Jacob Lund Fisker Quotes

For instance, why do we still work eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year, when we're twice as productive as we were 50 years ago?

If you have debt, you're not a free person. You're explicitly owned by your debt and implicitly owned by the creditor.

To paraphrase Einstein, you can't solve your problems with the same mindset that created them.

What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were?

The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything?

The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything? Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars? Or are you prepared to give up the stuff so that you can do whatever you want, whenever, and wherever, within reason? What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were?

Walkers easily travel three miles by foot. Drivers get in their cars to get from one side of the parking lot to the other. Neither quite understand why the other is so crazy, when it's so easy to do things their way.

Health is thus a condition of well-being and an ability to appreciate life. It's not necessarily optimizing or conforming to a set of measurable quantities like life expectancy or blood pressure, nor is it removing all symptoms using drugs. Health is the presence of something positive, rather than the absence of something negative.

Complexity, therefore, results in flexibility. Increasing complexity always increases capability and adaptability.

In other words, money is paid and gas is burned to make one's possessions as comfortable temperature-wise as the inhabitants

Doing something that is considered very difficult at least once in your life is highly recommended.

The real problem is not how much we earn; it's how much we waste, perhaps to demonstrate our supposed wealth, when we spend it.

this case it's sensible to develop a skill to just before the point that it begins to require maintenance, continued practice--beyond this point, replacing skill and time with capital assets makes more sense.

The mass education in high schools reflects the mass production of the real world. The teaching style has one teacher (supervisor) lecturing (leading) 20-25 students (workers) sitting in rows, much like a manager and his employees.

Many profit-driven corporate strategies are based on fashion, planned obsolescence, unneeded upgrades, and masterful emotional manipulation --marketing--causing people to continuously replace goods which are still in good working order.

The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by modernism. Not surprisingly, this human ideal has almost been forgotten in our culture. The Renaissance, literally "re-birth", was a revival and rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman culture following the decline of culture, trade, and technology during the Dark Ages.

Dollar cost averaging naturally provides steady employment for fund managers and most everyone else associated with the stock market. Regular contributions are therefore sold to the public as something that is beneficial. In reality, dollar cost averaging is a double-edged sword. Proponents usually imagine a scenario of an initial market decline that recovers. In this case, even though the starting and ending price are the same, the average cost is lower, thus resulting in an overall investment gain. Now consider the scenario of a rising market that subsequently declines. In this case, the average cost is higher than the start and ending price, and the investor will have lost money. In fact, given that markets rise much more slowly than they drop, a dollar cost averaging investor is more likely to make an entry and invest larger amounts while the market is rising than during its decline. At its best, dollar cost averaging provides no benefit, but regardless, dollar cost averaging is an excellent way of providing steady work for Wall Street, which collects fees and commissions to invest the steady stream of money from workers.

conspicuous consumption is not a natural state for all of us.

Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars?

Changemongers thus have the following four variables to play with: Increase your dissatisfaction with present situation. Strengthen your vision of future situation. Build a plan to get from the present to the future. Lower the perceived cost of the plan.

Feynman once remarked that the best way to find new insights into a problem was to step out of the box, ignore previous publications, and come to your own conclusions.

Buying a set of, say, screwdrivers to "save" money is rarely worthwhile. You will end up breaking the ones you use constantly and with a collection of ones you never use. Never buy the set.

Many houses increasingly serve not only as living quarters but also as storage areas for toy collections, personal libraries, galleries of art and other assorted knick-knacks, small supermarkets (massive refrigerators), home cinemas, and restaurant-sized kitchens which seem proportional in size to the time the owners spend away from them,

If you only have a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail--the most common hammer is in the shape of a credit card.

Since humans need very little, eliminating various wants can go far in terms of solving problems. Can't afford it? Don't want it! Too complicated? Don't want it! Reduce and simplify. Reduce and simplify!

Let current purchases determine what problem you're currently solving rather than the other way around; adapt your plans to what is on sale.

Providing things for free provides value insofar as it prevents further consumption of finite resources and maximizes the use of our productive efforts.

If information is simply accumulated (compiled), one should expect at some point to be forgetting practically as fast as new things are learned--it is just the brain's way of being efficient on its own.37 This is particularly true when the focus is on compiling facts instead of reducing facts to principles and synthesizing more general theories (see Gauging mastery). The same principle holds when accumulating things without learning new and better ways to use them, or when building relationships without connecting them into a community.

The main mistake when dealing with an overwhelming amount of data and stuff is to reduce it, rather than relating to it on a more abstract level. It's always easier to cut away than it is to create, but it's not always the best solution.

When renting, you're usually not responsible for breakdowns. This is a winning proposition if you don't have the skills to fix it yourself and a losing one if you do have the skills or could cultivate them.

What happens is that air-conditioning makes sweat glands ineffective as they're never called into use. This means that when moving outside in the hot air, more blood has to be directed away from the core and the muscles to cool the body.

During the day, professionals attend to their jobs. During the evenings, they vegetate in front of their TVs, thereby prevented from learning anything, and this effectively keeps them in their jobs.

traditional best way is to learn several recipes and notice which ingredients they have in common. If one recipe includes an ingredient that is used in only that recipe, avoid the recipe. The more it's optimized, the easier it is to manage the system, but obviously there are diminishing returns to obsessing over which recipes have the most synergy.

Further, in the US walking is something you do inside the mall, and in Europe walking is something you do to get to the bus stop.

In that regard, our society is more akin to a highly developed insect colony where specialized members work for the greater whole.

Don't mention that you also happen to manage a six-figure portfolio to your "voluntary simplicity" friends and don't mention that you only have one bedroom to your investment friends unless you're prepared for the resulting discussion.

Having a firm relationship with one's personal values is also important in the short term.

The volume of the pyramid represents the will to change from an unsatisfying situation to something else and depends on vision, how practical the change is, and the level of dissatisfaction with the situation.

This figure shows the cash flows in a world with only two people. I labeled them creditor and debtor. In reality, there are many creditors and debtors (see text for details). It also explains why the "rich get richer" and why those who are in debt and work for a living never seem to "get ahead.

Nobody thinks of using improvements in technology and productivity to allow people to work less and require fewer assets to achieve the same standard of living. Instead, while everybody is richer, at least in terms of stuff, no one is any wealthier. Their wealth is "safely" out of reach. If it weren't, how many would still show up for work the next day?

Our current world I submit that we currently live in a climax stage.21 We have a political model that is based on leading in the popular polls--a model where barely differentiated political leaders pretend to be different by steering voters away from important issues and onto subjects that, albeit emotional, are of little consequence to most people--a model where the election is won by the person with the best marketing, and where consistency and integrity are irrelevant. We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn. We live in a world where the money necessary for our way of life comes out of a slit in the wall as long as we keep showing up for work, yet only experts understand the fiat-based money/credit system. We live in a world where food can be heated in a microwave oven at the touch of a button, yet only experts understand how this works. This goes for most of the other technology we use. All we know is that if we press this or that button, things magically happen. We are aware of large-scale problems, but most of us believe that we can't do anything about them. Instead, we believe in a mythical They who will find a solution, just like They have provided all this wonderful technology we surround ourselves with. We may be more technologically advanced as a group, and correctly but myopically hold up technology as our one indicator of "progress,"22 but in terms of individual understanding we have not come far, and once again live according to old concepts. In fact, we might have turned a full cycle from the last climax stage: The Dark Ages.

We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn.

People with more money than time buy $3,000 road racing bicycles with ultralight carbon frames to shave two pounds off the bike, regardless of the fact that they themselves are probably at least 10 pounds overweight.

Any connection with nature and most connections with technology are lost. There's a belief that nature is irrelevant and that anything can be solved using the current methods--now technology; previously magic or praying.

Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it.

When the automobile was made affordable to the masses, people moved further away from work and further away from stores. While transportation speed increased, transportation distance increased proportionally, keeping transportation time constant.

realize that economic agents all represent special interests that typically interpret the situation according to their own interests or political views.

no-stick treatment for pots and pans only lasts a couple of years and that it can't, as far as I know, be replaced, get stainless steel, iron, or copper the next time.

Finding the good stuff can be done by exploiting survivor bias. As someone informed me, the good stuff is whatever costs more than $100 in a pawn shop or an antique store.

Is your money best spent on an extra bedroom or five years of freedom?

preprocessed food, which only needs to be heated, takes about 15 minutes of salary work to pay for, which is comparable to the time it takes to cook a similar meal from scratch.

A very common and very good piece of career advice is not to work to earn money but to work to learn new skills, gain new connections, and create new opportunities.

first running out to stores to buy supplies and then running back to work to pay for them, leaving little time and room for the project, which eventually moves out to the garage with the rest of the stuff.

The reason is that, other than working faster, most people really don't have a lot of freedom in terms of strategies for reaching their goal, since their strategies are locked in

Most activities require some combination of agility, strength, and work capacity. Yet aerobics, running, or jogging enhance none of these qualities.

For example, the amino acid tryptophan, which is found in abundance in chocolate, oats, and milk and meat products, is a precursor for the neurotransmitter serotonin, which improves mood.

We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground.

It is curious that experts recommend that investments be broadly diversified, while at the same time recommending that job skills should be highly concentrated.

This lack of complex social structure has led to neighborhoods where each household has their own power mower that they use for 15 minutes a week to mow their postage stamp-sized lawn.

Rather than working to establish such a large income, it can, however, just as easily be gained by acquiring skills instead.

High-intensity workouts generate more than 1000W (see High intensity interval training), which is comparable to a small space heater. For room-heating purposes you can substitute the company of 10 friends with one intensely exercising person.

Commercial detergent is an interesting concoction of sodium carbonate, borax, and inactive ingredients (color agents), all of which are very inexpensive, plus advertising campaigns, management salaries, distribution systems, etc., which comprise most of the cost.

Don't buy anything unless it has been on the wish list for at least 30 days.

Reduce wants and needs from the marketplace to a minimum to decouple the buy-work connection. Decrease the volume and size but increase the sophistication of your activities and possessions. Measure prosperity by less activity, not more. Do fewer useless things. Work for the purpose of earning money for no more than five years of your life or five hours a week. Avoid generating waste and find ways to use the waste of others. Learn to use the system to your advantage, but don't be evil! Serve yourself rather than having others serve you. Instead, help them.

In fact, education is very different from training. Training is what you know whereas education is who you are as a person.

In the same vein, tally up the sum total of your earned income so far, subtract your savings, and compare the difference to your pile of stuff. Was it really a good deal?

wit, a salary or even the potential of a future salary seems to be a gateway to the debt drug; so many people could probably reduce the risk of getting into debt by simply quitting their jobs.