| ▲ | arjie 7 hours ago |
| A wife is a useful thing to have in this respect, not because they tend to profligacy, but because this kind of thing is much easier to detect and fix in someone close to you than in yourself. Both my wife and I have lived frugal lives at various times[0] and I feel much happier with the degree of spending we have now. I'm reminded of the intelligent corvids in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory where the sum of the two birds forms a being with intelligence in a way that the individual segments do not. The frugality is a deeply embedded piece of our being and undoing it seems hard, but together we financially operate in a place that leaves us both feeling comfortable. 0: In the US sense of the term, not in the sense of the term as known in Taiwan or India. |
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| ▲ | don-code 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| My experience has been that it's easy to say, "oh, it's just me", but much harder to subject someone you care about to the same standard that you would yourself. I'm in a similar position with the thermostat, even though something we initially bonded over was that we both kept our thermostats at a low temperature that was outside the window of being socially acceptable. |
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| ▲ | takinola 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | In the winter, I keep the thermostat at frigid temperatures when I am home alone and jack it up to warm just before any one else gets home. My thinking is that it is wasteful to warm up the entire house when it's just me since I can put on a sweater but I don't want to subject others to my, shall we say, quirks. I keep meaning to calculate how much I am actually saving by freezing my butt off. My guess is it'll work out to something like $0.75 a day or something equally trivial. | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Depending on the kind of heating system you have and the temperature differences you talk about it can be cheaper to heat the house to a constant temperature (because your heating can run more efficiently under lower load). |
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| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
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| ▲ | catcowcostume 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just a reminder that since a couple of centuries ago in most Western societies, wives are not "things" anymore, but rather human beings on the same level as husbands. |
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| ▲ | letmevoteplease 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This usage is fine. "A dependable friend is a rare thing to find." | |
| ▲ | kranner 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "... tend to profligacy" was really bothering me as well, until I figured OP probably meant "tend" as in 'take care of', and not 'inclined to have'. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's "incline", the subtext is: "Reader, you might start thinking of a certain common stereotype at this point, but don't do that, because my argument is very different, and that stereotype is irrelevant or possibly untrue." Compare to: "A pick-up truck is a useful thing to have, not because you are insecure about your genitalia, but because you can take home bigger products from IKEA." | | | |
| ▲ | letmevoteplease 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, "tend" means "incline" here, but the normal grammatical reading of the sentence does not suggest wives have profligate tendencies. | | |
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| ▲ | xnx 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| s/wife/spouse/ |
