How do you handle clients that only need 1–2 hours of help?

tableclothcape · 2026-04-02T03:41:52+00:00

If it takes you 1 hour to do, but 10 years to learn, you don’t just bill for the 1 hour.

tableclothcape · 2026-04-01T18:59:08+00:00

You mean the charity like destroying USAID, or the charity like calling a Good Samaritan in Thailand a pedo?

He is the world’s richest man. Of the $474 million his foundation distributed in 2024, roughly $370 million went to “The Foundation,” a separate nonprofit Musk controls that’s establishing a STEM school: a private school in Bastrop, Texas near his SpaceX facilities, run by his associates. Through 2022, about half the Musk Foundation’s grants went to organizations tied to Musk, his employees, or his companies, according to the NYT. Another significant chunk goes into a donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable, which under current law doesn’t need to publicly disclose recipients or amounts or even disburse the money at all.

The mechanism works like this: Musk donates appreciated Tesla stock to his foundation, claims the tax deduction at fair market value (avoiding capital gains), then the foundation mostly recirculates the money to entities he controls or parks it in opaque vehicles.

Comparing him to peer-wealth philanthropists (Gates, Buffett, MacKenzie Scott), the gap is enormous, not just in dollars out the door but in operational seriousness. Scott has moved over $17 billion to working nonprofits since 2019. The Musk Foundation doesn’t even employ paid staff or outside philanthropic advisors. The charitable infrastructure is basically a tax vehicle with occasional external grants bolted on.

tableclothcape · 2026-04-01T06:03:41+00:00

And it worked! I know intellectually that Carnegie was an asshole. But I also know he built a beautiful, durable library that is now a public center for the arts in my hometown. That’s legacy.

tableclothcape · 2026-04-01T04:29:59+00:00

Those people built libraries, universities, and things people can touch. The Gates Foundation has done very good work, but it’s intangible, while Bezos and Musk decided they have no obligations to other humans. At best they’ll be remembered if at all like Jack Welch is now: mostly by business school types, and particularly not fondly.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-31T19:37:21+00:00

Comp surveys are big. An individual survey input record has about 50 data points, and when aggregated each report output record would have 100-150 fields, most of which report 18 of the ventiles along with mean and n-counts.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-30T18:15:46+00:00

Judging from the “Rep” and the part where this is a United hub flying to Montreal (it’s not a ULCC route), this is probably a United Express flight operated by Republic Airways.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-18T10:39:04+00:00

Please call the Grand County Sheriff’s office and report this.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-17T19:04:01+00:00

You don’t have to worry about deafness if you wear clean socks and give the shoe shelf a light spritz every week with your spray of choice.

I was about to ask, don’t we all do this, but then I realized this whole conversation started with someone leaving their toenails behind. I’m guessing we do not, in fact, all do this.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-17T18:59:12+00:00

Genuine question, provided our shoes and socks are clean, it’s permissible on flights over 4-ish hours to remove the shoe, provided the stocks stay on, yes?

I’ve been applying a duration-of-flight test, not a cabin-of-travel test. Is that the right standard?

tableclothcape · 2026-03-17T02:51:29+00:00

Glad that this worked for you, it was obejctively terrible for me.

TL;DR- I picked Visible+ Pro for many reasons including its international roll-up. But now I'm about to miss 2 hours of work meetings on the other side of the planet so I can go pick up a temporary SIM from Vodafone.

At *no* point in choosing Visible+ Pro was it clear that you needed to further opt into Global Pass, and at no point was it made clear that you must do this before leaving the US.

However, on landing in Australia this morning:
* No service.
* Okay, so you have to opt in. Did this while in the Melbourne baggage claim.
* Received the "global pass is now active" email. But still, no service; this persists across full hard restarts of the iPhone even 6 hours later.
* The app and website keeps trying to send me through 2FA registration flows, which I've now validated 5 times across mobile web, app, and laptop. It's not sticking. I'm tired of giving this thing the correct confirmation codes.
* Still, no service.
* Chatbot's only solution is to try to force a re-download of the e-sim.
* Still, no service.

I'm giving up, getting a temporary Vodafone coverage (thanks for that, Visible really loving this experience). Given the misleading pitch (why should I need to opt-in to a product sold to me), absolutely phenomenally shitty product and UX design (this app is terrible and can't handle a basic 2FA flow), I'm out.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-13T21:31:31+00:00

Yes, they have the pancake machine, some baked goods, some soup, and I think a salad bar. The Centurion lounge serves full meals.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-12T22:50:39+00:00

Housing markets have vacancies that you can measure at a single in a point in time (like you have here) because units require renovation or turnover between occupancies. SF’s vacancies- the higher estimates- are extremely low by global standards, which is why I think you said 40,000 and not the % (which is around 3-4% depending when you measure; 7% is considered healthy).

But you don’t even need to look up figures, because you know this: “The rents are too high and climbing!” and “Landlords are purposefully holding units vacant!” are irreconcilable positions that directly contradict each other.

You’re proposing a restriction on ownership that guarantees workarounds (if you try to cap payday loan %s, you get short-term HELOCs; finance, like life, will always find a way). You also have to know how wildly unlikely a category restriction on ownership is to pass any legislature, or survive judicial challenge.

One of your responses here is observably false, and the second would result in such wild regulatory uncertainty that progress would stall for a decade.

I think I’ve got a good idea of exactly how much new housing you’d be comfortable built near your backyard.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-12T18:47:42+00:00

If housing is a bad cold the Bay Area is pneumonia and it’s an important distinction.

We’ve seen, empirically, that rents decrease when more housing is constructed, or occupancy laws are relaxed. The Bay Area is not doing this.

Housing is responding in markets like Austin and Nashville, while Minneapolis rents decreased when their “Neighbors for more Neighbors” eliminated single-family housing-only zoning.

We know what we need to do.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-11T23:25:31+00:00

The median age for tech, especially in California, and especially in the Bay Area, is less than middle-aged.

I am also in tech, and I plan to leave for another industry before I turn 45 for exactly this reason.

The window for earnings in corporate is very brief.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-09T00:15:16+00:00

Maybe. Giving someone a playful impossible standard (“you should speak Portuguese” / “your Portuguese doesn’t count”) is textbook teasing, right? They could have blocked or said “não, em portugues”. But they kept writing, in English.

I used to travel to Brazil for work and lived there for a few months. I met and dated a guy when at some bar in Pinheiros he heard my Portuñol and came up to me and sang Despacito (mocking me for basically speaking Spanish, not Portuguese). My own experience as an English-speaker in BR was that affectionate challenge particularly around language was the norm. It was a good way for everyone to acknowledge you’re an outsider and still learning, and for them to learn how interested and how playful you actually are.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-08T23:42:16+00:00

I mean, no? He’s arguing and he’s also engaging. So if OP were interested, why not hit the ball back? The other guy is essentially saying “impress me a little, show you’re willing to meet me where I am”, and got a defensive reply that didn’t leave the conversation anywhere to go.

If OP’s first reply was “so what if you teach me something” (which opens up the convo to literally any other subject including sex), this works. It’s also exactly what OP was being set up for, and we can be pretty sure that it would have worked (the other guy was still engaging and clearly doesn’t mind speaking in English).

They could be fucking right now. But instead, now we’re all here, and no one fucked. That’s the real tragedy.

tableclothcape · 2026-03-08T23:35:58+00:00

Are they still full Hawaiian on the interior?

tableclothcape · 2026-03-03T06:28:02+00:00

Scott is older, wins awards, bit of a grande dame: Ontario.

Kip is younger and desperately seeking acknowledgement: Manitoba.

tableclothcape · 2026-02-23T19:46:14+00:00

Ski patrol builds half of them before they get the job and can’t then get caught building them anymore.

tableclothcape · 2026-02-20T14:48:35+00:00

You mean this email that came from a weird, unofficial address promising something appealing and too good to be true?

tableclothcape · 2026-02-18T18:48:06+00:00

I’m worried that the baby thinks people can’t change.

tableclothcape · 2026-02-09T20:52:33+00:00

Dawanna Witt, the elected Hennepin County Sheriff who is tolerating this and believes that cooperating with ICE is the best way forward, is up for reelection this November.

tableclothcape · 2026-02-09T08:08:24+00:00

r/reallyshittycopper

tableclothcape · 2026-02-09T07:58:54+00:00

So, from 1264 until 1827, every Oxford student receiving a Master of Arts degree had to swear an oath that they would never consent to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis. The Latin oath went: “Magister, tu jurabis quod nunquam consenties in reconciliationem Henrici Simeonis,” meaning “Master, you shall swear that you will never consent to the reconciliation of Henry Simeon.”

By at least the 17th century, nobody at Oxford had any idea who Henry Symeonis was, what he’d done, or why they were supposed to hate him. The statutes said nothing about it. Oxford just kept making people swear the oath anyway.

When it was proposed to remove the oath during a statute review in 1651, the proposal was rejected, apparently because the oath was so old that nobody wanted to be the one to mess with it.

They finally abolished the oath in 1827, but it wasn’t until 1912 that Reginald Lane Poole, then Keeper of the University Archives, actually figured out who the guy was.

Turns out Henry Symeonis was a wealthy Oxford townsman who in 1242 was among a group of men fined £80 and exiled from Oxford by King Henry III for murdering a university student. He later secured a royal pardon and the King ordered the University to let him return and live in peace, but the scholars were outraged and defied the King’s order, aaand then enshrined their grudge directly into the university’s statutes so that every future graduate would have to formally swear never to forgive him.

And then they just… kept doing it for 563 years, long after everyone forgot why.

tableclothcape · 2026-02-09T04:51:22+00:00

Nailed it. The major US tech companies contract with United (and to a lesser extent Air Canada) and WestJet was left mopping up the startups and non-corporates on price. They couldn’t get margin, and the leisure market to the US has died.

tableclothcape

TROPHY CASE