I don’t do budgeting, per-se. For personal expenses, the idea of pre-planning everything we’re going to spend just seems like overkill. Maybe that’s just cause we’re not close enough to the poverty line for real financial hardship. But I find a reactive approach works well, rather than proactive.

I keep an accounting ledger that I update every 1-2 weeks. The ledger is just a big Excel (actually LibreOffice Calc) file that I setup with some formulas and pie charts to make it easy to see when expenses are outpacing income, and what our biggest expenses are if we need to cut down for a while (spoilers: it’s utilities and food).

I’ve tried a handful of different free accounting applications in the past, but never found one I liked for the above purposes. I ended up starting a project to make my own, like a year ago, but I haven’t gotten around to finishing it. The spreadsheet approach has been working well enough. All the custom app would do is help automate the data entry.

I re-watched the movie a few months ago, and I had a similar realization: it was quite depressing to see a depiction of NASA that is now entirely lost to us.

Same concept as how Trump gave no written order for the Jan 6 mob to storm the capitol building, therefore he’s totally not responsible for it.

Parallel Processing Unit: PPU