Debunkery, yet again

October 18, 2010

Vertical stripes make you look young

 

I hate writing about this topic, so much so that I can’t even be bothered to downshift and transfer this post to the third person like I always do. The only challenge this week will be seeing if I can write 800 words without including anything that could be construed as a double entendre.

Brett Favre might be the most reported-upon athlete of my lifetime. Regrettably, little of that media coverage focuses on his powerful arm, his speedy setup and release, his ability to overcome average mechanics to consistently find receivers downfield, or his superlative longevity.

No, the coverage focuses on his first retirement. His father dying hours before a Monday night game and Brett eking out a win. His grandchild. His second retirement. His enthusiasm for Vicodin, as if a guy whose job includes regularly getting the wind knocked out of him by fast and gigantic men should just play through the pain. His third and fourth retirements. His childlike enthusiasm, just a kid having fun out there! His final comeback, spurred by his daughter saying (I swear to God I saw Favre say this or something close to it on TV), “’Daddy, do you think you could win one more Super Bowl for me?’” (As long as he was concocting folklore, why not give her leukemia while he was at it?) And yes, maybe a story or 2 on the penis shots.

I tweeted earlier this week that Babe Ruth wouldn’t have made it to 714 home runs today. He would have incurred a 2,000-game suspension somewhere along the line for defiling a willing groupie with a champagne bottle. What about the first time Wilt Chamberlain mailed a Polaroid of the Little Dipper to a receptive white woman? Forget about it. David Stern would have ordered sensitivity training with a licensed therapist, whom Wilt would have almost certainly ended up bedding.

What does this have to do with personal finance? A fanciful Forbes post that I refuse to link to claims that Favre’s 2-year old texts to a woman who looks uncannily like his wife will cost him $100 million in lost salary, endorsements and speaking fees. Just for the record, those texts went to a woman who exposed her own genitalia to anyone willing to buy the relevant issue of Playboy.

It’s that kind of innumerate nonsense that doesn’t deserve a response, but to summarize:

  • He’s 41. His playing career’s almost over, this time for real. He’s going to get paid through the year, and likely wasn’t going to find a contract for 2011 anyway.
  • There was no breakdown between retirement-era speaking fees and endorsements in the Forbes estimate, but let’s say half and half? That’d be roughly 4 billion speaking appearances. (What, I can’t play fast and loose with numbers, too?) However many appearances it is, that sort of schedule would defeat the purpose of being retired.
  • Does Jenn Sterger really want to claim harassment? She hasn’t done so formally. Hopefully she’d appreciate the irony of someone whose fame derives exclusively from exploiting her own sexuality painting herself as a victim. Even if she is that mercenary, a couple hundred thousand ought to shut her up.
  • Favre isn’t Roman Polanski. Or Mike Tyson. Or even Ben Roethlisberger. Or even Zeke Mowatt. Favre is a sexual harasser like Deion Sanders is a felon (he got arrested once. For fishing out of season.)

The worst part about the “$100 million” figure, aside from its basis in something other than reality, is that it reignites the tired catcalling about how athletes are overpaid. I’d do his job for nothing, how does being able to throw a tight spiral benefit society, teachers should get more than quarterbacks (well, maybe JaMarcus Russell), etc.

Favre will take home 8 digits this year, and that must have some nefarious connection to the small hourly wage that Metrodome game-day personnel make. Or to the starting salary for a teacher in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

No, Favre’s riches derive from one thing: how much revenue he can generate: or more accurately, his employers’ assessment of how much revenue he can generate.

Having Favre in the backfield means Vikings center John Sullivan isn’t snapping the ball to empty space, which would result in an 0-16 season. More practically speaking, having Favre around means Tarvaris Jackson isn’t the Vikings’ starting quarterback. (Granted, starting Favre at quarterback this season has resulted in only 1 victory. But again, Vikings’ ownership was projecting from what Favre had done throughout his nonpareil career, culminating in taking his team to within a couple of plays of the Super Bowl the previous season.)

Favre’s fame and longevity make whatever personal charisma he has more visible. That means that if he can recite a line and look at a camera somewhat convincingly, Sears can hire him to sell TVs. Or VFC, parent of Wrangler, can hire Favre to sell jeans. We don’t know how many TV or jeans sales to attribute to Favre being on camera, but presumably they’re enough to make it worthwhile to have him on the payroll.

The teacher who keeps the peace in an elementary school classroom, staying in the ultimate professional comfort zone while finishing work at 3:00 every afternoon and getting summers off, has skills that are easy to find and replicate. Same with the retiree who takes tickets at the Metrodome entrance. If that teacher can get 64,111 students into her class, at prices ranging from $39 to $143, and sell the broadcast rights to her classes for a few million, then she can start complaining about being underpaid.

**This post is featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #281**

Filed Under: Capitalism, Economics, Making Smart Choices, Net Worth, Personal Finance Tagged With: , , , ,

Relax, You’re Swimming In It

September 27, 2010

Iguazu Falls, where $231 worth of water flows per second

Do you know how much that dripping faucet in your kitchen is costing you? If it drips once a second, 24 hours a day, it’ll cost you…

So little that a standard 8-digit calculator can have trouble measuring it.

When you go to other personal finance blogs that give useless “money-saving tips” like “use less water”, you’re wasting your time. And possibly some water, but that shouldn’t matter. The overzealous conservation of water is pseudoscientific, pseudoeconomic nonsense.

Kids were getting indoctrinated with screeds about the scarcity of water at least in the 1970s, and probably earlier. Here’s a gem that social studies textbooks still use:

Of all the water on earth, <3% of it is freshwater, and almost all of that is in glaciers. Only .01% is in surface water – lakes and rivers.

OMG we’re running out! We’re going to be a desert planet soon! Either that, or we’ll have to develop gills!

Congratulations, you just fell victim to a mathematical parlor trick. Percentages don’t mean a thing, only raw numbers do. The 310 million cubic miles of seawater on the planet are irrelevant to the discussion of fresh water. The only purpose they serve is to make the amount of fresh water on the planet look relatively small. If the entire Sahara turned to seawater tomorrow, the percentage of the earth’s water that’s fresh would fall but the amount of fresh water wouldn’t change. The earth’s surface water works out to about 100,000 cubic yards per person. You’re not going to die of thirst.

It’s Control Your Cash’s sacred duty to tear into other bloggers’ hogwash – especially after reading something as ludicrous as the following indefensible feel-good comments that sound great but signify nothing.

We asked the author of the following italicized lines if she wanted attribution. She politely declined. Remember, this is an attack on the post, not the person. Still, someone’s probably going to end up crying:

 

We use water every day for a number of reasons, but the bottom line is that water is a necessity.

Thank you. These are the kind of incisive, groundbreaking research findings that make most blogs such a pleasure to read. What are your feelings on air: necessity, or luxury? How about food?

Everyone likes to unwind in the shower after a hard day at work, but taking long unnecessary showers will definitely rack up that water bill.

 

No it won’t. Soon, we’re going to watch math work its magic.

Instead of taking a twenty minute (sic) shower try taking a ten minute (sic) one.

Also, a 9-minute shower will use less water than a 10-minute one. And if you want to use less water than a 20-minute shower, but aren’t quite ready for a 10-minute one, you might want to try a 15-minute shower. Other acceptable shower lengths in this range include 11-minute, 12-minute, and 17-minute.

20 gallons of water cost 1¢ in Control Your Cash’s neighborhood. A typical low-flow showerhead expels 1.5 gallons per minute, so by showering for 10 fewer minutes a day, you’d save 23¢ a month. Assuming you can shorten your shower by 10 minutes in the first place.

When we go into the bathroom to brush our teeth we just let the water run. Try turning it off while you brush your teeth.

Turning the water off while brushing your teeth will save significantly less than a penny. 1 gallon per minute is standard for bathroom faucets, and that’s at full power. Let’s assume half power, and even that seems liberal. The Sonicare Flexcare toothbrush cleans your teeth in exactly 2 minutes, or enough time to use .05¢ worth of water.

Many of us like to wash our vehicles at home, but this could be costly.

 

Nope. Just proved that. 5-gallon bucket = ¼¢. If your vehicle is a Los Angeles-class submarine, maybe washing it could be costly. Then again, you probably don’t keep it at home. Plus submarines stay wet as a matter of course.

It will be much cheaper in the long run to…collect rain water (sic, does anyone here understand compound words or hyphens?) to use when washing your vehicle.

This is the last refuge of the desperate blogger: a logically sound statement that makes zero practical sense. Yes, the clouds don’t charge for water. But unless you live in Cherrapunji, it’s going to take you a while to collect the raw material for your next car wash.

(In case you’re not getting it: no one is encouraging you to waste water. But unless you’re hiking Zion Canyon in the middle of summer, discarding a few ounces isn’t going to kill you.)

Dripping faucets are an annoyance. They’re not a financial drain, to coin a phrase, that’ll bankrupt you if you don’t immediately fix them. (Heck, one hour of a plumber’s labor would already put you in a hole impossible to dig out of in your lifetime, if you’re weighing it against the water you save.) If you want to collect rainwater to wash your car with, knock yourself out. If you want to take showers that are shorter than the average Ramones song, fine. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that there’s an economic rationale for it.

Filed Under: Acts of God, Economics, Healthy Living, Making Smart Choices, Math Tagged With: , , ,

Charity is for suckers

September 23, 2010

Apparently you can use a pen, can't you? Fill out a job application with one.

 

Can you stomach a first-person story? We try not to do these, but here’s one with a greater purpose. After reading it, your disposable income should increase (or at least not decrease.)

20 years ago your blogger was a recent college graduate with dreams of being on the radio*, living in downtown Toronto – a central business district so dense that it can’t help but be pedestrian-friendly. To get to work every morning (at the office of a crooked penny stock promoter, now mercifully out of business), I’d walk a mile or so from my condo to a high-rise office on Bay Street (Wall Street’s smaller, colder, less influential, eternally apologetic sister with an inferiority complex.) En route I’d pass by College Park, a vintage shopping mall whose wide sidewalks served as a depository for dozens of the city’s beggars, buskers, and Deadheads looking to make a better world by receiving money in exchange for things made of hemp (or not.)

Some of the street musicians were fairly talented, if Indigo Girls covers with tambourine accompaniment happened to be your thing. But as the Napster defendants argued, music was meant to be free. Thus I’d never give my serenaders money. The soundtrack in my head was entertainment enough.

Among the beggars and their slightly more motivated brethren, one person stuck out. He was a quadruple amputee with what remains one of the sunniest dispositions I’ve ever witnessed. Shirtless, bearded, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans, he’d say hi to everyone who walked by. His arms stopped somewhere around the elbow, his legs were a mystery. Sometimes he was there with a handler, sometimes he wasn’t, or maybe during those absences the handler was getting food. Or cigarettes. The beggar would somehow manage to smoke by holding the cigarette between his stumps and placing the butt on his wheelchair whenever he got tired, which I’m guessing was often. Normally I’d argue that smoking cigarettes is for idiots, but I’ll reserve judgment on someone whose smoke-filled lungs were among the most functional parts of his body.

I never learned the beggar’s name, but the black humor hemisphere of my brain christened him “One”, after the Metallica song.

Some days I’d hope to get there before he’d set up shop for the day, because there’s another part of my brain that would refuse to not give him money. Every time, whatever was in my wallet was his. Occasionally that meant a $50 bill, which I could ill afford. Yet it was all I could do to restrain myself from stopping passersby and insisting that they follow suit. “Look, I don’t give money to beggars either. But this guy’s different.”

One day, One disappeared. Which isn’t noteworthy: beggars aren’t renowned for their permanence. Without having any details about his departure, I could imagine my own happy ending: his biological family had misplaced him after birth (stubby kids are easy to lose), spent decades searching for him and finally found him. A visiting European princess took him under her wing (or her arm.) Something good, because God knows he deserved it.

A few months later the stock promoter put me out of my misery. I applied for a job at CFRB 1010 – Canada’s biggest, most powerful radio station. Wore my best** suit and tie, met with the program director, laughed at his jokes and tried to make my laughter sound authentic. He shook my hand, I said I’d find my own way out.

Down the hallway, I passed a semi-open door and heard an unmistakable high-pitched voice.

One. All by himself, conducting phone surveys. With a headset attached to his head and a pen in his mouth.

Fortunately his back was turned, so I didn’t bother disturbing him. He wouldn’t have recognized me anyway.

At that moment, an epiphany: I vowed I would never give money to anyone, either via an institution or hand-to-hand, if that person had at least one functioning limb.

No example you give can trump this. The teenage mother with multiple kids, the illegal alien, the woman who ate herself into superobesity, the meth addict whose parents didn’t hug him enough: they can all go to the Fifth Ring and share a skewer when a man who’s completely helpless can find gainful employment.

Some ambulatory people like to self-tithe, or to convince themselves that their residency on this planet requires them to care for “the less fortunate” for some reason. Taken to its logical extension, that would mean we’d never do anything productive, creating any wealth. We’d each be spending our time endlessly transferring our money: from the most fortunate (Kobe Bryant, Angelina Jolie) through the slightly less fortunate (me, probably you) all the way down to crack babies.

You want to help someone who doesn’t have “enough” money? Offer them a job. If you can’t, the next best thing you can do is nothing. Seriously. That’ll help avail them of the inevitable truth – that giving people money out of guilt not only doesn’t do any good, it makes things worse. It lets whatever marketable talents those people have wither and weaken – and whatever contributions to society they could have made to society, will go unmade.

I’d always thought “if he can do it, anyone can” was a fluffy piece of motivational-poster nonsense. It took the most disadvantaged man I’d ever met to make a believer out of me.

*This was a completely legitimate aspiration to have back then. Thank God I didn’t achieve it in any meaningful sense.

**only

**This post is an editor’s pick at the Carnival of Money Stories**

**They love us at the Carnival of Money Stories**

Filed Under: Acts of God, Healthy Living, Making Smart Choices, Personal Finance Tagged With: , , , ,
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