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The year I take up guitar and investing.

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Now barely 27 years old, I feel I shouldn’t be talking about retirement. But a conversation yesterday about pensions found my boss and I in pessimistic moods at the thought of working till death and got me pondering a modern interpretation of work and retirement.

Consider: as workplace seniority becomes less valuable for employers and less likely for employees, the merits of working in one place from college till done are … what? As the pensions of generations X, Y, and so on hurtle towards a gauntlet of debt obligations, retirement as we know it seems less likely, and given our probable physical fitness (and my personal hope for mental fitness) in the years we will be considered elderly, we’re going to work when we’re older and probably be okay doing it.

This isn’t to say that retirement is impossible. In fact, I’m thinking I’d like to retire sometime in my 30s. And again in my 40s. And 50s – once a decade until death.

You can call it an unsubsidized sabbatical, because that’s what it is. I prefer to think of it as retirement in bursts: after saving and investing at a moderate to high rate for about eight or nine years, take 12~18 months off then re-enter the workplace. I would have to save more money to stay liquid during that time of unemployment (and hope for good health), but the tangible benefits of saving would be revealed to me sooner rather than later. Knowing I would be seeking new employment at least once every decade, I would be forced to maintain leading-edge expertise in my career(s). And, of course, I’d get to enjoy some rest and relaxation, to invest grand swaths time in pursuits other than, well, saving for retirement.

Among the caveats is that health care for the unemployed in the United States is a curious menu of undesirable choices (though continued residence in this country is not mandatory). There’s a possibility I’ll end up with a longer burst of retirement than I anticipate and run out of money before landing a new job. And though I’d like to raise a family, my savings rate would likely suffer under the fiscal weight of a household of more-than-one, the aforementioned curious menu would be untenable to my wife and children, and the discontinuity inherent to this approach would likely emotionally strain people around me (given they’re not also disposed to the idea). Institutionally, the structures built around the model of retirement at a later age – Medicare, Social Security, IRAs, the AARP, daytime television – reinforce the traditional model of working until the seemingly arbitrary age of 65 and thereby also burden younger working generations with the cost of elderly care.

Living as a 38-year-old with an ostensibly twentysomething physicality, I’ve clashed with this institutional structure, and though in 40 years (if it’s still around) I’ll be its benefactor, I desire more greatly to live independently of it and be less burdensome to youth to come. As a fan of retirement, however, this solution effectively uncouples long-term relaxation from aging. And by this retirement calculator (given an annual percentage rate of 7%), my first retirement at 35 is pretty manageable – even 32 is a possibility. So, to that end, among the things I acquired for myself on this birthday was an individual investment account – a few sound bets on blue-chips in a weak economy should make that 7% achievable.

I am also acquiring a new MacBook and hosting local friends for adobo on Saturday.

The day I turned 26 was conferred best day ever status by a confluence of events; the year since has been true to that rainy evening’s promise. Today can’t match it and few days in my life will compare, but I pause to recognize now the feeling of being loved and appreciated and the fact I have friends who write stuff like this. This will be the year I take up guitar and investing. In the meantime, Christina plans to lavish me with dinner at Restaurant Nora.

Posted in Nostalgia and Politics | 1 Comment »

Health and wealth.

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Megan McArdle’s take on preserving the American private health-care system ends with the assertion that “at this point, the US is the only country left providing a hefty incentive for inventing new treatments.”

In McArdle’s case, US = profitable sectors of medical patients, while the movements towards single-payer health care (which I unequivocally support) mean that “US” will pretty much equal all taxpayers (with most of the burden placed on the very richest, if the House bill comes to pass). If all taxpayers have to foot the bill, medical innovation should gravitate towards those diseases that affect the largest parts of the population regardless of revenue potential.

In short, erectile dysfunction can wait while the development of a cure for cancer is subsidized.

I can’t think of a major pharmaceutical company developing drugs or a hospital that performs operations knowing that healthy people are (statistic goes here, help me out people) more productive, and in the case of contagious diseases, keep others healthy and productive as well. Goodwill and utopian notions of an illness-free society aside, there is an argument to be made that there are greater economic benefits in all manner of other private industries when people are healthier.

Good health, like sound education and thoroughly developed transportation infrastructures, is a veritable force multiplier, one that makes us more consistently productive and (even quantifiably) valuable. Better smiles lead to better paychecks, flu shots mean less sick days, less sneezing on the Metro can potentially save dozens of employers lost productivity. Any kind of public health care would actually spur entrepreneurship since health care would become a part of the byzantine process of self-employment tax rather than a separate byzantine process of applying for over-marketed insurance. I could go on.

Now that I’m done assuaging the capitalists I count among my friends, I believe that privatized health care (especially in the wealthy United States) is symptomatic of a culture that neither values sustained wealth over a quarterly economic outlook nor believes that health is a public good, and I think that’s contemptible. The degree to which various systems of subsidized health care address the public good – conceptually or in reality – I’m open to debate.

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That’s just the way it is; things will never be the same.

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Please forgive the continuing election post-mortem.

This is required viewing for anybody who confuses sporting a lapel pin for true patriotism (nicked from The Daily Dish). I question and doubt my government because I want it to be better, because its impact on the world is undeniable. All those baseball games where people stood respectfully and listened to a celebrity of dubious talent sing the national anthem were just practice for this moment. Eddie Izzard said about the American national anthem: “70% of what people react to is the look, you know, it’s how you look; and 20% is about how you sound; and only 10% is what you say.” But that crowd on St. Mark’s Place knew and believed 100% of what they were saying. The awkward pause before ‘banner,’ where the crowd collectively catches its breath to belt out the last three words of that phrase, gives me chills.


Courtney took this picture of me in the crowd at James Hoban’s. Even if in the future I am happily married with five children, this past Tuesday may still be one of the top 5 best days of my life.

And just as 25 years and 364 days is just a night of sleep away from 26 even, I know that though the president-elect is now preparing for the quantum leap into residence of the Oval Office, the deep, fundamental flaws that bore this cynicism and disbelief have yet to be addressed. The ecstasy that washed over crowds was just rain water; the ground supply still needs to be cleansed of its bitterness. Until then, I still worry. I’m always prepared to be let down, to be told I’m wrong again, to be part of a minority stewing over beer and waiting for vindication.

I’ve been listening to “Changes” by 2pac pretty much constantly since the morning of 5 November. My iTunes library is rarely sorted by artist, but that morning, it was, and this song was at the top of the list. I remember riding around Irvine with Rishi and Ky Vinh, this song blasting and us commenting in between laments about our respective existential crises that it was still relevant in 2005. That two lines of that song — and although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president — were rendered moot in one night is why St. Mark’s Place burst into song, why I can’t stop grinning, why I stick my tongue out at the sky not to spite the heavens but to catch a drop of rain.

Posted in Media, Music, Nostalgia, Photos and Politics | No Comments »

You complete us.

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

After the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, I became acutely aware of how voter fraud and suppression are perpetrated and how the simple process of tallying a majority can get so damn complicated. I don’t doubt that it happened again yesterday, that there were places where voters were intimidated, places where good citizens were confused for felons, places where the vote just didn’t work. And I don’t doubt that it will happen again. I fear this is just an inherent assumption of the millennial voter.

But those practices don’t scale, not for a margin of victory like this. I undertook my birthday rituals — noodles, haircut, and more liquor than advisable — but I don’t know how to celebrate something like this, how being in a majority is supposed to feel, how to feel when something I’ve wanted for years is uncompromisingly, by law, scheduled to happen. It wasn’t just some random lesser-of-two-evils Democrat who won but the one who when I watched the DNC keynote in 2004 I knew instinctively had to be president in my lifetime.

And that instinct, over time, was confirmed with a political platform and manner reasonably proximal to mine for him to earn my vote yesterday morning. And though I may come to regret this decision in November 2012, I doubt it. I know this feeling well, perhaps too well, and for as improbable to me as that outcome is four years from now, I regret more now the times in my life I was certain of a future but unable or unwilling to defend my vision. Yesterday’s euphoria was borne of that vindication, that private victory that marked the end of my September, writ large for over 63 million people hardly a month later.

When I left the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on East Capitol Street yesterday morning, I put my headphones back on and the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow” was playing. And it asks, this time tomorrow, where will we be? This time tomorrow, what will we know?

Over dinner, I raised a glass to victories, big and small, for us to celebrate something everyday. When I left Bourbon, not even last call when Obama had finished his victory speech, I told the cab driver my address and sat silently for the ride home through a light rain. I don’t know how to celebrate something like this. All I got for my birthday was a big, stupid grin and I’m still wearing it.

I woke up at 9 am to my Umbrella Today message, half an hour ahead of my alarm. E Street was strafed with jackhammers. I’ll retire FiveThirtyEight from my daily surfing, frame the cover of my DC Voter’s Guide. And the big, stupid grin: I could get used to it.

Posted in Millennials, Nostalgia, Photos and Politics | No Comments »

Being vindicated is the most fun a person can have without taking their clothes off.

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

I’m going to keep my mouth shut and let (inter)national news media do the talking.

And then there’s the blogosphere’s take on it.

Also, I should note that I was on the outside of this decision and that the people who made it are a group that includes my direct supervisors and others vastly above my pay grade. My contribution was actually just making that page where the error message now resides.

And I don’t agree with it at all, not when reducing the number of requests was really what would bring the situation under control, and the simplest way to do that would be to just surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. Let me repeat and italicize that seemingly revolutionary idea: surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. This is what I advocated for years. And anybody with an eye on the trends – search logs, web stats, etc. – and a long enough memory to recall the drop of the 9/11 Commission report PDF and the Mark Foley resignation (which brought down the Clerk’s site with hourly spikes two years ago, to the day) would’ve seen this coming as early as Thursday. Where the asinine triage command originated I can’t identify. It’s just unfortunate that constituents hoping to contact their representatives in earnest are the group most adversely affected (to say nothing of the group in the Infrastructure branch monitoring the servers, the legislative correspondents under the deluge, and anybody else freaking out about the arbitrary path the American government has chosen to remedy massive failures in private enterprises).

I sent over to Lou a copy of the top 20 search queries from Sunday, 28 September, and he’s posted it to the Search Analytics blog at Rosenfeld Media. I intend to follow through with this research (off the top of my head: “bailout” was the top query starting on 23 September, “Barney Frank,” “email,” and “contact” each cracked the top ten in days preceding), not that it’ll make a dint of change in my employers’ minds. It’s just nice to know, as time passes, as I’m now well into my fourth year of employment, that I haven’t lost my ability to think beyond what this job requires – rote production of kilobytes of rhetorical fluff – and about what this situation requires.

I wonder what legislative change, if any, this will prompt. Granted the House has pressing issues on the floor but this is just embarrassing. Can the paradigm with which lawmakers have approached the World Wide Web – mid-’90s stamp of technology adopted for its own sake – be shifted into something more appropriately modern by passing a law? That remains to be determined, although I’d like to help write that legislation, if only to actually guide and assist instead of just saying “I told you so” years after the fact. Not that it isn’t fun to say.

I told you so.

Posted in Design and Politics | No Comments »

All flowers in time.

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Hardly five days back from Port-au-Prince and I’m moving the one-quart plastic bag of liquids and aerosols from my rolling suitcase to my duffle bag and filling the rest of the space with clothes appropriate to the current Portland weather—a mild peak of 57 from a low of 52, intermittent rain. And when I return on Wednesday, I’ll have a mere 36 hours before I receive Eric for a two-week stay.

And this seems to be the prevailing pattern for 2008: travel somewhere new, host an old friend (or my mother, as the case was in April). After Eric leaves, I’ll be back in Manila for most of July until the beginning of August, and I’m planning trips to Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur during that stay.

Then it’s All Points West, UX Week, and orientation at Georgetown. So much for those unaccountable weekends of concert-going, movie-going, museum-going, and other-country-going, binge drinking to the last. So much for open tomorrows.

I’ll keep my comments about my trip to Haiti brief, and first, yes, I actually was there. Except for my colleagues, it seems my updates about a new passport picture and maladrone were all taken as groundwork for an elaborate ruse, and although there were moments even I didn’t believe it was happening, it did. I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the country, let alone the city of Port-au-Prince, as we were largely confined to the hotel and the tony hillside during our three-day stay, conducting transactions in American English and dollars. Ultimately, we were there to do a job, and after my end of that was torpedoed by possibly the most ill-conceived website launch I’ve witnessed, I’m told we still fulfilled our symbolic purpose, which I have to convince myself counts for something. And as a natural extension of the fact I rarely parted with my DSLR there, I assumed the role of delegation photographer—there’s ample evidence I am not making this up.

Nevertheless, given the thesis I’m planning to write, it was a fruitful trip for my personal academic purposes. And though our itinerary was narrow, we made the best of it, three single guys on straight cash per diem. Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, and I know, I know, I know…

Apropos today’s itinerary, man, is romance in the 21st century a weird beast or what? Sure, good things happen to me when it rains, but whither tornadoes?

“I know you say there’s no-one for you, but here is one.”

Posted in Love, Music, Politics and Travel | No Comments »

Sailing.

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Chris: “I love sailing, but some people say it’s a way of going nowhere slowly at great expense.”
Me: “I work for the federal government. I could get used to sailing.”

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New lens.

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Back from a second whirlwind weekend in New York in as many weeks, and there’s a veritable goon squad of deadlines bearing down in the next eleven hours before I leave for Port-au-Prince. Nevertheless, I have a new camera for the trip—93/75 with thundershowers, 6-megapixel sensor and 18-55mm Nikkor kit lens, and the general feeling that when I return Friday, I’ll be seeing the world in a totally different light.

Posted in Objects, Politics and Travel | No Comments »

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