Oh, Yum! March 14, 2003February 22, 2017 CALORIE-FREE Dana Dlott: ‘It’s not really true the dressing you wrote about has zero calories. The imitation bacon bits have calories. The FDA has some legalistic rules about labeling that allows the company to say zero. I believe you don’t count calories from the spices. However it is close enough to zero for government work. Salad dressing is supposed to be oil, vinegar and spices. Vinegar has few calories and the spices are defined to have zero calories, so the oil which makes it creamy is the problem. This stuff is an example of modern food technology. If you take sugars, starches or oils and turn them into long chain polymers, they become difficult to digest, and if you do it right they can taste good but being indigestible have no calories. In this stuff the creamy texture is provided by a cocktail of ingredients including cellulose gel (cellulose from wood or grass is a starch polymer that is indigestible by people but yummy to cows), other starches that are also modified, and some other polymers such as modified alginate which is extracted from seaweed. I notice they are using sucralose for sweetening, which is a polymer of sucrose (table sugar) that is also indigestible but which tastes more like sugar than most other artificial sweeteners. ‘If you asked 10,000 scientists, only 10 of them would say there is anything to worry about in this stuff. Of course these 10 are in the news all the time. The two main concerns, they say, are eating this indigestible stuff can cause some kinds of stomach distress. Of course eating a lot of fat also does this. Also they say this stuff can stick to various vitamins and carry them out of the body. That is the kind of stupid thing that somebody desperately searching for a reason to not like something might say. So eat up, be happy. If the stuff upsets your stomach don’t eat it any more.’ Dan Critchett: ‘Aw, c’mon Andy, you know why food sellers whose product ISN’T fat-free, calorie-free, or carb-free get away with saying that their product IS: they make their serving size small enough so that it contains fewer calories, fat, or carbs PER SERVING than the FDA requires them to disclose. My favorite is Pam, the cooking spray: it’s 100% oil, 100% fat, but advertised as totally ‘fat free.’ How? Because a serving size is a one-second spray. (Try it some time, see if you can really spray it for only one second. Impossible. What a scam.)’ John Kasley: ‘Here’s a link to a page that answers your question about Walden Farms. (What a great name for food which is totally artificial.)’ I DON’T KNOW – WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING TO YOURS? Pieter Bach: ‘Oh, Andy, WHAT have you been doing to your rhubarb! I hope someone told you the green part at the bottom is POISONOUS (no government program on this one, just trust me, I come from farmers) and that you have to COOK it with a little sugar – brown is actually better than white, here – to get it to taste good. How’s your stomach? Rhubarb was for centuries part of the physicians’ natural remedies lists, and was prescribed as an emetic. ‘Prescribed’ and ’emetic’ are important terms to note. It is high in oxalic acid, and the vitamin and mineral content is released by heat, the same as spinach. It used to be an important part of the spring tonicking, along with castor oil. It is combined with strawberries in pies because the iron content of strawberries (quite high) is made more available by the oxalic acid; you could, of course, combine strawberries and spinach, but I don’t think that would bake up very tasty. Think of rhubarb as a vegetable that is not improved by salt, and class it with shchav, French sorrel, and what we used to call ‘sour grass’ (Argentine oxalis), in terms of minerals. It goes well with goose and duck, because in culinary terms it lightens the fat content of the meat and makes it more digestible.’ ☞ Only a man of true dedication to his readers would poison himself with frozen rhubarb chunks and then struggle to his post to tell the tale. (The truth is, I took one taste and tossed it. And as Charles will tell you – he has seen me eat food five years past its expiration – I don’t toss food lightly. Stick with the frozen sour cherries.)
Food for Thought March 13, 2003February 22, 2017 Well, I can tell you this much: rhubarb is certainly overrated. It tastes nothing like it does in the pie.The bags of sour cherries that you get frozen at the supermarket, on the other hand – and the frozen blackberries and frozen mixed berries – are the perfect Cooking Like a Guy™ snack. Just open and eat with God’s own chopsticks, your index finger and opposable thumb. The trick? The veritable ‘je ne sais quoi’ of the frozen sour cherry snack? Do not defrost. You can let them thaw a little, but beyond that you are making a mistake. I can also report that “dried plums,” as they are now cleverly being marketed – a plum assignment! handled with such aplomb! – taste an awful lot like prunes. The really interesting food to discuss for a minute – well, there are radishes, but radishes deserve a whole column (see, for example, November 11, 1999, “Underappreciated Vegetables,” which also lacked room for the radish) – is the Walden Farms Fat-Free Sugar-Free Hot Bacon Salad Dressing. Not only is it fat-free and sugar-free; it is cholesterol-free, carbohydrate-free, and calorie-free. You see what I am driving at? How is this possible? Calorie-free? It is a thick, creamy, flavorful, imitation-bacon-bit salad dressing. What could it be made of? Smog? I’m expecting answers from you, people. FIXED LINK Ron Goldthwaite: “The link in yesterday’s column was mangled. Since it’s an interesting article, it’s worth fixing.” ☞ Oops. Click here for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory report that discusses the effectiveness of plastic sheeting and duct tape in preparing a residential safe room. AND ONE MORE THING TO WORRY ABOUT Ed Biebel: “In addition to my regular working life, I am also a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician with my community’s local ambulance service. Hazardous Materials Awareness and Operations has been part of our basic training since I became an EMT 10 years ago. My point in mentioning this is that a lot of the current buzz about chemical attacks sticks in my craw. True Emergency Management is “all hazard, all risk.” That is to say that terrorist attacks are not the only vector for exposing a population to deadly chemicals. Tanker trucks full of lethal chemical agents regularly travel our highways. In our region, we have had accidental chemical releases from nearby plants, derailed freight cars carrying chemicals, natural gas main breaks involving evacuation of numerous city blocks . . . and the list goes on. These are risks that occur every day. Yet the agencies that should be protecting us and reducing our risk are being gutted. State agencies struggle with budget cuts and if there is money trickling down from the Feds to help, I’m not sure where it is going. Sure we want to check to make sure that the driver of a chemical truck isn’t a terrorist. But don’t we also want to make sure that the brakes on the truck work and that the tanker is properly inspected and that the company is observing all of the regulations for transporting deadly chemicals?”
Maybe Get a Little Duct Tape After All? March 12, 2003January 22, 2017 WHERE DO E-MAILS GO? Mike Baute: ‘Cool column. Now tell us where Regular Mail (snail that is) goes!’ BECAUSE THEY ATTACKED EVERYTHING HE SAID? Anne Speck: ‘Why do you suppose Al Gore bungled so badly on communicating that he had presided over the biggest contraction of government bloat in U.S. history? I find it very amusing that it is the Democrats who shrunk the government and the Republicans who are now expanding it and making ever-more intrusive decisions about the lives of Americans.’ RELAX – IT’S JUST PLAGUE (A CONTRARY OPINION) Michael Axelrod: ‘The article by Easterbrook in the New York Times you quoted last month is in places misleading and in other places incorrect. I think he knows very little about the things he writes about in this article. For example, the ‘tape and seal’ protective strategy for chemical warfare attacks on civilian populations originally comes from NATO (1983) and Israel, not the US Department of Homeland Security. This ‘expedient sheltering’ idea is not for ‘psychological benefit.’ In 1991 Israeli civilians used ‘tape and seal’ in anticipation of chemical attacks from Iraq. You can find a report prepared by Oak Ridge National Laboratory here that discusses the effectiveness of plastic sheeting and duct tape in preparing a residential ‘safe room’ against chemical and biological attacks on cities. There is no intelligent basis for Easterbrook’s claim that a chemical attack on an American city would have a small effect, and that your chances of harm would be ‘a million to one.’ This kind of statement is irresponsible, and the New York Times is irresponsible for printing it. The experiments and calculations for assessing this risk are current research. But, let’s go on to bio-terror where Easterbrook really demonstrates his ignorance. ‘The 1971 smallpox outbreak at Aralsk in the (then) Soviet Union is a particularly troubling incident because the index case likely caught the disease from smallpox that was both weaponized and aerosolized and retained its infectivity for 15 kilometers. The index case would have become infected while aboard ship in the Aral Sea when it passed near the Soviet bio-warfare testing ground on Vozrozhdeniye (Rebirth) Island (actually a peninsula). In other words, the smallpox virus did not require human contact; it was carried by the wind to its victim. For details, see the report by Zelicoff at Sandia Labs. Easterbrook doesn’t seem to take this incident very seriously, completely missing its significance because he thinks it requires person-to-person contact to spread smallpox. ‘Easterbrook gets some of the important facts about the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk in 1979 wrong. There was no explosion at the bio-warfare facility in Sverdlovsk, and the quantity released was not necessarily large. The Soviet defector and scientist, Ken Alibek, covers this incident in his book, Biohazard. A missing filter caused the anthrax release. According to Alibek, the Soviet Union was planning to deliver anthrax warheads by ballistic missile to the US. He says an anthrax warhead is as deadly as a nuclear weapon! ‘Easterbrook also doesn’t seem to understand the effects of nuclear weapons either. The Hiroshima bomb exploded at about 5,000 feet, which is the optimum height for damage. The effects of a surface detonation would be quite different. ‘In short, don’t rely on the New York Times, or any other newspaper for that matter, to get accurate and complete information about this complex topic.’
The Boss Speaks March 11, 2003June 17, 2019 ‘You try not to be cynical, but without the distraction of Iraq [people would notice] that the economy is doing poorly, and the old-fashioned Republican tax cuts for the folks that are doin’ well will seriously curtail services for people who are struggling out there. I don’t think that’s the kind of country Americans really want.’ – Bruce Springsteen interviewed in the February 28 Entertainment Weekly ‘The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you.’ – Rita Mae Brown (as quoted at the end of our condo newsletter) And now . . . . . . at long last . . . . . . Where DO e-mails go? [Warning: Curiosity may not have killed the cat but merely put him to sleep. Feel free to stick with the Springsteen interview.] John Kasley asked this question February 24: ‘I occasionally send myself an e-mail with a URL in it, as a reference to something I may want to investigate later. I just sent myself such a note, and it took 9 minutes to get back here. I’m on a cable connection. Where did the message go and what did it do? I hope it had a good time. Your readers seem to know everything in the world. One of them will surely know this.’ John Seiffer: ‘Emails (like everything on the web) exist on a computer somewhere called a server. When you send an email, your computer sends it to the server you’re connected to – owned by the place you get your internet account from, called your ISP, Internet Service Provider. That server then checks the address of where it’s going to and sends it out to the server that handles that address. Then, to receive email, your computer gets it from that server. It’s likely that – even sending to yourself – the ‘sending server’ and the ‘receiving server’ are not the same. It as if there were one mail carrier who picked up mail you sent and another who brought mail you received. It’s possible that in sending from one server to another, the message got delayed and parts of it had to get sent again till the whole thing got there. It’s also likely that when the message got to one or the other server it just waited in line for a while before it got sent out or before it got filed in the right place so some other software would know it was there (AOL used to be notorious for this). And it’s also possible that a person’s computer is only set to check for new emails every 10 minutes (mine is actually set to check every 30). This is something you can usually adjust in your email program.’ Peter Ludemann: ‘There’s a long answer, involving jargon such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, MTAs, etc. I’ll try a shorter answer. The Internet mail system was designed in the early 1980s. In those days, always-on connections were an unheard-of luxury. So, mail was sent by ‘store-and-foreward,’ which means that it would be relayed from one machine to another until it reached its destination (similar to how the real post-office sends mail between offices). Each relay would keep trying at intervals to connect to the next machine, until it finally had sent the message. Even the most trivial mail message requires: 1. send from your machine to your mail server 2. send from the mail server to the recipient’s mail server 3. send to the final destination machine. ‘This is necessary because otherwise both you and the recipient would have to be connected at the same time to send mail (as in Instant Messenger). In the case of sending mail to yourself, step #2 can be left out, but you still have an intermediate mail server. In some cases, there might be multiple intermediate servers (often called “gateways”). ‘There can be any number of reasons why things get delayed on a server … can’t connect from your machine to the server, the server is busy, it’s out of disk space and needs to wait for some mail to be delivered before accepting yours, etc., etc. (Even today this relaying occasionally fails and you get a message saying that the server tried for 3 days and couldn’t deliver the message.) ‘In the early 80s, if a message was delivered within half an hour, you were usually very happy. Often the mail didn’t get delivered at all and you got no notification of the failure. Nowadays, people assume that email is reliable and are amazed when it takes more than a few seconds to arrive.’ Erik Streed: ‘When you send an email from a program like Outlook or Eudora it typically contacts your mail server (something like pop3.mit.edu or mail.mit.edu in my case) and passes on the message. That server then looks at the To:, CC: and BCC: fields and figures out which other servers it needs to contact to pass the message along. It might also check for viruses, tack on some good legal voodoo disclaimer or toss back the message if it’s too big. ‘One of the more common rules of the system is . . . to wait. There are two reasons for this. One is that if the server accumulates several messages going to the same place (say aol.com) it can talk to that server once and everything is much more efficient. It’s kinda an artifact from when the ‘net was very young and your mail server might make a mail run once a day or once an hour by directly calling someone else on a modem. The other reason is bugs. Suppose you have a mailing list program. You send a message to the list address and the program emails everyone on that list. If someone’s email has turned sour and the message bounces, the entire list could be mailed (instead of just the sender). Most list servers are smart enough to figure this out (now, at least), but by delaying a message for a few minutes can change a devastating bug (or virus for that matter) into a minor nuisance.’ Turner Jones: ‘POP servers (Post Office Protocol) are busy, busy little bees. Every ISP (internet service provider) has to have one so that you can get your e-mail. These little bees are constantly opening the door, getting the mail, sorting and stacking, moving and storing, and opening the door again and sending the mail out. All day long. It gets to be too much some times and to top it off, some bees are smaller and weaker than other bees so they can’t do as much work as the bee keeper (ISP) would like them to. In fact, some bee keepers are just downright cheap and don’t really care how overworked the bees are. If you are interested, here is an informative link – hopefully, without the bee analogy.’ Brad Hurley: ‘Where do e-mails go? Answer: When you click SEND your e-mail gets chopped into pieces (called packets), which are then volleyed about from server to server until they reach their intended destination, where they are magically reassembled. Usually that process takes milliseconds, but sometimes things get held up. Traceroute, a command built into both the Windows and the Mac operating systems, lets you to see how many bounces it will take for a request from your computer to reach a specified server. It also shows you how long the request takes to get there. Instructions for Windows are here. For Mac OSX, here.’
The Cop and the Firefighter March 10, 2003February 22, 2017 The market? If we really catch Osama, as it seems as if we soon may, that’s the kind of great news that could easily touch off a rally – Lord knows there’s a ton of cash of the sidelines, including a gram or two of my own. And if there were some kind of good surprise with Iraq, the market could go over the moon – short term. My own sense (and I would be first to agree my own sense is not worth a whole lot, and that timing the market is all but impossible for anyone) is that the values, for the most part, are just not yet that compelling, and that the economic challenges and uncertainties are still awfully great. So even if we get lucky, I’d be surprised if, as a general proposition, stocks, bonds, or real estate have hit bottom. And if things should go badly in Iraq and its aftermath, as they well may, times could get tougher. Well – you asked. And now, on an entirely different topic . . . Click here.
Our National Debt March 7, 2003March 25, 2012 Yesterday I said I had no problem with a $300 billion or $400 billion deficit in a bad year, “or even – given the size of our economy – with, say, a $100 billion deficit every year. (That would be less than 2% annual growth in our national debt. If the economy were growing at a nominal 4% a year – between real growth and inflation – and our collective debt were growing at just 2%, our indebtedness would steadily shrink in proportion to our economy.)” Michael Young: “I don’t think you really mean that, do you? The arguments against a $400B deficit still apply at the $100 billion level. It’s only a matter of *how soon* it catches up with us.” Not true. Imagine a $200,000 house you buy with a $160,000 mortgage – 80% of the purchase price. Now imagine adding 2% a year to the outstanding principal (instead of paying it down) but imagine, also, that its value is increasing at 4% a year. In a century, you’d owe nearly $1.2 million on the house . . . but the house would be worth more than $10 million. So your indebtedness would have shrunk from 80% to 12%. The problem, I argued yesterday, is when you set yourself on a trajectory, as Bush has done, for $400 billion – and higher – deficits as far as the eye can see. That is, deficits that grow the national debt faster than we can grow the economy, which increases the debt relative to the size of the economy. (That same $200,000 house, worth $10 million after a century of 4% growth, would be burdened by a $13 million mortgage if we added 4.5% a year to the principal balance instead of 2%. The indebtedness would be 130% instead of 12%.) With $400 billion deficits, I argued yesterday, pretty soon, it mounts up . . . and the interest we have to pay mounts up with it – both because the outstanding balance is higher, but also because that higher balance is likely to be subject to higher interest rates. (When your own credit card debt begins to get out of hand, they stop mailing you those 0% interest offers – just when you need them most.) If we were doing all this deficit spending to rescue the states from their own fiscal disasters, or to accomplish some fantastic investment to make us more productive in the future, I argued, that would be scary enough. But we are doing it to reduce the tax burden on the wealthy. With the unintended result, I think, that it will make us all less wealthy. What, I asked, could we be thinking?
What’s Fair? March 6, 2003February 22, 2017 Sreenivas Ikkurty: ‘I read your article on CEO pay in PARADE this Sunday. The situation [gargantuan pay even in the face of mediocre performance] is really deplorable. My suggestion is to do as Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett does in motivating Lou Simpson. Simpson is the CEO of GEICO, part of the Berkshire empire, and manages its investment portfolio. In those years when his portfolio does worse than S&P 500, he pays Berkshire from his personal account. His salary becomes negative (not zero). If he beats the S&P 500, he receives a bonus proportional to his gains above S&P 500. What do you think?’ ☞ That Buffett is a smart cookie. He has also pointed out from time to time that ‘record earnings’ are often not the triumph they are made out to be. If one owned a company that did no more than invest all its assets in a savings account and let them compound, its earnings (assuming a constant interest rate) would rise to record heights each year. The idea is to do better than a savings account – or else why go to all that extra trouble and take all that extra risk? I’m not sure about getting many CEOs to take negative salaries when they don’t perform well, but I think it would be healthy if it were possible to attract and motivate talented CEOs without having to dangle the prospect of $100 million pay days. You can get by on $1 million or $2 million a year, plus perks. (Can’t you?) Or at least the next generation of CEOs might be able to. Yes, incentives and an ownership stake make sense. But pride and competitive drive generally motivate quality people, too. And the lower the base salary, the more modest the incentive need be to have impact. To a guy making just $1 million a year, the prospect of an extra million is a lot more meaningful than to a guy making $5 million a year. (Of course, this all verges on the obscene in a world where most Americans make $35,000, and most of the rest of the world would be ecstatic to make $3,500. But as I argued in PARADE, I’m all for people reaping the fruits of the free market. It’s just when the market isn’t free – when the CEOs are essentially setting their own pay with the blessing of the friends they’ve put on the board, many of them fellow CEOs – that I balk.) Jeremy Bronson: ‘Gennady S. wrote: ‘The guy who made $100 million took a lot more chances than the guy who did not, and if his risks are not rewarded, capitalism would not work. Period.’ What kind of logic says that the guy who made $100 million took a lot more chances than the guy who did not? For one thing for every one of those so-called risk-takers who made it big, there are dozens who didn’t. Why shouldn’t the lucky (yes, lucky) one bear a reasonable tax burden for his or her success? More importantly, the odds are that any person who is in a position to make $100 million in stock options has had everything in life much easier than people at the bottom end of the tax bracket. Imagine how much easier it is to take risks when you know that you have family resources (parents, future inheritance, spousal income, equity in a nice house) and/or a good education and lots of useful connections to fall back on if the venture fails. It is this terrible misconception about the difference between what we are given and what we earn that generates such conflict between America’s increasingly stratified classes. God forbid, the children of the super rich actually go to war to defend the country that rewards them so generously!’ Jonathan Levy: ‘I really like the Democratic line I have heard that Bush’s tax cut is not a tax cut but a tax postponement – to a future generation. Given that, how about an estate tax pegged to the net budget deficit run during the dead person’s adult life? Before you can pass along wealth to your own children, you have to pay your share of the debt that would otherwise go to everyone’s children. Even those people who never voted for a winning candidate built up additional wealth by paying lower taxes than were necessary to fund the government spending that actually took place. For those who may say they did not want a lot of the spending – too bad. That’s how democracy works. It is not as if you get to duck income taxes by objecting to the spending. Obviously, this is way out there and I am not necessarily completely serious. However, I think there is a point to be made. Someone has to bear the burden of the deficits, and it seems more fair for it to be someone who was 30 in 1980 than someone who would not be born for 30 years.’ ☞ Well, I have no problem with a $300 billion or $400 billion deficit in a single bad year or two. Or even – given the size of our economy – with, say, a $100 billion deficit every year. (That would be less than 2% annual growth in our national debt. If the economy were growing at a nominal 4% a year – between real growth and inflation – and our collective debt were growing at just 2%, our indebtedness would steadily shrink in proportion to our economy.) The problem is when you set yourself on a trajectory, as Bush has done, for $400 billion – and higher – deficits as far as the eye can see. Pretty soon, it mounts up . . . and the interest we have to pay mounts up with it. Indeed, the interest mounts up faster, because it mounts up two ways: first, it mounts up simply because the debt is higher; but, second, because huge deficits will lead to higher interest rates to carry that debt. We could see our annual interest burden double in just a few years – a huge burden on our national finances. If we were doing all this deficit spending to rescue the states from their own fiscal disasters, or to accomplish some fantastic investment to make us more productive in the future, that would be scary enough. But we are doing it to reduce the tax burden on the wealthy. With the unintended result, I think, that it will make us all less wealthy. What could we be thinking?
Rest Easy, God Is On Our Side March 5, 2003February 22, 2017 Have you seen the cover of Newsweek? It’s a story about our President and his ability to rest easy in the knowledge that he is on a divine mission. My guess is that more than one of the suicide bombers felt the same assurance; but the difference, of course, is that their faith was terribly misplaced. Not to be missed. Separately, I commend to you this op-ed by Lisa Bennett of the Human Rights Campaign, fresh from her word processor: Reality Bites By Lisa Bennett I have an idea for a new reality show. Call it “Not Married by America” and watch what happens when same-sex couples face everyday family challenges, like, say, birth, accidents and death. It may not be quite as funny as Fox’s new “Married by America,” where Americans get to vote on who should marry whom. But it might be refreshing to see a reality show about something… well, real. Here’s episode one. Susan and Mary, a happy couple in their 20s, are entertaining their parents at their home in Florida. As they sit down to dinner, Susan announces, “I’m pregnant!” Smiles and tears appear on every face. Then Mary drops the bombshell. “But we have to move to Pennsylvania.” Cut to commercial. Pennsylvania, the women later explain, is the nearest state that will guarantee same-sex couples access to second-parent adoption, or the right of both to be legal parents of the child they will raise together. Episode two. Joe and Brandon, a 40-something couple, are driving to the supermarket one morning when they pull over to help a stranded motorist on the side of the highway. A passing car hits Joe and he’s rushed to the hospital. Although Joe and Brandon have been together for 14 years, the hospital won’t let Brandon visit Joe, let alone make medical decisions on his behalf. Hospital officials say he is not considered “family.” Instead, they telephone Joe’s parents, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. Laughing yet? Wait. Here comes episode three. It’s morning and Jonathan, age 5, is in his pajamas playing with his mother, Kathy. After a few minutes, she kisses him and says it’s time for her to go to work. “Have fun with Mommy, sweetie,” she says, nodding toward her partner, Sharon, who enters the room. “I’ll see you tonight.” Foreboding music. Later that afternoon, Kathy, who was born with a hole in her heart, has a fatal heart attack. Her son and his stay-at-home mom are left to fend for themselves, without even the cushion of Social Security survivor benefits because Kathy was denied the right to become Jonathan’s legal parent. OK. Now here comes the fun part. At the end of each episode, the American public can dial in to vote on what might have been a more fair ending, which might be something really surprising like equal rights under law. Polls have shown, after all, that 71 percent of Americans support hospital visitation rights for same-sex couples; 70 percent support employer-sponsored health insurance; 68 percent support Social Security coverage; and (note to network execs) 68 percent of high school seniors support adoption rights. Or we could avoid putting the country through this whole saga and do something really radical and simply grant all families equal rights under law – by ridding discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity from marriage and adoption laws, and bringing equity to retirement, Social Security and tax laws. Until this day becomes a reality, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people can take steps to protect themselves with some important legal documents, such as domestic partner agreements, durable powers of attorney, hospital visitation authorizations, last wills and testaments, living wills, and, if appropriate, co-parenting agreements. None of these documents will provide them with the same rights and responsibilities that the strangers united on “Married by America” will receive when they say, “I do.” But it could help keep their stories from appearing on “Not Married by America.” Lisa Bennett runs the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s FamilyNet.
Cutting Uncle Sam’s Deficit and Your Own March 4, 2003February 22, 2017 ANOTHER GAME YOU CAN PLAY Colin Ramsey: ‘Do you know this nice link? [2009 UPDATE: SITE HAS DISAPPEARED; SORRY] I just reduced the national deficit by almost half, and did so while raising spending in almost every important area, including both military spending, and education and social programs. I simply didn’t go to war in Iraq, and didn’t do Bush’s current tax plan. It was that easy.’ I’M PAYING $99 FOR A $275 ROOM Paul McKittrick: ‘Found a site called biddingfortravel.com on which people reveal what they paid for a Priceline Hotel. After several information gathering visits, I bit the bullet and ended up with 3 rooms in London for $85 a night each ($100 with VAT) at the County Hall Marriott. Then cancelled our long-standing reservations. Not the Dorchester, but with a six foot five brother-in-law and 2 pre-teen neices in tow, the space, pool and extra room will be great. The biddingfortravel.com ezboard is helpful for novices. Especailly those who refuse to follow your advice without question.’ ☞ Heck – even I don’t follow my advice without question. WHAT NOBEL-PRIZE WINNING ECONOMIST JOSEPH STEIGLITZ THINKS If you like the Bush tax cuts, click here.
If Only Iraq’s CEO Would Open a Roth and Go to Hell March 3, 2003February 22, 2017 TO HELL AND BACK It started when my Compaq screen died in my hotel room in mid sentence. All else was working fine, but hard to do much when you can’t see the screen. Solution: plug into an external monitor . . . but not so easy to carry one around. Eventually got back to home base and made the switch-for-real, finally, to my IBM Thinkpad. But, but, but . . . well, it seems AOL 5.0 won’t work with Windows XP. You get a message giving you only two more sessions before it simply will not work until you upgrade to AOL 8.0. But I can’t upgrade because my address file is too big and the upgrade installation always crashes. So I have to use 8.0, but I can’t use 8.0. I will spare you the hours on hold. Suffice it to say that if you right-click any program icon in XP and select the Compatibility tab, it lets you run that program as if you were still using Windows 98 whenever you launch it. So AOL thinks I’m still using Windows 98. (I know, I know.) CEO PAY If you have yesterday’s PARADE sitting around with your Sunday paper someplace, you can see my little jab at excessive CEO pay. It’s not on PARADE’s website, but there’s a place to sign up if YOU want to be on PARADE’s cover next year . . . and a quick ‘salary game’ that’s actually kind of fun to play. (I thought I had it aced but lost big time.) WHAT TO DO, WHAT TO DO Joe F: ‘Since reading your books, I have erased all my delinquent credit card debt (I only have three cards now with no more than about $150 combined debt at any one time). I still have student loans (about $25,000 which I just consolidated to 3%). I saved up $6000 in an emergency fund by moving back with parents in September. Now that you have a little background, the simple question: Should I just continue to pay off my student loans? Or do I take half of the saved nest egg and deposit it into to an IRA? Or do I take that half and start investing? (I was looking at index funds and spiders, no stocks just yet.) ☞ Do put $3000 into a Roth IRA for 2002 (you have until April 15) and then again for 2003 (any time between now and 4/15/04) . . . assuming you have some 2002 and 2003 ‘earned income’ that will allow you to do this. I think the market still has considerable risk, but less, obviously, than when it was much higher. At worst, you start buying index funds or spiders for your Roth IRA now and buy more next year even cheaper. If you keep putting $3,000 a year into a Roth IRA all your life, you should do fine. I don’t see a lot of point in rushing to pay off a 3% student loan. (“Investing” is not a separate choice from contributing to a Roth IRA; a Roth IRA is just a way to shield your investment returns from ever being subject to federal – and, in many states, local – income tax.) As for emergencies . . . well, just work harder and plan to fall back on your folks. They’ll be thrilled. And actually, you can withdraw money you’ve put into a Roth IRA at any time without penalty (you just can’t withdraw its growth) … so in an emergency, if you really had to, you would still have a $6,000 emergency fund, unless you had lost a chunk of it in a falling market. Virtually anyone who qualifies for a Roth IRA (with income under $95,000-$110,000 single, $150,000-$160,000 joint) should take full advantage of this nifty tax shelter. WHAT BILL GROSS THINKS Alan Atwood: ‘Until I came across your references and links to Bill Gross and PIMCO, I’d never really heard of him. Since reading about him here I have made it a point to keep up with what Mr. Gross has to say each month. His accuracy has been uncanny when compared to many others who like to hold themselves out to be gurus of the markets. But it’s what he just posted to the PIMCO March 2003 Investment Outlook that I want to talk about. ‘A month or so ago I had what amounts to a small internet ‘war’ with someone who holds himself out to be a ‘guru.’ (Last October he told us that the Dow would be at 11,000 in March 2003 and that his models were basically never wrong.) This ‘guru’ was advising people to get on board with the ‘rule the world’ plans of the Bush administration because the only thing that mattered was profits. If ‘shock and awe’ means bombs rain down on civilians in Baghdad, well, that’s too bad. It’s still a profit opportunity and besides, if he were to speak out about the moral aspects of war, he’d alientate some of his subscribers . . . they’d cancel and he’d lose some bucks. ‘Now comes Bill Gross today.’