Category: Wealth

Big Swedish Coins, Italian Women Pole Vaulters, and the Future of Money, Part I

“Dollars? There’sa wherea my uncle lives.  Dollars, Taxes!” – Duck Soup

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We’re gonna need a bigger purse . . .

This post was inspired by a great e-mail from Ricky, which makes it the second reader-inspired post I’ve done this month.  Heck, it’s the second in seven days.  We’ll see the post I was originally going to do next week, probably.  I plan these posts out weeks in advance and have a backlog of over a year’s worth of planned post topics, but the requests are just so much fun.

Here’s the basic thesis statement in Ricky’s words:

“I’m right there with you that collapse is coming to our house of cards because of the way they were dealt.  But after all of the individual survival dramas play out, survival ultimately depends on a community rising from the ashes.  And the glue of a community is ultimately the deals made between its individuals.  And money is the encapsulation of those deals.

“So when the dust settles and the smoke clears and the phoenix rises from the ashes of the eagle’s nest, there’s gonna need to be a reset on money.  On what it is, and how it works.”

There’s a lot more information from Ricky which may lead to yet another post, but this statement alone is a great taking off point.

To address this question, let’s go back to first principles.  First, I’ll restate:

What does money look like after the collapse? 

I’ll start from first principles so that everyone has an idea of where I’m coming from.  The most basic first principle about money is this simple question:

What is money?

I can’t answer any better than to say that money is an idea.  Sure, you’d look through all of the piles of money I keep at Chateau Wilder and say that those stacks of cash and piles of gold and silver doubloons were money.  And they are money.

Heck, the Swedes once mined and refined so much copper (around the year 1600 A.D. or so) that they couldn’t sell it all, since the tuba, which uses approximately 89% of world copper production had yet to be invented.  Being crafty Swedes they came up with the idea that the best way to use all that extra copper was to put Sweden on the “copper standard.”  Since these Swedes were apparently very strong but not particularly bright, they took the concept to 11 and used nothing but copper coins as currency.  Okay, sure, it’s silly.  But we can make it Wilder-level silly:  let’s not use lots of small coins, let’s make ludicrously large coins.  I mean the Rosie O’Donnell of coins.  Some of the coins they used were quite O’Donnellesque, with the largest one weighing about 45 pounds.  You could get your lifting in by just going grocery shopping, which may explain why Planet Fitness® franchises were so unprofitable in Sweden in 1620.

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Yes, a 45 pound coin.  Don’t get me started about how large their pockets were, but as a hint they could hold an entire twelve pack, a dozen clowns and the case of Avengers:  Endgame.  FYI:  This was a 10 “Daler” coin.  Daler came from the Bohemian coin name “Thaler,” which later became Dollar.

In the simplest definition, money is just something that we agree is money.  Money is perhaps the most abstract concept people deal with on a regular basis, and we’re forced to deal with it practically and emotionally even though most money doesn’t exist physically even as a dollar bill:  it’s a ledger entry on a balance sheet on a bank, and it’s not backed by anything.  At all.

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Counting spare change was how the Swedish women trained for the 1644 Olympics®.  But that’s back when men were men.  In 2019, however, “men” can be pregnant and “women” can drive well.  Soon enough?  Men will cry and be in touch with their feelings.

Money can be a gold coin, or a promise for, say, a bushel of wheat or a cigarette.  Money can also be a string of numbers or just a piece of paper.  As long as there’s someone who will trade you a rifle or a beer or a T-34 tank for it, it’s money.

We’ve been dealing with “money as just an idea” for so long we even have a name for money which has less backing than a third Hillary™ presidential campaign:  Fiat© money.  Fiat comes from the Latin for “found on roadside dead” – oh, wait, that’s Ford®.  Fiat™ is “fix it again, Tony,” which is more literally translated from the Latin as “let there be.”  This means that fiat money is “let there be” money.  Those Italians were good with language.  It’s good when we keep Italians working on language, wine, and hot Italian chicks doing pole vault because Italian engineers can’t seem to figure out how to keep oil on the inside of the car.

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In the best version of Europe, Germans chicks do shot put and car engine design.  The Italian chicks do pole vault.  Preferably in slow motion.  

Money in the United States today is fiat money, made up money.

The net result is that we send money that we printed from cool paper and people from around the world fight for the opportunity to give us oil, gold, PEZ®, flat screen televisions, and other physical things.  Heck, they even ship it to us using our made-up currency as payment for the shipping costs.  To top it off, if we’re feeling lazy that day, a guy in comfortable shoes working in a windowless office in Washington D.C. will press a button and a computer will spit out strings of digits that we’ll use for money because paper is just too much trouble.

If the United States doesn’t have enough money, the solution is simple:  we’ll print (or make up) some more.

If you’re shaking your head wondering how we convinced the world that this was a good deal, well, I am too.  It might have something to do with all of those nuclear missiles and the strange thing that happens to world leaders that announce that they’re going to start trading internationally in currency other than the dollar.  Or, heck, maybe the United States has a track record of really being super fiscally responsible?

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Yes, there are many good reasons to take the dollar.

Well . . . no.  In actuality, the United States defaulted on the very first debt it ever took on, represented by the Continental dollar, which was supposed to be (at the start) the same as a Spanish silver dollar.  How badly did we default on that debt?  Well, we ended up printing $241 million dollars, which doesn’t include the huge numbers of British forgery notes that were created during the Revolutionary War to mess with our economy.  It was like we were trying to pay for muskets and wooden teeth with Tribbles® instead of real money.  It was worse than Tribbles© – at least you can make good soup with a Tribble if you pluck it right.  Nope – most of the creditors ended up with nothing, which makes a pretty poor soup unless you’re fasting (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water).

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Worst thing about Tribble© soup?  The bones. 

This particular default stung our Founding Fathers Parental Units (it is 2019, after all) so much that when the Constitutional Convention met, they added into the Constitution that “No State shall . . . make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts  . . . .”

So, the United States learned its financial lesson and never ended up with financial problems again.

Just kidding.  We’re still a financial basketcase.  But we have nukes.

I hate to leave you on a cliffhanger, but this is now an average length post, and I’ve already written more than you’ve read here in Part 1 for Part 2, and I haven’t put the funny bits in yet.  So, more coming on Friday which will work towards answering the thesis that Ricky put forward above.

Thanks, Ricky!

How Auto Manufacturing Makes You More Likely to Die in a Crisis, Plus, Ironman is a Mass Murderer.

“The most efficient killing machine ever invented; you’ve got her doing the laundry.” – Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles

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My first job was in a toy vampire manufacturing factory.  I worked as part of a two man team, so I had to make every second Count.

Modern society is based on efficiency.

Efficiency in what?

Efficiency in everything, from the proper number of employees to completely mess up my order at McDonalds© to using the absolute minimum amount of labor and material to make a car.

Let’s stick with cars, because the local McDonalds™ in Modern Mayberry is primarily efficient only at serving me a Sausage McMuffin® without sausage, egg, or cheese.  Yes.  They served me a plain muffin, which I guess is more efficient.  In 2018, Toyota® sold roughly 8,000,000 cars, trucks and station wagons (I refuse to call them SUVs on principle) worldwide.  Overall, 86,000,000 new cars were made and sold in 2018.

I think cars just might finally be catching on as a consumer item.  Maybe they’re not a fad after all.

When you do something 86,000,000 times, though, you start to get good at it, or at least sore.  I brought up Toyota© because they decided to get good at making cars, and were highly innovative in trying to increase quality while at the same time increasing efficiency – they made better cars with less labor, less rework, less effort.  While I can make the case that Detroit finally caught up with Toyota™ by the early 2000’s as far as quality goes, Toyota® was leading the pack for decades – that’s why they’re the number one auto manufacturer in the world today.

One particular innovation that Toyota® came up with was “just-in-time” manufacturing, which is also known as “Lean Manufacturing.”  The concept is simple:  I make a car with parts that just showed up – nobody has to go get them, they just show up right when I need them.  The ideal would be the supplier delivers the part to the production line at the moment it’s required.  The windshield wiper salesman puts two in the bin as the next Corolla™ arrives at the windshield wiper installation station.  There isn’t a bucket of thousands of wipers behind the worker, just the few he or she needs right then.  Hence?  Just-in-time.

Just-in-time sounds really nice.  The things you need just show up, right when you need them, as if teddy-bear angels with lace wings made them materialize from the aether as they used to when Victoria was Queen.  In practice, you need more than two windshield wipers at the Corolla© assembly station, but you might only need enough for an hour.  Or two hours.  That de-clutters the line, and makes the work actually go faster.  Implementation of this system is one reason Toyota™ went from a mass producer of cheap cars to a mass producer of high quality cars.

Why didn’t they invent and do this just-in-time production in 1880?  Transport speed.  Slow transport requires stockpiles and large shipment.  Also required is production coordination.  Assembly lines break from time to time – you have to make sure that the windshield wipers don’t stack up like chocolates on an assembly line.  There has to be sufficient communication, and the Internet helps make it easy.

Now?  I can order prescription glasses online and have them shipped to my house directly from the manufacturer in China in less than a week.

Worth watching again even if you’ve seen it before.

The rest of the world has, in the last thirty years, done everything they could to adopt this system, which is now called “Lean Manufacturing.”  Accountants love it, because it reduces inventory, and turns that inventory into cash as soon as possible.  An example:  the average grocery story turns over its entire inventory nearly 14 times per year, which means lots of items hit the shelf and disappear.  Some grocery stores even have the vendor stock the shelf, eliminating costs there as well, as they attempt to get the customer to do the job of a checker.

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But the at least the cashier was dead sexy.

The result of this effort is a one-time boost in profits as inventory is reduced.  There is also the ongoing benefit that the money that paid for the inventory (that no longer exists) can be used for some other business purpose like bonuses, bacon-wrapped shrimp, corporate jets or Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment lawsuit settlements.

But since there’s less inventory, you need fewer warehouses.  And fewer warehouse workers.  Yay!  More money for bacon-wrapped shrimp!  You can see how this was a dominant concept in the late 1990’s when most corporate jobs required that you sign over your soul to Satan®, or Al Pacino if Satan™ had taken the corporate jet with Weinstein that day.

If I were to create a personal analogy, Lean Manufacturing is similar to the idea that when you buy gasoline you buy just enough for this trip, and this trip only.  No more wasteful storage of gasoline inventory.  And why keep more than a single meal on hand in the house?  While we’re at it, let’s also reduce that inventory of money we keep in the bank.  I bet we could make sure our lives are structured around a system that I think I’ll invent a snazzy name for:  Paycheck-to-Paycheck™.

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If you think no one cares if you’re alive, skip a month’s worth of bills.

So, all sarcasm aside, the paycheck example starts to illustrate the problems with Lean Manufacturing.  Inventory is a bad word in a manufacturing plant, and no manufacturing plant in the world would keep spare capacity that it doesn’t use regularly just sitting there.  Soon enough, a bright young soulless MBA from the head office will either start production on the spare capacity, sell the manufacturing equipment, or take a jet trip to a conference where there is a platter of free bacon-wrapped shrimp.

What has been profitable business advice is, as you can see, horrible personal advice.  Life isn’t about efficiency.  Life is about . . . life.  Being inefficient actually has some huge advantages.

People who regularly prepare for disasters (“preppers”) have popularized the phrase “Two is one, and one is none.”  I looked for the origin of the phrase, and I believe it is old enough that it probably originated in a Roman Legion stationed in Carthage, when a grizzled Centurion stuck a cigar in his mouth and was dressing down a new recruit for having an insufficiently shiny gladius.  And don’t tell me that it was another 1,500 years until tobacco was introduced to Europe – an outfit with a good supply guy can find anything.

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Okay, you don’t need two of everything.  A friend of mine has two ex-wives.

The philosophy of prepping is the exact opposite of Lean Manufacturing.  It says that we are stupid – we don’t know what’s going to happen so having extra supplies is crucial.  Stuff gets broken.  Stuff gets lost – just this week somebody found a batch of Revolutionary-era bayonets in a pit at Valley Forge.  You can bet there was a corporal that got his butt chewed over those by George Washington.  But I’m betting that the Continental Army had some extras.  Heck, it’s certain that even the Egyptians knew to store the extra grain in good years 6,000 years ago because:

  • Spare capacity is freedom,
  • Spare capacity is resilience,
  • Spare capacity gives you time and space when both are precious, and
  • Scarcity is the enemy, not inefficiency.

Recently, there have been a series of movies about obscure comic book heroes from the 1970’s.  You might have heard of them – The Avengers™.  In one of them, The Avengers:  Quest for Infinity Cash®, the villain (a very large Smurf™ named Thanos©) had been hungry as a child and decided nobody should ever be hungry again.  Thanos® then gathered a bunch of magic rocks which allowed him to make a super glove so he could make a wish.

I’m not making this up.  People spent $2.048 BILLION dollars to see that story.

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See?  Big Smurf® and magic rocks.  Told you I wasn’t making it up.

Anyway, Thanos®’ wish was that half of the people in the Universe disappear.  That’s just what happened.  Half the people turned to ash.  It really wasn’t that sad, at least for me, because it’s a comic book and Superman and Batman have each died something like fifty times, so death in a comic book movie is about as permanent as a Hollywood marriage.  The movie ends with lots of people, including Spiderman®, dissolving into ash.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to go see the sequel, The Avengers:  Endgaming for Even More of Infinity Cash©.  Whether or not the people who turned into ash were going to come back was spoiled before the movie started – one of the trailers was for the new Spiderman® movie.  Endgaming© starts five years after half the people in the Universe turned into ash.

After watching the movie I’m thinking that, like every member of Congress, the screenwriters had no training in economics.  Okay, a big Smurf© snaps his fingers and everyone disappears and I’m concerned they didn’t get their economics right.  Yeah, I’m an economics nerd.

What did they miss?  Well, after all the people disappeared the economy would have cratered.  We would have gone from producing 86,000,000 cars to producing . . . zero.  The economy would stop completely.  Grain would rot in the fields because half the people who ate Twinkies® were ash.  In 2009 when the Gross Domestic Product dropped by 2.5% and the economy nearly locked up.  If half the people disappeared, the economy would drop by 70%.

Anarchy.

But in The Avengers:  Endgaming for Even More of Infinity Cash©, everybody who was turned into ash returns after one of the Avengers® (Tony Stark™) snaps his fingers.  Take that, Thanos©!

Except by doing that, Tony Stark© just sentenced most of them to death when they showed back up.  Why?  In five years, the economy on Earth had contracted to serve not 7 billion, but 3.5 billion.  When an extra 3.5 billion people show back up?  Our just in time world only has food for 3.5 billion.  We only planted enough corn for 3.5 billion.

Massive famine and starvation.

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Oops.

Thanks, Ironman©.  Instead of a nice, peaceful death you’ve condemned some large fraction of beings on every planet to a horrible slow death of starvation, misery, and violence, mainly thanks to the lack of resilience in our planetary production systems.  I guess that I should stop expecting economic accuracy in a movie that features a talking raccoon.

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Only be the last guy to the supermarket during a disaster if you want to take amusing pictures.

But I am concerned – our economy is based on a global experiment in efficiency that frees up capital for bacon-wrapped shrimp, at the cost of making our lives less secure.  What could go wrong?

Sweet dreams!

Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

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I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

  • Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
  • Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
  • Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
  • When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
  • If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism.  But why would you strip out the cynicism?  That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial.  “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past.  Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so.  The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen.  I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index.  “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index.  So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.”  I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now.  Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

  • The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
  • Donald Trump would be president,
  • China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
  • The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
  • People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
  • Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
  • People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
  • Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
  • You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
  • People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

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If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head.  The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic.  The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible.  We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA).  From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

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Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig.  I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting.  It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now.  In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated.  After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming.  “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018.  This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq.  Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either.  My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future.  Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself.  Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others.  One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.  One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection.  In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone.  Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today.  And, again, this is the span of only thirty years.  We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

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Duh.  Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen.  Huge things.  And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade.  The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I?  General Dwight D. Eisenhower said:  “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™.  I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade.  I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome.  But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong.  Hint:  They will be.

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Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered.  A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial.  Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well.  The future is unknown.  The future will surprise you.  If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt.  Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.  I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this:  It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done.  The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from.  Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail.  However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.”  A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.”  I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that.  But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

The One Where I Talk About WWII Tanks, Red Dawn, Wealth Management and Steve Martin

“Well I’m gonna go then.  And I don’t need any of this.  I don’t need this stuff, and I don’t need you. I don’t need anything except this.  And that’s it and that’s the only thing I need, is this.  I don’t need this or this.  Just this ashtray.  And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need.  And this remote control.  The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that’s all I need.  And these matches.  The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball.  And this lamp.  The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that’s all I need.  And that’s all I need too.  I don’t need one other thing, not one – I need this.  The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure.  And this.  And that’s all I need.  The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.” – The Jerk

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On film, first movie.  No pants.  Which explains the blackmail letters I keep seeing.   

There’s a common scene in movies where the hero, a has-been, out of shape bum in need of a shave and smelling like convenience-store cheese, cheap booze and a Kardashian who hasn’t showered in weeks wakes up.  The surroundings are a mess.  Generally, the place is a fleabag motel – one that doesn’t cater to respectable people, like those fancy folks that use actual hamburger in their Hamburger Helper©.

Our hero is always a guy, never a gal.

Generally, what happened to our hero to have dropped to such a low point is that he lost something, generally a woman, though sometimes a child, but always of great meaning.  It’s generally his fault.  And with the loss of that loved one, he lost the reason to care.  Everything is going wrong with his life.  To quote one of the best movies since Rome fell to the robot legions of Abraham Lincoln in 1932, Baseketball:

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We should make the Losers wear Loser t-shirts after the Super Bowl®.  Why?  Branding.

Our hero, Joe Cooper, being interviewed after losing the national championship in his sport (due to his error) and when he goofed up trying to save the life of his friend:

“Today I lost the game and a dear friend and . . . I’m feeling pretty vulnerable right now.  I don’t think I should be by myself.  I need someone to talk to . . . .”

The announcer turns away from Joe and faces the camera:

“It certainly looks like it’s raining s**t on Joe Cooper.  Back to you.”

It’s at this low point that something happens to remind the hero of who he was, and what he stood for.  The hero then looks himself in the mirror and decides that from today onward, life is going to change and he’ll start using that topical cream, every day, just like the label says.

One montage later?  Instead of drinking a six-pack, the hero now has six-pack abs, gleaming teeth, and a mane of hair that would make a sorority swoon.  Assuming women still swoon in the current year, or that sororities are comprised of women.  Or that women are anything more than a social construct.

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I’ll attend my mandatory sensitivity training next week, but even in 2019, BOYS CANNOT GET PREGGERS.  Anything pregnant with that must facial hair must be a Kardashian.  I promise – no more Kardashian jokes this month.

The big difference is that there is something that makes an emotional impact on the hero, which brings him back from his fallen state.  This something changes him, gives him a reason to live, makes him care.  It also connects that hero to the audience, allowing the audience to share in the struggle and, through that sharing, care about the hero and vicariously share his inevitable come-from-behind victory.

Who could have seen that coming?

It’s the theme of most of my favorite movies.  Unfortunately, it’s also the theme of our recent history in the United States, but we’ve yet to see the redemption part.

There was a time when the Right cared about the debt and actually talked, unironically, about balanced budgets.  I recall the constant drumbeat during my youth that “government can’t spend too much” because we would default, interest rates would skyrocket, and the Evil Wizard Jimmy Carter would keep cutting our money in half through his magic +2 Inflation Spell.  At some point, probably before I was born, I think Democrats and Republicans both agreed on that we couldn’t spend money like Joe Biden in a hair-plug factory.

Later, probably in a Nixon-related rant, the post-war truce between Right and Left split.  Democrats decided they couldn’t spend enough on social programs, and Republicans decided they couldn’t spend enough on military stuff.

red dawn

Yes, I’m going to Leftist Hell.  Aisle seat, please.

I’ll argue that we got a better deal with the military stuff, which resulted in Russia replacing the U.S.S.R.  Russia on it’s surliest (feeling bloated and all) day isn’t ready to unleash nuclear Armageddon on Earth because Karl Marx convinced a bunch of barely literate people in the midst of a vodka-binge that killing the Czar was a cool idea.  Sure, Russia is a state that barely visits this fine blog.  And some of the freedoms might be lacking, like freedom of speech.  But Russia has nothing fundamental against our way of life – they’d love to emulate it, but with 100% fewer hipsters.  In my opinion, very penny spent on the military from 1948 to 1992 was worth it.  I don’t miss the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

Sadly, all we got from the Leftist social programs that were set up to eliminate poverty was more poverty.  It would have been cheaper to just give everyone in poverty a million dollars back in 1965 when Johnson declared the War on Poverty©.  At least then we’d be done with feeling guilty about it.  “You’re poor?  Sorry.  Paid that bill.  Shoo.”  The best way (really) to eliminate poverty is to increase consequences and allow lower taxation on rewards.  Make it so Playbox® and X-Station© don’t replace working for food.

Eliminating unlimited pools of foreign labor couldn’t hurt, either.  But that’s another post.

socialism

Not my original, but it illustrates the point well.

Not to say that military spending hasn’t been silly from time to time.  I’m absolutely certain that we have the finest equipment ready to turn back the Wehrmacht if Hitler’s ghost ever assumes control and decides he wants to invade San Diego.  I guess I’m saying that our military, from a strategic standpoint, might be ready for those new bands, the Beatles© and Elvis™.

Why did we spend so much on the military?  The norm throughout history in every nation in every war was to provide soldiers with the absolute minimum that they needed to get the job done.  Kipling wrote about this a century ago in the poem Tommy, which has nothing at all to do with pinball:

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all . . .

It’s nearly certain the same from the time the Roman legions marched on Carthage (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) to the today, every soldier has been given only was absolutely necessary, and that was mostly grudgingly provided.  “Really, armor on your vehicles?  What, do you think we’re made of money?  Rub some dirt on it, you big babies.”

So where does all the military money go?  Well, there was once a joke that the armed forces had developed an absolutely invincible weapon system:  it had parts manufactured in every single congressional district.  That’s where the money goes.  Into the pockets of likely voters.

People used to argue about government spending and how we could reduce it.  In public!  Now it’s different.  No one cares about spending or debt at all.  Social spending?  Why not have Medicare™ for all?  Pay for everyone’s student loans.  While we do that, let’s also build huge floating targets aircraft carriers, the likes that the Japanese Soviets ISIS our future foes will fear.  But, please, let’s not talk about Chinese missiles taking one to the bottom of the sea.  Why, do you know where the components of an aircraft carrier are made?  Why, everywhere from the Redwood Forests, to the New York Islands!  This carrier was built for you and me.

Social programs are a vote-harvesting program.  And so is the manufacture of aircraft carriers.  But, again, should World War II break out again, we are so totally ready to win it.  We’ve even modeled our procurement strategy after the Germans (remember, they lost) – small numbers of really technically advanced components.  6,000 Panthers (German) will beat 49,000 Sherman (American) and 64,000 T-34 (Russian) tanks any time, right?

Oops.

Guess not.

(Translation for the tank impaired:  Germany produced, without question, the highest quality of tanks during World War II.  But they didn’t have many of them.  When the United States and the Soviets started making tanks, they massively outnumbered the technically superior German tanks.  It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks.  They might be small, but they will get you.  I half imagine the Air Force© would like to produce just one perfect fighter plane.  Just one at the cost of a trillion dollars.  But it would be so perfect, and never mind that the enemy produced 150,000 fighters at two million dollars each.)

The point, however, isn’t about tank production strategy, even though you can buy a working – with functional gun! – T-34 for about $80,000.  No, the point is about the indisputable fact that no one in Washington cares even a little bit about how much money we spend every year, or if the troops live or die, or if anyone ever stops being poor.  And why should they?  It appears that right now we can spend as much as we want, consequence free.  That’s bound to continue forever? And how would I explain to The Mrs. that she needs to brush up on her college Russian for the manuals for the T-34 I just bought?

Do you think The Mrs. might buy the argument that I bought a Russian tank because of my principles?  Do you think James at the Bison Prepper (LINK) might think I was frugal because, really, what could be more prepper than a tank?  And, for the record, it’s not a new tank.  Totally used.  No FLIR or anything.

t-34 meme

I suppose I could use it for hunting?

I’m not sure what broke us as a nation, what make us that slovenly, unkempt guy with a three-day growth of beard smelling of cheap gin, Johnny Depp, and just as sticky as a movie theater floor.  But just like Steven Segal’s® belly, we as a nation seem to have lost our discipline.  Honestly, I’m tempted to buy that T-34 just so I can imitate our government and waste the money, though, honestly, nobody’s making T-34’s anymore.  I’d really love to buy a Panther, but there are only 29 (as far as the Internet knows) of them still in existence.

Hmm.

There is a bright side to this:  the Federal Reserve© has discovered it can print money forever, and can guarantee that you will receive your promised Social Security benefits.  The Federal Reserve™ won’t, however, guarantee that you’ll be able to buy a single piece of PEZ™ with your monthly check let alone a Panther or a T-34.

The future will bring bailouts.  Why?  Spending.  Duh.

The funny thing is that this will really be a stable system.  Until it’s not.

Will that be the moment that makes the hero recognize who he is, and what he’s given up?  And, most importantly, will he have a tank?

T-34 pic from:  Antonov14 [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)]

Avenger of Thrones Season 8, Infinity Gauntlet Episode: Shakespeare and Debt

“A Lannister always pays his debts.” – Game of Thrones

ironmanthrone

Okay, one of the aristocratic families on Game of Thrones™ is the Stark family, so it’s only logical that Tony Stark™ get the Iron Throne©, being Ironman® and all.

In Hamlet©, in the scene before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern assemble the Infinity Gauntlet and destroy King’s Landing, Shakespeare wrote:  “neither a borrower, nor a lender be.”  Several of his plays referenced debt, including The Merchant of Venice.  I may not have perfect recollection, but I don’t recall Shakespeare mentioning debt in a positive light, except when he was trying to borrow money for a $83,000 pickup with heated seats.

Debt, at its core, is borrowing from the future to fund today.  We do that with life all of the time – I’ll have the extra brownies, so I’ll exercise tomorrow.  I’ll stay up late to binge-watch Avenger of Thrones®:  Trans-Robot Skywalker™ and then grab some extra sleep tomorrow.   But when we talk about debt, we mainly mean money and thankfully not my soul.  That’s been repossessed like six times already.

Debt is very personal.  I remember $20 in a concert I owe to a guy from when I was in college, and I wish I knew where he was so I could repay him – the reciprocal concert I bought tickets for was cancelled.  I also remember $20 that a guy owes me from 2015.  I ended a friendship because a guy said he returned the $75 I lent him under my front door mat, but I didn’t have a front door mat.  That wasn’t about the debt, more about the lies.  But you get the picture.  Debt is personal.

In addition to being personal, the way that people react to debt is also emotional.  I’m pretty sure no person ever decided that having $78,231 in student loans was something to brag about – if anything, people who have borrowed a lot of money are often plagued with feelings of embarrassment, as if they’d been caught making out with Chelsea Clinton.  Sure, it’s legal, but, ewww.

competence

I’m sure her husband married her for love.

Recently, records found from 1600 or so show that Shakespeare’s father, John (!) Shakespeare, had tons for problems with debt.  I think these were his credit card receipts.  The problems that John had happened while William was still young and living at home, so it’s likely Pop Shakespeare had to borrow money for Bill’s prom tuxedo.  The good news was that the standard for a corsage in 1582 was a turnip on a string of twine stapled with wooden pegs to the date’s forehead, so, that didn’t set John back too far.

Thanks (in part) to Shakespeare, the most basic advice about borrowing money is this:

  • Don’t borrow money unless you absolutely have to. Debt may be a necessary evil, but like Canada and their sensuous, flirty doughnuts, it’s still evil.
  • Most people who lend you money aren’t like my dad, Pop Wilder. Pop had been at a small-town farm bank and had worked with the same families for decades.  He had an interest in seeing them thrive.  Nowadays?  Those banks are mainly owned by FirstBank Of Chase Fargo® with an Internet server hosted in Beijing.  Most people who lend money see you like Oprah© sees a cheeseburger with extra bacon:  as an opportunity.
  • Paying back money you borrowed hurts. Adding interest on top makes it worse.  Adding “Knuckles” the enforcer as a mechanism to make you pay?    That makes it even more painful.
  • Loans haunt you like a ghost and poison your hope for a peaceful future. Maybe loans are even worse than a ghost, because I’m sure loans are real.  Robert Heinlein said, “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage:  pay cash or do without.  Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.”  Debt hangs over you like the smell of the armpit of a thirteen-year-old who hasn’t discovered deodorant.
  • You come to resent the people who you have obligated yourself to. If you really want to hate someone, borrow money from them.  It’s like a screechy ex-wife on steroids, but it haunts your dreams.  Like a screechy ex-wife.

debtcollection

The dog cost a lot more money, and just shot anyone who came up the road.

That last point deserves a bit more discussion.  I had a friend come to me wanting to borrow some money.  There was, I kid you not, a PowerPoint® presentation that they put together explaining the need for the money and the certain benefit to me if I loaned them money.

Yes.  It was a family member.

The presentation was impressive.  They had put some thought into it.  I especially liked where they Photoshopped® me sitting on a throne in a Roman palace.  I loaned them the money.

If you want to really understand the character of someone close to you, loan them money.  If you do this, be prepared for them to hate you for doing every single thing they asked.  Why?  Because it obligates them into the future for, potentially, years.  Present them loves you, but future them will hate you.

shakesloan

Word choice can make a blog post much gooder.

Let me be clear:  the closer you are to them, the more likely they are to completely break their word to you.

Why?  Because borrowing money is emotional, first there’s an elation, you got the loan.  Then every payment is a little bit of dread deep into their soul.  They may really think they will be good at paying you.  They certainly have the best of intentions.

But then . . . the rationalization hamster on the hamster wheel in their head starts running on the wheel.  “John Wilder loves me.  He won’t call the collateral if I miss this payment.”

The wheel moves faster.  “John Wilder is doing fine.  He doesn’t need this money.”

The wheel moves faster yet.  “John Wilder?  He sucks.  What a leach.  Why does everything good happen to him?”

There is one big benefit to loaning that money.  If you make them sign a contract?  They’ll never ask for a cent again.  If they do?  Just point to the contract that they never fulfilled.

And that’s the key.  By not honoring that contract, they know that they have a debt.  They’ve broken their words to you.  But that’s not the worst part.  They broke their promise to themselves.  To quote Heinlein again:  “Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily.”  People who don’t pay debts have fallen away from duty.  That’s a cancer to the soul.  That’s why I don’t like debt.  It’s addictive, and as a borrower it’s an easy way to make yourself a victim.  As a lender, it’s an easy way to make yourself a predator.

shakesista

Oh, if only the great minds from the past lived today.

I was going to write about good reasons to go into debt, but could only come up with “to buy a reasonably priced house or build/expand a profitable business.”  Twelve words.  Not much for a post.

Then I had what I thought was a genius idea:  put out a list of bad reasons to get into debt.  But I then realized that, so far, I’ve written over 464,000 words on this blog.  If I put out a list of bad reasons to get into debt I could easily double that word count on just the list of bad reasons to get into debt.

So, avoid debt.  Also?  Avoid lending.

What does it say when an entire society is addicted to debt?  I’m sure that it’s okay.  I’m certain that it’s different this time.

But remember what The Bard says:

natdebt

This is fine.

Risk, Vladimir Putin on a Cat, and Death by Playground

“I respect what you said, but remember that these men have lands and castles.  It’s much to risk.” – Braveheart

putinrisk

I would say I want a cat I can ride, I’d just settle for one that wears sunglasses and doesn’t buck me off after explosions.

When The Boy was tiny, he was afraid of slides.  Any slide.  Short ones.  Long ones.  Plastic ones.  Metal ones.  Forget tall ones.  I would stand at the bottom of the slide, waiting for him to slide down.  Often there was crying and yelling from behind a tear and snot-covered face.  And The Boy was even worse.  But there was no real reason for him to have any fear – I was there and the playground equipment met every Federal standard, even the regulations that made sure that the swings were safe for handicapable lesbian migratory waterfowl of size.

Playground equipment was more dangerous back before the dawn of recorded history, when I was in kindergarten.  At my school, our playground equipment included a merry-go-round that was missing part of the wooden deck (this is true).  The missing deck part was close to the center, and a kindergartener could stand in there, and could run and push the merry-go-round a LOT faster.  The downside was if any of us had fallen under the merry-go-round while pushing it up to speed?  At that point the merry-go-round would become a quite efficient kindergartner decapitation machine.  Thankfully, we had already gnawed all the lead and asbestos off of the handles so it was safer for the next batch of kids, and the headless zombies were already our mascot at good old Sleepy Hallow Elementary, so a decapitated kid would have been just displaying a very large degree of loyalty.

Don’t fault a kid for being true to his school.

merryg

Our school nurse was excellent at re-attaching spines.  Lots of practice.

We also played with, I kid you not, the dry ice they used for packing the food they shipped to the school.  The Lunch Ladies® tossed it on the ground behind the kitchen after they unpacked the peas that had DONE NO WRONG before they turned them into the most ghastly smelling split pea soup.  They had to stop making that soup after the United States© ratified the Geneva Convention™ against chemical weapons.

Anyway, we had dry ice.  Let me write that a bit more specifically:

WE WERE KINDERGARTNERS WITH LIMITED SUPERVISION IN POSSESSION OF DRY ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Naturally we competed to see who could hold the dry ice in our hands the longest.  Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and has a temperature of -109.3 F (which really is -78.5 C).  The unsurprising answer to “How long can a kindergartner hold dry ice in their hand?” is: “Not very long.”

We did much better holding it against each other’s arms, I liked to hold it until the skin of my classmates turned white.  To a kindergartner, the pain of other people doesn’t exist, their brain isn’t developed enough for empathy.  Or maybe I was just a sociopath.  I will admit that I enjoyed it when the other kindergartners made funny noises.

Okay, I’m probably a sociopath.

Oh, and I forgot about the high jump pits.  We’d crawl between the top foam block and the bottom foam block and then the other kids would jump on the blocks.  When you have a dozen kindergartners on a foam high jump pit, it pretty effectively blocks out the light in the second layer.  As well as the air.  The last time I crawled between them I recall waking up with stars in my eyes after the bell rang and all of the other kids had gone inside.  Who says near suffocation can’t be a fond memory?

Playground equipment had evolved to the point when The Boy was a young Wildling™ the only way to actually hurt yourself on the equipment would be to take a hot glue gun and affix razor blades to the slide, and my restraining order prevents me from being near hot glue, so that’s right out.  A good slide designed in the last 20 years will be scary, but yet cozier than a mother’s womb.  Word is that a Federal Commission is looking to redesign wombs to meet current safety standards, including encasing the fetus in breathable bubble wrap and removing the word “mother” from association with the word “womb” because it’s something-ist (I lost my scorecard) to assume that only women can have wombs.

But returning to the original thought – it was hard to get The Boy to take risks as a kid – I remember how he cried the first time I made him rappel out of a helicopter.  What a baby!  You’d think that it was child abuse making a three year old do that!

rappelling

Isn’t fear the way to overcome fear?

I kid.  But The Boy really did plug a speaker directly into a power outlet.  That made a hell of a noise and tossed out some sparks.  And was far more dangerous than the plastic four-foot high slide at the park.  This led me to an observation about The Boy.  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.

And it’s not just kids that judge risk poorly, adults can suck at it, too.  Pop Wilder got more afraid of ordinary things as he got older – for example, he became unwilling to even attempt to adjust anything electronic – so he left his lights on continually.  Again, I kid.  But if it was more complicated than an on/off switch?  Nope.  Not his thing.

He also cut off many life choices due to this fear.  When everyone with three HTML programmers and a business plan was scheduling Hall and Oates® to do a business kick-off concert and was an instant Internet millionaire back in 1999, Pop was complaining about how much his medicine cost.  I got online (via a 56k modem) and found that his prescriptions could be had for about 10% of what he was paying.  Just by changing to GonnaGoBrokeSoonRX.com, we could save him about $1000 a month.

A month.

He wouldn’t do it.  “Well, it might get warm.  One of these medicines needs to stay cold, and only my pharmacy has the Wee Cuckold Striptease Elves© that keep it at the right temperature.”  So he paid $1000 a month more than he needed to.  I guess he owed something to the Elves.  Stupid Elves.

casinorisk

It’s natural to not want to risk it all.  Unless you’ve been drinking.

As I’ve observed you humans my fellow humans for the past few decades, I’ve discovered that Risk is poorly understood.  Pop Wilder had fallen victim to what I’m now calling Wilder’s Rule of Risk:  What he thought was safe, was risky.  What he thought was risky, was safe.  He ended up outliving his savings due to decisions that prioritized “safety” over even minimal risks.  He built barriers to action over unreasonable and unlikely fears.

monaco

Eyepatches.  I’ve always wanted one, or a glass eye that has a snow-globe inside.  Sadly?  Two good eyes.

I read the above passages to The Mrs. and she (rightly) noted that the risks I’ve taken in my life have been measured.  I’ve never taken all of my money and put it all on red.  The career choices I’ve made have been (generally) ones that led to more money and more security – they’ve been bets of winning versus winning more.  And when the stock market goes down?  I lose very little of my net worth.  Yay!  But if the stock market doubles, my wealth doesn’t double.  I’m giving up some of the upside in return for the safe.

bondi

But did I mention there were really good benefits?

But what am I missing?  I’ve won enough with the bets I’ve made that I’m playing life with house money now.  The question is, what if I’d dreamt bigger?  What if the subs you had delivered were Wilder Johns©?  Or Buffalo Wilder Wings™?  Yeah.  I do have a list of great ideas that I’ve had but never acted on.  Primarily because I’ve followed a path that led to me being pretty comfortable.  But is that always really safe?  Probably not, especially when you look at the big picture, and I recognize that.

Oddly, we often don’t realize on a day-to-day basis that some things in life aren’t risks, they’re certainties:

  • You will Did that rip the Band-Aid© off?  Oh, wait, I forgot that you’re the immortal one.
  • Taxes will go up.
  • Freedoms will disappear. They might come back.  You might have something to do with that.
  • Your money will be worth less. Hopefully not worthless in your life.  But in the long run?
  • Systems you don’t expect to collapse, will. Like Medicare®, or Pringles©.  Imagine life without Pringlesâ„¢!
  • If I described the year 2049 to you in detail, it won’t be like you think, unless you can imagine life without noses. Noses are so 2022.

So, we’re all going to die!  Let’s give up.

Never!  But understand other certainties that may or may not happen in your lifetime.  They’re certain, but their timing isn’t:

  • The dollar will collapse.
  • We will run out of economically viable/thermodynamically viable oil. We’ll never run out of oil, what’s left will just be too hard or too expensive in dollar or energy terms to harvest.
  • Star Wars® movies might be good again.
  • Global Warming© won’t doom humanity. Not even close.  It might flood New York, but probably not in my lifetime, if ever.  Darn it.
  • An asteroid will hit George Clooney. A small one.  (Small asteroid, not a small George Clooney.)

Stein’s Law says:  If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.  Wilder’s Corollary:  But it might go on so long you can’t make a buck off of it failing.

cruise

Seriously, this may be from Risky Business®, but Tom’s still four foot three and nearly old enough for Social Security©.  Oh, and he drinks only vegan free range chicken juice.

Life is like Tom Cruise.  It’s short.  Life is also like having sex with a Kardashian.  Hairy and risky.  But you have a choice.  You can be afraid and live in fear.  You can also live gallantly, and die nobly.

We want to live with certainty.  We want to, especially when we’re young, and when we are old, avoid risk.  But we can’t.  The absence of risk is the absence of life.  The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when you’ve bet it all on red, those are life.  Life is struggle.  Life is fighting.  Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly?  Don’t be afraid of risks that aren’t real.

Step two?  Don’t spend too long in the high jump pit.

Health, Wealth, and Chainsaw Hands

Captain Murphy:  Wait a minute, he gets eye beams, but I can’t get x-ray vision?

Sparks:  Okay, everybody gets x-ray vision.

Captain Murphy:  Yeah, and big chainsaw hands! – Sealab 2021

tats

Hail to the King, Baby.

Recently there was a fairly large windstorm across large parts of upper/lower Midwestia.  We live in a fairly calm region, but, it’s Midwestia – there are no mountains or even ambitious ant hills to slow down the wind once Global Warming® causes it to blow.  I am reliably informed that the entire Earth was sunny and 72°F (0.15°C) with no wind and gentle rainstorms before Global Warming©.

Despite all that, I also live on the slope of hill – which shelters us on the days the wind acts in ways entirely unapproved by several Congressional committees.  But this windstorm brought a very special wind.  One might call it a mighty wind.  Since it did damage all over Modern Mayberry, one might even call it a breaking wind.  Stupid Global Warming™.  I guess that they could even use it as a symbol of Global Warming®:  they could call it Breaking Wind©.

The Breaking Wind™ came at night, while I was asleep.  And make no mistake, I was really, really asleep, I’d been up late the night before, lovingly crafting these thrice-weekly missives for you out of Elven dreams and stud weasel chum, so I was exhausted.  The rest of the Wilder Family was up, doing whatever it is those people keep doing in my house which as far as I can see consists of making all that noise, leaving a trail of unidentified sharp plastic objects on the stairs, and a creating a continual kaleidoscope of weird smells.  What does a thirteen year old do, exactly, to make the hallway smell like bigfoot’s armpit after he ate a lot of asparagus, broccoli, and cabbage?

So, I was sleeping.  Soundly.  The Mrs. threw open the door to the room and turned the light on, which is how I like to be wakened at 1:15AM.

“You need to get up.  We just had a huge gust of Breaking Wind© hit the house and Pugsley says that there are trees down everywhere and possibly an attack of people from Ecuador.  It even pushed my stapler off the table.  The wind pushed the stapler, not the Ecuadorans.  I don’t think we need to worry about the Ecuadorans, they’re not even taking cover properly as they advance up the driveway.”  I may have mangled part of this, like I said, I was sleepy.

stapler

It’s that exact model, but the one that blew off the table is blue.  I’d work for a better joke, but I’m already up to my armpits in elven dreams and stud weasel chum.

The Mrs. had one window open on the windward side of the house, a two foot by three foot (16 meter by 27 liter) sized window.  Not very big.  But the gust had blown leaves and debris into the screen on the windows.  Not on to the screen – the leaves and other biological material had been embedded into the screen like rap fans attempting to leave a polka shindig.

I knew with winds that severe, it might be dangerous outside.  Very dangerous – heck, there could be branches even now getting ready to tumble out of the sky like a camera-seeking-Kardashian missile.  So dangerous.  Then I realized the best way to brave the wind, rain, and hazards of falling hairy women outside.

I’d send Pugsley.

He’s younger than The Boy, and we have less time invested in raising him at this point, so he’s the most expendable.

“Go check it out.  Take some pictures.”

I kid. It was just wet and I was in my footed Yoda® pajamas.

yodajoke

The only appropriate use of Yoda© themed apparel.

Okay, I don’t really have footed Yoda© pajamas, but I still had a fantasy of being able to get back to sleep, and being soaking wet at 1AM would lower the odds that would happen.  I mean, under those conditions, sometimes it takes me minutes to get back to sleep.  Minutes!

Pugsley came back inside, thankfully Kardashian-free.  “A tree hit the house!”  I walked outside into the torrential downpour.  Nothing of the sort had happened.  A tree fell, but it missed the house.  So much for my housecat-like fantasy of not getting wet.

The next morning, we surveyed the property around the house.  Only one entire tree was down, but there were huge branches that had been ripped off several other trees, including a big branch off the apple tree in the front yard that nearly blocked the driveway.  Nearly.

The Mrs. was not enchanted with my “just wait a few years and they’ll rot away” strategy.  The Mrs. is not in favor of nature’s way, and I bet The Mrs. even doubts Global Warming®, even after having firsthand evidence of the Breaking Wind™.  The bright side?  I had a good excuse to buy a chainsaw.

kill

You get more attention with a kind word and a chainsaw than with just a kind word.  Frankly, all you need is the chainsaw in that situation.

I had owned two chainsaws when we lived in Alaska, but I hadn’t cranked them since Bush 2 was in office, and they were “somewhere” in the garage.  Why two chainsaws?  Two is one, and one is none.  The last thing you want is to be 35 miles from home in the middle of getting firewood and have to stop because you have a broken chainsaw or if you need to have a duel with a grizzly bear.  It wouldn’t be sporting to not have two for a duel.  Also:  best way ever to die – having a chainsaw duel with a grizzly – not that I’m planning anything, but that’s really something for a tombstone . . . here lies John Wilder – Died in A Chainsaw Duel with a Grizzly.  My pallbearers would grow immediate beards from the testosterone oozing from my coffin.

I realize the frugal thing would be to spend the three hours required to get my two old chainsaws back up to speed, after spending the six hours to find them, but I was out of frugal.  Thankfully, Wal-Mart sells chainsaws.  Also, thankfully, I also had a good reason to buy one.  Since my chainsaw work would be around my home and there were no grizzly bears here, I could just go inside and get some iced tea if the saw went south.

Guilty admission:  I like running a chainsaw nearly as much as I like shooting.

When we lived in Alaska, we heated our home exclusively with firewood, getting massive amounts of firewood each summer.  But it’s been a lot of years and a lot of carbs since we lived in Alaska.  But I figured that Pop Wilder ran a chainsaw until late in his life, much to the consternation of the people running the nursing home.  If he did it, I certainly wasn’t too old.

chainsawfacebook

And his Instagram® is made from real grandmas.

But with my brand-spanking-new chainsaw I discovered that in three hours, I can cut more branches and trees than my two boys could move to the burn pile in eight.  And when you have a chainsaw in your hand, everything looks like a branch or tree that needs to be cut and added to the burn pile.  That may explain why the cat was scarce.

Oh, and in Modern Mayberry, whenever I want to burn my burn pile?

No permits?  No permission?  No problem.

It’s a thing we call freedom, baby.

But I come by my love of chainsaws, firewood, and the forest honestly.  Pop Wilder also heated his exclusively with firewood when I was growing up.  Cord after cord after cord of wood.  Pop was prepared, and needed to be:  the winters were often -40°F (-273.15°C) for an extended time.  So every summer weekend when Pop wasn’t working at the bank, it was off to the forest to make the forest a little less susceptible to forest fires.

I was the youngest, so I wasn’t allowed to run the chainsaw – they seemed to like the idea of me having two hands.  Pop Wilder and my brother, John Wilder (Yes, we have the same first name, for reals in real life.  My parents forgot about him once I was born and saw my magnificence and accidently named me John, too.) ran the saws.  They told me I had the easy job.  I got to pick the wood off of the ground, put it on the tailgate.  Once there was enough wood on the tailgate to stack in the truck bed, I’d hop up there and stack the wood in the truck in rows.  Then I’d hop back down and repeat the process until the truck was full.

firewood

The Boy with the firewood we got in one weekend when we lived in Alaska.  It was a busy weekend.

Once we got home, Pop and my brother would go into the house to shower up and get some cold drinks.  Me?  I got to unload the truck, sweep out the truck bed, and finally go in to see my freshly washed father and brother having a snack and some cold lemonade.  Some weekends we’d get four loads of wood.

We were a fun family at parties.  Firewood?  Well, there’s split firewood.  Blocked firewood.  Kindling firewood.  Stacked firewood.  Piled firewood.  Fireplace firewood.  Stove firewood.  Burning firewood.  Firewood ashes.  Aspen firewood.  Pine firewood.  Birch firewood.

And that’s all we know about firewood.

But one thing was certain – cutting, loading, splitting, and stacking firewood is great summer exercise.  It’s not bad exercise in the winter, either, bringing the wood in from the piles to the house.  In Alaska, not only was it great exercise, we figured it saved us about $1000 a month in fuel oil – in January it was regularly -55°F (-7,000,000.15°C), and if the house was 65°F (4.15°C) inside, there was a 120°F temperature difference between outside and inside.  And we were living in a log cabin.  Holy Dehumidifiers, Batman!  We kept a pot of water boiling on the wood stove continually.

I was in great shape then.  Now?  I’m 14 years older, and I’ll admit even though I now had The Boy and Pugsley hauling the blocks of wood and branches, I was more than a little sore the next day.  That was okay, because when I got finished with the all the hard chainsawing work?  I was soaking my sore muscles in the hot tub while Pugsley and The Boy worked on hauling wood to the burn pile.  From time to time I made encouraging noises.  I’m sure that they appreciated that.  Thankfully they were on hand to get me some cold beverages.

I mean, the hot tub is sweaty work, right?

No staplers were injured in the creation of this post.

staplerpet

Dependence, Freedom, and Toddler Hammer Fighting

“I’ve been kidnapped by K-mart!” – Ruthless People

grexit

I love George, going out of his way to join the English for breakfast and all.

I frustrate my children a lot.  A lot.  Here’s an example from 2018:

The Boy, Pugsley, and I are out shooting.  Fun times.  Heck, here’s even a description of that particular day (12 Strong Movie Review, Exploding Tide Bottles, Rifles, and Significance).  When we finally got home, it was nearly dark.  I handed The Boy a cleaning kit and the AR-15 and .22 we’d been shooting.

“Clean these.”

I didn’t explain how.  I gave a short lecture on ammunition safety and “always treat it like it’s loaded” and “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” and “don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill,” and “never trust a liberal with your rifles.”  I even checked the rifles to make sure they were empty.

I handed The Boy a cleaning kit, and walked away.

“How do I do this?”  He was talking to the back of my head as headed down the hall.

“You figure it out.”  I heard The Boy’s long-suffering sigh as I went into my bedroom.

Ten minutes later I was walking back through the dining room and was pleased to see he’d already disassembled the weapon.  Ten minutes later when I walked back through he was putting the finishing touches on a cleaned and lubricated AR-15.  I gave it a look, cycled the action.  Smooth.

The Boy had done a good job.  I told him so.  He looked proud.

blunder

Dads.  We just love to share the work . . . 

I know that when I tossed that task to him with little information, he was irritated.  That makes sense – we’re all that way.  I also knew that it probably took longer than it would have if I would have done it myself.  It certainly took longer than it would have if I would have spent the time going step by step, leading The Boy through cleaning the rifle.  It wasn’t really efficient.

But if I wanted efficiency, I wouldn’t have taken either The Boy or Pugsley shooting.  I would have done it all myself, the shooting, the cleaning, all of it.  But because my goal is to teach my children that there’s no shortcut, and the only way out is through I took them.  They were the point of the whole trip.  Their struggle was the goal.  Their prize?

Independence.

Sure, we’re dependent upon a lot of things.

And those are all reasonable things to be dependent on.  I guess.  But there are some things that are much more corrosive to the soul.  Most of them are self-explanatory, some less so.

  • Parental handouts.
  • Government handouts.
  • The opinions of other people.
  • Alcohol.
  • Anti-PEZ®
  • Paychecks.

I’m against being dependent upon those things, and I want to make sure I make my kids strong so that they’ll have that reserve of strength when something unexpected happens.  You never know what’s going to come at you, because life is like a weightlifting toddler, short and hard.  I guess you could say I went to the Charles Darwin School of Parenting:

John Wilder:  “The child will eat if it has the will to eat.”

The Mrs.:  “But it’s only three hours old.”

John Wilder:  “Why do you coddle it so?  Do you want to make it weak?”

darwin

I’m probably the only person who thinks toddler hammer fighting would be funny.  But I think it’s really funny.

But the approach has paid dividends for those children that survived.  I turned control of the mowing of the yard for Stately Wilder Manor over to Pugsley some time ago.  It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he knows much more about the mower than I do.  My role in the house has been changed from decision maker to provider.  Pugsley tells me what he needs for the mower, and I get it.  He fixes it.  Pugsley has even re-wired one of the safety systems on the mower – when you get off the mower, it’s supposed to kill the engine as soon as your butt leaves the seat.  Not anymore.  Pugsley has defeated that safety device.

I’m hoping it doesn’t defeet him.  I’d hate to have throw him a block of wood and a knife so he could whittle himself some wooden feet.  When it comes to my kids, I’m attempting to use everyday situations to create radical independence.  I’m a fan of the old Robert Heinlein maxim:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I expect my children to be able to do all of that.  If I can help them be competent, I may or may not have been a good parent, but I’ll have met my own goal.  One of the proudest moments of my life to date was when my eldest child, Alia S. Wilder and I were arguing about her college major, Medieval French Basket Weaver Equity Studies.  Her response to me?

“Listen, Pop, it’s my degree, it’s my choice, and I’m paying for it, every cent, so if you don’t like my major, tough.”

Game, set and match: Alia.  That’s the sort of independence that makes a parent proud.  I suppose I could have paid for her school.  But last time she was down to visit, she thanked me.  “You know, by you letting me find my way, it means more.”

I then told her, “I’m proud of you.”  She cried.  Then we had a Lifetime® TV moment and some International Coffee™ or whatever it is they advertise on Lifetime©.

mow

I mean, seriously.  Straight lines, people.

The other side of the coin, however, is the conscious creation of dependence.  This is commonly achieved by using manipulation, guilt, low self-esteem, anxiety, and fear.  I’ve seen it done to people.

Fear is the key.  Some parents hobble children, in a conscious or sub-conscious attempt to keep them dependent.  The downside is that this dependence creates resentment.  How many times do people, when given something for nearly nothing complain that you’re not doing enough?  Since 1964, the welfare system has cost taxpayers more than three times the total cost of all wars that the United States has ever fought.  All wars – every single one of them.  Yet poverty hasn’t gone down at all, and the people in poverty hate those they are dependent upon.  They know that they are indebted, and they are both slaves to the system, as well as haters of the system.

Once you’ve got a grievance, it’s never enough.  Someone always has it better, so why don’t you deserve what they have?  This is the consequence of free stuff.  A trip to Wal-Mart® might cost you $221.32 if you pick up the two-fer bag of charcoal, but free stuff costs you your soul.

phenry

“Give me liberty or give me medicare?”

It’s ironic that the surest form of enslavement occurs not with a whip and a lash (though I imagine those really suck, because outside of bondage clubs on the East and West Coast, not a lot of sane people like that stuff) but with voluntarily accepting kindness.  Generosity.  Free stuff.

You’ll notice I put paycheck into that list up above, too.  For those almost every one of my readers, the paycheck isn’t a problem.  You work hard.  You pay your dues.  You’re compensated fairly.  You go home without a chip on your shoulder, without blaming the rest of the world for your job.  Beware:  once a person starts feeling like they’re a victim, that someone owes them that check, they’re deep into the free stuff zone.

It’s as true today as when Pop Wilder repeated it to me again and again when I was growing up, “What you work for matters to you.  If you have to spend your own money, you’ll take care of it.  Because it’s yours.”  The most costly thing I could ever give them . . . is free.

I paid attention.  I hope my kids have.  And if only I could get The Mrs. to give up that weakness of hers, insulin.  She should “just say no.”

Creative Destruction and a Girl in a French Maid Outfit

“Well, they’re wrong.  You are creative.  You are damn creative, each and every one of you.  You are so much more creative than all of the other dry, boring morons that you work with.” – The Office

unemployment

Hmm, you’d think the road sign outside of the office might be a hint?

A good friend of mine works out in Silicon Valley, and related a (fairly) short story about being a hiring manager after the dotcom bust – he works in the dreaded Human Resources Department.  Somehow a gentleman with a Ph.D. in multiplexing signals on fiber optics got a job interview with him.  This particular job interview was fairly short.  My friend said, “Umm, we’re looking for a mechanical engineer.  With no experience.  Why would you be looking for a job with us?”

“I’m looking for anything.  Anything.”

“I hope you saved your money,” my friend thought.  What he said was:  “We’ll be in touch.”  That’s what recruiters say when you’re in their office and they’re really tired of the stink of failure and hope that it won’t wear off on them.  They especially don’t like getting it on their shoes.

The economy is in a constant state of change, and has been since 1800 or so.  Joseph Schumpeter, the dead economist, is credited with coming up with a name for this – Creative Destruction.  That’s an academic foul for two reasons:  First, some other dead economist else came up with the idea.  Second, yet another dead economist, a different one this time, used the name before he did.  So, like Columbus, he got credited for something someone else did.  The nice thing is that you can spend your spare time wondering what you can do with a dead economist.  I like to drag mine out at Christmas and decorate him with little graphs, sort of like Martha Stewart.

martha

I like to add cinnamon to my economist.  Makes him smell more festive.

Whoever first used the name is unimportant.  Like I said, he’s dead.  But the idea of Creative Destruction originated with Karl Marx.  Karl came up with the idea (by observing economics in the 19th Century) that existing production and existing productive forces were periodically destroyed by the economy.  This was a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution.  Innovation among clever people kept changing the world.  First the loom replaced weavers.  Then the factory replaced artisans.  And finally the PEZ® dispenser replaced scores of servants that would unwrap and gently place the PEZ© in your mouth while wearing fancy-schmancy servant clothes (including white gloves!) after executing a perfect curtsy and pulling the PEZ® off the silver tray with hand-crafted PEZ™ tongs.

Ahh, the Victorian Era.

pezgirlz

I can only afford a single PEZ®-maid.  Talk about frugality.

This change in production had the side effect of making lots of weavers, craftsman, and PEZ™-maids unemployed.  The transition was difficult, and it very much was a First World Problem.  It’s not like goat herders in Botswana become unemployed when a goat factory comes online – no.  There’s no factory for goat herding, at least not yet.  And, for the record, I have no idea if there are goats in Botswana, and I don’t care enough to Google® it, and, honestly, have only the basic knowledge that Botswana is somewhere near where people get Ebola and you can’t get decent Internet.  That’s enough knowledge about Botswana for me.

firstworld

The above is an example of a First World Problem and a good example of Creative Destruction – I kept one cell phone for six years, and had museums calling me to see if they could have it. 

Even though Creative Destruction was (and is) a First World Problem, and even though this Problem has created more wealth than any other system in the history of humanity (poor people in the United States today have better nutrition and entertainment available to them than Roman Emperors did) it still sucks when the Creative Destruction Fairy picks your job to be the one that gets axed.  Marx echoed this and predicted Silicon Valley when he wrote that capitalism grows “ . . . by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”  Strangely, that also describes my high school dating career.

But I digress.

Silicon Valley is built on just quote from Marx in the paragraph above.  The concept of “business disruption” is exactly what Silicon Valley does best.

Cabs?  Let’s disrupt it with Uber™.  This refinement will allow people to have cheaper cab rides.  Oh, and the money will be more concentrated, and the “cab drivers” will be paid less.  Nearly every business model out of Silicon Valley is based on this disruption – from consumer goods (Amazon®) to communication (Apple©) to “friends” (Facebook™).  If you look at the most successful companies the world has ever seen, each of them was founded on the destruction of an old economic paradigm.  The more fundamental and important the paradigm, the larger the success.

It’s like the economy is a game, and the more fundamental the rules violation, the bigger the payoff – say for example you were the only guy in the NFL® that recognized that there was no rule preventing you from using an axe however you wanted during a game.  My guess is that you’d have a pretty good pass rush if you did that – and sacking the quarterback would be permanent.

inigo

Does Creative Destruction mean what I think it means?

Marx felt that Creative Destruction, over time, would lead to people that “produce” losing all of their money to people who were merely financiers.  And, if you look at it, he’s right.  The financial sector produces less (directly) but finances all of this disruption.  If you’ve been a reader of this blog for very long, I’m certain that you won’t be surprised by my conclusion:  just because Marx was right in understanding disruption, don’t for a second think that I agree with him on his solutions.

Similar to Darwin’s theory, capitalism requires competition.  The stronger business survives.  Islands of the economy free from competition (government sponsored monopolies – like electric companies, or government sponsored businesses – like electric cars) don’t generally provide innovation.  Elon Musk must be some sort of weird innovator, because in one sense he’s disrupting the undisruptable – government monopolies on electric cars and space launch systems.

But Marx was no Musk.  Marx’s solution is simple.  Charge people what something costs to make, rather than for what value it provides – which means that every worker, for instance, makes the same wage.  Rip the production from the hands of the owners and give it to people who don’t innovate.  Free the economy from ruinous competition.  Power to the people!  Oh, and a totalitarian government to enforce it all because people don’t work the way that Marx imagines they do.

Creative Destruction is real.  But in the end, this replacement of old versus new generally increases the overall wealth in society.  I’m not speaking of the virtual importation of slave labor and environmental degradation through “free” trade agreements that are derived in secret and written on thousands and thousands of pages.  No.  But actual free trade among equals generally makes everyone wealthier. And the reality is that regardless of what controls a (fairly) free government puts in place, disruption is going to happen.

marx

From each according to his ability, to each according to your mother.

So what can you do about it?  Get a Ph.D. in fiber optics?  Well, my friend was right.  If it pays enough that for the short time it’s extraordinarily valuable, sure.  But that’s like hitting a career lottery.  If I were to give advice to a younger person, I’d say something a bit different.  I’d suggest that you look to careers that minimize the ability of Creative Destruction to ruin your Friday.

Let’s look at bad career ideas:  number one on my list of “sounds good but it’s really stupid” is software engineer.  Any career that pits me against a billion people in India and a billion people in China is a bad career.  Remember, if you’re one in a million in China, there’s a thousand other dudes just like you.  The numbers are really bad – and they don’t even have to come to the United States to compete with you.  Heck, they can pay recent grads $5,000 a year.  So they can hire at least a dozen people to do what you do.  Those are not good odds.

So, a good quality of a Creative Destruction-resistant job would be that it has to be local, or has some sort of license requirement that prevents everyone in Shanghai from applying.  Lawyers, doctors, and engineers have gotten the licensing-thing down.  It’s been so successful that some states even apply it to nail polisher-people (whatever the term is for that).

crashtest

New openings daily!  And that’s just in your skull!

Construction is has a lot of the attributes required, but it seems like Honduras has moved here to do that for us.  So that’s kinda out.  But it does point out that a job that requires actual citizenship might be a good thing.  Teaching would fall under that designation, but so much of teaching today is following a set curriculum that’s based on a set of tests that the process itself is rigged against deviation.

That may be part of the point.  Today Creative Destruction’s plan is to replace you with the lowest cost alternative, like:

  • An App
  • An Algorithm
  • A Process
  • A Batch of Cheap People Working Remotely
  • Artificial Intelligence

Avoid jobs where you can be easily replaced.  I’m not going to sit here and make a huge list and rank it and put a likelihood that you’ll be a victim of Creative Destruction in the future.  I’m not that psychic, unless I’m following my strict broccoli and chocolate diet.  No.  But I’m betting you can start to come up with your own list.

Okay, I’ll give you another one:

Blogger!  Heck, the pay may be zero, but you can always work for the fame, glory and sweet, sweet PEZ®!

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter.  Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million.  But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Roth

Update:  I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man.  Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.”  He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house.  And the television.  And the car.  And the other car.  And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending.  While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards.  The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old.  It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more.  He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house.  The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it.  He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship.  Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that.  Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe.  He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

dday2

Pop says he saw him.  But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability.  That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly.  He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things.  Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots:  the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area.  A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption.  I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

voters

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop.  Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it.  When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered.  The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail.  But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business.  He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder.  But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run.  What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback.  Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse.  Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled.  Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished.  They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving.  Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay?  No.  But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates.  And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money.  But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

distracted

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you. 

Pop Wilder spent it all.  Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe.  Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month.  Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month.  And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker.  I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study.  I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake.  There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out:  “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense:  most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you.  And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help?  Maybe.

geometry

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end?  Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain.  Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad.  This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5th Century book, City of God.   Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

fortuna snack

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna.  There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

  • there be inflation?
  • they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills?   We thought about it, but live next door to a banker?  I hear they bring down property values.
  • civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
  • I live to be 190? I hope not.
  • government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty?  In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.