Another Brick in the Wall (Part One)

[ertyu]

what happens to the habit fund after

[candide]

what happens to the habit fund after

I'm not sure what you are asking. Could you elaborate more?

[ertyu]

As far as I understand, you deposit money in a habit fund when you accomplish certain points? So I guess what I'm asking is, once you get the reward of 100 dollars, what do you do with the money

[candide]

Ah, I see.

That fund of money is the only way I let myself spend on things that aren't food, transport, and housing, family care.

I allow myself to invest in my workshop at a 1:1 ratio (each dollar in spent in the shop deducts a dollar from the fund). Tools, consumables like tape and glue, etc. This all started with the shop, as I wanted a way to not feel guilty about spending stuff for it, but I also didn't want to just let myself say "I have the money -- just buy it." This lets me have the experience of earning and saving up again.

If I am spending "for fun" the ratio is 2:1. For example, I have a bet I need to pay off (with fancy coffee). When I pay that off, I'll deduct twice the bill from my habit fund.

[ertyu]

quite cool, thanks

[candide]

Akrasia Fund: $140.

I'm not in love with the new name, but I was bothered too much by calling it a "habit fund" -- as I am not building habits, but pushing myself to do what I wouldn't ordinarily do, at least that day. So calling this akrasia is a less bad option here.

I am just writing to report positively on my tweaks to this system. Randomization with the dice is a good way to go, and going 100 points to get $25 freed up does lead to more moments where I can see I am only a few rolls away from the next level.

I've been spending along the way, but I'm now saving up for something that I think will be pretty cool. It gives me something to dream about.

It is much easier for me to find time and energy to read than write right now. This state of affairs could last all school year for me.

[candide]

DW uses this can to gather limbs. The darn thing kept blowing away, so I put together this little frame to hold it in place. I think it is pretty clear that this was a quick/cheap optimization. All of the wood was scraps, with the green pieces being recent additions picked up from when my in-laws neighborhood was having a trash out. All of the fasteners were inherited from deceased relatives -- though I must admit that collection is starting to get a little low in certain sizes. Still: $0.

[candide]

I didn't think I'd be writing about my job for the rest of the year, but here we are. . .

My school district is experiencing a ransomware attack. Just another step in the Long Descent/Emergency, I guess. I think there might be some entertainment value in reporting how it unfolds (if you are cursed to live in interesting times, you might as well look at the interesting stuff...) but for now this has just tickled my curiosity in the scope and scale of ransomware attacks on school systems. Some fruit of the quick research:

From
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/c ... -rcna46504

Ransomware hackers often go after computer networks tied to essential services, especially if they’re not staffed with strong cybersecurity protections, making school districts a ripe target. In some cases, that leads to schools being closed with little notice, forcing parents to make emergency plans for how to watch their kids.

At least 26 U.S. school districts have been infected with ransomware so far in 2022, with seven of those incidents coming since the beginning of August, according to a tally maintained by Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company.

From
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/inform ... e-attacks/

In 2021, 67 individual ransomware attacks affected 954 schools and colleges, potentially impacting 950,129 students. We estimate that these attacks cost education institutions $3.56 billion in downtime alone. Most schools will have also faced astronomical recovery costs as they tried to restore computers, recover data, and shore up their systems to prevent future attacks.

For scale, I looked up the Halloween industry, which is $10.6 billion, up from last year's $10.1 billion. Whether that makes the amounts we are talking for school systems more shocking or more normal-seeming, I leave to you the people.

But look how far this growth industry has taken off in such a short time!

Ransomware really started to take hold in the education sector in 2019. With just 10 attacks reported in 2018 but 96 reported in 2019, this was an 860 percent year-on-year increase. However, these figures fell in 2020 to 83 and even further to 67 in 2021. But, with the astronomical ransom demanded from Broward County Public Schools and some of the other larger, more targeted attacks on bigger school districts with higher budgets and a larger numbers of students, hackers are perhaps becoming more tactical in their approach.

Oh, brave new world!

A baseline for what is typical under a ransomware attack for a school district/college:

According to the figures we did find (for 19 of the attacks), schools suffered an average downtime of just over four days in 2021. But the recovery process lasted nearly 30 days. Downtime relates to schools being shut and/or services being largely unavailable, while the recovery period may mean schools are open but certain servers, devices, and services are unavailable.

[candide]

Work
====

Hmmm. I kind of thought more interesting things would happen as a result of a week without networks working in the school district. Still, I will carry on with some notes from the week.

It turns out they were somehow able to pull up student rosters and print roll sheets. And good thing they had that out on Monday because they shut off the copy machines for several days, starting in the afternoon on Monday. After all, those machines are also networked and we can't just have them default to being photocopiers that use the papers you already have, now can we?

The little world of my classroom wasn't so bad. We were in the middle of a novel (and if we hadn't have been, I just would have started it with them). The only complication was that this was the week I was supposed to be observed teaching by my direct report. I would just blow this off, but she had admitted to me earlier in the year that she doesn't enjoy all the hassle of her job and one of the only things she likes is getting to see kids in classroom. And the thing is I believe her. She's very committed to her children and is an admin to provide a better life for them (at least from her perspective). Key data point: she won't let her children have smart phones.

So on Monday I had a super involved lesson with multiple segments, interactive notes, class participation, etc. But as I feared, she was so busy putting out fires that she wasn't able to get to that lesson. So we rescheduled for Friday, where I had the class do a Congress-style debate over topics brought up by the novel, and then a last topic on whether school is better with computers. We got to that topic, and, alas, the students heavily voted in favor of it.

I made my own gavel for this. I actually did a pretty bad job, in the spirit of cheap/fast, but several kids were impressed by it, as is always the case when I show them that you can actually make things.

This brings me to ...

My Shop
=======

I must admit that as a self-taught woodworker, I have not until this point done anything about air quality in my shop. I really only understood it for a year. At that point, I started making most of my cuts outside.

Following the principle I learned from Paul Wheaton that you should heat yourself rather than the space, I have bought a respirator, so I can clear the space around my nose, rather than the whole space.

Further, I've made a jig to try to get better cuts with something as simple as a handsaw. It is based on this video:
https://youtu.be/n_1Z7DzPas8

Retractions
=========

I have not at all been doing 10 minutes of making a day as I thought I would. I'm just worn out from work to get any joy from that. Trying to psyche myself up for those 10 minutes becomes "just one more thing." So, instead, I am a weekend warrior -- not even all of the days of the weekend, and not ever every weekend.

Also, in spite of all my sturm and drang, my current version of my plan is work another (school) year where I am at. The reason to teach again is to be maximally legible for a home loan, so we can get everything to a the state DW would like -- reminder she is WL 2.75. The deal here is that as our current house is paid off, I will contribute half of the amount of the upgrade in cash and she can do it how she wishes, which is as a loan. As the year has gone on, I have become more comfortable with the devil I know. I think my direct reports respect me and the work I do, and it has shown in this difficult year -- but that still leaves the real problems of the structures of the system in place above their head (don't get me wrong, if comes down to their career or mine, they will throw me under the bus, but that's just to be expected here in the land of opportunity). Next year, with my wife back at work, we'll make sure to put our child's insurance through mommy, so I can be in a maximal "fuck you money" stance.

Thinking this way clicks some things into place for me. I can punt my math certification work to the summer. Also, I am cooking up an idea of working next year and then the year after that becoming a sub and going to the same school three days a week -- attempting to mine out the social life from teaching without doing the lesson planning or grading, or even showing up five days a week... In this idea, I would use the fact that my mom evidently will never work again, and have her watch DD a few days a week. If all that doesn't add up to a burn rate of zero, it will at least be a low enough cost of living that I won't have to think of anything else for a long, long while, given my stash.

[theanimal]

Could you move your 10 minutes of working to before work?

[candide]

@theanimal

That is a good idea, and I'll try to implement it, though my mornings are when I try to get in exercise and chores for the household -- both of which I don't feel I am efficient enough at as is. But following your idea and putting on my timer for doing things in the shop might more reliably make me a body in motion that could stay in motion, thus increasing my adherence to both. (It will cut down on my reading, however, as something has to give).

I also must admit that I have been compensating for my lack of time by using more electricity, so I need to be mindful of my neighbors if I start with morning sessions. Previous experience has shown the scroll saw isn't too loud with the door closed on the garage -- glad I bought and set up that 3M respirator so this no longer endangers my lungs -- and I think my little drill press isn't any louder, though I think my corded drill *is* too loud, as well as hammering operations. And my jigsaw is just out of the question.

[candide]

Both the network-less schooling and the shop stories came together today, as well as my Akrasia Fund. First, I bought the Walmart store brand[1] orbital (but not randomly so) sander, leaving me with

Akrasia Fund: $54 (I also recently bought and enjoyed some booze).

I sanded down the crappy gavel I made to chair the in-class debate, and applied a finish of boiled linseed oil to it. I am giving this away as a gift to my direct report (assistant principal) who observed the class. I am also giving explicit permission to throw it away if she so wishes.

[1] HyperTough, not Hart, for those who are connoisseurs of fine tools.

[candide]

I tried theanimal's suggestion of working a bit of making into my morning routine. I liked it greatly, but I become ill for several days, and then we got to the Thanksgiving Break.

Woodworking
===========


I have a project that called for some 2-by-2s. But when I went to my big box home improvement center the supply was 2-by-2s was a disaster, so I decided I would buy 2-by-4s -- even finding good enough ones of them was hard enough -- and rip them.

Well, I don't own a table saw or band saw, and one of the points of the Akrasia Fund is to use the limitations of the fund as a game to force me to find different solutions, so I had to think of something else. I have found in the past that a jigsaw does a terrible job, so I experimented with ways to do it with handsaws. My pull saw did an okay job, but it took long time. Next I tried a traditional push saw, which did a slightly worse job, but it was quicker than the pull saw -- though still dreadfully slow. This is not particularly surprising as the handsaws I was using are not rip saws, but rather "universal."

Doing a few practice runs with some off cuts for my project made me willing to look for other options. What I came up with was this little Harbor Freight offering:

https://www.harborfreight.com/22-inch-h ... -1321.html

It's a "Hand Saw" brand hand saw. And while "junk" is an appropriate term, it has some features that are interesting. At 7 teeth per inch, it goes through the material a lot quicker than what I was using -- something like 5 teeth per inch would be worth owning one day if I end up doing more ripping. Also, the teeth are actually (subtly) in a rip pattern, which is somewhat humorous considering the saw isn't even advertised as a rip cut saw. Lastly, being junk, the tips aren't even hardened like the off the shelf saws you get at the big box stores. But I think this is a long-run benefit: I could practice sharpening the teeth.

So that's the tool. When it comes to technique, I absolutely butchered the rip. But I think I least did so in ways that taught me how to correct better in the future -- the extra aggressiveness of the saw magnified my mistakes To be honest, if I end up going with that technique, flipping the board back and forth and backing up to make adjustments, I will do so with a lower teeth per inch saw and just deal with the extra time it is going to take...

I'm now going to break my own rule (more of "best practice") and talk about an idea before I do it, as this project is so important to me that I know I am not going to abandon it: I am going to try to use the good edges of the pseudo-2-by-2s I cut to make a jig directly on the next 2-by-4 I try to rip. As this is a project where the members are going to be covered, I don't think it will be a problem screwing the sticks I've cut onto the the 2-by-4. This will be my attempt to get the junk saw to cut square enough.

Akrasia Fund
===========

$19.

My expenditures are $27 in 2-by-4s and $8 for the saw mentioned above.

[jacob]

I have a project that called for some 2-by-2s. But when I went to my big box home improvement center the supply was 2-by-2s was a disaster, so I decided I would buy 2-by-4s -- even finding good enough ones of them was hard enough -- and rip them.

Well, I don't own a table saw or band saw, and one of the points of the Akrasia Fund is to use the limitations of the fund as a game to force me to find different solutions, so I had to think of something else. I have found in the past that a jigsaw does a terrible job, so I experimented with ways to do it with handsaws. My pull saw did an okay job, but it took long time. Next I tried a traditional push saw, which did a slightly worse job, but it was quicker than the pull saw -- though still dreadfully slow. This is not particularly surprising as the handsaws I was using are not rip saws, but rather "universal."

Doing a few practice runs with some off cuts for my project made me willing to look for other options. What I came up with was this little Harbor Freight offering:

https://www.harborfreight.com/22-inch-h ... -1321.html

It's a "Hand Saw" brand hand saw. And while "junk" is an appropriate term, it has some features that are interesting. At 7 teeth per inch, it goes through the material a lot quicker than what I was using -- something like 5 teeth per inch would be worth owning one day if I end up doing more ripping. Also, the teeth are actually (subtly) in a rip pattern, which is somewhat humorous considering the saw isn't even advertised as a rip cut saw. Lastly, being junk, the tips aren't even hardened like the off the shelf saws you get at the big box stores. But I think this is a long-run benefit: I could practice sharpening the teeth.

So that's the tool. When it comes to technique, I absolutely butchered the rip. But I think I least did so in ways that taught me how to correct better in the future -- the extra aggressiveness of the saw magnified my mistakes To be honest, if I end up going with that technique, flipping the board back and forth and backing up to make adjustments, I will do so with a lower teeth per inch saw and just deal with the extra time it is going to take...

I'm now going to break my own rule (more of "best practice") and talk about an idea before I do it, as this project is so important to me that I know I am not going to abandon it: I am going to try to use the good edges of the pseudo-2-by-2s I cut to make a jig directly on the next 2-by-4 I try to rip. As this is a project where the members are going to be covered, I don't think it will be a problem screwing the sticks I've cut onto the the 2-by-4. This will be my attempt to get the junk saw to cut square enough.

My ripper is an ~100 year old Disston ripper at 8 tpi. (For those who don't know, rip means that the teeth appears as a series of small chisels. If they appear as a series of small opposing knives, it's at a crosscutter intended to go 90deg on the grain. Insofar you buy a $10 saw at the store, it's probably a crosscutter.)

My technique for ripping 2x4 by hand is to use a "marking gauge" (google it, they come in different forms) and score a line on both sides. Then saw a few (3-5 inches) on a given side at an acute angle and then flip it around and do the same thing on the other side over and over until you're done. The acute angle creates a track on each side for the saw to follow. After it's done, I follow up with #7 plane to square the board.

[candide]

Unfortunately, that is the technique I am buggered up -- well, with the aggressive 7 TPI saw I bought [1]; I had okay results on a test piece with the repeated flips with my pull saw. In the trilemma, the cheapness is locked in -- I'm not getting any more new tools for this project -- but I am running an informal experiment on time or (relative) quality.

I'll be doing family stuff the next two days, but I plan on sharing the results, even if negative.

[1] I keep getting deflection at some point and then it tries to form two divergent lines after the flip, both hitting the line on the their respective x/y axis, but not lining up straight and connecting on the Z. I have discovered that I have to go back and pick one of the sides. I have hopes for the jig holding that up/down.

=

ETA. Update. I snuck some shop time and I can report that the jig did not in fact work.

Much shame. Time to fall on my sword.

[candide]

Housing
======

Since the mortgage paid is off, 'tis the season for yearly property taxes. Relative to how well I do with the Big Three (Housing, Transportation, Food), and my worries about my future Terrible Two (Health Care, Child Care), this is my best result. My property tax for the year is $1165.

This makes “rent” $97 a month. And when my wife begins working again next school year, she will pick up some bills again, so even better.

Akrasia System
============

A few tweaks. One, I no longer give myself points for doing diapers. There was a time I was hesitating to do it, so I made it a way to earn points so I would do what I knew was my share. But now, I just find it really easy to do things for this little person that smiles so often when she sees me in the morning and coming home from work, and sometimes gets a serious case of the giggles when we play.

I don’t reward things that I want to do anyway. For example, I don’t reward cooking; it’s doing the dishes that I need some kick in the pants to do.

Speaking of which, my next tweak is for the first time adding punishment to the system. If I do not have the dishes cleared off the cooking area it is minus [one roll of the dice]. I had been avoiding adding a punishment having read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, but the way the incentives were set allowed for a sense that I could always earn the points whatever way “I” (present self) wanted, but that prevented me from consistently getting what “I” (aspirational self) wanted.

So far, I only punished myself the first day I implemented the new tweak. I applied the rule retroactively because I was sick of dishes piling up in weird places that I would just try to work around in “creative” ways. Well I wanted to show myself what kind of hard ass I could be to myself, and I wanted to see some creativity come out in other ways, mister. I finally learned that I meant business, and the result has been a cooking area that is ready to go.

[avalok]

I finally learned that I meant business, and the result has been a cooking area that is ready to go.

The cost of working around stuff that should be actioned (cleaned, put/given away, etc.) is sneakily high. I find, merely on a mental clarity basis, that having a tidy space is beneficial. Repeatedly walking past something that needs to be actioned, and triggering the mental note again that I need to do that is tiring and distracting. That's before you consider how much of a pain it becomes to do other things when stuff is left in the way (when the cooking area is not ready to go). Not that I don't leave stuff around all the time!

[ertyu]

The cost of working around stuff that should be actioned (cleaned, put/given away, etc.) is sneakily high. I find, merely on a mental clarity basis, that having a tidy space is beneficial. Repeatedly walking past something that needs to be actioned, and triggering the mental note again that I need to do that is tiring and distracting.

Either that or I numb out and space out even more to avoid the displeasure of it being there. tl;dr @avalok, spot on, and good job @candide

[candide]

The cost of working around stuff that should be actioned (cleaned, put/given away, etc.) is sneakily high.

Well said... It really does put a lot of things into focus: things that should show up as negative externali[ties] on fishbone diagrams, the nature of fullest WL 5 optimization, how we can design our webs to make more serendipity possible, making the moves to WL 6+.

Good design matters. Good workflow matters.

Because I had the area ready to go, my wife felt more comfortable using up some old materials to try to make pancakes today. If dishes had been piled up in a way that past self (thought he) could just work around, I don't think my wife would have felt comfortable even trying. And she probably wouldn't have told me. It would have been on opportunity that would have died silently.

@ertyu I know those emotional side-effects of the problem all too well. I hope we can start carving out spaces on the forum to productivity talk through the emotional hang-ups as we move to TOTAL FREEDOM-TO THROUGH FRUGALITY or perhaps the Spiritual Oneness of Using Less. Which I am in earnest about doing for myself and helping others get to, but I am used to the need to teach humans, which I know includes more than just the parts of them competing for test scores. (Talk about building one part of a system up while making the rest more fragile).

[7Wannabe5]

But now, I just find it really easy to do things for this little person that smiles so often when she sees me in the morning and coming home from work, and sometimes gets a serious case of the giggles when we play.

Awwwww