I have very strong views on lying to kids: I think you both should and shouldn't do it. "Lying" covers a range, including saying things that hurt your kids and your relationship with them, and others that help them grow into an appropriately skeptical adult. The distinction is whether I'm leaving them believing something false.

For example, if my kids were asking for ice cream and I thought they'd already had too much sugar, I might be tempted to say "sorry, we're out of ice cream." Or if there's an ice cream truck and I think it's overpriced I might be tempted to say "sorry, I don't have any cash on me." But I'm not willing to say something false with the goal of causing them to believe something false. [1] In addition to that just being wrong:

I recently finished the largest set of changes I've made to my rhythm stage setup in 4.5y. The basic interface is similar, but I have a lot more flexibility, more control, more options, and it's easier to travel with. My favorite part is the speech recognition for calling chords.

Reading the comments on my post on junk I was surprised to see the extent to which people's relation to rarely used possessions varies.

Some people forget rarely used possessions, and get minimal benefit from having them stored. When they need something, they don't know whether they already have it, and the effort to maintain an index [1] wouldn't be worth it. Ben writes:

In many disasters sheltering in place can make a lot of sense, but what about fire? As someone who lives in one of the densest municipalities in the country, with 3-story wooden buildings packed close together, is fire likely enough to rule out any kind of "stay put" approach? After having Claude do some rough calculations I think probably not.

Occasionally people will get excited about a minimalism fad, where you figure out which of your possessions you need and keep only those. As someone who generally doesn't like getting rid of things, I've been thinking some about why, and the main thing I keep coming back to is that random objects can be helpful in unpredictable ways. Here are some things that I kept without a specific use in mind, but that ended up being useful. You could say they saved time or money, but often the biggest gain was from being able to do a project in one go with what I already had on hand:

When I first started playing dance weekends I would fly Friday and Monday, and I quickly realized that if I took two vacation days for each I'd run out of vacation. [1] The typical dance weekend schedule, however, is Friday evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday until early afternoon: if you live near an airport with a lot of direct flights, it's possible to do this without missing any work!

The pattern I've used for most dance weekends is:

• Fly Thursday evening, after work.
• Work remotely Friday.
• Play the weekend Friday-Sunday.
• Fly home Sunday night.

This approach does depend on a few things: