Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

[black_son_of_gray]

@Suo

If one of your chief complaints is the noise of a generator (totally understandable), then it's worth knowing that there are sound-dampening options. There are commercial products (expensive but easy, and still probably much cheaper than the PV system) and there are lots of DIY options for "soundproof generator boxes"*.

I have some experience with the DIY route, in that I built a box for my shop vac. These are often incredibly loud...as in, they will damage your hearing and they will annoy the neighbors. My solution to the noise problem was to buy a professional grade vac (a little more expensive up front, but HEPA filtered and much quieter @~65dB). This would be akin to you buying the quieter generator, probably. I then DIYed a small cabinet for it out of mostly MDF, reused shipping package insulation, and some cheap 1x wood strips (bonus points: learned a lot about torsion box construction). End result, I measured about a 20dB noise reduction, so ~45dB. Basically, when my shop vac is on in the workshop (garage), you cannot hear anything from the street or from the edge of the yard (I also have apartments behind me). IIRC it cost me about $100 for materials, but this was during the bizarre lumber price spike during the pandemic. But it is so effective that the actual sound of my bandsaw cutting through wood is louder than the shop vac, and bandsaws are actually pretty quiet...I have no regrets, but then again, I use it almost every day.

Considerations:
1) It isn't quite as simple as "just building a box". You will need a way to get air in and out of the box (i.e. intake and exhaust), which probably means that you'll want to have a baffle system incorporated into your design.
2) My workshop is protected from weather, so I don't need to worry about my MDF getting wet. Material choice may matter depending on elements.
3) My shop vac is electric, so I'm not worried about fuel/exhaust fumes.
4) Not sure how much heat a generator can produce or tolerate. Depending on design, the box interior may get pretty hot. Generally speaking, the more airflow the box allows, the less dampening you'll be able to expect, even with decent baffle design. YMMV.
5) Sound frequency matters a great deal as far as how easy it is to dampen it. Higher frequencies are easier to deal with. Low frequencies usually require a lot more mass than would be cheap to DIY. (If you want a fascinating internet rabbit hole, look into how recording studios are designed to handle noise...they'll often have two thick walls i.e. the room has two sets of nesting walls, and insane HVAC systems.)

*none of them are "soundproof", but that's the best search term.

[suomalainen]

- I ended up buying a couple of portable solar panels and a 1.5kwh battery as emergency backup. Points taken about alternatives, but as with everything, it boiled down to psychology. As I wrote in the "Perspectives on Money" thread:

For me, money is a medium of exchange of life energy, which is why I'm so offended when others (my kids) think nothing of spending it. This is also why I'm so quick to spend my own accumulated life energy to solve a present problem when my current stores of life energy are near-zero nearly constantly.

The idea of losing power again in mid-August made me nauseous. That cost far outweighs the cost of the system (>30 year timeframe of recouping my investment by running my own little power plant scheme in my backyard). And yes, I recognize the Sisyphean doom loop, but at the same time, I have a fixed timeline as opposed to a fixed 25x/33x number and no amount of "badassity" will change that. C'est la vie. At least my shoulders are strong.

- Building various baffles and testing their sound-dampening qualities actually sounds like a really fun construction/carpentry/engineering experiment. Alas, see life energy.

- I've done quite a bit of doctor's appointments this year. Blood tests are mostly fine other than a 128 ldl reading (recommended 100 max) and a minor vitamin-D deficiency. Blood pressure may be a bit high. Cardiac calcium scan came back at zero calcification noted in the coronary arteries. Everything else was normal for my age. The gist is I have to eat more veggies and exercise more, which I already knew, but good to know that nothing else hidden and major was lurking. I do still need a colonoscopy, so I'm looking forward to that.

- My ex-wife's dog died. A few weeks later, my wife's cat died. After experiencing a pet death a few years ago and especially the young-human death last year, these last two experiences were somewhat muted for me. I was pained that my ex and my wife were pained, but for myself, I basically jumped straight to acceptance upon learning of their deaths, with occasional and relatively fleeting jumps back and forth to the other stages. Death is just so final - what else can you do but accept?

- I haven't written about @gravy's process considering a semi-ere approach (going part time and/or quitting for a period of time) as it's still in flux and I think it's her decision to make without undue influence from me. In the end, I am mostly concerned for her health and happiness and supportive of whatever pathways she chooses to follow in pursuing those. The one thing I hope she embraces, regardless of where it may take her is:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

[delay]

For me, money is a medium of exchange of life energy, which is why I'm so offended when others (my kids) think nothing of spending it.

Thanks for your journal update! I first read about the equivalence between life energy and money on YNAB " money isn't just a resource; it's a virtue, and it deserves your love and undivided attention.".

It sounds like a stressful way to define money. Money is an abstraction humans use to measure obligations. All historical coins have track records of disasters before being phased out. Life energy is what I feel when I walk around in nature.

[jacob]

Thanks for your journal update! I first read about the equivalence between life energy and money on YNAB " money isn't just a resource; it's a virtue, and it deserves your love and undivided attention.".

It's practically the foundation of YMOYL, which famously calculated the true income of work[ing for money] (by subtracting incidental expenses on clothes, transportation, ... ). However, it dates back to Thoreau and maybe even further:

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

YMOYL essentially just put a number on it by developing an "effective hourly wage".

[delay]

It's practically the foundation of YMOYL, which famously calculated the true income of work[ing for money] (by subtracting incidental expenses on clothes, transportation, ... ). However, it dates back to Thoreau and maybe even further:

YMOYL essentially just put a number on it by developing an "effective hourly wage".

Thanks for mentioning YMOYL. I remember their idea of measuring purchases in hours worked. A very helpful idea to reduce spending.

It's an interesting trade though, since you cannot trade money back for life energy. And the life energy cost of a work hour varies wildly. There are jobs that barely require energy, so that you can read a good book while you get paid.

[suomalainen]

It's an interesting trade though, since you cannot trade money back for life energy.

Sure you can. It takes life energy to fix a toilet. Whether its yours or a plumber's is your choice, if you have money.

[delay]

Sure you can. It takes life energy to fix a toilet. Whether its yours or a plumber's is your choice, if you have money.

Right, you can trade money to change the way you spend future life energy, like on more pleasant things than fixing a toilet.

What I meant is you can't reverse the trade. Time can only be spent once. You cannot trade money back for your own life energy.

[suomalainen]

Tomayto tomahto?

1) Current life energy traded for money at work.

[time travel]

2) Current money traded for someone else's work, freeing up your current life energy.

I think the more general point is that 1 then 2 only makes sense to the extent the difference in value of past work vastly exceeds the value of future work, such that I work LESS in the past in order to buy MORE in the future. It doesn't make sense to work for 3 hours to earn money to pay a plumber to do something that only takes an hour. But if you can earn a plumber's hourly wage in 20 minutes or less, why wouldn't you?

And, yes, I realize this is exactly the springboard into the discussion of salary-man vs renaissance-man or FIRE vs ERE or FIRE vs SEMI-ERE. I realize there are other values at stake than purely life energy / money. But I am serving a fixed sentence as salary-man, so.

[7Wannabe5]

There is a bit of an imbalance in the YMOYL practice due to the fact that each purchase is evaluated for whether or not it offers good value for life energy expended, but beyond calculation of effective hourly wage, different forms of work-for-money aren't evaluated for the extent to which they provide fun, fulfillment, or other benefits at the margin. For example, it's as obvious/easy to note that spending 10 hours cold call selling swamp land to seniors is not as rewarding as spending 10 hours teaching kids to garden as it is to notice that spending $50 on junk food isn't as rewarding as spending $50 on garden supplies.

Of course, almost every work-for-pay activity is likely to go beyond fun/fulfilling/FITB at the 40 hr/week level, so the lack of flexibility in the current paradigm pretty much makes this analysis moot. If I think about a world in which I could just walk into any place of employ for a few hours every week or a few months just this year, the calculation becomes quite different.

[suomalainen]

Of course, almost every work-for-pay activity is likely to go beyond fun/fulfilling/FITB at the 40 hr/week level, so the lack of flexibility in the current paradigm pretty much makes this analysis moot.

Yeah.

If I think about a world in which I could just walk into any place of employ for a few hours every week or a few months just this year, the calculation becomes quite different.

And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.

In this respect, this is why having a sentence is freeing. I know my dreams can only be dreams. I can let go of chasing the impossible while it may be very difficult to let go of the merely impractical. This was the magic of divorce. It resolved the ERE:kids:(unsupportive) spouse trilemma, albeit by jettisoning two of the three , at least for the duration of the sentence.

[7Wannabe5]

Yeah, pretty much the only solution path for the general problem of critically unsupportive spouse is Dialogue: Differentiation: Dominance: Divorce. There is a possibility for successful resolution at each juncture, but no guarantee. And kids can only tend towards making it more of a 3-Body problem. I'm still kind of chagrined/amazed/amused when I contemplate how quickly I popped out of my dysfunctional marriage practically the moment I decided my youngest child was pretty much functionally an adult making her own decisions.

I actually think it is reasonably possible to podge together a happy mix of very part-time or temporary employment if/when your spending levels are very low and your vigor iand skill assortment s reasonably high. Otherwise, transition costs will tend to come into play.

[suomalainen]

I watched a TED-talk rant on how American society is effectively not really in a class war so much as a generational war. The old people today have far more wealth than old people in any other time in history. At the same time, college costs are way up (compared to post-war history); wages are flat (compared to asset prices); housing costs are way up (compared to recent history, either on an absolute basis or as a multiple of wages). Taxes on the wealthy (wages and capital) are down relative to a big chunk of the post-war era. At the same time, suicides and depression and obesity and cancer and all this other shit is also way up in the youth. I thought, yeah, that seems like a bum deal. I'd probably be a bit miffed if I were a millenial or Gen-Z.

And then I went golfing at a private golf club (as a guest) where membership is an $8,000 initiation fee plus something like $8,000/year. I'm sitting there waiting for my member friend and his buddies to show up and I'm watching as two types of people roll in. Middle-aged white yuppie douchebags with pot bellies and old people. And then I thought, "Holy shit. I'm a middle-aged white yuppie douchebag with a pot belly. I fit right in ... I'm in the wrong place, man." I would have rather been riding my bike, but be that as it may, I paid my guest fee to have a(nother) shitty round of golf, all to maintain some semblance of "friendship" or I suppose really just "companionship" as most of the people I play golf with don't really like me all that much and we're not really friends, but we all need some social interaction, and we're friendly enough to put up with each other for a few hours every month or so.

What a strange day.

[Western Red Cedar]

Have you considered just moving on from those relationships? Life is too short to spend time with people you don't really like, doing things you don't really want to do.

I watched a TED-talk rant on how American society is effectively not really in a class war so much as a generational war.

Scott Galloway?

[suomalainen]

I was lost for a really long time trying to figure out what was True, what was the One True Way of Being (thanks dad and then religion). Eventually, I learned that nothing is True, and we all have to figure out what works for us. But baseline, we all have varying degrees and types of physical needs (eat, drink, run, jump, sex, sleep), emotional needs (connection, sex, meaning, purpose, community) and mental needs (challenge, puzzles).

I have a deep, deep need for emotional connection (thanks mom and dad!), and this consumed much of my life in my first marriage, as that marriage could never provide what I needed (thanks religion for the pressure to get married and have kids young before you have any fucking clue who you are and with whom you may be compatible!). But all that exploration helped me understand that you can have different types of friends and there's no need for a single unicorn BFF who satisfies all your needs. So I accepted friendships of different levels, one of which is "friends of convenience", aka "work friends". My true friends, with whom I have a meaningful connection, have all moved away, so I have to travel to have meaningful in-person interactions with my good friends. And then since I work from home beginning around COVID, I don't have daily interactions with humans via work friends.

Long way of saying that I know what these guys are to me and what they aren't. I accept them for what they are and appreciate the human interaction they provide, even if it just checks the primitive biological box of "Hey, I saw an adult human face other than gravy's today." But I don't seek or need their approval. I'm just the one weird guy who says the things you aren't supposed to say and they find it humorous. I don't mind that they're laughing at me rather than with me. On some level, they respect that I have the balls to be different even in the face of their disapproval. "That's just suo being suo." Like they all know how much money I make and how much I burn (literally) on air travel and how much the guest fee is ($80), but fuck it if I'm going to lose a $1 golf ball. When I come out of the bush at a private club scratched to hell grinning from ear to ear because I found 5 golf balls, they just shake their heads.

Yeah, Scott Galloway. Just popped up in my feed, but I have read articles over the years touching on the various things he mentions. The differing tax treatment of capital and labor has always been a head-scratcher for me. Some of the other stuff I've read about in connection with my parenting. But, yeah, he was really amped about it.

[delay]

Tomayto tomahto?

The differences seem real to me. One tomato is infinite, the other is finite and perhaps smaller than we think. If you work too much (trade too much time for money) you can't reverse it. Given the large amount of wealth the older generation has this seems quite common.

It doesn't make sense to work for 3 hours to earn money to pay a plumber to do something that only takes an hour.

It would take me days to do the work a plumber does in an hour. I would have to purchase or borrow tools. I'd be learning on the job with repairs and re-work. There's a good chance I'd hurt myself. There is the risk of water damage. My neighbours and landlord would get angry if they learned I was doing my own plumbing. I'm glad there are people who specialize in plumbing!

[7Wannabe5]

Yes, but then you know how the plumbing system in your house and most others works. It's kind of funny how affluent people are often willing to waste their time on experiments in realms in which they have no hope of fairly easily gaining competency, for example, doing 160 hours of research in order to become their own immunologist and then dosing themselves with supplements, when a plumbing system is magnitudes of order easier to comprehend than the human immune system.

[suomalainen]

Well, that's just the thing. We humans actually have too much time in this life. Think about how much of your life you're just killing time. Think of the verb there too. Killing. Time. So it's not really a question of "saving time" or "having more time". It really is just life energy and time shifting. What would you prefer spending your time on and when? It's like the FIRE vs ERE vs SEMI-ERE approach that's been discussed, right? Work hard for 5 years and save 80% of your income and do whatever you want the rest of your life. That's just frontloading your working time (the difference to the traditional 40-year career is one of degree, not of kind). What about semi-ere / coasting to FIRE or whatever, where you just work a little bit every day for your whole life? That's just smoothing your "work consumption", as it were. This is all we're talking about. Which shit sandwich do you want to eat and how? The thing that most people seem to get hung up on is "what if you work too much???" Well, guess what just about every (especially early) retiree does at some point after they retire? They work. Why? 'Cuz work provides benefits other than money. You gotta do something. Work doesn't really seem to be the problem. Our psychology about work seems to be the thing that needs more attention.

As to the plumbing thing, I picked "fix a toilet" because our toilet was leaking from the floor level and I knew it was just a wax ring that needed to be replaced. I could have done it in an hour, but because we're renters, we called the landlord and told him to do it. It also took him an hour. But I only knew that because I'd done that work myself before. I just didn't feel like it this time, plus if there were any surprises when the toilet came up, I'd rather the landlord discover that himself rather than me trying to explain.

[delay]

Well, that's just the thing. We humans actually have too much time in this life. Think about how much of your life you're just killing time. Think of the verb there too. Killing. Time.

Thanks for your reply, well said! Wasted time assumes there is a purpose to life that the time should have been spend on. I'm not sure that is so. A philosopher said "the time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time", and that's another way to think about it. Or for an introvert, much of one's wasted time is recovery time.

It's like the FIRE vs ERE vs SEMI-ERE approach that's been discussed, right? Work hard for 5 years and save 80% of your income and do whatever you want the rest of your life. That's just frontloading your working time (the difference to the traditional 40-year career is one of degree, not of kind).

Retiring after working for five years implies unusual frugality. That is an extreme that reminds many people of poverty, and it repulses them.

As I remember How I Became Financially Independent In Five Years it doesn't mention "hard work" and the numbers work even with a below average academic salary. I recognized the horror at being subjected to pointlessness. For me the horror subsided when I started working and the work I did produced somewhat tangible results.

[jacob]

That's just frontloading your working time (the difference to the traditional 40-year career is one of degree, not of kind).

No, they're different in kind. A job turns time into money on a linear basis. Whereas investments compound non-linearly. As such, the more you can front-load, the more of your total lifetime income will come from interest and the less will come from wages. In other words, it is not a straight trade-off. The figures in chapter 7 are curves. Only in the 0% interest case is the line straight.

An example with the same level of spending (20% of full time income):
Work 5 years full time (2000 hours per year) with a savings rate of 80% and you're set for life. IOW, 10,000 hours of lifetime work is enough up front because one can live off of the proceeds forever after that.

Work 20% of full time and you earn and pay as you go. You only work 400 hours per year, but you have to keep this up until you die. If you live another 50 years, that's 20,000 hours of lifetime work.

[suomalainen]

@jacob, sure, if your primary (sole?) axis is to categorize the source of future money, then I concede the mathematical point about returns from labor being linear and returns from capital being exponential and therefore (sort of?) different in kind even though they're both still just money (but different in degree). As a result, an ultra-saver can do less "work for money" on the front end and enjoy more "money for work" on the back end.

But to adjust your examples:

An example with the same level of spending (20% of full time income):
Work 5 years full time (2000 hours per year) with a savings rate of 80% and you're set for life. IOW, 10,000 hours of lifetime work is enough up front because one can live off of the proceeds forever after that. Meanwhile, you spend time and money doing things you enjoy, but you get bored from time to time and you seek a challenge and you write a book and go work full-time for a hedge fund for 3(?) years and moderate a forum and maintain a garden and do other activities with an economic return of one sort or another. You do your own plumbing. You have now worked [>10],000 hours and you have more money than you could ever possibly need.

Work 20% of full time and you earn and pay as you go. You only work 400 hours per year, but you have to keep this up until you die. If you live another 50 years, that's 20,000 hours of lifetime work. Meanwhile, you spend time and money doing things you enjoy. You also get bored and want a challenge from time to time so you write a book and moderate a forum and maintain a garden. You do your own plumbing. You have worked [>20],000 hours and you have slightly more money than you need.

Third example:
Work 40 years full time with a savings rate of 15%. You work 2000 hours per year for 80,0000 hours lifetime and spend time and money doing things you enjoy. You have more money than you could ever possibly need. You never do your own plumbing. You never write a book, moderate a forum or maintain a garden, unless included in the "things you enjoy" previously mentioned.

In all three cases, people do some economic activity and some non-economic activity in all the years of their lives. Isn't the only difference the concentration/density/intensity of certain activities in different periods of life?

Perhaps the only difference in kind that I can see is one of "safety" and flexibility. The first example offers the most safety/flexibility to take advantage of the current economic situation and provide maximum safety/flexibility going forward. The second example requires labor-market participation / resilience / flexibility for the entirety of one's life, but offers maximum lifetime flexibility to "do what you want." There is no traditional "safety" in this model. The third offers the most safety if one assumes the current economic situation won't change (historically a bad assumption), but it has the benefit of being the "tried and true" culturally-appropriate lifestyle. Economic shocks will be most challenging to this group's resilience.