When I was a kid we repaired everything: darned our clothes, fixed the car, radio, etc. My parents taught us these then essential life skills. In addition, since cash was tight, we used things until they wore out, or if we got something new and additional (like new clothes) we basically didn't use them until the old ones wore out (difficult when you're a growing kid).
50 years later I can't unlearn this even though it makes little sense in most cases in an age when things have no repair affordances or are so cheap (socks) that the "cost" of repair is greater than the effort to replace it.
The consequence is that I really dread buying things and have no ability to make an impulse purchase. Every purchase feels like a burden: did I really get the best one that will last the longest? How will I look after it? I can't understand people who go shopping for fun. A gift also feels like a burden has been handed to me (I have to look after this and use it appropriately).
It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything -- though the rational part of my mind wonders if they might be making the right call.
This behaviour can end up being pathological and counterproductive.
It drives my wife INSANE that... I have nice brand new pair of shoes from 5 years ago I never ever wear, because I refuse to put wear on them and instead use the cheap shoes from 8 years ago. Same with shirts and sweaters - the nice ones she bought me over last few years are waiting in the closet until my old shirts and sweaters die - and some are getting close to 20yo.
Nothing wrong with it, as such. But it's not always rational behaviour either - more of a left-over compulsion from leaner time (I come from eastern europe and then 2 years of civil war).
As for people repairing anything - much as I love his writing, I disagree with Heinlein's "specialization is for insects". I can help a friend with computer or fix our network. There's weird things I can do like watches and whatnots. There's any number of things I can do well. But I'm probably better off doing the thing I do well, getting paid for it, and then in turn paying plumber or electrician or mechanic for things they do well.
If fixing a car or your washing machine makes sense or is your hobby / pasttime, brilliant. But sometimes it doesn't, and it's OK to keep the circle of life/economy going :).
I fix lots of things and there is no experience like doing something, there is also this weird cross-pollination thing going where knowledge acquired in one domain helps you in another. So while I am well aware that most of my repair jobs are net negative in terms of actual material value generation for me, the gradual increase in my capabilities in many different domains ends up helping me even in my chosen specialisation. By this point I am just generally at an advanced beginner stage of anything after some basic research (which I have naturally becomes quite good at).
There is also a skin in the game effect that even a paid random plumber is not actually that invested in doing a good job and, while you cannot compete in terms of speed of executing a fix, or possession of special tools, you can compete - and exceed - on final quality simply because you really care about the final outcome.
> There is also a skin in the game effect that even a paid random plumber is not actually that invested in doing a good job and, while you cannot compete in terms of speed of executing a fix, or possession of special tools, you can compete - and exceed - on final quality simply because you really care about the final outcome.
I have experienced this recently, as I have been making the rounds through various lawn care companies. I'm on my fourth one in the past four years, and I just have not been able to find one that truly cares about the lawn with the same love and detail that I would. And why should they? I am just one of many lawns they take care of each month.
Although I still generally lean towards the parent commenter's philosophy of paying the experts to do what they are good at, there are just some areas where the extra level of care and attention is worth the decrease of efficiency in getting the thing done.
One thing to add is that if you value the learning from trying a repair job, doing it on a problem in front of you is close to free. Taking a class would cost money.
I learned to fix my car because I was a broke kid with a shitty corrola. I was learning programming at around the same time as when my car was having problems.
And honestly at the time the two felt kind of similar. Both were super scary, black boxes. But both were things that normal human beings learned to do. You didn't have to be some crazy genius. And a lot of times you really are debugging a car, except since it's physical, it's a lot more intuitive.
I once tallied up all the repairs vs what I would've paid mechanics and it came to 18k. Nowadays that's a price I can swallow and it no longer makes financial sense for me to do my own repairs.
But I now have a garage full of "free" tools and I can tell very confidently when mechanics bullshit me. But that happens less than just simply talking the lingo and having the mechanic appreciate that I know what's going on and can commiserate on how shitty a repair is gonna be.
I think most sw people can enjoy and go into the physical world. I think there's so many similarities and never understood certain people's reluctance or even badge of honor of being bad at working with physical stuff
I used to do this with shoes as well because if they're worn, they fit well. They've adapted to your feet (or your feet to them?). Whereas with new shoes, you still have to make them fit well.
"A gift is a burden" - I feel the same way about it.
I'm almost 40 years old and have barely bought any items of clothing in a decade -- my parents keep gifting me things (some I've finally started giving to Goodwill), but much of my clothes I care for well so it takes many years before they are bad enough to throw out. It's an unpleasant feeling - I feel pain buying more when I have so much, so I haven't been able to buy things I like (or clothing that I feel expresses my style) in years.
You might be short-changing yourself more than you realize. I was similar for most my life, but this year I decided to learn about fashion and actually dress nice. Not only do I look a million times better, but---surprisingly---it actually physically feels better when your clothes fit just right. It's like they're hugging you throughout your day as you wear them. Can't believe I went so many years without ever realizing this. Probably a lot here on HN who grew up poor and became "new money" through software dev are short-changing themselves like this.
I was recently in the same position. Did a full wardrobe replacement (majority secondhand, so not as insane as it sounds). It’s amazing how much better I feel! I’ve never been one to care much about clothes/fashion, but now I feel like I’ve spent decades missing out on something good.
This articulates a feeling that I've had for a long time. I struggle to buy gifts, which probably does me no favours socially, for this reason. I can't help but feel the burden I'm giving to someone else. Christmas is hell.
I also hate Christmas for similar reasons. Choosing gifts that don't feel like giving unnecessary junk/clutter is very hard and stressful. It has got a bit easier as I get older and the circle shrinks a bit, plus usually we only give food/drink gifts now, often homemade which helps.
The right consumables make a lot more sense past a certain point. For me, if I want/need something, I'll just buy it. Other things can be nice especially if I've talked about them but have been procrastinating about taking the plunge--though then that probably means they're a lot for a casual gift. I could probably get rid of half the stuff in my house and not miss it.
> It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything -- though the rational part of my mind wonders if they might be making the right call.
I can see knowing how to repair things but choosing not to: Maybe your high income means the time you might use to repair it could be better spent making money. Maybe you're busy with something today, and are willing to pay for the convenience of having someone else do it. Maybe you're getting old and just can't get on your back and do complex auto wrenching anymore.
But, I see people (mostly younger than myself) who never even learned to do even basic, basic home/auto repairs. I'm not talking brake jobs and kitchen remodels, I'm talking they can't change a flat tire, replace a leaking sink supply hose, or hell even vacuum their own apartment. They pay people to do everything. That's shocking to me. I kind of just naively thought everyone just gets taught this stuff when they're teenagers.
A disk brake job is an almost ideal first DIY repair IMO. It seems daunting and risky, but there's fairly little chance that someone who is trying to do a good job will end up with a brake job that, undetected, leaves the car unsafe. (There is a higher chance you'll somewhere get stuck unable to complete it or need to ask for help, but that's not a safety issue.)
AAA will change a tire for you, and I've driven past plenty of service calls where I saw exactly this happening. Also, run-flat tires are a thing.
I get where you're coming from. People in the US mostly don't put in time to learn the ins and outs of vehicle maintenance. They want turnkey personalized transit and turnkey maintenance. I've just accepted that as the state of how things are.
AAA is fine if you’re in a city. Drive through the desert? Not so much. I’ve changed mine on a soft shoulder, it was not fun but when roadside assistance is an hour away…
As social inequality increases, people with more money start being able to afford services much more easily. Do you think British nobility used to vaccuum their own homes? Ask someone with money how the Brazilian upper middle class used to live. Or ask people in India.
Doctors can afford to have people to clean up their houses, to cook their food, everything.
I’m a doctor. I’m married to a doctor. We have no children. We have a once a week housekeeper who does some laundry and puts up the dishes and vacuums the place. We do not have a cook, unless you mean ordering takeout.
Medicine pays well, but it’s all W2 or 1099, not something like getting stock and long term capital gains.
Sorry, I did not mean doctors in North America. But if you go to rural Brazil, or to India, that's the living style that many doctors can and do afford.
The interesting thing is, I've seen a pervasive view on HN of high-income people doing this, and being proud of it. Trading their money for time (sounds backwards, I know), but by having the most mundane aspects of life done by others, they get to do more meaningful things with their time.
I personally am of the low-income, do-as-much-myself-as-possible and pinch every penny crowd. But HN has always seemed to me to be the opposite, given it's well over average income skew.
Part of this is reprioritization as you get older. The old saying:
When I was young I had time but no money.
Now that I am old I have money but no time.
Like you, I did a lot myself when I was young/poor, pinched pennies etc.
It got me to the point where I was successful. Now that I am older I value the things I am running out of time to do. So the money is well spent on maximizing my time left.
Probably just that for those of us who are accustomed to working for a living, we see our time as the commodity and money as the compensation for marketing and selling it.
Wealthier people can sit on the opposite end of that transaction and purchase our time commodity with their money, freeing up their own time in the process. But walking a mile in those shoes can feel backwards when one is accustomed to it only ever working the other way.
I mean, you obviously do trade money for time just like the wealthy. You have a dishwasher, or a washing machine and a dryer etc. You probably have a car, or some way to go around places that isn't walking etc.
I question whether the time 'saved' is really put to better use than learning how to interact more deeply with the world around you, and giving yourself more direct agency.
I put cooking in this same sort of category, but over the years have noticed a lot of people on HN who seem to dislike cooking and have no interest in learning how. Maybe because it's such a regular imposition for them, it feels different.
> A gift also feels like a burden has been handed to me
Many people selfishly give obligations as gifts - often small things where the purpose is to be a placeholder for remembering them. also see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tchotchke
Personally I try to give consumable items or give experiences (that are high quality or rare or have other specialness) I recently bought 27kg of good bush honey, and have been giving it to friends - but aiming for zero social obligation: so far everyone has been very happy to get some - but it is really good honey and there are colds going around at the moment (winter in New Zealand)
> The consequence is that I really dread buying things and have no ability to make an impulse purchase.
Having also grown up with limited means, I am deliberate about purchases. Unlike you however the lesson I learned growing up was that I don't need to buy "the best" of flashiest item, because that often was out of our reach.
> It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything
I hate wasting money on new "toys" (things I don't need but enjoy), and I also enjoy repairing stuff. My solution to both is buying Thrift store or garage sale electronics, perform repairs if necessary, put them to use and sell them off when I acquire a better replacement.
> It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything -- though the rational part of my mind wonders if they might be making the right call.
It's a hard line to draw. Consumerism/throw-away culture isn't (and can't and shouldn't be) a historic norm so participating in it will ultimately alienate people from most people who have and will exist across time. On the other hand, not participating at all will alienate you from a lot of people now.
Disagree. "Throw-away" culture has been a historic norm and can actually become a moral "should". Cultures that produce "toxic" waste products (such as the current dominant one) do indeed have a moral imperative to do what they can to reduce waste. However, cultures that produce "beneficial" waste have a moral imperative to produce more. "Throw-away" culture has its roots in the long history of humans where "throwing things away" was just returning resources into the larger ecological systems. In this model, who gets alienated over the long arc of time?
> Disagree. "Throw-away" culture has been a historic norm and can actually become a moral "should"
> However, cultures that produce "beneficial" waste have a moral imperative to produce more
To me "throw-away" culture very much implies with it that what you're throwing away something toxic without considering the about consequences -- maybe you could say "composting" culture as an alternative. And in that context, there isn't really "waste" at a system level, only on an individual one. It's a good point that there is all the difference between just managing waste (repair) and recycling it. Both are independent skills and good in their own way.
This is a great point: 'long history of humans where "throwing things away" was just returning resources into the larger ecological systems'.
One of our team is an anthropologist. She once mentioned that there's a lot of trash around in many agricultural communities in "developing countries". And indeed, earlier the culture was that when you ate a piece of fruit you just tossed the rind into the bushes or on the field and went on your way. There aren't public rubbish bins in these small villages, so what happens is plastic bottles and chips bags fly around.
My partner and I recently watched an old episode of the Simpsons where a plot point is Homer attempting to repair the toaster and creating a time machine.
It was taken as completely normal that you’d assume anyone would repair their toaster if it stopped working. Made me realize it’s been a long time since it would seem reasonable to self repair any home appliance.
Do you have any advice on making the repairing process less painful?
I’ve learned to repair things here and there: home, auto, woodwork, sewing, etc. and so I’ll make a repair purely out of the sense of obligation not to create waste.
But I haaaaaate it. Every minute that I’m performing a repair, I’m bored to death. My brain is screaming at me to find any alternative occupation. I wind up spending the whole repair time drinking and/or distracting myself with podcasts to make the experience suck less, but then my results take a hit.
You would think that the gradual accumulation of skills is something I would find satisfying, but I can’t see the process as anything but a chore. Does anybody have advice on how to cope with this in a healthier manner?
I love doing DIY work (more precisely, I love saving money on it and being more in control over the repairs; I don't find the repair work terrible).
If you really hate it and can afford not to, just don't do it. If you have to justify it somehow, find something else productive to do and use the money or savings from that to offset that you aren't fixing your car or whatever.
We're tight on money with 2 young kids, and we buy our clothes second hand for very little money. They're cheap and look well, even branded stuff, but its for a fraction of the new price. With your kids it makes a lot of sense. When they get older, sure you get peer pressure but also clothes will last longer.
I don’t think there is a right call. You just have to live the life that you’ve been handed and the adapt accordingly.
It’d suck if no one knew how to repair anything, but it’d also suck if everyone repaired everything all the time. But we have both and it makes society a little more vibrant.
That said, I repair some things and don’t others. “Is it worth my time?” is what I ask, and not purely from a financial dimension — also from an enjoyment aspect.
Both the article and your "gift as a burden" remark reminded me of Walden:
"I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust."
I grew up in a DIY house too. We worked on everything, every thing.
I had given up doing my own auto maintenance for a number of years. I picked it up again this year. Auto Shop hourly rates are more than mine and I can do it myself, already have the tools.
hah, I'm in my 20s but feel the same way. This tends to also happen when you grow up in a less prosperous country where you can't just purchase stuff on a whim.
a friend who moved from the city to the country shared with me that folks with knowhow are more valuable in the country where there's more burden finding repair folks and coordinating logistics out in sparsely populated rural regions. In that context these skills buy you independence and some form of popularity I've heard.
Reminds me of some Smarter Every Day videos where he covers farm life and the varied skill sets that benefit people in that domain.
I think it's thrice: Acquiring price, usage price, and disposal price.
I've recently discovered how large the price of getting rid of something can be. Usually these costs are hidden because you just throw something into the trash and it's gone. But not always the case.
A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and it's too big to fit in my car anyway. Having someone come to our house to repair it would cost more than buying a new one. But... how do you get rid of a broken generator? It weighs 45 kg and it has four gallons of gasoline in the tank. You can't just chuck it in the trash.
(FYI, I decided to take it apart and was actually able to get it running again. It turned out to be an easy fix -- broken fuel valve. But success was far from guaranteed, and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?)
It would have been incredibly easy to get rid of this by listing it on any online marketplace "free for pickup". There are hundreds of guys who know that many of these will have a simple fix and they get a free generator for a few hours' time. And many other guys who might pull parts or get various other uses out of it.
I still think it was the right call to give it a shot. Save my uncle and myself, nobody I know will try to repair anything themselves.
My preferred disposal method of anything that I think has some value is to post it "free for pickup" or if it's a real hot thing (like cut up logs from a tree felling) just put them on the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street - the universal "free" location.
I used to read all the time, see videos, "you should learn to deal with small engines," but for decades I just leaned on my farm-raised friend when I couldn't get a thing started. Then I moved out of the city and came to a morning when I needed to blow my driveway, the blower wouldn't start, and basically I had no choice but to figure it out.
Solution: find a very thin pin and ream out the buildup in the carburetor, and all the steps leading up to being able to do that. The sense of personal (horse)power I felt after reviving that engine was palpable.
It's funny cause now, just based on that experience, I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I am saying if I encounter any small engine that won't start I will eagerly start trying to figure it out. It looks fun now. The brain is weird.
Just this weekend, I ran into a different situation. I've owned battery powered equipment for 5 or 6 years now using the original batteries. They are interchangeable, and have served me well...until this weekend. The battery will no longer hold a charge and the charger light blinking pattern indicates there are problems with the battery. How do you self-repair that?
Funny thing, the replacement batteries are much larger in capacity now, but the price of a single replacement battery is the same cost of a new powered tool. So, I wound up getting a new tool that I didn't have with a new battery. I have a few LiPo batteries for my cinema camera gear that have died as well. I'm going to try to find someone that can just replace the batteries packs inside the custom housing.
Corded tools, my friend. Corded tools, a few good extension cords (and a pluggable reel), good hand tools, small/dumb tools with AA/AAA rechargeable batteries.
Very few exceptions to this rule for me, and I generally avoid anything with a Micro-USB charger like the plague if I can, as I can't help but see it becoming e-Waste in 3-5 years.
working with LiPo battery packs just isn't my thing though. I've taken apart the camera battery and can clearly see the type of batteries in it, but they are all glued together in the shape to fit the case. Maybe I'm a just a wuss, but trying to disassemble the pack without piercing a cell is a bit more than I am willing to risk at this time. I'm hoping paying someone with that skill to make the replacement will still be cheaper than buying new. ~$400 for a 14.8V 98Wh 12A max battery.
Reminds me of all the computer manuals from the 80s that would say something like "YOU CANNOT HURT THE COMPUTER BY USING IT - if you get confused, turn it off and back on".
Omg, I am reminded about daily that there are buttons all over every UI that you absolutely do not want to push. We're constantly three wrong clicks from completely ruining an app/your data/the entire OS/your entire disk. And it seems like UIs are constantly violating this:
I don't disagree with your overall sentiment, but working safely with gasoline requires a lot more than just ventilation. In my case, I was fixing a fuel valve, which turns out to be fraught with all manner of peril. I was very lucky in that I had a neighbor who has experience working with ICEs looking over my shoulder. Without that it would have been very dicey.
I mean generally in that case I would simply drain the tank into a gas can, pinching off the line if I had to while disconnecting it from the carburetor. After that it would be pretty trivial.
If you need to try a repair again checkout YouTube, the small engine guys on there are really, really good. They've got tricks even I'd never heard of before.
Yes, of course. But that's because you know what you're doing. Someone who didn't know what they were doing could end up with a puddle of gas on the floor, which could then turn into a cloud of gasoline vapor, which could then turn into a bomb if they dropped a wrench the wrong way.
That’s an extremely contrived scenario that has never happened in real life. I’m proud of you for fixing your engine, but let’s not pretend it was dangerous.
I refuse to believe someone who is attempting to repair an internal combustion engine does not know that gasoline is flammable and the working area should be ventilated (or outside), particularly if they’re working on the fuel system.
Could take a finger off with a snowblower too, I get nervous when I change out shear pins even with the starter key in my hand. You gotta have a sense of yourself obviously.
My friend has been making some rather major purchases lately, such as a portable air conditioner and a portable generator. She is elderly, retired, and lives with a younger fellow who's technically inclined. She's trying to hedge her bets around an inept landlord, bad house wiring and an unstable grid, and air conditioning that constantly breaks at inopportune times during the summer.
But I kept telling her that she doesn't want these complex mechanical things hanging around. I tried to impress on her (pace Technology Connections) how abysmal that air conditioner is going to be. I also tried to explain to her that if she gets a generator, she'll have to maintain it and fire it up once in a while, and that will not be easy. I explained that I have at least one other friend who decided that owning a truck and an inverter was way easier, because the truck has wheels that you can use to drive it around, the truck is easily maintained by the auto shop on the corner, and the truck will provide plenty of power just the same as the generator.
She really has a prepper streak, though, and I couldn't talk her out of it, especially after the sales lady got talking to her. She doesn't have a car and her roommate doesn't drive either, so I don't know how they'll transport/maintain these machines, but oh well.
I am constantly dismayed that there aren't more electric and PHEVs that are set up to serve as backup power supplies. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing to do. With a big enough network of these we could solve a big part of the storage problem for sustainable energy technologies.
The hard part is that car batteries have limited cycles before they must be replaced at HUGE cost. For personal backup during power outages it would work, but I have a hard time believing that many car owners would be willing to put the wear and tear on their battery.
EVs use more than an average home's entire daily electricity budget to go 50 miles. In an emergency you could run your lights, fridge, and water heater for weeks on an EV battery. It's really not much wear and tear.
That seems like a use that Ford is already embracing with things like the lightning.
My comment was more in line with using cars as energy storage infrastructure. I think most car owners don’t want to use their car batteries as grid infrastructure.
You're right that a generator must be taken care of, but a truck with an inverter is very different from a generator if you plan to power something significant. The truck+inverter will probably keep your fridge and lights running, but can't power your whole house unless you get an oversized aftermarket alternator, which will cost more than the generator probably will (aftermarket car parts aren't cheap).
Come on, what you were suggesting was ridiculous and not a serious alternative. Buying and maintaining a truck is way more expensive than even multiple portable air conditioners and generators.
Furthermore, only expensive late model trucks even have high capacity inverters built in that are capable of running a separate air conditioner. The little portable inverters that plug into a 12V vehicle outlet can only do about 150W.
I like my standing air conditioner dammit. I can just roll it in the corner on the off season and don’t need to carefully clear a path to the storage closet and practice proper lifting form just to avoid injury using it. And it doesn’t have a chance to drip water everywhere when I take it out once a year.
The first few plumbing jobs I did myself were a net loss from time, tools, materials. But I've made it up since then. Also, I think it's not always direct - tinkering with the car has made me more confident in plumbing and vice versa. A few years of that and I was happy to install my own dishwasher.
So for me, I'll always spend time on this sort of stuff if it's within my reach to do a decent job.
As far as disposal goes... yeah, most stuff I sell on Marketplace or Gumtree would be a net loss after wasting time dealing with people (and scammers, who belong in their own category). But I hate to have things I used and enjoyed just die alone in landfill.
Yep - there’s a very real benefit for me of the satisfaction of having something reused. It’s a deep seated sense that this is the way. It’s worth the time for me to find a new home for many things.
The other nice thing about doing it yourself is you can do it better than right - a plumber will fix your pipes up to code and it'll work just well, but unless you explicitly ask, he won't do things like add new access doors, make it accessible in the future, etc.
> it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator.
I started rebelling against the idea of "I might as well buy a new one". The way I see it, if (say) my phone screen breaks I have two choices: I spend $150 fixing it, or I spend $150 buying a new phone. In either case I end up with a working phone, but the second case has generated one phone worth of electronic garbage.
> (...) and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator.
I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it.
Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.
It is quite interesting to calculate the true cost of doing things itself.
In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you.
If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x.
Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing.
I have the same thing, I feel these high income taxes force me to do repairs and home improvement myself because the converted hourly is higher than my own generous contracting rate.
That is what taxes on trade do, they make trade more expensive. This is why income taxes are counterproductive but they are easy to calculate and enforce so governments rely on them.
I'd like to see the math for your calculations here, I suspect something is a bit iffy. As an example I'll use Swedish taxes which should be comparable to Danish ones.
If we assume I'm a contractor charging $100 per hour and take the cash as salary:
(100/1.3142) * 0.5 = $38 left after payroll tax and the top income tax rate (50%).
So if I'm just as fast and good as a professional, the professional needs to charge $38 per hour or less for it to be worth it. But in reality, a professional is probably at least 2x as fast as me, making it $76. That's probably less than they charge, so it's worth paying for a professional.
The person you contract also pays income tax on the amount. So you need to doubly add the tax.
Then you also need to add some cost of doing business.
Said in another way: The 100SEK you earn becomes 25SEK the contract can use (assuming 50% tax rate) – that's the first factor of 4. The last factor can be found in the details.
On the contrary: My initial statement had nothing to do with price negotiation. All I was trying to assert was how the tax implications are when you do something yourself vs. when you subcontract.
Do it yourself: Miss out on that hours worth of salary
Subcontract: 2 times tax is paid.
Obviously this has implications on negotiation. This is exactly the reason why services are considered very expensive in the Nordics (as in 80USD to get your hair cut).
Note that this needs to be compared with a company getting their stuff fixed. Their contractor costs are fully deducted from their income.
The contractors tax situation is irrelevant to you. The only thing that matters is income vs expenditure. Or in this situation, "how many hours do I have to work to pay the contractor's hourly fee?" and "how much faster is the contractor?". The tax stuff are just details around this.
In my example, a contractor who's twice as fast needs to cost $76 or less per hour . Thrice as fast is $114 or less.
You're right in principle though, just not on that calculation. In Sweden we have tax deductions for private citizens exactly to combat this issue: up to a certain amount per year can be deducted from your income, just like a company can, for certain services (such as cleaning or house repairs).
No, but you pay an average of 40% income tax, 25% VAT, 150% on cars (+ 25% VAT) and the European gasoline tax. The result is that the tax system disincentivizes these types of transactions when you can not deduct the costs in your personal tax bill.
Said in another way: you don't pay income tax when you paint your own house.
This is interesting, do you have some resources on this? (Sorry, I am just a computer scientist with an interest in economics, so I don't know the established theories)
My outsider view is the desire to account for all labor output. If the labor of painting one's own house goes un-accounted for it distorts the view of the current state of the economy.
What I found out, is that it takes a painter team two days, and it takes an untrained single person two weeks.
I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.
> I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.
If you would have to do it again, would you do the same errors, and the paint job would turn out equal? Or would you do better second time?
That is why I never painted an entire house before having painted a bedroom at least one time. And I've never painted a bedroom before I painted a small piece of furniture at least one time. One needs to learn gradually, hopefully with someone who knows how to do things. Last year I built a terrace and room with the (paid) help of a contractor. I started just carrying the trash, then breaking things, then putting cement of the walls, etc. etc. Now I can quite complex things by myself..
What I've found is that it's very often worth doing your own painting, but if you need carpets laying or walls tiled, then get a professional, because the professionals are awe-inspiringly fast and do a better job.
I will pay for exterior painters - the cost to my own state of mind with painting a house is too high. I will glady do harder jobs than painting myself, but nothing pisses me off more than painting for some reason.
The thing with painting--at least interior/trim/etc.--is that it'd 1.) Not that hard; 2.) You do it repeatedly so it's not the usual: Do it once poorly and never do it again; and 3.) If you're touching up something already painted, you can probably take some shortcuts a professional won't.
The "hourly rate" argument is a bit slippery; you didn't stop working (and being paid) to fix your generator, and unless you could have spent those hours being paid (hard for many people to do) you only "lost" the hourly rate you could have gotten, which is often much lower than your current work hourly rate.
On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time?
I wouldn't work saturday afternoon anyway because my head is already useless for programming. So I do need to change line-of-work somehow. I can either go for a walk and learn something about nature. Or I can self-repair something and learn something about construction.
Of course spending all free time on self-repairs would be exhausting. But I don't feel like lying on a couch entire weekend either.
> On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time?
This is the key! I do these kind of things on my spare time!
On my spare time I could (1) do nothing; (2) try to cram more screen time into my life, and give the money earned to someone to do my repairs for me or; (3) do some things by myself, learn while doing it, and feel like a super-human that can control is own life (well, some of it). I prefer number 3!
I got a young little one, so I've actually needed to take some Mondays off to finish some of the home repair tasks. It's not like I can go around with a hammer while he is trying to nap.
So it is more comparable with the work rates, since I do not have a lot time time to tinker
I bought a half-built house right after the kid was born.
Yes, using power tools while kid is napping is no-go. But after few months kid is not napping that much. And there’re many relatively silent jobs. It’s easy to silicon a window sill while kid is sleeping in another room. Or assemble a drawer with an old good screwdriver instead of a drill. And after a couple years there’re endless learning possibilities. Sure, it goes slowly, but it does happen eventually.
Full disclosure - I did hire handymen for a good portion of jobs for various reasons. Mostly because we were burning a lot of money in rent or some jobs require too many special tools and knowledge to be done right (electricity, drywalls, etc).
While I appreciate and share the DIY spirit, some doubts have been creeping in recently.
Firstly, in most cases we are just DIY'ing the final "craftsman" step of the work, we still depend on the materials being available.
Second, if more and more people that actually care about work quality go DIY it leaves people who can't or won't be as involved. Over time unscrupulous tradespeople will take over the market.
I add an additional component: the embedded energy that was saved by not purchasing a new generator. To me it better reflects the real effort put into making something.
Labour in the west is much more expensive than energy, so it's only natural that your time was worth more than a new unit.
But that's an accident of geography and politics. Someone in a poor country, in the same line of work that you're in, might actually break even on this.
I believe there's value in this sort of self-sufficiency. Especially considering that, as recent years have shown, we're one global supply chain breakdown or war away from plain unavailability of some goods.
Knowledge is valuable. Just knowing you could fix this gives you confidence next time when something else breaks. But I also think it has an intrinsic value. It just feels good to learn. Compared with just, for example, entertainment, I usually prefer to learn. One could ask, what is the marginal cost of viewing Netflix. The monthly cost is one thing. But what could you have done with your time instead?
>it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator.
Not necessarily. It depends on the job and other factors. How much time does it take to find a competent person to hire? And what if you fail, and they do a bad job; how much time does it take you to deal with the situation and fix it (or do you end up paying twice, once for the bad job and again for someone else to redo it)? Do you need to be on-site to supervise them (so they don't steal stuff)? That's more of your time. If it's something portable or that needs to be transported to the professional, how much time and money does that cost?
Don't forget the value of the satisfaction from having fixed something yourself and how good fixing stuff helps with recovering after spending hours in front of a computer
My wife doesn’t understand how I spend my whole day complaining about fixing things (sys admin) for work then seem genuinely happy to work on a car, bike, random electronic thing, etc.
Completely different.
On the selfish side, I might actually get to enjoy what I fix at home.
On the brains are funny side, anything physical hits different. Turning a wrench, busting knuckles, burning myself triggers a satisfaction a screen does not.
I’m not a masochist either. Why is a soldering iron so hard to hold? Probably a me problem.
When considering your own wages per hour it can be helpful to consider whether you could have converted those hours into those wages or if that avenue is already saturated.
For example if you are an employee and establish your rate that way, you probably can't work more to get more anyway.
So repairing things for yourself is just cream on top in that case.
I'm glad you took time to fix it. Owning things is almost a debt to keep them running. Stack this experience many times over and behold how valuable simple, robust machines (like a metal pair of scissors!) are so much better than complex software things or plastic throwaway crap. (That metal pair of scissors could literally last until the end of your life!)
I dunno about there, but here you can just put it at the curb in front of your house and someone is bound to come along and pick it up, even if only to scrap it for the metal.
I surely could have done that. The reason I didn't is that I live in a place where some people leave old cars out in their yards for years, and so I had no assurances that whoever picked the generator up would do something reasonable with it.
> I think it's thrice: Acquiring price, usage price, and disposal price.
I'd add a 4th: storage price. Having lived in the city, space is at a premium. We have found ourselves unable to go into specific (smaller) apartments in the past just because we had too much stuff. This goes especially for kitchen items.
Case in point, Adobe Creative Cloud. Never have I encountered more anti-consumer behavior. For yearly subscriptions they only allow you to "not continue subscribing for another year" during a brief window of time right before your renewal date.
Mind you, I'm not talking about cancelling the service and backing out of obligations that you've agreed to, I'm talking about Adobe engineering a situation in which they implicitly assume that you want to continue being a customer, while removing the ability for you to tell them that you no longer wish to be a customer.
My dad used to tell me a hierarchy of satisfaction in the context of home-ownership: buying > replacing > repairing > painting > cleaning. I think disposal is probably just after buying.
Funny enough, I actually have noticed this with my books. More books require more bookshelves. More bookshelves require more real estate. It's a straight-line arrow of causation from picking up a copy of Moby Dick to house-shopping for a place large enough where I can have my own private library.
Others have added additional prices that must be paid after the fact for maintenance, and storage.
I'd offer another that has to be paid before the price in money:
Research cost.
Increasingly I don't need "things." I need the best/right "thing" for the job. And for hobbies or high cost/risk purchases (think car, house, big dollar contracts) I find I need to invest substantial time into researching my problem and then my options for solutions, which takes lots of my time. Because the cost of getting it wrong often means even more time, money, and headaches that I don't want to deal with, I sometimes find myself over indexing on the up front part to avoid the pain of getting it wrong.
In many cases the cost of time invested eclipses the cost of the object because the cost of the time to remedy it is more than the cost of replacing it.
This makes me think of how much time it can take me to find clothes that fit the way I really want them to fit. I thought about it when I almost lost my luggage the other day, that yes it would annoy me to lose that much money in the first price of the clothes, but how much time/energy did I put into the finding of those clothes?
There's also an opportunity cost. The usage of that item takes up finite time which could be utilised in alternative ways. The acquiring/usage/disposal price of a TV or a gaming console, for example, is negligent, compared to the lost opportunities during your time with them.
The same argument can be made with regard to finite space. Say you are a collector of diecast model cars, but have limited space in your house to store them. Acquiring a new model limits you from acquiring a potentially more desirable model in the future.
And that's why buying cheap is often really not the best choice.
If I have the option to choose between two gadgets, the acquiring prince of one may be far less (assuming lower quality and everything else equal) and even usage is kinda the same, modulo a bit of frustration if the lower-quality thing is not as smooth to use, but if it breaks, then cheap stuff tends to be harder if not impossible to repair, and if you can't fix it then you need to dispose of it and possibly get a replacement.
Too much hassle. If I have the money, I optimize for quality above everything else.
(Sadly, since manufacturers know this, the premium quality version usually costs disproportionally more cause market -- I'm ok with paying more. Not just a bit more, but much more.)
Often times the problem is figuring out the price-quality ratio from the signals, eg. brand, design, materials, advertising, price. Sometimes, it's deceptive, and an expensive gadget that feels premium isn't necessarily the one that will best serve its purpose or that is most durable.
Something that can sadly still been seen widely in ex-yu countries is illegal dumping of old furniture and appliances. It's common to leave smaller appliances next to garbage containers. There are recycling centers being built in cities, but a lot of people are unaware and don't know it's their duty to properly dispose of items. I believe it's the consumerist culture, people are being sold shiny products on shelves, but the whole dirty lifecycle is hidden from them. In addition, companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal, even just by making things easier to disassemble and recycle.
> people are unaware and don't know it's their duty to properly dispose of items. I believe it's the consumerist culture
> companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal
The curent approach is fraudulent offloading of responsibility.
The only solution is to charge manufacturers and importers complete cost of disposal / recycling for a given item. They can be asked to provide evidence of recycleability, they can be fined for lying. Manufacturers have incentive then, to improve recycleavility - costs willvbe lower. This issue should be solved between manufacturers and government.
Three reasons why current approach will never work:
1 - A consumer cannot evaluate suitability of a given item for recycling or disposability, that information is only avaliable to the manufacturer. A consumer cannot evaluate government's ability to recycle - UK has over 100 different local authorities and each has different rules for which kind of plastic goes where.
2 - Manufacturers routinely commit fraud - and there is no way for consumer to get compensation if they were told something is recycleable but 5 years later it turns out it's not. Recyclers themselves regularly commits fraud - people are told their item was recycled but actually it gets dumped in africa. There is currently a system in UK where recyclers get paid by government for recycling plastic, they claim they recycle 2x as much plastic as exists / gets produced/ is imported into UK. A significant portion ends up illegally exported to philipines, not recycled.
3 - Individual disposal is unpoliceable - you can't police millions of idividual people. You have to move to policeable entities - manufacturers.
And storage price. Housing in the city is like $40/sqft/year, so that plastic playhouse for your kids occupying a 3'x3' patch of living room floor gets pretty expensive.
The worst part is when kindly relatives give your kids huge toys, like a doll house or rocking horse. I know they mean well but the gift ends up being a burden just due to the space it takes up and you can't get rid of it without offending the giver.
Some items I've had luck just leaving at the end of my driveway with a free sign on. (I'm set back from a busy road.) But, yeah, I have a bunch of stuff around my house that I'm basically holding onto because getting rid of it would be a pain. I actually have a small dumpster which helps some but one of these days I'll probably need to get a junk disposal service.
Excellent remark, and as you suggest, it’s often a hidden cost. That might be a cost paid at society level, but the trash system does not work without some attention, energy and time.
But there is a deeper topic behind these: what value foundations do we use to estimate what comes to our awareness. Without valuation judgment, there is no cost and no gain.
For someone putting above all immediate serotonin peaks, an endless disposal of affordable first price might be enough.
For someone that is striving to realize some daunting task that will catch most of other people in awe, it’s obviously mostly the second price that will matter: the more expensive the better.
For someone driven by a sense of sustainable community of life forms, the emphasis will be all on recycling through virtuous loops.
Of course I do have my own tropes that one might be guess from the way this points where formulated, but I recognize there is no absolute true accessible to human beings that will prescribe some categorical imperative between them.
That also goes for software (like notetaking apps or using a certain build system).
How easy is exporting the data you care about if you want or have to change platform? Not seldom it's so labor intensive you'll never migrate to something better.
This is why I cannot use things like Evernote, OneNote, or the MacOS Notes app. I have first-hand experience of the latter two encountering corruption which was unrecoverable due to their proprietary data format. All three have pretty poor export choices (PDF? Really? What am I supposed to do with that?). I am at the point where I will never again use something that is not plain text files as they are and will likely remain the most portable format.
This is how I ended up discovering Obsidian and I have not looked back since.
This can be nuanced into infinity though. For example, the "first price" is not the first either. I usually spend good time looking for a good deal, a trusty device, or something to consume, before paying the "first price".
So for the sake of simplicity, and to invoke thought, I think the two prices are good enough.
Please don't bring transaction costs into play, you might ruin the beautiful neoclassical models.
If money saves transaction costs, then it can't be neutral. The introduction of money becomes an essential part of the economy. It's not like there are good alternatives to money.
Don't think this further and wonder if interest is just a monetization of the transaction cost savings. Then it would turn out that interest payments negate the benefits of the division of labor entirely.
Yes. Enlightened capability lifecycles include 'disposal' at the end. There may be fairly obvious costs such as disposal of e-waste, but other activities such as thinking about how to reuse infrastructure, resources and people who are associated with the thing being disposed of.
I think you're right! I wish our society did recycling better. In Japan, to get rid of a computer (for example), you don't throw it in trash - you must pay a recycler to handle it correctly.
I often think about recycling nirvana (mostly for use in sci-fi scenarios).
Got a broken doodad? Throw it in the recycler and print a new one. 99% of the necessary feedstock ought to come from the broken one, so the only costs should be energy and the part that failed its tests and had to be replaced. Hopefully it's something small like a single capacitor.
There's probably some fundamental limit on how good such a system can get. Like, even if you recover 100% of the solder, you're going to need new flux every time. Or maybe you fill the chamber with argon so you don't need flux, but then how much of that can you recover. Or maybe you just leave it full of argon, but then how lossy is your doodad-in-out mechanism...
Star Trek took it a bit too far for my tastes. I prefer Sci-fi with tech that is out of reach--but just barely (e.g. The Expanse)
If your recycling scheme involves condensed matter physics, it might as well be magic. But if it's just known-robotics and reusable parts and good design taken to the n'th degree... that's the kind of thing that could feasibly inspire action in a reader--which is the kind of sci-fi I want to read.
Besides, there's something inelegant about breaking something all the way down just to build it all the way back up. A system that understands that the shortest path from here to there means something other than a full molecular disassembly is far more impressive than one that's just a decomposer.
Right I see what you mean. A disassembler and diagnostic thing might be very particular, but I suppose it's something I can Intuit, something with a high degree of dexterity and enough brains to get the broken unit back to the platonic ideal of said doodad.
It'd also be a nice springboard for an AI's first go at manufacturing and going out of spec lol
I find "paying twice for things" a nice analogy. Over the years I have been unconciously paying more attention to the second price, and often ignore the first one (obviously I'm getting older and have less time to waste). "will this thing last long enough?", "will it break when I most need it?", and "is it worth my time?" are some questions I ask myself when purchasing or choosing something new. It has had a net positive outcome for me.
One person once told me "urgency has no price." i.e. time is priceless, as cliche as it looks like. For me in the long run, the cost of time I invest in the "consequence" of my decisions dwarfs all other costs.
The most recent maintenance on my car would have been the same on an EV. Tires, brakes, wheel bearing, blower, window motors, shocks, boot struts. And I repaired a couple of broken trim bits in the interior and replaced the speakers.
Outside of around 30 euro per year of maintenance bits, the engine and gearbox don't need a lot of work. Simple combustion engines that are not put under stress can last a long time.
30 EUR per year? You can't even buy 2-3 liters of engine oil for that money, let alone brake oil, new tires (you change them every 50000km, right?), tire pressure sensors etc.
I spend 20 euro on the yearly oil change, including the crush washer. And about 10 euro on miscellaneous parts. A set of spark plugs were €9,28 last time.
Gear box doesn't need much. Oil gets changed when I do clutch, which isn't often. Just like how you don't need to change the differential or motor fluid on an EV motor often.
They mentioned engine and gearbox, so still you'd need at least gearbox oil change once in a while. Not to mention that they elegantly forgot clutch + flywheel which EVs don't have but are expensive as hell to change on ICEs (and you have to change them sooner or later).
Clutchplate is a 25 to 40 euro part and a day of my time. Needs to be replaced once every 200k kilometers. I have transverse engine, I guess it means engine out but that is a 45 minute job.
There's a 3rd cost that you're sorta glossing over. The work you're doing (and the speed you're capable of doing it in) means you've had a non-negligible amount of experience. Depending on how fickle we're going to get, there's 4th costs of the tools you own allowing you to do that work. Perhaps other costs for your living situation allowing you to have a place to do such tasks.
I do my own maintenance work too. But I think it's foolish to gloss over those aspects of the work. They don't come for free.
Some new apartment blocks have charging in the car park that is at-cost. And ofcourse if you own a house with a driveway, that allows you to access cheaper rates.
Additionally, the current energy crisis should be temporary, normally electricity is 1/3 the price of petrol. At least if the tory government, that constantly harps on about growth, stops blocking construction of every windfarm and solar panel they can.
In personal experience, in iur famioy BMW it was the engine that failed.
Sure. By mileage my car is most often used for long distance trips across the country, for stuff under 10-20 miles I usually use public transport or cycle.
I had an EV for a period and used on-street charging 90% of the time for that reason. It was a tremendous pain.
One of the main, negative, reliability drivers in modern cars is electronics anyway, mechanically new cars hardly ever fail outside of normal wear (e.g. brakes, suspession, gaskets) that is simply unavoidable.
Now, the thing with EVs is, they have tons of electronics...
Regardless, as soon as EVs hit a price range, accounting for size and so, that is within budget we are going to switch.
I'm in a situation where my partner loves to acquire things whereas I have a minimalist mindset.
I have felt like every item I own is a burden, and when I live in a house where the vast majority is "owned" by the both of us, it can be overwhelming.
I've learned to cope though by simply internally "letting go" of ownership. They're just inanimate objects and they're not "mine". I simply possess them as a mental/legal construct.
Take your partner to an estate sale, where the next-of-kin are trying to sell their departed parents' stuff. And just wander around contemplating. We're not taking any of our "stuff" with us when we go. An entire lifetime collecting all these knickknacks and tchotchkes and stuffing your house and storage units with them and at the end... It just becomes a burden to someone else.
I think this activity can be good therapy to help people to stop and think about their "stuff accumulation".
I don’t buy and keep things to take with me when I die. I get them to be useful to me and others.
In fact, I’ve gone to many estate sales and picked up useful things at significant discount off new, sometimes even free. It would delight me if someone else benefited from my stuff after I am gone.
The biggest thing I struggle with is keeping it organized in a useful way.
Yep. My parents moved into a retirement community and have a huge unfinished basement, probably 1500-2000 sqft of floor space. And they have filled it with crap. Its like a warehouse down there. Some of it has value but vast majority of it is just plain junk (mostly stuff from their old house which they should have gotten rid of when they moved, some literally in the same boxes). They are in their 80s and not dealing with it. It will be my problem eventually.
I would ideally like to be able to fit my whole life into a suitcase and be sufficiently free of commitments that if someone asked me to move to the other side of the world next week I could. I achieve this in my own life, but I share the feeling of almost overwhelming burden you describe when I see my parents' possessions. Some day I am going to have to deal with them. It would be unbearably wasteful and disrespectful to just throw them out or give them away to people who don't value them, but disposing of them properly would be a major undertaking, and many of the items have great sentimental value to my parents so I can't imagine giving them to anyone else but at the same time I don't want them. I doubt that I could trick myself into overcoming this by "letting go" as you describe.
I'm similar; I found a way to "compartmentalize" - I don't concern myself with what's in my wife's closet or in her boxes. I also have some spaces that are purely mine - so I can have the flavor of minimalism that brings me joy.
This is starting to get to me. Everything I buy I now have to store somewhere, and/or is then something that I need to throw out. And everything I throw out seems like such a waste to me.
Something changed in my mindset over the last couple of years.
I have so many tools that I feel this way about. I enjoy lending them to people because it makes owning them feel like less of a waste, but I don't have enough of a social network to lend them often enough to "break even" on the second cost.
Some time ago, an article made me rethink my view on the speed differences between cars and bicycles. Here, too, you have to pay twice with your own lifetime, because ultimately the time it takes to get from A to B is not simply the driving time, but you have to add to it the (proportionate) working time to earn the money you need to acquire, operate and maintain the vehicle: speed = (working time + driving time) / distance. Of course, the outcome of this calculation varies depending on the specific situation. I recommend everyone to estimate this once for their personal situation. In any case, I was amazed at what came out for me.
It really depends on where you live. I lived in Taipei and cycled around everywhere in that city. There were sometimes bike lanes on the street, and sometimes wide sidewalks with bike lanes, and sometimes neither. Drivers were pretty reasonable most of the time. I felt I could manage the risks by cycling conservatively and assuming drivers didn't see me.
I'm in Los Angeles now. While I miss biking dearly, I look at drivers around here and just think it's a matter of when, not if, I'd get into a cycling accident if I tried to ride within a few miles of my home.
> The effective speed is calculated on the basis of the price of the car (costs per kilometer) and income (net income). The amount of hours you have to work to drive your car (taxes, insurance, fuel, etcetera) is added to the average speed of a car driver in the Netherlands.
I have bought a considerable number of books that I have only read partly, skimmed, or not at all. It really took off after reading about Umberto Eco's anti library philosophy; the most important books in your personal library are the books you have not read.
> People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.
I can resonate with this one. Over the years I have learned that things a person NOT do, is more important compared to what they do.
Careful with that - a somewhat earlier version of ChatGPT, when asked who George Wickham was, confidently asserted that he was the hero of Pride and Prejudice.
Ah to clarify these are all self-help / methodology books, so if it was explaining lean startup methodology and made stuff up then it mostly wouldn't make sense.
I think this article is a brilliant insight into so much unsconscious consumption patterns I see in my own and everyone else's lives these days.
Because of plummeting manufacturing costs, we're essentially cash rich and time poor. But our habits around purchasing haven't caught up with that fact and it's very easy to find yourself only calculating the money cost of something when determining if you can afford it, without incorporating the time cost too.
I make music and this problem is endemic there where you see people with walls of guitars they can barely play and racks of synthesizers whose functions they don't know.
It's really hard to fight against this because marketing is constantly trying to downplay the time commitment for stuff to get you to buy it.
> A new novel, for example, might require twenty dollars for its first price—and ten hours of dedicated reading time for its second. Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one. Paying only the first price is about the same as throwing money in the garbage.
I think this is a bit too much of an absolutist take. One that turns too many people off from reading, and can add an unnecessary air of elitism around it. If you pay $14.99 for a book, you aren't seeing returns only after ten hours of dedicated reading. Even reading one chapter can yield returns that are equivalent to $14.99, if it's a good book. With non-fiction, you can also pick chapters that strike you as the most interesting and start directly from those, getting faster 'returns on investment'. Then going back and reading the whole thing if you're sucked in.
It's very common for sites to publish curated segments of books, whether were talking science related things or not. And even getting double the amount of that text by purchasing the book (compared to the short excerpt) can be worth the price of admission.
I think the article is less making a comment on “how many hours of time you need to put into reading before it’s worth the monetary cost you laid down for it”.
I think it’s trying to remind people that before you get the utility you wanted out of a (non-decorative) book, you need to pay not just ($14.99), but ($14.99 + 10 hours), or indeed ($14.99 + 1 hour).
I understood the article to encourage more thoughtful budgeting of that second kind of cost, and that we are tuned to automatically mostly consider the first kind of cost.
But sometimes you want to fill time, as it were. You might buy a paperback before getting on an airplane so that you have a boom to read, not because you care about the contents.
I’d go further for the specific example of the book. For me the price of reading a good book isn’t a price at all. It’s a gain. I’ve paid the first up front price to be able to read the book and gain enjoyment from it.
I get that there are different reasons for reading a book, but even then, it also seems overly simplistic and absolutist to me.
For a lot of people, they are just paying $20 to have the book. It makes them feel nice through the act of purchase or building a collection. Or maybe it provides a safety blanket if you might need it one day, but no need to read it right now. That's a good deal for them.
This has been submitted and discussed before[0], but I'd suggest that before you go and check out that conversation, read the article and see if it resonates with you. Maybe you'll have a new insight.
I (mostly) value (many of) the points of view provided by (some of) the HN community, and it would be nice to see more of them.
I love this piece. I had a moment of lifted delusion about a decade ago, I didn't put these particular words on it, but I vividly recall looking around at all the second-price debts I had racked up, books, instruments, pedals, even just software I downloaded intending to learn to use it, and I guess I got so pissed off or something that I skipped right past my usual anger at myself and the accompanying session of self-loathing and I went straight to hating the debts and attacking them. In some cases I passed on the acquired thing, in others I started to just use them, one by one. I still have shelves and shelves of second-price debt unfortunately, but I'm better off these days.
Indeed you do! Time is a strange resource, as it's very finite, and also non-fungible (your time today is not the same as a day in the future, or in the past).
It's of course not transactional in the real life, but I think it's valuable to think things through this lens. So you have some time, how you spend it, what you gain from it, etc. For the same time investment, some shows are better than others, and sometimes, reflecting on the person's needs, another show is just a diminishing return compared to other ways of spending time.
Yeah it seems like such a strange mindset to me too. I feel like some people find it hard to think of things outside of a monetary system. We live in such a financialised world. You can't just read a book and enjoy it, you have to add it to your balance sheet, ammortise the costs, fill out a psychological tax return at the end of the year.
I don't think it's that weird. Reading is still work. It's a kind of work that often gives you more reward than you feel it takes away while doing it but I still think it makes sense to talk about a kind of cost here. Because it affects how we relate to the activities we chose.
Some books are immediately rewarding, like fiction, some are rewarding at multiple moments later in time, like fact books. (Not saying face books can't be rewarding in the moment as well though.)
In game design this doesn't seem like a far fetched concept. You often talk about grindy games for example.
Also, how else do you explain why we tend to buy books and then not read them? Maybe for books the cost is often the initial cost before you get into it enough to enjoy it?
I think the wording is a bit confusing, because the reading isn't the second payment, the time it takes is the second payment. You are paying the time it takes to do the thing in order to get the enjoyment of reading.
However, I still find this a strange analogy... time is not like money, you can't save it... that time spent reading the book was going to go away whether you read the book or not. You can't save up that time to spend it on something better later.
> time is not like money, you can't save it... that time spent reading the book was going to go away whether you read the book or not. You can't save up that time to spend it on something better later.
Time is not money, but it is opportunity cost.
Time allocated to X is time you have lost the ability to allocate to Y.
Some years back, the RIAA floated a proposal that would make you pay every time you listened to a song. You would never actually own music, you would just pay for it every time you listen to it like you were a radio station. It's just greed.
I actually like the idea. Many things pay-per-use are actually cheaper unless you use it basically constantly, because if it isn't cheap enough, many people would stop using it, thinking: is listening to it right now really worth X amount? People have a strange attachment to the concept of ownership, so that they are willing to pay extra for it. Pay-per-use is actually a more profitable concept only when people are hesitant to buy something fully, because they are not sure if they would use it enough.
Well we already have this, it's called Spotify and Apple Music. I collect vinyl and I rather like having the whole album to listen to without paying anything more. If I had to pay per song which is IIRC the RIAA proposal, I would be less likely to explore music. I would stick to only music I can be reasonably certain is going to be good.
Wouldn't a pay-per-song scheme destroy independent bands so that only the biggest and most shared get listened to?
You'd listen 3 times instead of 5 to save on the monthly bill.
Same as when dialup Internet access was billed by the minute. Most people would limit their time online to reduce the bill, and didn't feel free to browse for hours every day if they found something interesting. Email and to some extent Usenet were popular because you only needed to go online for a few minutes to download and upload your messages; you could read and write offline for free. When unmetered "always on" connections arrived people's habits changed radically.
All makes sense, and that is why I said pay-per-use is usually less profitable, because back when dail-up was available, my internet bill was really lower than it is now. Granted, I am comparing apples and oranges, because I am also using the internet much more nowadays. But the argument that the greedy music industry wants to milk us by asking us to per-per-use is nonsense. They would make less money and probably people consume music more consciously.
When I "own" music, I interpret that as being able to listen to it whenever I want, forever, with no restriction. My digital music library (225GB of mostly FLAC files ripped from CDs and bought from Qobuz/Bandcamp) is close enough to ownership for me, even though I can't use most of it for commercial purposes or redistribute it or anything.
Mostly agree, though one thing I strongly disagree with (especially for books :)).
Paying 1$ at a yard sale for Moby Dick would be it for me. No need to read, I will simply enjoy having the book around me, just like having a new friend at home
More like a friend of a friend, then :) From whom you have heard many anecdotes, have common friends, and you feel like you know them. You are curious to meet them.
One random comment:
The book on the photo, Trois fois par jour #2 (Three times a day #2)
Is a great cookbook for mere mortal with cooking skill juste above beginner. A few recipes became once a week classic and helped me improve my cooking skill and taste. Highly recommanded! #1 is good too.
I'd also add the regret of not buying something you later realize was a unique opportunity, and wish you would've jumped on in the moment!
I've learned that there are so few things that I genuinely feel an itch to buy, that should I come across one (say in a shop window, or a stall in a craft market) I should buy it. So many times I've seen something interesting, thought "okay I'll take a picture and research it and decide later", and I don't think I've ever actually returned a single time -- although I have regretted not purchasing it. Sometimes in life you have to capitalize on the moment - it may not come again!
If I paid $20 for a plate of food at a restaurant, eating it is the second half of the price. If I eat too much (don't take a box) I pay the second price. If I only eat just enough, the second price is much lower.
I also take issue with the statement early in the article that only paying the first price is the same as putting money in the garbage. It's not wrong but that mindset will lead you to becoming a victim of the sunk cost fallacy. If you've already paid for the thing but you no longer want it, get rid of it.
Similarly to carbon costs and derivatives, we can go as far back as we want (carbon cost since big bang, since factory, or from the store) or examine the consequences into the future or alternative timelines (opportunity cost).
It is an interesting idea, and a good thought experiment.
If we are going to quantify everything, we could also quantify the enjoyment of the item as a negative cost, saving us from stress or health or other expenses through its enjoyment. We do it with opportunity cost, so why not in the other direction.
In this case, from the top of my head. Buying a book and not reading it yet:
- Can provide value by showing that book on my shelf (despicable, but true for some)
- Can make me feel good by knowing I am contributing to the author income, or by knowing when I am bored I can reach for the book without intermediate steps. This benefit is immediate.
- Can be one step in a chain of steps bringing one closer to a set goal: preparing to find a new job by learning something explained in the book.
- Can help build long lasting beneficial habits like focus or language mastery.
- If buying the book in a shop, it can bring opportunities for social interaction, that are difficult to quantify.
So the value of buying a book is not necessarily the one explained by this model. We can choose other models where the book provides "some" value immediately.
IMO what we quantify is not objective, but a reflection of a perspective in itself.
Storage costs can also be significant. I have a friend who pays $200/month for his storage unit to keep all of the extra seasonal junk and decorations, and then must swap it out twice per year. Many people pay a less transparent version of the same fee by getting a larger house or apartment for the same reason.
> But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
I think this is the thing people miss when saying open source software is given free and people shouldn't complain. Yes, but it requires effort to adopt and it's a liability. So when a free piece of code is published, even marketed and touted, it can create some expectation of commitment, even though the author is not obligated to provide it.
Nice analogy. I see "prices" as money and time. To save time, pay more money, to save money, pay in time. Ikea is maybe low on money, but definitely high in terms of time. Any software with good UX should be high on money, because they are low cost in time.
There is also a feel good factor, which the time component is 0. e.g. I have a bad habit of buying books not to be read, but to put on bookshelf because it looks good. Sorry Knuth, I am at maybe page 10 of the your 4 volumes of TAOCP. It looks good on my shelf.
After dealing with custom builders... Ikea is not high in terms of time either. You're likely to drive to Ikea in the morning and have a shelf/cabinet/couch/whatever ready same evening. Now dealing with custom builders is a wee more involved... Less sweating, but time-wise, it's not that different.
And then there's delivery terms if you're on a rush to have something usable in your empty housing.
I find myself acquiring lots of books lately, books I won’t read for at least 6 months. It feels like you can’t investigate topics online anymore without some machine somewhere watching you. If I look something up about my house plants in a reference book, sure it might take longer, but there’s something quite liberating about knowing I’m not being watched by some Ferengi-esque bot that wants my money. Same applies to fiction, maybe I want to be able to read or reference Moby Dick in peace.
Interesting take. You can push it further and suggest that if you don't pay the second price you don't own it at all. It's lying around as an object or unused subscription, but you're getting no benefit from it.
It's not a binary because sometimes you want things for the future, or just in case, or just because you like having them - and maybe showing them off.
But sometimes none of those are true. So what did you buy? And why?
>Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one.
Only if you didn't buy it for the psychological effect. There the point is not paying the secondary price.
This is also something which is usually unheard of in a consumerist society, where most things are bought because of utilitarian consideration and not "because ownership makes you feel better".
Well, if we feel better because we own it for the simple "fact" that we own it, that is the utility we have from it.
That said, we rarely get such a thing in anything we can acquire with only money as a price. For example it’s well known and documented that taking time into meditation sessions will give us many benefits, but no amount of book or titles like "special contributor of the temple" that we can acquire by throwing money at it will give us these same benefits.
Money can buy us the prestige and some kind of social obedience, but it won’t auto-magically cultivate our mental flow into sane dynamics.
Also let’s remember that there is no ownership outside of a society that recognizes us some form of prioritised policy implementation over some limited matter. So we can’t own anything without paying some price to remain included in this society. That’s the 0th price of any ownership, could we say.
You become keenly aware of this if you run a small business and run the IT. Once something is provisioned and in production you maintain it as long as physically possible. Buying a new one is not expensive. The time to get it set up can be 10x the cost of the item in terms of hours.
Purchasing a copy of Moby Dick at a garage sale for $1 means you have purchased the option of reading it for as long as you want to keep it on your bookshelf.
There is a slight possibility you could sell it for $1 in the future, or $0.50 or $2. But that would probably take more effort than you want to put into the enterprise.
But mostly what that $1 buys you is an option on use value. You are free to use the book after paying for it. But you are not obligated to use it.
The author's point was, I believe, that there's a difference between exchange cost and use cost, which is certainly true. But if you're going to use this parable as an analogy for some business process, you may be better served by thinking about a larger scope: a scope that admits the possibility of value in options.
When I was a kid we used to say: "You always pay for what you get. And if you're lucky, you only pay in cash."
The value of having the option to read Moby Dick is essentially zero: you can look it up online whenever you want.
When someone chooses to spend a buck buying Moby Dick at a garage sale, the value they get is based on calculating that they will also read it. If they spend the cash but not the time, they've basically just thrown a dollar away.
I am asserting that you are claiming ignorance on the author's part when the better interpretation is that the author is speaking about general common occurrences and you are focused on edge cases that while true do not detract from the author's point.
Presumably anyone about to embark on a voyage to Antarctica understands that their purchasing decisions have slightly different constraints than a random person sitting in their apartment mindlessly scrolling on Amazon and doing some "retail therapy".
Options are closer to paying 1$ at a garage sale for the owner to sell it to you on a future date at 1$ and you have the right but not the obligation to do so (say the price is 20 cents next year - you don't have to buy the book at 1$ anymore and you hope that your option you purchased is less than 79.9 cents in order to profit.
I'm gonna go sell or donate some of my 2nd price debt items now. They're now a good reminder that time is finite and you need to curate your hobbies and attention carefully.
In the U.S., it is at least possible to avoid such double taxation (but only in some situations -- i.e. you were itemizing anyway instead of taking the standard deduction, and you live in a state with no income tax). https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/...
I'm (Dutch) self-employed, which means I have my own one-man company, and as such, I can get my VAT back for stuff I buy for my business. Of course I also have to charge VAT for my services again, so that's expected to include the VAT for the stuff I bought.
But it does create a massive tax loophole: because I'm a software developer, I can deduct the costs of any computer I buy, but nobody is checking whether I actually use it for work or for gaming. I can deduct work lunches, but employees can't. I know someone who deducted his motorbike because he also used it for work. I can deduct phone and internet costs because I also use them for work.
I find the way I can avoid some taxes that others can't, rather questionable. Frankly, everybody should have their own company to avoid this inequality. And the stuff I can deduct is small potatoes compared to the stuff I'm sure some other people are deducting. I'm no tax expert, but I'm sure this is a big part of why billionaires pay so little tax.
Also, companies on the edge of the health care system have a problem, because health care is VAT free, so health care companies cannot get the VAT back they have to pay to their suppliers, which makes suppliers of services to the healthcare industry effectively more expensive than they should be. I think this whole system is in dire need of an overhaul.
You’ll find you’re not the first person who has discovered that you can cheat on your taxes by expensing personal purchases and by deducting things you are explicitly not allowed to deduct. The government’s inability to cheaply audit people like you means you won’t get in trouble. Your gut feeling that “it’s questionable” is right. Accountants lie about what deductions are allowed because they know the way to get happy customers is by producing tax savings, even where none exist. Just look up the tax laws for yourself and you’ll find that the “massive loophole” doesn’t exist.
But this isn't even cheating; this is stuff I am allowed to deduct. My accountant keeps bringing them up, and he's not the kind to cheat on this stuff. Other clients of his have been audited and received compliments for how well their stuff was in order. There are apparently very good reasons why this can be deducted. If the massive loophole doesn't exist, it's because it works as intended and is not a loophole at all, but to me it feels like a very grey area, because I don't think employees can't deduct all of this stuff.
And I'm certainly not going to look up tax laws; that's exactly what I'm paying my accountant for.
Your accountant is 100% wrong. If you buy a computer and use it 20% for work and 80% for hobby stuff or gaming then you can deduct it for 20%. That's the law. This takes 30 seconds to google and your refusal to do so is mystifying because your accountant isn't liable for filing your taxes wrong, you are.
Your accountant keeps bringing deductions up because he wants you to feel he's worth his fees. That's why literally every accountant I've ever worked with has told me that "a good accountant pays for himself". Accountants compete with each other based on how much they can lower your tax bill. So yes, of course they'll help you make unlawful tax deductions, and they'll reassure you that it's perfectly fine and that they have many years of experience etc etc.
Yes, and I'll do you one better: everybody should have their own company and there should be no "employee" option. Everything should be contracts. Makes it clearer it's not a family relationship, it's business.
Look at it from the viewpoint of someone with sufficient wealth: income taxes are wonderful, because they only apply to realised income. (and there is a whole cottage industry devoted to ways to cumulate gains without realising income)
50 years later I can't unlearn this even though it makes little sense in most cases in an age when things have no repair affordances or are so cheap (socks) that the "cost" of repair is greater than the effort to replace it.
The consequence is that I really dread buying things and have no ability to make an impulse purchase. Every purchase feels like a burden: did I really get the best one that will last the longest? How will I look after it? I can't understand people who go shopping for fun. A gift also feels like a burden has been handed to me (I have to look after this and use it appropriately).
It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything -- though the rational part of my mind wonders if they might be making the right call.