Stress-free moves don’t exist. But for less stress, get professional movers from a reputable company, if you can afford it. Yes, packing too. Especially packing.

Yes, we have started the move today, Day 1 of who knows how many.

Here is some child-rearing equipment that we only began using the fourth time around:

Glass bottles, like Philips Avent. We used Playtex disposable liners before and now regret it: what we got in convenience was not worth the cost in money, raw materials, and potential plastics exposure. Our biggest fear going into it was having glass shards all over the house from my sleepily mishandling a bottle at 3am. But no breakages yet! These Avent bottles are quite sturdy — I would expect them to chip the kitchen counter sooner than crack — yet not as heavy as you’d expect for something so robust.

One-piece silicone pacifiers, like these from NUK. We have progressively used them less for each of our children — one gets more used to an occasional nocturnal gasp or scream as time goes on, though of course here I speak solely for myself as I know that a certain someone in our house would violently disagree — so I suspect our infant will soon stop needing his, but as he has the nasty habit of trying to put the entire thing in his mouth not having sharp plastic edges is much appreciated; not have any plastic there at all even more so.

Zip-up onesies, like you can now find practically everywhere. In years past most zippers were too uncomfortable and the risk of accident too high so we opted for snap-ons, which could be found in about equal proportion at a Babies"R"Us. Not any more: in the zipper versus snap-on wars, the zipper won handily. Thankfully, they seem a lot more comfortable, with cushioning, double zipping and what not. They are also faster to put on than snap-ons, which required figuring out the sometimes bewildering pairing of snaps.

And here are some old favorites which remain in use:

OXO bottle cleaners, like these here. They used to come in fun colors like seaweed green and teal. Alas, now that it’s mostly millennials who are parenting it only comes in gray. As a geriatric millennial, I condemn this bias against color.

The 360° sippy cups, mostly from Munchkin. Sucking liquids through a straw is for people with lockjaw or those recovering from dental surgery and most other sippy cups are elaborate ways of hiding that straw. Not these beauties, which unlike the OXO brushes above come in a million color combinations.

A large, rickety stroller, like those from Baby Trend or Graco. They are big, robust, and able to carry much more weight than those sleek metal and faux-leather vehicles I usually see around DC. They also come at one third of the price. Yes, this may have to do with the fact that it’s not our first rodeo and have long ago crossed into the zone of no fear, no embarrassment, nothing to prove.

And then there are things that are popular now but you just know will disappear in the blink of an eye. Looking at you, Snoo, you subscription-peddling, FDA-defrauding sack of technofeudalist grift.

A quarterly update to my Now page is in. For more like it, check out Derek Sivers’ nownownow.com.

In his latest essay, “How to Earn a Billion Dollars”, Paul Graham does his best impression of a condescending prick while trying to explain that it is possible to have a billion dollars without cheating. This was in response to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s comment that:

There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn.

This is my interpretation of Ocasio-Cortez’s words: no one deserves to have one billion dollars of their own. You can get to them by ways both lawful — underpaying your workers, abusing labor laws, etc. — and, of course, unlawful, but you can’t earn them. Somewhere on your path to a billion, in fact in too many places to count, you will have broken a moral, ethical, personal or public standard, sold your soul piece by piece, through acts diabolical when written down and thought about for more than a moment but which tend to go down smoothly, like nothing at all, just doing regular business as taught and practiced by people like Graham. No one described it better than C.S. Lewis in his essay “The Inner Ring” and, more viscerally, in the third book of his space trilogy.

This is how Paul Graham seems to have interpreted those same words: it is impossible to have one billion dollar net worth without cheating. He then uses basic math — start with a few measly million, grow it at 93% per month, see magic happen — to show that no, it is mathematically impossible not to get to a billion with that kind of growth. The only reason you are not a billionaire is that you are not trying hard enough, not producing the magical technology that will get you to a 93% monthly growth rate. Left unsaid, for this was initially a talk he gave at the Oxford Union debate society, are the many assumptions that are to me unpalatable but to Graham either so common that they have become like water or equally unpalatable and therefore hidden deep in his hindbrain. I can’t tell which is worse.

Assumption one: growth is a universal good. Without even going into what it is that you are growing (gambling, recreational drugs, surveillance systems, etc) the easiest way to grow a thing good or bad is to provide more to the customer than what they are paying. If I gave people a dollar for every quarter they spend my growth would be through the roof! Normally you grow because the perceived value to the customer is greater than the monetary one, but we are long past that. Getting thousands of dollars worth of tokens for a $200 per month subscription is the latest iteration, but Uber did it before on wheels, as have many companies before and since. Welcome to step one of enshittification.

Assumption two: to the founder go the spoils. Well, not just the founder — spare the thought for the investor — but notice how it goes without saying that by getting the company to a billion dollar valuation it is the founder who would become the billionaire. You see in this kind of thinking one of the reasons why CEOs, board members and investors are so enthusiastic about AI: widespread implementation would absolve them of the moral injury they get by shafting their workers. Well, those who still have morals to be injured.

Assumption three: these are not, I repeat — not — shark-infested waters. The second assumption is that the workers should be happy with their salary and a few lottery-ticket options, and that only a handful of people, the founders, should get a lion’s share of the company. The third is that the financial ecosystem will let the founders keep the money. Alas, from banking and legal fees to business partners and investors claiming their share, our newly not poor founder may find herself in an Old Man and the Sea situation. This is much more common in biotech where the academic founders regularly get mere crumbs once they cede most business to people presenting themselves as the adults in the room.

Assumption four: all assets are equal when it comes to net worth. The Internet has been flush with graphic depictions of what one trillion dollars means in physical terms — even one of my favorite popular science outlets was in on it — without stopping to think whether Elon Musk actually has access to that kind of money. Founder shares are particularly susceptible to melting down once the founder starts liquidating them, so the answer is no, Musk would not be able to get his one trillion and lock them in a vault Scrooge McDuck-style. Which is fine, as long as you can buy, borrow, die, but then what have you “earned”, exactly? The right to cheap credit and no taxation?

Assumption five: to be a billionaire, you have to want it. This one is in fact the correct assumption! There are no accidental billionaires, though not for the reason you think. You can be purposeful and diligent in building a great business; alas this is not sufficient. Mr. Market won’t just hand you gobs of money after it sees what you have done, no, you have to absolutely want to be a billionaire, make those small sales of your soul, shaft the workers, avoid the sharks and buy into the lifestyle. Balk at any one of those steps and wham, even if the number of whatever tracker you use gets to ten figures you won’t stay there for long. Well, conditional on inflation being under control, or soon enough we will all be billionaires!

There are many, many people in the tech and biotech circles who could have become billionaires but haven’t, and kudos to them! They tend to be silent, but Jeff Atwood comes to mind as an exceedingly decent human being who is also unusually outspoken and kudos to him. Whether there are even more people who would desperately want to be billionaires but can’t — or aren’t yet — I cannot say for certain, though my brief exposure to the ecosystem tells me that the answer is sadly yes.

After ten… eventful years in DC, our family — which doubled in size since 2016 (and more than doubled if you include the cat, and why wouldn’t you) — is moving to Denver, Colorado! Next month. Less than three weeks from now. Gulp.

So anyway, here is a recent storm over Washington to set the mood.

DEVONthink Pro — henceforth DTP — is one of those Swiss Army Knife applications that is different things to different people. ⊕ [Note: At one point or another DTP has also been my app for journaling, structured note-taking (even bought a book about it), managing journal references, reading RSS feeds, archiving podcast episodes, batch renaming and automated file wrangling à la Hazel. Phew. ] After a dozen or so years of dabbling, I have pared down its use cases to a single one: managing documents both electronic (office files and emails, mostly) and physical (thanks to the now discontinued but still phenomenal ScanSnap iX500). The only reason I used DTP and not say Finder was its “intelligent” file sorting, or rather sorting recommendations paired with fast search. So, that was the only thing I had to replicate to get my DTP replacement on Linux now that I am making the slow jump.

And with quite a bit from Google Gemini — again — I think I have this one licked:

• Recoll provides full-text search, with consult-recoll for integration with Emacs (yes, it’s Emacs all the way down).
• Dirvish gives a nice 3-pane view of the file structure.
• A custom python script [Note: Note: this is a completely Gemini-generated piece of code. Use at your own risk or better yet ask your favorite LLM to make one for you ] which a) trains itself on the folder and file structure of my “Documents” folder to b) predict correct classification for a single (via Emacs) or a group of files (via command line). Yes, it’s the old-fashioned AI, a.k.a. Machine Learning, which now runs as a once-hourly cron job on my laptop.
• A custom Emacs function that binds the “c” key while in Dirvish — usually while in my “Inbox” folder — to classify a file and move it by TAB-completion; in the case I am not happy with the few folders it recommended I can start typing and it will fuzzy-find what I wanted.

Rube Goldberg-y? Yes. Does it work? By golly, it does. For 95% of things I need it for it works even better and faster than DTP, which required mouse-dragging to move a file whenever I wasn’t happy with the recommended classification. The only wrinkle left to address is naming conflicts: DTP didn’t care if two completely different files had the same name as it had its own way to track them. Trying to copy a file to a folder that already has it right now doesn’t work, but that should be a quick weekend fix.

Well, folks, I did it: I have hit FeedLand’s feed creation limit. Any chance this can be increased, @dave? I’ve just discovered a new blog I’d like to add.

Tax Day was a good kick in the rear to clean up all the recurring payments that have accumulated over the years. Here are a few notable cancellations:

• Netflix, which I tend to picked on even as I commend its better offerings. Turd to diamond ratio is still too high, and with the most recent price increase it is not worth it any more.
• Paramount+, because there are better things to do in one’s life than watch Star Trek reruns.
• Disney+ would have been a cancellation as we rarely ever watch it. But for some reason we have been grandfathered into the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ 4K plan for $80 per annum and at that price it is worth it to have Gravity Falls available at a moment’s notice.
• All iOS weather apps, because my weather-related needs just aren’t that sophisticated and the default app serves them fine, thank you very much.
• Hookmark, previously known as Hook, a MacOS productivity app that (1) pissed me off by brandishing the tag line “Buy Once, Own Forever” even as it kills you with notifications that the new version 3.2.1.3.2.5 is out and you need to pay $30 for an “Updates license” all while (2) I am trying to move away from MacOS anyway. Yes, technically this is not a subscription that needs canceling but the toughest attachments to part with are those that exist only in my mind (see also: Tinderbox, DEVONthink, OmniFocus, MailMate, etc.)
• Epsilon Theory, a more esoteric platform which never quite recaptured the time they first grabbed my attention.

So with all of that deadweight removed, I felt that I could splurge on a Digital+Print subscription to Nautilus, an even more lay audience-friendly version of Quanta Magazine. Both of those are, of course, wildflowers growing out of the compost pile that was Scientific American. Thus Nautilus joins the Financial Times as the only print editions we subscribe to, all other magazines that come in the mail being hoisted on us as members of various medical societies.

For reasons that will soon become apparent, I would like to share with you a joke I heard back at medical school. I will remind you that this was in Belgrade, Serbia in the early 2000s, but the joke would apply to any Serbian institution of higher education, or indeed any place anywhere in the world that uses oral exams [Note: I have heard these called viva voce in the US, which is a bafflingly cheerful-sounding name for a rather traumatic ordeal. ] to determine the final grade. Please also bear in mind that I am not the best at telling jokes.

Anyway, here it is. A not very well prepared student comes in for his Anatomy 1 exam with a rather erratic professor (the joke had the actual name, which I am sure changed from time to time and from school to school). While sitting in front of the office waiting for his turn, a teaching assistant (again, named) approaches him. “Look”, the TA says, “I know he can be tough but for 100 euros things would go a lot easier for both of you. I’m going into his office now so if you have enough with you I can pass it on.” It so happened that the student did have a fresh 100 euro bill with him, which he gave to the TA, who then knocked on the door, spent a few minutes in the office, then came out with a smile and a nod. With newly boosted confidence, the student did better than he could have hoped for and got a 7 (on a 5 to 10 scale). Beaming with pride for his academic savvy and mental fortitude, he winks at the TA hanging around in the hallway. The TA winks back.

So when the time came for Anatomy 2 ⊕ [Note: Technically, there was no “Amatomy 1” and “Anatomy 2” but rather a mid-oral exam you had to do after the first two semesters where you got drilled about everything but the central nervous system, followed by the final oral exam in which everything was in play. Fun times. ] , our student was even more confident and less prepared, and by now you should know where this is going. Same professor, same hallway, same TA coming in with an offer for the privilege to pay a 100 euro lubrication fee. Alas, the professor was in a foul mood that day and flunks the student within 10 minutes. Crestfallen, the student slouches out of the office and sees the TA. “So sorry about that”, says the TA while handing him back the 100 euros, “but you were so bad that there was no chance he could let you pass.”

The joke, if you can call it that, is that the professor was psychotic but not corrupt, and that the TA was playing a game of chance. If it works it works, if not, well, there is always the money-back guarantee. It is as close as you can get to a victimless scam.

A phone call my wife received this morning reminded me of the scheme. It was from someone presenting as staff from the Johns Hopkins billing department. Apparently, there was a balance past due, back from November of last year. This was only a courtesy call, you see, but would you like to pay now or set up a payment plan, to avoid it being sent for collection?

Between the six of us we get about two dozen Explanations of Benefit each quarter. I may not be diligent about looking at every line item, but if there is one thing our insurance company helpfully provides even without logging in to the portal and opening the PDF it is the amount owed. Now, if my wife and I were inundated with work the way we usually were something could have slipped through the cracks, but I was on paternity leave with more time than usual to deal with the overhead of living in the United States so I was pretty sure there was nothing we could have received from insurance that we would have missed.

Except for a pile of snail mail on our dining room table, which I collect about once per week. And there, in an envelope addressed to my wife, was an account statement from Hopkins dated last week — due early next month — that said that we did indeed owe just shy over half a grand for hospital services rendered last November.

This was the first we had ever heard about owing for these particular services, rendered in an in-network facility, performed by in-network physicians. And was that not a curious sequence of events, an early morning phone call urgently asking you for money you didn’t even know you owed until, at best, just the week before? I didn’t want that particular loose thread hanging over me on Tax Day of all days so there I was, HRA card in hand, ready to settle the balance online, until my wife who is as wise in the ways of health insurance and billing as she is in the ways of shopping asked me to cross-check the Hopkins statement with the insurance EOB before I did anything rash.

What a good thing I did, as they did not match. If you are lucky enough not to have to deal with American health care, this is how billing works: hospitals have a list price for their services which they pull out of thin air. Insurance companies have their own opinion about what those services are worth, and a hospital being “in-network” means that they have agreed on the insurance company’s price while “forgiving” the rest. On the hospital bill this will be the “insurance adjustment”. Well, the adjustment our insurance said they negotiated and what was shown in the Hopkins statement differed by exactly the amount Hopkins was now asking from us, which as an in-network hospital they were not allowed to do.

So now it was me on the phone calling the Hopkins billing department, asking about the charge, the person on the other end of the line checking — on a 15-minute muzak hold — what was going on, not finding out, promising a call back in 5 to 7 business days and not to worry about the collection because we will get to the bottom of this mysterious error (if it is an error at all, let’s wait and see) that the hospital made, happens very rarely, practically never, always in the hospital’s favor. I look forward to receiving a voicemail, 5 to 7 business days from today, telling me that the magnanimous Hopkins billing department staff has forgiven all our transgressions and that our balance was zero.

Back when there was such a thing as guidance on conflicts of interest for federal employees, it was drilled into and onto us that even semblance of impropriety, what social network warriors would tag as not a good look, was to be avoided at all costs. It does not matter if you did or did not mean to pick this contractor because your spouse works there — they may be the best company in the world for the job for all we care — you should not be involved in the decision. I agree with this now-antiquated viewpoint and propose extending it to scammy behavior or large corporations. It doesn’t matter whether you used a fake charge on a late bill to threaten collection while offering a quick solution with the express intent to defraud or if an unfortunate series of events led to only the appearance of a scam: it is not a good look. One that, unlike our fictional teaching assistant’s, can and does have real victims.

Having switched to Linux for 90% of my computing, I realized Emacs could cover much of those 90%:

• mu4e for email
• org-mode for project management
• Denote for slipbox-styled notes [Note: I have followed the Zettelkasten blog since its early days but have somehow missed out that they were big proponents of Emacs. Here is a talk Christian Tietez of the Zettelkasten blog had at EmacsConf 2025, which is how I learned about Denote. ]
• A custom micro.blog client, Microbe, for blog post management
• A custom Inkwell client, Inkling, for reading RSS feeds

And for all my kvetching about how ugly Emacs can be, this was in fact a me problem and not an Emacs problem. It took 8 lines of code and downloading some decent fonts for things to look much better.

Microsoft’s Windows Office Copilot web apps cover almost everything else. Alas, not absolutely everything:

• Having used DEVONthink for document management I am reluctant to go back to the naked file system. Still, in the last few years I had been using DEVONthink’s advanced capabilities less and less to the point that its main purpose was as a security blanket.
• My data analysis journey went from R to Python (or rather iPython/Jupyter) to Mathematica. There are many reasons why Mathematica is no longer a good fit so now I have to decide how many steps back I should take — to Python or R.
• Podcast recording and editing is a tiny issue in the grand scheme — there is but a single podcast in Serbian that I am in care of — but I would rather not have to reinvent the workflow I have down pat in Logic Pro that gets me from raw mp3 to the final upload in 15 minutes or less.

Which is to say, expect a few more of these updates on the software side. Hardware will have to wait.