Category Archives: Random Thoughts

How to convert currency quickly

You can get about 23 Baht for 1 Canadian dollar. So if you see a price like 850 to get the CAD amount you divide it by 23 right?

I don’t know about you, but figuring out 850/23 is pretty slow…

So don’t do that.

Here’s a trick one of my former colleagues (and all around great guy) Klaus showed me:
Instead of doing divisions, do multiplications!

So let’s say I have 23 to 1, instead multiply by 4. Now where the heck did 4 come from you may ask. To get 4 you take 100 and divide it by 23. And yes, that’s not exactly 4, but for our purposes (figuring out roughly how much that coffee costs) it’s close enough. So you take 850 *4. In most cases you just need to take the most significant digit, in this case 8 and do *4. Boom 32$.

(Now yes, it’s actually 36, but it took so much less time and it’s accurate enough for most cases [and yes you technically need to divide by 10, but usually you know if something will be 3,30 or 300$ instinctively so you can skip it)

We’re basically plants

There’s this image that comes and goes on social media:

Image result for we're plants need water and sun meme
It seems to be from http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/ but I can’t find the actual link to that comic

It’s silly how much of an impact sun has on me. I often don’t want to believe it you know? That all these complex emotions, thoughts, and feelings are deeply influenced from the fact that I’m in the sun or not. I often kind of diminish it’s impact, want to believe I can overcome it. But when there’s sun… It’s all just Sunshine Rainbows and Lollipops:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5Fgp-KihIA

Having self esteem makes you a bad person.

I’ve come to realize something recently with my therapist, and that’s a strange belief I have. The thinking goes that If you believe yourself to be a good person, you’re likely to not be on guard for if you truly are. You become unaware of your actions, your thoughts, and your intentions. By thinking yourself a good person, you put in place systems that make you slowly become a bad person.

And by bad we can go with something like morally dubious, unaware, not-compassionate, toxic in relationships, manipulative, self-centered, emotionally abusive etc. It ranges from being a “Douche Bag Bro” to someone on twitter insulting or being condescending at everyone who has a different opinion.

It feels very sophomoric (seriously my favourite word recently) as a way of thinking really. It’s easy to find an example of someone with self confidence who is a good person. (for whatever metric of good you want) Just as it’s easy to find someone with no self confidence who is a bad person.

And yet, I have a hard time shaking it. Part of the problem with these kinds of thoughts is, they’ve gotten me this far, so clearly it can’t be that wrong, right? If I’m generally happy with what I’ve accomplished, why should I change. Now clearly that’s also questionable logic right there. It’s always possible to be better no matter how well our current thoughts, actions and beliefs have served us.

It’s very hard for me to admit that it might not be true in my case (As in I don’t worry about others being a good or a bad person in relation to their self esteem, this just applies to me). I’d love to have a good conclusion here, a wrap to the story, something to the effect that I’m working on it or that I’ve changed my thoughts or some shit like that. But I haven’t, at least not yet. But I do know what the problem is.

The great rebalancing

Note: I originally wrote this Feb 24 but didn’t post it until now. I don’t think the current market crash really validates or invalidates any of what’s below.

Predicting the future is always tough. Doing so publicly is basically asking for trouble…. So I’m just going to do it!

I think something is going to happen with the market, that’s not really a prediction, something always happens to the market. But I think this time it will be different.

Right now everyone “knows” that index funds are the best way to invest. Just like everyone knew that buying a house was the best financial decision you could make (and many still do think that, especially in Canada which hasn’t really had a correction in the market…yet).

As soon as everyone knows something like this, it will eventually become false. By it’s nature, as soon as it’s popular the market will adjust to price that in. Everyone thinks buying a house is great, therefore everyone buys houses, the price of houses goes up and up and up until it reaches a level that doesn’t make sense.

I worry the same thing will happen with index funds. Last year the amount of money managed in index funds probably surpassed actively managed funds (Wall Street Journal) https://www.wsj.com/articles/index-funds-are-the-new-kings-of-wall-street-11568799004 that means that for all intents and purposes, everyone knows index funds are the best way to invest.

The problem is that index funds reward the top stocks, not because they are in any way good, but because they are popular. That worked incredibly well in the past since it for all intents and purposes took all of the available information and invested it based on that. But now, over 50% of that information is self referencing. In that the biggest funds are not big because a majority of people think they are valued correctly but because they were previously big.

Pump and dump isn’t a new thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump it’s been around for years. But now, all you have to do is get listed on one of big indexes and automattically millions of funds will rush to buy the stock. No need to convince people that this is the next penny stock that will be worth billions, just get listed. Now yes, I say just get listed like this is super easy, it’s not, but also not super hard in some countries [and you probably have a % of your portfolio in a global index fund])

Anyway all that to say that I have a crazy prediction and it’s that the next big thing will be some sort of “Great Rebalancing” (you know like the Great depression and the Great recession). And it’ll probably be linked to the confluence of index funds, consistent historically low interest rates, zombie company and stock buybacks. (note: or you know a pandemic…)

The only problem is I don’t know how to take advantage of if it’s true.

Also, this should be obvious but I’m not an economist, I have all of zero real knowledge in the matter, this is not financial advice and you should definitely not make any financial decisions based on reading the random musings I have on the matter.

When to buy cheap when to buy expensive

I find it very hard to know ahead of time when you should just buy the cheapest possible version of something and when not to.

I think growing up, the expensive version usually meant the one that had a marketing campaign attached to it. Not necessarily a better product. That being said, the no-name Cheerios never tasted as good…

But now, There are so many variables. Is this thing going to break and just cause more “junk” and garbage in the world? Would the more expensive one last longer? Will it serve it’s purpose better? We bought a really cheap sliding mider saw…. It didn’t end well…. But, most of our tools are from the cheap brand because we don’t use them all that much. I don’t need a Makita if I’m just doing stuff a few days out of the year.

Technology also changes this. Okay so the headphones technology is not going by leads and bounds and good headphones that work now will keep working in the future but will I want it to be able to do better noise cancelling? Will I want it to be able to connect to my phone and my laptop at the same time and seamlessly change between them? Do I even need this new “feature” that I seemed to survive living without the last few years?

One thing I’ve found myself recently is doubting all of my purchases and taking wayyyy too much time to make decisions that in the scheme of things won’t matter in 3 months.

I have a few nagging suspicions why that is… But that’s for another post.

Indistractable

It’s a cliché to say that we live in a world of distractions, of instant gratification. I just right now got distracted from writing this to pick at my nails….

And while it’s easy to blame our phones, technology, technology companies, advertisement as the go to way to monetize something, etc. Just like my previous example shows. While the external doesn’t help, we can always find something to distract ourselves with.

I’ve wanted to start reading indistractable for a while now. Slightly ironic I know. One thing I’m trying differently is to do the exercises that accompny the book and to try to actually adopt it as part of my day to day life.

I find that too often I read a book, an article, whatever, on some way to better myself. I agree with the article / book, or in many cases I’m like, oh ya I already “know” this. And by know I mean I have the information on this topic. I already have all the information I need on how to be in better shape. How to lose weight. How to be happier. How to be better at task X.

And yet…. They don’t usually stick.

I did a speech at toastmasters recently and I might write a version out here later, but the point of the speech was that the initial action was useless. There are no big swooping actions that change the world. It’s not a single speech from Ghandi that ended the occupation, a single decisive action I took (paying for personal training) that helped me get in shape or a single challenging instance that makes you smarter at something. It’s the constant iterative small progress.

I’m just at chapter 2. But I’m hoping it will help me be more mindful of how I spend my time. I guess we’ll see.

impermanence and lost videos

I recall this video I saw once. It was a bit cheesy, you know most of it being a voiceover of nature scenes and the like. It touched upon impermanence and mentioned Nietzsche and some other philosopher sending each other letters and one (I’m going to guess Nietzsche really) talked about how impermanence was sad. And the other on how impermanence meant that this moment, this present moment you just witnessed was special, was unique.

At some point it pivots to Buddhism and the acceptance of impermanence being part of the noble truths. Something that a main cause of suffering, is not accepting how everything is transient.

At times I feel silly for liking some of those “I’m a hippy and philosophize about life” but I often find it’s good reminder. A bit like how people shit on quotes, but I really like them.

I’ve tried to find that video. I mean, I even looked on vimeo, (and looked thru my youtube history) And I don’t know if I’m using the wrong word. Kinda like how memory will trick you. Maybe the term was transience… Anyway, if anyone finds it, post it in the comments.

Feedback and gratification

It’s easy to shit on Facebook. That they and many technology companies have co-opted our need for gratification with gamification. And to be clear, I’m not saying they haven’t. Anyway, recently I received a few messages on the blog posts. Most of them very encouraging, some of them asking if I was okay.

Funnily enough, the past 6 posts were all written in the span of one hour Friday and scheduled to be posted. I think that’s why it’s easy to see a trend since there was a trend, but it was all in the span of one hour and not over 3 days, which means all the emo music didn’t really have a sort of long term message or anything. (seriously, this post is going to be published at 7 am. I’m never up at 7 am)

But back to the “point” of this post. It in a sense surprised even myself how much those messages from folks saying they enjoy the blog posts made me feel good. Like, ridiculous just smile to yourself good.

It made me think of social media co-opting this feeling and it made me wonder. Is it actually Social Media’s fault for using this? Or is the fault actually more in terms of how we live now a days? The lack of real communities where we belong. Yes, in a sense we’re more connected than ever and yes, it is easier to join a community, especially when you don’t feel like you fit in with those immediately around you.

I guess this is turning out to be one of those “What if the problem was inside of us all along?” kind of posts. And again, I don’t want to say the tech companies don’t have things to answer for. But perhaps we just need to fill this human need another way to be less susceptible to those tactics…

Sadly, I don’t think I have the answer to what that is.

Dormir Dehors

Une chansons que j’aimais vraiment quand j’étais jeune c’était Dormir Dehors par Daran et les chaises. C’était un des genre 12 CD que on avais a la radio étudiante a l’école et presque chaque fois que j’étais le “DJ” je la jouait.

Je suis pas sur a 100% ce qui m’attirais à la chanson a se temps la. Mais j’ai toujours aimer la chanson. je l’ai retrouver cla une coupe d’année et je pense que je l’apprécie encore plus. Et maintenant je comprends ce que y veut dire quand y mentionne “cuisine équipées”. C’est pu juste une random ligne qui fait pas de sense.