jrkatz

We have a hybrid solution: A joint checking & savings pair (+ credit card) into which paychecks are deposited and against which living expenses (mortgage, food, etc), are drawn; and personal checking & savings accts with monthly transfers from the joint accts. The personal accounts are our 'fun money', and don't get much - they mostly exist to offload the actual bookkeeping of the discretionary spending to the bank, since they cost us nothing to administer except an extra card in the wallet.

We set it up this way because I take home more than her, and I was tired of arguing with my wife that she should feel free to spend some of 'my' money, or that 'me' buying her something with 'my money' was not a gift per se, but an acknowledgement of the futility of her trying to maintain 'her half' of our lifestyle on her paycheck alone while also kicking in to the house. Abstracting all that into a shared fund we both draw on brought psychic peace. Money's fungible and all, but at the end of the day it does feel a lot better when it's not "I pay the mortgage, you buy the food, my savings grow, yours don't". Now the money doesn't feel like manna.

If your incomes are homogenous this is probably too much effort, but to be clear that effort was mostly just 3x as long at the bank once, to get the accounts set up.

I should add I only won that argument when we had a baby and our 'shared' expenses skyrocketed. Before that she was fully committed to separate finances and a constant, low-grade sense of shame & indigence.

For very long term effects (e.g., the impact of painting every surface of your website in ads which will certainly drive users away), hold backs aren't enough because it's too hard to consistently identify users. If ads will drive me away over the course of a year, there's a five percent holdback, and I use multiple devices and cash maybe be consistently identified for a few days or weeks at a time, that means that 95% of the time I use the website I get the bad experience, and I eventually bounce. The holdback will show no effect.

I was in a similar position, but highly motivated to switch due to advancing RSI symptoms. I waited to switch until a low-code, long-duration project came across my desk and was pleasantly surprised by how quickly my old habits were replaced. The trick seems to be that with split keyboards (especially orthilinear models) the finger closest to the next key is usually the one you ought to use anyhow. When home-row is mandatory, it's easy.

After a month or so at most, I was back to full speed. It did ruin me for laptop keyboards, though, I can't type on those at all anymore.

Heat pumps use energy to _move_ heat, not create it. Your refrigerator, for example, moves heat from inside the fridge to outside the fridge. Your AC operates on the same principle. Pump the refrigerant in the other direction (note: mechanically this isn't possible in garden variety ACs) and you reverse the effect. Given the same amount of energy and typical conditions - this won't work to absurdly cold temperatures - it's several times more efficient to use it to run a heat pump than to convert it to heat directly.

Right, I am suggesting that a city can play out this competition by paying higher wages, i.e. paying suburban workers directly, rather than indirectly via subsidy. The experiment here is in wondering what those same workers would do given a net zero change to their income through a larger paycheck and higher housing costs. The subsidy doesn't allow efficient price discovery.

Asserting that the cost is necessary is a _big_ assumption. It's subsidized, sure, but that doesn't imply that it needs to be. If the subsidy ends, maybe wages will rise to close the gap, or maybe they won't, and suburban residents will move into denser accommodations nearer the city.

This is exactly why I buy presents. If I give my dad $250, he will not buy a smart thermostat. The economic utility to him of a smart thermostat is not that high versus, say, $250 in gasoline or food. He'll fill his tank every time. He does _want_ a smart thermostat - it's just not justifiable to him at the price point. At the same time, though he likes having food and gasoline, having more will not bring him joy per se.

That's where the gift giving comes in. I buy him a smart thermostat, effectively giving him license to have the nice object he cannot otherwise justify†. The economic destruction is the point.

†Based on a true story.

> If they're taking shots at you with the intent of harming you, that's already a crime; in most jurisdictions it's called assault with a deadly weapon or something similar. The basis for such laws is that having someone intentionally shoot at you, even if they miss, is a harm in and of itself. But that theory does not generalize to any action that carries a risk of causing harm.

You can't lean on the argument that the harmless act of shooting and missing is a already a crime while simultaneously arguing that drunk driving should not be a crime unless the driver connects. You really need to decide what amount of reckless disregard for another life constitutes a 'harm' and should be criminalized.

> The only moral principle I have stated is that one should not impose punishments on people who have not caused actual harm

But isn't the risk of death a harm? That's what I'm driving at here. It's about where the line is drawn.

Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss? Drunk driving is the tip of an iceberg here.

> My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.

This bit about a doomed society interests me. Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function? If society needs those to function and it makes them (society produces its own laws, after all), isn't that the look of a society that is succeeding? A society that regulation and fails to self-regulate is doomed, for sure.

Now then, the bit about 'most' adults needing such help doesn't come from anywhere. I agree it's a few. But if most adults don't need government incentive to drive sober, regulation preventing drunk driving abrogates a 'right' _they won't exercise_. Are their freedoms limited in that case? Or are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?

I'm sorry, I should have been clear. The 'certainty of punishment' bit should be understood as a probability. The gist of it is that a person considering criminal behavior isn't worried about the severity of the punishment `S` in isolation, but also the likelihood (read: 'certainty') `C` thereof. Simplistically the deterrence model is `C*S`. An extremely severe punishment (execution!) with zero or effectively zero chance of getting caught provides no deterrence. There's more to it - for example doubling severity does not double deterrence in general - but that's the gist of it.

My little thought experiment supposes a person who is drunk evaluates, before deciding to get in the car, the potential outcomes of drunk drive, while entirely convinced they won't harm someone. (I suspect most drunk drives are entirely convinced they won't harm someone, although it is obvious to anybody else there is at least a _chance_ they will.) Today, getting caught with whatever nonzero probability results in a punishment of some severity. By the model we're assuming above, this produces a nonzero amount of deterrence. If we shift away from punishing drunk drivers, the severity drops to zero. If a drunk's options are to call for a ride from the bar or try to drive home, and getting caught at the latter only mean they'll have to call for a ride from some location between the bar and home, driving is the rational choice after all, _so long as they are convinced they won't hurt anybody_.

I was being too circumspect. The point of my scenario is to highlight that decriminalizing drunk driving will likely increase the amount of drunk driving, at least among the population of drunk drivers who are overconfident in their abilities. That in turn will increase the danger drunk drivers present to the rest of us.

I gather you think reaction is morally preferable to prevention in such cases. Is that a fair assertion? In general, I bet we agree there is some amount of risk to myself that I must tolerate to afford others their freedoms, and have just landed at different risk tolerances. I try to take need into account when drawing my line in the sand. "Does anybody _need_ to drive drunk?". Since it's a situation drunk drivers make for themselves I'm happy to punish it. How do you draw your line?

> lock their car and take them to the police station and let them contact someone from there. But don't force them to pay a fine or go to court if they haven't caused harm.

Supposing at least some drunk drivers are aware they are drunk but fully convinced they will not harm anyone, this improves their worst case scenario substantially. Before, losing their license; now, getting even closer to home before calling a ride. Does this incentivize drunk driving among people unable to evaluate the danger they present to others (e.g., drunks)?

Obviously, this falls apart somewhat because those same people probably drive drunk today thinking they won't get caught. Nonetheless, the common consensus is that certainty of punishment is the primary deterrent against criminal activity. Certain non-punishment will change some of the calculus.

And let's not even get into all the bishop-free houses with cathedral ceilings. People have no respect these days.

A basic step for securing a resource intensive API from DDOS attacks and some user impersonation attacks is to rely on a security token in a cookie set in the response to an earlier request. For example, a user may land on a web page and receive a unique, encrypted, short-lived security token cookie that is marked http only (inaccessible to javascript), plus a copy of the token in cleartext. When the user agent later polls an expensive API, it must send the cleartext token as part of the request. Server-side, that's compared to the encrypted copy (received from the cookie) and the expensive call is terminated early if they do not match.

A DDOS attack that relies on a malicious ad or web page directing user agents to poll your expensive API in a loop will no longer work as well, because those user agents will not have the correct security token cookie value, and the attacker is unable to figure out what the correct value is for any given user agent running their malicious code. More sophisticated/expensive attacks are still available, but anything is an improvement.

There are a few ways to skin this cat, so don't refer to the above as a how-to-guide - find a more authoritative voice on best practices than me, please, if you try to implement security like this.

Anyhow, if you want to use an API implementing security like this, you copy the cookies out of your browser and feed them to your program so it can add them to the calls.

Yeah, it turns out all the "An X and a Y walked into a bar" jokes are based in reality.

Many years ago, my friends and I had a night in our favorite dive. That bar draws college kids, Brazilian immigrants, alcoholic townies, yuppies, punks - everyone. It was packed: there was nowhere to sit and hardly anywhere to stand. When we started pushing through to the open space in back, a literal giant of a man who had a booth to himself invited us to sit with him because he liked my tattoos. As the night wore on we discovered 1. the giant man had a peg leg; 2. he was a proud neonazi (and didn't realize we were Jews and Cubans); 3. he could chug a pitcher of Gansett in a few seconds. He even sold one of us some adderall.

I saw the same man a few weeks later at that bar, cheerfully asking a group of Indian grad students shooting pool where they were from, with some level of suggestion they should be sure to return when they finished their degrees.

We weren't going to be friends, and I'm sure he's found his way back to jail by now (and that he deserved it), but it was a night I'll not forget soon. None of that happens at Applebees.