When I write these stories, I always start with a title and then go rom there. The title is a reflection of what is on my mind and what resonates and sounds “catchy”. Having written 2,400 such stories over the past six and a half years, I have stumbled onto the same title more often than I care to admit. It’s a bit like seeing the edge of your imagination when it happens, but I…
They played us all for fools. The bullshit has gotten so regular and so deep that we frogs are way past parboiled. No one wants to or is going to come out and say it plainly, but someone must. This Yemen Signal Chat scandal isn’t a scandal because they used an unsecured app. The real scandal is that a plurality of our country (or at least the majority of our dubiously elected officials) trusted that…
I am writing this with the knowledge that it will publish on the day I should be arriving home from our grand tour of what is often called the Southern Cone of South America. If all goes as planned, you will see this in your inbox as I am dragging my sorry ass off the plane in San Diego, having just gotten back from Buenos Aires. While I have been in BA many, many times,…
Every cruise that starts or ends or even goes through Buenos Aires, inevitably also stops in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. That may seem redundant because Montevideo is just across the delta from Buenos Aires, a mere 150 miles. But there are many reasons everyone should visit Montevideo based on what Uruguay has created for itself…an example that might be as close to Utopia as any on earth. Uruguay, despite being one of South America’s…
We are cruising back towards the mainland of Argentina today. If we went east we would likely not hit anything until the beaches of Perth, Australia. That part of the planet between the Atlantic and Indian oceans never gets much play (except when a Malaysian airliner disappears there). I learned that the Malvinas sit at 52 South Latitude, which compares in the northern hemisphere to the Latitude of London, which sits at 52 North Latitude.…
Today was about the largest national park in Chile called Vicente Perez Rosalez Parque in honor of the Chilean who turned this remote area into a well-known tourism and agricultural zone. It was supposed to be a sunny day that was going to stay cool in the 50s for most of the day, but the weather gods had a different idea and as we tried to board the tender from the ship into the port…
Last year Mark Cuban made headlines when he paid his $276 million tax bill. While his outspoken support for more liberal causes made some pundits ask if he was paying more than what he owed. he said that he pays what he owes. “This country has done so much for me, I’m proud to pay my taxes every single year,” Cuban went on to say that while he doesn’t expect all of his tax money…
I just had a text exchange with my red pals and I feel like it was a doozy. I keep that text chain going for two reasons. First and foremost, I shared some good times with these guys and have fond memories of many great motorcycle trips with them. Secondly, I find it important and fascinating to stay in touch with the mindset of people who I think should be ideologically aligned with me but…
Last night my friend Mike sent me a CNN article on Chile and the collapse of their electric grid due to excessive summer heat, drought and infrastructure overburdening. Yikes! Seems like Chile is experiencing a combination of California and Texas calamities just as we are heading down to begin our cruise. Mike seemed a bit pensive about it all where I felt like I wanted to take it more in stride. I take some solace…
Back in 2010 I was teaching at Cornell in my Pensions class and I was trying to explain to a rather arrogant young graduate student that gathering enough wealth so as not to need to worry about retirement savings per se (i.e. insufficient pension asset accumulation or what is often called unfunded pension liabilities) was a false sense of comfort. My point was that you have to think about the broadest implications of such macro…