Bah 1. Opportunity cost = the cost of fixing whatever shit it was yourself instead of paying someone to fix it for you, and getting on with whatever you do that puts food on your table. [leave alone whatever tinkering and fixing you do in your spare time - a lot of which goes to reading mailing lists if I don't miss my guess with people here]
2. Dollar store flipflops - even if interchangeable - wear out fast. Buy a $100 pair of shoes and they'll last you for far longer, and can be used in far more places than you can use dollar store flipflops. [You might even find that they last longer than $100 worth of flipflops] 3. As for sharing a vacuum cleaner with your neighbors, you don't get to have the cleaner available when you most want it (mornings or evenings, whenever you have the spare time to vacuum rather than code or wait tables or approve loans or whatever). And who gets left holding the bag when someone you loaned the damned thing to breaks it and returns it without telling you? 4. and 5. And over organization and too much discipline for simple tasks can turn other work that you do into garbage by taking up all the time you have available. The sort of "just in time" system of inventory control and household task management described will work great if you're running a large manufacturing plant or an agile software process. You'd have to put in a huge amount of work to see any tangible results from applying the same principle to household tasks. So there's this threshold where such tasks cease to be essential and become a total waste of time. 6. Yes you can cook cheap (beans and rice with hot sauce) or you can cook cordon bleu gourmet with imported cuts of meat and spend a fortune on sous vide vacuum sealers and temperature controlled cookers if you think you're Ferran Adria's long lost doppelganger. Most people find a golden mean somewhere between the two. And again, the cents you save by living on beans and rice with hot sauce will probably translate to several hundred dollars worth of medical expenses starting with blood work for cholesterol. 7. Yes, you can grow a herb garden in your yard if you have a house with a yard rather than a shoebox apartment, get access to good herbs, pesticide, fertilizer and such [not to mention having some of your herbs either just die on you for no reason or get eaten by birds, say] 8. I'll agree with the bicycle part though you can catch a cold just as easily riding a bicycle + getting soaked in rain as you can by sitting next to someone with a cold in a crowded bus (which is anyway stuffy and overheated before you step out into chilly, snowy weather) 9. As for adapting to chilly weather, if you want you can learn from the netbsd developer known as "der mouse" who wears nothing except shorts, tshirts, flip flops and a beard to rival zz top, even in the height of a montreal winter. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=543483293097&set=o.7853633068&type=1 10. A wall that's painted but not decorated, fine. A dish that isn't washed means you're up to your ass in cockroaches. A knife you haven't sharpened means you just can't cut a damned thing with it [and there you go, with another do it yourself task in front of you, sharpening a blunt knife and washing dishes] srs -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Udhay Shankar N Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 8:22 PM To: Silk List Subject: [silk] some notes on frugality Stripped out one additional layer of forwards. ----- Forwarded message from Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]> ----- From: Kragen Javier Sitaker <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2011 05:33:35 -0400 To: [email protected] Subject: some notes on frugality User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) * Repairing things yourself can cost less than paying someone else to fix them, but it takes a lot of time. The surprising benefit, though, is that you learn why they broke, and how to tell when it’s about to happen. It turns out that a lot of day-to-day things (bicycles, clothes, cars) will last a lot longer if you have enough awareness of them to care for them properly. * Dollar-store flip-flops (in my case, bought from a wholesale shop for US$0.75 per pair) will break eventually. You can extend their life substantially by buying several matched pairs, so that when they break, you can mix and match. Also, black ones show rubber dust and diesel exhaust less than white ones. Flip-flops are less hospitable to foot fungus than other kinds of sandals, much lighter and easier to pack than any other shoes, don’t require socks, and reduce weight especially on your feet, where it counts most. * Dacyczyn-style tightwaddage places a big emphasis on self-sufficiency and self-reliance. While it’s certainly desirable to be able to make do when nobody else is around, it’s a lot more frugal to take the opportunity to share your vacuum cleaner with your neighbors. There are lots of opportunities for cooperative management of capital goods like these, and a lot of these are newly enabled by information technology. Any durable thing that you use with a duty cycle of under 50% is a candidate, the further below the better. * The difference between garbage and resources is organization. (This is the modern information-theoretical understanding of the third law of thermodynamics: entropy, and thus the uselessness of a system, is a measure of how much you don’t know about where things are and what they are doing.) Organization and discipline can allow you to manage a much larger set of tools and materials. Lack of organization and discipline (as I can attest) can turn working resources into garbage. * Living in a city means you don’t have to buy things until you need them. Country people have to keep a stockpile of spare parts, which soaks up capital that could be invested in something that provides a return. City people can spend their capital replacing only the things that do break, instead of the things that might break. But I still carry an extra pair of flip-flops in my backpack, which came in handy today when I broke one of the ones I was wearing. In a sense, a spare gasket at the hardware store is an investment in rapid recovery from leaks whose up-front capital cost is borne by the whole neighborhood (in the form of retail markup) rather than by each neighbor separately. * Sauces and spices can inexpensively make even beans and rice an endless source of culinary delights. But you’ll regret it if you overdo the habanero sauce. Ow. Also, don’t forget MSG. * Given limited space for gardening, start with herbs, spices, and greens you can’t stand to eat in bulk. Nasturtiums are too strong for me to eat more than a leaf or two a day, but they add freshness, nutrition, and a lot of flavor to a cheese sandwich. 100mg of rosemary can flavor 1000g of rice very nicely; an extra 100mg of rice would go unnoticed. So grow the rosemary and get the rice at the store until you have a paddy. * Given limited time for limited-space gardening, use deep planters and prefer hardier plants. * Bicycles are a lot cheaper to drive than cars and about as fast and cheap as taking the bus, at least until you plow into a taxi and run up a hospital bill. But their real advantage is that they make your time predictable: you rarely have to hunt for a parking space and you never wait for half an hour for the bus to come. Also, they keep you from catching cold from people on the bus, and they improve your health when you don’t get into accidents. * Adapting your body to chilly weather, when it comes, reduces your need for clothing and laundry soap, lightening your backpack dramatically. And it means you can use flip-flops more of the year. * Much ugliness is unnecessary, simply people accepting the defaults and not bothering to create harmony in their surroundings; and the same is true of household and mechanical maintenance. I see walls I haven’t decorated, a dish I haven’t washed, a book I haven’t put away, and a knife I haven’t sharpened. -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-tol ----- End forwarded message -----
