Brotherly Love?

Expecting siblings to love one another is rather optimistic.

I took a piss on my dipshit brother the other day (the other one, not the stinking hippie) and it may have come across as harsh.  Some folks have lifetime relationship with family members and get along - even go into business together!  Wilbur and Orville Wright, for example - which one was the Steve Jobs and which one was the Wozinak (who did all the real work)?  We may never know.

My own relationship with my siblings varied from friendship to competition to fighting to hatred to abuse to neglect.  And this is somewhat normal - the "happy family" where everyone gets along and meets for Thanksgiving year after year, is sort of an anomaly.

And maybe this started with my Grandparents. My Dad never got along with his Dad, who was a violent drunk.  He and his sister were pals, though. By the time I was born, Grandad had died of lung cancer, so I never met him.  My Mother always had an antagonistic relationship with her Mother, who, as a home economics major, judged my Mother harshly on her housekeeping skills.  Ahh.... Moms and Daughters - the original dysfunctional relationship! She had a brother - my Uncle - but you would never know it.  They hated one another, for reasons unknown.  Later in life, while drunk, she would accuse him of molesting her as a child.  Whether that is true or not, I do not know.

One of my earliest memories (and sadly, I tend to remember everything I should forget and fail to remember important stuff) was of my eldest brother playing tricks on me.  Being an older brother has got to suck, quite frankly.  You are the golden boy, the center of attention, and then this little shit comes along and gets away with bloody murder. Not only that, you want to hang out with your teenage friends, smoke stolen cigarettes, talk about girls, and maybe sneak a beer or look at a purloined porno mag stolen from Dad's stash behind the furnace.  A little bratty brother tagging along is going to ruin that.

So I never "hung out" with my oldest brother - we never bonded.  Worse yet, we were told never to go into his room, as it was sacrosanct.  I am not sure why - maybe because he was jerking off in there or something.  But he had a weird privacy thing and really didn't want his younger brothers invading it.  And quite frankly, I was a little brat - prone to temper tantrums.  The few attempts he made at bonding did not end well.  We were strangers and still are.

When I was about three of four, that brother decided to play a trick on me.  He announced he was a magician and could teleport from one place to another.  My other brother and I shared a large bedroom over the garage with two closets with sliding doors.  He went into one closet and told me to close my eyes and when I opened them he magically appeared in the other closet!   I was mystified of course, being only three.  But he thought it was the height of hilarity and roped my sister and other brother into this.  My earliest memory of my elder brother was of him mocking me.

It didn't end there. I must have been three or four and we were watching our black-and-white Sears television (the only one in the whole house, $99 on sale) and a Western was playing. The good guy took a shot and a bad guy fell off his horse and died.  My brother told me, in all earnestness, that the actor playing the bad guy actually died in order to make the movie and anytime someone dies in a movie, the actor actually dies.  Yea, stupid, I know, but it ain't hard to fool a three-year-old and who gets their jollies fooling a toddler?   Sick people is who.

Sadly, that would not change over time.  He went away to prep school, as did my sister, as they were "having problems" in public school. I am not sure what that was all about.  But throughout my life, no matter what I did or achieved, it was subject to ridicule by my eldest brother.  Could it be jealousy?  After college, he went to live on a commune in an unheated barn, listening to the thoughts and commands of the "guru" who ran the place. One year, he sent us a cassette tape of him playing the guitar and singing old-timey folk tunes.  It was a pretty good tape, but my father was livid. "Four years of prep school and four years at Middlebury and he's living in some goddamn barn and playing the guitar!  He's 25 years old for chrissake!  Why doesn't he get a job!"

So when I turned 18 and went to work for General Motors, that had to sting. After all, as the youngest in the family, I was always smaller, dumber, and viewed as a lesser entity. Suddenly his youngest brother has a job and a pension plan - not to mention health insurance and a company car.   It was after that that he decided to go back to school and get another degree - and another.

But in the meantime, he had to run down what I was doing as "selling out to the man" or some such nonsense. Success was not rewarded in my family - particularly by my siblings.  When I was accepted into law school, he must have blown a fuse.  It is funny, but when I was in law school, my brother was still dicking around figuring out what to do with his life - and bear in mind, he was nearly a decade older than me.  I was at my parents' house and they were imploring him to go to law school.  "We'll pay for law school!" they said.  I cleared my throat, "Um, hey, I'm already in law school!"  But somehow that didn't register or count to them.  My parents helped pay for some books and such, but the majority of law school I had to pay for with student loans.  That didn't stop my parents from telling my siblings they "paid my way through law school" which was totally untrue.  This later created a division in the family.

Needless to say, if working for GM was "selling out to the man!" then becoming a Patent Attorney was even worse - they just assumed at that point that I had turned Republican.  They would only be happy if my life was somehow lesser than theirs, that if I was struggling and not doing as well.  And since they were not doing very well, it was hard to not outstrip them.  It wasn't my fault they were fuck-ups!

I met Mark about that time and we've been together for 36 years now.  Regardless, whenever I hear from my brother, he says, "Are you still with Mark?" as if it was some sort of one-night hook-up and that he didn't expect to last.  This guy is rooting for me to fail.  Fuck him.

So, no, I don't hang out with him.  We have nothing in common, and his idea of being a "big brother" seems to be limited to running down whatever I am doing and "correcting" my thinking.  On the other hand, while I don't like him, personally, I am glad he got his "Doctor" degree and a nice job with the University.  He done well, in the end.

My other brother was closer in age to me, and as I noted, for much of our early lives, we were sort of shunted into a communal bedroom.  I should have read the writing on the wall early on, but like most people, I was sucked into this idea that "family is everything" and your parents and siblings "have your back" instead of stabbing it.   I should have realized this the day my brother destroyed my pink jeep - at age 4.  Yes, I remember everything - it is a curse.

I wish I could say it got better, but it got worse.  Again, being an older brother (or sister) sucks, as you are expected to babysit (for free!) your younger siblings. You want to hang out with your own peer group and baby brother hanging around is just buzz-kill. My other brother and I did do a lot of hobbies together for a while, but we also fought like cats and dogs.  We got home from school around 3PM and Mom and Dad didn't get home until five or six.  We would watch the old black-and-white television in their bedroom (our only television!) which played after-school shows aimed at kids, or old war movies on "Films and Four."  We also beat the crap out of each other.

I am not sure what we fought over - or whether there was any real reason we fought.  Mostly it was him mocking me and me getting mad in response, as I recall. My parents' king-sized bed became a professional wrestling ring (before professional wrestling was popular) and we would just pound the crap out of each other.  Another game we would play was to chase each other around the house or try to lock the other one out of the house.  After a typical wrestling match, the mattress on my parents' bed were on the floor, the box springs were awry and the bed frame had collapsed.  Sheets, blankets and pillows were wadded up on the floor.

We would hear a car in the driveway and suddenly our feud would be put aside and we would reassemble the bed in minutes before we heard a key in the door.  My Dad would always grumble about how that "cheap mattress" was so lumpy and they kept buying new mattresses - not realizing that we were destroying them as quickly as they bought them.

I guess we kind of grew out of that phase.  I noted before that my sister thought she was "doing us a favor" by turning us onto pot when I was 13 and my brother was 16.  Marijuana is like that for some people - they make it into a religion.  "If only..." they say, "...everyone got high, the world would be a better place!"  The Catholic Church says the same thing about Catholicism and the Muslims say the same thing about Islam.  "If only..."

Predictably, our grades started to suffer and we became more anti-social.  My brother, who was going to become a rocket scientist, dropped all the "hard" courses in Math and Science and concentrated instead on English Literature.  I kept on with the science, but smoking pot and calculus don't really mix.

My brother started hanging out with some odious "friends" and got into all sorts of minor (and major) legal troubles.  He started this thing - for about a year or so - where he would call me the worst sort of names, to the point where it was alarming my otherwise uninterested parents.  He started stealing my paper route money, too.  Brotherly love!  He's got my back - or a knife in it.

Needless to say, when I turned 18 and went to work for GM, he had just graduated from college and, like my other brother, was basically unemployed.  Rubbing salt into the wound, my parents gave him my old car - he was getting hand-me-downs from baby brother, instead of the other way around!

As you might imagine, we started drifting apart.  He moved away and I had moved away and we moved on with our lives.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  Family members can turn into strangers over time, and sometimes they end up being people you'd rather not know.  My brother started going off on politics, usually after a few bong hits, and then he scared me by getting into guns.

That is the weird thing about marijuana - the stereotype of a pot smoker is someone who is all hippy-dippy and left-wing and a peace nut.  But as experience has shown, people can smoke pot and be MAGA Trumpers and Qanonsense believers and "sovereign citizens" and gun nutz - and see no disconnect between these different aspects of their life.  So long as they are only throwing black people in jail for possession, it doesn't affect me, right?

It is like the guy who owns the Columbia restaurant chain in Florida (a tourist trap, sort of, that serves Cuban cuisine).  He voted for DeSantis, but then was raided and had dozens of employees deported - and was fined $500K for hiring them.  Surely those laws don't apply to me, right?  The "Pick Me!" mentality.  He thought he was "one of the good ones."

My brother hasn't turned into a MAGA Trumper or Qanonsense believer - to the best of my knowledge.But then again, I never thought he would end up buying guns, either - he used to rail about gun violence and how we needed more gun control.  People change over time - it is sad, but true.

I suppose the pièce de résistance was when he had a new will drafted for my Dad, only weeks before my Dad died, writing me out of the will and appointing himself as executor.  He had my back - with a knife in it!  I suppose I could have challenged the will, as it was poorly drafted (he should have left me a dollar - but instead failed to mention me at all) and Dad was halfway into dementia when he signed it. The fact the will was drafted weeks before he died wouldn't have helped in court, either. But an attorney friend of mine put it bluntly, "What's the point?" - and he was right. Better to just walk away.

I read about these families who are all buddies with one another.  "My Dad and I are best friends!" they crow.  "Me and my brothers get together every year for a fishing trip!" another says.  And I look on in wonderment - don't you hate each others guts like normal people do?  I am being facetious of course, but it seems more like an outlier than the norm.  You read all the time about families that squabble over money or jealousy or even murder each other - or wipe out the whole family!  Who are these "normal" people who do get along, anyway?

Well, I suspect it has to do with family history and geography. If you live near your parents and siblings, you see each other more often and don't grow apart as one might do if you live on opposite sides of the country.  I suspect the parents have a lot to do with it as well - including their relationship with their parents and siblings.  My Mother hated her brother and we rarely saw him, so maybe that sent a message to us as kids about family relations.

Thus, too, is the idea of the "black sheep" of the family.  Every family, it seems, has one family member they all want to hate on.  And often this turn in the hot-seat is passed on from family member to family member.  My eldest brother, when he went to live in the commune, was the "bad boy"for a while, until my other brother usurped him with his legal troubles. They finally decided to name the seat in my honor and retire my jersey, hating me for.... being successful, I guess.

The painting above is of Cain and Abel - the first murder in the history of the Bible (but not the last!). Cain slew Abel apparently out of jealousy - that Abel's offering of a sacrificial lamb (you know, that Old Testament shit!) was accepted by God, but God told Cain that his offering of crops was not up to snuff!  Try again, Cain!  So he committed the ultimate sacrifice - and beat his younger brother to death.  Brotherly love!  Right there in the Bibble!  And only one generation removed from the Garden of Eden.

Maybe it is just me, but it seems the Bible is saying something here - don't trust your siblings!  Some folks argue that families need more religion in their lives, but I am not sure that would have worked for Cain and Abel.  Most brothers are like Cain and Abel, I'm afraid.

But if you do have a sibling or parent who is "your best friend!" either you are really, really lucky or you need to move out of your parents' basement and get a real job. For most of us, in this modern age, being successful means leaving the family compound and starting lives of our own. Our agrarian ancestors may have all lived together like The Waltons, but even then, only the eldest son was expected to inherit the family farm (or family business) and the other members of the family were either married off (if they were girls) or were expected to find another way of making a living.  It was a recipe for fratricide, quite frankly, and more than one younger sibling would stage an accident so they would be next in line to inherit.

Some people waste a lot of time and energy trying to "fix" family relationships.  I noted before that my Sister wanted to "understand her relationship" with Mom, and used up a good portion of her short life this way.  "I have vacation time coming up!" she says, "Let's stage an intervention for Mom!"  I replied, "Sounds like a shitty vacation to me!"   But I get where she was coming from - society tells her that she should have this idyllic family relationship like in the sitcoms, but it never happened.  In fact, it was horrific - and she never saw the worst of it, leaving home before Mother really broke down.  Maybe that was the difference - I didn't see anything that could be "saved" nor a person that wanted saving.

And that's the point, I guess. My siblings want to live their own lives and I want to live mine. My brothers may think I am a bourgeois "sell out" for getting a job and trying to better myself.  But they have to live their own lives and I have to live mine.  We all do. And in a modern industrial society, this often means we move off in different directions and live different lives.

There is nothing wrong with that.  In fact, I suspect it is pretty much the norm these days.  Sadly, some do-gooder know-it-alls try to tell other people that their lives should be like a Hallmark movie or a Norman Rockwell painting - and that somehow they are to blame for not making this happen.

Don't believe it - for a minute!

Sometimes, the Internet Rocks! Other times....

You can find things at low prices online.  But everything else is pretty much garbage.

Mark came to me last evening holding the handle to the sliding glass door in the bedroom.  It fell off and broke into two pieces.  No problem, I thought, I've seen these for sale at the big box lumberteria.  So I went online and yea, they have them, for $58!

I searched some more and discovered the handle is made by PrimeLine and is model number C-1280.  With those two pieces of information, we can search for the exact handle we are looking for and filter out a lot that don't fit.  Amazon has the whole set for $28 which is a big improvement, but we only need the outside handle - the inside part didn't break and in fact, is still attached to the door.

eBay to the rescue - someone is selling just the outside part for $12 - a good chance to use up my PayPal bucks - thanks reader!

Why did it fail?  I suspect it was my fault.  On these vinyl sliding doors, the handles come loose as the vinyl frame compresses.  So I tighten it  - too much - and the pot metal breaks.  Lesson learned - for $12.

Of course, the Internet also sucks.  One gets a lot of anxiety and angst from it.  People spend too much time online, convinced they need to "keep up" with "what is going on" when in fact what is going on, on the internet, is largely fake.

If you read something online, particularly on social media, first ask yourself if what you read was generated by a troll, a bot, or an AI-generated karma farm. It could also be posted by a teenager or middle-schooler or even some crazy person off their meds. You have no way of knowing. A lot of what you read online isn't "real" and even "real" postings are skewed by online demographics.

One reason Reddit is so depressing, for example, is that a lot of depressed people are on it.  If I had to construct a profile of a "typical redditor" based on r/all it would be an IT geek who spends all his free time gaming, sending out for doordash and then bitching when it sucks.  This is not a slice of everyday people.

Online "surveys" are thus just stupid.  Elon Musk makes a big deal about having a "vote" as to whether Alex Jones should be allowed back on the site.  Of course, the "vote" is only people on Twitter and even then, only a small slice of people who give a damn about the issue - that and bots of course.  It is faux democracy at its best.

No doubt, Republicans will propose replacing the electoral college with Twitter voting, except that the electoral college does still work to their advantage.

The Internet is not reality.  Facebook isn't reality, nor is Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Tick-Tock, or any other social media site.

Sadly, it seems many people today - most, in fact - prefer living in the alternate reality and echo-chamber of the Internet.  And this has driven the world slowly insane.

How Subsidies Raise Prices

When you subsidize an activity, you don't lower the price, but raise it.

In Iowa, they decided to go with this ill-advised "school voucher" deal which is a big piece of welfare for the wealthy.  It is a wealth transfer from public schools (which the poor use and desperately need) to wealthy private school parents, who can afford to pay tuition at private schools as it is.  Proponents of voucher systems claim that it will allow poorer parents "choice" in their children's schooling, as the vouchers will allow them to send their kids to private school.

One proponent of this plan was shocked when, after the plan was passed, the local private school promptly doubled their tuition which meant that private school was still hopelessly out of reach for her children.  That was kind of the point.  You can't have the poors sending their kids to prep school, can we?

But this experience illustrates the folly of subsidies and how they usually backfire.  One of the largest subsidies - again of the wealthy and middle-class - was the exemption of home loan interest from taxation.  If you bought a home, you could deduct the interest payments from your income, which meant that effectively, you were saving as much as 30% on your mortgage payments, if you were in the top brackets and at the early stages of your loan - when every payment was mostly interest.

The market reacted by raising prices.  The home mortgage interest deduction became factored in to every home buyer's purchase decision.  People buy homes based on monthly payments - particularly first-time buyers and middle-class buyers.  Rich people pay cash.  So, for example, if a young couple can "afford" $3000 a month for a mortgage, and they are in a 30% tax bracket, they can afford to spend 30% more for the home and still come in under that $3000 a month limit.  Since they are bidding against other buyers in the marketplace (who are similarly situated) they bid up the price of houses in their area.

Tariffs work the same way.  Obama signed a tariff agreement on tires - ostensibly to protect the American tire industry.   The American tire industry reacted - by raising their prices to match the tariff prices of imported tires.  They saw a one-time windfall profit and the price of tires skyrocketed - for a few years.  Eventually the tariffs ended and the price of tires came down - and today, most of the tires on the American market are made overseas.  All the tariff did was raise prices.  It didn't "protect" domestic industry at all.

So when they passed this "voucher" scheme (and it is a scheme, created by schemers) all it did was raise prices, which was entirely predictable.  For example, let's assume that tuition at the born-again flat-earth private school is $1000 per semester, probably wildly inaccurate, but a number for the purposes of discussion. They set their price based on how much parents are willing to pay - and thus achieve the best balance of number of students versus income.   They know their current crop of parents will pay this much.

Now the State institutes $1000-a-semester vouchers.  The school knows the parents will pay that much already, so it makes "sense" to raise tuition to $2000-a-semester as the parents can afford it and with the voucher, are effectively paying the same price.  With the extra money they can attract better teachers, or improve facilities, or build that football stadium they have always dreamed about.  And as an added bonus, doubling the tuition keeps the poor people from even applying.  There are only so many classroom seats they can sell, so it makes sense to keep tuition as high as the market will bear.

In  other words, the school isn't being "greedy" but realistic.  They would be fools to keep the tuition low and make it effectively free for their students.  They would be flooded with applicants and not have the money to expand to accommodate them.  Better off to stay small and make big bucks.  Or as my GMI professor once said, "We can sell one car for a billion dollar profit, or one million cars for a thousand dollar profit each - the net result is the same, but the former takes less effort!"

So, school vouchers don't work on two levels.  First, they strip away a lot of funding from public schools and transfer it to private ones.  Second, the students at the public school are not "leaving" to attend private schools, because - as the Iowa example illustrates - even with vouchers, it is still not affordable for most parents.  So the public school has as many students as before, but less money with which to educate them.  Public schools are thus gutted - but that was the point, wasn't it?  We can't have an educated populace voting in elections (as Jefferson envisioned) can we?  They might vote us out of office and see through our "social issues" campaigns!

Sadly, this sort of thing is gaining steam, and it sounds - on paper - like a good idea, much as charter schools sounded, back when they were proposed.  Privatize public schools!  Break the iron grip of the teacher's unions!  But the end result has been the opposite - public schools lose funding, which leads to more problems in public schools.  The charter schools and religious schools turn out to be a real nightmare in some cases, as their teaching standards are often lacking.  Even traditional private "prep" schools often provide worse educations than a well-funded and properly administered public school - as I experienced firsthand.

But beyond vouchers, the same rule applies - subsidize an activity or product and you raise the prices.  And sometimes that is the intent.  Crop subsidies are intended to raise prices so farmers make more money.  As we saw in the run-up to 1929, crop prices could plummet to the point there it wasn't even worthwhile to harvest your crop and ship it to market.  Better off to let it rot in the field!

Similarly, $7500 tax credits to buy an electric vehicle were intended to make the cars more affordable. Instead, it just allowed manufacturers to raise prices and make more money, which they needed in order to break into this new field of Engineering.  When the subsidies vanish, the price of the car has to come down, or people can no longer afford it (or they flock to a competitor who still qualifies for the subsidy!).

And so on and so forth.  When governments meddle in markets, oftentimes the net result was the opposite of what was intended.   Which is a good reason to think hard about attempts to meddle in markets!

Is PayPal Just One Big Scam?

PayPal is pushing retail investors into buying crypto.  This is outrageous - and ironic.

A reader sent me money on PayPal.  Thank You!  I do not use PayPal much anymore, other than for occasional reader donations.  I unlinked my bank and credit card accounts from PayPal as I do not trust the platform, and having their shithooks into my finances makes me nervous.

I recounted before how in the early days PayPal was run like it was out of a dorm room.  Giggling 20-somethings told me on the phone that they were going to keep $4500 of my money that I got through PayPal when I sold my Mercedes.  I finally found an adult (on a Sunday no less!) that cleared up the "lock" on my account.  PayPal back then had a limit of $2000 per transaction, and when my buyer tried to pay in multiple transactions they "locked" the account for fraud.

Which is ironic as PayPal was basically founded on - if not fraud - playing fast-and-loose with banking regulations and the truth.  Their two biggest offenses, in my mind were (1) renting out their merchant account to users, and (2) claiming to be FDIC insured when they were not.

With regards to the first item, a "merchant account" is an account you set up with the credit card companies to accept credit card payments.  They are very strict (or were) about this, and back when I had a merchant account, I had to submit all sorts of documentation to them as well as banking information.  They policed the account very strictly. If you had too many "charge-backs" for example, they would close your account.

I had a friend ask me if they could use my merchant account.  They were selling something and the buyer wanted to pay by credit card.  They would have him pay me through my merchant account and then I would pay them, pocketing $10 for my hassle.  I had to tell him "no" for a number of reasons. First of all, if the credit card companies found out, they would close my merchant account, immediately, with no recourse.  It was one of their "seven deadly sins" of merchant accounts.   It also is, basically, PayPal's business model.

Of course, there were other reasons. If the buyer backed out of the deal and did a charge-back, I would be out the total amount and would have to hope the seller reimbursed me.  It was just a hot mess and I wanted nothing to do with it.

As you might imagine, in the early days of PayPal the credit card companies figured out that PayPal was basically renting out their merchant account (by letting users accept credit card payments through PayPal's merchant account) and told them to stop.  PayPal, using the standard Silicon Valley technique of "breaking things" and "going large, fast" told the credit card companies to stuff it.  You see, while PayPal was breaking all the rules, they were also roping in millions of dollars a month in credit card fees for the credit card companies.  Rules are rules, of course, but money talks.  So the credit card companies said, "You know what?  We're OK with this!  Send more money!"

I suppose that you could argue that no one was harmed in this situation, but it illustrates how "breaking all the rules" ends up being the most profitable play in silicon valley - at least some of the time.  But then again, it is dishonest and you've read what I've said about dishonest business people.  If they lie once, they will lie again, particularly if there is money involved.

The FDIC thing was another early operating-out-of-a-dorm-room kind of thing, where they would take the daily deposits and put them in a number of FDIC-insured savings accounts overnight, in different banks.   The FDIC insured accounts for up to $250,000 total.  You can't create multiple accounts to aggregate this limit to millions of dollars.  But that point is moot - the real deception was in claiming to be FDIC insured (like a chartered bank) when in fact, they just had an FDIC insured account at a bank.  Yea, maybe they were insured (to the tune of $250,000) but you weren't.

This sort of left a sour taste in my mouth about PayPal.  Sure, it was neat for buying and selling on eBay, but in terms of trustworthiness, well, I was skeptical.  And all banking and investing is based on trust - you lose that, you've lost it all. And it should come as no surprise that in the early days, Elon Musk had his dirty hands in it.

So, over the years, I have tried to use PayPal less and less and indeed, there really is no need for it anymore as most online retailers, including eBay, do not require it in order to receive payments. They just take credit cards with no PayPal middleman. I still run into, on occasion, a retailer that only accepts PayPal, which is as quaint as running into someone who is still using an AoL e-mail address.

As a result, I suspect PayPal isn't as lucrative as it used to be.  So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when they moved into crypto and tried to sell their users on it.   A reader suggests that they are not even really selling crypto, in that you don't have a real crypto wallet and address.  If so, that is even worse.

But what made me laugh out loud was the links shown above, which I saw when I logged onto my PayPal account.  "Protect yourself from scams" was un-ironically posted above "Getting started in crypto!"  They helpfully suggest I set up my account to automatically "invest" in crypto every month, with the money being automatically debited from my checking account.

I politely declined.

When this whole crypto thing started many years back (has it been a decade already?) many folks cried "scam" and were told by the crypto-bros crypto-trolls that "they just didn't get it" and that this was a "virtual investment."  They were right about the second part - it was a virtual invesment in nothing.  Investments pay back by earning money which is paid out in interest, dividends, or retained earnings.  Anything else is just speculation based on the difference between supply and demand.  An antique car is not an "investment" as you are depending on the market to drive up prices based on scarcity.  Ask any "dot-com" millionaire in the 1990's how his "investment" in a Ferrari worked out. Once the bubble burst and everyone had to sell their cars, the prices plummeted.

And that is crypto in a heartbeat.  The price goes up when it is hyped.  It falls when people want to cash-out because they need the money or get nervous when yet another crypto brokerage falls apart.  And there are so many.  Mt. Gox was the first indication of where this was going.  FTX is just the latest iteration (and one of the seven largest crypto collapses - of 2022 alone!).  They wanted an unregulated market and their dream came true - as a nightmare.

Sure, you can make a lot of money in crypto - and lose a lot as well.  It is a zero-sum game - for every winner there is a loser - or one hundred losers.  And the winners are the ones who got in early and got their "coins" for cheap.  By some reckoning, only a few thousand people own the bulk of some currencies - and make lots of money selling off tiny slices to gullible buyers.  And that's just the "legit" coins - there are plenty of scam coins out there as well.

Shame on PayPal for promoting this nonsense. But then again, maybe this is a sign of PayPal's struggle.  The share price peaked in 2021 at over $300 a share, but today languishes at under $60 a share.  Incidentally, PayPal owns Venmo, which has had its shares of issues.  Seems PayPal just can't escape its scammy past!

PayPal hoped to achieve a staggering 750 million users by 2025 (that's more than twice the population of the United States!) but now has shifted to trying to extract more revenue from existing customers by pivoting to an online shopping experience, crypto, and savings accounts.  Good luck with that!  Remember what I said about trust and investing?

While I have bought dozens of items a year through e-commerce, I noticed that only a handful went through PayPal during the last two years (which is as far back as PayPal keeps records).  The only reason I had that many was because of reader donations.  If not for that, my PayPal transactions would be close to zero.

In fact, PayPal is a hassle to use.  When you "checkout" using a credit card, Google will automatically enter your stored credit card information - you need only add the CVV2 number and you're all set.  With PayPal, it is "please wait while we take you to the PayPal site" and then you have to log in and get an authorization code from your phone.  The raison d être of PayPal was ease of use.  That raison is no longer d être.  PayPal is now the hassle, credit cards are simpler.

So, they have to sell something else.  Crypto, anyone?

Too Many Offers, Coupons, Sales, Discounts, Upgrades, Rebates!

Retailers are offering inducements to spend.  Maybe they should just lower prices, instead?

I noted before that it seems like my inbox is flooded with "offers" these days.  Every merchant I have ever done business with is sending me discount offers, coupon codes, rebate offers, and other inducements to spend.  Some of these are merchants I have done business with this year.  Others are merchants I haven't heard from in years - but suddenly are my new friend!  Maybe this price-gouging thing isn't working out anymore?  Just a guess.

But rather than induce me to spend, it makes me pull back.  We get lots and lots of brochures from cruise lines - we have been on three in our lifetime.  Each is offering fantastic "deals" like "50% off, free stateroom!" which makes me think their retail pricing is like the price on a GM car back in the 1960's - a mere suggestion or placeholder.

Speaking of which, I saw a video online the other day - a dealer training film.  Seems the government (boo! hiss!) mandated that carmakers put sticker prices on their cars.  What would the salesmen do?  How can they convince a buyer to buy a car if the price is printed right on it?  Of course, like anything else, the commercial interests find ways to subvert government regulations.  The manufacturers padded the "suggested retail price" on the sticker, so the salesman can offer "discounts" off that price.  Look how much you are saving!  But in fact, you are not saving anything.

I digress, but it reminds me of how the cable companies reacted when Congress passed a law requiring that cable companies offer a basic tier service for $30 a month.  They lobbied hard against it and lost. But rather than admit defeat, they just offered nothing but crappy shopping channels and off-the-air television on the "poverty tier."   And the upper tiers?  They raised the prices by $30 and called it a "government mandated price increase."   Cable billing and cellular contracts - two very opaque pricing schemes - which is why I refuse to engage with either.  Taxes, access fees, fee-fees, and we-just-want-more-money fees are extra!

In shopping for appliances (which may wait until the new year at this point - or wait until they break) we see the same deal.  "Black Friday Savings!"  "Rebate Debit Card!  Buy one appliance, get $50 back, buy two, get $100 back!" and so on and so forth.  The problem with these "deals" is that they tend to make me think no matter how clever I am in chasing them, I still paid too much.   When prices are all over the board, it is hard to perceive the real price.

And that is the point.

With regard to the cruise lines, a simple way to figure out the real price is to take their "sale" price and add a zero to it.  The $299 cruise to the Bahamas will cost you $2999 when it is all said and done.  $299 is the per person charge, not including taxes and port fees and other fees (fuel surcharge?  really?).  So right off the bat, you are close to $1000 the day you make the reservation.  Factor in your airfare, parking, overnight stay in a hotel (cruise ship leave early, and if your flight is late, you'll miss the boat, quite literally).  Then there are onboard expenses - your drinks, dining in the extra-cost restaurants (when you get tired of the trough-feeding at the buffet).  Then there are shore excursions which are mostly extra-cost.  Pretty soon, well, you have gone from $299 to $2999.  That has been my experience.

So they use these come-on prices and offers of 50% off (or other staggering numbers) while claiming the ships are full all the time.   Maybe they are lying about that last part.  The cruise lines are like builders - each racing to get that last customer for their new townhome development, before the market goes South.   Each cruise line is launching yet another "mega-ship" with 7,000 passengers and 2,000 crew.  You gotta fill those staterooms somehow!

I digress, but having been on the Hubris of the Seas, I don't recommend any cruise on a ship that has thousands upon thousands of passengers.  It is not a pleasant experience.

I guess the other side of this plethora of sales and discounts is the nagging feeling that if I wait a little longer, the price might actually go lower.  And if that happens, well, I would feel like a fool for buying now.  This is, of course, the opposite of economic theory with regard to inflation.  Economists tell us that as consumers, when we see prices going up, we think, "better buy now, before prices go up further!" - which is the epitaph of many an underwater homeowner.

Maybe that is true - maybe consumers really think about the direction of prices and then make decisions that way.  I doubt it though - have you looked around you?  People are idiots.  And quite frankly, when I see prices going up, my thought is to spend less, not more.  But maybe I am an outlier.

Living Stingy tip 'o the day:  I went to Jacksonville to pick up our camper on a recall campaign (window broke).  I stopped at a chicken chain for lunch and ordered just the chicken sandwich.  That sort of freaked out the server.  "You don't want the bargain supersized value meal with fried potato chunks and a high-fructose corn syrup type-II diabetes nightmare?"  No, no thank you.  Today's fast-food sandwiches are so huge they are more than enough for one person for lunch, and I always carry my cheap-ass Walmart stainless steel mug with icewater in it.  Of course, I could have saved even more if I threw together a sandwich at home to take with me.  Lesson learned.

But you see, that's me.  When I see prices at "fast food" restaurants skyrocketing, I order less, or order not at all.  Others merely grouse about paying $15 for a "value meal" and put it on their credit card and try not to think about it.

But getting back to economic theory, if inflation causes consumers to pull the trigger on spending (which I doubt) then maybe offering all these sales and discounts and coupons and such does the opposite.  If they are offering lower prices, what is the inducement to "spend now or be priced out of the market forever!"   The coupon deal of today will be replaced by the coupon deal of tomorrow.  Indeed, the "rebate" offer from KitchenAid expires on December 31st, only to be replaced by a nearly identical offer on January 1st.  So why buy now?

That is the conundrum of discounts and promotions.