Round number two of shoveling done. Our neighbors helped with their big ass snow blowers to shovel some of the big mounds away from entrance. It’s freezing raining / sleeting with gusto. I shudder at what it’s gonna be like towards evening and morning tomorrow. Practically gonna be an ice rink!
Macro
As more time goes by I have begun to hate Biden more and more. I used to believe he was one of the best presidents we have had but I no longer think so. He failed the most critical test of his presidency and put the country and world in danger. Surely he and administration knew how much of a danger Trump and his loonies were to the society and yet, he barely scratched the surface. He should have foreseen this and take much much more decisive actions especially when Supreme Court made him the king. Instead he let his ego blow out. History should not be kind to him.
lol I actually asked Gemini what is the best strategy on parking my cars to ease snow shoveling later and it came up with suggestion that I agree with. Our neighbor across street is covering is suv with thick plastic cover – I thought that was just an instagram trend but if it works for him I might try that next time!
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In two weeks, the kid is going to a sleep away weekend at a ski resort for one of her BFFs from swim. A and I are considering giving R digital copies of her passport, birth certificate and our passport pages as well to keep. Most of the ski resorts are in trump land Virginia and that’s making us nervous. We plan to talk to her friends parents too and relay our concerns so they can keep a watch. They are the kind of white parents who are super nice but also super oblivious to anything beyond 15ft of themselves, so we have to do the needful and open their eyes a bit for safety of our own kid. Congratulations America, this is what you voted for.
Ah white people. Went out for drinks and dinner with pretty much all white folks. Really nice people. I like them (heck part of reason I changed jobs!). But. Slowly the topic of current times came along. Everyone’s liberal so not like politics is taboo. One after another each white person says the same thing – they hate everything right now but unable to do anything. They feel like they “can’t” do anything at all. I didn’t want to address directly so I gave them examples about Indian protests and French protests – they agreed that Americans must learn from French – but all of them simply looked down and basically said but I can’t really do anything and nothing they can do will change anything. 10 minutes later they were all planning an offsite in Arkansas to meet a customer to which I was like yeah no thanks I don’t want to get killed. They didn’t get it. They really do not get it.
There is a sense of escape I feel in Seattle being far away from dc. The negative aura of the current occupant of White House spreads far and wide and engulfs everything and everyone 100 miles around. Here it’s nice to see Fuck ICE boards pasted on windows and feel you might somehow still be safe.
Looks like the next weekend might be ultra cold along with a potential for historic snowstorm. I hope neither happens but if I had to choose I will take biting cold over snow. A few inches is fine but anything more than 6-7” basically means the doggy walks are going to be treacherous for next few weeks until the snow melts and that takes its own sweet time.
I have been using Projection Lab over last few weeks to simulate financial futures. There are few tools like this that focus only on retirement simulation with a lot of bells and whistles that are better than your traditional ones that you find in any financial tools. For starters everything in Projection Lab is manual to the T – so it takes some time to actually input your data with precision. But it’s a useful and necessary task. Next, after you create your retirement plan you can run simulations to see how well you’d do. You can also see when might you achieve financial independence, and when might you FATFire (which is basically saying, you can spend lavishly in retirement). You can also run your simulations against specific time periods – for example I ran my simulations against Great Depression years, the 1980s, the dot-com bubble and financial crisis era to figure out whether our plan can actually sustain. It’s interesting to see variables change over different eras. For example, in Great Depression era the tool said I could not retire until 70 (thankfully though I could is a miracle). I am still exploring this tool and paid for a month subscription. I don’t think I am gonna keep doing this monthly to invest in a yearly membership, but a month long membership is enough to give some directionality. All in all, we are doing OK, and that is about the best outcome I could take out of it.
That said, I am also slightly dubious of historical trends as calculations. The USA is in unprecedented territory right now, not just fiscally but also politically and influence. There is absolutely no telling how next few years will turn out and whether everything will collapse under its own weight. And unfortunately there is no way to simulate that – so while we feel ok about where we are, knowing where the country is headed in an exponentially uncharted territory basically makes us feel inadequately prepared. Time will tell though.
Sigh. The rower deal fell through. The seller was nice and invited me come to their house to check the rower out before finalizing sale. They lived in Burke which is like booneylands of fairfax county. Drive there and see a Trump 2024 sign outside their SFH window. I nope the fuck out of there – make some excuse and call off the sale, and block the seller. They were very nice over the whole interaction though prior to this, and I don’t have a reason to believe they would have done anything bad, but I just don’t have it in me anymore to engage with Trumpkins even in good faith.