Daniel Reeves

Thanks for mentioning "yootling", as otherwise I would never have found (noticed?) his wife's guest article on the same subject [0]. It was a nice complementary article.

In that article, she mentions in passing the general case. From this, it seems like it would totally work with three people.

There are n participants, each with some share — i.e.,
some fraction — of a decision. Everyone submits a sealed bid,
the second highest of which is taken to be the Fair Market
Price (FMP). The high bidder wins, and buys out everyone else’s
shares, i.e., pays them the appropriate fraction of the FMP.

A caveat is, some things you wouldn't want someone to bid for -- putting the kids to bed -- but other than those kinds of things, I suspect that they would not mind in the slightest if a roommate wanted to subsidize their rent by doing dishes or laundry.

My biggest question is how to handle this when the household has a single source of income.

0: http://messymatters.com/autonomy/

>>If I plan to own the house for multiple years, a large chunk of my money goes to equity: I'm banking away value for later that you will get back when you sell the house. (Assuming the market doesn't go pear-shape: a big assumption.) In contrast, money you spend on rent is a pure cost, and irrevocably lost.

This logic is fundamentally flawed. Contrary to the popular conventional wisdom (repeated by our Baby Boomer parents), renting is not "throwing away" money. You are getting something for that payment, which is a place to live.

Conventional wisdom says that with a mortgage, you are building equity instead of paying the money to someone else and that makes more sense financially. But this is not true. You should read this piece to understand why, specifically the Epilogue part: http://messymatters.com/buyrent/

Ha, nice! I mean, "onomastics" really should win simply for already being the established term. But if one were picking the name from scratch then I'd say "nominology" has probably...

* greater evocativity (at least for us philistines)
* nearly equal brevity (same number of chars, one more syllable)
* equal greppability and googlability
* greater spellability, maybe (again, at least for us philistines)
* equal pronouncability
* equal verbability (nominologize/onomasticize, nominological/onomastic, nominologist/onomastician)

Of course "nominology" mixes Greek and Latin roots so that's presumably fingernails on a blackboard for more educated folk than me. Cf http://messymatters.com/nominology/#comment-530036107

Same, though I think the BikeTours/GoSojourn thing may just be an imperfect example of a point that is correct.

A better example (for me at least) would be backroads.com vs. something like biketourstoday.info. The former is distinct, trustworthy, memorable, greppable, and just good. I thought a lot about these things in starting my business. While capiche.com doesn't say anything about SaaS, I think it resonates with people more than, say, saasreviews.io or whatever would've.

btw, this post is highly relevant and is one I reference often: http://messymatters.com/nominology/

EVOC Evocativity Conveys at least a hint of what it’s naming
BREV Brevity Shorter = better
GREP Greppability Not a substring of common words
GOOG Googlability Reasonably unique (and domain name available)
PRON Pronounceability You can read it out loud when you see it
SPEL Spellability You know how it’s spelled when you hear it
VERB Verbability The name (or variant thereof) can be used as a verb

Source: http://messymatters.com/2011/10/31/nominology/

If I understand correctly, you are marked active if data is sent in without logging in, say if you are replying to the emails or using Gmail Zero [0] or TagTime [1]. So logging in is neither necessary nor sufficicent to be considered active.

If automatic data entry is enough to be considered active, maybe you should warn people that the data points entered automatically will make them count as active.

[0]: https://www.beeminder.com/gmailzero

[1]: http://messymatters.com/tagtime/