I’m going to focus more on entertainment in terms of real products as I expect this category to be underrepresented in this thread:
Spotify Premium: ~$10/mo, unlimited commercial-free music streaming (+ ability to sync to mobile for offline listening). They have an enormous library. I have essentially stopped buying albums because they are all available on Spotify (might not be as useful if you listen to really obscure music, but it’s worth searching their library before buying a subscription. You may be surprised what they have. I just bought my dad (a huge audiophile and musician) a 6 month subscription for his 65th birthday and he just downloaded Rolling Stone’s top 10 albums of the year that he otherwise would have bought and is really happy with it.
Netflix: Unlimited streaming is ~$7/mo, which is all I have. They have a large library and are starting to become content producers as well as just aggregators. Of course if you’re easily seduced into binge-watching when you really want to be doing other things, it might not be a good idea. Personally, I get a lot of enjoyment out of it and it’s cheaper than one movie ticket a month. Lots of classic movies as well as more modern stuff. However, it’s relatively easy to “run out” of stuff to watch on Netflix, at which time you can just cancel your subscription.
Roku: If you don’t have a Smart TV, it’s the best of all of the 3rd party options (FireTV, AppleTV, Chromecast, etc.). Get the “Roku 3”, it’s under $100 and has access to a lot of streaming services. The best feature is “Universal Search” where you search for a title and it looks across all of the different streaming services and lets you find the cheapest (or free) offerings. (Not offered as far as I know with any of the other products because they all push their own content stores first).
Aux-port/Cigarette-lighter Car Bluetooth Adaptor: ~$30-$40. Gives you in-car bluetooth if you don’t already have it. I recommend the Belkin one on Amazon. It’s been well worth the price in terms of added convenience for me.
Windshield/Dash Suction-Cup Mount for Smartphone: Cheap. If you use your phone for driving directions, it’s much more convenient (and a lot safer) than having the phone in your lap. Keep in mind that in some areas, it may be illegal to mount it to the windshield.
Radar Detector: ~$200 – $700. Get either a Valentine or a Cobra. They’re about the cost of one speeding ticket and can help you avoid tickets. (This is not an endorsement of driving too fast of course). Valentine is simple but effective and indicates front or back direction of radar source. Expensive, but no bells and whistles. Cobra has a wide range of products with a wide range of prices. Not directional, but has lots of bells and whistles like learning false positives, traffic-cam alerts through GPS, and connection to a network for crowd-sourced data (think Waze, but for stuff like speed traps). Again, these may be illegal in your area—make sure to check first.
Tablet/e-reader: I prefer to read textbooks on a tablet and other books on my Kindle Paper-white. Had an iPad provided by my previous employer before I left and I’m really missing it more than I thought I would for textbooks. I’m looking into a new tablet and really want one with good palm-rejection and a stylus for taking notes (If anyone has suggestions, please let me know).
Textbooks: I give myself a monthly education budget and buy a new textbook (and sometimes solutions guide) every couple months. There are also free options of dubious legality like libgen.org or libgen.info. e-textbooks go great with tablets.
Wake-up light / Dawn Simulator Alarm Clock: ~$100 Some love em, some (like Eliezer) don’t get any benefit from them. I kept a sleep journal for a month and it seems to work for me. I’m in a much lighter sleep when the alarm finally goes off (if I don’t wake up naturally from the light). If you’re techy, you can build your own with an arduino or raspberry pi pretty easily. On that note...
Arduino / Raspberry Pi: ~$30-$40. Very fun if you want to learn DIY electronics. Arduino is a microcontroller whereas raspberry pi is a full computer. I’m just getting started learning embedded systems and electronics myself (taking a class on edX starting this month called “Embedded Systems”. If anyone else here on LW is planning on taking this, let me know).
My favorite fiction Novel (aside from HPMOR): The Shadow of the Wind—by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Great story, deep characters, a love story, a mystery, and some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever seen.
Nice sunglasses: $15 - $300. Get some brown/amber-tinted, polarized lenses with a nice lightweight aviator frame. You’ll never look back. May be a bit hard to find at the lower price point, but not impossible.
Radar Detector: ~$200 – $700. Get either a Valentine or a Cobra. They’re about the cost of one speeding ticket and can help you avoid tickets. (This is not an endorsement of driving too fast of course). Valentine is simple but effective and indicates front or back direction of radar source. Expensive, but no bells and whistles. Cobra has a wide range of products with a wide range of prices. Not directional, but has lots of bells and whistles like learning false positives, traffic-cam alerts through GPS, and connection to a network for crowd-sourced data (think Waze, but for stuff like speed traps). Again, these may be illegal in your area—make sure to check first.
Alternatively, one could focus on driving more slowly and more safely, so as to reduce the risk of dying in an automobile accident. Your life is valuable.
But in certain places the optimal speed to drive at (i.e. minimizing some linear combination of probability of dying, time spent, fuel used, etc.) may exceed the legal speed limit (i.e. maximizing revenue from speed tickets).
Then again, going fast and then braking right before a radar may itself be quite dangerous.
But in certain places the optimal speed to drive at … may exceed the legal speed limit
I’ll make a stronger claim: in many places (e.g. US highways) the optimal speed to drive does exceed the legal speed limit for the simple reason that the probability of an accident is a function of the difference between your speed and the speed of the traffic around you, and the traffic on interstates generally goes faster than the speed limit.
I think I have seen it claimed that (because driving faster is more dangerous) driving faster, especially near or above the speed limit, is generally a net expected loss in time when you offset low-probability long-time hospital stays against high-probability short-time improvements in travel time.
Back of envelope: your overall accident risk per mile driven is on the order of 10^-6 to 10^-5. Suppose the speed limit is 60mph and you drive for a mile at 70mph, and suppose this gives you an extra 10^-6 chance of an accident. It also saves you 1⁄7 of a minute. So it’s a net loss if the (appropriately weighted) time cost of an accident is more than 10^6/7 minutes, which is about 100 days.
That sounds unlikely on the face of it. (Not least because maybe a substantial fraction of those accidents are little ones in which no one is hurt much.) On the other hand:
Something like 1⁄200 of all road accidents are fatal. Perhaps ones that occur above the speed limit are more likely fatal, but let’s leave that aside. If you expect to live another 40 years, then a 1⁄200 chance of death is about 70 expected days lost. (It’s not clear that those expected days quite correspond one-for-one with days spent in hospital after a non-fatal crash.)
It also seems pretty plausible that driving sufficiently far above the limit to need a radar detector actually puts you (overall) into the regime where your accident risk per mile is substantially above the overall average. If it’s 10^-5 instead of 10^-6, for instance, your expected time lost due to accident only needs to be 10 days to make this a bad idea; that’s substantially less than the “death cost” I just estimated.
Of course accidents have costs other than the time you stay in hospital. You may have to pay to have your car fixed. You may have to pay higher insurance premiums for a while. You probably attach disvalue to the pain and inconvenience of injury beyond the time spent in hospital. There may be paperwork that wastes a lot of your time. The injury may have lasting effects that reduce your quality of life. You may injure someone else, in which case you may have a legal fight to deal with and maybe some time in prison, which might be even worse than hospital, or a fine. Etc.
I dare say it does sometimes happen that the overall optimal speed is faster than the limit, but I suspect it’s less common than most of us like to think.
Not sure why you were downvoted. Tried to reverse that for you. I agree actually. I just love the way the world looks through them, especially nature. And most sunglasses put a gray tint on the world instead of making it warmer. Why would anyone want that? That’s why I said you’d never go back once you tried it.
To each his own. But if you’ve never tried them and that’s a response on principles rather than experience, you really should give them a try. You might be surprised.
My point though was that sunglasses of any kind skew color accuracy. But of the possible skews, amber-tinted sunglasses really are nice and don’t seem to detract from what you see the way gray-tinted (in reality, a strange blue-green) lenses do. I’m not talking blue-blockers here. Just regular, subtle amber/brown lenses.
Netflix and Spotify Premium are pretty expensive. I could see these being worthwhile if you’re really dedicated about movies/music, but buying the occasional DVD or downloading music tracks from the likes of Amazon/iTunes Store will probably be cheaper in the long run for most folks.
E-paper readers are interesting, but if I were to buy one I would choose it for openness to homebrew development. That way I could use the e-paper display for other purposes as well, such as running software on a remote box.
In principle I agree. In practice I know I’ve gained far more happiness from the integratedness of the amazon store, the size of their selection, and the free international internet (it’s on one particular model, the kindle keyboard, which you can only buy in the US, but it still exists AFAIK) than I ever would have from running an SSH app or developing my own apps. The refresh rate makes these devices really very limited for general-purpose computing. My advice is to buy a good, open phone, and treat the e-reader as a single-purpose appliance.
I think it very much depends on how annoying other ways of watching things are to you. The main benefit to netfix is on average higher quality more access to subtitles than stealing stuff via torrents, and FAR more convenience than DVDs, especially for those of us with new enough computers to not even have DVD trays.
With Spotify the main added benefits are being able to use your own music from a home computer wherever you go, and no advertisements. For me advertisements are pretty damn annoying, but your own mileage may vary.
The reason I really love Spotify style services is that they massively reduce the friction of trying new things out. I’ve found a lot more music I enjoy of various different types over the last two years of using rdio / spotify than in any time period previous to that, because the cost of trying something new is as simple as typing in a search query.
I personally prefer using YouTube with AdBlock instead of Spotify. I actually canceled my Spotify subscription because I was always just using YouTube anyway. Pretty much any song you can think of is on YouTube, the streaming is pretty much instant, and you can find playlists, cover versions, versions that just have the lyrics instead of any video, etc. YMMV, but I find YouTube to be superior to Spotify in practically every way.
The main time in my experience that Radar Detectors are useful are in long, flat, relatively safe speeding areas such as Great Plains states. The rest of the time, the difference between going 9 over (the speed at which you’re basically guaranteed never to get pulled over) and going 20 over as a percentage gain over your base speed is actually unsafe due to cars, turniness of roads, and visibility.
I’m going to focus more on entertainment in terms of real products as I expect this category to be underrepresented in this thread:
Spotify Premium: ~$10/mo, unlimited commercial-free music streaming (+ ability to sync to mobile for offline listening). They have an enormous library. I have essentially stopped buying albums because they are all available on Spotify (might not be as useful if you listen to really obscure music, but it’s worth searching their library before buying a subscription. You may be surprised what they have. I just bought my dad (a huge audiophile and musician) a 6 month subscription for his 65th birthday and he just downloaded Rolling Stone’s top 10 albums of the year that he otherwise would have bought and is really happy with it.
Netflix: Unlimited streaming is ~$7/mo, which is all I have. They have a large library and are starting to become content producers as well as just aggregators. Of course if you’re easily seduced into binge-watching when you really want to be doing other things, it might not be a good idea. Personally, I get a lot of enjoyment out of it and it’s cheaper than one movie ticket a month. Lots of classic movies as well as more modern stuff. However, it’s relatively easy to “run out” of stuff to watch on Netflix, at which time you can just cancel your subscription.
Roku: If you don’t have a Smart TV, it’s the best of all of the 3rd party options (FireTV, AppleTV, Chromecast, etc.). Get the “Roku 3”, it’s under $100 and has access to a lot of streaming services. The best feature is “Universal Search” where you search for a title and it looks across all of the different streaming services and lets you find the cheapest (or free) offerings. (Not offered as far as I know with any of the other products because they all push their own content stores first).
Aux-port/Cigarette-lighter Car Bluetooth Adaptor: ~$30-$40. Gives you in-car bluetooth if you don’t already have it. I recommend the Belkin one on Amazon. It’s been well worth the price in terms of added convenience for me.
Windshield/Dash Suction-Cup Mount for Smartphone: Cheap. If you use your phone for driving directions, it’s much more convenient (and a lot safer) than having the phone in your lap. Keep in mind that in some areas, it may be illegal to mount it to the windshield.
Radar Detector: ~$200 – $700. Get either a Valentine or a Cobra. They’re about the cost of one speeding ticket and can help you avoid tickets. (This is not an endorsement of driving too fast of course). Valentine is simple but effective and indicates front or back direction of radar source. Expensive, but no bells and whistles. Cobra has a wide range of products with a wide range of prices. Not directional, but has lots of bells and whistles like learning false positives, traffic-cam alerts through GPS, and connection to a network for crowd-sourced data (think Waze, but for stuff like speed traps). Again, these may be illegal in your area—make sure to check first.
Tablet/e-reader: I prefer to read textbooks on a tablet and other books on my Kindle Paper-white. Had an iPad provided by my previous employer before I left and I’m really missing it more than I thought I would for textbooks. I’m looking into a new tablet and really want one with good palm-rejection and a stylus for taking notes (If anyone has suggestions, please let me know).
Textbooks: I give myself a monthly education budget and buy a new textbook (and sometimes solutions guide) every couple months. There are also free options of dubious legality like libgen.org or libgen.info. e-textbooks go great with tablets.
Wake-up light / Dawn Simulator Alarm Clock: ~$100 Some love em, some (like Eliezer) don’t get any benefit from them. I kept a sleep journal for a month and it seems to work for me. I’m in a much lighter sleep when the alarm finally goes off (if I don’t wake up naturally from the light). If you’re techy, you can build your own with an arduino or raspberry pi pretty easily. On that note...
Arduino / Raspberry Pi: ~$30-$40. Very fun if you want to learn DIY electronics. Arduino is a microcontroller whereas raspberry pi is a full computer. I’m just getting started learning embedded systems and electronics myself (taking a class on edX starting this month called “Embedded Systems”. If anyone else here on LW is planning on taking this, let me know).
My favorite fiction Novel (aside from HPMOR): The Shadow of the Wind—by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Great story, deep characters, a love story, a mystery, and some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever seen.
Nice sunglasses: $15 - $300. Get some brown/amber-tinted, polarized lenses with a nice lightweight aviator frame. You’ll never look back. May be a bit hard to find at the lower price point, but not impossible.
Hope some of this was helpful!
Alternatively, one could focus on driving more slowly and more safely, so as to reduce the risk of dying in an automobile accident. Your life is valuable.
But in certain places the optimal speed to drive at (i.e. minimizing some linear combination of probability of dying, time spent, fuel used, etc.) may exceed the legal speed limit (i.e. maximizing revenue from speed tickets).
Then again, going fast and then braking right before a radar may itself be quite dangerous.
I’ll make a stronger claim: in many places (e.g. US highways) the optimal speed to drive does exceed the legal speed limit for the simple reason that the probability of an accident is a function of the difference between your speed and the speed of the traffic around you, and the traffic on interstates generally goes faster than the speed limit.
On the other hand I’ve never been pulled over when doing the same speed as cars around me, and I’ve been speeding for over a decade at this point.
I think I have seen it claimed that (because driving faster is more dangerous) driving faster, especially near or above the speed limit, is generally a net expected loss in time when you offset low-probability long-time hospital stays against high-probability short-time improvements in travel time.
Back of envelope: your overall accident risk per mile driven is on the order of 10^-6 to 10^-5. Suppose the speed limit is 60mph and you drive for a mile at 70mph, and suppose this gives you an extra 10^-6 chance of an accident. It also saves you 1⁄7 of a minute. So it’s a net loss if the (appropriately weighted) time cost of an accident is more than 10^6/7 minutes, which is about 100 days.
That sounds unlikely on the face of it. (Not least because maybe a substantial fraction of those accidents are little ones in which no one is hurt much.) On the other hand:
Something like 1⁄200 of all road accidents are fatal. Perhaps ones that occur above the speed limit are more likely fatal, but let’s leave that aside. If you expect to live another 40 years, then a 1⁄200 chance of death is about 70 expected days lost. (It’s not clear that those expected days quite correspond one-for-one with days spent in hospital after a non-fatal crash.)
It also seems pretty plausible that driving sufficiently far above the limit to need a radar detector actually puts you (overall) into the regime where your accident risk per mile is substantially above the overall average. If it’s 10^-5 instead of 10^-6, for instance, your expected time lost due to accident only needs to be 10 days to make this a bad idea; that’s substantially less than the “death cost” I just estimated.
Of course accidents have costs other than the time you stay in hospital. You may have to pay to have your car fixed. You may have to pay higher insurance premiums for a while. You probably attach disvalue to the pain and inconvenience of injury beyond the time spent in hospital. There may be paperwork that wastes a lot of your time. The injury may have lasting effects that reduce your quality of life. You may injure someone else, in which case you may have a legal fight to deal with and maybe some time in prison, which might be even worse than hospital, or a fine. Etc.
I dare say it does sometimes happen that the overall optimal speed is faster than the limit, but I suspect it’s less common than most of us like to think.
That’s probably a bigger deal on certain roads than on others.
I find that yellow or other warm-colored sunglasses have a noticeable positive effect on my mood.
Not sure why you were downvoted. Tried to reverse that for you. I agree actually. I just love the way the world looks through them, especially nature. And most sunglasses put a gray tint on the world instead of making it warmer. Why would anyone want that? That’s why I said you’d never go back once you tried it.
I’m being targeted for mass down-voting. Thanks for caring!
I much prefer to see the world in accurate colours.
To each his own. But if you’ve never tried them and that’s a response on principles rather than experience, you really should give them a try. You might be surprised.
My point though was that sunglasses of any kind skew color accuracy. But of the possible skews, amber-tinted sunglasses really are nice and don’t seem to detract from what you see the way gray-tinted (in reality, a strange blue-green) lenses do. I’m not talking blue-blockers here. Just regular, subtle amber/brown lenses.
Netflix and Spotify Premium are pretty expensive. I could see these being worthwhile if you’re really dedicated about movies/music, but buying the occasional DVD or downloading music tracks from the likes of Amazon/iTunes Store will probably be cheaper in the long run for most folks.
E-paper readers are interesting, but if I were to buy one I would choose it for openness to homebrew development. That way I could use the e-paper display for other purposes as well, such as running software on a remote box.
In principle I agree. In practice I know I’ve gained far more happiness from the integratedness of the amazon store, the size of their selection, and the free international internet (it’s on one particular model, the kindle keyboard, which you can only buy in the US, but it still exists AFAIK) than I ever would have from running an SSH app or developing my own apps. The refresh rate makes these devices really very limited for general-purpose computing. My advice is to buy a good, open phone, and treat the e-reader as a single-purpose appliance.
I think it very much depends on how annoying other ways of watching things are to you. The main benefit to netfix is on average higher quality more access to subtitles than stealing stuff via torrents, and FAR more convenience than DVDs, especially for those of us with new enough computers to not even have DVD trays.
With Spotify the main added benefits are being able to use your own music from a home computer wherever you go, and no advertisements. For me advertisements are pretty damn annoying, but your own mileage may vary.
The reason I really love Spotify style services is that they massively reduce the friction of trying new things out. I’ve found a lot more music I enjoy of various different types over the last two years of using rdio / spotify than in any time period previous to that, because the cost of trying something new is as simple as typing in a search query.
I personally prefer using YouTube with AdBlock instead of Spotify. I actually canceled my Spotify subscription because I was always just using YouTube anyway. Pretty much any song you can think of is on YouTube, the streaming is pretty much instant, and you can find playlists, cover versions, versions that just have the lyrics instead of any video, etc. YMMV, but I find YouTube to be superior to Spotify in practically every way.
The main time in my experience that Radar Detectors are useful are in long, flat, relatively safe speeding areas such as Great Plains states. The rest of the time, the difference between going 9 over (the speed at which you’re basically guaranteed never to get pulled over) and going 20 over as a percentage gain over your base speed is actually unsafe due to cars, turniness of roads, and visibility.