adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

(This is a complete tangent on a post that’s already long, so I think I’ll split it off.)

You know, while I *had* considered the possibility that my and Dad’s differing baseline approaches to household finances was a generational thing, I’d figured it was because he’s from one of the few patches of space-time where single-breadwinner middle-class households were feasible, common, expected, and he still aims for this no-longer-practical goal. I’d never thought of it in terms of differing conceptions of the *apocalypse*, and yet it fits.

For him (part of what the post calls “Generation Jones”), the central example of an apocalypse is total nuclear war. Quick, sudden, binary, inescapable. Either humanity goes abruptly extinct or it continues on as before, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it either way (unless you are (or can become) one of the few people with power over it).

For me, the central example of an apocalypse is global warming. Long, slow, gradual, mitigate-able. The world has been ending for a hundred years, and it will keep ending for a hundred more. Humanity is unlikely to go *entirely* extinct even in the worst cases, and there are many possible cases other than the worst ones. There are many opportunities (most tiny, some larger; large ones mostly only available to the powerful, but everyone has at least *some* opportunities) to make the apocalypse be just a little milder, or work just a little slower.

The goal is something a bit like longevity escape-velocity. You’re never safe from destruction, not truly. You’re only ever buying time. But you can use the time you buy to buy yourself *more* time, and so on, and with some luck and a lot of diligence, you might never get around to dying. You might even live long enough for the powerful to come up with a way to truly fix things, but even if that doesn’t happen, you can still survive, though with death always nipping at your heels.

As above, so below.

Tags:

#I say this having earlier today done a [s]three-hour[/s] 3.5-hour shift at a fast-food place #(it was going to be three hours but we were busy so I stayed late) #thereby obtaining enough income (money and free food) to cover ~3.4% of the total weekly expenses of my household #(probably more actually) #(that percentage is based on 2016 average expenses) #(and we’ve been gradually getting better at frugality over time) #(likely enough to be a bigger factor than inflation) #I was raised with an every-bit-counts mindset towards saving the world and I approach saving my family the same way #oh look an original post #death tw #scrupulosity tw #I feel like this probably deserves some additional warning tag but I’m not sure what #apocalypse cw? #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

(I don’t think there are any revealing details here, but under a cut just in case)

Did you know the Ontario Energy Board has an electricity welfare program? (they don’t technically use the word “welfare”, but that’s the general idea)

Because *I* didn’t.

Did you know that Ontario-Energy-Board-regulated electricity providers have different peak hours in summer and fall (May 1st – October 31st) than they do in winter and spring?

Because *I* didn’t.

(Specifically, they flip which times are mid-peak and which are on-peak. Which means if you’ve been trying to move some of your on-peak electricity usage to mid-peak times, you need to change your strategy when the seasonal rate changes or you’ll end up making things *worse*.)

So the bad news is, my family’s been severely fucking up our attempts to reduce our electric bill for three and a half months, and moderately fucking it up for years. Good news is, now that we actually know what our cards are and how to play them, between that and the recent drops in electricity rates we can probably cut our electric bill to, like, $10 – $20/month (our 2016 average was ~$130/month; 2017’s been more like $100 so far, but they just dropped the rates again, so an equivalent amount of usage would now cost ~$80).

I don’t think I actually have any Ontarian readers, but the rest of you might want to check if anything analogous is going on in your area. That’s a lot of money that could be going towards food, shelter, etc.

Tags:

#shown above: an example of why I haven’t played Flight Rising since December #why play dragon capitalism when you’re playing *real* capitalism #(I suspect in the long run I’m going to end up with some serious miser issues) #(we’ve been bleeding savings to some extent or another for so long) #(I’ve gotten used to the idea that my future selves will always need my money more than I do) #(that the overall trajectory of one’s finances is always downward) #(but the sooner you start acting as if you’re already broke the longer it will take for you to become *actually* broke) #(and the softer a landing it will be when you inevitably get there) #(so if I ever end up in a position of true financial stability) #((rather than the one-time cash infusions that have kept us afloat so far)) #(I’m going to have a hell of a time convincing myself of it) #(I think part of me’s always going to believe that the good times are temporary and I need to be preparing for when they end) #anyway I’m glad I double-checked the electricity-price rules #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what #oh look an original post #the more you know #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

FOOD DISCOURSE

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

jeffreineadelaiide:

your pizza order

favorite ice cream

top 3 fruits

favorite cuisine

buffalo wild wings order

favorite breakfast order

Tags:

#tag rambles #1. plain cheese #2. it used to be Thin Mint #but I’ve found lately that I prefer my desserts to contain nuts #(…maybe I could mix nuts *into* the Thin Mint ice cream) #(ooh) #3. empirically oranges/bananas/apples #(”empirically” = ”what I eat most”) #but I’d eat nectarines more often if they weren’t so expensive #(though even then I’d only eat them in the summer) #(never eat nectarines imported from another hemisphere they’re terrible) #(nectarine-shaped greyish flavourless disturbingness) #4. it was Italian like a decade ago but now I’m not sure #maybe Chinese #5. is this a restaurant? never been there #6. I never eat out for breakfast #I stay home and eat a fruity granola bar #(I used to have yogurt but it’s too expensive) #(and doesn’t keep as long) #(so you can’t buy a three-month supply when it’s on sale and live off of it until the next sale) #(you actually have to pay full price a large percentage of the time) #(also last year I found out I enjoy Nutri-Grain mixed berry and blueberry bars) #(I used to think I disliked them but it turns out I actually just don’t like the apple ones) #((which is a shame because apple was my favourite flavor of Quaker fruit bar but they stopped making them ages ago)) #(((I’m going to deliberately leave ”flavor” that way because))) #(((it’s interesting how I sometimes subconsciously use American spellings when discussing American things)))

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

memewhore:

Tags:

#a while back I had some entries in a raffle #one of the prizes was a pair of baby shoes #and it occurred to me #that if I won that prize I would end up literally placing a ”For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” ad #and that it would be a *happy* story #(”yay I won a thing and (through a somewhat convoluted process) I will exchange that thing for goods and/or services”) #not all baby-shoes-never-worn are sad #(I did not end up winning them) #(but I *could* have) #(and maybe I’ll win a pair in some future raffle) #tag rambles #death mention

~ Brin ~ 5 Comments

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Relatedly:

I’ve really been feeling my lack of networking lately.

  • I don’t know anyone in my neighbourhood, so I have nobody to team up with on Pokemon Go raids. (At my current strength (level 24, in an area where Geodudes and Machops pretty much never spawn outside events and I get a Dratini every couple of weeks), this effectively limits me to tier-1 raids unless I’m lucky enough to happen to show up at the same time as a stranger, and it’s impossible to *ever* do a tier-4 raid without a *minimum* of one other person, no matter how high-level you are.)
  • I don’t know any Canadians who both have TV service and would trust me with their TV-service login credentials. (We recently cancelled our TV service because we can’t afford it anymore, which means I can’t watch Daily Planet on TV. I can’t even pirate it, because it’s not popular enough for black-market providers to consider it worth stealing. Discovery Channel has an online streaming service, but you need TV-service login credentials for them to let you in.)
  • I don’t know anyone who I can both trust-trade my excess Amazon credits with and who wants to buy them. (Menial Internet labour for poor people, much like charity for poor people, usually fails to follow the “just give them money, rather than goods they’ll have to sell at a discount to buy the things they *actually* needed” guideline. They make excuses about how Amazon credit is basically the same thing as money because you can buy ~everything~ there, but in fact the list of things I want that Amazon has is fairly limited, and I end up getting credits (both USD credits and CAD credits) faster than I can spend them.)

This is clearly a problem (or a collection of related problems), but I don’t know what to do about it.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #rants #(sort of) #in which Brin learns to speak Pokemon #tag rambles #traditionally when you don’t have money you’re supposed to trade favours amongst your network of personal contacts to pick up the slack #but I don’t *have* a network strong enough to trade favours with #so when I can’t solve logistical problems with money they don’t get solved at all #and as my finances continue the slow deterioration they’ve been doing for half my life #I increasingly can’t solve logistical problems with money #my normal approach to friendship is #to stumble into relationships with people I don’t know well enough yet to know what terrible people they are #and about two years later I know enough of their terribleness that I can’t take it anymore and leave #occasionally I stumble into relationships with people who *don’t* turn out to be terrible but this happens too rarely to compose a network #(and besides even then I sometimes lose contact with them anyway) #I don’t know how to deliberately make friends #and I don’t know how to filter in advance so that a good fraction of new friends remain likeable after >2 years #and I *especially* don’t know how to do any of this in the Hard Mode of being poor #and therefore a noticeable portion of my motivation for befriending them being necessarily mercenary #(even when it’s a mutually-beneficial kind of mercenary I’m told people tend to find that sort of thing offputting) #(or they use it to take advantage of you) #(which is probably why the first group finds it offputting) #at least I’ll probably be strong enough to solo tier-2 raids before too long #that’s something #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

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Anonymous asked: How are you managing to be underweight in a country where obesity is correlated with poverty?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

Poor people in the US are overweight because they substitute higher-quality expensive food for lower-quality cheap food. I’m underweight because I substitute eating for… Not doing that.

Preparing food costs me a huge number of spoons, I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food, and food delivery is never cheap. Given these options, not actually eating usually makes perfect sense.

(food cw, disordered eating cw)

(I’ve heard rumours the first-degree ask bug might have been fixed. Let’s find out.)

>>I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food<<

How are you defining “prepared”?

When you make/attempt spoon-consuming homemade food, where are you getting the ingredients from? Stores that sell ingredients usually also sell granola bars, peanut butter, crackers, I was going to say apples but then I remembered your sensory issues. Bananas if you can take them sensory-wise and reliably eat them during the ~3-day window between underripe and overripe. If you have the spoons to reliably handle refrigerators, orange juice (consume within 1.5 – 2 weeks of opening), and if you’ve the lactose tolerance for it, cheddar (only buy it if it’s on sale) and milk (American milk lasts longer than Canadian milk, 1 – 2 weeks instead of 3 – 5 days).

These suggestions might not work for you, but if they don’t, I’d be interested to know why. You’re not the first person I’ve seen jump straight from homemade food to takeout when they ran out of spoons, without passing through granola bars first*, which makes me wonder if there’s reasons I’m missing.

*Which I find are less effort than takeout, making it all the more confusing to me.

Okay, ask bug not fixed. Please see above post.

Tags:

#(copied tags:) #lately I’ve been crunching the price-per-calorie numbers on the foods I eat regularly #and I am frequently surprised by how *cheap* food is #I can feed myself for a day for like 5 – 7 dollars *without even actively trying to save money* #less if I’m trying #(though part of that’s low metabolism) #(and I don’t know how the prices differ around San Francisco) #reply via reblog #food #disordered eating

Anonymous asked: How are you managing to be underweight in a country where obesity is correlated with poverty?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sinesalvatorem:

Poor people in the US are overweight because they substitute higher-quality expensive food for lower-quality cheap food. I’m underweight because I substitute eating for… Not doing that.

Preparing food costs me a huge number of spoons, I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food, and food delivery is never cheap. Given these options, not actually eating usually makes perfect sense.

(food cw, disordered eating cw)

(I’ve heard rumours the first-degree ask bug might have been fixed. Let’s find out.)

>>I have almost no ability to transport myself to places that sell cheaply prepared food<<

How are you defining “prepared”?

When you make/attempt spoon-consuming homemade food, where are you getting the ingredients from? Stores that sell ingredients usually also sell granola bars, peanut butter, crackers, I was going to say apples but then I remembered your sensory issues. Bananas if you can take them sensory-wise and reliably eat them during the ~3-day window between underripe and overripe. If you have the spoons to reliably handle refrigerators, orange juice (consume within 1.5 – 2 weeks of opening), and if you’ve the lactose tolerance for it, cheddar (only buy it if it’s on sale) and milk (American milk lasts longer than Canadian milk, 1 – 2 weeks instead of 3 – 5 days).

These suggestions might not work for you, but if they don’t, I’d be interested to know why. You’re not the first person I’ve seen jump straight from homemade food to takeout when they ran out of spoons, without passing through granola bars first*, which makes me wonder if there’s reasons I’m missing.

*Which I find are less effort than takeout, making it all the more confusing to me.

Tags:

#lately I’ve been crunching the price-per-calorie numbers on the foods I eat regularly #and I am frequently surprised by how *cheap* food is #I can feed myself for a day for like 5 – 7 dollars *without even actively trying to save money* #less if I’m trying #(though part of that’s low metabolism) #(and I don’t know how the prices differ around San Francisco) #food #disordered eating

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On matched betting

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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.

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#(stuff like this is probably part of why I’ve acquired an alief that any company advertising online is untrustworthy) #(I have to actively fight the tendency to reduce my level of goodwill towards a company I already liked if I see online ads for them) #the only way to get guaranteed money out of a gambling place is to help them inflate their search-engine rankings #by pretending to do a legitimate search for gambling-related keywords and then clicking their link in the search results #and sticking around just long enough #to trick the search algorithm into thinking you were interested in the site (and it was therefore a good match) #every so often you find some on Mechanical-Turk-type places paying four cents per click #though I haven’t seen any in a while so it’s possible Google outsmarted them once and for all #reply via reblog #gambling #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

queer-sunshine-femme:

kaijutegu:

kaijutegu:

I’m so impressed with the Shedd Aquarium right now. Starting July 1 (and going for… forever), they’re giving free admission to families and individuals with EBT cards, essentially removing one of the biggest barriers to access for a lot of people. Taking a family of four to the Shedd and just getting basic admission costs almost a hundred dollars (and that’s the basic admission with a Chicago resident discount). For many families, that’s an impossible luxury- but now so many more folks are going to be able to visit.

A little more on this- the Shedd is doing this as part of the Museums for All program, which is actually pretty fantastic. I’d not heard of this initiative before, which is a damn shame because it’s good. Institutions are required to not just offer free/reduced admission (admission is either free with EBT/WIC or up to $3), but they also require that the participating institutions train sales and front line staff appropriately to ensure good customer service to individuals and families seeking to take advantage of the Museums for All program. Nobody gets shamed for visiting, there’s no special line or anything. The museums that participate also don’t require local residence or anything- EBT cardholders from any state are able to visit any of these institutions for free or reduced admission. 

Here’s a list of participating institutions. I’d love it if this gets spread around because the school year’s ending soon, and these are fun, safe places to be for kids and adults alike. (And on a practical note- with the exception of the zoos and other outdoor things, all of these places are going to have air conditioning. Perfect for hot days, y’know?) 

:0

Tags:

#PSA #home of the brave #pleased to see that the American museum I went to most recently is on this list #the Ecotarium’s a nice place #(or was as of November 2015 anyway) #(it’s been a while since I travelled for reasons other than exploiting cost-of-living differences to stock up on cheap food)

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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Updates:

SD cards turn out to be a lot more complicated on Android 6.0 than they were on 4.2, so it took longer than I thought it would, but I’ve finished the transfer. All of my stuff (give or take a weather app) is on my new phone, and my old phone is now officially Mom’s.

—

Re: Internet access, it remains to be seen how much can be done with option 1–I might still use it at least partially–but it’s looking like the primary answer is going to be option 3.

Mom was remarkably agreeable to switching to my old smartphone as her primary cell phone, under two conditions: that nobody expects her to use the smartphone to anywhere near its full functionality (she doesn’t want to have to deal with getting to know a new kind of computer, at least not beyond a shallow level), and that I figure out a reasonably practical way for her to carry it around with her (she currently carries her phone in a flip-phone-sized pouch in her backpack).

(Dad suggested sticking her SIM card into a smartphone when I wanted to use data, then putting it back in the flip phone afterward for routine use. I said I didn’t think flip phones had removable SIM cards. Turns out the real answer is in between: *modern* flip phones have removable SIM cards, but her phone is so old it predates PC Mobile flip phones becoming the type of phone that has a removable SIM. In order to switch a SIM card back and forth, she’d need to get a new flip phone; if she’s going to change primary phones anyway, why spend money on an additional phone when we have a perfectly good smartphone available?)

It seems we can’t get a monthly or yearly graph of how much phone credit she’s actually using, but judging from the amount of credit she currently has built up, over the six years she’s had her account she’s used an average of ~$70/year. Put another way: if the average usage rate holds, we could buy a $10/month basic data plan May – October and not run out of spare credit for about 6 years. That’s long enough to be getting on with; hell, for all I know, I’ll have a need for my own phone plan by then.

I already borrow Mom’s phone on those occasions I need access to the cell infrastructure. This will just be an extension of that.

I’m not going to take any action on obtaining a data plan until it gets close to spring. If all goes well, Mom will keep her old flip phone for the rest of the winter, and she’ll have some time to get used to having a smartphone before trying to do any actual phone stuff with it.

(It’ll have to be Brother who gives her the tour of how to do actual phone stuff on a smartphone. I’ve never done it, after all.)

Tags:

#I looked it up and it turns out PC is actively encouraging people with SIM-less phones to upgrade to SIM models #so they can consolidate their networks #for us personally I consider this a good sign #because it means it *probably* won’t be a huge hassle to switch her account to a new phone #people usually make things easy to do when they’re trying to convince you to do them #hopefully running a mobile hotspot will also be non-frustrating #*knocks on wood* #oh look an original post #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(and not three) #in which Brin learns to speak Pokemon

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