I admit to cheerfully badmouthing Ramsey based entirely on him looking and sounding like someone I would hate to spent time with. That Suzy Ormond too, for the same reason.
They would probably both approve of my 401k, but that's not me being frugal. It's because I worked for a university that offered a 150% match instead of paying a reasonable salary.
They would approve of the generational wealth that I was born/married into. "It's a wise child that chooses their parents," as my grandfather used to dryly say.
That helped too, yes. But Pitt's 401k matching was great.
Anyway you can see the Calvinism seeping into everything. Like environmentalism, where some are focused on urging austerity among the poor as a fix for problems mostly caused by the richest.
I really think that it's subpar as a strategy.
One interesting thing that this comparison (analogy?!) brings to mind is that human psychology can really struggle with obsessing about numbers specifically. I recently found ways to hide seeing my number of unread work emails, and it's been a significant psychological improvement. You see advice about how to gauge weight without seeing a number (e.g. using a string, but not a tape measure, for waist measurements), and I could see that credit scores (as well as bank balance) could cause similar problems.
With money, weight, exercise, resting heart rate and recently with alcohol consumption, I have become an obsessive tracker of numbers in the way that I think Upetgi is critiquing here, and for me it has been hugely useful. I have, for instance, cut my alchohol consumption in half since I started tracking it last July.
I have a rather unfortunate competitive streak that nonetheless serves me well when I am competing against myself. I recently bought a blood pressure cuff, and I've just started tracking that, too. I betcha I can bring those numbers down.
I track my blood pressure because my doctor wants me to because it is high. It's up like 20/10 since the election.
You can lower your blood pressure by emptying your bladder.
Doctors are always very impressed with my blood pressure, like I'm somehow doing something about it.
"It's up like 20/10 since the election"
Two points seems like it's within measurement error.
My family has a history of high cholesterol, my mom and siblings are all on statins, every time the doctor checks my cholesterol it's high even after I lost a lot of weight. But every year the advice (maybe autogenerated by the EHR system) is "please eat healthier, less red meat, more vegetables fruits and whole grains." MFer I live with vegetarians, I eat red meat maybe once a month at a work event, give some goddamn Lipitor.
That's how constipation advice goes. It's so infuriating. YES I'VE CONSIDERED DRINKING MORE WATER AND EATING MORE FIBER. I come from a long line of stopped up pipes that are not going to respond to that kind of weenie advice!
My doctor used to tell me that I needed to eat less to lower my cholesterol. I asked if I should eat more fish, he said eating less was the key and what I ate was secondary. But I think he gave up.
I start most mornings with oatmeal (mixed with dried cranberries) and coffee. That way, I poop on the regular during working hours.
Literally, fruits/vegetables/oatmeal won't cut it for me. Large quantities of metamucil and magnesium will do it. I started taking it really seriously after my mom's bowel rupture due to being stopped up.
Also, my system freaks out if I do anything abnormal, like take a long car ride. It's really absurd.
Also remember the woman with the local politics blog (not in my town) who is being threatened by the local council to shut up? They followed through with a cease-and-desist letter for defamation.
Would a local light-rail system help?
Isn't there an ADHD/constipation link? I always imagine it as your gut isn't moving the poop along because that's boring and it's busy thinking about more fun things, but that's probably not exactly it.
My vague understanding from some IBS treatment that was suggested to me by a doctor, but which I haven't done, is that a lot of gut stuff is actually very amenable to 8-style gamification. You can train your muscles to move things along at a better rate if you could actually see what they're doing, but there's not good technology to see what your gut muscles are up to cheaply at home.
Before cell phones, people with ADHD had to poop infrequently because it's hard to take more than one book into the stall.
WHAT. That is wild. That's two ADHD weirdo things today - the other one is a funny way of sleeping with your hands. Jeez.
I don't consider myself that ADHD anymore. But as I was backing up my blog, I got to the last two years of graduate school, and jesus christ I was a mess. I would have strongly benefited from the conversations around today about treatment and strategies. It's all extremely textbook ADHD - can't find anything, utilities get turned off for non-payment, overwhelmed by executive functioning type things, etc etc.
It very possibly might have kept me on the research track, instead of flaking off for teaching. But on the other hand, I genuinely love teaching, so who cares.
Somewhat relevant to this thread, for the past couple months I've been trying to lose weight for the first time in my life. For three reasons: my lab results have started creeping into the low pre-diabetes range, I started playing frisbee again and felt slow (which was mostly being out of shape, but I think moving more weight also played a role), and I got interested in paying a bit more attention to clothes and it's much easier to find clothes that aren't too long on my short limbs if I could wear smalls instead of mediums. (Though I have since realized that buying women's clothes in boxy cuts is a great way to deal with the last one.) Of course since I literally have never thought about it before, that does mean there's a lot of extremely low-hanging fruit, so it's kind of easy mode, which I get is a privileged place to be. I don't have a scale or any easy way to access a scale, so in some sense I don't know how it's going (hence being aware of the stuff in 7, because "how do I know if I lost weight without using a scale" gets you to people who've had eating disorders), but there's been some success with clothes fitting better, and today I have frisbee again for the first time so we'll see how that goes. Won't see lab results until May though.
The liberals don't want you to know this, but the scales in the produce section work for people too.
That gave me a recovered memory of actual human scales, big green metal ones with the upright back part, just outside the grocery store under the awning. Was this actually a thing?
OMG!! It was specifically a Publix thing!
They're exactly as I remember! What an unbelievably satisfying turn of events.
Giant Eagle makes you climb inside the little metal bowl.
They don't allow living birds in the store.
Aren't all Eagles Giant? Like if a raptor is giant then you call it an Eagle.
Giant Eagle is like Mara Rooney in having a double-NFL name.
Dead giant eagles aren't much fun. They don't come when you call. They don't chase squirrels at all.
Speaking of squirrels. Something in our attic this week has started making noises that sound almost exactly like a smoke alarm low-battery chirp. It seems to starts around midnight. One single sharp chirp, then a long pause (20-60 seconds), then another chirp. I'd have thought maybe it was a smoke detector (the ones in the house recently got low on batteries, so if there's one in the attic it would be low too), but the spacing between chirps isn't regular, so I'm pretty sure it's an animal. I'd think baby bird, but it's a weird time of year for it. I was also thinking maybe a squirrel alarm call, but that doesn't seem to sound right. I'm really kinda baffled. Apparently there's frogs in Texas that would explain it, but I'm not in Texas, and again a weird time of year for frogs.
The main thing is that it got very cold and snowy here this week, which is maybe related in some way.
The real no-fooling most giant eagle was Haast's eagle in New Zealand, which fucking preyed on moa.
Basically the ekranoplan of eagles.
One of my favorite questions, that unfortunately we'll almost certainly never learn the answer to, is whether when the Maori showed up in New Zealand, the Haast's Eagles were like "huh, new giant bipeds, maybe I should try to eat one?"
35. I recently read that squirrels in California have developed a taste for meat and are hunting and eating small animals, so I wouldn't go up there, Upetgi. I'm pretty sure it's a trap.
Well, it was either that or fly them to Mordor.
Though I guess you could just drop the bipeds near Mt Doom for a little while until they get nice and crispy, and then pick them up again to eat.
The stories like 39 that I remember most vividly are pelicans eating pigeons and cows eating rabbits.
Speaking of pigeons, I forgot to mention that we'll have luggage when we go to Queens. Are a couple of suitcases going to make it hard on the subway (non-rush hour)?
What kind of suitcases? Accessibility in the subway is pretty terrible, you should assume that you'll need to carry whatever luggage you have up two flights of stairs.
Probably like a carry-on sized backpack each and maybe a laptop bag. Or maybe a rolling bag. A couple of flights of stairs aren't a problem, though.
What are you worried about then?
The only real rule is that dogs must be in a bag. Otherwise anything goes, you see furniture, standup basses, whatever.
Obligatory dog pics:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/PJJgE13Qwe
People with luggage get in the way on the bus. I guess the subway is wider.
Try to avoid rush hour.
Unless everyone in NYC could agree to be to work by 8:30 on Friday.
You'll just have to be bold. People will make space.
14: Crestor kicks Lipitor's butt and is is available as a generic.
I am told that diet-wise red beans are one of the best natural ways to lower cholesterol but it's not enough if you've got a serious family history like that. If it's truly terrible cholesterol, the big guns are the PCSK-9 inhibitors. The other "natural" way is red yeast rice extract, because it's a natural source of lovastatin. Not recommending that route at all.
That's what they want you to think.
My sister says I should ask for something besides Lisinopril, but I don't mind the occasional cough.
The luggage on the subway is no problem. It might be a little irritating for you to juggle if it's super crowded, but you won't be violating any norms (assuming you take the backpacks off rather than wearing them like crazy people).
Operation deal faster reasonably successful. Still old and out of shape, but at least I can sprint again when needed.
"Feel faster" autocorrect got me because I can't spell "feel." Still looks wrong.
||
Thanks to whoever it was here who menyioned Austral. Good plausibly depressing read.
|>
Not an animal. Basement smoke detector. Remains a mystery of electronics why it would only start beeping when we turned off the lights.
Maybe an animal lights up a cigarette when you turn off the light?
I feel like no airline would have a flight 666, but Amtrak just assumes you don't think of Satan while taking a train.
The stop was long enough to defeat a gym, but we moved before I could put a Pokémon on the gym.
I was not emotionally prepared for Eagles fans drinking at noon.
Someone has strong feelings about the NFC East as a whole.
Because of the train hole, you can't play Pokémon Go in Philadelphia during the 20 minute crew switch.
Out of train hole. I was last in Philadelphia in 2018 or so. Weird to see Pokestops that I've spun before.
I guess I didn't know where Trenton was. I was thinking that the "Trenton Makes, the World Takes" sign was when you go into New York, not when you leave Pennsylvania.
New Jersey has lots of dense housing near the rail line. Someone should congratulate them.
65: The real reason the Christian Right hates trains so much?
They like driving because the Bible mentions that the apostles were all in one Accord.
Speaking of cars, I was told they were gone from Manhattan, but there's a bunch of them.
You should have seen us two weeks ago.
72: my dad was born there, but I don't really know where it is, either. He didn't grow up there, though. (He grew up in White Plains. I don't really know where that is, either.)
One of those few extant pre-internet questions that you haven't quite taken a moment to check your pocket computer on in this crazy modern world.
On F train, standing next to a guy with a double bass. Not even joking.
This train is slower than it was supposed to be.
He took off the stand, put on a wheel and rolled away.
One time I was on the subway with a guy with a double bass who had a metronome in one of the case pockets that he'd somehow accidentally turned on. Took a few minutes to realize it had nothing to do with the train.
On smoke detectors: The low-battery circuit is pretty sensitive to temperature (since the battery's voltage is). So a cold snap is likely to make a marginal smoke detector battery go under the alerting threshold.
This plus diurnal temperature variation is also why they always seem to start making low-battery beeps at like 3am.
My wife once accidentally turned the house heating off instead of down and overnight the house getting down to 50F made one of the smoke detectors start chirping.
Yeah, that must be what's going on, which is why today it was still going in the morning while for the past couple days it was only at night (more dead now than it was before). But the weird thing is that the first night it started chirping, I finally got out of bed, turned on the lights, and got dressed to go see if it was a smoke detector in the attic and somehow that made it stop!? That made sense if it was an animal, but I can't figure out how getting dressed and turning on the light would have changed the temperature in the basement.
It's a wired smoke detector with battery backup, so I wonder if there's any possible way that you get a slight change in measurements based on electricity use in the rest of the house, so somehow turning on the lights made it stop?
The other confusing thing was that at first it really wasn't going off regularly at 20 seconds the way it was this morning, I think it must have been going in multiples of 20 because it was somewhat random each 20 seconds whether it still thought the battery was too low, but it sure didn't seem like it was regular enough.
There was a halal food cart selling corn dogs and that seems wrong to me. You can make s beef hotdog, but a proper corn dog needs something abominable in it.
"I feel like no airline would have a flight 666"
I assumed this, but no! BA666 is London Heathrow to Marrakech. Air China 666 is Copenhagen to Arvaikheer, Mongolia. Some other airlines have used 666 but for repositioning flights only, looks like.
I didn't think to check.
My son saw a rat at the 34th Street station. Should we call someone and report it?
Rodents aside, I'm starting to see why people doing tourist stiff go to Manhattan instead of Queens.
McDonnell -Douglas executives were ready to name the F-4 the "Satan" until they were talked out of it. Maybe airplane people just don't understand how close they are to damnation.
91: HEY! I'M WALKIN' HERE!
Nobody reads me anymore.
people doing tourist stiff go to Manhattan instead of Queens.
Yeah but if you want better place for food, its Queens.
91.2: Genuinely laughed out loud. I suppose you could call 311 and tell them about it.
I am wondering if the new universal compost pickup is going to help knock down the rat population some, by making the regular garbage less nutritious. One can hope.
96: Also, the Unisphere. And the Panorama in the Queens Museum of Science. In short, Queens is a world of wonders.
The Sanitation Commissioner was my roommate's coxswain in college, so I might be able to back-channel this emergency directly to the top.
The Sanitation Commissioner was my roommate's coxswain in college
Can you at least produce a New Yorker-worthy short story that begins with this line? It can get pretty wild. This is 2025.
She famously said: "The rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement. But the rats don't run this city, we do."
That's the spirit. Tell obvious lies to encourage people.
Why I know what a coxswain is: at the age of 9 or so, I had a teenage babysitter who was a rower, and all I wanted to do while she babysat me was talk to her about her sport until she put me to bed. It was the happiest I'd ever been with a babysitter. For some reason she never came back, possibly because my little sister was prank calling the CIA while we were talking for hours about rowing or something.
McDonnell -Douglas executives were ready to name the F-4 the "Satan" until they were talked out of it. Maybe airplane people just don't understand how close they are to damnation.
I think NATO gave the SS-8 the codename SATAN (all surface to surface missiles start with S: SCUD is the most famous of course) but that's a bit different.
McDonnell Douglas did have previous in the "weird occult names" area. Voodoo, Goblin, Banshee and Demon were theirs, and of course the F-4 ended up being the Phantom.
The Russian names for Russian hardware are just bizarre. Heavy self-propelled artillery or anti-aircraft missiles are called things like "Hyacinth" or "Beech Tree".
"Jason Bourne is at the Culver's."
And it will never not be funny that the British army had a tradition of giving its tanks names, and the US army (in 1941) didn't, so when the old Lend Lease started up and 500 very large metal things arrived in Liverpool in boxes labelled "MEDIUM TANK M3" the British thought to themselves "These are great! But we need to give them a name, we can't just call them "Medium Tank M3". I know! As a gesture of gratitude to our allies across the sea, we should give them an American name! We could call them after some famous American general! They'll like that!"
And then, some months later, when the first US troops arrived in Britain, all commanded by officers with names like Beauregard T. Slavebasher and Kirby J. Antebellum, the British proudly pointed at a line of 500 very large metal things with freshly painted labels saying "GRANT TANK, NAMED AFTER GENERAL GRANT, YES, ULYSSES S. GRANT, OF WHOM WE KNOW YOU AMERICANS ARE ALL TERRIBLY FOND" and were somewhat taken aback by the unenthusiastic response this evinced.
I had actually wondered how that happened -- not specifically curious about Grant tanks but Sherman tanks -- before I learned that the US Army didn't assign the names.
I have actually simplified for comic effect; the first batch of M3 Medium Tanks were called "Lee tanks" in British service, which presumably was fine with the US, and then the British asked for an improved version with a slightly modified turret, thicker armour and a few other things, and called those "Grants", which would have been even more galling because the spec for the Grant was just "Lee, but slightly better in every way".
There was also a Stuart, although the soldiers resolved any Civil War issues by opting for horny and calling it a Honey.
I think part of the story was that WSC was a massive civil war buff and hero-worshipper of Lincoln and so he kept doing this.
Sherman was initially not such a figure of hatred in the South. Had a seemingly successful visit to Atlanta in 1879.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://blueandgrayeducation.org/pdfs/newsletters/Dispatch_5-Jun-20.pdf
If Horwitz wrote his book today it would be Confederates in the Fucking Everywhere.
the soldiers resolved any Civil War issues by opting for horny and calling it a Honey.
British tank names were just utter chaos at that point. The first few were perfectly logical. Mark I, Mark II, Mark III and so on. There was a slight outbreak of weirdness when they decided to have male and female tanks*, but other than that no issues. And then from about 1943 onwards they took the very sensible decision that everything would have a fighty-sounding name that started with a C. Cromwell, Churchill, Comet, Centurion, Chieftain, Conqueror, Challenger and so on.
But in the bit in between it was completely insane.
"Matilda". A name they loved so much that they then took a completely different tank and called it "Matilda II". "Valentine". "Honey".
*Male tanks had a 6pdr gun for blowing up bunkers, female tanks had multiple machine guns for killing infantry, which is historically seen as women's work.
There used to be a US Highway 666, but they renamed it to 491 about 20 years ago when the Woke Christians got to the Federal Highway Administration. Its interchange with I-40 in Gallup looks exactly like that viral picture of Breezewood PA so the number was appropriately infernal.
Our zip code is 78666, and there are a whole lot of local businesses or gimmicks that make hay out of 666.
(Like the entire city has the same zip code.)
My entire hometown had the same phone prefix. Ten-digit dialing was a real reach for me because I started with only needing to learn four.
114: Here's an article on the USDOT site with far more information on US 666 than you would ever want to know.
One of the better recitations in any resolution:
WHEREAS, people living near the road already live under the cloud of opprobrium created by having a road that many believe is cursed running near their homes and through their homeland; and
WHEREAS, the number "666" carries the stigma of being the mark of the beast, the mark of the devil, which was described in the book of revelations in the Bible; and
HEREAS, there are people who refuse to travel the road, not because of the issue of safety, but because of the fear that the devil controls events along United States route 666; and
WHEREAS, the economy in the area is greatly depressed when compared with many parts of the United States, and the infamy brought by the inopportune naming of the road will only make development in the area more difficult.
That is amazing; thank you so much for sharing it!
I knew Stormcrow would come through with the details on the Devil's Highway.
I was against the renumbering at the time and I still am.
Why 491? I'm guessing it's not a reference to the passage I found when searching for "4:91". Also probably not an "angel number".
Stormcrow's link explains it. In short it's because at the northern end it intersects with US Highway 191 in Monticello, Utah.
The numbering system for US Highways has never really made any sense. (This is sort of the overall tl;dr of the link in 118.) The way it works for interstates is sort of a lesson learned from that experience.
Back to the OP, I am bored by this posting genre.
For a start, as Heebie identifies right at the beginning, it isn't actually true that calories or debt(!) are somehow fake; whatever kumbayah song you may sing about Social Solutions, it's absolutely possible to fuck up by running up a lot of debt or pursuing a stupid diet, you can do that, it's a thing you can do. Second, it just pursues the usual pattern of Calling For stuff and then doing a hair flick and striding away from the lectern* leaving them wanting more; in substance, calling for a social solution for budgeting is just telling people to wait for pie in the sky. Third, I am not sure what you're meant to do about them cutting off your electric while you wait for the political revolution.
Also, as Heebie also says, this bit makes no sense at all:
Budget culture idealizes and advises for a definition of richness that relies on things like power at work, freedom from domestic labor, well-rounded education, debt elimination, homeownership, credit, and other things moneyed, straight white men tend to have access to more readily than anyone else.
We're meant to be at war with well-rounded education now? Compared to what? One-dimensional hyperspecialisation? Good old pig ignorance? Further, you know what really won't help if your problem is domestic labour? Having to remember to pay all your bills individually, presumably in some insane quaint US personal banking way by queuing up at the church with a chicken or something, rather than put them on automatic because that would be bad and Individualist. I guess a social solution to that would be to mandate all the utilities to do something sane like direct debits here but I reckon you'd get told you were being a technocratic policy wonk.
And finally, the finish is almost caricatural. Oh, so you yourself faithfully executed this terrible advice and it worked? It's very true that the most important item in any budget is the revenue line but I absolutely guarantee there's a similar blog post sneering about careers.
*it's telling that this is precisely a rhetorical pattern you can execute in a lecture.
Also, AHP herself came in as a rare thing, an expert on celebrity management outside the business, which sounded like it had really interesting journalistic possibilities - but she's ended up doing these slatepitch-for-lefties things about Cheese is Fascism that come down to a boring five point formula.
- pick something common and inoffensive
- denounce it on the grounds that it involves action on your part and is consequently not a Social Solution
- introduce incredibly shonky "evidence" (a 2021 survey for The Penny Hoarder is it?)
- run through a tick-list of groups to pretend you care about
- Call For something windy and vague, FLICK!, and walk off
126-7: This and the college article posted last week is making me think that we should just shut down Substack because they don't seem to be adding much value. I suppose they're engagement bait.
Surely no intelligent woman would seriously write "Budget culture idealizes and advises for a definition of richness that relies on things like power at work, freedom from domestic labor, well-rounded education, debt elimination, homeownership, credit, and other things moneyed, straight white men tend to have access to more readily than anyone else."
Just to abbreviate a bit: "Budget culture idealizes and advises for a definition of richness that relies on things [...] that moneyed [...] men tend to have access to more readily than anyone else."
Your definition of richness is bad, this woman thinks, because it's based on things that rich people are much more likely to have. Let that marinade in your cerebral fluid for a bit.
Sometime very soon. the instructions in 127 are going to be incorporated into a Large Language Model and the staff of Slate will be laid off.
There is an inherent tension in two kinds of advice -- and the purveyors of that advice often confuse them. There is advice about 1.) understanding how the world screws people over and 2.) understanding what you should do about that in your personal life.
As heebie says in this case, "it's really, literally, about class." So yeah, 1.) the world is this way because of class stratification, but 2.) you're still better off thinking about how you manage your money.
There are plenty of people who will tell you that other people need to solve social problems by getting their acts together (recognizing point 2 and ignoring point 1). The author of the linked advice here treads close to saying that it's pointless to think about adjusting your behavior because the social problems of the world necessarily render personal responsibility ineffective (recognizing point 1 and ignoring point 2).
Sometime very soon. the instructions in 127 are going to be incorporated into a Large Language Model and the staff of Slate will be laid off.
Why Redundancy Could Be The Best Thing That Ever Happened To My Former Colleagues
by ChatGPT-16
Agree with 126. They don't actually have any real power so it's hardly the most important thing in the world, but boy am I sick of this mode of lefty communication. Any actual conversation just getting shut down by waving your hands in some very vague way about capitalism and racism. I guess it must work as a cheap way to score participation points in section without doing the reading, and getting reposts on social media, but it's not useful, interesting, or even especially true.
I can't tell if 126 was written after reading the linked article or extrapolated from heebie's excerpts. The message is "I'm bored by this genre," so it can't possibly matter. I'm just idly curious.
126/131: I think the problem is that we've been reading these articles since blogs started. It's just that this particular group has had these conversations already. It's kind of like criticizing Seventeen or Sesame Street for always re-churning the same content - it's appropriate for a new audience and maybe no longer appropriate for a stale audience. Who's the punk that posted this anyway?