When I was younger and earned less money, I was encouraged to save. Put a little away each month into savings! That is a wonderful sentiment, but after meeting expenses, what is ever left over?
Some years back after hard times I took a new job, set up new bank accounts, and had my paychecks direct-deposited into Savings. Using the online banking interface I set up a monthly recurring transfer from savings to checking. I began saving money without effort.
It is hard, though, to start from nothing. A windfall helps. If you are me you don’t want to squander good fortune, which is what one naturally does without some sort of system. It is harder, though, to start from nothing.
When you have some savings, you see interest accumulating on the monthly statement. You’re getting money for free! Neat! Sure, it isn’t much but dang it is nice to get ahead of the curve. Times have been good these past years, my savings account has enough money in it to maintain my normal monthly allowance for 3-6 months. (And somewhat more than that if I am layed off and collect Unemployment Insurance.)
Once I have about six months worth of expenses saved up, I usually purchase a CD, which means the bank holds on to my money for a certain period of time, with a certain guaranteed return. Anything beyond six months of income I invest in stock market index funds (ETFs) because I have read that over a long enough time horizon, the stock market provides a better average rate of return than banks do. I can afford that risk, but it is nice to have that one pool of money in a CD coming back to me with a certain return at a certain date, in case things have gotten squirrelly.
While we are in the middle of a nasty recession, my own job is fairly secure. Last time I had savings enough to roll over, I decided to forego the currently-low interest rates and instead buy straight into an ETF. This was in March, when the market had pretty well bottomed out, so although my other stocks and 401(k)s and the like have lost value, that lot of stock purchase has grown in value by 40% and I can smile and claim to be a financial mastermind.
Oh yeah, those 401(k)s . . . and my employer’s stock-purchase program. Times are good: my salary is considerably more than my expenses, so lots of money is drained away from my paychecks into retirement savings, and another pool of capital, before it hits the reservoir of my savings account, which I then tap into my checking to meet expenses. A wiser person than me would manage investments such that one pool is for retirement, another for a house, or a college fund, or whatever . . . I’m not that clever, which is why contributing to 401(k)s is nice: that money is set aside by government mandate! My main financial ambition these days is to buy a house, probably after I get married. (That is a different topic.)
Another financial ambition I have been putting off is college money. For the one part, I don’t have kids of my own yet, and there’s no guarantee I ever will. But I am also an Uncle and a God-father: there are children I know whom I want to succeed . . . on the other hand my own experience is that after I was discharged from the Army, I was a non-dependent and eligible for a lot of financial aid, and I attended an inexpensive state school. It is nice if you can rely on your parents’ generation to help you through school, but I also know that “God bless the child that’s got his own.” That’s not to say I don’t want to help, only that I know that even if I can not help, a way can be found.
All the same, it is a challenge and a strain sometimes to live on a “fixed” income, when there is plenty of money that could be spent so easily. To be sure, I kind of enjoying saying “no” to fancy stuff, and driving around in my old car, making do with less, as generations before have done. But I also like to eat out for lunch, take my girl out, fly home for holidays, buy nice clothes, and support my hobbies. I’ll squeeze a little extra out of the piggy bank for the holidays, maybe a vacation, and other one-time expenses like maybe a new computer, and the occasional needs of broke relatives, but I am mostly tight-fisted. The past few months I have had a growing credit-card balance. I raised my “allowance” for the first time in years to pay it off quicker, but I’d rather endure the sting of interest rates that encourage me to say “no” more often than to raid the piggy bank . . . even when times are good, money is a hassle.
If things continue to go well, I like to think there will be a day in the future where I stand proudly in the newly-purchased house that is the fruit of my labors and discipline. Then I’ll have decades of mortgage payments to look forward to. I’ll feel even more nostalgia for the earlier lean times, when life was full of possibilities. But I will also have the thrill of knowing that my settled, successful, middle-class life offers possibilities of its own.
Seriously, WikiWords are the dumbest idea for marking a link to a document node. But when you generate HTML that looks like this, you are doing it wrong:
I will never forget a day in high school when I was sitting on a crowded bus, headed home, and the lady in front of me, who was not old or pregnant, had what looked to me to be a pained expression on her face. I wondered if maybe her legs hurt as the vehicle lurched around, but I was a shy kid scared to offer her my seat in case really I had just totally misread the situation. After a while the crowd eased and the woman took a seat near me with obvious relief. I had failed on that day to give my seat to someone in need, and ever since I have made an effort not to repeat that mistake by paying greater attention to my fellow passengers.
I still ride transit most weekdays, and I have noticed especially that younger people tend to fail at the whole courtesy thing. Part of it may be self-involved rudeness, but part of it I think is a combination of shyness, and a fear of making contact with strangers in a public place. My generation was raised on the lessons that the world outside our homes is extremely violent and treacherous and that the most dangerous thing a child could ever ever do is to talk to a stranger. I like to think that with time most people grow out of their shells and feel more comfortable taking the initiative for social responsibility.
My own strategy is that if I see a person who might better deserve my seat, I try to make eye contact, at which point I start to get out of my chair. Then they either move forward or gesture for me to sit down. (It is better to err on the side of getting someone a seat. Also, I think people looking for a seat know to look others in the eye.) In other cases if the vehicle is crowded and eye contact can not be achieved, I’ll often just stand the heck up anyway, positioning myself in such a way that the person who could best use my seat finds it most accessible. (I would hate for a young punk to ignorantly snipe my seat.) (more…)
In browsing the Internet I was tempted to click a link labeled The 101 Hottest Princess Leia Slave Photos. Alas, I was horrified at the horrible scaling and otherwise atrocious user interface.
Then I asked myself if I could solve this problem. Well, not me personally, but the crowdsourcing tool called Flickr:
A couple years back I came upon this magazine somewhere that was all poetry, prose, and black-and-white photographs. And the stuff inside was good. I love reading and I used to mostly keep up with The New Yorker. These days The Sun is one of two magazines I subscribe to. It is more enjoyable and less of a burden than The New Yorker.
Another thing about The Sun that I really appreciate is that there are no ads. Just me and the writer, mediated only by the editorial staff of The Sun and some pleasing typesetting. As the editor, Sy Safransky recently explained in his annual appeal for donations from Friends Of The Sun:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with some advertising, just as there’s nothing inherently wrong with a traveling salesman knocking on your door. But you probably wouldn’t invite the salesman in if you and a friend were having an intimate conversation. In a magazine that strives for emotional candor and a reader’s quiet respect, a sales pitch is an unwelcome distraction. I want to place one simple demand on a reader’s attention: the content. Nothing else.
I sent them some cash last year. This year I figured maybe I can send a couple subscribers? If you’re looking for good stuff to read on a monthly basis, I totally recommend a subscription to The Sun. And if you happen to be kinda poor, drop me a line with your home address because when I renew I have been known to throw in some gift subscriptions and you might could get lucky.
Some ways back I followed some advice somewhere and tried the Xoopit plugin for Gmail under the delusion that it would somehow make my life better. It was kind of cute but it also got in the way so I uninstalled the plugin. But I kept getting e-mails from them about all the crap it was indexing in my inbox. So, I finally deleted my account, at which point they sent me a message reminding me that I’ll have to kill the plugin, and also:
I’m not going to stick something in my mouth that is named “choke.” (CC: spychic)
Finally, please take one minute and reply to this email and let us know what you didn’t like about Xoopit. Your feedback is incredibly valuable to us!
Now, getting in to delete the account had been frustrating enough, because when you don’t remember your password and click on the password reset link they send you an e-mail that links to a web page where you can reset your password after you correctly enter your password. Yeah, that had me confused too, until I re-read the thing and it said “enter your Gmail password” which worked but then I was reminded that I’d given my Gmail password to something called Xoopit and I felt dirty all over again.
Anyway, here’s some of what I wrote. I think the name thing is important:
Also, and I mean, what’s in a name? I don’t eat artichokes. They may be delicious, but you know what? I’m not going to stick something in my mouth that is named “choke” . . . it just sounds like common sense. Xoopit? Okay? Like Arm pit? Tar pit? Snake pit? Is it pronounced Zoo Pit? Is that like where they dump all the animal feces to compost? Because I mean, they way you guys Hoover up all the multimedia crap in my Gmail it kinda feels that way. “Look! Look! I indexed all the crap you don’t care to look at, and I’m sending you more crap to delete!”
There is too much crap in my inbox. If you can make it better, you could be more useful to me. If you make it worse, I dump you. That’s it!
And, seriously, xoopit? You need to work on that name. Yes, Google is the best search engine, but it wouldn’t have caught on if it were named Dogpile.
“You know that Global Warming isn’t real, right?”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“No, really! Don’t just agree with me because you think I’m crazy!”
“Uh huh. Well . . .”
He then went on to explain that we only know how much carbon is in the atmosphere for a few centuries, max. I then explained that scientists go to Antarctica and Greenland, drill deep holes in the ice, and can analyze the frozen atmosphere from tens of thousands of years ago. He explains that carbon has fluctuated a great deal over time, and it is no big deal, and I explain that our species has developed civilization during a period of climatic stability, and that the last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere there were dinosaurs running around, so the Earth can totally handle global warming but we’re not sure if homo homo sapiens will survive it. He was like well its too late to stop it anyway, and I would have gone on to explain that when you’re driving your car into a tree, you hit the breaks instead of the gas, because then you’re more likely to live and have a better chance of reducing damage to and repairing your car . . . but we headed back to the office before things got too stupid.
And I watch it, and I’m like “yeah . . . glacier retreating.” Then I look at the caption:
This remarkable image sequence captures a series of massive calving events at Columbia Glacier near Valdez, Alaska. Composed of 436 frames taken between May and September of 2007, it shows the glacier rapidly retreating by about half a mile (1.6 kilometers), a volume loss of some 0.4 cubic miles (1.67 cubic kilometers) of ice or 400 billion gallons (1.5 trillion liters) of water.
And I’m like “a dramatic video of a glacier melting in Alaska over the course of five months . . . in the summer!”
And I’m like “Holy crap, Al, do you ever speak with a skeptic?! A dramatic video of a glacier melting in the summer makes you look like a tool!”
But, there’s no comments or feedback on his blog, so if I wish to sublimate my angst, I’ll do it here.
Recently someone obtained my social security number and home address and phoned in to various credit card companies claiming to be me, claiming they were traveling and needed a cash advance. They claimed they had left the credit card at home and otherwise failed to provide correct information. So, the credit card companies said no, and each in turn called me, and offered to send me new cards with new credit card numbers, just in case, and I put a fraud alert on my credit report, and aside from the idea that someone is running around with my social security number and will surely try to identity thieve one day in the future, life went on happily.
My Chase credit cards both appeared overnight, on my doorstep, courtesy of FedEx. I have double-checked now, and seen no fees for this courtesy. Capital One, on the other hand, appeared the next week via first class USPS. That’s good enough for me, but what also appeared the next week was a statement with a $16.00 “Fast Card Fee”.
So, instead of calling in to activate the card, I called customer support. Within a few minutes I got a nice lady on the line, and instead of activating I simply canceled the card. I explained that the Fast Card Fee was insulting and wrong. She processed the cancellation and asked if there was anything else to be done. I thought a moment and asked to speak to the manager and when she asked why I explained that I wanted the Fast Card Fee refunded since the fee was not disclosed to me when the service was offered and contrary to her understanding the card was not dispatched “express mail” rather USPS First Class and further more those cards that had bothered with the expense of overnight mail didn’t charge me anything.
She went away for two minutes and when she returned she explained that she had gotten the fee reversed on the grounds that it had not been disclosed, but that even though the fee was canceled I should go ahead and pay the minimum balance by the due date and it would subsequently be refunded to me. I explained that I would do no such thing because by canceling the fee my balance would be 0 by the due date and if they want to charge me a late fee for failing to pay a zero balance . . .
Anyway, we’ll see. I’m mailing the thing back to them with a note and if they want to dig a deeper hole I’ll give them what for. As it is it is just nice to vent a little testimonial on my web site.
If this were any other food, reducing the size a bit to keep costs in line and maybe keep us from getting fat is a reasonable thing. But Haagen Dazs isn’t food, it is Joy in the form of a delicious treat and I would much rather pay a little bit more for Joy than receive less.
Ben and Jerry’s is keeping their size and their comparable price, but their ice cream is overly-sweet glop. Haagen Dazs is a superior product for which I’d gladly pay a bit more!
It has been a pretty busy day at work. In between bouts of business I entertain myself with various baubles like mailing lists. Someone made a statement I found utterly hilarious, that in the context of current events:
“I think it would be politically possible to return to a gold standard.”
I responded that:
“I think a carbon tax would be more relevant to the concerns of the 21st Century.”
To which some else responded:
“Our currency and economy are broken, and the solution is to tax use of fossil fuels, biggest source of productivity the world has ever seen!”
And I though yeah . . . it is hard to advocate an idea like a new “tax” during a recession. Personally, I think calling it a “carbon ration” might be smarter: you get your allotment and if you make good lifestyle choices you can sell your excess at a profit. Anyway, I responded from the basis of an idea I heard at TED last week:
Over a century ago we swore up and down that without the cheap energy afforded by black slaves the national economy would collapse. So, instead of abolishing slavery we made compromise after compromise. Ultimately our nation was plunged into the catastrophe of civil war, and we abolished slavery for International PR reasons and in order to literally free up fresh soldiers for the war effort from among the newly-emancipated populations.
These days we swear up and down that without access to unlimited cheap energy, our economy would collapse and we would be unable to enjoy the “quality” of life we do now. And as each decade passes we find greater and greater evidence that we are living on borrowed time, and that we are multiplying the problem of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and that we are approaching various global tipping points which bring us closer to catastrophe.
In both cases, abolitionists and environmentalists are ridiculed and despised an know-it-all killjoys out to ruin everyone’s fun. Where the abolitionists had printing presses that would literally be burned down by their detractors, modern radicals warm themselves with flame wars on the Internet.
To go back to your glib response to a carbon tax, it is easier to make radical changes when it is clear that the status quo is broken. A big reason for the present crisis is that we were fueling growth on unsustainable credit models. Debt Debt Debt. Injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a form of debt against the future, and if we go bankrupt with climate that’s really really not pretty. So, we have a good opportunity to look at how we structure the free market to take natural resources like the atmosphere into account, and price them appropriately so that we can realize economic benefit with the greatest efficiency.
Maybe one way to think of the idea of carbon rationing is that it is like Social Security for the environment: we each make a sacrifice now so as to secure against a future characterized by poverty. In this case the poverty would be a world wrecked by sudden catastrophic climate changes.
As someone who has wondered at the issues involving monastic vows of sexual abstinence, I found myself dog-earing the following passage from an interview with a Buddhist couple who gave up the monastic life for marriage, as interviewed by Leslee Goodman in the January, 2009 issue of The Sun. (more…)
So, in the past two weeks I have traveled to Pueblo, CO, Chicago, and a little overnight trip to Monterey, CA with a visit to Hearst Castle. I shoveled snow, played Santa Claus, flew on four planes without any serious delays, drove three cars other than my own. On New Years Eve I rode in a cab after a nice, not-too-crowded party. That’s my two weeks off!
Tomorrow, back to work. I’m guessing I’ll have 3,000 e-mails to delete. I think I’m even on-call starting on Tuesday. Fun! I had a few quiet days and sent out holiday cards but mostly these past two weeks have just been a break from regular life. Enough of a break that I’m actually looking forward to resuming routine.
Happy New Year, all! Despite the economy, I have hopes for 2009.
Now, I love me some fresh fresh eggs, but for a lazy day-off scramble I am not picky. I’m a bachelor with a thinly-stocked refrigerator, and I have been traveling over the holidays. Today is the last on a two week vacation and I had two eggs left that I figured to scramble. Alas, the “sell by” date said November 7. Two month old eggs? Well . . . they’re probably fine but this struck me as occasion for a bit of research.
Then I found a discussion among red-blooded Americans. The advice is that eggs age well enough if you are cooking them, and if there’s any doubt crack them into a separate bowl. Bad eggs will reek. If you are cooking and you crack the eggs into a separate bowl you will have isolated the bad egg without ruining the rest of your recipe.
The USDA will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. Dangerous bacteria are more likely to be on the outside of the egg, though eggs are washed before they are packed. The longer an egg sits the longer any bacteria inside has a chance to grow and make you ill. If an egg has gone really bad it will likely be somewhat obvious. All the same, cooking tends to kill bacteria, except that I personally do not cook eggs with the same heat and duration that I cook meat.
Anyway, I cracked my eggs, and while they did not have the beauty of fresh eggs they still looked and smelled okay. I cooked them in a hot pan over medium heat and enjoyed them with hot sauce, garlic salt and oregano. If they kill me in the next few days I’ll try to let you know.
All the same, if I was old, young, pregnant, HIV positive, or otherwise not a healthy adult with a strong immune system I would adhere more strictly to government guidelines.
I was asked to “critique” a friend’s new blog. Because I’ve been writing like this since before anyone called this format a “blog” . . . here’s two paragraphs from my response:
I’m really excited about Prop 8 as well, and it is funny that you borrow that story from Gandhi that I enjoy as well. Tonight I just watched “Cry, the Beloved Country” and was moved all over again by great words in a book I have read twice, about . . . compassion and forgiveness. I did not expect to be left feeling so emotionally.
[ . . . ]
And I hope you enjoy the blogging thing. Write for yourself but remember you are being read. I still get emails from old posts I wrote, especially about the divorce stuff. Occasionally someone comes to me expressing a pain that is familiar, and I have the chance to return in a small way some of the kindnesses that have been bestowed upon me over the years. Your children, your grandchildren may some day read through or skim what you had to say. In that way you may be able to help them in their growth, years from now. And remind yourself of things forgotten.
To be sure, “the divorce stuff” is really just a bunch of excerpts from a book someone else wrote. Lately though I have had very little to say about my personal life or things that have stirred my passion. There is less creative self-expression or revealing of myself these days. I am not sure if that is as it should be, or if that needs to change. I figure that my relationship with my web site changes over time based on my needs and how I take responsibility for fulfilling those needs.
Update: Tammie was laid off a few weeks ago. If you know anyone looking for a smart, talented and diligent Microsoft .net and C# hacker, please check out her LinkedIn profile. (Welcome to the economic down cycle. Yahh!!)
