I want a boat.

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Well, to be honest … I think I want a yacht.

I have no idea what got me off on this tangent as I was out walking the dog this evening, but for some reason I started thinking about how cool it would be to own a really big boat to just bum around to wherever, whenever…

Granted, it’s probably an idea better left for retirement when one doesn’t necessarily have anything to do on a given day … not to mention that still gives me another 20-30 years to save up the couple of million dollars that I’m finding a nice, simple, 65-foot luxury ship will run you these days! Not to mention yacht fuel and dock fees and I’m sure that there are about a billion other expenses involved with owning one of these things … but still, yacht!

I wonder what the right terminology is here. I mean, “boat” is probably understating yourself just a bit, but yacht sounds super big and fancy and ultra-rich. Mine doesn’t have to be ultra-rich – just kind of rich … I’d be happy with the kind that turns a few heads and doesn’t sink when you try to take it out in the ocean. And not out in the ocean, but you know, sailing up and down the eastern coastline and around the Keys and the Gulf of Mexico and the Bahamas would be kinda neat.

Maybe you call it a ship … from some of the pictures that I’ve looked at tonight, the moniker certainly seems appropriate – especially when I learned that one boat in particular didn’t have engines on the back, per se, as much as it had an engine room like a miniaturized version of the one you’d find on a cruise ship!

I’m not a very good mechanic, so I hope that’s not going to be a problem.  😕

I’ve been feeding my random curiosity this evening gawking over some of the blog posts and pictures and specs on Ken’s Blog … you might remember Ken Williams and his wife Roberta as the founders of Sierra Online, pretty much the makers of most of my favorite computer games growing up. Well, now they own a 68′ boat that looks absolutely gorgeous from all of the pictures, and they spend their summers floating around wherever the water takes them. Apparently this summer they’re touring Europe again, and I guess it all just seems like a really fun way to spend your time when you don’t really have a particular schedule that you’re required to keep anymore.

I got a big kick out of watching this video that Ken posted a couple of weeks ago where he gives a tour of the controls of his boat, Sans Souci. So many buttons and controls – see what I meant about it looking more like a cruise ship than some smaller power boat that you might take out on the lake for an afternoon?! I was absolutely fascinated when we took that behind the scenes tour of the Carnival cruise that we went on a couple of years ago, and even though I’m sure there’s a ton to learn, click around to some of those other videos and check out the views and tell me that it wouldn’t all be worth it!

Seriously – he even has a hot tub on his boat! Add in a chance to get back into SCUBA diving in a big way, no lack of Internet access, the occasional dolphin in the wild, plenty of wine and plenty of time to enjoy it with Sara, and I think I could get used to being away from land pretty quick. 😉

I’ve always liked the idea of traveling, even though we haven’t done a ton of it just yet … but the gigantic, month-long road trip that Sara and I took a few years ago was absolutely a blast, and even though it was kind of expensive, it really wasn’t too bad when you consider how long we were gone and how many different places that we visited. There are places all over the world that I know the both of us would like to see – Europe, the Bahamas, Australia, even more of the western US – and it seems like owning a boat like that would be a pretty swell way to travel if you could afford it! Plus, living here in Tampa gives us prime access to the water anyways, so I’d like to think that it would give more opportunities even just for shorter adventures out around the local area, popping down to Miami and the Keys for a few days here or there, or whatever.

I guess I probably need to look at a map or something, but it even makes me wonder if it’s possible to get from Florida to Michigan via boat … there’s got to be larger rivers or something that connect the Great Lakes to the ocean, aren’t there??? That would be fun – pack up down here for the summer and then head down around the coast of Florida, up the east coast, dock in New York City for a while to take in the sights and visit Sara’s family, and then work our way west until we end up around Mackinaw / Petoskey there at the tip of Northern Michigan where my own hometown is!

Not for nothing, but I’d much rather stay on a yacht than in a tent, and I’m pretty sure that opinion won’t be one to change in the next couple of decades… 😛

Sure, I know – the price is ridiculous and maybe it’s way out of league of where I’ll ever end up financially, but what’s the fun of dreaming if you can’t DREAM BIG?! That just means I’ve got to sell lots and lots … and lots of books in the next 20-30 years to help pay for it all, and I’ve always been one for a challenge!

The open water beckons me. This is going to happen, and when it does, it’s going to be sweet.

Prospective name for my new boat: The Best Seller

“$250,000 is not rich … it’s actually close to poverty…”

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Ok … so I couldn’t let this go without more than just the single line of commentary that I left on my last post because when I did just the tiniest hint of digging to see if there was more to the quote … anything, really … that gave it the slightest notion of not being just absolutely and hopelessly out of touch, what I actually found was this fun, little thread with several people supporting her general comments … despite being a couple of years before she even said them!

Granted, there were also plenty of people abhorring such a notion, but let’s talk about not those people who actually have the comprehension to grasp that the median household income in American is $50,000 per year, and yet $250,000 per year is A LOT MORE DOLLARS THAN THAT.

As a side note, more and more I find myself running out of ways to add emphasis when I’m talking about things that have been said on FOX News – go figure…

So anyways, here’s the link – http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/12/07/Down-and-Out-on-250000-a-Year.aspx – and in it the author attempts to dissect the budget of a family of four making $250k per year, walking through all of the taxes that they pay and how things are pretty tight for them budget wise, and it wouldn’t be so bad if they’d just leave it at “having more money in the door means more money going back out,” but instead they start to break down specifics and that’s where people start to feel disconnected:

  • $5,000 for a house cleaner
  • $4,000 family vacation each year
  • $3,000 for “gifts / holidays / family celebrations”
  • $4,000 for the kids to go to “camp” (P.S. what “camp”?! Scout camp when I was a kid cost $100-200 for a week!)
  • $8,000 for kids’ college fund
  • maximizing 401k contributions

What the author, and a lot of people in this income bracket, fail to realize is that the reason people find this story disingenuous is because a lot of people don’t have the money for these things – period. I won’t even make the “poverty” comparison because frankly that’s just asinine, but the fact that they don’t get that people who are really broke don’t have a housekeeper because they can’t afford one, don’t go to Disney World each year – maybe once in a lifetime, don’t save for college – thus resulting in massive student loans that most college kids end up on the hook for, and don’t really have much for investments at all.

Adding up just that list of discretionary spending right there (including $17,500 if they’re truly “maximizing” 401k contributions), that’s a whopping $37,500 that they’re spending on things that most families in the neighborhood of the national average might do once in a blue moon, not every single year. In fact, it’s almost the entire median income of those families, so go figure a lot of people want to spit in the face of somebody who’s bringing in a quarter of a million dollars a year if they’re trying to claim that they don’t have any money!

Now I know that one of the primary arguments that was presented in the comment thread of that article is that people in more expensive areas like New York / DC / LA have no other choice because the cost of living is higher, real estate is more expensive, etc, etc…, and to that I’m going to call bullshit, too, because it’s still all a matter of perspective. There are eight million people living in New York City today, and yet all of them don’t make $250k a year … in fact, most of them make considerably less than that because the median average there, too, is still only $48,000. A person who makes $48k a year can’t afford an $800,000 house with $3,000/month mortgage payments, and they’re not all sleeping in cardboard boxes in Central Park, so there’s got to be cheaper housing available in the biggest city in the country.

It may not be housing that some people would refer to as safe and comfortable and the closest to quality schools, but it exists.

So I’m not buying the excuse that somebody has to have an $800,000 house in New York because that’s just what real estate costs there. Go to the neighborhoods that you refuse to visit at nighttime … or even during the day. Go outside of Manhattan and Staten Island and into the cheaper areas of the city. Or at least simply acknowledge that you choose to spend the money that you’re lucky enough to make on nicer housing because that’s important to you.

I don’t begrudge anyone their wealth until one of two things happens – they rub it in people’s faces, or they don’t appreciate the idea that some people … most people … earn far, far less than they do. The amount that we’re talking about is something that the average worker might see in 5-10 years of his life, and those people below the average like people stuck in minimum wage, part-time jobs might never see it in their lifetime. It’s very hard to visualize something that one person earns in a year when it’s the same amount that another might earn cumulatively over 5-10 years or more.

I look at it this way with my own finances – in 2013, my wife and I combined are in around the top 10% of earners in the country, which comparatively is roughly 7x the poverty level today. Reviewing our monthly budget, we don’t have a ton of cash leftover at the end of each month, but you can also look around and see that we’re living pretty comfortably, too. We take day trips to Disney World – a lot. We have two cars. We have a swimming pool in our backyard. We’re saving for retirement, although admittedly not as much as I’d like.

We don’t have a lot of free cash because we also have a lot of debt from college and those cars and various home improvements, plus trips to Disney aren’t cheap and those investments – small as they are – really do add up, but if push came to shove, there are plenty of areas where belt-tightening could take place before we would even enter the realm of being in trouble financially. Not real trouble, anyways.

I get the idea of someone making $250k not thinking that they’re “rich” because just like you or I, they still see celebrities and politicians and bankers who literally make millions of dollars a year, and think, “No – that’s rich!” And they’re right, but it’s also somewhat relative – to a person who only makes $30,000 a year, $250k seems just as outlandish as $250 million … who could imagine either amount when you’re just scraping to get by. And that’s why hearing somebody complain about not having any money after all of their investments and college funds and family vacations is so frustrating because it’s like they’re only comparing their checkbook balances at the end of each month to those of the median workers instead of considering all of the things that they actually spent their money on throughout the month to get down to $0 at the end.

The takeaway is really simple – if you make money, be grateful about it, and don’t gloat about it, whether you make $10k more than the guy next to you or $10 million. There are honestly times when I’m reluctant to write about having a pool because I know that not a lot of people have one … even in my neighborhood, there’s only one other … and I don’t want it to come off as bragging. But I do enjoy it and I feel that I’ve worked hard to make the money to afford it, so when I do I just try my best not to gloat about it and not make statements like, “OMG – I don’t have any money left!” after writing a check to the pool guy who helps make sure it doesn’t turn into a giant cesspool in our backyard each month.

Humility goes a long way with me, and I think if more of the top 1% – or even top 10% – in our country felt the same way, the overall perception that people have on wealth in America would be very different.

“Raise the minimum wage?!?!?! But then people would never LEAVE!!!”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwKsu4K7RLo

A long time ago, I used to be among those with the opinion that it was ultimately pointless to raise the minimum wage because what would end up happening is that companies would have no choice but to raise all of their costs to support it, which would then trickle back down and make the rate hike a moot point because what’s the sense in getting $10/hr if Big Macs now costed $10 instead of $5.

That was before I had spent much time working for big corporations, where I started to notice the real issue here … despite an always impending necessity to cut costs and maximize efficiency at the sake of employee wages and headcount, these businesses always managed to turn a profit. A big one. So when a company like McDonald’s posts an annual profit of $5.5 billion, but has employees clamoring that they’re not making enough money to survive without second jobs, or the can’t afford basic healthcare, or what have you, it begs the question of why doesn’t the company take a lesser profit and use some of those proceeds to help support their own employees better???

Of course, the reason is because for many corporations, its shareholders are more important than its employees … or at least the rank-and-file ones who actually have to wallow in those grease pits in order to collect all of that profit one customer at a time. This is nothing new – a lot of people tend to look down at minimum wage earners as if they’re somehow beneath them … you can definitely get that attitude from some of the anchors quoted in that segment when they start citing that “minimum wage shouldn’t be cushy and make them never want to leave” … as if that’s even a thing that could possibly happen!

I’ve never worked a fast food job myself, but my first job was sweeping floors in a warehouse for minimum wage, and there were slow days or days before I learned other tasks that I pretty much did nothing but sweep for hours on end, and it sucked. Anyone who thinks that these entry level jobs are easy should try doing one – not for a day or two, but day in, day out for months and years on end, because that’s when the fatigue starts to set in when wallowing in grease (or dust, or whatever) for 40+ hours a week is what you do to support yourself or your family.

I mean, people always comment about these types of jobs being something that anybody can do when you’re unemployed or down on your luck, but when you’ve worked for years in a comfy, white-collar job where you eat more of your meals at tables than from counters, and you’re used to being able to take lunch whenever you want, and not getting timed like a hawk when you go to the restroom on your break … I think a lot of people who’ve never really done that type of thing become disconnected for just how much fun those jobs really aren’t, so then if you also see that you can’t even make ends meet at your shitty, minimum wage job because the minimum wage hasn’t kept up with costs of living that have skyrocketed in the last few decades?!

“If the economy were strong, McDonald’s would be paying higher wages.”

As John so perfectly puts it – yes, because that’s how capitalism works.

P.S. And if you think that FOX News quote is atrocious, I think that “$250,000 is not rich … it’s actually close to poverty…” pretty much takes the cake. I’m not sure that outside of smacking her across the face with a fish there’s any other reasonable way to respond to a statement like that.

An Internet Suicide Note … and more

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So I found this really weird thing earlier this evening, and ever since then I’ve been trying to figure out what I think about it.

Martin Manley, a sports writer from Kansas City, committed suicide yesterday. Before he did, he published a website about his life … and death, which can be found here (mirrored here because I’m sure the main site is getting slammed).

Browsing through that website is a very bizarre and troubling experience, as I’m sure anyone who’s ever had to read a suicide note could attest. I’ve known a couple of people who’ve committed suicide, but never before have I had this kind of glimpse into what’s going on inside the person’s head before they finally pulled the trigger … and at this point I don’t think that’s a good thing.

I don’t think many of us are really fans of suicide. I think it’s silly to make something like that illegal, and I think that I can better understand the scenarios where someone has been very sick for a very long time and is just tired of suffering. Mental suffering like depression is a bit harder for me to grasp, simply because I’d like to think that everyone has a chance of getting help, even though I get that there isn’t always help for some people.

But what confuses me as I read through the pages of that website is that Martin went out of his way in an attempt to make clear that he’s fine and he’s just ready to die. One friend on Facebook commented that he seems paranoid about the future, talking about economic collapse and recent tragedies like Hurricane Sandy and the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. He also talks about buying $30,000 in gold coins back in 1998 “in preparation for Y2K,” and yet he also cites having one of the highest IQs in the state.

The more I dig into it, I guess that’s when I start to get a little icky about it because it started to remind me of a couple of writers that come to mind that write in this same style, and are kind of all over the place in what they do, and more importantly, the feeling that they’d do just about anything to get people to read their work. And I’m not talking about the natural drive to want your work exposed to as many as possible … at this level, I’m talking about more extreme cases, and it’s because of this that I’m not sure I want to read anymore because I can’t tell how much of this is interesting because it’s interesting, as opposed to what’s interesting because it’s from a guy who just killed himself.

And the thing is, if you want to be remembered for something, killing yourself isn’t the best way to go about drawing attention to it because it ends up getting associated with the suicide itself instead of holding its own merit anymore.

He has a page on this extensive site of his where he comments on whether the whole thing is self-serving, citing that “This is to be the LAST AND ONLY CHANCE I will ever have to tell the world who I was.”, and I think it’s partially from self-deprecating attitudes like that where the term cowardice gets associated with suicide because another option if you’ve really got so much about your life that you still want to share with other people, why not stick around a while longer and share it with people. Time will mark the end for you on its own soon enough, so instead of throwing out one last pitch and hoping that people remember you for that throw instead of the fact that you went and offed yourself immediately after the game, why not play a few more and share the stories yourself???

Now if people decide (or have already decided) that they don’t want to hear your stories, then that’s something that you just have to deal with as a creative person … and I’m not necessarily saying that that’s the case for this guy, as I’ve never read a word that he’s written other than the several thousand on this site. My point is simply that killing yourself is no more effective at getting people to like your work than it is at making your ex-girlfriend get back together with you.

Anyways, I think I’ve written long enough about this. On the surface, it seems like an intriguing concept to read about the things going through someone’s head leading up until they decided to take their own life, but when you actually start to peel back the layers and just find yourself faced with more and more questions that you’ll never have the answers to, I think that personally I’d much prefer to read about someone who was passionate about life than one who was more focused on his own death…

The Future of Broadband Speeds, New Computer Talk, and Sexual Innuendo

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I don’t really remember what drove me here, but at random I found myself doing a new speed test a little bit ago and it just kind of blows me away to think how far we’ve come…

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Both in terms of just the last year when I first got FiOS installed at our previous house with speeds of 21 Mbps down and 13 Mbps up, and of course going back even farther to maybe circa 2000 (?)  when the idea of “broadband internet” was just coming to the small, forest glen that is Gaylord, MI with a whopping 1 Mbps down and what … maybe 384 kbps up!

I just checked and officially my package with Verizon is for 50/25, and yet for another five bucks a month, I can bump that up to 75/35! The plans beyond that are still kind of ridiculously expensive (+$50 for 150/65, +$120 for 300/65, and a whopping +$210 for 500/100).

Still, the fact that fifteen years after dial-up modems, you can now get a fiber cable running half a gigabit speeds into your home … pretty cool! 😉

In the past I’ve kinda been one to poo-poo these extra-high speeds just because I still contend that basic web surfing only needs a fraction of that – even if people are watching YouTube videos at the same time.

…though don’t even get me started on YouTube because somebody, whether it’s Verizon or Google or somebody in between, sure has a habit of making my video watching miserable despite this amazing pipe running into my house!

Anyways, it kinda makes me want to pay the $5/month to bump it up to 75 Mbps because, well, why not?! Do you have any idea how much porn a guy can download at 9 megabytes per second?! 

33 GIGABYTES AN HOUR, that’s how much…

Until 4K porn comes along and ups the resolution again, I can’t even watch 33 gigs of porn in an hour’s time.

Then again, I think I’m getting hard just talking about that download speed, so maybe I won’t need 33 gigs of porn…

Nobody needs 33 gigs of porn…

Channeling my inner-Dave Barry, wouldn’t 33 gigs of porn be a great name for a rock band?

ANYWAYS… WHERE WAS I???

Oh yeah, so I need a new computer.

Seeing those crazy download speeds, among other things, makes me kind of miss the days when I had a home server that gave me an excuse to download stuff from time to time. Unfortunately, that died sometime back in 2010 and I never did seem to find the money/time to rebirth it. Plus, the hard drive on my desktop has been big enough (600 GB) that since then I’ve really just saved everything that I download there instead … which maybe that’s the reason that it’s starting to get pretty darned clunky, too!

According to the Internet, apparently the last time I performed surgery on this machine was March 2009, and even that was only replacing the motherboard/processor/memory, so who knows how old this hard drive actually is! Thankfully it seems to be trucking along a bit more reliably than some of the older drives I’ve had did over the years … but I certainly don’t want to tempt fate any longer than I have to.

On a side note, it’s been so long since I’ve put together a computer that I was browsing on Newegg and I don’t even know what’s good anymore! Four years ago I thought that four cores and four gigs of RAM was pretty bitchin’ for a desktop PC … how many dozens of cores and terabytes of RAM are they cramming into these things now???

Once I do figure that out, I think what I want to do is this … instead of building my desktop PC and a home server PC separately, I want to buy a small server rack that I can put in my closet, then build two new machines and put them both in the rack, along with my router and all of this other junk around my desk that at this point really could go in the closet without me missing the clutter too much. I found a really well-executed example of somebody doing this and putting the rack in a corner with a lamp on it, so I think it could work and it would likely be a much better solution for my home server desires if I can put something together that’s properly cooled because I’m almost positive just cramming five or six hard drives into one case didn’t bode so well for their longevity or anything!

Still, it kinda makes me miss the setup I had in apartment #2 where I had a small, walk-in closet off of my office and was able to setup my own little server area in there by running all of the cables through the walls! Only difference now is that this time I own the walls, so if I feel like getting really crafty, I could probably even wire things up properly by putting power and cable jacks right there in the closet where the rack will be! 😯

I remember thinking before I actually owned my own house that when I did, I’d take the extra effort to run cat6 through the entire house and wire it for networking, whereas now I’ve got ethernet running from the router to my desktop a foot and a half away, and so far I’ve been quite content just letting wi-fi pick up the rest of the slack to keep me from having to clunk around upstairs in the attic… 😛

Anyways, so that’s my computer update for … a while! Will definitely share plans and pictures and whatnot if I can rustle up enough money to start on this little project. The rack alone is a couple of hundred bucks, and I haven’t really dug in to research prices but I’m sure between all-new components for both and going the extra mile with hard drive cooling for the server … it’s gonna be pricey.

But then again, with a broadband connection capable of sucking down nearly a terabyte of porn every day, I think it’s clear that a professional installation is required to properly house such a valuable personal archive!

…maybe I shouldn’t have used the phrase sucking down…

😀

Disney Imagineering : The Documentary

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It probably comes as little surprise that I’ll eat up just about anything that peels back the curtain to give us a glimpse at Disney’s creative team, and the fact that this is being put together by Leslie Iwerks, the granddaughter of Ub Iwerks, the man who co-created Mickey Mouse with Walt Disney … well, that’s pretty darned cool, too! 😉