Fixed income investing

 The bond market changed in 2008. Before that, it was actually possible to never touch stocks and still retire.

I no longer believe that to be true. There are 2 things working against a fixed income investor:

1/ The way inflation is measured is constantly being changed. I doubt there are very many people for whom the CPI actually shows real inflation as they experience it.  It's easy to do your own research with expenses if you have just one checking account that you're pulling money from. When I tracked my expenses over the period of a few years, it was an eye opener. A 5-year TIPS got me around 20% at maturity, but expenses went up close to 50%. This is from 2019-2024. If the discrepancy between CPI and your actual experienced inflation is 50% (i.e. when CPI is 1%, you experience 1.5%), this has minimal impact at low values of CPI. The hotter that CPI runs, the bigger the impact. For example, if you have an investment that tracks the CPI and CPI is 4%, you are essentially losing 2% of purchasing power per year. And that's before taxes, which brings us to #2.

2/ Taxes are a killer with fixed income in a taxable account. With the NIIT, for someone in the 35% tax bracket, the total tax rate is 38.8%. With a 3 month t-bill earning 3.6% state tax free (this matters in a lot in states like CA that have a high state income tax), one would end up with only 2.2% after tax. Current CPI is 3.3%. So this is a guaranteed loss of purchasing power. The highest yield on the treasury curve is 4.88% for a 30 year bond. After tax that leaves 2.98%! Yes, even if one was crazy to risk capital for 30 years, they would be guaranteed losing to CPI right now, let alone actual spend which is actually much higher than 3.3%. TIPS in taxable account aren't going to be of much help, plus they come with the added disadvantage that you have to pay taxes on the inflation adjustments even without getting paid--the opposite of tax deferral! Products like BOXX may help, but they require taking added risk which I don't fully understand.

Corporate bonds are even worse because the yield spreads vs treasuries are low and they are subject to state tax. So even they don't keep up with inflation.

If a bond book was written before 2008, it is probably not very relevant for today's investing environment.  When bond investing worked, this book was probably the best book:
https://zvibodie.com/book/worry-free-investing/
You can now buy a pdf for $5 at the link above.
The gist of the book was that you only start investing in stocks when your basic retirement needs are covered by fixed income instruments (money market funds, CDs, stable value funds, treasuries, TIPS, I-Bonds, E-Bonds). This is almost impossible to achieve today as you'd be constantly falling behind.

It's OK to hold bonds. Just know that historical data that shows that it can keep up with inflation (or even exceed it) no longer holds.

Something's wrong with the economy and it can't be fixed

I'm not an economist, but this is something that's been bothering me.

If a company can build a business on issuing debt and buying bitcoin and create millions in wealth for its shareholders, what is the incentive for someone to deploy capital in building and running a factory?

Because of fed policy, pension funds have been driven into stocks.  Therefore, pension funds will become insolvent if the stock market stays flat or goes down over any extended period of time.  So if the stock market is guaranteed to go up, they why deploy capital building and running a factory or any other kind of business where you have to deal with the day to day stress of running the business including labor and legal issues?

Already most of the brightest students aren't seeking careers in medicine, engineering, research, or teaching.  They prefer to become quant traders or work for private equity firms.  This means we simply don't even have the talent to advance the technology as much as other countries do.  What is the incentive for someone to spend half a million on medical school when they can get a job as a realtor after high school and make as much as a primary care doctor?  Unless your earnings are indexed to asset prices (realtor, trader, etc.), your income is probably not keeping up with inflation and your standard of living is falling.  As an engineer or accountant, you struggle to get a raise.  If, on the other hand, your income is indexed to assets which have been inflating then you have made a killing.  So as a realtor, asset manager, private equity banker, etc. life has been great. 

Couple that with a broken medical system and the cost of labor for regular jobs is unaffordable for most businesses.  The medical system cannot be fixed without collapsing the whole economy and the stock market.

I can't think of a way out of this.  As a country, I often hear we will "inflate our way out of this".  But we can't do that because our unfunded liabilities (especially the cost of medical care) is going up much faster than the rate of inflation.

The broken web

 This post is a summary of broken systems and how it's darn near impossible to get them fixed.  It's important to keep these in mind as we try to automate more and more of our lives.  Because of issues like this, I dread the day of widespread AI adoption because it means WAY more inconvenience for customers and patients.

• 3/19/25 - It's 2025, and Gmail still puts a ton of legitimate email from technical mailing lists and from the customer service responses of various vendors in my spam box, while allowing spam and phishing messages in my inbox.  Unfortunately there is no way to disable the spam filter.  This has been going on for many years.
• 3/19/25 - I received an email from customer support of a prominent organization (AAA) where the "from" address was my email address.  In other words the from and to addresses were the same and there was no way to respond to them to tell them the address was wrong.  My mail app even showed as if the message were from me!  When I used the form to get in touch with them, the rep at the other end had no idea what I was talking about.
• 3/19/25 - I received an email from a merchant (a small olive oil vendor) with "do not reply" (and thus no way to respond to the message) notifying me that a certain product which I had ordered a couple of weeks ago had just shipped.  The product was already delivered several days ago, but there was no easy way to contact the merchant.  They do not even list an email address on their website.  I used the contact form, and interestingly when I got a response, it ended up in my spam folder on Gmail!
• 3/19/25 - I received a text notification from Doordash that my order was dropped off approximately 5 hours after it had been dropped off.
• 3/19/25 - My brokerage has been sending me 2 expiration notices for trades that didn't go through during the trading day.  This has been going on for many months and happened today as well.  The first one arrives at the close of trading at around 1 pm pacific time.  The second one arrives at the end of the business day at 5 pm pacific time.  When I contacted the brokerage about this, they suggested that I change the email address that I use for these notifications!
• 4/2/25 - I received an email from AT&T with a link to review my account.  I click the link and there's a flash of the screen but no web page opens, as if a web page opened and then closed immediately.
• 5/4/2025 - I noticed a product I bought from Nordstrom previously got merged with a cheaper product.  When I pointed this out to customer service, they insisted the pricing and description was correct.  Basically you had the cheaper product being sold at the price of the more expensive (the EVA product whose normal price is $54.95 was being sold at the price of a leather product at $200).  No amount of going back and forth with their customer service could fix this.
• 5/6/2025 - I searched for sandals on the Nordstrom site and filtered by Men & Sandals.  Yet I had a bunch of boots and boat shoes show up in the search results.  Next, I order something and ask for it to be shipped to store.  A day later I get a text message from DHL asking me to authorize delivery (to the store) without signature!  It is also impossible to send an email to Nordstrom customer service.

Numerology for names

Here are the numbers for each letter from Cheiro's Book of Numbers.  If the name adds to a single digit, those are covered in separate chapters starting at page 38.  If the name adds to double digits, those are covered starting on page 80.  Many folks that utilize numerology will change the spelling of their name to one that adds up to a more fortunate number.  You can use this page to run the computation for your name.

1 - A, I, J, Q, Y

2 - B, K, R

3 - C, G, L, S

4 - D, M, T

5 - E, H, N, X

6 - U, V, W

7 - O, Z

8 - F, P

Car design trends that I wish would go away

 Here are some car design trends that have seem to have taken over the auto industry that I wish would go away.  They help with neither usability nor aesthetics.

• Use of piano black in the interior.  These show fingerprints and dust very prominently and are also prone to being scratched and showing those scratches.  Use matte black or wood instead.
• Use of shiny chrome in the interior.  This reflects light and in some situations can be downright uncomfortable for the driver.  Use brushed aluminum instead.
• Ever larger wheels.  16" or 17" wheels on a sedan of any size should be good enough.  On an SUV 18" or 19" should be the most needed.  Larger wheels have tires with smaller sidewalls and make the ride uncomfortable especially given the pothole-ridden roads we have nowadays.  Bigger wheels and tires weigh more (lower mpg and slower acceleration), and they cost more to replace.  It's insane that we now have cars with 18" or 19" wheels and SUVs with 20" to 22" wheels. 
• Excessive use of screens and touchscreens.  It's OK to have one small one for navigation and infotainment, but why put things like climate control in there?  Why have a complicated digital dash controlled by complicated steering wheel controls when a simple one will get the job done?  Would really appreciate physical controls for the climate control.  Most of these screens have flicker, sometimes excessive flicker.  There is now a trend of having screens on the passenger side (seen in the newer cars from MB, BMW, and Audi).
• Uncomfortable seats with poor padding.  Many newer cars seem to have extra firm seats with worse seat comfort than the corresponding previous generation.  It almost mandates using a separate seat cushion to get adequate comfort during long drives.
• Use of run flat tires.  These are noisier to begin with and get even noisier and harder as they age.  This makes them very uncomfortable especially on bad roads.  They are also heavier so getting rid of the spare doesn't save much weight, if any once you have all the extra weight of run flat tires. Finally, they are more expensive to replace and it greatly reduces the number of choices available.  I really wish they'd stick with regular tires and a compact or full size spare.
• White LED headlights.  The color temperature of most headlights nowadays is too high and will tend to cause fatigue and lead of difficulty falling asleep after one has been driving at night.  A warmer color temperature that matches regular halogen headlights would be better.
• Plastic trim around wheel wells. For some reason car makers decided to stop painting these and expose black plastic which fades and looks horrible over time.
• Crazy wheel designs.  What was wrong with the single color 5-spoke, 7-spoke, and multi-spoke wheels of the from the 90's to the early 10's?  Now we have the busiest wheel designs with all kinds of jagged and incoherent geometric patterns, often in black/dark grey/silver combinations.

Dealing with ID theft

Things to do to minimize any damage if your identity is stolen.

• Freeze credit bureaus.
• Equifax
• Experian
• TransUnion
• Innovis 
• Lexis Nexis (https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/freeze)
• Chex Systems (for bank account opening)
• Early Warning System
• Clarity Services
• NCTUE (for utilities)
• SSA
• mySSA account to secure SSN with SSA (needs ID.me or Login.gov ID)
• Account with local state unemployment office
• Report stolen SSN to IRS and get PIN (needs ID.me)
• File a report with identitytheft.gov
• File a report with local police department

Here is a thread on reddit summarizing all the actions that need to be taken.

Peak technology

I am of the opinion that we have reached the peak of technology that benefits people at large.  From here on out almost all technological developments will be in the area of mass surveillance--monitoring driving, consumption habits, health, etc.  I'm not sure how this information will be misused, but misused it will be.

Technology is continuing to be abused in many ways.  AI is imperfect and will adversely impact the lives of those that are incorrectly classified as false positives in whatever the AI program is looking for.  This is likely to cause a lot of pain for those people.