July 2023
7/2
I defer to you the choice of a beard groomer, because I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. I do feel like I could use something like that. We have a couple Andis clippers, one designed for cutting hair, the other for edging, which is what I use now, those and a pair of sheers. The blades on those could probably use replacing. I would like some options to help me shape the beard, which I struggle with. I like a natural shape, but not to the point of manicured. I haven't bought into the "manscaping" trend of the last 20 or so years; seems to me another cultural trend pushed to sell more products.
I've looked at the Tilley selection.... A lot of options, and I'm not really sure what the difference is. It would be nice if they had a guide to help me find what I might like, or to tell me what the difference between the various models are. I like the darker color options, like the navy blue I have, and also the olive color. I'll keep it in mind and give it another look at some point.
It sounds like your income comes from the NNS pension, supplemented with 401K withdrawals and savings accounts, and next year you'll start getting SocSec? It looks like you have to start making withdrawals from 401K at age 72 if you aren't already. As for the pension, is that a set amount you get every month/week/year, or does it change based on markets/inflation, and is there a risk of it running out/ending, or is it guaranteed?
The stories you shared about co-workers working lots of overtime but desperate for their checks I find interesting. In the book Becoming Your Own Banker the author talks about "Parkinson's Law" which states that work will always expand to fill the time available for its completion, but he spins it to say that spending will always increase to meet income. I feel like so many jobs, unless you're one of the fortunate ones who have found a way to be sufficiently compensated doing what you are passionate about, can be reduced to "money harvesting", and so we spend our lives harvesting money, but many of us don't know what to do with it once we have it, beyond getting what we want/need at the time.
What are your general thoughts on taxation?
---
Emailed above to my dad. I did not include this:
And what you say about the dwindling of the value of money is true. The US dollar has lost all intrinsic value. "Fiat", or "it has value because we say so", and the only way they can say so is by only accepting it as a way to pay taxes and forcing others to accept it as payment. I think that's one of the main reasons why they still demand direct taxation and not just pay everything through inflation, to maintain the illusion that it has intrinsic value. Personally I think the idea of taxation is at the core of nearly all ills, that a person or group of people can take someone's property because they "know better" or "for the greater good"; it seems to me just another form of playing God, and if government had to ask for money, if people could vote with their dollar as they do with a ballot, it would be revolutionary. The Founding Fathers got some things right, but keeping taxation around was not one of them!
7/5
Every man has a single finger on the truth, and perhaps some have more of a finger than others, but no one man has a grasp of it, his four fingers and a thumb around it, to wield as a tool.
---
I started cutting my own hair for the same reasons you did, was rarely happy with the cuts I got, so I figured if I was going to be unhappy about it, I may as well own it, and not pay for it, and perhaps I'll learn a new skill. I had a basic cut I was pretty good at, took me about an hour from start to after clean up, where I would trim it down with scissors to make it easy on the clippers, then fade it up with the clippers and leave some length on the top. Sometimes I wonder if cutting our hair is like giving up a part of ourselves, our individuality, if our hair enhances our ability to sense or feel things going on around us, and by cutting it we're suppressing that sixth sense.
I was wondering, do you use scissors on the back, and how you go about that since it's hard to see. I'd like to trim mine up just a little so it's more even, since the back is a bit longer than the front, since that's basically the difference it started with after the last time it was cut. Liz doesn't seem comfortable doing it for me, so I'll probably be stuck doing it myself unless I can convince one of the older kids. There may be a trick to doing it oneself if I search YT.
Do you have a back up plan if the pension disappears (since it sounds like it's not guaranteed? Re: 401K, did you choose to withdraw everything when you retired, or were you forced to? Did you put it into a different account (perhaps an annuity?) afterward so that it could continue to grow/provide an income?
That's interesting about your coworkers trying to duck taxes, and I've heard similar stories, where people took it to court and proved income tax to be unconstitutional. I've also heard stories of people who stopped paying their mortgage and got the foreclosure thrown out by showing that the money that the lender provided them was created out of thin air, i.e. not backed by reserves in the bank. I can't confirm any of those true and certainly don't have the cojones at this point in my life to try either myself.
I asked you about taxation to get another perspective, because I've come to understand over the last couple years that it is immoral, specifically the idea that under certain circumstances (i.e. some deceased persons signed a piece of paper saying so, and a bunch of our neighbors checked off their names on a piece of paper) any person or group of people has a right to take someone's property without their consent. One might say we are giving our taxes, but only so far as someone under gunpoint might "give" their wallet to a mugger. Yes, some of the services government provides may be necessary, but who's to say who knows how best to meet those necessities? For example, what if not everyone agrees with how the government is providing and sanitizing water? Should those who disagree be forced to fund such a project?
If the presidential or senatorial or representative candidate you vote for loses, why should you then have to financially support their directives? Wouldn't it serve everyone better if they had to win over your support, especially if they won by a small margin? Conversely, what if your candidate wins but you find that their actions in office conflict with their campaign promises that happened to be the reasons you voted for them in the first place; wouldn't it serve everyone better if you could then withdraw your support? I wonder about that: If we were a truly free society, where everyone's property rights were fully respected so that everyone could vote with their dollars as they do with their ballots, how much better off we would be. Taxation as a concept, regardless of how small the government starts, carries with it the promise of full-blow communism. We've seen it here in the U.S., how it's only gotten bigger. Look at our transit system: inefficient, costly, unsustainable as there is no guarantee how long the oil will continue to flow, not to mention downright dangerous, and yet we continue building more roads and widening highways as if the oil will flow forever. Why? Because the DOT has the monopoly, because we can't vote with our money, and so it's business as usual until the shit hits the fan and the government needs to take more of our property to clean up the mess they made.
---
Emailed above to my dad.
7/7
Dick,
I am grateful for your words today and blessed to have had you as my baptism sponsor. It was a lot of fun building that pantry, and I am fondly reminded of it every time I have to grab something out of there, which is quite often! While I seek to live peacefully with earth's many inhabitants, the deer, slugs, Japanese beetles, rabbits, and as of late raccoons (they have been clawing away at our first ever harvest from one of our peach trees just before they go ripe!) are doing there best to tempt me away.
I hope you are well and that we get to talk soon. Take care!
---
Emailed above to Dick this morning.
---
I appreciate the birthday wish, and happy aphelion day! I think I'm older now than you were the last time we saw each other.
You had asked me about the garden.... It's going pretty well. I feel like I'm always meeting new challenges, and constantly having to rethink my routine and strategies, which is disheartening. A lot of the greens that I seeded out in late February are still pumping out leaves, namely chard and I believe a type of collard. I thought they'd be skeletonized by caterpillars by now, but I've seen birds flying in and out of there under the leaves. We had a nest of chicks in our garage on one of the upper shelves. We kept the garage door open during the day and closed it at night. I would hear the babies chirping away when the parent was close. Then one day they were gone. I only heard them for two or three weeks. They grow up fast.
This is also the first year I planted corn that hasn't been blown down by the June thunderstorms; I dug the bed and buried some food scraps just before planting, which I think made the difference and allowed the corn to get its roots deep and anchor itself. Deer are still finding their way into the backyard area and at this point I'm not sure how. They seem hungry lately and have been frequenting our yard multiple times during the day, which is not normal--although last year, a mother doe were leaving her fawn in our backyard during the day. One of our peach trees is producing fruit for the first time this year, but I think a raccoon is getting to the fruit just before it ripens; there are claw marks on many of the fruit, and one of them was half chewed.
I haven't had much success with fall crops and I'm hoping to change that this year, but that means starting to plant now. I placed an order for seeds Monday of last week, but I haven't gotten word yet that it has shipped, so I'm getting anxious.
It sounds like you pay taxes for the same reason I do, to avoid the inevitable violence against me and my family if I don't. I don't know that all insurance is a racket, though most of it is probably inflated thanks to government interventions. I think health insurance is becoming a new type of taxation, since I guess there is a penalty if you don't have it? And it's ridiculously expensive, again thanks to government interventions.
I use checks for a few things, mostly to avoid extra fees (and to avoid costly typos on my part as I experienced this past January with trying to pay our HOA fees electronically for the first time and apparently typed in my account number in wrong, which ultimately cost me $30 and a lot of time wasted trying to fight it), and rarely have cash. I never pay with a debit card, learned that a long time ago and not the hard way. We've had a few incidents with our CC info getting stolen, but I keep an eye on our expenses and it's never cost us anything. With a debit card, it's your money that's stolen, but with the CC it's the bank's money, and you only give up your money when you pay the balance, and so there is a level of protection in that you could just not pay. Banks care more about their own money being stolen.
Going digital does concern me, but I feel we may be too far gone as it is. I heard about how in Canada they were locking the truck protesters and anyone assisting the protesters out of their bank accounts. In China they were trying out a social credit system in some places. I imagine it is still going on. I try not to worry about it, because what can I do? But then sometimes I wonder if I could write something like Thomas Paine's Common Sense that somehow resonates with people and starts a movement. I think we live in an age where tyranny could be ended peacefully, for the most part, but I could be wrong. The only way to know is to try, I suppose.
Thanks for the haircut pointers!
---
Emailed above to my dad this morning.
7/9
What I mean by voting with your dollars is simply funding that which you want to support. For example, if there is a company that you know does humanitarian work that you like to see happen, you might go out of your way to buy their products because you would want to see them prosper and continue/expand their humanitarian work. In a truly free society where all government funding would be voluntarily given (i.e. not through compulsion by threat of violence), if you like your representative's proposals, you might donate money to his/her discretionary fund or a designated fund; while you may or may not have voted them info office by ballot, you are essentially voting for them to succeed in their proposals through your donations. Conversely, if a candidate wins that you do not like, you would pull your funding until convinced otherwise.
The wealthy are already getting more than the poor; it's likely this would continue, but they'd have a much harder time. Property must be maintained and protected; once you acquire more than you can handle yourself, you have to start hiring help. I think many of us would prefer to have less than we can handle so that we can enjoy our lives and give from our abundance, but there are those who probably enjoy the fun of it, of trying to see how much they can control and how many people they can get to do the work for them. But in a truly free society, the natural tendency will be toward self-sufficiency, and hired help will get more expensive. M&Bs currently pour money into politicians and lobbying because there is a guaranteed cash flow running through D.C. from taxation and borrowed Fed dollars, and they want some of it to flow into their pockets; it's an investment for them, but when that cash flow is no longer guaranteed, the investment will be much riskier. And switching currencies will also be on the table, so if someone finds a way to game the system and hoard a bunch of it so that it becomes hard to come by, the general public will find a safer medium of exchange, and that initial currency will plummet in value. It would not be an easy or predictable society, but it would be slaveless and, I think, saner and more prosperous. It's amazing how people's behavior can change when they're treated with respect and decency. There's nothing respectful or decent about mugging someone.
We have wills but they probably need to be updated since we had them done before the youngest two came along. I'd like to keep as much out of the government's hands as possible.
Thank you for sharing the details of your passive income situation. It's helping me see our future a little more clearly. And thank you for the advice. Gratitude is something I've struggled with, but I think I'm getting better at it.
I have some big professional choices to make in the coming years as the kids get older and move on. I recently heard that car mechanics around here are making double what I make. I think I'm overdo for moving on from my current employment (and 3%/yr raises aren't going to cut it), but I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up.
---
Emailed above to my dad this afternoon.
I defer to you the choice of a beard groomer, because I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. I do feel like I could use something like that. We have a couple Andis clippers, one designed for cutting hair, the other for edging, which is what I use now, those and a pair of sheers. The blades on those could probably use replacing. I would like some options to help me shape the beard, which I struggle with. I like a natural shape, but not to the point of manicured. I haven't bought into the "manscaping" trend of the last 20 or so years; seems to me another cultural trend pushed to sell more products.
I've looked at the Tilley selection.... A lot of options, and I'm not really sure what the difference is. It would be nice if they had a guide to help me find what I might like, or to tell me what the difference between the various models are. I like the darker color options, like the navy blue I have, and also the olive color. I'll keep it in mind and give it another look at some point.
It sounds like your income comes from the NNS pension, supplemented with 401K withdrawals and savings accounts, and next year you'll start getting SocSec? It looks like you have to start making withdrawals from 401K at age 72 if you aren't already. As for the pension, is that a set amount you get every month/week/year, or does it change based on markets/inflation, and is there a risk of it running out/ending, or is it guaranteed?
The stories you shared about co-workers working lots of overtime but desperate for their checks I find interesting. In the book Becoming Your Own Banker the author talks about "Parkinson's Law" which states that work will always expand to fill the time available for its completion, but he spins it to say that spending will always increase to meet income. I feel like so many jobs, unless you're one of the fortunate ones who have found a way to be sufficiently compensated doing what you are passionate about, can be reduced to "money harvesting", and so we spend our lives harvesting money, but many of us don't know what to do with it once we have it, beyond getting what we want/need at the time.
What are your general thoughts on taxation?
---
Emailed above to my dad. I did not include this:
And what you say about the dwindling of the value of money is true. The US dollar has lost all intrinsic value. "Fiat", or "it has value because we say so", and the only way they can say so is by only accepting it as a way to pay taxes and forcing others to accept it as payment. I think that's one of the main reasons why they still demand direct taxation and not just pay everything through inflation, to maintain the illusion that it has intrinsic value. Personally I think the idea of taxation is at the core of nearly all ills, that a person or group of people can take someone's property because they "know better" or "for the greater good"; it seems to me just another form of playing God, and if government had to ask for money, if people could vote with their dollar as they do with a ballot, it would be revolutionary. The Founding Fathers got some things right, but keeping taxation around was not one of them!
7/5
Every man has a single finger on the truth, and perhaps some have more of a finger than others, but no one man has a grasp of it, his four fingers and a thumb around it, to wield as a tool.
---
I started cutting my own hair for the same reasons you did, was rarely happy with the cuts I got, so I figured if I was going to be unhappy about it, I may as well own it, and not pay for it, and perhaps I'll learn a new skill. I had a basic cut I was pretty good at, took me about an hour from start to after clean up, where I would trim it down with scissors to make it easy on the clippers, then fade it up with the clippers and leave some length on the top. Sometimes I wonder if cutting our hair is like giving up a part of ourselves, our individuality, if our hair enhances our ability to sense or feel things going on around us, and by cutting it we're suppressing that sixth sense.
I was wondering, do you use scissors on the back, and how you go about that since it's hard to see. I'd like to trim mine up just a little so it's more even, since the back is a bit longer than the front, since that's basically the difference it started with after the last time it was cut. Liz doesn't seem comfortable doing it for me, so I'll probably be stuck doing it myself unless I can convince one of the older kids. There may be a trick to doing it oneself if I search YT.
Do you have a back up plan if the pension disappears (since it sounds like it's not guaranteed? Re: 401K, did you choose to withdraw everything when you retired, or were you forced to? Did you put it into a different account (perhaps an annuity?) afterward so that it could continue to grow/provide an income?
That's interesting about your coworkers trying to duck taxes, and I've heard similar stories, where people took it to court and proved income tax to be unconstitutional. I've also heard stories of people who stopped paying their mortgage and got the foreclosure thrown out by showing that the money that the lender provided them was created out of thin air, i.e. not backed by reserves in the bank. I can't confirm any of those true and certainly don't have the cojones at this point in my life to try either myself.
I asked you about taxation to get another perspective, because I've come to understand over the last couple years that it is immoral, specifically the idea that under certain circumstances (i.e. some deceased persons signed a piece of paper saying so, and a bunch of our neighbors checked off their names on a piece of paper) any person or group of people has a right to take someone's property without their consent. One might say we are giving our taxes, but only so far as someone under gunpoint might "give" their wallet to a mugger. Yes, some of the services government provides may be necessary, but who's to say who knows how best to meet those necessities? For example, what if not everyone agrees with how the government is providing and sanitizing water? Should those who disagree be forced to fund such a project?
If the presidential or senatorial or representative candidate you vote for loses, why should you then have to financially support their directives? Wouldn't it serve everyone better if they had to win over your support, especially if they won by a small margin? Conversely, what if your candidate wins but you find that their actions in office conflict with their campaign promises that happened to be the reasons you voted for them in the first place; wouldn't it serve everyone better if you could then withdraw your support? I wonder about that: If we were a truly free society, where everyone's property rights were fully respected so that everyone could vote with their dollars as they do with their ballots, how much better off we would be. Taxation as a concept, regardless of how small the government starts, carries with it the promise of full-blow communism. We've seen it here in the U.S., how it's only gotten bigger. Look at our transit system: inefficient, costly, unsustainable as there is no guarantee how long the oil will continue to flow, not to mention downright dangerous, and yet we continue building more roads and widening highways as if the oil will flow forever. Why? Because the DOT has the monopoly, because we can't vote with our money, and so it's business as usual until the shit hits the fan and the government needs to take more of our property to clean up the mess they made.
---
Emailed above to my dad.
7/7
Dick,
I am grateful for your words today and blessed to have had you as my baptism sponsor. It was a lot of fun building that pantry, and I am fondly reminded of it every time I have to grab something out of there, which is quite often! While I seek to live peacefully with earth's many inhabitants, the deer, slugs, Japanese beetles, rabbits, and as of late raccoons (they have been clawing away at our first ever harvest from one of our peach trees just before they go ripe!) are doing there best to tempt me away.
I hope you are well and that we get to talk soon. Take care!
---
Emailed above to Dick this morning.
---
I appreciate the birthday wish, and happy aphelion day! I think I'm older now than you were the last time we saw each other.
You had asked me about the garden.... It's going pretty well. I feel like I'm always meeting new challenges, and constantly having to rethink my routine and strategies, which is disheartening. A lot of the greens that I seeded out in late February are still pumping out leaves, namely chard and I believe a type of collard. I thought they'd be skeletonized by caterpillars by now, but I've seen birds flying in and out of there under the leaves. We had a nest of chicks in our garage on one of the upper shelves. We kept the garage door open during the day and closed it at night. I would hear the babies chirping away when the parent was close. Then one day they were gone. I only heard them for two or three weeks. They grow up fast.
This is also the first year I planted corn that hasn't been blown down by the June thunderstorms; I dug the bed and buried some food scraps just before planting, which I think made the difference and allowed the corn to get its roots deep and anchor itself. Deer are still finding their way into the backyard area and at this point I'm not sure how. They seem hungry lately and have been frequenting our yard multiple times during the day, which is not normal--although last year, a mother doe were leaving her fawn in our backyard during the day. One of our peach trees is producing fruit for the first time this year, but I think a raccoon is getting to the fruit just before it ripens; there are claw marks on many of the fruit, and one of them was half chewed.
I haven't had much success with fall crops and I'm hoping to change that this year, but that means starting to plant now. I placed an order for seeds Monday of last week, but I haven't gotten word yet that it has shipped, so I'm getting anxious.
It sounds like you pay taxes for the same reason I do, to avoid the inevitable violence against me and my family if I don't. I don't know that all insurance is a racket, though most of it is probably inflated thanks to government interventions. I think health insurance is becoming a new type of taxation, since I guess there is a penalty if you don't have it? And it's ridiculously expensive, again thanks to government interventions.
I use checks for a few things, mostly to avoid extra fees (and to avoid costly typos on my part as I experienced this past January with trying to pay our HOA fees electronically for the first time and apparently typed in my account number in wrong, which ultimately cost me $30 and a lot of time wasted trying to fight it), and rarely have cash. I never pay with a debit card, learned that a long time ago and not the hard way. We've had a few incidents with our CC info getting stolen, but I keep an eye on our expenses and it's never cost us anything. With a debit card, it's your money that's stolen, but with the CC it's the bank's money, and you only give up your money when you pay the balance, and so there is a level of protection in that you could just not pay. Banks care more about their own money being stolen.
Going digital does concern me, but I feel we may be too far gone as it is. I heard about how in Canada they were locking the truck protesters and anyone assisting the protesters out of their bank accounts. In China they were trying out a social credit system in some places. I imagine it is still going on. I try not to worry about it, because what can I do? But then sometimes I wonder if I could write something like Thomas Paine's Common Sense that somehow resonates with people and starts a movement. I think we live in an age where tyranny could be ended peacefully, for the most part, but I could be wrong. The only way to know is to try, I suppose.
Thanks for the haircut pointers!
---
Emailed above to my dad this morning.
7/9
What I mean by voting with your dollars is simply funding that which you want to support. For example, if there is a company that you know does humanitarian work that you like to see happen, you might go out of your way to buy their products because you would want to see them prosper and continue/expand their humanitarian work. In a truly free society where all government funding would be voluntarily given (i.e. not through compulsion by threat of violence), if you like your representative's proposals, you might donate money to his/her discretionary fund or a designated fund; while you may or may not have voted them info office by ballot, you are essentially voting for them to succeed in their proposals through your donations. Conversely, if a candidate wins that you do not like, you would pull your funding until convinced otherwise.
The wealthy are already getting more than the poor; it's likely this would continue, but they'd have a much harder time. Property must be maintained and protected; once you acquire more than you can handle yourself, you have to start hiring help. I think many of us would prefer to have less than we can handle so that we can enjoy our lives and give from our abundance, but there are those who probably enjoy the fun of it, of trying to see how much they can control and how many people they can get to do the work for them. But in a truly free society, the natural tendency will be toward self-sufficiency, and hired help will get more expensive. M&Bs currently pour money into politicians and lobbying because there is a guaranteed cash flow running through D.C. from taxation and borrowed Fed dollars, and they want some of it to flow into their pockets; it's an investment for them, but when that cash flow is no longer guaranteed, the investment will be much riskier. And switching currencies will also be on the table, so if someone finds a way to game the system and hoard a bunch of it so that it becomes hard to come by, the general public will find a safer medium of exchange, and that initial currency will plummet in value. It would not be an easy or predictable society, but it would be slaveless and, I think, saner and more prosperous. It's amazing how people's behavior can change when they're treated with respect and decency. There's nothing respectful or decent about mugging someone.
We have wills but they probably need to be updated since we had them done before the youngest two came along. I'd like to keep as much out of the government's hands as possible.
Thank you for sharing the details of your passive income situation. It's helping me see our future a little more clearly. And thank you for the advice. Gratitude is something I've struggled with, but I think I'm getting better at it.
I have some big professional choices to make in the coming years as the kids get older and move on. I recently heard that car mechanics around here are making double what I make. I think I'm overdo for moving on from my current employment (and 3%/yr raises aren't going to cut it), but I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up.
---
Emailed above to my dad this afternoon.