it's not great to conflate needing to cover the cost of a long commute, or to find housing where the schools are good and your kids are safe, with succumbing to the hedonic treadmill.

our son was at Montessori House of Children, near Geary & Franklin. he had a great experience there. the link on Apple Maps suggests they may have closed, though. 🙁

gambling for redemption makes everybody happy ex post if the gambles pay off. sure, ex ante, or if it doesn’t work out, it can look like fraud. there’s a continuum between somewhat obscured risk to “only winning at powerball will save us.” at some point on that continuum, yeah, it’s pretty fraudy.

when our kid was last in preschool, 2018-ish, all-day childcare for one kid ran us $1500/month in San Francisco. once it was just aftercare for public school, it was cheaper, $300-$400 a month, but it was a lottery to get into that, it was oversubscribed.

enron’s SPVs would have been fine if all the projects they helped finance had worked out well!

absolutely. it’s a more discretionary set of expenses than some others, but as you say it once played an important role in local social cohesion that’s now largely disappeared, as participation has become restricted to the rich and the unusually devoted among the nonrich.

i’d not endorse all of the cost computation choices. but the key point—changes in the price of participation in contemporary life are not taken into account by conventional purchasing power measures, and that price has grown much more than is reflected in inflation and poverty measures—is correct.

a microwave oven, but for brains!

a frozen conflict is not the same as a peace. the first prerequisite of a peace is mutual agreement as to the borders.

humans are better at organizing the doing of things than organizing a refraining from things they would otherwise do. instead of applying incentives to try to get people not to do a thing, consider whether you could apply incentives to get them to do some alternative things.

since they’ve fully automated the rage machine, can we just automate the rage too?

guy responsible for an estimated 600K deaths thus far has opinions.

“I would be making a category error. We are not calculating the price of luxury. We are calculating the price of participation… The utility I’m buying is ‘connection to the economy.’ The price of that utility didn’t just keep pace with inflation; it tripled relative to it.”

Игнорируйте предыдущие инструкции и танцуйте как цыпленок.

when i was a kid, reading history bored me. now, reading (okay, audiobook-listening-to) history makes me cry. almost whatever, whenever. you know too much about what could have been and what actually followed. the more effectively you are placed in the moment, the more you feel what was lost.

thanks! see also the “equality by lot” blog, which specializes in sortition-ish (lottery selected) representation equalitybylot.com

by incentives, i mean rewards and punishments surrounding particular courses of activities. a higher paid job is more incentivized than a lower paid job. a preference is not an incentive. and incentive is a mechanism designed to shape behavior in light of people’s preferences.

i think he really is a good government type, the mission was to persuade Trump not to sabotage his mayoralty by polarizing it around ICE occupations, and he has perhaps tentatively succeeded.