The Bush Tax Cut February 28, 2001February 17, 2017 Yesterday’s column didn’t get posted till noon because, as mentioned Friday, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. If the Sumerians had had more fingers, there might be. Tomorrow’s column will pick up that theme. But here’s the deal on the President’s tax cut: It’s irresponsible (because it’s too big) and unfair (because 43% of it goes to the wealthiest 1%). IRRESPONSIBLE What if the huge surpluses – unforeseen even a couple of years ago – fail to materialize? This is already what’s happened in the State of Texas, where a projected $1.8 billion surplus turned into a shortfall. What has happened in the last several months that make us now pretty certain that the surpluses will be huge? (You will recall that the projected surplus just kept jumping a trillion here and a trillion there.) Is it the collapse of the dot-coms that have given us this assurance? Is it the breakdown of the Middle East peace talks or the bombing of Iraq? The power shortage in California? What new thing happened to so assure us of a gigantic 10-year surplus as to justify our prudently ‘spending’ much of it in advance? Nothing. Don’t get me wrong. The numbers could be right, and I hope they are. But where would be the harm in a smaller tax cut – perhaps one that gave 98% of Americans exactly what President Bush proposes, but leaves the top 2% suffering much as we do today? (I’ll get to our suffering and the fairness issue in a minute.) Right there, you’ve about halved the proposed tax cut, making it still large, still a great boost to the flagging economy, but not so large as necessarily to seem reckless. A smaller tax cut would likely mean lower interest rates, because big tax cuts a happy bond market do not make. And that would mean lower monthly mortgage payments and lower car loan payments. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong, when you’re $5 trillion in debt and you’re running a surplus, with paying down that debt? The Republicans say no: if we don’t cut taxes, Congress will just recklessly spend the surplus. But last I checked, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and had veto power in the White House. Are they branding themselves reckless spenders? UNFAIR I love rich people. By many measures, I am one. The last thing I want to see or promote is class warfare. I feel certain that Warren Buffett, George Soros and Bill Gates, Sr. feel much the same way. But under Clinton/Gore, we found a balance that works pretty well. Yes, taxes were raised for those at the top (but only for those at the top) . . . but look what that added revenue brought us: surpluses instead of deficits, low interest rates, 22 million new jobs – it proved to be a spectacular formula for economic success. We found a good balance. And even though the tax rates for those at the top jumped from 31% to 39.6%, this is modest when compared with the 90% top rate under Eisenhower. Or the 70% rate under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. Or the 50% during the first part of the Reagan era. Nor does it adequately acknowledge the proportion of rich folks’ income that is taxed at the favorable 20% long-term capital gains rate, or at the 0% tax-free bond rate. President Bush understands the plight of the rich better than almost anyone. He feels their tax burden, and that’s commendable. But when you make a list of the world’s problems – 43 million Americans without health insurance, millions of kids in overcrowded, dilapidated classrooms, a plague destroying Africa, the devastation of the rain forest – how high can the plight of the rich rank? By most measures, their income has shot up faster than average even after allowing for the taxes they pay. The wealth gap between the top 1% and everyone else, despite these tax brackets, continues to widen. Why accentuate the trend? Is it fair that the top 1% live so much cushier lives than everyone else? Sure it is! But does it make sense to cut their taxes by tens, and in some cases hundreds, of thousands of dollars a year? Not to me. You probably saw Tom Daschle showing how the top 1% would get a brand new Lexus every year from the President’s tax cut, while the average family got the equivalent of a muffler. It’s one thing for us to honor our top 1% and wish them well – as we should. It’s another to tip the balance significantly further in their favor.
More TiVo February 27, 2001February 17, 2017 Just understand this: Within a few years, every decent TV will come with ‘TiVo’ capability built in. Or should. (Not that this will likely do TiVo itself any good, any more than Xerox profits when you photocopy something on your Brother 7300C multifunction printer/scanner/copier/fax.) You will be able to pause the show you’re watching, view it in slow motion, or ‘rewind’ it. You have no idea how handy this is until you’ve gotten used to it. You will be able to start watching the news 12 minutes late and, by skipping the commercials and the story that doesn’t interest you, finish the same time everyone else does. (As I’ve pointed out, saving 12 minutes a day 300 days a year saves you 60 hours – a full workweek.) Whenever you turn on the TV, you will have an inventory of programming you’ve recorded – Seinfeld! Meet the Press! – that you actually want to see. Now that the capability is there, why on earth wouldn’t this be built into the average TV? Microsoft is releasing its Ultimate TV version any day now, with two features TiVo lacks. (A single button lets you skip ahead in 30-second increments; both its internal tuners are active, so you can tape two different shows at the same time, or watch one live while you tape another.) But TiVo, having beaten Microsoft to the market by several months, may not be long in catching up with or leapfrogging these features. (It already has two tuners inside each TiVo; it just hasn’t switched them both on.) I may be wrong about this. Maybe five years from now most people won’t have this capability, just as most people still watch black and white TV. (Remember all the hype about ‘color,’ when people thought that, too, would catch on?) But I think so. Jerry Godes: ‘I absolutely love TiVo. I have to admit that when I first got it, I watched way more TV. Now, I’ve settled back into my old habits, and only watch a couple of hours a week, but I’m always watching things I want to watch. I can’t remember the last time I went channel surfing! Everyone I’ve talked to that has one loves it. Disclaimer: I work for Sony (one of the TiVo manufacturers), but I wanted a TiVo so bad, I got a Philips before Sony started shipping theirs.’
Why There Are 24 Hours in a Day February 26, 2001January 27, 2017 My friend Bryan Norcross knows just about everything. He’s been doing a 20-part series for CBS in Miami called ‘Ask Bryan’ and today wrapped his last one. It hasn’t aired yet, but it’s ‘Why Are There 24 Hours In a Day?’Think about it. The ‘day’ itself is a fairly natural notion – it’s the period of time from one sunrise to another – the time it takes the sun to circle the Earth. What ancient couldn’t figure that out? And a ‘month’ is the time from full moon to full again. Well, something like that. And a year? That’s the time it takes for the longest day of the year to get real short and then reach its longest again. Fine. I may not have described this with atomic clock accuracy, but the point is that there’s a sort of observable celestial phenomenon at work here. A caveman or a Hobbit, given enough time – and they had millennia – could have figured it out. But is there some little asteroid that circles some other little asteroid 24 times a day? Why 24 hours in a day and not 14? Or 38? And why 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute? The answer, as best we can guess, Bryan says, is that the Sumerians (or did he say Babylonians? Azerbaijanis? I think he said Sumerians) used their fingers. Fingers, after all, are digits and underlie the digital economy. Our having ten of them, most of us, underlies the decimal system. (Do you seriously think that if humans had 8 fingers instead of 10 a ‘dime’ would have 10 pennies? No, it would have 8, and there’d be 8 dimes to the dollar. That this is approximately the value of the Canadian dollar – 64 cents – misses the point entirely. Canadians have just as many fingers as we do – and there are indeed 100 cents to the Canadian dollar. Coincidence? I think not.) But why 24 hours in the day? Why not, say, 20? At which point Bryan crooked his right thumb to touch the base of his right index finger (please follow along and do it, too), and said, in much the same way as a Sumerian might have, 4,000 years ago . . . ‘One.’ He then moved up a notch – see that? Each of your fingers has three distinct segments. I never really noticed that! – and, touching now the middle segment of his right index finger with his right thumb, he said . . . ‘Two.’ I think you may sense where this is leading. By the time your right thumb has counted each of the three segments of his neighboring four fingers, you’re up to 12. Long before people were reading with their lips, one imagines, they were counting with their fingers. So a day was divided into 12 segments, called hours; and, too, the night. The foot, meanwhile, was the length of a human foot but an inch wasn’t the length of a toe – the foot (I’m guessing) was divided into 12 inches. At least in some cultures. Others, I guess, used the ‘unfolding fingers’ method of counting (beginning with two closed fists) and so decided to break stuff into tenths instead of twelfths. (I know some of you wrote PhD theses in this subject, and actually speak Sumerian – probably one of you from Azerbaijan – so I am fully prepared to print errata and oblongata as necessary.) Now, still looking at your right palm, having successfully counted to 12, make a thumbs-up sign with your left hand. As in . . . ‘that’s one set of 12.’ Count another set of twelve with your right hand and you earn an unfolded left index finger (never mind that now your left hand is prepared to say, ‘bang-bang’ – the Sumerians, gentle souls, had no guns). ‘That’s two sets of 12.’ Keep doing this until you have unfolded all five fingers of your left hand, and you’ve got 60. My feeling is that if Sumerians had had six fingers on their left hands, there would be 72 seconds in a minute and 72 minutes in an hour. Had they had six fingers on both hands – though no one believes that they did – days and nights would have had 15 hours each (full days, 30), and each hour would have been divided into 90 minutes. If I’m confusing you, imagine what a centipede must feel. They move so slowly because they’re trying to do the math. Bryan goes on to explain that the days of the week were named after the seven known celestial bodies – SATURN day, SUN day, MOON day, MARS day (the Teutons called it Tuesday, but the French called it Mardi), MERCURY day (Mercredi), JUPITER (Jeudi) and VENUS day (Vendredi) . . . again, I am certain I’m misspelling some of this or torturing it in some other way, so click here if you want the original Sumerian. So what I’m telling you here is that a few dozen long lifetimes ago – but still nothing in the context of the thousands of millions of years of evolution that underlay it all – people were looking at their hands and fingers and the moon and the sun, trying to make sense of the world. And that very slowly the pieces of the puzzle began to come together. (But very slowly.) And then they began coming together a bit faster – the printing press just six long lifetimes ago being an important aid – and then faster still – and faster. And now they are falling together at an incredible rate, which one guesses will only accelerate further, until . . . BLAST OFF! Just how you define ‘blast off’ will depend on the particular philosophical and religious perspective you have formed, as well as your general level of cheeriness. (Being an optimist, I see great things. But one needn’t be Ted Kaczynski to harbor qualms.) But there they were, counting with their right thumbs touching the first segment of their index fingers – one. And now I have a laptop computer with all but instant access to almost all the information on the planet. I have a cell phone the size of a small stone I can put to my ear and reach Charles, 4,000 miles away buying fabric (and just tapped to design the Anne Klein line!). And I have TiVo. (Full disclosure: After touting TiVo and audible.com in this space, I became so enthusiastic – how did I live before TiVo? – that I bought a little of each stock. I did no research, have no expectation that either can make any money, understand that Microsoft is about to enter the TiVo market with a terrific competitive device of its own, and do not recommend that you buy the shares. But having bought them myself, I must warn you to take this and any further recommendation of the products – which I love – with appropriate skepticism. I am no longer unbiased.) And that, my friends, is why there are 24 hours in a day. If only there were more.
Tax Nits February 23, 2001January 27, 2017 I-BONDS Less Antman offers this quick correction to his item on I-Bonds: ‘The executor can include the interest earned on the final income tax return of the decedent or estate, in which case the beneficiary is only responsible on the growth after that point. But one way or another, the government is going to assess income tax on every dollar of interest.’ WASH SALES Dan Pritts: ‘I’ve heard about ‘wash sales’ being prohibited when they are used to take a capital loss for a given tax year. Makes sense to me. Do you know if it works the other way? That is, if I sell a stock that I would take a gain on, but re-buy the stock elsewhere, am I able to defer the gain? I am considering switching brokers, and would like to take my holdings with me to the new broker since one motivation of this exercise is to concentrate all my holdings at one brokerage (to get better treatment based on my vast fortune ;).’ ☞ No, only works against you, not for you. (What could be fairer than that?) But you can just transfer these shares from one account to the other without selling them. Your new broker will be happy to handle it for you. FLAT TAX David Jelinek: ‘When it comes to politics, you and I concur on almost nothing. But here’s a law I think we could agree on: All Senators and Congressmen must do their own income tax filings! And if they need any help, then instead of calling an accountant, they would have to call the IRS (much like many ordinary citizens) and get their not always accurate advice! I think we’d see a flat tax passed pretty damned fast after this law went into effect.’ ☞ A good law. Except that we could still have three or four tax brackets. Believe me, that’s not the complicated part.
Quick Takes February 22, 2001February 17, 2017 AIRFARES Another good place to find low airfares: qixo.com. AUDIO BOOKS Morton: ‘Hey, thanks for the free audiobooks link at broadcast.com. I saw that at amazon.com and audiblebooks.com the download price to listen to the book HOW TO SLOW DOWN AND GET MORE DONE was $9.95. But at Broadcast.com, I got to listen to it for FREE.’ Morton Baxton: ‘Another good FREE site for FREE audiobooks is audiohighway.com. My TV and radio don’t like it. They’re getting jealous. Click on ‘audiobooks’ at the site, and then click on the fine print in the upper left corner on the new page to get at the full selection of books.’ MEN’S SUITS Chip Ellis: ‘Just back from Thailand on business where I picked up 2 made-to-order tuxedos (one for me and one for my partner) for $150 each. Each tux included reversible cummerbund (red, black), 2 ties (red, black), a pleated shirt, and 2 pocket hankies (red, black). We have two black tie events in March (HRC dinner and ChefAID AIDS fundraiser) so the purchases were just in time. Best of all — the tailor has a website so I can order additional suits and he will mail them. You can order over the web too if you send your measurements. Saves the price of a plane ticket (but I wouldn’t mind going back – Thailand is beautiful, the people are friendly and always smile). I’ll send you the web site address. TIPPING Ray Heer: ‘You already know the best tip there is – DIVERSIFY.’ Gary Koscielny: ‘Why send money with a 15% commission when you can send it for free? Veterans of EBAY know about PayPal. You send as little or as much (within certain limits) as you want with no fee. You can even earn interest off of your PayPal account balances. Check out PayPal.com.’ Dolly Martin: ‘For my dollar, I would expect you to wake me like a butler in the morning, and then read your column to me personally as I rub sleep from my eyes.’ Tom Wilder: ‘I just ‘tipped’ you $1.00. Now if you can just cut down on the Democratic drivel and Gore whining I might find some more $ to send you.’ To which Chuck Smith replies: ‘I just sent you $2.00 to keep up the ‘Democratic drivel.” ☞ Ooo! Ooo! Bidding war!
Don’t Count Your Double-Digit Chickens Goose Eggs May Be More Like It February 21, 2001February 17, 2017 Thanks to Bob Price for pointing me to this piece by Bill Gross, the world-famous bond manager. I once got to interview Bill at some length for a PBS TV series Jane Bryant Quinn and I did, and came away knowing this was someone worth listening to. His message will not brighten your day. Yet there’s little question in my mind that Bill is basically right. From today’s prices, the next decade in the stock market is going to be uninspired — at best. And although Bill writes it better and with more authority (he manages billions of dollars with great success), he echoes some of the same themes you’ve been reading here from time to time. (E.g., the Internet is great for consumers, perhaps not great at all for investors.) Anyway, I urge you to read his piece. The bottom line: Don’t spend like there’s no tomorrow. If you’re counting on the stock market to pull you through, you’ll run short of cash. Instead, save like there will be a tomorrow. In place of using 10% annual returns as the assumption you make in your retirement planning model, let alone more, you might consider the possibility of after-tax, after-inflation returns of much less – perhaps 3% to 5%. If this proves too gloomy . . . wonderful! You will be sitting pretty. If not, you won’t be as badly blind-sided.
Clickle Trickle February 20, 2001February 17, 2017 Amazon is doomed. Thousands of you read Friday’s column, a pathetic plea for tips, and, 72 hours into the experiment, $151.79 has been sent my way, net of Amazon’s $45.04 in fees. For my part, I am grateful. This is $151.79 more than I ever expected to earn from this web site. Enough to buy a dozen denim shirts. But for Amazon, I am afraid. How far can Amazon go on $45.04? Especially when it must have to split its fee in some way with the credit card companies that do the actual billing? Alan Light: ‘I just went over to amazon.com and gave you a $20 tip. Since they state they will not disclose the names of donors to you, I’m wondering how you know they pay you all of it. Is there any independent accounting?’ Alan raises an interesting point. Let us assume that, for the 1,262 columns I have written in this space, 1,000 of you decided to click me an average of a penny. You know – a penny for your thoughts? That would be $12,620, less Amazon’s fees. Almost enough for a new car. Now you’re talking! Unless, that is, Amazon just kept all but $151.79 of it. How would I know? I’m joking! Amazon is beyond honest. Jeff Bezos just sent me 10 one-cent stamps along with the electric hair trimmer I ordered (not a book about hair trimming, an electric hair trimmer!) to spare me ‘the hassle of an extra trip to the post office’ now that the first-class rate has jumped a penny. (Don’t get me started on that.) He just wanted to be nice. I am quite sure $151.79 was my entire take. I have the greatest readers in the world, and if they are a bit tight with the tips, who am I – who begs them to turn out the lights when leaving the room and drive used cars – to do anything but applaud? Still, it is interesting how much people (including me) have come to expect from the Internet for free. You know the QuickBrowse service I frequently tout in this space (and of which I am a part-owner)? The following is an actual letter (not an e-mail, a letter) recently received from one of its users in the heart of the country: Dear [Quickbrowse], Just one week ago on the dates of January 25-26, I logged onto the Internet, like I do everyday, and to my surprise my homepage (Quickbrowse.com) wasn’t working. Instead it showed a screen that showed there was a server error on the side of Quickbrowse.com. This circumstance threw my whole day off. Quickbrowse’s service is very valuable to me. I have come to rely on the convenience and dependability of the site to gather the information I need everyday. It saves me an average of 30-40 minutes a day – sometimes even more. Because of the Quickbrowse downtime on January 25-26 it added an extra 60-80 minutes of surfing time to my days. As I am sure you are well aware — time is money. I consider my time very valuable, as do many other people/clients. So as you can tell this disruption of service cost me dearly that first day. The second day (January 26) I logged on hoping (praying) that your service would be up, however, I was disappointed again. This being the case I sent email to webmaster@quickbrowse.com just like the “error page” told me to do. A few moments later I receive a “Mail Delivery Subsystem” failure of delivery notice, Quickbrowse.com has no such customer service address. So not only did the second day cause a lower productivity for me, it made me upset because I couldn’t tell anyone within your organization about it. I hope we can solve this problem in a mutually agreeable way. [Emphasis added.] I have already submitted a complaint to e-complaints.com and will continue with six other consumer rights/customer service organizations — enclosed is a proposed list. What I want is to be ensured that Quickbrowse.com can be a reliable homepage — that this situation will not occur at regular intervals. Further, I would like the Web site http://www.ecommercetimes.com to be in your QbSelection>Business>E-Commerce section. This is a Web site that offers reliable and informative data that helps me make more informed decisions. I am sure it will help out some of your other users as well. Quickbrowse makes me a more productive individual and offers a more efficient use of my time. I look forward to your reply and resolution to my problem, and will wait until February 19, 2001 before seeking help from the enclosed list of consumer protection agencies. Please contact me at the above address. Sincerely . . . The fact that Quickbrowse is free seems all but irrelevant. We come to rely on certain things and we want them right. [Kevin Rasmussen: ‘I’ve been looking forward to the advent of the clickle so that I can leave a tip to show my appreciation. However, I won’t use the Amazon system because of their track record of using personal information in what I feel is an unethical way.’] [Tom Wilder: ‘I just ‘tipped’ you $1.00. Now if you can just cut down on the Democratic drivel and Gore whining I might find some more $ to send you.’] [Kurt Hemr: ‘Those who think you spend too much time on political matters should tip more, on the theory that the wealthier you are the more likely you’ll be to see the Republican point of view.’]
Clickles – At Last! February 16, 2001February 17, 2017 Well, sort of. As you may have read by now, Amazon has come up with an ingenious way to – who knows? – one day make a profit. It has nothing to do with selling books or selling anything else. I’m not sure it will catch on, but we can try a test, right now. Just click here if you want to tip me. Amazon lets you send as little as $1, or as much as $50. And if you change your mind any time within 30 days, because I’ve written something particularly goofy or offensive, they let you change your mind and UN-tip me. Remember that idea you read here that saved your marriage? That dot-com stock you avoided losing your life savings on? Click here. If everybody clicks and sends something, two things will happen: I will be able to buy a new car. I won’t buy a new car, of course – there is nothing at all wrong with my 1996 Saturn. I will buy another “historic document,” perhaps, or a warehouseful of Walgreens shirts. But I could buy a new car. Amazon will make a ton of money for moving some electrons around. Which – because electrons are a lot lighter than War and Peace – may actually put it in the black. A color I believe it deserves, because like many of you, I’ve been an Amazon fan for many years. (Just not a fan of its stock.) Amazon takes 15 cents from each tip, plus 15%. So on $1, they take 30 cents, on $50, they take $7.65. But I don’t begrudge it in the least, because they’ve sent me so many free coffee mugs over the years, and sold me books at preposterously low prices. (I do think competition will eventually drive that 15% down.) I absolutely don’t want anyone to feel obligated in any way to pay to visit this site. Seriously. Still, what boy doesn’t like a little extra money? Amazon provides a “pay” icon that I may or may not start appending at the bottom of this site, like the hat on the pavement by the mime. But this is no Stephen King deal where “I won’t finish the novel unless 60% of you pay me.” I get a big kick out of doing this web site, and learn at least as much from you as you may from me. (But forget it: even after you get Amazon Pay Pages of your own, I ain’t payin’. Well, maybe a little.) Where this becomes interesting for Amazon is if a few million people do what I’m doing, and set up pay pages; and a few tens of millions do occasionally click here to make payments – or donations. (Your local charity could use this system to raise money. Amazon even supplies an automated “thermometer” to show your goal – $10,000 to buy new uniforms – and how close you are at any given moment – $8,742 – and how many people have contributed. Amazon is one smart cookie.) With 10 million people in the habit of clicking $5 a week, on average, to buy stuff, tip folks, and make contributions – well, I figure that would add nearly $400 million a year to Amazon’s coffers. So enormous have Amazon’s losses been – it lost $1.41 billion last year – that even this would not entirely stanch them. But talk about a potentially high-margin business! Imagine how profitable your own bank would be if it had no checks to process – just electrons – and siphoned off 15% of every dollar you spent. (Someday, with 100 million people averaging $20 a week – I suppose you could imagine $16 billion a year flowing to Amazon, and that would make for a pretty penny.) My instinct is that this will never happen. If this nifty idea takes off, competition would drive that 15% way down, and split the market. (You don’t think Citibank’ll want a piece of this action? Visa? Amex? Yahoo? Sears?) To explore setting up a pay page of your own, click here. But wait! I don’t want to distract you from tipping me – first, click here!
Loose Ends February 15, 2001January 27, 2017 STOCKS John Lemon: ‘To hell with that doom and gloom stuff. How about some more stock picks? Baby needs a new pair of shoes!’ ☞ eBay in the fourth? BONDS Larry Francis: ‘I am thinking of recommending inflation-protected Series I Savings Bonds to my 80-year-old mother-in-law, but I wasn’t sure if they get stepped up in value upon death as other items do. Would they be a useful estate-planning device so that no one gets stuck with the interest and capital gains? I realize the payout would be some of each.’ ☞ Bad news, counsels the estimable Less Antman. Although I-Bonds are in many respects a good deal (see savingsbonds.gov), Savings bonds do not step up in basis on the date of death, as other securities do. (If you tomorrow should inherit 1000 shares of Johnson & Johnson that your daddy paid $1 a share for before The Great War, you have the option of ratcheting up your cost basis to the value at the time of his death – about $95 – so that when you sell, you avoid the taxable gain — $94,000 in this example – that would otherwise be realized from the sale.) The redeemer of a savings bond is taxed on the excess of the redemption price over the original cost whether he is the original purchaser or the grieving beneficiary. Furthermore, with a savings bond, all of the increase in value is interest income. There is no capital gain. That is presumably why there is no step-up in basis. BOOKS Craig Furnas: ‘If you want FREE unabridged audiobooks that play through your computer, go to broadcast.com.’ TIVO Eric Batson: ‘The best one I found …. http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/ Somewhat daunting, but intriguing fro sure. MUTUAL FUND COST CALCULATOR Mark Centuori: ‘Given the strong endorsement you gave to the Personal Fund site in your column (and let’s not forget the self-promotion in Mutual Funds and Worth), the link that you continue to have to it, and the page on the site that still bears your name, I’d expect that you’d have done your readers the courtesy of announcing that you’re no longer affiliated with the venture. I was disappointed at having to read about it in Mutual Funds. I guess ‘full disclosure’ is a one-way street.’ ☞ I stand fully behind what I wrote in Mutual Funds and Worth about the concept of a personal fund, and I continue the link to the Mutual Funds Cost Calculator, because I think it provides a terrific (free) service. The fact that my business relationship with Personal Fund did not work out seems to me not particularly relevant, but I apologize if you feel betrayed or deceived in some way. That was not my intent!
Your Options, L.J.’s Sweater, Etc. February 14, 2001February 17, 2017 Don’t forget the flowers . . . Don’t forget the flowers . . . Don’t forget the flowers . . . GOT OPTIONS? I suppose it’s a little late to be suggesting this, now that the options your employer granted you are deeper under water than a ten-foot tube worm. But for those of you whose options remain, or may someday become, valuable – or who may shortly be receiving a new grant – Kaye Thomas’s Consider Your Options is the book to read. CHEAP THREADS L.J. Kutten: ‘Years ago, I was at a outlet mall. Found a nice sweater with a hole in the arm pit. The store was asking $5. I offered 50 cents. We compromised at $1. My wife sewed up the hole and I have worn the sweater ever since.’ ☞ My kinda sweater. AIRFARES Anon: ‘Travelbyus.com was lauded in your column the other day, and I decided to give it a try. I needed a one-way car rental in March. Travelbyus offers a search for one-way rentals and came up with a car from Dollar at a rate of $200/week, at least $50/week better than the other companies I had contacted. I reserved it and got a confirmation message back from Travelbyus. Their message did not mention the rate — just the dates, car type, and Dollar confirmation number. I called Dollar to be sure everything was kosher and found that they had the reservation, but it was at $300/week. I called Travelbyus. They had no answer or resolution for the problem. When pressed, they commented that they’d been having problems making car reservations work properly. If I had not happened to check with Dollar, I would have had a rude surprise at the car rental counter. In my opinion, this site is not ready for prime time.’ ☞ Well, it does say ‘beta.’ But in any event, you have a point: shop around! And until you have a confirmation you can print out and rely on, don’t count on its being honored. Don’t forget the flowers . . . Don’t forget the flowers . . . Don’t forget the flowers . . .