Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Debit reimagined

I have been thinking about the concept of debit and seeing it in different ways.

The idea of technical debit has crossed my radar a couple of times recently and I have started looking for other types of debit around my life.

Sleep debit.  (Not getting 'enough' sleep in a night supposedly accrues a 'debit' of unpaid sleep.)
Time debit. (Owing time to something/someone or borrowing time from one project or job and putting it into another)

Mess debit. (Not cleaning up and letting stuff pile up without putting it away/back where it goes.)

Ok, so that's all pretty obvious; but for me it expands the abstract idea and allows me to see how the improved abstraction relates to other concepts that I work with.

If you follow this abstraction, making a mess at home and not cleaning it up incurs a debit.  While cleaning up returns you to equilibrium.  So what fits into the 'investment' ( moves you into positive space above equilibrium) in terms of home? 

Improving storage space? Having cleaning supplies more accessible?  Reducing the amount of stuff?  Some of these are risk mitigation or risk increase activities.

This helps me to improve my economic model.  I currently see it as the value dimension ( value credit and value debit being on either side of the equilibrium) with a second dimension being risk. ( increase risk and mitigate risk being on either side of equilibrium)  It's easy to map this onto a 2dimensional Cartesian space with risk and value on th X and Y axises. If you are bored, you can map time on to the third axis and have a whole modellling party.

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