The Clothing Notebook ~ Yay or Nay?
This week I have been reading a book by Anne Ortlund, Discplines of a Beautiful Woman. The chapter that I just finished talked about your looks. Now I must admit that I am not one to spend a lot of time on my clothing or my appearance.
What Anne shared was very thought provoking, so I thought I would share it with you!
~Her first tip was this: when you become conscious in the morning (meaning waking up fully), get decent. Before she has her devotions or spends time with God, she gets up and gets herself dressed and ready for the day.
She says
I look over the day’s calendar, warm up a little and then stair climb (the fastest way to get in exercise) shower, and put on my face while I talk to God. Hair next, then clothes. Now I am ready for breakfast, meeting God, and all the day’s agendas.
This little bit really struck me because I am one of those ladies who lounges around in her PJ’s until 10 (I do get everything done, but when I do this I tend to feel chaotic and out of sorts.) I think I might start implementing her suggestion and see what happens.)
~The next thing she talks about is the Proverbs 31 woman being a worthy woman. She stated that out of the 22 verses on the Proverbs 31 woman, only one of them is about how she looked. Anne had this to say:
Father, I want to give 1/22 of my time to making myself as outwardly beautiful as I can; and I want to give all the rest of my time, 21/22 of my life , to becoming wise, kind, godly, hard-working, and the rest.
~Anne then goes on to share about her clothing. This is what really got me to thinking, because I don’t do this and I honestly should, because I AM TIRED of standing in front of my closet thinking I have NOTHING to wear! She shared that most of her morning hour is spent doing the looks thing–exercising, showering, doing her face and hair. She only spends five minutes getting dressed. Seriously? Five minutes? This is why!
I have SO few clothes to choose from! I keep my closet stripped down to the following outfits: 4 dressy street length outfits, 4 long casual outfits, 6 day pants, 5 day dresses, 2 sandal dresses, 3 at-home outfits, 3 evening and party outfits.
There is NO way that I could use her clothing plan because I don’t even have those types of clothes. My problem is finding something that does not have a stain on it! EVERYTHING I own is stained, so I stand in the closet for twenty minutes trying to decided which item is less stained. I really need to work on getting my clothing updated–and perhaps an apron for the kitchen so my clothes will stop getting stained. Sounds like a trip to the thrift store is in order!
But her organization of her clothes AND her accessories is where I was truly drawn in. Listen to this:
Now when I buy a dress or an outfit, I don’t just buy that alone. I make sure at the time I have everything I need–shoes, bag, jewelry, underthings, scarf–whatever. I stand before a full length mirror when it is new and check the whole outfit. I jot that complete outfit in my notebook. Everything is listed to complete the ensemble. Then it’s ready to go. I never have to dawdle over, “Does this blouse go with this skirt?”, “What beads would look good with this neckline?” I know the whole outfit, and I can fall into it fast and get onto life’s more important considerations.
I guess this just really floored me because I have never considered utilizing a clothing notebook to help with organization in this area.
So what do you think? Would you consider trying this? If you already do this, how does it work for you? Is this just “over the top”?
Continue reading The Clothing Notebook ~ Yay or Nay? …
From Econobusters.
Building Skills for Free
As I’ve mentioned a few times on here, I’ve been taking piano lessons since early February. When I come home, though, my materials are mostly books I’ve been gifted or printed out from various places and I practice on an old electronic keyboard or by walking to a local church and practicing on the older piano in their basement.
While I’m not at all what I would consider good at this point, I can see that I’ve started to build some skill at piano playing over the past several months. I can read simple sheet music and play it. I can play a handful of simple songs from memory. By simple, of course, I’m referring to songs people know – like “Where the Saints Go Marching In” or “Fur Elise” in fairly simple arrangements without a lot of flourishes or anything.
It feels very good, and it’s particularly fun to set goals for myself, like “I want to play Song X from memory without errors” or “I want to be able to open this music book to a random page and be able to play what’s in there.” I’m looking forward to being good enough and confident enough to play in social situations – I’m not there yet, but I can see it down the road.
What I’ve really learned from this is that it’s really empowering to learn a new skill – and it doesn’t have to be all that expensive, either. There are so many new skills anyone can learn out there that the only thing missing is your motivation. You don’t need money – for many skills, you just need time and a little bit of motivation.
Skills pay off in a lot of ways, too. Yes, sometimes they’ll turn into a career, but sometimes they’ll just help you to assist a friend or work through social awkwardness or help add some spice to a social situation (like piano playing, for example). Those things have great value as well – there are few things more valuable than a strong social network.
Most people, when they think about skill-building, envision a classroom, a teacher, a bunch of expensive supplies, and tuition bills. That’s only true if you’re looking to earn some sort of certificate to write about on your resume, but it’s certainly not needed to build many skills you might wish to have. Instead, here are five free resources anyone can use to start building up many of the skills they might want to learn.
Hit the library. There’s a “how-to” book on virtually anything you would like to learn about at your local library – and if it’s not there, they can probably get that book via interlibrary loan. I glanced at the self-teaching piano books at the library recently and there were dozens of them – in fact, I checked out two of them myself, just to read different angles on the ideas.
Hit Freecycle. If you need equipment, one great place to start looking for it is Freecycle. Basically, Freecycle is a resource for people looking to give away unwanted things – and many of those things are quite nice and useful. Subscribe, pay attention, and you’ve got a good chance at finding the things that you need. I’ve walked away from it with multiple items over the past few years.
Request use of public facilities. Many communities have facilities available for many, many different activities, from basketball and tennis courts to churches with pianos sitting in their basements. If you need equipment to do what you want to do, spend some time studying what’s available to you already.
Participate. If there are groups in your community focused on whatever skill you’re trying to build, whether it’s public speaking or woodworking, make an effort to join that group. Don’t be ashamed of your “new” status or your lack of equipment. Quite often, if a new member joins a group like that and shows some passion and initiative, the other group members are often really happy to help the new person get rolling.
Trade. If someone else has access to the training or equipment that you need to use, work out a trade with that person. Could you swap some of your already-existing skills for access to that training or equipment? A good old-fashioned barter usually leaves both participants in a much better place.
Most of all, just do it. If you’re sitting there dreaming about some skill you want to build, I can only guarantee one thing: continuing to sit there and dream about it won’t build the skill. Get up and start doing it. I can’t tell you how long I dreamed about starting to play the piano, but it wasn’t until I started actually doing it that anything happened.
You’ve got to do it to be able to do it.
Continue reading Building Skills for Free …
From The Simple Dollar.
Gifts and Choices
Recently, I came across (via jason kottke) a brilliant commencement speech given at Princeton by Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon. The main focus of Bezos’ speech was the difference between gifts and choices. Here’s an excerpt:
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
He goes on, near the end, to illustrate the idea a bit more directly:
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
When I was in college, I took a course on the theory of programming languages – fairly arcane computer science stuff. For some reason, I just got the material. It just really, really clicked in my mind.
At the end of the semester on the day of the final, there were two people (myself and one other student) in the class who had cinched an A regardless of our performance on the final, which was obviously a relief. I vaguely knew the other student, so after the final was over, I caught up with him just to somewhat debrief on the class with someone else who really got it.
What I came to find out is that the other student with an A had put an absurd amount of work into the class. He had studied and studied. He had stayed up late working on every project. He told me, quite sincerely, that he had invested more time in that class alone than he had in all of his other classes combined that semester.
My ability to get an A in that class was a gift. His ability to get an A in that class was a choice.
Every single person out there has gifts. Some of us are very gifted with the ability to make friends easily. Other people have an innate understanding of a particular topic. My mother and my grandmother and my uncle all share a gift for sketching, a gift I simply do not have. They could (and still can, in my mother’s case) sit down with a pencil and a sheet of paper and make an amazing sketch of almost anything you can name. My mother virtually never does this, but on the few times I’ve seen her do it, I’ve been blown away at the quality of what she can produce.
Every single person out there has a life full of choices. You’re choosing what to do with every moment of your life, whether it’s work or practicing the piano or watching The Real Housewives of Duluth, MN.
Quite often, a series of choices can make up for the lack of a gift possessed by another. The story above about the student in my computer science class is a perfect example of this. I find it’s true in my own life, too.
I have always had a very difficult time being social with people I don’t know very well. It is only through a conscious choice to continually work on my social skills that I have been able to engage successfully with groups of new people and build quite a few great positive relationships in my community. By no means am I a social master, but for a very introverted guy like myself, the ability to walk into a community event, greet and be greeted by several people, and usually have one long conversation or two before I ever reach my seat is a sign that a series of conscious choices can make up for a missing gift.
However, the real home runs occur when a person knows their gifts and makes choices to accentuate that gift.
All you have to do is look at the truth of how the top people in any field have reached that point. Yes, they’re resting on some natural gifts, but those gifts are virtually always cultivated by countless hours of practice and other hard choices. Kobe Bryant didn’t wake up one morning being the best basketball player in the world. He has natural gifts, no doubt, but he constantly makes very difficult choices in terms of his practice regimen, his diet, and other areas of his life. The result? Five rings, a pile of awards, a ticket to the Hall of Fame, and more money than he can count.
In other words, people pay money to see the results of gifts matched with choices. The real message here is that gifts are certainly a help, but it is choices that really take you places.
That’s why I’m a firm believer that people should follow their passions. A passion means that you’ll constantly be making those hard choices that build something exceptional. Like that student in my class who stayed up all night working on theory of programming language projects, the results of chasing a passion are usually very strong.
Combine them with a few gifts and you have something amazing. Something people will pay money for.
It’s Tuesday afternoon. What choices will you make today to build that amazing future? Will you choose to spend less money? Will you choose to stay up all night getting that project you’re working on just perfect? Will you go home tonight, pull that canvas out of the closet, and put some paint on it?
The choice is yours.
Continue reading Gifts and Choices …
From The Simple Dollar.
Setting Goals with Your Partner
As I’ve said many times on here, my wife and I have a small handful of major goals that we share going forward in our lives.
We both want to eventually live in the country with some wooded area and a small barn.
We both want to focus on raising our children as well as we possibly can.
We both want to achieve complete debt freedom (we currently just owe on our mortgage) to give us even more career and personal flexibility in the future.
Here’s the interesting part: these goals do not reflect everything I want to do in life, nor do they reflect everything Sarah wants to do in life.
Instead, they’re the goals we share together and because we both share them, there’s a lot more power and mutual motivation and mutual benefit in achieving those goals.
How did we get there from each having our own goals? Here’s the process we went through – and are still going through.
We each sketched a picture of what we wanted our future to look like. What did I want my life to look like in five or ten or twenty years? I spent some time really thinking about that question. I made a list of some of the things I wanted to happen in my life over those timeframes. I had career dreams and family dreams and personal goals I wanted to achieve.
We compared our pictures of the future. What we found is that some of our goals overlapped, some of them did not, and some of them were personal goals that affected our partner in various ways.
So, for example, we both had a dream of living in the country with woods and a small barn. I had a dream of building a fully self-sustaining farm there (with wind power, geothermal heating, and so forth), but Sarah didn’t share that vision as strongly: “It’d be cool, I guess, but is it really worth the cost?” I also had career goals that impacted Sarah a little bit (because of the time and energy investment), but not too much.
We agreed to focus on the larger goals we both shared. I listed those above. Those goals are not a list of the goals I came up with – if I listed all of the things I wanted myself, the list would be longer and have a much different flavor.
However, a big lifelong goal that your partner is not on board with is not only much more difficult to achieve, pushing hard for that goal can put problems in your relationship. On the other hand, sharing a goal and both working towards that same goal encourages an environment of mutual support. Focus in on the goals you both deeply share – and you identify those by coming up with your own list of goals on your own, then sharing and comparing them.
Our next step was to settle on a small handful of key goals that we both shared. For us, this was very easy. We had three very obvious key goals that we each individually wanted – a house in the country, complete debt freedom, and strong parenting.
If you find that you’re coming up with a lot of shared goals, that’s a good thing. I recommend settling on just a few – the ones that are most deeply important to both of you.
If you find that you’re not able to come up with shared goals, I would suggest spending more time together and focusing on building your relationship with each others. Not having shared goals is a sign of being on diverging paths in life – and that means if you take your relationship seriously, it needs some work, whether you can see that on the surface or not.
Once you’ve figured out those shared goals, work together to keep them front and center. Remind each other regularly of the goals you share and the little steps you’re both taking to make it happen. If you’re not both engaged with a goal and working towards it, it’s hard to do it alone. You’ve got to be together, and if it’s a goal you both share, reinforcing each other and helping each other should come somewhat naturally.
A final tip: revisit your goals on occasion. We talk about ours all the time. Usually, it’s motivational. Sometimes, we refine the goals a bit – for example, we’ve been thinking about the location we’d like to move to. The key thing, though, is that we talk about it together, cement our bonds to each other, and motivate each other to move forward.
It’s a lot easier to reach for something great if you’re doing it together.
Continue reading Setting Goals with Your Partner …
From The Simple Dollar.
9 Simple Ways to Save Money on Your Groceries
It never fails, we budget for our groceries, but the bill always ends up being more. We underestimate, run out of things faster than expected and overall, everything is becoming just too darned expensive! To make things a little bit easier, here are 9 simple ways you can start saving money on your groceries. 1. [...]
Continue reading 9 Simple Ways to Save Money on Your Groceries …
From Moms In A Blog » Frugal Living.
Making Your Time Less Money-Dense
One of the biggest ways to leak money is to spend your time in money-dense ways. The easiest way to explain it is to just show you a bunch of examples.
Spending eight hours at Disney World with the requisite food, drink, and souvenir purchases costs about $200. The cost per hour of this event is $25 per hour. This is a very money dense activity.
Spending eight hours reading a book you checked out from the library costs nothing at all. The cost here is $0 per hour.
Watching a DVD at home that you borrowed from a friend costs perhaps $0.20 in electricity ($0.08 per hour).
On the other hand, going out to a movie for two and a half hours costs you $10 for the ticket ($4 per hour) or, if you buy drinks and popcorn, $18 for the trip (about $7.50 per hour).
You can do this for virtually any activity with which you might spend your leisure time. From shopping for clothes to playing a video game, all such leisure activities have a cost per hour, and the lower you can make that cost per hour, the better off you’ll be.
But how can you actually use this idea?
What I did a while back is simply make a giant list of all of my favorite leisure activities. Taking a walk. Playing a board game. Reading a book. Playing a video game. Playing basketball. Playing with my kids. Working in the garden. Going to movies. Going to bookstores. Going to the library. The list was quite long.
Then, I figured up the approximate cost per hour of engaging in those activities.
Going to the movies was pretty expensive, as was going to the bookstore (because I rarely leave it without a book in hand). Playing a board game or a video game were usually pretty cheap, as the cost of each is prorated down because of the many times I’ve played each one ($1 per hour or, often, much less than that, and even that’s merely recovering a sunk cost). Other activities, like taking a walk or playing at the rec, were effectively free. Gardening arguably earns a little bit for each hour invested in it.
What happened was that when I had brainstormed this huge list of activities and actually figured out what they cost per hour, I began to spend more of my time on the lower cost activities (like taking a walk or yard work or reading a book or playing games) and less of my time on the more expensive things for the time invested (like going to movies).
It wasn’t even a conscious choice, really. Just by raising my awareness of the implicit cost of engaging in various activities I enjoy, I began to migrate towards the ones that drained my wallet at a slower rate.
Naturally, my entertainment and hobby budgets have dropped over the last year or so at no cost to my enjoyment of life at all. I just simply improved my awareness of the real cost of many of the things I enjoy and started making my choices of how to spend my scant free time from a more enlightened perspective.
Continue reading Making Your Time Less Money-Dense …
From The Simple Dollar.
Promises, Promises (To Yourself)
Connie writes in with a great question whose answer got far too long for the Mailbag:
My biggest problem with money is that I lie to myself. I keep telling myself everything is going good and at first it is. Then I start slowly falling back into old habits but I keep telling myself everything is good. Eventually, everything is worse than before but I still keep saying everything is good, and then I’ve racked up thousands of dollars on the credit cards again. I don’t know what to do anymore.
I think that lying to ourselves is something we all do to some extent. Most people tend to believe they’re above average in most categories, which indicates some degree of self-delusion among practically everyone out there.
A little bit of self-delusion is very good, actually. It gives us self-confidence, something we need to have to overcome difficult situations. We can tell ourselves we can do something just a bit beyond our skill and talent level and thus by pushing ourselves to doing it, we’re able to achieve something that was previously just beyond us.
Yet, as Connie points out, self-delusion can sometimes be a very, very dangerous thing. It can push us into making some terrible mistakes under the guise of “everything being fine.” It can cause us to undermine our own progress and goals. It can sneak us into ever-greater problems, like an endless sink into debt or obesity or career mediocrity.
My biggest current problem with self-delusion is with my weight. I’m not gaining any – that’s not the problem – but I often delude myself into thinking I’m doing very well at losing weight when I’m actually treading water or losing it very slowly.
In the past, however, I’ve been able to battle self-delusion in many different areas: my career, my personal hobbies, and my time management abilities immediately come to mind.
Here are four techniques I’ve found that really work for cutting through self-delusion.
Make yourself directly accountable to others
This is the top strategy I’ve found. You’ve simply got to make yourself accountable to others in your life. Lay out your situation to them. Explain where you’re at and where you’d like to be.
Most importantly, you’ve got to report regularly to them on how you’re doing with your goal.
The added pressure of reporting your progress to someone you trust goes a long way towards keeping you on the right path. Plus, a trusted person can often give you feedback, positive support, and assistance at the very times you need it most.
You can do this face to face. You can do it on Twitter or on a blog or on Facebook. Just do it.
Keep the reason why you’re doing this front and center all the time
Why are you trying to save money? Why are you trying to get out of debt? Why are you trying to lose weight? Why are you trying to make whatever change it is in your life that you’re trying to make?
What you’re looking for here are extrinsic motivations. Are you trying to lose weight and get in better shape for your kids? Are you trying to save up for your dream house?
Whatever that reason is, put reminders of it everywhere. Use an image editing program and literally put a statement reminding you of your goal on top of a picture of whatever your motivator is. Then print off fifty copies of it and put it everywhere – on your desk, on your rear view mirror, on your bedside table, on your bathroom mirror, wrapped around your credit card, everywhere.
Use a clearly-defined measurement as your metric for success
Never, ever trust a general “sentiment” of success. If your idea of success is that it “feels” like you’re doing well, then it becomes very, very easy to delude yourself into a false picture of success.
Instead, try finding a specific way to track your success in a specific area. Keep track of your net worth every week or month. Track your weight every day.
It’s really hard to lie to yourself when the number so easily reveals the truth of the matter.
Drastically change your routine
Many people tend to fall back into bad habits because they don’t change their overall life routine. They try to quit smoking, for example, but their life routine involves holding something in their hands and going outside regularly for smoke breaks. They try to quit overeating, but their metabolism is wired to constant snacking and overeating. They try to quit overspending, but their life routines constantly put them in places where they overspend.
One effective way to buck all of this is to go for a radical change of scenery. Make a major life change while traveling, for example. Give up smoking while visiting your sister for two weeks. Give up overeating while on a series of business trips. Give up shopping while picking up another time-consuming hobby.
When you’re out of your normal environment and context, it becomes much easier to break bad habits and adopt new ones.
Continue reading Promises, Promises (To Yourself) …
From The Simple Dollar.
Five Big Ways You Need to Think About Christmas … Now!
It’s mid-June, so there’s no better time to write about Christmas. Right? Right?!
The truth of the matter is that just a little bit of forethought right now can save you a ton of time, effort, cost, and heartache this December. While it might feel really out of place to think about Christmas on a warm June day, right now is the perfect time to give these five things a quick thought.
Kill off unwanted gift exchanges
If you’re a member of a gift exchange or two with family that you just don’t want to participate in, right now is the time to put an axe in it. Just send out an email or a Facebook message to the other members of the exchange stating the truth of the matter: you enjoy seeing the people, but you don’t think a gift exchange is a great idea.
If completely bowing out seems potentially damaging, suggest that this year be a “secret Santa” drawing instead of everyone buying everyone else gifts or put a strong cap on how much can be spent.
Doing this now is much better than doing it in late November or the middle of December when people are already financially and emotionally involved in their holiday purchasing. The solution to too many Christmas gifts purchased is just an email away.
Get the important people on your radar
For most of us, there are a handful of people that we’re going to buy Christmas gifts for this year. Since these people are truly important enough to us to be an automatic gift recipient, we often desire to find the “perfect” gift for them.
That’s why I start my list now, so I have plenty of time and space to listen to what they’re saying, think about what they’d value, and come up with great gift ideas (and bargains on those ideas) well in advance of the big day rather than stumbling through Target on December 20th, pushing aside the hordes and scavenging whatever overlooked items remain on the shelves in hopes of finding something they won’t find too repugnant.
Just start a list of the people you want to buy for, then pay attention to them in the coming months. Most people will reveal deep interests and passions and sometimes even specific ideas over the course of the year. For example, maybe your sister will mention a type of sweater she finds particularly flattering, or maybe your father will lament not having grow lights so he can start seedlings in the basement in January instead of having to buy starts for his garden in April. Write these down, as they can be the source of great gifts.
Start automatic bargain hunting
If you’re certain of a particular purchased gift for someone already, there’s no better time than now to start bargain hunting.
Already?
Well, it doesn’t have to be as painful as it sounds. Let’s say, for example, that you have decided to buy your sister’s oldest son a Playstation 3 for Christmas this year – but you don’t want to spend a mint on it. Right now is the best time to start automatically bargain hunting for it.
You can use tools like FeedSifter to sift through the internet feeds of websites that list bargains related to what you’re looking for – like, for example, Amazon Gold Box. Then, put that FeedSifter feed into a service like FeedMailer so that whenever a deal pops up, you receive an email telling you about it.
Then sit back and wait. The exact deals you want will pop into your email inbox as they come up. Easy as pie.
I already have six of these running related to two different potential Christmas gifts.
Plan ahead for homemade gifts
Some of us (myself included) love to receive homemade gifts – and we love to make them, too.
The problem is that some of them take a lot of advance planning. In order to age well, you need to be considering making things like homemade beer and homemade soaps now rather than in November. If you’re going to knit some sweaters, now’s the time to bust out the yarn and the needles, for example.
If you’d like to save a lot of money and come up with some really memorable gifts, go homemade. The catch? You probably should start now on whatever that project is, because you’ll likely need some time between then and now to cause that gift idea to become reality.
Make it easier on last-minute gift hunters for you
In my family, a lot of people wait until the last minute to do gift shopping. They wait until December 15, then call around in a panic and search internet wish lists (like Amazon’s) for some sort of an indication as to what people want for a gift. Yes, each year, I get calls where people directly ask me what I want for Christmas.
Of course, the typical response to this is to try to think of stuff quickly off of the top of your head – items that usually end up not being items you really want or could actually use, but are items that just seem to randomly float in your head.
Take that challenge head on. Spend some time thinking of a handful of items you could genuinely use in your life. Once you discover them, put them on an Amazon wish list (or something similar), then if last-minute panicked calls come in, you don’t have to rack your brain coming up with half-baked ideas. You can actually point out items that you have thought about in advance and can genuinely put to good use in your home.
There’s no need to promote this list, of course – just create it as something of a protection against last-minute gifts that turn out to be items that you don’t want and they grasp at straws to buy. With just a bit of effort now, you can turn a situation where no one wins into something useful for yourself and something gratifying for the last minute gift buyer.
Continue reading Five Big Ways You Need to Think About Christmas … Now! …
From The Simple Dollar.
Convenience and Piracy
I’m going to go a little bit off of the beaten path here and talk about something not directly related to personal finance, but something that has a strong indirect relationship: piracy of intellectual property.
A week barely goes by when a person writes to me asking for some sort of justification for their piracy of music, computer software, or other electronic materials. I usually don’t give it to them because I feel pretty strongly that piracy is wrong and that content creators (and all of the people that help that process along) deserve to be paid for that work.
However, I also believe that the biggest reason piracy thrives online is that most of the time it’s easier to just pirate a song or a piece of software than it is to pay for it.
Case in point: recently, the “Humble Indie Bundle,” a wonderful collection of computer games, was made available for a stunningly low price online. You could simply pay whatever you wished for it with the minimum price of one cent. You could also direct any portion of that price to charity.
What happened? There were people actively pirating the “Humble Indie Bundle.” Rather than giving a single cent to a charity to download it legitimately, they chose to simply steal the software.
Why? It’s easier.
That’s my explanation anyway.
In order to download the software legitimately, you had to fill out forms. You had to decide how much you wanted to pay the developers. You had to decide how much you wanted to give to the charity. You also had to have some sort of method for actually paying for it, whether it be a credit card number or a PayPal account or something else.
And that’s the problem. Some people aren’t comfortable sharing their credit card information with a random website or with Paypal, and I don’t blame them. I have much more concern with giving a dollar to a website for something that I do with giving a dollar bill to a street vendor. That dollar bill doesn’t have my personal information attached to it and it doesn’t make it possible for that vendor to swipe my identity. I also don’t have to put forth the effort to take out a credit card, type in the sixteen digit number, the expiration date, the code on the back, or any of that other stuff.
That’s a lot of effort for making a purchase. It makes me reconsider purchases all the time, both from an effort standpoint and from a personal information standpoint.
Piracy is a real problem. Software piracy alone cost $51 billion last year, and that doesn’t include a dime of the piracy of music or movies or books.
From my perspective, a lot of that loss would vanish if downloading a song or a movie or a piece of software was as easy as pirating it. If one could simply purchase such things with just a few mouse clicks without sharing personal information (beyond perhaps a single place), much of the reason for piracy would go away.
Most pirates don’t believe that the content creators deserve nothing for their efforts. Instead, they believe that content sellers often make it difficult and privacy-invading to purchase such content. I agree with that sentiment strongly, even if I don’t agree with their action in response to it. Instead, I usually just don’t buy, which also hurts the content creators.
Online piracy will always have supporters until buying electronic items becomes as easy as giving a $5 bill to a hot dog vendor. It’s not there yet.
How can we get there? A standardization of online currency would be a big first step. Since no one trusts a corporation to do it, I think the best operator of this would be a non-profit that keeps the costs as low as possible instead of trying to turn a buck on it. A U.S. Online Mint, perhaps, where you could convert real currency to virtual currency and back, perhaps at your local bank, and then spend it as easily as cash.
This type of thing would be a revolution in how we use money.
Continue reading Convenience and Piracy …
From The Simple Dollar.
10 Organic Garden Aids For Pest & Disease Control
With a little bit of planning you can help cut down on pests and disease organically by planting natural repellants near problem plants. I have a few suggestions listed below along with a few recipes using non-harsh ingredients that can help deter pests (and some disease).
10 Organic Garden Aids
Epson Salt Spray: 2 ounces of salt [...]
- Also See These Tips:
- Pest Prevention Concentrate
- Natural Pesticides: Recipes & Tips
- Make Your Own Organic Potting Soil
Continue reading 10 Organic Garden Aids For Pest & Disease Control …
From TipNut.com.