Archives for May 2019

On Reading

“Reading great literature is like having an intimate conversation with someone who has thought a lot about what they are going to say.”

On Knowledge

“I try to be open to the idea that at any given moment, I am wrong about everything.”

On Understanding

“If you encounter a situation, someone, or something and can’t immediately make sense of it (or them), that is a good sign.”

On Finding Faults

“Whatever bothers you most about other people is what bothers you most about yourself. When nothing bothers you about other people, you are at peace with yourself, or subjacent a rock.”

On Whatever You Own

“Use it, or lose it. The less you keep idle, the better. Let little reside blind of the sun.”

All On blanks attributed to myself, unless otherwise noted.

I wrote in August 2010 (nine years ago!) about a product called the “money-band,” which was a cutting-edge elastic fastener (OK—household rubber band) marketed for the use of replacing the traditional bi or trifold wallet. I was enamored at the time by the idea of minimalism—and I guess I still am, though that word no longer crosses my mind¹—and it was enlightening for me to see an object that so demonstrably instantiated that “Hey—there are other ways to go about this 78.5-year trek. You’ve been doing it all wrong. Wake up.”

The money-band in particular was compelling for two reasons:

1. It was almost nothing—insubstantial, a relative filament—yet it served the same function as a standard wallet, which is to hold identification and money. Wallets can be elaborate. This was not. It blared the idea of doing the same (or more, or better) with less.
2. It was an evidential case of form governing function. Being so limited, it demanded a reassessment of what it meant to be a “wallet”—boundaries, working parameters, function—and from the there, it could only take shape as a more honed tool.

To elaborate some on that second point, my original money-band held three items: a debit card, my driver’s license, and around $20 in cash. That’s all. It could have held more, but not much more, and what else did I need? If I’d be able to navigate my way through 24 hours with nothing else on me, I was set. This was how I defined its core function. And I could do that with ID and cash. Common wallet-dwellers like receipts, rewards cards, photographs, and change—even at the time, in 2010—were superfluous and have since been obsolesced by digital movements of the past decade. The modern phone holds all of those items, and more. Which means: The bare-bones wallet is even more pertinent today. It was forward-thinking. It still probably is. Constraint can often force coherency, and paring down the wallet was invaluable exercise in critical thought that I still reach back to today.

Progression

I ditched the money-band in 2012 (after my stock of four overstretched) for a pair of standard, size #64 rubber bands chained together (how-to here). $7—the then going price—was exorbitant for a set of money-bands, and I had a full box of #64s idling in my filing cabinet. The chained RBs functioned almost as well. This wallet was finicky, though, with the two bands flopping every whichaway as I unfastened it. It was also more bulky and unsightly. Streamlined it was not. I used v2.0 for about five years too long, then one day became fed up with the two-strap system and sought out a single-band replacement, akin to the money-band. I landed on Alliance Pale Crepe Gold, size #82, and it’s a delight.

officedepot.com

These bands supersede the money-band in all ways I consider important. They retain their elasticity longer, the color is agreeably neutral, and the dimensions are about perfect, for me a least. If you carry a lot more in your wallet, you may need to size up in diameter.

The other functional change I made was in the way I carry cash. I previously wrapped my ~$20 in half around my cards. This was a flawed approach because it meant that I had to futz around with the cash each time I wanted to access my debit or credit card to pay for anything. And I used my cards to pay for virtually everything. So: The cash was in the way. It was a regular obstruction.

After realizing this, I folded my cash in half, twice (i.e., in fourth) (using this paper folder, which I adore) and stored it sandwiched between my cards. It was now out of the way, but still available, and the wallet became considerably smoother to operate. Despite being ostensibly simple, there is minutiae to this thing!

Contents-wise, 2010 vs. 2019:

2010

• debit card
• driver’s license
• less than $20 in cash

2019

• credit card
• driver’s license
• library card
• ~$20 in cash

The inclusion of a library card serves as a personal subliminal reminder to continually check out books, and read. I end up seeing it almost every day, and even though this doesn’t register mindfully (viz., “I am holding my wallet which contains my library card which has eclipsed my peripheral vision…”), I could probably substantiate with data² that I have been reading more since I started carrying my library card, and specifically since I positioned it on the outside of my wallet, in sight. (To clarify: I do not need my library card to check out materials, so I didn’t always carry it on me; in the past, I relied on my driver’s license instead.)

I switched from a debit to credit card for fraud protection. It’s a lot easier to get a fraudulent charge reversed on a credit card than a debit card, which gives me peace of mind when I’m at an unfamiliar gas station or otherwise traveling. Frankly, I assume there’s a possibility my card will be stolen each time I use it. So this decision is a precaution. Paying in cash would be another precaution, but carrying lots of cash is a liability as well.

Going Up: On Credit Cards

I’ve thought about this some, and I will try not to act like I’ve figured anything out (because I haven’t; what follows is conjecture) but here’s my sense: Credit cards levy an invisible tax on consumers. You should probably avoid them. But it may be too late to do so. To expound: Credit cards bind consumers in the following way:

1. Many consumers justify making purchases with credit cards (rather than cash or debit cards) because credit cards yield rewards. (For example, the Amazon card gives 3% cash back on Amazon purchases, other cards benefit travelers, etc.) In essence, consumers believe they are getting better deals by using credit cards over the alternatives. Consumer feel good—shrewd, even—about shopping this way.
2. Merchants are met on the receiving end with interchange fees (let’s say 2% per credit card transaction).
3. Merchants, if they are smart, raise prices across the board, because of interchange fees, by at least 2%. (In other words, they place the fee [and then some] on the consumer.) Consumers loathe surcharges, and it’s confusing to convey separate prices for credit and cash. So, to keep things simple, merchants raise prices all around.
4. Consumers end up paying more (not less) by virtue of widespread credit card use. They get worse deals, even when factoring in rewards.
5. At end: Credit cards virulently inflate the costs of goods and services for all who use them—and for everyone who eschews credit cards, too.

And, it should go without saying: Credit card users also expose themselves to a basket of other fees (e.g., interest fees, penalty fees, annual fees, cash-advance fees, etc.), which again outweigh the benefits the cards provide.

Script Flipped

To play devil’s advocate and not paint credit cards in a totally cynical light: There is overhead to processing cash. A customer counting cash from their wallet and handing it to a cashier who has to make change takes time. I estimate (from standing in line with a stopwatch at supermarkets…) that such exchanges are 10–20 seconds slower than electronic ones, from start to finish. Assuming a cashier makes $15/hour, that implies an initial 4–8¢ processing fee. Later, that exchanged cash may be removed from the cash register, counted again, and transported to a bank. These actions imply further processing fees. But, still, once the money has settled, you’re probably looking at something closer to a flat processing fee than the percentage-based interchange fee. I have to wonder if it ever isn’t cheaper for a merchant to process cash.

For a high-volume merchant, though, every second matters. If electronic payments allow them to process more transactions per minute, then tolerating the interchange fees is a no-brainer. So they are fine with the levy. Convenience attracts customers. And maybe merchants don’t inflate their prices to offset interchange fees.

Answers, Out

I don’t see any obvious ways to empower yourself as a consumer besides either

1. paying with cash (even though there is rarely a discount for paying this way; it’s commendable to opt out of the system) or
2. treating credit cards strictly as cash (and not the plastic casinos they are).

My reluctant advice is to use one credit card with no annual fee that yields either no rewards (if you can find one; they’re rare) or unvaried, negligible cash back. Don’t waste your time juggling multiple cards to earn rewards under specific buying conditions. I did this for a while, and it turns out I was severely misguided: The rewards I earned over a two-plus year stretch would have been nearly the same (and as paltry) if I’d elected to use any one of my three credit cards exclusively (rather than wield them selectively, as I did). So it was a waste of time to deliberate between cards on purchases. And, because each card had annual fees or one-off spending bonuses to chase, I likely justified purchases I otherwise wouldn’t have made to reach those benchmarks. (Which means, rewards included, I spent more than I would have if paying by cash. N.B.: You do not have to overspend by much to cannibalize your rewards entirely.)

I played the game, and failed. Unsurprisingly. The banks know better. Lessons learned: It’s far more productive to improve your income and/or not spend money in the first place. And watch out for anything that appears to be free. It’s too good to be true.

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¹ My current interests lie in efficiency and plasticity, rather than the more ascetic notion of getting by with almost nothing. (These interests do still beget neuroticism about the objects I consider worth assimilating into my routines.)

² I won’t because it’s not that important and I forget exactly when I made this change to the wallet. I do keep track of what books I’ve read and when, though.

I wrote fairly extensively regarding the 2019 AC.com redesign when it launched, and I knew then, as I took a loupe to my work, that the design had issues. Collating that assessment was constructive because it forced me to acknowledge shortcomings that I may otherwise have turned a blind eye. I kept ideas for improvements in the back of my mind, to work themselves out (stew, as I like to put it), while I submersed myself in other matters.

Yesterday ended up being a “I have nothing planned / oh god / I’m feeling existential uselessness slash woe” kind of day¹, so in an attempt to make something of quiescence, I opened my laptop and forged ahead with an assortment of creative adjustments.

Tweaks

Goodbye, Home Header

I called this element “experimental” initially, and upon reevaluation, it was overly ambitious; it had too much going on. Presented was a fat stack of links, boxes, and doodads for the end-user to manage—too much for a single pair of eyes to concisely assess. Though it lacked focus, it did contain redeeming elements. I still think overflow: scroll will be relevant as long as viewports are limited. The property allows you to include more (whatever) in less space. That’s useful! I moved the posts lists (titled “Blog,” “Dingus,” and “Reading”) to widgets, located the right or end of posts (depending on your viewport)—and swapped the latter two posts lists for more blog posts, which is the trademark content on here I’d be wise to promote.

With those elements salvaged, I retired the home header. It created inconsistency between the home page and every other page on the site. That’s an indication of poor planning; I should want the elements—especially the header, which is perpetually visible—to be coherent throughout. Users shouldn’t have to rack their brains to figure out what the design is going for.

Byline, Revised

The words “published” and “updated” have been replaced with “↘︎” and “↗︎” (respectively) (see this code snippet for more), and the “read in” phrase has been eliminated entirely. These omissions improve the legibility of the date and read time (since there’s less redundancy in the way) and the arrows help draw the eye toward the start of each post, to begin reading.

The shortened byline also now fits flush—on a single line!—on my ant-sized iPhone SE screen, which is joy.

I’m tickled about this update. The diagonal arrows are intuitive, I think, yet I can’t recall encountering quite this same application of arrows in bylines before.² (Maybe there’s a reason for that. Reversion incoming…) If I’m scrupulous, I’ll end up replacing the HTML arrows with SVG ones (possibly these) so that the symbols will be consistent across browsers and operating systems. (Right now, they’re not. Alas.)

Photos of Moi

In the sidebar, instead of Shrek! and wooden spatulas (among other various read items and dinguses), there are now random photos of me. Your boi. I mentioned that my face has to be seen, and though previously it was unavoidable on the home page, it was absent all elsewhere.

Well, I’m back. Pervading your space. Eyes on ya. HEY. (Granted, on mobile, my physiognomy still can’t be seen without scrolling a mile, so there’s still a puzzle unsolved.)

Related: I will plunge into this later, in another post, about what I was going for with the books and dinguses that resided in that sidebar spot previously, but, for now, a teaser: Affiliate programs are for the lazy and suckers.

Join My Newsletter…

I’ve placed newsletter signup forms at the bottom of every post. Oh, look, here’s one now:

If I want to accelerate whatever I’m doing with this blog (or my life…), I need to be able to apprise those who may be interested in what I’m doing that “hey, I am up to something!” I’m all-out on social media, which means that email is essentially my only way to shout from a digital mountain. (And this’s not to discredit email—I think email is far more stable and a safer investment of time/energy/money than social media, but most people are blasé about it; email’s old technology. We are in the midst of a revival in newsletters, but that interest will intensify and reverse course again soon, and the internet will again be sick of them; think of a ship undulating.)

BTW, web dev nitpickers: I am aware that the Buttondown iframe is an external resource and slow to load and I should be hosting my own form and probably a pop-up too. I’m not getting lost down that rabbit hole of optimization yet. The iframe functions well (I prefer how it handles the signup process to the vanilla HTML form provided by Buttondown) and, importantly, it’s enough. Visitors can join easily—if they want to—now.

Nav Nudges

The next–previous posts navigation, floated to the right of the byline, is newly pronounced. I added the word “skip” to the right arrow (“⇢”), and the separator is now an erect pipe (“|”) instead of a limp forward slash (“/”). I knew this element needed a lift after I hadn’t looked at the site in a while and, upon return, immediately thought it finicky, vague, and inchoate.

Tag Spacing

Post tags have been spaced out, so maybe you and I will actually notice and point a cursor at them. Not that I’ve done a superlative job at tagging content over the years, in a way that would foster meaningful connections between content, facilitate discovery, and warrant the tags’ perusal, but…(trails off)…(inarticulate)…(choking sounds)…click them anyway!

Wish List

There are two features I have in mind to improve functionality:

1. Autoload more posts in widgets when the termini of the posts lists are reached (i.e., incorporate infinite scrolling)
2. Enable keyboard navigation to move between posts (on single post pages and archives) (using left and right arrows, or J and K)

Both features will require custom JavaScript, which is my weakest language (of the ones I at least feign to understand). (HELP.) Call me sold on the overflow: scroll posts widgets (“Overflow, 2020.”), so I consider it worth the time to figure that out. Keyboard nav is something I’ve done on PkmnCards, so I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to swing, but I’m already envisioning issues that beget complicated solutions and JS still viscerally perplexes me.

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¹ Am I the only one who experiences this? It’s an anxious feeling of pending self-nihilism. If I’m not moving, or nothing around me is moving, I’m on edge.

² Smashing Magazine uses a loopy arrow (“↬”) in their article summary sections, which is where I got the idea from. I want to differentiate when a post has been published versus updated though, so the distinct downward (to signify “published,” in the sense that the content has landed) and upward (to signify “updated;” self-explanatory) arrows make contextual sense.