This post makes the case that you can compare Dave Ramsey style budgeting culture with diet culture:

Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation -- much like diet culture does for food and bodies -- and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success.

In the same way diet culture is quick to blame health conditions on a person's weight, or prescribe food restriction as treatment toward the goal of being thin, budget culture sees measures like credit scores and debt as signifiers of financial health, and prescribes spending restrictions as the first step toward wellness -- defined, at its core, as being (on the way to becoming) rich.

I like this comparison, because in both cases, there are actual real consequences to spending far beyond your budget or eating way beyond your maintenance calories. It's just that the capitalist pop media individualist approach to solving these problems is a total mess.

The simplest problem with this approach is that budgeting, like dieting, doesn't work. Restriction and deprivation are unsustainable; accurately tracking spending is hard; income fluctuates, and costs don't operate on a perfect monthly reset. Budgets don't account for the way lives work, so they're hard to keep in our lives consistently. But even when people do use them, budgeting doesn't necessarily fulfill its promises: A 2021 survey by The Penny Hoarder, for example, found that budgeters are just about as likely as non-budgeters to have any amount of debt.

Obviously everyone here favors societal solutions over individual hectoring. That's like our unifying battle cry.

The author is also on board with us, but I think she's missing the basic point when it comes to attribution:

The broader problem with budget culture is its emphasis on individual responsibility and insistence on ignoring the varying levels of access and privilege in our world. It vilifies and oppresses anyone who doesn't live up to the ideal, regardless of their circumstances. And that ideal is, unsurprisingly, rooted in maleness and whiteness in the way many of our cultural ideals are. Budget culture idealizes and advises for a definition of richness that relies on things like power at work, freedom from domestic labor, well-rounded education, debt elimination, homeownership, credit, and other things moneyed, straight white men tend to have access to more readily than anyone else. We equate these things with being good with money because we exist in a system designed -- by people with money trying to keep it -- to favor them, not because they're inherent signs of more or less responsible stewardship of money.

Sure, whiteness and maleness, but it's really, literally, about class.

I do appreciate this honesty:

I used to tell people I was grateful to work in personal finance, because what I've learned has helped me get my own money under control. I have a small IRA, a comfortable $20,000 savings cushion, automatic bill payment, a credit card and a 740 credit score. But I've stopped giving financial literacy the credit, because I know the real reason my finances are "healthier" now: I have more money. I took a job with a salary that quadrupled my income, and voila -- I became a lot more "responsible" with money.

1. A quick rundown of how lucky Trump got in all his court cases, to have arrived at this point so unscathed.

2. Idk, I know we're trying not to borrow trouble from tomorrow, but c'mon. He's saying a lot of weird stuff, per usual.

3. Bonus content under the jump, for mild anonymity purposes.

I'm sharing this so that you can hear an accent that would make Billy Bob Thornton weep with jealousy: video here.

It's a formerly homeless guy, talking at citizen council about the high quality case management service he received from a local organization.

(Note: This is a screen recording from my phone, just to avoid sending extra traffic to the actual hosting website.)

What the hell? Scary and I hope everyone's okay.

1. First off, this article makes a case that appeals to me: Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? We would rather talk about literally everything else.

She basically makes the following case:
- there's a well-known phenomenon on how professions evolve from male-dominated to female-dominated, and part of it is a tipping point, where once there's a certain percentage of women, men start fleeing. So for awhile, you're adding women to the pool, and then suddenly you're also subtracting men from the pool.
- Boys are attending college in lower and lower numbers. People who analyze this seem willfully unwilling* to entertain the idea that it might be sexism driving them away from an increasingly female space, by the phenomenon in 1.

The article has a certain tone that's going to drive everyone crazy, I recognize that.

*"Willfully unwilling"? Is that the best I can do?

2. Supposedly I'm supposed** to discuss this Atlantic article at faculty workshops next week: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books. (pdf here.)

I am having the hardest time taking this article seriously. It's so the Kids Today On My Lawn With Their Cellphones that I'm unable to pause and see if there's any merit this time. After all, a kid on a lawn with a cellphone should still be right twice a day, right?

**"Supposedly I'm supposed"? Oh come off it.

NickS writes: I don't have a well-developed theory about paywalls. I'll try easy steps to get around them and otherwise just stop reading when I hit one. I am amused that this article has quotes from several people, many of whom appear to be trying to justify that behavior:

"The era of free websites is coming to an end and there's nothing you can do about it," Lance Ulanoff announced in an October column at TechRadar (which, for the moment, is still free). His article laid out the culprits that typically take the blame: declining ad revenue, AI-driven summaries that dissuade searchers from clicking on sources, audience migration to alternative news sources such as TikTok (for now) and YouTube (which recently cracked down on ad blockers in its own anti-free offensive), and decreasing subsidies from the formerly lucrative television or print properties that once propped up the internet toeholds of legacy media.

Granted, the present, pricier state of affairs isn't the historical anomaly; the heyday of Napster and unrestricted access to CNN.com was. After all, it's not as if pre-internet newspapers' print editions were delivered for free. Still, what's old being new (and costly) again is jarring to the generations that became accustomed to getting gratis what now requires a credit card. Not only is there no such thing as a free lunch, but there may also be less to read for free on your lunch break.

As Ulanoff acknowledges, though, there is something you can do about the proliferation of paywalls--depending on your appetite for escalade. "We don't usually willingly enter Paywall land," Ulanoff wrote, adding, "we find ways to see more than our share of free content." Yet he also copped to feeling guilty about scaling walls that were erected to protect people in his own profession. "I know I'm the last person who should be doing this, and sometimes I wonder how I can be so cheap," he confessed.

Two things that strike me are, first, that part of my objection to paywalls is that they incentivize click-bait style of writing; a site wants to promise that they can provide unique and valuable information behind the paywall and, generally, that isn't the case.

On the other hand, I probably don't pay enough to support journalism and should be willing to pay more. I remember seeing the argument that one reason why movie-making has become more formulaic is the collapse of the DVD market which had provided a revenue source other than theaters for mid-budget and independent movies. If true it's a good example of the connection between an industry having multiple routes to make money and producing a wider variety of material and journalism, as an industry, is trying to figure out what avenues are available to get people to pay for their product.

Heebie's take: Several bits resonated with me:

Like anyone else, her problem with paywalls is partly rooted in the frequent frustration of being barred from opening one-off articles at sites that she has little reason to read regularly.

Exactly. I don't want a subscription to the Peoria Times.

When I ask about bypassing the paywall of an outlet that isn't in one's area, though, he's far more forgiving: "In the scenario you said, they should be able to read the piece for free. And in that case it might be a bit much to expect them to donate or something like that." In fact, Waldman puts the onus on the papers for not making it easier for lookie-loos to make a small, one-time investment to unlock a particular piece. "People have talked forever about having a micro-payment system, and yet it's never happened," he says. As Curtis put it, "If I had to concoct a defense for shoplifting, it's that paywalls are still cumbersome and annoying. ... So maybe one defense for skirting the paywall is that you're doing a runaround on a practice that was anti-consumer to begin with."

Sullivan similarly advocates for local outlets to come up with "a piecemeal way that would allow access." She also floats the possibility of "some kind of a cooperative" in which one user could sign up for a plan that would grant access to a consortium of local coverage across the country. Waldman says that he hasn't heard of any efforts for local outlets to offer that type of plan because readers generally aren't interested in more than one local publication. A pay-per-piece approach would probably have to keep prices quite low to generate interest. The Reuters Institute found that 57 percent of non-news subscribers "would not consider paying anything," and one of the other surveys cited above determined that the average amount people would be willing to pay per paywalled piece is $1.01.

I'm willing to pay for lots of authors on substack, because the process isn't too onerous. It's really annoying that there's not a Cable News package for all these small news outlets to sign on to.

Separately, this is really a problem in this day and age:

The Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel told Semafor this month, "I think it's a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls."

(Literally minutes ago, there was a headline about how Facebook is ending fact-checking posts, in order to more thoroughly bend over for Trump.)

So NYC congestion pricing has eked through after all, and made it to implementation?

Semi-related, I subscribed to Krugman's new substack, which I'm looking forward to. He wrote a congestion pricing response, which is more generally about "car brain".

(I have been fantasizing about this hypothetical lightrail line for 20 years.)