Said Achmiz

Karma: 16,221

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 10:11 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

I think you’ve had her buy an extra pair of boots.

Ah, true. So, $239.41, at the end.

(Of course, this all assumes that the cheap boots don’t get more expensive over the course of 14 years. Siderea does say that she spends $20 each year on boots, but that’s hard to take seriously over a decade-plus period…)

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 8:56 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

We might be talking about poverty at different orders of magnitude, and you might be writing off a lot of failures to purchase efficiently as “skill issue”… but being poor in skills and the capacity to hone them is, itself, a form of poverty.

Once we’ve redefined “poverty” to mean something other than poverty, we can obviously make all sorts of claims about it. Being “poor in skills and the capacity to hone them” can be the cause of poverty. Notice how this is a different cause from the one that “boots theory” posits.

As I’ve written, I have personally experienced my family being quite poor. Buying a roll of toilet paper instead of a whole package, or buying just one meal’s worth of food instead of a week’s worth, is definitely a “skill issue”.

Being poor is unpleasant in many ways. It being “expensive” is not one of them.

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 6:52 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

In another world, Siderea buys $20 boots and invests $260. …

I think that your calculation is a bit off. After a year, she’ll have $258.20 (i.e., ($260 * 1.07) − $20). After two years, $256.27 (i.e., ($258.20 * 1.07) − $20). And so on. After 14 years, she’ll have $219.41.

Still better than buying the expensive boots—in purely financial terms.

(Inflation-adjustment is another important point, of course. That $200 in 2005 would be $265 in 2018 dollars.)

In short, yes, this is indeed a very poor example—ironic, as it’s a real-life version of the original example!

(This is also often missing when people talk about buying versus renting. Yes, the mortgage is often lower than rent, and house value is likely higher at the end, but you gave up investing your deposit. How do those effects compare? Probably depends on time and place.)

This is precisely what made renting come out far ahead, in my aforementioned calculation. (And this is without even considering the time value of money.)

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 2:23 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

buying poor quality food and then having to pay for medical care

I have seen this sort of thing mentioned, but I don’t think that it works.

Let’s set aside for the moment the somewhat tenuous and indirect connection between the food you eat today, and the medical care you will require, some years down the line. (If you end up with heart disease in ten years because you’ve been eating poorly, surely this can’t be any part of the reason why you’re poor today—that would require some sort of anti-temporal causation!)

And let’s also set aside this business of “having to pay for medical care”. (Even in the United States—famously the land of medical bills—the poorest people are also the ones who are eligible for Medicaid. You’re more likely to have to pay for medical care if you’re sufficiently well-off to eat well than if you’re very poor!)

Let’s instead consider just this notion that there’s a causal connection between being poor and eating poor quality food—and specifically, the sort of food that contributes to poor health outcomes—because you can’t afford healthy food.

There was a time when my own family was very poor. (We’d just arrived in the United States as brand-new immigrants, with little more than the proverbial clothes on our backs; my mother had to work two, or sometimes three, jobs just to pay the rent; even my grandfather, then already of retirement age, got a job delivering newspapers.) As I would routinely help my grandmother with grocery shopping, I was very well acquainted with how much it cost to feed a family on a very tight budget, what sorts of purchasing decisions needed to be made, etc.

And what I can tell you is that the sort of food we ate was not cheap-but-unhealthy. Rather, it was cheap-but-healthy. What was missing was luxuries and variety—not nutrition! You can, in fact, have a healthy (and even tasty) diet on a tight budget. I have extensive personal experience with this.

The difference between my family and the poor people who buy junk food is much more cultural than anything else. Specifically, the missing ingredient is cultural transmission of knowledge of, and expertise in, preparation of nutritious, satisfying food under severe financial constraints. My family’s cultural background contains a tremendous amount of accumulated wisdom on this topic. Someone who, for whatever reason, lacks access to such cultural metis, will be severely disadvantaged in this regard. But this has nothing to do with poverty as such.

buying a cheap car that costs more in repairs

This, too, is a dubious example. The key word here is “more”. More than what?

Do you mean:

(1) “Car A (which costs less), over a period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling X; car B (which costs more), over the same period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling Y; X > Y”

If so, then notice that this does not support “boots theory”! But perhaps you instead mean:

(2) “Car A (which costs less), over a period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling X; car B (which costs more), over the same period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling Y; (cost[A] + X) > (cost[B] + Y)”

This might support “boots theory”. But is it plausible?

The car I currently drive was bought used, at a cost of ~$13,000, in 2016. Since then I have spent ~$2,000 on repairs (not counting inspections and oil changes, which will apply to everyone equally), for a total of ~$15,000.

In 2016, I could instead have purchased a much cheaper used car, for ~$3,000. Suppose that this had been all I could afford. For this to have turned out to be a “boots theory”-supporting example, I’d then have to spend ~$12,000, in the 9-year period since, on repairs.

Seems improbable. Indeed, at that point, I could just buy another car. I could buy a new car four times! (And notice that this scenario would then still not support “boots theory”.)

payday loans

This is a complicated topic, and I am not qualified to opine confidently on it. I will say only that it seems like a highly non-central example of the alleged phenomenon.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin by philh (Mar 19, 2025, 8:56 PM; 2 points)

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 1:23 PM
12 points
3
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin
paying rent instead of buying and building equity

It’s interesting that you should mention this. I currently rent an apartment. At one point, some years ago, I realized that my financial situation was such that, if I wanted to, I could buy a condo or co-op. I recalled the received wisdom that owning is better than renting, and looked into my options. After doing the math, I concluded that, on a time horizon of 10, 20, 30, or 40 years^[1], renting unambiguously came out ahead—and not just slightly ahead, but way ahead. Buying an apartment would have amounted to setting a big pile of money on fire for no reason whatsoever. The received wisdom was diametrically wrong.

(One can make all sorts of objections to this, along the lines of “but isn’t this just because of the crazy real estate market in NYC”, or “but isn’t this just because of historically-unusual economic situation X which currently obtains”, etc. But what is the use of that? The reality is what it is.)

buying consumable goods instead of investments

Investing is certainly useful, if you can do it. But what in the world does that have to do with “boots theory”, or with the “phenomenon where people spend a lot to buy things that are poor quality instead of longer lasting higher quality things”?

Your “instead of” in the “consumable goods instead of investments” clause is fallacious, I think. Poor people spend some amount of money on consumable goods, have no money left over, and thus do not invest. Rich people spend more money on consumable goods than poor people, still have money left over after spending more, and invest the remainder. This is unambiguously not consistent with “boots theory”.

working jobs instead of building passive income

This, too, seems like a non sequitur. You can only be “building passive income” if you already have a lot of money. You can’t get there by spending less money. What’s more, if you do have a lot of money (which you can invest, thus securing a source of passive income), nothing prevents you from also working a job, and earning additional money. Indeed, plenty of people do just that. Many don’t, of course—but this is not because it would somehow end up costing them more money than not working! Rather, it’s because they (quite reasonably) don’t want to work if they don’t have to.

There is still a real phenomenon where people spend a lot to buy things that are poor quality instead of longer lasting higher quality things.

Well, I should like to see some examples. So far, our tally of actual examples of this alleged phenomenon seems to still be zero. All the examples proffered thus far… aren’t.
1. ↩︎
  Or longer, really—but “longer” is likely to be a moot point, for various reasons.

Said Achmiz Mar 19, 2025, 4:11 AM
7 points
3
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

Boots theory captures the “being poor is expensive” element that’s true in Ankh-Morkpork and also true on Earth

It certainly is not true on Earth.

As I have written:

It sounds so wise and worldly! And it’s also complete bullshit.

Because let’s say that I want a pair of sneakers (i.e., shoes that are comfortable and won’t hurt my feet) that won’t wear out in a couple of years, so that I can buy them once and wear them for ten years. Why, I’d have to pay five times the price of an ordinary pair of sneakers! But then I’d have my ten-year shoes. Right?

WRONG.

Oh, sure, I can buy a pair of sneakers that costs five times what normal sneakers cost. And they’ll last for just about as long—at best!

And it’s the same with cookware, it’s the same with computer hardware, it’s the same with a whole lot of things.

The reason why people mistakenly come to believe this “boots theory” is not that more expensive stuff lasts longer, out of proportion to the price difference—but rather, that stuff purchased in the past, whose inflation-adjusted price was substantially higher than the current price of the current cheap goods, lasts longer. But this is not because of the price difference.

It’s because they don’t make ’em like they used to.

Said Achmiz Mar 15, 2025, 1:05 PM
2 points
0
on: The Dangers of Outsourcing Thinking: Losing Our Critical Thinking to the Over-Reliance on AI Decision-Making

I’ve become so reliant on a GPS that using maps to direct myself feels like a foreign concept. Google Maps, Waze, whatever, if it’s outside of my neighbourhood, I’m punching in the address before I head out. Sometimes I notice the GPS taking slower routes or sending me the wrong way as I get out of a parking lot, but regardless, I just follow its directions, because I don’t have to think. Though I know, without this convenient tool, I’d be lost (literally).

If you recognize this problem, why not stop using a GPS? Navigating without a GPS is not difficult. You could regain this skill easily. What’s stopping you?

Said Achmiz Mar 14, 2025, 10:34 PM
6 points
2
in reply to: Grayson Chao’s comment on: Trojan Sky
Given how spectacularly harmful psychedelic drugs can often be, I think we’d better hope that there isn’t any such “sensory-input-only” method of inducing psychedelic states.

Said Achmiz Mar 13, 2025, 1:27 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Announcing turntrout.com, my new digital home

your proposal would have the displayed image revert back to the first frame on mouseleave IIUC

Yes, correct.

I was hoping to have the hover-mode animation seamlessly pause and unpause

This SO question has several answers, all of which seem like reasonable solutions to me (if I were doing this, I’d try them all and pick the most performant one, most likely).

Said Achmiz Mar 13, 2025, 1:19 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Announcing turntrout.com, my new digital home

The “auto” icon is the sun if auto says light mode, and the moon if it says dark mode. Though ideally it’d be self-explanatory.

Hmm, I see. Alright, that’s not too bad, given the labels.

I found setting it in smallcaps to be quite distracting, so I settled for italics. What do you think?

Seems reasonable. (I agree that underlining the links is no good.)

Said Achmiz Mar 12, 2025, 6:12 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Announcing turntrout.com, my new digital home
Auto-dark mode!

Good; however:
1. “Auto” has the same icon as light—confusing!
2. “Auto” has a label, while the others do not—likewise confusing
3. The “Auto” label is styled just like the sidebar links, but of course it’s not a link at all (indeed, it’s not clickable or interactable in any way)
For #1, I suggest the “black & white cookie” (a.k.a. “contrast”) icon, as seen on gwern.net (this trio of “B&W cookie” / “sun” / “crescent moon” for “auto” / “light” / “dark” is becoming increasingly common for tri-state mode selectors, in my experience).

For #2, you should label all or none. My advice would be “all”, with a compromise: show labels on hover only (and make them a bit less obtrusive, and style them differently: smaller text, put the label off to the left—there’s room, given the shape of the logo—and perhaps set them in smallcaps? or even a different font, perhaps a sans; this would also solve problem #3).

Said Achmiz Mar 12, 2025, 6:05 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Announcing turntrout.com, my new digital home
I can’t play/pause the GIF on hover because GIFs don’t allow that (AFAIK).
1. Make a static version of the image (the first frame of the animation, perhaps?). Set that image to load by default.
2. At the end of page load, in the background, load the animated version.
3. On hover (by adding a listener to the mouseenter event), rewrite the src attribute of the image element to point to the animated image.
4. On un-hover (mouseleave event), rewrite the src back to the static one.
I don’t really mind the zeros. If I hear from more people that the slashed zeros bother them, I’ll reconsider.

Slashed zeroes are Correct™.

Said Achmiz Mar 11, 2025, 3:24 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
Just the benefits gained by the small minority of kids actually being taught something?

Certainly we lose that, yes.

Whether we lose other things is beyond the scope of the main point that I am making here. That point is: if we switch from teachers teaching kids to parents teaching kids, we cannot assume that we thereby go from kids not being taught effectively, to kids being taught effectively. That is because most parents are not competent to effectively teach their kids most (or, often, all) academic subjects.

I would guess (but haven’t checked) that most of the teachers qualified to teach are at private schools anyway.

I, for one, did not attend private schools.^[1] My comments upthread, about my own teachers, referred to a public school. (The junior high school I attended, where the teachers were also substantially more competent than the “average teacher” described in this discussion, was also a public school.)

Your guess may nonetheless be correct in the statistical aggregate; I don’t know enough to comment on that.
1. ↩︎
  Except for a ~2 month period in 3rd grade; the school in question was substantially worse than all public schools I have attended.

Said Achmiz Mar 11, 2025, 5:34 AM
6 points
0
in reply to: Radford Neal’s comment on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell

I think much of the discussion of homeschooling is focused on elementary school.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is a motte-and-bailey situation here, where the motte is “some kids can be homeschooled at the elementary school grade level by some exceptional parents” and the bailey is “abolish schools and homeschool everyone for everything at all grade levels”.

I can provide you cited quotes if you like; or you can take my word that I’ve seen many homeschooling advocates quite unambiguously arguing for homeschooling beyond the elementary-school level.

But in any case, very few high school students are taught chemistry by a Ph.D in chemistry with 30 years work experience as a chemist.

Yes, of course.

If most of your teachers had Ph.D or other degrees in the subjects they taught, then you were very fortunate.

Absolutely. No argument there.

My point, however, is that what it takes to teach children a subject is both skill at teaching, in general (which most people, parents included, do not have), and substantial domain training/expertise (whether that comes from a degree, preferably an advanced degree, in the subject, or from extensive professional experience, or both—and which most people, including most parents, likewise do not have, for most or even all the subjects which are commonly part of a school curriculum).

You might object: doesn’t this imply that most kids in the country are not being taught, and cannot be taught, most of their subjects by anyone who is qualified to teach them those things (as neither their parents nor any of their teachers at school meet those qualifications)?

I answer: correct.

And if we’re going to discuss atypical situations, I do in fact think that I would be competent to teach all those subjects at a high school level.

Well, I am not personally acquainted with you and am not familiar with your academic and professional background, so of course I can’t confidently agree or disagree. However, I hope you’ll forgive me for being very skeptical about your claim.

Said Achmiz Mar 10, 2025, 7:19 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Radford Neal’s comment on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
My mathematics teachers in high school were qualified to teach me mathematics because they had degrees (mostly doctorates, but a couple did have lesser degrees) in mathematics.

My chemistry teachers in high school were qualified to teach me chemistry because they had (respectively) a Ph.D. in chemistry and three decades of experience as a working chemist in industry.

My computer science teachers in high school were qualified to teach me computer science because they had degrees in computer science (and were working programmers / engineers).

My biology teachers in high school were qualified to teach me biology because they had degrees (one had a doctorate, another a lesser degree) in biology.

My physics teacher in high school was qualified to teach me physics because he had a degree in physics.

My drafting / technical drawing / computer networking / other “technology” teachers were qualified to teach me those things because they had extensive professional experience in those fields.

(I am not sure what degrees my humanities teachers had, but those subjects aren’t important, so who cares, really. Also, some of them were not qualified to teach anything whatsoever.)

Someone who has a degree in education only is, indeed, not qualified to teach mathematics / chemistry / physics / biology / computer science / any other STEM field at the high school or even middle school level. (Even the latter grades of elementary school are a stretch.)

Said Achmiz Mar 9, 2025, 9:08 AM
11 points
6
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
I want to follow up on this a bit more, because this is a point which I’ve discussed with homeschooling advocates before, and it’s one which seems just wildly underappreciated in these sorts of discussions.

I will mention one anecdotal example, which is, I think, very generous to the pro-homeschooling side: namely, my own case. Now, my mother is a professional educator (now retired). She has a doctorate in education. She taught (English—specifically ESL / “Business Communication”) for several decades. She worked with school age kids and with adults in continuing-education programs. She did curriculum design, consulted for leading publishers of educational materials, won teaching awards, etc.

Do I think that my mother was qualified to homeschool me, and to teach me all the subjects that I in fact learned in school?

Hell no. No way, no how, not a chance, not even close, not in a million years. Absolutely, unquestionably, categorically not.

And if that’s so, then what possible hope does the average parent have?

Said Achmiz Mar 9, 2025, 8:54 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
Ugh, this is totally my fault, but I did mean “first paragraph”. (Second paragraph of the comment, of which the first paragraph is the quote… yeah, I know; I wouldn’t have figured it out either…)

What I am saying is: yeah, your second paragraph makes sense. But… aren’t you just describing exactly the same thing that you, in your first paragraph, said would be bad?

Like… you say that “if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools”, this would be bad, would put an undue cost on homeschooling, etc. But then you say that “a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education” would be fine, but meaningless in practice.

But…

… aren’t those the same thing??

if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools

a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education

What’s the difference? You can’t just be leaning on the “greater than” vs. “greater than or equal to” distinction here… right? (Because that’s obviously a trivial difference!) Other than that, are these two scenarios not literally, exactly the same? What am I not seeing here?

Said Achmiz Mar 9, 2025, 2:14 AM
14 points
8
on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell

Instead, the actual thesis of many against homeschooling, when they’re not making up things like the claims earlier in this section, is flat out that parents are not qualified to teach their children.

That’s just true, though. Most parents aren’t even slightly qualified to teach their children. Is this not obvious…?

EDIT:

It is beyond absurd to think that an average teacher, with a class of 24 kids, couldn’t be outperformed by a competent parent focusing purely on their own child.

But most parents aren’t competent, at all, in any way whatsoever, especially at teaching anyone anything (but also at most other things).

The idea that if you don’t specifically have an ‘education degree’ that you can’t teach things is to defy all of human experience and existence. Completely crazy. And yet.

Oh, no, no, that’s not the idea at all!

The idea, rather, is that you probably can’t teach things, regardless of whether you have an “education degree”.

And that idea is completely consistent with all of human experience and existence.

Most people are stupid, incompetent, and very bad at teaching (and at most other things).

Said Achmiz Mar 9, 2025, 2:02 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell
Er… I think you maybe got the adjectives mixed up in a bit? As written, your second paragraph doesn’t make any sense.

Did you perhaps mean… “good” / “as bad as the best”…? But that is also weird… yeah, I don’t understand what you had in mind there. Clarify, please?

Said Achmiz Mar 5, 2025, 10:05 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Richard_Kennaway’s Shortform

When a magnificent body is just one more of the things that is yours for the asking, what will you do with it in paradise?

See also Stanislaw Lem on this subject:

“The freedom I speak of, it is not that modest state desired by certain people when others oppress them. For then man becomes for man—a set of bars, a wall, a snare, a pit. The freedom I have in mind lies farther out, extends beyond that societal zone of reciprocal throat-throttling, for that zone may be passed through safely, and then, in the search for new constraints—since people no longer impose these on each other—one finds them in the world and in oneself, and takes up arms against the world and against oneself, to contend with both and make both subject to one’s will. And when this too is done, a precipice of freedom opens up, for now the more one has the power to accomplish, the less one knows what ought to be accomplished.”