Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Oil shock

Owners of electric vehicles must be feeling pretty smug right about now. With the Strait of Hormuz closed thanks to the American President irrationally ordering an attack on Iran, petrol prices have climbed significantly in the past month. And it’s only going to get worse until there’s truce.

I’m so glad I do not have a car commute. Though if I did, I would have purchased a fully electric vehicle a long time ago. EVs are the perfect commuting appliance. The lack of combustion engine means a super quiet cabin. The torque innate to electric motors makes zipping in between traffic gaps a cinch. There’s far less maintenance items for an EV compared to an internal combustion car. The only negative is that, for those who can’t charge at home, you’ve got to wait a bit long to “refuel”.

But you’d rather have that, wouldn’t you, than paying for stratospheric gas prices. If your livelihood is car-dependent - ride share and delivery drivers - and your car uses petrol, it is currently not a very good time. Fix cost per mile has shot straight up. Another smug feather to the cap of Waymo. Their fleet of self-driving taxis is fully electric, therefore insulated from the inflating gas prices. I reckon the human taxi driver as a profession is slowly going towards extinction.

The taxi driver that drove us to the airport in Guangzhou was not feeling the gas price pinch. Because his car is fully electric. China has successfully weened itself from internal combustion vehicles. Can’t have an oil chock if you’re not dependent on oil! Perhaps it will prove shortsighted for the United States government to roll back on its EV incentives and infrastructure spend. If not for air quality, do it for oil independence.

That said, even if you drive an EV, this turmoil in the oil markets will touch you and all of us eventually, one way or another. Way too many things are dependent and correlated on the stable availability of petroleum. Gas prices is only the tip of the iceberg we can easily and initially see. There’s surely more pain to come in many other areas. I should book that flight for my fall vacation before airlines raise ticket prices…

WeChat pay the proper way

It’s well known that digital currency is super common in China. The foreigner trying to pay in paper cash money is the extreme outlier. Everybody else just tap-tap with their phones for absolutely everything. It’s like paying for everything with credit cards, but with no fees - you add money from your bank account, and with way more surveillance. As someone who has used WeChat Pay And AliPay extensively for many weeks over the years, the system is fabulously convenient.

Unless you are a foreign tourist. The two main payment platforms cannot be bound to foreign bank accounts. Nor can foreigners open local bank accounts without some sort of residency proof. Tourists’ only option is to bind their foreign credit cards, which works just fine with official merchant accounts. However, the small mom and pop shops typically carry personal WeChat Pay and AliPay accounts. Even some taxi drivers carry personal accounts. Those accounts cannot accept payment from foreign credit cards. It’s paper currency for you.

And while official law is merchants must accept cash, in practice it’s hugely inconvenient for the cash user. At pay-before-you-eat restaurants, you might be served after people who are paying with mobile. Not because of overt discrimination per se, but because the cashier has to dig up the tiller from the back. Because you might be the only cash transaction for the store for that entire day. Paying for taxi with cash? Don’t expect change in return. There’s a solid chance the driver won’t carry enough amount and variety of bills.

The ultimate flex as a foreigner is to have a local person transfer money to your account. Word on the street is many a hotel front desk person has done this. Foreigners give them cash, they transfer digital money from their WeChat or AliPay account. No restrictions, no messing around with foreign credit cards. This is how I’ve done it when I do my yearly travel to China, and it’s fantastic. A truly cash-less society is one I can get behind, because it’s cleaner, too. Currency bills are notoriously dirty. No thank you.

Dude where is my money?

Word on the street is there’s a delay in folks getting their Federal tax return. A friend of mine filed for his parents back in February, and as of writing they are still waiting for their hard-earned cash from Uncle Sam. Good news is they are not the type to desperately need their tax return to balance the personal budget. However, for those who do, they must be pretty annoyed with our government.

Sir Elon Musk must have DOGE-d a bit too hard and got rid of a few too many IRS workers.

Maybe this will be good impetus to incentivize people to adjust their tax withholdings so they end up owing the IRS instead. We’re all familiar with the pithy saying by now: don’t lend the government money interest free. And if it’s difficult for you to come up with the sum to pay Uncle Sam at the end of the year, then I think you need to first look at how you’re spending your money. Good news for pay-in-four fans: the IRS already offer payment plans!

I end up owing money every tax year, which is as it should be. 2025 I owed a bit more because I sold some securities. What I forgotten about was that the State of California treat investment gains as ordinary income, which is absolutely insane. It’s already bad enough the Federal Government takes 15% of the proceeds, but California wants to wet their beak so much that it is permanently submerged. No wonder people are leaving the state, or carry bank accounts in tax havens.

Bad news for me I don’t make nearly enough money to resort to such financial trickery. It’s truly the middle class that gets screwed. The 1% may pay the most taxes, but the law of large numbers means what’s leftover is still way more than anyone can ever need. The government taking 5 million out of my 10 million still leaves me with my own 5 million. At the same percentage cut, $50,000 out of $100,000 really hurts.

Give them what they want

The university I work at is facing a prolonged budget crisis. A revenue source that the campus can draw from is selling what is called “pouring rights”. As the name poorly suggests, it’s about non-alcholic beverages. The university signs a contract with a drinks company, be it Pepsi, Coco Cola, Red Bull, whoever, and that company have exclusive rights. If Pepsi inks a deal and you prefer Coke, well that’s too bad.

At the recent budget meeting the pouring rights topic came up, and certain folks voiced concerns about the healthiness of the beverages sold. Incredible: we are facing a mathematical shortfall, and people can still find ways to virtue signal. As if offering healthier drinks will somehow make the university more money.

Despise capitalism all you want, but that’s the framework we operate in. Should California spend more on public educaiton? Sure, but until that happens, universities will do accounting just like any other private corporation. It’s not personal, it’s just business. You cannot spend more money than you take in.

I couldn’t care less if the university signs a contract with Coco Cola, and all the vending drinks are the tasty sugary stuff. If that is what generates the most revenue, then that is the way. The lone goal here is to make money.

And let’s not infantilize full-fledged adults. If you’re old enough to sign up for the military, then you’re old enough to make your own choices about what to drink and what to eat. College students don’t need to be coddled and restricted. If junk food is what sells, then by god we should sell all the junk food and take in that much-needed cash.

Besides… GLP1 agonist medications are thing now!

The math is not math-ing

The San Francisco Unified School District teachers are on a historical strike. Tomorrow will mark the third consecutive day that schools will be closed. As a member of a union myself, bully to those fighting for wages. We understand that in this economy, any increase will immediately get wiped out by inflation. Everybody knows this, except for the reigning President of the United States.

However, from a pure mathematical standpoint, it’s difficult to square away the conflict of a school district that is facing a 100 million deficit for the current fiscal year, and its employees asking for a raise. The math cannot possibly be math-ing here. If labor is already the biggest pie of the expenditure, and it’s set to increase in size, not decrease, that’s not a good start to balancing the budget.

Of course, the school district can increase revenue, but demographics is against that. There are fewer school age children in San Francisco than ever. Furthermore, those with the means to - hello, tech bros - send their offsprings to private school, rather than be at the mercy of SFUSD’s notorious lottery school assignment system. Short of the State of California adding more funding per pupil, you just hope the revenue pie doesn’t continue to shrink!

As a person who works at a public university, I am very familiar with the downstream pains of decreasing enrollment.

Nevertheless: if this were the private sector, asking for a raise when the company is fiscally performing poorly who never fly. You’d know better than to even ask. It doesn’t make sense to further jeopardize an already precarious situation. Salary increase is rather meaningless if the company itself doesn’t survive long enough for you to reap the benefits.

Public sector education is Lindy enough to last forever, right? That’s probably true. But again, it’s just simple math: it doesn’t make logical sense for a district that’s already in the hole - that they must climb out of, to make the hole bigger. Alas, if it’s like anything San Francisco has done previously, I’m sure it’ll be yet another tax measure on the ballot. Should we save BART, or should we save public schools?

No free marketing

You ever walk by rows of parked cars and noticed that plenty of them still have the dealership license plate frame affixed? That cannot be me! There is no way I am giving out free advertising space like that, no matter how excellent the deal was the selling dealership gave me. The positive Yelp review should be a good enough return gesture.

If I can safely de-badge my car - without leaving exposed holes in the sheetmetal, I totally would. Volkswagen should be paying me to advertise that the vehicles they make are worth buying.

A similar befuddlement happens when I see car enthusiasts put stickers of aftermarket part manufacturers onto their cars. Again, you would have to be paying me to have your company logo displayed and driven all over town. Unless of course I got that car part for free, then the gratis marketing is an appropriate quid pro quo.

I’m just saying: don’t give away something for free so easily! Think of the Uber drivers that run advertising boards on top of their cars: you think it’s for charity?

On the same principle, my mother has steadfastly refused to buy any clothing with logos on it. I’ve seen her seamstress hands painstakingly take logos off thread-by-thread, because the underlying shirt was bought on sale. It wasn’t a want of anonymity, but a purely business decision. If the world is run on advertising - see Google, Meta, etc, then us peasants should not give away marketing space for free.

If I ever start a YouTube channel, I’m taping up/blurring all branding, unless otherwise sponsored. Sorry, MacBook Pro: your signature Apple logo will have to go under the gaffer tape.

Ends to a mean

Isn’t the best part of a workweek day going home time? Our servitude towards money is temporarilyy over. The hours left truly belong to us. The world is infinitely our oyster.

At least that’s how it feels. No matter how many chores are on the list, or how much attention the child is asking for, anything is better than being at work.

Sometimes I walk by the mall, and I can see the literal relief of service workers at the end of their shift. Fold away that apron for the day and moving on to happy hours. Best of all, service workers truly do not have to think about work while they are not at work.

Not so lucky for those of us in the knowledge economy. The higher you are on the ladder, the higher your pay, and more responsibility you’ve got. There’s no turning off the work brain even when it’s time to go home, because a problem on that ongoing project still needs solving. So you’re going to thinking about it all through dinner, and for the rest of the evening.

That’s why they get paid a salary: a facade to avoid actual calculation. Perhaps if one is to add up all the hours that brain signal is being used towards work, the knowledge worker might not be that much higher paid on a per hour basis than the service worker. Especially in California where the fast food minimum wage is unusually generous.

But those are the tradeoffs. Sacrifices have to be made to make more money. Even the illegal drug dealer has to stand in the corner for many hours, risking police capture. Often times I think what I want is to be like Ralph Fiennes’ character The Menu: a plain chef making a plain cheeseburger. Nothing extraordinary, nothing status-seeking. Every day you leave work, you truly leave work.

Plus, He’d get paid at least $20 per hour here in California!