Computer related:
- Don’t be your family computer savy guy, you just found yourself a bunch payless jobs…
- Long desks are cool and all, but the amount the space they occupy is not worth it.
- Block work related phone calls at weekends, being disturbed at your leisure for things that could be resolved on Mondays will sour your day.
Buying stuff:
- There is expensive because of brand and expensive because of material quality, do your research.
- Bulk buying is underrated, save yourself a few bucks, pile that toilet paper until the ceiling is you must.
- Second hand/broken often means never cleaned, lubricated or with easy fixable problem.
I really disagree with your secondhand comment. Buy more secondhand, less new! Cheaper, better for the environment, and you can find some cool things you wouldn’t otherwise. I get nearly all my small kitchen appliances from thrift stores. Most people get them as like a wedding gift or something and then never use them, so they are practically new. All my clothes except underwear and socks are thrifted, most of my furniture, my dishes, most electronics… I love thrift stores.
“proofread before submitting”
“don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity” is good advice for friends and family.
It’s bad advice for salesmen, politicians, corporations, etc. They are more sophisticated than you and will take advantage of your willingness to extend trust after bad behavior.
I’ve been in a surprising number of hostile situations professionally that defied any explanation that did not include both malice and stupidity :D
It’s bad advice for salesmen, politicians, corporations, etc.
I dunno. It’s pretty easy to attribute their misdeeds to malice.
Or at least to greed and malicious indifference to your concerns.
I think that’s what they were saying. For those, it is likely indeed malice. For friends and family, it’s likely just stupidity or ignorance.
When driving don’t be nice, be predictable.
Eg.: If you are on the priority road, drive - don’t be nice and slow down to let someone in from a side road. That’s how you get rear-ended.
Assume the best of people and the worst of circumstances. It just makes my life a little bit happier giving my friends and family, and even strangers, the benefit of the doubt.
Attribution bias. We have a tendency to attribute our own behaviours to external circumstances (“I’m driving slowly because I have good reason”) whilst attributing others’ behaviours to personal traits (“That person is driving slowly because they are incompetent”). It’s nice to remember that situational factors may be affecting a good person’s behaviour.
It makes everybody else happier, too!
Don’t be your family computer savy guy, you just found yourself a bunch payless jobs…
Disagree, while my family didn’t pay me in cash, they made me food and such. They took care of me.
My family did not and it just added another avenue they could sap my energy. I down play it a lot more these days.
Same. I owe a lot to my parents. The stable nurturing home they provided was a huge leg up in life. Showing them a thing or two on the computer was the least I could do.
The whole thing has degrees. I very much like to help my mother to update her browser. I really don’t want to help choosing a printer to my cousin’s second brother’s wife AND install it during Christmas when we are home and I want to just chill with my close family.
Depends on who it is. I’ll spend 10 hours on a pc issue for my mom but if it’s a cousin and it takes more than 10 minutes I’ll either say it’s outside of my knowledge or straight up say I would have to charge because of time commitment.
Depends on your level of agency as well. As a tech savvy teenager I felt I wasn’t allowed to say no to my family asking for computer help. Now I follow what you outlined, close family and friends, free. Not so close family, 10.00 to look at it. 20.00 if it’s difficult.
That’s fair. I look at it for free if they bring it over but I charge 25 with a 3 hour minimum if there’s any work. Most people say no thanks, I helped an older lady replace her hard drive and didn’t actually charge her even though she wanted to pay since it really was just 5 minutes to order a new one and 10 to change it out once it got here. She gave me some homemade cookies so it was a good deal for me.
Haha did you get woken up in the middle of the night to fix things too?
I had the opposite solution though. I just threw money from my summer job at computing infrastructure until they had things that wouldn’t often break. Maybe a bit silly, but it did eventually work!
Assume positive intent. Amazing how much lower stress your stress levels will be if you don’t feel attacked (on the road, on social media, in conversations, etc).
Oh yeah, and buy a bidet. Your bum will thank you.
That really agressive driver? She/he probably just has to poop real bad. Instead of raging at them, give them directions to the nearest gas station bathroom.
Buying second hand is underrated. I’ll often try buy something second hand first and just give it a good clean, I’ve saved loads like that.
Proof-read your writing; even when writing titles.
A good exercise is to read your essay from the bottom up. Start at the last complete sentence and when you’re done read the one above. You’ll catch more things that way because your mind has to change the perspective.
Rice is a cereal and therefore a valid breakfast food. Fry last night’s rice with some chopped veg and garlic salt for a nutritious and easy breakfast.
Inventory is waste.
Why ? Unless you are talking store inventory you might have some reason.
Not just stores, but inventory of goods in general. The thought is that resources spent on inventory are resources which could have otherwise been spent elsewhere. This line of thinking and fixation on Just-In-Time goods deliveries was one of the most important factors in the supply chain fuckery around covid, which only began to stabilize last year.
excess inventory is waste. Always have a buffer to handle shenanigans and/or be able to source the next thing,and avoid being up shit creek the next time the TP truck is a week late.
Explain.
For me, inventory is a way to save money, save time, and it gives you a buffer when shortages happen.
This is at the expense of space, so if you have free (wasted) space, you might as well take advantage of it.
It’s an idea from Lean management. Everything you need to keep, prevents you from keeping something else; requires you to remember where it is, where you could be remembering something else; takes longer to move when you have to move it; takes longer to organise than having less would. It poses fire hazards that having nothing wouldn’t pose. Blocks light that having nothing wouldn’t block. Keeping stuff is inherently wasteful.
None of this is to say that keeping stuff is bad. It may be very useful to keep it. But you should always recognise that doing so incurs a cost that you need to trade off against its usefulness.
While we’re on it, inventory is one of the eight kinds of waste identified in Lean. They are:
- Transportation
- Inventory
- Motion
- Waiting
- Overproduction
- Overprocessing
- Defects
- Skills (misuse of)
Remember TIM WOODS.
All of this is meant for running a factory, but I’ve found a lot of them useful in other bits of life, especially the idea that Inventory is a form of waste.
I guess the context in which this is applied to makes the difference.
In my home, I’m fine with keeping inventory when it makes sense.
Non perishable food, for example, has it’s own happy place in a corner of my home that wouldn’t otherwise be utilized. Stocking up on this inventory has demonstrably saved a lot of money vs. buying when needed.
During covid, my stockpiling years before allowed me to essentially not run out of anything or pay a premium on things that were either not available or overpriced during the first year of the pandemic.
Keeping a stockpile also means that I’m not wasting time, gas, energy, or money running out multiple times a week to pick up necessities. I just take from my inventory, which would be at a lower price than the current price, and I move on with my day.
If I had to only buy certain things when needed, I estimate that I’d likely be overspending by at least 30% + whatever time and transportation costs to make those errand runs.
No disagreements here! What you’re doing here is recognising that the waste incurred from storage is less of a problem than the waste incurred through Transportation, or Waiting for resupply. In this case, inventory is waste worth doing. Any workshop needs to keep SOME spare parts, every house needs to have SOME food in the freezer. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a kind of waste to store stuff – a fact people acknowledge when they choose not to rent a warehouse to store even more.
What I’m saying is that it’s a trade-off. In fact it’s a pretty bland statement, obvious when you think about it, but putting it into words like this can be helpful when making processes more efficient.
Do stuff for other people and explain until they are like 20% there. Then let them do it themselves and gradually reduce your help.
Thats how my dad did it with a lot of stuff, and I learned so much. Saves you from “mansplaining”, from doing free work, from being unempowering.
This makes people feel motivated and you can share your learning experience too, and maybe learn from theirs
You’re good enough. Start where you are.
“Measure twice, cut once.”
I cut it twice and it’s still too short!
Refurbished is not second hand. It’s an item that has been returned to the retailer for one reason or another and gone through thorough diagnosis for any existing issues and repaired. You can save money over “new” to buy something that you now know has been scrutinized. Sometimes there may be blemishes, but depending on the product that matters very little.
I saw a video, I believe it was about refurbished gaming consoles, and the guy was showing that often times companies just blow dust out and don’t do anything of value to refurbish the consoles.
Considering that you get a shorter warranty with refurbished items, I don’t think it’s worth it unless you know what exactly was done to the item.
