Looking to spend (waste?) more time on the web, here’s a great place to start:
http://twistedsifter.com/2013/08/maps-that-will-help-you-make-sense-of-the-world/
Some mind-blowing statistics displayed graphically as a map. And that leads right into
http://twistedsifter.com/2013/03/most-perfectly-timed-photos-ever/
The 50 most perfectly timed photos ever. And no doubt there is much more on Twisted Sifter.
Ron
Quora Weekly Digest is really interesting this week, a good read IMO.
A friend of ours is considering retirement in the immediate future. She has come to the conclusion that she will run through her savings if she continues to live in Mountain View. She could move to Arizona or Florida, but she is adventurous and where’s the adventure there? She is considering retirement abroad, perhaps Thailand or Central America.
I’ve recommend www.escapeartist.com to her. This is a very informative and frank website that has ex-pat posts from around the world. It describes “how to” and the pitfalls in retiring in specific countries. There are wide ranging stories, from the joy of re-discovering yourself to the trials acclimating to a new culture. One story I will never forget tells of a guy who pissed-off the government while building a custom home. Construction was a long drawn out process. Shortly after moving in, government agents ransacked the home in the wee hours looking for drugs (or retribution).
I am not affiliated with escapeartist.com and have no reson to recommend them other than I enjoy the information provided. If you are considering moving to a foreign country, look into the information escape artist has available by country.
For example, Costa Rica law provides for squatter’s rights. In most instances, you will have no trouble purchasing property in Costa Rica, but…. If you do not visit your property every other month or have a reliable on site “grounds keeper”, you could lose your property to a squatter. There are even tales of real estate agents using squatter’s rights to steal back properties they just sold. I expect these are “bear stories”, there’s some truth there but not much. Still why take chances. Another example in Panama, Bocas Del Toro where a guy owned particularly nice ocean side land that a developer coveted. The owner was forced out by that developer and corrupt government official(s).
I will not retire to a foreign country, I enjoy the San Francisco Bay Area far too much to move. Also, there is the advantage of living in a country governed by laws.
Ron
OK, we live in a free democracy. Socialism is the devil, Capitalism reigns. GOOD.
But who makes the laws? A bunch of attorneys. And who do they make the laws for? Not you and me. Nooooo. They make laws for themselves, the wealthy attorneys, politicians, and their contributors for the most part. (democrats try, republicand don’t care in my view)
The latest round of “balance the budget” is an attempt by the wealthy to strip the poor of their safety net. In the words of Marie Antionet, “Let them eat cake”. (I’ll save this for another rant)
Each piece of legislation that passes congress has riders attached. What’s a rider? It is a series of special case laws enacted to grant priviledges to those who asked (read, can pay) for them. Some riders are so specific as to single out a particuar company in a particular county in a particular state for a reduction in the taxes that specific company has to pay. Corruption?? No, it’s our “new” democracy.
Right, I’d love to pay less taxes. We all would. But would we actually pervert the law to exempt ourselves as a “special case”, when our neighbors have to pay that tax? I leave the answer up to you. Are you one of the greedy “mothers” who would say yes? Apparently there are many wealthy people who have no compunction signing up.
I do believe that our grand experiment in representation for all has been pre-empted by unscrupuolus attorneys who are both greedy, self serving, or looking for renound and a paycheck. The poor in this country have no representation. The middle class is being squeezed out. I have no idea how to remedy the situation. I sure hope we are not the next Mexico or Bolivia, with the wealthy and the poor and nothing in between.
In California, prop 13 was intended to reduce real estate taxes; to avoid having grandma taxed out of her home. In actuality it was the very rich who saw taxes on their multi-million dollar estates going up to the point they were not sustainable. They pushed for prop 13 and the taxpayer rewarded them by passing the measure.
Prop 13 created an unequal playing field. The longer you have owned your home (or estate), the less you pay in taxes. The tax base of a home changes when it is sold. Move your home ownership into a trust and the trust owns the home. The trust can be passed on to children and grand children and the tax basis of the home is not adjusted. It increases at a very low rate.
This is what happens when attorneys control the government. It is no longer government by the people for the people. It becomes a circus, government by the wealthy for the wealthy ( or those who study the tax law, or any law for that matter).
I’m rambling.
I expect a ground swell of opposition to prop 13 in the next decade as young families realize just how much they have been screwed by the wealthy. My manager once said that he was paying more on his 3br Eichler in Palo Alto than John Paul Getty was paying on his mansion in San Francisco.
We all should pay taxes based on the current value of our property, PERIOD.
Don’t get me wrong. I have benefited from prop 13. My taxes are far less than new home buyers in my neighborhood. But I belive that is WRONG and should be corrected.
End of rant.
Ron
What do I hate most about the web? It is something most of us learned in kindergarden or 1st grade: put your name and date on the top of the page. How many posts do you read that are not dated?
Looking at my blog posts, I notice that they are not dated! This is a travesty. The difference between a post dated 1998 and one dated 2013 is vast. The posts should not be confused. How many times have you searched for something on the web and pulled up undated information? Is the data current, a year old or TEN YEARS OLD? How do you know?
I’ve actually emailed publishers about this. Name and F#(@ date at the top of the page please.
I will probably forget and probably often, but I will attempt to remember to date my posts.
Interest rates change. What is a deal today is expensive tomorrow or vice versa. A review of a gasthause in Deutschland in 2013 has no bearing in 2020. We know about the time value of money (if you do not, you should learn). What about the time value of information? It is probably more significant than the time value of money. For example, if I could time travel and I knew who will win the super bowl in 2014, or what Google stock would be priced at in 2015, is that valuable? So future information is highly prized (and not possible), current information if “true” is valuable, and “old news” is worth what??
So for all thosse who publish on the web, remember your kindergarten lessons. Name and Date at the top of the page, please!
Ron
This is a fun feed that I ran across doing some web search or other. I subscribed: free and it seemed interesting and it is. I get an email every week (feels like every few days) from Quora with “headlines” that refer to short articles at their site. Sometimes the entire email does not interest me. Today three of the first four headlines were interesting and I clicked through.
One was an article about a fellow who stopped a $10M robbery by fraud. http://jamesaltucher.quora.com/Claudia-Is-Worried-I-Will-Be-Killed-For-Posting-This
Or this:
What are important things and advice to know that people generally aren’t told about?Highly upvoted answers below make the following points:
Marry your best friend: If the person you’re the most comfortable with isn’t your spouse, make them! (Assuming this person is not your family member)
Don’t try to be a “grown up”: Always have fun. Mud-wrestle, sing, pillow-fight, at any age.
Don’t stop learning: If you start coasting through life, you’re gonna lose. Always stretch your intellect.
Don’t always try to be original: Just tell the story or paint the canvas or whatever.
Focusing on “fairness” will lead to stagnation.
If you’re not failing, you’re doing it wrong. (It’s OK to make mistakes.)
Don’t try to reason with mindless, irrational people.
Don’t stress yourself out with news and “staying informed” too much.
Do something that’s not for money.
The key to happiness is BUILDING stuff, not GETTING stuff.
True love and a good marriage involve a lot of fighting, not serenity.
Time passes by a lot faster than you’d think. This effect accelerates with age.
Wealth is relatively unimportant.
Some things can’t be learned; they can only be experienced.
Figure out who you are, then ACCEPT that person, and then BE that person.
Don’t wait for permission. Give yourself the okay.
Don’t lie to yourself.
Forgive as much as possible. Grudges achieve little.
Be humble (especially to the “little” people).
You and you alone control how happy you allow yourself to be.
Find a mentor and BE a mentor.
Find what you like and let it kill you.
You don’t have to eat everything that’s on your plate.
You don’t have to pick up a phone that’s ringing.
Always take action on things. People regret inaction more than action.
The past is something you learn from. It is not something you live in.
Wealth is measured by your happiness and not by your financial statement.
Your mind decides what is hopeless. Your circumstances do not.
More things will happen to you that you have absolutely no control over than things you do have control over. You ALWAYS have the power to choose how you will react.
To me the #1 issue is “don’t lie to yourself”. How can you deal with any issue if you are not operating from reality?
Ron
If you have access to the web, now you have no excuse. You can take Harvard or MIT on-line courses for free. That’s right, free. You can audit a class or take the class and get a certificate when you pass. I do not think these courses count for college credit, but that is not the point.
You can take classes from world class institutions for free. THAT is the point.
Educate yourselves, become informed on the issues. Do not believe what the talking heads are telling you wether it be Rushie/Fox News or Ed Schultz/MSNBC. Do the research. Seek out and be openn to alternative opinions.
I’ve signed up for PH201x Health and Society starting Nov 15th. I’ll be auditing.
Ron
I read nbcnews.com. It’s a good source of news. Not as good as NPR, but it is good. Imagine my surprise at the article presented below. I find this preposterous. Are people really that insecure in who they are that they cannot or will not present the good and the bad? Seems weird to me. If I have a bad experience, I’m willing to say so and explain what happened and why. Perhaps it was me, perhaps, the weather, or perhaps this is an experience best avoided and I can save the next fellow the displeasure!
Life is not a bowl of cherries, not always. I must say nearly all of my vacations have been big fun. The time I went marlin fishing two days in Cabo and caught nothing? That happened. Or the hike I took without map and compass in the Sierra to see what would happen. Well I got lost, big surprise there. Or the two week backpacking trip south of the Smokey Mountains that abruptly stopped short at Clingman’s Dome. I could not handle the bus loads of tourists driving up the road that I was sloggin up. So for me, the truth about the good and the bad is important. It is what happened. If you have a bad time, admit it and move on. You can lie to your facebook “friends”, but can you lie to yourself? What does that say about YOU? As for me, what I post on this site is and will be “the truth” as I experience it. I feel no need or compunction to misrepresent or to lie.
Your shiny, happy vacation on Facebook is a lie, and that’s OK
Dana McMahan NBC News contributor
Courtesy Megan Winfield
After her trip to Thailand, Megan Winfield’s Facebook wall was full of pictures like this one of the idyllic beach they visited. There were no photos or mention of her fever, or how much her family wanted to get off the island and back into air conditioned surroundings.
Not only do people edit their vacation photos they post on Facebook — selecting the ones of the best experiences, a little cropping here, a little faux vintage filter there — some are actually starting to edit what they do on their vacations in order to get a more impressive status update.
In a way, living your travels in real time for an online audience is like producing your own reality show. And in this version, everything is glorious all the time.
Megan Winfield, mother of two, took a family trip to an island in Thailand last fall. She posted pictures of the beach, but not any of her fever in tropical temperatures amid no air conditioning and no ice.
“We’re cranky, we’re over it, we’re like, ‘When can we get off this island?'” Winfield told NBC News. You never want to admit “when the wheels came off the bus.”
John Y. Brown III’s Facebook photos of his family’s Mediterranean cruise last winter likewise tell an abridged tale. “There’s a lot of stuff I’m leaving out, like meltdowns and sulking and sitting alone in my room nauseous and bored to death,” he said. “There’s the pictures we take and post, and there’s the pictures we don’t dare take and post.”
For instance, while in Athens, Greece, Brown spent a lot of time thinking about how dirty the city was and how his iPhone battery wouldn’t stay charged. He vowed never to return. None of that made it onto his Facebook feed. “I waited until we were at the Parthenon,” said Brown.
‘OK, everybody look depressed!’
Not only do travelers select the photos that put their trip in the best light, some say their decisions while traveling are influenced by what would get more “likes.”
“I find myself in restaurants and think, ‘Do I want a plain waffle, or do I want a monstrosity that has five different toppings and looks insane and it’s gonna make a better picture?’” Catherine Pryor of Oklahoma City said. She often finds herself going for the second choice.
“Trip editing” isn’t a surprise to Eleazar Eusebio, assistant professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. “We have a social pressure to portray what we’re doing as positive,” he told NBC News. “You don’t want to be ‘that person’ because you’ll call yourself out as an outlier. We don’t want (friends) to say ‘they are a downer because they can’t have a good time’.”
Before you start posting confessional updates on all your old vacation photos about how it really went down, fear not. “Posting positive pictures and presenting a ‘better face’ is a normal thing because it allows you to reframe the vacation in a way that makes the memories more rewarding and pleasant,” Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, told NBC News.
After all, “When you take a pictures nobody says ‘OK, everybody look depressed!’” said Eusebio.
Except for Winfield and her family. “Every trip you end up with pictures where you’re in front of something amazing like the Colosseum and someone is weeping,” she said.
“It started as a joke to get the kids to stop crying but turned into a tradition to get the camera out and say ‘here’s our sad picture’.”
I love what I do (mostly). There are always parts of any job that are not fun, but have to be done, Documentation is one example. Describing how something freshly minted works or how to use it for someone else: boring.
Ah, “the job”. Working is way over-rated. If you define yourself by what you do, you are one sad case. Many who do define themselves in this way (the overachievers in life) find themselves an early grave after a few years of boredom after retirement.
Better: you can define yourself by your relationships, by who you have saved or helped over the years, or by your family; but please do not go in for living vicariously through your children. Perhaps better is to define yourself by your dreams! What do you expect to accomplish? As we age, must our goals age with us?
Still sader is defining yourself by what you own. “He who dies with the most toys, is still dead”. Better to give some of those toys to the living, they can make better use of the “stuff”. That revisits your relationships.
For now I am very much tied (ball-and-chain) to my job. There is no travel of any significance in my immediate future. Sucks, in a way. My premis is that I will be able to “get outta Dodge” soon. Is 30 months soon? I guess that depends on your perspective. A 20 year old would see 30 months as forever ( ~10% of her life). An 80 year old may see 30 months as “tomorrow” (about 3% of one’s life). As Einstein discovered, “it’s all relative”.
So I work. To stay focused, I do not plan vacations. I am focused on how to solve today’s problem, how to advance the “product”. I am a software engineer; every day is different. For those who do not know, I peer into a monitor for long hours and bang on a keyboard and mouse. Booooring. Right? But no. Actually, like most software guys, I am problem solving. Focused on the interconnected pieces of a puzzle I am building. That puzzle and its solution is mostly in my mind with some piece of the solution defined in the structures I’ve hammered out on the keyboard. Mostly the constructs, the great scheme, is etherial; pure creation. It is like playing GOD with ones and zeroes. (religious nuts: that was a dig…)
I will probably never truely unplug. Retirement is not a “getting away from” (Dodge??), but a re-discovery. What really matters to you? Once retired, can you ask that of yourself? What really matters? To You?
Me? I have some inkling. I have long and short term unrealized goals and some future plans. Mostly I will be open to life’s random walk. The goal is not getting from here to there, it is the journey. But most important of all is to have a direction.
So much to discover, to do, to be, still to become! Define yourself by your J. O. B. ?
That’s not me.
Ron
Gaia, the ancient Greek goddess or personification of the Earth. Happy Mother’s Day.
Googling around this morning, I came across gypsieElder.com, an intriguing website; intriguing in-part because the website’s name is so close to mine. GypsieElder.com is a heartfelt rant on the evils we do, and a call through personal guilt to do something about it. The site is well written and thought provoking, but it left me with a haunted feeling.
My first reaction was a touch of guilt. In contrast to solving the world’s problems, eldergypsies.com is a celebration of the freedom to travel and explore the world. One of its goals: to search out new experiences in glorious environments; to provide a feast of what the earth has to offer. Selfish prospect when compared to saving the world.
It is my hope that I will give back as well as “take” in my travels. I expect to work in some environments: to teach, to build, and to encourage where I can.
My second reaction was more telling. Gypsyelder.com is a bit naïve. I support its emotional plea, but some implicit assumptions trouble me. I get the site’s righteous indignation born of living in a country whose domestic and foreign policy is often abhorrent. But from an historical perspective, the US is no different than any other empire through-out history. “The Imperial Cruise” documents US policy at the turn of the century with a historical retrospective early in the book.
We, individually and as “these great united states”, are evolving. The liberties declared in the Declaration of Independence have only recently been granted to all. Women were chattel, blacks were slaves, women’s suffrage became law in the US in 1919, and segregation only ended in my lifetime.