I consider the notion that one's time has intrinsic value as a capitalist construct - a phrase that is used to place a value on everything. Time has no value; experiences do.
(Having said that, I always said I would consider myself well off if I earned more in an hour than I could drink in an hour, of my usual tipple at normal bar prices. I reached that tipping point some years ago. I still don't feel well off though.)
Oh, absolutely. And as a practical matter it cheers me up no end that many of the things I value most (most of them?) aren't things you spend money on.
Alas, though, I find myself stuck deeply in a capitalist society and unwilling to abandon it. For me, understanding how it works, and how it affects me, is important. In my defence, even Marx had an extremely good grasp of how it works. Though perhaps his warning that the point is to change it is one I should remember.
There is a danger I want to avoid in focusing on money as the location of value.
Very interesting. This kind of thing is on my mind because my income from working equals the cost of childcare plus travel to and from work, which is a weird position to be in and means I'm constantly trying to work out whether I should give up my job, since it has no current financial benefit. (Answer, no I shouldn't, because I like my job, I don't want to be at home full-time, and next September childcare will get cheaper. But I still keep redoing the calculations.)
Wow, that's a tough one. Very much shows how important the other factors beyond simple time vs money are.
This reminds me that I value time away from the kids (like, at work) as well as time with them, so it's very much a question of balancing, not minimising.
Yes - I feel that I *should* value time with the girls over everything else, and therefore should want to give up my job. But I don't: I love them, but I want them balanced with time spent in places where I don't have to be directly responsible for anyone else!
You put down 50p per mile as a standard cost for driving.
£1.40 per litre at 4.54 litres per gallon = £6.36 per gallon.
20mpg = 31.8p per mile 30mpg = 21.2p per mile 40mpg = 15.9p per mile 50mpg = 12.7p per mile
My 3 litre car in mid-town rush hour traffic gets 20mpg. What is it you drive and how fuel effecient is it? Of course you could be taking depreciation into account, but that seems like a lot of depreciation per mile unless it's a brand new car.
Yes, I was taking depreciation and things like tax and insurance in to account, defrayed across the number of miles driven. There's also servicing and parts, which are partly milage driven and partly time-driven.
The 45p figure from the Inland Revenue seems fairly convincing. And there's these figures from the AA, which range from 30p for a high-milage cheap car to 314p for a low-milage expensive one
( ... )
Fair points in general, though it's hard to amortise tax and insurance on a per mile basis (insurance does go up with distance, but relatively little compared to overall cost per year). Servicing I guess depends if you do it on a time basis or a distance one (I used to do the former, now the latter since I got a newer car that reminds me). Depreciation is also some mixed formula based on age as well as distance, which probably is specific to the car in question and its average time to various component breakages.
All of which can be roundly ignored (and happily rounded) to some nice, easy to use figure like 50p for the sake of a thought experiment :)
(of course it's fun to consider all the possible nuances before ignoring them)
Yes, insurance is a funny one. I too believe (but have no compelling evidence) that insurance rates vary a lot less with milage than a naive per-mile model would give you. It's possibly because low milage drivers are more likely to have an accident per mile driven than high milage ones because they have less experience; that effect probably tails off for very high milage drivers who have more issues with managing fatigue routinely. Also, the three claims I've ever been directly involved in had my vehicle stationary and parked, which suggests that there's a significant baseline risk of bozos smashing in to you even when you're not driving. As I know to my cost, it's not always possible to recover all the actual costs from the other driver even in cut-and-dried cases of fault
( ... )
On DIY, it's not even exactly that I like doing it - sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, usually it wouldn't be my first choice activity as a process - but a lot of the value in it for me seems to come from looking at it later and enjoyably thinking "I did that, yay me". As it happens I'm in the middle of my first ever bit of tiling just now! and even though it was quite slow and sometimes a bit stressful (due to worry about things drying before they're in the right place, in fact unfounded), there is something very pleasing about looking at the shiny row of what I've done. Grouting yet to come :-)
Online shopping - don't know about other online supermarkets, but Ocado do a delivery pass which costs I think £4 a month to then get free deliveries any time Tues-Thurs, which works out much cheaper than booking delivery slots on an ad-hoc basis if you are using them regularly and don't mind mid-week deliveries. Whether the cost of your shop is more is hard to gauge - the problem I find is that I have to e.g. buy 2 lemons rather than 1 lemon and things like that.
The issue with homeschooling is that unless you can both go part-time, even if you are happy with the financial trade-off, one of you has to give up your career which ups the risk significantly if the person still working loses their job. This has obviously been on my mind a lot recently from a more general perspective...
At one point in my life, I had friends who were pro poker players and the amount they earned was on a macro level proportional to the number of hours they put in. Not sure I'd recommend it as a career though ;-)
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(Having said that, I always said I would consider myself well off if I earned more in an hour than I could drink in an hour, of my usual tipple at normal bar prices. I reached that tipping point some years ago. I still don't feel well off though.)
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Alas, though, I find myself stuck deeply in a capitalist society and unwilling to abandon it. For me, understanding how it works, and how it affects me, is important. In my defence, even Marx had an extremely good grasp of how it works. Though perhaps his warning that the point is to change it is one I should remember.
There is a danger I want to avoid in focusing on money as the location of value.
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This reminds me that I value time away from the kids (like, at work) as well as time with them, so it's very much a question of balancing, not minimising.
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£1.40 per litre at 4.54 litres per gallon = £6.36 per gallon.
20mpg = 31.8p per mile
30mpg = 21.2p per mile
40mpg = 15.9p per mile
50mpg = 12.7p per mile
My 3 litre car in mid-town rush hour traffic gets 20mpg. What is it you drive and how fuel effecient is it? Of course you could be taking depreciation into account, but that seems like a lot of depreciation per mile unless it's a brand new car.
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The 45p figure from the Inland Revenue seems fairly convincing. And there's these figures from the AA, which range from 30p for a high-milage cheap car to 314p for a low-milage expensive one ( ... )
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All of which can be roundly ignored (and happily rounded) to some nice, easy to use figure like 50p for the sake of a thought experiment :)
(of course it's fun to consider all the possible nuances before ignoring them)
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On DIY, it's not even exactly that I like doing it - sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, usually it wouldn't be my first choice activity as a process - but a lot of the value in it for me seems to come from looking at it later and enjoyably thinking "I did that, yay me". As it happens I'm in the middle of my first ever bit of tiling just now! and even though it was quite slow and sometimes a bit stressful (due to worry about things drying before they're in the right place, in fact unfounded), there is something very pleasing about looking at the shiny row of what I've done. Grouting yet to come :-)
Reply
The issue with homeschooling is that unless you can both go part-time, even if you are happy with the financial trade-off, one of you has to give up your career which ups the risk significantly if the person still working loses their job. This has obviously been on my mind a lot recently from a more general perspective...
At one point in my life, I had friends who were pro poker players and the amount they earned was on a macro level proportional to the number of hours they put in. Not sure I'd recommend it as a career though ;-)
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