hope he can keep this job for a good while) #(*knocks on wood*) #oh look an original post #tag rambles #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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.

Tags:

#fun* fact: my parents ran out of money around the end of February (depending on how you count) #*not actually fun #it’s up to me and Brother to keep things running #(mostly Brother since he has more savings and more income) #((and the reason he has more savings is *because* he has more income)) #venting cw? #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

I have collected the data and calculated the results for 2017, and the main result is:

Over the past six months, we were short an average of $65/week. Just $65. That’s all.

(Considering how large some of the outlier charges were, there must have been some individual weeks in which we had more money at the end of the week than at the start. Maybe even individual months.)

We are *damn* close, and this could very well be the year we get in the black.

*sigh*

Okay, so this is very embarrassing, and also bad even if you ignore the embarrassment factor, but I told you the first thing and so I feel obligated to tell you the second.

I am issuing a retraction. When calculating our income for the latter half of 2017, I failed to notice that one of the entries was not actually income, but rather a transfer from a retirement account (an account which, by the way, is now empty, and so will not be able to help us in the future).

The actual shortage is about $360/week. If, as we are planning to do, we drop the less cost-effective of the two life-insurance policies, this drops to $185. Still possible (13 more minimum-wage hours would do it), but rather less so.

(I suppose if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is)

(what does it say about my life that “only short $65/week” is too good to be true)

Tags:

#both of my parents appear to be in that awkward stage of life #where you’re too fucked up to perform able-bodied work but not fucked up enough to be Legally Disabled and get help that way #I mention this because of the possible positive resolutions to this predicament #one of the more likely ones is ”a parent manages to find a job they are actually capable of doing and which is willing to hire them” #but they keep looking and often all they find is jobs requiring traits like #”must be able to stand up for several hours straight” #or #”must have good hearing” #or for Dad #”must be able to act as if one is reasonably happy to be there” #(like) #(I manage to mostly skip the emotional-labour parts of my fast-food job) #(by being *genuinely* happy to be there and so not having to fake it) #(but even when Dad is happy it’s hard to *tell* that he’s happy) #((not to mention that he *wouldn’t* be happy)) #((because depression + overly high standards)) #adventures in human capitalism #oh look an update #tag rambles #oh look an original post #(ish)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

I have collected the data and calculated the results for 2017, and the main result is:

Over the past six months, we were short an average of $65/week. Just $65. That’s all.

(Considering how large some of the outlier charges were, there must have been some individual weeks in which we had more money at the end of the week than at the start. Maybe even individual months.)

We are *damn* close, and this could very well be the year we get in the black.

Tags:

#(why are people insisting on spinning my finances negatively when we have *this*) #now if you’ll excuse me I’m late for accounting homework #(I am amused by the amount of my life involving spreadsheets lately) #(spreadsheets for school. spreadsheets for play. spreadsheets for personal finances.) #(just. spreadsheets.) #(it’s pretty great tbh) #adventures in human capitalism #I might take up audio transcription again at some point #every bit helps #oh look an original post

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

The official Times Square livestream crashed at 11:59:50, presumably overwhelmed by all the viewers.

The version of Auld Lang Syne Mom picked out was screechy and failed to have a Scottish accent.

That one Scottish guy came through, as he has every year.

I try not to read prophetic symbolism into things, but this reads as “some rough patches (mostly poverty-related), but things will work out okay in the end”. I suppose that’s not so bad.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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#look the ball drop is nice but it’s not worth $1200/year #(the cost of TV service) #(though we could probably have managed to get it down to ~$900) #((and maybe if you specifically wanted it *just* for the New Years coverage)) #((and you went through a lot of buying-and-cancelling hassle)) #((you might be able to get it for $25)) #((but it would be a *lot* of hassle)) #New Years #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #I should probably go to bed now #(I normally go to bed sometime between 12 and 12:30)

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

gnomer-denois:

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.

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.

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?

Tags:

#adventures in University Land #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #today was the last day of my current semester #now that there’s no short-term schoolwork for a little while I was thinking of doing some digging #trying to learn about what being an accountant is like #but I will happily take stumbling across some information #(only one more month until I can make the annual report for 2017!) #(honestly looking forward to it)

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