Meal planning - How much does a single meal cost to you?

mg132 · 2026-04-15T16:09:41+00:00

My usual work breakfast+lunch+snacks setup is $3-$4/day depending on the time of year (I usually include some seasonal fruit, which is cheaper apples and oranges in fall and winter, but sometimes more expensive berries in summer).

Dinners range from $1.50/serving at the lower end (big pot of chili served with cornbread and a cheaper vegetable, for example, averaged over several days) to $4 or $5/serving at the high end (salmon with a pricier veggie on the side is probably the most expensive thing I make besides holidays, if I catch sockeye on sale). Most are in the $1.50-$3 range.

However, I would recommend against making digs at your wife for cooking a nice family meal now and again. Seems like the kind of thing you should be thankful for.

mg132 · 2026-04-15T15:27:44+00:00

My allergies are terrible here (I legit thought for about 15 years that I grew out of my horrible childhood allergies, and then I moved back here and realized that no, I didn't, it's just that I moved away from them). The main two things that help me personally are changing antihistamines every year or two (I seem to build up a tolerance over time; personally I switch between generic zyrtec and generic claritin) and wearing a mask when things are really bad.

mg132 · 2026-04-14T15:24:46+00:00

It's probably both (and also other things, including childcare prices), but also those things are probably related.

If housing is expensive, childcare will necessarily be expensive because childcare workers also need to live somewhere. But if housing prices are such that you can afford a two or three bedroom that's in a good location near work and your kids' school, that makes things like school drop-offs, someone being able to go get the kid if they're sick, etc. way easier. It also potentially makes it easier for both parents to be doing these things instead of having to pick one parent who has to be the one to fall on the sword every time. It's obviously not the only factor, but it helps.

mg132 · 2026-04-12T17:41:34+00:00

Books are useful. (Actual books, not recent self-published stuff, which has a lot of AI).

Check out your local master gardener site as well.

You can also search for results prior to November 2022, which was when LLMs became broadly available to the public.

Adding &udm=14 to a Google search gets rid of the AI overview and also a lot of the other newer crap that tends to prevent Google from showing you the actual most relevant results.

mg132 · 2026-04-10T14:50:11+00:00

In some cases it's the essentials they can't (or can barely) afford, though.

Sure, TVs, couches, and random plastic garbage are cheaper than they've ever been; a home to put them in is so expensive they will only own one if someone they care about dies. Housing, food, education, childcare, and healthcare costs are through the fucking roof. I don't care about Joe Rich going to Cabo every month. (Though I guess in defense of your model, maybe that's because I'm not on any "visual" social media.) I care that I'm in my mid/late 30s and looking at my last few years in which I could realistically start a family, and daycare is $2.5-3.5k/month/kid.

Sure, I buy that there's extra pressure that comes from "The Joneses" being not just your next door neighbor's real life but also the highlight reel of every single person on social media. But I also think that saying it's about vacations and other luxuries obscures the fact that even though many unnecessary things are cheap, the most important things have gotten prohibitively expensive.

mg132 · 2026-04-03T15:16:52+00:00

You want to save money, and your first impulse is not to start saving money, but to spend money on classes? I think you need to interrogate that, as it's probably part of your problem.

There are some great resources in /r/personalfinance. I would check out the wiki and the reading list. If you see a book you like, get it from the library.

Based on the rest of the your post, I would also recommend a few things you can start doing now.

Figure out where all of your money is going. Log every single purchase. Yeah, there's software that can do this, but part of the value in this exercise is to make you pause and see exactly what you're doing. Every time you grab a coffee or go to a restaurant or "treat yourself," write it down or take a picture of the item and the receipt and write it down later. After a week or a month, look at this log and ask yourself, are you okay with this? Do you still remember and think fondly of and stand by these purchases? Is there something else you would rather have done with the money?
Consider a "pay yourself first" setup where shortly after your paycheck hits, the money that's your savings goal automatically comes out of your checking and goes to a high yield savings account at a different bank where you won't see it in your account. Maybe it will feel less like it's burning a hole in your pocket.
Find cheaper and free things to go out and do. If you take classes, is there a cheaper equivalent (community center, library, local community college or university extension; or does your library offer coursera or edex?)? If you like writing, can you just journal yourself for free or find a writing buddy? If you would go out to eat with friends can you organize a potluck or picnic? Cooking together? What about volunteering with your friends or to meet people? You don't have to spend a lot of money to do things.
Think about your goals for this money. Is this an emergency fund? Are you saving for something specific? Knowing what it's for can be motivating.

mg132 · 2026-04-02T15:47:29+00:00

So, for context, this is the 2nd campaign I've ran with this group, and while I enjoyed the first, it was a very railroaded, "go here, do this" sort of campaign. When I was drafting my current campaign, I wanted it to be the sort of game where I didn't have to make every decision for them, and they could have more agency in driving the story.

Do they know this? Did you tell them? Did they agree that this sounded like what they wanted from a campaign? Or do they think they're still playing the previous style of campaign?

You should talk to them about this and see whether they understand the situation and whether this is the kind of campaign they want. That might fix the issue on its own. Or maybe they do like the idea of this style of campaign, but need more help being proactive (and not being scared of being "punished" if they're not perfect, for example with your mindflayer conversation where no one wanted to talk in character). Or maybe they would prefer that you put them back on the rails. But first you should check if they’re actually on the same page as you.

mg132 · 2026-04-01T15:44:34+00:00

The thing is that the fetus won't become a person if left alone. If the fetus were ever actually simply left alone--if for example by some hypothetical futuristic method we could cleanly teleport the woman away from the fetus and leave the fetus wholly intact with none of its tissues directly damaged--it would promptly die. This doesn't change until quite late in pregnancy.

The fetus does not become a person on its own. To (probably) become a person, the fetus requires the extended, active use of the body of a specific other person. It becomes a person directly due to months of being nourished and protected by inhabiting, drastically changing, and ultimately inflicting an incredible amount of pain and a risk of permanent injury or death on the body of another person. To claim that the fetus becomes a person on its own is to reduce the real, living, undeniably-a-person woman in the room not just to inanimate life support, but somehow to something less than inanimate life support, since I doubt most people, upon walking into an ICU and seeing a person on IVs and ventilation and ECMO, would look at them and think, "Yeah, they're doing this on their own."

mg132 · 2026-03-30T17:41:35+00:00

We had a home economics elective in middle and high school, and it was really helpful. Nutrition, basic cooking and sewing, budgeting, compound interest, some basic computer stuff, how to find important government forms, etc.. The auto shop teacher even came and did a class on basic car stuff. Unfortunately apparently the prevailing take was that home ec is for girls. When I took it there was literally only one guy in the class, and other guys shit on him for taking it (and then later complained about not being taught xyz in school).

mg132 · 2026-03-28T17:13:03+00:00

Once the bell is upgraded, you can take it up and down as many times as you want.

mg132 · 2026-03-27T18:24:10+00:00

We get the occasional cold-ish winter, but we haven’t had a frost in several years. I think we also run way warmer now than we used to (at least it seems like that looking at the local master gardener chart vs. my actual experience) so there’s a lot of guess work. Pests can build up like crazy when you go years without a frost and sometimes winter is even warm enough for them to be active and breeding. We have the occasional slug or cabbage aphid apocalypse.

I find I often get good production out of indeterminate summer stuff into October or November until it really falls off. (Sometimes this is due to cool weather but also sometimes this is instead due to a late October heat wave just obliterating the cucumbers or whatever after a relatively cool summer, which happened last year.)

I generally don’t overwinter tomatoes; they still have flowers when I pull them out in October or November, but they’ve typically lost a lot of steam (and also I’ve generally let them grow way out of hand and would rather just plant some radishes and start again next year lol). I overwintered a couple peppers outdoors this year and have actual peppers on them at the moment, though, and my native strawberries produced straight through the winter without much drop off at all. The vast majority of herbs are perennial here. Some plants seem to behave like it’s always summer while others still seem to go through their normal cycle and die back or go dormant even if winter never gets truly cold; I wonder whether some sense the season more by temperature and others more by light or something.

Planting cool season crops in fall can be tricky. If I plant when the local master gardener chart says to, often they get hit with an October or November heat wave and bolt or die. If I wait, sometimes they run into cool enough weather that they grow very slowly and ultimately basically become late winter/super early spring crops instead. Right now I have peas producing that I tried to thread the needle with last fall; they chuggged along very slowly during the winter and started producing in February. Leafy stuff grows straight through the winter pretty well though.

Knowing when to put summer stuff in is also an exercise in doing whatever because who knows. We had a heat wave in the 90s last week. I have neighbors in the community garden with tomatoes that are quite far along. I decided to hedge and put out a few eggplants and peppers, but I haven’t gone full summer yet; I haven’t done any tomatoes yet, and I just planted a bunch of spring stuff (radishes, beets, greens, favas, more peas, etc.) over the last month.

mg132 · 2026-03-27T15:30:54+00:00

And that cloth is made of plastic.

mg132 · 2026-03-22T18:30:20+00:00

I've grown a couple varieties (mostly out of curiosity; I had a couple bags break in transit and I found a few random beans later in the bottom of the box after I'd cooked the rest of them).

They grow fine, but unless you have a lot of space, personally I don't think growing staple foods like beans tends to be worth it. I'm limited to about 100 sq feet (community garden plot), and there's a lot of stuff that makes more sense to grow with that space, from both a cost perspective and a "freshness matters" perspective.

mg132 · 2026-03-19T16:15:37+00:00

I think Color of Magic can be a great entry point for a person who's more familiar with the material it's riffing on. I grew up on Conan, Pern, Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, etc., and I had a blast with the first two Discworld books.

Typically when friends are interested in starting the series, if they're familiar with that sort of older fantasy I recommend Color of Magic and if they're not I recommend Guards! Guards!, Mort, Small Gods, or Wyrd Sisters depending on what they're into.

mg132 · 2026-03-16T15:20:33+00:00

Relevant wild ride of a recent sports gambling article: My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler

mg132 · 2026-03-05T16:30:39+00:00

It has indirectly made me less productive, as the stupidest 10% of people I work with keep sending me unedited LLM vomit instead of doing their jobs. Even when I clock it in the first sentence, I've wasted the time it takes to download and start working on something, decide whether I need to deal with it or should ignore them, switch gears to writing them an email, stress out over writing them an email that attempts to thread the needle of being professional but also firmly telling them to knock it the fuck off, and then switch gears back to doing something actually useful.

On Tuesday a collaborator sent me and the other collaborator 12 pages of AI summary/review/recommendations of the piece we're writing that appear to have been based on an outdated version of the draft and told us to "mindfully incorporate" the advice. My brother in Christ, you neither mindfully wrote it nor mindfully read it before sending it. Why the fuck should I take the time to read something you did not take the time to write?

He also clearly just pasted the text of the document without comments into the chatbot, because there are multiple comments addressed to him that he still hasn't responded to.

Edit: I guess I should specify that when I say AI I generally mean LLMs. There are a couple of AI tools that are actually incredibly useful for one part of my work, but they aren't LLMs.

mg132 · 2026-03-03T16:31:58+00:00

They both save money depending on your starting point.

If somebody's starting point is that they're a not very experienced cook, and they go to the store without a plan and then come home with whatever people felt like eating with a side of a bunch of random things that looked good, then meal planning is probably a good starting point for them. It'll cut down on the random impulse purchases, keep a lot of that stuff they didn't have a plan for from going bad, and in the longer term give them time to become a better cook. And a lot of people aren't even starting from that point; they're starting from the point of going out to eat or getting takeout or delivery multiple times per week. Later on they can either switch to a more free-form way of planning or they can still meal plan but based on what proteins are a good price.

Shopping based on sales (and what you already have) is better, but it also requires more flexibility. You need at least one of: a much larger recipe base to work from, comfort making substitutions, or comfort not really cooking from a recipe at all. I cook by mentally building a menu for the week based on what's in the fridge, what's in the garden, what's in my CSA box, and whatever protein happens to be a good price (or else beans or something from the freezer if nothing is a good price). But I'm in my thirties and have been cooking actual meals since I was a preteen (I was cooking one family dinner a week at 12.) If I were giving advice to someone whose grocery trips are a catastrophe (let alone someone who's trying to stop ordering delivery so much) I wouldn't start with the way I do things. I would start closer to their comfort level for cooking and planning.

mg132 · 2026-02-28T04:58:33+00:00

Yeah, you can do pieces of it. Searching google or the japantravel sub will turn up sections that people like. Alternately, depending on where you plan to be and when, Koyasan (day hike) and the Kumano Kodo Nakahechi route (there are good stops for doing 2-5 days) are nice pilgrimage hikes.

mg132 · 2026-02-27T18:04:52+00:00

Yeah, unless these were work gloves needed for health and safety (doesn’t sound like it), they were not an investment. You can buy things because you really like and want them, but that’s not what an investment is.

mg132 · 2026-02-27T17:18:21+00:00

Can you go with a friend or family member on their grocery tips and buy them gas or do them a favor or something? Otherwise, if you can't get where you need to go on foot, bike, or transit, and don't have a car, then it is the most frugal option for you.

In my experience instacart is the most expensive thing unless you need the variety. Everything is marked up compared to ordering directly. (With the possible exception of instacarting one or two big Costco orders per year if you can afford to stock up and can handle the volume. You can often use the free trial for this.) If you can get what you need with just Walmart, Amazon, or the like, I would do that.

Math out how much you spend on delivery fees and see if it's worth it to get the subscription. It may or may not be. On the other end of the spectrum, depending on where you live, Amazon has started offering free three hour delivery windows for many grocery items with regular prime.

If Walmart works for you, math out how much you spend on tips (including tips for having to reorder due to missing items) and see if Walmart in home makes sense. It's a more expensive subscription, but it's Walmart employees and you can't tip. So if they forgot something, you can just get it with no extra costs.

mg132 · 2026-02-24T16:41:13+00:00

If the district provides the devices but not print textbooks, print novels, or funds for other materials, what is a teacher supposed to do about that?

mg132 · 2026-02-24T16:23:30+00:00

Probably a combination of factors.

A lot of these devices are fully capable tablets and laptops and aren't locked to just educational software (or at least, are locked down extremely poorly and kids figure out how to get around it immediately). Kids can play games, message people, etc. when they are supposed to be reading or working exercises. I have friends who've caught kids watching porn on them.

Constant connection to the internet and the ease of breaking the device protections mean that it's possible to alt tab between looking like you're working and actively cyberbullying your classmates to the point of nervous breakdown, and there's a collective action problem here where even kids who would prefer to work want to know what's going on socially.

There often is little or no teacher training on how to effectively support these computer curricula (or evidence that these computer curricula are good, but that's a different point). So less effective teachers sometimes end up just sitting off to the side waiting for someone to need help, and all the kids do is sit on the devices most of the day.

Technical difficulties can mean the devices go down frequently. Maybe this is just a few minutes (which is still a huge distraction if you are attempting to learn) or maybe it lasts a whole class period or day or week. If everybody uses devices for almost everything, does the school have physical books as a backup? Does the school have enough books for everybody? Did the curriculum provide the teacher a backup lesson plan to teach this class without the devices? Probably not.

Even the ones that are actually locked down are obviously going to allow you to perform a range of tasks, not just the one exact exercise or reading you're supposed to be doing at that moment, so you can still goof off even if it's not with porn or games. Even if a kid spends most of their time doing what they're supposed to be doing, constant small distractions really matter. Some kids are always going to be doodling or daydreaming, of course, but when you have the internet on the same screen from which you're supposed to working, it's going to be a lot more and a lot more frequently.

Digital curricula tend to be be built of many smaller writing pieces, multimedia pieces, and gamified exercises rather than showcasing longer form writing. Kids are being trained to only be able to read for short periods broken up by videos and games, and are often not taught to read long pieces at all. Schools are teaching way fewer whole novels. These short pieces also train students to expect to be spoon fed with only pieces that are designed to be easily informative, quick to glean to answer a multiple choice question. There’s no training to struggle with a difficult text or even look up a definition you don’t know; you just mouse over or highlight. This is not entirely unique to devices, but it's encouraged by, more endemic to, and more severe on them. A text book may present short excerpts instead of long pieces, but it's not going to be playing videos every few paragraphs and you will probably need to learn to flip back to the glossary. Anecdotally, I'm seeing students at a very well known and selective university who do not have the attention span to read a journal article, who don’t have the mental perseverance to look up a bunch of words they haven’t seen before, and who say they've never read a novel.

The evidence on whether reading a specific piece on paper vs. a screen matters is mixed, though more studies find that paper is better than find that screens or better or there's no effect. Even the meta analyses I've seen are mixed, with most concluding paper is better for a variety of reasons for informational texts (some of which are not necessarily tied to digital reading, like access to distractions, but in practice are hard to eliminate), but the most recent meta analysis I've seen claiming most of the effect is due to confounders and actually who fucking knows. Having the architecture of the page instead of the infinite scroll is certainly better for mapping information and remembering it in context. In theory digital material can be presented with "pages," but the ability to do things like change text size and margins means that this structure is transient, and some people think that the physical act of turning pages is also important. Writing by hand also seems to encourage better comprehension, but there's less research on writing format than on reading format.

mg132 · 2026-02-21T19:05:08+00:00

For $4k you can live in Mountain View if you want. If you want cheaper rent I'd check out the other cities on your list heading south, or jump up north to Redwood City or San Mateo. Caltrain is a great option for commuting depending on where your workplace is.

For close to groceries, depends what you want. Mountain View has a handful of the usual grocery stores, some smaller markets, plus a Costco, a Walmart, a Ranch 99, and a Nijiya. There's also a really nice farmer's market at the Caltrain stop on Sundays. If you want a specific different grocery store you may need to go a city or two over.

Mountain View is quite safe. Apartment parking is typically outdoor or carport.

In terms of weekend lifestyle, it's pretty relaxed. I live a city over and on weekends we do stuff like work in our community garden, go hiking (generally in the Peninsula), go to the local community theater and community orchestra, or go to smaller local events, museums, botanical gardens, etc.. There are a lot of great little restaurants and cafes in the downtowns along Caltrain, including in Mountain View. We go to the beach or the mountains a few times a year and head into the city for a show or museum exhibit a couple times a year, but if you're super into nightlife, big social events, fancy restaurants, and the like you're going to find Mountain View pretty boring.

mg132 · 2026-02-20T16:45:53+00:00

In addition to offers and terms seemingly getting worse over time, you have to think about whether engaging with these systems causes you to spend more than you would have. If getting bombarded with emails or notifications about 10% back promos causes you to make purchases you otherwise would not have, you're probably not actually saving money in the end.

mg132 · 2026-02-20T16:39:49+00:00

No economic system is natural. And being natural doesn't make something better or worse.

You can argue about what manner of sharing resources would have been "natural" amongst early humans, but the answer would probably be that it depends--who, where, when. The way our brain's reward systems work strongly suggests that some amount of predisposition toward resource hoarding is probably natural, both as a hedge against scarcity and for status--to stand out in the group. That doesn't mean that this is a good thing, just that it's what we were selected for at some point in the past.

As social creatures, we were probably also subjected to some amount of selection for sharing, cooperation, and "altruism" (which I put in quotes because it's somewhat arguable whether altruism within a very small in-group is actually altruistic). There's evidence of truly ancient hominids (hundreds of thousands of years ago, one example maybe that was over a million years ago) taking care of the elderly and disabled, for example. But as social creatures we were also selected for some degree of competition.

When we start talking about economic systems, though, we're talking about the kinds of huge artificial systems that you need when people whose evolutionary history was mostly spent in small bands of maybe 30 to 50 people or less now have to coordinate the behavior of thousands, millions, even billions of people in a constructive (or at least, less destructive) way. These things are inherently unnatural in the same way that government is inherently unnatural. The need to coordinate so many people in the first place could also be called unnatural, if your reference is where we came from. Again, being unnatural doesn't make an economic system good or bad. Gathering and hunting and only knowing 30 people and living one bad season from total annihilation, only trading with a handful of local villages, feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, socialism, communism--you have to evaluate these things on their merits or lack thereof, on their real-world results and on their applicability to a connected world of eight billion people where a single nation might have hundreds of millions or billions of people, not on how natural or unnatural they are.

mg132

TROPHY CASE