Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Poor judgement

Sony recently announced their next generation over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones: the forever stupidly named WH-1000XM6. I’m sure the new cans are better performing and whatnot, but what gets me is the new price. A $50 increase to the already hefty $400 of the previous generation.

$450 for a pair of headphones? Do people realize how much money that is? Think of how many hours you have to work to even net $450 into your deposit account. I’m old enough to remember when premium consumer noise cancelling headphones were in the $300s range. And please spare me with the “Well, if you adjust for inflation…”

Of course, $450 for the Sony cans is still not as insane as the $550 Apple’s been charging for their AirPods Max. Every time I see a student on campus with a pair those, I fail to fathom how one is capable of spending such a large chunk of their income (remember: students) on headphones. $199 for a pair of AirPods Pro (when it’s on sale at third party merchants, which is often) is all the private listening device I need. Travel? The AirPods Pro is vastly smaller than any of the over-the-ear products.

On MKBHD’s review of the Sony WH-1000XM6, he initially bristled at the $50 price increase, but at the end concluded that it’s worth it. I am sorry, but a guy with millions of dollars in net worth is a poor judge of value. Marques is no longer of the proletariat class. He can afford to wipe his ass with $50 bills. Spending $450 on consumer electronics is but a drop in the ocean for him. I don’t think he can appropriately judge worth for the typical consumer netting a few thousands a month in income.

I’m not hating on MKBHD. He deserves all the rewards for his ceaseless hard work. Enjoy your millions, King. I’m simply taking his judgement of value with a carton load of sea salt.

That's pretty spectacular

I think we can recognize that tech companies are implementing artificial intelligence features as an excuse to raise their product prices. Adobe did that just today in raising the subscription price of its creative suite. Users will be forced to pay more for AI features with debatable usefulness. Maybe these companies can cloak the upcoming tariff price increases under the guise of AI!

To Adobe’s credit, there is an AI feature of its Lightroom suite that I recently found to be utterly incredible.

This past weekend I shot photos at a wedding reception. A Chinese restaurant in the evening is about the worst lighting conditions this side of a nightclub. Because I was photographing people, I had to maintain high shutter speed (to avoid motion blur). Nor could I shoot at wide open aperture because the focal plane would be too narrow for a group shot. High ISO was the only remedy, which meant lots of noise in the output.

Enter the AI denoise function introduced in Lightroom back in 2023. With a single click of a button, and a slider to choose how strong, the high ISO photos I took came out clean and sharp, like freaking magic. (On my now dated M1 Max MacBook Pro, to denoise a single RAW photograph took about 30 seconds.) No more messing with manual noise reduction sliders and guessing what each of them actually do. Never again will I fear bumping the ISO setting to the limits (dynamic range tradeoffs aside).

I went back to some other high ISO photos I’ve shot over the years just to mess with it some more. For sure AI tools can be gimmicky, but when they do perform seemingly miracles, I’ve no issue paying more.

You all are nasty

Part of my duties as IT support is to facilitate fixing laptops when they break. And let me tell you, the sanitary condition of some of these is utterly disgusting. I don’t quite understand how someone can look at a screen caked with various oils and reckon that to be “normal.” I mean, it’s got to be normal for them, right? Otherwise they would have cleaned it already.

One time I had a user complain about the laptop display getting fuzzier as he used it from new. You guessed it: it was a dirt and oil that was progressively getting stuck onto the screen. A classic case of problem existing between keyboard and chair.

I understand everybody has a different conception of cleanliness. But I bet we can all agree the definition of absolute clean: when a device is brand new (or a car is brand new). You would be rightly pissed if you opened a sealed MacBook Pro, freshly purchased from the store, only to find a lid with a smudge on it. Meanwhile, people are capable of using a computer with a smudge for a very long time, so long as the smudging was done by the user.

I reckon people also tend to be more cavalier with items that they don’t feel a sense of ownership with. Say, a work-issued computer. It costs the user absolutely nothing. Things given freely don’t tend to last very well. Just look at public housing. Compare that to a personally purchased MacBook Pro costing many thousands of dollars: I would hope users are more inclined to take care of that. Because they have skin in the game.

When the penalty of ruining a work laptop is essentially nothing (we simply issue them another), the incentive to take care of devices is completely absent. Needlessly to say, I wear gloves at all times when handling user machines. For my protection.

It's all about luck

If there is a god, he must have a wicked sense of humor. The Dallas Mavericks have won, against highly unfavorable odds, the NBA draft lottery for the number one overall pick in the upcoming draft. This, only a short month and a half after the same team traded away their top five franchise star (Luca Doncic) for essentially peanuts. The dissatisfaction from Dallas fans then was bilabial. I guess karma really doesn’t exist!

The tar-and-feathering of Nico Harrison - GM of the Mavericks - ends immediately, right? Vindication for trading away a generational scoring talent in Doncic, but who can’t get in shape, and who can’t play defense? I’m not sure you can use that word when the reward is down to pure luck. Nevertheless, the Dallas franchise now gets to pick another, much younger, generational talent to replace Luca (Cooper Flagg). Are we sure this isn’t the Matthew principle at work?

This goes to show much much luck is involve in our successes and failures. I mean, isn’t the fact that we even exist at all is down to some goldilocks equation involving the position of the earth vis a vis the sun and the moon? Should the earth’s axis tilted slightly differently, then all of this would be nothing but less than a dream.

Look at the Golden State Warriors, currently deep into the NBA playoffs. The team is likely to lose the series to the Minnesota Timberwolves because transcendent star player Steph Curry suffered a freak non-contact injury in game one (of seven). Two Super Bowls ago, the 49ers defense was never the same after linebacker Dre Greenlaw suffered a torn achilles while getting on the field. Bad luck can absolutely ruin your day, no matter how good you actually are.

On the flip side, you can be less envious of successful people because there was likely a ton of good luck involved. This isn’t negating their hard work: you still have to put yourself in positions to leverage fortune positively. Even the couch potato needs to get off his ass to buy a lottery ticket at the gas station.

Dallas Mavericks fans must be feeling all sorts of mixed up right now.

No magic pill

Personal finance is easy. Spend less than you make. Put that extra money into the market in a low-cost index fund. Rinse and repeat every single month for decades, until you are ready to retire. You can say it all fits on an index card.

But like losing weight - eat less than you expend in energy, what’s easy on paper is difficult for people to execute. That’s why American obesity rate is top 10 in the world. (GLP1 agonists to the rescue!) And consumer credit card debt is at an all time high.

From watching personal finance shows like Caleb Hammer, what I am seeing is that people do understand what needs to be done, but the salience of that action is buried under a pile of emotions hijacking the brain. That forthcoming vacation is way more exciting to think about. The DoorDash delivery person is coming soon with that burrito you deserve after a long day at work. Why yes you absolutely should spend a year’s salary on a brand new car.

The boring and unexciting slog of wealth accumulation never stood a chance against those positive emotions. Just like the cozy and comfortable couch beckons you to abandon your difficult and tiresome workout plans for the day.

It can’t be all down to willpower, right? To mentally fight against the easy and pick the hard. Because we all know that willpower is fleeting. Our marvelous minds can convince and rationalize us of (and out of) anything. Spend six-figures on a car? Of course! I am a card-carrying car enthusiast. Hashtag man maths.

Unfortunately, unlike weight loss, there’s no magic pill for debt.

Here's a good reason

I think it’s ridiculous if people are truly not buying a Tesla car just because of Elon Musk’s antics in the Trump administration. The Model 3 and the Model Y remain some of the best electric cars you can buy. If I were in the market, I would not hesitate to buy one, no matter how supposedly toxic the CEO is. Much like you can appreciate the god tier levels of musicality with Kanye’s earlier work, even though the current him has clearly gone off the deep end.

Obviously, car purchase is not a rational decision. Otherwise we’d all be driving Toyota Corollas for multiple decades. America has such a robust car market precisely because so much emotion is tied to the vehicles we drive. We buy a BMW because we detest the usage of turn signals. Guys buy overly large trucks so they can (potentially) run over spandex-wearing wimps on bicycles.

So I can understand (though still ridiculous) why people are souring on the Tesla brand. In this current political climate, the Tesla badge carries a negative connotation. People think that owning a Tesla car is an endorsement of whatever the heck Elon Musk is doing. Though I wouldn’t go too far with that line of thinking; those folks mustn’t look up how Volkswagen was founded…

What should deter people away from buying a Tesla is the enormous cost to insure one. For fun exercise, I hypothetically replaced my expensive to insure BMW M2 with a poverty-spec Tesla Model 3. And there was practically no change to the insurance. Comparatively, if I were to swap the BMW with a Toyota 4Runner, my insurance premium would be cut in half.

I should sell the M2 and get a 4Runner…

Hit button, get reward

You would be mistaken to think that addiction to short-form videos like TikTok or Instagram Reels is an American phenomenon. I get it: it's easy to paint that stereotype upon us. A nation so addicted to food (we are fat) would then easily be inclined towards addiction to TikTok. Fill every void in your day with an endless scroll, with quick dopamine hits one after another. Congratulations, we've officially solved the problem of boredom! So long as you have the money for a smartphone (public libraries offer free Internet), you'll never have to deal with the demons in your mind ever again.

Well, it's not just Americans with this zombie dopamine drip-drip going on. The fine citizens of Guangzhou (China) and Seoul (South Korea) are also seemingly obsessed with the short-form never ending loop. The subway trains are full of passengers staring at their phones, glued to latest video served up by the algorithm. You know you have a safe society when people can stay utterly enmeshed to their devices on public transport, without any fear of it getting stolen. You would be crazy to do the same here in the States. I've unfortunately have seen my share of phone snatching. Pro tip: at least don't be near the doors if you're doing to be staring at your phone.

I completely understand the allure of short-form videos. It's just another thing of social media created to keep us mindlessly occupied. I don't pretend to be a superior breed simply because I don't partake in TikTok or YouTube Shorts. There's no illusions here that browsing Reddit or going on X isn't the very same thing. We're all seeking novelty and excitement to placate the void when we are in between tasks. Heck, sometimes we even multitask. Taking a dump at the toilet has forever changed since the invention of the smartphone.

Here's a challenge: next time you poop, stare at nothing.

And this might not even be a problem that needs solving. Addictive qualities do not always create harm. Otherwise you would have to kill me to pry my morning coffee away. Social media is part of the fabric of modern life. Get over it. The genie is much too fat to go back into the bottle. Just because you're able to go an entire plane ride without looking or listening to anything doesn't make you some modern monk worthy of praise. If anything, you might be the weird nail that's sticking out, begging to be hammered.