Scott Adams's Blog, page 391

Cheapatopia - Location and Energy

I didn't read all the suggestions for location, but it seems clear that there could be more than one great place to put Cheapatopia. For example, some people might enjoy desert living, where the inexpensive land and plentiful solar power are a good combination. Others might prefer to live in a place with four seasons, preferably above a geothermal power source. I can imagine the roads, driveways, and sidewalks in Winter Cheapatopia being heated to 33 degrees after a snowfall, so snow removal is

Cheapatopia

Engineers and techies are often misunderstood. They come off as looking cheap when in fact they are optimizers. It is their nature to solve any puzzle that is presented, and the persistent puzzle of life involves getting the most resources while expending the least.

I have a bit of that in me too. That's why my mental hobby for a few decades has been designing what I call Cheapatopia. Cheapatopia is a hypothetical city, designed from scratch to be an absurdly cheap place to live with a ridiculou

The Most Valuable Information

What is the most valuable knowledge in the world? Let's say I rule out a few categories:
Psychic knowledge of the futurePsychic mind readingTrade secretsCompany insider informationNational security secrets, such as war plans

Fair game is any sort of information that could be collected with some amount of time and effort, even if it isn't being collected at the moment. And it has to be legally obtained.

I'll take a stab at the question just to prime the pump. Suppose you formed a private online club

Investing

Yesterday a financial institution offered to help manage my portfolio for a fee of only .75% per year. With that fee structure, they get ten times as much in fees from a client who has ten times as much in his portfolio, even if managing it is the same amount of work, which it presumably would be.

I assume at least part of the money these professionals propose to manage would get directed toward funds that are managed by yet other professionals who take even more of your money no matter how well

The You Factor

My previous post got one of the top ratings for anything I've blogged about. Several of you wondered if I saw the recent episode of Penn and Teller's Bullsh*t that apparently dealt with the "cold read" phenomenon, in which general statements seem more personal than they are. I missed that episode, but the cold read concept has fascinated me for a long time, both as a writer and a hypnotist.

Originally I was going to title yesterday's post "Cold Read" but I thought "Your Psychological Profile" wou

Your Psychological Profile

Yesterday I went through my old blog posts to see which ones got the highest ratings from readers. Based on that information I have compiled a psychological profile of you.

You are unusually curious about how things work. You value function over form. You like solving problems, even if they are not your own problems, and other people don't always appreciate that about you. You can be argumentative. You like pets.

At least one of your parents is a bit of an intellectual. You place a high value on e

Good Samaritan

Last night we went to watch the new Transformers movie on the big iMax screen. As we got out of the car in the theater parking lot, in a rush to get good seats, a young man approached and asked if we had jumper cables.

Luckily I did not have jumper cables, because if I did, I knew we would be late for the movie. I did my best to make a face that said, "I sure wish I could help," while being secretly gleeful that this was officially not my problem.

I wondered if the young man thought I was lying

Shopping is Broken

Let's say you have a problem or a need or a want, and you're sure there is product somewhere in the marketplace that would help. You Google, and a handful of web sites pop up that offer promising solutions. But obviously you don't believe anything you read from vendors, so you check for online reviews. Then you wonder if the favorable reviews are planted by the vendor, and the bad reviews are planted by his competitors. Can you trust reviews from anonymous strangers?

You ask your coworkers and fr

Your Bank Hates You

I pay my bills online. The interface for the bill paying system is a tragedy, as you might expect from a bank. But it's not entirely accidental. Banks inconvenience their customers for a reason.

For example, I would like the option of automatically debiting my checking account every month to pay off my credit card balance just before it is due. The system could easily send me a courtesy e-mail warning me the transfer was about to happen, in case I changed my mind. And if I didn't have enough mone

Things I Don't Know How to Do

I can figure out how to do most things, no matter how complicated, if I put my mind to them. There's no shortage of challenges. There's my home computer, and my work computer, my cell phone, various entertainment electronics, a minivan bristling with options, kid toys, and so on. I spend half of my day figuring out why my technology isn't acting the way I think it should.

And then there is the complexity of general living, including my various business ventures, and lately the overwhelming compl