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Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
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Comments (1240)
If you're trying to extinguish an eating habit alter your sense of taste for the period in which it's a problem. The cheap and easy way is with mouthwash. If regular mouthwash doesn't last long enough chlorhexidine mouthwash (marketed as "clinical strength") will alter taste for around an hour or two. This may be useful for intermittent fasting and reduction in caffeine consumption.
This isn't even to the level of a hypothesis yet, but I think periodontal disease, which effects a great deal of people, may be significantly ameliorated by taking an NSAID like ibuprofen 20-40 minutes prior to brushing and flossing, due to the reduced gum inflammation decreasing periodontal pocket depth and allowing access to the pathogenic bacteria.
Is there a similar advice repository that is one level more meta? I want to be able to invent ridiculous munchkin ideas on my own.
An idea that may be too removed from the general field of expertise here. For those who live in suburbs (and have gardens/front yards/...), look at your weeds. Some of them, like Conyza canadensis (incidentally, a very aggressive alien in Europe), may hyperaccumulate certain substances (in this particular case, Hg, Pb, As and some other things you don't want in your food beyond micro levels). If you leave them to grow until just fruiting and then take out with roots, you will reduce pollution there (and the aliens' spread). However, you will need to put them somewhere, which may be inconvenient.
While technically true, will it make any difference? How much heavy metals (e.g. in mcg) would one plant accumulate? How many plants will it take to reduce the heavy metal pollution of a patch of ground by, say, half?
There are too many qualificators to go into detail here. You might wish to choose a plant that takes out more of a specific pollutant, or of several. Here are some references for Conyza canadensis specifically, they will give you the general idea why people are interested in this on industrial scale.
Phytoremediation is a developed field, with many plants being screened for efficiency. I would begin with learning what species you do have, and then googling them. (Maybe if you write to some guy who studies something that you have, you can offer him joint research - you gather hay and soil at your place, he analyses them for HM (so you save money). If you have a background in statistics, it raises your chances to Eucalyptus height from about clubmoss height:)
As to ANY difference at all...
The more biomass the plant gains, the more overall quantities of accumulated substances will be taken out (meaning if you weed it out earlier, that will be less effective). Also, if you only mow your lawn, you leave roots in soil, and they will probably contain the highest amounts of heavy metals (and some plants can re-grow later, possibly reaching higher than average concentrations of pollutants). And the part that you have cut off will fly away and add to the general level of pollution. However, if you don't mow your lawn, it might look less tidy:)) there will be status repercussions:))
If the plant is a serious weed, it would likely produce thousands of easily dispersing seeds per specimen (so you shouldn't worry about it NOT appearing again). If there is a wetland in your area, sedimentation processes and typically clonal nature of surrounding vegetation (reeds) will make heavy metals accumulate there (wetlands are sinks), so it is a good thing to take them out from surrounding soil in the form of fast-growing, short-lived biomass. In some (usually rural) areas grass is yearly burned, which would release a significant amount of the collected pollutants into the air (and that is not good).
(And of course, trees will gather pollutants from air more than, say, cabbage does, so if there is any significant effect it should be for vegetables and not fruit.)
So I think there is little to gain from not doing it and at least some good gained from doing it.
There are opportunity costs. It costs time and maybe money for procuring the plant.
(Still haven't found the time to check the literature for the best plant to remove HM, but I remember about it.) I really can't yet estimate losses/gains in money units; perhapsit could be organized as a community event of promoting neighbouriness. Neighbourhood?
It seems to me like you are more interested in signaling concern about cleaning up heavy metals than actually cleaning them up. Do you agree with that assessment?
I am even more interested in free advice on statistics of soil science, given to an internet user, because I do happen to be a member of a NGO and so have to signal concern more often than I honestly feel it. (After a while concern dwindles, but annoyance grows.) I would not want to signal concern about yet another problem without due preparation in real life.
Does anyone actually do this in real life (as opposed to writing academic papers about it)?
I notice the lack of numbers :-)
If you do have a heavy metals soil pollution problem, do you think bioaccumulating weeds will significantly help? If you do not, why should you bother? Talking about lawns, no one eats that grass, so you can make the argument that it's better to have contaminants tied up in the soil rather then extracted.
I don't know if people do this in real life (or I would have chosen a different thread), but one obstacle why they would not is lack of infrastructure. Once you get a truckload of toxic waste, what to do with it?.. Also, I hope to have some numbers for one species (actually, for a fraction of its ecoforms) in a limited range of pollutants in a specific geographic area, under specific land use conditions, collaborating with chemists who will hopefully find the problem interesting enough, AND I live in Ukraine. I won't have time for it until after defending my thesis. Give me a Latin name, and I will try to come with a prediction, however off key; but generalizing across orders of flowering plants is simply wrong. (ETA: a nitpick. A lawn is not a HM sink. The soil is far too often disturbed, and new layers are not yearly deposited there. It won't hold the pollutants reliably. Maybe, under some conditions, it is better not to extract them, I will have to think upon it. And the concept of a grass that nobody ever eats blew my mind, it did. Save yourself, man! (Woman, child, alien, AI.) Run! Sell your house to a sci-fi writer and don't look back!)
I'll ask a simpler question. What is the best (in terms of heavy-metal concentration as % of biomass) that a flowering plant can do?
(Still haven't got to read stuff on that, maybe I'll be more lucky next week. After five minutes by the clock thinking about the idea and its alternatives, have two results: 1) I think veeery slowly, 2) maybe it's possible to make a thin porous cable stuffed with enzyme analogue to download HM directly from the soil, collect them on electrodes once they are in, and extract massively in a special facility.)
To extract heavy metals from the soil you need a LOT of contact surface. Roots excel at this, cables, not so much.
I know. Still might be more feasible.
I started doing this a while ago.
There are a lot of fake memory cards going around on ebay. You can tell they are fake because they are going for a lot less (a third or less of the price, exact amount varies) than other places. They actually are just hacked to be less capacity than they claim. You can verify the exact capacity by using a program called h2testw.
I buy a few cards, wait for them to ship, dispute the transaction, and usually I get the money back without having to send back the item. (Once I had to send it back, but ebay paid for the shipping. Usually not, though.)
Viola, free memory cards. If you have paypal credit, it's even better, as you don't have to pay until later and you may cancel it before the payment is due. I'm ripping off scammers, so no ethical problems either.
You should not expect such cards to be reliable.
The reason this is possible is because of the way flash memory is manufactured now: the chips are produced with faults, then connected to a microprocessor that runs sophisticated proprietary algorithms to identify the faulty memory cells and reliably distribute stored files across the working memory cells, and also report to both the manufacturer and consumer the total capacity of those working cells. This way a single silicon wafer produced with imperfections can yield hundreds of sd cards ranging from megabytes to 128gb each.
The scammers you're talking about reprogram the microprocessors on these cards to identify themselves as having a larger capacity, but this isn't so simple as it being connected to a reliable 4GB flash memory chip and reporting itself as connected to a reliable 8GB flash memory chip, rather they're all uniformly connected to highly unreliable 32GB or greater memory chips and correcting the reliability problem in firmware, and there's no telling how the scammers messed with that besides the change in the reported capacity. I would expect any file saved on such a card to have pieces randomized or zeroed over time.
An 8G class 10 card can be purchased from frys.com for $3.00. You're not likely to get many cards larger than 8G by doing this and you may end up with a smaller card that is less useful. Unless your time and effort is nearly worthless to you, or unless you're so poor that you really would rather spend the time and effort to save such small amounts, this makes no sense. Furthermore, most people have no need for more than a few small SD cards anyway.
If it takes around 5 minutes per card (because you can order multiple cards at once), then making even 2 dollars a card is $24 an hour, for something that isn't very complicated and doesn't feel like work. I've also at times resold them myself (with the correct capacity, and as-is), and made money that way. Some people might also like to have a fake card for fun. (It's actually quite cool the way it's hacked.)
Besides, the title was Post ridiculous munchkin ideas.
I'm thinking of doing this soon, but I still need to check whether it is possible.
The more capital you have, the more you can make at any given point.
ETA: This is probably a bad idea, as it could be seen as fraud. I failed to realize this when I first posted it.
You assume that Kiva pays nothing for paypal money transfer or the credit card.
It's plausible that Kiva pays that sum from the interest of the loans. It might also be that Kiva has indeed a deal with Paypal that allows them to receive money for free. If they have a deal somewhere in that deal it could be a clause that this doesn't count as a purchase.
You might trigger some fraud detection system if you try to do that with significant amounts of money. Maybe you even signed somewhere a clause that allows your bank, paypal or kiva to sue you for fraud.
I was assuming initially that there would be fees charged, but they would be low enough that it would still be worth it.
I had not thought of this being considered fraud. In hindsight, it seems obvious; since it is most likely not worth the trouble of looking through everything I have ever signed, I'm going to shelve this idea.
In short, keep in mind that the system has lots of people with an incentive to prevent exploitation and it's unlikely that you managed to find a useful exploit that 1) bypasses all the checks and balances, and 2) if it ever did exist, was not already found and closed.
In addition, if you want to make money because a system of an organisation is broken, don't screw organizations like Kiva that produce a lot of public good.
What part of this is screwing Kiva? Temporarily lending money then getting it back is what Kiva is for.
I interpreted the suggestion is being about fastly moving money into and out of Kiva and not doing loans with the usual maturation time.
I've got one. I actually came up with this on my own, but I'm gratified to see that EY has adopted it
cashback credit cards. these things essentially reduce the cost of all expenditures by 1%.
...but that's not where they get munchkiny. where they get munchkiny is when you basically arbitrage two currencies of equal value.
as a hypothetical example, say you buy $1000 worth of dollar bills for $1000. by using the credit card, it costs $990, since you get $10 back. you then take it to the bank and deposit it for $1000, making a $10 profit. wash, rinse repeat
the catch is, most of them have an annual fee attached, so you it's a use it or it's not worth it scenario (note, though, that for most people, if they use it for rent and nothing else, they'll save about the same as the annual fee). also, most of them need good credit to acquire, so if you're a starving college student with loans, kiss that goodbye. also, you cannot directly withdraw cash and get the 1%, so you have to come up with a way ton efficiently exchange a purchasable resource for money.
Build an autonomous self-replicating robot. Not a RepRap -- those take hours of careful human labor to build. Design an assembly robot to put together parts: something that can pick up a screw, place it in a hole, and screw it in place. This is a hard problem (some current PhD students do similar projects for their research) but the required tools all exist, including ROS and existing robot arm control routines. Some challenging coding is required to execute the assembly steps in order, and some challenging systems engineering is needed to make sure the robot has the observation and control accuracy capabilities needed (e.g. hobby servos may not be accurate enough). The robot arm must itself uses only off-the-shelf parts (stepper motors, encoders, laser-cut parts, off-the-shelf shafts, etc.). This would be a hard problem to solve, but is solvable by someone who's great at coding, mechanical engineering, and systems engineering.
The munchkin part occurs when this is built. Existing robot arms typically cost ~2x or more the cost of the parts (so the manufacturer can pay assembly labor cost, engineering overhead, etc.). This autonomous assembly robot could thus be substantially cheaper than conventionally manufactured assembly robots. And, scaling up production does not require more workers, just more table/shop space for more robots. So, one robot could be used to make a very large number of additional robots, resulting in a large profit for the owner.
The munchkinnery continues by enabling full automation of more challenging manufacturing problems. Assembling a robot from parts purchased online is easier than, say, assembling a factory. To compete, people would race to automate increasingly complicated problems. Once one person had automated a task (requiring a large investment), others could copy the control code and designs for free (or a license fee) and enjoy increased productivity with lower costs. This would make manufactured goods much cheaper, and possibly make recycling and Mars colonization cost-effective.
Data to support the feasibility of this includes existing examples of high-level robot tasks (welding robots for cargo ship fabrication, navigation and mapping of buildings by drones, various capabilities of the PR2 robot platform) and NASA studies of the feasibility of moon colonization using self-replicating robots.
Side effects may include massive unemployment, creation of a robot-administered police state, and increased risk of self-improving AI.
Spread your genes without having children:
Donate to sperm/egg banks.
Sign up for genetic studies where your beneficial genes will be targeted if humanity decides to go a Gattacca-like route.
BTW, see Gwern's essay about that.
Encourage people who are genetically similar to you to reproduce.
My twin sister is trying to subscribe me to have a second child so that she would not have to have any, and I feel like'genetic similarities' are just not strong enough motivation.
If you are single, frequent online dating sites and look for people who match your Myers-Briggs personality type.
Whether or not Myers-Briggs measures something real, it definitely worked in at least one happily married case. :-)
so did "find god's match for you"
if we're looking at all the successful cases, but none of the unsuccessful ones, of course we're going to get positive results. also, as positive results go, "at least one" success is hardly reassuring
If you're a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt. Sure, libraries are great, but you have to wait if they don't have your book, you have to transport yourself there and back, and many of them are closed when inspiration strikes at midnight and you realize you want to stay up all night reading some book you literally just heard about but suddenly must have RIGHT NOW (or maybe that's just me). It's way better to have a bigger library on your computer. You can try books out and if they're stupid, at least you only lose the time it took to read it. If you use the kindle cloud reader, you can read on your computer. Then when you're done, you refund it, and you don't have to go through the annoying process of shipping anything anywhere, or worry about packaging or it being in the same condition.
Plus if you travel with your laptop, you can then have an unlimited supply of books that weigh nothing, as long as you have internet access, that are effectively free and in a convenient format.
If you're a slow reader, just buy it, read for a week, return it, then buy it again (and return it again after a week). Repeat until finished.
(Sigh.) It's bad enough that you've chosen to defect; it's downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
If you must obtain ebooks by extralegal means, there are such things as torrents and ebook sites, where you will find far more books than you will ever be able to read, and where you will only be committing copyright infringement, instead of infringement, wire fraud, theft of resources, and violation of that stupid US anti-hacking law that Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under. (Oh, and let's not forget the part where you just came pretty close to admitting that you've committed those crimes already.)
Advocating law-breaking on LW for ethical reasons might be one thing; advocating it for reasons of petty selfishness is quite another.
[Edited to add: this comment is not about protecting Amazon; it's about 1) not promoting illegal activities on LW, and 2) it not being a good idea to get into a habit of defecting on agreements (whether social/informal or legal/formal because of self-serving rationalizations like, "they can afford it" or "I can get away with it".]
Amazon can take care of itself. It doesn't need your paternalistic moralizing intervention. If Amazon believes that on net having a policy that allows returns of possibly already consumed goods will produce more profit than a more defensive strategy then it can do so. Save your shaming for people who need your defence or who are being 'expolited' in a way that isn't straightforward (albeit miserly) use of the deliberately included features of a powerful website.
Something actually ethical to recommend would be the use of calibre to convert and remove DRM and then returning the book while keeping it. That's clearly illegal and something I incidentally haven't done. I've never bothered looking in to the 'return book' kindle feature for those books I have purchased from amazon. (I just use that tool for the purpose of getting things into a format TextAloud can convert to mp3.)
It would help you argument is you were not to invent quite ridiculous notions just to make something look more scary.
Amazon has fired customers before for making too many returns[0]. So be aware that this may get your account banned at some point.
0
Have you seen an instance of this happening to someone who did not return multiple large purchases? I am worried about this happening, but in every instance I read about, the person who got banned had returned multiple TV's or computers, not small items. However, the ebook return policy has only been in place for around a year, so it might not show up.
With ebook returns, it seems like they only disallow you from refunding ebooks in the future, but do not ban your account
In academia, Munchkining has recently taken off.
These techniques for getting tenure have long existed, but they have been codified only in the last few years.
Self-citation
Multiple publication of the same materials.
To aid in citing several of your own articles that are effectively the same article, rotate "first author" privileges among coauthors so that multiple self-citations don't occur near each other in the alphabetically ordered bibliography.
And many more. Here is a selection.
Get brain-fog from eating an excessive amount of simple carbohydrates? Try donating whole blood (thereby causing new blood to be created that will be closer to default levels of blood-sugar, insulin, etc...).
This works. Donating blood seems to improve insulin sensitivity.
In India, the internet service provider "Tata Docomo" provides a wireless service called "Photon Plus" that uses a Huawei dongle to connect to the internet. I use this dongle and my plan consists of unlimited internet usage with speeds of 3.2 Mbps upto 5GB and then it is reduced to 153 Kbps (yeah! Imagine that!) for the rest of the month.
I have worked out a hack that gives me the full speed even after I have exhausted the 5GB data. I don't know if this is true about other service providers, but Tata Docomo tracks data usage every time I disconnect from the internet. So, if my earlier usage was 4GB and I have used 2GB in my current session, it won't be added to my total until I disconnect and end the session. So, even if I cross the 5GB limit in my current session, I still get the 3.2 Mbps as the records don't have me crossing the limit yet.
Thus, every month, I use the dongle for browsing etc until I reach close to the 5GB mark. Then I disconnect the dongle and then reconnect it, then I line up ALL the downloads that I have been saving for the month and don't disconnect again until all of them are completed.
Using this trick, I have been able to download more than 15GB data every month for the past 4 months. Unfortunately, there is a safety mechanism that the Tata Docome people have implemented, that disconnects the dongle automatically if it has been left connected for more than 24 hours. So, now I only have 24 hours to do my thing. But that is quite enough for my needs :)
Bitcoin hoarding for charity: Buy some amount of bitcoin, and keep it in a series of of wallets dedicated to various causes. Precommit to hoarding all of the amounts for a significant time, but spend the ones with the most warm-fuzzy results the soonest because that results in pumping up the value of bitcoin.
Eventually, at a point where the value cannot be pumped further by expending more on warm-fuzzies, spend hoarded amounts on utilitarian-optimal causes in a way that leverages economies of scale to achieve maximum impact.
(I remembered this yesterday while writing a comment about something else, but LeechBlock stopped me before I was able to write it here.)
The black keys on a piano keyboard form a pentatonic scale; that is to say, so long as you have an anywhere-near-decent sense of rhythm, nearly anything you can improvise using those keys alone will sound good. Non-musicians will be pretty unlikely to notice what you're doing, if they aren't very close to you.
IIRC There's a video (TED talk?) out there of a guy using this for audience participation, to great effect.
Edit: Here.
Wow, that's a big help to me. I can never remember the pentatonic scale, so that alone acts as an easy reference no matter what key I'm in.
I use classical conditioning on myself with genres of music to either help me focus or to relax. Basically I just always (and only) play a certain type of music when I'm working, and then switch to another type of music when I want to start winding down for the day.
I use these two stations because they have no words or commercials: (work): http://somafm.com/thetrip/ (relax): http://somafm.com/dronezone/
It definitely helps me. Sometimes if I forget to turn off the music I end up working way too late. Also, it's incredible how the focus and desire to work comes on almost instantly when I put my headphones on. I use very good passive noise cancelling headphones (they reduce ~25db of sound), so literally all I hear is the music, and I have to take them off to talk to people/leave the computer, which probably strengthens the effect
I can speak for this method; it really works, at least for me.
On a sidenote, I'm looking for a good pair of passive noise-cancelling headphones. Which ones do you use?
http://www.amazon.com/Vic-Firth-Stereo-Isolation-Headphones/dp/B0002F519I/ref=pd_cp_MI_0
Only downside is sort of obvious--they're pretty tight on your head, but I can wear them comfortably all day.
Try to take advantage of possible Sapir Whorf effects by constructing your own language to use for thinking in. I got this idea after finding a link here to this New York Times article which has several examples of such effects.
Random brainstorming on potential things to consider including:
It would probably be best to do this after learning at least one other language that is quite different from your native language. Also, keeping ways words can be wrong in mind is likely a good idea.
This would likely also have the same effects as thinking in any foreign language
I may or may not actually try this after I've learned Korean sufficiently well.
Incidentally, learning a new language isn't required for this.
One can, for example, adopt the habit of saying "I want X to work" or "I expect X to work" or "I would be happier if X worked" or "I would be happier if I expected X to work" instead of "X should work" while continuing to speak English.
Put differently: the habit of setting trigger-points around certain words ("should," "think", "want", "can", :will", etc.) to ensure that I actually know what I'm saying when I say them is useful.
How does Korean relate to this? I speak it semi-fluently and none of those three things happen in it. I have however found its folding in of adjectives into verbs one of several useful toeholds for learning Lojban, though.
It doesn't directly relate. I'm currently learning Korean and don't want to try learning multiple languages at the same time. Also, I want a broader experience with languages before I try to make my own.
Around two years ago, I tried devising a language for roughly this purpose. I concluded that it wasn't a worthwhile use of time; devising it is easy, but becoming fluent takes way too much time, especially since there's no corpus (or a very small corpus, if you use something like Lojban).
I write down and regularly review all my ideas, experiences, etc., and I've found it very useful to invent my own words (interspersed in normal English) for concepts that need annoying circumlocutions in normal English. I also use the derivational morphology of Esperanto and my own conlangs.
For an interesting example of a personal language created as a psychological experiment, see gjâ-zym-byn.
Don't go overboard with that -- IIRC, extremely few people succeed in becoming fluent in Lojban. IOW, think twice before flouting a linguistic universal.
Not everyone would agree that “I want it to work” is a correct restatement of deontic modality. (The one I use when wanting to avoid the ambiguity of “should” is “it had better work”.)
That effect is due to the fact that you're forced to use your System 2. It probably disappears after you become too fluent in the language (for example, FWIW, I don't ‘feel’ that happening with English).
Also, +1 or ygert's suggestion to read The Language Construction Kit, and you may want to check out the resources I mentioned in my reply.
Yes, that is a better way of phrasing it. Changed.
Unfortunately, this seems likely.
Scott (Yvain) did this in his fictional world. For example:
Certainly a ridiculous munchkin idea! It's a cool idea, although I would estimate that the actual difficulty of getting it working is very high. If you do manage, that would be quite awesome though. If you are serious about actually trying this, check out The Language Construction Kit . It's a pretty cool website giving tips and advice on language construction. Perhaps it could be useful.
More resources about language construction
I think this one is particularly useful for hylleddin's purposes.
Thank you for the resources! I've been a fan of conlanging for a while, but I've mostly used linguistics references and The Language Construction Kit.
Similar to BForBandana's idea, use the refund system to convert gift cards into cash.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, accountant or investment advisor. I have not tried this, and I'm currently trying to think of reasons why it won't work.
How to Beat the Tax System:
Suppose one had an investment account and a Roth IRA. Suppose further the investment account had a realized gain for the year. From the investment account, one could sell-to-open a way out-of-the-money cash-secured put at a high limit that no one would buy. As long as you're the only open interest, you could then buy your option in your other account. You'd in essence be swapping short-term gains for tax-free savings.
You're hosed if another party rushed in to sell you the put at a lower price, but the savings could easily exceed the cost of commissions if the option is thinly traded enough. I suppose you could just take the market price on both sides, though, if you're willing to repeat the process until the transition goes the "correct" way.
You can withdraw penalty-free from the Roth IRA when you buy your first house. Or, you could simply reverse the process as needed. This could be particularly helpful if one were having a bad year and had lost more than the maximum investment-losses deduction.
Any downsides to this bit of financial munchkin-ism? Does this constitute tax evasion? I imagine it wouldn't be provable for anyone other than me (you're welcome). Are there actually options that thinly-traded?
I am not a tax lawyer, but I suspect the IRS would treat the put-option sale-thingie as a deposit into your Roth IRA ("substance over form" is a recognized tax law doctrine, at least when it benefits the IRS). Likewise, reversing the process likely would be classified as withdrawing from the IRA. So, the general rules for deposits and withdraws from the IRA would likely apply. If I understand your suggestion correctly, the general rules would prohibit most of what you are trying to do.
In short, I don't think your plan does what you think it does, legally speaking. Whether you would get caught and penalized is a separate question - First, brokerages have lots of reporting requirements, and likely would issue a 1099 or some-such to someone if there were a change in beneficial ownership of an asset. Second, the IRS has an all-but-declared policy of spending a dollar to collect a dime, purely for deterrence purposes.
In summary, aggressive tax techniques without expert guidance is asking for trouble.
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn't do any legal research. Don't rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don't rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
I know nothing about tax law, so this is an important disclaimer. I won't end up trying this.
To spell out the idea, one could have their Roth IRA and their investment account at separate institutions. The Roth IRA broker would simply see a loss (gain) and the investment account broker would simply see a gain (loss). Each institutions reporting these changes to the IRS is the benefit of the finagling.
Yes, and the IRS would see both transactions under your tax identification number (for an individual, typically the social security number). The IRS is going to have an opinion about what that transaction means for your IRA account, and if your tax return is not consistent with that opinion, the IRS will expect an explanation.
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn't do any legal research. Don't rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don't rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
First-time poster, long time lurker. This discussion piqued my interest.
If you have your own business, a very cost effective way of promoting it is to get a part-time job, (or 'side quest' in D&D parlance) that involves delivering something such as catalogues, phone-books or even takeaway food or a paper-round in the location where your business operates. You can easily slip in your own flyers or business cards in along with whatever you are delivering. The wage from the part-time job will easily pay for the extra printing and mileage costs. I do this and my p/t employer hasn't found out yet or even explicitly or implicitly forbidden me from doing this; in fact, my p/t boss is pretty wily entrepreneurial sort of chap so he would probably actually approve so long as I am still good at his job.
Throughout history, a proven and popular method of acquiring wealth is to marry somebody rich.
How to accomplish this is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
Besides using evolution
I would recommend moving into a country where not so many people are freakishly rich.
The more obnoxious and evil the distribution of income, higher the likelihood that there will be no income social strata at the top of the "piramid". In other words, in the US there are so many people whose net wealth surpasses 10 million dollars, they can afford to intra-marry. This is not the case in Istambul, São Paulo, Jeddah or Lima. Some of them will be stuck with "poor" people, like you :)
This is not a guess, the toddler-infant unit of my school is in a very expensive neighborhood, and I've seen the mating patterns of the wealthy from a very young age.
I've started watching TV Shows at 2X speed. This has been incredible:
I started doing this a few months ago. It started when I realized that I already listened to Audiobooks at 2X-3X, and that TV Shows are basically the same thing.
Some tips:
I've switched from VLC to Daum's PotPlayer which has fantastic support for youtube videos and playlists and allows speeding up videos like this. It also uses significantly less memory and cpu than watching youtube in firefox.
Yeah, I've been doing this too, but only after I've determined something to be too boring when I try to watch it normally. I'm glad I didn't watch Puella Magi at 2x, for instance.
Another tip: Youtube can be watched at 1.5 and 2x, as well as slower speeds, but you have to go to testtube first and enable the experimental HTML 5 player.
(Currently it seems a little bugged: if you select a higher speed, you can't go back to 1x, because the normal speed button doesn't work. Reloading fixes that.)
I've been looking for a way to do this automatically. Whenever I start a video, I have to manually change the speed to 2x; sometimes I forget and end up wasting large amounts of time. I've been looking for a chrome extension or something, but I can't find one.
Has anyone had any luck with automating this?
I highly recommend people who use cars to somehow do this in their cellphones and connect the cellphone to the car soundsystem.
I cannot stress how much Traffic is not traffic anymore as soon as it become introduction to evolutionary anthropology. Bostrom told me there is cellphone software for accelerating podcasts, but it only worked for paid ones. Does anyone know one that is free?
Actually, I would suggest not focusing your attention on evolutionary anthropology while you're supposed to be piloting a multi-ton vehicle at high speeds.
Most people are far worse at driving than they believe themselves to be.
Now, assuming you're not in a car at the moment, you can probably hack something up using mplayer - there's at least one android port of that. You may need to write your own UI, though, and I suspect it'll reduce your battery life significantly. (Android native players take advantage of decoding hardware, mplayer probably doesn't. Also, the fourier transform required to speed up voice without affecting pitch is expensive.)
When you're driving a daily commute your mind is going to wander unless you have extraordinary focus control / mindfulness training. It's not obvious to me that it's more dangerous to have it directed to evolutionary anthropology than to what you're going to do when you get home (or wherever else it wandered).
There's a difference between accidental mental wanderings and deliberately focusing on a sped-up textbook.
If you're listening to a sped-up textbook without focusing on it, I'd say you won't get much out of the experience.
(After reading that sentence, in particular the word “evolutionary”, before reading what you were replying to, I had briefly thought you were arguing against this and gone WTF.)
Interesting. I definitely do this with Coursera... but you haven't noticed any dramatic timing being thrown off?
Not really, in the sense that everything is half the time so the timing between things is still intact.
Are there some "dramatic sequences" in which I miss part of the intention of the directors/etc.? Yes, I'm sure there are. But for at least a large portion of the shows I watch, most of the important stuff is in the dialogue anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm probably a less visual person than most, which means I don't pay as much attention to the visual aesthetics of shows as others do. Also - some sequences even I don't watch at 2X, mostly action sequences and the like.
I have friends who do this with lectures and audiobooks, which seems at least more productive-sounding.
I started with audiobooks and lectures as well. Since I'm a big fan of watching TV/Movies, applying the same thing to this area has allowed me to double the amount of consumption, while not really diminishing my enjoyment of the shows that I watch (and, in some cases, enhancing it if the show is slow but otherwise good).
I've personally found playing anime at 1.1x to be a difference which is barely even noticeable, but further speed increases to be somewhat annoying, and 1.5x+ to be unwatchable. It's likely low-hanging fruit for many, but YMMV.
It depends a lot on the quality of the speed-up algorithm. One cheap way of speeding up audio is to drop samples, but this significantly reduces audio quality.
Personally, I find anything above 1.2x to be annoying, but I still do it - not to save time, but to improve my japanese-understanding capability.
Here's why I think this is something most people can do:
I am personally a "native-level" English speaker, having spent 6 years of my childhood in English-speaking countries. I am now in a non-English-speaking country though.
A friend of mine who is also doing this is not a native English speaker, and while his English is quite good, it is clearly not native-speaking level. However, he also manages to watch almost all shows at least at 1.5X speed.
Of course YMMV, but I would encourage people to at least try this out and see if it hurts their enjoyment of shows or not.
I wonder, is it possible to slow down shows for those of us trying to learn a new language who have not yet reached 1X fluency? Assuming it's technically feasible, does it help? I'll have to try that.
Yep, that works. See uncle post - usually I speed things up, but for hard-to-understand shows I've found that slowing them down gives me more time to correlate subs and audio - or to try comprehending the audio without subs, at that.
Very interesting idea, hadn't thought of thought. You can technically slow down shows in VLC by pressing the - key, it slows to 0.67X speed I believe.
Please let us know what you find, I may try it out myself for practicing Spanish.
This brings to mind the dollar-coin-frequent-flyer-miles scam a few years ago. Where basically, the US treasury started making dollar coins and no one used them. To encourage their circulation, they would sell boxes of coins online with free shipping. Munchkins started buying them with credit cards that gave frequent flier miles, then would deposit the coins at their bank and pay off the credit card. Result: millions of frequent flier miles for free.
The US treasury no longer accepts credit cards for online dollar coin purchases.
Where's the scam in this story?
I guess I should have said scheme.
Would you say that anything which isn't explicitly forbidden is fair game, and cannot be a scam?
To me a scam involves some kind of deception. I don't see anyone being deceived, exactly. It's not as if the munchkins were lying about whether their credit cards gave frequent flier miles.
It's fair game according to the definition at the beginning of the OP, but when gaming human-made real-world rules, one should be aware that if it works, and it's against the intention of the rules, the rules are likely to be changed to prevent it. There's a certain amount of anti-inductiveness in the activity. See the running battle between tax legislators and tax accountants, which has recently come to public attention in the UK with the news that the UK operations of Starbucks, Google, and Apple apparently make hardly any profit to be taxed on.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, there's been informal internal discussions.)
What seems like it might be going on isn't that Google et. al are doing anything unusual, so much as they're taking advantage of loopholes that may have been established for the benefit of other industries, without paying off the politicians. The reasonable thing to do would be to change the laws, not to target individual companies.
I can't say I'm very familiar with the details, though.
Well, I don't work for Google (though sometimes I wish I did), but I agree that any company which does not use all the available rules to minimize its taxes should have its CFO fired. After all, that's what a person would do if she found out that the person doing her taxes deliberately does not maximize her return.
Of course, there is a difference between maximizing your tax return this one year and carefully milking the loopholes for decades. Google is not doing a good job of the latter, so whoever is responsible for Google PR should be replaced with someone more competent.
Capital prices are more about relative competitiveness than absolute competitiveness. If every hundred dollars makes $4 instead of $5 next year because of closed tax loopholes, and your investment now makes $400 a year instead of $500 because of those same closed tax loopholes, then your investment hasn't changed price.
Depending on the PR costs to support these tax loopholes, Google may even be better off closing them - so long as the PR costs are expensive enough, and the tax loopholes benefit everyone equally. The whole industry makes less money, the government gets more money, and Google saves on PR costs, providing a relative advantage and increasing their stock price.
If you have a reasonable ammount of money that you would like to save long-term and (potentially) remonetize 10+ years later on (for example for your retirement or whatever) then decide against playing the stock market (duh) or putting it in low interest bank accounts and buy the right stamps instead.
My dad is a passionate collector, but I have hardly any interst in collecting useless historical artefacts because I'm more interested in the future of humanity than its past. However even without any historical interest in the particular subject, stamps are an amazing thing to put your money into, because:
Few stamps ever fall significantly in value, some remain stagnant and most rise significantly over time. So having many rather than a few really valuable ones is good and in a timeframe of decades many individual stamps can easily double or triple their value.
They are very small, light and portable. Unlike most other art-objects you could potentially remonetize quickly. Much lighter than coins or anything else, really.
If you remonetize them, you don't pay extra taxes which you may have to pay for gains from playing the stock market. If there will be a tax on that at some Point in the future (which is unlikely for some reasons I won't get into), it can be easily avoided - illegally and probably legally as well.
You can remonetize them very, very quickly for a very good price by knowing the right person / auction house.
Unlike numbers on a bank account they are inflation proof.
No inheritance tax, your significant others will get all the dough if they remonetize it themselves.
The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).
Also you obviously need to keep them safe from theft and environmental hazards. (If you want to make the collection a one-time endeavor instead of an ongoing process, you can finish up your collection and put it in a small or medium safe deposit box in any bank.) Consider optimal storage conditions as well, since stamps are essentially made of fancy paper.
If none of this interests you, then at least take this advice: If you ever inherit a stamp collection, don't sell it on a flea market, inform yourself and sell it properly. Just recently a friend of my dad asked his advice on a collection he was about to sell for low double digits to learn that it was worth at least 20000$.
I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I've known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.
Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don't know how that factors in expected value return.
Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.
Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I'll say some outrageous hypothesis: Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen. Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god. There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.
I wouldn't know about magic cards, sorry.
Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don't.
Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don't come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come - there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What's also interesting is "catastrophy mail", that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.
There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.
I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I'm quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first "reliable" long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).
What I have taken from this is any time I travel abroad I should get in touch with my stamp investing friend and form a strategy for finding good local deals that have a likely long term value, possibly in other markets, and also I should try to make more friends expert in such collectibles investing for the same reason. I have not concluded I should expect to beat the market without a similar effort.
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There's always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there's an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone - logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.
I strongly advise against following this plan. Collectibles are not a good longterm investment, stamps included. That is, they tend to underperform stocks, real estate, and other investments, substantially so once transaction and carrying costs are factored in. The Wall Street Journal recently polled a number of experts about this. Their opinions were essentially unanimous, differing primarily in how bluntly each was willing to say, "Don't do this."
Those don't seem like substantial downsides, and ones that would be incurred already by a lot of smart philatelists.
The efficient markets hypothesis asks: why can stamps be a decent investment compared to something like an index fund? Especially since there are things like hedge funds for collectibles, and stamps are a leading suspect (along with wine and art and comic books).
Did you consult a tax attorney on this? I have no idea what you're referring to when you claim you don't pay "extra" taxes on selling your stamps. Selling your possessions is certainly income and would at least be subject to income tax (and the rate would be higher than a capital gains tax rate on stocks).
I'm from Germany, here they tax gains in stock trade with a higher rate and the government tried to extend this higher rate on trade with stamps and other "art" formats multiple times, but realized its unfeasible and for now gave up. Currently you pay a whopping 25% in taxes on capital gains over ~1000$ and have other substantial losses. A few years back it could even climb as high as 50% if you were unlucky. Also you don't pay any special taxes here if you simply sell your private collection.
I think the current US tax rate on capital gains is at 0% if you earn little, 15% if your income is in a "medium" range and it can climb to 20% if your wallet is really thick.
This is not based on any personal research but on what my father told me, yet seeing how much time he is (and especially has been) spending in this field, that he keeps up to date, and that generally speaking he is a reasonably smart man, I have no reason to doubt his expertise in this topic. Naturally he's enthusiastic about this but he wouldn't warp facts. Every time I visit I unsually tend to leave with more insight in this field than I really want to. He also keeps close track on how the value of his private collection rose over the past, how it still rises, and I know what the figures look like.
Back on track, I should have made the disclaimer that I'm not really familiar with US tax law. The main point I'm making here however is that it is a very safe long term investment that is practically guaranteed to pay out substantially more than what you buy it for in the long haul. This should hold true regardless of what country you're from.
I wasn't aware you're not in the US. If your country has high capital gains taxes compared to income taxes, the balance might be different in the US. However, stamps and other collectibles have many problems:
-- Stamps can get stolen, lost, or burned in a fire. It's hard for this to happen to stocks (unless you're behind the times and have them as a pile of paper certificates)
-- If you buy a type of collectibles that you're actually interested in, your desire to keep a co llection of something you're interested in may lead to poor decision-making on a financial level
-- When buying stamps and other collectibles, you generally have to pay retail prices, and when you sell them, you only get wholesale prices. And you can sell a stock any time; selling a collectible is a big deal and takes effort.
Also, I find it very doubtful that stamps aren't subject to inheritance or estate taxes.
I agree. It may be easy to avoid paying tax on the gain in value, but that does not mean one is complying with the tax law.
That said, if one is holding stamps as an investment, it is plausible that gains would be taxed at the capital gains rate instead of the ordinary rate (in the US).
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn't do any legal research. Don't rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don't rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
Learn some basic voice production for stage techniques. How your voice sounds is an absurdly strongly weighted component of a first impression, particularly over a phone or prior to direct introduction, and being able to project your voice in a commanding fashion has an overpowered influence on how much people listen to you and consider you a 'natural leader.' In particular, learn what it means to speak from the diaphragm, and learn some basic exercises for strengthening your subsidiary vocal chords like Khargyraa and basic tuvan throat singing, and you'll be surprised at how much it makes people sit up and listen. You might coincidentally have your voice drop into a lower register after about a month of such exercises, it (anecdatally) happened to me and several people in my voice production for stage class in college. (class of 25, 6 people had their voices drop within the first 4 months, teacher said those numbers were normal.)
Most people just assume you're born with a voice and have to deal with it, which is demonstrably untrue, and so they consider your voice to reflect your character.
This is cool! -- but how does being able to do it make a difference when you're speaking normally? (Other than the voice-lowering thing you mentioned.)
While I'm asking questions: Did you or any of your classmates find it did long-term harm to the high singing voice? (I'm specifically interested in the male voice just below the break.)
'How does being able to do it make a difference when you're speaking normally?' The vocal exercises drop your register immediately, particularly even a moment or two of Khargyraa will sort of... remind you that you have a lower register under your normal voice for no extra work, and sticks with you for about an hour if stressless or fifteen mins if stressed (public speaking, etc.). Also after extended use you develop the additional vocal muscles- it's like working on your core to increase your run times, by improving a range of seldom-used muscles you gain capabilities in your mains.
'Did you or any of your classmates find it did long-term harm to the high singing voice?' We weren't singing students. It was a Voice Projection for Stage class, followed by Diction and Dialects. Personally i've found that my high singing voice is more accurately pitched, but that may be due to an entirely different suite of exercises i've been pursuing simultaneously.
That would be rather surprising for me, considering that I already have a deep bass singing voice. Or are you talking about your speaking voice and not your vocal range? Because I often speak at a much higher pitch, especially when I'm trying to sound friendly.
Yes, i am referring to your normal speaking voice. Khargyraa and Tuvan techniques in particular add undertones to your normal speaking voice, making it seem deeper and more resonant when the exercises are performed regularly. It is not that your 'normal voice' becomes more resonant, but that the concept of 'normal voice' is actually based on a combination of vocal chords and you simply add to the mix, increasing the apparent depth and resonance of the timbre which the brain sums the voice into. In short, yes, I am referring to normal speaking voice, though it also allows some fun things when singing. Like metal screams without injuring vocal chords, at any register.
You seem to have knowledge about how to do this effectively - please share that knowledge or the sources for it.
@Zaine, I considered a lesswrong post on it, but it is very difficult to give general advice on the topic due to interactions between identity and voice, the fact that many people already use many techniques and so could get bored with a list, etc etc. How would you advise structuring such a sharing post?
I would identify a representative set of specific circumstances which would benefit from 'vocal training techniques', then go into detailed explanation of the physiological changes that effect a benefit in each specific circumstance. Now that the generally applicable part has been covered, you can detail various techniques designed to achieve the effects. As each person will have differing degrees of success with different exercises, list many, but at the outset state the ultimate goal for the technique the set of exercises are designed to develop, exempli gratia "You will feel X once it has worked" (I don't know if this is possible).
If you are clear that one is only learning how to use their body more effectively, I should not think considerations of identity will prove problematic - if it does, abandoning the exercises undoes the effects, correct? I would also mention that incorrect use of one's voice over long periods of time damages it; increasing one's ability to use it correctly will help preserve their ability to produce voice into the future.
I've read some basics on this, around 2006, but it's hard to think of more to say than "let most of the force in your breath come from lower." I do find that sitting up straight or standing is much better for this than slouching or lying down, etc. I generally do voicework standing (I only do the minimum for my own projects; I'm not much of an actor). It's the same breathing principals for playing a wind instrument, a lot of martial arts, meditation, etc. (The latter just focuses on breathing without the forceful projection, but the principal of controlling the breath with muscles lower than your throat and upper chest remains the same.)
@cae_jones, the technique you are referring to here is technically known as 'Diaphragm Breathing.' It is very effective and good both actively and passively, and used in voice training for stage, singing, and a variety of martial arts and meditative schools. It will also become second nature very quickly when practiced, and is the single best technique to know the existence of, which is why I taught it at the first rationality minicamp and the first boot camp.
Here is the technique, in brief form. YMMV.
Take a deep breath, placing one hand on your chest and one hand on your stomach. Note which hand moves. If your upper chest hand moves, you have much to gain. If your stomach hand moves, you will have an easy time making progress. If both move, you are partway along already.
To improve your diaphragm breathing, keep one hand on your stomach and fake a yawn. Your stomach hand should move, a lot. Not a little bit, but noticeably. It should feel like you just got fat :).
continue fake yawning in this fashion until you can separate the breathing from your stomach from the concept of a 'fake yawn,' and whenever you have a moment include either fake yawns (at the beginning), or diaphragm breathing (same thing, without the ostentatious yawn) in your quick meditations.
For voicework, I also find that "open your mouth more" and "keep your voice pitched as low as you comfortably can" are often helpful suggestions. Depending on who I'm working with, exercises to open up the chest are helpful too (that is, bring the shoulders down and back, straighten the spine, let the skull "fit" on the end of the spine, etc.). Of course, posture work is useful for actors for other reasons as well.
I have often thought that pranayama work ought to help, also, though I don't know much of anything about it and haven't seen much benefit from what little I do know.
@the other dave, those are excellent for singing and, when actively used, social situations, but there are other techniques which are more passive. The Khargyraa, Tuvan, Diaphragm Breathing, Nasal Passage Opening, and some more general speech techniques including speaking slowly, pausing often, knowing when to gesture, all of these contribute more effectively to your impression than the techniques you mention, which fade as soon as you get caught in the moment.
How do you guys feel about sharing hacks to increase your status, given that status can be a bit of a zero-sum game? I think I may have identified a nootropic that has the effect of making one feel and act higher status, but I'm not sure I want to just tell the entire world about it, given the positional nature of status.
Edit: see here for more.
Late to your question, but the issue is IMHO that status-hacks are fairly obvious, just expensive / time-consuming / hard, and actually they are supposed to be. The whole reason they work is that they are fairly exclusive, they convey status by putting you into a club most people cannot belong to, and this cannot really work as a cheat code that is protected only by secrecy. It must be, by necessity, something hard enough to do even if you know how. One obvious example is hiring a stylist, using his advice to replace your whole wardrobe, probably with DKNY level of designers stuff and even getting them fitted by a tailor afterward. Perfectly well know except it costs about a car and thus most people won't / can't do it.
I feel great about it. Let the users decide for themselves.
There no reason why we should give more status to tall people or who are otherwise physically strong. It's much better to give status to those people who are smart enough to apply hacks.
I'm very curious why someone would vote this down.
Actually, like skin color and facial structure, height is a pretty good indicator of intelligence. (This isn't genetic or even A->B causative; it's simply a fact that height and IQ are both highly dependent on childhood nutrition).
I don't say this to advocate heightism any more than I would advocate racism; I'm merely pointing out that in our current environment, they happen to correlate pretty well, and anyone under 6'2" should pause and contemplate the implications of that.
I had the impression that the height/intelligence correlation was actually quite weak:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/04/why-are-taller-people-more-intelligent/#.UZsQvIpDsqg
Um, I don't think you're using this correlation correctly. Because we have a model where nutritional deficiencies lead to both short height and low IQ, the amount of information we get is dependent on where we are in the height and IQ spectrum. Basically, if you're uncharacteristically short, say -2 sigma or lower, then you should be worried; if -1 sigma or lower, a slight suspicion; 0 or higher, little information, rather than the "if you aren't more than +1.3 sigma, contemplate."
Except that this correlation is much less informative than, say, IQ tests.
Tesla was just under 6'2", I'll spot you him.
Einstein was 5'9". Christopher Langan is 5'11".
Wolfram Alpha couldn't give me a height for Feynman, Hofstadter, or Darwin.
Nutrition is not the only derterminant of height.
Certainly; nor is it the only determinant of intelligence. "Highly dependent" != "solely dependent". But someone who wanted to maximize the chance of interacting intelligent and successful people would do well to pay attention to height, for multiple reasons - not the least of which is that everyone ELSE who wants to maximize the chance of interacting with intelligent and successful people tends to pay attention to height (even if they themselves are not tall).
Also, note that your "name X highly intelligent people who were not at optimal height" strategy is primarily anecdotal, and also that 6'2" to 6'4" is the optimal height for maximizing your height-based status gain, not the baseline height.
There probably are lots of things you could pay attention to instead that would give you more information.
(I'm 6'2", just in case anyone suspects this is sour grapes.)
I'm not sure that someone can just feel higher status - I don't think status is a single, persistent variable. Like my karate teacher is high-status when it comes to karate, but when it comes to the associated history I think he's about as useful as tits on a bull.
The upshot of which is that while I think there are probably things that relate to multiple domains, confidence for instance, the questions to do with increasing those individual things seem less loaded to answer in terms of whether you should post a hack.
Being high status is difficult. Acting high status is probably easier, and likely to increase your actual status somewhat simply because people mistake you for high status and so treat you as high status and it's all self-referential.
Disclaimer: it's also possible you would be seen as having ideas above your station and promptly quashed.
A very small number of people read LW, and a fraction of those people are going to apply any status hacks. Only a small number of people are going to apply status hacks, and they are the people who are diligent enough to research and implement them.
Posting such hacks is not going to push everyone to universally adopt them and return everyone to the previous status quo.
And even if it did, some of the actions that would increase one's positional status also have positive-sum effects (though in this specific case of voice training, they don't seem to be overwhelmingly large to me).
If you have a reason to wish to favour non-munchkins over munchkins in regards to status then it would follow that censoring such things is appropriate.
Which one? There are plenty of substances that have the effect of making one feel and act higher status. I am somewhat curious which one you are referring to.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hvu/what_are_you_working_on_july_2013/9bea
I'm curious as to how you went about identifying such a nootropic.
I didn't deliberately set out to find it, really. I'm also not quite sure how well it works yet. The effects are supposed to be cumulative, meaning the longer you have been taking it, the more of a confident jerk you become, and you continue being a confident jerk even after coming off of it (maybe). I doubt it's that much of a game changer really, it's a pretty commonly used nootropic and not many people list improved confidence as one of the effects--perhaps because the effects are subtle and only come with continued usage, or perhaps because they simply aren't very strong effects to begin with. It might be useful for people who have chronic social awkwardness though.
(if anyone reading this ever sees me act like a confident jerk, please tell me)
This description doesn't really make me want to use it. At all.
How do you know it works better than a placebo ?
Just tell people in such a way that only the kind of people you'd want to have higher status will pay attention.
For example, by posting it on lesswrong!
Well, the more people who know about it, the greater the chance that one of them will tell someone about it who I'd prefer not to have high status. I guess there are decently big taboos against taking drugs in our culture, so it probably wouldn't spread like wildfire. Actually, right now I have the opposite problem: I have friends who I'd like to be higher status and I'm trying to persuade them to try it but they won't.
That sounds like very useful advice. Do you have some suggestions for where to start learning this? E.g. particular books, classes, or Youtube videos?
Yes, I do have particular books, classes, youtube videos, lectures, exercises, and other resources. It is highly dependent on your particular vocal tendencies, so your mileage will vary for all of them.
But just as i don't feel comfortable posting physical fitness advice due to the above issues, i don't feel inclined to share the techniques which worked well for me or have worked for my students without providing the support to ensure you gain maximum benefit from them. So I will simply state some intriguing names of techniques and remain available to answer questions from your own journey, instead of listing techniques which will be mostly useless and are easily disproven in the majority of circumstances.
That being said, here are a couple of links.
Diaphragm Breathing/Speaking: http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=3
Khargyraa Techniques: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCom9ZCJAmE
The best tip for the Khargyraa stuff is just to watch that video and maybe this one and then wing it for a while, trying to get the sound right. If you manage it, try just saying some stuff in a normal voice and note the difference. It is immediate and surprising.
This link is nice because the guy is such an amateur! He clearly learned, like, one technique (probably from youtube) and then posted his immediate results on youtube, so it's a good starting point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X54KBdi5_xg
I know how to project voice, and I do it when singing all the time, but I always forget to do that in normal conversations.
@army 1987, it is the difference between knowing how to do push ups well, and run well, and do situps, and being strong in the sense that a blacksmith is strong. One is a sort of ability to perform a bounded activity, the other comes from constant use of the muscles in question over time. When you've done the right exercises, you don't have to remember, you're just strong and you have a life which makes you stronger every day.
Makes sense to me -- I've noticed the same difference between improving my posture by telling myself not to slouch vs improving my posture by exercising so that I won't even feel the need to slouch in the first place.
This isn't much use now (at least not in the northern hemisphere) but in wintertime, an uninsulated attic is effectively a refrigerator your parents don't know about. Whether you use this knowledge to store secret artisanal cheeses, or beer, is up to you.
My first thought :)
Here's a method for learning a complex subject that seems to accelerate acquiring instrumental skill and the ability to use the knowledge creatively. As a bonus, you make progress on projects you've deferred for want of technical skills you're learning now.
Project Mapping: a) Make a list of projects you're working or intend to do sometime. The more the projects excite you, the more effective this technique. b) Take a bite of your subject (a chapter or topic, smaller the better) c) Go to your project journal. Pick one or more projects from the list to connect to the material you learned. If they can't conceivably connect ... then why are you learning this? d) No matter how great the gap between the complexity and difficulty of your project and the simplicity of the elementary material you just learned, even if it's just whole number addition, describe ways to apply the knowledge to some aspect or part of your project. This is the actual "secret sauce" of the technique. e) Return to each bite to "rehearse" it by adding even more ideas, and feel free to connect in and use more advanced material you've learned, too. f) If you can, set your rehearsal schedule for each bite to initially just half an hour apart, but space them out by double the previous time between rehearsals. Force even boundaries on days or weeks to help simplify the schedule. Something like: 30m, 60m, 2h, 4h, 8h, 16h, 24h, 2d, 4d, 7d, 2w, 1m, 2m, 4m, 8m, 1y
A note on the "secret sauce" (part d): You'll often need to force your brain to believe, especially when learning the fundamentals of a subject, that you can apply it to your byzantine mega-idea. Try for five minutes. If it's just too hard, maybe create an easier project to stand-in.
I have unintentially been implementing something like this in anki.
I have discovered a way to carry a credit card balance indefinitely, interest-free, without making payments, using only an Amazon Kindle.
How my card works is, any purchases made during Month N get applied to the balance due in the middle of Month N+1. So if I make a purchase now, in May 2013, it goes on the balance due June 15th. If I don't pay the full May balance by June 15th, then and only then do they start charging interest. This is pretty typical of credit cards, I think.
Now the key loophole is that refunds are counted as payments, and are applied immediately, but purchases are applied to the balance due next month. So if I buy something on June 5th, and return it on June 6th, the purchase goes toward the balance due on July 15th, but the refund is applied as a payment on the balance due on June 15th! So you can pay your entire June balance with nothing but refunds, and you won't have to worry about paying for those purchases until July, at which time you can do the whole thing again. The debt is still there, of course, because all you've done is add and then subtract say $100 from your balance, but absolutely no interest is charged. This process is limited only by your credit line (which you cannot exceed at any time) and by the ease with which you can buy and return stuff each month.
Here's where the Kindle comes in. Repeatedly buying and returning items from a brick-and-mortar store is incredibly time-consuming and risky. You have to buy stuff, keep it in good shape, and then return it, interacting with human clerks each time, without raising suspicion. Not efficient. But if you have a Kindle, you know that when you buy a book, after you hit "Purchase" a screen comes up that asks if you have bought the item by accident, and if so, would you like to cancel the purchase. If you hit the button to cancel the purchase, what happens is that the purchase is still applied to your card, but it is refunded a couple of days later. Bingo. Automatic refunds, obtained at home at no risk, with no human oversight.
But e-books on Amazon are like $10, so you'd have to sit there all day hitting "buy" and "return" to shift a significant amount of debt, right? Wrong. If you know where to look, the Amazon kindle store has lots of handbooks, technical manuals, and textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars. Start out searching for "neurology handbook" and just surf the "similar books" list from there. Buy and return a few of those, and you're set for another month.
Obviously you have to pay off the debt at some point. This is not free money. But if you're in a tight spot for a few months, it's incredibly useful. And hey, if the inflation-adjusted prime rate is 0%, why should you have to pay interest? You're good for it.
This is by far the most munchkin-like idea I've ever had, and I'm pretty happy about it. I've been using it since January, making real payments toward my card as I can, and covering the rest with Amazon buy-and-returns. I know I'll pay down the debt when I have a better job, but in the meantime it is really nice not to have to pay any interest on it.
Excessive returns will possibly get you banned from Amazon for life, with no warning, as many have discovered.
But probably not for e-books as there is no recognizable loss for Amazon controlling.
Better to think of ways to not spend money than think of ways to keep on living relying on other peoples' money.
You don't get rich that way, though. Sure, you can accumulate a comfortable amount of low-grade wealth, but all the real games are played with other people's money. The only difference between BForBandana's trick and the typical externalities exploited by your average high roller is the number of zeros involved in the figures.
No way! Our noble masters got their rightful place on top of the Holy Free Market due to their hard work, brilliance, laudable ambition and - as much ressentiment as it might cause in the weak and envious - their overall innate superiority that separates them from the lower orders!
...And even if they do use tricks like that on occasion, lazy and worthless commoners like you shouldn't dare imitate them. In the hands of the good and the great they do no harm, but just any unwashed pleb exploiting loopholes like those is dangerously subversive of the natural hierarchy.
It may no longer be fashionable to point people to "Politics is the Mind-Killer", but that was the best example of a good, solid, and avoidable dig at the other side that I've seen for quite some time. Mockery contributes nothing, especially in a thread where as far as I can tell no one's advocated the positions you're mocking. Downvoted.
Fair enough. Yeah, I ought to at least stick to using those with some more context.
I would worry the effect this may have on your credit rating if anyone catches you at it, together with possibly more serious effects. This could potentially be considered fraud. Altogether it seems much more sensible to simply live within your means and pay off your credit balance each month.
This is the "ridiculous munchkin ideas" thread, not the "sensible advice you've already heard" thread.
A more pertinent worry. Especially with cards that give a percentage of each purchase as "reward points" or something, I'd be worried about this.
There's even a special page on the Amazon website for the express purpose of cancelling ebook purchases within the last 7 days: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144510
Upvoted for the fact that the author actually implemented the idea into practice. Too many other posts on this thread are just theorycrafting.
That was what impressed you? Not my creation of a real-life financial perpetual motion machine?
As far as I understand (and I could be wrong), your machine does not actually generate money, but merely defers payment until some future date. It does so by essentially exploiting a bug in the Kindle + Credit Card system, and it has an upper limit of whatever your max credit line is. My guess is that if this trick becomes popular, someone will patch the bug (probably Amazon, credit card companies are pretty slow).
So, don't get me wrong, it's a nice hack, but it's hardly perpetual or earth-shattering. One similar trick I know of is to have several credit cards, and use them to keep transferring the balance between them before interest accumulates; but this is less efficient, since the "free balance transfer" special offers occur relatively rarely.
The hack generates money if you invest the "loan" into something that pays interests in less than a month. Not enough money to be worth your time, of course; but it's still infinite free money for a given value of "infinite".
The hack generates money if you invest the loan into anything that pays interest. It requires fiddling to be done monthly but the investment can be anything and can be ongoing.
We could perhaps consider it a time value generator limited by max credit. This could be reasonably analogized to a perpetual motion machine with an ongoing finite output.
What does Amazon have to gain from patching it?
I'm assuming that the constant churn of purchases and returns costs them money. For example:
Okay, "perpetual motion machine" might have been hyperbolic -- the comparison I had in mind was to what we might call a "weak" perpetual motion machine, which doesn't generate energy but is exactly frictionless, so it twirls forever without energy input.
Interesting! Didn't know about that variant.
Do it for long enough and inflation will eventually reduce the debt to a negligible amount. In twenty years, at three percent rate of inflation, your debt will only be worth 54% of what it initially was!
A ridiculous munchkin idea which has long been floating around this community is increasingly looking less ridiculous: transcranial direct current stimulation is shown to improve mental arithmetic and rote learning of things like times tables with differences significant even 6 months after training. Original paper.
Has it been demonstrated to be safe over a long period of time?
How can somebody (without access to a lab) practically implement that technique?
The hardware is pretty cheap.
Relevant link from just yesterday: http://hackaday.com/2013/05/28/shocking-your-brain-and-making-yourself-smarter/ :).
Do you know anything about the long term safety of the method?
I recall reading that one of the best predictors of reported happiness is how much a person tends to compare herself to others. (I'm fairly sure I got that from the book "The How of Happiness" by Sonja Lyubomirsky)
You can probably get a quick but decent estimate of where you are on that "comparison-tendency" scale by recalling if you ever feel a sting of jealousy or if it otherwise negatively impacts your mood, or initiates a mental comparison when you see that someone else is up to something really amazingly cool on facebook. How do you generally tend to feel when you see people who are better looking or richer, or <insert desirable characteristic that others have and you don't> ?
I compared myself a lot with others some years ago, but all it took for me to get rid of that nasty mind-habit was to become aware of it every time I was doing it, and realizing that its a stupid and unhealthy habit. Thinking back it probably took me somewhere between 4 and 6 months until this way of thinking became essentially extinct and ultimately even somewhat alien. And I'm happy to say that I'm much happier now, arguably in part because I kicked that habit of thought.
So if you're suffering from this bad habit as well, the way I got rid of it was by simply realizing that it's bad, noticing it when I was doing it and simply moving on. Over time the frequency decreased on its own. The happiest people apparently hardly even know what exactly is meant by "comparing themselves to someone else". Seeing someone who does better than them in any desirable area simply does not trigger any kind of negative emotions, or feelings of inadequacy whatsoever. The opposite in fact, they tend to feel glad for people who are doing well, even if those people are doing better than oneself is.
I try to compare my personal finances, and the quality of my job, to the human median. It helps.
I'd like to confirm that indeed Sonja's book is your source. Less comparison correlates with higher happiness.
I am enjoying this sentence fragment immensely.
:'D
Also, what he said:
The trick to resolve the apparent paradox, I think, is to keep a firm distinction between describing people and emotionally evaluating people and then understand that the idea is only about cutting out the latter.
The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
7 minutes scientific workout http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itye1DEJTQk
Just tried it. it is tiring, but far from 8 on 0 to 10 discomfort level which was claimed somewhere in Lesswrong, though maybe it is for people who weight more than 75 kilos.
I think the idea is you should be setting a pace that gets to an 8 of 10 in discomfort, which is the tradeoff when you choose to dedicate only 7 minutes to exercise.
I have a horrible thought.
Most (legally acquired) debts are dischargeable in bankruptcy. That puts a floor on the amount of money one can lose. If your net worth is "almost nothing" and you can find suckers, er, I mean, organizations with loose standards that are willing to lend you money, then the expected utility of risky bets changes in a way that favors you - because going bankrupt while owing $10,000 isn't much different than going bankrupt while owing $500,000. Of course, going bankrupt is still pretty bad either way, but the upside of winning a risky, highly leveraged bet can also be correspondingly large...
Personally, I don't think this is a good idea and is probably unethical anyway, but it is the kind of crazy thing a certain kind of munchkin would do...
I knew someone who did this: bought large amounts of jewelry-making and other crafting supplies on credit, went bankrupt, and then made a living by using the supplies. It feels like theft to me.
IME the likelihood of success in risky ventures decreases faster than benefits increase.
You'll hurt your credit rating, right? Which makes it harder to find places to rent, 'cause landlords will want to know your credit rating. And of course, harder to get credit cards, auto loans, mortgages.
See also: voluntary homelessness.