The 'cleaning reflex' was triggered

Yesterday I took apart my living room, down to rolling up the Very Nice Rug and taking it outside and letting little children jump around on it.

The fall cleaning was long overdue, but it was initiated, in this case, by a child throwing a pinecone and breaking a storm window.

The pinecones were free, from church, but they turned out to be an expensive lesson for that child.

Anyway, having figured out the magic secret of removing the screen and the other storm window--it seems like it is a different secret for every rental we've lived in--I was able to clean the whole window, and then went on to wash the outsides of the other first-floor windows.

Returning inside, with the kids' desktop computers already disconnected to get at the window, I decided to keep going, slowly.

The children wanted the computer table moved to a different wall, and I wanted to move the toy shelf somewhere less prominent, replacing it with bookshelves that were already in the room.

I took out one end table, which used to function as a perch for little children and now only accumulates clutter.

The toy shelf went in front of a window.  I put our very rustic red dollhouse on it, knowing that our cat likes to curl up in one of the upstairs rooms.  Now she can watch both the family and the outside world from up there.  The rest of the dollhouse is again being used for drawing and coloring supplies.  

Back from break

I'm going back onto a semi-regular posting schedule.

Eldest child is doing well.

I finally have No! Children! In! Diapers!!  And they can all buckle themselves in, on their own or with a little help from a sibling.

I also have Multiple! Teenagers!!  I can go for a walk whenever I want, and we can easily go through two gallons of milk in a day.  I didn't have to hire a random stranger to babysit when I had jury duty last year.

I did a lot of stocking up on books, tools, and supplies, which has turned out to be timely, because there is apparently some law of the universe where my family's finances can only flourish under a Democrat administration.  I don't mistake the money economy for the real, real economy, though.

I've also been writing a teenage-level fiction book, which has been a lot of fun. 

What we stock up for...

...is the next round of unpleasant unplanned major expenses and impediments.  Which has now begun.

The child in the hospital is doing much better, although still not out of the woods.  I don't know when he will be able to come home.  People from church brought us a lot of food, and are willing to bring more as soon as we need it, and on top of that some of them are real prayer warriors.

It has been also been good to have the new musical instruments around the house, to pick up and blow some air through now and then.  My littlest children very quickly learned how to get the trumpet to toot.  I looked up the manufacturer online, and the trumpet could be a century old.  Transitioning to an open-hole flute has been much easier than I thought it would be.

I had decided a while back to get going with the hand weights and some simple exercises again, despite being somewhat wiped out from anemia.  That has been helpful with the added workload of a sick child.

Slosh slosh squish slosh

Follow the money. 

 

But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters.  -- I Peter 4:15 (KJV)

My turn, parts 2 - 94

A few years ago, I read a book called Everyday Racism, a thoroughly unscientific although commercially published book about a "study" that a professor did with black college students.  She asked them to tell her what the three most racist things that had ever happened to them were, and then she took their stories and wrote this book around them.

Reading it, I noticed two things:  first of all, the vast majority of these students' three worst victimizing racist incidents were in fact not all that bad.  Not really surprising, since both professor and students are from some college which I haven't bothered to remember the name of, that has a certain amount of Privilege attached to it.

The second thing I noticed is that very similar things have happened to me and my family.  And not just a few times; quite regularly.  And where they don't happen regularly, it's because I've been avoiding returning to the places where they did happen--shopping malls, for example.

I started listing these incidents out, and so far I am at 93 and counting.  Ninety-three little sob stories that would be marketable today, if only I were of some other race.

Well, that's not an insurmountable obstacle.  If the Black Like Me guy could travel around the South and "pass", I should be able (with a little work) to pass well enough for a couple of virtual book tours on Zoom over the next two or three years; everyone knows that COVID-19 is racist, just like everything else is....

The elite method, demonstrated so brilliantly by Christine Blasey-Ford, who didn't even need to resort to blackface, is to specifically blame whoever the Establishment is in need of demonizing at the moment, and to not worry too much about who was really present or not.  As long as the "feels" of the story are told in vivid enough detail that even the fictional elements are "brought to life", the hard facts of the matter can be left so hazy and nebulous that no one can disprove the story for certain.

The only real obstacle to this scheme is that I have a hard time writing in other styles without lapsing into parodying them.  But Sokal and others have blazed the trail there... I think the secret must be in the set of one's eyebrows; a sanctimonious posture must be a necessary precondition for sanctimonious writing.

Oh, and I better run my profile picture through MS Paint and add some Color.

If you can read this, you can do your own taxes.

I have before a prominently-placed advertisement from a local tax service, promising the "best" rates for tax preparation.  Rate for Form 1040 starts at a bit more than $200; Earned Income Credit form in the tens of dollars, $20+ dollars to use their software for e-filing from home, if you prepare your own taxes.  Audit defense services in the hundreds of dollars.

That's ridiculous.  If  my family outsourced our tax preparation to this firm, it would increase our income tax costs by roughly one-third, and only save a few hours of my time.

The worst part of the work in tax preparation is in gathering the information that you need, and in organizing it for easy reference.  I always make a one-page summary of the most important information, and I pull out the previous year's tax return for comparison. Once you've done that, you might as well do the easier part yourself.

Now, let's get back to the ad:  the IRS has e-file options, some of them free.

The Earned Income Credit form is simple, you just have to follow the logic through one step at a time.

Here is Form 1040.  And the Form 1040 Instructions.  Again, the secret is to go Line by Line, following the logic through. When in doubt, take the instructions as literally as a computer would; the first "computers" were people.

I always use paper wherever possible, because the entire process was designed to be done on paper.  Paper also provides greater privacy, which is particularly useful when you are working with intermediate rather than final numbers.

I usually do two full passes through the 1040 and associated forms; the first pass is to "trailblaze" my way through, note any changes compared to the previous year, and make sure that I have all the forms and information that I need.  I do my writing for this on separate sheets of paper, not on the actual forms.

That sets me up for a smooth second pass, where I figure the actual numbers, etc., that I will be entering on the forms.

Finally, I go through and fill out all the forms, make copies, and mail.

If you want to keep your income taxes and life simple, then be conservative in the deductions that you claim, and base them on very solid and ethically sound numbers.  You'll sleep better at night, and if you are audited, you will able to go in with confidence.

As the steward of your income, it is very important that you understand which deductions are available to you, and how to claim them.  That is something that you cannot outsource every single year, because it can affect so many other decisions that you make.  All those convolutions of the tax code were designed to be incentives, in one way or another.

The IRS doesn't care at all if you claim too few deductions or credits, or pay too much in income tax.

And if you make a minor mistake, all they will do is send you a letter and tell you.*

 

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* Subject to change under the Biden administration.

Paper towel outlook: poor

After the Affordable Care Act was passed, I quit buying paper towels as a protest.  

That protest will be continuing into 2021, as our health insurance is about to increase by 16%, after increasing by 15% last time.  

There are also some changes to the provider network; the base network remains the same, but the insurance company has created an additional, extra-restricted network, and an incentive for people to use it:  a lower deductible.

This annual ratcheting-down of services just to keep the costs on the painful side of "affordable" is not sustainable, especially when health insurance is required by law to provide coverage for a number of services.

It's almost time...

 ...to find out how much next year's health insurance is going to cost.  Last year, the cost went up 15% while the services covered went down a bit.

Biden still has that bit that made steam come out of my ears last year on his campaign website, where he promises to increase Affordable Care Act subsidies for the families that already receive subsidies.

Trump's campaign site lists his administration's accomplishments in health care, but not his plans.

 

How the Democrats will lose in 2020

Or at least, how they richly deserve to lose:  through the continuing slow-motion failure of the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats keep talking about health care and how it needs to be reformed, hoping that no one will remember that they were the ones who shoved that 1000+ page law through in 2009.  People who especially are being screwed by it:  young adults (subsidizing costs of older adults), parents of younger adults (having children staying on their plans until age 26), people getting health insurance through their employers (being ineligible for subsidies), single-income families (paying way more than Obama’s “affordable” 9.5% of income), and lower-income people nearing retirement age (paying far more than they can afford).

Out of curiosity, I looked into health insurance options in the high-unemployment coronavirus economy.  COBRA still exists, and now sucks worse than ever, because the ACA requirements generally raised premiums.  Thanks to Trump, there are now short-term plans available, but they may not count as having had “minimum essential coverage” when you try to get on a better plan later. Christian cost-sharing plans have not yet developed adequate fraud protections, I believe—without any evidence, just based on intuition. Going on Medicaid leaves the possibility open that the program could seek to recover the money it spent on you from your estate after you die, although at present they usually don’t bother to.

That leaves buying insurance yourself, either on or off the exchanges, or self-insuring.  My question was how a change in income would be reflected in a change in premium subsidy, for an exchange plan. It appears from this article that most of the time, an income change earns you a 60-day Special Enrollment Period, with subsidy re-calculation, aside from perhaps being required to report changes in income anyway. But with exceptions and changing rules and state-to-state variations, it just looks like a giant headache...one that could continue into next year with tax return preparation for tax year 2020, since the amounts of subsidies received versus subsidies qualified for have to be reconciled and squared up.

I’m tempted to think that the options presented there would be more understandable if they were presented in flowchart form, but there are too many unknowns. As I have said before, this system was designed to fail. It is simply too complex.

One minor point from near the end of the piece:  changing insurance plans will usually reset your out-of-pocket costs counter to zero. That’s a cost to factor in.

Hard times

I’ve been dipping into various parts of Studs Terkel’s Hard Times:  An Oral History of the Great Depression. It’s been several years since I read the whole thing.

It contains many short accounts from a wide variety of people...some of whom did all right and even lived comfortably during the Great Depression. Others barely scraped through.

I also went back to a local history book put together by my grandmother and some other people in the Seventies. One of her friends wrote up the Great Depression section, giving an account of moving to the country from the city. They sold their few appliances, as there was no electricity to run them with. Their water source was a spring. For a time, they didn’t have a car, only their two farm horses. There was a grocer who did a delivery route through the area. She said that they mended and patched and wore their clothes until they really were just “threads”.

My grandparents were set up a little better in household and farm. My grandma said once that they had everything that they needed, although the fabric for their underwear came from feed sacks or some such that were sent to them by a cousin.

A bad time to not be healthy

I've received second-hand information that parts of the local medical-industrial complex are in such bad shape financially that they are closing down entire clinics, "essential" or not. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it is likely that the underlying issues for that--some of which preceded the pandemic--are not unique to the Twin Cities.

Shutting down, and a simple craft

The local schools are closing tomorrow, the governor has banned restaurants and similar establishments from offering dining-in services, and the library is maybe closed--their website has conflicting information. My husband's employer is having everyone start working from home soon, which is going to force us to upgrade to faster internet.

No one seems to have a plan beyond the next couple of weeks. The present measures are not so much "flattening the curve" as they are just delaying it a few weeks. From this post by The Silicon Graybeard, it appears that we had better be increasing our medical system's capacity to cope with coronavirus cases as quickly as possible. That is possible, with a focused mobilization of resources.

I am viewing this season as something like an unplanned sabbatical on a large scale. The difficulty is that our society is not at all set up for it, and instead requires a regular income to pay for debt and all the other services that people and businesses are now dependent on.

Being reasonably well-supplied on food and toilet paper, I spent a very small amount over the weekend to stock up on intellectual stimulation for the coming weeks. I went to the library's book sale area, which I had all to myself, and bought a German-English dictionary and the only other book in German that they had, which appears to be a collection of articles by Sigmund Freud on the unconscious mind. I've never gotten very far with German; we have one book on the language, but it's from the 1940's, with Gothic-like type that is difficult to decipher.

I also looked at craft and decorating books, but didn't buy any. I did pick up some ideas for projects, both from the books that I looked at, and the thrift store that I visited next. It was also sparsely populated, with one cashier in a mask and gloves.

Yesterday, I mixed a little red craft paint with some shaving cream that we had, and we made marbled shaving cream prints. We learned that the technique works even when the paint is mixed evenly into the shaving cream; you just have to swirl the shaving cream around, and the paper picks up irregular amounts of color from the irregular surface.

Mostly we printed onto sheets of paper, but I also tried printing directly onto a white cardboard box that I had, and a piece of white fabric. These prints came out, but they were affected by the surface textures:  the paper surface of the box is slightly coarser than office paper, and the fabric's woven texture visually competes with the marbling.

I've been busy

The public comment period for our electric utility's latest 15-year plan ends next week. I've been working hard on my letter.

Their filing with the public utility commission contains a lot of information, but I also kept finding pages and documents on their website that give a fuller picture of their plans.

I learned that they did, or are now doing, a pilot project on shifting electricity demand, where they charge six times more for electricity from 3 to 8 pm on weekdays than they do from midnight to 6 am.

They are actively working on building up electric vehicle support systems and adoption.

Also, apparently they are rolling out some of their advanced metering and other new technology in Colorado before they do in Minnesota. The same thing happened with the push for low-emissions vehicles; first California, then Colorado and some other states, and now Minnesota is thinking about following suit.

I was able to scientifically calculate that even if they accomplish their ambitious plan of going completely "carbon-free" by 2050, it would reduce climate change by maybe 0.005 degree Celsius, if that.

Holiday interlude

I spent a bit of time thinking about how to spend my Christmas money, and ended up at the used book store.

Most of the time, I buy books from a thrift store or from the little book sale area at the library, so going into a real bookstore is like a trip to the candy store--except better, because you can read a book more than once.

Within the wider selection of books, I found a number of books that related to areas that I want to branch out into more.

My second stop was the craft store. I don't visit these very often either, because so many of the things in them, I could make for myself, if I wanted to put in the time and effort. What I did buy was basic materials:  leather remnants, wool roving, and fabric paint.

My third stop was for the really mundane things:  socks and a new toilet brush. I've had a remarkably hard time buying socks in the past, either because they weren't quite what I was looking for or needed, or because they were beyond my budget. I've settled on buying ankle socks a few pairs at a time, and using them as the feet for homemade knee-high tights.

I decided not to buy a new dish drying rack yet, but to just turn the old one around, so that the more worn-looking parts are at the back.

Also, I received a box of garage sale fabric from a visiting relative. There is a large piece of fleece that should be good for one or two pairs of child-sized pants, one and a half bedsheets, and more than enough upholstery fabric to cover the chair that I brought home from vacation. While I was busy with holiday preparations, my mending pile outgrew the small amount of cupboard space that I allotted for it, so I'm going to have to get to work on that again sometime soon.

Aspirations

When I started this blog, I planned on leaving politics out of it, but it turned out that politics doesn't plan on leaving me alone, and is having serious effects on my household's finances.  In today's example, Minnesota is working hard to transform itself into the California of the Midwest.

It's all kind of intertwined, but at the foundation are a solid belief in climate change*, and a steadfast faith in the power of collective, government-led effort to get things done.  There is a law on Minnesota's books, the 2007 Next Generation Energy Act, which mandates a 30% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels, and a 80% reduction by 2050.  The state is not on track to meet those goals, but by golly, they're trying.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is considering adopting California's ZEV and LEV standards, as several other states have already done. The initial public comment period on this effort closed yesterday; fortunately I was working on some of these things yesterday morning, and I noticed the deadline in time to get my comments prepared and submitted.

The LEV (Low Emissions Vehicle) standard would require that most new vehicles sold in Minnesota meet California emission standards. Apparently, federal law requires that states wanting to set more stringent emissions standards must either use the California standards, or do nothing.  The MPCA may take Colorado's LEV standard (which basically incorporates the California standard by reference) as a model for Minnesota's version.

I don't see how letting another state write your state's laws can end well.  Population of Los Angeles metro area:  4 million.  Population of the entire state of Minnesota:  5.7 million.

The ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) standard would set delivery quotas for electric, hybrid, and hydrogen-fueled vehicles for car manufacturers wishing to sell new cars in Minnesota. From a news report, it appears that people wanting to buy ZEV vehicles in Minnesota at present are having a bit of a hard time finding them, though most of them manage to purchase one in the end.

It turns out that this slight shortage in ZEV supply is because California and several others states have adopted ZEV standards, so the manufacturers are delivering these vehicles first to the states where they are required to deliver them.  In my comments, I pointed out that the economic forces at play will sort this situation out over time, without any government intervention at all. And that if government intervention sets the ZEV quotas above demand, then the manufacturers and dealers may start having to subsidize ZEV sales by charging more for higher-emissions vehicles.

This is another of those "unintended consequences" that keep popping up. They're never in my favor, either.

The MPCA claims that the LEV and ZEV standards would only affect manufacturers and dealers.  That is baloney; new car buyers would also be affected, as well as used car buyers in a few years as these vehicles trickle into the used car market.

Colorado's LEV standard exempts passenger vehicles over twelve passengers; I see a fifteen-passenger high-emissions van in my future.  Our family is large, but not that large. It's not a gain on the climate change front, either.

On the utility front, our utility is proposing to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2030, and to get to zero-carbon electric generation by 2050; not only meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement**, but exceeding them. They are asking for permission from the Public Utilities Commission to retire all of their coal-powered plants ten years early, and to build a lot more wind and solar power generation capacity.

The problems, of course, are that wind and solar electricity generation often don't track with electricity demand, and that it is very hard and expensive to store excess electricity in large quantities for the times when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining--which could be for days or even weeks.

Their solution is *waving the magic Technology wand* to use the power of technology to manage demand rather than supply. That looks to me like it is going to involve some kind of real-time pricing:  very cheap electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and very expensive electricity when they aren't.

Minnesota does have a nuclear power plant, but from what I've read, it sounds like they are working only on keeping it open, and not on building another one. The environment lobby Force is very strong in Minnesota, and it does not always act coherently.

Buried deep within the bowels of the utility's Carbon Report, I have found an implied wish list:  1.  Substantial tax subsidies for their "de-carbonization".  2.  That Minnesota be converted to a "high-electrification state, requiring that electricity be used for cooking, water heating, space heating, and passenger vehicles.  3.  That private generation of electricity (at least at the level of large businesses, etc.) be banned.

So, their brilliant plan to stop climate change and save the world is to use my tax money to force me to use electricity for everything, and then, when their zero-carbon-emissions electricity proves unreliable, to bar me from making my own electricity.

I just finished reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which makes a strong case that socialism always requires some sort of a common cause, and always ends up using coercion by force. I am also in the middle of a book about the history of the Baptist church in Russia.  Under the Soviet Union the Communists found it politically convenient to set the Church up as the internal enemy of all good Communists--as opposed to creating an external enemy that they might end up having to fight a war with, if passions ran too high.

More and more, I am starting to see climate change as the modern unifying cause of the socialists, the justification that they are using to take over control over more and more of the world's physical economic activity. Climate change cannot be separated from economic activity, because in their view economic activity causes climate change. The climate modelers are having to incorporate manufacturing and land use and so on into their models, and they already are showing a distinct tendency to want to control those activities in order to control climate change. This will not end well; it doesn't even end well when the economists are in charge.


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*The short version of my opinion of climate change is that we are working very hard to solve a problem that may not even exist.

**I read the Paris Agreement. It's only sixteen pages, but it has already spawned a complex of committees busily generating large quantities of documents written in bureaucrat-ese.  The character of the Paris Agreement can be seen clearly in its practice of calling a regular international assessment of progress toward reducing carbon emissions a "global stocktake"--overt Newspeak, in an Orwellian global program. The U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but the process will take some time.

Mileage

Driving around in pursuit of bargains is not free; there are costs in both time and money.

The IRS's mileage rate for business use of a car in 2019 is 58 cents per mile. This includes both fixed and variable costs, so it's an estimate of total cost per mile.

I used their mileage rate a few years ago to determine if walking to the more expensive neighborhood hardware store could actually be more economical than driving to a larger store with lower prices. It turned out that the neighborhood store was indeed the better deal overall...although it closed its doors not long after that, possibly because their service was rather poor.

When we do drive longer distances to buy things, it is usually not about lower prices, but to get better quality, or a wider selection.

Warren makes me tired

She doesn't just want to go in for another round of screwing up health insurance, she also wants to completely overhaul the energy and housing sectors.  As in M4A, this would involve massive amounts of taxpayers' dollars and incredibly complex tangles of laws, regulations, and brand-new government programs...for a sustainability score of 0, right off the bat.

Our local electric and gas utility is already proposing changes to radically reduce carbon emissions, including early retirement of all their coal-powered plants. The state Public Utilities Commission is asking for public comments, and I certainly have some to give them.

For housing, Warren is promising to "lower rents by 10%".  While at the same time promising under her 100% Clean Energy proposal to refurbish 4% of existing buildings and houses each year to make them "green". Supposedly this will be done through the magic of federal funding.

If I do a quick estimate, guessing that there are 150 million buildings that would be affected, with an average cost of $50,000 to upgrade each building, that would be $300 billion per year, or $0.3 trillion; $7.5 trillion over 25 years. Plus a few gazillion dollars to "decarbonize" electricity generation, and a few gazillion more to take away most of our fossil-fueled vehicles. This makes it a modest proposal, actually, compared to the multi-trillion-dollar annual cost of her Medicare for All plan.

I found this laughable:

I’ll also invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, including ensuring that every federal interstate highway rest stop hosts a fast-charging station by the end of my first term in office, and ensuring that charging stations are as widespread and accessible tomorrow as gas stations are today.

Given the difference in time between filling a gas tank and charging an electric vehicle (currently in the tens of minutes with Teslas, for a partial supercharge), I don't think that is going to look exactly like she thinks it will. The charging stations would have to be much more widely accessible than gas stations are today, and the sensible thing to do would be to place them mostly at peoples' destinations.

Her affordable housing plan will do little to improve my family's housing affordability or security. It would help if we weren't paying out the equivalent of another place's rent every month for health insurance, thanks in part to Senator Warren's Yes vote on the Affordable Care Act. There was, a few years back, someone who did the math and compared their monthly health insurance cost to the mortgage payment on a $400,000 house; they weren't wrong.

Happily, even if Warren were to win the Presidency, she wouldn't be able to get any of this legislated without the Democrats retaking a majority in the Senate.

Staples

We recently made a trip to Costco to stock up.

Since I had all the packaging handy, I could easily figure the cost per 1000 calories for some of the things we bought:

Oatmeal $0.53/kCal
Flour $0.14/kCal
Sugar $0.26/kCal
Rice $0.21/kCal

This doesn't include the annual membership fee, though, or the cost of driving further than the distance to our usual grocery store.  For the number of times a year that we go to Costco, it probably costs us about $12 each time to get over there and in the door.

Even so, by comparing against the chart I made of typical grocery store prices, Costco comes out fairly well, especially when I consider the quantity of food that we usually buy there.

For just those four items on this trip, we spent $35, and got 141,375 calories. No, these are not the only things that we eat.

Fifteen and fifteen

We have learned that our health insurance will be going up by another fifteen percent. The new plan actually offers somewhat better coverage, but it appears that it will cover a narrower range of services than before. We still have some number of years before it becomes impossible for my husband's employer to offer "affordable" health insurance as defined by the Affordable Care Act, and we all get sent off to the exchange, but the trend is definitely in that direction.

On the brighter side, an elderly woman with a large fabric stash is downsizing and giving her fabric to the sewing circle at my church. She brought in a big stack of flannel, and I came away with something like fifteen yards of it. I will be making pajama pants, cloth diapers and wipes, a few cloth menstrual pads, and from the leftover scraps, some little disposable kitchen wipes.

I have some other sewing planned as well, and did a bit of a cutting-out party yesterday. I like doing the planning, designing, and cutting-out of sewing projects, but not the actual sewing so much. I'm going to move my sewing machine so that I can sit at it for a day or two or sewing; sewing while standing keeps the machine away from the toddler, but gets tiring if I'm doing a lot of sewing.

Also notable is that we recently received several bags of children's clothing from families in our church, whose children had outgrown them. We have very rarely had to buy our children new (or new used) clothes.

"Property values" wins again

Background is here.

The voters did approve our school district's request for a 108%-plus increase in property tax levy for operating revenue.

The bright spot is that the margin of victory was much lower than that of the previous measure, which funded renovations and expansion; message sent.