Tuesday Tweets: July 31st, 2012 ? 6400 Personal Finance

This was a good week for Twitter.

Why?

Because yours truly stumbled upon The Duffle Blog?via Facebook this week and the literary wits over there have a Twitter feed. ?So now not only did I drop a particularly vacuous feed from the ?Following?list I replaced it with an incredibly entertaining one. Win.

I would also like to point out that TDB is a satire site. ?Now I suppose that its understandable for those not familiar with the day-to-day life of the US military to not pick up on that right away. Frankly some articles that they write?could be completely true. ?On the other hand not everybody got the memo as is evidenced by certain reactions to this article. ?If you?re too lazy to click the link its a satirical take on a general offering a less than?congratulatory?speech at a basic training graduation that results in a riot and the deaths of eleven people. ?Again, this is satire. ?I found the ?speech? to be hysterical but that can probably be attributed to my warped sense of humor. On the other hand I have no idea what this person?s excuse is for thinking that this is actually a real article:

You had the time to write a whole paragraph (and not spell check it) but not notice that they had an About Us page?:

Legal Crap

The content of this site is parody. No composition should be regarded as truthful, and no reference of an individual, company, or military unit seeks to inflict malice or emotional harm.

All characters, groups, and military units appearing in these works are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual military units and companies is purely coincidental.

By the way, they have the best copyright tagline that I have ever seen: ?Copyright ?2012?The Duffel Blog. Don?t steal our shit. Not only will terrorists win but it will also make you an asshole.?

In case you are wondering it is never a good idea to steal, even good in good fun, from a Soldier/Marine (jury is still out on Sailors and Airmen).

Short war story to illustrate the point: during the first half of my deployment I was an artillery platoon leader at a small Combat Outpost in a river valley in Afghanistan. ?There were maybe at most 150 military personnel assigned to this patch of ground and 25 of them were my active-duty artillerymen. ?The remainder were mostly from a National Guard infantry unit hailing from a state that has a severe inferiority complex: Oklahoma (?where everything is smaller?).

So college football season rolls around and apparently that is a Big F***ing Deal? for people who have never even attended college. ?Every week the infantry guys in the small ops center where we had a TV tuned to AFN wanted to watch the Oklahoma game and we obliged?.and then rooted for their opponent just to be assholes. ?The climax came in the days leading up to the Oklahoma-Texas game when one of the infantry squads hung a big Oklahoma flag outside their B-hut for all to see. ?Not to be outdone the Texans in my platoon busted out a big orange Longhorn flag and erected it over our firing point. ?Standoff.

Then we woke up one morning and the Longhorn flag had been stolen. ?Big mistake. ?The next morning the Guardsmen woke up to find their flag hanging from the business end of a howitzer:

How did it end? ?The Guardsmen went (crying, I would imagine) to their First Sergeant. ?A prisoner exchange was conducted, they learned their lesson, and the matter was resolved. ?The Sooners won 55-17.

ATTEMPT TO GET BACK ON TOPIC

Okay, tweets, that?s why you are here right? Let?s get started:

Again, its a satire blog. ?If you don?t understand why the above tweet is satirical then apparently high school history was just one of those subjects you didn?t ?test well? in.

Initial response is simple: it depends on whether you go to the gym or not. ?Then I read the article and found that not only was it a Lite version of something that Control Your Cash put up recently it was also poorly written and edited. ?Granted it was a guest post so I guess the blog owner gets a bit of a pass this time.

Unless you are a dedicated enthusiast, who must have access to specific equipment, a gym membership is usually a waste of money. There are cheaper and more enjoyable alternatives to getting exercise.

There you have it: unnecessary clauses, poor grammar, and qualifiers that defeat the point of writing an article. ?How do you measure the worth of a gym membership? Annual fee divided by the number of days you actually went to the gym? ?Change in healthcare premium as a percentage of the annual fee? What is the metric? ?Its simple enough to say that going for a walk is cheaper than using the C2 rowing machine (it?s also a bigger waste of time if you are into that kind of thing) but fitness isn?t measured in dollars spent, its measured in physical performance, so whether one is cheaper than the other is irrelevant. ?I guarantee that you will increase your cardiovascular fitness (which can be quantified) with less time invested (also quantifiable) with the C2 rower than with walking. ?Come back with a post that puts those numbers up against the price you pay for access and I won?t make fun of it.

Or you could just check out the $0 Workout Of The Week from the Carnival of Financial Discipline. Your call.

This ties in to the piece I wrote about Amazon Prime last week. ?The article is a good primer on the fundamentals of this issue and also includes this little doozy:

Last week the movement to pass the tax picked up an important ally: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The governor endorsed the idea that states should be able to compel online companies to collect sales taxes. In May, the governor reached a deal with Amazon.com to collect sales tax for online purchases for the Garden State. The online giant will open two distribution facilities in the state and bring in a reported 1,500 full-time jobs. In exchange, the 7% sales tax won?t be implemented until 2013.

That sound you can?t hear? Its people continuing to buy books from Barnes & Noble.

Does anybody else get tired of attempts at relating?everything kids do before they hit puberty to how it could influence their lives twenty years down the road? ?If you want to teach your kid about money give him $20 worth of venture capital to open up a lemonade stand along with a primer on quality of product, location, customer service, and pricing. ?On the other hand if your kid comes back from camp and manages to get your family to realize that?turning off the lights in rooms that you are not in is a good idea then you have no business investing your money in anything, let alone a beverage start-up.

Kids are very impressionable, as all parents know, and summer camp may introduce all sorts of new proclamations, from ?I want to be a vegetarian? to ?Let?s replace all the light bulbs with LEDs,? which my 9-year-old son suggested after a riveting day in science camp! (Apparently, they?re even more energy-efficient than CFLs.)

My family compromised: we would skip the expensive LEDs ($20-$50 a pop!), but turn off lights when leaving a room to save nearly $1,500 in energy costs per year. (Emphasis added by me)

I couldn?t make this up if I tried. ?By the way the author of the piece is on the?President?s Advisory Council on Financial Capability and is also the author of a New York Times bestseller so clearly she has found a way to turn obvious stuff that your mom used to tell you every day into a cash-cow. Good for her. THAT is the skill she should be teaching her kid don?t you think?

And on that note we have come to the end of yet another slightly demoralizing edition of Tuesday Tweets. ? Come back tomorrow for something original that might be loosely related to personal finance and follow me on Twitter @6400PF so you can, you know, read my tweets.

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Source: http://6400personalfinance.com/2012/07/31/tuesday-tweets-july-31st-2012/

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