“Jeff, the Blackbird doesn’t go to the moon.”

“Moon’s haunted”

Pay off a bunch of debt. Invest the rest.

It’s a boring answer, but it’s true. I’ve had a stable financial situation rug-pulled from under me three or four times already in my adult life. I’m sick of it.

I don’t even want to be financially stable for my own sake. I want to be able to tell my kids yes when they ask to eat at McDonald’s more than once a week. I want to be able to help everyone I know who needs it. I want to be able to pay for my wife to fly back home to her grandma’s funeral without worrying about if I need to sell a car to pay for it.

See every update from the websites you want updates from without trusting an algorithm to surface them to you.

I assume it’s got a pretty small capacity. Bigger capacity washers and dryers take about the same amount of time to wash four times as many clothes, but they take the same amount of time to dry as three or four loads–you just get them all during the same cycle, without having to move anything over.

If they can make it indestructible but it costs three times as much, it’s not unethical for them to make a less-indestructible version that they sell for less money.

Anything beyond that is rent-seeking.

A washer that takes that long would be kind of insane, but a drying time in the 4+ hour range isn’t that wild, in my experience.

One of my favorites is still “we can’t send email more than 500 miles.”

Bold words in the comments for an article talking about how it’s good now.

May your code run on the second try. Because if it works the first time, that’s suspicious. And if it fails the second time, that’s frustrating.

At this point, anyone who uses proprietary software when a good FOSS alternative exists is just asking to be rugpulled.

I’m not willing to put all my eggs into another proprietary basket. Fool me six times…

You’re saying “we shouldn’t do it because the government would ruin it.” I’m saying “the government shouldn’t ruin it.” To which you responded, “yeah but what if they do tho?”

I know all of that, and I’m not saying that this is the easy way out. But UBI is a much more effective and stress-tested way to introduce an effective social safety net to a capitalist society when done right. So I think we should do it right.

True UBI should replace those other services, because it should be a basic income that allows people to survive without a job. You shouldn’t need additional health care because we should have medicare for all. You shouldn’t need low income housing because your UBI should be enough to pay for a modest home. You shouldn’t need food stamps because UBI should cover it.

The fact that it’s always framed as “$600 bribe!!!” is infuriating and absolutely wrong, because that’s far from “basic.” “Basic” would mean enough to live on, without requirement.

I ain’t got nothing but love, babe.

4-day workweek and UBI, please.

Well, true. But it sounds like the library didn’t own the book either, all things considered.

Exhibit A for “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.”

I feel like, back in the day, they used to say “in theaters September 9th,” which basically meant “[this movie will be] in theaters [starting on] September 9th.” But then with the rise of streaming they wanted to make clear that the movie would not be released on streaming initially, so they awkwardly tagged an “only” to the beginning of the statement. You’re right that the “only” was meant to modify “in theaters,” and not the date, but I don’t remember that construction independently before streaming.

That’s a good question, and I absolutely don’t mind you asking. Honestly, I didn’t even make the connection between the “threenager” phenomenon and the fact that all three of our bad ones happened when they were new siblings until I was writing up that earlier post, so take my half-decade old memories here with that particular grain of salt; the real reason may well be “oh we never really thought about the connection.”

When we decided to go for our second, I think it was the fact that our first was a really easy one-year-old at the time, so we were feeling the hubris of new parents with an easy kid. He had been a slightly tricky newborn (medically), but then he turned into the sweetest kid, so we figured we were over the hump; he didn’t become difficult behaviorally until right around the time our second child was born. We also knew we wanted to have more than one, and had seen some research (and had some personal experience) that suggested a two-year age gap was best for sibling bonding and closeness, though I think I’ve heard that data has been questioned more recently.

And then our second was born, and life was kind of hell for a little while because she wasn’t sleeping and he was a threenager (and so you’ll note that the gap between the second and third is definitely bigger than between the other two gaps), but just like it got bad at the same moment, they both straightened up at more or less the same moment, too; he was potty trained, she started sleeping better, and they were suddenly really good friends, so we knew (or thought we knew) that the hard times would end and that we could make it through more or less unscathed.

At that point, we switched from the hubris of new parents to the hubris of parents of a big family, so after the third’s infancy was more or less fine and we made it through the second’s threenager phase, we went for a fourth, assuming we knew the drill. We didn’t; our third child’s absolutely horrible year from 2½-3½ was like nothing we’d experienced before or since. But it also ended, eventually. We had already decided even before the last one was born that we were done at four anyway, so we knew that it could only last for so much longer.

So I guess the tl;dr answer would be, ignorance at first, and after that confidence (hubris?) that we could handle it. In hindsight now, I don’t regret it. I honestly don’t even know if I’d warn new parents not to do it the way we did it if they wanted to, though I would give them the heads up that it’ll be tough for a while, and strongly recommend that they get a good community around them.

I don’t know you or your family at all, of course, so I wouldn’t counsel you either way; but I will say that the people who are unsure about whether they’re up to the task are, in my experience, the people who are most up to it. The people who are confident about it all are probably going to crash and burn, and the people who are sure they aren’t up to it are probably right. But if that worry about the first year overlapping the third is the only thing holding you back, maybe the assurance that it ends eventually will help.

(Sorry about the novel! Hope that helps.)