Blog

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

Are you not entertained?

How has your day been?

I’m writing this daily post in the afternoon, instead of my usual morning, because this whole thing with GameStop’s stock is so fun to watch. I woke up at 6:00 AM as usual and didn’t get out of bed until an hour and a half later, because the twitter feed was so enthralling. My whole morning routine got ruined by a gang of Reddit investors hoping to take down a few hedge funds.

Long story short: some retail investors discovered GameStop’s stock has more short positions than there were total certificates in circulation. So they went for a short squeeze by buying up GameStop securities en masse. The stock skyrocketed into hundreds multiple, and some hedge funds - with the short calls - lost billions of dollars. A few paper millionaires got minted over the span of a few days, and the rest of us are enjoying the show.

Things came to a standoff today: popular brokerage firms such as Robinhood and TD Ameritrade put a stop to new positions on GameStop and other companies that are being stoked by r/wallstreetbets investors. My twitter feed was filled with outrage at this seemingly blatant market manipulation. It sure helps the hedge fund short sellers to close out their positions easier, doesn’t it, if most $GME holders can only sell.

The optics are bad: Wall Street seems to be protecting their own, after being caught on the wrong side of a trade from a band of retail investors. Big Wall Street firms are the house, and the house always win.

Personally, I don’t have skin in this game. My investment plan is to dollar-cost-average index funds all the way onto retirement age. I don’t do individual securities. Some of these r/wallstreetbets investors are literally gambling their entire liquidity onto a single stock, which is amazing and reckless at the same time. If a position causes you to lose sleep, that’s not investing, that’s gambling. As with any gambling, there’s going to be those that specularly win, and those that spectacularly lose.

The rest of us are just watching to see what happens when the music stops playing.

Of budgets and cents

Boy, who would have thought that it’s harder to save money now that I have to pay rent! It sure was easy when I lived with my parents, and I get to squirrel away that 30% of my gross every month. It’s how I come to afford a six-figure sports car on a decidedly not six-figure annual salary. Well, the fun times are over: a far tighter monthly budget is one of the consequences of moving out.

And yeah, I’ve sold said six-figure sports car.

“Adulting” stops the fun. Everybody knows this. The need to save for some future probabilities means we shouldn't squander our entire paycheck. After subtracting rental cost, my discretionary spending have obviously gone way down. Nowadays, every dollar spent requires some serious thought and consideration. Gone are the days of dropping hundreds without thinking. Every outflow has to be reviewed. Did I mention I also have to buy groceries now?

The goal each month is to have something left over to stuff into savings and investments. Because having a money cushion provides optionality, and optionality provides stability and freedom. Stability in the sense that you have enough to cover any surprise money emergency. Freedom in the sense that you can do what you want, without being a slave to the any income. Work is turning out not so pleasurable? You can leave immediately, unless of course the next paycheck is figuratively life and death for you.

Having options is what I am continuing to strive towards. Paying rent is just a part of life, a new consideration that I have to account for. But it sure would be easier to not have it!

No TouchBar is okay with me

It’s a new year, so we’re all looking forward to what sweet Apple products are forthcoming this calendar. The introduction of the M1-powered Macs late in 2020 was an absolute game-changer, and we eagerly await the Apple silicon to proliferate to other models. A MacBook Air is nice, but for my purposes I need something more substantial. As a current user of an Intel-powered MacBook Pro 16-inch, the eventual M1 equivalent to come is what I am anticipating highly.

I thought I’d want an iMac with Apple silicon instead. The vast screen real-estate is not to be ignored, especially now that we are mostly working from home. However, the romance of being a “digital nomad” - being able to go and be anywhere at any moment - holds large over my psyche. The biggest Mac laptop - in dimension - that Apple sells remains the right product category for me. An iMac is rather difficult to take with you.

Lots of rumors are abound on what the M1-powered 16-inch MacBook Pros will be like. There’s talks of the return of MagSafe charging, though the lack of it currently hasn’t been that bothersome for me. There’s talk of the return of SD card slot, which would be very welcomed for a hobbyist photographer like myself that deals primarily in that storage format.

Finally, there’s talks of the eliminating the TouchBar, the controversial touch surface that replaces the function row on the keyboard. The advantage of the TouchBar is that it allow for content-aware, app-specific keys, rather than a fixed set that cannot be changed. Sounds great on paper, but personally it’s not something I use at all (much like shortcuts on iOS). Perhaps I’m a bit of a simpleton: all I need from the function row are the basics adjustments for screen brightness, and the media controls. The rest of the time I largely ignore the contextual keys that pops open. Emoji keyboard? I never use it.

Like the controversial “butterfly” keyboard, I would be happy to see the TouchBar go into the Apple museum of tried but unsuccessful ideas.

Weekend drives

Well, I hope your car is properly washed now after this noisy rainstorm (greetings, readers in San Francisco!) You did move it outside, right? Even my friend with a garage knows to move his Teslas outside when it rains, just to get it wash by nature. Alas, I’ve become that lazy as well, even though I’m a card-carrying car enthusiast. Ever since I bought the M2 Competition back in October, I’ve washed it myself a grand total of once.

I am at a stage where anything that doesn’t involve actually driving the car, I’m not all that enthused about. Spending an afternoon changing the oil? Not me! I rather pay the money and take it to the dealership. Good thing about new BMW cars is that the first three year’s maintenance is free. That’s partly why I bought the car brand new, instead of saving on depreciation in a used one. It’s not about the money: it’s about saving time.

With COVID lockdowns still in effect, I didn’t really do much outside this weekend. I went to Costco for the usual groceries, and that’s about it. I took a circuitous route to get there, though, because the M2 doesn’t get driven during the week, and I wanted to give it an appropriate amount of running time to get everything mechanically warmed up. That’s the only piece of driving I’m doing these days.

It was the weekend, so I encountered a few drivers taking their weekend sports cars out for a spin. A mint first-generation Acura NSX, a really orange Honda S600, and an early-model Porsche 911. All three were driven by seemingly older fellows, which leads me to believe those are cars they’ve kept for a very long time. It makes me wish I had the (mental) ability to keep a car for similar periods. Sadly, my record thus far is only three years.

The Porsche 911 was suppose to be my “forever car”, but “adulting” got in the way. I’m not yet sure if I want to keep the M2 for a long time. BMW’s spotty history of reliability is not conducive to that once it’s outside of the warranty period. Besides, these days I’m pining for something truly JDM: going back to my roots and getting a car produced by a Japanese manufacturer. With a manual gearbox.

Let’s see what happens after I’m done paying for the lease on my dad’s Hyundai Tucson in October…

Tough week

How can it be a “short week” - due to the holiday on Monday - and yet it still feels interminable? The stress from work that I wrote about last week has not abated, though not that I expected it to. In the grand scheme of things, I should be happy that I am still employed, and free of the coronavirus.

And indeed it’s been a rather joyous week. The Biden inauguration signals a return of competence to the executive branch, putting an end to four years of Trump craziness. My littler brother - in some trouble with the law - found out he won’t have to serve time in prison during his sentencing hearing. An absolute act of mercy by the judge. Hopefully my brother can truly begin to turn his life around from the transgression. His debt to society will be paid, just not in a jail cell.

I shouldn’t let the burden of work overshadow such happy events, but it’s tough.

What I really want to do this weekend is take the M2 out for long drives. Problem is, we are still in a stay-at-home lockdown situation. While the chances of me contracting the virus is very slim - it’s just me alone in a car; what happens if I get into a heavy accident? I’d be taking up a precious ICU bed from a hospital system that’s already running dangerously low. Besides, I’ve heard that people who live near the mountain roads are quite sick of us enthusiasts blasting through them in our fast sports cars. The BMW badge screams douche, doesn’t it?

The vaccine can’t be proliferated fast enough. I’ve signed up for San Francisco’s COVID vaccine notification. Working in education, and having to physically go to work, means I’m in the tier just after the initial one. Difficult to say when Phase 1B Tier 1 will get our shots, but I’m optimistic it will be soon (we have a competent federal response now, remember). I eagerly await the email.

Until then, I’m staying put at home. Seeing my friend utterly struggle with COVID symptoms have reaffirmed my thinking that the risk of going outside is not worth the momentary rewards.

Morning in America

Ah, how nice is it to wake up in the morning and not have to worry about what crazy stuff the President has done this time. It’s a liberation that we have not known for the past four years. The sense that actual competence is in charge, and that ordinary citizens shouldn’t have to constantly worry about the country’s executive branch. Character matters. Kindness matters. And it’s welcoming to see integrity return to the highest office, the leader of the free world.

As we celebrate surviving the four years of Trump, we have to recognize the many that did not. The hundreds of thousands of Americans that didn’t need to die, if only we had a proper response to the coronavirus from the federal government. Folks of rural America, believing a con man can save them from their misery, but with only overdose death to show for it. The friends and family members, figuratively lost to the conspiracy rabbit hole, egged on by the self-affirming mechanisms of social media platforms.

The economy was going great, until it wasn’t. The one excuse that Trump supporters point to to explain away the many deficiencies of his presidency got utterly upended by COVID0019. How Trump must rue the misfortune of the pandemic. A better person would have seized the moment and lead with conviction. Trump only made it worse for himself by each misstep, doomed by the destiny of character that he so lacks.

That’s all over now, turning the page to the Biden presidency. After four years of sycophancy and nepotism, it’s such a relief to see capable people put back in charge. Normal has returned to Washington DC. Hopefully, with renewed effort on the vaccine rollout, normal will soon return to the rest of us as well.

God speed.

Around the block

As a bleeding-heart introvert, this whole pandemic business isn’t without some silver lining. I’m used to staying home all the time anyways! The fact that a contagious virus has turn home confinement into something mandatory is not really a big change for me. I’m just sad that the rest of you extroverts have to suddenly join my lifestyle. Of course, I’m also devastated that over 400,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID.

Hopefully the incoming Biden administration - to be sworn in today - will be far more competent in combating the coronavirus than the departing administration.

Even the most ardent introvert needs some socializing. I was reminded of how nice it is to hang out with friends this past weekend. Properly socially distanced, mind you. A friend brought his kid over to deliver some things to me. During that time we got to stand around and chat for a bit, while the kid got to play with my housemate’s dog. Having a conversation in person: what a novel concept! The unseasonably warm and sunny day provided a perfect backdrop.

We then took the dog out for a walk around the neighborhood. Part of the allure of living in a suburbia-like area - houses with proper front yards and back - is how great it is to take a stroll just around the block. Vehicle traffic is minimal, and the air is wonderful thanks to the multitude of greenery. It was a cute scene with the kid holding onto the dog’s leash as it wanders through the neighborhood. Us adults following close behind, enjoying the sun.

It’s a shame I myself haven’t done enough walks like this; because, you know, pandemic. This brief hang out with friends provides a small taste of what we’ve missed, and what’s to come once everything goes back to normal. I am cheering for you, vaccine!