Personal blog. I write about what I learn as I am learning it

Parkinson’s law and lifestyle inflation

Have you heard of Parkinson’s law? The principle states that “work expands in order to fill the available time.” For example, if you organize a meeting at work and set it for 1 hour (as are most meetings), the meeting will last for the whole hour, even if the objectives are complete after 30 minutes.

In productivity circles, Parkinson’s law is often used as a tool to manage time, but I believe it applies equally to managing your money. In this case, Parkinson’s Law may be rephrased to read: “Spending expands in order to consume available money.”

Lifestyle inflation explains this phenomenon. Even if you get a raise at work, you may still be left with no extra money to save. A $100 shopping trip is more likely to result in you spending $100. You are also expected to spend thousands if you have that much money to spend.

Early retirement groupthink

I keep noticing a very annoyingly condescending attitude in the FIRE (financial independence/retire early) “community” towards people outside of it, the “normal” people. I think this is the consequence of early retirement groupthink.

What am I talking about?

Some of the symptoms of this problem are: mocking people that work full time, policing FIRE people that work on gigs or part-time projects, and idolizing people that reached FIRE. Ironically, those gig-and-part-time folks are often practicing what now has a name — Barista FIRE, and its quieter cousin Coast FIRE.

How I Solved the Shortest Superstring Problem in Excel

A while back I wrote an introduction to the shortest superstring problem and promised two follow-ups: one showing the greedy algorithm I wrote in VBA, and another showing how I bolted optimization on top to do better than greedy alone. Then I did what I usually do with “future work” and let it sit. Here, finally, is that follow-up — the whole thing in one post, because this is really the story of how I solved the shortest superstring problem in Excel with two stages of the same machine: a VBA pass that generates candidates, and an optimization model that picks the best of them.

Continue reading “How I Solved the Shortest Superstring Problem in Excel”

The shortest superstring problem

I was introduced to the shortest superstring problem by a request I got on Fiverr. The request turned out to be a waste of time but I really enjoyed learning about it.

Problem statement

The shortest common superstring problem aims to find a string with a minimal length that contains every string in a given set.

Favorite movie quotes

I am a movie fan and also a movie quotes fan. I quote movies all the time but I am going to list only movie quotes that I actually liked the moment I heard them in the movie. The first time. Sometimes you are quietly watching and something you hear hits you sort of like an epiphany. A punch in the face. A revelation. Something that had to be said or you had to hear. Many times how you receive a quote depends on your state of mind at the moment, and the same quote would have felt different in any other circumstance. Anyways, in no particular order, these are my favorite quotes.