Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Why was I invited to Beast Studios? (April 18, 1-hour-18-minute video from Folding Ideas) "But I just left haunted by a profound sense of tragedy. This glimpse inside a vast industrial machine that exists to produce nothing."

2. Prediction Markets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (April 20, 32-minute video) Wow, I knew prediction markets were bad, but they are even more of a horrifying dystopia than I thought.

3. Midwives saved his mom's life — and inspired him to pursue the profession (May 5) "A study, published in the Lancet Global Health in 2020, forecast that, if the number of midwives increased to universal coverage levels, 67% of maternal deaths could be averted as well as 64% of neonatal deaths and 65% of stillbirths. This equates to more than 4 million lives saved each year."

4. Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview wrongly claimed he was a sex offender (May 4, via) "If a human spokesperson made these false allegations on Google’s behalf, a significant award of punitive damages would be warranted. Google should not have lesser liability because the defamatory statements were published by software that Google created and controls."

5. Anti-poverty program is effective even in one of the world's toughest settings (May 4) "Now, research shows it works even in incredibly difficult circumstances, like in the southwestern city of Baidoa. Half of the city's 1.2 million people are internally displaced, driven from their homes by extreme drought and violence by the militant group al-Shabab."

6. H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery (February 25, via) Wow I am so into this, I really need to know if the H was originally installed upside-down.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Thank you to the commenters who left comments on the previous blogaround related to the Supreme Court case about drawing districts to dilute minority votes. What I'm kind of concluding is, this is racial gerrymandering, which has a lot of overlap with partisan gerrymandering. For the Republicans who are pushing it, their motivations are "we want our candidate to win" and also "we don't want black people to have equal voting power" and those motivations are kind of intertwined with each other. Gerrymandering is already bad because it results in a set of elected representatives that doesn't statistically match the population, and this is unfair- but on top of that, because of the US's history of racist voter suppression, it makes sense to have the Voting Rights Act to specifically guard against racial gerrymandering. 

Or, put another way, it's about how partisan gerrymandering has a disproportionate negative effect on minority voters. And the Voting Rights Act recognized that reality and put protections in place, which the Supreme Court says we don't need any more. 

(I am also boggled by all the articles saying it's been John Roberts's life goal to get rid of the Voting Rights Act. Why would someone *want* to get rid of the Voting Rights Act?)

Links:

What to do with a lawless Supreme Court? (May 4) "Since intent is what matters, and a pro-Republican gerrymander looks just like a White-racist gerrymander, it’s impossible to prove racist (rather than partisan) intent. So the VRA’s protection against racial gerrymanders — effectively the last piece of the VRA still standing — is effectively dead."

The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century (April 29, via) "After the Civil War, Congress passed the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, abolishing slavery; the 14th, requiring that states, among other things, not deny persons equal protection of the laws; and the 15th, barring racial discrimination in voting. Despite these amendments, racial discrimination was rampant in the early 20th century, and in the American South, Black citizens were consistently denied the opportunity to vote. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which provided enough protection to vastly increase the opportunities for minority voters to be able to register and vote."

Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act, greenlights GOP gerrymanders (April 29) "'Today… the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,' Kagan wrote in dissent."

2. He recorded his quest for tariff refunds. It shows why billions may never get repaid (May 4) "When the refund portal opened on April 20, businesses that applied did so in minutes. Brown was not among them. And he's still not ready."

3. SPLC Caved to Fascists. They’re Being Targeted Anyway. (May 1) "It’s so disappointing to see an organization that has the funding and goals and staff to make real change in the world, but the leadership decided to bet it all on cowardly compliance. We have seen this over and over and over again ever since Trump took office for his second time: the institutions that stand up to him, win. Those who give in, lose."

Yeah... I remember right after the 2024 election, I got so many emails from all these non-profit organizations that were like "we're going to fight back! send us money!" I'm sure it was a good opportunity for all of them to make money- but what are they actually *doing*? How do you know which ones are actually going to use your donation to fight in the way that you want? 

I kind of use the strategy of seeing which lawyer groups are mentioned in the news articles about standing up against these bad policies and suing to protect people's rights. Which lawyer groups have their lawyers calling a judge in the middle of the night to stop an illegal deportation flight. Those are the groups that are worth donating to.

4. Pope Bob Chooses Formerly Undocumented Dude To Be Archbishop Of Pissing Off Trump (May 3) "Throughout his career, he has worked with immigrant communities from all over the world, and insisted that all people deserve to be treated with dignity. In his last sermon at his church after becoming a bishop, he said, 'We cannot say that we love God if we do not love those who are closer to us. […] Empathy, my brothers and sisters. Empathy — putting ourselves in the shoes of others — is to realize our common humanity.'"

As 1 John 4:20 says, "For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen."

5. They Want You to Think Abortion Pills Are Illegal (May 4) "Something else to remind your communities of: informal networks of accessing medication abortion also remain in place regardless of court rulings."

6. Powell to stay on at Fed until 2028 (April 30) "This is an obvious own goal by Trump. If he had just shut his mouth, Powell would likely have also left the board in May allowing Trump to appoint another lackey to that spot."

7. Protester Banned From U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards’ McDonald’s Properties (April 17, via) "She ended up learning which six McDonald’s restaurants her congressman owns when she got banned from them."

On just giving people money

Cow and calf. Image source.

Here's a good post from Ozy Brennan: The joys of cash benchmarking. It's about comparing the results from a charity program (for example, giving cows to poor people) to the results for a different charity program which used the same amount of money, but just directly gave the money to the recipients, rather than giving them a specific thing or service. Ozy says that the majority of the time, cash outperforms other charity programs, when you measure the effects on people's health, economic situation, etc, and therefore our default stance should be to just give people cash, unless we have a good reason to think that some other approach will outperform cash.

The default thing to do with your altruistic dollars should be:

1. Find the poorest person you can.

2. Give them some money.

If you do anything with your altruistic dollars other than find the poorest person you can and give them money, you should have an explanation for why this is better than finding the poorest person you can and giving them money.

The post says that there definitely *are* charity programs that outperform cash- for example, preventative health care, like vaccines and anti-malarial mosquito nets. It's often the case that people don't take initiative and choose to spend their money on preventative health care (I think when you're extremely poor, you never have enough money for everything, and there will always be some other expense that feels more urgent than preventative health care), *but* if you do that math, it is better and more cost-effective to spend money on preventative health care rather than taking your chances on getting sick.

So because this is a known weakness of human psychology, charities can help by specifically providing preventative health care, and this can be more effective than giving cash. So yes, some charities do outperform cash- but most do not, and Ozy argues that in general you should just give cash unless you have a good reason to think a particular program will outperform cash.

And yes, there are charities that straight-up give cash to people living in extreme poverty, like GiveDirectly.

So, while I was reading this post, I felt like... Intuitively, I think it can sometimes be good to spend money on a specific *thing* instead of just transferring cash directly to the recipients, even if statistically that is "less effective." But maybe I'm wrong about that? So I want to think through it, and write this post about it.

Ozy is coming from an effective altruist perspective, and the whole idea behind effective altruism is that we should give money to charity in a way that maximizes the amount of good that results from it, as measured in lives saved and improvements to people's health and quality of life. But I think, for people who aren't effective altruists, there's sort of a different motive when donating to charity: You have an idea in your head for how you want the world to be, and you give money to a charity that is working to move things in that direction.

So, for example, the charity that gives people cows. Imagine a poor person, living in extreme poverty in the developing world. Now imagine that they are given a cow, and they then have the benefits of getting milk from it, or killing it and selling the meat. That world seems to be a better world than the world where they don't have a cow- and guess what, *you* can make it happen! You can change the "this specific poor person does not have a cow" world into the "this specific poor person has a cow" world.

Whereas the "giving people money" story looks more like, imagine a poor person, struggling to have enough money to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, and health care. Okay, now give them a few hundred dollars. Well, that's great, that will help them a lot with whatever their current needs are- but they're still living in extreme poverty. It doesn't really change the situation. This is a much more boring story than the "give them a cow" story.

(I notice that on GiveDirectly's website, they have a bunch of examples of how the recipients used the money to start a business that totally turned their life around. This is because donors want to imagine that the world where people receive this money is a world that looks different- in obvious ways, which feel good to the donors- from the world where they don't. But realistically, I don't think most of the recipients are using it for something that makes for a good story. I think they're using it for things they really need.)

But if you think about it for a second, you'll realize that it's more helpful for someone to receive money equivalent to the price of a cow, rather than receiving a cow. If the recipient believes a cow would benefit them, they can go buy one- so, this is the same result as if they were just given a cow. And if they feel like something else would help them more, then they can use the money for something else. So, they have more options than just getting a cow- so this is better. (And maybe you've had the experience where you are having financial problems, because of something boring like rent or medical debt- and then someone gives you a juice machine as a birthday gift, and you're like, well, that's nice, but I would have preferred to just have the money.)

Anyway, in the cow example, I do agree that in general you shouldn't donate to charity programs to "give someone a cow", and should donate to something else instead. As a donor, you imagine that hypothetical world where some poor person receives a cow, and how that's better than the current existing world- but I think there is such a huge difference between our lives and the lives of people living in extreme poverty, and therefore, whatever we're imagining about the lives of people in extreme poverty, it's probably wrong. So, not really a good idea to make decisions based on that. Give it to the recipients as money, because they actually know their own situation.

(However, for a donor who is either going to donate to the "give someone a cow" charity or not donate at all, "give someone a cow" is the better option! There are plenty of people who donate in that way, so, it does make sense that such a charity exists.)

I think it's often true that when people donate their money, they aren't trying to help the recipients as effectively as possible, but they're trying to address a specific problem. For example, if you give money to an organization that helps victims of domestic violence. This is not because you want to help these victims *in general* but you want to help them with problems that were caused by the domestic violence. Right? Maybe I shouldn't speak for everyone, but when *I* donate money, it's not because "I want to make people's lives better overall" but more like "I want to counter the effects that this specific problem has had on people's lives." (Or, "I want to prevent this problem from happening.") Effective altruists would strongly disagree with this- the entire point of effective altruism is that we should do whatever gives the most benefit (when you measure lives saved, health, quality of life, etc), and we should *not* focus on a specific problem. So the top charities recommended by effective altruists are charities that fight malaria, because the way the math worked out, those ones save the most lives per dollar. Not because there's any particular reason that we should care about malaria more than other problems. 

But I'm not an effective altruist; I see specific problems in the world and I want to do something about them, because I have feelings about them, rather than doing something about other problems that I don't have feelings about.

So, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I do feel that "I want to help people with some specific problem that emotionally resonates with me" is okay. It doesn't have to be about "I want to help in whatever way does the most good."

But also, sometimes this leads to weird results. For example, suppose you have a family member who has some specific disease, call it Disease A. And so you want to help people who have Disease A. You donate to an organization (let's call them Charity B) that pays the hospital bills for their treatment.

But then, another charity comes along, Charity C. And Charity C says, yes it's great that Charity B is paying for people's medical treatment, but in practical terms this often is not good enough- the medical treatment is still inaccessible because there are very few hospitals which can provide the treatment, so most patients have to pay a lot of money to travel, in order to get the free treatment that Charity B is paying for- and many patients can't afford the travel costs, so they can't get treatment at all. But, good news, Charity C has been set up specifically to pay for people's travel costs, hotel, lost wages, etc, all that overhead that is necessary in order for them to even come and get the treatment.

And so, since you care about people who are affected by Disease A, you decide you also need to donate to Charity C. You hadn't realized that many of these patients couldn't access the benefits of Charity B, but of course you want them to be able to. So, you reason, yes we need Charity C.

And then another charity comes along, Charity D. And they say, there's another disease, Disease E, whose symptoms are pretty much the same as Disease A, but it doesn't get any media coverage. So, this is really unlucky for people who have Disease E, because they are pretty much having all the same problems as people with Disease A, but they're not eligible for any of the support from Charity B or Charity C. A new charity has been started, Charity D, to help people with Disease E.

And so you donate to Charity D too- because your original motive for donating is that you knew someone who had Disease A, and so you care about people who have Disease A- but in your opinion, Disease A is pretty much the same thing as Disease E. If your relative had had Disease E rather than Disease A, well, it would have been the same thing, from your perspective.

So there are always going to be cases along the lines of "I'm donating money to help people with some certain problem. Oh, but, turns out, there's another problem which is pretty much the same as that problem, but which doesn't fall under the technical definition that the charity is using to choose its recipients." 

Wouldn't it be easier to skip all this and just find the poorest person and give them cash? 

There's sort of a mismatch... the donor has this idea in their head about what the problem is and how to help with it, and the charity has a program that is doing concrete things related to that problem- but the practical implementation of it probably looks very different from whatever fantasy the donor is imagining.

Anyway, I just wanted to write down my thoughts on this, because when reading Ozy's post I had this feeling like it *can* be a good thing to donate to a charity that does a specific thing, rather than giving cash and letting the recipients choose what to do with it- even if it's not like one of Ozy's examples where data shows it's "more effective." Maybe as a donor, you don't want the recipients to just choose whatever they feel is most useful, but you want to help them with a specific problem. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely something we should be aware of and think about. How to balance what you want, as a donor, with what the recipients feel is most useful. (Effective altruism says we shouldn't balance this at all, but only do what the data has shown to be most effective in improving people's lives.) 

Also, if we're talking about helping people in extreme poverty in developing countries, most of their problems do stem from the fact that they don't have enough money, so I agree that it's better to give them money rather than giving them something that feels "fun" to the donor, like a cow. There's not going to be some cool clever trick that totally changes their lives- the problem is poverty, the problem is money. The problem is not that it just never occurred to them that there are benefits to owning a cow.

But if you want to help people in the US, or other developed countries, who are having a problem that you relate to and you feel is important (note that effective altruists don't do this at all- they give their money to developing countries because a dollar goes much farther for recipients in extreme poverty), then I think there is more room for the donor's own feelings and opinions on how they *want* the problem to be solved. What kind of world they want to work towards, rather than just what's going to be most immediately useful to the recipients.

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Also, if you want to just give people cash, you can donate to GiveDirectly

Related

"Portfolios of the Poor" (book review)

My Weird Hangups About Charity

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. A few fun songs I recently shared with my little toddler:

Friend Like Me Song (from Aladdin) (Official Video) [High Quality] - Disney Songbooks - From the 1992 "Aladdin" movie

Sesame Street: Patti Labelle Sings The Alphabet (2009) Gospel cover of the ABC song.

2. China Bans Retractable EV Door Handles Over Safety Concerns (December 26, 2025)

3. Why these women break the law to sell their eggs for IVF (January 29) "'You've told yourself you've done something, but actually you've only made it worse,' she says, referring to the legislators who formulated this law. 'You've created a black market, which means the people participating in it have no protections — they have no bargaining power. If something goes wrong, they're already doing something criminal, something illegal. So who are they going to turn to for help?'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong (January 26, via) "No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back."

2. 5-year-old Liam Ramos and father are back in Minneapolis after being released from federal custody in Texas (February 1) 

3. Minnesota citizens detained by ICE are left rattled, even weeks later (February 1) "'I wasn't even outside for mere seconds before I seen a masked person running at me full speed,' Hussen said at a news conference last month. 'He tackled me. I told him, 'I'm a U.S. citizen.' He didn't seem to care. He dragged me outside to the snow while I was handcuffed, restrained, helpless and he pushed me to the ground.'"

4. Anti-ICE protesters call for national action against federal immigration tactics (January 31) 

5. It Can Happen In Your City Too (February 1) "As she was on the ground, the agents dumped out her purse, found her U.S. passport and left the scene, according to SEIU."

6. Trump Pressures International Orgs To Disavow Trans Care, Social Transition Globally "At Any Age" With Funding Ban (January 27) "In practice, the rule would attempt to force groups receiving U.S. aid worldwide to adopt extreme discriminatory policies toward transgender people as a condition of continued funding."

7. Trump admin is trying to deport LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers to countries where they'd be killed, lawyers say (January 29, via) "Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, passed in 2023, prescribes life imprisonment for consensual same-sex relationships and allows for the death penalty in cases labeled 'aggravated homosexuality.'"

8. His mistaken deportation was thought to be unique. But 'the problem is getting worse' (February 3) "Sandoval-Moshenberg said he alone has a dozen other plaintiffs like Abrego Garcia. It's impossible to quantify how many such mistaken deportations are happening — as only a small subset of immigrants have lawyers to argue for their return."

9. Judge temporarily blocks axing deportation protections for Haitian migrants (February 3) "A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's attempt to end deportation protections for more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants, who are allowed to live and work in the US legally under Temporary Protected Status (TPS)."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The cookies that fueled votes for women (December 14) "Cookies, cakes, pies and treats like these little kiss cakes were sold at bake sales around Salt Lake City and all over the West. The proceeds helped suffragists crisscross the country to make their case for women's rights."

2. To 'graduate' from poverty, they can borrow to build a business. So why aren't they? (December 13) "'What we're seeing clearly is that it's deeper than you need money to make money,' he says. 'You also need to be able to take on risk to make money. And that's a double whammy for someone who's poor.'"

3. Questions of accuracy arise as Washington Post uses AI to create personalized podcasts (December 13) "In a statement, the Washington Post Guild — which represents newsroom employees and other staff — tells NPR, 'We are concerned about this new product and its rollout,' alleging that it undermines the Post's mission and its journalists' work." This sounds like a bad idea.

4. LET’S PLAY: ‘Text With Jesus’ (December 1) "That’s a nice dodging of the actual question. But real talk here: The chatbot can’t actually answer this question because no Christian can."

And Captain Cassidy's other posts on "Text With Jesus": AI meets Christianity in ‘Text with Jesus’ and Text With Jesus: Why an AI Satan scares some Christians 

So apparently there's this "Text With Jesus" app which uses Chat GPT to create chatbots of bible personalities, like Jesus. Okay, so, the first thought I had was, wouldn't it be something, to be able to pray and then get an actual response back? Whomst among us has not had the experience of desperately praying, asking God why, and never receiving any answer? But a chatbot- it *has* to reply. Wow, prayer would be a totally different thing if it came with a guarantee like that.

But as Captain Cassidy's investigation shows, the answers that "Jesus"/the other bible characters give are very boilerplate, Christian cliche answers. This is all stuff you can hear at church. Nothing new. Nothing real. And, I mean, of course it can't be anything new, it's just a chatbot. It's not real. 

(And apparently you can choose options about which denomination of Christianity you are in, and the chatbots will answer according to the beliefs of that denomination. I feel like that kinda breaks the illusion. Here, choose the set of things you already believe, and then this chatbot will regurgitate them back at you, in a quirky bible-character voice.)

If I had the real Jesus captive and required to answer me, I would ask extremely pointed and emotional questions about the problem of evil. I kinda wanted to try that on this chatbot, but you have to download it first, and that's too much trouble, also, it's just silly for me to treat this as if there's a possibility of actually getting new truths from it- it's a chatbot.

I wonder what kind of person uses this app and views it as helpful for their spiritual life. Are there people actually texting all their prayers into this app, and it feels better than just praying the normal way and "listening to God"? That seems... bad because it's fake. Like instead of experiencing the actual struggle of trying to "listen to God", looking for answers and getting nothing, overanalyzing your thoughts and "signs" you might have seen, you just get this easy-to-read AI response. 

But also, this seems quite limited in how much enjoyment you can get out of its responses. It's all very boilerplate, nice-sounding churchy language. Don't know how long one can stand to listen to that, when one wants *real* answers.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump administration's 'worst of the worst' includes pregnant, postpartum women (December 12) "In one Louisiana facility, according to a Senate report, at least 14 pregnant women were visible during the staff’s visit."

2. WHO expert group’s new analysis reaffirms there is no link between vaccines and autism (December 11, via) Can't believe we really have to keep talking about this.

3. The Trump administration's authoritarian house of cards is starting to fall down (December 12) "Kilmar Abrego Garcia is '[o]n his way home.' Another grand jury rejected DOJ's effort to indict Letitia James. And, Indiana Republicans said no to Trump's redistricting pressure."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Graham Platner is an Embarrassing Liar (November 13) "They don’t care. They don’t think they’ll ever face consequences–not for the imperialism, the violence, the racism, the misogyny, and no, not even the Nazi tattoo because they know there will always be another white man in those Reddit comments explaining that it’s not a big deal and we just don’t understand what it’s like to be in the military."

2. The developing world needs more roads (November 11) "This problem shows up most clearly in the differences in land allocated to road networks: 27 percent of Manhattan is dedicated to roads, as is 24 percent of London. These cities are typical for their income group. ... For the average city in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, only 16 percent is reserved for streets. Just 12 percent of Dhaka, 10 percent of Kolkata, 14 percent of Dakar, 13 percent of Addis Ababa, 12 percent of Nairobi, and 14 percent of Accra are dedicated to roads. Instead, lax building rules have allowed homes and workplaces to take over public spaces."

Also from Works in Progress: How market design can feed the poor (September 22) This is an article about a system that was set up to efficiently distribute food to food banks. Instead of just assigning them whatever, like the old system did, the food banks have a currency called "shares" and they can make their own choices and bid their shares on the available food, according to their own needs. 

3. Philosophical issues with transness are a symptom of dysphoria (November 15) "But in my experience, if your hormones are on point and you’re generally seen the way you want to be seen, then it’s not a big deal if you’re in some abstract philosophical sense your assigned sex at birth. You might prefer to be in some abstract philosophical sense the gender you identify as, but it doesn’t cause you persistent unhappiness."

4. The U.S. just produced its last penny after a more than 200-year run (November 12)

5. A 'breakthrough' drug to prevent HIV, an 'unprecedented' rollout (November 18) "Just two injections a year provide near-complete protection against an HIV infection."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Epstein survivors release MUST-WATCH new PSA as Congress prepares to vote on releasing the files (November 17)

2. Gregory Bovino is exactly who E.B. White — author of 'Charlotte's Web' — warned us about (November 17) "But, to use a book authored by E.B. White as your name is an offense to history. White was a leading voice for American democracy and freedom and against fascism and tyranny. Abusing his life’s work like this cannot stand without a response."

3. State Department Reverses Course, Says Trans Passports Will Be Valid Until They Expire (November 18) There has been a lot of back-and-forth about passports for trans people. The latest update is that, even though the Supreme Court says the government is allowed to stop trans people from getting passports with their correct gender marker, the good news is that passports which already have been issued will still be valid.

This whole thing is extremely stressful for trans people in the US (and it's still going on). Cis people should all be thinking about what we can do to support them.

4. Food stamps are back, but millions will soon lose benefits permanently (November 15) "The loss of SNAP 'was really stark during the shutdown,' said Dottie Rosenbaum, director of federal SNAP policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 'But [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act] is the largest cut in the program’s history. That is also going to be really deeply felt.'"

5. What Counts as Political Violence? (September 26, via) "Ezra Klein did not write a high profile essay about how Villegas Gonzalez was doing democracy the right way by working hard and taking care of his kids."

Also from Noah Berlatsky: First-of-its-kind LGBTQIA+ hotline in Illinois offers support amid sweeping attacks (November 3) "One caller to Illinois Pride Connect, according to the caller description, was “a parent of a trans adolescent seeking information on the risks and benefits of applying for a passport to reflect her child’s gender identity.” The family had updated birth certificates and state ID but had not changed their passport or Social Security record, and was worried about trying to get through customs with inconsistent gender information."

And: Republicans Want Poor People to Suffer (November 4) "This is the Newsmax logic; if anyone anywhere is misusing federal funds, that offsets the benefits of 3 million children a month being lifted out of poverty. Stopping one evil welfare queen is worth starving any number of children."

6. U.S. deports dozens of migrants to Ukraine amid war (November 18)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Reading Halloween (1978) Through the Lens of Labor (October 30, via) "Parents, historically, have been the most recurring threat to babysitters in their capacity to exploit and prey on them, and yet with Michael on set, the threat of the predatory employer-parent gets completely displaced."

2. Scientists thought this fossil was a teen T. rex. Turns out it's a new tyrannosaur (October 30) 

3. Hundreds killed in Darfur hospital massacre, 'hero' doctors abducted (October 30)

4. Israel still blocking most Gaza aid as military carries out more attacks (November 1, via) "This is an average of 145 aid trucks per day, or just 24 percent of the 600 trucks that are meant to be entering Gaza daily as part of the deal, it added."

5. Too many rats? Birth control is one city's answer (November 1) "For all these reasons, Somerville is trying something else — an anti-fertility chemical that targets the mature eggs in female rats."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. America's immigration crackdown is disrupting the global remittance market (October 28) "What leads Yang to argue this is that immigrants in the United States send a jaw-dropping amount of money back home to their families. These remittances, as they're known, have dwarfed the size of official foreign aid that the U.S. spends on things like economic development, health, and humanitarian assistance."

2. America’s Assault On Real History Comes For The Staff Of The Charles Lindbergh House And Museum (September 3, via) "As of the end of August, it’s all gone."

3. Trump administration sets lowest-ever cap on refugee admissions to U.S. (October 30) "'It is egregious to exclude refugees who completed years of rigorous security checks and are currently stuck in dangerous and precarious situations,' said Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project. He said that the number of those with confirmed travel plans to the U.S. is greater than the new refugee cap."

4. Trump Admin Attempts To Ban Trans Youth Care Nationwide With New Federal Rules (October 30) "Now the administration is escalating with a blitz of three new rules that could effectively end most transgender youth care nationwide if enacted—pressuring many medical institutions to drop trans patients from receiving the care they need out of fear of federal reprisal, and punishing those who do not comply."

5.  The Myth of the Woke Right: A Response to the New York Times (October 24) 36-minute video from Big Joel about how that felon never actually understood "free speech" to mean "free speech"; how the New York Times wrote an article about "The Woke Right" but that's not really a thing, and the people who use the term use it to mean all sorts of different things; and the difference between cancel culture and government censorship.

6. Food Stamps are Good, Actually (Here Comes the Science) (October 30) "In the meanwhile, I urge you all to reach out to your local community to help out, or to find help if you need it."

And: Trump administration faces Monday deadline on use of contingency funds for SNAP (November 3) "The situation leaves millions with uncertainty about how they will feed themselves. Benefits will be delayed in November regardless of the outcome of the court cases because many beneficiaries have their cards recharged early in the month and the process of loading cards can take a week or more in many states."

7. US carries out new strike in Caribbean, killing 3 alleged drug smugglers (November 2) "The U.S. military has now killed at least 64 people in the strikes."

8. They were promised a lifeline to 'graduate' from poverty. Then it was taken away (November 2) "But just as you are about to receive that support, it gets canceled."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How to Make a Great Government Website (2024, via) "First is the required interview. Most of the time it’s a phone call. Often they’ll call from a blocked number. They’ll send you a notice of when your interview is scheduled for, but this notice will sometimes arrive after the actual date of the interview."

2. Beauty and the Beast - How bad was A.I.D.S.? (October 10, via) 56-minute video. It's a queer reading of "Beauty and the Beast," as is overlaps with what was going on with the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s.

3. AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet (October 7) 12-minute video from Kurzgesagt.

4. This post about Copilot in Excel getting a simple sum wrong. Apparently it's because the prompt didn't actually include any info about what cells the data was in. The AI doesn't give an error message or anything, so there's no way the user would have known that.

I haven't ever used Copilot in Excel so maybe I'm missing some key thing, but, uh... my reaction is, excel formulas update when you change the data, but if I'm using an AI for something that matters, I would need to carefully check the output. Having a human pay attention to the output every time it changes seems incompatible with having things update automatically (which is one of Excel's biggest strengths).

Doesn't seem great if every formula in every cell of your excel sheet has a mind of its own and you can't rely on them being right.

5. U.S. measles cases continue to climb, with outbreaks across the country (October 12) "Before widespread vaccination, pretty much everyone got measles in childhood. And 400-500 people in the U.S. used to die from it each year."

6. Hamas releases 20 remaining living Israeli hostages after two years in Gaza (October 13, via) "Parents were reunited with sons and children with fathers as those held were handed over to the Red Cross before finally rejoining their families with the help of the Israeli army."

7. Taylor Swift - The Fate of Ophelia (Official Music Video) (October 6) I like this song~

8. Michigan Republican pushing pornography ban linked to porn site, records show (October 7, via) So it was discovered that Schriver, a politician who's been trying to ban porn, used to have an account on a site with sex webcams and the like.

I'm posting this because people are calling it out as obvious hypocrisy, but I think it's a little more complicated than that. In conservative Christian culture, porn is seen as this evil bad thing that all men are naturally drawn to. If they don't have good enough self-control and/or restrictions on their computer, all men would go and make an account on a porn site. A lot of talk about how so many men are "struggling" with porn use, "addicted" to porn, how it's such a bad thing but they're all tangled up in it because it's so tempting.

It makes perfect sense to me that a lot of these conservative lawmakers supporting "porn bans" are men who have been part of this "struggling with porn" subculture- partly interested in it and partly repressing themselves and feeling so much shame- they try to make laws to ban it as a way to fight against their own "porn addiction"- as a way to show God that even though they keep failing in their resolution to not use porn, on some level they really are trying to fight it.

9. The Supreme Court’s First Blockbuster Case This Term Looks Pretty Fake (October 6, via) "And I think, in theory, there’s nothing wrong with bringing a test case. If someone’s rights are really at stake and they haven’t faced punishment yet—but they fear that they will—it’s legitimate for that person to sue. But what ADF does is really finesse the facts, often to the point of fiction, to justify creating a test case that the Supreme Court can use to change the law."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. No Kings is on Saturday, October 18. Go out and protest if you can.

2. Chicago and the Horrors of Carte Blanche (October 4) "Authorities seized people first, without probable cause, treating merely living in the same complex as suspected undocumented migrants as a crime."

Also from Jay Kuo: The Hunger Games (October 3) "After all, why should the Democrats agree to keep the government open for another seven weeks to negotiate a “budget” if the White House can later refuse to honor it? What’s to stop the OMB from doing exactly the same thing with New York City transit funds and blue state energy projects even after a budget is passed and signed into law?"

3. Van Nuys car wash owner files $50M claim over injuries sustained during immigration raid (September 26) "Shouhed says he was terrified as he tried to explain to the agents that his employees were authorized to be on the job, yet he says they took at least five of his employees away in handcuffs. He says he screamed that he is a United States citizen and had proof in his wallet, but he says they did not listen."

4. 'I'm done being afraid': How the shutdown has led federal workers to speak out (October 10) "They say the best organizer is a bad boss, and we all have the same bad boss."

5. ‘Bring her back’: Delaware abuse victim rescued from ICE deportation (October 13, via) "Before agents rummaged through her home, Isabela demanded they show her an arrest warrant. They refused and broke down her door anyway, injuring her son with the doorknob as they barged in."

6. “I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore”: They Tried to Self-Deport, Then Got Stranded in Trump’s America (October 10, via) "ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen Venezuelans who said they wanted to take the U.S. government’s offer of a safe and easy return. They signed up months ago on the CBP Home app and were given departure dates. But after those dates came and went, these immigrants said they feel betrayed by what the president told them."

7. MIT Rejects Trump’s Bid to Institute Trans Bathroom, Athletics Ban (October 11)

8. Multiple airports refuse to play Kristi Noem video that blames Democrats for government shutdown (October 13)

9. This frog protester in Portland, from this link: Everyone Is Pointing Out This 1 Reason Why The Anti-ICE Inflatable Frogs In Portland May Be The Best Protesters (October 14)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Mark Zuckerberg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse (September 18, via) "You’ve already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce."

And here's another one about AI: California issues historic fine over lawyer’s ChatGPT fabrications (September 22) "The fine appears to be the largest issued over AI fabrications by a California court and came with a blistering opinion stating that 21 of 23 quotes from cases cited in the attorney’s opening brief were made up."

2. Giving people money helped less than I thought it would (August 19) "Many of the studies are still ongoing, but, at this point, the results aren’t “uncertain.” They’re pretty consistent and very weird."

3. Your Review: Participation in Phase I Clinical Pharmaceutical Research (September 5) "This phrase, 'better safe than sorry,' overwhelmingly characterizes the protocols of research clinics at every level, except the level where they start to ask whether participants might become more likely to pass through their filters by lying than meeting all their criteria."

4. Groundbreaking Analysis Upends Our Understanding of Psychiatric Holds (July 23) "Why would an intervention intended to help end up doing harm? The researchers offer and investigate several plausible explanations. Involuntary hospitalization can be a deeply disruptive experience. Patients are often forcibly taken by police, held for days, and sometimes medicated without consent. Such experiences might isolate individuals from their support networks, including family and existing mental health providers. Furthermore, hospitalizations can disrupt employment and increase homelessness, causing a spiral of instability that exacerbates rather than alleviates mental distress."

5. Did Amazon trick people into paying for Prime? Federal case goes to trial (September 23) "One example regulators offered showed a large yellow button 'Get FREE Two-Day Shipping' as a swift way to sign up without much detail about recurring membership costs, while a small blue hyperlink 'No thanks, I do not want fast, free shipping' would avoid signing up for Prime."

Yeah, that aspect of the Amazon checkout process is one of the best examples of a company being dishonest and trying to trick you into signing up for something. You literally have to click "I do not want fast, free shipping" to get past that page.

And an update on that: Amazon to pay $2.5 billion to settle U.S. lawsuit that it 'tricked' people into Prime (September 25)

6. Beastly Christianity (September 24) "It was a powerful, compelling argument and it prevailed in the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. This was theology from “the global south” contributing to and reforming the dominant theology from Europe and America. It changed the way white Reformed Christians around the world understood a key passage from the book of Romans, an epistle that is one of the most-studied texts in all of the Bible for Reformed Christians."

7. China’s ‘Worst Handwriting Group in History’ Rewrites Grief (September 25) "The turning point came in October, when one user shared her father’s nearly illegible scrawl from an ICU bed."

Oh man, I am so bad at reading Chinese handwriting. Yes, I can read Chinese- by which I mean, on a computer screen. In a book. On a sign. Printed on a label. You know, Chinese in a standard font. But people's handwriting, that's totally different. You see, each Chinese character, if written correctly, has certain strokes that go in certain places- but when people are writing by hand, they often collapse a bunch of strokes into some kind of scribble, in order to write faster. I very much do not have the skill of figuring out what strokes a scribble was originally supposed to be.

8. On Thought Experiments (September 24) "Everywhere I go people are proposing thought experiments that involve people-seeds landing on the carpet or filling the observable universe with tightly packed shrimps or something wacky about pills and then getting very angry at each other about the results."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Jimmy Kimmel's show is returning to ABC on Tuesday, but not all stations will air it (September 23, via) 

Jimmy Kimmel is Back! (September 24) 

"Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can't take a joke."

2. 3 thoughts from an autism researcher on Trump's acetaminophen and vaccine claims (September 23) That felon is out here saying that pregnant people shouldn't take Tylenol, or their baby will end up autistic. (And no, this is very much NOT what the scientific evidence says.)

This annoys me so much, because even though it's not true, it's going to get added to "the pregnancy rules." Yeah, when you're pregnant, random people feel entitled to judge you for what you're eating/doing/etc, and tell you that you are harming your baby. And there are SO MANY pregnancy rules. Don't eat deli meat. Don't eat pre-cut fruit. Don't eat sushi. Don't eat fish that are high in mercury. Everyone is so paranoid- including the pregnant people themselves- and there's this huge burden placed on pregnant people, all these things you're not allowed to do. And you have to follow these rules because you'd do anything for your baby, right? You wouldn't want to be selfish and put your baby at risk, right?

(I wrote about "the pregnancy rules" here: "Expecting Better": Asking the Right Questions About Pregnancy)

Any kind of medicine at all, pregnant people are already paranoid about taking it, and feel like they should just tough it out and take no medicine because it might put their baby at risk. Any kind of medicine, regardless of what evidence there is about its safety. This is not logical- there's also a risk to the unborn baby if the pregnant person has an actual medical problem and it goes untreated. Why isn't anybody talking about that? Anyway, now Tylenol is gonna be one of those things that brings random busybodies into pregnant people's lives. One of those things which feels so emotionally high-stakes when you're pregnant because "how could you put your baby at risk????" but the evidence doesn't say that at all.

And another link: Trump admin 'seems to care very little about autistic people,' says advocate (September 24) "But it also just continues to ratchet up the stigma. They talk about autistic people, like our existence is some sort of plague."

3. Georgia senators demand answers on more than a dozen deaths in immigration detention (September 23)

4. Trans Patients File Groundbreaking Legal Complaint Against UPMC For Capitulation To Trump (September 24) "Now, plaintiffs are seeking reimbursement for medical expenses associated with the termination of care, emotional distress, and attorneys’ fees and costs; urging the Human Relations Commission to investigate UPMC for discriminatory practices; and pursuing immediate injunctive relief, so that all trans people and families devastated by the care stoppage can once again access evidence-based, life-saving treatment for gender dysphoria."

5. Deadly shooting at Dallas ICE detention facility may have been politically motivated (September 24)

Despite fear, migrants show up for ICE appointments in Dallas and are turned away (September 25) "Marcos, who asked to use his first name because he has a pending immigration case, says he is worried that ICE will not excuse his missed appointment, even though the building is closed and still an active crime scene."

6. A statue of Trump and Epstein holding hands in D.C. is removed as fast as it appeared (September 24) You guys have to see this statue, it's amazing.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The "ministerial exception" is rapidly becoming a civil rights nightmare (August 12) "The precedent here is devastating. Civil rights protections can now be dissolved, not by an act of Congress, but by the stroke of an HR pen in the name of religion."

Ah, it's about World Vision discriminating against a woman in a same-sex marriage, who applied for a job. Well that brings me back to The World Vision Debacle of 2014, where the Christian blogosphere found out that World Vision's policies allowed employees to be in same-sex marriages, and oh my goodness it was a huge scandal. So much outrage on the internet. World Vision is a Christian organization that helps impoverished children around the world, but oh my goodness, the evangelical Christians were just beside themselves, ready to cancel World Vision (I guess this was before it was called "cancelling" though). We absolutely cannot help poor children if a gay person might also be helping them, absolutely not. That was the sentiment that Christians were posting all over social media. And as a result of the backlash, World Vision changed their policy- employees are *not* allowed to be in a same-sex marriage.

That was the point where I officially quit being evangelical. The evangelical Christians were all over the internet, loudly proclaiming that we will throw poor children under the bus in order to reject gay people to the fullest extent possible, and I just... this is unredeemable. I can't be a part of this any more. I can't "change it from the inside." I'm done.

At the time, I wrote about it here: Go ahead and say I'm not a Christian. I don't care anymore.

Also from Hemant Mehta: "Shiny Happy People" sequel highlights Christian boot camp that traumatized a generation (July 30) Oh I really want to watch this and blog about it.

2. Researchers discover a secret weapon that saves babies' lives. And it's not medical (August 18) "Cash cut mortality in children under 5 by about 45%, the study researchers found, on par with interventions like vaccines and anti-malarials."

This is great news! A few questions that are worth exploring: Does giving cash to some people have any negative effects on other people who didn't get cash? Also, in what kinds of situations does it help to give cash, and in what kinds of situations does it not help? For example, if you're in a big city with very high rent prices, and you say "let's give everyone money, then their rent will be affordable"- well if a big proportion of renters get money, the landlords will just increase the rents, and it won't help the renters. So the issue is that there just isn't enough housing supply- it's not clear that adding money to the situation will help.

In this article, though, it's mostly about families being able to more easily access food and medical care, which aren't going to be limited in that way- so that's good.

3. 小鸭子嘎嘎嘎 - In case you would like to know what kind of music Chinese toddlers are into. My daughter's nanny ("ayi" in Chinese) has been playing this song for her. It's about ducklings. "Ga ga ga" is Chinese for "quack quack quack."

4. Exhausted and Alone, China’s Single Moms Are Moving in Together (August 20) "Posts advertising 'roommate moms' circulate widely, drawing responses from strangers across cities. Some end up splitting rent, others share school pickups and grocery runs, piecing together a version of family that is less solitary, less precarious, and a little more possible."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Four More Virginia School Districts Defy Trump, Reject Trans Bathroom Ban Demand (August 18) "As a school board member, I cannot sit idly by while adults who should know better try to pit one group of students against another. Our responsibility is to ensure that every child — including those who are transgender or gender nonconforming — has an opportunity to achieve their full, unique, and limitless potential."

2. After the CDC shooting, federal workers demand more protections from RFK Jr. (August 20) "A letter signed by hundreds of current and former HHS employees, addressed to Kennedy and members of Congress, says Kennedy is 'complicit in dismantling America's public health infrastructure and endangering the nation's health' by questioning the integrity of the CDC's workforce, making false claims that COVID vaccines are not safe or effective, changing vaccine policy based on ideology rather than science, and contributing to 'harassment and violence experienced by the CDC staff.'"

3. Trump vows to end use of mail-in ballots ahead of 2026 midterm election (August 19) EXCUSE ME, WHAT? (I am outside the US and I always vote by mail.)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Snake-in-the-Box Problem (August 6) From xkcd.

2. There are now more than half a billion mobile money accounts in the world, mostly in Africa — here's why this matters (July 7, via) "As the chart below illustrates, the percentage of people in Sub-Saharan Africa with a mobile money account grew rapidly, from 12% in 2014 to 33% by 2021."

Also from Our World in Data: Two billion people don’t have safe drinking water: what does this really mean for them? (June 23) "The vast majority of the two billion — around three-quarters of them — do have access to a piped water source or protected well that is probably safe to drink. But it’s either not located in their home, is not always available, or there’s no guarantee it’s completely contamination-free. That usually means they must travel to get there; whether that round-trip takes less or more than 30 minutes determines whether they fall into the 'basic source' or 'limited source' category."

3. You Can Now Buy Eggs From In-Ovo Sexed Hens! (July 17, via) "Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive)."

4. The Element Song by Tom Lehrer

Posting this because Tom Lehrer, influential musical satirist, dies at 97 (July 27)

5. More than 1,000 rabbis and Jewish leaders denounce starvation in Gaza (August 1) The letter says they agree with Israel fighting this war, but don't agree with using famine as a weapon.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Cynicism Is the Enemy of Action (July 1) "I think back to the phrase climate journalist David Roberts coined a decade ago, the 'doing it wrong brigade,' for those people on the sidelines who tell those who are doing the work that they should be doing it differently, criticizing their tactics, goals, alliances, or some other thing that falls short of perfection since as Hayes and Kaba point out, when you're not doing anything you can set impossible goals and then lounge about figuring out how those doing the work fall short."

2. Federal agents spread out across D.C. streets amid Trump's vow to crack down on crime (August 11) "He offered no explanation for where homeless people would be sent, but in a social media post last week Trump suggested he is considering a federal takeover of policing in Washington."

3. Asylum-seekers thought they were following the rules. Now some are told to start over (August 10) "'You're literally making documented people, again, undocumented, and they're already in here,' said Michelle Marty Rivera, an immigration attorney who has dozens of clients who have received these letters. 'You are canceling employment authorization. You're virtually converting people that are following the normal traditional asylum rules and leaving them without a status and without protection and asking them to show their faces to ICE.'"

So the strategy that the MAGAs are using is to find some minor thing where somebody's asylum-seeking process didn't go exactly according to the "rules" (even if this was the government's fault for not having availability to do interviews) and then saying that means the entire thing is invalid. It comes across as "the government is out to get you" rather than "there should be a system where people with genuine reasons are able to claim asylum."

(I have some thoughts about the similarities between this and conservative Christian ideology about sin and hell. Maybe if I have time I'll write a post on that. See also: ICE and Hell)

Update, I wrote the post: When You Believe God is Out to Get You

4. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposts video of pastors saying women shouldn't vote (August 9) Ah, the pastor in question is Doug Wilson. How will I explain Doug Wilson to my children?

5. A family's fishing trip ends with the dad at 'Alligator Alcatraz.' Here's their story (August 9) "Unable to show a driver's license, the couple were arrested and taken to a local jail where they were separated. M. says this was the last time she saw her husband, before he joined the hundreds of detainees at the controversial makeshift detention center, which has been dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz." She told NPR their story on the condition of anonymity for the entire family, because she fears retaliation from immigration officials."

6. Texas Showdown (August 6) "When people ask, 'But what are Democrats actually doing to save our country from MAGA fascism?' point them to the brave men and women of the Texas state Democratic House caucus. They are risking their political careers and even their personal freedoms, not to preserve their seats and their power, but to preserve our right to a fair and representative system."

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