2026-03-25 21:00:00
I always look at unit prices: how much do I get for my dollar? But that assumes I can use all of it. The manufacturer puts "12oz" whether I'll be able to get the full 12oz or only 6oz. L'Oreal was selling lotions where:
these Liquid Cosmetic Product containers only dispense between as little as 43 percent to 81 percent of the container's advertised contents. — Critcher et al. v. L'Oreal
Even though these containers would often dispense less than half of the advertised volume, L'Oreal won the case: the law says the amount listed on the container means the amount in the container, not the amount you'll be able to get out of the container. But it doesn't have to be that way. What should our laws say?
We should update our labeling laws to require manufacturers to use the amount a consumer could reasonably extract. If you have a wide mouth transparent container with smooth insides, a rubber scraper can get it all. If you have a narrow mouth squeeze bottle, then only count what squeezes out. Maybe manufacturers would shift to more efficient packaging, or maybe consumers would accept higher unit cost for more convenience. The important thing is aligning incentives: pay for what you can use.
There is actually one area where we do this already: medicine. Because it seriously matters that when the doctor prescribes 10ml you receive 10ml, they are required to measure losses and adjust for them. If we could only do this in one part of the economy I agree medication is good choice, but why don't we do this everywhere?
2026-03-24 21:00:00
I've recently started using ChatGPT voice chat to practice Spanish, and it works surprisingly well. I don't know if I'll have the discipline to keep doing it after the novelty wears off, but I've already spoken more Spanish in the last week than in the last fifteen years combined.
I started learning Spanish in middle school, and by the end of high school could make myself understood. I might need some circuitous phrasing to work around missing vocabulary, and I certainly abused periphrastics to avoid tricky tenses, but if I was dropped into an unfamiliar environment and needed to communicate I could do that. [1]
With minimal Spanish in my daily life, my skills have atrophied a lot. Most of my utterances over the past decade have been trying to say something to Julia without the kids understanding: "quieres ir comprar helado?" This is a poor way to maintain language skills, because "actual Spanish" isn't actually a constraint: all that matters is that Julia can understand it and the kids can't. If I forget a word, taking the English equivalent, adding an "-o", and pronouncing it as if it's Spanish still works.
I've tried to practice Spanish with other English speakers, but not only is it easy to diverge from actual Spanish, it's also much less fun than speaking freely in our stronger language. I've considered matchmaking apps, pairing with someone looking to practice English, but I don't want to do the English component, don't want to schedule calls, and expect the tech would be annoying.
Recently I realized that ChatGPT's conversational mode, which is built into the standard app, does pretty much what I want. I turned it on, said "entiendes Espanol?" and we were off. I could play with it when I had a bit of spare time, and while it's not an especially interesting conversational partner, it gets the language flowing.
There is a threshold level of fluency necessary for this to work, though: I have enough Spanish that the more I talk to it the more I remember (or newly learn). I also gave it a try with my poorly remembered Chinese, but its responses just washed over me: I'd need to practice a lot elsewhere before I was able to make progress this way. I did try prompting it to speak simply and be a teacher, but it was still beyond what I could handle.
I also tried out Spanish with a couple other models. Gemini's conversation mode was much less... conversational? It kept ending its turns awkwardly early, and often with something unnatural like "it there an aspect of X you have more questions about?" With Claude, I couldn't even get that far: it seemed to only speak and understand English, even after "Settings > Speech language > Spanish."
It is a bit dystopian having conversations with an AI about nothing, but overall I'm ok with it: it's helping me work on my Spanish so I can better communicate, live in the moment, with people who speak it.
[1] The most stressful version of this was probably when I flew to
Ecuador with Julia in 2012. We traveled separately to save money, and
when I checked in they were only able to give me my boarding pass as
far as Colombia; I'd need to get a boarding pass for the flight to
Quito once I got there. The first leg was fine, and when I got to
Bogota I went to the gate where my flight was leaving. I was very
early, and talked to the gate agent (in English). They told me that
they were there for the current flight, but if I waited for the next
gate agent they'd be able to print my boarding pass and get me on my
flight.
Except when that person turned up they told me that actually the only people who could check me in were the people at the ticket counter, outside security. So I'd need to go out through customs, get my boarding pass, back through security, and then back to the gate, which there definitely wasn't time for. Possibly I could have made more of a fuss at the gate, but instead I went along with this as far as going to the ticket counter, at which point I needed to explain my situation and get on a later flight. It turned out I'd missed this airline's last flight of the day, and also that there was no one available who could speak English, so I ended up trying to explain what had happened in Spanish, and especially how I followed the agent's instructions such that it was not my error that led to my predicament. I was eventually able to convince them to put me on a flight to Quito on a different airline, and arrived about 4hr late. This was especially worrying because (pre-Fi) Julia and I had no international cell service and I had no way to let her know what was going on.
2026-03-23 21:00:00
There are a lot of great musicians who don't live near you, and if you hold your dance on a Saturday it's much harder to put together a tour that brings them to you. Consider a Friday evening or Sunday afternoon, or even a weekly evening slot?
Looking at the 330 contra dances tracked by TryContra, which I think is just about all of them, there's a very clear scheduling pattern:
There are more dances on Saturdays than the rest of the week put together. This makes sense: people are mostly off, and they're mostly off the next morning too. If you consider each dance in isolation, Saturday is often going to be the best choice.
The picture changes, however, when you consider tours. I live in Boston, and it doesn't make sense for me to drive 8hr round trip to NYC or Belfast ME to play a single evening. If I can make the weekend of it, though, and play Fri-Sat-Sun, the ratio of driving to playing gets a lot better. Similarly, a 12hr round trip to Philly or 16hr round trip to DC don't work on their own, but they're possible as part of being able to play Wed-Thr-Fri-Sat-Sun in Princeton, Philly, DC, Bethlehem/Chatham/Lancaster, and NYC.
If you're thinking about starting a new series, consider that picking a different day can help you convince bands and callers to come visit. I think Sunday afternoons in particular are underrated: in addition to helping attract touring bands there are a lot of people who have to get up early, more time to drive home means it's possible for people to attend from a larger radius, and there's tons of time left for afters.
It can also be worth explicitly coordinating schedules with dances that are 1-3hr away, and offering a group of dates to a band. Scheduling tours is a pain, but if a group of dances that are normally too far away offered a Fri-Sat-Sun I think many more musicians and callers would consider it.
I wouldn't want to move to a world without Saturday night dances, or one where dances tended not to have any local talent, but I think we're pretty far from this world. Consider prioritizing the cross-pollination benefits of bringing callers and musicians from a bit further off?
2026-03-11 21:00:00
EDIT: this comparison is much less clean than I thought it was: the Union Sq building has 19 garage spaces reserved for affordable units. Combining these with the permits, it's 29% of parking-eligible units having a car instead of 8%.
In 2017 I wrote:
One of the major reasons existing residents often oppose adding more housing is that as more people move in it gets harder to find on-street parking. What if we added a new category of unit that didn't come with any rights to street parking?
My city (Somerville MA) included this in our 2019 zoning overhaul, but it does have some exceptions:
This policy exempts residents that may be 'choice limited', including:
- Persons with disabilities
- Occupants of affordable dwelling units
- Residents with extenuating circumstances
While this is a compassionate approach, it means we haven't fully disconnected housing construction from parking demand. For example, there's a proposal to build a 500-unit parking-ineligible building in Davis Sq (which would no longer be the end of the Burren). It's 25% affordable units, and opponents argue that if each has a driver this would be 125 additional cars competing for street parking. But would we really get that many?
A few years ago we got a similar parking-ineligible building in Union Sq, also a short walk from a subway station:
This is 450 units, of which 20% (90) are affordable. Ashish Shrestha submitted a records request to the city, and learned that only seven units have parking permits.
While the Davis project is a little bigger, this would suggest something in the range of 10 permits, much less than feared.
This makes sense: if you're in Union or Davis, with good public transit and bike options, living without a car is pretty practical. It also saves you a lot of money, especially for folks living in affordable units.
2026-03-10 21:00:00
People are often pretty short-sighted, spending money today that they'll want tomorrow. Debt makes it possible to prioritize your current self even more highly: you can spend money you haven't even earned yet. This is a trap many people fall into, and one different communities have built social defenses against.
One of the more surprisingly successful approaches is the Financial Peace (Ramsey) system, popular in evangelical Christian communities. It has a series of rules, most prominently the seven baby steps:
Save $1,000 for your starter emergency fund.
Pay off all debt (except the house) using the debt snowball.
Save 3–6 months of expenses in a fully funded emergency fund.
Invest 15% of your household income in retirement.
Save for your children's college fund.
Pay off your home early.
Build wealth and give.
There are many more specific rules, however, such as:
As a general rule of thumb, the total value of your vehicles (anything with a motor in it) should never be more than half of your annual household income.
I have had several conversations over the years with Christian friends and acquaintances who are big fans of these methods, and each time I'm thinking both:
This seems like a set of rules that, overall, is likely to help the median American improve their financial situation. The advice is straightforward and accounts for how people actually behave. Bright line rules reduce decision fatigue, limit rationalization, and generally make it harder to fool yourself. A community that strictly follows this approach likely ends up much stronger financially than average.
The rules are full of bad advice.
Some specific bad advice on which the Ramsey approach is uncompromising:
If you have $10k of debt at 2% interest and $11k of debt at 10% interest, you should pay down the $10k first.
If you have any non-mortgage debt you should not contribute to retirement, even if this means passing up on a generous employer match.
If you have debt at very low interest (ex: a mortgage from 2021 at 3%) you should pay it off as fast as you can afford to, even though extremely safe investments (money market funds, treasury bills) pay higher rates (~4%).
I want to write about how terrible this is, but I can't. It really is awful advice for a disciplined and informed person who's thoughtful with their money, but that's not his audience. And it's not most people.
Still, the choice isn't between the Ramsey approach and nothing. There are other advisers out there who combine consideration of human irrationalities and failings with a better ratio of good to bad financial planning advice. The next time I'm in one of these conversations I'm going to try to hook them on Mr. Money Mustache or at least the Money Guys.
2026-03-08 21:00:00
A common source of friction within couples or between housemates is differing quality standards. Perhaps I hate the feeling of grit under my feet but my housemate who is responsible for sweeping doesn't mind it so much. If you do chores when you notice they need doing and stop when they seem done, this works poorly: the more fastidious get frustrated, and often stew in silence or nag. Even if it's talked about kindly and openly, doing a chore before it bothers you is harder and less satisfying.
When people set out to divide chores they're usually weighing duration and discomfort. These matter, but I think people should put more weight on the standards each person has, and generally try to give tasks to the person with the highest standards in that area.
If you divide everything this way, though, it will probably be pretty unfair: preferences are correlated, where someone who notices dirt on the floor probably also notices crumbs on the counter and that the recycling is overflowing. Some options:
Do chores on a schedule. We host a monthly event at our house, and there are things I clean as part of setting up. It doesn't matter whether the bathroom mirror looks dirty to me, I'll clean it because it's on my list. (But Julia will probably also clean it a few times over the course of the month.)
Bring your needs closer together. If one member of the couple does the laundry but the other always runs out of socks first, they could switch who does the laundry, or they could just buy more socks.
Decouple your needs. That same couple could instead switch to each doing their own laundry. Now if one person doesn't do it for a long time it doesn't impact the other.
Make the need more salient. If one person isn't noticing that something needs doing, you can address that directly. Empty the trash, but instead of taking it out you put it by the door they walk through to go to work. Accumulate dirty dishes on the counter (visible) and not in the sink (hidden). If you just start unilaterally increasing salience that's passive aggressive and probably doesn't go well, but if it comes out of an open-ended "what are some strategies we could use to make our chore division more fair" I expect that's positive.
Lower your standards. I know a few people who internalized a high cleanliness target as children, and benefited as adults from deciding to focus less on it. Often when becoming a parent: higher demands on time, letting high standards slip, realizing that actually it's not a problem. I could also imagine a sloppier person intentionally raising their standards, but that seems a lot harder, or else it's just something people around me have been less likely to talk about.
Hire someone. If one person cares a lot about having clean floors and the other person doesn't, neither of them enjoys mopping, and they have some money, they can apply (3) to solve (1) without running into issues with (2). I know couples and group houses who decided to pay for a cleaner to come every week or two, and found it massively reduced conflict. Automation (dishwasher, floor-cleaning robot) can work well here too.
This is an area where Julia and I used to have a substantial amount of conflict, and while things aren't perfect here I do think they're a lot better in part due to applying several of the above.
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