I’ma add: don’t sleep on mission-driven colleges. Earlham, the Webb Institute, Berea, and other mission-driven schools are flat-out tuition free, and great choices when their mission lines up with who you are and what you want to do. (Earlham is free for low-income Indiana/Ohio students, Berea for students from…

I was ten when I saw RoboCop (1987) on opening night. It was a spectacularly violent film even by the standards of that era, and I was convinced that it was also art of quite a high nature. (Robocop is a kind of satire in which Detriot’s policing is outsourced to a private company, OCP, that wants to reanimate dead…

I bought my first house when I was a graduate student, and rented the extra bedrooms to friends. While I was visiting my girlfriend’s family at Christmas, one of my renters called to tell me that they didn’t have any hot water. So after no luck on a plumber, I drove home (overnight) and installed a new water heater…

The price difference and sell logic.

I’d call them mediocre. Like, the worst neighborhoods in Youngstown are nicer than the best neighborhoods in Gary or Camden.

1) That “segue” and the word pronounced “seg-way” are the same word. (I thought that the word “segue” was pronounced “seg” and that there was another word, pronounced “seg-way,” which meant roughly the same thing but which was somewhat rarer in print).

This sounds judgy even by the totally neurotic standards of internet parenting. Like, if I’m watching two kids while I’m cooking dinner — which I do — I will 100% cook dinner with one kid and let Alexa read a book to the other.

Meh. People are allowed to have competing priorities or even more than one kid. There are times that my two year old wants to play cars and my five year old wants a story read to her. It’s nice to be able to give both kids what they want.

1) Reward good behavior inconsistently. It’s more effective at encouraging good behavior than rewarding good behavior consistently (as anyone who runs a casino will tell you).

That’s worth saying twice. We live in an environment of artificially calorie-dense food products, and so you have to constantly make intentional choices about how much of what to eat if you want to have reasonable odds of staying healthy.

For some applications, like weight loss, this makes a lot of sense. I walk in the morning while I read mail on my phone or listen in on a meeting. (Triage issues as you walk and respond to them when you’re back at your desk.)

I’ma second this. Your local Credit Union may have a product from Kasasa — or something similar — which offers about 3% APY on checking and savings account balances under $10K.

Lawyer is a lousy entry on this list. The median and average may be at or around $100K, but — forgetting that many freshly-minted JDs don’t get jobs in law at all — there’s a bimodal salary distribution.

FWIW, used dryer sheets are good for getting fingerprints and water marks off of stainless steel. You can use unused ones but you’ve got to wipe up with a dry cloth afterwards.

Another reason not to make regular payments: you can invest them between now and October and pocket the earnings. It’s easy to come out ahead when you borrow money at 0%.

I certainly wouldn’t want my kids using “derpy” in front of somebody with a disability, and that’s probably a good litmus test for whether they ought to use the word at all.

J Crew makes a great budget (~$30) faux-shearling slipper.

J Crew makes a great budget (~$30) faux-shearling slipper.

Yeah, I don’t see anything in this planning that reflects the social function of schools. Here, school is the only place a lot of kids get meals, or clothes, or routine health care. It’s important to keep people safe, but it’s also important to understand that closing schools hits a whole lot of kids at a subsistence…

This. We all understand that there’s  a whole bunch of people who are so ploughed under that no choice they’re capable of making will change their financial lives for the better.  You can’t save your way out of a chronic disease.