wait I’m confused, what is a star worshipper and why does this make you feel broken (don’t have to answer if you don’t wanna, just curious)
I was using “star-worshipper” to mean people for whom looking at the night sky inspires awe. They tend to go on about how light pollution is bad for the soul and I’m not complete as a person until I’ve seen the Milky Way with my own eyes. I’ve heard this sort of thing enough over the years that I’m now sensitised to it: even things that, taken on their own, are value-neutral or only mildly charged statements about stargazing and the absence thereof tend to make me bristle because they invoke all these other memories of proselytising star-worshippers. (There have also been at least one or two statements in the textbook that were more than mildly charged.)
Now that I think about it, making the entire link and only the link italicised might have obscured the fact that it was a link. The last couple paragraphs of the linked post explain why it makes me feel broken.
lizardywizard said: ah yeah I was on mobile and that didn’t even show up as a link for me for some reason! (no offence taken!)
Tags:
#(June 2016) #conversational aglets #(I’m going to start queueing these again) #(there seem to be quite a few of them) #replies #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
Hello from my new (well, refurbished) Dell Inspiron 15R M5110! (Wow, Dell nomenclature has gotten complicated.)
My crappy old Latitude D620 was finally starting to die of old age, so I got this one instead (for less than the D620 cost me three years ago; after researching used computer prices I’m beginning to wonder if the brick-and-mortar used computer store I bought that one from ripped me off). It arrived Monday morning, and this morning I pretty much finished setting it up how I want it. It has six gigs of RAM and a Radeon HD 6480G graphics card, and do you know what that means?
Masssss Effff—
Wait, no, I have a final exam next week to study for, plus one and a half school projects and two articles to complete by the end of the month. I don’t have time to get into a new game. (No matter how tempting justice-turtle is making Flight Rising look.)
December 1st, maybe sooner if I manage to finish early:
Masssss Effffectttt
MASS EFFEEEEEEEEECT :D
Yay for being responsible! I’ll be here to cheer you on on December 1st! :D
(Lots of rambling advice under the cut because Mass Effect yay – no spoilers here though)
#(November 2014) #conversational aglets #(realised yesterday that I didn’t check my OPs) #Mass Effect #(I got a few missions in before wandering off and never really got back to it myself) #(I *did* end up getting into Flight Rising though) #(failed one of the projects because I suck at rock identification but still managed an A- overall) #(and A+ for the other course) #(but those grades are probably never going to matter because they don’t fit into an accounting degree) #(oh well‚ at least I learned stuff about rocks and computers and compensating for failures) #adventures in University Land
Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.
Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.
And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.
I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.
(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)
Huh. Interesting. I didn’t know Canada still used cheques like that. Ive heard a Canadian talking about how they never carry cash and just use their card everywhere, which I can’t get away with even in London so I thought Canada would be even further along than us with that kinda stuff.
Yep, I’m in Canada, and as such so are my meatspace social groups.
—
I’m not so sure that “widespread use of electronic paycheques” and “being able to make all consumer purchases with a card” are sufficiently similar things that any society with one can be assumed to have the other.
—
Whether you can get away with not carrying cash here depends on your lifestyle and risk tolerance. I work in fast food, and every once in a while the card-reader part of the system will break or glitch, and usually at least two people per outage will have to leave because without a card reader they can’t pay. A while back someone had her credit card declined and didn’t have anything else on her, and ended up abandoning the food we’d already made. (The assistant manager told me I might as well keep it, and I brought it home and fed it to Mom. (It was not a food I personally like.))
((Although to be fair, I think part of the problem in that last case was that she was embarrassed by the decline and fled. She was holding a smartphone in her other hand, and given twenty seconds to think over the options we might have been able to arrange some smartphone-mediated payment method. It would have been worth a shot, at least.))
—
We don’t have pennies here anymore and instead round cash (and only cash) transactions to the nearest 5c, which (perhaps unintentionally) actually gives you an *incentive* to use cash in some edge cases. Like, if you buy something that’s 52c and give them two quarters, you’ve gotten almost a 4% discount, better than what you’d get from credit-card cashback. I often pay cash when buying from my own workplace for this reason.
(before you ask “since when does *anything* these days cost only 52c”: the employee discount is quite large, and some of our items are quite small)
—
Note that while I routinely *receive* cheques (just got one today, in fact), I literally never *write* them. I don’t even own any.
I won a small scholarship a while ago and they wanted a void cheque in order to send me the money (it was *not* the kind where the money goes directly to the school), and I went to the bank and asked about it. The teller told me that a: cheques are extremely expensive for the lower-tier account that I have (like $50 a pack, I think she said?), and b: there’s no need for a void cheque to literally be a cheque these days, here, have a pre-authorized debit form. (The scholarship people accepted it, and so did the bank I later opened a savings account with that wanted to see a cheque in order to do cross-bank account linking.)
Ah ok, ‘occasionally receive cheques but never write them’ is closer to my experience too, although I don’t know anyone who gets paid for their job by cheque.
I also got a cheque for a scholarship type thing so it is still around very occasionally here.
#conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #our home and cherished land #adventures in University Land #in which Brin has a job #long post #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.
Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.
And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.
I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.
(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)
Huh. Interesting. I didn’t know Canada still used cheques like that. Ive heard a Canadian talking about how they never carry cash and just use their card everywhere, which I can’t get away with even in London so I thought Canada would be even further along than us with that kinda stuff.
Yep, I’m in Canada, and as such so are my meatspace social groups.
—
I’m not so sure that “widespread use of electronic paycheques” and “being able to make all consumer purchases with a card” are sufficiently similar things that any society with one can be assumed to have the other.
—
Whether you can get away with not carrying cash here depends on your lifestyle and risk tolerance. I work in fast food, and every once in a while the card-reader part of the system will break or glitch, and usually at least two people per outage will have to leave because without a card reader they can’t pay. A while back someone had her credit card declined and didn’t have anything else on her, and ended up abandoning the food we’d already made. (The assistant manager told me I might as well keep it, and I brought it home and fed it to Mom. (It was not a food I personally like.))
((Although to be fair, I think part of the problem in that last case was that she was embarrassed by the decline and fled. She was holding a smartphone in her other hand, and given twenty seconds to think over the options we might have been able to arrange some smartphone-mediated payment method. It would have been worth a shot, at least.))
—
We don’t have pennies here anymore and instead round cash (and only cash) transactions to the nearest 5c, which (perhaps unintentionally) actually gives you an *incentive* to use cash in some edge cases. Like, if you buy something that’s 52c and give them two quarters, you’ve gotten almost a 4% discount, better than what you’d get from credit-card cashback. I often pay cash when buying from my own workplace for this reason.
(before you ask “since when does *anything* these days cost only 52c”: the employee discount is quite large, and some of our items are quite small)
—
Note that while I routinely *receive* cheques (just got one today, in fact), I literally never *write* them. I don’t even own any.
I won a small scholarship a while ago and they wanted a void cheque in order to send me the money (it was *not* the kind where the money goes directly to the school), and I went to the bank and asked about it. The teller told me that a: cheques are extremely expensive for the lower-tier account that I have (like $50 a pack, I think she said?), and b: there’s no need for a void cheque to literally be a cheque these days, here, have a pre-authorized debit form. (The scholarship people accepted it, and so did the bank I later opened a savings account with that wanted to see a cheque in order to do cross-bank account linking.)
Tags:
#long post #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #adventures in University Land
I think I have a healthy work environment right now, so here are some things I’ve learned that I didn’t learn (and which became nasty sources of anxiety) during my first corporate job or for the first few years of running my business:
-Most, if not all, businesses have process inefficiencies and it’s normal to feel like you’re doing something in an annoying or hacky way.
-Good managers and coworkers will appreciate you bringing these up.
-Good managers and coworkers will be interested in you taking steps to fix these things or at least be able to talk about why it ended up that way in the first place, what kinds of tradeoffs are being made, or why your proposed solutions might make things harder on other people in the company.
-Small businesses mess up their books all the time.
-It is normal to discover that you have been doing something wrong, especially if you are new to the job, the field, or the workforce in general.
-Good managers and coworkers expect things to take longer than ideal and it’s more important to give honest updates on your progress and honest estimates of how long something will take you.
-it will take time to learn how to reliably estimate how long things will take you.
-Good managers and coworkers will make it clear when your performance or output needs to improve, specifically, long before you are at risk of being fired.
-Good managers will work with major health issues, family crises, and even things like circadian rhythm as much as they can, and will have reasons that make sense when they can’t (even when it sucks or is incompatible with you remaining in that position)
-working well in any given work environment is a skill and will take time to develop, and good managers will account for this when they assess your performance.
-you will eventually learn which things can be ignored or delayed, and which things must be prioritized.
-good managers will help you figure this out
-in healthy work environments you will know roughly what is expected of you to retain your job
-it is normal to forget “basic” things and have to ask
-knowledge gaps are normal
-some parts of any job will suck. Minimizing the shitty parts is important and a good work environment will be interested in helping you do this.
About getting used to working, in general:
-you *can* eventually learn how to work with your happiness and energy levels. It’s a skill.
-being “bad” at parts of your job or even working in general isn’t a moral failing. It’s a skill.
-taking more time than you expected to figure out how to work, what kind of job you can thrive in or at least tolerate, and how to perform *well* is not a moral failing. It’s a skill.
-taking longer than your age peers to figure out all of the above is not a moral failing. It’s a skill.
-rest and recreation aren’t luxuries. ambition/burnout cycles will put more wear and tear on you than you think and fuck with your ability to evaluate how much you can tolerate your work environment.
-everything will be harder if you are chronically sleep-deprived.
-you aren’t doing anything wrong by leaving a work environment that “needs” you, even if you feel guilty for leaving. Your employer will prioritize the needs of the company, and you should prioritize yourself. The trick is finding a balance you can both accept.
-not loving your job is not a moral failing.
-noticing things that people really appreciate or rely on is useful, even when the thing feels “trivial” or “easy.” It’s evidence of the specific value you provide. You can use positive feedback to figure out what to talk about when negotiating for a raise, and when interviewing for new positions.
Tags:
#tag rambles #adventures in University Land #I’ve been doing some research and realised a couple of days ago that #it’s totally plausible that I could have an accounting internship this time next year #(it would only take a couple of fairly small tweaks to my plans over the next year to get into a position) #(where there would be actual internships that I could actually apply for and have a decent chance of getting in) #so it’s good to see some advice from a more experienced accountant #(I suppose a nice thing about a summer internship is that) #(if you find yourself struggling to handle [9 – 5 Mon – Fri and probably an hour+ each way commuting†] long-term) #(*this* time you only have to withstand it for like three months) #(and then afterward you can regroup and plan workarounds‚ coping mechanisms‚ limits‚ etc for next time) #†no driving‚ though
Laptop is in the shop almost certainly overnight at least. I can’t find the power cable for my old 2010 one. I probably can’t set up my Raspberry Pi, I know I don’t have the right adapter for it because I broke it. I might be able to use someone’s old AlphaSmart?
Laptop still in shop. I should get info tomorrow at least, emails say I’ll be called after 48 hours. I forgot to ask about the AlphaSmart.
Honestly I think the amount of stuff I’ve done and the fact that I have had chunks of happiness over the past several days and not injured myself at all is really suggestive of a lot of mental health improvement. Maybe it’s experiences, maybe it’s having more produce and sardines, but something’s working.
Update: Apple called this morning to say that I have a hard drive problem (that affects booting from USBs and persists when the drive is wiped, yet doesn’t present any issues when copying files off the drive? seems unlikely) or a motherboard problem. Apple wanted to charge $475 to fix it, which I declined.
I was able to install Xubuntu on it from USB, and it is “working”, in that it still can’t talk to the battery at all and that it seems to freeze sometimes. I’ll probably try to transfer files later today. I am still overall dissatisfied with this state of affairs, though.
I am happy that I have a computer right now, but this does create a bit of a dilemma. I’m not sure I can justify replacing this computer just because I want to play some video games without Linux support and be able to see how charged my battery is. I guess this might get worse in the future, which might also justify replacing it. I sure don’t know how to replace a motherboard myself, and it sounds like a huge pain.
It gets completely nonresponsive and requires a forced shutdown sometimes more than once daily
Still doesn’t show the battery level (acpi won’t work)
Sleep/wake issues, does not travel well (overheats in bag)
Cannot shut down properly
I also still haven’t put my files on this thing. “Mount a 200GB disk image, on an HFS-formatted drive, of an Ext4 partition with logical volume management, and then figure out how to decrypt an encrypted user folder, with the password but without being able to log into it” is something which sounds like it should be technically feasible but also kind of sounds like a nightmare, and I have a feeling that my current computer setup is really not my long-term setup. I can get files from SpiderOak but that will take a while and they won’t be as recent.
What’s going on with the disk image was that booting up my computer in Target Disk Mode and getting the data off of it, using a connected Mac, was such that I couldn’t mount or even really properly interpret a partition with logical volume management, so I just frickin’ copied the whole thing. Yadda yadda I should make more frequent cloud backups or actually figure out how to do regular nice usable backups to a drive or both. At least I have the files. Probably.
I will apparently have some support in repairing or replacing this machine, which biases me towards doing so. Also, I’ll want to use it for taking lecture notes and other time-sensitive outside-the-home uses, so freezing and being a pain to store while asleep are problematic. If I repair it, I’m pretty sure it needs a logic board replacement which I would really rather not do myself. (I don’t have the right screwdrivers, a good workspace, etc.) If I replace it, I should probably replace it with a Windows machine, because the only times I’ve used OSX recently have been gaming and taking the easy route in dealing with printers/scanners.
I don’t know much about shopping for non-Macs or using whatever the latest version of Windows is. Every time I interact with recent proprietary operating systems I do get the vague feeling that they are tending in a direction my computer is not, such that my experience with Windows XP and 2016-and-previous versions of OSX won’t necessarily generalize.
If anyone has advice on any of the above, let me know.
For replacement laptops, eBay is great, especially for people located in the United States. The laptop I am typing this on, which I recently bought from one of the refurbished-laptop stores that sell through eBay, was USD$300 *after* international shipping and import taxes. For an American, it would have been around USD$250.
My usual strategy for laptop buying is “get the best PC USD$300 can buy”. I generally find laptops at that price point strike a good balance between “cheap” and “will keep pace with my needs for the approximately three years it takes for a used laptop to die of old age anyway” ; if you need more from a laptop than I do, you may need a higher budget.
You might not need me to tell you this, but make sure you know what kind of specs you need in a computer (RAM quantity, storage space, number of CPUs, dedicated vs basic graphics, etc), and add a little to leave room to grow. When searching, keep an eye out for laptops that have been discounted because they have problems in areas you don’t care about or are willing to live with: my previous laptop was unusually cheap because it was incapable of standby and took several minutes to come out of hibernation, which was pretty easy to adapt to for someone with my usage pattern.
Since I only just got a Windows 10 machine yesterday, I can’t say much about it. I *can* say that I’m pretty much just keeping that partition around for gaming, and intend to continue using Ubuntu for my primary OS.
—
Rather than a dedicated backup drive, I just keep a full copy of my files on my smartphone [link], where they are readily accessible and can in fact–in most cases–be accessed directly from the drive itself. I gather that a lot of people have too much data to pull that method off easily, but even if you can’t do it *yet*, maybe keep it in mind for if/when the progression of smartphones’ increasing storage space catches up to your needs.
Yah. Used laptops are a lot cheaper than new laptops for entry-level performance.
The one huge downside is battery life. Batteries have improved quite a bit recently, and there are a lot more low-power CPUs on the market. So, even the low-end Chromebooks and such can trounce any used laptop in terms of battery life.
Yeah my $150 2015 chromebook, after 4 years of fairly regular use, only gets 5ish hours of battery life, down from almost 10, so if battery life is of interest you can get pretty good. On the other hand, it is not a powerful machine. This is mostly okay for my personal laptop.
#(since I’ve pretty much only ever had used laptops I’m whatever-the-opposite-of-spoiled-is on battery life) #(1.5 – 2 hours is simply how long a laptop battery lasts and so I don’t find it a cause for concern)]
holy shit
(ftr, I tested this laptop’s battery shortly after receiving it, got a result of 2 hours, and was pleased to have a battery life near the high end of normal)
—
What do you *use* a 5-hour laptop battery for, anyway? I mean, more battery life is always better all else equal, but when I need to computer for significant lengths of time off-grid that is what smartphones are for.
(Admittedly, my smartphone’s battery also sucks, at least by smartphone standards–sometimes it dies because I didn’t check it for 4 days and it only has a 3-day standby time, and that’s in airplane mode–but it’s much easier and cheaper to get a backup power pack for a phone than a laptop.)
(yes I *did* end up getting that solar-powered phone charger I wanted [link], and so far it’s been working pretty well)
For me the initial use case that caused me to buy an ultrabook type laptop with long battery life (in my case one of the 12in MacBooks), was college classes. Namely, situations where there would be multiple hours of straight through classes or something like a long evening class that would be four hours long.
It’s a bit less relevant now for me to have that type of battery life now that I’m out of college.
But the other benefit of the increase in laptop battery life is that even the high performance desktop replacement laptops are starting to get to the 2hr+ level of performance. Making desktops as a whole a lot less relevant as a platform because desktop replacement/”gaming” laptops have started to become actually usable as laptops and not just in effect really shitty small form factor desktops.
Good point, and I’m a little embarrassed not to have thought of that. The few times I have had some form of meatspace class I used a paper notebook, but I can see how that would be suboptimal or outright unsuitable in many cases, especially for a routine event.
(It’s interesting that we’ve now *both* made remarks that make no sense to someone with the other’s experience of college [link]. I guess we’re even?)
—
Also, even though the battery-monitor section of my phone settings did not *display* anything on its list of battery-draining apps, force-stopping TunnelBear improved my phone’s standby time tremendously. I will have to remember to shut that app down completely when I am not using it (and I’m usually not), not just setting it to off.
Tags:
#Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #reply via reblog #adventures in University Land #long post #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
why is “olde vampires in high school” the big thing and not “olde vampires in college”
everyone in college is eccentric. everyone
you wanna wear full on Victorian suit? the girl in pajamas who clearly hasn’t slept in three days supports you
everyone is too preoccupied to care as long as you’re polite and follow class etiquette
multiple high school diplomas? eh. same stuff. multiple BAs? Enjoy learning chemistry AND art history! All in detail!
wandering around campus at 3am? that’s just the lifestyle tm
no matter how old or young you look it’s not really that weird, there’s sixteen year olds and sixty year olds doing BAs somewhere
big schools are very anonymous so nobody’s gonna bother to hassle you
the girl in pyjamas is the vampire
Also:
If u put ur blood in a water bottle ppl will assume it’s juice and be Jealous
“Oh god I’m a monster” 20 students who r all procrastinating big projects say “same” simultaniousely and with the exact same tone
Everything is a joke so if u say “I subsist on the lifeblood of mankind” someone will go “lol what a mood”
It would take u like 100 years to major in everything
Seen sucking the blood of a fellow classmate and u r instantly the campus Cryptid and Mascot
Listen. If u have an ethical dilemma go find a philosophy major that believes in ethical subjectivism and they’ll make u so angry u forget abt whatever the fuck was bothering u
College is the only acceptable place to get into fistfights over classical literature
Literally all u need to do to avoid suspicion is be the guy that always has gum and a stapler
If u have a majestic mustache ppl will just assume ur an English major
Allergic to crosses? Cool. So r certain stem majors.
We’re also all nocturnal anyway so you’ll make friends with So Many Grad Students who also lurk in the library basement after hours, mulling over their dark decent into madness.
I mean with them it’s feeling bad about misquoting a source but it’s basically the same.
Tags:
#vampires #story ideas I will never write #adventures in University Land #(my university experience has not really been like this but it still seems like a fitting tag)
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.
Fascinating! I haven’t experienced much pity or judgment from either direction on the episodic-vs-diachronic spectrum, and I don’t think I’ve interacted with the Buddhist type much. I’m also not all that extreme on the episodic end, and both styles make a lot of sense to me.
Reading your post, I’m reminded that 10 years ago, I was a *lot* further on the “income is a way to acquire savings that you then live off” end of the spectrum. At some point in the last 5 years or so, I passed a threshold from most of my resources being in literal savings, to most of my resources being in my ability to keep obtaining resources in future. (I guess, in this handwavy model, a nursing degree is sort of an intangible asset? On some level I would be *delighted* if I had to fall back on this; I miss nursing.) I think most of my personal resources are in the form of “reputation in my community as a skilled ops person”. That’s also a sort of intangible asset, if you squint at it sideways… (I am starting to stretch the accounting metaphors pretty far here).
In any case, at one point I considered it mandatory to have 1-2 years of runway in savings (back in Canada, when a year’s living costs were like $30K). Then, later on, I spent down those savings in order to get married, move to Australia, later move to the Bay Area, and generally have my life go in completely unexpected directions. I spent a while being *terrified* by the instability and chaos of it, and I’ve become ok with it by reminding myself that my security and ability to survive the future rests, not on my current pile of resources, but on my accumulated skills, social capital, and resilience/ability to land on my feet.
Some of my current sense of security comes from other fall-back assets, like having family who will let me live rent-free in their spare room for three months on a week’s notice. Knowing I have that luxury gives me a lot more willingness to take risks and optimize less for security. But I’m definitely not optimizing for financial security right now – it would be madness to live in the Bay Area on a nonprofit salary if I was. And there are unlikely-but-not-that-unlikely scenarios, like getting seriously ill and being unable to work for a while, that I’m not really protecting against.
Hmm. I can imagine someone looking at this exact situation more from a balance sheet perspective, and focusing on the overall status of “intangible assets” like job skills and social networks, rather than mostly looking at their impact on the profit & loss statement and the delta over recent time periods to judge how well things are going. This spectrum reminds me a bit of Spencer Greenberg’s post on Stability vs Acceleration as different life strategies: https://www.facebook.com/spencer.greenberg/posts/10104091893110202
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#(December 2018) #conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw? #(I just now read that Stability vs Acceleration post and yes it does remind me a lot of diachronic vs episodic) #(in that I am so accustomed to being pressured towards an acceleration I don’t want that #merely *mentioning* the existence of a continuum immediately makes me feel defensive) #(since I know what people who bring it up tend to say next) #((in a PM a while back I described myself as #”tending to measure my life’s progress in terms of the number of potential disasters I’ve mitigated #and the extent to which I’ve mitigated them”)) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Peterson may be an academic, but he’s dispensing with the academy’s constraints. His university salary is around $128,000; that now looks modest beside the $1m a year he receives in crowdfunding via the site Patreon, in return for YouTube Q&As. Traditional universities charge “unforgivable” fees, and “haven’t got a hope of surviving in their present form”, he says. He has hired three people to work on a proposal for a new online university — “user-funded at the lowest possible cost, but also crowdsourced in terms of its operation”. He is in touch with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who urges undergraduates to drop out. There’s a blurred line between the thinker and the salesman, and Peterson has crossed it.
It’s totally poisoned because Peterson is tied to it.
But the online university thing might not be a bad idea. You could probably replace quite a bit of the operation of a modern university for lecture-based subjects with a mix of pre-recorded videos, and decentralized discussion with other students, and “crowdsourced” operation that relies on offloading some tasks to students.
Probably the biggest issues would be to sell it as something that people consider reputable (a number of purely online universities exist and have lower costs, but they have issues building a reputation), and dealing with things like arranging for securely proctored tests.
When you say that test proctoring would be a big issue, do you mean you think it would be a big issue for online universities *in general*, or specifically a problem for online universities who are aiming to destroy the old tertiary-education system (rather than just adding more options to it)?
My university technically has a corporeal campus, but I’ve never been there and neither have the vast majority of the other students. They have standing arrangements with a bunch of universities, community colleges, and…*looks at list*…huh, libraries too, maybe you *could* make this system work even if you’re trying to end all corporeal campuses (and so don’t want a system dependent on them continuing to exist). Anyway, they have standing arrangements with a bunch of places across the country to host the exams of the local students. My local community college charges the student a $30/exam hosting fee (to compensate for increasing their proctor’s workload and such), but other than that it’s really a non-issue.
(The computerised exams also have an option to have somebody watch you over a webcam, but I’ve never tried that.)
(now if only my university would join the reciprocal college Internet system, because as it stands I’m not allowed to use the Wi-Fi at *my own exam centre*, and it makes coordinating with my ride a lot trickier. but that’s another matter.)
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I see people sometimes who think that exam proctoring is some massive obstacle that online universities will soon face and probably fail to overcome, and it’s like…
One time I read an article about how self-driving cars on public roads would be a disaster, because–not being able to make eye contact with the driver–pedestrians would have no way of knowing whether the car had noticed them and would stop for them, and the car and pedestrian would get into standoffs where neither was willing to risk moving forward (or, worse, *both* of them gave up waiting for the other at the same time). The writer appeared to think that this was insurmountable and would destroy all public goodwill towards self-driving cars.
A few months previously, I’d seen a news clip about a self-driving-car prototype with a smiley-face-shaped light on the front, which it lights up while stopping for a pedestrian in order to let the pedestrian know they’ve been noticed.
The way I felt reading that self-driving-car article is how I feel when people say online-university exam proctoring is a huge issue. The doom they are just now getting around to foretelling has already been noticed and averted, and without anywhere near as much difficulty as they think it’s going to take.
Interesting.
Most online college classes I’ve taken have either had no proctoring system or some terrible web-based one that caused a lot of issues. One of the nearby community colleges did proctoring for a fee as a service but the classes rarely allowed that option to be used. Maybe its consistently better ran by colleges that are purely online than colleges that are mostly meatspace but offer a few online classes.
…I graduated from a great (accredited, affordable, semi-self-paced!) online university. Our test proctoring was done over webcam and had fairly stringent rules (360 pan of the room, ID, etc). I had a test ended by the proctor once for looking like I had something written on a calculator. You could cheat with the level of difficulty similar to a normal classroom exam but not any more easily than that.
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#interesting #adventures in University Land #conversational aglets #proud citizen of The Future
Brinens and Things 