- calmbell parentWhole foods are affordable and healthy. My wife and I eat mostly rice, tofu, lentils (especially red), and vegetables (mostly frozen). We buy in bulk, spend around $350 a month on groceries (while barely eating out), and have a lot of variety through preparing the tofu and lentils in different ways. Our favorites recipes are from Nisha Vora of Rainbow Plant Life and The Vegan Chinese Kitchen.
- The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.
My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.
If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.
- The Palma 2 doesn't have stylus support. I seriously considered the Supernote Nomad, the modular design is neat, but went with the Palma 2 for the backlight and the Boox software, which seems to be superior to Supernote for everything but writing and notes. If my primary use case were note-taking rather than reading, I would have gone with the Supernote Nomad.
- Don't buy a dob to do untracked astrophotography. It will be hard, and you will be disappointed with the results. I would pick between visual observation and astrophotography. They are almost separate hobbies that require separate kits. Get the Apertura AD8 for visual or a smart telescope like the Seestar S50 or S30 for astrophotography. The dob would provide great views of the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and decent views of some deep sky objects. The smart telescopes provide decent images of the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and great images of many deep-sky objects with image stacking build into the software. The smart telescopes are automated, and the dob requires learning the sky for manual tracking.
- Here is the arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15806
- Here is an article from 2022 that does a great job of explaining the issue: https://www.columnblog.com/p/us-media-celebrates-letting-18-...
"Cut to 2022. Wages are still down 30% to 50% in key markets, and the job is as dangerous and taxing as ever. Naturally, the pool of people wanting the job would reduce accordingly. Thus, when demand for truckers increases, there’s a “labor shortage.” But, as Peter Greene noted in Forbes when debunking a related myth of “teacher shortages” in 2019, it’s not a lack of willing workers: It’s a severe lack of incentives—wages, unions, benefits—needed to entice workers to take on the difficult work"
- How is being prevented from going 10 mph above the posted speed limit in the car of someone convicted of speeding over 100 mph an onerous burden? The car is the property of the person convicted of speeding and sanctioned with an ISA. If someone behaves reckless with their gun in a way that obviously endangers others, is taking their gun away an onerous burden to a neighbor who may borrow it?
- Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).
- Just to nitpick, there are North Korean defectors who are not South Korean citizens. For example, the U.S. has resettled North Korean defectors under the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_Human_Rights_Act_...
- I was shocked to learn that 75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than 20-year-old white men: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... (search for "75-year-old white men").
- That is how science seems to work as a whole. What worries me is that the market views the emergence of additional productive paradigm shifts in AI as only a matter of money. A normal scientific advancement plateau for another five years in AI would be a short-term disaster for the stock market and economy.
- I am also not an immigration lawyer. In Maslenjak v. United States (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/16-309_h31i.pdf), eight justices disagreed with the expansive interpretation of the statute you describe. From the majority opinion, "The statute Congress passed, most naturally read, strips a person of citizenship not when she committed any illegal act during the naturalization process, but only when that act played some role in her naturalization." and "Suppose that an applicant for citizenship fills out the paperwork in a government office with a knife tucked away in her handbag. She has violated the law against possessing a weapon in a federal building, and she has done so in the course of procuring citizenship, but nobody would say she has “procure[d]” her citizenship “contrary to law.” That is because the violation of law and the acquisition of citizenship in that example are merely coincidental: The one has no causal relation to the other."