The trouble with commitment

whistler - nocturne in black and gold [click image for huge]

Many investors will not sell anything at a loss because they don't want to give up the hope of making their money back. Meanwhile, they could be making money somewhere else.

Emodon's Rule

Especially the tourist

joyless street

If what happened to the defeated Central Powers in the early 1920s is anything to go by, then the process of collapse of the recognised, traditional, trusted medium of exchange, the currency by which all values are measured, by which social status is guaranteed, upon which security depends, and in which the fruits of labour are stored, unleashes such greed, violence, unhappiness, and hatred, largely bred from fear, as no society can survive uncrippled and unchanged.
...
Partly because of its unfairly discriminatory nature, it brought out the worst in everybody—industrialist and worker, farmer and peasant, banker and shopkeeper, politician and civil servant, housewife, soldier, merchant, tradesman, miner, moneylender, pensioner, doctor, trade union leader, student, tourist—especially the tourist.

Adam Fergusson - When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany

My mother was raised in care and I'm terrified of being homeless

Social class isn’t defined for individuals by how much loot one has: it’s defined by how far one can imagine oneself descending. I fear the pit.

Eric Miles Williamson

Back to work

...it’s true that I really wanted to make money so that I could quit my job. That’s the only point of having money, to have the freedom of your days, but it’s fundamental.

Michel Houellebecq, Paris Review interview

Certain inexorable trends

mark wood

And what made it extraordinarily clever [...] was that this project would not even be a struggle as such. They would not have to defeat any adversary or overcome any obstacle - merely ride along with certain inexorable trends. All they [...] had to do was notice these trends.

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver, p224

Would you buy a used paradigm from this man?

jaron lanier by allan j. cronin

Good talk by Jaron Lanier at the LSE [link to MP3 on that page] that starts slow and fairly rambling, but touches on a lot of interesting things [Xanadu / the importance of boundaries / the wrong turn at Turing / anti-Singularity / anti-Wikipedia / anti-neo-Maoism / pro-micropayments] as a way to a) sketch out the ideas in his new book, and b) make a case for a new [well…old] technological / economic model for the Internet, essentially based on one copy of each file [Ted Nelson's Xanadu] and micropayments.

Since Larnier was previously on the ‘free’ side of the ‘information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive’ debate, it’s an interesting trip he takes the listener on. The bottom line – of this talk, at least – is that micropayments will be embraced when anyone can launch themselves as a creator – already possible – and become part of the system [not yet in place, but presumably something like a bigger version of the iTunes store]. With the right incentives thus in place, people will work harder at being more creative, because they’re being [potentially] rewarded for their efforts and can maybe pay the rent and so on without a day job.

Side note: things are sloooowly getting back on track here, and something like abnormal service will kick back in later this month.

Moving average

The standard freelance work is famine or feast, and while it'd be nice to have things smoother that'd also take away the random and non 9-to-5 nature of the work, and it's in the peaks and troughs that you get the rushes of doing the right thing with regard to getting lots of work / $ and then having enough loose time to bicycle around town at odd hours and do other things.

Below is one way to smooth things out.

Freelancing income, arbitrary units, June 2008 to February 2009

I plotted my freelancing income for the last nine months as regular numbers and as a cumulative average. What's unsurprising is that wild fluctuations are far more likely to come at the start of the process, and the line gets progressively smoother, with even large changes having little effect.

Now halfway through March, which so far has been less busier than February, although I'm due 200 or so pages of a philosophy thesis [book?] from the UK this Friday, which is supposed to be finished by Monday. No doubt it'll be on Derrida and make no sense, whether well written or not. Accepting jobs like this makes me wish I hadn't eaten all my modafinil long ago, but I charge by the hour and it'll take up the slack of the last few days of doing nothing paid.

Still, halfway through March and the income is not where I'd like it to be, and because I'm relatively new to this game and waiting on general economic collapse there are small episodes of panic...but then plotting it out as a moving average makes it that much easier to relax. [That and the ton of work that came in today after this was written, not posted]

Looking at the figure and thinking back to the stoicism of the last post and whether this can be applied more widely. Wild fluctuations of feeling in youth, and then gradually less buffeted by life's ups and downs. One thing against this is that humans are not rational, and specifically not rational accountants of their own well-being. But then the theory of the hedonic treadmill would support the idea of something like a moving average for happiness (I think....my brain fails when it comes to real stretching).

Abstract from a related paper [pdf] with too many numbers for me to really enjoy

There is consent among psychologists and some economists that satisfaction from some events, like income and marriage, is adaptive. We propose a subtle but vital difference: happiness may itself be adaptive. First we present a model to explain the emergence of adaptive stimuli. We test our hypotheses running dynamic happiness regressions based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the British Household Panel Survey and the Swiss Household Panel. Surprisingly, the autoregressive component is positive and significant in most econometric models considered. We propose that the hedonic treadmill may be mixed with what we call the "scale treadmill".

Deconstructing the Hedonic Treadmill Perez, Ricardo and Bottan (2008)

Fun with zero sums

Photo by Ben McLeod

I don't have a job, but I work. Only back two days after the Chinese New Year break, but it certainly seems slower, and this could be, as everyone thinks, the recession kicking in and people cutting back.

It doesn't really bother me. I've seen this several times before. When times are good I work hard and save money. Then when times are bad I relax and spend money.

Of course, I write the above and save it, cycle out for exercise / lunch and drop off a paper at the university, find a stack waiting for me there and then come home and two more by email, plus a book on Kate Chopin. So much for the days of idling.

My original freelance schedule was getting up early and finishing by noon, and although this works it has a flaw, which is that Tainan is really a night time kind of place, and fading at midnight is no good. The bars open at 10pm and don't pick up until after eleven, then go on until four or five, and there are plenty of restaurants and food stalls open until dawn, when a new set opens up for the tai chi crowd.

So, starting this week I put myself on a different schedule, with the loose aim of sleeping at 4am and getting up at eleven. That way any time I go to bed before four is an early night, and as long as I start work at noon then all's right with the world.

The rules of the game

david bowie mugshot

Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chapter Six

I was looking for free language mp3s and ended up at audiouniv where there was nothing that really got my eye except The Four-Hour Week, which I remember hearing about when it came out, and then again at Casey Serin's page, and so I thought why not? Stick it on the mp3 player and ride the bicycle around town, expose myself to the self-help / get rich madness.

So I started listening to the book. The guy starts out with the mission statement that you don't have to be rich to live like the rich - you too can have time to pursue your bliss. But then how? Simple...you become rich. At that point the essential sleaziness begins to flow.

There are far more failed than successful entrepreneurs and artists, which is all cool if you're in it for the passion, but it kind of sucks to fail and fail again, even to fail better, if the process itself is no fun, just fixated on the goal of $ rather than the task in hand. It's now when we have to live, not in the past or future. The means become the end.

So I'm a lazy man, I want to relax without a large income, without the necessity of worldly success. A flexible schedule at a job you enjoy, with low / no stress. Spend less than you earn, exercise, eat right, have fun, pay less attention to what others do.

No matter how rich are and how much property you own, you end up with a private quarters where you get things done. Essentially an office with a bathroom, perhaps a kitchen, living room, library and so on either attached or part of the whole. You can live in a mansion or own a skyscraper, but in the end you'll essentially build a small apartment and do everything in that.

And never forget that Elvis had it all - looks, talent, fame, acclaim and wealth - and he died busted on a toilet just after 40.

"All the people that created traditions, that created countries, and created rules.All them fuckers are dead. Why don't you create your own world while you got the chance?"

Bill Hicks says this dressed as Elvis, here.

Iggy Pop, Manchester [U.K], October 1977, Bowie on keyboards and backing vocals

Related posts:
Deception, trickery, vanity, falsehood
The myth of 1,000 true fans

Bill Hicks on his worst gig ever [LSD, guns, knives]

Crash / burn / repeat

Casey Serin, foreground, with Christ Hippie, his volunteer assistant

Casey Serin's back. He's the 20-something guy who bought a bunch of houses with no $ down and had it all collapse last year, with the fun part being that he blogged about it and remained dementedly optimistic and faithful to his gurus and dreams of massive and almost immediate success.

One total collapse, divorce and disappearance later and he's back. He's living in a hotel, with two more weeks' money, and a 'business plan' that's focused on selling 19 pages a notes for an e-book about his experiences for $50 a copy. He's started doing a call-in show that becomes a podcast on completion, with the call-in parts better than the preamble [and show 2 better than show 1, the only two up so far]. The new site and MP3s are likely to disappear fairly soon, but for the while they offer some grim entertainment of why it pays to face reality.

Wikipedia

Health and frugality

FelipeArte

The simpler I can make things the better, and I think when I get truly old and my brain starts to melt it'll be a long time before anyone notices.

I was wondering if I should be worried at all about economic collapse, but can't seem to work up any concern. All I do is try and stay healthy [exercise / diet / rest / no stress] and live within my means. That's all I can do, and the rest is up to chance, the collapse of one critical state into another.

Tom the Dancing Bug [click pic for full story]

Frugality

Bill Burroughs & music: Words of Advice for Young People

In the long run, for most people, there's no choice - you earn less, you spend less. The question is whether you cushion the change by cutting back early, accustomed to the lower standard of living and having $$$ in reserve.

I see disaster looming and at the same time remain fairly stoic. I've been through bad things that lasted for years, so I know when I'm being lucky, and all the times I asked for trouble that never came along.

I step off the hedonic treadmill often, to keep a sense of wonder.

Material progress is not guaranteed, there are discontinuities and backslides, and countries become poor, just like people.

I see disaster looming, but in general, not specifically. For me this long and busy summer is almost done and I'll be free in 2.5 weeks, Yuki back in 2.5 days, and various good things set in motion. But I could lose everything in an instant on the road.

Shopping with your genitals

William Steig

About half way through a talk called Totalitarian Consumerism and the Death of Citizenship by Benjamin Barber [details and MP3 - look for the little speaker icon - at the link], and I'm sure it will develop better, but it starts from the well-worn premise that, in developed countries, all our needs are met and now the market has to construct essentially superfluous wants to keep things going, with Barber giving the example of the iPhone. This is an argument that only an intellectual could make, one who doesn't think, or doesn't want to give the impression of thinking, with their genitals.

We're primates, and our main want, after food and shelter, is for some good place in the hierarchy, leading to status / friendship / sex. That kind of thing. A flashy phone, the right pants, a new car - these things are cool, in certain circles, and lead to status / friendship / sex. It's true that the markers themselves are fairly arbitrary - this brand or that - but the underlying values that they represent, obtaining an object of scarcity, rationed either by an underground coolness quotient or the financial barriers to ownership, are genuine markers of social / sexual desirability. Rich guys and cool guys get to f*** more women and hotter women, if they want to, than the poor and uncool. Status counts, and even if you don't fall for the rules of this group [LV, Ferrari, etc], you'll fall for another [insert subculture fetish here], or another [ditto]. Such needs are not really manufactured, but are clamored for.

Obvious question: that accounts for men buying supposedly useless crap, but what about women? I'll be honest and not claim any detailed understanding of their status games, but have no doubt these are operating in some way, as they must do in all healthy folk of both sexes up to, say, 40 or so, the original life expectancy of the species, the age to have raised your own kids beyond sexual maturity.

But I'll finished the talk tomorrow, while washing up, and will no doubt recant all of the above.

Things fall apart

'Many of the people we are seeing borrowed money over the past couple of years simply because they could. I had a young semi-professional in last week who owns her home and had borrowed £25,000. When I asked her what she had borrowed the money for, she couldn't tell me.'

Epidemic of debt spreads to Britain's middle classes

I'm frugal to a fault, i.e. stingy. For me the fear of being destitute is perhaps more real than it should be, but I plan with the idea that everything may fall apart tomorrow and I'll have to flee / rebuild my life with little more than my passport, bank IDs, a set of clothes and my glasses.

I'll spend a little money that I've earned - the work's been done, it's in bank, but I'm not going to sell my future and buy things on credit. I don't have that kind of confidence, nor that kind of need for things.

But I'm lucky, I have cheap tastes and my wife is the same. We have no children and our cat is a low maintenance animal. So for me these choices are very easy, we get our thrills from our heads.

Stories about middle class people in debt amaze me. Spending to keep up with their peers, who are also in debt. Trying to buy happiness, which can be done, but you need to be very careful with the dose, as a tolerance is known.

My life is all about trying to find the weaknesses in my system and then constructing workarounds to exploit these to get the outcomes that I want, or rather that I need, and that I kid myself into wanting. I have so many weaknesses that there's a lot of potential for improvement, a lot of tweaking to be done, and one way is to keeping jumping on and off the hedonic treadmill.

A case in point, as I think about going almost full time with proofreading in the next year or so, is the understanding that teaching a class or two every day is probably necessary to ensure that I a) get dressed, b) talk to people, and c) don't start drinking before nightfall.

Related post: Taleb on f*** you money

Dig the new breed

The Guardian has an article on European middle-class 20-, 30-somethings waking up to reality - stagnating or declining living standards, and, although unspoken, the rise of other regions, primarily Asia. My main reaction on reading it was 'duh!' - that goooood thing of global competition for blue collar jobs is hitting the white collar types, and things are not as much fun any more. The bigger picture is that it can't be fixed, but the article doesn't go there, it just recites various stories of apparent woe from overeducated people who still manage to pay the rent, eat out, etc, but who worry that there's no steady path of improvement and prosperity ahead. The odd thing is, for students of the humanities - as many of them are - it oughtn't matter so much - the consolations of philosophy and all that. And why is a higher living standard than one's parents so essential, especially when those parents had it good? Extracts follow, full article here.

The kids learning to swim at the pool near Via Casilina, in a working-class suburb of Rome, could not ask for better qualified instructors. One is a literature graduate with a masters in communications from Brussels, while another, Antonio di Martino, is an aerospace engineer.
[...]
'Some of the pressure to graduate also slipped away when I saw one friend get his degree and then only earn €500 a month at an Italian space firm and another get €800 a month at the European Space Agency.'
[...]
On Friday night, Lorenzo, 35, was on a train heading to work a nightshift for a major American sales website's Berlin branch. He trained as a historian and a photographer. 'The pay is just about OK - €2,700 a month for a 40-hour week - but it is hardly the job I dreamed of doing,' he said.

With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, Nathalie, Lorenzo, Arias and Di Martino are among tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life who are now realising that the world has changed. The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences.
[...]
Freelance architect Emilio Tinoco Vertiz, 32, earns just €1,000 a month. 'Who needs architects when no one wants to build houses?' he said. In Spain people such as Emilio are known from their pay as the 'mileuristas' (thousand euro-ers). In France they are the 'babylosers' - a term coined by sociologist Louis Chauvel to contrast them with 'babyboomers'.
[...]
Only eight years ago, 62 per cent of Germans were in the middle-class bracket, according to a second study. Key markers of middle-class status - such as overseas holidays - are disappearing or becoming blurred. 'I haven't been away for two years,' said Aurel Thurn, 38, who works for an art gallery in Berlin and has top-level qualifications, 10 years' experience and speaks four languages fluently. 'I have enough money for my rent, my telephone and food. But that's it.' [Full article here]

Out here [Taiwan] most students still study science and engineering, with various forms of design about as flaky as things get. I'm not saying this is a good thing overall, just a good thing if you want to get a job related to your training. Not many folk studying philosophy, film or literature. In addition, engineers out here will work for less than €1,000 a month, and still be making good pay, and they'll work hard, knowing their job might be about to move to China. People live closer to the reality of things out here, there are fewer invisible or nameless forces.

Looking to the past and looking to future are both difficult and somewhat disinteresting to me - see the previous post. I used to do both far too much, and I always misremembered and / or dwelled on the past, filled the future with all kinds of nonsense. These days I can just about manage to look at what's happening now, and that's enough to fill a life.

Mishima in leather

At 16 Mishima receives a letter from his father:

I hear that some high and mighty writers speak of you as a genius, or precocious, or some kind of deviate, or just unpleasant. I think it's high time you took stock of yourself.

p43

"Most writers are perfectly normal in the head and just carry on like wild men; I behave normally but I'm sick inside." [Mishima in conversation, 1960s?]

p109

This morning I handed over the money for a new scooter, a Yamaha GTR FI 125, and almost at once had doubts. Had hoped to pay and get the paper work done fast, so I could ride into the hills and let the thrill counter any regret, but have to wait until Monday [now Sat] to pick it up.

Can't understand folk who get a thrill when spending money; unless it's other people's cash I've no interest in the sport.

Taleb on f*** you money

Nassim Taleb has a lot of money, while I don't, but I have enough, and no debt. He also has his one idea, which is a good one, enough for me to buy the first two iterations of the one book he has to write and ready to get the third when it comes out. This is how I feel about money.

I certainly do not buy the notion that money does not make you happy, counter to the literature on the hedonic treadmill. This idea stipulates that additional wealth leads to no long term gains owing to a reversion to a baseline. I agree with the reversion to a hedonic baseline. But if spending money does not make me happy, most certainly, having money stashed away, particularly f*** you money, makes me extremely happy, particularly compared to the dark years between the age of 20 and 25 when I was impoverished after having had an opulent childhood. There is something severely missing in the literature, the awareness of the idea best expressed in the old trader adage: the worst thing you could possibly do with money is spend it. Having no argumentative customers increases my life satisfaction. Not depending on other people’s subjective assessment increases my life satisfaction. Not being an inmate in some corporate structure increases my life satisfaction. Not doing some things increases my life satisfaction. Having the option to give everything away to go live as a hermit in the desert or as a social worker in Africa, increases my life satisfaction. Either nobody in these papers and papers tested for that, or he can’t get it published.

Ideally in an ideal situation you would live simply with a hidden stash somewhere that nobody knows about. Nobody hangs around with you because of your money; nobody laughs at your jokes because you are rich.