March 20, 2023
News
I’m sitting at the airport right now waiting for our 5-hour delayed plane to bring Ilana and I to Las Vegas. I don’t have my laptop with me so this edition is handwritten and will be online-only once I am able to type it into the website.
On Friday we had a bit of a party at the apartment for St Patricks Day. It was nice to have a lot of people over and party on the weekend — I don’t hardly ever do that anymore. There’s no reason not to except I try not to drink too much anymore. But we all had a nice time.
The pickle ball league is coming together. Kevin and I (mostly Kevin) have rallied up more than enough people to join. Maybe in 50 years I’ll be able to whoop younger people at pickle ball and I’ll be able to tell them I’ve been playing ever since the very first ALTA league.
I’m very happy to be going on vacation. I have been letting stress build up too much. This flight delay is probably a blessing — 5 hours of empty time is a perfect way to begin de-stressing.
Finance
I have spent a lot of time this week worrying about money. Between my book on America and the dollars’ demise and my foray back into twitter, where apparently the banking system is going to collapse and the Fed will be hyperinflating the dollar, I have been consuming a lot of negativity in this area. More than likely, everything is going to be fine. I don’t doubt that the dollar and the American Empire are on the decline, or that there are real systemic issues with the banking system in light of the Fed’s interest rate hikes. But at least for me, as long as the Fed keeps raising interest rates things will be ok for at least the next few years. Inflation is the worst thing for my money right now, so rising interest rates seems to be the best thing. As far as a widespread run-on-the-banks situation happening, I think the vast majority of people trust the FDIC 250K guarantee to where this is not a likely possibility. Whether people SHOULD trust this guarantee is another story; but regardless, I think the vast majority of Americans do. As far as a larger scale decline in the dollar as a reserve currency, I think that this is a dependent effect from inflation and/or a run-on-the-banks scenario. The only issue with this is that to quell inflation we must sustain high interest rates, which makes it very difficult to fund a war. Our enemies (namely China and Russia, who are ascending empires while the US is declining) are aware of this, and may capitalize on this to force us to hyper inflate the dollar with low interest rates and unseat the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. However, China’s economy is still rebounding from COVID and Russia is already in the middle of another war, so for the moment this doesn’t seem likely.
All of this is the justification I have made up in my head before going to Vegas to waste money. However, to prepare for the worst I have told Ilana that we need to be prepared to make drastic changes in our lives if/when war with war with China arrives.
Literature
I recently found out about a web platform called Ghost (ghost.org). It provides a platform for anyone to create a beautiful looking blog and bring in revenue from paid subscribers. This is very similar to substack, but I also just found out about substack. I had no idea that any single person would be able to draw in enough paid subscribers to make a living, but it seems to work for a lot of people. A lot of the successful blogs are written by people who are already famous, so it makes sense that they would be able to get a lot of subscribers through their preexisting online presence. However, there seems to be plenty of successful blogs with no name attached, so I would think that anyone could be successful with this format as long as their content is great and they do a minimal amount of marketing. I would love to read and subscribe if any of you want to start doing this. I am considering doing it — not with any expectation of making money, but to give myself a place to post longford writing whenever I feel I want to do that. I set up a domain where a template is hosted at evnv.dev. A lot of my friends are much better writers than myself, so please reach out and let me know where I can read and subscribe if you decide to give this a try.
Food
I recently learned that food is an extremely important thing to Ilana. She looks forward to dinner all day, and she says there is not much else she would rather do than eat a nice meal at a nice restaurant. I don’t really understand it, but it’s a good thing to know. Now I don’t take our plans for dinner as lightly as I would before, because I know now it’s a very important event for her.
To me it feels somewhat wasteful to go out to restaurants often. It’s a lot of money, and I don’t particularly care too much how my food tastes. I do care that it is nutritious and preferably organic, which is almost always not the case at restaurants. It is a nice time though — I’ve started thinking of it as an outing to go somewhere outside the house, which makes it feel more worth it to me, since I spend all day working at home. And I can’t deny the food is yummy.