<story><title>Everything must be paid for twice</title><url>https://www.raptitude.com/2022/01/everything-must-be-paid-for-twice/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yojo</author><text>The author is framing consumption as having two pools of currency:&lt;p&gt;1) money&lt;p&gt;2) time&lt;p&gt;It costs money to get access to the good you are consuming, and hours to unlock the value. Whether or not you enjoyed reading Moby Dick, you have 16 less hours in the time bank.&lt;p&gt;If you do enjoy it (I did not), you have paid 16 hours out of the time bank and reaped the reward of 16 hours of pleasurable reading.&lt;p&gt;There are “cheaper” thrills. I am told you can spend 5 minutes on TickTock and receive some quick gratification. The up front cost is low. The cumulative payoff of spending 16 hours watching cat videos may not be as ultimately rewarding to you as plowing through some classic literature.</text></item><item><author>BEEdwards</author><text>But that&amp;#x27;s not a price, I enjoy reading, that what I paid for.&lt;p&gt;It is not something that costs me anything other than time, however that&amp;#x27;s not the &amp;quot;price&amp;quot; he&amp;#x27;s talking about. Otherwise &amp;quot;low price pleasures&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a category, if you enjoy that time it&amp;#x27;s not marginally better than nothing.</text></item><item><author>gjm11</author><text>The author &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; say that you don&amp;#x27;t get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly but importantly different:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the &amp;quot;second price&amp;quot; is &lt;i&gt;being&lt;/i&gt; paid.&lt;p&gt;And I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s quite right to say that the sixteen hours &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; the actual reward. They&amp;#x27;re the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You &lt;i&gt;pay&lt;/i&gt; the price of using 16 hours of your time to read &lt;i&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/i&gt;. You &lt;i&gt;get&lt;/i&gt; the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading &lt;i&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/i&gt; does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.&lt;p&gt;The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They&amp;#x27;re still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading &lt;i&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/i&gt; are 16 hours you aren&amp;#x27;t spending reading &lt;i&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/i&gt; or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.</text></item><item><author>cortesoft</author><text>This makes sense for some things, but the examples the author uses don&amp;#x27;t make sense to me.&lt;p&gt;Take the Moby Dick example... the author says you don&amp;#x27;t get the return on it until you have paid the 16 hour price of reading it... but isn&amp;#x27;t those sixteen hours the actual reward? You don&amp;#x27;t read a book to be finished with it, you read it because you like the reading process. The reward starts the first minute you start reading the book.&lt;p&gt;Not only that, but you don&amp;#x27;t have to finish the book to get something out of reading it. If you enjoyed the time you spent reading, that is enough.&lt;p&gt;This attitude seems very &amp;quot;completionist&amp;quot;, where you only get value after you finish something. That isn&amp;#x27;t how I view things.&lt;p&gt;Also, why does he think mindless apps and games are the same as doing nothing? The idea is you enjoy the time spent playing the game. Sure, you don&amp;#x27;t end up with anything after, but you enjoyed the time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unixhero</author><text>Tiltok is surprisingly good. I get: really beautiful girls (bordering on softporn), advice on home DIY, cooking howtos, HIGH end cooking howtos, bartending recipes, vegan recipes, meat BBQ recipes, life motivational videos, really funny short sketches from funny regular people (in several languages), relationship advice, psychologists&lt;p&gt;All original content. It has its own twist to it. All in 5 to 10 minutes. Everything just flows, I never use any browsing. Just swipe.&lt;p&gt;EDIT:
I also need to mention that TikTok is host to many, not just one, many emergent properties. Trends take off, people from around the world do the weirdest things which become super popular. Such as ASMR videos, example: whispering secretary</text></comment>
<story><title>Everything must be paid for twice</title><url>https://www.raptitude.com/2022/01/everything-must-be-paid-for-twice/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yojo</author><text>The author is framing consumption as having two pools of currency:&lt;p&gt;1) money&lt;p&gt;2) time&lt;p&gt;It costs money to get access to the good you are consuming, and hours to unlock the value. Whether or not you enjoyed reading Moby Dick, you have 16 less hours in the time bank.&lt;p&gt;If you do enjoy it (I did not), you have paid 16 hours out of the time bank and reaped the reward of 16 hours of pleasurable reading.&lt;p&gt;There are “cheaper” thrills. I am told you can spend 5 minutes on TickTock and receive some quick gratification. The up front cost is low. The cumulative payoff of spending 16 hours watching cat videos may not be as ultimately rewarding to you as plowing through some classic literature.</text></item><item><author>BEEdwards</author><text>But that&amp;#x27;s not a price, I enjoy reading, that what I paid for.&lt;p&gt;It is not something that costs me anything other than time, however that&amp;#x27;s not the &amp;quot;price&amp;quot; he&amp;#x27;s talking about. Otherwise &amp;quot;low price pleasures&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a category, if you enjoy that time it&amp;#x27;s not marginally better than nothing.</text></item><item><author>gjm11</author><text>The author &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; say that you don&amp;#x27;t get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly but importantly different:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the &amp;quot;second price&amp;quot; is &lt;i&gt;being&lt;/i&gt; paid.&lt;p&gt;And I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s quite right to say that the sixteen hours &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; the actual reward. They&amp;#x27;re the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You &lt;i&gt;pay&lt;/i&gt; the price of using 16 hours of your time to read &lt;i&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/i&gt;. You &lt;i&gt;get&lt;/i&gt; the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading &lt;i&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/i&gt; does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.&lt;p&gt;The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They&amp;#x27;re still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading &lt;i&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/i&gt; are 16 hours you aren&amp;#x27;t spending reading &lt;i&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/i&gt; or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.</text></item><item><author>cortesoft</author><text>This makes sense for some things, but the examples the author uses don&amp;#x27;t make sense to me.&lt;p&gt;Take the Moby Dick example... the author says you don&amp;#x27;t get the return on it until you have paid the 16 hour price of reading it... but isn&amp;#x27;t those sixteen hours the actual reward? You don&amp;#x27;t read a book to be finished with it, you read it because you like the reading process. The reward starts the first minute you start reading the book.&lt;p&gt;Not only that, but you don&amp;#x27;t have to finish the book to get something out of reading it. If you enjoyed the time you spent reading, that is enough.&lt;p&gt;This attitude seems very &amp;quot;completionist&amp;quot;, where you only get value after you finish something. That isn&amp;#x27;t how I view things.&lt;p&gt;Also, why does he think mindless apps and games are the same as doing nothing? The idea is you enjoy the time spent playing the game. Sure, you don&amp;#x27;t end up with anything after, but you enjoyed the time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zuminator</author><text>Rather than two separate pools, I see it more as that every good&amp;#x27;s value is a complex number. The &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; part is the sticker price and the &amp;quot;imaginary&amp;quot; part is the time spent to consume or enjoy the good.  So while we usually just assume the sticker price is the value of the good, in reality you have to calculate the length of the complex vector.&lt;p&gt;When you&amp;#x27;re young and poor, the sticker price seems very close to the actual value, but as you get older and richer, you come to see the time spent as by far the most significant scalar quantity.</text></comment>