Category Archives: Money Matters

Getting Our Ass Kicked

Posted on by
1

By Canada. British Columbia more specifically. Victoria’s Dallas Road Waterfront Trail even more specifically.

That was my thought this morning walking back from my dentist’s office through downtown Olympia. Specifically, at this point on the Fifth Street Bridge.

Rando bushes, three feet tall, growing out of the sidewalk curb. Next to chipped paint. Maybe I’m overreacting. Or maybe it’s symbolic and I’m not.

If you want to know the financial condition of a college or university ask about one thing—deferred maintenance. Financially strapped private arts liberal colleges are patching roofs because they can’t afford to replace them. Look for buckets in libraries on the proverbial rainy days and you will likely find them. Dead give-away.

The sidewalk “greenery” is symbolic of not being able to keep up with maintenance of public spaces. Is it possible that Canada’s higher tax rates translate into superior social infrastructure which consists of places were people are prone to gather and make friends? Positive social infrastructure, of course, depends upon comfortable, accessible, clean, physical infrastructure like you see all over the Dallas Road Riverfront Trail. In the form of clean bright yellow chaise lounges, tables and benches, drinking fountains, ubiquitous trash cans, dog parks, and groovy public art.

Which all combine to make the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca a magnet for walking, running, cycling, socializing. Sunday morning I couldn’t get my AirPods to connect to my watch for some reason so I did that most scary of things, ran with my own thoughts swirling around in my peabrain. So many smiley people said “hello” wonderfully oblivious to my citizenship. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they were so cheerful.

Dig this video, especially from 1:42-1:50 where you can catch a glimpse of the yellow chaise lounges, and at the very end, some public garbage cans. On parts of the trail, there are large numbered garbage cans every 50-100 meters. Numbered, I suspect, because someone is keeping close track of their status.

Olympia’s sidewalk bushes are not numbered. They may very well turn into trees before my fellow citizens realize, often, you get what you don’t pay for.

What Well-To-Do Retirees Get Wrong

Posted on by
3

Look at me with the click-baity title. Somehow forgot the word “Some”. Some wealthy “seasoned-citizens” sacrifice their present well-being for their heirs’ future well-being. I normally applaud selflessness, but in this case, wealthy retirees are missing the forest for the trees.

Increasingly, as some states, like these ten jack up their estate taxes to make up for budget shortfalls, the monied class in the (dis)United States talk of moving . . .

. . . to these ten states in order to save their heirs lots of money on future taxes.

Relocating, of course, means abandoning established friendships, the exact thing social scientists point to as most important to one’s well-being and longevity. That friend-group coffee, bike ride, dog walk, dinner party, book club, it’s the closest thing there is to a panacea for improved health and happiness.

You protest, “Ron, knucklehead, I can make new friends while saving big bucks at the same time.” Tru dat, but you can’t rush the building of truly close interpersonal relationships. There’s no short cut to true familarity and intimacy. They take serious time.

Also, a common thread of especially close interpersonal relationships is a shared history. My friends and I routinely tell the same stories over and over, stories from our collective past that we no doubt embellish as we do. Those exaggerated stories are the scaffolding of our friendships. There’s no fast-forwarding to a shared history. And spoiler alert, the older one is, the less time there is.

So go ahead, pack up, sell your crib, move out-of-state, hug your spreadsheet, and stick it to your state government. That is, if you haven’t built meaningful friendships and like being penny wise and pound foolish.

Source.

Paragraph To Ponder

Posted on by
1

From The New Yorker.

Alexis, from Michigan, was in college studying to be a welder when she found out she had metastatic spinal cancer. To cover her medical bills, she created an OnlyFans page. Her first day, she made six hundred dollars. “That was absolutely life-changing,” she says. “Like—I called my mom.” Nowadays, as Alexis XJ, she brings in half a million dollars annually posting videos of herself in a bikini fixing cars. She says that she once made twenty-five thousand dollars in tips for live-reading a textbook on diesel-engine mechanics: “One guy said, ‘I’m learning something.’ ”

I need a new saying. I always say, never underestimate the male ego. Update. Never underestimate the male libido. Both and.

What Do You Worry About?

Posted on by
Reply

If you are a parent in the (dis)United States, recent research suggests you are worrying more and more about your children’s futures.

These numbers blow my mind. Even the 2019 baseline represents a serious break with the post- World War II past when parents assumed their children’s lives would be better than their own. Now, that has completely flipped.

The most cited culprits include the rising cost of higher education, the utter lack of affordable housing, rising health care costs, a gerontocracy that continuously games political and economic systems in their favor, and a tax code that favors investors who tend to be older. It’s no wonder so many young people choose not to vote, thus creating another hurdle.

A picture I took this weekend of an old, solitary tree. I wonder if it worries about its seedling’s futures.

What A Relief

Posted on by
Reply

Doubling since October, 2025, Elon Musk’s current net worth is approximately $1.2 trillion.

In a The New York Times article today, Adeo Ressi, Musk’s college roommate at the University of Pennsylvania says, “It’s not like he’s planning to leave this in a massive family trust. It’s literally going to be used to make humanity into a multiplanetary species.”

How ’bout you go first Elon.

Paragraphs To Ponder

Posted on by
1

From YahooFinance.

“Before MacKenzie Scott signed the Giving Pledge and started on her path to give away her $36 billion net worth, she went looking for a paragraph in a book she’d marked up during her college years.

She opened her Giving Pledge letter with a memory of pulling Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life off a shelf of her old college books, where she found a passage that she had ‘underlined and starred.’ Dillard’s advice to writers was to not hoard your best material for some later chapter. 

‘The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now,’ Dillard wrote, warning that otherwise, ‘you open your safe and find ashes.’ Scott took the writing advice literally and applied it to her massive fortune. 

For the past six years, Scott has remained committed to emptying her safe, so to speak. She’s donated more than $26 billion across more than 2,700 gifts through her philanthropic organization, Yield Giving. Her marquee year was in 2025 when she donated an eye-popping $7.2 billion. (That’s more than Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, have given over their entire lifetimes, according to Forbes estimates). The publication also named Scott the third-most generous philanthropist in the world this year, noting she has given away 46% of her net worth. 

True to the Dillard ethos, she gives fast and lets go. Her philanthropic style is stroking unrestricted checks with no applications, no progress reports, and almost no press.” 

Absolutely certain it doesn’t mean anything to MacKenzie Scott to be named the “third-most generous philanthropist in the world” this year. In fact, I’m pretty sure if she had her way, pieces like this one would never appear in print. What a role model.

Don’t hoard. Don’t find ashes. Annie Dillard with one of the most amazing assits of all-time.

Oh Oh!

Posted on by
Reply

When it comes to Lynn’s estate details, we’re rounding third base and heading home. As the trustee of her estate, this sentence from an “outline of important details of the trust administration process” stopped me cold.

“You are under a duty to exercise the judgment and care that a person of prudence, discretion, and intelligence exercises in managing his or her own affairs.”

If my estate attorney knew me better, she’d lower that bar. Or Washington State more generally. :)

Sentences To Ponder

Posted on by
Reply

From John Gruber:

“The Pentagon pegs the cost of the Iran War so far at $25 billion. Larry Ellison currently has a net worth of $220 billion. That’s just short of 9 Iran Wars. But since the start of the war on February 28, his net worth has grown $46 billion. That’s about 2 Iran Wars during the time of the actual Iran War thus far.”

Postscript. Today, apparently, Ellison’s networth is up $6b.

Paragraphs To Ponder

Posted on by
Reply

Very sad news from The Seattle Times.

“Even the wealthiest residents are having a rough time in the Seattle area’s real estate market.

Hitting the market at $85 million in 2022, Bruce McCaw’s Hunts Point mansion was once the most expensive home for sale in Western Washington. The telecom magnate and his wife, Seattle-area philanthropist Jolene McCaw, sold the home last week for $38 million — $47 million under its original asking price and $16 million under its assessed value. 

. . . The home stands out among Hunts Point’s collection of luxury waterfront homes. The 12,600-square-foot mansion contains five bedrooms and 10 baths, while the property holds a beach house, a staff house, a cabana, a tennis court, a pool and plenty of space for a seaplane and a yacht.”

Related. I’m always frustrated when I buy a house only to learn afterwards that there’s not room for the seaplane and yacht.

I’ve Seen The Future And Eek

Posted on by
2

The Feed, whose motto is “Food for Athletes”, is a newish, trendy, growing biz where more and more endurance sports kids are getting their fuel.

And if there’s any chance I might be a wee bit cool by association, I’m going to conform. So today, I received a text message from The Feed saying my most recent order of carbohydrate drink mix, energy gels, and engery chews had arrived.

Lo and behold, when I opened the front door, the big ass box looked like it had been chewed completely open by a colony of beavers. Even worser, the smaller box of 30 gels was also opened. And somehow three of the large gels had opened and were all over everything in the box. Resulting in one very large, very gooey mess.

Somewhere, there’s a colony of beavers absolutely ready to rip some trees apart and drag them into a stream. Right now, everything I ordered is in the kitchen sink waiting to be rinsed and dried.

No, this is not remotely equivalent to the challenges you’re dealing with today. I’m not seeking sympathy for what is ultimately an inconvenience. This is a story about the future having arrived too soon. Or more specifically, about how shit early AI customer service is.

I emailed The Feed. Told them what happened. Shared the pics for emphasis. Asked for a new box of gels. Seemed reasonable.

A minute later, “Matt-bot” replied:

The P.S. says Matt-Bot is better than a real live human being 87% of the time. LOL. The response I received falls squarely in the 13%. When they write that Matt-Bot is “designed for quick, complete resolutions” what they mean is we can employ far fewer people, lower our overhead, and increase profit margins for our shareholders’ benefit. At least in theory.

My fave part of the reply is the braindead closing, “Keep pushing”. Brah, all I was looking for was a run of the mill, “Very sorry for the inconvenience.” Well, and maybe a, “We’re committed to making it right. . .”

I switched from emailing an AI bot that strangely uses personal pronouns to emailing a human being. I wrote, “Really disappointing impersonal reply to my email and pictures about the gels arriving opened and getting over all the contents of the torn/opened big box.”

I have not heard back yet. Which is okay because I’d much rather have a slow, but thoughtful human reply than one from an uber-fast, weirdly impersonal AI customer service bot. I’m afraid, that in relatively short order, more deliberate, thoughtful, and humane responses may be a thing of the past.