Wanted: Mature Single Male For Shared Housing

From the housing classifieds. The blurb:

“We all need housing, but we all need a life as well. Why live alone, pay outrageous rents and have no life when you can share with someone pleasant, have reasonable rent and have a life. I’m a mature single female and my preference would be for a stable mature male. If this interests you at all, please drop me a line…”

I am not sure exactly what arrangement this single female is thinking of (presumably a 2 bedroom?), but it brings up the opportunity costs of being single. For many people, if you get married (or cohabitate, if that’s your preferred version), you can almost halve your rent, share a car (if one person doesn’t need one all the time), drive together to places (half the fuel), cook dinner together (decrease time per person, and probably decrease costs as well), halve your internet bill (Sacha, nota bene!), and so on. These could reasonably amount to combined savings of $1,000 a month = $12,000 a year. Suddenly, the cost of a wedding ring doesn’t seem so high.

Tim Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Work Week (here and blog accessible through here) distinguishes between “Deferrers” and the “New Rich”. He then lists key beliefs that differ between the two. Here is one:

“[Deferrer]: To retire early or young.
[New Rich]: To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.”

This got me thinking about how the “Deferrer” belief described here is a secular version of a Christian Heaven. You have an earthly life (a job), then you ascend to Heaven (retirement), which lasts for the rest of the time and is what you are striving for here on earth (because this “Heaven” will be highly enjoyable).

The question is how accurate this notion of a paradisiacal, secular “afterlife” is, or will be. The problem with retirement is that you don’t actually know if you’ll enjoy it. Imagine you like sailing on the weekends. You imagine how great it would be to retire after 20 years (that’s retiring young!) of work and go sailing. You have sailed for longer periods before (1 week, 2 weeks, even a month). It is possible, however, that you enjoy sailing because it is part of a cyclical process (work -> relax). Once you retire, it’s all relaxing (relax -> relax), and after a short period of time - if you don’t have other interests and passions that you have cultivated - you might find that you are bored. In fact, many people who are enticed to work 20-40 years and then retire find that they are bored or unhappy, and some simply return to work, or revert to a “semi-retired” status.

The idea with the “New Rich” in 4HWW as relates to the belief described above is to take time now to develop personal interests or passions, alternating between doing them and work time. For example, 2 months working -> 1 month pursuing interests, x 4 times a year. How do you do that if you have a job or own a company? That’s described in the book.

Merry Christmas to everyone. May you enjoy a relaxing, refreshing Yuletide.

“My counter prediction:
This will be the recession that no one remembers. Unless a major government is stupid enough to institute price controls, there will be no shortages of anything. It will turn out that our unprecedented levels of leisure time and disposable income will be a great buffer against real hardship.”

Raven makes an interesting point in the above quote. People nowadays have a large amount of disposable time and income, which buffers them from scarcity of fundamental needs (basic food, shelter, and so on). You can cut out the extra trips, yearly new car, and so on, and still have lots of room left to maneuver. A 10% or 20% drop in economic output, if distributed across the population, probably would have much less affect in this sense than it would in, say, a recession 100 years ago.

This reminded me of a thought I had about things like television viewing. Think about how much time is spent watching television per year, by the average person in say the U.S. Now think about how much potential production could be made with that time. In economics, if someone pays to watch television, and is caused to purchase more things by watching the advertisements on television, this is considered an economic plus. Yet, there are significant counterfactual costs to doing this - i.e., what they could create or experience of value if they weren’t watching television. A problem with conventional economic metrics is that they don’t tend to emphasize counterfactuals - economic activity in one form is almost always taking away from economic activity of another form.

Reading SecularRight.org, I have an uneasy feeling about much of the discussion - and I think it comes from the following question: Does it make sense to talk about religion as one kind of thing? Rather, is it full of such disparate kinds that it usually makes more sense to talk about specific religions?

Furthermore, does it make sense to talk about a religion’s affect on people, or more sense to talk about a religion’s affect on a specific kind of people (at a specific time)? In politics, you often hear talk about democracy or monarchy, for examples, as if there are no important differences within the governments that apply the general ideas we call ‘democracy’ or ‘monarchy’, or as if the policies or processes involved in them would affect all kinds of people in generally the same way.

I’m very skeptical of this sort of talk. Abstraction is often very useful, but I think most abstraction of these sorts is too abstract. Taking the cue from Aristotle, talking about religion is easy - and misleading. Talking about religion as applied towards a specific people, in a specific proportion, at a specific time, and in a specific manner - this is not easy, but is what will lead to more rewarding discussion.

Nelson makes a bunch of good points here.

This comment:

“I did find a terrific dentist, though, after going through a slew of mediocre ones that insisted on various procedures or dental accoutrements that I was pretty sure I didn’t need, by cross-referencing the recommendations between various dentists, I found zero agreement on the work I needed done[.]”

reminded me of how the payment structure for dentists and doctors is upside down. They should get paid if you’re healthy, not sick. (I was told once that at some point in Japan’s history samurai paid their doctors a yearly stipend as long as they were healthy that year - I have no idea if this is true or not.) Types of ‘holistic’ health are a step in this direction, but the onus is on the person whose health is at stake to put the pieces together.

In Canada with its public health care, there is pressure on provincial governments to reduce medical costs, and one way to do that is to prevent health costs. This is good, but it seems we could make a much better incentive system if we put our heads to it …

“For the economy we have seems to be condemned to an ever-deepening and widening cycle of crises, each brought on by the cure for the previous crisis, which is always the same: more government.”

Here. If you have a strong inductive argument to the effect that economies in our time go through boom and bust periods, shouldn’t you structure your company, government, and so on, in preparation for an inevitable downturn? The truth is that, far from a ‘crisis’, this was a predictable end of a boom period brought on by easy borrowing. The government’s solution so far, or course, has been to try to make borrowing easy again.

The idea is that people and companies who realize that they have over-spent or over-borrowed and are trying to cut back shouldn’t - because continued over-spending will then get the economy back ‘on track’, although the track is of course what led to this point in the first place.

I was trying to find a term for what is happening in the U.S., where the government props up companies that are losing large amounts of money, caused by poor management or executive strategic decisions.

The term I came up with was ‘economic loserism’, as opposed to ‘economic nationalism’ - the difference illustrated by the following analogy.

Scenario 1) Let’s say you have a star knitter, Granny A, and in her heyday she was amazing. She would slay the competition with her knitting prowess. However, now she’s 104 years old and on life support. You desperately want quality knitters in your country, however, so you are using infusions, transplants, everything - at incredible cost - to keep her going … for at least a little while longer.

Scenario 2) You decide to invest in healthy, young knitters who have long-term potential, protecting them from international predation while supporting key technological innovations so as to keep them highly competitive.

The truth is that the U.S., or any other “first world” country, cannot compete with the vast amounts of cheap labour unleashed by countries like China and India in terms of wages, unless it wants to bring its average wages down to the level of those countries. Its best bet is probably something like what the Japanese have done in their auto industry, making long term technological investments (such as turning to intensive roboticization) to significantly boost productivity and make differences in factory hourly wages more and more irrelevant for determining competitiveness. The difference is that Japanese car companies are currently healthy, and so for them this is in effect preventative medicine. With the U.S. car companies, they are very sick, and this is last-minute desperation medicine.

A more forward thinking, nationalistic economic framework from the U.S. would benefit the country - but not economic loserism.

Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament until January 26th has led to the following - no legislation passing for approximately two months. This gives the government time to see what other countries do, and what is working and is not, and to better understand the nature of the financial downturn. My concern is that they will not use the time to do that, but rather will unveil a “stimulus” package as the centrepiece of the new budget at the end of January - which will contain large amounts of pork and bailouts to sway Liberal and NDP supporters, and is intended to remove the casus belli of the coalition (the perceived lack of adequate Conservative response to the coming recession in Canada).

It is still not clear whether Harper intentionally antagonized the NDP and Liberals (including the measure to strip public election funding for the parties) because he believed that it would cause them to overplay their hand. Perhaps, although I doubt it, there are unseen considerations that Harper was more concerned about, and so an intentional provocation with the possibility of leading to a coalition was a lesser evil from his perspective. Perhaps we shall get a better view of exactly what was going on behind the scenes and the chronology at a later date.

If the Bloc Québécois has agreed to vote with the coalition on confidence matters for the next 18 months - that is, if it has given a possible coalition government a blank cheque - the obvious question is, in return for what?

The next question I have is, what will proroguing the Parliament actually accomplish from the Conservatives’ point of view?

[Post edited to correct term.]