Yikes, my Toshiba touch screen stopped working!!!
Issues that Jack Krupansky has stumbled across as he journeys deeper into the blogging jungle
How can I become a millionaire?
One last block quote.
This is supposed to be a block quote.
Just trying a centered paragraph here.
This is a block quote?Second line.Last line of block quote.
Okay, that first test failed, but in a predictable manner that illustrates
In this second test I switched to "plain text". Just to see what happens.
Unfortunately, it loses all formatting, including hyperlinks.
I am curious to see what happens with the extra blank lines I added to make
the paragraph spacing look right in the composition editor.
-- Jack Krupansky
This is just a test post...
I am trying to debug a font problem with my blogs. I post to all of my blogs by sending email from my PC. I had figured out how to set the font so that it would take on the default font for the blog back when I was sending from Microsoft Outlook Express on Windows XP, but since I upgraded to Windows Live Mail (successor to OE) on Windows 7, the font gets messed up. The worst part of it is that the font size becomes very tiny, almost unreadable, even though it looks fine in the email composition editor. Sure, I can manually correct the font in the Blogger composition editor, but that's extra work. So, now I am about to try some experiments to see if I can figure out some Windows Live Mail "magic" to fix these font problems. I will leave each of these posts unchanged for future reference about what does or doesn't work.
So, let the tests begin...
This initial post is a forward of a post that worked back in April 2010 on my old machine. In other words, this is what used to work before I upgraded in late May 2010.
Is this too tiny to read?
BTW, in WLM the mail composition editor says that this is 12-point Calibri. Actually, in OE is said that it was Times New Roman, the default, which worked with OE, probably because it did not set the font in the message since it was the default.
Also, I have a "div" for each paragraph, set in OE, which has the effect of making each paragraph a "web-style" paragraph with a blank line after it, because that is the style used in the blogs.
Who exactly is rich these days? In other words, what criteria should we use to judge that someone is rich? In recent tax cut debates there seems to be a presumption that $250,000 of income is kind of the dividing line, but I don't quite buy it.
To me, the primary criterion for judging someone as being rich should be that they can live a relatively affluent lifestyle without working. In other words being rich is not about income per se, but a question of wealth. If you have sufficient wealth that you can live your affluent lifestyle solely on investment income from your wealth, then I would say that you are rich. And that is after taxes and after inflation. And that also requires a two-to-one safety margin so that you need not worry about what the stock market is doing or the state of the economy on either a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even annual basis.
Put another way, being rich means you never have to worry about money.
That is what separates the rich from the middle class -- the latter have some money (unlike the poor or lower class who don't have enough money for the essentials of daily life), but are constantly worrying about it, frequently because they have chosen to live a level of affluence beyond their means (averaged over booms and busts.)
So, given that base definition, how much money (wealth) do you need to be considered rich?
Even back in early August 2007, just before the first big crumble of the financial crisis, in Who wants to be a millionaire? I suggested that $50 million in liquid investments was the magic number. At the beginning of April 2008, as the financial crisis was starting to rumble on the backburner with increasing fury, in Are you wealthy? I reconsidered but reaffirmed that $50 million number. And today, after further reconsideration and calculation I also reaffirm that $50 million number.
I think it is reasonable to say an income of $250,000 (from your investments) is the rock-bottom low-end of being rich. Simply avoiding work is not enough, you need to afford some significant degree of affluence, so that you at least look rich (although you may make a tactical decision to "dress down" so that you do not appear to be rich even if you are.)
For purposes of discussion I will assume a very conservative investment style consistent with no worrying about how your investments are doing. To me, that means long-term Treasury bonds. You can choose other investments based on your own risk tolerance, but for the purposes of defining worry-free rich, Treasury bonds fit the bill.
If you bought 30-year Treasury bonds at the most recent auction you got a yield of 4.75%. If you bought that same bond on the open market on Friday, the yield was 4.68%. For purposes of discussion, I'll presume that you buy only at the quarterly auctions.
Ignoring taxes and inflation for the moment, if you bought those 4.75% Treasuries, you would need $5.3 million of them to give you that $250,000 annual income. Unfortunately, taxes are not zero and inflation is not zero. Assuming the most recent annual headline inflation of 1.6%, that 4.75% becomes 3.15% and now you need $8 million for that same income level. I am presuming that you want that $250,000 income to "keep pace with inflation." There is no state or local income tax on Treasuries and I calculate the federal effective tax rate to be 27.05% using the 2010 federal tax tables. You may have deductions too, but let's start by being conservative. 4.75% minus 1.6% for inflation and 27.05% taxes gives us an effective yield of 2.30%, meaning that you would need Treasures in the amount of $10.9 million to give you that magical $250,000 annual income.
But wait... didn't I say earlier that you needed $50 million and this calculation shows that $11 million will do it? The answer is a classic "Yes, but..."
It's all about assumptions.
First of all, if you really want to be conservative, you need what Warren Buffett's mentor Ben Graham called a "margin of safety." There are all sorts of crazy things that can happen in the real world, let alone the worlds of economics and finance. So, I am going to insist that a two-to-one margin of safety be used to judge someone as being rich. This is an important factor if you want to be able to sleep at night and not have to worry about money. So, that $10.9 million would really be $21.8 million. But even that is still far short of $50 million.
Inflation may currently be 1.6%, but that is historically quite low and we have seen times when it was 3% or even 4% or on occasion higher. So, to be conservative, I would say it would be better to assume a 3% inflation rate.
Treasury yields can also fluctuate significantly, so to be conservative I will knock that 4.75% yield down to 4.25%, which is what it was in the preceding auction.
So, assuming you want $250,000 per year, Treasury bonds yield 4.25%, inflation at 3%, and taxes at 27.05%, my calculation comes up with an effective yield of 0.91%, which translates into needed wealth of $27.4 million. Add in that two-to-one safety margin and you get $54.8 million, modestly more than my $50 million suggestion, but, lets just call it $50 million since we have been quite conservative in its assumptions.
Another assumption I made was that you need to live on income only, not liquidation of principal. Better to plan on leaving the $50 million as inheritance to family or charity rather that put the vagaries of fate in the financial markets into play and risk the potential for introducing worry into the lifestyle of the supposed "rich."
So where does that leave you if you don't have $50 million in liquid wealth (which includes me, by the way)? If you still need to work to earn your $250,000 a year or are only a mere millionaire, you are definitely well-off and upper-middle class, but I wouldn't call you rich or wealthy.
AFAICT, "the rich" is mostly a term of partisan political disparagement and a tool for class warfare than an attempt at economic accuracy. Somehow, some liberal politicians have decreed that an income level of $250,000 defines "rich." It would be interesting to know who precisely started the "meme" of $250,000 of income meaning someone is "rich."
In any case, my number for "rich" is $50 million in liquid investments with an after-tax, after-inflation yield of 0.91%. Anything less than that and you are just pretending to be rich.
-- Jack Krupansky
I was really looking forward to see the new Wall Street 2 movie ("Money Never Sleeps") and although it had quite a few good moments, overall it just wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped. Despite the severity of the recent financial crisis, the movie just didn't have the visceral punch that I though Oliver Stone would bring to this encore.
Michael Douglas was great, but he was great in the original, so no new ground was broken there. "Jake" as his nominal protégé was okay, but not great. His girlfriend, Gordon's daughter was... well... pathetic (or more charitably I could say that this was great acting to portray a pathetic character) but maybe that was intentional to forcefully illustrate how "toxic" the cretins of Wall Street really are.
The ending was quite lame, but maybe given the current cultural context Mr. Stone felt obligated not to leave people in a state of complete despair. That would be bad for ticket sales.
On the positive side, the acting of Frank Langella and Eli Wallach as aging investment bankers was absolutely fantastic.
As I noted, there were plenty of great individual scenes and lines such as you saw in the two trailers.
Maybe the bottom line is that Mr. Stone did in fact portray the culture of Wall Street and its denizens as being irredeemably "toxic", although his lame ending inscrutably seemed to let them off the hook and even excuse illegal activity.
There were a few scenes that reminded me of Wall Street activity that I hope the so-called Volcker Rule will eliminate or at least dramatically reduce, but only time will tell.
Maybe that is ultimately the fatal flaw with this movie: there is too much in it that is borderline documentary and cuts painfully too close to the bone. At the end of the credits it reminds us that it is a work of fiction and that similarities to real people and places is... "unintentional." Yeah, right. Sure, they changed the names of the investment banks, but we all know who they were talking about.
The New York Times article from Friday by Sewell Chan entitled "Small Gifts Sent to Ease U.S. Debt" that quotes me about making contributions to pay down the public debt and has my picture has been translated into Portuguese on this Brazilian web called Economia with the translation entitled "Para pagar dívida de R$ 23 trilhões, uma doação de R$ 554 - Crescem nos EUA as contribuições voluntárias para diminuir o rombo nas contas do governo, mas impacto sobre os débitos é mínimo". My original quote in The New York Times:
"I get mixed reactions," said John W. Krupansky, 56, a software developer in Midtown Manhattan who started reading about economics during the dot-com crash a decade ago, and has blogged about his tax deductible gifts, nine so far, of $25 each. "Some people are annoyed; they think the right thing to do is complain about the debt, not actually do something about it. Other people are amused that anyone would waste their time to do such a thing."
Translated into Portuguese:
"Ouço reações diversas", diz John W. Krupansky, de 56 anos, desenvolvedor de software no centro de Manhattan que começou a ler sobre a economia durante a crise das empresas pontocom, há uma década, e tem escrito em seu blog sobre suas doações - nove até agora, cada uma de US$ 25. "Algumas pessoas ficam irritadas. Elas pensam que a coisa certa a fazer é reclamar da dívida, e não fazer algo concreto sobre isso. Outras pessoas se divertem com a ideia de alguém perder seu tempo para fazer uma coisa dessas."
Huh, my meager efforts to take responsibility for paying down the public debt have gotten me a little attention... in The New York Times of all places! Today they are running an article by Sewell Chan entitled "Small Gifts Sent to Ease U.S. Debt" that actually quotes me:
"I get mixed reactions," said John W. Krupansky, 56, a software developer in Midtown Manhattan who started reading about economics during the dot-com crash a decade ago, and has blogged about his tax deductible gifts, nine so far, of $25 each. "Some people are annoyed; they think the right thing to do is complain about the debt, not actually do something about it. Other people are amused that anyone would waste their time to do such a thing."
And they even ran my picture.
Two days ago I decided to take an indefinite hiatus from Twitter. 48 hours later, it still feels like the right thing to do. No regrets, so far.
Sure, on occasion a thought pops into my head and I feel an urge to reach for Twitter, but it's only a momentary urge and quickly dissipates. Sure, Twittering can be fun, but it is also quite mindless, definitely unproductive, and usually a complete waste of my time and adds no value to my life.
Rather than twittering because I can, I find myself being more deliberate in thinking about how I spend my time.
I will post again in a week or so about how the de-twittering of my life has progressed.
Twitter is certainly an interesting phenomenon, but it also has its annoyances. This morning I saw a brief mention of Twitter considering ads. No real surprise there, but it got me thinking. By writing tweets, I am providing Twitter with content for free. I am basically working for Twitter with zero compensation. So what do I really get out of the deal? Twitter does help to promote blog posts (but does not give any actual Google juice) and does provide an "outlet" for excess energy, but that is about it. Maybe once in a blue moon somebody actually connects with somebody in a valuable way, but that is the exception rather than the rule. In short, the answer to the question "What value do I get from Twitter?" is not much at all and certainly nothing comparable to the effort invested.
Twitter is still a young phenomenon and evolving over time, so maybe a few months or a few years from now Twitter will actually, finally have some features that deliver significant value to me. But for new, Twitter is, well, I hate to say this, but, a complete waste of my time. I would not say that all of my time in Twitter has been wasted since it has been an interesting experiment with a new technology, but I have definitely reached well beyond the point of diminishing returns.
So, to be clear, I do not consider my time spent with Twitter a complete waste of time, but simply that the marginal value has been too small, for me, personally.
Twitter may have great value for some people, but I am not one of them.
Besides, I now have some real, billable work to do, so Twitter really is an unnecessary and unproductive distraction, for me.
And, there have been any number of times where I could have posted a more valuable blog post, but took the lazy route of a simple tweet instead. My loss.
BTW, I have over 3,000 tweets, so it is not as if I haven't given Twitter a chance to prove itself.
I am not sure how long my hiatus will last. Could be a few months, or maybe a year or more, or maybe just a few weeks. Three to six months would be my preliminary estimate. I may check in on occasion just to see if I have been missing anything. The bottom line is that I'll stay away from Twitter as long as it continues to show very little promise of adding any significant value to my life. So, my hiatus could in fact be extended to infinity.
My hiatus will also give me some extra time to contemplate my experiences with Tweeter and maybe even distill them down to realize what value, if any, they have for me.
If anybody really does see a true breakthrough in Twitter that really would add dramatic value to my life, please send me an email message about it.
Now, it is time for my to go tweet my final tweet and then get back to real work.
I posted on Monday about CheckingFinder.com for finding community banks offering FDIC-insured high-interest checking (2-4%) and just this morning I took the plunge and opened a new bank checking account through their web site for a community bank in Texas. I still need in get the bank's welcome kit in the mail and send back the signature card and other documents, but within a few weeks I should be on my way to earning 3.51% APY on a bank checking account. What could be more exciting (in banking)?
I did see a bank offering 4.09% on Monday, but they were no longer listed this morning. 3.51% APY was the highest listed rate for my zip code this morning. Still, this is a fantastic rate compared to just about anything else available.
First I had to call the CheckingFinder.com customer service number to clarify exactly what qualified as an "automatic payment". I make several payments each month by ACH debit from the web sites of my electric company, telephone/Internet provider, and credit card, but they are all "manual", so I wasn't sure if they qualified. Customer service picked up quite promptly and indicated that each bank had its own quirky rules, so it would be best to speak directly to the individual bank. I had already selected my preferred bank from their list and customer service gave me that bank's direct number. The bank picked up promptly, redirected my call and quickly answered my question, stating clearly that to get the special rate I needed "one ACH debit or credit" each month. Many consumers see ACH debits as part of "automatic bill payment" and only overly-cautious people such as me want to manually check my bill before it gets paid.
That so-called "automatic payment" was the worrisome "qualification" for me, but now I know that it is a no-brainer. There were three other specific qualifications for this particular bank (which many of the listed banks also had) in order to get the juicy 3.51% APY rate:
Note: Some of the CheckingFinder.com banks also have a bill-pay requirement, but this bank did not.
The sign-up process requested my current bank checking routing and account number so that the initial funding can be done via an ACH debit. This funding will not actually occur until after the bank receives the signed signature card and other sign-up documents needed to satisfy government regulations. My chosen bank bad a $100 minimum initial deposit. I chose $250 for the sign-up deposit. I intend to put a moderate pile of cash in the account to earn that 3.51% APY ASAP, but I want to see that the account gets all set up and working as advertised before committing more cash.
The sign-up process also asks a serious questions about your financial history similar to those you see when requesting your credit history to verify your identity. Usually not a problem, but having a copy of your credit history handy couldn't hurt. Some people claim to have had difficulty signing up due to questions about things they had forgotten or gotten confused about.
The bank is HCSB in Plainview, Texas. They have been around since 1934, formerly operating as "Hill Country State Bank."
Some other info on the account:
So, now, I am just impatiently waiting for the paperwork to arrive via pony express.
In practice, the way I will use this account is in tandem with my local TD Bank account. I will deposit checks in TD Bank and then ACH transfer the bulk of the cash to HCSB. I'll write checks against HCSB. I'll keep a modest balance in TD Bank for "just in case" contingencies. I think I'll use HCSB for ATM withdrawals, but I could use TD as well.
I just finished reading an essay on Edge by noted computer scientist David Gelernter entitled "Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously" which basically argues for his concept of lifestreams as a better model for publishing and accessing information than today's web model. Rather that organizing information in a spatial form, he recommends that we think about and organize information along the time dimension. As he puts it:
The Internet's future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle -- instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market -- the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story.
He proceeds to describe the nature of the problem and how lifestreams will address it:
13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important -- not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.
14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams some called blogs, "feeds," "activity streams," "event streams," Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.
16. Your own information -- all your communications, documents, photos, videos -- including "cross network" information -- phone calls, voice messages, text messages -- will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.
17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order -- putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.
18. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet will move through streams. You will be able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or auctions or new findings in any field, or traffic, weather, markets -- they will all be gathered and blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream will be added. The result is your mainstream: different from all others; a fast-moving river of all the digital information you care about.
In short:
To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis.
There is much more to his model for information in the "Cybersphere", but time-based lifestreams are his core starting point.
It is less than eight weeks until the annual Entrepreneurial Connections (EntConnect) conference, from Thursday, March 25, 2010 through Sunday, March 28, 2010. Traditionally the conference consists primarily of a reunion of former readers of Midnight Engineering magazine and a few newbies who have gotten suckered into trying it out, but each year we try to figure out new ways to attract fresh blood.
Check out the conference Web page for an idea of what the conference was like last year. Hopefully the page will be updated very soon for the details for this year. I do know that the hotel rate has jumped from $79 to $89, despite the fact that we are still only in the early stages of a prolonged economic recover from a dep recession. It will be held at a different hotel, the Crowne Plaza Downtown Denver, which is actually in downtown Denver. We hope to have a notable keynote speaker, but as usual the primary focus will be sessions led by your fellow entrepeneurs.
Here is my traditional 30-second elevator pitch blurb for the converence:
Whether you are an entrepreneur or thinking about starting your own business or simply need a good excuse to go skiing in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the Entrepreneurial Connections conference (EntConnect) may be just the conference you have been waiting for. Targeted primarily at engineers (hardware, software, and other) and others with a strong technical interest, it is more of a loosely-structured "unconference", with plenty of opportunities for a relatively small group of participants (15 to 40) to network or even give their own presentations on a very wide range of topics from technology, business strategy, intellectual property and legal issues, accounting issues, finance, marketing, sales, and even selling your business. With plenty of time to ski or otherwise enjoy the mountains and Denver area (great time to visit Boulder or Colorado Springs as well), the conference is a great opportunity to "learn and share" and otherwise have an "out of box" experience. Participants and speakers range over the full spectrum from wannabes and newcomers to successful young entrepreneurs and seasoned veterans. The conference is an excellent opportunity to meet up with former readers (and possibly even the publisher) of Midnight Engineering magazine as well. The conference runs from Thursday, March 25, 2010 through Sunday, March 28, 2010.
Visit the official conference Web site, EntConnect.org.
I have been attending the conference since it first started in 1992 as ME SKI '92 and then evolved into ENTCON and then Entrepreneurial Connections or EntConnect.
I actually have not even started planning my trip. I need to decide whether to come in on Thursday or Friday and leave on Sunday evening or Monday. In the back of my head I have even contemplated taking the time to take the train, but that's not a high probability, yet.
For a little nostalgia, check out the original ME SKI '92 conference announcement.
Oh, and please feel free to join the Midnight Engineers Yahoo discussion forum.