If you refinanced your mortgage 8 or 10 years ago there’s probably no reason to do it again. (Maybe your mortgage is almost paid off!) But mortgage rates are setting new generational lows and if you have any substantial balance left it might be worth refinancing.
I can kinda understand the 0.1% (with secure bunkers on high ground) talking down climate change. But what’s up with ordinary people living near a coast? How are they not demanding urgent action?
Interesting to me that the Great Recession doesn’t even show up as a blip on this graph.
With no card number, CVV security code, expiration date or signature on the card, Apple Card is more secure than any other physical credit card.
Source: Apple Card launches today for all US customers – Apple
While @jackieLbrewer was working at the bakery there was a cash register glitch. For several days they took credit card payments on paper, writing the number down by hand, and then entering them manually at the end of the day.
Those customers would have been totally secure from being able to buy bread.
Very interesting and right up my alley: “fully automated luxury communism isn’t just science fiction: it’s a going concern with real evidence on the ground.” Via BoingBoing. h/t @limako
Cathy Reisenwitz is trying to reconcile her belief in the benefits of free enterprise with her growing realization that many industrial-produced edible substances are not healthy food. See: The processed food tribe.
Personally, I do not find those ideas at odds: Corporations operating in a free market will make maximizing their profits their only goal.
Producing food that’s cheap to make and tastes great is the obvious way to maximize profits. Negative health effects that don’t show up for years (and don’t kill the customer for decades) are entirely consistent with the profit-maximizing goal of a corporation.
The health of their customers will only be prioritized to the extent that poisoning their customers isn’t profitable. (Sometimes not even then: See the multiple scandals related to Chinese companies adulterating milk and baby formula with melamine.)
A free society would make a priority of allowing each individual to choose what to eat based on their own values. One would assume that being as healthy as possible would be a priority for most individuals, but there are many stumbling blocks. (One of the biggest is that getting accurate information is hard in a world where corporations fund studies designed to produce and publish inaccurate results about the harms of eating too much sugar. Another is that food scientifically designed to be hyper-palatable is in fact so tasty as to be hard to resist, especially for children—and the tastes one forms in childhood influence one’s tastes as an adult.)
Free markets are the best mechanism we’ve found for optimal allocation of resources. But the market only allocates resources to achieve one set of goals (maximum profits) and ignores other goals. Maximum public health is one of the goals that a free market does not concern itself with.
As to the topic of the term “processed” food, I have found it useful to include a category of “minimally processed” food when thinking about what’s likely to be healthy.
Blame the bosses, not the robots, when your job gets automated away. ‘Robots’ Are Not ‘Coming for Your Job’—Management Is
Does money come with new-agey energy flows or emotions attached? For most of my life, I’d have said no (or more likely just rolled my eyes at the question). As you might expect from an economics major, I bought into a free-market model of how money worked.
Experiences over the course of my career, gradually convinced me that those ideas were . . . Well, not wrong exactly, but incomplete. I came to understand that money isn’t the kind of neutral object that it is in economic theory.
Ken Honda’s new book will let you skip over the 25 years of first-hand experience it took me to figure this out.
If you think money is a neutral, transactional artifact, then it just makes sense to earn as much as you can in the easiest ways possible. Because I was a software engineer whose career started in the early 1980s, it was pretty easy to find a job that paid well, and salaries grew rapidly, so I was doing just fine as an employee. There are certain things that come along with being an employee, the main one being that you’re supposed to do what your boss tells you to do.
I was okay with that. More okay than a lot of my coworkers, who objected when the boss wanted them to do something stupid or pointless.
My own attitude was always, “Yes, attending this pointless training class is a waste of time that I could be spending making our products better. But it’s easier than doing my regular work, and if my boss is willing to pay me a software engineer’s salary to do something easier than write software, I’m fine with that.”
The idea that I was fine with that turned out to be wrong. In fact, putting time and effort into doing the wrong thing is a soul-destroying activity. Getting paid a bunch of money for it doesn’t help. That money is, in Ken Honda’s terms, Unhappy Money.
Money that flows into (or out of) your life in a positive way is Happy Money—money that you receive (or give) as a gift, money that you earn by doing something useful (or spend to get something that you want or need). Unhappy Money is money lost or gained by theft or deceit, paid grudgingly by someone who feels cheated or taken advantage of—or, as in my own case, paid willingly, but paid to someone who doesn’t think what he’s doing to earn it is worth doing.
Honda’s thesis is that if you adjust your life around this idea—so that your own money flows are all Happy Money (and that you refrain from receiving or spending Unhappy Money)—your life will improve. My experience is that this is true.
If that insight is the key to the book, probably next most important is understanding that “There’s no peace to be found in always wanting more,” which is one of the points I tried to make when I was writing for Wise Bread.
To be honest, probably one reason I like the book so much is that a lot of the practical advice sounds a lot like what I talked about for years at Wise Bread. (For example that the strategy of just saving more quickly reaches limits in terms of its utility for making your family more secure.)
Much of the book is on the details of how to shift all aspects of your financial life toward Happy Money. There’s a long discourse on what he calls your “money blueprint”: The attitudes and practices passed down from parent to child (or rejections of those attitudes and practices), people’s basic personalities, and simple ignorance about how money works. A crappy money blueprint will predictably lead to people into cycles of Unhappy Money flows.
I’ve been interested in money for a long time, at least since sixth grade. Between studying economics in college, and embarking on an enduring interest in investing, I’m sure I’ve read hundreds of books on money. Among them, Happy Money: The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money stands out.
Whenever I tweet about a company, I like to go ahead and tag the company in the tweet, so they can see what I’m saying about them. Besides that, I’ve a natural inclination toward brand loyalty (for companies whose products I like), so I like to keep up with what the company is doing, and twitter is a good way to do that. (Not nearly as good a way as an RSS feed, but that’s neither here nor there.)
The upshot is that I’m not infrequently searching for a company’s twitter handle—and just lately, I’m pretty often not finding one. More and more companies are limiting their social media presence to Facebook and Instagram—both of which are terrible choices.
Facebook is very bad. It tries to monetize passing on information! It deliberately holds back information that the company wants to share and that I want to see, specifically in order to pressure the company to pay up.
Instagram may be even worse. It is inherently about sharing pictures, whereas information is often best presented as text. Worse yet, it won’t share links, which is almost always what companies (should) want to do, if they’re trying to tell me about the sorts of things I want to hear about.
Twitter is a bad company that provides a service which is bad in many ways, but at least it will show me all the tweets of the company I’ve followed, tweets which can include text and links as well as pictures.
The photo at the top is of a donut I bought this morning at Industrial Donut—the latest company I noticed limiting its social media presence to Facebook and Instagram.
Why has the Fed been able to produce asset inflation but no price inflation for past 10 years? My guess: lack of union power and globalization are blunting transmission into wages and prices. But I don’t see an easy way to test that hypothesis.
