Chickens Annie has a little bit of bumblefoot, so every couple days she comes inside for a bit so we can change her bandages. As far as she's concerned, she comes inside for a bit to get extra snacks and attention. She can't see well, so new things and places are even more scary for her than for the average chicken, but she feels safe and loved snuggled up against me. (she gives very good hugs with her body pushed up against me as firmly as she can!) Research I met up with a new student who's working on a project that I'm interested in. I'd talked with her advisor about it before, but haven't had much time to actually do any work. We're planning to meet up and study together, which I'm looking forward to -- it has been a while since I've had other students working on the same thing I am. The financial aid office, which manages the fellowship I'm funded through right now, is threatening to cut off my funding if I don't take "corrective action" to fix the problem that I have taken "too many" credit hours. Most of those credits are research credits I've taken just to meet the "enrolled full-time" requirement to get funding in the first place; 80% of their purpose is just bookkeeping for the university. I've got a year or so before I hit their hard limit and my funding disappears, so hopefully I'm outta here by then. Dammit, I just want to do research and write papers and help the newer students as much as I can and not worry about whether the university deems me worthy of $16k/yr, is that too much to ask? Climate Change kleinbl00's post yesterday got me thinking about the future and, in particular, the uncertainty of climate change. We've had a cool summer here and the fresh produce has suffered for it. I have some red pepper plants that just now are starting to make fruit, and it seems like this sort of thing is just going to be more commonplace in the years to come. Am I going to be able to retire? Will the bit I've saved now actually add up to enough, or are the markets going to become more unpredictable too? Last night I finished The Dispossessed. At the end, LeGuin reveals that on that universe's Earth, humans never got their shit together and were almost eradicated by climate change. And, fuck, that book was written in 1974, and here 45 years later we're getting ready to do the same fucking thing and even so we're still arguing about whether or not it's happening, or whether or not we should bother talking about it.
No. Nobody is saying this anywhere but the newsletter circuit but "retirement" will likely be revealed to be an aberration for about five generations - those that were able to retire between 1933 and 2040. Do not expect to retire, do not shape your future on your ability to retire, absolutely keep retirement as a goal but recognize that it's not an entitlement the way it has been portrayed lo these many years. The 'boomers will likely be the last generation to retire with any regularity. The secret to retirement is "magical" compounding interest and we're entering a period of potentially a decade or more where interest doesn't compound. For the past 15 years it's been compounding at half the rate everyone was expecting it to and that's punched a giant hole in the economy that nobody really wants to talk about. Get good with cold frames. Those who succeed at intensive agriculture will enjoy a better standard of living than those who don't. Sorry to be a downer. The tea leaves are particularly bitter and cloudy this morning.Am I going to be able to retire? Will the bit I've saved now actually add up to enough, or are the markets going to become more unpredictable too?
Eh, my political and financial tea leaves have been bitter for a few years now. Think I'm going to graduate, start a little chicken farm, and learn sustainable agriculture with my wife. Trying to learn how to make and fix stuff since I'm skeptical that we will continue to enjoy the plenty and ease of access to all sorts of things that we do today.
The two books I recommend are Radical Homemakers and 5 acres and independence. I fought tooth and claw for what you want to do. Unfortunately my wife's success depended on an urban density that made this approach largely impractical. Still, dreams die hard. I remain on the Whatcom Farmers email list.
A broadly diversified US equity fund like VTSAX had a CAGR of 10.25% from 2003 to today. That's a hair over the 10% that underlies many projections about retirement investment.For the past 15 years it's been compounding at half the rate everyone was expecting it to
Yeah but pension funds don't get to go "pile it all into SPDR" because diversification is a hedge against disaster. Take it further: VTSAX is at 17% for the year! Yet CALPERS made 6.7% which is under their 7% goal. And thing is, once you miss a goal you don't get a do-over. So why don't they pile into index funds like everyone else? Index funds that buy what works? How 'bout some of those marvelous tech stocks? I mean, what could go wrong? After all, things with the Nifty Fifty worked out so well: So yeah. If you're golden in 2013, and you don't touch it, and you don't have greater expectations, and you needed to make 10.25% that you could get out sixteen years later, VTSAX works out fine. But if you live in the real world, your goal has been 6-7%. And you've been making 3-4%. And the PBGC has $1.7T in insurance, an annual budget of $423m and there are 19 trillion dollars worth of pension obligations in the United States. Which, by the way, now generates 95% of all the positive-cash-flow bonds in the world.
So my idea of moving to the Methow isn’t a bad idea, then, assuming that it doesn’t all burn down.
I think about climate change a lot, and most of my job is working on concrete solutions to tackle climate change at a governmental level. The good news is that there is a very large and increasing group of people making more and more systemic changes towards sustainability. Things are different from ten, twenty years ago. Ideas that were fringe/sci-fi are now mainstream. My worry is not whether we can curb it, because I think we can, but that the exponential growth in sustainable solutions hasn't picked up fast enough to prevent a lot of harm and suffering.
One of the more important origins of the sustainability movement as we know it now was the 1972's Club of Rome report 'The Limits to Growth'. I am pretty sure that Le Guin was inspired by that, considering the publications are only two years apart. There are some people who still hold on to the idea of infinite, exponential growth, but I am definitely not one of them. For me, reading Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything was an eye opener in just how tightly related capitalism and climate change are.
What's funny is how many people made fun of Limits To Growth and how wrong World3 was when in fact, when you look at the numbers, they fucking nailed it.
