The assets-vs-debt thing is something I go back and forth on. My only debt is my mortgage, which has about 3.5% interest. And I have a bunch of cash and liquid investments (boring index funds).

I found it pretty easy to keep my expenses in check until I had kids. And the extra money I’m spending isn’t even really “for the kids,” it’s for me. The vacations and private lessons jump out in their budget, but the real kid-related expense is the house. I had no use for a big place before I had kids. Now it’s not…

I’ve noticed the “it’s for the kids” excesses from a time-management perspective, too. And a lot of it is due to pressure from society. If I send my kid off to his room to go play with his trains because I’m exhausted and I could use a break, I’m neglecting my kid. If I do the same thing because I need to rock his…

It depends. If you’re running a business that’s netting you $500k, an accountant may be worth it, but if you’re making $500k/year off a couple of W-2's, the accountant isn’t going to do much for you. There are a couple of small-scale tax stunts you can pull off with things like backdoor Roth IRA’s, overfunded college…

Living in NYC is a choice. I live in SF with a comparable budget, and as much as I sometimes say, “well, SF is an expensive city,” to justify my expenditures, I’m well aware that I’m making a consumption choice by living here.

I finally understand why serious soccer people hate the world cup being decided on kicks from the spot.

My insurance cost has gone way down and coverage has stayed basically the same since I heard the word Romneycare. But I think I was the only healthy person buying insurance on the individual market in the pre-mandate days.

Ha! Black people give their kids crazy names! And how about those wacky Native Americans, amirite?

I have a really hard time feeling sorry for them. Trump ran on a platform of racism and taking away Obamacare. He duped some white people into thinking that his racism meant that he wouldn’t take away their health care, since they’re white. Of all of the victims of Trump’s policies, the people who thought Trump was…

Yeah, I think that might be where my being maybe uniquely bad came in to play. “Just hit the other guy’s rock” is a bit like “just hit the head pin” in bowling. A totally reasonable goal for a beginner, but easier said than done.

I’m not sure if I’m exceptionally bad at curling or what, but the one time I tried it it was ridiculously difficult to get a stone anywhere close to the house. The closest thing I can compare it to is hitting a pitching wedge from 50 yards in golf. The pros can put it within inches of where they’re aiming, and make it…

It’s kinda charming how much we care about the rankings of the 40th-50th best college basketball teams in the country this time of year. It feels like just about the only place where we collectively, as sports fans, acknowledge that there’s more to sports than just winning a title.

Seems implausible. With systematic doping like that, you’d expect to see crazy results like a middle distance runner turning into an elite marathoner overnight.

If the Mariners had one of these, Griffey would still be in the league.

Just in Minneapolis, or anywhere in the country? Here in SF, stolen bikes don’t usually stay in the city for more than a day or two; even just moving Oakland bikes to SF and vice versa lowers the chance of a bike getting id’ed as stolen, but most of our stolen bikes find their way up or down the coast.

I’m kind of confused by the “without ever actually putting the cash on the table” part of this. Don’t bookies have to pay out real cash when a bettor winds up in the black? I can’t imagine the typical bettor wants to extend a line of credit to the bookie. (I understand that this is a minority of the clientele, but…

Most police departments don’t really have a good way to tell you if a bike is stolen. If you’re lucky, they’ve got a searchable list of serials of bikes that have been stolen in your city recently, but bike thieves usually move bikes to another city. Your best bet is checking bikeindex.org.

I’m just impressed that his toilet can handle that. 26 squares of TP on wipe 1, 10+ on each subsequent wipe, pretty soon you’re looking at 50-60 squares of TP in the bowl. In giant wads. That poor toilet must clog all the time.

I’ve learned to recognize my biases and gotten entirely out of the stock-picking game. It’s still a struggle, though, to decide when to pull the trigger and sell a bunch of stock and put the money in index funds instead. One thing I’ve found helpful is to pick a date at some arbitrary future time, usually a few months…

Hah! The VC’s got out long ago. Now it’s your retirement fund that’s invested in twitter.