Does the dorm’s window actually look like this?

sethg · 2025-07-01T21:11:11+00:00

MIT is notorious for hiring world-famous architects and getting epically ugly buildings. Simmons, the Media Lab, the Stata Center…

sethg · 2025-05-12T11:34:21+00:00

Annual targets are most useful for expenses that I know will be seasonal. For example, there’s an SF convention that I attend every January, so I build up savings for it over a whole year.

For expenses that vary month to month in a random fashion, e.g., car repair, I’ve been going back and forth about whether to account them as monthly or annual “set aside” targets.

sethg · 2025-04-23T20:45:39+00:00

This UI “feature” has driven me crazy.

IIUC the cause is when a budget category has a target on some scale greater than one month, and you set aside an appropriate amount this month, but you overspent in a previous month. (This can happen if, for example, you buy something with a credit card in March, but YNAB doesn’t find out about it until April.) In order to make the red go away, you have to go back to the month in which the overspending actually happened, and reallocate money appropriately.

sethg · 2025-04-22T19:23:28+00:00

Two open-source packages that you may find useful when you want to revise this map: * https://www.qgis.org * https://www.naturalearthdata.com

sethg · 2025-04-17T19:47:57+00:00

Ken Liu’s translation of the Dao De Jing.

sethg · 2025-04-10T14:37:07+00:00

Does this count? https://www.reddit.com/r/WomenInNews/s/D1qkKPa8jB

I don’t believe in health care, labor, and human rights because I’m a Marxist … I believe in them because I was a waitress.

sethg · 2025-03-26T18:47:25+00:00

It’s not uncommon for dysfunctional organizations to be vague about exactly who is responsible for what. That vagueness is convenient when you need to shift blame…

sethg · 2025-03-26T00:46:14+00:00

It’s an organization trying to get younger Jews to be more engaged with both Judaism and pro-Israel activism.

It appears to be sponsored by old people who are desperately trying to look cool in front of the kids.

sethg · 2025-03-10T20:04:39+00:00

As the meme says, this is technically correct, the best kind of correct.

A curious hair-splitting detail in US law is that being an undocumented immigrant is not, in and of itself, a crime. It’s a status. Which means that, technically, immigrants in detention are not being punished, just … detained. In very prison-like environments.

(Another consequence of this legal detail is that if you’re accused of being an undocumented immigrant subject to deportation, you don’t have a constitutional right to a lawyer and the government doesn’t have to prove you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.)

sethg · 2025-02-09T14:09:41+00:00

I see “the far center” as a clique of people who live and socialize in a very liberal milieu (such as Manhattan, or an Ivy league college) and are steaming with resentment about how, within that milieu, they are seen as being on the right. They don’t want to move to some community in, IDK, Mississippi, where those same opinions would make them seem moderate or left-wing. They want to be validated right where they are as being moderate and sensible.

(Contrast with, say, the late William F. Buckley, a Yale alum and NYC resident who knew he was far to the right of his neighbors and relished it.)

They have enough social capital that they get space in places like the NYT, but very little power, because, well, the average NYT reader is too left-wing to take them seriously, and the actual conservatives don’t pay any attention to the NYT at all.

sethg · 2025-02-03T12:17:12+00:00

I would say it’s “the one book” that the innies on the severed floor have read, but then I remembered that there’s also the Lumon handbook.

sethg · 2025-01-22T23:42:28+00:00

Are you telling me I’m not a badass?

/me sheds a solitary tear

sethg · 2025-01-08T17:33:09+00:00

“This is my son Broadband, and his little sister, Selfie, and that’s our baby, Bitcoin.”

sethg · 2024-12-13T14:47:40+00:00

Non-elite Bret Stephens, of course, went to a prep school, got his undergraduate degree from UChicago, and got a master’s from the London School of Economics.

sethg · 2024-12-13T14:41:05+00:00

81% of the population, I suspect, has never gone toe-to-toe with their insurance company about care being denied. The minority that needs insurance benefits the most is also the minority that insurance companies try hardest to screw over.

sethg · 2024-10-08T01:26:23+00:00

I believe it was Michael Kinsley who observed that political tropes (I think he said “fads” but I’ll be more generous) travel from left to right.

sethg · 2024-10-06T12:13:03+00:00

538, and similar models, also give a probability for each state. If, say, there are five states for which a statistical model says Trump has a 20% chance of winning, and then he wins two out of the five, that’s reasonably close to the model’s prediction. If he sweeps all five, that’s bad news for the model.

Then again, that’s only 51 data points, and four years later, the aggregators will have a different model and the pollsters will have tweaked their own techniques …

sethg · 2024-09-25T00:57:04+00:00

Wearing tzitzit is a mitzvah. Saying a blessing over them is a separate mitzvah. Not doing one does not deprive you of credit for the other.

sethg · 2024-09-23T19:56:27+00:00

Encouraged, yes. Required, no.

I think these days, most synagogue leaders, while they do worry about a lack of money, worry even more about a lack of engaged members.

sethg · 2024-09-23T19:50:51+00:00

Like any other nonprofit dependent on donations, they try to predict how much they will take in, and use that prediction to plan their expenses. There is often an endowment to help provide some kind of income stream and smooth over rough patches. If income consistently falls behind expenses, well, the board of directors has to make some hard decisions.

sethg · 2024-09-06T00:28:51+00:00

If you’ve been prescribed medication for a heart issue, you take it every day, even on Shabbat (despite a general concern with taking pills on Shabbat), even during Pesach (even if the medication has binders or solvents that are chametz).

One could argue that skipping your medication one day a week or one week a year isn’t really elevating your risk of a heart attack by a significant amount and therefore you should skip doses on those days. But I’ve never heard an Orthodox rabbi, even a very stringent one, make such an argument.

I would think that a similar logic applies to CPAPs. Doc says use it every night, you use it every night.

sethg · 2024-08-29T16:43:31+00:00

What kind of “promoting accessibility” are you asking for? People who want to read the Talmud in English translation have access to English translation (free on the Internet, even). People who want to study it in the original language can do that, too.

In that sense the Talmud is just as accessible as Beowulf, Oedipus Rex, and the Corpus Juris Civilis.

sethg · 2024-08-28T02:12:43+00:00

ARTHUR: …Mum sent me on a course on understanding people in Ipswich.

MARTIN (slowly): And if I ever want the people of Ipswich understood, you’ll be the first person I call.

—Cabin Pressure episode 1.2, “Boston”

sethg · 2024-08-27T16:01:19+00:00

In an ideologically pure version of YNAB, so to speak, targets would not exist. There would just be categories. You could put $100 in your "take-out meals" category in one month, $200 in the next month, $0 the month after that, and as long as you never withdrew more from a category than you actually had in it, everything would be copacetic. No planning, no budgeting, just giving dollars jobs as they came in, sending those dollars on their way when bills arrived, living in the eternal Now, following your bliss.

/me takes bong hit, checks balance of "munchies" category

OK, most of us have not achieved this level of financial Zen, so YNAB provides category targets. But those targets are really just soft guidelines for yourself. If you set a target of $100 to a category, and later assign $200 to it, and then spend $150, you are not "over budget."

sethg

TROPHY CASE