Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

With what money?

I go the mall sometimes during the weekday lunch hours, and I would see the local high school kids buying lunch at the food court. How on earth do they have the money for it? The allowances they get from parents must be hefty. I make above the American median household income, and I only feel comfortable enough to get Chipotle once in a while. Kids, with no income - how are they doing it?

Especially these days when $10 can’t even buy you a meal at McDonalds. At least back when I was in high school, there was the dollar menu. That’s a lot of McChicken for the $20 my father would give me once in a while. A dollar now can literally buy nothing at the Golden Arches. I understand inflation, but people aren’t making that much more money? A suitable food allowance for a higher schooler of today must be in the hundreds per month.

I guess there’s a lot of rich parents out there in San Francisco.

No wonder it’s said that child rearing is so expensive. With the recent inflation it’s got to be more than the quarter million to raise a child from baby to 18 years of age.

My parents most certainly did not spend a quarter million dollars to raise me. They didn’t have to money to. Not even close. I think it’s people’s expectations of what entails child-rearing that drives up the costs. Childcare, birthday parties, toys, trips to Disneyland (allowance when they reach teenage years); a lot of it is more wants than needs.

I read an article about parents getting into debt to bring their kids to Disneyland. News flash: if you cannot cash flow a Disneyland trip, you cannot afford it. There’s no rule that a child must experience Disneyland. For sure they will be sad when they hear from their school friends who went, but I didn’t have Nike shoes growing up, and I turned out just fine (allegedly). No emotional damage at all.

Do you even lift, bro?

The only thing I bought from last week’s Amazon Big Deal days is a scale. Not for food, but to check my body weight. I’ve been lifting weights consistently for about a year now, and I was curious to see if I’d gotten any heavier. Muscle weights more than fat, I’ve been told.

And drum roll please, since last October I’ve gained a grand total of two pounds. I’ve certainly gotten stronger compared to last year, but I guess I am not eating at an enough surplus to gain lots of weight. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be violated: burn more calories than you take in, you lose weight. Intake more calories than you burn, you gain weight. It seems I’m barely above maintenance.

Sugary foods doesn’t necessarily make one fat. If I give you only one sugar cube to eat everyday - and nothing else - you’re going to be skin on bones in a few weeks’ time. The problem with sugar is that it tends to be part of calorically dense foods. Think ice cream, or a can of non-diet soda. Therefore it’s super easy to overeat. Halloween is coming up soon. Parents ought to look up just how much calorie those tiny pieces of candy contain.

If I want to built muscle mass quickly, I have simply must eat more. But, I am okay with this two pound per year pace, honestly. Besides, the point of strength training for me isn’t hypertrophy: it’s for longevity. I want to be mobile and able as late into my twilight years as possible. There’s also correlation between small body mass and lifespan. Think of the people in Okinawa.

Getting too big is also cumbersome for flying. I’m always envious of tiny Asian women, where economy seating might as well be business class for them.

My exercise goal is to be as strong as possible for my current leanness.

Dell support

At work we deploy, on the PC side, mainly Dell computers. Word on the street (I don’t handle purchasing) is Dell is a fantastic vendor to work with, and the discount we get is hefty. As well it should be, with the amount of hardware we buy.

Obviously, on the Mac side it’s just Apple.

As personnel on the support side, I can say Dell computers can do with better quality control from the factory. Every batch we buy, there seems to be always a few computers that need immediate servicing. During the pandemic, we bought hundreds of Dell laptops, of which dozens had to be serviced because of poor fit and finish (a trackpad should click). I get it, pandemic times were uniquely funky, but the batch of Mac laptops we bought from Apple had zero such issues.

Good news for Dell is that the servicing is solid. Though that’s a back-handed compliment, isn’t it? I reckon companies would want to put out a product so reliably good that the end-user never has to know about after-purchase servicing. Nevertheless, if Dell isn’t capable of ratcheting up its quality control, at least it’s super easy to get items fixed.

So long as the product is under basic servicing warranty (we prepay for four years for everything we buy), Dell can dispatch third-party technicians to your location within business days. Or, if the customer is not in a hurry, an overnight prepaid mail-in option is also available (the Dell repair facility is in Houston). All of this can be initiated on the Dell support website via chat, which is great for people like me who avoids using the telephone as much as possible.

It still won’t pry the MacBook Pro out of my hands. But, if I ever need to run a Windows PC, A Dell-branded unit is a fine option. Even if it malfunctions within the first week of use, Dell support will get it fixed with haste.

Unforgiven

As a person employed by a university, I am perhaps not the most unbiased opinion in this whole student loans forgiveness issue. My job depends on the college system continuing on to be a revolving door of incoming students turning into graduates. Should the value of a college degree crater into oblivion, well, I better go find something else to do.

The students are the paying customer, that is of no doubt. And in grand American tradition, they pay in credit. How else can anyone afford to attend college when room and board for a year is the equivalent of a used car. I managed to avoid student loans because one, my family was poor enough to get me all sorts of State and Federal grants, and two, I lived at home.

I’d have signed loan papers too had I needed to pay $900 per month just to share a tiny dorm room with a complete stranger. Probably a guy named Mike from Souther California.

Students graduate with a tremendous amount of debt weighing down their financial future. Unlike other debts, students loans do not get wiped off in a bankruptcy. I wonder what were they trying to prevent when that was implemented. Seems to me they don’t want people to declare bankruptcy upon graduation to shed the school debt. The graduates can take the credit hit because they’re just starting their adult career anyways.

Piggybacking off that, I think student loan forgiveness will create negative incentive for universities. There would be no motivation to control costs (like building a lot more student housing) if there are no consequences for the students down the road. Don’t worry about the tuition increase! Borrow all you want from the government! Uncle Sam will wipe it away eventually!

We need to look at the whole thing holistically: how to lower the total cost of college, so that whatever students has to borrow can be repaid timely and responsibly. Numbers getting too large (and inescapable) is how we got into our current mess.

Can't have everything

I read on Reddit about this guy who wants to be a competitive bodybuilder, but is lamenting his inability to hang out with his friends. In order to get lean and jacked, the guy cannot go out to eat, drink alcohol, or smoke weed. He wants to have his cake and eat it too, though honestly, who buys cake to not eat it?

What I am reading is the unwillingness to sacrifice. What you’ve heard about life is incorrect: you cannot have everything. You have to choose. The amount of effort and dedication required to be a stage-ready bodybuilder is immense. Those who go on that journey will have to forgo many things in order to achieve the goal. There are no shortcuts, you cannot have both.

It’s the wanting to have it all that leads to upset, depression, or raging against the night. People are pining for the impossible. The new parents who can’t stand to see their single friends hanging out and traveling. Sorry, the tremendous lack of sleep and non-existent social life is part of the deal. The bargain may feel Faustian, but one really can’t be resentful of their kids ruining the life they once had.

I too have felt the misery when I have to choose. For example: I love cars. I’ve been toying with buying another car to compliment the BMW M2. However, it would absolutely crater my long term financials. (I’ve already done it once.) I simply cannot keep two cars and hope to have money for other things I enjoy, such as travel, or expensive camera gear.

I can of course switch careers and get a higher-paying job, but that comes with its own trade-offs. Work-life balance would surely go to shits. Is it worth that just to feed the car enthusiast side of me?

Maybe. I don’t think there’s a wrong answer here. You make a choice, and a door opens while other doors have to close.

Not twinning

Frequent listeners of podcasts (or followers of gym girls on instagram) have undoubtedly heard of EightSleep pod covers. A cooling layer between you and the bed so that you can sleep better during the hot summer days. It’s rather expensive, and the latest version even requires a subscription. But, if you live in Texas and your summers are three months of 90 degree nights, a pod cover for the bed is likely much cheaper than running air conditioning for the room.

Here in San Francisco, we really only have one week of “true” summer. And it’s during October. The one week that makes me pine for a cooling solution so I can actually sleep at night. But even if I’m willing to pay the high price, there’s a problem: EightSleep’s smallest size offering is a full. I have a twin mattress, of which I just purchased two years ago. There’s no way I am changing (read: paying even more money) that arrangement just to sleep better for a week out of the year. Maybe. Thinking about it.

To the fine folks at EightSleep: why discriminate against broke boys like me? I can’t afford a place in San Francisco with enough space to fit a full size (and above) bed. Not in this economy! I want you to shut up and take my money (thousands), yet you guys refuse to make a twin size version of your product. Or perhaps you’ve done customer studies, and people who have twin size beds (children, and space-efficient adults like me) aren’t likely to be customers. Either way, I am very disappointed.

At least my Helix mattress has a sewn-in cooling top layer. No, I don’t have a discount code for you. A website with dozens of readers is atomically insignificant to receive brand deals.

The final tour

The Grand Tour (this iteration, anyways) has come to an end. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May have done their final motoring program after two decades of collaboration. An absolute end of a glorious era. Their final episode - aptly titled One for the Road - is up to the usual standards: spectacular cinematography, mixed in with many pre-planned ridiculousness.

It’s a firm reminder that things change, and things come to an end. Nothing is static, good or bad. In a (fake) ideal world, car enthusiasts would love to see Clarkson, Hammond, and May continue on making car videos. Like your favorite pint of beer, you don’t want it to end ever. Every February there has to be a Super Bowl. But even with the NFL’s immensely enormous popularity, who can say for certain American football will still be around in a few decades?

Father Time is undefeated, of course. No one wants to see an obese Clarkson on these prolonged road trips in third world countries. He himself probably can’t handle the stress any longer. People age out of their profession (like NFL players), it is what it is.

Clarkson did remarked in One for the Road that one of the reason he is retiring from the job is that he cannot get excited about electric cars. And those are the future, isn’t it? I very much agree with Clarkson. I think electric vehicles are fantastic for urban driving duties. The fact they don’t emit any greenhouse gas in our city environment is a huge win.

However, there’s no romance in electric cars.There’s no quirks to give them flavor, unique mechanical layouts to bring about varying dynamics. They all sound the same, too. The whirl of an electric motor doesn’t exactly tingle the spine. A crescendo that never arrives.

Clarkson and co can’t do an epic road trip in used EVs. Soon as one breaks down, you have to call a tow truck, and that is the end of the program. There’s no fixing it on the side of the road like an internal combustion car. The fire risk with batteries is too huge to perform stunts with EVs. The amount of water to put out an electrical fire is apparently way too much.

Never mind that plenty of countries and locales don’t have the infrastructure to support vehicle charging.

With these two headwinds of advancing age and lack of enthusiasm for modern new cars, it’s no wonder Clarkson, Hammond, and May are hanging up their proverbial hats. Hang their jerseys up on the rafters; these three (and their entire crew) have provided us with many tremendous hours of motoring entertainment. Cheers.