Sambal

Don’t split tasks evenly, explains Noah Berlatsky, writing in Scientology puff-magazine the Atlantic:

 Housework isn’t a debt wives owe to husbands, nor one husbands owe to wives. It’s not a gift you give to make a slave. Rather, it’s the quotidian stuff of which the relationship is made. We’re married, so we help each other. And the helping isn’t to protect the marriage, or to keep the people in the marriage happy. The helping is the marriage itself.

Yeah, no kidding.

What if we tried to split all the tasks up equally?  She’ll breastfeed half the time, and …… what? the other half of the time.  I’ll hold the steering wheel, you shift the gears.  You go to your office Monday, Wednesday and come to mine Tuesday, Thursday…

Or maybe: sure, go to medical school — but make sure you’re home on time every day to take care of your twelve hours of the parenting.

Shyeah, right.

Arnold Kling, quoting John Holt on schooling:

Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.

society demands of schools… that they be a place where… children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way…. They are a kind of day jail for kids. [elided much of this paragraph - Sam]

Apparently Kling was previously familiar with the work of Ivan Illich, who was a friend and colleague of Holt’s.

Since Illich and Holt were both more of the Left than the right (albeit, a liberty-celebrating Left that’s more like left-libertarianism than modern Progressives or even 1980′s liberal Democrats), I am curious to see how this influences Kling’s thinking.

Microsoft helpfully “upgraded” office in 2007 and destroyed all the personal intellectual capital that people had created by learning the menu system.  I took slight notice of this at the time because, hey, infant twins.

Recently I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming off of Office 2003 and started using Office 2007, so I’ve had to deal with this piece of junk myself.

Eventually I noticed that Excel 97/2000/2003 menu shortcut keys still work through a “magic compatibility mode”.  But for the things that I used to use toolbars, I was screwed.

Right-clicking on a selection brings up a toolbar that contains almost all, but not quite all, of the least useful formatting commands.

Today I was trying to resize some rows and columns and it was so incredibly painful that I actually found a meta-solution: an add-in that lets you search for commands by name.   Found it via Debra Dalgeish’s blog Contextures, which looks to have lots of useful Excel stuff.

I hope someone doesn’t add a command-line interface to Excel next.  I’d have to find something new to whine about.

I’ve been making French press coffee for at least 20 years.  About every third time, while pressing the coffee, a little bit spills onto the counter.

The other day I tried it differently: I put the French press into the sink and pressed it there.

20 years of pointless, needless counter-wiping could have been averted by using the sink for its intended purpose.

Don’t let this happen to you…

Well maybe just a wrap-up for NOW.  Maybe I’ll bang on this drum more, later.

I don’t know enough about John’s business to argue with him further.  400 journal entries a year sounds like <10 a week to me, which is less than an hour a week.  But if an hour a week is more time than you want to spend on the business at all, because it’s supposed to be passive income… well.  Hard to say.

The underlying principles are:

• A transaction should be recorded as soon as possible, and ideally by one of the people involved in the transaction
• The principals/owner/CEO should be aware of the current financial position of the company

When the owner is the only employee, then there’s an obvious candidate for entering the transactions: you!  When the bookkeeping is simple, then there’s no need for intermediate layers of accounting.  The financial position of the company is Cash On Hand + Accounts Receivable – Accounts Payable.

For a lot of people — for me, even, at several points in managing my business — it seemed “easier” to just take a quick look at the bank balance and make a decision from there.  But there’s a big difference between $12,000 in the bank and owing $20,000 in taxes vs. $12,000 in the bank and expecting $2,000 in the coming month.

For a lot of self-employed people, if they’re not doing their own books, nobody is doing the books.  So do your own books.