Tom's Twelfth Pile of Stuff
Robots, even smaller hobbits, and please direct your complaints to the supreme leader
Sweep the Floor With a Broom? What Are We, Farmers?
Despite the fact that I'm a cisgendered heterosexual white male from America, I did not grow up with infinite privilege. My family was lower-middle class at best, with mom teaching public school and dad doing all kinds of not-highly-paid blue collar jobs. We weren't destitute—we did have a house and cars and television—but everything we had was modest, and we did not have much disposable income.
And growing up kinda poor, I picked up some habits that don't make as much sense when you've become a gainfully employed programmer. My wife, having grown up in a rural Chinese village before moving to bustling Hong Kong as a teen, has many of the same habits.
Specifically, we are both cheapskates.
I don’t mean frugal. Yes, we’re frugal. But we often speed right past the exit to Frugal Town, straight toward Stingyville. There are many small problems in life that can be solved by spending a modest sum of money. And sometimes it takes years of being annoyed by these problems before it occurs to us to solve it with money!
The latest example: we finally bought a robot vacuum cleaner. I am very bad about procrastinating when it's my turn to sweep the house every other week. It's been a recurring annoyance for years—but no more!
Now that we've got a robot servant, the house gets vacuumed every single day! No effort on my part! And wow, this house is filthy. What was I even doing when it was my turn to sweep? The robot collects as much dust daily that I swept up once a week.
This isn’t an advertisement for robot vacuums.1 It’s a reminder that you should consider where in life you might be stuck in a scarcity mindset that isn’t justified. Where are you wasting money on cheap items you’re always replacing instead of a costlier item that lasts? Where are you trading your valuable time just to save a few dollars? Faced with the choice between spending a bit of cash to solve a problem, or saving it but suffering a constant annoyance, maybe you should part with the cash.
What Is This, A Hobbit Village for Mice?
When we saw a mouse in our front yard a month ago, our instinct was to buy traps. But a UK man named Simon Dell had a…different response. He named it George and built it an entire village. It’s a very cute and totally inappropriate response to household pests. Go enjoy Simon’s cute mouse hobbit village photos and short videos.
Hacks on a Train
Somebody hacked the Iranian national railway, disrupting travel completely. “Ok, ok,” you’re thinking, “just another boring infrastructure hack.”2 Well, these hackers left a particularly sweet cherry on this ice cream sundae…
Electronic notice boards at train stations displayed a telephone number they could call about the disruptions. But it wasn’t a railway office number—it was the telephone number of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei!
Obligatory Oreo
Nothing—and I mean nothing—can keep Oreo away from her tennis ball.
Though that is an Amazon affiliate link above. If I’ve convinced you to buy your own robot vacuum, buy through that link to support this newsletter!
If somebody took down Amtrak, could we even tell the difference?
I cannot claim my wife and I have fully learned our lesson about when we should spend money to solve problems. Last night we stayed up until midnight assembling a new storage cabinet. The value of the time we spent, based on our combined salaries, was $362. For any amount less than or equal to that number, we should've hired someone to do it. And they probably wouldn't have made so many mistakes while doing it, either.