Monthly Archives: September 2013

Putting Things in Perspective

retro moneybag

 

Chances are, if you are reading this post you are doing pretty doggone well.  You have access to electricity, and a sheltered place to store a computer.  That puts you in fairly elite company when compared to the world at large.

There is a website that will use income or wealth to give a world ranking: http://www.globalrichlist.com/  .   A natural tendency is to think locally, but it can be eye-opening to think about wealth globally.

To reach the lofty stratosphere of the TOP 1% in global income takes an annual salary  in USD of $31,100.

To reach the lofty level of the TOP 10% in global income takes an annual salary of $13,200.

The only way to determine if one is doing better than others is to compare.  But choosing who to compare will determine the outcome.  How many people protesting the 1% (in the US) are themselves in the 1% (of the world)?

On the other hand, the Independent Penguin does not need to compare with others to feel wealthy.  He lives on a stable tip of his iceberg that is sufficient to supply his needs and wants.  He values stability and freedom.   And that alone is enough to feel wealthy.

 

The Problem With Spending Down

firewood

 

There is an unspoken problem with typical withdrawal strategies for a retirement portfolios that are timed to spend down to zero when the investor dies (or perhaps a few years safety). And the problem is related to the problem of what is “enough”.

This analogy comes from Tommy Angelo (of Tiltless fame).  Tommy is a wordsmith, philosopher, musician, and poker player.  I have adapted his analogy below (he gives explicit permission on his website to do this) – but I cut out the poker stuff.  If you want to read the whole thing, it’s at: http://tommyangelo.com/articles/enough-is-not-enough/ .

One night when I was camping, I was sitting by the fire — a fire that was in no jeopardy whatsoever of being underfed — when it occurred to me that my relationship to firewood while camping is the same as my relationship to money. I severely and drastically do not want to run out of either one.

And it turns out there is a scientific theoretical mathematical relationship at play as well. To camp, all I need is time and wood. To live, all I need is time and money. Do the algebra and you end up with wood equals money.

Before I carry this analogy too far, let me describe the landscape.

The place I camp is Butano State Park. It is a redwood forest. Did I mention that it’s a redwood forest? That it comes with daytime darkness and extra silence? And did I mention that there’s not much for ants and bees and flies and mosquitoes to do at human level, so there aren’t any? And that the dominant representative of the animal kingdom is the banana slug? And that when you walk in the forest, on the duff carpet, you are not really walking next to the trees, you are walking through them, because really, the ground itself is just more and more redwood stuff, and the whole forest is like one really big tree?

Butano is five miles in from the Pacific and 1600 feet above it. Along this stretch of ocean there is a series of small beaches, which are basically river deltas. You can see geological time here. You see a beach, and behind that, sand dunes, and behind that, huge ancient sand dunes that have become sandstone mountains with soil and plants and your occasional redwood forest on top. You can see the rivers come down from the mountains and go right through or under the beaches they make.

During the big winds and waves of winter, thousands of trees that were living on the edge are uprooted, and they fall into the ocean, where they are dismantled and sanded and baked. The ocean then transports the driftwood to my beaches and deposits it on high ground where it waits for me to come along and select the very finest, for the fire. There are no signs on the beach that say, “No wood gathering.” But I asked a ranger anyway, to be sure. “Take all you want!” she said.

It’s a labor I love, walking hundreds of yards in the soft sand, rummaging through sprawling lodes of logs of every kind and size, and walking with the chosen ones, back to the car. I place the bounty in the trunk and in the back seat, just so, to make room for more.

Back at the campsite, me and my saw do five minutes here, ten minutes there, and suddenly, hours later, there is a heaping array of wood for all occasions. The fire is started in the large, metal, cylindrical fire pit.

The pile of wood depletes, but it is never depleted. At noontime on departure day, everything I brought to the campsite is in my car except for one thing: a stack of leftover logs, with kindling on the side.

You could say I’ve gone too far with this. You could say I’m too worried about running out of firewood. And you’d be wrong. I’m not the slightest bit worried.

The campers among you might be wondering:

But don’t they sell firewood at the campsite?

Yes, in toy-sized bags, to the plebeians.

But isn’t the forest by definition full of wood? Can’t you just pick up nearby old dead logs and burn them in your happy little fire pit?

Uh, no. You don’t go into a redwood forest and burn the plants, even the dead ones. They do officially tell you this, but they don’t have to — you just know. If I may continue now?

What does it mean, really, to have enough of something? Does it mean having barely enough? Does it mean having more than enough? Or does it mean having way more than enough? With things like meat and milk, I like to have barely enough. With things like olive oil, soap, and candles, it’s no big deal if I run out, and I only have so much room in my supply bins, so what I like to have is more than enough, but not that much more.

But firewood? Enough is not enough for me, no matter how much enough actually is. Let’s say I arrive at the campsite at noon on day one with 100 logs, intending to go to the ocean at noon the next day to reload. Noon the next day comes around, and I burn the very last of the logs just before heading to the ocean. If we look back at the previous 24 hours to evaluate my wood-management skills, we see that I did not run out of logs, which is good, but, does that mean I had brought “enough?”

NO! The problem with the 100-log pile is I’d know from looking at it that if it was enough, it was barely enough, and I’d be in constant panic for 24 hours. 100 logs, as it turned out in this example, would be enough to keep the fire from going out, but not enough to keep me from going off.

So we know that the right answer is more than 100 logs. But how much more? The answer is however many logs it takes so that whenever I look at the wood pile, the only thought that comes to mind is, “I have way more wood than I could possibly need.”

The Independent Penguin is wary of any financial plan that calls for a spend down to zero, since he doesn’t plan to live life in fear watching his portfolio shrink.  What about you?

A Review of the Orgreenic Non-Stick Pan

orgreenic

 

I have a list of things that would be nice to have.  When I want something, it goes on the list.  If it’s still on the list after a month, then I will think about purchasing it.

A non-stick flat surface went on my list awhile back.  My nine year old doesn’t like to eat his veggies, but loves pizza.  I found a recipe on the net for a cauliflower crust pizza with great reviews: http://www.eat-drink-smile.com/2011/04/cauliflower-crust-pizza.html .  It looked great so I made it, but the experiment was an epic disaster.  The crust ended up being glued to the cookware and no amount of peeling or prying could budge it.  Dinner ended up being a peanut and butter sandwich.  Hence the non-stick surface went on my list.

The commercial for the Orgreenic cookware shows eggs and cheese totally sliding after cooking.  It made it seem like nothing would stick – that’s what I was looking for.  In my previous quest with Kohl’s cash to make a purchase that would not be subject to hedonic adaptation [ http://www.independentpenguin.com/an-experiment-in-overcoming-hedonic-adaptation/ ] I had eyed the frying pan, but it was $20 and after tax would exceed my allotted budget for the task.

But last week I found the pan on sale at our local grocery store for $10, so I got it.

The reviews on Amazon are amazingly bimodal – a group at 5 stars (excellent) and a group at 1 star (terrible) and very few opinions between.

When I got it home and opened it, I read the instructions on use.  The first step was seasoning the pan.  I chose to use Olive Oil and heating in the oven at 300 degrees for  an hour.  I didn’t actually think about it much at the time but looking back I did some things well unintentionally.  I coated it in the Olive oil and then wiped it out so the pan looked dry.  After heating, I let the pan cool again before wiping.  After seasoning the pan, I started wondering why pans have to be seasoned, and found this great webpage on the chemistry of seasoning cast ironware: http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2010/01/a-science-based-technique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/  ,  Basically on cast iron, the oil polymerizes on the pan surface to form the coating.  If something similar on happening on the Orgreenic (which seems reasonable) the way I seasoned left a nice coating.  If I had read the cast iron blog before doing it, I would have used flaxseed oil as the seasoning.  On the other hand, the flaxseed oil might have cost more than the pan – so perhaps I am lucky to have not read it first!

Last night I made the cauliflower pizza in the flat bottom of the Orgreenic pan (just popped the pan in the oven).  I didn’t use any aid to prevent sticking – just the seasoned ceramic surface to put the pizza crust “dough” on.   Cooked per instructions and ….

The entire pizza slipped right out of the pan in a perfect one round piece!  The splatters of pizza sauce or stray cheese that burned on the side of the pan?  A paper towel wiped them right off with no residue.  The pan looked new after wiping it out.

I’m impressed.  Put me in the five star camp.  After reading some of the one-star reviews on amazon and the comments in the cast-iron blog linked earlier in this post, I suspect that many of the problems people have had with this pan are due to seasoning issues.

And my son gave two thumbs up on the pizza.