Category Archives: economy and money

Right reasons

Posted on by
4

I’d just like to make one thing clear.

When one is suffering from material adversity, and they think material solutions are going to improve their situation, for instance they are cold during winter because they can’t afford heating, they are eating bad quality food or starving because they don’t have money, or they don’t have a good housing solution because they are destitute, they are more-less completely justified in their thinking. Money would indeed improve their situation, because the problem is caused by the lack of money. Materialism, in a sense of desiring things for their material properties, such as desiring a warm blanket when you’re cold or a good meal when you’re starving, will indeed solve a material problem. I’m not saying you should not desire material things for their material properties. It’s only reasonable to do so.

What I’m saying is, don’t desire material things for their abstract, ideal or spiritual properties, because that’s bullshit and a trap. Associating spiritual conditions with material conditions is a form of projection and bondage of spirit to the material world, and it’s a terrible idea.

Basically, it’s perfectly fine to want a car that is comfortable, fast, safe and durable. That’s what a car should be, as a physical object, and you’re perfectly reasonable to want one. The problem is when you associate ownership of a certain brand or model of a car with some spiritual state or achievement, and you think owning it will mean that you made it, that you attained success.

In fact, it’s going to have only its physical properties, and its brand-related social-status properties are going to have some effect, but never what you hope for or expect, and sometimes the exact opposite. Illusions of that kind are notoriously fickle.

Buying for the physical properties is, for instance, how I buy lenses. It’s a matter of how sharp, what aperture, how free of optical defects, how heavy, how well built, and how expensive. I make a list of all those properties and the winner is usually the lens that has the best image quality, but not at the expense of twice the mass and twice the money. It needs to be a reasonable balance of properties. Also, brand name doesn’t actually mean much to me. I owned so many brands of gear that I don’t care, but I will prefer the original manufacturer of the camera because of the possible incompatibilities of the electronics, because they are a thing, to the point that I recently had to replace Biljana’s Sigma 105mm EX DG OS HSM macro lens for Canon because the electronics were so glitchy or outright malfunctioning on her Canon RF system, that no amount of optical perfection could make up for the issues. It is one of the optically most perfect lenses I’ve seen, and it was replaced because it’s unreliable and possibly electronically faulty.

I don’t give a shit about mythical brands and their mythical properties. I care about tangibles, about actual performance and what I personally perceive of image quality. I care about the brand being well adopted in the professional circles, because then it’s going to continue to exist and the system isn’t going to die and force me to change it. Also, if it’s popular, the manufacturer is going to earn lots of money, and that means new good lenses and cameras. That’s why I avoid small exotic brands. Give me something that the professionals use as their bread and butter system; if it’s good for them, it will be good for me. And the ultimate test is going to be image quality. If I’m not getting the image quality I want, I’m going to dump it. If it works for me, I’ll be as happy as a hog in a field of corn.

And what brand name is on what, I don’t give a single shit. I used to have a Sony camera, Soligor macro extenders, Viltrox adapter and Canon lens as a singular working system. As long as I’m getting the results, it might be literally anything. Within reason, of course; I won’t buy something that’s better than what I need. Some specialist professional piece of gear that’s super expensive and designed for specialists with needs different from mine will be shrugged at and ignored. I won’t buy it just because it’s great, if it’s not great for my needs. I certainly won’t aspirationally buy Leica or Hasselblad just to look “serious”.

So, materialism, in a sense of buying physical objects for their physical properties and function. I heartily recommend it. Idealism, in a sense of aspirationally buying exclusive branded items for their elusive spiritual properties… fuck that.

Idealistic spending

Posted on by
2

I was just thinking how a common interpretation of striving to attain things is that people believe things will bring them happiness. I don’t think this is what we are seeing. I think people buy things for their symbolism, and the entire thing is some kind of magical thinking, or even an unconscious magical ritual, where they think that, by putting symbols of success, wealth or fame onto themselves they will increasingly participate in the desired outcome.

In that sense, they are some sort of idealists, because they see things for their social and emotional value, not their material value, and I’m some sort of a materialist, because I buy things mostly for their physical utilitarian value. For instance, I buy coffee cups in order to drink coffee from them. I don’t care how fancy they are. They need to be the right size, nice enough shape and they need to be durable, inexpensive and locally available. All of those things are physical properties, and emotional or social significance of those cups is zero.

Nothing fancy.

However, when someone buys coffee cups from a fancy brand, and wants them to increase the perceived social standing of the household in the eyes of guests, they are doing it for the ideal, not material properties of the object.

I’m not saying I’m never buying things for their perceived meaning. I do, when it’s useful. For instance, when I need to maintain an impression in order to “pass” socially, I’ll buy a thing or two for their status symbolism, but I’ll try to be reasonable about it and not overspend. This, however, is also mostly functional, because I see the symbolism as part of the utility. I know how people think, what they perceive, what conclusions they will make, and I know what impression I want to make in order to have the least possible amount of issues. So, apparently, sometimes the symbolism of status is a commodity to be purchased.

But this is a completely different thing from believing that, if you buy enough expensive things, you will magically become more successful and wealthy. No; you’ll be poorer, because wasting money on depreciating symbolic assets doesn’t do absolutely anything, other than make people think you’re an idiot. There are people who are so obsessed with things, that you can precisely assess the amount of money they have by whether they bought some symbolic asset or not. For instance, if he didn’t buy a Rolex, you can tell for sure he has less money than the price of that Rolex, because he would have bought it even if he had exactly that much money and not a Euro more. If he had enough money to buy a Mercedes, he would have certainly bought it.

The concept that you can be rational and calculated about those things is, apparently, too much for some people. The “magical” power of material symbols is too great for them to resist, because they actually think this is the way you make progress. You buy Mercedes, wear Rolex and eat lobster all the way to material success. It’s insanity, but that’s how they think. I, on the other hand, think that status symbols are the fastest way to financial ruin, and one should avoid them as much as possible and instead act rationally and frugally, but within reason and until a point.

The limit of frugality, in my opinion, is respect for yourself, your work and your family. If you respect your family you won’t allow them to wear rags and look homeless. If you respect your work you will buy yourself good tools. Also, you will purchase sufficient symbols of status to shield your family from social pressures. So, status symbols are somewhat necessary and you can’t completely avoid them, but if you’re rational about it, they won’t cost you much more than purely utilitarian things of good quality. You just need to know what you’re doing and be purposeful and deliberate about it. Also, you need to avoid growing expenses to match and exceed your income, because that’s deadly.

For instance, there’s a pretty defined amount I’m willing to pay for a watch, regardless of how much money I have. I’ve heard statements that a watch should cost a month or two of your income, but I completely disagree with that. I would never buy a watch that expensive. Instead, my limit for a watch is my monthly budget for discretionary spending. Just think about it: a monthly income isn’t something you can recover in a month. You have expenses – rent, bills, food, fuel and so on. When you remove standard expenses from your income, the rest is what you can comfortably spend on something and not get yourself into trouble. In order to recover a full month of income, you need to pay it off from multiple months’ worth of discretionary spending budget, and depending on your actual numbers, that can be a very long time. So, if your discretionary budget is 10% of your income, it will take you 10 months of that to recover your monthly income, if you burned it on a watch. So, essentially, you’ll have to live on bare necessities for 10 months to pay for a gadget. You see how insane that “rule” is?

So, rather than defining “what I can afford” as the amount I can pay without dying, I define it as the amount I can pay without feeling any adverse effects. This means I can afford much less than people who will go into debt and destitution just to prove a fictitious point. I do, however, prefer having actual money, to creating an impression of having money. Impressions are sometimes useful, but it is my experience that they peak out very quickly.

Illusion over substance

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking about how I don’t care about the appearance or an illusion of a thing, and would rather have the thing itself, and how often people do the opposite – sacrifice a thing in order to have the appearance of it.

Perhaps that’s too abstract, but let’s take luxury goods as an example. Unlike what people tend to think, they are not something rich people buy because they can afford it. They are something middle class and actually poor people aspirationally buy in order to create an impression of wealth, thinking it will magically attract wealth into their lives if they appropriate its appearance, or something. And sure, there is a segment of rich people who also buy luxury goods in order to create the appearance that their lives are not empty and meaningless and that their wealth did actually help them achieve some worthwhile thing. However, most wealthy people invest in projects that are actually worthwhile, at least in their opinion. Traditionally, libraries, hospitals etc. bear names of their wealthy donors. They finance welfare projects for the poor, infrastructure, science and so on. Sure, they will buy a big mansion, yacht and jet plane, but the majority of their focus usually lies in making something lasting in the world they will be remembered for. Also, unlike the aspirational middle class, the people who think they will be perceived as belonging to the important class by wearing a Rolex and an expensive suit, the actually wealthy people are known by name. You get to be important by doing something that matters, not by puffing yourself up with status symbols that define your status – as that of a desperate wannabe social climber.

So, what do status symbols actually do? They convert actual money into appearance of wealth, and in the case of middle class people, they aggravate their actual financial situation by incurring debt and depleting their bank account instead of that money being invested into something that will actually help them – basically, if you want to improve your social standing, buying LVMH shares will do more for you than buying their products.

Cars are likely the worst, since they cost a significant portion of a real-estate purchase, they depreciate rapidly and need to be replaced with some regularity, and if you want to use a car as a status symbol, you’d have to refresh it every five years or less, and that will be such an impact to your finances, it might actually prevent you from achieving any worthy goals. The expensive cars are for people what Pleistocene tar pits were for wolves and sabretooth cats – an irresistibly attractive fatal thing where their bones get to be found at a later date.

In both cases – cars and luxury goods – you create an appearance of wealth at the cost of wealth itself. It is something that doesn’t matter if you’re so wealthy that this doesn’t actually cut into your wealth significantly, or at least no more than a good dinner cuts into the income of an average person. For instance, if the price of your car is your annual income, such a purchase is literally destroying your financial future. But if the price of your car is one or two months of your income, and you keep the car until the entirety of its useful life had been exhausted, this might be a reasonable and frugal purchase. But have this in mind: a very rich person will buy an expensive car for their pocket money. It will be a fraction of their monthly income. If you try to imitate them, you probably could, but you will have to financially destroy yourself in the attempt, and it will do absolutely nothing useful for you. It won’t make you rich, it will make you poorer. It won’t get you into the company of rich people where you’ll do business and become one of them. You’d still have to figure out how to do that regardless of the car. You’re buying an illusion of wealth at the cost of the actual thing.

There are things other than wealth where this applies as well – for instance, sacrificing happiness in order to obtain the illusion of it, but wealth is the easiest example. The most fatal one, however, is spiritual advancement, where one has to choose between the thing and appearance thereof very early on, and almost everybody chooses to appear spiritual. You can imagine what that looks like – read the right books so you know the lingo, be vegetarian, believe in karma and reincarnation, and so on. Add celibacy and poverty for the next level. Do that for twenty years, and you’re perceived as a genuine spiritual seeker. The problem is, not only did you achieve absolutely nothing of value in the spiritual sense; you achieved things that are making it impossible for you to even start. You made yourself into a circus act. And, most importantly, you have your “achievements” to defend as a matter of ego support structure, which means you won’t listen to good advice and change your stupid behaviour when someone like me tells you’re merely making a fool out of yourself. Essentially, you sacrificed the possibility of getting the real thing in order to obtain the appearance thereof.

Why do people do it?

Because it’s easy to copy the appearance of something; or, at least people think it is, if they believe they know what the real thing is supposed to look like, and in the case of spirituality, they absolutely don’t. They also have “magical thinking”, and they believe that if they become similar enough to something in appearance, this will make them more like that thing in substance. It’s a “cargo cult” mentality.

Let me tell you how you become rich. You do it by having more money and other assets. You don’t do it by having expensive shit on you. You become “spiritual” by having the soul structure and size of the angels and persons of God. It’s not done by trying to make yourself into a stereotypical cultist. I know that children learn by pretending to be, or at least they think they learn, and adults seemingly just keep this up but in the adult version, but it’s not working. It didn’t work for you when your were children, and it’s certainly not working for you as adults. Imitation is not a way of becoming – it’s a way of losing substance in order to obtain appearance. Just stop it.

State of things

Posted on by
4

I thought I was going to get some rest and recover from serious brain fatigue after writing the book, but somehow, the opposite happened, as I tried to get the book corrected and out in the final form as quickly as possible, and that meant proofreading it once, then having Marin proofread it using his AI tools as I vetted the suggestions, which meant basically somewhat proofreading it for the second time, and then after he was done, I went through the book for the third time, and all of it of course used the same parts of the brain as writing the book, since you can’t proofread it if you’re not experiencing it fully and so on.

But we got results: “The Light Beyond” is now properly corrected and published on Kindle as an e-book. The samples of the physical hardcover edition are on the way to Marin, because he’s closer, and then we’ll decide on whether to go with glossy or matte, how good the cover looks IRL and whether the inner margins are big enough. The classic typesetting stuff. The purpose of the hardcover is to avoid the situation where people will try to print it themselves and end up with all sorts of improvised and unsatisfactory solutions, the way it always happens when I don’t publish a physical book, which is how it always turned out ever since the early 2000s. That, however, is pure convenience, which is why it’s the second thing we went for. The first thing was the e-book, because in the era of digital media where everybody reads books from phones, tablets and other computer-forms, that became the book. In fact, I haven’t read physical books in who knows how long, simply because it’s harder on my eyesight to read from a non-illuminated surface where the text can’t be magnified to a comfortable size.

I’m making the PDF download available for free on this website in parallel. It’s mostly a failsafe against censorship; I don’t care whether it’s free or Amazon makes all the money, because those are the two only realistic options. The only way I could actually get some money from it, which would actually be nice, is to set up cryptocurrency donation on my website, which is something I might actually do at some point. Every other way, someone else is going to make all the money and people are going to be pissed at me for getting rich off of people wanting to read books. I mean, I wouldn’t mind getting rich that way, since it would be the most satisfying thing – I’d profit from doing something good.

As for how I’m doing – not well, I’m afraid. The guys “up there” stopped downloading stuff into my brain since I finished the book, but I’m transforming an endless river of karmic refuse from global sources, and it’s going on basically 24/7. Someone’s in a hurry, I guess, and I never got any rest whatsoever. Right now, I would assess my condition as pretty much critical, in the sense that this can’t go on, because something is going to break.

Occasionally, when I go out and take pictures, I do get some rest because that uses different parts of my brain, and that helps. This continued barrage of writing and proofreading exhausted my brain to a point where it automatically blanks out when I try to use those parts. This means things would get actually damaged if I pushed it any further. That, combined with the fact that I’m not allowed to rest because spending karma seems to be absolutely urgent and can’t be postponed, means I’ll try to take pictures of nice things while not thinking about anything, but of course, that won’t happen, because FML. 🙂

Tariffs

Posted on by
36

Trump introduced those super high tariffs on every country America is in trade deficit with, which, essentially, means every country.

As a result, those countries are going to introduce reciprocal tariffs on America, which translates into a trade war.

What’s going to happen next is global disentanglement of supply chains based on toxicity. But more directly, some things are going to get more expensive. Expecting them to get more expensive, people will buy the existing stock quickly, and the manufacturers are going to stop supply until the pricing is figured out. This means both scarcity and high prices.

So, obviously, during the weekend I looked into the stuff I will have to buy in the next six months to a year, overlapping with the stuff that’s going to get more expensive within that timeframe, and as a result I bought two Apple laptops. Biljana needs a replacement for her Intel 16″ Macbook Pro from 2019, so she’s getting a 16″ M4 Max Macbook Pro. My 13″ M1 Macbook Air is also due for replacement because I broke the tab key and my eyes aren’t what they used to be so I got myself the 15″ M4 Air, but this time I got 24GB of RAM because 8GB was limiting. Essentially, I just flushed my shopping list for the year because I see no benefits in waiting.

So, yeah, my prognosis for this is that the economy will go down, prices will go up, availability of things will go down, and the general standard of living will be degraded across the West. Also, I expect wars to get much worse, and quickly. Buying laptops is not what you would normally do in those conditions, but I’d rather replace failing hardware now when it’s merely preventative maintenance, than later when it might be a serious problem.