Scott Burns on Retirement

I definitely disagree with Scott Burns on politics (especially his views on Social Security), but the man does write a great financial column:

Work, Part 2: Men need to pay more attention to women. They're a lot more adaptable than we are.

My wife retired this year, kind of, and she is as happy as I've ever seen her. She works for good causes and is useful. But the money meter is no longer running.

The weaker sex (men, if there was any doubt) would live longer if we could only see life as a cooperative festival rather than a competitive struggle.

Work, play and opportunity cost: The greatest dilemma of continuing to work is fairly subtle, something you don't think about at 30: Every hour spent working is an hour lost to play.

Money: In the big picture, it is less important, not more important.

Some will criticize this statement, noting that it's easy to say money isn't important when you have plenty of it.

But one of the true blessings of being older is that objects don't mean much. Friends do. Objects cost money. Friendship is free. It comes from the unlimited currency of the heart

Investing: But 40 years of investing has taught me that rented brains seldom help us build our nest eggs. Rented brains feel a deep spiritual need to build 20,000-square-foot log cabins in Jackson Hole with the return on our money.

Headphones

Piaw's reviews of headphones for the ipod

First of all, forget the earbuds that come with the ipod. They are terrible, and not at all what I would consider either comfortable or practical. Note that despite my mention of helmet compatibility in these headphones I neither endorse nor encourage the use of headphones while riding your bicycle in traffic!!

Sennheiser PX 100 Headphones

I paid about $38 for these when they went on sale a while back on Amazon.com, and they are great! Plugged directly into the ipod, the sound is neutral, and almost as good as my Sennheiser 600s with an Airhead amplifier. They fold up neatly into a box the size of a spectacle case, and are very comfortable to wear on hikes as long as 4 hours or so. These are my favorite headphones for hiking or general walking around.

Koss KSC 75

These are the ones to get if you can't stand having a headband over your head, or have to wear a helmet while listening to your music. They fit nicely on the helmet exterior, and despite the loose feeling connection, don't fall off easily. They sound great for $14, and while not as nice as the PX 100s, are cheap enough that if you destroy them you won't feel guilty about them. The plug is also a very ipod friendly 90-degree plug, which isn't true for the Sennheiser.

Koss Sport Pro

At $22, these are disappointing. I bought them when I gave my mom my KSC 75s, and they do work under your helmet, but the headband isn't super-comfortable under the helmet. (You can tilt the headband backwards so it doesn't interfere with the helmet) They do fold up neatly into a nice compact package and clamp nicely to your head so they don't allow as much road noise as the KSC 75s, but despite that they still do not sound as nice as the KSC 75s and are a far cry from the Sennheiser PX 100s. I only recommend these if you've already tried the KSCs and found that they don't fit your ears for one reason or another.

View of the Santa Cruz pier from the Boardwalk 

View of Monterey Bay (& Big Sur) from the top of Skyline Blvd
(Photo digitally enhanced in Picasa with a graduated filter)

More riding

Up Old La Honda, down 84, up Alpine road, down Page Mill. 50 miles, and 1400m of climbing (4593 feet). It was gorgeous, of course.

Thoughts from the ride: it's hard to make friends as you get older. For one thing, everyone's incredibly busy, with kids, with work, or with their existing friends. The days of saying, "Can you come out and play?" and then spending the day hanging out and doing stuff are perhaps one of the luxuries we don't get when we're adults. But when you do get a chance to do so, it's a lot of fun, and really something to treasure.

I thought of us
So hard to talk these days
Did we change
Or were we strangers all along
Tell me what caused us to turn away
--- Wall of Silence, The October Project

My favorite Halloween picture.

Scott Burns predicts a recession

And I believe him. Together with the imminent collapse of the housing bubble, we're going to see some tough times:


... Skeptics should consider this brief list:

•The rising cost of gasoline. With the typical household consuming about 1,000 gallons a year, an increase from $1.50 a gallon to $3 meant a purchasing-power loss of $1,500.

•Rate increases for electricity and natural gas.

•Rising medical co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses for health care, plus rising employee health insurance premium costs. Premium costs were up 10 percent in 2004 alone.

Another way to see the same thing is to examine wage gains.

In 2004, the average weekly earnings of private nonagricultural workers rose only 2.2 percent. The consumer price index rose 3.3 percent over the same period.

Scott Adams starts blogging

And it is a very good blog indeed. Very much worth reading!

To the best of our knowledge interviews Margaret Atwood

They interview her about her latest book, Oryx and Crake. Scarlet should listen to this because at one point Margaret Atwood denies her existence. She says, "Girls/women don't spend hours and hours in front of the computer playing strategy games." Scarlet is much more capable of doing that than I am, though I'm sure that Evan has cut into her gaming significantly. Yet I suspect that Scarlet will not be the kind of person who would consider video games to be rotting her kids' brains.

Review: Freakonomics

Freakonomics

Yes, I'm late to the party. Levitt & Dubner actually visited Google a few months ago, but by then I already had the book on the queue at the Santa Clara County Library. It's a great read, covering everything from crime to sumo wrestling and the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan by Superman (a true story!). Highly recommended!


Recall for a moment the two boys, one white and one black, who were described in chapter 5. The white boy who grew up outside Chicago had smart, solid encouraging, loving parents who stressed education and family. The black boy from Daytona Beach was abandoned by his mother, was beaten by his father, and had become a full-fledged ganster by his teens. So what became of the two boys?

The second child, now twenty-seven years old, is Roland G. Fryer Jr., the Harvard economist studying black underachievement.

The white child also made it to Harvard. But soon after, things went badly for him. His name is Ted Kaczynski.

Climbing Black Mountain 

Family pix on the surrey 

Riding a Surrey at Monterey 

View from the overlook on the waterfall trail at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park 

Big sur roadside view 

Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life

An excellent book covering what's essentially "Economics 101" for non-economists or for people who skipped that class in college (or high school). It unfortunately doesn't cover some of the complexities that are in typical economics textbooks (such as network externalities and increasing returns to scale), but given the limited space, that's understandable.

Recommended if you're not already an economics junkie.

The Talent Myth

Gladwell came to give a talk at Google, which prompted me to mine his web-site for more good stuff. The Talent Myth is great reading, and has a lot of very good lessons for smart people, who tend to overvalue smartness.

OK, this takes the cake



The mixing of the Apple ipod and religion seems particularly appropriate.

Republicans are Evil, part III

Well, the U.S. government has to get money from somewhere. As a two-term former Republican senator from Florida, where do you suggest we get money from?

What money?

The money to run this country.

We'll borrow it.

<>I never understand where all this money comes from. When the president says we need another $200 billion for Katrina repairs, does he just go and borrow it from the Saudis?

In a sense, we do. Maybe the Chinese.

Is that fair to our children? If we keep borrowing at this level, won't the Arabs or the Chinese eventually own this country?

I am not worried about that. We are a huge country producing enormous assets day in and day out. We have great strength, and we have always adjusted to difficulties that faced us, and we will continue to do so.

List of 2005 Book Reviews

I've decided that it's a good idea to put links to all my book reviews in one post, for my own needs. They're not listed in any particular order, though what I've done is for series of books, to place the books in series order (i.e., the order in which they're intended to be read) Having this list will let me select books of the year (at the end of each year), and also provide a handy link off to the right so new readers can have a collection to jump to.

The best books of 2005 get special mention in their own post.

Fiction

• Excession
  
• The John Varley Reader
• The Drawing of the Dark
• Iron Sunrise
  
• A Deepness in the Sky
• Year's Best Science Fiction, 22nd Annual Collection
  
• The Rhythm Section
• A Fire Upon The Deep
• The Time Traveller's Wife
  
• Idlewild
• Cavedweller
• The Golden Compass
• The Subtle Knife
• The Amber Spyglass
• The Black Company
• Shadows Linger
• The White Rose
• The Silver Spike
  
• Shadow Games
• Never Let Me Go
  

Non-Fiction

• British Walking Guide: Coast to Coast Path
• A Cost to Coast Walk
  
• Fantastic Voyage
• Freakonomics
  
• Hidden Order
  
• The Future of Success
  
• The Cheating of America
• The Search
  
• The Wright Exit Strategy
• Hanging out with the Dream King
• Climate Crash
  
• Fooled by Randomness
  
• Blink
  
• The Long Emergency
  
• The World Is Flat
  
• Why We Buy
• Collapse
  
• Moneyball
  
• Fever Pitch
• Dealers of Lightning

Graphic Novels (AKA comic books)

• A Distant Soil
• A Distant Soil: Ascendant
  
• Orbiter
  
• Castle Waiting
  
• Batman, Child of Dreams
  
• The Astonishing X-Men: Gifted
• Flight Vol 1
• Flight Vol 2