Director Detection at SecureBio in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
jefftk
Karma: 24,798
I have a lot of trouble seeing how this would work in practice. I’d expect the downsides of intentionally creating disasters to be high, and that the people in a position to cause them through negligence would generally not be the ones who could benefit by selling into a disaster.
I do see how this could happen when the seller is a monopoly, though, so I do think our normal approach of trying to avoid monopolies, and to the extent we allow them highly regulate what they can charge, is still good.
How Many Parking Permits?
Ended up turning this into a post: https://www.jefftk.com/p/non-obvious-benefits-of-insurance
Pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first seems like simple advice that most people should be able to follow.
Agreed. But the argument for paying off smaller debts first isn’t that comparing interest rates is confusing, it’s that the experience of retiring debts is motivating and you want to get some wins sooner.
Rules about “the total value of all vehicles” seem pointless and distracting.
I think you might not be aware of how much Americans tend to put into cars and other vehicles. People commonly get themselves into situations where their car payments are on the same scale is rent.
Price encodes the standards gap. If you care more about something, you’ll negotiate it higher. The market naturally surfaces who has higher standards for what, without it needing to be a direct conversation about “you’re not doing enough.”
I don’t understand how this works. It seems to me like if I have high standards for keeping the kitchen floor clean, then someone with lower standards will typically underbid me because keeping it clean to their standards is less work.
Alternatively, if because of my high standards choose to bid lower, to make sure that the task is assigned to me and done to my high standards, then I get less “credit” for the tasks I take on, and soin general I end up doing quite a bit more work.
I think this is off base
Sorry, is “this” here me or Ramsey?
If you “invest 15% of your household income in retirement”, this is probably equally as valuable as setting that money on fire.
There are still a bunch of good reasons to put money in retirement accounts: Retirement Accounts and Short Timelines, Personal AI Planning.
Conflicted on Ramsey
Chore Standards
The gas stove is almost infinitely forgiving by comparison. You can throw an oddly shaped piece of chicken at it while half-watching television and get something edible. The microwave, at least the version in this book, demands you weigh things in ounces and preheat empty skillets and basically treat dinner like a chemistry practical.
I’m not convinced. The things we do without thinking about it to get good results from conventional cooking (preheating ovens, boiling water before adding pasta, ensuring nothing burns to the bottom of your pot, planning how steam will interact with the food as it cooks) just seem so normal to us we don’t notice.
Introducing and Deprecating WoFBench
I do think this is important, and the big one is fuel for heating food: pasta and rice are pretty minimally nutritionally valuable if you can’t cook them (pretty sure soaking is not good enough). Canned / jarred food does very well here, and we do have a decent amount of this.
As much as possible I’d like to approach this through the nearly-free “buy more of what we already cook”, and in our particular case I think we’re good there.
With freeze-dried meals, you can get big tubs of ones packaged to last 25y (example, though note “just add water” is misleading since you need to cook them), so I’m not too worried about rotation there.
Here’s to the Polypropylene Makers
Look around your house at the non-perishable food already on the shelves, and buy more of that. Then rotate through over time.
This is a place where we can look at how things have gone in real situations, and not try reasoning through from first principles:
It looks like anger and force are generally targeted at governments and stores, not individuals. Violence was typically around stores and in the streets; staying home and out of the way was often much safer. I do think keeping food in your house instead of an easily-robbed shed is good, though.
Storing Food
It’s confusing, but that only applies for people born after 2025-12-15.
The largest harm of Enron was the massive accounting fraud, not the artificial scarcity (though that was also large and bad!). But even the artificial scarcity was mostly fraud (lying to CAISO in various ways).
The artificial scarcity was also only possible because of regulatory loopholes that have since been closed. Overall this looks to me like a situation where instead of “full regulated monopoly” or “full free market” we built something in between, and initially did a bad job of it.