Monetary cost: $50/month = $600/year which requires savings of at least $15000 to sustain in retirement. Financially, a cable subscription will delay retirement for more than a year for most people. This assumes that one does not buy a new $1200 TV every other year which will double the numbers.

A much bigger cost is opportunity cost.

Opportunity costs: The average person spends 4 hours a day watching TV. That is close to 1500 hours a year. Experts on experts estimate that it takes 1000 hours to become competent in a skill, where competent is defined as being able to perform routine tasks at a level that is demonstrably better than a beginner. It takes 3000 hours to become a Master in a subject, where Master is equivalent skill to a master degree. It takes 10000 hours to become a world expert in a field, that is, the equivalent of a successful PhD degree.

Why not get rid of your TV and learn some frugal skills? Learn to cook. Learn to fix clothes. Learn to repair your preferred transportation vehicle. Learn to invest. Surely, this is a better way to spend your time than to master the arching story lines in Law&Order?

To put things in perspective. If you instead of watching TV did a focused study on food (not just following recipes or heating up pizzas and eating them), then in less than one year, you could learn to whip up a meal from whatever is in the fridge and pantry. In three years, you could cook well enough to cater or work in a restaurant. You would certainly be the chef at family gatherings. In six years, you could open your own restaurant.

If only there was not so much TV on TiVo that had to be watched, right?

Originally posted 2008-08-20 07:07:37.

You need a bag of mealy potatoes, an onion, some eggs, and a ton of cooking oil. This will basically be a meal so full of fat, starch, and cholesterol that you’ll be able to hear your arteries hardening while you eat it.

Peel about 2-3 times the number of potatoes you would usually eat as a side dish if they were cooked and shred them using a grater. Unfortunately we don’t have a grater so this was one of those rare instances where the food processor came in handy. Also shred an onion to taste and dump it in with the potatoes.
Dump the shredded material on a towel and wring out as much water as possible. It is this step that will make or break the meal (and you).

Put the shreds back in a bowl (or in my case the pressure cooker since it is sufficiently bowl like) and add flour. I prefer to add just a little flour and then just keep adding eggs until the concoction is somewhat slimy, but there is lots of room for experiment.

Now use a skillet (I prefer cast iron because it lasts forever and one can use metal utensils on it with no harm done) with lots of oil (several table spoons per pancake). Make the pancake palm sized and finger thick. My first pancake wasn’t too good (the first pancake never is for some reason) but I quickly got the hang of it.

DW suggested eating the pancakes with apple sauce which we did. I think mustard is also a good option.

My overall opinion of this meal: It’s as unhealthy as french fries due to all the oil but also very filling for the same reason. It takes forever to make, especially if you don’t have access to foodprocessors or child labor (Hi mom! 😉 ). I’m not sure I would repeat this one since I do need my arteries at a certain thru-put level.

Originally posted 2008-02-06 06:49:40.

Some strategies for discovering things that go unnoticed would involve ignoring the “junk mail” and go to the (usually smaller) shops in the side streets. These often offer better deals because they do not sell low margin junk and compensate for it by volume and advertising like the mass stores. Yesterday I alluded to the fact that search engines may have begun to suffer from the same problem by ranking according to popularity or by being gamed by specific writing styles (aka “marketing” in the real world). In other words, search engines show the main streets, first and foremost, and not so much the side streets. To wit, a search engine would show a main street shop if it had just one item of what you were asking for instead of showing a side street shop with more selections. New shops in particular have a huge problem since they are judged by the network rather than their inherent quality.

One way of discovering new blogs is to use other blogs as a reference. This, I think, does not work nearly as well as it could.

I do not think a blog roll is any substitute for that. Blogroll often turn into a mutual link exchanges (I thought of a different word for it, but it wasn’t fit for publication 😛 ), consequently grow huge, etc. They are often not reflective of what the bloggers actually read.

Maybe it is time to return to the roots: A blog is really short for weblog and in a blog one is supposed to write about what one did on the web on that particular day. It may be as simple as a rough edit of one’s browser history.

Originally posted 2010-02-02 10:06:36.