This week the AWS issue was the last straw and had me take out my smart lights, Ryder Caroll has good advice on how to take notes that mean something in the future, and what are the costs of tunnelling tax?
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Goodbye Smart Home Shit
As I’m sure many of you noticed AWS had issues this week and while I understand this happens it also got me to finally drop the “smart” lights in my office. Usually I’d walk in and say “Alexa turn the office on” but Monday morning nothing happened. I reset my Sonos speakers with Alexa to see if they needed a fix and then logged on to my computer while they woke back up to find that no – AWS was just down and the reboot would do nothing.
I was lucky in that the Alexa app did turn my lights on and I just lived with the fact that again my lights caused me an issue. Later in the day though when AWS was all better, in theory, my lights still didn’t work so out came the smart bulbs and in went generic LED bulbs that just turn on when I flip the switch on the lamps.
When I got these inexpensive bulbs that worked with Alexa, I was thrilled with being able to change the brightness with my voice as needed. My kids loved coming into my office and changing the colour of the lights. They were cool tech.
Years later we have fridges with forced ads, beds that overheat and are stuck upright without an internet connection, and tech that reinforces a companies bottom line at our expense. I’m over the smart home, give me dumb stuff that just turns on when I press a button and has no smarts to it.
Taking Notes that Last
As is often the case Ryder has some great advice even if you don’t use his Bullet Journal Method. Specifically, do you own the files in a format that’s portable for your digital note system? With Obsidian, yes you do. It’s all markdown and I edit in not just Obsidian but in nvim or Emacs sometimes.
I also like his point that you’ll loose the context of your notes, so take the notes for a future stranger that doesn’t have your context.i
Tunnelling Tax
When we encounter scarcity we end up focusing on the few things that feel most important in the moment because we have little bandwidth to use to focus on anything but what’s right in front of us. For this focus we end up paying a tunneling tax1, because we focus on one thing at the expense of others.
Money is tight and you’re focused on that, then your mean to your kids because you don’t have the bandwidth to take a breath and realize they’re children and don’t have any concept of being short on money. They ask for things because they want them. Kids don’t have a filter until you help them learn, which takes patience.
Tunnelling also often has us borrow from the future. Pay a bill today with money that will be needed for a future tax payment. It solves the immediate problem, but often spirals into a bigger problem later when the tax bill comes due and we’re far short of what we should have for it.
This trap can also be set for us. The current US government has so many crazy things going on that we can’t keep track of them. They’re taking a page from The Shock Doctrine. According to Klein, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina were used to reshape housing and schooling in the city during the rebuild. Affordable housing was neglected, charter schools were given more funding faster than public schools. These were things that wouldn’t have been possible if so many citizens hadn’t been involved in simply surviving.
To survive tunnelling tax you need to increase your bandwith, even a little bit of slack can help. During a bad patch of business when my children were young and took loads of work, I cut back on commitments outside work and home. I let some people down in my community when I said I wouldn’t continue to volunteer, but I reduced my need to rush to everything.
Those few hours saved allowed me to use a bit of time for extra work which helped build savings and deal with tax bills. The extra time meant I could sit on the floor with my kids and play without feeling like I had other more important things to do.
On a wider scale I’m persuaded by the arguments for basic income2. Some money monthly allows those on the lower income end have slack to say no to bosses that take advantage of their precarious situation. It puts more power into worker hands which raises wages and shortens hours.
- Scarcity Pg 31 ↩︎
- See Basic Income for Canadians for more ↩︎