Author: Jim Wang

I would like to ask a favor of you.

Regardless of your politics, I would like you to watch this six-minute video with an open mind.

It’s just six minutes. But it encapsulates what many are feeling.

Learn about Tulsa.

Learn about Rosewood.

Have a good weekend.

When we had our first kid, we opened a 529 plan in the state of Maryland. The tax benefits on the front side are are minimal (you don’t get much of a deduction) but it grows tax free as long as you use the expenses on education. It’s a pretty solid deal and now that we have three kids, we increase our chances at least one of them goes to college. 🙂

If you don’t know 529 plans too well, my friend Robert at The College Investor has a great guide.

529 Plans: The Ultimate Guide to College Savings Plans [The College Investor] – “Nearly every state in the United States has some type of 529 plan to help families save for college. These plans are designed as tax-advantaged accounts – which give you tax benefits to save for college.”

Speaking of kids, a little over a week ago, I was excited to watch the SpaceX launch. I was trying to explain to our kids how amazing it was that a private company was in charge of sending human beings into space. They got excited about it because everyone loves space and I’m tempted to show them Apollo 13 sometime in the near future. We’ll see when that might be but I remember loving that movie.

If you get jazzed up about space too, you might enjoy this article about the Voyager mission:

Voyager: Inside the world’s greatest space mission [BBC Future] – “In 1977, two spacecraft started a mission that has redefined our knowledge of the Solar System – and will soon become our ambassadors on a journey into the unknown. BBC Future looks at their legacy, 40 years after launch.”

The power of the transmitter on Voyager is around 12 watts and peaks at 20 watts – equivalent to your refrigerator light bulb!

Kidnapping: A Very Efficient Business [The New York Review of Books] – “In Argentina in the early 1970s, leftist guerrillas started snatching executives of multinational companies and demanding ransoms. This culminated in the payment of $60 million to the Montoneros, a Peronist guerrilla group, for the release of the brothers Juan and Jorge Born, executives at the grain-exporting firm Bunge & Born and the sons of its president. The ransom seems noteworthy for its heft—at about $275 million in today’s money, it stands as the largest one paid in a conventional kidnapping case.”

How’s that for a side hustle?

When I heard that Minneapolis was going to “defund and dismantle the police department,” I was surprised. Completely shutting down the police department doesn’t feel like the solution – you still need policing.

But “defunding” doesn’t necessarily mean what I assumed. The police are called upon to respond to many situations where they are not the best solution. They respond because they’re often the only solution available – which is not a good thing. Defunding would mean shifting budget away from the police department so it can go to other programs so those programs can respond to situations they are better suited for.

Like in any budget, there’s excess and unnecessary spending. I saw it first hand in the defense industry – you spend the money or you don’t get as much next time. It’s better to waste it on a few expensive toys now than have your budget cut and need the money for something important later.

Defund the police? Here’s what that really means. [The Washington Post] – “To fix policing, we must first recognize how much we have come to over-rely on law enforcement. We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue. […] Defunding and abolition probably mean something different from what you are thinking. For most proponents, “defunding the police” does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs.”

It Only Takes One Toxic Employee To Infect The Entire Team [My Quiet FI] – “There is a disease spreading across offices everywhere, and no, I’m not talking about COVID-19. I’m talking about the power one single toxic employee can wield. And left to their own devices, they become an office plague, infecting and destroying everything they touch. Like cancer they need to be cut out before it’s too late.

Because make no mistake about it, these people will literally kill your culture.”

A police station is no different than an office.

Last Christmas, a movie featuring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx titled Just Mercy shared the story of lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s quest to exonerate Walter McMillian. We don’t watch many movies in the theaters (three young kids!) so we didn’t catch this one but it’s a story that needs to be more widely shared.

60 Minutes covered this story in 1992 and pulled it from their archives:

UPDATE: Google made Just Mercy available for free on Youtube.

Incredible stuff.

A little context before this next post – Patrick McKenzie is an American who has lived in Japan since 2004. I first learned about him on Hacker News when he was working on and writing about his side project, Bingo Card Creator. I enjoy reading his writing and this article is a fascinating insight into his perspective on work and business in Japan.

Doing Business In Japan [Kalzumeus] – “I heard a great line about this once, and unfortunately I cannot remember the source: “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.” The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.”

A treasure chest hidden in the Rocky Mountains for a decade has finally been found [CNN] – “Thousands of brave souls have ventured into the Rocky Mountains for the past decade, searching for a treasure chest filled with gold, rubies, emeralds and diamonds.

But that adventure has finally come to an end. The treasure has been found.” (we first mentioned this in September of last year)

I want to see what was really in the chest!

Lastly, before you go – what’s your guess as to what’s happening here?

Belgian man has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for years [The Brussels Times] – “A 65-year-old man in Flanders says he is “losing sleep” because he has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for nearly a decade, sometimes several times a day.”

Free food for life!

Hey Apexian – Last Friday, J.D. shared how he lost readers when he spoke up about social and racial issues.

No matter what position you take, even the most innocuous ones, someone will hate it. Many someones will hate it. Then suddenly, they will turn on you, call you horrible names they’d never have the guts to say in person, and then unsubscribe. It will not matter how much you’ve helped them, sometimes those animalistic instincts take over.

But I don’t mind losing people this way. I’d rather not have them in my life.

Then there are those who are just as passionate but are willing to have a conversation. Those conversations are important because that’s how you learn and grow. They may be uncomfortable because you are forced to reconsider your world view but it is necessary to lean into them because they are rare.

How the Personal Finance Sphere Upholds Systemic Racism [Our Next Life] – “Words mean things, and debt and slavery are simply not comparable on any level. An enslaved person could not declare bankruptcy and escape slavery. A person in debt does not transfer that debt to their children and their children’s children the way all an enslaved person’s offspring were owned as chattel from birth. And with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, even escaping a slave state for a free state didn’t guarantee a former enslaved person’s freedom. They could be forcibly returned to their “owner” by the “good guys” in the abolitionist state. There is no world in which you can equate that to debt, something that can be paid off and eliminated and which does not deny you personal liberties beyond simply having to dedicate some of your income to its service.”

You can walk away from that post thinking “I don’t mean that when I use that word,” but closes your mind to the possibility that the words you use are hurting people. It speaks to your intent and not to the result of your words, which ultimately is what matters.

Embracing Conflict- my talk at the EconoME conference [rich & Regular] – “As a first generation immigrant of Jamaican parents, I’ve had to pick and choose the aspects of the culture I wanted to carry forward and what parts I’d rather leave behind. Naturally, my selective adoption of cultural practices created an internal conflict because the more I let go of my born identity, the less I identified with people who’d nurtured it…my family.”

Here’s his talk (it’s 9 minutes and the first few mirror his post, but keep going):

Powerful.

I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast where he has a chat with Adam Perry Lang, owner of APL Restaurant in Hollywood, CA. They talk a lot about how the steakhouse has been dealing with the Coronavirus shutdown, which was itself illuminating because I haven’t seen a lot of restauranteurs talk specifics about how bad it’s been. We know it’s bad but it wasn’t until this chat that I finally understood that even with takeout, APL Restaurant was only doing 15% of the business they were doing before. 15% is shockingly low.

The discussion then moved to knife-making and Lang made all the steak knives in the restaurant. And people steal them. And he has to shame them back.

Kind of fits nicely with the first post of the day (oh, and don’t steal) –

Hotel thieves aren’t stealing toiletries – but framed art, TVs, a fireplace [The Guardian] – “They’re putting the average shoplifter to shame by taking paintings and mattresses. How do they get away with it?”

Mattresses? Seriously? (oh, that’s not even the craziest one)

Why is the Market Doing Well Lately? [Oblivious Investor] – “The easiest way to understand this concept is to imagine a company that is undergoing a massive lawsuit. If the suit fails in court, the company would be worth $100 billion. But if the suit succeeds, the company will be bankrupt. Given those facts, what is the company worth right now? That depends on the likelihood of the suit succeeding. If the suit has a 30% probability of success, the company should be worth $70 billion right now (that is, 70% chance that it ends up being worth $100 billion, 30% chance it’s worth zero). If the suit has a 50% probability of success, then the company should be worth $50 billion right now.”

I Followed a Kilo of Cocaine From Field to Street [VICE] – “In a new book, Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels, war correspondent Toby Muse reports on the human stories behind the drug’s passage across Colombia, from coca leaf pickers and jungle chemists to cartel sicarios and speedboat smugglers.”

Enjoy the weekend Apexian!

I don’t know if I’d call it a mini-retirement but every few years, we take a long vacation of several weeks over the summer.

We are fortunate in that both my wife and I have flexible work schedules. We can reduce our hours, take vacation, and be able to “live” in areas for a longer period of time so our kids can enjoy a different culture and lifestyle. They’ve been amazing life experiences for ourselves and our kids and hopefully we can continue to do them!

How to Negotiate a Mini-Retirement [Millennial Money] – “A mini-retirement is when you strategically save money and plan to take an extended time off of work (could be from 1 month to 6 months or more), so you can follow your passions – whether that’s traveling the world or launching a non-profit.” This was a guest post on Millennial Money by the amazing Jillian Johnsrud. The post is great but make sure you pop on over to her personal blog and subscribe. (tip of the cap to Alien on F.I.R.E. for sending this to me)

You Weren’t Born to Pay Off Debt and Die [Cait Flanders] – “What you don’t have to do forever is live with debt. You don’t have to spend every month calculating how much you can afford to put towards debt repayment, while continuing to use credit, and staying in the never-ending cycle of borrowing money and trying to pay it back. It’s not an easy cycle to get out of; I know that firsthand. But it is a cycle that will not only control your finances, it will control your mind and your life—and our time on this planet is far too short to let debt control your life.” Many thanks to Jim of Elemental Money for sending this to me.

If you had to pick a hot area of the stock market before the pandemic, marijuana stocks were a good choice. If you wanted to pick the next spot for a startup flameout, marijuana companies were a good choice.

Lavish Parties, Greedy Pols and Panic Rooms: How the ‘Apple of Pot’ Collapsed [Politico] – “MedMen was the country’s hottest pot startup—until it flamed out. Its fall has exposed the gap between “green rush” hype and the realities of a troubled industry.”

Years ago, while talking with a friend contemplating a career change, I asked him what he’d say if the roles were reversed.

What if I was working somewhere that didn’t excite me? That I was only continuing to work at because I’d spend the last five years there? I didn’t mention the idea of “sunk cost” or how we were both young and, despite five years at a company, still in the infancy of our careers. Just changing the perspective was enough to convince him of something I could see very easily – he should make the move.

It’s hard to give ourselves advice because we’re so very much in our own lives. But if we can trick our brains just a little bit and set outside of ourselves, we can often identify and address many of our concerns.

That’s why I enjoyed this article – Treat Your Life Like a Business [MonkWealth]

Can Money Buy Happiness? [The Wallet Wise Guy] – “Reaching their financial goals gave them the freedom to pursue the things that really mattered to them…even if those things weren’t necessarily bigger homes, cars, or retirement accounts.” Having the money doesn’t mean the things you want are the things you can buy.

The Science of Developing Self-Control in Life [Darius Foroux] – “Why is it so difficult to improve yourself? Every day, we have the choice to do something that pays off later instead of now. Going to the beach, binge-watching tv shows, reading gossip, drinking alcohol, smoking, or every other pleasurable activity in life always gives you an instant payoff.

You temporarily feel good. But in one year, two years, five years from now, you look back and you see no progress in your life. In life, we have to deal with a concept called “entropy.” Entropy is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and stands for the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system. The basic idea is that everything inside a system moves towards disorder.”

Price is perception… and this is clear when you look at wine:

The pandemic has been terrible but if you wanted to find a silver lining, this might be it.

What We Leave Behind [No Mercy / No Malice] – “Covid-19 has presented an opportunity to envision our lives when turned upside down, powder redistributed. We can start over. We hoard relationships and the accoutrements of a life others have fashioned for us. We often don’t know any better, or don’t have the confidence to draw outside the lines until we’re older. My colleague professor Adam Alter has done research on the regrets of the dying. One of the biggest: not living the life they wanted to lead, but the life others chose for them.”

🔮 The exponential march of solar energy [Exponential View] – “This plunge in prices has far exceeded any credible forecast. Solar electricity in 2020 is roughly half the cost I projected in 2011, and one quarter the cost the International Energy Agency (the IEA) projected in 2010. Both the world’s foremost energy authority (the IEA) and possibly the world’s biggest optimist on solar (me) were wrong.”

You can’t stop the sun!

And before you go – here’s everything you need to know to survive Covid-19 from sci-fi and horror movies (both funny, scary and sad at the same time):

With unemployment at historic levels, it’s time to revisit the idea that during a recession is the best time to start a business.

Is a Recession Really the Best Time to Start a Business? [Marker/Medium] – “Considering how awful it is to be a human now, it seems like an even worse time to become an entrepreneur. [..] Some of the entrepreneurs I spoke with come from money and have prestigious business degrees. Others are working with whatever resources they can scrape together. All of them seem to think that right now is a perfectly reasonable time to start a business.”

I think that everyone should start some kind of side hustle, whether it’s a business that can grow into something big or just a little extra cash on the side. It provides insurance for your income.

One country, two monetary systems [JP Koning] – “For a few months now, something strange has happened to Yemen’s banknotes. Old rials and new rials have ceased to be fungible. Any rial note that was printed prior to 2016 is now worth around 10% more than newer rial notes.

More generally, the entire Yemeni monetary system has split on the basis of banknote age. From a Western perspective, it would be as if every single U.S. banknote issued with a Steve Mnuchin signature on it, the current Treasury Secretary, were worth 10% less than bills signed five years ago by his predecessor Jack Lew.”

The Three Sides of Risk [Collaborative Fund] – “In investing, the average consequences of risk make up most of the daily news headlines. But the tail-end consequences of risk – like pandemics, and depressions – are what make the pages of history books. They’re all that matter. They’re all you should focus on. We spent the last decade debating whether economic risk meant the Federal Reserve set interest rates at 0.25% or 0.5%. Then 36 million people lost their jobs in two months because of a virus. It’s absurd.”

Just so we don’t end on a bit of a down note…

Axios Sports: 50 Best Sports Documentaries [AXIOS] – “👋 Good morning! The bad news is ‘The Last Dance’ is officially over. The good news is there are hundreds of other sports documentaries waiting to be watched, and this morning, we’re hooking you up with our ‘Top 50 of all time.'”

Have a good week!