Tainted Money March 9, 2001March 25, 2012 “There are only two things tainted about money,” an old Georgia governor once said — “taint mine and taint enough.” See you Monday.
Tidbits March 8, 2001January 27, 2017 SURFER TRICKS Paul Lerman: ‘Great space-bar tip Monday (I didn’t know that one either) and I didn’t know this one until last week: If you type, e.g., qb into your address bar and then hit CTRL-ENTER, the rest will be inserted automatically at the appropriate places. No need to type ‘http://www.’ or ‘.com.” ☞ That works in Internet Explorer. In AOL 5.0 it does not (maybe in 6.0?). But if you type anything.com (or .org or .gov) and then Enter, AOL usually does the rest. Tom Mathies: ‘Another trick when browsing: use the ESC key to freeze flashing ads….works at least for Netscape and Internet Explorer.’ Craig Wiegert: ‘Tab-Space doesn’t scroll up for me (Netscape/Linux). Backspace, however, does.’ REPLAY! George Berger: ‘I hate to nitpick, but after one more in a long stream of TiVo articles I had to say something. TiVo has a competitor that I have never seen you mention – Replay TV. I’ve had one of their units for a little over a year now and I love it. I think it has a slight edge over the TiVo in that it has the 30-second skipahead feature you mentioned will be available on the Microsoft version. Otherwise I think it’s pretty much equivalent. With all the attention being lavished on TiVo to the neglect of Replay, I’m worried that I might end up with tomorrow’s Betamax.’ ☞ I did buy a Betamax, years ago. That’s why I bought a TiVo and not a Replay. It just seemed to be the one catching on. But I’ve heard that Replay is great, too – enjoy! ELUSIVE TIME Inspired by Bryan Norcross’s riffs on keeping time – the most recent of which some of you missed because Q-Page delivery was down Tuesday (sorry) – Mark Langenderfer points us here.
Step Right Up March 7, 2001February 17, 2017 I-Bonds, you will recall, are US Savings Bonds that protect you from inflation and grow deferred from taxes. Currently, they yield 6.49%. They will not make you rich, but they’re completely safe. Death, you will recall, is currently a way to escape the capital gains tax. Your heirs have the option of ‘stepping up the basis’ of the stuff you leave them to its current value when you die. This applies to real estate, jewelry, and just about anything else, but most commonly to stocks. Say Gramps bought 100 shares of Johnson & Johnson at $28 and when he died, it was $80. You inherit those shares and, a while later, sell them at $90. Your taxable gain, if you elected the step-up in basis, is just $10 a share. Sell at $65 and – far from having to pay tax on the gain – you get to take a $15 a share loss. Much is made of people jumping out of windows when the market crashes. Tax-wise, it would be far more advantageous to defenestrate at the peak. OK, that’s a bit extreme. But people do, understandably, look for every tax advantage, which is why it has rankled some of you that with Savings Bonds (as opposed to ordinary corporate or government bonds), heirs get no such step up. (If at any point in this column you get bored, click here for something completely different.) Diane Anderson: ‘Could you deal with the lack of a step-up by having the I-Bonds owned by a trust instead of directly by the mother-in-law? Then, the bonds wouldn’t get the step-up, but they still wouldn’t be taxable until the end of the 30-year term (because they’re not being transferred or retitled at the grantor’s death).’ ☞ Why bother? Savings Bond owners, and their beneficiaries, may already elect to defer tax on the interest until the bonds are redeemed. Jerry Avillion: ‘Regarding the non-stepping up of I-bonds at death, would you be able to avoid that by buying shares in Vanguard’s inflation protected securities fund?’ ☞ Nope. If the shares were held in a taxable account, you’d be paying income taxes annually on the growth in principal value already. Yes, your basis would step up every year — but that is because the income was being taxed each year. If it were held in a tax-deferred account, all distributions would be taxed upon withdrawal by the owner or beneficiary. CAPITAL GAINS TAX ON TAX-FREE BONDS While we’re at it, maybe this is a good time to explain a couple of quirks about how taxes work on bonds. The interest is ordinarily taxed as ‘ordinary income,’ just like interest from a savings account or any other kind. The interest from a tax-free municipal bond is free of federal income tax (and free of state income tax if it was issued in your state). But what of the difference in price between what you paid for a bond and what you sold it for (or the $1,000 it was redeemed for at maturity)? Most bonds are issued at $1,000 face value and are redeemed for $1,000 years later, so if you buy at the beginning and hold the whole time, there is no capital gain or less, just all those years of interest income. But: What if you buy the bond in the open market for $800 and later sell it for $950? You owe capital gains tax on the gain – even if it was a tax-free municipal bond. (If you die and leave these bonds to your heirs, they could elect to step-up the cost basis to the value of the bonds at the date of death.) What if the bond were Originally Issued at a Discount (an OID bond), like a zero coupon bond that pays no interest, but gradually rises in value from the price at which it was issued — $300, say – to $1,000 at maturity? In that case, there will be an ‘accretion schedule’ built into the bond, showing how much the bond ‘should’ appreciate each year in its inevitable climb to $1,000 at maturity. That accretion is considered interest, not a capital gain. Only to the extent your gain when you sell exceeds that expected accretion do you have a taxable capital gain. To the extent it falls short of the expected accretion schedule, you have a capital loss. It is obviously the stuff of migraines – and reason enough not to buy such bonds, except within a tax-deferred retirement account where it doesn’t matter. And now – unless you got bored and already clicked it up above – a little fun from Newt Gingrich pal, columnist Arianna Huffington (who is my pal, as well). Click here.
Tuesday, Thursday, Monday, Friday . . . March 6, 2001January 27, 2017 You know Mack and Mabel? That wonderful song at the end – now, don’t start sobbing – ‘Time heals everything . . . Monday, Wednesday . . . Time heals EVerything . . . Friday, Tuesday . . .’ I don’t remember the exact lyrics, or the exact mis-order of the days of the week, but the music swells at the end and it goes, ‘TIME HEALS EVERYTHING . . . but lov – ing – you.’Well, my point is . . . why do we have the days in the week in the order that we do? And so it’s time for a little music of our own – our ASK BRYAN music – and, as we did last week, turn back time. Or at least some of the mysteries surrounding it. Bryan Norcross explains: ‘It’s all very nutty, and I’ll skip some of the details, but here’s the bottom line. Remember: there were only 7 known nearby celestial bodies. The question is … in what order? Well, first you have to know the order the ancients thought they were from the earth. The list beginning with the closest was: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. ‘Not only did the Mediterraneans (Egyptians, Persians, etc.) think that each day was owned by a planet, they thought (more fundamentally) that each 7-hour period was owned by a planet… in reverse order! ‘So, beginning with Saturn getting hours 1-7 of the first day, then Jupiter hours 8-14, then Mars 15-21, then the Sun 22-28, lo and behold, the Sun gets the next day because it ‘begins’ the next 24 hours period. ‘Continuing: Venus, 29-35; Mercury, 36-42; Moon, 43-49. And there you go, the Moon gets the beginning of the next day, the 48th hour. And on you go until you get the order of the days of the week ‘ruled’ by Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. Yes, in this scheme Saturday is first. Genesis affected the beginning-of-the-week issue in Christian countries. Bizarrely, in cultures as diverse as ancient Egypt and the ancient Japan, the order was the same.’ (I’d hit you with a chorus of ‘It’s A Small World After All,’ but I’d rather you leave humming Mack & Mabel.) Tomorrow, back to the fun stuff: Bond Taxation (Can’t wait for something more substantive? Click here.)
The Old Dog Ate My I-Bonds March 5, 2001February 17, 2017 OLD DOG, NEW TRICK Press the SPACE BAR. See that? I never knew that! Apparently, this works on all web pages, not just mine. The SPACE BAR functions just as the ‘PageDown’ key or scroll bar would, and is a lot easier. I didn’t know that! (You know the long ‘masterpages’ you get in Quickbrowse, when you have it stitch a whole bunch of separate pages together for you? E.g., the whole New York Times and Wall Street Journal on a single loooooong masterpage? Or all the items you’re interested in on eBay? The easiest way to scroll down through all that is just to keep tapping the Space Bar.) Tab-SPACE BAR scrolls you back up. I-BONDS Diane Smith: ‘You encourage readers to purchase inflation-adjusted savings bonds online with a credit card, ‘and get the frequent-flier miles or any of the other goodies that credit cards award.’ I ordered approximately $100,000 worth of bonds on my Chase cards during the past two years & received miles for them (including as recently as December), earning me four tickets to Europe on Continental. Chase Visa recently notified me that savings bond purchases are ‘cash transactions and don’t earn frequent flier miles.’ If this is false, I would strongly encourage you to dissuade people from using their Chase Visa cards to purchase bonds (or anything else!).’ ☞ Well, the FAQ section on the government’s web site states: Q: Is this considered a merchandise purchase or a cash advance? A: Your savings bond purchase is treated as a merchandise purchase. It is not a cash advance. So you may have a beef with Chase, Diane. Or maybe Chase doesn’t care what the government thinks. In any event, I’m glad you got four tickets to Europe. Maybe instead of asking people to tip me with cash (that sure didn’t work) I should suggest they send miles. NASDAQ Down a little more than 58% from its high, the NASDAQ is a lot more interesting here than it was at the top. Where the bottom will be, I have no idea. But Intel looks better at 27 than it did six months ago at 75, and Oracle looks better at 17 than it did at 46.
Your Tax Feedback March 2, 2001February 17, 2017 Toby Gottfried: ‘Here is a simple proposal which helps everyone in what I think is a fair way: raise the brackets. That is, leave the rates alone, but increase the income levels where they take effect. That lowers everybody’s taxes, helps the upper end more than the lower, but not unreasonably, and doesn’t change ‘pain thresholds’ much.’ ☞ I like it. We’re too far along for this to be likely to happen, but I think it makes good sense. Paul Glass: ‘Why give a bigger tax refund to those who don’t pay as much in taxes? Sounds more like a wealth redistribution scheme.’ ☞ When the top bracket was 90% and dropped to 70% and then 50% and then 28%, the great mass of tax payers got little or no lowering of THEIR tax brackets. So now I’d suggest let’s give the average guy a break without necessarily giving the wealthiest few a huge break. Even after the tax hike to 39.6%, gains in after-tax income for the top 1% have way outstripped gains for the bottom 90% – in part because the capital gains rate was chopped from 28% to 20% in 1997. That was a huge tax cut for the wealthy without a commensurate break for everyone else. So now maybe it’s the average family’s turn. Thorsten Kril: ‘So at which income would you set the cut-off for tax cuts? And on whose authority can you decide where the middle class ends and the rich starts?’ ☞ Well, it’s arbitrary, just as now. (I do think most would agree that the top 2% is not ‘middle class.’) There are lots of ways to give even the top 1% a little relief without spending $688 billion to do it. For example, the extra $500 per child tax credit the President proposes would apply to rich as well as poor. Robert Pomerenk: ‘You write that under Clinton, taxes were ONLY raised for those at the top. That is true. And recall the rationale: we had deficits “as far as the eye can see,” and taxing the rich was intended to right the boat. Now we find that we did the job only too well, and are facing surpluses as far as the eye can see. Do we now give back the excess to the rich that paid it? Of course not. Now that Washington has got the money, let’s dream up some new programs, or else give the lion’s share to ‘hard working’ low- and middle-income earners. (It’s funny how the rich are NEVER described as ‘hard working.’) Either our government was duplicitous in using deficits as merely an argument to re-distribute wealth from the rich to the non-rich, or government simply overshot the mark and gouged the rich more than needed. If the latter, it’s a simple matter to give a portion of it back. But I will not hold my breath.’ ☞ Maybe we should wait until we’ve paid off the $5 trillion debt, most of it racked up when Reagan cut the top rate from 70% to 28%. Maybe he overshot a little? (As for the hard-working rich, scrubbing floors, working the assembly line, the only quibble I’d raise is that their hard work is voluntary, which sometimes makes it more fun.) James Schaefer: ‘I’m very surprised to see you replaying Senator Tom Daschle’s comments with out putting the numbers to the test. I don’t think I could better explain the misleading comments of Mr. Daschle better than Scott Burns . . .’ ☞ Scott Burns rightly points out that the Bush-plan tax-savings to someone earning $300,000 wouldn’t equal a new Lexus each year. (I told you guys to buy used cars.) But the confusion may be this. The minimum income in the top 1% is something like $319,000 (I am doing these numbers from memory), and, no, that poor guy does not get a Lexus. But the average income of the folks in the top 1% is more like $900,000, on which the tax savings would be an annual Lexus. Even then, if $900,000 is the average and not the median, fewer than half the one-percenters would get a new Lexus each year; many would get a Mustang or a Sebring, some would have to settle for a ’96 Saturn. But the larger point I think is quite fair, even if Senator Daschle may not have been clear in his statement. It’s the same sort of error President Bush makes when he says that the average family would save $1,600 under his plan. ‘This claim is misleading,’ reports Citizens for Tax Justice, because it is based on the average income, not the median. Almost 90% of taxpayers would receive less than $1,600 — and 27% would receive no tax cut at all. And what if a huge tax cut unsettles the bond markets even a little, and interest rates wind up a bit higher than they otherwise would have been? If your home mortgage and car loan cost an extra 1%, might that not wipe out much of your tax relief? This is not a problem for the top 1%. They tend to do more lending than borrowing. Tom Wilder: ‘You Democrats astound me. Of course the tax reduction is more for those in the highest bracket in dollars. They pay far more in dollars than the rest! What about in percentage? Have you even considered this aspect? My calculations show that a cut from 15% to 10% is a 33% reduction and a cut from 39.6% to 33% is a 16.67% reduction. (From this you could argue the tax cut is twice as large for taxpayers in the lowest bracket.) You never seem to address this point. (Maybe it does not fit the Democratic party chorus of drivel?)’ Ted Niblett: ‘Dude! Your logic is turning me into a liberal! My fiancée loves this trend; I’m a touch horrified. Keep it up!’ ☞ Beats clickles any day. (Especially being called ‘dude.’)
My Life Is Now Complete March 1, 2001January 27, 2017 Monday I explained why there are 24 hours in a day and suggested there should be more.Tuesday’s column was late – early readers just got ‘gone fishing’ – because there are only 24 hours in a day. And now I find this column, written nearly a year or so ago, that got buried somewhere in my file and never posted. But that just makes my point. There’s too much stuff! How can we keep track of it all! So here it is now, only slightly tweaked at the end (thanks for the link, Alan): * It used to be I had one hour a week with nothing urgent to do. With the addition of “The West Wing” Wednesday nights at nine (eight Central), my life is now complete. One hundred percent full. Let’s just start with the ssssibilants. There are Seinfeld and Simpson reruns daily, CNN round the clock, Sixty Minutes Sunday, CBS Sunday Morning, Saturday Night Live (which may actually be getting better, after so many years of draught), CNBC’s Hardball, Spin City on Tuesday night and Sex in the City on HBO. (We can’t afford HBO, but a friend sends tapes.) And C-SPAN and C-SPAN2. And then there’s Dharma and Greg, Will and Grace, Drew Carey and Just Shoot Me. And Frasier (for Niles) and Friends (for Phoebe). Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Biography and Charlie Rose. There are The Sopranos and OZ, neither of which I have ever seen, but both of which, I’m told, are the best things on television. There’s The Nightly News. There’s satellite TV. There’s the Internet. There’s the New York Times, which now comes in almost as many sections as the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal, physically or on-line. There’s Auto Insurance Report. There’s e-mail. Hundreds a day. (Not to mention snail mail, fax and FedEx.) There are fantastic new movies — “American Beauty,” most recently, “The Insider” opening next month. There are fantastic movies I missed, now out on video. And fantastic movies you would never plan to watch for the fifteenth time — but how, when you happen upon the climactic scene of “Where Eagles Dare” as you surf from CNNfn to MSNBC to Fox to the WB — that scene where Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, dressed as German soldiers, are befuddling the generals in the main castle dining room and securing the list of all the German agents in Britain — well, how can you not hang on to watch those last five minutes, always forgetting that, with commercials, that last five-minute climax stretches on for more than an hour? (They have to wire the castle with explosives, get the radio guy, hold off 500 attackers, send one of their prisoners down a rope from the window, call in the rescue plane, get out to the gondola, jump from the down gondola to the up gondola as the two pass and before the first explodes, get down to the river, get into the snow-plow-equipped bus, blow up the bridge, destroy all the German planes, get into the British rescue plane, unmask the final traitor, let him jump to his death, give Clint that last line, and bring up the music.) There are the magazines. I had hoped Vanity Fair would get awful when Tina Brown left for The New Yorker, but no! There’s The New Yorker, which also, sadly, remains good now that Tina has left to found Talk. There’s GQ. (I love GQ because it weighs six pounds and can be skimmed in 10 minutes. Ah, the feeling of accomplishment.) In come Fortune and Barron’s and Money and Smart Money and Blueprint and The New Republic and Newsweek and Time and New York. Do you know the guilt I feel not reading The Economist every week? And skipping Wired? And letting The Atlantic lapse? And shouldn’t I be reading Fast Company? And starting my subscription back up to Business Week? And shouldn’t I be reading People and Rolling Stone to have a clue what’s going on out there? There are books. So many wonderful books. New ones I buy but never get to read. Old ones I bought and never got to read. The classics I’ve always meant to read. And all this, except for the latest movies, without ever leaving the house. And before hooking up my TiVo, which will assure I never miss a TV show again. And before the broadband revolution that will shortly allow you to see anything you want any time you want to see it. They are writing it faster than I can read it. Filming it faster than I can watch it. I love it – and at the same time I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Could the Middle Ages have been anywhere near this much fun? Click here.
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.