jenk

1. If you have money, you don't have to worry about it. This isn't guaranteed. [...] This feeling of financial serenity isn't, however, only for the wealthy. If you live beneath your means and invest prudently, you can achieve a sense of financial control long before you achieve full financial independence. [...]
   
   
2. Money can give you the freedom to pursue your passions. Ideally, you want to spend your days engaged in activities that you find absorbing and satisfying, that you feel you're good at -- and where you feel you're doing good.
   
   [...Y]ou don't need to be financially independent to have a sense of purpose. If you're young, you can pick a career that is close to your heart. If you're in your 40s and you have been saving for 15 or 20 years, maybe you can afford to swap into a new job that is less lucrative but more fulfilling.
   
   
3. Money can buy you time with friends and family. [...W]hile money makes all this easier, it clearly isn't a necessity. Disgruntled with your lot in life? My advice: Forget spending more money at the mall -- and instead spend more time with friends. Your bank account may still be skimpy, but your life will be far, far richer.

IN 1904 Willie Vanderbilt hit a thrilling 92.3 mph (147.7 kph) in his new German motorcar, smashing the land-speed record. His older brother's sprawling North Carolina manse, Biltmore, could accommodate up to 500 pounds of meat in its electrical refrigerators. In miserable contrast, the below-average Gilded Age American had to make do with a pair of shoes and a melting block of ice. If he could somehow save enough for an icebox, a day's wage would not have bought a pound of meat to put in it.[...]

[C]onsumption numbers, [like income], conceal as much as they illuminate. They can record only that we have spent, but not the value—the pleasure or health—gained in the spending. A stable trend in nominal consumption inequality can mask a narrowing of real or “utility-adjusted” consumption inequality. Indeed, according to happiness researchers, inequality in self-reported “life satisfaction” has been shrinking in wealthy market democracies, America included, suggesting that the quality of lives across the income scale are becoming more similar, not less.

You can see this levelling at work in markets for transport and appliances. You no longer need be a Vanderbilt to own a refrigerator or a car. ( Read more... )

[W]hen the prices of food, clothing and basic modern conveniences drop relative to the price of luxury goods, real consumption inequality drops. But the point is not that in America the relatively poor suffer no painful indignities, which would be absurd. It is that, over time, the everyday experience of consumption among the less fortunate has become in many ways more similar to that of their wealthier compatriots. [...]

This compression is the predictable consequence of innovations in production and distribution that have improved the quality of goods at the lower range of prices faster than at the top. [...]

This increasing equality in real consumption mirrors a dramatic narrowing of other inequalities between rich and poor, such as the inequalities in height, life expectancy and leisure.

[Payment recipients] will not have to complete applications, file any extra forms or call the Internal Revenue Service to request the payment, which is automatic. The IRS will determine eligibility, figure the amount and issue the payment.

[about Madame de Pompadour]

Rose:	The Queen must have loved her.
Doctor:	Oh, she did. They got on very well.
Mickey:	What, the King's wife and the King's girlfriend?
Doctor:	France. It's a different planet.

- From Doctor Who 2.4, "The Girl in the Fireplace", by Steven Moffat.

The market is a herd of lemmings following one another up in good times and down in bad times. Lately, there's been so much negative press about the housing crisis that everyone's saying the bottom's falling out. And when everyone begins to act on this information, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the basic, fundamental value of most of the S&P 500 stocks has changed very little in the past few months. Yeah, they may take a hit for awhile, but when the tide turns and the lemmings start to say things are all better again, they'll skyrocket.

Anyone who follows an election campaign too closely will sometimes get the feeling that politicians think voters are idiots. A new book says they are. Or rather, Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, makes the slightly politer claim that voters systematically favor irrational policies.
[...]
Many political scientists think [ignorance] does not matter because of a phenomenon called the "miracle of aggregation" or, more poetically, the "wisdom of crowds." If ignorant voters vote randomly, the candidate who wins a majority of well-informed voters will win.

The principle yields good results in other fields. On "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?," the answer most popular with the studio audience is correct 91 percent of the time. Financial markets, too, show how a huge number of guesses, aggregated, can value a stock or bond more accurately than any individual expert could. But Caplan says politics is different because ignorant voters do not vote randomly.

Instead, he identifies four biases that prompt voters systematically to demand policies that make them worse off.

jw1776

• Don't expect them to look like incandescent. It's not just tone, it's brightness. A "looks like 60-watt" fluorescent is often just that little bit brighter than a 60-watt incandescent. A hallway with 3 recessed overhead lights should be all one type of bulb. Putting in one 60-watt fluorescent or one 60-watt incandescent is going to look "off". (Our downstairs hallway drove me nuts for months. I finally noticed the middle bulb was incandescent...replaced it with a fluorescent to match the other two and OMG I'm actually turning them on now!)
• Think about the type of light you want. Our home library is a big room with a cathedral ceiling. We have uplights for general room light, but task lights - reading lights - have been a struggle. At the moment, I brightened the overall lighting by putting in "daylight" fluorescents. Are they true daylight? No. Do they mimic "grow-bulbs"? Not quite, but close. Would they make me nuts as the only lights in the room? Oh yeah. But having them in the uplights, with other smaller lights for balance - that works.
  
  And on a similar note,
• Not in my "makeup" (bathroom) mirror. Not yet.

jw1776