He knows about my housebound situation and has been sending me things to read.
‘Personal finance is never really about the money,’ says CFP Akeiva Ellis at The Bemused.
“I
wish I had known sooner that while financial literacy and knowledge are
important, personal finance is never really about the money. Though I
had a lot to learn, not knowing was never my biggest obstacle to
progress; doing was.
Real
progress started when I finally asked myself, ‘Why am I like this?’
when it came to money management and began unpacking the hidden beliefs
and narratives I carried about money. Those often unexamined stories act
like a bossy backseat driver, influencing decisions without you even
realizing it. Once you address that part, the tactics finally stick.”
"Margin Retreat" is when an enterprise drop simple, less profitable products/services and "retreats" to the high-end of the market because their costs have gone up and they lose money on the cheaper products.
Trucks and cars and snowmobiles and ATVs became bigger, faster and loaded with more "mandatory" features due to margin retreat.
A base S-10 pickup truck cost $12,600 in 1999 (and you could usually pick one up even cheaper at model close-out). Today, a Colorado work-truck has an MSRP of $36k or 3X as much. The annualized, compound interest of 4.3% in price doesn't seem outrageous but the official CPI numbers are a 93% increase and an "official" rate of inflation of 2.6%.
Fast food
The fast food industry shows how the market creates a conveyor-belt that pushes enterprises into margin retreat.
McDonalds opened a drive-in restaurant but didn't make a lot of money, so they famously decided to only prepare and serve those items they made money on. They got rid of the girls on roller skates and the fancy glasses. Hamburgers, fries and soft-drinks all served in paper. They printed money.
The idea caught on. Thousands of me-toos sprang up.
Competitors offered bigger burgers. McDonalds matched them. Competitors offered fish sandwiches. McDonalds matched them. Menu complexity grew.
Real-estate agents became adept at sniffing out where McDonalds was shopping for new locations. The asking prices went up.
Civic leaders started leaning on McDonalds to "contribute to the community" as if providing thousands of kids their first employment experience was not enough.
Customers started suing McDonalds, not because McDonalds is bad but because they have money.
Stockholders expected dividends.
Staffing became a challenge.
And a flotilla of bare-bones burger-joints opened up that undercut the bottom end of McDonalds menu; competitors with names like In-and-out Burger, Just-a-Burger. In time, if they are successful, they will acquire the non-business costs that accreted on McDonalds, like so many layers of water depositing calcium carbonate on a stalagmite. A company that was once agile and nimble is now cemented to the floor by costs.
Margin retreat is everywhere
You see it in the cost of housing.
Builders say they lose money on stick-built houses smaller than 2000 square-feet. That is sad because two empty-nesters don't need 2000 square-feet and many of us don't want to live in apartments.
Lots, utility hook-ups or on-site wells/drainfields, driveways, garages, worker rules, waste disposal rules, ever-advancing insulation and electrical codes...all add to the cost of the building and don't add a single, salable square-foot. In fact, the insulation requirements reduce the usable, interior room.
Getting back to trucks
Back in the 1990s, it became fashionable for ranchers and people who grazed animals to leave their $35k pickup parked in the driveway and use a simple UTV + trailer to do fence maintenance. Why use a vehicle that can go 90mph and carry 2000 pounds of cargo when you needed a vehicle that could go six mph over rough ground or maybe 35 mph on gravel roads while carrying (or towing) 300 pounds of fencing tools and supplies?
Maybe you had a way to carry a light varmint rifle or a shotgun for targets-of-opportunity but the that was the extent of the frivolity.
At that time, UTVs like the 400cc Yamaha Kodiac/Grizzly seemed to hit the sweet-spot. MSRP of about $6000.
Today, the smallest engine that ride comes with is a 700cc motor and the MSRP plus mandatory destination charges will cost you $11k.
And, just as sure as God made little-green-apples, there are competitors flooding into the space the big names abandoned.
An Indian couple was awarded $200k in a court case when a college told them to stop using the microwave ovens to heat their curry sauce. Other students/employees complained about the smell and the mess.
I expect that in very short order, large numbers of students and employees will be firing up their George Foreman grills and filling the air with the sweet smells of barbecuing beef.
It is hard to imagine that any judge could rule AGAINST beef-eaters for cooking the traditional foods of their peoples even if it makes other employees retch.
For the record, I once worked in a factory that forbid the cooking or reheating bacon in the break-rooms. I wonder why.
I was not able to complete my maintenance goals of warm-up and then four sets of six reps of dead-lifting my bodyweight.
The warm-ups went OK. My warm-up isn't very scientific. It is six reps of 135lbs (the bar + a 45 pound plate on each end) then six reps of 185 (the bar + a 45 and a 20 pound plate on each end).
I managed one set of six reps of my bodyweight and my glutes and hamstrings said "Enough".
I don't think the flu made me weak. I think the inactivity that went along with the flu did.f
I expect the stamina to come back quickly if I lift once every three days and walk on the other two days.
Eaton Rapids is usually placed in USDA zone 6A (predicted annual low of -10 F)
It was -16 F, actual, when I looked at the thermometer this morning.
We tend to be warmer than some of our neighbors because our house is on a knoll and we have tree cover. Cold air is dense and runs downhill and puddles-up in the hollows.
A dense tree-cover is helpful in terms of softening temperature extremes at ground-level. "Cold" is partially the result of the heat-energy stored in items on the ground radiating through the atmosphere to deep-space. Clouds help retain over-night heat. Branches over-head also help reflect some of that heat back.
A secondary effect of heavy tree cover is that the sap and the buds freezing release heat and cause a very localized rise in temperature. Multiply that slight rise a million times and it makes a difference.
Shallow, snow-covered bowls with no vegetation or strctures emerging above the snow are the worst-case scenario for low temperatures. They are parabolic mirrors aimed at deep-space and have no other thermal mass than the human stupid enough to choose to bivouac or have their snow-machine founder there.
Gordian Knots (not to be confused with Don Knotts)
The Phrygians had no king, but an oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Lycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become king. A peasant farmer named Gordias drove into town on an ox-cart and was immediately declared king. Out of gratitude, his son Midas dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios and tied it to a post with an intricate knot ...comprising "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened"
The ox-cart still stood in the palace when Alexander the Great arrived. An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to rule over all of Asia. Alexander the Great wanted to untie the knot but struggled to do so before reasoning that it would make no difference how
the knot was loosed. Alexander the Great drew his sword and sliced it in half
with a single stroke. -Adapted from Wikipedia
Rules
I want to blather a bit about "rules".
I believe that reality is filled with chaos and turbulence and unpredictable events. It may be predictable for short intervals but things fall apart as scales increase.
This causes us, as humans, endless intellectual anguish. We spend our childhood forming mental-maps and yarn-balls of if-then-else logic. It is a universal conceit to think that our mental models accurately and comprehensively map the world.
It is pretty easy to demonstrate that it doesn't, though. Maybe there is a rule that says "Don't go into that bar!" or "Don't walk through that neighborhood after dark". The reason for those "Don't go" rules is that the operative rule-sets we are carrying in our heads fails (often catastrophically) in those environments.
Declaring "That is against the rules" is not a viable defense against a mugger or rapist.
Trump
The main reason progressives HATE Trump is because he doesn't honor the rule-sets in their heads. This is an unprecedented (in our lifetime) event.
For example, the head of NATO reportedly told Trump that if the United States is attacked, that no European country will assist us in defending our nation. Four generations ago the US initiated the Lend-Lease program and the support has flowed and the defense umbrella stood without a hiccup since.
Intelligent people are unable to perceive how
distorted and self-serving their mental models became over decades of
self-referential evolution. Julian and Fatou sets are a mathematical example of how simple rules applied over many iterations can produce bizarre and complex outcomes.
The Euros are outraged when Trump demands that the Europeans reciprocate in any way. In the experience of every living European, American generosity has been akin to gravity: Reliable, always there, a force of nature that you don't have to pay for.
Other Gordian Knots
The war-gaming guys have the same blind-spots as everybody else.
Who says China will not use nukes to seize Taiwan? If they did, how certain are we that the US would retaliate with nukes? Isn't that what the Slotkin/Kelly insurrectionists were prepping the troops for? "Disregard your superiors when they tell you to launch nukes?"
