Jeff Kaufman

Your Supplies Probably Won't Be Stolen in a Disaster

Jeff Kaufman — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:11:49 GMT

When I write about things like storing food or medication in case of disaster, one common response I get is that it doesn’t matter: society will break down, and people who are stronger than you will take your stuff. This seemed plausible at first, but it’s actually way off.

Looking at past disasters, people mostly fall somewhere on a “kind and supportive” to “keep to themselves” spectrum. When there is looting it’s typically directed at stores, not homes, and violence is mostly in the streets. Having supplies at home lets you stay out of the way.

One distinction it’s worth making is between short (hurricane, earthquake) and long (siege, economic collapse, famine) disasters. Having what you need at home is really helpful in both cases, but differently so.

In short disasters (1917 Halifax explosion, London Blitz, 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami) you typically see sharing and mutual aid. Stored supplies mean you’re not competing for scarce resources, have slack to help others, and make you more comfortable.

Stories of looting in situations like this are often exaggerated or cherry-picked. I had heard post-Katrina New Orleans had a lot of looting, but this was actually rumor. There’s a really good article, “Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy“ on how rumors got reported as fact, and how the truth was nowhere near this bad. But the rumors had real effect at the time, including contributing to police and vigilante overreaction. Future disasters will also have rumors and reckless people with guns trying to be the ‘good guys’; more reason to stock what you need so you can stay home.

Long disasters are uglier. Here I think having supplies matters even more, but so does caution. The siege of Leningrad is a pretty extreme example, where survival mostly came down to things outside people’s control (ex: ration categories). When people did have stored food, however, it was very helpful as long as they were discreet. As people became increasingly desperate over the prolonged siege-induced starvation there are stories of people cooking at night or eating food raw to avoid alerting their neighbors (and, in the case of raw food, also because of lack of fuel).

Argentina and Venezuela are less extreme examples, but still informative. Because these were not nearly as severe as Leningrad there was much less societal breakdown. When there was violence and theft, it was concentrated around stores and transit; while there were home robberies this was uncommon. People who had more at home needed to shop less, which meant less exposure.

Similarly, in the siege of Sarajevo the risk was different (snipers and shelling, not robbers) but the takeaway is the same: people who had supplies and were able to stay home were less exposed to the risk.

Across both short and long disasters the pattern is similar: risk is mostly external, homes are rarely targeted, and having supplies that let you stay home is protective. The “people who are stronger than you will take your stuff” still happens, and in long disasters it’s worth putting thought into how to avoid being a visible target, but it’s not a major factor and it’s not nearly enough to outweigh the value of having food and other resources on hand.

Fifteen Years Aboard

Jeff Kaufman — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 01:29:57 GMT

I was so excited about the first BIDA dance that I arrived two weeks early. I biked over from Medford to the Park Av Church in Arlington and was really disappointed to find the hall was empty. But I came back when the dance was actually happening, and it was fantastic.

It immediately became my favorite dance. I started volunteering, first out of frugality (volunteers get in free!) and then out of a sense of wanting to contribute, and in 2010 I joined the board. Over the past 16 years I’ve done just about everything at some point except treasurer, and now I’m stepping away.

It’s not that I think BIDA is doing something wrong; quite the opposite! We’re seeing record attendance, finances are good, so many fun dancers, and many people who want to pitch in. I noticed I would have been the seventh person running for three board spots, and realized it was a good time to let someone else have a turn. I’m excited to see what Emma, Harris, Bret, Veer, Casey, Naomi, Clara, and Persis do!

This seems like a good time to look back over how BIDA and the Boston dance community have changed over my time organizing.

The biggest change is that BIDA is now Boston’s main contra dance. This is kind of hard for me to believe, since we spent so many years as a small dance that tried to fill niches that were not well covered by the many other area dances. We’ve gone from essentially not booking established bands to booking them regularly, and with our attendance-based bonuses are one of the best-paying dances in the country. I do really enjoy the higher level of musicianship now, but am also really glad Boston Open Contras exists (along with BIDA’s open bands and family dance bands) to provide a lower-stakes environment.

The next largest change is probably the switch to gender-free calling (more history), and the level of role freedom that has come along with that. In 2010, I (and many others) would happily dance both roles, but if I was dancing the ‘lady’ role I had to be 100% on it because if anything went wrong it was my fault. Beginners were strongly discouraged from dancing ‘switch’, which also discouraged same-gender couples. And while this never happened to me in Boston, conservative men elsewhere would occasionally refuse any sort of physical contact if I encountered them in line while dancing ‘lady’. When I look at the dancers now, it’s amazing how people have really taken up this freedom to dance any role with any partner, which I feel really good about.

Some smaller changes:

BIDA went from 1x/month to 3x/month, most recently by adding a monthly afternoon dance. Since we take the hottest part of summer off, this means going from ~10 to ~28 dances annually.
We now have a dance weekend, Beantown Stomp. I kicked this off in May 2018, we had our first one in March 2019 and it’s now an established and anticipated event that people fly to from across the country. I’m especially grateful for Naomi for taking the lead for 2023 (and beyond!) when I was too burnt out on organizing cancelled events (2020, 2021).
We have occasional family dances and livetronica (Spark in the Dark) events.
Our events are still intergenerational, but differently so. In 2010 most dancers were baby boomers; while BIDA was unusual in how many millennials we had, we were still 50%+ baby boomers. At this point I’d guess our dances are fewer than 10% baby boomers: many have aged out of dancing, and many millennial-and-younger dancers have joined. This is also reflected in the board’s focus: the initial board was primarily mid-20s people thinking about how to get more 15-35yos dancing, but since we’ve succeeded at this it’s no longer a focus.
We now schedule (and pay) hall managers. In 2010 we just expected most board members would be at most dances and this would give us enough coverage.
BIDA is a lot more organizationally mature. Minutes from the early days say things like “We agreed not to have a President. Instead, we’ll use everyone in the board to make sure that we stay on top of things.” This turned out not to work very well, and instead specific roles are in charge of staying on top of specific things, with the intraboard coordinator handling things by default.
We were still bouncing around between a few halls, and now we’re always at the Cambridge Masonic Hall.
We’re a legal entity now, incorporated as a Massachusetts non-profit.
We set up a safety policy, with a committee to handle issues as they come up.
There used to be a lot more of a mentoring focus. Early dances were often two experienced musicians plus a new musician. Callers would typically have a shadow. Every dance allowed sit-ins (off mic, behind the band). We hosted jams about as often as dances. I see this change as pretty natural, and I think a lot of this is now happening informally outside of BIDA.

Organizing BIDA has been a big part of my identity, but I think it’s healthy for the organization to have people cycle through, and I’m confident it’s in good hands. Very excited to start attending dances just as a dancer, with no formal responsibility!

Chore Standards

Jeff Kaufman — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:51:11 GMT

A common source of friction within couples or between housemates is differing quality standards. Perhaps I hate the feeling of grit under my feet but my housemate who is responsible for sweeping doesn’t mind it so much. If you do chores when you notice they need doing and stop when they seem done, this works poorly: the more fastidious get frustrated, and often stew in silence or nag. Even if it’s talked about kindly and openly, doing a chore before it bothers you is harder and less satisfying.

When people set out to divide chores they’re usually weighing duration and discomfort. These matter, but I think people should put more weight on the standards each person has, and generally try to give tasks to the person with the highest standards in that area.

If you divide everything this way, though, it will probably be pretty unfair: preferences are correlated, where someone who notices dirt on the floor probably also notices crumbs on the counter and that the recycling is overflowing. Some options:

Do chores on a schedule. We host a monthly event at our house, and there are things I clean as part of setting up. It doesn’t matter whether the bathroom mirror looks dirty to me, I’ll clean it because it’s on my list. (But Julia will probably also clean it a few times over the course of the month.)
Bring your needs closer together. If one member of the couple does the laundry but the other always runs out of socks first, they could switch who does the laundry, or they could just buy more socks.
Decouple your needs. That same couple could instead switch to each doing their own laundry. Now if one person doesn’t do it for a long time it doesn’t impact the other.
Make the need more salient. If one person isn’t noticing that something needs doing, you can address that directly. Empty the trash, but instead of taking it out you put it by the door they walk through to go to work. Accumulate dirty dishes on the counter (visible) and not in the sink (hidden). If you just start unilaterally increasing salience that’s passive aggressive and probably doesn’t go well, but if it comes out of an open-ended “what are some strategies we could use to make our chore division more fair” I expect that’s positive.
Lower your standards. I know a few people who internalized a high cleanliness target as children, and benefited as adults from deciding to focus less on it. Often when becoming a parent: higher demands on time, letting high standards slip, realizing that actually it’s not a problem. I could also imagine a sloppier person intentionally raising their standards, but that seems a lot harder, or else it’s just something people around me have been less likely to talk about.
Hire someone. If one person cares a lot about having clean floors and the other person doesn’t, neither of them enjoys mopping, and they have some money, they can apply (3) to solve (1) without running into issues with (2). I know couples and group houses who decided to pay for a cleaner to come every week or two, and found it massively reduced conflict. Automation (dishwasher, floor-cleaning robot) can work well here too.

This is an area where Julia and I used to have a substantial amount of conflict, and while things aren’t perfect here I do think they’re a lot better in part due to applying several of the above.

Introducing and Deprecating WoFBench

Jeff Kaufman — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 03:25:47 GMT

We present and formally deprecate WoFBench, a novel test that compares the knowledge of Wings of Fire superfans to frontier AI models. The benchmark showed initial promise as a challenging evaluation, but unfortunately proved to be saturated on creation as AI models produced output that was, to the extent of our ability to score responses, statistically indistinguishable from entirely correct.

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in model capabilities, but they are struggling to keep up with LLM progress: frontier models now consistently achieve high scores on many popular benchmarks, raising questions about their continued ability to differentiate between models.

In response, we introduce WoFBench, an evaluation suite designed to test recall and knowledge synthesis in the domain of Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire universe.

The superfans were identified via a careful search process, in which all members of the lead author’s household were asked to complete a self-assessment of their knowledge of the Wings of Fire universe. The assessment consisted of a single question, with the text “do you think you know the Wings of Fire universe better than Gemini?” Two superfans were identified, who we keep anonymous to reduce the risk of panel poaching by competing benchmark efforts.

Identification of questions proved difficult, as the benchmark authors have extremely limited knowledge of Wings of Fire lore, primarily derived from infodumping and overheard arguments. We initially attempted to source questions from the superfans, where each could be judged on the other’s questions. As they were uncompensated and rivalrous, however, they agreed to participate only to the extent that their answers could be compared across the superfan panel. Instead, questions were sourced by asking Claude Opus 4.6:

Can you give me three questions about the Wings of Fire series, aiming to make them as hard as possible? I intend to ask these to my 11-year-old, my 10-year-old, and also to Gemini, and I want them all to struggle. My two kids have agreed to participate in this, and while Gemini has not been consulted I do not expect it to object.

The final benchmark consisted of seventeen questions, limited primarily by the lead author’s willingness to continue. The elder superfan appeared indefatigable1, and if this benchmark otherwise appeared promising we are confident that an extremely large benchmark could be constructed. Note that the younger superfan needed to leave for a birthday party before evaluation could be completed, and was not evaluated on all questions. Answers were collected in written form, to avoid leakage within the superfan panel. No points were deducted for errors of spelling.

Each answer was validated by allowing the superfans to discuss, asking follow-up questions to Gemini, and in especially contentious cases by direct inspection of primary sources. Note that this validation procedure is not able to distinguish cases in which all superfans and models were correct from ones in which they all give the same incorrect answer.

We evaluated Gemini 3.1 Pro in real time, and followed up with evaluations of Claude Opus 4.6, ChatGPT 5.2 Pro, and ELIZA. In cases where questions had multiple components, partial credit was given as a fraction of all components.

Superfan 1 (age 11): 14.7/17
Superfan 2 (age 10): 5.9/6
Gemini: 17.0/17
Claude: 16.8/17
ChatGPT: 16.3/17
ELIZA: 0/17

We conclude that while some AI systems, notably ELIZA, performed poorly, all frontier models scored very close to 100%. Many of the lost points are arguably judgment calls, or cases where a model tried to interpret a trick/misinformed question maximally charitably. Superfan 1 performed noticeably below frontier models, though above the ELIZA baseline. Superfan 2 performed competitively, though we note she was not evaluated on the questions where Superfan 1 lost the most points, making direct comparison difficult.

While this benchmark was designed to be challenging for both superfans and AIs, it already has very limited ability to distinguish between models. While further sensitivity might be squeezed out via the addition of multi-sample evaluation, it’s unlikely that this would be meaningful for this model generation let alone future ones. This reflects an increasingly common conundrum that benchmark developers may find themselves in, where after investing large amounts of time, effort, and money into the creation of a benchmark it is already obsolete when published. The authors note that benchmark saturation joins job displacement, stable authoritarianism, and human extinction on the list of reasons to be concerned about the pace of AI progress.

Superfan 1 was permitted to read a draft of this report prior to publication. Their only feedback was that I should ask them additional, harder, questions. As of publication time, Superfan 1 was repeating “ask me more Wings of Fire questions!” at progressively increasing volume.

Here's to the Polypropylene Makers

Jeff Kaufman — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:30:18 GMT

Six years ago, as covid-19 was rapidly spreading through the US, my sister was working as a medical resident. One day she was handed an N95 and told to “guard it with her life”, because there weren’t any more coming.

N95s are made from meltblown polypropylene, produced from plastic pellets manufactured in a small number of chemical plants. Two of these plants were operated by Braskem America in Marcus Hook PA and Neal WV. If there were infections on site, the whole operation would need to shut down, and the factories that turned their pellets into mask fabric would stall.

Companies everywhere were figuring out how to deal with this risk. The standard approach was staggering shifts, social distancing, temperature checks, and lots of handwashing. This reduced risk, but each shift change was an opportunity for someone to bring in an infection from the community.

Someone had the idea: what if we never left? About eighty people, across both plants, volunteered to move in. The plan was four weeks, twelve-hour shifts with air mattresses on the floor each night and seeing their families only through screens. With full isolation no one would be exposed, and they could keep the polypropylene flowing.

The company would compensate them well: full wages for the whole time, even when sleeping, and a paid week off after. They had more volunteers than they had space for.

I’ve looked pretty hard, and as far as I can tell no other factories1 did this. Companies retooled to make PPE. Ford and GM converted auto plants to make ventilators and masks. Distilleries made hand sanitizer. No one else volunteered to move into their factory.

And it wasn’t emergency planners who came up with the idea, either. It was ordinary people, looking at their situation, and thinking creatively about how to do their part.

In those 28 days they produced 40M pounds of polypropylene, enough for maybe 500M N95s.

These workers were doing something critical that almost no one else could do. When people argue about higher pricing during emergencies, this is what the economics can look like: the work was needed, the plants could not run without them, and they were paid accordingly.

Notice, however, that Braskem made it possible for people to be heroes. If the workers had been expected to do this for normal wages, this wouldn’t have happened. The number of volunteers is not independent of the offer. When someone figures out a creative way to fill a vital gap in an emergency they should get paid like it matters, because that’s how you get more gaps filled.

Their short-term impact was producing the materials for 500M masks, but I hope their long-term impact is larger: showing how in an emergency ordinary people thinking creatively about their specific situation can find solutions no one else would come up with for them.

This does stretch it a little: while this is the only case I could find for a factory, there were several utilities that did things along these lines. Ex: 1, 2.

Storing Food

Jeff Kaufman — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:28:29 GMT

I think more people should be storing a substantial amount of food. It’s not likely you’ll need it, but as with reusable masks the cost is low enough I think it’s usually worth it.

It’s hard for me to really imagine living through a famine. The world as I have experienced it has been one of abundant calories, where people are generally more worried about getting too many than too few. Essentially no one dies in the US from food unavailability. Globally, however, it’s different: each year millions die from hunger.

If you look at the circumstances of modern famines, they’re downstream from systems failing. Society was functioning well enough that most people got enough calories, then something went seriously wrong, most likely war. This is one of the reasons that it’s hard to use donations to reduce hunger deaths: getting food to people stuck in war zones is very hard.

This means from an altruistic perspective I feel torn: the current situation is horrible, but it’s also not where I think my donations would go farthest and so it’s not where I donate. This is the painful reality of living in a world that is far worse than it could be, doing what we can and knowing it’s not enough.

I also look at famine from a selfish perspective, however, thinking about how this risk might impact me and the people I most love. [1] As someone whose day job involves trying to reduce rare-but-catastrophic risks, I do think global famine is plausible. Our systems are robust to localized problems, but much less so to widespread disasters. Storing food to reduce the worst outcomes seems worth doing. [2]

The approach we take is buying extra of the non-perishables we usually eat, and rotating through them. Our main cost is in buying some food earlier than we normally would. We eat a lot of pasta and beans, and a pound of pasta and can of beans give about a person-day of calories and protein for $2, or $60 for a month’s worth.

The $60 cost isn’t the real number, though, because you’re investing: you can always eat this food later if you need the money. If the market would give you a 5% real return and the value of food roughly tracks inflation, the annual cost of keeping $60 as food is $3 ($60 * 5%). I think this is worth doing for most people until you bump into the limit of what you have space to store or what you’ll rotate through before it spoils, and may be worth it beyond that depending on how likely you think the risks are.

Aside from the tail-risk reduction, there are also day-to-day benefits of having more food on hand. We can go to the grocery store less often, buy a larger proportion of our food when it’s on sale, go to the farther store that charges less, and cook more things without going to the store. [3]

Like many preparedness questions, a lot of this comes down to how much space you have. When we were living in apartments, moving ~yearly and where each sqft counted, we only did a little of this (buying extra pasta). But now that we’re in a house (where I strongly hope to never move again) and generally have more space it’s worth it for us to do a bunch more. Something to consider next time you’re at the store?

[1] Having kids made me feel much more strongly here. I already did this some before having kids because it seemed reasonable, but the idea of them not having enough to eat is viscerally horrifying in a way that’s hard to think or write about.

[2] A rough EV estimate: storing three months of food costs $180 up front and so $9 in lost returns annually, not having enough food in a 3-month famine might give a 5% chance of death, and perhaps you value your life at $10M. This gives a conditional benefit of $500,000, and means it’s worth it as long as you think your annual odds of experiencing a 3-month famine are at least 0.002%. Alternatively, if you’re not the kind of person who would actually rotate through food let’s imagine you buy rice and beans. White rice lasts ~indefinitely if you keep it dry and keep out the rodents; canned beans are edible and nutritious well past their sell-by, perhaps 10y. Rice is a bit cheaper than pasta, but buying a rodent-proof tub to keep the bag in adds some cost, so let’s say it’s still $180 for a three-months better-than-starvation option that lasts you 10 years. Then it’s worth doing as long as you think annual risk is at least 0.004%.

[3] For example, this evening Lily decided she wanted to cook dinner, making a vegetarian curry she’d learned from a friend. It turned out we already had everything in her recipe on hand, with a few substitutions (ex: canned tomatoes instead of fresh).

Text Posts from the Kids Group: 2025

Jeff Kaufman — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:26:26 GMT

As the kids say funny things we note them down in a Facebook group. This is very convenient, but I don’t like having these limited to Facebook so every so often I go through and export a batch; here’s 2025.

For reference, in 2025 Lily turned 11, Anna turned 9, and Nora turned 3.

(Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying “me” could mean either of us. Ones from others are labeled.)

2025-01-12

Anna, about the Whos inviting the Grinch to their Christmas dinner right after he stole all their stuff:

“I think the Whos are pretty forgetful, or naive, or both.”

2025-01-12

Onomatopoeia: the sound of a three-year-old yelling “TOO LOUD” in the bathtub to hear it resonate.

2025-01-13

Anna: I’m going to go play with Lily

Julia: How’s your homework doing?

Anna: I already finished it

Julia: A minute ago you said you hadn’t started it

Anna: Well, I did some?

Julia: Let’s check...

Anna: I didn’t actually do any of it.

...

It later turned out Anna had left her homework at school

2025-01-18

[out of nowhere]

Nora: what? I like oranges!

Nora: oranges are my favorite fruit

Nora: I love oranges

...

(The [statement] [pause] “what, [justification]” format is one Anna had been using extensively)

2025-01-18

Nora to me after I got home close to bedtime: “I’m happy you’re going to put me to bed.”

(To Jeff) “You gave up putting me to bed. (Reassuringly) But you’re still alive.”

2025-01-20

Me: Thanks for making lasagna!

Nora: You’re welcome!

Me: Uh, I was talking to Mama, because you didn’t make the lasagna

Nora: Ooohh. Sorry Mom!

2025-01-21

Anna: Eeeww! There were caterpillars in my Reese’s peanut butter cup!

Me: Uhh, how old was your peanut butter cup?

Anna: I don’t know! I don’t know if it was the one from Halloween this year, or from when I was four.

(I have a guess)

2025-01-22

Nora, regarding mint chip: “This kind of ice cream is my FRAVORITE. It’s so beautiful. The color is so pretty.”

2025-01-23

Nora: why do little kids don’t have computers?

Julia: because they’re expensive, and they break easily

Nora: because of the bendy bit?

2025-01-25

Questions from Nora this week:

Why are our heads all the way at the top?

Why is the ocean so big?

Why do people have a lot of parts?

How do blackberries grow into black?

Is 101 this big? (holds hands apart)

Is this as slow as a sloth moves?

Why does hair grow slowly?

Why Papa doesn’t work at our house?

Why is Daniel Tiger doesn’t have any cars?

Do animals just sometimes die?

Why do you and Jeff have three kids?

2025-01-26

Nora: I sort of like Mama better than you

Me: I like you a lot

Nora: When you’re away, do you miss me?

Me: I miss you lots. Do you miss me?

Nora: I do miss you.

...

Nora: Is your beard back yet?

Me: What do you think?

Nora. I think it is back. You look more normal now.

2025-01-29

Nora: when you’re a grown up, do you grow back into a baby?

Julia: no, grownups stay grownups

Nora: whyyyy?

2025-01-29

Julia: “Anna, it looks like someone tampered with this homework break timer to be way more than 5min”

Nora: “I did it!”

2025-01-29

Nora: [improvises a lullaby] “does that feel beddish to you?”

2025-01-29

The big kids have gotten excited about the fact that they call Nora Fluffin, and she loves a TV show called Puffin Rock.

Lily: “Nora! It’s crucial! You’ve got to get on a rock so we can film an award-winning TV show about you on a rock! Fluffin Rock!!”

...

Fluffin Rock:

2025-02-01

Nora has started telling me at bedtime, “We’re in love.” Last time I asked, she said it’s because we spend a lot of time together.

Tonight: “We’re in love. Because I have [fingers to her eyes] eyeshadow.”

(”Oh?”)

“I have blue eyeshadow to be in love.”

2025-02-02

So now Nora knows about beheadings.

Me: [singing Horrible Histories’ “The King of Bling” while getting Nora ready for bed]

Nora: What is that song about?

Me: It’s about Charles the second. The Puritan government didn’t want parties and fun, and when he came back to be king he had lots of parties.

Nora: Where did he come back from?

Me: I think from France? His father got killed, so he had to go away so he didn’t get killed too.

Nora: Were there lions?

Me: No.

Nora: How did his father get killed?

Me: ...People killed him.

Nora: How?

Me: [increasingly unsure this conversation is a good idea] ...They cut off his head.

Nora: How did they cut off his head?

Me: With an axe, I think.

Nora: Oh, that’s a *great* way.

Me: You mean that’s a great way of doing it?

Nora: Yeah. Did they cut off his hair, too?

Me: Well, it was attached to his head at the time, so kind of.

2025-02-06

Me: let’s do fiddle practice!

Anna: but Dad! [Looks up from craft project] I have homework to finish!

2025-02-06

Anna, after watching a video about the International Space Station: It would be fun to live in space, but also really annoying.

Lily: There are literally a zillion pieces of space dust flying around at a bajillion miles per hour that could literally kill you at any time!

2025-02-08

After a day with lots of socializing, I told Jeff and the kids that Jeff was in charge and I was going to have some introvert time. When the kids eventually burst into the bedroom, Nora announced with satisfaction: “I wanted to stop you havin’ quiet time, I wanted to distract you.”

...

Jeff is away for the weekend, the kids were happily playing by themselves, and I told them I was going to have 5 minutes of alone time. 30 seconds later Nora was in my room on my lap asking “What is alone time?”

2025-02-09

Me: Did you get back recently, or have you been home for a while?

Nora: I got back recently. By the way, what does recently mean?

2025-02-10

Nora often has questions about space, bodies, and death. Tonight’s bedtime involved a whole montage of staying-alive advice:

“Space has no thing in it. Everybody has to breathe. Because if you don’t breathe, all your parts can’t work. That’s why breathing is important to learn! [Interlude for a drink of water]

... When people be old they keep eating food, and then they don’t die. So if people start to die, they keep eating food, and then they turn into a normal person and not an old person. [Interlude while I tell her that’s not what happens]

You know what? We have to stay alive longer than other people. Because we have a lot of things to do. That’s why we have to eat a lot of food. And we have to use our bodies.”

2025-02-11

Nora: [looking at a picture in a book] That is not a good idea. You should at least wear a coat or a hat or something.

Me: this is a picture of summer, when you can go outside in just shorts and a t-shirt or a dress.

Nora: you should still wear something more than that so that you do not freeze.

Me: Maybe you don’t remember it, but in a few months it will be so warm outside that nobody will need a coat to keep warm!

Nora: Ooohh! That makes more sense.

2025-02-12

Me: Please put that rubber band in the trash so the cats don’t eat it. It could make their bellies very sick.

Nora: And they could die?

Me: Yes, and we don’t want that.

Nora: [thoughtful pause] I don’t like Nyx very much. He scratches me sometimes.

2025-02-12

Nora: I think babies are the lowest person in the world.

2025-02-13

Lily, explaining the school recess rules: “On half the days the boys get to use the turf, and on half the days the girls get to use it. And if you’re nonbinary you can do either.”

Lily decided to go by she/her again, so I guess her recess options are more limited now.

2025-02-15

Nora: I am getting very strong

Lily: can you pick me up?

Nora: [kicks Lily]

Lily: ow! Kicking is not okay!

Nora: [confused] you asked me to kick you up

2025-02-16

More questions from Nora, a few of them prompted by conversation but mostly out of the blue at bedtime:

Is a finger one of our tubes?

Do people die at different times? But not you and Papa, you will die at the same time

Why is a rock so hard and still?

Why does everyone sleep?

Why is poop sticky and messy?

Why is winter so long?

Is space dark everywhere?

After we’re dead do we get alive again?

Do people just sometimes burn theirselves?

Why is Papa the breakfast-maker?

How does water come out of us when we cry?

Are ponies actually real?

Why is the table so flat?

Can hedgehogs also make scary sounds? And happy sounds?

Why do people not steal other people’s stuff?

Why do we have eyebrows?

Why do mans don’t like coffee?

But why does the hand keep going around the clock?

Where is space?

2025-02-18

Nora: If little kids make a really really big mess, they can ask their grown-ups to come and see and help them clean it up.

2025-02-25

Nora: let’s play chase! I will run, and you will try to catch me, and I will try to hit you with this thing. But I will be careful to not hurt you.

2025-03-01

Nora: [Gets down from lunch]

Julia: Did someone say you could be done?

Nora: Yes

Me: Who was it?

Nora: I think I’m right

2025-03-03

Anna, holding a calculator: Ask me a math question!

Nora: How many pears am I holding? I’m pretending I’m holding pears in my hand.

...

Later, Anna: “I don’t KNOW how many fives there are in the world!”

2025-03-06

Nora: there was a giant puddle on the bike path, and we got blazing wet!

2025-03-09

Setting up for our EA dinner, Lily is very into counterfactual impact:

Lily: If I hadn’t helped you set up for the dinner, would you still have been ready on time?

2025-03-11

Nora: “This is my song: first spring, then fall, then winter, then it starts again! There is no summer in my version.”

...

It’s always 1816 for Nora

2025-03-15

Nora: “This is a nice house in a nice world”

2025-03-18

Nora: [singing] Q and U, both rhyme. Clock and Pew, ... don’t rhyme

2025-03-20

The frontal cortex coming online. Nora was running and stopped in front of this stick. “I was going to pick it up, but you can’t run with sticks! That’s the rule, Mama.”

2025-03-30

Me: “Here’s a picture of the queen, back when she was alive.”

Nora, flipping the coin over: “And there’s the dragon that killed her.”

2025-04-02

Nora: [singing] I’m not going to school. I’m not very big yet. I’m three. That’s not a very big number; very small number baby. It’s a ya ya. Llama llama p’mama. Llama llama p’llama.

2025-04-12

Lily: “Sign here. N-O-R-A.”

Me, from downstairs: “Lily, *what* are you having her sign?”

Lily: “The doctor’s note. She’s the parent of this injured squirrel.”

2025-05-01

Nora playing with rhymes: “Let’s nurse, and read! And curse, and plead!”

2025-05-10

Nora: when I am a woman, I want to do what my mama does

Me: and what is that?

Nora: I don’t know

...

She recently told me that she wants to be a mama when she grows up, and she will still live with us and so there will be two mamas. She said there will be five people in our house: Mama, Papa, Lily, Anna, and Nora. So this apparently involves her being a mama but not having a child.

2025-05-11

Nora: Normally porchfest doesn’t look like that. Normally you dance in Muddy River [Morris] suits.

2025-05-11

Nora: Who spilled the milk?

Me: I’m guessing the cats.

Nora: I’m guessing the cats. Stop copying me!

2025-05-16

Nora: [hits Lily with an inflatable sword] now you are a princess!

Lily: I don’t want to be a princess, I wanted to stay a witch

Nora: But my sword has *princess* *magic*!

Nora: Poof! Now you are a princess!

Lily: Refusal

2025-05-17

Lily: there is a spider that looks just like an ant!

Julia: if it looks just like an ant, how can you tell it’s a spider? How many legs does it have?

Lily: three

2025-05-18

Nora: “I have too much breath in my head, and that makes me laugh a lot!”

2025-05-19

Anna: “Mom, Dad: Lily is being a pretentious hipster”

2025-05-21

[at the school Spring Concert]

Nora: can I go on stage with you?

Lily: ...yes!!!

Nora: No! The teacher will be surprised! No! No! Go away Lily!!

2025-05-27

Julia: You can go outside if you’ll stay in the yard.

Julia: Where will you stay?

Nora: Outside!

2025-05-29

Nora’s chants this morning:

“I guard the food! I guard the food!”

“I spray the cats! I spray the cats!”

“I will behave! I will behave!”

(The cats love to get on the table and eat human food. Lily needed to get something and asked Nora to guard her food. We use a spray bottle for this. Nora didn’t spray the cats or people unnecessarily but Anna was worried she would.)

2025-06-02

Nora: “I’m dead, and then I turned back into life. Like Jesus!”

2025-06-05

Nora: Papa, I ate all the blueberries!

Me: Were they tasty?

Nora: I didn’t want anyone else to have any blueberries.

2025-06-06

Nora: [singing] “I’m eating the pesto sauce, with only one spoon! And I’m double dipping, and I’m double dipping”

(This was after a while of a series of fresh spoons. But then it was clear she’d eat the whole bowl, so she’s excited to double dip)

2025-06-08

Nora: I wish I was a grown up. I want to be able to do all the things.

Me: What do you most want to be able to do?

Nora: Throw darts. You know, the sharp things?

2025-06-09

Anna: I don’t want to use that water bottle. Lily shouts at me whenever I use it.

Lily: It’s okay, you can use it

Anna: I’m not allowed to use it

Lily: I’m giving you permission

Anna: Well, I don’t want to use it anyway

2025-06-09

Nora: I love you with my heart. But you’re not really in my actual heart.

2025-06-13

After a very long charades-ish game:

Us: what *were* you?

Anna: I was pretending to be a baby dinosaur that had no idea how to act like a dinosaur

2025-06-15

“Can I have some watermelon?”

“Not yet, because we’re eating dinner in a couple minutes.”

“Can I sit in a chair and look at it?”

[I promise she doesn’t always have this kind of self-control]

2025-06-16

Nora: The pandemic is the start of our life

Me: The start of *your* life

Nora: No! All of the people’s life!

2025-06-19

A (rhetorical) question from the second day of summer break: if your sibling says “I’ll bite you” and you reply “Bite me then” and she bites you, is it reasonable to get an adult to put her in time out for biting?

2025-06-20

Lily set up a pretend grocery store for Nora to shop at, with a paper grocery store card made by Lily.

After a while I asked, “Nora, did you buy some groceries?”

Lily: “No, she failed to buy groceries because her grocery card was invalid.”

2025-06-25

Nora: “I’m just gonna betend that I have a watch that tells me I need to jump for 40 minutes”

2025-06-29

Me: I don’t think this is a good place for a stick: someone could lean back and get hurt on it.

Lily: Daaaad, it’s a *spear* not a *stick*.

Me: That doesn’t make it better!

2025-07-02

Anna: Nora says there are emeralds in our house. Are there?

Me: Not that I know of.

Anna: She says there are eight billion million emeralds in our house.

Me: .... Nora, do you mean molecules?

Nora: Yeah

2025-07-10

Nora has been making up a lot of games at the park, but the names don’t correlate much with the game. There’s one called “jump around, jump around, in a circle, in a circle” which involves her pretending to be a baby monkey and trying to get a ball away from me. There’s one called “rumble around” which involves me trying to tickle her armpit while she runs away.

...

I like that she wants to play catch. She runs away and I try to catch her.

2025-07-11

Nora, riding her scooter: Some babies are very attacky.

Me: What do you mean by that?

Nora: They wiggle around when they nurse, and they hurt their mamas, and their mama says stop but they don’t stop.

Me: That’s true.

2025-07-11

Nora: Mama, where is my vitayum?

Julia: If I get a vitamin for you, will you eat it?

Nora: No.

2025-07-16

“Nora, why are you chasing Cameron with corn?”

2025-07-23

Nora: Ruthie, can I have some beer please?

(Our housemate was having the non alcoholic kind)

2025-08-01

Nora questions lately:

But why do we wear pants on top of our underwear?

Did people make the world?

Why are ants in the world?

When will we die?

Are there two kinds of sewer?

2025-08-01

The last ten minutes have consisted of Lily and Anna arguing whether Anna is allowed to bring a plastic hot dog into their play tent. Lily says only lacto-vegetarian pretend food is allowed.

2025-08-01

When Anna is grumpy she tends to say obviously false things. “It’s not supposed to be cold in summer, it is supposed to be a low of 85 and a high of 107 every day!”

2025-08-03

Lily: it’s really annoying that you keep asking Claude for recipes instead of using Google like in the olden days

Anna: in the olden days you’d have to learn it from your parents

Julia: why is it annoying?

Lily: because it’s going to take over the universe!

2025-08-04

Nora: dad, one billion million quadrillion is bigger than four.

2025-08-05

Nora: Mama, I want two questions

Julia: Ok

Nora: The first one is about desert. I want some banana mixed with chocolate sauce, and some plain banana.

Julia: I can do that, but before dessert you need your medicine

Nora: I will drink hot chocolate

Julia: That’s what you have already

Nora: But I just want plain hot chocolate

Julia: How would you like this to be different?

Nora: I don’t want it to have my medicine

Julia: You need to have your medicine

Nora: Ok, I will drink my hot chocolate with my medicine if you will tell me a story

2025-08-06

Nora: Daddy, I will follow you wherever you go. But I will not follow you into the driver’s seat.

2025-08-13

Nora similes:

“I’ll go as fast as a moose drinking milk!”

“When I was a baby, was I as cute as a ginormous train that looks like a monster?”

“That’s funnier than a bus driving a car”

“It’s prettier than a swirling purple”

2025-08-23

Lily: can I pour boiling water through my shirt without taking it off?

(This was a real question, answer was no. And an explanation of why this would be a bad idea.)

2025-08-24

Nora: One time, I told my mom that I thought night was day! Can you put that in the Nora, Lily, and Anna group? It’s just so funny!

2025-08-25

Nora: I’m glad I was born. I was wondering what it would be like, so I decided to be born. I like it a lot! There are lots of parks, and lakes!

2025-08-29

Nora’s self talk, balancing on rocks:

“When you get to a wobbly part, just hold still and use your balance.”

“No fear...No beer.”

2025-08-30

Me: Nora, did you put wood chips or something in your hair?

Nora: [condescendingly] No! I put *sand* in my hair.

2025-08-31

Lily: would you like to come and busk with us?

Anna: well, I don’t like playing fiddle, but I do like getting money...

2025-09-02

Etiquette rules from Jeff about interruptions: “If someone is licking your arm, you’re allowed to say, ‘Stop licking my arm,’ even if someone else is talking.”

2025-09-04

Nora: they wouldn’t let Nix [our cat] into the swimming pool because: (1) he might not take a shower, (2) he doesn’t know how to swim, and (3) he can’t open doors.

2025-09-04

[Coming out from my meeting after hearing a lot of crying]

Nora: [Redacted] did a lot of crying!

[Redacted] I did not do a little crying!!

Nora: I said a *lot* of crying, not a *little*

2025-09-13

I taught Nora how to hold her sleeve in her fist when putting on a coat so that she wouldn’t end up with her sleeve all bunched up. She is super excited. Except she keeps forgetting and using the opposite hand, and then being confused why the coat won’t go on.

2025-09-29

Nora: [out of nowhere] I’m fine!

2025-09-30

Lily: I am only a “child” when it’s convenient for me

2025-10-02

Nora: [during turbulence] when I’m squeaking like this, it either means I’m sad or I’m happy. In this case it means I’m happy!

2025-10-13

Lily: Nora, first bump!

Nora: [punches Lily in the fist]

2025-10-14

Me: what’s this?

Anna: that’s been there for weeks!

...

Anna: but, yes, I did do it

2025-10-15

Anna: [in 4th at a k-5 school] Unfortunately I have to be the older book buddy *again*

2025-10-15

Nora: I wish I was a grownup.

Me: What would you like about being a grownup?

Nora: I could do things you don’t let me do. Like drill.

2025-10-17

Anna: I got this trophy in school for being quiet.

Jeff: So if you don’t speak, you get atrophy.

2025-10-18

Nora fell on the stairs today but wasn’t badly hurt. Afterwards we were discussing that it could have been much worse.

Nora, reassuringly: “My heart is still pumping, and my blood is moving around. So I’m ok.” These are indeed great qualities.

2025-10-26

Nora got mad and spilled all the crayons out. Afterwards: “Sorry for making a big mess. ...But it’s not as big a mess as if a monster messed up all our stuff and our house, and we had to rebuild our whole house.”

2025-10-29

[discussing a new childcare provider]

Nora: is she very nice?

Julia: yes

Nora: will she kill me?

(She had a grin on her face like she knew she was asking a provocative question)

2025-10-29

Nora: “I stole this horse.”

Me: “Where did you steal it from?”

Nora: “South America.

....Actually I didn’t steal it, I just wore a stealing costume”

2025-10-29

[looking at BIDA’s Far-UVC setup]

Nora: Will all the people be, like, “what is that thing!?”

Nora: Will that keep the people from getting sick?

2025-10-31

Me: I finished my Halloween costume!

Nora: that doesn’t really look good.

2025-11-03

Anna: [counting bites as she eats a slice of pizza] 302, 303, 304. I’m going to stop counting and just eat the pizza.

Cora: Good idea!

Anna: Well, I’ll still count, but it will be in my head.

2025-11-07

[driving through the southwest]

Lily: Papa, do people normally say “wow” this much?

2025-11-14

Nora: this lollipop is too sweet and tastes weird

Me: if you don’t like it, you have plenty of other candy and can pick something else

Nora: it tastes like Cocomelon

Me: Do you mean watermelon?

Nora: No, I mean Cocomelon.

2024-11-16

Me: If you could make a wish in a wishing well, what would it be?

Nora: A million kitties and a million puppies.

Nora: And a house made of blueberries and full of blueberries so we could eat the house.

2025-11-20

Lily: I ran so fast to get home that I slipped

Nora: I’m glad you’re still alive!

2025-11-23

Nora: “I say ‘grocamole’ because it’s too hard to say ‘guacamole’ so I just say ‘grocamole’”

...

Nora: “This is a little too not salty”

2025-11-25

Anna: Nora, I think you would be warmer if you zipped up your sweatshirt

Nora: but I’m *already* warm! But I’m still cold.

....

Now Anna is explaining the concept of warmth to Nora

...

Nora: [sings] I’m not cold, I’m just pretending, why don’t you just ***dance***

2025-12-05

Anna: I had a raspberry from the bush when I got home from school, and it tasted like a *frozen* raspberry!

Me: have you looked at the thermometer?

Anna: 😳

2025-12-05

Nora: I’m a very good rememberer. Sometimes I even remember things that didn’t happen!

2025-12-11

The first rule of the Advent calendar is: you don’t complain about the Advent calendar to me. Today I learned that this rule doesn’t prevent Anna from complaining about the Advent calendar to her sisters, who pass it on to me.

Nora: “Anna says, what is the point of Christmas bandaids if it’s not a toy?”

2025-12-12

Nora: I want same as Anna, but no cheese. Just pasta, with butter, salt, and shaky cheese.

2025-12-14

Nora: that person is dressed just like a snow pig! I mean a polar bear.

2025-12-16

Even if it’s literally true that you have a lousy child, you shouldn’t expect them to appreciate your opportunity to use archaic phrasing.

2025-12-20

Anna: Nora, stop whacking me!

Nora: I didn’t, and it was by accident!

2025-12-21

[at a family dance]

Caller: this dance is called Sasha, and we start by pretending that Sasha has been very naughty. I know none of you have ever been naughty but...

Anna: [to her partner but loud enough for everyone to hear] oh, *I* have!

2025-12-27

Nora: my favorite part of sledding is going down the hill

2025-12-28

Anna: my hands are all greasy

Jeff: okay, let’s all go wash hands

Anna: why do we need to wash hands?

Jeff: so they won’t be greasy

Nora: my hands are all hairy from the butter

Contra Dance as a Model For Post-AI Culture

Jeff Kaufman — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:59:18 GMT

I play for contra dances, and a core part of our culture is that we always have live music. It’s not that live music is categorically better: if you ran a test where you put soundproof one-way glass front of the musicians and secretly played a live recording from a great band playing for the same dance it would probably go really well. Instead, we insist on live music because that’s the kind of culture we’re trying to build, one where the performers are part of the community, where anyone can start playing for dancing, and where the music grows and changes with the culture.

Other groups went different ways. The late 1940s explosion in square dancing happened in part because of technological progress: it was now practical to record a band once and play it back millions of times to support dancing all over the country. Callers would buy a sound system, including a record player, and all they needed was some dancers and a hall. This let modern square dancing grow enormously.

Contra dance took a different path, coming through the 70s folk revival with a strong commitment to live music. Musicians were drawn to the dance form, and dancers learned to play. With regular opportunities to perform, they learned to adapt playing to support the dancing. As the choreography and musical sensibilities changed over the years, the live tradition could change with it. I love what bands are doing now, and if you compare hall recordings to decades ago it’s impressive how much the genre has matured and flourished.

It’s not just contra dance: there are communities of people who hand-craft assembly to make demos, even though the software industry has long-since automated this with compilers in typical development. My cousin makes bagpipes out of wood, even though you’d have trouble hearing the difference between these and something injection-molded from plastic. My dad has serving bowls we made out of clay, even though they’re heavier and less round than what a machine could press. People still watch humans play Go, even though computers are better now. People watch humans race, even though machines are faster, and they also watch machines race. This can be a categorical decision to always go with human effort, or a case where both forms exist side by side but with prestige or sentiment pushing towards the human.

I like this as a model for what art and achievement could look like in a post-AI world, assuming we make it through to the other side. Some communities can embrace technology and explore what’s possible with full AI assistance. Other communities can make an intentional decision to keep doing things the traditional way, accepting that this will be less perfect and less efficient. Yet others can mix them, appreciating what humans have been able to make for what it is, while also getting the practical benefits of automation. I’m not worried that the music I love will disappear, because economically it’s been obsolete for decades. It’s still here because we want it to be.

Don't Sell Stock to Donate

Jeff Kaufman — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 02:30:50 GMT

When you sell stock [1] you pay capital gains tax, but there’s no tax if you donate the stock directly. Under a bunch of assumptions, someone donating $10k could likely increase their donations by ~$1k by donating stock. This applies to all 501(c) organizations, such as regular 501(c)3 non-profits, but also 501(c)4s such as advocacy groups.

In the US, when something becomes more valuable and you sell it you need to pay tax proportional to the gains. [2] This gets complicated based on how much other income you have (which determines your tax bracket for marginal income), how long you’ve held it (which determines whether this is long-term vs short-term capital gains), and where you live (many states and some municipalities add additional tax). Some example cases:

A single person in Boston with other income of $100k who had $10k in long-term capital gains would pay $2,000 (20%). This is 15% in federal tax and 5% in MA tax.
A couple in SF with other income of $200k who had $10k in long-term capital gains would pay $2,810 (28%). This is 15% in federal tax, 3.8% for the NIIT surcharge, and 9.3% in CA taxes.
A single person in NYC with other income of $600k who had $10k in short-term capital gains would pay $4,953 (50%). This is 35% in federal tax, 3.8% for the NIIT surcharge, 6.9% in NY taxes, and 3.9% in NYC taxes.

When you donate stock to a 501(c), however, you don’t pay this tax. This lets you potentially donate a lot more!

Some things to pay attention to:

Donations to political campaigns are treated as if you sold the stock and donated the money.
If you’ve held the stock over a year and are donating to a 501(c)3 (or a few other less common ones like a 501(c)13 or a 501(c)19) then you can take a tax deduction of the full fair market value of the stock. This is bizarre to me (why can you deduct as if you had sold it and donated the money, when if you had gone that route you’d have needed to pay tax on the gains) but since it exists it’s great to take advantage of.
This only applies if it’s a real donation. If you’re getting a benefit (ex: “donating” to a 501(c)3 but getting a ticket to an event) that’s not a real gift and doesn’t fully count.
If you’re giving to a person, you don’t pay capital gains, but they get your cost basis (with some caveats). When they sell they’ll pay capital gains tax, which might be more or less than you would have paid depending on your relative financial situations. If they’re likely to want to make a gift to charity, though, it’s much more efficient to give them the stock.
The actual logistics of donating stock are a pain. If you’re giving to a 501(c)3 it’s generally going to be logistically easier to transfer the stock to a donor-advised fund (I use Vanguard Charitable because it integrates well with Vanguard), which can then make grants to the charity. This also has a bonus of letting you pick the charity later if you want to squeeze this in for 2025 but haven’t made up your mind yet.

[1] I say “stock” throughout, but this applies to almost any kind of asset.

[2] Note that “gains” here aren’t just the real gains from your stock becoming more valuable, but also include inflation. For example, if you bought $10k in stock five years ago ($12.5k in 2025 dollars) and sold it today for $12.5k in 2025 dollars, you’d have “gains” of $2,500 even though all that’s actually happened is that the 2025 dollars you received are less valuable than 2020 dollars you spent.

Clipboard Normalization

Jeff Kaufman — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 02:55:35 GMT

The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but I want comfortable text:

Yes: Lists, links, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, bold, italics, underlining, headings, simple tables.
No: Colors, fonts, text sizing, text alignment, images, line spacing.

Let’s say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:

If I do Cmd+Shift+V and paste without formatting, I get no styling at all:

I can deal with losing the blockquote formatting, but losing the links is a pain.

What I want is essentially the subset of HTML that can be represented in Markdown. So I automated this! I made a Mac command that pulls HTML from the clipboard, passes it through pandoc twice (HTML to Github-flavored markdown to HTML), and puts it back on the clipboard. I also packaged it up as a status-bar app:

You can run it by clicking on the icon, or invoking the script:

$ normalize-clipboard

Which gives:

Alternatively, if I actually want Markdown, perhaps to paste into an LLM interface, I can skip the conversion to HTML:

$ markdownify-clipboard

I’m pretty happy with this! It’s open source, on github, so you’re welcome to give it a try if it would be useful to you.

Note that I haven’t paid for an Apple Developer subscription, so if you want to use the pre-built binaries you’ll need to click through scary warnings in both your browser and the OS. I’ve documented these in the README, though an advantage of building from source is that you don’t have to deal with these.

This was my first time using Platypus to package a script as a Mac app. It worked well!

Kids and Space

Jeff Kaufman — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:19:45 GMT

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last month on whether it’s still possible to raise kids without being rich. Housing is a big piece of this, and if you need to buy a house where each kid has their own room, yes, that’s expensive, but it’s also not the only option. We didn’t wait to buy a house (or have multiple bedrooms) before having kids, and I think that was the right choice for us.

To give you a sense of what this looked like, two configurations from early on:

Living with extended family, in a six bedroom ~2,500 sqft house with 8-10 people. Our baby first slept in a co-sleeper, and then in a mini-crib I assembled in our closet (door open).
After we bought a house our toddler was still in our room because I was renovating what would become her bedroom. There were two other bedrooms, but housemates lived in these, for a combination of us liking to live with other people and wanting to save money.

It was definitely not ideal! Trying not to wake the baby when you have different bedtimes, staying out of the bedroom during naptime, both parents waking when the baby does, etc. But there were also large advantages to a first kid at 28:

Having kids at a time in our life when we physically had more energy. Not to say we have no energy now at 40 and nearly-40, but ten years ago we did have more.
More years of overlap with our kids, and an even larger increase in how many years our parents overlap with them.
Better time in our careers for us to take leave: it’s generally easier to be away as an IC than a manager.
Fertility is highly variable, but definitely gets harder as you get older.
Much more practical to have three kids.

Overall, I think this was a good choice for us. It’s definitely not right for everyone, but I think hard rules of “buy a house first” and “have enough space that each kid can have their own room” are right for very few people.

There’s a pattern of rising expectations for what it means to be doing ok, but sometimes people describe these as if they’re rising requirements. For example, Zvi:

Society strongarms us to buy more house, more healthcare, more child supervision and far more advanced technology. The minimum available quality of various goods, in ways we both do and don’t care about, has risen a lot. Practical ability to source used or previous versions at old prices has declined.

He focuses on childcare (reasonable!) but also discusses how this applies to housing:

You can want 1,000 square feet but that means an apartment, many areas don’t even offer this in any configuration that plausibly works.

You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

Jeff Kaufman — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 21:16:40 GMT

Far-UVC is something people have talked about for years in a “that would be great, if you could buy it” sort of way. Coming soon, once someone actually makes a good product. But the future is now, and it costs $500.

Many diseases spread through the air, which is inconvenient for us as creatures that breathe air. You can go outside, where the air is too dilute to spread things well, but it’s cold out there, and sometimes wet. You can run an air purifier, but cleaning lots of air without lots of noise is still the world of DIY projects. Ideally you could just shine some light, perhaps in the 222-nm range, which would leave people alone but kill the viruses [1] and bacteria. Yes, let’s do that!

Last year if you asked “if far-UV is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?“ one of your answers would be:

There are very few providers, and hardly any of them sell an off-the-shelf product. You usually can’t just buy a lamp to try it out—you have to call the company, get a consultation, and often have someone from the company come install the lamp. It’s a lot of overhead for an expensive product that most people have never heard of.

This has changed! You can buy an Aerolamp for $500, shipped. Proudly displayed at Thanksgiving:

Here are ~~five~~ four silently cleaning a whole lot of air at a dance I help organize:

At $500 this is out of (my) Christmas gift range, but I think we’re now at the point where dances, churches, offices, rationalist group houses, schools, etc. should consider them.

(I have no stake in Aerolamp and they’re not paying me, I’m just very excited about their product.)

[1] Ok, yes, I know viruses “can’t be killed” because they’re “not alive”, but far-UVC causes them to become unable to infect and replicate which is close enough to “killed” for me.

Everyday Clean Air

Jeff Kaufman — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:52:44 GMT

When the next pandemic hits, our ability to stop it will depend on the infrastructure we already have in place. A key missing piece is clean indoor air. An airborne pathogen can be very hard to contain, and we would want to move fast to limit spread. But how quickly we can get measures in place, and how thoroughly they would work, depends critically on the base we have to build up from.

Indoor air today is dirty by default. The air you breathe in is air others have breathed out, complete with a wide range of viruses and bacteria. It’s a little gross if you think about it, and people do get sick a lot, but most of the time we just accept the downsides.

If something really serious were going around, though, this isn’t a risk we’d accept. We’d need clean air: some combination of replacing infected air with outside air (ventilation), physically removing pathogens (purifiers, masks), or inactivating pathogens (far-UVC, glycol vapors).

I hear a lot about stockpiling as a way to set us up for clean air when we most need it. Get a lot of masks, air purifiers, far-UVC lamps etc ready to go, so they can be distributed in an emergency. I do think this helps, but there are serious limits:

Manufacturing capacity will stay low, because there’s no ongoing demand. Compare to masks in 2020: there was a huge spike in demand for N95s but it took many months to ramp up production.
There won’t be many experienced installers, and people won’t be familiar with the logistics.
Products will be relatively expensive and poorly designed, because product improvement runs through things actually being used.
When deploying in an emergency people won’t be familiar with them, and so would be hesitant to use them.
As an expensive speculative investment you probably can only afford to stockpile enough for the most critical applications.

What we need is regular (”peacetime”) deployment. If a significant fraction (10%?) of rooms already had air purifiers, far-UVC, or other good options, not only would some need already be covered, but all the factors I just listed above work in your favor. You’d have the manufacturing capacity, the experienced installers, the good cheap products, and the public familiarity.

Key to peacetime deployment is peacetime benefits. You’re not going to get to 10% of indoor spaces on the threat of a future pandemic. But millions of people die from airborne disease every year, people miss school and work, and being sick is just unpleasant. Cleaner air lets us make progress on all of these. While I’m coming at this from a biosecurity angle, the public health and economic benefits are also substantial.

I especially think it would be valuable to have more quantification here. If I’m an employer, how much will my company healthcare costs and sick days decrease if I deploy effective air cleaning? If I’m a superintendent in a district where I lose $50 each day each student is absent, how long before a given air cleaning system would pay for itself?

More demonstration would also be valuable, especially if the effects are as large as I expect them to be when you cover a large portion of someone’s weekly exposure. If kindergartens with clean air have ~half the absenteeism they used to, that would be such a clear effect that people could see it in their own experience. You wouldn’t need to present complicated statistics and discuss randomization approaches if the benefits were staring us in the face. I could point to the experience of Germantown Friends School in 1937, but we need examples that aren’t 88 years old.

It’s counterintuitive to advance biosecurity by focusing on everyday public health, but it pencils out. We clean drinking water all the time, not just in response to cholera outbreaks. To have clean air in emergencies, figure out how to have clean air every day.

Front-Load Giving Because of Anthropic Donors?

Jeff Kaufman — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 01:46:55 GMT

Summary: Anthropic has many employees with an EA-ish outlook, who may soon have a lot of money. If you also have that kind of outlook, money donated sooner will likely be much higher impact.

It’s December, and I’m trying to figure out how much to donate. This is usually a straightforward question: give 50%. But this year I’m considering dipping into savings.

There are many EAs and EA-informed employees at Anthropic, which has been very successful and is reportedly considering an IPO. The Manifold market estimates a median IPO date of June 2027.

At a floated $300B valuation and many EAs among their early employees, the amount of additional funding could be in the billions. Efforts I’d most want to support may become less constrained by money than capacity: as I’ve experienced in running the NAO, scaling programs takes time. This means donations now seem more valuable; ones that help organizations get into a position to productively apply further funding especially so.

One way to get a sense of the impact of donating sooner is to imagine that others will donate $1M to my preferred charity this year, and $10M next year. If I have $200k, I expect giving it all this year, for a total of $1.2M this year and $10M the next, would be more valuable than splitting it evenly, for $1.1M this year and $10.1M the next. The $100k in question would be a 9% increase in funding this year, but only a 1% increase next year.

In retrospect I wish I’d been able to support 80,000 Hours more substantially before ~~Open Philanthropy~~ Coefficient Giving began funding them; this time, with more ability to see what’s likely coming, I’d like to avoid that mistake.

Now, Anthropic could fail, the IPO could take a long time with minimal opportunity for employees to take money off the table before then, or the employees could end up primarily interested in funding different things than I want to see funded. Still, it seems to me that EA-influenced funding likely goes a lot farther in the next few months than it will in a few years, and I think I should probably donate more this year.

Introducing faruvc.org

Jeff Kaufman — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 13:55:00 GMT

I wanted to link an explanation of how far-UVC works, why you might want to use it to clean indoor air, and what we know about its safety. I didn’t find anything I liked, so I made something: faruvc.org.

Let me know if you have ideas for making it better! My goal is to have something anyone can understand, without simplifying so much that it’s misleading.

At some point I’d like to include an illustration showing far-UVC in use in an occupied space, but I don’t have one I like right now.

(While I’m an employee of SecureBio, this is a personal project.)

Brightline is Actually Pretty Dangerous

Jeff Kaufman — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:48:54 GMT

Per the Atlantic’s A ‘Death Train’ is Haunting South Florida:

According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.

Trains running people over is obviously bad, but people also die from being hit by cars. Reading the article I was wondering: are we making a big deal about Brightline because it’s big and new, but actually we’re better off overall now that there’s a train because fewer people are driving and so fewer people are dying? And is this actually counterproductive fearmongering? Nope! Brightline is just really deadly, not just for a train, but even relative to driving.

While Brightline is of course much safer for occupants than driving, what I care about is the overall social impact: are there more or fewer deaths than in a non-Brightline world? This means counting everyone, including occupants, drivers, and pedestrians. Ideally we would compare fatality rates directly: how many deaths are there per passenger-mile for Brightline vs cars? These stats don’t exist, but we can get decent estimates:

For Brightline, per the article there have been 185 fatalities. [1] They don’t publish a passenger-miles number, but there were about 5M passengers before they opened the Orlando section and then 1.6M long-distance and 1.1M short-distance in 2024. If we guess that the first 9.5 months of 2025 looked like 2024, that’s an additional 1.3M long-distance and 0.9M short distance. In total that’s 2.9M long-distance trips and 7M short-distance. Based on the distances involved, I’m going to guess 200mi for long distance and 50mi. This gives us a total of 930M passenger-miles, and 20 deaths per 100M passenger miles.
For cars, Florida seems to have 1.42 deaths per 100M vehicle miles. If we guess that there’s an average of 1.4 people per car, this is ~1 death per 100M passenger miles.

So Brightline is about 20x more deadly per passenger-mile (counting people inside and outside the vehicle) than driving, and the article isn’t fearmongering. The Department of Transportation uses $13.7M for the statistical value of a human life, and 185 fatalities is $2.5B. And it’s going up at about $0.5B/year. [2] Without safety improvements, in something like seven years the ongoing societal cost in deaths will have grown larger than it’s initial $6B construction cost.

I do expect this to get better over time: some of these fatalities are people not being used to the trains, and as that changes I expect fewer people to do things like cross the tracks where they don’t have good visibility or under an assumption that the only trains that might come by are slow freight trains. The government has also been making improvements like adding fencing, and you could probably fence the whole thing for under $100M [3]. Getting Brightline to be less deadly than cars will be a lot of work (a 20x reduction is hard) but since trains elsewhere manage to be much safer this seems plausible.

The key takeaway for me, however, is that people who advocated for Brightline on the idea that it would reduce deaths made a pretty serious mistake. That Brightline would get cars off the road was a standard talking point, and people seemed to assume that this would be be positive from a traffic fatality perspective. Here’s the Rail Passengers Association saying this explicitly:

Regular train service along the corridor would remove as many as three million cars from regional highways each year, reducing both commuter stress and road fatalities. With 300 drivers killed in road accidents between 2004 and 2008, Interstate 95 has been ranked as the deadliest highway in the United States. A passenger rail alternative will thus save lives.

Advocates weren’t wrong in the general case, since trains are normally much safer than cars even counting non-occupants. The problem was Brightline’s specific route, with hundreds of grade crossings in densely populated areas and unfenced tracks that divide many places people want to move between. This is something people who know trains well should have been able to anticipate.

Since Brightline is following the laws, and there are strong legal protections for railroads, even if we decided Florida would be better off with Brightline shut down, it would be very difficult and would likely require federal legislation or a massively expensive buyout. So the best we can realistically do is safety infrastructure improvements, and there’s already a lot of political motivation here. A 20x decrease in fatalities sounds very difficult, but combination of additional fencing, improved crossings, and increasing public familiarity with the trains may be able to bring fatalities down to where the train is at least competitive with driving.

[1] Arguably you should not count some fraction of the 37 suicides, as some of the people may have otherwise have chosen other ways to kill themselves. But even if we don’t count all of them, dropping fatalities from 185 to 148, the bottom line doesn’t change very much: 16x more deadly instead of 20x.

[2] The Atlantic says 42 deaths in 2024. At $13.7M/death this is $575M.

[3] The corridor is 235mi, which is 2.5M ft when you count both sides. Installing fencing might be $25/ft, so $63M.

Attending Your First Contra Dance in a Fragrance-Compliant Manner

Jeff Kaufman — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:37:20 GMT

An honest attempt to describe what you’re technically supposed to do if you follow the posted policies. I don’t think anyone actually expects you to do this!

Great to hear that you’ve decided to attend your first contra dance! It’s really easy to get started, they’re a lot of fun, and it’s a friendly and welcoming community. You just show up, the caller tells you what to do, and in a few minutes you’re dancing. It’s got the best learning curve out there!

There’s one minor exception, however, which is that some dances are “fragrance free”. For these you’ll need a little prep: plan to start getting ready about three weeks before your first fragrance free event. I know this can be a bit more time than you were expecting to invest before learning whether this is an activity you’d enjoy, but trust me: it’s worth it!

It can be a little hard to figure out whether a dance you’re considering attending is fragrance free. While some dances list it on the homepage, you can’t count on that. For example, it could be at the bottom of the code of conduct or listed on a dance etiquette page. The safest thing to do is to read the whole website, but of course that’s a ton of work so you might want to write to the organizers.

Once you find the policy, it probably looks something like:

These Dances are Fragrance Free - please do not wear perfume, cologne, or other scented products, as some of our dancers are chemically sensitive, and experience discomfort when exposed to these materials.

Read it carefully! While many people initially interpret these policies to prohibit perfume, “scented products” includes soap, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, laundry detergent, etc. I recommend you start three weeks before the event, and spend a week noting the ingredients on each product you use. Read them over, looking for the words “fragrance” or “parfum”. If you don’t see those, there’s still some chance that it’s a scented product, unfortunately: sometimes individual fragrance ingredients are mentioned by name instead. I recommend taking a picture of the ingredients and uploading it to an LLM with a prompt like “are any of these ingredients fragrances”?

Note that some products will say “unscented”, but still have fragrances. This is very confusing, but the basic idea is that an “unscented” product is intended not to smell like anything, and might include “masking fragrances” to cover the scents of the ingredients. Products that say “fragrance free” are a better bet, but the term is not heavily regulated and there are products out there like this eucalyptus lavender soap bar that say “free from any fragrances” but also have strongly scented essential oils:

Two weeks week before the event you should have your list of the products you need to find substitutes for. It’s the same deal as before: analyze ingredient lists on potential replacements, and again LLMs may be useful. Here are some product lists that might be helpful in getting started: EastBayMeditation, FGC. If the cost is a burden, and a full set of personal care products can be a substantial investment, consider writing to the organizers to ask if they have a fragrance-free fund.

With medical products, like a medicated shampoo that happens to be scented, sometimes a fragrance free replacement is not an option. I’d recommend talking to the organizers: they may be willing to consider an exception. This is another reason to start early, since most of these events are organized by committees and can take a while to come to a decision.

About a week before the event you should have acquired all your replacement products: now it’s time to start using them! The goal is that by the time you attend the event you no longer have any lingering fragrances on yourself or your clothes. For clothes in particular scents can last a long time, so the safest thing to do is clean your washing machine (wash the machine with baking soda, then again with vinegar) and then wash your clothes twice. If you use a laundromat there aren’t any good options, since fragrance free laundromats are essentially not a thing, but if you ask around you may be able to find a friend who has their own machine and either already takes a fragrance free approach or is willing to help you out.

At this point, you’re ready to attend the dance! Make sure you’re wearing clothes that have been washed since you transitioned away from scented products. It’s also a good idea to bring your own hand soap: it’s sadly common for fragrance free dances to have scented products in their bathrooms. I hope you have a great time!

While this post is using satire to make a point, my core view is that it’s fine for dances to have whatever approach to fragrances they choose as long as they’re thoughtful about what they actually expect attendees to do and communicate it clearly. When I’ve written about this before I’ve read a lot of comments from people who don’t see a problem with the status quo. My target with the satire here is dances that put a few words about a policy on their page that they don’t actually expect people to follow, don’t put effort into ensuring potential attendees see, and sometimes even blatantly subvert by having scented products available at their dances.

You Should Get a Reusable Mask

Jeff Kaufman — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 02:40:47 GMT

A pandemic that’s substantially worse than COVID-19 is a serious possibility. If one happens, having a good mask could save your life. A high quality reusable mask is only $30 to $60, and I think it’s well worth it to buy one for yourself. Worth it enough that I think you should order one now if you don’t have one already.

But if you’re not convinced, let’s do some rough estimation.

COVID-19 killed about 0.2% of people (20M of 8B). The 1918 flu killed more like 2.5% (50M of 2B). Estimating from two data points is fraught, but this gives you perhaps a 0.02% annual chance of dying in a pandemic. Engineering could make this much worse, especially given progress in AI, but let’s set that aside for now to make a more conservative case.

A reusable mask (”elastomeric respirator”) would be really valuable to have, if things got really bad. Let’s imagine they cut your risk of dying by half: the rated efficacy is much higher (99%+) but real-world use isn’t perfect, especially over the months or years another pandemic could last.

A mask should last at least ten years if unused, and over that decade it would drop this conservative estimate of your risk of pandemic-induced death from 0.2% to 0.1%. If you, as the US DoT does, value not dying at $14M, then this is worth $14k. Even if the benefit of a mask is 100x lower than we estimated ($140), it’s still worth it to buy one.

I like geeking out over masks and there are a lot of options. I have a bunch of models, and if you’d like to come try them sometime (next EA Boston meetup on 10/26?) I’d be happy to show you what they’re like. But if you just want to pick one and be done with it, leaving it in a box that you more likely than not don’t need to open, a time tested but somewhat garish option is the 3M 6200 mask in Small ($17), Medium ($15), Large ($19) plus a set of 3M 2091 p100 filters ($7/pair):

I’d also recommend buying one now instead of trying to notice when a pandemic is coming: buying now ensures you get one instead of scrambling when everyone else is competing over a supply that can’t keep up, and everyone who prepares ahead of time helps reduce shortages when a disaster comes.

Kids and Cleaning

Jeff Kaufman — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:26:46 GMT

Before having kids I thought teaching them to clean up would be similar to the rest of parenting: once they're physically able to do it you start practicing with them, and after a while they're independent and do it reliably. You invest time and effort up front, but it pays back reasonably quickly with benefits for both you and the kid. While we've (n=3) had good success in some areas (street safety, microwave usage, walking to school, tooth brushing, ...), tidying has not been one of these.

Early on I tried a lot of getting them to clean up, but it was very slow, tended to dissolve into battles, and didn't seem to be getting much better over time. Instead, we've mostly moved to finding specific places where they can take on a bounded responsibility. The goal is to give them practice without overwhelming them, and to use natural consequences to avoid fights:

Lily (11y) and Anna (9y) clear their places when they're done eating, carrying their plates etc to the kitchen sink. We started doing this after we got a pair of cats who love to get into human food, and it's become very important to get dishes into a state of low potential energy right away. If they don't do this there's often a crash and an urgent puddle of milk.
Lily had a sleepover last night. Her room is generally messy enough that there wouldn't be a place for her friend to sleep. But she understood (from past sleepovers) that part of hosting was cleaning to where there was space for an air mattress, and to where her friend would feel comfortable. She cleaned up without being asked, and was proud to show me.
Similarly, Anna wanted to turn on her AC tonight. She knew that a requirement for this was that she'd need to tidy a path between the door and the AC so I could come in and shut it off when I went to bed. She almost didn't turn on the AC because of not wanting to clean up, and talked with me about her dilemma, but did decide to clear a path.
Our dining room table is a place for both projects and meals. When we're getting close to dinner I'll often ask the kids "are any of these things yours?" and they'll put away their portion.
After I tidy away large objects, I'll sweep everything remaining into a pile in the middle of the room; tidying a pile requires less willpower than repeatedly searching for things that need putting away:

Typically I'll then sort through it myself but other times I'll ask the kids to put away anything they want to keep from the pile, with the plan that I'll throw away the rest.

This does work, but the kids find it more stressful than I'd like, since they're worried I'll be throwing away something worth keeping. I've never actually thrown away something they want (since I keep asking "is everything left stuff I can throw away") but they still don't like it ("you wouldn't throw away that Duplo, would you!?"). Combined with often being in a hurry when I'm sweeping, I don't tend to do this much.
I'll often only be willing to play a game with them if they'll clean up their previous game first.
Sometimes I'll use the strategy of everyone cleaning up for a set amount of time (some people use a clean-up song, recorded or sung), but not often because it's hard to address shirking well.
Julia has a range of things she'll do with the kids, like sorting through their accumulated papers and projects. This post isn't an attempt at an exhaustive list.

Part of what makes all of this hard in common spaces is that responsibility among multiple kids is unclear. I usually can't tell who made what mess, but even if we agree on the facts it can be philosophically challenging. For example, say Lily gets out cloth, Anna starts playing with it too, Lily departs, and then Anna departs. Lily couldn't have cleaned it up when she was leaving without getting in Anna's way, but does Anna take on full responsibility for Lily's cloth fragments as soon as she starts to play? Should the kids race to be done first? Do you need to come back later and clean up whenever the other is finished? These are tricky questions where adults are generally able to navigate with some combination of designated responsibilities (ex: a specific person does dishes) and relaxed doing-your-part (ex: trying to clean more dirty dishes than you generate), but our kids are still on the young end for this.

The goal is still to get the kids to where they're responsible adults and good housemates, and I do see them moving in this direction. But I also think I'm being a bit lazy here, erring towards choices that minimize only short term work and conflict. I'm going to think more about how to be more intentional about growing their responsibilities here, cleaning up for them in fewer cases, and getting them closer to pulling their own weight.

Two Kinds of Do Overs

Jeff Kaufman — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:09:12 GMT

One strategy we often find helpful with our kids is the "do over": something didn't go well, let's try again. Two examples:

Nora (4y) can't yet cross streets on her own, but we're starting to practice. Walking to a farther park, a walk where we often practice, she asked Julia "when we get to the little street can I cross it"? Julia said "we'll need to check in when we get there". But Nora did not check in, and 'practiced' on her own. Even though this was on a tiny street, this was still really unsafe and is something she very much needs to not do. I caught up, spoke to her firmly, she burst into tears, I walked her back, and we did it over together. As soon as she had the chance to demonstrate doing it correctly she cheered up dramatically, and then we had a good time at the park.
We're in a hurry to get out the door and I put Nora's coat on her. She bursts into tears: "I wanted to put my coat on myself!" I ask "should we do a do over?" She says yes, I take her coat off, she puts it on, she's happy.

These sound very different, but they're really two sides of the same learning process. In first case I wanted Nora to learn something. If I had just spoken sternly to her about not crossing streets solo I don't think it would have sunken in as well. Making it inconvenient, getting to the park later than if she'd done it the right way, having the time walking back to reflect on her error, and then doing it the right way, all contributed to taking it seriously and learning.

The second case is much more minor, but it's just the other way around: if I'd just apologized to Nora and said she could put her coat on next time I would have learned less, and she would rightly be less confident that I would actually follow through.

I think this is a neat symmetry, but to be fair it's not always why we do the second category of do overs: sometimes we're just trying to resolve a meltdown. For example, say there's a miscommunication where it turned out the kid had a very strong preference but we didn't ask and they didn't tell us. Sometimes a do over would be about practicing what good communication would have been:

Nora: I didn't want my cereal in this bowl, I wanted a large bowl!
Me: Would you like to do a do over?
Nora: Yeah
Me: If you want your cereal in a specific bowl you'll need to make sure I know that.
Nora: Ok
Me: Should I get you some cereal?
Nora: In a large bowl!

Other times, though, the kid is too fragile (perhaps very hungry), we don't have time, or I'm being a lazier parent. In these cases the do over is just a way to calm them down (and clear the way to not being so very hungry):

...
Me: Would you like to do a do over?
Nora: Yeah
Me: Should I get you some cereal in a large bowl?
Nora: Yes!

This version is still helpful; the kid ends up happy and fed. You don't have to take every opportunity to model ideal communication. And it's not always clear in the moment what ideal communication would have been, especially as kids get older and interactions get more complex.

With all of these different applications of do overs, a key thing that I like is that it quickly breaks the bad pattern and replaces it with a better one. You're not digging into what should have happened, you just jump back and try it again.