Okay, so this article appears in today’s Arizona Republic: the City of Phoenix is about to spend $6 million to buy a vacant motel so the property can be handed over to Arizona State University to expand ASU President Michael Crow’s overweening plans to expand his empire.
Let’s see if a beleaguered taxpayer can get this straight:
The city of Phoenix is broke. It’s going to close our neighborhood library, which is mobbed every moment it’s open, and lay off cops and firefighters. It has abandoned the lightrail project up the conduit of blight that is 19th Avenue after having ripped out an entire row of homes in our neighborhood and covered the scars with hideous gray gravel. Then to add insult to injury it’s going to sock us with a regressive tax on food.
But it still has $6 million to stroke Michael Crow’s ego?????
Mr. Mattox, really. What on earth is the city thinking? ASU is out of cash, too. Case in point: the university closed my office, one of the most innovative academic publishing projects anywhere in the country, and canned all five of my staff. It’s shucking off staff as fast as it can dump them, its facilities are going to pot (our office was in an asbestos-ridden condemned building, one of whose floors was closed to public access for fear it would collapse, with no clean source of drinking water and bathrooms so decrepit we would walk to neighboring buildings to use the toilets). ASU is not going to build anything on that downtown site; not during your lifetime or mine. And I can assure you, once Crow is gone, the insanely ambitious schemes that are steering the university toward bankruptcy will come to an end.
I am now unemployed, thanks to the fallout from those insanely ambitious schemes, and at my age I’m not bloody well about to get another job. I’m only one of many thousands of unemployed Phoenicians who probably will never obtain work with anything like the pay we have lost. Of course, I would like to see my city’s downtown thrive as a vibrant urban core. But not on the backs of the new poor, people like me who are struggling to buy groceries as it is.
Use that $6 million to keep our police, firefighters, and libraries operating!
“Under weigh” is actually the correct phrase, a nautical term. But let’s go with the flow. The tidal flow, of course.
Old-timers here will recall that a year ago I had the bright idea of digging the sand and weeds out from between the flagstones in my front courtyard and filling in the spaces with river rock. It’s worked pretty well: minimal weed intrusion, and the overall effect is reasonably pleasant.
Outside the back door is another flagstone patio, installed by the late lamented Satan and Proserpine. For yea, many a year, I’ve tried to get dichondra, thyme, and other “steppable” plantlets to grow there. For yea, many a year, what’s grown there has been weeds.
Until last spring, the favored weed has been burr clover. This particular weed has not been unwelcome between the flags, because it makes a pretty little yellow flower and it does not, despite its name, make burrs.
Sweet little plant, isn’t it? In the past I’ve let it grow. It makes a nice mat similar to dichondra, and it costs nothing: it seems to materialize out of the air.
Last spring, though, a hideous invader took root between the back patio’s flagstones. Whereas it is true that I know almost everything, one of the very few things I don’t know is what the hell this little monster is. I don’t recognize it as a native desert plant (and I know most native desert plants). I don’t remember it among the many weeds that have grown in the several lawns I have been stupid enough to dump water on (but anything’s possible). I can’t find it among my favorite lists of invasive and annoying newcomers to the Sonoran Desert. The only thing I can think is that this thing blew in on the winds of globalization.
When it first appeared last spring, I thought, “Well, OK… It looks like something that will make flowers, so let’s leave it there.”
Wrong. It does not make flowers. And while it’s inoffensive enough when it’s young, as it ages it grows rangy, wiry, and uglier than pussley.
And it ain’t easy to pull out.
It crowds out the expensively installed dichondra I planted late last spring. Amazingly, it crowds out burr clover, an aggressive and resilient weed. When the heat comes up, what you have is an ugly tangle of wiry, tough gunk.
I pulled it out last summer and this spring found twice as much of it growing than I saw last year.
So I decided (once again!!) to dig out the weeds and dirt between the flags, only this time instead of trying to get something Iwant to grow there, to replace the stuff with stones, much like the front courtyard’s stoneware.
Consequently I’ve been scrounging free stones from the alleys again. Here’s the result, so far:
DaffodilsRed Salvia & Easter Lily CactiShamrocks & other things
It’s working out. Only a few more crevices left to fill—maybe two or three runs up alleys with the pooch covering for me (oh, dear Manny, Nosiest of All Possible Neighbors: just wringing out the dog behind your house :-D). Unexpected benefit: no more ankle-turning trips on the flags. The dirt has settled so much since Satan installed the patio that if I’m not careful to set my feet firmly on a flagstone, half my foot will slip into a crack and I’ll wrench my already strained ankle once again. With the stones carefully set so they’re level with the surfaces of the flags, I can walk across the surface without risk of additional pain.
Very nice.
I hope this landscaping scheme is not altogether hideous. Frankly, I think it’s better than the weeds. But for sure, one man’s weeds are another’s Eden.
Burr clover image: Shamelessly ripped off from UC Berkeley, but probably in the public domain, UC being a state institution
So I did end up springing for $25 (plus 8.3 percent tax, for a total of $27.06) to buy the yearned-after mineral make-up from Costco. Pretty nice stuff. I like it. However…
Take a look at this:
That large flat chunk of annealed plastic and cardboard is what Costco deemed necessary to deliver five small plastic vials, a tube of lip gloss, and four small makeup brushes to the unwashed and thieving masses. By way of perspective, each of those floor tiles is 13 inches square.
Up at the top, you see the tools required to get into the thing: a box-cutter, a wrench, and a no-longer-sharp knife.
Yes. To get at a few ounces of colored face powder, I had to spend a good fifteen minutes hacking away at thick, almost impenetrable plastic. You’ll notice that no amount of struggling removed the entire plastic bubble from the hard cardboard backing to which it was sealed. No. I had to carve out every. single. separate. piece in this kit. To do so, I risked injury and infection: all the edges where the box-cutter sliced through the plastic are sharp as a razor. And so is the box-cutter itself.
I wonder how Costco would like the lawsuit that would have descended upon its management had I cut my hand and then gotten one of those flesh-eating bacterial infections in the wound?
Once I’d removed the plastic vials of make-up, I still couldn’t open the goddamned things!
No. Each one was sealed shut with a strip of plastic that could not be lifted with the fingernails and peeled off. Now I had to go and get a kitchen knife and slice each of the five vials along the seam where the lid meets the jar. Besides taking forever (by now I was running late to choir), this of course wrecked the edge on my knife.
Why is it necessary to seal every flicking piece of merchandise individually in consumer-proof packaging? Industry estimates suggest that 43 percent of “shrinkage” comes from employee theft, as opposed to 36 percent for shoplifting. “Whatever method employees use to steal,” the New York Times reports, “their take is more substantial than that of the average shoplifter. [Researcher Joshua] Bamfield’s global study of retail theft found that larcenous employees averaged $1,890 in theft, compared with $438 for shoplifters.” So is there really a good reason to put customers at risk of injury and to pack the landfills with vast piles of excess plastic packaging that will litter the planet for the eons?
Speaking of littering the planet for the eons, now get an eyeballful of this!
The last time I bought toilet paper at Costco, I absent-mindedly picked up the Kirkland brand instead of my usual Charmin’.
I hate Kirkland’s toilet paper. Not because the TP itself isn’t perfectly fine—it’s quite good, comparable to Charmin’, which IMHO is the best toilet paper on the market. But when you peel off the plastic sealed around a lifetime supply of Kirkland TP, what comes out is a big bundle of individual rolls…every. single. one. of. them. wrapped. individually. in. plastic. Because I like to keep several rolls in a straw basket in the bathroom, every time I pad out to the garage to refill the basket, I have to unwrap a half-dozen rolls of over-packaged toilet paper. I just hate that!
WHY? WHY, WHY, WHY?????????
Why on earth is it necessary to double-wrap every single roll of flicking toilet paper, adding a bushel of plastic to the landfill for every package of Kirkland TP you buy at Costco?
Answer: it’s not.
Charmin’ wraps its entire lifetime-supply package in one sheet of plastic. Even that is undesirable, but at least it’s better than Kirkland’s strategy.
According to Discover Magazine, 63 pounds of plastic packaging per person ends up in America’s landfills each year. Ninety-three percent of people six years of age and older excrete bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used in the manufacture of plastic, in their urine.
What do you bet about 62 of those pounds comes from overpackaging like this? It abuses the customer on both ends of the retail cycle: in delivery and merchandising, and in clean-up after the mess produced.
If you complain to Costco about its absurd overpackaging (as I’ve been known to do in person), you’ll be told that it’s not their fault! It’s the suppliers who just insist on packaging products in consumer-proof plastic.
And that is about as specious as it gets. Costco has every bit as much clout as Walmart, an outfit infamous for its bullying of suppliers. All Costco has to do is tell Borghese it can’t sell its pricey products to the vast market that is the Costco membership unless it packages said products sanely. Borghese’s marketing people know that they’re reaching a large group of people who would not otherwise buy that company’s products. Most Costco consumers are savvy enough to know that the expensive stuff you buy in department stores (where Borghese is normally marketed) is really just the same darn stuff you can get in a drugstore at much lower cost. Threatened with a Costco boycott, Borghese will package the product in more responsible wrapping.
This make-up I bought: Costco sells a lot of it. In addition to the starter kit you see above (along with the tool kit required to get into it), Costco also sells individual packages of mineral powder foundation and eyeshadow. I like it. The effect is much nicer than the L’Oréal I’ve been using. But I probably will not buy it from Costco again.
That’s how much this annoys me. I won’t buy it at Dillard’s or Saks, either, for reasons of common sense: department-store cosmetics are obscenely overpriced. Probably I’ll look at Whole Foods, which carries eco-faddish products like “mineral make-up”; failing that, I’ll check the beauty supply store next door to the WF where I shop. I’d rather pay a few bucks more and not risk slicing my hands, and I deeply resent being forced against my will to add 63 pounds of plastic to the landfill.
I remember when Chernobyl happened, and also remember receiving the news that milk (human and bovine) and other products in North America were contaminated by the radioactivity that blew over this continent in the weeks and months following the event. Although (thank God) we were not as hideously affected as the people who lived near the plant (if hundreds of miles away can be called “near”), I can recall responding with the same fatalism: there’s nothing we can do about it, so why should we worry?
Debt and savings are directly linked. Every dollar you have to pay toward debt is a dollar you can’t put into savings.
Making your money work for you—investing plenty of savings in instruments that will pay returns that one day will support you—is key to building financial freedom. The only way you can get off the day job treadmill is to get out of debt and stay out of debt. In that respect, debt really is slavery: for those of us who are not wealthy at the outset, indebtedness means we must keep working to pay our bills. At the same time, debt sucks our savings away from us, keeping us trapped on the treadmill of never-ending labor.
My argument is that you don’t have to be rich to be free. Instead, you need to build a comfortable lifestyle that does not require large amounts of cash flow, you need to be out of debt, and you need to establish several sources income (dividends from savings; side jobs) to help you build wealth.
The truth is, too many Americans literally are saddled with debt. The consequences of this have become obvious since the crash of the housing market: something between a fifth and a quarter of Americans owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. This issue has become so aggravated that many people who can in theory afford to continue making payments are choosing to simply walk away, rather than continue to throw good money after bad.
So: obviously, the best course of action is to avoid debt. When buying a house, select one whose cost is low enough that you can pay it off in 15 years or less. And in day-to-day life, never charge more on a credit card than you can pay with your current month’s income.
All of which is easier said than done.
If you’re already in debt, step one on the road to financial freedom is to unload all revolving debt. Get rid of any department store and credit card debt—if it’s not mortgage debt, pay it offnow. Any number of personal finance gurus provide lots of advice on how to get quit of debt. Dave Ramsey is probably the most popular, with his “snowball” approach to pay-off. I’m partial to “snowflaking,” proposed on the now dormant blog, I’ve Paid for This Twice Already. PT’s strategy sets a certain monthly payoff amount that exceeds the minimum required payment, and then she adds every bit of “found money” and every windfall, no matter how small. These “snowflakes” are paid against the debt immediately, as they happen.
In fact, getting out of debt is not so complicated that you have to subscribe to a guru’s system. All you need are will power, a goal, and consistent, regular payments against principal. The strategy goes like this:
1.Quit charging. Even if it means you have to parcel out your paycheck in cash secreted in envelopes to cover budget items, do not put anything on a charge card that has a balance due.
2.Pay substantially more than the minimum due against all charge-card and car loan balances. If possible, consolidate credit-card debt onto one card and pay that down as fast as you can.
3. To accomplish this:
a)Live frugally. Economize tightly until you can get rid of the debt. b) Develop a second income stream and devote all of it to paying off debt.
The immediate goal, of course, is to get rid of noxious debt that cuts your buying power. Every penny you pay in interest for something you bought on time reduces the value of your dollar. So, if you’re paying some bank 21 percent for the privilege of buying things on its card, every dollar you spend on the merchandise is actually worth only 79 cents. That’s how much credit-card debt shrinks your standard of living!
But the long-term goal is freedom: financial freedom. Once you’re rid of revolving debt, you can work toward buying your shelter free and clear. And when you have that, you’re more than halfway to the exit from the day job.
After you’ve succeeded in paying off credit-card debt, it’s time to shift strategies. Now you have a newfound cash flow: the chunk of cash that was going to pay creditors is coming to rest in your bank account!
Hawai’i beckons. But resist the call.
Instead of diddling away your new real income, continue to live below your means. When using credit cards, never charge more than you can pay at the end of the current month’s billing cycle. If you find you can’t control spending on cards, then pay for everything in cash. This strategy will maximize your actual income. Instead of holding your salary less what you owe to lenders, your bank account will contain…yes! Your salary. Your whole net salary.
By living below your means—a habit you’ve already developed while paying off the cards—you will accrue money to put into savings. Take all the money you were spending on servicing debt and stash it in mutual funds. Some should be in a stock fund, some in a bond fund, and some in cash (i.e., the money market, CDs, or treasuries). This creates a kind of hedge: as a general rule, when stocks are up, bonds go down; when stocks go down, bonds rise. Because you earn more in the stock market, over time, than you do in the bond market, it’s a good idea to have somewhat more than half your investments in stock funds. To avoid being ripped off by fees, choose a low-overhead mutual fund issuer such as Vanguard or Fidelity. Arrange for dividends to be reinvested, and at the same time send in a set amount to each fund every month.
Do this above and beyond any 401(k) or 403(b) plan your employer offers. If your employer matches your retirement contributions, do not neglect to participate in the job’s plan. Even if there is no match, a 401(k) or 403(b) may allow you to contribute more pre-tax dollars than you can put into a regular IRA. Check. Also find out if you can put money into a Roth IRA, and if so, how much. Roths are preferable to regular IRAs because, even though you fund them with after-tax dollars, you don’t have to pay taxes on their earnings and you can pass the money to your children without having the government take the lion’s share.
In any event, the point is to get yourself into as many savings schemes as you can. If your employer offers a savings or a pension plan, by all means enroll in it. But also save and invest on your own. Your employer’s plan should never be your only investment.
At this point, you have laid the three building blocks for financial independence:
1. Live below your means. 2. Develop more than one income stream. 3. Save and invest all funds not needed to cover living expenses.
You now have only one remaining challenge: Get a roof over your head that costs you close to nothing. Once you have that, financial freedom is within your grasp.
Chant choir performed at tonight’s evensong service. It’s a monthly event in which a professional musician performs for about an hour before a high-church service that is almost all chanted. This evening was amazing.
Our director, Scott Youngs, performed a spectacular organ recital. The church has a world-class organ, and in fact the building itself was designed to accommodate it. In addition to his manifest talents as a music scholar and teacher, Scott is a gifted organist. He played pieces by Langlais (with whom, it develops, he studied in Paris), Bach, and Brahms. Absolutely magnificent music, and performed magnificently.
Afterward, eleven of us sang for the hour-long evensong service, mostly Latin chant. It amazes me that I can do that; it certainly would not happen without Scott’s tutelage, and the presence of several professional and near-professional-level singers on the choir.
