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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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...
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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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Fix Your Facebook Email
About a year ago Facebook changed how email addresses show up. The default now is your.facebook.username@facebook.com: This wouldn't be so bad if email people sent to you@facebook.com actually reached...
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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 ArticleHow 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...
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....
View ArticleGood Charity as Neither Tragedy nor Farce
People keep linking to Zizek's talk on charity, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, to say we shouldn't donate. So what's his argument? In the first half of the talk he describes a "cultural capitalism"...
View ArticleSurvey of Historical Stock Advice
If you open a standard personal finance book and read the section on investing in the stock market they'll probably say "Don't try to time the market or pick individual stocks" and therefore "Invest...
View ArticleHow Should BIDA Finance a Sound System?
BIDA is thinking of buying a sound system. We can store one at the hall and owning a system would dramatically decrease the unpleasant fraction of the work of running sound for the dance. It would also...
View ArticleCitric Acid
As a kid I remember candy was never sour enough. Warheads were good for 20 seconds but then were boring sweet hard candy. Sour Patch Kids were ok for 10 seconds but then were boring sweet gummy candy....
View ArticleContra: Looking Back 25 Years
I just finished reading American Folklore revival: a study of an old-time music and dance community, John Bealle's 1988 PhD thesis. It's about the Bloomington Indiana contra dance community. While the...
View ArticleHaiti and Disaster Relief
A couple months ago the New York Times published an article about the disappointing progress of relief and recovery after the Haitian earthquake. Three years in, with nearly $10 billion donated, Haiti...
View ArticleArguing About Banking
Discussion about earning-to-give often turns into discussion of whether working in finance is harmful. Would you be doing so much harm by speculating on staple foods that you can't do good on balance?...
View ArticleTalent or Money?
A few months ago I was wondering whether there are other strategies out there that beat earning to give as a way of making the world better. Of course it definitely depends on your situation and...
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