Maybe there are people who would be happier washing their clothes by hand, but I'm sure they're the exception rather than the rule.
Most people just don't like doing the shopping, cooking, and cleaning involved with daily meal preparation. Most people also don't like cleaning in general, and hate their commutes. Thinking of these as therapeutic tasks is as much a luxury of white collar life as unlimited access to maids and food delivery services is.
And the idea that you'd save time or money with proper knowledge of how to source and prep your own fruits and vegetables, or that time spent cleaning disappears because you consider it exercise, all seems like magical thinking to me.
As soon as you place a realistic dollar figure on the value of your time, for most of us, all of those calculations break down dramatically in favor of outsourcing most tasks related to food, cleaning, and transportation, not only as a matter of comfort, but also as a matter of economics.
It makes sense that it would work out this way, too. A single Uber driver with a single car can satisfy the transportation needs of a dozen people. An Instacart shopper can gather everything 3 families need in a single pass through the store. The driver can get those groceries to 3 homes in a single round trip instead of 3 separate round trips.
Outsourcing can seem wasteful and opulent, but in doing so you're often participating in a sharing economy or benefiting from economies of scale and division of labor that actually serve to reduce waste and inefficiency.
You are assuming the value of time spent on these activities is inherently negative therefore having someone else do them is a net gain. I disagree, you can enjoy them in poverty or as a billionaire.
While say playing video games seems more enjoyable than taking out the trash that's a subjective assessment. And you can alter your subjective perceptions.
You are assuming the value of time spent on these activities is inherently positive.
If you like cooking or cleaning or taking out the trash then by all means you should do those things. But, if you don't like doing those things then the threshold for when it makes sense to pay someone else to do them is lower than most would think.
That is their theory, but I see a lot of trouble in their analysis.
A different take on their data is:
Not doing things is becoming ignorant and in the short term ignorance of the negatives in life is bliss. In the longterm, not knowing how to do the things that are happening so you can survive is a larger stress for people. Consequently, people are happy when they are choosing to outsource, but it does not last and they choose to cycle back. The noveau rich outsource willingly and the other rich outsource more reluctantly as they are more familiar with the eventual costs of short term stress reduction.
I am arguing it's not not inherently positive or negative, but you can become someone that views it as a negative or a positive. Many people enjoy walking as a time for reflection and to de-stress. Other types of repetitive motion like folding clothing can fill the same void.
However a big part of this is simply how much space your keeping up. An efficiency can be kept clean though habitat, a 1,000 acre estate takes a staff.
PS: That's not to say having groceries delivered is a bad idea, just maximum productivity is simply a wasteful goal.
Very well said. The parent is living in a bubble. If you are a retired millionaire or financially well off, doing those mundane tasks might be fun. Just like people paying to go to gym to spend energy. It won't be fun to spend energy for doing hard labor because you need to put food on the table.
And more and more we're finding that that is a terrible basis for policy making, because it's only as good as our ability to quantify things. How much is the love of someone's parents worth, for example? Why can't you buy your dog's affection with money? Putting a dollar figure on everything is a terrible way to organize society.
1. I can use the ride to drink coffee and wake up, so I wake later and am more productive through the day. Plus I can use the time to generally relax, listen to music, listen to a book, read news, and so on.
2. I spend zero time at gas stations, washing the car, servicing it, warming it up, changing to winter tires, or cleaning the windshield off. I also spend zero time doing driveway snow removal in the winter.
3. I have to find parking with my own car.
4. I am more likely to use my feet as my primary mode of transportation. This means I am less likely to need to schedule separate exercise time. And I can still listen to music, news, or an audiobook.
5. Because it saves money, budgeting is a little easier (especially if you are poor) because you aren't as tight.
I know it has been the fancy thing to say for at least the past 2-3 years, but I for myself get car-sickness at even the thought of reading in a car. I do not get any car sickness while riding the tramway or the trolleybus (even though I have to stand up). The billions of dollars spent on companies like Uber would have been much better spent trying to raise awareness about the benefits of public transport.
I still try to take public transit when I travel (Chicago is pretty good and Portland is OK when it goes close to where you want. Bay Area doesn't have enough tendrils to get you within a few miles of where you want to go unless you're in SF proper, and half my friends refuse to ride Muni even though it's totally fine compared to SMART busses in Detroit) but it's hard to convince most people that the train or the bus could ever be not disgusting and filled with people who exist to make your life miserable.
Raising awareness of public transportation? It's not that people are not aware, the US political system is just a shit-show and thus it want happen. Even private public transportation is usually outlawed.
Uber style services is a market response to the problem of transportation, because public transit options have not grown form the market because the government is slow and outlaw most private public transportation.
By not driving to the petrol station, not doing scheduled car service, not dealing with insurance, not renewing driving license, and likely a few other things.
This time is often recouped by not having to get out of the garage and find place to park. (of course parking on or close to the street at home and having a designated place at work mitigates that)
Some proof or data to back up the article's claim would be great. I'm not really buying it.
If moms auto-like every post, then how is that a relevant signal? Everyone has a mom. That would mean every post is getting penalized in the same way (which effectively means no posts are getting penalized).
And if circumventing this was as simple as excluding his mom, wouldn't the effect be even greater if he excluded all non-technical friends and family?
Which pretty much just means you're posting this for the greater public, which presumably a lot of users of Facebook's API already do. Since his intention is for his content to be seen by the greater public, then... go ahead and tell the API that?
It's a great angle for an article, and it's very shareable, but he provides no data (even though he seems like someone who would have all of the data).
Have you ever had a post that ended up being liked by an odd subset of your Facebook friends? I certainly have had posts, that for some reason, only my high school friends end up liking.
I know this is only another anecdote and real data would be preferable. But I'm convinced that the described behavior absolutely happens.
That's interesting, but in that scenario, how important is the composer really?
Couldn't we just connect the variable output of the AI to some kind of Mechanical Turk-style focus group, feed those results as inputs back into the AI, and repeat that process millions of times? Might that produce a better song than an individual composer?
I've seen interviews with some modern artists, and they'll often take inspiration from decades-old hits (which are essentially de-risked melodies) and apply them to a modern template. I'm assuming the bigger labels already focus-group the output and make revisions. This seems like something that could eventually be automated.
Yes you are right. The app works by identifying the dish and then searching in an ingredient database. If the dish looks visually the same to one with peanuts then the app would have a false negative .
Maybe this has been said already, but one major problem with Twitter is that by default, the average person will publish and share content on it that's a complete waste of time and of no value to anybody.
The average unit of content shared by a user on Instagram or Snapchat is vastly more entertaining and relevant, and I think they achieve that by being more visual. Those platforms are image- and video-first, and they have all kinds of image and video filters. If we gave those tools to a monkey, it would produce something worth sharing.
The quality of their content is enforced inherently by the tools they provide you to share with.
Facebook achieves the same in a different way, by tightly integrating with your identity and social circles.
Twitter doesn't have any form of inherent quality control. Tweets are just words with little context. The people tweeting are usually strangers.
> Maybe this has been said already, but one major problem with Twitter is that by default, the average person will publish and share content on it that's a complete waste of time and of no value to anybody.
The same can be said about most social networks.
> The average unit of content shared by a user on Instagram or Snapchat is vastly more entertaining and relevant, and I think they achieve that by being more visual. Those platforms are image- and video-first, and they have all kinds of image and video filters. If we gave those tools to a monkey, it would produce something worth sharing.
I would disagree and also call this "a complete waste of time and of no value to anybody".
The trouble is that people are inconsistent and multi-faceted.
I might really really value a particular friend's opinion on tech, but constantly roll my eyes and sigh when he live-tweets his hot takes on Eurovision or football.
It would be cool if Twitter could do some sort of clever analysis on a persons tweet history and when you start following someone say: "Dave often tweets about US Politics, Baseball, Skiing and Programming. Which of these topics do you want to follow".
Multi-faceted is the thing Twitter and other person-based share/follow don't work well with. I ended up creating another account for music/art, separating it from my tech/business activity. But its pretty tedious to manage...
Risk is one of the things that debt can represent, sometimes, but there can be debt that doesn't involve any risk, and there are risks that don't involve debt.
What's risky about using a credit card to buy a kayak?
And how does investing money you already have in small cap equities represent a debt?
I think for the vast majority of individuals just trying to make good personal finance decisions, "don't take on debt" is (on average) great advice.
(I don't really agree with the simplification of debt = risk. Despite that...)
> What's risky about using a credit card to buy a kayak?
If you unexpectedly lose your job or are otherwise unable to pay off the card on the schedule you expected, you'll incur significant interest on the debt and end up having to pay far more than you originally planned. Compared with saving up money and paying in cash, there are clearly additional risks incurred when using the card.
(If you had the money to pay off the card already and are just using the CC as a convenient method of payment, the risk is obviously far lower.)
As with risks, so with debts. There are large ones and small ones. Paying down a balance on a credit card every month is pretty low risk, but not as low as paying with a debit card in the first place.
Also, a credit card you're paying down monthly isn't really 'debt', isn't it usually something you do for the air miles or cashback?
>Paying down a balance on a credit card every month is pretty low risk, but not as low as paying with a debit card in the first place.
Not when you account for the stolen card scenario. When someone steals your debit card and racks up charges, it locks up real money (your bank account balance) that you can't use until it's resolved. A stolen credit card just locks up a credit-line.
However, even if you ignore that, I'm still missing what risk you see with a credit card that results in it being higher risk than a debit card. What is the risk I'm missing?
>Also, a credit card you're paying down monthly isn't really 'debt', isn't it usually something you do for the air miles or cashback?
It's very short term debt. I do it for two reasons, air miles/cashback, and for better protection when things go south. In addition to the stolen card scenario above, some credit cards (e.g. an amex I have) will provide additional protection for things like rental cars (additional insurance) or even stolen goods (refunds for electronics stolen from your vehicle).
One caveat to this kind of thinking is that money is fungible.
One can easily pay for a vacation or years of eating at nice restaurants every day all in cash, and also go into debt for an education.
Also, one individual taking out an auto loan and a loan from Sallie Mae isn't 1 good loan and 1 bad loan. You could've foregone the high-interest loan on the big depreciating asset and used the savings to fund the education instead of the loan from Sallie Mae. In that scenario both loans were probably a bad idea, regardless of the return the education nets you.
I think another key metric beyond interest rate and rate of return, is degree of necessity. That's harder to measure though.
I'd be surprised if this house meets state regulations for residential construction in any US state.
That'll be one of the biggest obstacles to 3D printed housing in the US. Even if you somehow get efficiency gains through 3D printing, it's going to require a different configuration depending on the regulatory environment, which varies by nation and state and county and city and topography, and changes every year.
These regulations affect every detail of the construction of your house, from the foundation to the window panes. Even details as innocuous as sink depth are regulated.
On the other hand, if you really want to ensure that every construction detail are up to date and followed, automation and 3D printing is the way to go.
If you open the link, you'll note that this is in Russia; a lawless land where the government is constantly struggling to prove that you can run a business which isn't gazprom.
Yeah I'd agree about planning permission, but inside you can do pretty much what you like without issue. The US has rules such as the number and type of sockets you need to have in closets.
I take this one step further and say tablets are probably handicapping your kids in the home.
Having no tablets or smartphones available during the PC revolution forced most of us here to default to exactly the correct set of tools for maximum learning and efficiency: a keyboard, a mouse, a full-size monitor, sitting at a desk, with a full computer with some kind of (more-or-less) exposed desktop operating system.
This isn't a choice any of us made, it was just the climate and the time. That lucky coincidence has given most of us a lifetime of experience using these tools, extending back all the way into our childhood.
Over the last 10 years though, a lot of people/families have started replacing their desktops/laptops in favor of tablets/smartphones.
I can't even imagine how I would've become a programmer if I had grown up in a house that just used tablets and smartphones for everything.
They say that one of Bill Gates' greatest advantages in life was early access to the PDP-10.
I think this trend toward "convenience computing" is especially bad for lower-income families (which are more likely to rely entirely on smartphones/tablets), and could even be a significant contributor to income inequality.
When you teach e.g. basic astronomy or anatomy, you want students to explore the solar system or human body interactively, not their computers.
Computer use in schools is not only about learning to use the computer. One of the great features of the iPad is that once you start an app, it becomes a single-purpose device that just works.
I see a lot of kids who grew up with tablets and stuff, and they've learned nothing at all about computers - they learn how to run various apps. And that's it.
Most people just don't like doing the shopping, cooking, and cleaning involved with daily meal preparation. Most people also don't like cleaning in general, and hate their commutes. Thinking of these as therapeutic tasks is as much a luxury of white collar life as unlimited access to maids and food delivery services is.
And the idea that you'd save time or money with proper knowledge of how to source and prep your own fruits and vegetables, or that time spent cleaning disappears because you consider it exercise, all seems like magical thinking to me.
As soon as you place a realistic dollar figure on the value of your time, for most of us, all of those calculations break down dramatically in favor of outsourcing most tasks related to food, cleaning, and transportation, not only as a matter of comfort, but also as a matter of economics.
It makes sense that it would work out this way, too. A single Uber driver with a single car can satisfy the transportation needs of a dozen people. An Instacart shopper can gather everything 3 families need in a single pass through the store. The driver can get those groceries to 3 homes in a single round trip instead of 3 separate round trips.
Outsourcing can seem wasteful and opulent, but in doing so you're often participating in a sharing economy or benefiting from economies of scale and division of labor that actually serve to reduce waste and inefficiency.