How can I spend money to improve my life?

Jonathan Paulson

On ChrisHallquist's post extolling the virtues of money, the top comment is Eliezer pointing out the lack of concrete examples. Can anyone think of any? This is not just hypothetical: if I think your suggestion is good, I will try it (and report back on how it went)

I care about health, improving personal skills (particularly: programming, writing, people skills), gaining respect (particularly at work), and entertainment (these days: primarily books and computer games). If you think I should care about something else, feel free to suggest it.

I am early-twenties programmer living in San Francisco. In the interest of getting advice useful to more than one person, I'll omit further personal details.

Budget: $50/day

If your idea requires significant ongoing time commitment, that is a major negative.

Morgan et all (2010) (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/699/) estimate 11.1 cyclist deaths per 100000 cyclist-km in London.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate) estimates 8.5 road fatalities per 1 BILLION vehicle-km.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/sep/28/road-deaths-great-britain-data claims 125 motorcyclists died in road accidents for every billion miles travelled - the highest rate for all road users but also a year-on-year fall of 11%.

At 41 deaths per billion miles, the mortality rate for pedestrians was just above that of cyclists (35), with the former a year-on-year rise of 10% and the latter a fall of 6%.

Car occupants had by far the lowest mortality rate at four deaths per billion miles travelled.

London is an exceptionally unsafe place for cyclists. I doubt it's anywhere near so unsafe as to make up all the difference between cycling and driving in those statistics, but I would guess it's at least 10x worse than the average, maybe quite a bit more.

... Ah, wait, I see you have other statistics saying 35 deaths per billion miles cycled, which would be about 21 per billion km, versus 11 per 100k km or 110,000 per billion km in London. So, apparently London is nearly four orders of magnitude worse than average. That's ... more than I expected. Have I m... (read more)