Thursday, August 7, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Help Chris and (her dog) Chloe Save Their Home - I don't know this person, but I've seen her in the Slacktivist comment section before, and I hope she is able to raise the money she needs.

2. Canon (August 1) From xkcd.

3. Phistomefel's New Sudoku! (August 3) 1-hour-11-minute sudoku solve video.

4. NSFW and defensibility (August 5) "Just sayin’, there’s a certain irony in LGBTQ games leading the charge."

5. In Gaza, mounting evidence of famine and widespread starvation (July 29, via) "'This is not a warning, this is a call to action. This is unlike anything we have seen in this century,' he told journalists in Geneva."

How To Stop Gazans From Dying of Starvation Right Now (July 30) "The solution is tragically simple. First, open all viable land crossings—not for hours and not with caveats, but at scale, with fast screening and consistency, to flood Gaza with aid immediately. We know that in the ceasefire months of January and February this year, the flow of humanitarian and commercial goods made a difference immediately.  Second, ensure unimpeded access for humanitarian organizations to reach children and their families—from Rafah to northern Gaza. Third, the political track still matters.  A ceasefire remains vital. Without an end to hostilities, no humanitarian corridor can function safely, Palestinian civilians cannot be reached at scale and the hostages will not return home."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Adapting to Decline (August 4) "In other words, the fired BLS head will be replaced by someone who will cook the books for Trump."

2. Corporation for Public Broadcasting to close after US funding cut (August 1)

3. Confederate statue toppled during Black Lives Matter protests will be reinstalled (August 5) "'The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling the Pike statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable,' Norton said. 'He resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime and dishonoring even his own Confederate military service. Even those who want Confederate statues to remain standing would have to justify awarding Pike any honor, considering his history.'"

4. Their husbands were deported to Laos. Now they’re picking up the pieces together (August 5) "Cassie, who is Laotian-American, said her husband was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. 'They left when he was one, so he pretty much knows nothing of it,' Cassie said. 'So he’s never stepped foot in Laos until now.'"

Monday, August 4, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Reparations

Political cartoon showing an American bald eagle dominating a large area of the globe. Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 210-211:

15. Open Borders As Reparations and Decolonization

The United States has what could be termed "an imperial debt" to a number of countries throughout the world. "US responsibility for helping create the conditions that drive much of the out-migration from Honduras," Joseph Nevins writes, "should negate any justification by the US government to deport and deny rights of residence to people of Honduran origin." Given that Honduras is less exception to and more exemplar of the destabilizing effects of US imperialistic intervention, the same argument could be made for dozens of other countries, including but not limited to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Indonesia, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia.

Sri Lankan novelist and activist A. Sivanandan's famous and succinct line explains why migrants move to countries that had colonized their homes: "We are here because you were there."




Saturday, August 2, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How Star Trek’s Federation Actually Abandons Its Ideals (July 30) 43-minute video from Steve Shives.

2. TobyMac - Made To Love (Live from Alive & Transported) (2009) Christian music from a decade or so ago. I've always liked this song.

3. France, U.K., others plan to recognize a Palestinian state. What does that change? (August 1)

4. Debating Fascists (July 25) "This was a major topic of conversation in the early 2000s amongst scientists, who worried over whether it was worthwhile to debate “the other side” on issues like climate change and evolution."

5. An Amazing Truth About ALL Sudokus That We DIDN'T Know (July 27) 1-hour-23-minute sudoku solve video.

6. An Ohio couple welcomes a baby boy from a nearly 31-year-old frozen embryo (August 2) Cool, I'm happy for them. It's interesting how people's feelings and beliefs about frozen embryos had such a big influence on this whole process, all the paperwork, transporting the embryos, etc. Would have gone completely differently if the people involved had different beliefs about frozen embryos. Anyway, congrats to them~

7. YouTube will identify and restrict minors’ accounts with AI (July 30, via) Uh what? This seems like a terrible idea, because the algorithm is going to get it wrong sometimes. Of course it will get it wrong sometimes. You're never going to get an accuracy rate close enough to 100%.

8. Holocaust Memory in a Time of Genocide (July 31, via) "At this point, the fracture between the “universal” and the “particular-Jewish” components of Holocaust memory became an unbridgeable chasm: the “pro-Jewish” sentiment, which morphed into unconditional support for Israel and its murderous war following October 7, was completely severed from the universal sentiment of human rights."

9. Zootopia 2 | Trailer (July 30) Cool!

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Jon Stewart Reacts to Colbert's Cancellation & Trump's "Bawdy" Epstein Doodles | The Daily Show (July 22) "And if you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourselves so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king's radar, A, why will anyone watch you? And you are ****ing wrong."

2. Trump push to ban birthright citizenship unconstitutional, US court rules (July 23, via) "The three-judge ruling panel in the 9th US circuit court of appeals echoed a district court in New Hampshire that blocked the executive order earlier this month."

3. Innocence, identity, and blood libel (part 1) (July 28) and Innocence, identity, and blood libel (part 2) 

4. Federal judge delays expiration of TPS for Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Nepalese (July 31) "It affects about 60,000 immigrants whose temporary protected status was set to expire. The protections for the Nepalese were set to terminate on Aug. 5. The protections for Nicaraguans and Hondurans would have ended Sept. 8. Most of them have been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years." This is just wild to me, that the MAGAs are arguing that people who've been in the US for over 20 years should just leave- like why? Why should they leave? Just because the MAGAs hate immigrants, not any actual reality-based reason.

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Blogaround

Hi all, I'm on vacation, but here are some links

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Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021) "First, the good news: there are hundreds of studies on whether X causes Y. The bad news? We need to throw most of them out."

2. John MacArthur, dead fundamentalist (July 22)

3. OZZY OSBOURNE - "Crazy Train" (Official Video) I seem to remember I used to play this song in Guitar Hero. (Posting this because, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath frontman and icon of British heavy metal, dies aged 76 (July 22))

4. The NSFW game purge (July 24) "If a conservative group can apply pressure to remove certain NSFW games, what’s to stop them from removing, say, LGBT content? I am here to tell you that it has already happened."

Also from Siggy: Journal Club: Demography of Asexuality and Aromanticism (July 24) "We’re happy to see that this article is far more willing than most scholarly articles to cite gray literature, including blog posts, tumblr posts, livestreams, and YouTube videos."

5. His name is Mohammad Al-Motawaq. He is 18 months old. And he is starving in Gaza (July 27)

6. Get ready, Brazil. The 'good mosquitoes' are coming (July 26) "Remarkably, this bacteria and the virus that causes dengue are unable to coexist inside the mosquito that transmits this disease."

7. Freakier Friday | Official Trailer | In Theaters August 8 (June 7) !!!! A "Freaky Friday" sequel that has Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan again! Very excited about this!

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The Gloves Are Off | "I Absolutely Love That Colbert Got Fired" | Trump & Epstein's Wonderful Secret (July 22) 

And from npr: This was the week that comedy pushed back (July 27) 

2. From Joy To Justice (July 22) "Before I dive in, a special thanks to all of the lawyers, journalists, activists, Congress members and ordinary citizens who did not let this story go and never relented, applying constant pressure upon our government to undo its original illegal renditions. Whatever post-hoc reason the government gives today for its actions, we all know that the 252 men sent to CECOT would still be there were it not for the hard work of so many."

And from npr: 'Hell on Earth': Venezuelans deported to El Salvador mega-prison tell of brutal abuse (July 27)

And: Ex-marine convicted of killing three people released to US in prisoner swap (July 23) What! So is he just free in the US or what? I haven't found any reporting on whether they're just letting him go free or what's going on.

3. We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory (July 22) I had some opinions about this article, maybe I will try to blog about it if I have time. I want to say, in Christian "sexual purity" ideology, I have *definitely* come across the idea that the ideal case would be girls who are around 15 years old, right at the point where they've started having their period and are therefore able to get pregnant, getting married to adult men who are well-established financially. It's a pretty fringe idea, and I haven't met anyone in real life who was seriously advocating this, but I have seen the idea floated and it's totally consistent with the logic of purity culture, which says that the MOST IMPORTANT THING about sex and marriage is that you need to not have sex outside of marriage (oh and also, the husband has to be the leader). Other concerns, like actually treating each other right, are nice to have, but the main thing is DON'T HAVE SEX till that ring is on your finger.

(See my posts All of the LOLs for this Sermon on "Marrying Young" and Why Marriage as a Private Contract is a Bad Idea and Roy Moore Dating Teenage Girls "For Their Purity" is 100% Logical in Purity Land)

I never thought of that as pedophilia, but wow, it totally is.

4. US-funded contraceptives for poor nations to be burned in France, sources say (July 25) "One of the sources with knowledge of the issue said that the Trump administration was acting in accordance with the Mexico City policy, an anti-abortion pact in which Trump reinstated U.S. participation in January. The pact forbids the U.S. government from contributing to or working with organisations providing funding or supplies that offer access to abortions."

5. Fearing coverage could change, some parents rush to vaccinate their kids (July 25) How will I explain RFK to my children

6. PEPFAR escaped the rescission ax. But where does it stand? (July 26) "Since its founding, PEPFAR has put more than $120 billion into combatting the virus in more than 50 countries. The result of all that money and effort, it says, is clear, citing accomplishments that are widely accepted: 26 million lives saved, a plummeting of HIV infection rates and a rebounding of life expectancy, especially in Africa."

7. Trump administration hands over Medicaid recipients’ personal data, including addresses, to ICE (July 28) "Many people sign up for emergency Medicaid in their most desperate moments, said Hannah Katch, a previous adviser at CMS during the Biden administration. 'It’s unthinkable that CMS would violate the trust of Medicaid enrollees in this way,' Katch said."

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. New Texas law aims to save lives by clarifying the state abortion ban. Will it work? (July 19) This law is probably a good thing, but it's still based on the premise that we have to separate those evil murderous women who want abortions because they're so evil, from those good innocent mothers who want abortions for the right reasons.

2. Replication Crisis (July 18) From xkcd.

3. One Minute Park (via) This is a cool little site which shows you 60-second videos of random parks.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Court Orders 19-Year-Old Asylum Seeker Released After ICE Unlawfully Arrested Him at Immigration Hearing (July 17) "This happened despite Oliver’s legal entry into the United States, lack of a criminal history, and compliance with all government orders when applying for U.S. citizenship."

2. 10 Americans are freed by Venezuela in a prisoner swap for migrants in El Salvador (July 18) I'm confused about this- so apparently now all the Venezuelans that the US sent to CECOT have been sent to Venezuela? Is that good? Why were they originally deported to El Salvador if Venezuela wanted them back? And what about getting justice for those who were falsely accused of being "gang members" and mistreated by the US and El Salvador?

More on that: Andry Is Free. Trump’s Barbarous Immigration Regime Is Just Getting Started. (July 21) "For 125 days Andry and hundreds of other men were held in a torture prison where they got a “beating for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner.” They had been kidnapped by our government and left in that hellhole to rot with no due process, no access to legal counsel, no phone call home. They were completely stripped of their humanity. In many cases their only crime was existing in Stephen Miller’s America while being Venezuelan. For some, their sin was having the wrong tattoo."

“We Were Kidnapped” (July 18) "On Friday, more than 200 Venezuelans disappeared to a megaprison in El Salvador returned home. The horror stories are already emerging."

3. Stephen Colbert Announces The Cancellation Of “The Late Show” (July 18) He says the show will end in May 2026.

4. Evidence challenging the Trump admin's immigration moves is now out in the open (July 11) "The evidence is damning on all fronts, but especially as to the Trump administration’s actions on March 15, 2025, when it attempted to begin carrying out President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act without a war and without — as was later detailed — as much process as was given to suspected Nazis during World War II."

5. Congress rolls back $9 billion in public media funding and foreign aid (July 18) "The House has approved a Trump administration plan to rescind $9 billion in previously allocated funds, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) — a move that cuts all federal support for NPR, PBS and their member stations — and about $7 billion in foreign aid."

6. “Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison (July 17) "No one deserves to live in cramped, unsanitary, inhumane conditions and have their medical needs ignored. No one deserves to have their religious needs ignored. And no one deserves to lack access to nutritious food. I am free, but my true freedom is interlinked with the freedom of many women I lived alongside in ICE prison." Written by Rümeysa Öztürk.

Monday, July 21, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Exploiting workers on both sides

US-Mexico border. Image source: By User Larsinio on en.wikipedia - Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is (was) here19:00, 11 April 2006 Larsinio 1152x862 (189,587 bytes) (from http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/print.asp?URL=/cross-border/nafta-rules/new-mexrule.htm), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=791553

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From page 208:

Simultaneously, 50,000 midwestern auto workers, mostly in the midwest, lost their jobs. Many of those jobs went to Mexico, where, Akers Chacón reports, productivity rates increased over 66 percent between 1990 and 1999. During the same period, however, real wages fell by about 20 percent. Unionization rates also dropped over the same period. In other words, the open-borders-for-capital and closed-borders-for-people schema is a lose-lose for both American and Mexican workers. Closed borders is a win only for the corporations, which use the border as a wedge to lower wages, undercut worker protections, and keep the assembly line zipping.

Opening borders would immediately strip corporations of a key tool of exploitation, offering workers easier access to decent wages and facilitating collaboration and collective organization.



Friday, July 18, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Sting in the Tail: Life’s No Fairy Tale for Mermaid Dancers (July 11) "To make matters worse, to save on costs, many aquariums refuse to assign professional safety personnel to guard performers, and lack proper emergency response protocols. 'In scuba diving, we follow the buddy system — no one goes in the water alone,' Lin says. 'Why is such a critical safety rule suddenly ignored when the dive is a performance?'"

Also from Sixth Tone: The Promise and Pitfalls of China’s AI Sign Language Interpreters (July 9) "Deaf people reported having difficulty accurately understanding the signing regardless of whether they watched the video directly or read the transcribed records. On closer inspection, the movements of the avatars differed considerably from everyday sign language in terms of hand shape, position, direction, and movement."

2. Scientists find Uranus is surprisingly warm, heating up the case for a new planetary mission (July 14, via) Cool!

3. The Best 4x4 Sudoku Ever Made. (June 9) 1-hour-11-minute sudoku solve video. This sudoku is based on that genre of logic puzzles where one person says "I don't know the answer" and then another person says "I don't know the answer" and then the first person says "well now I know the entire answer." Love this.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘Perversion of Justice’ revisited (July 14) For those of us (like me) who haven't been following all the details about this Epstein thing since 2018, the Slacktivist has a timeline with links.

And: Trump doesn’t realize why MAGA needs the Epstein files (July 15) "For Trump, this has to be bewildering. His supporters do not treat sexual violence like it’s a bad thing. So why do they care about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, or the identities of his alleged co-conspirators?"

2. Will the Government Ever Do Right by Mahmoud Khalil? (July 15) "In a just country, Khalil would be entitled to legal recourse and monetary recompense for his unlawful arrest and imprisonment."

Monday, July 14, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How China Built the Most Extreme Metro Ever (June 18, 14-minute video) This is really cool! It's about the subway system in Chongqing, China. I've been to Chongqing before- very mountainy.

2. You and translator microbes (June 19, via) "Serious multilingual nuances and complexities, which the real world offers in abundance, are cordoned off into a one-line tech explanation and forgotten. Category mismatches, unaligned conventions surrounding conversational maxims, and the fact that different languages have different approaches as to which grammatical features to encode explicitly and which ones to leave unspoken (unspoken, yes, but still very much mutually understood amongst a speaker population) are all things that will inevitably arise occasionally in multilingual communications, even with maximally competent interpreters present." !!!!! This! All of this!

3. The Fungus behind King Tut’s Curse is a LIE (July 10) "As best I can tell, some microbiologists thought they were being cute with 'the pharaoh hypothesis' and the general public just saw the title and said, 'Aha! It’s real and the cause is fungus.' No!"

4. How this long-lost Chinese typewriter from the 1940s changed modern computing (July 5) Cool!

5. ‘Biblical grounds’ for white Texan divorce (July 10) "That’s how divorce works in white evangelicaldom — it’s completely unacceptable unless you can demonize your former spouse and put 100% of the blame on them for sinning like a sinful sinner."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Save Our Signs (via) "Join our effort to build a community archive of the signs, exhibits, and texts that could soon disappear from our national parks."

2. This Is What Trump Paid El Salvador To Do To Kilmar Abrego Garcia (July 4) I shared a link about this last time, but there are more details here. 

3. Judge blocks Trump's order restricting birthright citizenship (July 10) "'Every court to have looked at this cruel order agrees that it is unconstitutional,' Wofsy, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit in late June. 'The Supreme Court’s decision did not remotely suggest otherwise, and we are fighting to make sure President Trump cannot trample on the citizenship rights of a single child.'"

And related to that: It must be amazing to be a Supreme Court justice (June 30) "Leaving parents hanging on the question of whether their newborn children have citizenship here, or somewhere, or nowhere; issuing abstract rulings opining that while presidents should of course strive to not do plainly criminal things, they can do plainly criminal things so long as they do it from behind the right desk; hurling grenades that blow up centuries of established law on the last day of the term and than getting the hell out of Dodge before the ink is dry, booking it at top speed to go off salmon-fishing or island-hopping."

4. Federal judge orders stop to indiscriminate immigration raids in Los Angeles (July 11) "In her order, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, said there is "a mountain of evidence" to support the claim that agents are arresting people solely based on their race, accents, or the work they're engaged in, in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable government seizure."

5. Freed from ICE detention, Mahmoud Khalil files $20 million claim against Trump administration (July 11) "'My beliefs are not wanting my tax money or tuition going toward investments in weapons manufacturers for a genocide,' Khalil said. 'It’s as simple as that.'"

Sunday, July 13, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Not a rush

World map. Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". This section is talking about the worry that opening the border will cause a huge dramatic rush of migrants to come. From page 194:

7. Open Borders Doesn't Mean a Rush to Migrate

Across the globe, about 14 percent of the global population-- around seven hundred million people-- would, according to recent Gallup polls, like to migrate. Financial burdens, family ties, and fear of the unknown, however, keep a lot of them at home. Plus, many of those potential migrants wouldn't migrate in the same direction. Despite the lure of the Hollywood-baked American dream and economic and political pressures in "sending countries," most people want to stay at home.

Puerto Ricans have enjoyed the unimpeded right to migrate to the far wealthier mainland United States since 1904, but they haven't left the island empty. Similarly, Eastern European countries added to the EU free-migration zone did not swarm Western European countries with their citizens. Absent lethal climactic or political threats, most people tend to want to stay where they are.




Wednesday, July 9, 2025

On Skipping My Daily $5 Starbucks

Starbucks cup. Image source.

I recently published my review of the book "Portfolios of the Poor." Here's the follow-up post.

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I want to talk about the different ways that people think about the math involved in a household's budget. I have some possible models here; none of these models can account for everything. Some are useful in some situations, others are useful in other situations. It all depends on whether the factors that are omitted from a particular model are a big deal or not in your own situation.

I have here 6 different models for how to mathematically conceptualize the way people make choices about spending their money. This isn't "here's 6 different ways to plan your budget- pick which one works for you" because they're not all aimed at addressing the question of how to plan one's budget. They're not all about the same thing. But they're all related to how to think mathematically about the choices people make with their money.

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Model 1: Skipping your daily $5 Starbucks

Here's some financial advice I've heard many times: "It's not hard to save for retirement! Just stop spending $5 every day buying Starbucks! If you save $5 a day, multiplied by x number of years, [insert some math here], then you'll have a million dollars!"

This has always struck me as a bit ridiculous, because why on earth are they assuming everyone spends $5 at Starbucks every day? Hey, actually I already never go to Starbucks- oh my goodness, that means I am therefore a millionaire? You know, before Starbucks was founded, everyone was a millionaire.

This financial advice assumes a budget model like this: You have a certain income each month, and certain expenses, and they are very precisely calibrated to match exactly. When you make this one little change- you quit going to Starbucks- nothing else in your life will change. Therefore, the result will be that the $5 each day accumulates in your bank account, eventually adding up to thousands of dollars.

The big problem here is the assumption that nothing else will change. If you don't spend the 5 bucks at Starbucks, maybe you'll end up spending it somewhere else. This won't *feel* like a conscious choice- you won't feel like "well I didn't spend $5 on Starbucks today, therefore I will spend $5 on something else"- but who knows how the chaotic pile of experiences and thoughts you have every day will shift when you stop going to Starbucks? Who knows how that is going to shake out and the effect it will have on the amount of money you spend that day? 

Honestly, I don't think people have a fixed plan of what they spend money on, where if they change 1 thing, nothing else will change. I think people don't really have a plan, but they have a vague awareness of how much money is in their bank account, and a belief about what sort of lifestyle is a match to that, and which things are "too expensive." (This model I am calling "vibes", see below.) If you stop spending money on Starbucks, and the money starts accumulating in your account, you'll end up thinking "oh yeah, sure, we can go out for a fancy dinner, I have enough money" and you won't even be thinking about "no, I can't spend that, that is the I-don't-go-to-Starbucks-anymore money."

There's so much variation in a person's spending, from one day to the next, one week to the next- it's hard to say how to even measure the difference that $5 here and there would make. (I'm really interested to know if anyone has done a randomized controlled trial of some kind.)

No, to make this "skip your daily $5 Starbucks" advice useful, you have to say it like this: "Stop spending $5 at Starbucks every day, and instead, put that money in a separate bank account that you don't touch." Or, why do we even need to mention Starbucks, why not just say to regularly transfer small amounts of money into a separate account? Or, hey, this would work too: "You can spend $5 at Starbucks every day, and also put another $5 in a separate account every day."

Why even mention the Starbucks? The Starbucks is a red herring! The actual key here is to have that money saved in a separate account, an account that is explicitly dedicated to long-term savings, and you're not going to spend it on everyday stuff just because you have a vague feeling that you can afford to do so.

(And, okay, actually, some variations of the Starbucks advice go like this: "If you stop spending $5 at Starbucks every day, and you put that in a retirement account which earns 10% interest per year, then [insert math here] and you'll be a millionaire." So yes, sometimes it does mention the idea of putting it in a separate account- but it's framed like the reason to put it in a separate account is to earn interest on it. Rather than to keep it separate from the money you spend on everyday stuff.)

I guess it would make sense if the logic is like this:

"You should transfer $5 a day into a savings account."

"$5 a day? No way, that's too much, I can't spare $5 a day."

"Well, stop going to Starbucks every day and put that money in a savings account instead."

But this still doesn't make sense. If someone genuinely believes they can't come up with $5 a day, then would that person really be going to Starbucks every single day? 

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Model 2: Vibes

I mentioned the "vibes" model above, so I want to elaborate on it here. 

I'm really curious about this, actually. Do people make decisions about spending money based on a general feeling about how much money is in their account and what sort of price range feels right for them? I think they do. Realistically, I don't think people make their purchasing decisions by consulting a carefully-planned-out budget. I mean, I think about math all the time, and I don't even base my everyday spending choices on an explicitly-planned budget. I just go on vibes. Like, yeah I can spend x amount of money on something, because it's basically in the range of what I usually spend. And when I look at my bank account, it's never a dangerously low number, so that means I'm doing fine.

To be a little more mathematical in how we define the "vibes" budgeting model, it's like this: For each type of thing you might buy, you have a *feeling* about what a normal price should be, and a *feeling* about how frequently you should buy it. When faced with a choice about buying something, you check if the price matches your feeling about what a good price would be for that thing, and you search your memory for the last time you bought it. (For example, when thinking about buying a new computer, you think "I've had my old computer for 5 years already, so it makes sense to buy a new one." When thinking about going out to eat, you think "we've already gone out to restaurants 3 times this week, we can't go again.") That's all. And every now and then, you look at your bank account balance. If it's reasonably high, then no need to do anything. If it's way lower than you expected, then you temporarily change your behavior and put off buying stuff as much as you can, until the next time you get paid and your bank account is normal again.

I feel like, this is basically what my parents did when I was growing up. There wasn't a big overarching household budget, but if I asked my mom for fruit roll-ups at the grocery store, they were "too expensive." Like, it wasn't precisely defined anywhere, but we just had a sense of what's a reasonable amount of money to pay for things, and what's "too expensive." I don't mean we literally didn't have money to afford fruit roll-ups. I mean that we had a strongly-held belief that it's just not right to pay x amount of dollars and all you get is fruit roll-ups. That is- in some absolute, objective way- not worth the money, and therefore it just feels wrong.

And sometimes something is "too expensive" but then you come up with a reason to buy it anyway, like "we're on vacation."

(My parents also had savings accounts for various long-term things, and followed all the standard good financial advice- it wasn't all "vibes." But the day-to-day stuff, the feeling of things being "too expensive" but never defining what that means- that's vibes.)

And honestly, if you aren't going to do the work of planning an actual budget, a general aversion to spending money on things that are "too expensive" probably will serve you well. Yeah, I feel like this is the strategy I internalized about money, and overall it has been a positive thing for me, though there are things I don't like about it.

But also, for some people, vibes-based budgeting is more like, "I feel like it's fine to spend money on this thing because I have more money than that in my bank account." I don't think this is good- just because you have money available to you doesn't mean it's a good idea to spend it. You should do some long-term planning and then reach a conclusion about how much money it's okay to spend on stuff you don't exactly need. Or, if you don't want to do that much work, set up an automatic transfer to move 10% of your income to a separate account every month. That's a good start.

And for my husband and I, our current strategy for the big picture is based on the envelope method (described below), but for day-to-day stuff, I just use vibes. I feel like, it's fine to spend x amount of money on dinner, because I often spend x amount of money on dinner, that's just the lifestyle I have, and it's working fine for me.

There are a few problems with "vibes" though: First of all, it doesn't apply to long-term savings goals. It's just about your feelings about your current situation, your current bank account balance, and the potential purchase that's right in front of you. People don't really have a feeling about the fact that, in order to be on track for their kid's college savings account, they need to have some certain amount saved when the kid is 5, or when the kid is 10, and so on- that's not a feeling, that's something you actually have to do the math on.

Also, the vibes model has no mechanism to match your income to your expenses. It's just about what "feels" like the right amount of money to spend on things- but in reality, there is no "absolute truth" about the right amount of money to spend on things. It should be based on how much income you have. If you're using vibes and your feelings are miscalibrated and you're always spending too much and then panicking when you look at your bank account, well that's not good- that could be avoided if you planned things out better. And if you're using vibes and you're very frugal, you won't need to panic about your bank account being low, but you're missing out on things that your extra money could be used for (investment, charity, buying nice stuff that makes you happy), if you had a more clear plan about it.

Another problem: The "vibes" strategy is extremely vulnerable to lifestyle creep. You say "oh I can't buy that, it's too expensive" and then at some point later you say "well just this one time it's fine" and gradually your feelings about what's "too expensive" completely change.

Another problem with vibes is you're not able to figure out which things give you better value for your money. For example, let's say you often spend $20 for dinner, and you often spend $20 to buy a bunch of snacks at the grocery store, and you often spend $20 for whatever other things. In the vibes model, all of those feel about the same, because all of them are within the normal range of what you spend money on. But there may be a huge difference in how much benefit you're getting out of them. Maybe the $20 is just 1 dinner, but if you spend the $20 on snacks from the grocery store instead, you can get a huge amount, and that will last you for weeks- a way better use of money than just 1 meal at a restaurant.

I think it would be really useful to have a budgeting strategy which could help you pinpoint which things you're spending money on but aren't really giving you much value- and then you can eliminate those and it will make a big difference. I don't know of any budgeting strategy that does a good job at this- you would have to assign some kind of score to every single thing you buy, it would be an incredible amount of work, and I can't even imagine how one would come up with a standardized scale for that- but surely the vibes model is the worst one if that's your goal.

And another thing about vibes: Have you ever heard "people spend less when they pay for things with cash instead of a credit card"? There are some financial advice people really walking around saying "you should NEVER use a credit card, you should pay cash for EVERYTHING" because of this supposed "fact." I have my doubts about this- I haven't tracked down whatever scientific study this supposedly comes from, but I feel like it would depend on a lot of things, and it just doesn't make sense to claim that this is true about *everyone*. 

But anyway, this idea that people spend more when they are using a credit card than with cash, this makes sense in a "vibes" model. Having access to as much money as you want, via your credit card, is a different "vibe" than having access to only the limited amount of cash in your wallet.

If someone follows a "monthly limits" or "envelope" model (both described below), and they do just fine with planning their budget in that way, then the "use cash instead of a credit card" tactic won't make any difference to them. It only really makes sense in a "vibes" model.

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Model 3: Monthly limits

In the "monthly limits" model, you have a bunch of categories of things to spend money on, and for each one, you set a limit of how much you can spend on it each month.

This is similar to the "skip your daily $5 Starbucks" model. The difference is, "skip your daily $5 Starbucks" assumes everyone has this kind of "monthly limits" model going on subconsciously in the background, whereas the "monthly limits" model as I'm describing it here means you actually made a detailed plan about how each category is defined and how much money you can spend per month.

For example, each month you can spend up to w dollars on rent, x dollars on car insurance, y dollars on clothes, z dollars on groceries, etc. When you add up all the limits, it must be less than or equal to your income. You make a plan which sets these limits for yourself. Every month, ideally you should be under the limit in each category. If you go over the limit in some categories, that means you're not sticking to your budget. That's bad.

Note that this is a different thing than if you asked someone to describe their monthly budget and they said "I spend w dollars on rent, x dollars on car insurance" and so on. They're just telling you what the averages are. That's different from the "monthly limits" budgeting strategy, because in the "monthly limits" budgeting strategy, it's not about averages, it's about making rules for yourself, and if you break those rules sometimes, this model doesn't really have any way to deal with that.

This is what I always thought it meant, when people said "you should have a budget." And at various times in my life, I tried this, but I find it really doesn't work well for me, for the following reasons:

First of all, every month I'm all over the place in terms of which categories I was under the limit, and which categories I was over the limit. And then the next month, I'm again all over the place, but in a different way. So how do I judge whether I'm doing okay or not? Obviously if you're always under the limit in every single category, then you're not in danger of running out of money (at least in the short term). But if you're over the limit in some categories, and under the limit in others, well, that seems like it should also be fine, right? But how do you quantify that? Well you could just add them all up and see if it's a positive or negative number. But then what was the point of breaking things down into separate categories?

(I mean, one possible benefit of breaking things down into categories is that you will realize if you spend more than you expected to in some categories. Like "oh crap, every month I'm spending xyz dollars on taxis? Wow, I don't think it makes sense to spend that much, let's stop doing that." Maybe when you figure out in which categories the reality is very different from the plan, that can help you know how to change your behavior to spend money on the things you actually feel are worth it.)

A second drawback of the "monthly limits" strategy is that it doesn't have a mechanism for long-term planning. In a given month, you spend however much you spend, and then the slate is wiped clean for the next month. But you could modify this strategy to add long-term planning in this way: Maybe one of your budget categories is something you're saving up for, like your kid's college education, and you set some "monthly limit" for it, and every month you "spend" that money (equal to the monthly limit) by transferring it to a dedicated account for your kid's college education. (This would then be a hybrid between the "monthly limit" model and "envelope" model, which I describe below.)

And a third issue is, let's say you're really good at sticking to your plan, and every month you are under the limit in every category. So, as a result, your bank account is always accumulating more and more money (equal to the difference between the limit and how much you actually spent). And then, what? How much savings do you have, and what are you doing with it? This budgeting model can't address those questions at all.

Really, it doesn't make sense to say that you're always supposed to be under the limit in every single category. Then you'll always be accumulating the extra, and not doing anything with it. Wouldn't it make more sense to have a plan for what to do with that extra? Rather than just wiping the slate clean every month. That money still exists in your bank account, but your budget strategy is not keeping track of it anywhere.

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Model 4: Envelope

The envelope model might, at first, look the same as the monthly limits model. In both models, you have a bunch of categories, and you decide how much money should be spent for each category every month. 

The difference is this: In the "monthly limits" model, the number for each category represents the maximum that you feel you should spend for that category. It's sort of a goal, a hypothetical. In reality, your spending might end up being less than that number, or more, but this result isn't really used for anything, except making yourself feel worried if it goes over the limit. 

But in the "envelope" model, you decide how much money goes to each category, and then the money *is* in that category. In your bank account, every dollar is allocated to one of the categories. "Every dollar has a job," is how I've heard the envelope budgeting method described. And then when the next month begins, whatever unspent money remains in each category simply rolls over to the next month. 

This is the budgeting strategy that I have set up for me and my husband. We have a few big categories, and I've calculated the expected cost per year for each one, and divided it by 12 to get the average for each month, and then every month we allocate our salary money to the categories. 

The great thing about this is it doesn't make any kind of distinction between short-term and long-term budgeting. You have short-term stuff, like "how much do we pay for daycare every month?" and longer-term stuff like "how much do we spend on Christmas gifts every year, divide that by 12" and really long-term stuff like "let's save up for both of our kids to go to college." It doesn't matter at what frequency you will actually *spend* the money from each category- they're all treated the same. For each one, calculate how much it works out to on average per month. (For example, for the kids' college savings, it's like "if we want to save x dollars before the kid is 18, how much do we need to save every month?")

When I first heard about the envelope model, and how "every dollar has a job", I thought it meant you have to spend every dollar, every month. I thought "wow that sounds like a bad idea, what about savings?" But it's not about spending, it's about allocating. And then when it comes time to spend, whenever that may be, whether it's now or 18 years in the future, you withdraw from the applicable category.

(See also: Here's How We Do Our Budget, where I wrote about the monthly limits model and the envelope model.)

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Model 5: Priority list

In the "priority list" model, you always have a list of urgent expenses, and when you get paid, you use the money to pay for the items on the list, sorted by which is the most urgent. The sorting is necessary because this model would be used by people whose income is not really high enough to actually pay for everything they need. So there will always be things that they have to say no to, because they just don't have the money for it.

(Disclaimer, I don't have any experience with this myself, so I may be missing some key factors about what it's really like.)

A long time ago I read an article about being poor, which mentioned something like this- "There are sitcoms about families that are supposedly poor, but they're not realistic at all. In one episode, someone made a huge scratch in their wall, and in the next episode, it was gone. It was fixed. That's so not what it's like when you grow up in a poor household. That scratch would have stayed there forever, because you never have the money available to fix it." This fits with the idea of the "priority list"- you never have enough money for all the things you want/need, so you might have things which languish on the list forever, never a high enough priority to actually get paid for.

Similarly, people talk about how, when you're poor, smaller problems can snowball into bigger problems because you don't have the money to fix them right away. For example, maybe something is wrong with your car, and you should get it fixed, so this is on your list but there are always other things which have a higher priority. Until the car problem gets worse, and the car is so bad you can't even drive it any more, and so it moves way up to the top of the list, but it costs a huge amount of money to fix it, much more than if you had just gotten it fixed at the beginning. Same thing for health problems- spending a little money on preventative health care can save a huge amount of money in the long run, but there are always other things which are more urgent, so you keep putting off the health care.

Another example: If you loan someone money, as a friend, it's likely that they'll be more slow to pay you back, compared to how fast they pay back their loans from a bank. Because you're their friend, it feels less urgent. And so if they don't have enough money for everything on their priority list, it's likely they will put off repaying you. Actually, in "Portfolios of the Poor," it said some people actually prefer to take loans which require them to pay interest, because this pushes them to pay it back faster. Yeah, under the "priority list" model, it might actually make sense to artificially increase the urgency of a potential expense, in order to force it to actually get done.

I once read something on the internet about buying paper towels in bulk, and now it lives in my head rent-free, as the kids are saying. It was about how it's so difficult to save money by buying in bulk if your income is low. And maybe you get a group of friends to all pitch in on the bulk paper towels purchase- that could work! But the risk is, what if your friends flake out, and you have paid for the whole huge package of paper towels yourself?

I read that and it didn't make any sense to me, because I was imagining a "monthly limits" model. I imagined that this internet person had a line item in their budget for how much they spend on paper towels every month, and even though their friends didn't come through and pay their share, it's okay because then this buyer gets to keep all the paper towels, so then next month they will continue to use them, and save the money that was in the "paper towels" budget category. And every month thereafter, they can accumulate the money budgeted for paper towels, and then buy in bulk again when they need more- they're off to a great start in getting their whole financial situation turned around, through their bulk paper towel savings. I couldn't understand why this person on the internet was saying it's a problem to buy the whole bulk package.

But, no, how about this: It's a priority list. If they are out of paper towels, then paper towels are on the list. If they have a good supply of paper towels, then they're not even thinking about that at all, because they have much more urgent money problems to deal with. There is no budget line item for paper towels. There is no "wow I'm spending so much less than expected on paper towels." It's nice that they don't have to worry about buying more paper towels, but they have so many other things that they're worried about because they can't afford them- they don't really have the bandwidth to realize "wow it's so nice that I don't need to buy more paper towels."

For people whose incomes are too low to afford all the things that they need to have a decent lifestyle, they're pretty much forced to use the priority list budgeting method. You can't judge them for that.

And then, every once in a while, they get paid and they don't really have an extremely urgent thing on their priority list. So finally, FINALLY, they can buy something nice for themself.

There will definitely be people who would judge them for that, and say "you're always struggling because you don't have enough money, and now you finally have some- you should put it in a savings account, to be ready for the next emergency. It's irresponsible to use it to buy something you don't need." But... when you're forced to live with this priority list model, I can imagine that when you happen to have money and don't have anything urgent you need to use it for, it probably feels like "the future will be full of financial emergencies, regardless of whether I put this money in a savings account or not. But right now, I finally have a chance to take a break from that, and just buy something nice that I can enjoy." We shouldn't judge them for that.

However, there are people who use a "priority list" model when they really shouldn't- their income is high enough that if they planned it better, they *would* be able to afford everything needed to have a decent lifestyle. But they get paid and they feel that their priority list doesn't have anything urgent (you can also view this as using the vibes model), so they decide "let's go out and party" and then a week later when the rent is due, it comes as a TOTAL SHOCK, and they're like "where did my money go?" Yeah, not cool to think you can just spend your money on whatever, just because you don't have any bills due at that exact moment. Maybe plan better!

(Or maybe we could say, this hypothetical bad planner can still use the priority list model, but the first priority on the list should be putting aside the money they will need for rent/ bills/ normal expenses that month.)

It's not good to be using a priority list budget model, because it means you're not really making intentional choices about what you're spending money on- you just spend money on whatever's most urgent, until you run out of money, and for the remaining things, however urgent they may be, well, too bad. It's not good, and you should avoid it if you can, but if your income isn't enough to realistically live on, then you're forced into this.

Here's another example: Let's say that you're giving money to someone (maybe a family member) for some expense coming up in the future. You give them the money, tell them to use it for this specific thing in the future, and then time passes, and then it's time for them to pay for that thing, and they tell you they don't have money. So you're like "What? I gave you money for this. You spent it? How could you be so irresponsible?" You're imagining it like an envelope model, where it's clearly stated that this money is for this thing, and so obviously it doesn't get spent on anything else. But maybe they are using a priority list model, and they feel like you are being really unrealistic for expecting a big sum of money to just sit there untouched for a few months. So really the ideal thing to do here would be give them the money at the point in time they need it to pay for the thing- at that specific point in time, that thing is the most urgent on the priority list.

And there are other variations that you could conceptualize as a priority list, though they're a little different than what I've been describing so far. For example, I've heard of Christians saying "when you get paid, the first thing you should do is set aside 10% to give to the church. And then live on the rest. Our responsibility to tithe should be our first priority, not something we do at the end if we have money left over." This advice seems to assume a "priority list" model- because in the "monthly limits" and "envelope" budgeting strategies, it's not really meaningful to say which category is "first"- you make a plan that includes all the categories, and tweak all of them until the plan fits your income. (Or you could say that this advice falls under the vibes model; one of the inputs to the vibes model is the amount of money you have in your bank account, so you remove that money from your bank account immediately, so your "vibes" don't make you feel like it's okay to spend it.)

Or, you could even conceptualize the envelope model as a priority list model, like "when I get paid, first I allocate x dollars to this category, then I allocate y dollars to this category..." But since the order doesn't change, and you have enough money that you don't run out partway down the list, I feel the "priority list" model is not the ideal way to view it.

See, that's the thing with models- the same situation can be described using several different models. No model is going to be ideal for every situation. Each model emphasizes certain things, and has certain assumptions about your income and about human behavior. It's not that a model is "true" or "not true" of a particular situation, it's that a model may be more or less helpful in understanding someone's choices in a given situation.

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Model 6: Giving your neighbors a feast

I read this blog post a while ago, Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! (by Bret Devereaux). It's about subsistence farmers throughout history, and the strategies they used to not starve to death if they occasionally had a bad harvest or other problems which affected their ability to farm. Check out this part:

The answer was often to invest in relationships rather than in money. ...

The most immediate of these are the horizontal relationships: friends, family, marriage ties and neighbors. While some high-risk disasters are likely to strike an entire village at once (like a large raid or a general drought), most of the disasters that might befall one farming family (an essential worker being conscripted, harvest failure, robbery and so on) would just strike that one household. So farmers tended to build these reciprocal relationships with each other: I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me. But those relationships don’t stop merely when there is a disaster, because – for the relationship to work – both parties need to spend the good times signalling their commitment to the relationship, so that they can trust that the social safety net will be there when they need it.

So what do our farmers do during a good harvest to prepare for a bad one? They banquet their neighbors, contribute to village festivals, marry off their sons and daughters with the best dowry they can manage, and try to pay back any favors they called in from friends recently. I stress these not merely because they are survival strategies (though they are) but because these sorts of activities end up (along with market days and the seasonal cycles) defining a great deal of life in these villages. But these events also built that social capital which can be ‘cashed out’ in an emergency. And they are a good survival strategy. Grain rots and money can be stolen, but your neighbor is far likelier to still be your neighbor in a year, especially because these relationships are (if maintained) almost always heritable and apply to entire households rather than individuals, making them able to endure deaths and the cycles of generations.

The farmers described here used this kind of strategy: When you have a good harvest, you should have a feast and invite your neighbors. This way, you are investing in relationships with your neighbors, and if you have hard times later, they will help you.

I think there are likely people today who are in a similar kind of situation- where the best way to protect yourself from financial hardship is not necessarily to save your money in an individual savings account, but to spend it on social connections, with people you can rely on to come through if you ever need help.

Related to this, here's what Jesus said in Luke 14:12-14,

Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

As an American, I had always read this passage and found it confusing- what does Jesus mean about being "repaid"? When I invite people to go somewhere, it just means I'm inviting them to go somewhere- there's not really more to it than that. I don't really think about being "repaid."

But now that I've read Bret Devereaux's article about giving a banquet to one's neighbors, I'm thinking maybe Jesus was speaking to a culture that had this sort of perspective: When you invite people to a feast, that creates very real social obligations. One of the key reasons to hold such a feast is so that your guests will be obligated to help you in the future. But Jesus is saying here, you should invite "the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind" because they aren't able to repay you in that way. You invite them solely as a way to be kind to them.

And even in Chinese culture, we have this to some extent. If someone gives you a hongbao (a red envelope full of cash) as a gift, you're obligated to give them an equivalent hongbao at some point in the future. Chinese people really keep track of these things. I've heard people say, "We didn't want to have a big wedding, but my parents said we needed to, so they could get back all the hongbaos they've given to people over the years- we invited all my parents' friends, and my parents kept all the hongbaos that people gave us at the wedding."

My husband (who is Chinese) finds it very uncomfortable to have that kind of obligation to people- he tries to avoid it as much as possible. When our first child was 100 days old, and traditionally you would have a party to celebrate, he only invited a couple relatives, and took them out to eat dinner. He didn't want to invite a ton of people, because then they would all give us hongbaos, and we would have to keep track of it, and find some occasion in the future to give them equivalent hongbaos, like maybe for their kid's birthday. Sounds exhausting.

Related to this, it's common that if people come from a poor background and then get a good education and well-paying job, they will be obligated to send some of their money to help their family members. Especially family members who made sacrifices in order to help them pay for their education. The financial advice I always heard assumes you're just an individual, and you're able to freely make choices about what to spend your money on- but that's not true for everyone. For some people, it would be wrong to not send money to help their poorer family members who need it, because those family members helped them get to where they are.

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In this post, I've described 6 different models for how people decide what to spend their money on. Each model is incomplete, and is based on certain background assumptions- therefore this can't be a "one size fits all" thing- it depends on your own specific circumstances. I grew up around a lot of Republicans who had the opinion that "you should be responsible, save your money, have a 6-month emergency fund, if you're not doing all of that, then it's your own fault that you're poor (and you should stop going to Starbucks so much)." But actually, it's more complicated than that. 

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Related:

Here's How We Do Our Budget

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