A universal rule
Oct. 2nd, 2013 11:58 amNever trust anyone who will not back what he says with their own money.
Always tell the truth. If not out of principle, then at least out of precaution. The day might come when being believed on your word might make the difference between success and failure, or between life and death.
TWO LESSONS FOR LIFE
Feb. 19th, 2011 12:39 pmOne: Never, ever, EVER undertake a large-scale job - especially for payment and for someone else - until you have made sure that your technical equipment is up to it.
Two: the worse your technical equipment, the more important that you pace yourself and use time to best purpose. DON'T work yourself into the ground trying to recover time lost by your malfunctioning apparatus, if that means that the next day you will be exhausted and out of focus.
Two: the worse your technical equipment, the more important that you pace yourself and use time to best purpose. DON'T work yourself into the ground trying to recover time lost by your malfunctioning apparatus, if that means that the next day you will be exhausted and out of focus.
Things I learned the hard way
Jun. 21st, 2008 09:23 pmThe way to save money and stay out of debt is not to look for the cheapest way to buy what you want. It is to set a household budget with a maximum daily expenditure limit, and never, but never, go above it. That budget must be very easily within your expected income – and by expected I mean certain – and be set with an eye to the minimum you need reasonably buy every week. Change it if you find it does not work, but never, for any reason, go above it. Big-ticket items are usually the least urgent to buy, and if there is anything you really need, you can usually afford to wait till you can buy it without ruining yourself.
Run a tidy household. You do not own – not really – anything that you cannot lay your hand on, immediately, at need. That means anything: money in a savings account, tools in a shed, books put away in an attic, even computer data saved on a DVD or memory stick whch ended up at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. Always arrange things so you can see them, because you cannot rely on your own memory to remember what you have and what you do not Better to have a cluttered and inelegant-looking house, but to be able to find anything you need when you need it. Two corollaries:
- Never buy anything you have no need for. Need, in household management, is a large concept; but it is not limitless. If you cannot see yourself using something frequently, and if you have not found yourself wishing you had it before you saw it, leave it on the shelf. Never mind how clever and tempting it is. Never mind that it is discounted, that it is in fashion, that it enters you for a competition for a flat in Benidorm. It always means spending money you will never have again (and most likely will regret spending in a few days), and taking up space that would otherwise be either uncluttered or used by something you really do need.
- Money that is invested or placed in a savings account counts, for all practical household purposes, as lost. You may count on its profit and on the final planned return of the capital in a certain amount of years, but you should never think of it as part of the daily household budget. Any groups or people who say that they can help you access invested money while it is still invested (e.g. those who claim that they can help you use the money invested in your house) are not your friends.
You have to consider your household budget as something quite separate from your savings and investment budget. Only until you are certain of the first should you even consider embarking in the second. That is, only until you have a decently safe idea of how you will pay for the roof over your head, the heating, electricity, food, clothes, cleaning and every other necessary everyday expense, should you consider setting aside any money for savings and investment.
However, a household budget is a flexible thing. If you have a good idea or an urgent need for investment, you will find that opportunities for permanently reducing your household budget will present themselves to you. Do not, however, endanger the roof over your head or the food on your table for the sake of a business idea that may not come off. Investments can and do fail.
The essence of both investment and borrowing is to remove a considerable amount of space for manoeuvre, of possible options and opportunities, from your future. Any time you borrow or invest or both, you are cutting out a slice of your possible future. Consider it well before you do either thing. Above all, neither borrow nor invest to your limit, nor even close. It is not true that only death and taxes are certain: there is a third certain thing – Murphy’s law. What can go wrong will, somewhere, somehow, sooner or later, go wrong. It may not involve you, but sooner or later it will. And if you have mortgaged enough of your future, you will not have the resources to meet it. Wiseacres mock at old guys who keep their money under the mattress, but the old guys have learned enough to know that under the mattress is sometimes the only place where you can find your money when you need it.
Of the two, however, investment is far better than borrowing – even where it IS borrowing. That is, the only kind of borrowing that makes sense is large-scale borrowing for big-ticket items such as a house or car; better still, for something that will help you make money, like a truck or a house to rent. What you are doing there is to commit a large part of your future work and effort to the possession of things without which that work or effort would not even be possible – a roof over your head, a place to work from, a means of transport. It is a reasonable exchange. No other form of borrowing is.
What that means is that borrowing is the nuclear option, not to be used until everything else is impossible. Do not be tempted to take a loan or buy on credit anything that you could buy outright with a few months’ planned savings, like a computer or a washing machine or a bicycle; not only will you find that it ends up costing you a lot more, but you are placing a marker on your future that will, at some point, prevent you from using money in a way that would then, at that point, make more sense. If you want anything that badly, you can afford to wait for it; it will take you less, or rather, it will take less out of you, in the long run.
Of course, this is not an absolute rule. It can happen – not often, but it can – that a sudden and desperate need for a new item arises – a computer, a wheelchair. If the need is really urgent and will not wait, then take any reasonable financing option available, and consider it an investment, in the same sense as borrowing for a home or car. Other than that, however, avoid borrowing.
And if there can be a reason to borrow to meet an urgent and unexpected need for a single item, there is absolutely no excuse to borrow to meet household expenses. Rather starve; it comes to the same thing, and you are not going to be in debt to anyone else at the end. Borrowing to pay for your daily expenses means, essentially, that you do not know where the money for your most desperately needed expenditure is to come from. That is, you are for all practical purposes without reliable sources of money. Do you see why I say that to borrow money to meet ordinary expenses is essentially the same as to be starving? It IS starvation – date briefly deferred, and with the added humiliation of debt on top. You should have thought of that months before, when you made your spending plans and set your budget for the near future.
At the heart of this lies an immensely important norm: NEVER LIE TO YOURSELF. With the possible exception of sexual desire, there is no more fertile ground for self-deception than money affairs. To take one instance: I have said, above, that it is legitimate to take a loan to meet an urgent and unexpected need for a piece of equipment such as a computer. However, it is entirely too easy to deceive oneself as to the urgency of the need. If you really do not need that computer TOMORROW, you can afford to wait for it. This can be painful: the children will want the toy that everyone else has, the family will expect the holiday abroad that all their friends brag about. But that is neither an urgent nor an inevitable need.
It can be even more painful when setting your budget. I said that borrowing to meet household expenses is ony starvation with the delightful extra of humiliation; but when you are setting a budget, those options are far in the future, whereas that of facing up to the fact that income does not match needs is present and agonizing. Poverty is an ugly fact which people tend not to want to look at.
And yet they should. A fact once accepted, and however ugly, is an asset. It is something on which you can build. As I see that in so much time I will run out of money, what should I do? Can I find an extra job to pay for the excess expenditure? Do I really need the expenditure? Are there items that are not essential, that I can do without? Would it be possible to find a cheaper lodging, and if so, how much time do I have to find it? (And to prepare for the inevitably expensive and tiring move?) If these questions are met in time, it is possible to get out even from very ugly situations.
Run a tidy household. You do not own – not really – anything that you cannot lay your hand on, immediately, at need. That means anything: money in a savings account, tools in a shed, books put away in an attic, even computer data saved on a DVD or memory stick whch ended up at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. Always arrange things so you can see them, because you cannot rely on your own memory to remember what you have and what you do not Better to have a cluttered and inelegant-looking house, but to be able to find anything you need when you need it. Two corollaries:
- Never buy anything you have no need for. Need, in household management, is a large concept; but it is not limitless. If you cannot see yourself using something frequently, and if you have not found yourself wishing you had it before you saw it, leave it on the shelf. Never mind how clever and tempting it is. Never mind that it is discounted, that it is in fashion, that it enters you for a competition for a flat in Benidorm. It always means spending money you will never have again (and most likely will regret spending in a few days), and taking up space that would otherwise be either uncluttered or used by something you really do need.
- Money that is invested or placed in a savings account counts, for all practical household purposes, as lost. You may count on its profit and on the final planned return of the capital in a certain amount of years, but you should never think of it as part of the daily household budget. Any groups or people who say that they can help you access invested money while it is still invested (e.g. those who claim that they can help you use the money invested in your house) are not your friends.
You have to consider your household budget as something quite separate from your savings and investment budget. Only until you are certain of the first should you even consider embarking in the second. That is, only until you have a decently safe idea of how you will pay for the roof over your head, the heating, electricity, food, clothes, cleaning and every other necessary everyday expense, should you consider setting aside any money for savings and investment.
However, a household budget is a flexible thing. If you have a good idea or an urgent need for investment, you will find that opportunities for permanently reducing your household budget will present themselves to you. Do not, however, endanger the roof over your head or the food on your table for the sake of a business idea that may not come off. Investments can and do fail.
The essence of both investment and borrowing is to remove a considerable amount of space for manoeuvre, of possible options and opportunities, from your future. Any time you borrow or invest or both, you are cutting out a slice of your possible future. Consider it well before you do either thing. Above all, neither borrow nor invest to your limit, nor even close. It is not true that only death and taxes are certain: there is a third certain thing – Murphy’s law. What can go wrong will, somewhere, somehow, sooner or later, go wrong. It may not involve you, but sooner or later it will. And if you have mortgaged enough of your future, you will not have the resources to meet it. Wiseacres mock at old guys who keep their money under the mattress, but the old guys have learned enough to know that under the mattress is sometimes the only place where you can find your money when you need it.
Of the two, however, investment is far better than borrowing – even where it IS borrowing. That is, the only kind of borrowing that makes sense is large-scale borrowing for big-ticket items such as a house or car; better still, for something that will help you make money, like a truck or a house to rent. What you are doing there is to commit a large part of your future work and effort to the possession of things without which that work or effort would not even be possible – a roof over your head, a place to work from, a means of transport. It is a reasonable exchange. No other form of borrowing is.
What that means is that borrowing is the nuclear option, not to be used until everything else is impossible. Do not be tempted to take a loan or buy on credit anything that you could buy outright with a few months’ planned savings, like a computer or a washing machine or a bicycle; not only will you find that it ends up costing you a lot more, but you are placing a marker on your future that will, at some point, prevent you from using money in a way that would then, at that point, make more sense. If you want anything that badly, you can afford to wait for it; it will take you less, or rather, it will take less out of you, in the long run.
Of course, this is not an absolute rule. It can happen – not often, but it can – that a sudden and desperate need for a new item arises – a computer, a wheelchair. If the need is really urgent and will not wait, then take any reasonable financing option available, and consider it an investment, in the same sense as borrowing for a home or car. Other than that, however, avoid borrowing.
And if there can be a reason to borrow to meet an urgent and unexpected need for a single item, there is absolutely no excuse to borrow to meet household expenses. Rather starve; it comes to the same thing, and you are not going to be in debt to anyone else at the end. Borrowing to pay for your daily expenses means, essentially, that you do not know where the money for your most desperately needed expenditure is to come from. That is, you are for all practical purposes without reliable sources of money. Do you see why I say that to borrow money to meet ordinary expenses is essentially the same as to be starving? It IS starvation – date briefly deferred, and with the added humiliation of debt on top. You should have thought of that months before, when you made your spending plans and set your budget for the near future.
At the heart of this lies an immensely important norm: NEVER LIE TO YOURSELF. With the possible exception of sexual desire, there is no more fertile ground for self-deception than money affairs. To take one instance: I have said, above, that it is legitimate to take a loan to meet an urgent and unexpected need for a piece of equipment such as a computer. However, it is entirely too easy to deceive oneself as to the urgency of the need. If you really do not need that computer TOMORROW, you can afford to wait for it. This can be painful: the children will want the toy that everyone else has, the family will expect the holiday abroad that all their friends brag about. But that is neither an urgent nor an inevitable need.
It can be even more painful when setting your budget. I said that borrowing to meet household expenses is ony starvation with the delightful extra of humiliation; but when you are setting a budget, those options are far in the future, whereas that of facing up to the fact that income does not match needs is present and agonizing. Poverty is an ugly fact which people tend not to want to look at.
And yet they should. A fact once accepted, and however ugly, is an asset. It is something on which you can build. As I see that in so much time I will run out of money, what should I do? Can I find an extra job to pay for the excess expenditure? Do I really need the expenditure? Are there items that are not essential, that I can do without? Would it be possible to find a cheaper lodging, and if so, how much time do I have to find it? (And to prepare for the inevitably expensive and tiring move?) If these questions are met in time, it is possible to get out even from very ugly situations.
A wonderful story
May. 1st, 2008 03:08 pmSome sports have, above and beyond the matter of winning or losing, certain and special kinds of achievement which can be quite unique; never, perhaps, to be held even by confirmed champions, and yet accessible, with a little bit of luck, to any player. They are lifetime achievements, whom the player is allowed - indeed, expected - to dine out on and bore his/her friends silly for the rest of his/her life: my hole-in-one, the hundred-pound salmon I landed, the time I took a world champion ten rounds and lost on points.
Not all sports have such achievements, which is why I am explaining the point. Now in baseball (and softball, which is its female version), the special achievement is the home run: to strike the ball so high and so hard that, by the time the opponents have recovered it, you have had the time to touch all three bases and score a full point (a run). If you are feeling particularly showy, you can do it at a canter or a walk, just to underline your confidence. Every child who knows baseball dreams of a home run.
A day or two ago, the Central Washington University ("Wildcats") softball team was playing Western Oregon University in Ellensburg, Wash., for a local league. The Wildcats were one game behind their opponents, with a chance to reach the playoffs. Western won the first game 8-1, extending its winning streak to 10 games. The Wildcats desperately needed the second game.
Western Oregon's 5-foot-2-inch right fielder came up to bat with two runners on base in the second inning. Sara Tucholsky's game was off to a rough start. A group of about eight guys sitting behind the right field fence had been heckling her. She tried to concentrate and ignore them. She took strike one. And then the senior did something she had never done before -- even in batting practice: shesmashed the next pitch over the center field fence for an apparent home run. With two players already on base, that was worth three points and an almost certain victory - not to mention shattering the Wildcats' hopes.
She started running. As she was about to touch first base, she looked up to watch the ball clear the fence and missed touching it with her foot (as the rules require). Six feet past the bag, she stopped abruptly to return and touch it. But something gave in her right knee, and she collapsed.
"I was in a lot of pain," she told the local newspaper. "Our first-base coach was telling me I had to crawl back to first base. 'I can't touch you,' she said, 'or you'll be out. I can't help you.' "
Tucholsky, to the horror of teammates and spectators, crawled through the dirt and the pain back to first.
Western coach Pam Knox rushed onto the field and talked to the umpires near the pitcher's mound. The umpires said Knox could place a substitute runner at first. Tucholsky would be credited with a single and two RBIs (points scored by others on her hit), but her home run would be erased.
At that point, Mallory Holtman stepped in. Mallory Holtman is the Wildcat's star player, and as a rule opponents are not happy when they see her. However, what she had to say stopped their breath: could they, the Wildcats, the opponents, help Tucholsky complete her home run?
The umpires scratched their heads and decided that they could think of no rule against it. And so began one of the most beautiful scenes in the history of sports. Mallory Holtman, the Wilcats' star, made a chairlift together with teammate Liz Wallace, picked up Tucholsky, and resumed the home-run walk, pausing at each base to allow Tucholsky to touch the bag with her uninjured leg.
"We started laughing when we touched second base," Holtman said. "I said, 'I wonder what this must look like to other people.' "
Holtman got her answer when they arrived at home plate. She looked up and saw the entire Western Oregon team in tears.
"My whole team was crying," Tucholsky said. "Everybody in the stands was crying. My coach was crying. It touched a lot of people."
Even the hecklers in right field quieted for a half-inning before resuming their tirade at the outfielder who replaced Tucholsky.
Western Oregon won 4-2, putting an end to Central Washington's playoff hopes. But as far as any one of us who values certain things is concerned, Central Washington had won a lot more than playoffs. And I hope that any time any of us feel cynical or angry at the human race, we can stop and remember two girls carrying another, in a different colour uniform, so that she could be certified the score she had deserved.
Not all sports have such achievements, which is why I am explaining the point. Now in baseball (and softball, which is its female version), the special achievement is the home run: to strike the ball so high and so hard that, by the time the opponents have recovered it, you have had the time to touch all three bases and score a full point (a run). If you are feeling particularly showy, you can do it at a canter or a walk, just to underline your confidence. Every child who knows baseball dreams of a home run.
A day or two ago, the Central Washington University ("Wildcats") softball team was playing Western Oregon University in Ellensburg, Wash., for a local league. The Wildcats were one game behind their opponents, with a chance to reach the playoffs. Western won the first game 8-1, extending its winning streak to 10 games. The Wildcats desperately needed the second game.
Western Oregon's 5-foot-2-inch right fielder came up to bat with two runners on base in the second inning. Sara Tucholsky's game was off to a rough start. A group of about eight guys sitting behind the right field fence had been heckling her. She tried to concentrate and ignore them. She took strike one. And then the senior did something she had never done before -- even in batting practice: shesmashed the next pitch over the center field fence for an apparent home run. With two players already on base, that was worth three points and an almost certain victory - not to mention shattering the Wildcats' hopes.
She started running. As she was about to touch first base, she looked up to watch the ball clear the fence and missed touching it with her foot (as the rules require). Six feet past the bag, she stopped abruptly to return and touch it. But something gave in her right knee, and she collapsed.
"I was in a lot of pain," she told the local newspaper. "Our first-base coach was telling me I had to crawl back to first base. 'I can't touch you,' she said, 'or you'll be out. I can't help you.' "
Tucholsky, to the horror of teammates and spectators, crawled through the dirt and the pain back to first.
Western coach Pam Knox rushed onto the field and talked to the umpires near the pitcher's mound. The umpires said Knox could place a substitute runner at first. Tucholsky would be credited with a single and two RBIs (points scored by others on her hit), but her home run would be erased.
At that point, Mallory Holtman stepped in. Mallory Holtman is the Wildcat's star player, and as a rule opponents are not happy when they see her. However, what she had to say stopped their breath: could they, the Wildcats, the opponents, help Tucholsky complete her home run?
The umpires scratched their heads and decided that they could think of no rule against it. And so began one of the most beautiful scenes in the history of sports. Mallory Holtman, the Wilcats' star, made a chairlift together with teammate Liz Wallace, picked up Tucholsky, and resumed the home-run walk, pausing at each base to allow Tucholsky to touch the bag with her uninjured leg.
"We started laughing when we touched second base," Holtman said. "I said, 'I wonder what this must look like to other people.' "
Holtman got her answer when they arrived at home plate. She looked up and saw the entire Western Oregon team in tears.
"My whole team was crying," Tucholsky said. "Everybody in the stands was crying. My coach was crying. It touched a lot of people."
Even the hecklers in right field quieted for a half-inning before resuming their tirade at the outfielder who replaced Tucholsky.
Western Oregon won 4-2, putting an end to Central Washington's playoff hopes. But as far as any one of us who values certain things is concerned, Central Washington had won a lot more than playoffs. And I hope that any time any of us feel cynical or angry at the human race, we can stop and remember two girls carrying another, in a different colour uniform, so that she could be certified the score she had deserved.
A random thought
Apr. 12th, 2007 08:47 amAt one end of life, ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avus, who is old enough to be my father, works like a demon to help rehabilitate his wife, who has suffered a terrible accident, and is rewarded by a slow but constant improvement, till he is certain that the woman he married is back. At the other, ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
photosynthesis, who is young enough to be my daughter, and who has a had a life in which absolutely nothing ever came easy, receives a proposal from the man she loves in the most awe-inspiring and romantic circumstances imaginable - at the altar rails on the day of the Resurrection of Our Lord. Now tell me why these two events should move me so much.
Well, there are two possible interpretations. One is that, having myself completely and permanently failed to find a companion, I tend to overestimate the importance of marriage. The other is that marriage, the union of a man and a woman, really is the central event in life, and that moments that bring out its tremendous and heroic aspects - commitment for life and ceremonial grandeur - have the emotional power of all the things that are noble and just and true.
avus, who is old enough to be my father, works like a demon to help rehabilitate his wife, who has suffered a terrible accident, and is rewarded by a slow but constant improvement, till he is certain that the woman he married is back. At the other, photosynthesis, who is young enough to be my daughter, and who has a had a life in which absolutely nothing ever came easy, receives a proposal from the man she loves in the most awe-inspiring and romantic circumstances imaginable - at the altar rails on the day of the Resurrection of Our Lord. Now tell me why these two events should move me so much.Well, there are two possible interpretations. One is that, having myself completely and permanently failed to find a companion, I tend to overestimate the importance of marriage. The other is that marriage, the union of a man and a woman, really is the central event in life, and that moments that bring out its tremendous and heroic aspects - commitment for life and ceremonial grandeur - have the emotional power of all the things that are noble and just and true.
