path: root/scratch.txt

Earlier this week I was driving to the store, lost in thoughts about how massive my debt had become over the last year when I ran a red light. I'm pretty sure I have never run a red light before and I *know* I have never run a red light without even noticing that there was a light, let alone that is was red. And this is on a street I drive down at least once a week.

Fortunately no one was coming from the other direction and there were no consequence beyond me being totally freaked out. 

I just pulled in the parking lot and sat there for a while in my car, watching the rain on the windshield and trying to figure out how I got here. Here. Deeply in consumer debt, no steady stream of income and living paycheck to paycheck which half of the time don't show up on time, sending me deeper into as I have to use credit card to fill the gap.

I've always been a frugal person. Or at least that's what I like to think. I managed to put together enough money to travel the world for a year once, so clearly I am capable of saving money. When I got back from that trip I discovered blogs like Get Rich Slowly, Simple Dollar and eventually the one that hit closest to my Thoreau-esque leanings, Early Retirement Extreme (since ERE is no longer active -- except as a forum -- nowadays I read Mr. Money Mustache). I started saving. Indeed when I lost my most regular client two years ago I had a $15,000 emergence fund to fall back on. I thought I was in pretty good shape.

Yet sitting there in the parking lot, realizing I was so absorbed in worrying about debt that I had run a red light I was forced to confront something -- the ideas I have about my financial situation do not match with my *actual* financial situation. I think I've know that for some time on some level, but there's knowing and there's *accepting*.

It's time to turn things around. So I started this blog as a kind of public accountability and perhaps as a way to help others who do not have a day job or steady paycheck, but still want to get of debt, retire early and enjoy financial independence. 


movies:

Kintaro Walks Japan -- amazing race guy walking across japan
Fire on the Mountain -- WWII mountaineer soldiers
Touching the Void
Man on Wire
The Devil and Daniel Johnston -- about the musician



Swan Swan Hummingbird Hurrah

Athens Georgia is the smell of stale beer and cigarette butts at 7AM on a Sunday morning. 

It's stumbling home from the 40 Watt, ears still ringing. It's the unannounced shows at the Georgia Theatre. It's the forays into the iron triangle for enhancements. It's the house parties with JB's Sausage truck parked out front.

It's the insane location of the dartboard in the old High Hat; it's the searing pain of hot caramel on your palm. It's the taste of blood in your mouth behind the 40 Watt on your worst of nights. 

It's the coffee shops and restaurants you worked in, the classes you skipped, the Periwicks you never bought, the beds you lay in wondering, the porches you smoked on thinking, the beer you drank dreaming of elsewhere. It's all things that were and never will be again forever.

Athens, GA for 15 years I have danced on your bars, fallen asleep in your alleys, floated down your rivers, swam in your lakes, walked under your trees. 

You are one of the last great places in Los Estados Unidos, but that is also your downfall. You are in Los Estados Unidos and I can no longer be.


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promote book:

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sub reddits
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hacker news

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"How we construct meaning is a matter of personal intentional choice." -- paraphrasing D.F.W.

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"As always, the more you know, the less you need. I think in many cases, it's easier just to accumulate more money than squeeze the last 20% out of a regular budget." - Jacob from ERE

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* How to Build Responsive Websites
* Why Being "Responsive" is more than just adapting to screen size
* How to Build Faster Websites with Progressive Enhancement
* New Workflows that Will Speed Up Your Development Times 
* Handling the real-world problems like advertising and images

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Places change the more time you spend in them. People change. The minutia you start to notice colors their faces a different shade, talking to them day after day begins to change how you see them. Even the smallest interactions, ordering food at the counter, buying coffee on a quiet morning, chatting with the waiter while you order. No one looks like they did the day you met them, when you weren't really paying attention to just another person behind a counter, another waiter come to take your order, another street food vendor you walk past, another guesthouse common room you hardly bother to notice. And then you do. You strike up a conversation, you suddenly notice someone. 

Even then though, your perception is limited; your understanding is wanting. And you can only see what you understand to exist. This is why people see UFOs and why we say that a place or a person "grows on you". Most of the time it's not them growing on us, it's our understanding of them deepening. 

gwe see every day in our lives are ever-changing. It's why no matter how much time you spend with someone, no matter how long you linger in a place you can never really 

Sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. 

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Gratitude binge, emailing and thanking people for things. Making my once, a key piece of software and so on. The purpose being two-fold: to express gratitude yes, but also to get over the fear of talking to people. The fear of reaching out, to push myself out of my comfort zone.

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Stay outside as much as possible. Remember when you were a kid and you'd stay out of the house as long as you could? Only come home when you heard your dad whistling and you knew it was time for dinner? That kind of enthusiasm for being outside

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Make detective gold story more scifi with AI agents that escaped from google around the same time that the pilot disappears after the third gulf war, GW3. This might be connected to the gold, as in the AI selected the pilot to find the gold and used him to hide it? but the AI would have access to online currencies so why the gold? maybe something other than gold. or maybe we just leave that, maybe it needs seed money, hard currency as opposed to bitcoin, which is otherwise the currency of choice--scene where she swaps her government issue dollars for bitcoin before the storm. Also a meditation on why government avatars always looked so cheap-- government didn't want to advertise ostentatious, it wanted to look broke because everyone expected it to be broke. In fact most citizens would have felt offended if the government wasn't broke, since the vast majority of its citizens were perpetually broke.

The treasure is something from a future war in the Middle East, or something that makes it possible to mint new bit coins? Or some digital currency. But it is lost somewhere around Greenland. A ship with the laptop sinks or something. The shipping lanes over the North Pole are new at this point (which is future from now, past from the story's present) and so the are a string of accidents before things get sorted and reliable routes are established. CEntral character goes looking for the sunken ship? Or instead of sinking it runs aground on one of the many Canadian islands up there toward the North Pole.

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The dog smells differently when it is sleeping.

For a long time after I got out of the hospital this singular thought occupied me. I consulted the web for an explanation but no one seemed to have noticed this phenomena previously. or if they had, they had not yet recorded it into the collective consciousness.

part of my prescribed therapy involved walks 

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Time is your raw material, money is a tool. Don't trade too much material just for some tools all without making something.

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You can assume that if content is loaded from a company's web server, they are tracking everything about the event.

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Jacob from ERE:

So this article essentially describes a liquidity/lack of savings problem which can be fixed with more savings. (Or a government bailout for those with Washington connections.)

A bigger risk for the middle class is hyperinflation which would eradicate those savings. In such a case it doesn't matter how much money one has (unless that money is in controlling interests). If one can't get things by spending money anymore because nobody will take it, it comes down to skills with actual value [in such an economy] such as growing food, keeping warm, fixing transportation, ... and doing so without buying anything. Few have these skills noawadays.

I think this point is being sorely missed by most (dare I say) "middle-class" and "upper middle-class" oriented financial planners/sites/blogs/... I find it scary that so many recommend "saving more money" as the solution to ALL problems. They'll never know what hit them.

http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/topic.php?id=2533&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EarlyRetirementExtremeForums+%28Early+Retirement+Extreme+Forums%29#post-34605

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Jacob from ere: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/topic.php?id=2204&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EarlyRetirementExtremeForums+%28Early+Retirement+Extreme+Forums%29#post-34359


For example, educationally speaking, when talking to other people with letters after their name (e.g. PhD, PE, CPA, ...), a degree becomes a joke (Doctor? So are you a real doctor or just a phd?). When talking to people with significantly less degrees, they will be impressed: "Wow, you're a scientist!"

It all comes down to what people value.

I'm sad to say that most people don't really value the freedom and independence ERE brings. They'll gladly sacrifice it for "comfort" which I understand has something to do with spending lots of money on stuff they never use(*).

(*) Someone seriously told me that she'd rather keep working if ERE meant she couldn't collect shoes.

I only really have one example with a solution...namely that friends and family used to believe we were struggling for money (just like them, supposedly). The solution was, for one month, to post all my investment transactions and dividend postings on facebook (family is big on facebook), e.g. "Today I bought $7000 worth of ...", "Just got my quarterly check from JNJ" ... that was a post a few times per week of some dividend income. Since that month, I've heard no comments whatsoever concerning our financial well being.

(Another way of fixing that problem is just to shoot for a million bucks, this being the social convention of what it takes.)

In terms of status, it varies incredibly depending on who you talk to.

Careerists value their job title (assistant vice presidential middle manager anyone?). People without money value money (as do people with a LOT of money). Teenagers are impressed by the number of concerts you've been to. Twenty-somethings are impressed by the number of countries, you've traveled to. Vigilant mothers by the number of children you have. Some sad people derive their personal worth from what their children or spouse does. Some derive it from size of their car or their residency.

And so on.

However, ERE will generally only be valued by people who value self-sufficiency and independence. There are not many of those.

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Another post in same thread:

There's a very good documentary on the subject by Alain de Botton:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKkdFSqAxV8

Wanting to be liked and sometimes admired for something is a very human thing and thus nothing to be ashamed of. We are a social animal after all and that's simply a part of it.

I think looking for status is a big part of what keeps consumerism going. We have learned that we get status by owning -or at least leasing- certain things (or having a job title that implies money, which then implies that you probably have all the status objects). Be it through ubiquitous ads or simply aspirational television where everyone is a doctor and lives in a large loft, some way or another we all drank the advertisers' Kool Aid.

I've just seen a talk by David Foster Wallace (This is water), where he at one point says that people choose to worship some deity or philosophical notion of morality or the eightfold path or whatever because these things don't consume you when you worship then. If you worship intelligence, you will always feel stupid. If you worship money, you will always feel poor. If you worship status, you will always feel inferior. If you worship beauty, you will always feel ugly. Simply because you can never get enough of whichever external object of worship you choose. I found there's a lot of wisdom in that.

The video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8

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Another children's book idea: a story about a bear that either, eats children and that makes all the other animals in the forest dislike him and he becomes lonely or he eats all the other animals and gets lonely. He goes to see a bearapist.

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Facebook has conflated friendship personness and opinion in a way that is really unwholesome. You are not your opinions and your friends are not their opinions. And that's what's wrong with it...

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Hmm, mining petroleum products out of trash dumps at the compound floating villages that sil calls home is sort of an extension of the current squatters on landfill existence of current tent camps in Latin America, credit to John Rodderick. And need to look up whether or not it's currently possible to melt plastic into petroleum... Also mining the trash from the pacific ocean -- that could be why Sil crosses over to the pacific and ends up agreeing to go all the way to India.

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The danger sisters -- twin sisters who's parent have disappeared, an accident with their time machine and they're stuck somewhere back in time, so the sisters take their own time machine and go to rescue them, adventures ensue.

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A series of children's books in HTML, optimized for the iPad with page flips etc. offline stage for those at pay.

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Then the series switches to young adult stories and then tenn novels and then a regular adult novel.

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Saying that your culture is unjust and you're going to change it is like
dropping a polar bear in the desert, watching it die and then arguing the
desert was unjust.

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