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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, June 21, 2003
Eric Hoffer On Racial Pride I mentioned a few days ago the absurd and demeaning "whiteness studies" programs that schools like Amherst are doing; a reader pointed me to a couple of recent essays by Thomas Sowell about Eric Hoffer, a migrant farm worker who turned himself into an intellectual: Having spent several years in blindness when most other children were in school, Hoffer could only do manual labor after he recovered his sight, but was determined to educate himself. He began by looking for a big book with small print to take with him as he set out on a job as a migratory farm worker. Who's On First Meets The 21st Century My mother just forwarded this to me. If you haven't ever heard Abbott & Costello do "Who's On First" you won't fully appreciate this: Hello, this is the Ultimate Computer Store. Can I help you? Friday, June 20, 2003
Gun Control Nuts Must Be Going Just Crazy Right Now Colorado went non-discretionary on concealed weapon permit issuance a couple months ago--and passed a state preemption law to strike down Denver's very restrictive gun control laws. North Carolina has just passed a reciprocity law that recognizes concealed carry permits from any state that recognizes North Carolina carry permits, effective August 14, 2003. (Sorry I don't have a newspaper or official legislative site URL for this--if you find one, let me know.) Ohio is very close to going from "no permits at all" to a non-discretionary permit law. The lower house has passed a decent law; the Senate has passed a decent law with some bizarre and potentially lethal provisions. Delaware's House has passed a reciprocity bill similar to North Carolina, but it hasn't passed the State Senate yet. What makes this so amazing is that Delaware isn't even a shall-issue state! IF you live in a Delaware, here's a list of State Senators that you should politely ask to pass the bill; if you are a tourist that passes through Delaware, suggest to Delaware State Senators that you are more inclined to visit Delaware if they pass this law. I sent them some email to that effect this weekend. A Third World Official Condemns the Evils of Western Culture, Including the Invasion of Iraq But for once you won't find any leftists agreeing with him, you can be sure. From the Sydney Morning Herald: Australians and their European brethren are a greedy, war-mongering mob who promote free sex and sodomy, are indifferent to incest and want to conquer the world.It's unfortunate that he doesn't understand the difference between the leftists who control our exported culture and big name universities, and the civilized parts of American society. The Democratic Party: Slave to Trial Lawyers This article from Associated Press about the food industry asking for protection from lawsuits just shows what slaves the Democratic Party is to trial lawyers, trying to enrich themselves with absurd lawsuits: WASHINGTON (AP) - Restaurants, cookie makers and other food companies are asking Congress to shield them from lawsuits by obese people.The trial lawyers, their slaves, and their pimps, are busy defending these absurd suits: John F. Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University, told lawmakers at the hearing that if the lawsuits really are frivolous, then the restaurants shouldn't have to ask Congress for help.This is the sort of manipulative intellectual dishonesty that I--and most other Americans--expect from a lawyer. He knows full well that frivolous lawsuits are expensive to defend, and that you can win every suit and yet be so devastated financially that you have to give in even when you are right. Banzhaf continues: "Note that the smoker lawsuits, the nonsmoker lawsuits, and the lawsuits by the states against the tobacco industry, all were initially called frivolous," Banzhaf told lawmakers at the hearing. "But they have all proven their worth and helped to make a significant dent in the public health problem of smoking."And here we see where the left wants to go: it wants to be, if not Big Brother, at least Big Mother. "You aren't eating enough green leafy vegetables! That's not good for you! You've already had one soda today!" And yet the left wouldn't think of saying, "Gee, I don't think it's wise for you have sex with dozens of different partners--you might pick up HPV or some other incurable STD." That's because the left isn't interested in freedom in any general sense, but only in freedom for certain behaviors that they like, such as promiscuity, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and encouraging children into sex too young. Rep. Mel Watt, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said after the hearing that while restaurant and food industries believe they should be protected from lawsuits, Congress should not interfere with people's right to sue them.What's next? Will we see lawsuits against the government for failing to adequately fence off oceans and lakes to prevent drowning? We obviously won't see lawsuits against the entertainment industry for promoting STD transmission, because trial lawyers and the entertainment industry are part of the same corrupt organization: the Democratic Party. Promoting Racism: The New Function of Universities From the Washington Post via Orin Kerr: AMHERST, Mass. -- Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege walk, and she wasn't happy about it.This is the sort of individually demeaning classroom exercise that argues for abolition of universities. One of the sociology professors at University of Idaho has students make a vagina out of clay--part of "demystifying" it for the students. (As if any significant number of the students haven't already had some significant level of interaction with the real thing by this point.) When I was growing up, the notion that that your race matters, instead of who you were as an individual, was a primitive idea of ignorant yahoos. Now it's a sign of being an intellectual. At some point, universities need to stop being therapy sessions for emotionally damaged pseudo-intellectuals like the professor teaching this "whiteness studies" class, and start being educational institutions again. If it doesn't happen very soon, there is going to be a taxpayer revolt on trash like this. Not exactly on target to this, but worth saying: When you take pride in your race--something that you have no control over at all--it's because you as an individual have done nothing in which you can take pride. This is the reason that "white pride" gets spouted by neo-Nazis who haven't managed to accomplish anything else. It's not any different with "black pride" or "Hispanic pride." UPDATE: I just realized that the joke is all on all of us. This "White Studies" movement is clearly in the same category as the film The History of White People in America (1985), starring Martin Mull. At least, I have to believe that. The alternative explanations are just too bizarre. Thursday, June 19, 2003
Handguns in America Before 1848 Among the claims made by Michael Bellesiles in his book Arming America was that there was no civilian market for handguns in America before Colt opened his Hartford revolver factory in 1848. Click here for two pages from the May 11, 1742 Boston Gazette. Most issues of this newspapers that I read from November 1741 through September 1742 (the end of the reel of microfilm, in this case) had at least one merchant offering guns for sale. This issue is a little unusual in having two merchants offering guns. Gerritt, whose ad appears on the last page in the upper right corner, usually offered both "fire-arms" and pistols. In this issue, he offers only only "neat Fire Arms". The ad at the bottom of the last page is from a gunsmith named Samuel Miller, offering "Neat Fire Arms of all sorts, Pystols... Firelocks." I was getting ready to finish up for the day at Berkeley library, and I thought, what happens if I pick a New York City newspaper at random? How long will I have to read to find an ad offering handguns? The answer is: the very first issue of the very first New York City newspaper that I picked out of the drawer. The paper was the New York Morning Herald for January 1, 1838. The exact same ads appear from two different merchants repeatedly for the first few weeks. You can see the dates and page numbers of the paper on which these identical ads appear here. You will notice one of these merchants advertises for sale "500 Guns, 300 Rifles, 2,000 pair Pistols"--and he runs this ad almost every day for more than two weeks. Humor It's a blonde joke, sent to me by a beautiful blonde Russian with whom I used to work, but good for irritating animal rights activists who lack a sense of humor. A young blonde was on vacation in the depths of Louisiana. She wanted a pair of genuine alligator shoes in the worst way, but was very reluctant to pay the high prices the local vendors were asking. Just In Case Your Child's Doctor Doesn't Get the Word From FoxNews.com: WASHINGTON — No one under age 18 should be prescribed the drug Paxil for major depression because the adult anti-depressant may increase a child's risk of suicide, the government said Thursday.The article goes to explain that child depression is different from adult depression. I have some concern that because a lot of the SSRI antidepressants are relatively low risk compared to traditional antidepressants, a lot of doctors are prescribing them to kids without sufficient attention. Sophisticated and Cultured France I'm so tired of liberals holding up France as a paragon of virtue and sophistication. The Telegraph is reporting: A Paris court last night halted publication of a book by a former investigating magistrate that claims France is institutionally corrupt.Of course, some of this corruption seems to involve France's relations with Third World thugs, and we certainly can't let some judge lift the covers on the extent to which French foreign policy involves cozying up to brutal thugs, can we? Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. These People Are Eligible to Vote Someone's blog is devoted to "interesting" book reviews from Amazon.com. Yes, it's a useful reminder that you don't need a command of English to use a computer. (Unfortunately, they don't have the excuse, "I am not a native speaker.") What's frightening isn't just the felonious use of English--it's the ideas that they manage to express anyway. Thanks to Orin Kerr for the link. Ann Clwyd, Labor MP, On Weapons of Mass Destruction; The Left's Excuse Making For Torturers From the London Times (thanks to Instapundit for the link): I never imagined when I wrote on this page in March about the plastic shredder used to kill in one of Saddam’s prisons that I would, some months later, read in a chillingly meticulous record book that one of the methods of execution was “mincing”.Read the whole thing. It's sobering. The 200 or so soldiers who have died overthrowing this kleptocratic torturocracy are personal tragedies for their friends and families; I hope the grieving families can take a little comfort knowing that their loved ones stand alongside the liberators of Dachau and Auschwitz among the great heroes of human history. For several generations now, the Left in America has allied itself with the most brutal thugs imaginable. They made excuses for Stalin--covering up the Ukrainian famine and genocide in the early 1930s. When Stalin and Hitler were (briefly) the best of buds, they were full of excuses for why war was a bad thing. In the 1950s, the American Left defended Soviet totalitarianism with the same excuses that Fitzhugh's Cannibals All! (1857) used to defend slavery--by attacking capitalism's freedom as "the freedom to go hungry and be fired by a heartless employer." When I was in junior high and high school, it was very fashionable to carry Mao Zedong's little red book, and defend the police states of Cuba and North Vietnam. In the 1980s, those with the integrity to speak out who spoke out about the horrifying crimes of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (such as Joan Baez), found themselves at odds with the American Left. In the last two years, the American Left and its counterparts in Europe have made excuses for why the U.S. should not overthrow this evil man and his government or rapists, torturers, and murderers. Any one of these situations might be characterized as evidence of a certain naivete about the real world. I'm beginning to see a pattern here, however. What I can't quite tell is whether the pattern is, "Every totalitarian torturer deserves our support" or "America is by definition the most evil nation in the world, and therefore any enemy of the U.S. must be good." Regardless of which is the factor, the net result is the same: the American Left are the cheerleaders for the world's monsters. Their concern about the thugs that our government sometimes backed during the Cold War increasingly appears not to be a genuine concern for human rights, but a simple love for totalitarianism. Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Great Cultural Moments in North American History From Canada: TORONTO (AP) - Canada will change its law to allow homosexual marriage, joining Belgium and The Netherlands as the only countries where same-sex couples can legally wed, Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced Tuesday.Well, for the moment. I do not doubt that within ten years, Canada's very liberal establishment will decide that it's just bigotry to allow churches to decide who gets to marry whom--or what. ("The groom may now kiss the bride." "Baaaaa!") Every time I find myself wondering how much lower the Catholic Church's moral stock can go, we get something like this: PHOENIX — Police arrested the Roman Catholic bishop of Phoenix Monday following a deadly hit-and-run accident after tracing a license plate number to his car and finding the windshield caved in.Yes, I know that most Catholic priests are not child molesters. The stunts that the Catholic Church has engaged in to protect its child molesters, however, fit right in with these charges. Of course, as I observed a few months ago, when it was announced that the Archdiocese of Boston was considering filing for bankruptcy to get out from under the civil judgements associated with this, the Catholic Church (the institution, not individual Catholics) no longer has any moral authority. As you probably know, I oppose a complete ban on abortion for a number of reasons, of which the strongest is that I don't it's enforceable right now. (It's probably not Constitutional, either. Roe v. Wade (1973) came to roughly an originalist result by completely bogus means.) Nonetheless, I am pleased to see this news story pop up: The former plaintiff known as "Jane Roe" in the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized abortion sought to have the case overturned in a motion filed Tuesday that asks the courts to consider new evidence that abortion hurts women.McCorvey says that her lawsuit back then was a lie. Similarly, Sandra Cano, the "Doe" of Doe v. Bolton (1973) says that her attorney lied, filing papers on her behalf concerning the right to an abortion that Cano says she didn't even know about. If you the only way that you can win your position before the Supreme Court is by lying, perhaps there's something wrong with your argument. UPDATE: Here's McCorvey's affadavit at The Smoking Gun. It's pretty sobering. Newsweek Article About Al-Qaeda in America Why, you might get the impression from the article that Attorney General Ashcroft's paranoia has a basis in fact: KSM had more diabolical plans for another of Khan’s American relatives, a commercial truckdriver named Iyman Faris (a.k.a. Mohammad Rauf). The truckdriver is a naturalized U.S. citizen, a longtime resident of Columbus, Ohio. His ex-wife told friends that in hindsight she finds it disturbing that her husband, a devout Muslim, had long expressed an interest in learning how to fly. He spent hours, she said, reading magazines about ultralight aircraft, gliders with small engines that can be piloted almost anywhere. The order to study ultralight aircraft came directly from KSM, according to intelligence documents. Monday, June 16, 2003
I Get Lots of Weird Spam But this isn't identifiably spam. From: "Remy Fox" testiclesadriatic@earthlink.netThe email address bounces. There's no attachment. What does it mean? McDonald's Efficiency: Good for the Bottom Line and the Employees My daughter is working at McDonald's this summer, and she has already noticed some interesting differences between how they organize production and the fast food operation that she worked in last year. 1. Everything is organized assembly line, and everything is at working level. She noticed that instead of having to squat down to get meat patties out of the refrigerator, or having to turn and twist, she can stand at her station, and make hundreds of hamburgers without moving. This is not only good for efficiency, but reduces back strains and repetitive motion injuries, because all the motions are fairly standard actions. 2. Anything that gets messed up, gets thrown away. At the other place she worked, every prepared food item that you threw away required documentation explaining why. McDonald's apparently would prefer that mistakes get thrown away without paperwork, because meeting customer expectations is a higher value than the cost of some materials. 3. They are starting her on three hour shifts until she is completely sure of what she is doing. She is very appreciative of this, because at the very beginning, it's easy to get confused about procedures. 4. The patties are cooked by a timer. She drops nine patties on the grill, puts down the top, and when the patties are cooked the required interval, the top pops up. Since the patties are uniform size and shape, I'm going to guess that McDonald's has spent some time figuring out exactly how long to cook them to guarantee food safety, without wasting time or energy--and you will notice that this doesn't require an employee to make a judgment, which might well be wrong. 5. Even in her little college town, when minimum wage jobs are scarce, they are paying her $6.25 an hour. This makes her very happy. Yes, McDonald's isn't haute cuisine, even of the fast food set. But these are signs of an organization that clearly recognizes that efficiency is good for the bottom line, the customer, and the employee. Sunday, June 15, 2003
How To Become Wealthy (Part 9) This is going into the permanent version at http://www.claytoncramer.com/rich/BecomeWealthy.html also. What Are Stocks? Stock is partial ownership of a corporation. If you buy stock in a company, you are either buying it directly from the company, or from someone who bought it from the company, or someone who bought it from someone who bought the company. Regardless of how many steps you are removed from the initial sale of the stock by the company, the net effect is the same: buying stock provides capital that allows the company to build factories, purchase materials to turn into a product, hire engineers to design a product, or one of the thousands of other necessary and sometimes unnecessary things on which companies spend money. What do you get when you buy stock? There are only rational three reasons to buy stocks: dividends, capital appreciation, or control. You may find that the stock you purchased only gives you one of these three items. (If it doesn't give you any of the three, you probably shouldn't be buying it.) Dividends Dividends are usually paid quarterly, and are a share of the profits of the company. Generally, profitable companies that have been around for a while pay a dividend. GM, for example, closed on June 13, 2003, at $36.20 per share. The last quarterly dividend that GM paid was $0.50 per share. Annualized, that would be a 5.52% return on your investment. Compared to stocks, and even to most short-term bonds, that's a pretty decent return. Of course, that's the last quarterly dividend. There's no guarantee that the next dividend will be $0.50 per share. It could be $0.75 per share--or it could be a big flat nothing, if GM didn't make a good profit, or the board of directors decided to put all the profits into new factories. Of course, if they did that, the price of the stock would almost certainly drop, as investors looked for places to get a better return on their money. Capital Appreciation One of the defining characteristics of the 1990s stock bubble was the large number of high-tech companies that were: 1. not profitable; 2. had never made a profit; 3. didn't see a profit coming anytime soon; 4. so everyone and his brother bought the stocks, and drove them to truly insane levels. What's going on with that? If you think a company that sells for $20 per share will be selling for $40 per share in six months, why do you care that they aren't making any money? After all, you'll double your money in six months! Okay, but why will the company's stock double in value in six months? Because everyone is buying it with that expectation. And what happens if, one beautiful morning, enough people get nervous that this can't go on forever, and start selling? Hmmm. No dividends because no profits. The stock stops rising in value. I guess I better sell. So why will anyone buy the stock that you are trying to sell? I guess they won't, will they? And you know why the great bubble of high-tech collapsed in April of 2000. Capital Appreciation & Dividends Dance Together It turns out even stocks that pay a dividend often have a capital appreciation component to them. If the only reason you bought GM stock on Friday afternoon was the 5.52% yield, you would be a bit foolish. That's a decent return, but you can buy any number of corporate bonds that have a better return than that--and with a bit more certainty that you will get the same bond interest payment twice a year. After all, GM's board of directors might reduce the dividend next quarter; they can't really do that with a bond. (The corporation could default on a bond, but that's not very likely; it's a promise, and once a corporation starts to break promises to bondholders, it is in deep trouble trying to borrow money.) You buy a stock like GM for the combination of dividends and capital appreciation. The two, of course, are related. If GM's profits go up next year, and they raise the dividend, it makes the stock more attractive. This encourages people to buy GM stock, and drives up the price. If GM's profits fall, and they lower the dividend, some stockholders will say, "Why am I holding a stock with a poor dividend--and a falling stock price?" Control With most stocks, you get some voting rights for members of the board of directors. If you are the average investor, your 1000 shares of GM are, to be polite, not going to significantly change the membership of the board. If you have 5% of GM shares, it's a whole different affair. I'm going to assume that few of you reading this are in danger of owning 5% of any major corporation. For the vast majority of investors, control is irrelevant as a reason to own stock. Common vs. Preferred Shares Common shares have the same relationship to preferred shares that peasants do to nobles--distinctly second class. Preferred shares often pay a better dividend, have preferred status for distribution of assets if the corporation goes into bankruptcy, and in some cases, have voting rights that the common shares do not. Some years ago, I worked for a company named Diamond Lane Communications. The employees owned common shares (or, more commonly, options to purchase common shares), which had no voting rights. The preferred shares, which were worth 10x as much as the common shares, had voting rights--and these were owned by the venture capitalists that provided most of the funding. I don't any strong reason why you should care about this distinction--I just thought that you might run into the terms, and not know what they meant. Buying Stocks: How To Make Stockbrokers Rich There's a great story (perhaps apocryphal) from the late 19th century, about how one of the founders of a rather prominent stock brokerage firm (and still prominent today) was at the yacht harbor in New York. He was pointing to all the yachts anchored there, and mentioning which of them belonged to the brokers that worked for his firm. The person hearing this tale said, "Where are the yachts that belong to their customers?" Stock brokers make their money on the transaction charge involved in buying and selling stocks. If you buy a stock at $20 a share, and resell it at $21 a share, there are two possibilities: 1. You are selling such a huge number of shares that the broker's commission is noise. 2. You are selling such a small number of shares that the broker's commission is as big as your net profit. Either way, this is a sobering reminder that if you plan to make money "day-trading" (as the rapid in and out of stock trading is called) you need at least one of the following: 1. A discount broker with very low commissions. 2. Enormously good skill in identifying stocks that are undervalued. 3. The ability to forsee the future. 4. Enormous guts. My very first stock trading exercise was when I was 16 years old. I had become enamored of Interdata Corporation for the reason that only a teenaged computer nerd would: I loved the instruction set of their minicomputers. So I bought 15 shares at $9 a share. (In my family, this pegged me as an aspiring Alex Keaton--for those of you who remember the series Family Ties.) A few months later, Perkin-Elmer Corporation bought Interdata. During the run-up in Interdata's stock price, I sold those 15 shares for $18.75 per share. The broker's commissions were more than my net profit. I made about $60 profit from my incredible foresight (actually, just dumb luck). In 1993, I was a pretty active day-trader. I spent a lot of time plotting the price and volume of DSC stock, day to day. DSC had acquired my employer, Optilnk Corporation, and my Optilink stock options had become DSC stock options, so this was more than an academic exercise. In addition to my stock options, I was also buying and selling pretty gutsily large blocks of stock: 500 and 1000 share trades, when the stock was in range $40-$65 a share. Because there were large traders that had computers placing buy and sell trades based on arcane theories of price movement, DSC stock was often engaged in something that looked like a drunken sine wave with a period of 1.5 to 2.5 days. I was trying to buy at the bottoms, and sell at the tops, and on average, it worked pretty well. I was making $1000-$1200 per trade (when it worked) and losing $500-800 per trade (when I guessed wrong). It was, however, very rough on my stomach--these were huge amounts of money for me back then, and even today, this level of day-trading for someone at my wealth level back was, in retrospect, insane. To top it all off, because all of these capital gains were short-term (measured in hours and days), 40% of the profit was going to taxes. Why bother? Well, along with the stomach-wrenching moments watching the stock rise and fall (distracting not only myself, but lots of other engineers from what we were supposed to be doing during the day), there was an adrenalin rush to it. If you have read Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (a splendid novel about New York City), you may recall the expression that the bond trader describes himself with: "He-Man Master of the Universe." (I've since read that this is actually a very cleaned up version of what real Wall Street sorts call themselves--but I'm too polite to use the expression that they use.) I was at least a "He-Man Master of My Neighborhood." It was a heady feeling, and if I was not such a risk-averse person, might have been led into the sort of nonsense that sinks day-traders with more guts than sense. Should You Buy Stocks? If you buy stocks directly, rather than buying a mutual fund that buys stocks, remember: 1. Any individual stock involves significant risk. Even if the average of the stock market rises, the individual stocks that you buy could plummet very unexpectedly because of dishonesty in accounting that has just been discovered. The company may make mistakes (the infamous exploding Pinto gas tanks problem of Ford). They could get stuck with the bill for something that they didn't do, but the courts found them a convenient deep pocket. Sometimes, stocks fall for no apparent reason, other than a lot of investors simultaneously decide something else is sexier. 2. If you are buying stocks based on rumors about a new product, the chances are excellent that what you are hearing are the result of a "pump and dump" specialist--someone who buys a stock, circulates rumors about how well the company is doing, or is about to do, waits for you and the other suckers to drive up the price--then they dump the stock at the higher price. Once you (and the rest of the market) find out that the rumors were false, the stock has fallen back down again. I get at least four to five rumor emails a week that are obviously "pump and dump" conmen, trying to provoke a buying panic in some low-priced stock. 3. You can get around the problem of large stock commissions by buying really large blocks of stock--but usually, this means that you need to buy a low-priced stock. A stock that sells for $3 a stock means that you can a thousand shares very cheaply. If the stock goes up a dollar in value, you can sell it, and even after paying the brokerage commission, you can make more than $900. The problem is that a lot of low-priced stocks are low-priced for a reason. Our next segment will discuss why it is generally a better idea to buy stocks through mutual funds--and explain what mutual funds are. Personal Jets: An Extravagance, But Here's The Reason Some People Buy Them One of my friends from high school bought himself a couple Gulfstream V jets several years ago. My first reaction (and second, and third) was, "Whoa! That's extravagant!" Now, these are really nice ways to get around. I've ridden in a Gulfstream V from Plano, Texas to the Bay Area once (it was our CEO's personal jet, which he leased to DSC), and comparing it to commercial airliner travel is like comparing a motor scooter with a Corvette. Instead of crammed close together, it was like sitting in a living room. My seat would rotate all the way around; the windows were huge; the steward kept the 10 or 12 us more than adequately fed. (I understand that they stopped serving alcohol on board after an unfortunate incident involving a long flight back from Venezula involving the Marketing Department and a food fight.) Still, it's a lot of money. Even for the superrich (of which, alas, I know many, but I am not one myself), these are still a pretty big chunk of change. Two or three families can live very comfortable middle class lives forever on the interest you would earn from the price of a Gulfstream V. But I have had one of those experiences recently that makes me understand this seeming extravagance a bit better. My nephew is getting married at the end of August. On a Sunday. At 4:00 PM. Unfortunately, while I would very much like to attend, I start teaching the next day. First class, my first teaching experience--I'm not going to risk coming back on a morning flight, and maybe not be there on time, fully prepared, and fully alert for it. That would not be a good start. Unfortunately, there are no flights to Boise from any Los Angeles area airports that I can make after attending a 4:00 PM wedding in Riverside. This is exactly the sort of situation where having your own personal jet would be very convenient. Yeah, still an extravagance. But for that huge number of Americans for whom $15 million is equivalent to me buying a Corvette--well, I guess it's worth it. The "How to Become Wealthy" Series I've really appreciated the positive feedback (and the occasional contributions in the tipjar) about this series, and for those wondering when part 9 will appear--it's been a very busy last few weeks. Real soon now. In the meantime, I have gathered it all together into a single document . As I fill in the discussion about stocks and mutual funds, I will both blog them, and add them to that document. |
