You “get” the concept that retirement means not working, and you’ve arranged a pension or nest egg which should cover your costs till you head for the great beyond. So now you just retire and start smiling, right? Wrong. The transition may be jarring, and if not done well, can lead to many outcomes other than Smiling Retirement.
That video I mentioned in Part One talked about the Vacation Phase of retirement: the few weeks or months where the lack of structure provided by work gives the new retiree the sensation of being on vacation. Days become irrelevant, or as retirees joke, a week consists of “six Saturdays and a Sunday.” Things like school calendars, holidays, and long weekends can creep up on you since they no longer seem relevant. Most everybody enjoys this at first, but eventually the sameness of the lack of structure begins to grind on you. We generally limit our tours and cruises to ten-to-twelve days for the same reason; otherwise, it all begins to blend together.
Turns out, humans need routines. If work doesn’t provide one, you have to come up with your own. The beauty of retirement is you’re free to develop your own. Perhaps you’re a night owl who had a career which required an early morning start; now your day can start at 10:00 am and end at 3:00 am, if you like. Never had time to fit in exercise? You do now. When do you eat, and what’s your big meal? All up to you. And you can change it, to see what works.
I started eating a huge breakfast (bacon or sausage, eggs, avocados, tomatoes, hash browns or a bagel) every morning, after a career of having only a banana and a cup of coffee. It was heaven, and I didn’t need to eat again until dinner. But while I enjoyed this schedule, my digestive tract didn’t, and it made its objections known. I switched to some fruit or yogurt and coffee in the morning, and a large lunch in the mid afternoon, which my body ratified. I moved exercise to the late morning after only exercising after lunch for decades. I found starting my day with prayers meant I didn’t skip them later, and I was in a better mood regardless of how I slept. You get to experiment with things you always did one way, because now you can.
If you don’t establish a routine, you’ll get bored. Then you’ll feel a powerful pull to go back to work, if only for the routine. Or you might substitute some other thing (volunteering, for example) for work to provide your routine. But that is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. Find the routine that works for you, makes you comfortable, then fill in your hobbies and activities around it.
Experimentation is just as important when developing your new (or rediscovering your old) interests. Take up the guitar? Why not! Learn to cook Welsh Rarebit? Sure! Join a charity or service organization? Of course. But whatever you do, never, never, never impose a “success” filter on it. It’s ok to consider whether you can afford a hobby (financially or in terms of time), but don’t start evaluating “am I any good at this?” or “is this doing any good for that?” Those are business/work concepts, and you don’t do that anymore, right? If you like it and can afford it, keep doing it. If not, don’t.
It is easy to fall back into workday notions of success, competition, and merit. But you’re living, not working. Perhaps we can learn something from the way children behave. When a child finds something they really enjoy, they’ll get lost in it. They don’t start asking “how good am I?” “or “what’s the purpose of this?”, they just enjoy themselves. They haven’t met the work world yet, but they have mastered one key to retirement!
The vacation and experimentation periods of retirement are incredibly rewarding. Getting to try out new things without any pressure to “do well” or “succeed” is liberating, once you understand it. How long do they last? How long do you last? To some extent, the two timelines are the same. As time goes by, you’ll find a daily routine that fits. You’ll find hobbies and interests that fit, and people who also fit. But all that may change. Friends asked me why I stopped attending a group, and I said (truthfully) “it seemed too much like work.” You may get too tired for pickleball, or too old for globetrotting, too bored for politics. It happens.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that this phase is just a transition. You may enjoy the transition, but you haven’t reached Smiling Retirement yet!
St. Paul’s first letter to Timothy (chapter six, verse ten) tells us “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Hard to improve on that. Mark Twain allegedly did so, quipping “the lack of money is the root of all evil.” When it comes to retirement, both maxims apply. As with working life, more money means more opportunities. Worker or retiree, you can be a happy, poor person, or a miserable rich person. The differences appear in the many ways you get there.
The key point is this: since you’re not working (remember our definition from Part One), your ability to generate resources may become limited. If you have a pension indexed to inflation, consider yourself greatly blessed. If not, there’s social security as a safety net (if you’re an American). If you have invested in a retirement account, it may continue growing, but you’ll be tapping it as you go, which limits the overall growth and total available. The inputs side of the equation, less a winning lottery ticket or a rich uncle’s will, is a fairly constant constraint.
Meanwhile, you do have great control over your expenses. Your spending for commuting, maintaining a wardrobe, and business expenses all drop dramatically. You can live where you want, which could be much less expensive. You can take time to comparison shop, and seize opportunities for deals and discounts which were out of reach during the workday. But you’ll also want to do things previously postponed (like travel or a hobby) which might be expensive. And you’ve got to place a bet which most of us avoid: how long am I going to be doing this? Most importantly, you control this variable (expenses, not when you check-out).
Since financing retirement is mostly a math problem, it is actually the easiest part to master. When should you start saving for retirement? Yesterday. Money set aside early compounds (remember the magic of compound interest?), turning the few dollars you saved in 1978 into thousands today. The amount is much less important than the fact of investing and not tapping it early. By the way, this is my biggest complaint with Millennials and Zoomers today who are living the digital nomad lifestyle, in effect moving retirement forward so they can enjoy it while they’re young. Your traditional work years (ages 20-50) are your peak earning years. By reducing your income in this period, you reduce what you can invest, and thus surrender significant compounding of your investments. I hope they are doing the math, too, while trekking across the globe!
How about those other young folk buying into the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) concept. Basically, the idea here is to restrict your spending while young, invest wisely, then retire very early and live off the wealth you created. Some challenges here are: (1) actually restraining your spending while young (hard, not impossible), (2) investing smartly to maximize your wealth (hard, not impossible), (3) guessing how long you’re going to be retired if you do so very early (damn near impossible, but essential to solving the FIRE calculation). It’s a simple math problem for a 65 year-old retiree to project they’ll live approximately fifteen more years, and a small error is easily covered. But a 40 year-old retiree planning to live another forty years? This is double jeopardy, where the “scores can really change!”
Great Christmas Movie!
What if you don’t have a pension, didn’t save much (or anything) for retirement? Well, you have a lot of company: 45% of baby boomers in the US have zero retirement savings. If you’re planning on retiring under these conditions, you’ll need to seriously consider how to drive your cost-of-living down to meet your social security level means. Folks who through no fault of their own found themselves retirement age but with no other resources were a major source of expats in Mexico once upon a time. That is becoming more difficult to pull off, as the Mexican government keeps raising the income requirements for residency (temporary or permanent) while tightening up enforcement of tourist visa overstays.
I’m not going to get into all the ways one can amass wealth, as that is a path well-trod by many financial planning experts (which reminds me, retaining one of these experts, especially one who gets paid by the size of your holdings and not by the amount of trading, is a great idea!). Suffice it to say: live within your means, invest and diversify, avoid keeping up with the Joneses, and don’t get divorced. Maybe I will write a blog on how to amass wealth.
more life lessons from Die Hard
To finish with one more Die Hard reference, the “fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench” of retiree financing is your health. Health care costs, whether routine or traumatic, can bankrupt even the frugal, life-long saver. Having good health insurance is critical, but hard to do. You can’t really save your way past the risk of long-term care expenses. You will get old, you will get sick. Maybe you’ve won the genetic lottery. Maybe you exercise and eat a healthy diet. We all do what we can. I prefer to think of it this way: if you face life-or-death health issues, retirement financing is the least of your worries.
In Part Three, we’ll consider how to transition to retiree, smiling or not.
I recently saw a Tedx talk (link) which did a good job of discussing the phases of retirement. Still, some things bothered me, since some of the language (e.g., “squeezing all the juice out of retirement”) seemed to convey the exactly wrong sentiment in my opinion. So I decided to gather my own thoughts and write about it, as that’s what bloggers do. I’m not exactly an expert on retirement, but I do have some credentials, which I’ll cover as we go. So far we (important change of subject pronoun there!) have faced none of the financial or existential challenges which are so common among retirees. So we got that going for us. . . which is nice.
Before we dig in, may I take a moment to point out just how weird the concept of retirement is? For all of human history, people worked and raised families until they were too old or infirm to do so, then they died. The rich never needed to work, so they found ways to spend their leisure, and eventually they died, too. But nobody “retired.” Rome gave its soldiers a pension, but that was because having poor-men-with-combat-experience-lying-about is bad public policy. Otto von Bismark introduced the modern concept of retirement in the 19th century by forcing Germans over the age of seventy to quit and accept a government payment. Even as late as FDR’s successful enactment of social security in the States, many people of retirement age were opposed to the idea of having to stop working! Population growth, the industrial revolution, and the rise of the middle class all combined to popularize what we now call retirement. So it’s fairly recent and not at all surprising humanity hasn’t quite mastered the concept!
So what is retirement? In its simplest form, it is a period of life in the absence of work. To differentiate it from other times without work (i.e., unemployment), I would add “the need to” before work. Pretty simple, but you would be amazed at the number of people who fail to get this definition. I think here of friends who talk about their “retirement job,” “part-time retirement,” “semi-retired,” or “retired except for. . .”. Nope, not retired, that’s all. Not that there’s anything wrong with continuing to work, or working less hours, or working with less stress: all great concepts, and rightly to be praised. Just not retirement.
Notice that in the definition I have proposed (a period of life in the absence of the need to work) need does not necessarily denote resources. Need can be financial (e.g., I have to keep working to pay off my mortgage) but it can also be purposeful (I have to keep working because I’m the boss, that’s who I am), or evasive (I have to keep working because I don’t know what I would do with myself), or well anything. Need just represents the “what” which comes after “I have to keep working because . . .”
So the person who takes on huge responsibilities in volunteer positions during their retirement? Are they truly retired? Perhaps, since only they can answer “why?” they do so. The point here is not to judge what options anyone chooses, but rather to clearly identify what we are talking about when we say “retirement” so we can then move on to how to be a smiling retiree.
Next up, Finances, or the way we go about retiring!
Facebook just reminded us we passed our sixth anniversary of moving to Mexico. Time to take a look around and see what’s changed here, and what remains the same.
First and foremost, there are more people around here. Not just expats, but also chilangos and tapatios looking to live the good life. Now that we are post-pandemic, there is a steady stream of NOB social media posts about “moving to Mexico,” and the snowbird season is especially noticeable for the crowds and traffic. But weekends year-round can be overcrowded, too. Now, to keep things in perspective, lakeside remains a string of small villages nestled ‘tween the lake and the mountains, and most of the time it still feels that way. But at times and seasons, one starts to feel the “where did all these people/cars come from?” vibe.
Weekends wall-to-wall
Several of the grand development projects intended for lakeside have flopped. The eyesore along the libramiento, on the hill overlooking WalMart, is in suspended animation: no building, maybe not even any advertising. Just an ugly road zigzagging up the mountain. May it always be only so. The seven story apartment complex on the lake near La Floresta got cut down to three or four stories, which was all it was originally approved to be. The assisted living facility west of town seems to be financially stuck, not completely finished. It’s still hard to do big things in Mexico; that hasn’t changed.
The eye-sore…
Which is not to say there is no development. Lakeside has been a beehive of what is known as “in-fill,” where small parcels or lots are transformed into little complexes of homes or apartments. This is happening in the village of Ajijic and westbound towards the county line with Jocotepec. There are some larger developments intended along the libramiento, and perhaps in and east of Chapala. There is also a continued gentrification challenge, as cash-heavy gringos buy traditional casas in Mexican neighborhoods, then gut-and-remodel them into much larger, more expensive properties.
Despite all this development, there is still no serious government plan to improve infrastructure. There are condominios with problems accessing water, others areas face sewage run-off. Internet access went from poor to good (not by NOB standards), but it is spotty by location, with the usual problems of intermittence. Still, it is generally good enough for streaming and perhaps working online. And the roads. . .well, they merit some paragraphs all their own.
Cobblestones + rain = potholes (baches)
First, we have mostly cobble-stone streets. They are the local tradition, quaint, difficult to walk on, and easily damaged. And when I say cobble-stone, I do not mean pavers, or bricks, or anything else other than STONES which are cobbled (placed) together to make a surface. During our rainy season, when some streets become streams, the stones get dislodged, and gradually grow into wheel-eating baches. Eventually the government hires someone to carefully replace the stones, usually after the rainy season ends. Rain-n-Repeat.
Given the lakeside villages lie between a lake-and-a-mountain range, there is only one major road crossing the area, with no space for another. The government occasionally adds traffic lights, which don’t help, since they are neither timed nor use sensors. All these lights do is spread the traffic jams smoothly across the area. Everyone notices that when the lights go out during the rainy season, traffic flow actually improves. Add in numerous gringos whose licenses NOB would have been suspended decades ago, young tapatios who think any straight road is a potential drag-strip, trash-trucks, gas-trucks, vegetable-trucks, families on scooters, pizza-deliverers, and people tripping on cobblestones and you can see why some folks find the traffic maddening.
the car-tastrophe
The most obvious and nakedly terrible change was the redesign of the intersection of the libramiento (the main bypass leading in to Ajijic) with the carretera (main street) in front of WalMart. Months of work and apparently minutes of planning resulted in a concentrated series of lights, right turn lanes, no left turns, topes (speed bumps), bus stops, an access road (with dividers which can be driven over) that safely brings all traffic to a standstill, except late at night, when everybody just drives through regardless of the lights. There is literally no legal way for drivers coming from the east to turn into WalMart. It is a spectacle that must be seen to be believed.
The government did complete a cyclopista, a bike lane running the length of lakeside. It was widely derided by expats as a white elephant project, and even locals objected because it ate a parking lane on the carretera. But it turned into a field-of-dreams moment; they built it, and now it’s full of cyclists and pedestrians! Of course, gringos flying down the bike lane in electrified bikes are a new menace to left turns. But that’s Mexico, two steps forward, two steps left, three steps right, one step back, and what were we doing, anyway?
One thing unchanged is lakeside remains dining-out heaven. There are more, more diverse, inexpensive but good quality restaurants than any comparable town on the planet. The restaurants constantly come and go, or just change locations. The staffs move around, too. We often find we are re-introducing ourselves to a waiter by saying, “weren’t you at X and then Y restaurant?” Prices have been hit by inflation and a small appreciation by the Mexican Peso. But here’s a telling example. We went out for German food yesterday. Yes, German food in a tiny Mexican village. We had two suppen as vorspeisen, a bottle of German bier, two glasses of Mexican wine, and two servings of German-style goulash (beef) with red cabbage and spaeztle. Delicious, and quite authentic (we used to live in Germany). Total with tip? $1000 MXP, or roughly $50 USD at current rates. Of course one can eat much more frugally, but you get the point. I can cite German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Middle-Eastern, Thai, Indian, Vegetarian/Vegan, Russian, Jewish Deli, Venezuelan, Chinese, Japanese/Sushi, Vietnamese, Argentine, Tex-Mex, diners, pubs, and maybe even a few Mexican places, doncha’know?
We’re seeing more, younger expats. The pandemic sent several million baby-boomers into early retirement, and that’s something (I can attest to being) much more affordable in Mexico. We also see more young families, who are looking for a quality-of-life improvement. The weather, the cost of living, and the cultural emphasis on family over financial success all play parts. We don’t see as many of the young, single, digital nomads. They tend to head toward bigger cities, as the night-life at lakeside can be limited.
The increase in migration from the United States to Mexico has led the Mexican federal government to be more rigorous about immigration status. The financial requirements keep increasing (they don’t want indigent visitors any more than any other country does), as do the enforcement of things like tourist visas, property ownership, car buying, et cetera. On the plus side, they are streamlining the actual process of crossing the border at airports, so it’s much smoother and faster.
The weather remains near perfect in this expat’s opinion. Long-time expats assure me it was warmer in winter way back when (twenty years ago), but I remind them they were much younger way back when, too. We still don’t have and don’t need heating or cooling. I have yet to start my gas fireplace for any reason beyond cosmetic. I admit the climate here has greatly reduced my tolerance for extremes. I used to run daily in Washington, DC, whether in 100° F “black flag” heat-warnings or two feet of snow and ice, always in just a t-shirt (sometimes long sleeve) and shorts. Our recent visit to Panama left me seeking shelter from the tropical Sun, and our December visit to northern Italy had me shivering uncontrollably. I guess my blood has officially thinned.
Commercial development has started to spread along the carretera west of Ajijic, much like it once did east through Riberas and San Antonio Tlayacapan. There are more restaurants, shops, and services, although again they come and go without any sense of a development plan. Nothing captures this better than the sad tale of the dog shelter, which gringos requested and the local government funded the purchase of a property. Which ended up being next to several developments. Which meant 24 hour-a-day barking. Which led to petitions to move or close it. And another government effort to find a place, which apparently fell through and, well, you get the picture. One thing that has not changed is the absolute necessity of visiting a neighborhood before living here, and also looking at the land around it. Your small set of homes amidst groves could later have an auto-body shop, a dog run, and an evento (party palace) next door.
Some expats tell me the locals are starting to resent the expats for driving up prices. WalMart’s prices don’t change due to the expats, and the locals shop the tiendas, where they never pay “gringo taxes.” Expats do run up real estate prices–the gentrification problem I mentioned earlier–but that happens regardless of who is buying: Mexicans from Mexico City (Chilangos), Guadalajara (Tapatios), or expats (Gringos). The problem exists anywhere there is a desirable place to live. Regardless, everybody seems as friendly as ever, and this remains a great reason to visit or move here.
What about crime? Well, one becomes accustomed to waking to the sound of automatic weapons fire, and cordite-in-the-morning? It smells like victory! I kid of course, the only consistent noises we hear are cohetes (fireworks) and roof dogs. Nothing tells you you’re dealing with a newbie expat more than if they ask “what’s with the fireworks?” or “why are there dogs barking from rooftops?” Seriously, lakeside remains a Mexican Mayberry. We have predictable crime patterns: before Christmas, there are a raft of petty thefts and purse-snatchings, as some desperate people try to eke out some extra cash. After an election, the police are hesitant to make arrests because they don’t know how the new administration will respond. Sometimes a few new crooks come into the area and we have a string of car thefts or mustard-bandits, until they get caught. The degree of violent crime is such that no one thinks twice about walking around at night in the village. Can you do that where you live?
What do we have more of? More hospitals, clinics, doctors and dentists than you would imagine, especially since we are a short drive from Guadalajara, which is Mexico’s medical centro. We have two hospitals and a hospital-like clinic just around Ajijic. A couple more private international schools have opened, along with the existing public schools and the technology training center. More real estate firms (‘natch!). A dozen or more thrift/resale/antique shops. More Costco re-sale shops, who travel up to Guadalajara, purchase from Costco, then stock shelves locally.
Living among an aging retired expat cohort, one change is constant: good-byes. We’ve lost amigos to death, family emergencies NOB, and health issues. More newbie expats arrive than depart, and while this discomforts some old-timers, life here would be less if it was otherwise. Like the steady flow of people into the United States (I’ll write more on that in the near future), the steady flow to lakeside attests to one thing: life really is better here, if this lifestyle fits you. It sure fits us!
Here’s a series of things you might have heard of as true, but aren’t, since everything you see on the internet is not true (shocking, I know):
Ever see a FaceBook post that instructs you to click on the white space, copy & paste something, rub your head and pat your tummy (I made that last part up), and then “Prest-o! Change-o!,” you’ll see more posts from more of your friends. No, just no. Their algorithm is a mysterious thing, but you can’t hack it. In fact, it hacks you. FaceBook (and all social media sites) measure everything you do on their site: how long you linger on a post, what/who you respond to, what groups you join, what ads you remove, every single thing. The algorithm is designed to maximize the amount of time you spend on FaceBook. Yes, it wants you addicted to FaceBook. So it tries different approaches: if you argue with someone, it starts showing you more of their posts, to get you to argue more. If you share something, same. But the algorithm is clever, too. It will adjust some things, “starving” you from one friend’s posts or some site you like and only giving you a “hit” once in a while. So the only way you could “hack” it was to do random things, which would confuse it as to what you like/dislike. And who has time for that? Not only that, but you’d still be spending time on FaceBook, which means they would still be getting paid. So don’t try to hack it; you can’t. Go with the flow and use it if you like, but always remember, it’s using you, too!
Speaking of hacking, you (probably) haven’t been hacked. Especially on social media, people receive “friend” requests from folks with whom they already are “friends” and they let their friends know, saying “you’ve been hacked.” Hacking involves assuming the identity and account access of a person. The hacker is you and you are not you, any longer. Instead, what I have described is called cloning. Clones are a ruse wherein the cloner starts another page with your name, perhaps image, maybe some info, and then starts sending out friends requests. Your page is still there, but now there is another one. While a hacker can do some damage by posting things you would never say, the cloner is less dangerous. They can ask your friends for help/money, but that’s about all the damage you can do. If you’re the type of person who gives out money to social media “friends” then perhaps the clone trick will work. By the way, if you are that type, send some my way, too! Cloners mostly exist to gin up more eyeballs looking at sites/posts by sharing them with their even-less-real internet friends.
Ever see an extra long video with a title like “unique way to clean X” or “hack your Y.” So you watch it and it seems crazier as it goes. There’s one on cleaning your toilet–which I won’t link to, because I don’t want you to watch it–that goes on and on, with the cleaning person putting ever more odd stuff in the toilet. So you get done and you think, “that was a waste of time.” Except it was only a waste of your time: what the creator got was your eyeballs on their video, which is worth real money to advertisers. So beware such videos, and who knows if the special technique even works?
Which recalls the internet maxim “if you’re not paying for it, YOU are the product.” Which is not to say paying for things is always better, or always results in better service. But paid exchanges have a predictable nature: I send money and I receive a thing. When someone provides a free object or service to me, they probably are relying on my reaction as a tangible thing to market to someone else. So they might be trying to manipulate me in the process. Just a caution.
That image somebody shares of an otherworldly view of a tornado, or lightning, or a cliff-side village, or, well you get the point. If you use the Chrome browser, you can right-click and choose “search image with Google” then “find image source” to see if somewhere out there on the internet there is an original, that may be very different. If you don’t use Chrome, try “Google reverse image search” and you’ll see how to be your own fact-checker with pics on the internet. While this is mostly innocuous now, you need to get into the habit of being skeptical. PhotoShop and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have gotten pretty good, so there’s a lot of digital imagery nonsense out there. Eventually you’ll see fakes of political leaders, friends, family, etc.
Speaking of Chrome, some really like a feature therein called incognito mode. They think that when they use this mode, they are invisible while out surfing the ‘net, so they perhaps can go to naughty sites to which they would rather not admit. Incognito mode doesn’t hide you browser history, nor does it prevent cookies. It simply masks who you are to the site you’re visiting. This is useful when reading an article from a news site that only allows three free articles, for example. But don’t think you’re invisible. Anyone with access to your computer can see where you’ve been. Oh, and if incognito doesn’t work to avoid access limits (perhaps for paid subscriptions), you can always try the WayBack Machine or the Internet archive. Sometimes brand new articles take a day or two to get archived.
Ever get one of those “I truly believe X is a cause worth supporting, and I want # of my REAL friends to share/post this”? Another version asks you to read all the way to the end of a long post. These do not support any cause. They are simply the internet’s version of chain letters. I may be going out on a limb here, but they mostly annoy everybody who sees them. If you really care about something, write (that is, in your own words) what you really feel about it and share it.
Pfishing is the fine art of getting someone to release important financial or personal details through an online interaction. You undoubtedly have received the infamous “Nigerian Prince” e-mail offering you a great cash windfall if you provide the sender with your bank information. Right. But it takes many other forms of which you may be less aware. A list of places you have visited, which “the average American has visited only 10.” A challenge to come up with your Hollywood name, wherein your first name is the name of your favorite pet growing up and your surname is the name of the street where you lived? Favorite foods, things you would give up forever, places you would never go, life experiences. It all seems so innocuous. But if you respond (as millions do), you add to the publicly available data about you. Hackers can send bots through the internet looking for “your name” and “whatever you post publicly.” So? What’s a common security question for websites: How about your favorite pet’s name? Your address growing up? Favorite food? Ooops. But it’s not like they have your birthday, since only all those “friends” on the internet who send you congratulations every year know that. Let’s not become paranoid, now! None of these things means you’ll be hacked. What they do is make you easier to hack. Remember the old joke about the two men going walking in the woods? The first one is wearing hiking boots, and says to the second one, “why are you wearing running shoes? Are you planning to outrun a bear?” The second one says “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.” Don’t be the person online wearing hiking boots.
What about password security? First, why are we even using passwords? Passwords started because networked computers were for businesses and organizations, who needed a simple security procedure they could mandate to employees. As online interactions and commerce took off, it seemed like an easy transition to keep using them. Except I don’t work for Amazon, and having a different password for everything I do online is unworkable. Not to mention passwords are eminently hack-able. The good news is passwords are dying, being replaced by other security measures like texts, biometrics, and tokens. So this is a problem being solved. In the meantime, using a simple generic password phrase is fine for all your unimportant sites. But remember, it’s only an unimportant site if it has NO IMPORTANT INFORMATION. If you let the unimportant site keep your credit card on file, or it has security questions or other data, it’s not unimportant. For important sites (think banking), use a password phrase with both upper and lower cases, a number and a symbol. Surely there is an old song lyric you will never forget: “ONCE th3r3 w@s” a way… is an example. If you have multiple important sites and know all the lyrics to a favorite song, using different lines of lyrics from the same song also works well.
Note as computers get faster, these periods will shrink!
Did you notice that many sites now ask you to register, usually using your name and e-mail address. Why not? Well, that’s another useful piece of information about you. Which means it can be shared, sold, or hacked away from you, and combined with all the other info about you out there. Solution? Get a second, free e-mail account for everything other than important business and friends. When anybody else asks for an e-mail, give them the alternative. You can check on it once a week in case something interesting shows up, but otherwise just let it sit there and fill up. If anybody tries to tie you to that e-mail, they don’t get anything useful!
Back during the pandemic, my family started doing monthly Zoom calls just to keep up to date and in touch. Some won’t participate because of the much-publicized “zoom-bombing” which coincided with greater Zoom use. Zoom-bombing is when someone unauthorized enters your Zoom call and generally makes a nuisance of themselves (or worse. Some folks share pornography!). That was a problem, especially for people who post Zoom sessions on public websites (like social media). But Zoom fixed that: when you enter a zoom call now, the call moderator has to “authorize” you to join the call. If they don’t recognize you/your number, they can chat with you to confirm or simply leave you in the “waiting room.” So Zoom to your heart’s content (which may be short).
Last, a tip I haven’t been able to confirm, but seems to work. If you access a site with many ads, and that takes a long time to load, try increasing the size of the displayed text or portion (usually <ctrl> and <+> at the same time) so only that text/portion is visible. The computer doesn’t always load things which don’t fit the screen. I noticed on my old MS Outlook Mail this hack works well, speeding up my reading and eliminating the flashing annoyances of paid adverts. If anyone can confirm or refute this, please do in the comments!
This book was written by two University of California economists (Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner) who make no secret they see the legalization of “weed” (their preferred term for marijuana) as a positive step toward a more logical, more just society. They take no position about the moral implications of drug use, but rather focus on the economics. and more specifically the claims that legalization would have several positive results: ending the illegal drug trade (at least in weed), eliminating the unnecessary incarceration of those involved in the trade, redirecting law enforcement resources, and generating large and growing revenues for federal, state, and local governments. They conclude that– unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with supply and demand–none of these projections proved to be true.
“Blunt” Get it?
When California led the way by decriminalizing weed in the form of medical marijuana, the path seemed clear: safer weed to smoke (or eat), easily available via a doctor’s note at local dispensaries, less expensive, and without the baggage of any connection to the illegal drug trade. The alleged medicinal properties of weed, which to date remain under study but not proven, were the ostensible reason to legalize weed. Yet medicinal weed was never the intended endpoint, but rather a useful start toward full legalization. Dispensaries and the fiction of a “doctor’s note” only salved some consciences, but did not satisfy the final goal of legitimizing recreational weed use. And that is where things became interesting.
What went wrong? Let us count the ways:
The move to full legalization almost always involved government regulation, taxing, safety and quality restrictions. Which increased the cost of doing business. So the price of legal weed went up, while illegal weed remained available from all the same suppliers at a discount. Would consumers pay extra for the government assurances and regulation? No, since most weed users had been buying for years from suppliers they considered safe, and the connection to the illegal drug trade seemed tenuous, even though it was real (“I don’t deal with a cartel; I buy from Joe down the street.”)
Meanwhile, decriminalization/legalization made retailing weed a crime, but not possessing small amounts. So there was no longer a strong reason for police to “police” the illegal weed marketplace, except as a matter of violation of commercial regulations. And the move toward legitimate recreational weed use eliminated the need for the “medicinal marijuana” ruse: in states which legalized weed, the dispensary weed business largely evaporated. Meanwhile, Oklahoma, a relative newcomer, has stayed at the medicinal weed way point, and has a medicinal weed dispensary for every 3,000 residents (the greatest density of medicinal weed suppliers in the nation, despite no strong medical evidence)!
Specifically in California, legalization included giving local officials the right to regulate where and how weed was bought, sold, and consumed, a compromise necessary to ensure legislative support for legalization. And in the land where NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) rules supreme, public use of weed in most of the state, which was unregulated under medicinal weed rules, became outlawed under legal recreational weed laws. It seems that most Californians didn’t want a weed shop on their street, people smoking a joint in their public parks, or even a weed field next door to their homeowners association (marijuana fields are well-known for a distinctive, unpleasant odor).
Of course, the wild card in legalization was how would organized crime respond. The optimistic forecast was that drug-dealers would simply accept the inevitable and either go legit by becoming regulated weed retailers, or leave the weed business for other, more lucrative drugs. As the authors point out, people who thrived selling weed when it was illegal were those adept at avoiding government regulation and maneuvering among violent competitors: not skills which translate well into a legal marketplace. So local drug dealers simply went on selling weed more cheaply and without government interference (remember, the police don’t care as much about economic regulations), undercutting the legal business. And cartels have taken to offering legitimate weed retailers the classic Mexican dilemma: “plato or plomo,” meaning work with the cartels (accept their silver, plato) or get killed (received their lead, plomo). So illegal weed also continues to leak into the legal business. The biggest change in the illegal weed market has been to move weed growth from Mexico to the US, to avoid the problem of federal restrictions on its importation. Cartels don’t need to smuggle weed across the border anymore, when they only need to hide it as it grows in the States (where law enforcement is less interested in finding it).
Which points toward the long-term outlook. Of course federal law which still treats weed as a Schedule 1 substance (serious drug) acts as a restraint, but only just. The drug war was always fought primarily at the state and local level, and there it is ending with a whimper, not a bang. Eventually the federal government will give up also, but of course local drug-dealers and cartels will not. Meanwhile, numerous investing firms, tycoons, and get-rich quick investors have gone literally bankrupt betting on the profitability of legal weed.
What happens next? The authors point to several scenarios, but none of them are particularly positive for the weed business. They posit four changes they see as relatively certain in the long term (2050): (1) national legalization of weed, (2) legal interstate weed commerce, (3) more efficient weed farming production, and (4) agribusiness involvement in the weed market. Legal weed loses its counterculture cachet and a national market reduces profit differentials. Weed grown in greenhouses needs cheap labor and cheap power, making a place like Oklahoma incredibly competitive with California. Current demand is met by small, distributed producers, and while some weed aficionados claim market use will soar, that is unlikely. Just as weed may prove to have health benefits for some, long-term weed use is likely to pose health challenges. More efficient farming techniques will produce stronger, safer, and cheaper weed. All of which is to say the legal weed business will resemble farming more than prospecting: a highly competitive market with some product customization (read craft weed), low prices and profit margins, and relatively static demand.
Hardly the profitable, smokey nirvana the weed industry projected. If you like supply and demand charts and lots of data, read the book. The authors have a wicked sense of humor and make the economics discussions about as lively as the dismal science can be. Otherwise, you received the gist of their analysis here. And it is a cautionary tale: legal weed will be neither a golden goose for government revenue, nor a rainmaker for investors. Legal weed will not affect the illegal drug business, nor will it reduce crime. Legal weed does not cause mass addiction, but it also (probably) is not a wonder drug. What legal weed does do is add one more legal way to get high. That’s the blunt truth.
This tourist zone encompasses a series of similar tourist resorts that stretch along the Mexican Pacific coast, from the end of the Baja peninsula down to the Huatulco in Oaxaca. It’s perhaps unfair to call these places similar, since they are in fact different. However, the chief difference is that they are at different stages of development in the same life-cycle: tourist hot-spots.
The oldest of these, and arguably the most famous, is Acalpulco, which became a getaway for the Hollywood rich and famous back in the 1940s. Now it is well past its prime, attracting fewer foreign visitors and having a vaguely seedy reputation. Puerto Vallarta, or PV among expats, is the reigning champion. It has a modern cruise ship terminal and a well-developed tourism infrastructure to host visitors and expats. Probably next in line after PV are the various resort towns at the end of the Baja peninsula, namely Los Cabos (Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo). We visited Huatulco, PV, and Cabo San Lucas.
What you’ll find at all these sites are plenty of the usual tourist development (yes, Señor Frog is everywhere) but even more amazing ocean/beach activities. World-class sport-fishing? Check. Ditto for surfing. Endless beaches with bars, seafood restaurants and palapas? Yup. Whale-watching? Swimming with Dolphins? Of course. Ocean kayaking, paddle-boarding, snorkeling, yes. Para-sailing: yeah. Back on land, there are tours of small Mexican towns, visits to haciendas, tequila and mezcal tasting, and eco-visits to jungles and deserts. There is quite literally something for everybody along this coast.
Not being beach people or adventure-seekers, we visited small towns in Oaxaca and Baja California Sur. We can certify that the cruise tours provided what they promoted: very authentic sites where locals produced textiles, mezcal, or other crafts, and small towns still mostly as they are, not carefully crafted tourist recreations. The rug-weavers we saw came from the same small town in central Oaxaca we visited back in July. The mezcal producer used the same techniques we saw in Tequila.
We did sneak in some adventure. I finagled Judy’s agreement to go whale watching while in Puerto Vallarta, as December is the beginning of the humpback whale annual visit to the bay. I imagine she envisioned changing out the cruise ship for a large boat and watching for whales from a distance. I didn’t bother to explain we’d be in zodiacs, basically large inflatable rafts (with a hard interior) and an over-powered pair of marine engines. While Banderas Bay is generally calm, there is nothing calming about screaming across the small waves at 30+ knots in a zodiac, chasing whales. Judy survived the experience, so I’m still here to blog about it!
Happy Judy, when the zodiac is going slowWhales!Our ship looming over the cruise dock in Puerto VallartaNew development built to fit in, in Todos SantosThe Spanish mission churchand insideLocal tour guide claimed this was the inspiration, but it isn’t
Sunday found us docked at Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala, so we availed ourselves of an “on your own” bus to Antigua, one of the ancient capitals (yes, plural) of Guatemala. It’s a well-maintained historical site with excellent views of local, active volcanoes. Which is why it’s no longer the capital.
North, west, east south: volcanoes
Seems when the Spaniards arrived, they established their first capital on the site of the indigenous palace. Which was subsequently destroyed by a volcano. So they moved to another valley, where the second capital was safely away from a volcano, or so they thought. But there was a nearby mountain with a lake on top. You guessed it, there was an earthquake which unleashed the lake and destroyed the town. So the Spaniards built a third capital in 1541 in another valley, safe from most volcanoes and most earthquakes. Of course, mother nature has a way of making man look foolish, and in 1776 there was a tremendous earthquake which destroyed the third capital, resulting in the final site at Guatemala City (which still stands as of the time of this post).
Iconic archway between two convents, framing another volcano
But the people in the third capital didn’t want to give up, so they slowly rebuilt, calling the town Antigua Guatemala (as in the old capital). And there it sits today, a mix of preserved ruins and rebuilt colonial houses, without the business or industry a modern capital city would normally have. It’s as if the old city was preserved in amber from a date long ago.
Cathedral facade
It being Sunday, we had scoped out a Catholic mass in what remains of the old cathedral. Mostly magnificent ruins, locals refurbished one small wing of the cathedral as a small parish. During mass, we heard loud cheers and groans coming from the town plaza immediately outside. There was another religious event of sorts: the World Cup Final. The priest even made a parting joke at the end of mass about seeing everyone outside.
Cathedral interior in ruins, still magnificent
Defending champion France was playing Argentina that morning, and the local government had erected a giant screen in the plaza for all to come and watch. Normally weekends bring a rush of local tourists from Guatemala City to spend a day in Antigua, but this Sunday the crowd was all locals, and most of the town was bunched into a corner of the plaza, glued to the screen.
We heard Argentina was leading 2-0 as mass began, then we heard more screaming during the liturgy. We were surprised to learn France had tied the game up, so we grabbed a coffee (a local specialty) and enjoyed extra time and a penalty kick shoot-out. The crowd, which was rooting for Messi & Argentina, grew silent until the result was in. I mentioned to Judy how strange it was to know the whole world (less the US) was watching the same event at the same time, all holding their breath. It was something like the moonwalk, and special to enjoy among passionate fans.
Don’t look for it on a map. It’s less of a place than a state of mind. You’ve been there if you did an ocean cruise in the Caribbean, Central America, heck even Alaska. It exists where a large cruise ship arrives at a small port in an underdeveloped region or country. And it’s always the same.
Our ship comes in
When Judy & I were hard-working professionals in Washington DC (“working hard or hardly working?”, yes I know the joke!), we tried to get away every winter for a week, usually to cruise the Carrib Sea from Miami (Pro-tip: you pronounce it “car-RIB-ee-an” not “care-i-BEE-an”). We soon learned there was no reason to off-board at the ports, because they were all the same. You walked off the ship and were accosted by a steel drum band. Locals started offering to (1) braid your hair, (2) sell you Ganja (marijuana), or (3) give you a henna tattoo. As we were uninterested in all three, well, why disembark? There were the usual set of excursions, but these too predictably fell into beach-time, water-time, and local customs. We tried some of the latter, but found them more generic than legitimate. I recall visiting a market near Cozumel and buying a “Mayan sun disc calendar” which turned out to be Aztec. Whatever.
If you head north to Alaska, they’re selling sweatshirts, salmon, and First Nations handicrafts. In Central America, its tropical drinks, Mayan art and indigenous clothing. Notice that few things have “made in” labels, because you don’t really want to know from where it came. I don’t mean to disparage the hard work or the opportunity. If you’re on your once-in-a-lifetime trip, enjoy the experience, don’t over-analyze it. And the vendors are trying hard to make a living, souvenirs being souvenirs the world ’round.
Welcome to Wherever
We landed in Puntarenas (sandy point), Costa Rica. We were greeted by a xylophone band, a market full of t-shirts and carved wooden tchotchkes, and some restaurants featuring (in English) “Costa Rican food.” We sauntered past in the tropical heat and found our way to the local church. After we tried the locked doors, a handyman came over and opened it up to we could visit. The cafes and shops were barely open, although there was a line outside the government medical clinic. This could have been any pueblo anywhere in Latin America.
Pleasant church
We’ll be spared the experience in Nicaragua. The Captain explained that the Nicaraguan government is closing its ports due to Covid. Funny thing, the Nicaraguan government website has no mention of it. More likely, the Sandinista government is engaging in another round of repression, so Norwegian Cruise Lines decided not to send day-trippers merrily traipsing across the countryside lest than run into a protest, a riot, or an insurrection. But we will be in Acajutla, El Salvador, soon thereafter, and I bet it will be eerily familiar.
The Panama Canal is, to my mind, an afterthought today. The last great controversy involving it was when President Carter decided (1977) to deed it back to Panama on January 1st, 2000, which resulted in none of the catastrophic consequences imagined at the time. Yes, it connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and greatly facilitates trade, but really it seems to be just a piece of infrastructure, and a really old one at that. Which is precisely why it is a marvel.
The first canal between those oceans was attempted by the French in 1881. They had completed the Suez canal, a sea-level enterprise which cut the sailing time from Europe to the Far East to ten days. Suez was said to be impossible, but Ferdinand de Lesseps and his French engineers pulled it off, and it was the marvel of its age (1869). Then they decided to do the same in the Colombian province of Panama. To understand the difference in terms of difficulty, imagine that immediately following the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, NASA announced that Apollo 12 was going to Mars. Yes, there was French arrogance involved, but they had already done the impossible, were the best at what they did, and their plans were sound, with two exceptions. First, they shrugged off the disease implications of the Panamanian jungle (mainly Malaria and Yellow Fever), and second, they insisted on another sea-level canal. Sea-level canals are much easier endeavors than lock canals: any child who has dug two pools in the beach sand, then connected them with a scooped line between has basically mastered the design of a sea-level canal.
De Lesseps was a force of nature (he was called “Le Grand Français” or The Great Frenchman), and his renown as the conqueror of Suez made his opinion unassailable. Despite his talent and expertise, despite the quality of the engineers the French sent and the money they spent, the effort failed. Too much graft and corruption, too little respect for the size of the task and the challenge of the jungle, spelled defeat.
The Americans literally rough-rode in to pick up the pieces. President Teddy Roosevelt settled on completing the task as a declaration of America’s rise as a world power. Instead of negotiating with the Colombian government (a notably difficult proposition), he fomented rebellion in Panama, recognized the rebels, and signed an incredibly advantageous treaty for a US-built and operated canal. All of which just left the canal-building to be done.
The American effort very nearly failed. The fact of mosquito-borne illness had just been established, yet the canal leadership thought it just “a theory” and very nearly suffered the same catastrophic losses the French had endured. The American engineers finally came around to the impossibility of building a sea-level canal that had to cross a mountain range (!) and ran parallel to a raging tropical river (the Chagres) which flooded up to 33 feet during the rainy season. Eventually the Americans settled on damming the Chagres, creating a giant lake in the middle of the isthmus, then building locks on either side to connect to the oceans. The final canal greatly dwarfed the original estimates by orders of magnitude in terms of how much digging, blasting, and construction was required, yet it was completed ahead of schedule and under budget.
From Wikipedia; the Gatun lake was once all swampy jungle
The Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) went through several organizational structures and leadership teams before falling under the (eventually) legendary George Washington Goethals, a West Point-trained Army engineer who turned the entire operation into a model of efficiency. Some called the canal zone administration a “socialist paradise” as it was so well-run and so accommodating to its work force. There were stark inequalities between the black Caribbean islanders who did the manual labor and the white Americans who oversaw the work or did the skilled jobs, yet all experienced better pay, free medical care and food, paid leave and other benefits unheard of back home. The administration was not strictly a government: it was more of a giant company-town, where every body and every thing was focused on a single task: digging the canal.
The ICC needed healthy workers, so mosquitoes were practically eradicated from the canal zone, despite it being carved out of the jungle. Skilled doctors and engineers weren’t going to come alone to Panama for years on end, so homes and schools and community centers were built. The losers in all this were the Panamanians themselves, who anticipated a windfall in sales and services but instead found themselves shut out of the manual and skilled labor, and competing with a massive organization designed to bring the comforts of home to the tropical jungles.
The grassy areas are the large earthen dam, completed with the small traditional concrete structure
The canal construction redefined social, technological and material limits. It created the largest dig, the largest earthen dam (at Gatun, above), which resulted in the biggest man-made lake, using the largest heavy equipment (95 ton steam shovels) and largest steel products (gates). Electric motors, just coming into their own, became a chief power source, and the canal used hydroelectric power to be largely self-sufficient. A fledgling American company named General Electric designed a control system whereby engineers could sit in a single room and see a scale-model with a series of live-controls that managed the whole system. The controls were connected in a way it was impossible to “skip a step” or open the wrong lock/dam/gate (aka “idiot-proof”). The final cost was $500 million USD (at the time), the largest single expenditure in US history, and more than five times the cost of all land acquisitions (Louisiana Purchase, Alaska, etc) of the US government till that point.
Container ship in the lock ahead of our cruise ship; notice the elevation gainClose-up of a “mule,” a small locomotive which pulls a ship through the locks
It opened in August, 1914, but to little fanfare, as the impending Great War in Europe quickly blotted out what had been an object of intense international attention. Still, the canal functions to this day–108 years on– much as it was originally designed and built. Additional, larger locks permit larger New PanaMax vessels to cross, but the locks, the dams, the mules (trains which pull the ships through the locks) are either the originals or rebuilds to original specifications. It is hard to imagine another working infrastructure project which has held up nearly as well: perhaps the Roman roads/aqueducts?
The Culebra cut, where the mountain repeatedly slid back into the canal excavation, requiring constant re-digging
The value of any infrastructure project is simple: does it work? The marvel of this one is not that it works, but that it was ever completed. The beauty of it (if one can call infrastructure beautiful) is how well it works, so long after it was done.
