How is a 401k tax advantaged?
People often describe 401(k) accounts as "tax advantaged", but how do they help? How much? Let's look at a single person earning $50k, saving 20% for retirement over 40 years, and then spending down...
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Bitterness and Longevity
People vary in how much they can taste bitter things. If you go around giving people the chemical Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), which you shouldn't do, because it is toxic, you'll find that some people...
View ArticleAll-Pay Auction for Charity
While in a standard auction you have to pay your bid only if you win, in an all-pay auction you pay whether or not you win. The standard example is a dollar auction where you're selling a dollar....
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Identifying the Worst Charities
The Tampa Bay Times has made a list of the worst 50 charities, ranking them by the fraction they spend on fundraising. As the worst offender they identify Kids Wish Network, with $110M in fundraising...
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Is Unicode Safe?
Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure. — Bruce Schneier, 2000 Over the last 25 years Unicode has succeeded. It hasn't displaced all other character encodings, but it's clearly on its way...
View ArticleAvoiding Distinctions With Abbreviations
In casual English I can talk about "veg advocacy", "being trans", or "Swarthmore alums". These abbreviations are helpful where more formal English would require a distinction I might not want to make:...
View ArticleInscrutable Blog Notes
When I get an interesting idea that I might want to make into a blog post I'll get out my phone and make a note. I'm generally in a hurry doing this, because I'm in the middle of something else or...
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Charity Navigator Pushing for Results
What matters in evaluating charities is results, but most charities either don't have or don't share the necessary evidence. The GiveWell approach with AMF, SCI, and Give Directly has been a...
View ArticleAnthropic Arguments and MAD
The standard view of Mutually Assured Distruction (MAD) is something like: During the cold war the US and USSR had weapons capable of immense destruction, but no matter how tense things got they never...
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Variable Pricing
Mary sells tasty pizza from her food truck. Charging $2/slice, she always has a long line. A friend points out that charging a bit more would probably mean selling fewer slices, but with the higher...
View ArticleHypotheticals and Certainty
Consider two questions: If I push something off of a five foot ledge, will it take longer to fall than if I push something off of a one foot ledge? If a doctor could save five lives by killing one...
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How to run Diplomator
On Saturday I searched for [diplomacy mac] and found the top result a little strange: This is a program I wrote in high school and uploaded it to sourceforge. Softpedia is apparently redistributing...
View ArticleIs Pandora Really Exploiting Artists?
In 1993 David Lowry helped write the song Low. Whenever it's played on the radio he gets 40% of the writer's royalty, and he's angry at Pandora for ripping him off. But are they? Pandora is an...
View ArticleContra Flourish Workshops
A: Dance? B: Yes! Do you have a preferred gender? A: Can I be the lady? I don't know how to lead. The response from 'A' is typical among people who think of contra as something where a major part of...
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Mandolin Straps
I've tried mandolin straps in many different ways: over the right shoulder, around the back, attached to the end of the neck, attached to the body. None of them worked well: to hold the instrument in...
View ArticleKeeping websites up to date
The web is full of stale websites and outdated information. No one intended this, it just happened. When you write up a page on your organization, product, self, or idea you're making a snapshot. But...
View ArticleAccepting Betting
Growing up Quaker meant not betting. When people would try to turn a disagreement into a bet I would just say "I don't bet". Should I still do that? The argument that a bet is a tax on BS is strong:...
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Fun With Multitracking
With a rare day completely free I decided to figure out how to make layered multitrack recordings. I think the right way to do this involves fancy software like Reaper, but I used Audacity because I...
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Citric Acid on Watermelon
About a month ago I got some citric acid. Since then I've tried putting it on and in various things. Chocolate was strange, Strawberries were good, but my favorite has definitely been watermelon: (If...
View ArticlePrioritizing By Happiness
When the limiting resource is money it's quite clear that we should prioritize the uses where it goes the farthest. If there are three organizations that can distribute antimalarial nets for $5/each,...
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