Rememberment

"I'm too poor to buy cheap things" is an old wisdom. It's famously illustrated in Terry Pratchett's book "Men at Arms" where the story goes like this: A poor man buys boots for $10. They're good enough to last for a season or two, but then they're worn out and start to leak. Meanwhile, a wealthy man buys a pair of $50 boots. Those will still be in good shape after 10 years. The end result is that the man who always buys those cheap boots will easily end up spending twice as much money as the wealthy man, and would still have wet feet. This is called the Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness. Paradoxically, life is in many ways more expensive for those with lower income. Those with money can afford to buy in bulk, and so end up paying less per unit. Banking fees are lower (or free) if you have enough money, while exceeding one's balance incurs costly "insufficient funds" fees. Borrowing money is more costly i...

I was still very much into computer games and whenever I visited my friends (or cousins) we spent most of the time playing on their computer. And by computer I mean the Commodore 64, because that's what everyone had. So why did they all have the C-64? There were two simple reasons. The first was that it had the best selection of games for it, the second being that it was rare for anyone to actually purchase them. Piracy was absolutely rampant. I kept begging my parents for a computer of my own, even though I wasn't very hopeful. But I made sure to always stress that if such a miracle were to happen, the computer specifically needed to be a C-64.  It was a day like any other, and my dad was picking me up from school. He was grinning at me when I approached the car. When I opened the passenger door, I saw a big box. "There you go, son" Dad said happily. "It's finally yours". I looked at the box; it was definitely a home computer, but certainly not the C-64...

"What I say has very little value. You will forget it the moment you shut this book, or you will remember and repeat certain phrases, or you will compare what you have read here with some other book -- but you will not face your own life. And that is all that matters -- your life, yourself, your pettiness, your shallowness, your brutality, your violence, your greed, your ambition, your daily agony and endless sorrow -- that is what you have to understand and nobody on earth or in heaven is going to save you from it but yourself." - Jiddu Krishnamurti, "Freedom from the Known". Krishnamurti was adopted as a child by the Theosophical Society to become a messianic figure - a vessel for the mystical "World Teacher" entity and the leading figure of the Order of the Star in the East. However, when he was 34 he resigned from his role and decided to dismantle the Order entirely, returning all the significant assests which had been donated to it, and stated that ...

Even though I was in a new school, some things remained the same - I was still a skinny, awkward little dweeb who got routinely bullied. While it was mostly just sneering and name-calling, sometimes it got physical too. In the yard there was a climbing frame with a "spider web": on the side of the frame was a net made from ropes for climbing, hence the name. One day a couple of the bigger kids decided they would have some fun at my expense when I was climbing there; each of them grabbed one of my arms from the other side of the net and started pulling me against it with all their might. I thought they would rip my arms right off - the torment only stopped after a supervising teacher heard my screams and headed over. Another fun prank was to creep next to me and yell right into my ear, or pin my arms behind my back while other kids started delivering fillips onto my nose from underneath. That didn't always go so well though. One time when they did that, I managed to break ...