Compound Interest spreads its wings only at Dusk

It’s January. The nights are long, and it is cold, and rainy. It’s about this time of year that they always run the articles abut Blue Monday when it’s the most miserable time of the year, because we are done with the Christmas debauchery and it still doesn’t feel light even though the Sun is rising earlier. They are still wittering about the economically inactive. The BBC have at least identified there’s not much chance of getting you FI/RE lot to do your patriotic duty for the economy.

Almost nobody who has retired early says they want to return to work.

A new year, new start

I am old enough to have determined new years resolutions don’t work. I don’t do gyms anyway, but the best way to avoid that sort of resolution is not to pig out to excess extendedly. It’s OK to eat and drink to excess a couple of times in the Christmas period, but debauchery and gluttony are to be avoided in excess.

One thing I am experimenting with is to reduce screens/online. Interesting that Weenie is taking up jigsawing to go in this direction, is it a zeitgeist thing or great minds…

I have already taken step through the end of last year to reduce news consumption. I still remain informed, it’s the time/attention thief I am trying to reduce, rather than to do the full Walden Pond thing. One way is to to act more like it were 1998 on dial-up. As long ago as work I got a win on this with email by not running it all the time, once in the morning and once in the mid-afternoon. I have forgotten what office-worker’s guru put me onto that but it worked. For a wider win I aim to concentrate interwebs in bursts, like it were before the Millennium. GenZ has taken this battle to the enemy with customary panache, at the cost of never clocking off. I wonder if that Zuckerberg isn’t barking up the wrong tree trying to create the metaverse. It’s already here, just unevenly distributed. Poor old Zuck he’s pushing forty, and his younger self called the problem out

Young people are just smarter

I get to listen to a lot more music. Which is more reflective than using t’internet, although when I stream it is from a NAS rather than the likes of Spotify or Apple. I did consider using Tidal but I still can’t bring myself to do subscriptions. It is possible to buy downloads from Qobuz but it’s usually cheaper to get the CD s/h. I listen to music through the electric, instead of on their phones.

A trip to the Great Wen in the Ides of March

The Ermine made a rare visit to London recently, to see the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. The exhibition is striking enough – not so much about the specifics of Stonehenge but about the development of the Neolithic world-view in North-western Europe, insofar as we can determine.

Part of the trouble with Stonehenge is that it is very clearly there, after forty-five centuries, but there is no story associated. That is the enigmatic appeal of prehistory. "Every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves — or desires"1 This exhibition tries to fill in some of the blanks, with analogy, with a general timeline meandering through the exhibition sequence.

The ticketing roster packs ’em in, and while it’s not explicitly prohibited to go back, it’s hard and discouraged. So if you want to admire Seahenge, the wooden circle with upturned tree trunk in the centre, do it as you pass the first time,

Seahenge exhibit, normally at Flag Fen

Because else you will be going against the tide of visitors for a long time. There’s a certain prelapsarian hint to the narrative, peaceful cooperation in the the early days, and remarkable evidence of quite long-distance communication and exchange of ideas as styles. Technology remains simple, there is a certain beauty in the collections of stone axe-heads.

Stone axes

a polissoir – how you sharpen your stone axes

Evidence of remarkable craft skill in gold

Until the advent of iron in metal working, and then this happens

Overall good stuff and worth the £20 a head cost of admission, if a teeny bit rushed 😉

Ill fares the land

Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey
When wealth accumulates and men decay.

The Tory party conference is in full swing and celebratory high-fives, with Lord Frost chuntering that the long bad dream of EU membership is over. Now unlike some of you whippersnappers, I recall what the sick man of Europe looked like in 1973, though as an ankle-biter I wasn’t that economically aware. Ermine Command sent an expeditionary force to the fair city of Oxford. Through the crackling wisps of t’internet came this signal

Tesco

Our nonplussed forward team commander wondered if they’d picked up the time machine by mistake “I’m in a time slip and it’s Thatcher’s Britain all over again” – at least they’re all set for CDs if they can find a way to put them in their phones.

Welcome to the Weird

It’s the dog days of summer, the lazy time but late enough that you can smell the change in the seasons, the rich scents of decaying plant matter signalling impending Autumn. The robin seems to have moulted and is now a bright orangey-red and singing again.

There’s a fractious feeling about. The Ermine thinks back to my mid-teens. We didn’t have a TV in 1975, but you could see the iconic photograph of the last Huey out of Saigon in all the papers. Harold Wilson, bless his cotton socks, had kept Britain out of that misbegotten enterprise.

Saigon 1975 and Kabul 2021

I’m kind of with Al Jazeera in this particular instance – Blinken may say that this is not Saigon, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… Looks like Pilger had a point that the wide boys who promoted the Project for a New American Century got something wrong. Rummy didn’t do badly on the limits of epistemology

there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

but knowing something is the case and acting coherently on that knowledge are different things. “You have the clocks, but we have the time…”

Apparently it was all about whupping OBL’s ass, not all the other stirring sound and fury. It’s a shit situation and there are no good answers, other that perhaps the inference that winning hearts and minds through military means in far-flung places with very different approaches to living is a really tough ask, and probably beyond the capabilities of the Imperium at this stage of its decline.

The Big Short

Markets are weird, too. Valuations are up in ths sky. There’s much froth and excitement about fintech and apps bringing the little guys in to the markets. When was the last time we saw that show – ah yes, the heady dotcom days. Michael Burry, he of the Big Short’s observation

Greatest Speculative Bubble of All Time in All Things. By two orders of magnitude. #FlyingPigs360.

seems apposite.

I took a look at the FCA’s Strengthening our financial promotion rules consultation H/T Monevator and thought to myself I am the drunk offering directions here:

“If you want to get there, you don’t want to start from here, mate”

I cast a cynical eye at the attempts by the FCA to save our blessed citizens from the blandishments of bitcoins and the cons of cryptocurrencies and think to myself this is like Centralia, guys. The fire’s burning deep underground and it’s been going for some time. Let’s deconstruct the vexed problem of fixing people who think a 30% annual ROI is only just about remarkable.

The Coming Gilded Age and Vanguard’s mustelid indigestion

Diversification is  a decent principle with bank accounts and the like, particularly given the tendency of financial organisations to freeze people’s accounts without due process due to the money laundering regulations. Then there’s the Madoff risk of the unknown unknowns cratering a business. So much to worry about.

1+1 redundancy is a good principle in many things-when I did a parachute jump there was a main and standby. Whether I’d have had the presence of mind to pull the standby¹ before becoming a grease spot is another thing, but main and standby is A Good Thing.

To that end I have a second ISA with Charles Stanley as well as the main one with iWeb. The aim here is damage limitation, and you get most of the win with the first standby system you introduce. In theory I could get better security against providers going titsup by balkanising my ISA to try and stay under the FSCS compensation limit. Life is too short for that. Main and standby – and stop there.

My main ISA with iWeb is pretty spit-and-sawdust. Their win is not charging me annual fees, provided I hold no funds (shares and ETFs are fine) and don’t trade. I am OK to pay them transaction fees, the aim here is not to churn. They have no monthly investing facility, and you can’t borrow from the ISA – it isn’t a Flexible ISA.

Flexibility is valuable to people with no income

The financially independent are despised by the banking system, who won’t lend them money because without a salary income they can’t qualify the risk. So it’s handy to be able to borrow from your ISA, though you should never aim to use it. I hung onto my Charles Stanley account for its flexibility, but what with one thing and another it tended to grow, and CS jacked up their fees a while back. This begins to irk me. According to the Great God Monevator, CS rocks in at 0.35% where Vanguard are 0.15%. The difference in that makes it slightly worth while to shift as the account gets larger. As an old git I don’t need to flay costs as if they were the tattooed agents of darkness is the same way as TA, because I am a decumulator, and there aren’t as many decades to accumulate as for a 20-something. On the other hand I carry a lot of gold in the iWeb ISA and have shifted my risk balance lower, so maybe I do need to up the ante on the equity part. I was pointed toward the behemoth Vanguard as a lower-cost supplier with a flexible facility via a comment on Monevator. Although flexible access tends not to be a bargain basement offering, Vanguard do indeed offer it. To wit

The Vanguard ISA is a “flexible” ISA, meaning that money you withdraw may generally be paid back in during the same tax year without counting towards your annual allowance

Don’t transfer your old ISA as your first act. Because: AML theatre/freezes

Crab House Cafe, Dorset

LivingCheapinLondon gave us a great tip from recent post about a fine source of modest decadence, and Mrs Ermine was on it immediately. We were going to dine at the Crab House cafe, where Chesil beach starts to leave the mainland at the southern end. This took place is the sort of intermediate phase of the coronavirus pandemic loosening up, where you could eat out, as long as outside meant outside, which is a little bit on the brass monkeys side in late April, even on the south coast.

The Hellstone via Dorchester

To work up an appetite we took a look at the Hellstone dolmen, I have been coming to Dorset regulars with some old college pals ever since one of them had a camper van in the late 1980s. I last saw this some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when one of our party who shall remain nameless managed to get an impressive thump followed by outpouring of blood as he made the mistake of standing up in the Hellstone. You don’t want to do that because the headspace is about 5ft 4in, enough to get a good heft because the irresistible force loses out to the immovable object. There’s a reason the AONB booklet calls this land of bone and stone…

We hustled him back town the track to the Hardy monument, and figured we really ought to take him to A&E at Dorchester General after deploying the first aid kit in the camper van. Fortunately it wasn’t concussion and he only needed a tetanus jab, but that site had been crossed off the list for ever afterwards and this is the first time I’d been in the area without him in the party.

I regaled Mrs Ermine with this story, and fortunately the imp of the perverse did not prevail. Peace has been made with this fine site.

which is a short hike from the Hardy monument. For some reason Mrs Ermine took objection to this object, because I had said it was to commemorate Thomas Hardy, for the last two decades I assumed this was Thomas Hardy the author, he of Tess of the d’Urbervilles etc. The trail to the dolmen starts from the Hardy monument, and the National Trust educated me that this was Thomas Hardy, the naval fellow to whom the dying Lord Nelson was reputed to have said “Kiss me, Hardy”