On Anti-travel

I’m interested in anti-travel.

Travel has become a personality and a fetish and a brag (pre 2021 anyway) these days. But look at it this way. In, say, my 1994 world in MN, I might have considered a Mongolian-located herder-yurt “exotic” but we have to also consider the idea that the Mongolian herder next to the yurt would’ve considered my St. Paul back yard exotic as well given the distances in either meters or culture and the relativistic framing. Which was exotic, then, and worthy of "travel" in the western sense we know from the modern decadent world we now live in? Well...both I guess. So that means I needed to have considered my back yard worthy of examination from a travel sense in the same way that the braggarts -- with pictures of the pyramids or Antarctica or the great Wall -- might conceive of things from their superficial iphone perspective from the side of the yurt as they stood with their Apple-product triumphancy. Heh. I mean cmon.

On the Head-Fake of Precision in Spend Rates in Retirement.

The impulse in the retirement finance lit I read seems to be to come up with mega-ultra numbers, the right answer, the unified field theory. I’m not sure that this can be done even though I took my own shot at it for a few years. The following post has exactly zero science so you can more or less blow it off. This piece is just an opinion. The images/charts are completely, entirely illustrative: not real; just trying to make a point.

End of my wine collecting career

Barolo - La Spinetta 2000 Campe

I started drinking wine in 1976, my 18th year. Instantiating my journey, my older brother gave me a glass of wine at dinner once. It was a 1974 Napa cab which had just been recently released. For those that don’t remember, 74 was a remarkable year in CA. I was ~18, dumb, and so I said: “huh, this is pretty good" and that wrapped up my experience for the moment. Then, in 1992 or so, I had a business lunch at an Italian restaurant in Montreal – full linen service with 8 glasses per setting and a tasting menu method – that had 50,000 bottles of Italian wine downstairs in an abandoned subway tunnel; this lunch-wine vignette now had my full attention.