Salon Des Geeks

Current Topic is ‘Tolstoy’s Characters’:

http://readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/a-question-of-character/index.html?hp

Are we getting the best value for our time?

This is a question more typically asked about money. You want to expend money in places and situations that will produce the best value for you. Sometimes this manifests as comparison shopping, if you want to acquire a specific item. Sometimes it’s a matter of weighing questions such as “Should I buy that new gadget or put the money into my retirement fund?” You want to decide where the money is best spent.

But increasingly, I’ve been thinking about where my time is spent. Consider this thought experiment:

Alice works as a cashier at the local 7-11. She earns minimum wage for her trouble, which is currently $5.85 per hour. Her gross income per 40-hour workweek is $234.00.

Betty has collected a college degree or two and now commands a higher wage in her position as a phlebotomist with the Red Cross. The median rate for this position in California is $15.02. Betty therefore has a gross weekly income of $600.80.

Assume that Alice and Betty have the same life situations. To keep it simple, they both are single and childless; they live in the same city; Betty does not have any debt from her college studies left. Effectively, their base living costs are the same.

Betty actually has an interesting choice here:

1. Work 40 hours per week and enjoy the use of an extra $366.80 in disposable income.
2. Reduce her hours to 16 per week and enjoy the use of three extra days of “disposable time”.

Everyone I personally know has chosen option 1. Why? Inertia? Habit? Cultural norm? Why is it that the investment in degrees and credentials is most often seen as paying off in terms of dollars, not time?

It is so easy to let your base living costs creep upward to match whatever your salary currently is. But then you’re running and running but not getting anywhere in terms of a better living experience; you’re still working 40 hours a week and you’re still making ends meet at about the same level that you were.

Leaving grad school and getting a “real” job was one time that this really hit me. One year, I was subsisting on a microscopic annual income (just above minimum wage); the next year, my income had more than quintupled. Did I have 5x the financial needs? No. Grad school had forced me to keep my living expenses gratingly low, so I did. With the additional income, I began to live much more comfortably, and even save for what ultimately became the down payment for my house. But at some point — at this point — I’m starting to wonder: would I be willing to trade income for time? “Disposable time” would permit me to do volunteer work or travel or hike or make crafts or do anything I wanted that didn’t require that I be earning money. I’m starting to lean in this direction more and more strongly. After all, do I live to work? Or do I live to live?

I’d love to hear the Salon’s thoughts on this.

There are people in this world who don’t put too much thought into what they do for a living. If they make widgets, they don’t think about why the widgets are good or where the widgets are going later, or to whose enrichment the widgets get sold. They make the widgets, and then they go home. I desperately wish that I were one of those people.

The widgets that I make are Social Security Disability cases, and they are made by a machine so broken that it can only belong to the Federal Government. I normally wouldn’t bother you with something as mind-bogglingly dull as the Social Security Administration, but friends, I’m at the uncomfortable end of my rope, and I have to tell somebody what our government is doing to people who deserve to be treated much better. My current bout of depression began on Thursday, when I won a case in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now, you could say that it takes a certain kind of depressive personality to get depressed when one has just won a case – just gotten, in fact, a much better result for the client than she had any business to expect . But if you think for a moment about what depression really is, deep down, it’s nothing but the belief (correct or incorrect) that what you do doesn’t make a whit of difference, leading to the strong inclination to just stay in bed and not bother.

The reason why our Social Security Administration (for which your hard-earned dollars pay, in case you mind) is a perfect factory of depressed persons is that its decisions are almost completely arbitrary. Thursday’s case was an example. The claimant, whom I shall call Ms. Jones, is what we call, to use a term of art, “Not Disabled.” (more…)

“Penso che una vita per la musica sia una vita spesa bene.”
(I think a life for music would be a life well spent.)
-Luciano Pavarotti

I began this post a month ago when Luciano Pavarotti passed away at the age of 71, but to my great shame, wedding and work stress prevented me from concentrating long enough to write a proper tribute to a man who has added so much beauty and pleasure to the world. Musically, there is no way to write a proper tribute; the only proper tribute is to listen to the music that has earned him titles like “King of the High C’s,” and the Guiness world record for most curtain calls (165). (more…)

Hi all,
Iain, I don’t know if you know this guy (any other Salonniers go to Carnegie Mellon?), but I thought this was a very powerful speech. (I didn’t watch the full version, just the excerpt.) I kind of needed a reminder kick in the ass to carpe diem, and this provided it. Have tissues at hand.
Kim

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Gastroenterology/PancreaticDiseases/tb/6760

For your delectation, here’s a (big) snippet about flavors I sent a friend who’s just starting to cook. It’s a summary of the section on building flavor from Wayne Gisslen’s “Professional Cooking,” 6th edition. I find it to be a fascinating way to think about flavor: his heuristics are useful, but the part I find most exciting is his attempt to convey an almost literary view of culinary narrative. (Is it time to plug The Table Is Laid: The Oxford Anthology of South Asian Food Writing again? *grin*)

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