[travel] Naxos

Naxos, another one of the Greek islands, is far less touristy than Santorini.  However, it has some lovely mountains, well-preserved traditional towns, and caves to explore.  It also has the feeling of being an authentic Greek island.  Lonely Planet points out Naxos is probably the only economically self-sufficient island in the Cyclades. 

Here's what it looks like:

Coming in:



National Geographic, ancient Roman style:



Old village:



Some lush town/landscapes:

 

 
( And a whole lot more... )

[travel] Jockeying for position

Taxi touts waiting to pounce on an arriving passenger ferry.  Note the much cheaper public bus waiting in back.

Taken by me in Rafini, Greece

[travel] Holy Meteora

Thanks to the advice of a man I met on the bus in rural Thailand a couple of months ago, I checked out Meteora, Greece. Meteora is cluster of monasteries perched atop some extremely steep sandstone pillars. The monasteries meet just about all the aesthetic criteria I mentioned earlier with regard to what makes a beautiful city, with serious overachievement on the natural beauty criterion. It's the sort of thing that would spring out of the mind of Tolkien or a writer of romantic fairy tales.

Monks, seeking a quiet place to meditate free of worldly distractions, built stone buildings in places that no invaders or nosy townspeople could reach. 

Celibacy was enforced by gravity. 





One of the few rocks without a monastery on top:



( Much more behind the cut... )

[personaldev] Teaching myself to intuitively ignore sunk costs

Rationally speaking, most people (myself included) know they should ignore sunk costs, but it's hard to actually implement this philosophy day-to-day. I think the problem is that most people's money philosophy is more intuitive than rational... when we think about a purchase decision, we usually get a gut feeling about it and act based on it. As a result, despite thinking repeatedly “this is a sunk cost, I should ignore it”, I still have a strong impulse to retroactively justify a purchase by making use of it.   I want to integrate the idea of sunk costs into my intuitive money philosophy.

A few years back I noticed that I had a problem with stinginess toward purchases for myself, wherein I would waste my own time or put myself in discomfort to save a few bucks. I mostly cured myself of that intuitive urge by deliberately forcing myself to buy nicer items than I would normally get when I knew I could afford them. Doing this for a while got me to devalue money relative to what I gain from spending it, which is the intuitive cost-benefit tradeoff that goes through my head every time I think about buying something.* This effort has been particularly successful with regard to food – since my food is used to make more me, it's worth paying for the good stuff. Ditto for preventative care.

So how can I apply this to learning to intuitively ignore sunk costs?  Based on my prior experience, it seems that making a large number of decisions under the new rules in a short time span is what changes the intuition. However, simply buying a bunch of things I don't need and then not using them seems like a rather silly and ineffective approach. I think the solution is to look at things I've bought as options rather than obligations.** I can fortunately practice that mode of thinking all the time and thus hopefully change the habit more quickly.

*On a side note, I still have trouble spending money on things that I know are complete rip-offs, even if they still satisfy the cost-benefit tradeoff. This has been made abundantly clear by my interactions with third-world cab drivers. If someone is trying to charge me 5x the going rate for a ridefor a cab ride, I will tell him to shove it even if there are no other cabs nearby and the actual amount we're talking about is just a couple of dollars. It's more of an ethical decision – I don't want to reinforce that sort of behavior.

**I've recently noticed that very financially well-off people I know tend to think this way.