Basuragomi's journal

[basuragomi]

February 2021 update



I passed a minor milestone this month: Net worth barely surpassed lifetime employment income. Over unity and onwards into runaway criticality!

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Replacement dish gloves unexpectedly failed, but I managed to repair them with a bicycle innertube patch. Hurray!
- Broke a dish (part of a set I got for free), so replaced with some nice locally-made artisanal bowls bought directly from the potter. Not frugal at all but they really are instant classics. I want everything I have to be both useful and unique.
- Repaired my broken slip-on crampons with some wire which came in handy after the big winter storms. They broke in a new and exciting spot instead of the repaired bit, so I'll call that a success.
- Filling up registered accounts for the year. I've been doing Norbert's Gambit for a few years now and it is the cheapest way to convert lots of currency. Highly recommended for anyone (yield chasers?) converting between CAD/USD.

ERE failures
- Spending too much on food, eating too much and having to exercise more as a result. Wasteful all around. I'm going to blame new year leftovers for that.

Things considered
- The problem with my to-do list was that most items called for an abundance of time spent with idle hands in front of the computer. I've been trying to make my screen time more intentional so those items fell into the abyss. Realizing this let me abandon the truly hopeless projects.

Things to consider
- Seeing all the meltdowns/self-cancellations on this forum was more than a little strange. Not a coincidence that it was some of the most prolific posters. Maybe the way to go is not to turn your habits into a mounting liability but find some way to silo or benefit from discovery - i.e. choosing between presenting yourself anonymously vs. virtuously. Kids these days keep a separate public social media account and a private one held in a circle of trust. Maybe that's the strategy.

[Jiimmy]

That's a beautiful income/expense chart you have! And congrats on NW exceeding earned income, that's huge.

[Stasher]

Thanks for commenting over on my journal so I could find your detailed and interesting perspective from the other side of Canada You mentioned going car free here and on my journal so I thought I would quickly drop this quick you tube link to Levi Hildebrand who lives down in Victoria here on the island. He has a great theme for his Vlog and really enjoy the content he creates. Anyhow, he went a year without owning a vehicle and did a video on what it was like for his wife and him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o95fsV8IKvQ

My best-case guess would be a return to multigenerational housing as families get tied more and more to immutable property. Too expensive to buy, too precious to sell, handed down by inheritance like a tiny fiefdom. By some accounts this is already happening.

This is what I am thinking for us. We moved to the island in 2013 and got out place before the housing market went crazy, 1 block from the ocean and 2-4 block walk to ever single service a person could need in our small seaside village. House has enough room for my adult children and my wife to comfortably live here forever. The reason I say forever is because of what I quote from you. We bought for $330,000 and could easily sell for $550-700,000 (I picked such a wide range as houses are going multiple offers over ask with no conditions). We love the area so buying something smaller would be silly overpriced as well and thus it is too precious to sell for us.

[basuragomi]

@Jiimmy: Thanks, I love data visualizations if it isn't obvious! I have a few more sophisticated ones but they are probably too personally identifying to release right now.

@Stasher: My wife watches quite a bit of Hildebrand! She complains that he sold out with all the product reviews haha. Being car-free in a car-centric society definitely requires some deliberate lifestyle design. I tried to stop complaining about housing prices in this journal since I'm just resigned to it now - if my choice was between buying property or being unhoused, I would likely try to move back in with family or leave the country entirely. The price of a 400 sqft condo would buy a very nice chateau in Provence. Probably one with a cheese cave.

[basuragomi]

March 2021 update



This rise does not feel sustainable.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Learned how to make ramen noodles by hand! Surprisingly easy. I don't eat much pasta but I do eat oodles of noodles, so this is a welcome skill. I used a pizza cutter and straightedge to make cutting long, thin, even noodles a breeze.



- Germinated spinach and basil to start a small garden. Next step is a bucket worm compost system. I'm planning on using my neighbour's 5-gallon kitty litter buckets.
- Went screen-free almost every weekend and got a ton of projects done.

ERE failures
- Bought a multimeter. Probably could have found a nice used one for cheap instead, as there are plenty of greybeards around here with dozens of the things, but I used the pandemic as an excuse to be lazy.
- Spent too little time on cardio, probably because I spent too much time working. It's so easy to fall into the vicious cycle of no exercise->poor sleep->low energy->no exercise. It's finally warm and dry enough to make running pleasant so hopefully I can reverse this.

Things considered
- Separate post to follow inspired by all the recent forums drama.

Things to consider
- My phone plan went up in price. I kept it around for so long since I have unlimited data and it was easy to justify keeping it on that basis. But after I moved I got a fixed internet connection and never used more than a fraction of the limit. Time to change it up.

[basuragomi]

I've been thinking about how online forums can manage discussion of polarizing topics without driving the forum towards a monoculture as commonly happens. Political purges can lead to death spirals since forums depend on traffic to drive discussion, and reducing both population and the range of permissible discourse hurts on both fronts. Some might say that a mature adult willingly debating online probably should be able to handle divergent opinions, but experience seems to suggest that ability is strictly limited.

I was wondering what drove people to purge themselves from forums in general. I think a large part of living in the bottom part of a hierarchy is learning to express multiple identities and shifting between them as is advantageous for a particular situation - e.g. code switching to signal social status. I think inhabiting multiple identities gives resilience against social aggression since one can switch to the most defensible identity, kind of like a motte-and-bailey approach. There's probably some parallel with the Kegan level concept here.

If someone instead presents holistically, then any social attack would necessarily be against them as a whole. As a result, being successfully attacked along even a single axis would set them firmly in the out-group. E.g. cancellation for displaying out-group opinions unrelated to whatever topic is at hand. Though fairly authentic and easy, presenting a single unified identity is not a very resilient approach. On the internet you can easily silo your identities, so mandating that is probably a good starting point.

I started by assuming two axioms:

1) People want to spend the majority of their time/effort in safe spaces, even if they sometimes seek confrontation.
2) People feel safe when their opinion largely coincides with other safe space occupants.

So how can an online forum attract people, make them feel like they are accepted by the tribe, but keep challenging people with some diversity of opinion? I propose a set of systems:

A: Persistent users but anonymous posting. This would prevent people from being identified as from being the wrong tribe. Other forums have drama follow users around every topic and being anonymous would mostly prevent that. Having persistent users enables the other elements.

B: User-sourced classification. Upvotes and downvotes. This would not be visible nor used to grade content, but instead the user would be analyzed with respect to who they approve/disapprove of.

C: Clustering algorithm. The idea is that with enough interactions, mutual upvotes and mutual downvotes can be aggregated to determine overall correlation and anti-correlation between users - i.e. who is a tribe member and who are the relative outsiders. I assume that a tribe of users all share roughly the same opinions on the same topics, so clustering by topic isn't strictly necessary.

D: Tribal ranks. With ranked correlations, people can be ranked within the tribe which would presumably correspond to how tribe-conformist their opinions are. Ranking from outside the tribe would determine how extreme they appear to the other tribes, separating the dilletantes from the devotees.

E: Gatekeeping. One tribe's most extreme members can now be mostly hidden from discussion with other tribes and only the more moderate members exposed - i.e. those most likely within the other tribes' Overton window. The user can feel like they are usually staying within the tribal bubble but are constantly tested with divergent opinions. If their opinion shifts over time, then their tribe classification would follow.

Since this system would rely so much on voting, posts would probably have to be gated behind voting - something like being forced to vote by e.g. being presented with only one post at a time, and being forced to vote by swiping left or right to see each subsequent post.

It's blatant social engineering, but with allowance for much more fine-grained bubble enforcement. I'll file this away into the future projects folder.

[basuragomi]

Small hacks 3

Food packaging edition, since it's basically the only stuff we're buying these days.

Squirrel-proof planters, made from two yogurt tubs, a garlic bag and potato bag thread. Version two (not pictured) drops the centre ring and instead adds longitudinal bends to the support ribs for strength. These can be extended arbitrarily high with more tubs.



I couldn't find a hat with a very broad brim (broader than Tilley hats) that is light and fits me. Normal sun hats are made from a continuous braid and sewn together which makes them quite floppy over a certain size. So I wove a corn husk sun hat. Made from corn husk and rice bag thread. It's kind of rough due to not knowing what I was doing, but I can repair and upgrade it with the corn harvest every summer - not coincidentally when it's mostly likely to need repairs. I swear my basketry is normally way nicer looking.



I saw people 3d-printing earsavers and thought it was pretty silly to 3d print a 2d object. So I made my own from yogurt tubs. I've got a big head so these let me wear a mask comfortably for longer than five minutes. They're worn white side out.



Cake turner. I didn't want to pay $30 for a half-assed bearing on a big plastic stand that took up ridiculous amounts of space. So I used two dairy product tub bottoms as races and added mung beans in between to act as ball bearings. Pearl barley would probably work better. The centres of the races do not touch, making it a true thrust bearing. It works really well and makes nice cakes!



I learned how to convert video to GIF:

[Alphaville]

hahaha! you're on a roll... exemplary ingenuity, no kiddin'. much respect.

[ertyu]

awesome. all inventions are great my favorite is the hat. very cool

[basuragomi]

April 2021 update



My non-essential expenses have jumped up a lot: I have started donating about 30% of my income to charity. It was a lot easier than I expected, emotionally, to send off that much money. While I still work full-time, I plan to gradually ramp this up until I hit 100%.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Started a worm compost bucket. I rescued rain-stranded worms off the sidewalk and stuck them in with a bunch of food scraps and shredded packaging. They seem to be still alive and wriggling after about a month so far.
- Repaired all sorts of things as part of spring cleaning.
- In honour of @Bigato, tried his spread of miso mixed with tahini. It is not really tasty...
- I've fully stopped worrying about withdrawal rates. I used to check sites like FIREcalc and FIcalc.app somewhat obsessively, but I haven't in a year.

ERE failures
- Donating to charity anonymously. I am worried about getting targeted as this level would put someone in the sub-1% of donors and get their address/contact info sold widely. However, the most web-of-goals compliant way would be to use donation as a way to build social capital. I think I would need to achieve an order of magnitude greater wealth to be able to move in that world, and that's not an appealing prospect.

Things considered
- Switched my phone plan and saved a few bucks. It was ridiculously easy and took all of 5 minutes online. I should've done this two years ago!

Things to consider
- Trying out some level of immersion for language learning. Seems like a recipe to burn out quickly, but with the potential for very rapid progress. As long as the burnout phase is short enough it could work?

[basuragomi]

May 2021 update



NW just eased over $700k. Big jump in essential expenses due to a landlord fuckup. Next month should be much lower to compensate, but this is the lowest savings rate (~20%) I've had in years.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Made my own tofu! Also baked a cake (chocolate mousse) for the first time ever.
- We've gone 6 weeks without buying any groceries at all, prompted by the massive COVID caseload here but still an accomplishment. Beansprouts were my best friends here.
- Patched a few flat tires on the bikes. I figure the more patches, the tougher they get. Tubes are very hard to get right now too. My road bike rear tire has about 5 patches on it now. If you're wondering, a 24x1.75 tube will fit a 24x1-3/8 tire with some trepidation.
- I wanted to listen to my music collection (using my preferred player) anywhere around my place. Someone is probably screaming "get Bluetooth headphones you idiot!" but I've yet to find one that isn't crap and has swappable batteries. So instead I set up my computer to broadcast a local audio stream that I can pick up and control with a smartphone. My stack is Quod Libet (music player/database with MPD control plug-in enabled) -> PulseAudio (Linux audio server) -> DarkIce (pipe to IceCast) -> IceCast (stream broadcast) -> Local network -> VLC/Firefox on Android. It works!

ERE failures
- Wasted food. I keep a spreadsheet on our pantry with all the canned food expiry dates but somehow wrote down the wrong year on a can. Never seen chickpea jelly before.

Things considered
- Switched machine and browser language to French. It's been helpful, I've learned a lot of new vocabulary mostly from reading Wikipedia. My main stumbling block is actually speaking/composition at this point, but I'm not sure how I can adjust things to increase immersion here beyond deliberate practice.

Things to consider
- There's been a lot of talk about inflation, but it seems like any ability to generate future income will strongly diminish risks. I've hedged my rent with an equivalent amount of REITs and have few other fixed costs. Am I wrong in thinking that any ERE-er is mostly immune here?
- There was some discussion on the forum about how charitable giving does not address second- or third-order causes or effects. I think that charitable giving has first-order impacts on first-order issues, so is highly effective per unit effort relative to an indirect approach with orders of magnitude smaller impact. This got me thinking - how much would it cost to lobby politicians for more charitable government policy instead? There's a dilemma here, where the more voter support a policy would have, the less money you would need to get it implemented and sustained. However, the more in line you are with the voters, presumably the less charitable you are being as it's by definition apart from mainstream behaviour. Is charitable giving therefore condemned to always be fringe behaviour or unworkable on a mass scale? Lots to think about.

[basuragomi]

All the talk about WL7,8,9,n is really confusing, so here's a guide to High Wheaton Levels for Dummies like me.

Level 5: You don't buy shit you don't need.
Level 6: You've started eating the squirrels in your garden. Your wardrobe is half pelts and half hemp.
Level 7: Some people do sudoku puzzles at breakfast. You hash bitcoin by hand. And your breakfast is pinecones.
Level 8: You've started photosynthesizing, but that's okay: now you can distill your sweat into maple syrup.
Level 9: You now get all your energy from nuclear fusion, performed by carefully squeezing your hands together. It'll still be 20 years before ITER manages to send you a plane ticket.
Level 10: Buddha directly reincarnates your past lives onto your dinner plate. Talk about self-sufficiency!

[mountainFrugal]

Level 8: You've started photosynthesizing, but that's okay: now you can distill your sweat into maple syrup.

Brilliant! Not sure what level I am at, but 8 sounds amazing. Can I use your levels for an illustration?

[C40]

I am a big fan of your Income/Expenses chart. It shows a lot of data clearly

[basuragomi]

Thanks @mountainFrugal and @C40. I don't respond too quickly in this thread since I don't want to bump it without content but rest assured I appreciate the comments!

[basuragomi]

June 2021 update



ERE-type things I have been doing
- I've been focused on combating some addicting habits with success (this has really been my theme for the last few years). Of all the things I've quit or tried to quit, I will say that sugar was by far the most difficult.
- I had a workout shirt that wore through where the barbell sits. It's a badge of pride to have worn the thing out, so I patched it with a more worn-out workout shirt:

- Bubbles! I've learned a lot this season. I've been designing a large bubble machine too. Looks like people are slowly becoming more aware of how environmentally damaging and pointless mass balloon releases are, maybe there's a business opportunity here.

- Harvested some garden plants. I never knew spinach tasted that much better when super fresh.


ERE failures
- Worm compost was a complete failure. I didn't pay enough attention to it, set it up improperly, and it wasn't big enough in the first place. Not compatible with my current living configuration.

Things considered
- If you had to rank the following actions from most charitable to least charitable, how would you do it? It's an interesting exercise.
- Donating to charity (anonymously)
- Donating to charity (publicly or for a tax receipt)
- Volunteering for a charitable organization
- Working an unpaid internship
- Giving someone free requested advice
- Giving someone unsolicited advice
- Giving someone unsolicited fashion advice
- Adopting a kid (related to you)
- Adopting a kid (not related to you)
- Feeding your children/family
- Smiling at someone
- Buying food for yourself
- Donating to a non-profit you run
- Donating to a charity that is a hobby organization you participate in (like a church or sailing club)
- Donating to a politician
- Donating to a violent terrorist group
- Feeding a feral cat colony or other invasive species
- Feeding native wildlife
- Donating excess clothing as part of decluttering
- Donating excess food because it will soon expire
- Giving someone recreational drugs
- Buying something from a fundraiser bake sale
- Buying a fundraiser raffle ticket

Things to consider
- Am I missing out on some kind of giant purchase/goal? What is it and why is it worth it?

[basuragomi]

July 2021 update



Costs have gone up: I've increased donations to $3,000/month to hit my $24,000 first-year giving target.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Asked for and got a 20% raise. It's funny how it pretty much mirrors the amount I targeted to donate. I feel like the universe is just throwing money at me these days, I can't even give it away! This is beyond first world problems. Zeroth world problems?
- I programmed a little game for fun to learn Javascript and stuck it up on Github.
- Got vaccinated and socialized in person for the first time in over a year. I need to shake this system around a bit, since so many friends have moved to the exurbs in the last two years.
- Dropping meat consumption even further to about every other day. It's a bit of a feedback loop: the less meat you eat, the less meat you can handle eating at once without feeling sick after. Maybe I'm just getting old.

ERE failures
- Going back to the gym! Pandemic restrictions have lifted. I had a home workout routine that was fairly effective, but I think the gym ultimately fits better in my life. I want to keep the nice parts of the home workout, like quality time with my wife, and I need to find some way to do that.
- My credit card, that I rely on to provide rental car insurance, is instituting a $15,000/year minimum spend. This is not an issue for the next year due to my charitable donations, but beyond that I will need to figure out a new transportation system or some way to run lots of churn through the card. Maybe a bike-based grocery delivery micro-business?

Things considered
- I read a bunch of scholarly works on the philosophies behind charity and it named the third axis I was missing in my earlier thoughts: justice-charity, positive-sum-negative-sum, and close-far. More to come.
- I was thinking about my FOMO, but socializing again helped put it into perspective: My SO and I are really crazy compared to the mainstream, even to my crunchier friends. So some of the buying decisions we agonize about don't even register as potential choices to people... that's why I post here.

Things to consider
- Building a program on that scale was pretty addictive, to an almost scary degree. It's like playing those Skinner box clicker games, there's always one more tiny snippet you can get a rush from fixing. Kind of the same problem I have with my working life... or really any project, since I end up spending whole days in flow without eating or exercising. I'm not sure if it's better to try to manage or harness this tendency.
- I'm considering switching jobs, solely for breadth of work experience. It would be fairly remote, very spendy (I would need to buy a car!), and I'd see my family once a month at best. But it would be a hell of a ride. It seems crazy to focus on career growth when super-FI, but it feels like what I need to have had a fully rounded career. I need to think a lot more about this.

[basuragomi]

Analyzing Charity

So after a lot of reading, I think there are three major axes that people evaluate charitable giving (as a social signal) along:

1) Justice-charity
-Is the action simply rendering aid, or is it also righting a wrong? This is why feeding your children is not considered charity, because they deserve to be fed under almost any moral system - it is not charity if it is your societal obligation.
-There is a paradox here: if rendering justice is morally the highest priority, and charity is by definition not justice, then all your surplus resources should be spent on justice, not charity. So charity is only morally acceptable in a just world, which shouldn't need charity at all under most formulations.
-Someone's personal philosophy on what is a fundamental right and the obligations of society members would greatly impact how this is interpreted, e.g. collectivists frame many issues as matters of justice while individualists frame proposed remedies as undeserved handouts.

2) Close-Far
-Is the action nearby, physically, temporally, or in a network?
-This is a common criticism of the "Giving Pledge" billionaires - they are committing to future action, instead of addressing an issue immediately.
-Donating to a organization centred around a personal hobby can be criticized as too close to the donor to be charitable. Donating to an organization completely divorced from your life, like "Effective Altruism" seems to settle on, can be criticized as not being based on any real consideration of the gift's future or second-order effects.
-Following from #1, a more remote giver is perceived as more charitable because they have fewer societal obligations to the receiver, even if their gift is objectively worse than what someone familiar with the situation would have requested. The remoteness means that anyone that may judge the donor (besides the receivers, who are too distant to matter) is similarly incapable of judging what is actually needed. See: people building useless water pumps in Ghana, or the news emphasis on people giving consumer goods to total strangers.
-There is another irony here, where it follows that the most charitably-perceived act would be spending a lot of money on a completely performative gesture, which is absurd. I think I just described virtue signaling, though.
-One interesting thought exercise is: how much is it worth spending now in order to save all of humanity in 100 years?

3) Positive-sum-negative-sum
-Are you actually losing something you value to aid someone else, does the transaction benefit both parties, or are you actively causing harm?
-Most of the examples I listed in a previous post ended up falling into this category. E.g. feeding a feral cat colony, or donating unwanted clothing as part of decluttering.
-Like in #2, a tension here is in perceived value. What is valuable to one person is not valuable to another, but the receiver's valuation often is not part of the equation.

Tying it together
-I'm left with a lot of ways to criticize or defend any giving effort. Could make a flowchart.
-It seems like one solution to #1 is to have an outlook that considers inequality justified. Maybe with a highly individualistic or religious outlook?
-The common theme here is that disconnection from the receiver results in inability to evaluate effectiveness. Which makes the Effective Altruism approach pretty funny.
-I think the way forward for me is to focus on efforts to reach justice in the local community, in a way that reflects my understanding of the root causes and long-term effects.

[basuragomi]

August 2021 update



Expenses are high but they are mostly work-related so will be reimbursed.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- Pickled beets! Another two-year supply locked in. I don't like the commercial ones since they're too sweet and not spicy. I got wide-mouth jars this year which let me use extra-large beets and should be more useful for storing leftovers.

- Harvested pears and tomatoes and am still munching my way through both. Maybe next year will be the fabled wild grape harvest.
- Went socializing in person for the first time in ages, and reconnected with some old friends.
- Learned some assembly programming. Really enlightening!

ERE failures
- Replaced our old, weird, but free pots with a shiny new set that is much easier to clean. The new ones are a classic design, but I certainly could have found some used ones. The time-money trade-off favoured less time here.

Things considered
- Had a very long think about home prices, future returns, and inflation. Conclusion: My goals are different, stay the course.

Things to consider
- Changing up format for this journal's second anniversary.
- Professional language lessons. I need to get better with speaking on complex topics - I can give directions just fine, but can't explain e.g. how lake overturning affects benthic organisms without serious prep. The cheapest method would be some kind of language exchange, but this stuff is so stressful to me that maybe serious focus is the way to go here.

[basuragomi]

September 2021 update



Expenses are again work-related.

ERE-type things I have been doing
- 3d printed a keyboard leg after it cracked in half. I paid for the print with money I found on the side of the road while walking to the library. Works great, though the other (OEM) leg broke just a few days later!

- Learned the trick to making my pans actually non-stick: Put the food in while the pan is still cool! Completely counterintuitive but it works. I need to investigate further.
- Made seitan for the first time! It was honestly not my favourite dish, though the texture will be useful incorporated into other dishes. I combined it with powdered anchovies, kombu broth and some other condiments/spices to make "fish balls" for my pho. I need to figure out what to do with the starch.

ERE failures
- I confirmed that I have developed an intolerance to eggs! I love eggs and they're a great cheap protein source, so this is a big disappointment!

Things considered
- Car rentals have skyrocketed in price this year (+40%), so I looked into car shares again. Things have progressed a long way in terms of options, so I joined one. Ironically, the most basic zero-commitment tier actually offered the cheapest per-rental cost due to how the car demand curve works here. This should halve our car costs in the future!
- This month is the 2-year anniversary of the journal, and I will be going way more free-form afterwards.

Things to consider
- I've committed to 2022 being the year I retire. Now I need to figure out the logistics of doing it in an efficient way.
- The best way to build up and hold physical bullion. Looking like 1 oz maple leafs are the way to go, but the prospect of handling that much value is daunting.