Love the idea of interrupting the "dopamine loop" with a delay vs. simply tracking or restricting usage. I worked on creating a Chrome Extension several years ago for myself and I can't believe I didn't have this (in retrospect) obvious idea. I have a few concerns:
* The UI feels somewhat unpolished for asking me to purchase an annual plan on signup.
* I would prefer a free version that is fully featured for a short trial period that later reverts to a limited (one app) version. I have more than one problem app and it's hard to get a feel right now.
* Can I overlap schedules (i.e. open during lunch and any time during the weekend)?
* How do I set this up for something like YouTube? I have several modes of using this app:
1) mindlessly watching 5-10 minute videos looking for the next one, or
2) setting up a long playlist while I'm working out and treating it as a podcast app.
I only want to prevent the former.
I can relate to this.
I created SuperFocus (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/superfocus-stop-sc...) with a similar idea. Dopamine loop is a big problem. I have tried site blockers / SuperFocus which is a feed blocker but there was something missing and have been looking for the magic solution. Just signed up for Clearspace and immediately felt this is it.
Planning to rewrite SuperFocus later this week to do the same on desktop as most of my time spent is on the desktop browser.
Hey this is great and something I started on working myself.
Just a note that if you pin the extension on the extension page itself it gives a very, very confusing message of
"SuperFocus works on Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
SuperFocus is not yet available for
dboceidahklphhjpfbpnicodnbkoiokn."
thought it was a bug before I realised that must be the chrome extension id, but it's quite likely people will first open the extension on this tab as that's where you teach them to pin it
- fair enough, for some users they reach us at a point of "I'm wholesale re-arranging my digital life RIGHT NOW" so they'd prefer to subscribe annually at signup and remove all barriers to better digital habits while they're in the mindset of habit change. will give this some thought.
- we've been thinking about experimenting with this model. I personally find it annoying forgetting to unsubscribe to things I only wanted to trial but I understand your use case.
- hmm, you could alter your youtube session options so that your only options are 45 minutes or longer? this wouldn't explicitly prevent you from shorter sessions, but might cause you to think "wait I don't have 45 minutes right now - forget it". would be curious to hear if that works for you.
Damage isn’t a huge problem, watches tend to be pretty sturdy and mere scratches aren’t going to hurt resale value in most cases (unless you have them repaired!)
Theft on the other hand is a pretty big concern, I just had a 100k patek ripped off my wrist. I’m very lucky though, the local store manager was sympathetic and managed to help me skip the queue for a (slightly more desirable) replacement, effectively nullifying any financial damage.
Lesson learned, not walking around with uninsured watches no matter how nice the area is. Insurance premiums aren’t too bad though.
Insurance on a $100K watch through Hodinkee is around $1400 a year, although I'm sure you can get a better deal.
If you're an enthusiast then you're paying for peace of mind. If you're an investor then that's the equivalent of a 1.4% management fee per year.
The price action right now is absolutely ridiculous, but if you already bought at say 5x retail then that dramatically eats into your potential profits. It's just not worth it, you shove it into a safe and never let it see the light of day.
You can find waay more attractive premiums through traditional insurance brokers than via Hodinkee, but depending on the size of your collection it might not be worth the hassle as finding a decent traditional option is a headache unless you know someone who’s already gone through the trouble.
Managed NAT Gateways can be a very substantial cost depending on your architecture. I believe the recommended VPC layout has 3 AZs so you're paying close to $100/month for a single VPC just for NAT.
Ding ding ding, ppl here dont take to account HA and disaster preventions you sometimes have to abaid to due to security certifications and regulations!
So your comparison with your $5 local lab is not just less "convenient"!
Do you really need multi-multi-region failover redundancy? Do you really need multiple NATs in every region (it's easy to share one NAT Gateway across AZs, especially so if a region is only servicing DR)? Your numbers still sound high.
x $1 + y $0.60 to make up $30 is a _lot_ of regions/AZs.
That's interesting, with the OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock Pro (we have about four deployed) they all originally worked at the 10 GbE speed for us, then we had some sporadic issues dropping down to 1 -- and now the ethernet does not work at all. On a mix of x86 and ARM Macbook Pros.
I'm sure we'll find a way to keep inflating housing prices. I'm in my 30s and my entire adult life I've been thinking "no way it can keep going up" and it kept going up.
Prices will keep going up while there is more demand than supply, and the supply shortage is mostly political. I advise you and everyone else feeling locked out of the housing market to pressure your representatives to allow more housing to be built.
At the same time because of supply and demand, even when more and more apartments are being built I would expect single family homes to still go for top of market rates and be in very high demand forever. The supply we are adding into most built out areas is just apartment stock mostly optimized for the recent college grad vs a family with children (e.g. mostly 1 or 2 bedrooms, and a pool/hottub area clearly optimized for people drinking alcohol than kids playing), because these areas are built out by definition and there isn't available land to add any more greenfield single family home stock to the local inventory. That single family home stock imo will always be constrained in cities and will never get cheaper. Apartments and condos might see their costs not swell so much, but not ever detached homes imo.
Detached homes are a very specific type of housing well suited to specific needs. The problem [In the U.S.] has been that suburbian-style has been prescribed, with little flexibility to accommodate other needs. Lawns, backyards/front yards, and setbacks are great if that's what one desires and is willing to pay for.
However, not everyone wants that, yet is forced to pay for it through zoning rules requiring them. Tall multi-storey townhomes are a great middleground that reduces land costs and retain many of the benefits of SFHs, yet are literally illegal to build in much of the US.
A ton of land in competitive markets is being wasted through zoning, to many people's [And the climate's] detriment.
Housing developers are sitting on huge swathes of land that have planning permission (every council has a housing development plan), but by building slower, and with no real penalties for not using the land (LVT or similar) they can pad their profit margins by trickling properties onto the market.
> I advise you and everyone else feeling locked out of the housing market to pressure your representatives to allow more housing to be built.
I'm currently building a house and the problem is getting people to come out and do the damn work. Not sure what complaining to a politician is going to do about this. Even white collar workers are hard to get. I went through three architects.
There are plenty of housing developments going up. Just not a large enough pool of people to work in them.
Mostly, not entirely. Furthermore, this housing crunch has been decades in the making, not something that's suddenly happened, as evidenced by prices spiraling out of control. It's no surprise that trying to build a new home during a worldwide labor and supply chain crunch is especially difficult.
Complaining to a politician may not provide immediate relief now, but in the long term if supply was able to meet demand, prices should stabilize.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today.
Most of the country never (in recent times) had a housing shortage before now. So it might be a political issue for the people who live in a handful of coastal cities, but this isn't a political issue in most states.
I have years worth of zillow pricing emails in my inbox, if I go back to '18, YoY price increases were like <1% in most zip codes and 2-3% in the nicer ones. Recent emails have prices going up 20%+ all over town.
I'm in the coast, so I won't pretend to fully understand the markets elsewhere, however, it should be noted that ~50% of the U.S. population lives near the coast, or a constraining border limiting expansion.
For a very very large portion of the population it's land use and zoning rules that are constraining supply and causing everyone else to pay more than they otherwise would.
IMO there’s a pretty simple rule that you can apply. If you’re planning to stay somewhere for at least 7 years, then buy your home. If not, renting gives more peace of mind.
The problem with buying is that it’s a single large transaction that you can’t spread over time. Over time ownership turns a profit, but if the time span is less than seven years, you may end up buying at the peak and having to sell near a bottom.
It's admittedly a small sample range, but if I'd taken this advice when I started buying houses around '09 (never more than 1 at a time, but I've moved just about every two years since then), I'd be at least $250,000 poorer. And I didn't come anywhere near optimizing for profit—it's mostly been happenstance and the fact that houses just keep going up in price, plus an initial bump from coming in right after the housing bubble burst (though house prices around here never got down to where they "should" have been if they'd tracked inflation since the start of the bubble, and only seemed cheap relative to the peak). I also started with one hell of a lot less capital than, say, a FAANG employee ought to be able to save in a couple years. Think, like, $25,000.
("But you could have invested that money instead and the market's gone crazy over that same time span, so maybe you actually lost money, opportunity-cost wise!" sure, but not really, since rent exceeds TCO for houses in my area so I'd have just bled money to that in exchange for no equity whatsoever and probably living somewhere worse)
For another data point, the Manhattan apartment which I'm renting was recently sold. The previous landlord had purchased it in 2016 for $200k higher than the sale price now, over five years later.
I'm renting because I know I'll be moving again within the year. If I had bought a place in NYC when I moved here, I'd have lost a lot more money than I've paid in rent.
The opposite was statistically much more likely to happen. The high transaction costs alone are enough to eat up any "profits". But the risk of buying a dud goes up as you move more frequently. Etc.
Your outcome is pretty close to a best case scenario. And I'm happy for you that things went so swimmingly.
The main question for any investment, ever, should be: you have some amount of money...what will net you the highest return on that money. You can modify this with considerations for risk and diversification, but the name of the game is always opportunity cost.
People stop thinking about opportunity cost when it comes to housing for some reason because they just can't stop thinking of paying rent as "throwing away money," without understanding that you're always throwing away money.
To take a simple example, let's say that you have $500k in cash.
Scenario 1: you pay $50k per year in rent from salary, park that $500k in a $2M investment property that returns $85k in rental returns. In this scenario, your returns are property appreciation and rental income. Your costs are mortgage, property tax, home insurance, home repair, and the rent you pay.
Scenario 2: you pay $0 per year in rent from salary, park that $500k in a $2M property that you live in that returns $0 in rental returns (because you live there). In this scenario, your returns are property appreciation. Your costs are mortgage, property tax, home insurance, home repair.
It's entirely possible, and common, for these scenarios to work out to be exactly the same. If you prioritize the purchase of properties that yield very high rents compared to the property value, it's very common for the numbers to work out in favor of owning investment property. And that can include "throwing away" money on rent.
TL;DR: you're never not renting. Even if you pay $0 in rent, the price you pay is the opportunity cost of not renting your house, and not maximizing returns on the money you've parked in it.
I can't speak to recruiters, but as a hiring manager I see padding as a yellow flag. I don't really want to see the same company listed three times consecutively unless you've spent 1+ year in substantially different roles.
> unless you've spent 1+ year in substantially different roles
That's exactly what I meant. I've seen people with a single entry for their current job at am employer they've worked at for 10 years. That means they've either been stuck in the same role and learned nothing... Or their profile doesn't show what they've actually done.
I've also seen 10 entries of 3 months at client X. That's not what I meant.
* The UI feels somewhat unpolished for asking me to purchase an annual plan on signup.
* I would prefer a free version that is fully featured for a short trial period that later reverts to a limited (one app) version. I have more than one problem app and it's hard to get a feel right now.
* Can I overlap schedules (i.e. open during lunch and any time during the weekend)?
* How do I set this up for something like YouTube? I have several modes of using this app: 1) mindlessly watching 5-10 minute videos looking for the next one, or 2) setting up a long playlist while I'm working out and treating it as a podcast app. I only want to prevent the former.