Relax, You’re Swimming In It

September 27, 2010

Iguazu Falls, where $231 worth of water flows per second

Do you know how much that dripping faucet in your kitchen is costing you? If it drips once a second, 24 hours a day, it’ll cost you…

So little that a standard 8-digit calculator can have trouble measuring it.

When you go to other personal finance blogs that give useless “money-saving tips” like “use less water”, you’re wasting your time. And possibly some water, but that shouldn’t matter. The overzealous conservation of water is pseudoscientific, pseudoeconomic nonsense.

Kids were getting indoctrinated with screeds about the scarcity of water at least in the 1970s, and probably earlier. Here’s a gem that social studies textbooks still use:

Of all the water on earth, <3% of it is freshwater, and almost all of that is in glaciers. Only .01% is in surface water – lakes and rivers.

OMG we’re running out! We’re going to be a desert planet soon! Either that, or we’ll have to develop gills!

Congratulations, you just fell victim to a mathematical parlor trick. Percentages don’t mean a thing, only raw numbers do. The 310 million cubic miles of seawater on the planet are irrelevant to the discussion of fresh water. The only purpose they serve is to make the amount of fresh water on the planet look relatively small. If the entire Sahara turned to seawater tomorrow, the percentage of the earth’s water that’s fresh would fall but the amount of fresh water wouldn’t change. The earth’s surface water works out to about 100,000 cubic yards per person. You’re not going to die of thirst.

It’s Control Your Cash’s sacred duty to tear into other bloggers’ hogwash – especially after reading something as ludicrous as the following indefensible feel-good comments that sound great but signify nothing.

We asked the author of the following italicized lines if she wanted attribution. She politely declined. Remember, this is an attack on the post, not the person. Still, someone’s probably going to end up crying:

 

We use water every day for a number of reasons, but the bottom line is that water is a necessity.

Thank you. These are the kind of incisive, groundbreaking research findings that make most blogs such a pleasure to read. What are your feelings on air: necessity, or luxury? How about food?

Everyone likes to unwind in the shower after a hard day at work, but taking long unnecessary showers will definitely rack up that water bill.

 

No it won’t. Soon, we’re going to watch math work its magic.

Instead of taking a twenty minute (sic) shower try taking a ten minute (sic) one.

Also, a 9-minute shower will use less water than a 10-minute one. And if you want to use less water than a 20-minute shower, but aren’t quite ready for a 10-minute one, you might want to try a 15-minute shower. Other acceptable shower lengths in this range include 11-minute, 12-minute, and 17-minute.

20 gallons of water cost 1¢ in Control Your Cash’s neighborhood. A typical low-flow showerhead expels 1.5 gallons per minute, so by showering for 10 fewer minutes a day, you’d save 23¢ a month. Assuming you can shorten your shower by 10 minutes in the first place.

When we go into the bathroom to brush our teeth we just let the water run. Try turning it off while you brush your teeth.

Turning the water off while brushing your teeth will save significantly less than a penny. 1 gallon per minute is standard for bathroom faucets, and that’s at full power. Let’s assume half power, and even that seems liberal. The Sonicare Flexcare toothbrush cleans your teeth in exactly 2 minutes, or enough time to use .05¢ worth of water.

Many of us like to wash our vehicles at home, but this could be costly.

 

Nope. Just proved that. 5-gallon bucket = ¼¢. If your vehicle is a Los Angeles-class submarine, maybe washing it could be costly. Then again, you probably don’t keep it at home. Plus submarines stay wet as a matter of course.

It will be much cheaper in the long run to…collect rain water (sic, does anyone here understand compound words or hyphens?) to use when washing your vehicle.

This is the last refuge of the desperate blogger: a logically sound statement that makes zero practical sense. Yes, the clouds don’t charge for water. But unless you live in Cherrapunji, it’s going to take you a while to collect the raw material for your next car wash.

(In case you’re not getting it: no one is encouraging you to waste water. But unless you’re hiking Zion Canyon in the middle of summer, discarding a few ounces isn’t going to kill you.)

Dripping faucets are an annoyance. They’re not a financial drain, to coin a phrase, that’ll bankrupt you if you don’t immediately fix them. (Heck, one hour of a plumber’s labor would already put you in a hole impossible to dig out of in your lifetime, if you’re weighing it against the water you save.) If you want to collect rainwater to wash your car with, knock yourself out. If you want to take showers that are shorter than the average Ramones song, fine. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that there’s an economic rationale for it.

Filed Under: Acts of God, Economics, Healthy Living, Making Smart Choices, Math Tagged With: , , ,

Charity is for suckers

September 23, 2010

Apparently you can use a pen, can't you? Fill out a job application with one.

 

Can you stomach a first-person story? We try not to do these, but here’s one with a greater purpose. After reading it, your disposable income should increase (or at least not decrease.)

20 years ago your blogger was a recent college graduate with dreams of being on the radio*, living in downtown Toronto – a central business district so dense that it can’t help but be pedestrian-friendly. To get to work every morning (at the office of a crooked penny stock promoter, now mercifully out of business), I’d walk a mile or so from my condo to a high-rise office on Bay Street (Wall Street’s smaller, colder, less influential, eternally apologetic sister with an inferiority complex.) En route I’d pass by College Park, a vintage shopping mall whose wide sidewalks served as a depository for dozens of the city’s beggars, buskers, and Deadheads looking to make a better world by receiving money in exchange for things made of hemp (or not.)

Some of the street musicians were fairly talented, if Indigo Girls covers with tambourine accompaniment happened to be your thing. But as the Napster defendants argued, music was meant to be free. Thus I’d never give my serenaders money. The soundtrack in my head was entertainment enough.

Among the beggars and their slightly more motivated brethren, one person stuck out. He was a quadruple amputee with what remains one of the sunniest dispositions I’ve ever witnessed. Shirtless, bearded, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans, he’d say hi to everyone who walked by. His arms stopped somewhere around the elbow, his legs were a mystery. Sometimes he was there with a handler, sometimes he wasn’t, or maybe during those absences the handler was getting food. Or cigarettes. The beggar would somehow manage to smoke by holding the cigarette between his stumps and placing the butt on his wheelchair whenever he got tired, which I’m guessing was often. Normally I’d argue that smoking cigarettes is for idiots, but I’ll reserve judgment on someone whose smoke-filled lungs were among the most functional parts of his body.

I never learned the beggar’s name, but the black humor hemisphere of my brain christened him “One”, after the Metallica song.

Some days I’d hope to get there before he’d set up shop for the day, because there’s another part of my brain that would refuse to not give him money. Every time, whatever was in my wallet was his. Occasionally that meant a $50 bill, which I could ill afford. Yet it was all I could do to restrain myself from stopping passersby and insisting that they follow suit. “Look, I don’t give money to beggars either. But this guy’s different.”

One day, One disappeared. Which isn’t noteworthy: beggars aren’t renowned for their permanence. Without having any details about his departure, I could imagine my own happy ending: his biological family had misplaced him after birth (stubby kids are easy to lose), spent decades searching for him and finally found him. A visiting European princess took him under her wing (or her arm.) Something good, because God knows he deserved it.

A few months later the stock promoter put me out of my misery. I applied for a job at CFRB 1010 – Canada’s biggest, most powerful radio station. Wore my best** suit and tie, met with the program director, laughed at his jokes and tried to make my laughter sound authentic. He shook my hand, I said I’d find my own way out.

Down the hallway, I passed a semi-open door and heard an unmistakable high-pitched voice.

One. All by himself, conducting phone surveys. With a headset attached to his head and a pen in his mouth.

Fortunately his back was turned, so I didn’t bother disturbing him. He wouldn’t have recognized me anyway.

At that moment, an epiphany: I vowed I would never give money to anyone, either via an institution or hand-to-hand, if that person had at least one functioning limb.

No example you give can trump this. The teenage mother with multiple kids, the illegal alien, the woman who ate herself into superobesity, the meth addict whose parents didn’t hug him enough: they can all go to the Fifth Ring and share a skewer when a man who’s completely helpless can find gainful employment.

Some ambulatory people like to self-tithe, or to convince themselves that their residency on this planet requires them to care for “the less fortunate” for some reason. Taken to its logical extension, that would mean we’d never do anything productive, creating any wealth. We’d each be spending our time endlessly transferring our money: from the most fortunate (Kobe Bryant, Angelina Jolie) through the slightly less fortunate (me, probably you) all the way down to crack babies.

You want to help someone who doesn’t have “enough” money? Offer them a job. If you can’t, the next best thing you can do is nothing. Seriously. That’ll help avail them of the inevitable truth – that giving people money out of guilt not only doesn’t do any good, it makes things worse. It lets whatever marketable talents those people have wither and weaken – and whatever contributions to society they could have made to society, will go unmade.

I’d always thought “if he can do it, anyone can” was a fluffy piece of motivational-poster nonsense. It took the most disadvantaged man I’d ever met to make a believer out of me.

*This was a completely legitimate aspiration to have back then. Thank God I didn’t achieve it in any meaningful sense.

**only

**This post is an editor’s pick at the Carnival of Money Stories**

**They love us at the Carnival of Money Stories**

Filed Under: Acts of God, Healthy Living, Making Smart Choices, Personal Finance Tagged With: , , , ,

Sacre bleu

January 24, 2010

Economic opportunity comes in odd forms, including this one.

Even a catastrophe can demonstrate how important it is to think as someone who Controls His or Her Cash. If doing so can dispel some class warfare misconceptions too, then all the better.

Unfortunately, for some the Haiti earthquake is more than just a colossal tragedy, since it’s possible to attach a moral component to some benign human behavior in the earthquake’s aftermath.

Haiti is the size of Massachusetts, with more people than Michigan. And since people started keeping records, Haiti has been the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The citizenry has endured uninterrupted horrible government since independence two centuries ago, unless you count bloody coups as “interruptions”. As you’ve probably heard, shortly after Haiti fell to rubble Royal Caribbean cruises’ Independence of the Seas made a scheduled stop 2 miles from the major northern city of Cap-Haitien. Never an industry to look beyond the surface, the media helped matters by using loaded terms like “frolic” and “frivolity” to describe the pampered passengers on board, who allegedly sipped mai tais and played shuffleboard while thousands of people died relatively close by. While you’re welcome to bash people who vacation on cruise ships as emblematic of indulgence and sloth, that isn’t the point.

If you glean one piece of knowledge from Control Your Cash, let it be this: alternatives must exist. Given that cruise ships exist, and that that existence is somewhat permanent, exactly what is supposed to happen if the Independence of the Seas cancels its visit to Cap-Haitien? The ship has to go somewhere. Were the Independence of the Seas to drop anchor a few miles off the coast of Hispaniola, or continue uninterrupted to San Juan, perhaps that would somehow mitigate the carnage around Port-a-Prince. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

Circumstances placed the passengers on board the Independence of the Seas in an awkward situation (yes, it’s all relative. “Awkward” compared to the passengers who took the same cruise the previous month, not compared to the Haitians waiting for the International Building Code inspectors to come by and slap a giant “Condemned” sign on the entire western half of the island.) If it’s distasteful to play on waterslides and sample the breakfast buffet while docked in Haiti, would it be any less so to do the exact same thing a few dozen miles offshore, where the locals couldn’t see the ship? Do you really believe the poor dark-skinned unfortunates can be that easily fooled?

Refusing to dock by Cap-Haitien won’t alleviate anyone’s suffering, unless you count assuaging the partially developed consciences of a few uptight and unthinking people. Furthermore, Cap-Haitien was 50 miles from the epicenter of the quake and is relatively unscathed. So naturally, the logical thing to do would be to bypass the port and keep tourist dollars from entering the country when they’re needed most.

Haitians, by virtue of being poor and rendered poorer by tectonics, don’t have the luxury of concerning themselves with such secondary cares as etiquette and propriety. While the spectators can debate the merits of hybrid subcompacts vs. SUVs, or refuse to eat food grown 101 miles away from their homes, the Haitians themselves have more pressing problems. Such as getting fed and sheltered.

It shouldn’t take a natural disaster to illustrate this point: while ordinary modern humans don’t live at the beck and call of rich people, it sure is handy having them around. Because once someone elevates from mere comfort to affluence, the difference between the two is measured by money that needs to be spent or invested. That money will almost always be spent or invested with people poorer than that rich person.

Liquidity of money is everything. Liquidity means the speed at which funds get spent in the economy as they move from lower-valued uses (sitting in a tourist’s pocket) to higher-valued ones (being exchanged for food and shelter, by a Haitian selling whatever goods or services.)

The irony is that cruises, despite being synonymous with ostentation, are anything but ostentatious. 75 years ago, the average person had as much chance of going on a cruise as she did of traveling in space. Today, cruises have been democratized to the point where Royal Caribbean offers 4-day junkets from Miami to the Bahamas (and back, presumably) for $247. That’s not per night, either.

Perhaps the distaste and second-guessing stems from the level of pampering the passengers on board the Independence of the Seas enjoy. If she had only one whirlpool instead of two, or served off-brand ice cream in her coffee bar instead of Ben & Jerry’s, that might mitigate the protocol horror.

Kudos to Royal Caribbean CEO Adam Goldstein for putting practicality ahead of public relations. He unapologetically made the economic case for docking in Haiti, hoping to persuade the holdouts who think it’s bad to patronize the hundreds of local merchants who rely on moneyed Americans to indirectly feed their families.

Just ask the merchants along Front Street in Lahaina, Hawai’i, who salivate when a cruise ship docks at the nearby terminal and passengers disembark, ready to spend. The people running those shops are Americans. If it’s a slow day at the shop, the merchants and their employees still have warm beds inside structurally sound dwellings to sleep in that night.

But for a Haitian local, the $15 he can earn for a day’s worth of tour guiding can mean the difference between going home, and going home hungry. The alternative (there’s that word again) would be for the cruise ship passenger to keep that money to spend it at the next port of call, which is certain to enjoy a higher standard of living than anywhere in Haiti does.

If the passengers are “uncomfortable” with coming within 50 miles of a disaster zone, or if people with no vested interest in the situation are uncomfortable, suck it up. Or you could ask a Haitian who just lost his house, his income, and a family member or two if there’s anything he can do to salve your discomfort.

One way to solve the problem of naked income disparities would be to have Royal Caribbean only cruise to ports with substantial per capita incomes. Luxembourg, for instance. That way, neither the cruisers nor the locals will perceive any inequality. Alas, Luxembourg is landlocked.

As to the finger-pointers who decry the Independence of the Seas’ passengers as representing all that is unholy with the festering white underbelly of globalization? If those naysayers really gave a damn about Haitians, they’d buy a cabin, dock at Cap-Haitien, ask for the deluxe tour from whichever Jean-Michel or Rene greets them at the port, tip generously, then head into a local café and order as much tassot et banane pesé as their well-fed First World stomachs could hold.

“Rich”, “out-of-touch” and “pampered” are perfect descriptors for anyone who recommends essentially forbidding poor Haitians from earning a livelihood. Especially now. A physical distance from the problem doesn’t exonerate you, either. If you’re ready to chastise Royal Caribbean and its customers, while you’re spending even a nickel on non-necessities of your own, you’re far more loathsome than the cruise passengers you condemn.

Filed Under: Acts of God Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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