Archive for category Personal
Grateful to be educated
It seems that Indian politicians are once again doing what they do best – stroke egos (and of course lining their pockets) with fake “India shining” concepts. The attempt to host commonwealth games in India is probably the joke of the century, the biggest loot of public money in recent times, in a country with more mobiles than toilets.
The article in TOI has hit the nail on the head about the crux of the subject matter, so I am not going to repeat it here. But I have to admit it bugs us Indians who has had a decent education and doing pretty well in life, that we can’t do anything to bring a visible change within a short time. I agree that changing a nation in terms of its politics and people is an unimaginably daunting task, and short of a revolution, fruit of one’s efforts will not be tangible in a lifetime. But does it mean we don’t bother and keep living our lives isolated from all the din and bustle ?
I don’t think that not being able to bring a big change can keep us from doing small good things on a daily basis. Our education is a tremendous asset. We have decent jobs and places to stay. We don’t have to worry about daily struggles. We have bandwidth to contribute. Here is what all we can do that can strengthen the “India” brand in the global scenario:
1. Keep doing a good job at work.
2. Ditch the petty gossip on politics, bollywood and cricket — the herculean melting pots of corruption and mediocrity.
3. Spend less time on stupid TV shows.
4. Think and discuss new ideas to solve myriads of today’s problems. Co-found or join a startup if possible.
5. Be an expert (or good enough) at something. Anything. Then teach, mentor and inspire others to be productive.
6. Volunteer for good causes. Donate labor whenever possible.
7. Buy less useless stuff. Create. Fix. Recycle.
I think the aim of great education is to produce creative, capable and productive global citizens. I like to consider ourselves more as earthlings than Indians. And please, lets discard the cliche tagline “Proud to be Indian”. It should rather be “Grateful to be educated”. We do not choose our birthplace. We make the best of where we are born and raised. And we can give back to anyone needing help, because humanity has no political boundary.
Think global and do good work. Life is too short to bother about bullshit.
ROI is everything
To a business person, ROI is an everyday term. And even to people who keep track of stock markets. But I am not talking about that in the same context. Making a financial profit in the market, business or elsewhere is definitely good, but it is not everything.
ROI is return on investment, but not necessarily of money alone. In fact, time is a more valuable resource in our hectic modern life than our possessions. Free time and leftover energy progresses towards the priceless status over time, as we age. What we need to look for is return in terms of emotional well being, sense of purpose, or in some cases, money.
Before we partake in anything that needs any kind of resource, we should all be asking a simple question – is it worth my time/energy/money ? Take a look around you. With all the modern day conveniences and short cuts, people keep making their lives busier by consuming (skimming) ever more stuff. Lives are superficial. 500 facebook friends but hardly any close ones. Whatever happened to being in the present, extracting the last drop of juice from whatever you have at the very moment ? Once you realize this mind boggling truth of what big corporations, media and mind-numbing advertisements have done to our lives, you can find the way towards a life of higher ROI. You don’t have to reduce your consumption by an absolute figure, but only to so much that you can fully enjoy.
I realize that the following things can be reduced/cut without repercussions:
1. Checking email every 15 minutes during the day
2. Spending 30-40 minutes on facebook in the morning and before bedtime
3. High cellphone bill with tons of minutes in the minimum plan and internet on the go
Instead I can do the following with higher ROI:
1. Checking emails less often and invest some time daily reading up educational stuff
2. Be productive in my home workshop instead of wasting time on facebook
3. Sacrifice the comfort of all-in-one cellphone plan and find a way back to a bare bones prepaid plan
You get the idea. It is difficult to do with our shortcut-trained brain, but it can be done. It is a pure win for who can.
Minimalism
I came across this mnmlist blog earlier but took a look at it in detail only recently, thanks to my friend Soma. I think this is one of the blogs out there that resonates with my view of life.
I like to think myself as a minimalist since I try to find out the ROI (return on investment) on everything which costs me time, energy, money, or even space. I think hard before buying anything, sometimes more due to the space it will take than the cost. I like to buy my tools and other utility gadgets used, and craigslist is a blessing for living in the bay area.
I realize that while we had much less stuff when we were young, we used to extract the full value from them. I still cherish that lesson and will be forever grateful to my parents for not providing me with too much stuff. Sadly, today’s young people seem to just skim through their possessions. It is just mind boggling how much daily waste is in the modern life. Everyone is busy working to make more money to buy more stuff and pay for their fancy manufactured lifestyle. I feel just goddamned lucky to understand this big picture.
I will see how much progress I can make towards minimalism. Minimalism for me is not having less number of things, but having less unused things. I want to make sure that over time, there won’t be much stuff in my home which gathers dust. Achieving this simple goal would be a major milestone in my life.
VHEMT
One of the most comprehensive and meaningful websites I have read so far: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT)
Another thoughtful article which talks about the taboo topic “Eugenics”: Future Generations
It is almost scary to have understood the nature and scale of the problem we are heading to, and despite the existence of workable solutions, it is almost too late. We are letting mother nature to adjust the balance, at great cost to humanity and our planet.
Humans have screwed up the earth, and committed unthinkable crimes against each other. All in the name of unsatisfiable greed and hunger for so-called “growth” and “civilization”. Other species are dying out because of our actions. The planet can do much better with less of us, maybe only those who live consciously and with minimal footprint.
A study shows that even if a government policy restricts one child per woman, it would take decades for the world population to come down to a more sustainable level. But that is never going to happen. Once the population grows beyond the tipping point (it might already have) when no amount of technology can sustain the system, the civilization will likely implode with great losses of life and resources. I just hope I won’t live long enough to see that day.
Going paperless at home
I have been sick and tired of the flood of junk mails at my home. I have already opted for paperless delivery of bills and statements, but the insurance and credit card offers keep coming. Finally found a blog post with solution to stop them as well. Here are a couple useful links:
1. How I Went 99.9% Paperless At Home
2. Evernote Is Decluttering My Life
Tetra Society of North America
Posted by therider in Hobbies, Personal, Technology on July 29, 2010
As if it was destined to happen, a coworker today showed me the website of Tetra Society of North America. It is a nonprofit organization that recruits skilled volunteers to create customized assistive devices for the physically disabled.
Why did it get me so excited ? Not only do I understand the plight of the disabled, I am currently running out of ideas of what to build next in my home workshop. If I get to make some kind of assistive device, whether out of wood or metal, it will not only make practical use of whatever skills I have, it will also justify owning whatever tools I desire.
Thank you so much, Ted. I just applied for a technical volunteer position and will look forward to making some contributions in near future.
All Joy and No Fun
An extremely well-written overview of recent studies showing how and why the fun has gone out of parenthood:
Why is this important to the childfree by choice? Well, the next time someone says, “You’ll regret not having kid.” or, “Parenthood is such a joy, you’re missing out” you can send them a link to this article.
It is much much better to regret not having kids, than to regret for the rest of life after the fact. Too bad there is no 30-day return period. You can change everything else in life. Jobs can be changed, marriages can be ended in divorce, pets can be donated to shelters, yet you can’t dump or divorce your kids. Once you make that choice, there is absolutely no turning back.
A comment from a friend on facebook:
I know people who have raised their kids to the age of 26 & older, paid for their entire lives – drugs, vacations, college, rehab, wedding, given them jobs at the family business, cars – raise the next generation of grandchildren too. I blame it on the parents – not culture, not society. These folks get no respect from their offspring who wait for them to die, so they can inherit the house and properties. It’s pretty pathetic.
The fad of “living green”
“Green” is a major hype and propaganda these days. Hybrid cars, compostable cups, re-usable grocery bags, this and that. Makes us believe we care for the environment. Fancy TV advertisements regularly feature a smiling family of four “living green” in a huge mansion, driving a hybrid monster SUV.
What an epic hogwash in the light of overpopulation and global warming.
The biggest inconvenient truth is that we don’t need more humans for several decades before the world’s population comes down to a stable level. That means one thing – “thou shalt not reproduce unless you contribute to the society”. In other words, there should be incentives and rewards for people who choose to stay childfree, and high taxes for parents opting for more than two children.
Childfree by choice couples can even drive hummers and live opposite of a “green” lifestyle and still be consuming resources several orders of magnitude lower than a family with one or two kids. Living “green” is like saving up pennies, and when a child is born, the effective expense of the planet is of the order of several hundreds of dollars in comparison. Saving those hundreds of dollars and spending pennies in “guilty luxuries” is much much better in my opinion.
In a geek friend’s words: “Don’t have a kid unless he/she can invent cold fusion.”
Mortgage rate vs points
When you take a loan for a home purchase, the rational thing to do is to grab the lowest interest rate offered, right ? But that usually comes with an another variable, points. A point equals 1% of the loan amount, and lenders typically offer you to buy some points in exchange of a reduction in rate. So what will you do, pay some cash upfront to lower your rate, or take up a slightly higher rate ?
Basically it all comes down to a threshold number of years that you plan to stay in your home before selling it. If you take a higher rate then you must sell the home within N years to come out ahead versus taking the lower rate.
A nice calculator is here: Time to recover cost of points
A good read: Choosing Rates vs. Points in a Mortgage Loan
Here is how to use the calculator: Suppose you want to know if it is worth paying $2760 in upfront costs to reduce interest rate from 4.875% to 4.5%. Here is the calculation. We see that the break-even is 3yr 10months, that means the lower rate will be beneficial if I stay in the home for more than that duration.
Now some of you will argue that it is better to get a no-cost rate, but that rate will be higher than a lower rate at a cost. Suppose you get a no-cost rate now and then the rates went up, you can end up missing the opportunity of securing a lower rate which could be worth the upfront costs in a few years.
We are about to enter another ice age
I found a very interesting and downright scary post while researching on climate change and extreme weather.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/
We humans are all wound up with global warming and how we should reduce our carbon emissions, as if that will stop the natural cycle of earth’s climate. We are trying to understand and change a cycle of hundreds of thousands years from data worth only a thousand years. The most interesting fact from the article is:
…increasing atmospheric CO2 is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise.
And the scariest part is:
The Vostok ice core data graph reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at approximately the same levels which they are at today.
Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.
The article makes sense to me. It is only natural to be short sighted and not try to be scared of life changing events even if they seem to be knocking our doors. Media does not like to highlight the harsh scientific facts because truth is not popular.
I guess we got to get ready for a chilled future, if we get to live through the transition at all.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the Personal category.
About
Hi, I'm Joy, a Javascript engineer at Zoosk. While code pays my bills, I enjoy hang gliding, photography, motorcycling, woodworking and home renovation. Welcome to my blog.
Recent Comments