My Big Fat Belizean, Singaporean Bank Account

Earlier this month, I decided to see how hard it would be to set up my own offshore bank account. I figured it would be pretty difficult, because I’m not rich and don’t have a team of tax lawyers to oversee my money and because the E.U. and U.S. governments have been cracking down on tax havens by imposing stricter tax-sharing requirements. So I proceeded with some caution.

First, I Googled “company registration tax haven” and randomly picked three firms that set up accounts in offshore jurisdictions. Then I called each and explained that I was hoping to minimize my tax exposure and didn’t want anyone to know anything about my finances. Each company quickly noted that I should consult a lawyer to make sure that I wasn’t breaking the law. Then they calmly explained how to create an account that, it seemed to me, was unlikely to be discovered by the I.R.S. or any other authority.

I ended up working with A&P Intertrust, a Canadian company that I chose largely because I liked its Web site the best. (The other two companies’ sites appeared stuck in a late-’90s style with lots of flashing boxes.) A&P works with the governments of Panama, the British Virgin Islands and Belize. (Other companies that I contacted prefer the Seychelles, Cyprus or the Cayman Islands, where Mitt Romney has been reported to have money.) I decided to start my shell company in Belize because it would be exempt from all Belizean taxes and, as A&P’s site explained, “information about beneficial owners, shareholders, directors and officers is not filed with the Belize government and not available to the public.” And I’ve been to Belize and like the place.

Setting up the company was a lot cheaper than I expected. A&P charged $900 for a basic Belizean incorporation and another $85 for a corporate seal to emboss legal documents. For $650 more, A&P offered to open a bank account to stash my fledgling operation’s money in Singapore — a country, the Web site also noted, that “cannot gather information on foreigners’ bank accounts, bank-deposit interest and investment gains under domestic tax law.” And for another $690, it offered to assign a “nominee” who would be listed as the official manager and owner of my business but would report to me under a secret power-of-attorney contract. Then an A&P associate asked me to fill out the incorporation information online, just so she wouldn’t type in anything incorrectly. The whole thing took about 10 minutes. (...)

Setting up an account may be easy, but managing one is expensive. Following the law requires a team of lawyers and accountants to carefully monitor tax laws in dozens of countries and maintain accounts that stay on the safe side of confusing rules. It’s not really worth the cost for anyone other than wealthy investors looking to put aside money, tax-free, for future generations. Or for large multinationals who prefer to centralize their global cash-flow stream in a place that doesn’t tax corporations or require a lot of financial reporting. Why would a huge company like G.E. want to pay U.S. taxes every time its Spanish subsidiary sells parts to a company in Belarus when it could avoid them by incorporating offshore?

It’s easy to imagine that most other kinds of offshore activity are shady, but there is no definitive way to know, because we don’t even know how much money is in these centers. The estimates, however, are striking. The Bank for International Settlements, which collects voluntary reports from banks in 44 countries, offers the best single source of data. It counts around $31 trillion of foreign-owned assets in the world’s banks and estimates that about $4 trillion is in offshore financial centers. An estimated $1.5 trillion is in the Cayman Islands alone. The country of 52,000, which is about the size of Blaine, Minn., has more foreign-owned deposits than Japan or the Netherlands.

by Adam Davidson, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Marilynn K. Yee

川瀬敏郎
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Liu Maoshan（Chinese, b.1942）

Songs of Birds Echos in Jiangnan  

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Yankees Acquire Ichiro Suzuki From Mariners

[ed. Good job, Mariners. Ever since 2000-2001 you've excelled in trading your best players away. See also: Careers of Suzuki and Matsui are further intertwined.] 

In their recent search for help in the outfield, theYankees explored several modest options that might have created a small ripple inside the world of baseball. Instead, they made a move that surprised two continents and helped reinvigorate their pursuit of a 28th World Series title.

With a little more than two months remaining in the season the Yankees acquired Ichiro Suzuki, who became the first Japan-born position player in the majors when he joined theMariners in 2001, when he was named the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player.

Before Monday’s game between the two teams at Safeco Field, the Yankees sent minor league pitchers D. J. Mitchell and Danny Farquhar to the Mariners for Suzuki , whose five-year, $90 million contract expires after this season. The Yankees will also receive cash to offset the financial commitment. (...)

The Yankees designated outfielder Dewayne Wise to make room on the roster for Suzuki , a 10-time All-Star whose success in the majors helped pave the way for many other Japanese position players, including the former Yankee Hideki Matsui.

But Ichiro, who signed with the Mariners before the 2001 season and then put together a record 10 straight years of 200 hits, had grown tired of all the losing in Seattle.

About two weeks ago his agent, Tony Attanasio, called the Mariners on behalf of Ichiro and requested a trade to a contending team. The Mariners are once again in re-building process and Suzuki wanted the chance to play for a playoff-bound team before his career ends.

He will have that with the Yankees, who went into Monday’s game against the Mariners with a 57-38 record and a six-game lead in the American League East.

The Mariners were only too happy to accommodate Suzuki’s wishes, considering they were 42-55 going into Monday’s game, and had little interest in re-signing him. Although still considered a gifted player, Ichiro is in the midst of his worst season after a precipitous decline over the past two seasons.

He went into Monday’s game batting .261 with a paltry .288 on-base percentage. He scored 49 runs and had 15 doubles, 5 triples, 4 home runs, 28 runs batted in and 15 stolen bases.

It is a long way from the player he was as recently as 2010 when he hit .315 with 214 hits and had a .359 O.B.P. Suzuki became an instant sensation in his rookie year with Seattle, hitting .359 with 242 hits and 127 runs scored for the juggernaut Mariners. He joined Fred Lynn of the Boston Red Sox in 1975 as the only rookie to win the M.V.P. award.

Suzuki helped take the Mariners to the American League Championship Series in 2001, where they lost to the Yankees in five games. He went 16 for 38 with two doubles and seven runs scored, but he never made it back to the playoffs. It was the only time he ever played left field, he said.

He would go on to carve out a Hall of Fame career, with a historic list of accomplishments. He has led or tied for the major league lead in hits seven times, matching Ty Cobb and Pete Rose as the only other players to do it, and is the only one to do it in five consecutive years.

by David Waldstein, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

Steve Jobs: Inspiration or Cautionary Tale?

Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the current pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, the recently recrowned chief executive had a simple response: Break the contract. When an Apple manager warned him that this decision would probably mean a lawsuit, Jobs responded, “Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.”

The shipper did sue. The manager quit Apple. (Jobs “would have fired me anyway,” he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a significant amount of money to resolve. But meanwhile, Apple hired a new shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO.

What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? After all, we turn to the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want. Jobs routinely told subordinates that they were assholes, that they never did anything right. According to Isaacson, even Jonathan Ive, Apple’s incomparable design chief, came in for rough treatment on occasion. Once, after checking into a five-star London hotel handpicked for him by Ive, Jobs called it “a piece of shit” and stormed out. “The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him,” Ive explained to the biographer. Jobs’ flouting of those rules extended outside the office, to a family that rarely got to spend much time with him as well as to strangers (police officers, retail workers), who experienced the CEO’s verbal wrath whenever they displeased him.

Jobs has been dead for nearly a year, but the biography about him is still a best seller. Indeed, his life story has emerged as an odd sort of holy scripture for entrepreneurs—a gospel and an antigospel at the same time. To some, Jobs’ life has revealed the importance of sticking firmly to one’s vision and goals, no matter the psychic toll on employees or business associates. To others, Jobs serves as a cautionary tale, a man who changed the world but at the price of alienating almost everyone around him. The divergence in these reactions is a testament to the two deep and often contradictory hungers that drive so many of us today: We want to succeed in the world of work, but we also want satisfaction in the realm of home and family. For those who, like Jobs, have pledged to “put a dent in the universe,” his thorny life story has forced a reckoning. Is it really worth being like Steve?

In one camp are what you might call the acolytes. They’re businesspeople who have taken the life of Steve Jobs as license to become more aggressive as visionaries, as competitors, and above all as bosses. They’re giving themselves over to the thrill of being a general—and, at times, a dictator. Work was already the center of their lives, but Jobs’ story has made them resolve to double down on that choice.  (...)

The second camp is what you might call the rejectors. These are entrepreneurs who, on reading about Jobs since his death, have recoiled from the total picture of the man—not just his treatment of employees but the dictatorial, uncompromising way that he approached life. Isaacson’s biography is full of stories of Jobs as an unpleasant individual—the fits he would throw over the most picayune-seeming details, like the type of flowers in his hotel room or the way an aging Whole Foods barista made his smoothie. He would park in handicap spaces; he refused to get a license plate for his car. And he abandoned his oldest daughter, applying his “reality distortion field” to the question of his own paternity.

by Ben Austin, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: Gregg Segal

XTRATUFs versus SORT-OF-TUFs

Those accustomed to XTRATUF boots, and they are numerous around here, might have noticed a change in quality lately. If you bought your boots after Christmas, chances are that your previously U.S.-made boots are now a product of China.

Beyond the argument of whether or not the company should have left its home in Rock Island, Illinois for cheaper Chinese workforce, both customers and the company say the quality of the product has suffered from the move. Word around the harbor is that XTRATUFs aren’t so tough anymore.

Andrew Moravec, a 29 year-old fishing guide, has been a regular user of XTRATUFs for years. He bought his latest pair one month ago and the boot already shows decaying symptoms.

“I had my first pair of XTRATUFs for two and a half years and they were fine,” says Moravec surrounded by fish oil, a knee on the ground getting the flesh out of a halibut’s cheek. “I got these a month ago and literally within two weeks they started to separate,” he says while inserting his finger right through the brown body of the boot and the white rubber seal above the sole.

Ian Winder, another fishing guide working at the Orca Adventure Lodge during the summer, looks at his colleagues’ boots with frustration and jumps in the conversation. “Look at this, the rubber is chipping off, that’s ridiculous after a month!” Winder wears his XTRATUFs 24/7 throughout the season.

“These are my footwear. I’m going into town in training: I’m wearing these. I’m cleaning fish: I’m wearing these. I’m out on the boat: I’m wearing these. I go everywhere,” he says proudly. (...)

Determined to verify the trustworthiness of such allegations against one of Alaska’s most cherished items of clothing, I called a few stores in Valdez. There, Joe Prax, owner of Prospector Outfitters, tells me of similar problems encountered by men working on oil tanks. Their boots too, have been falling apart as they hadn’t before.

“They need to know it's a big deal. The boots are called XTRATUF and not SORT-OF-TUF,” says Prax over the phone. The owner of this apparel and outdoor gear store says he decided long ago to share his clients discontent with representatives of the brand. “I have really tried to get that across to them.”

So, does this mean XTRATUFs devotees should switch for competition? Not quite yet, say Honeywell - XTRATUF’s manufacturers and representatives in the U.S. “We did not change any of the components, we build the boots in the same way,” ensures Steve Haynes, a sales representative at NorthStar Sales Group.

The problem seems to be coming from the poor training given to employees in the Chinese plant rather than the material or technique used. According to the company, both equipment and molds used in the U.S. were moved to China, as well as a management team from the Rock Island factory to oversee training.

“By moving to China we knew we would be under the microscope, and we goofed with the training of the people making the boots,” says Haynes.

by Diane Jeantet, Cordova Times |  Read more:

Stephen Bone, The Artist’s Studio. 1938
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The Basics of Owning Bonds

I need some yield!

This is the battle cry of investors who have become frustrated with the low yields that the Fed’s zero interest rate policy has created.

Indeed, last week saw the 10-year Treasury bond yields fall to near-record lows. This holding, the backbone U.S. bonds for most fixed-income investors, fell below a yield of 1.5 percent. And Federal Reserve chief Ben S. Bernanke gave rather dour testimony to Congress about his expectations for a weak economy in the near future.

The impact also was felt in equities, where, perversely, the bad news led to a stock rally. The traders’ assumptions — Yeah! The economy is getting worse! — was that more weakness will beget another round of quantitative easing. That excess liquidity has a tendency to goose stocks higher.

But it is in the bond market where some very odd things are occurring. Buyers of the 10-year Treasury are agreeing to lend Uncle Sam money for a decade and receive a piddling interest payment of 1.5 percent. That is barely above inflation in the depressed environment, where price rises have been modest. It is reasonable to expect higher inflation in the future, but when that will finally hit is anyone’s guess.

Given these low, low yields, perhaps it is time to revisit some of the basics about owning bonds, bond funds and ETFs (exchange-traded funds). We can also explore what alternatives exist regarding yield and generating income.

The most important thing you need to know about bonds is that they are essentially loans to some entity. As such, there are three main elements to any bond:

Quality: The credit worthiness of the borrower.

Duration: The length of the loan.

Yield: What the loan pays you in interest.

As is always the case in investing, there is no free lunch. If you want higher yield, you are either buying riskier bonds or lending money for a longer period of time (you can also use leverage, making a riskier investment even riskier).

There is something terribly disconcerting about so many people “discovering” bonds AFTER a 30-year bull run in fixed-income instruments.

My point of view on bonds as investments or income sources is simple. Here are five points to know:

1 Ladder: Owning individual bonds in a ladder — meaning a series of bonds that mature in successive years — is the correct way to own fixed income. By laddering bonds (2014-15-16-17, etc.), you are not tying up money for too long. If and when rates go up, you get to reinvest the specific holdings as they mature with higher yielding issues (note that if this happens, inflation is probably higher).

At present low rates, I prefer to keep my bond ladders to no longer than seven years. (This is much preferred to bond funds.)

by Barry Ritholtz, The Washington Post |  Read more:

We Are Alive

The atmosphere inside was purposeful but easygoing. Musicians stood onstage noodling on their instruments with the languid air of outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the band’s volcanic drummer, wore the sort of generous jeans favored by dads at weekend barbecues. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, keeps up a brutal schedule as an actor and a d.j., and he seemed weary, his eyes drooping under a piratical purple head scarf. The bass player Garry Tal-lent, the organist Charlie Giordano, and the pianist Roy Bittan horsed around on a roller-rink tune while they waited. The guitarist Nils Lofgren was on the phone, trying to figure out flights to get back to his home, in Scottsdale, for the weekend.

Springsteen arrived and greeted everyone with a quick hello and his distinctive cackle. He is five-nine and walks with a rolling rodeo gait. When he takes in something new—a visitor, a thought, a passing car in the distance—his eyes narrow, as if in hard light, and his lower jaw protrudes a bit. His hairline is receding, and, if one had to guess, he has, over the years, in the face of high-def scrutiny and the fight against time, enjoined the expensive attentions of cosmetic and dental practitioners. He remains dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit. (“He has practically the same waist size as when I met him, when we were fifteen,” says Steve Van Zandt, who does not.) Some of this has to do with his abstemious inclinations; Van Zandt says Springsteen is “the only guy I know—I think the only guy I know at all—who never did drugs.” He’s followed more or less the same exercise regimen for thirty years: he runs on a treadmill and, with a trainer, works out with weights. It has paid off. His muscle tone approximates a fresh tennis ball. And yet, with the tour a month away, he laughed at the idea that he was ready. “I’m not remotely close,” he said, slumping into a chair twenty rows back from the stage.

Preparing for a tour is a process far more involved than middle-aged workouts designed to stave off premature infarction. “Think of it this way: performing is like sprinting while screaming for three, four minutes,” Springsteen said. “And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then you walk a little, shouting the whole time. And so on. Your adrenaline quickly overwhelms your conditioning.” His style in performance is joyously demonic, as close as a white man of Social Security age can get to James Brown circa 1962 without risking a herniated disk or a shattered pelvis. Concerts last in excess of three hours, without a break, and he is constantly dancing, screaming, imploring, mugging, kicking, windmilling, crowd-surfing, climbing a drum riser, jumping on an amp, leaping off Roy Bittan’s piano. The display of energy and its depletion is part of what is expected of him. In return, the crowd participates in a display of communal adoration. Like pilgrims at a gigantic outdoor Mass—think John Paul II at Gdansk—they know their role: when to raise their hands, when to sway, when to sing, when to scream his name, when to bear his body, hand over hand, from the rear of the orchestra to the stage. (Van Zandt: “Messianic? Is that the word you’re looking for?”)

Springsteen came to glory in the age of Letterman, but he is anti-ironical. Keith Richards works at seeming not to give a shit. He makes you wonder if it is harder to play the riffs for “Street Fighting Man” or to dangle a cigarette from his lips by a single thread of spit. Springsteen is the opposite. He is all about flagrant exertion. There always comes a moment in a Springsteen concert, as there always did with James Brown, when he plays out a dumb show of the conflict between exhaustion and the urge to go on. Brown enacted it by dropping to his knees, awash in sweat, unable to dance another step, yet shooing away his cape bearer, the aide who would enrobe him and hustle him offstage. Springsteen slumps against the mike stand, spent and still, then, regaining consciousness, shakes off the sweat—No! It can’t be!—and calls on the band for another verse, another song. He leaves the stage soaked, as if he had swum around the arena in his clothes while being chased by barracudas. “I want an extreme experience,” he says. He wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, “with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”

by David Remick, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Julian Broad

From an Unlikely Source, a Serious Challenge to Wall Street

Something very interesting is happening.

There’s been so much corruption on Wall Street in recent years, and the federal government has appeared to be so deeply complicit in many of the problems, that many people have experienced something very like despair over the question of what to do about it all.

But there’s something brewing that looks like it might eventually turn into a blueprint to take on the financial services industry: a plan to allow local governments to take on the problem of neighborhoods blighted by toxic home loans and foreclosures through the use of eminent domain. I can't speak for how well this program will work, but it's certaily been effective in scaring the hell out of Wall Street.

Under the proposal, towns would essentially be seizing and condemning the man-made mess resulting from the housing bubble. Cooked up by a small group of businessmen and ex-venture capitalists, the audacious idea falls under the category of "That’s so crazy, it just might work!" One of the plan’s originators described it to me as a "four-bank pool shot."

Here’s how the New York Times described it in an article from earlier this week entitled, "California County Weighs Drastic Plan to Aid Homeowners":

Desperate for a way out of a housing collapse that has crippled the region, officials in San Bernardino County … are exploring a drastic option — using eminent domain to buy up mortgages for homes that are underwater.

Then, the idea goes, the county could cut the mortgages to the current value of the homes and resell the mortgages to a private investment firm, which would allow homeowners to lower their monthly payments and hang onto their property.

I’ve been following this story for months now – I was tipped off that this was coming earlier this past spring – and in the time since I’ve become more convinced the idea might actually work, thanks mainly to the lucky accident that the plan doesn’t require the permission of anyone up in the political Olympus.

Cities and towns won’t need to ask for an act of a bank-subsidized congress to do this, and they won’t need a federal judge to sign off on any settlement. They can just do it. In the Death Star of America’s financial oligarchy, the ability of local governments to use eminent domain to seize toxic debt might be the one structural flaw big enough for the rebel alliance to exploit. (...)

The plan is being put forward by a company called Mortgage Resolution Partners, run by a venture capitalist named Steven Gluckstern. MRP absolutely has a profit motive in the plan, and much is likely to be made of that in the press as this story develops. I've heard many arguments on both sides about this particular approach to the eminent domain concept. But either way, I doubt this ends up being entirely about money.

“What happened is, a bunch of us got together and asked ourselves what a fix of the housing/foreclosure problem would look like,” Gluckstern. “Then we asked, is there a way to fix it and make money, too. I mean, we're businessmen. Obviously, if there wasn’t a financial motive for anybody, it wouldn’t happen.”

Here’s how it works: MRP helps raise the capital a town or a county would need to essentially “buy” seized home loans from the banks and the bondholders (remember, to use eminent domain to seize property, governments must give the owners “reasonable compensation,” often interpreted as fair current market value).

Once the town or county seizes the loan, it would then be owned by a legal entity set up by the local government – San Bernardino, for instance, has set up a JPA, or Joint Powers Authority, to manage the loans.

At that point, the JPA is simply the new owner of the loan. It would then approach the homeowner with a choice. If, for some crazy reason, the homeowner likes the current situation, he can simply keep making his same inflated payments to the JPA. Not that this is likely, but the idea here is that nobody would force homeowners to do anything.

On the other hand, the town can also offer to help the homeowner find new financing. In conjunction with companies like MRP (or the copycat firms like it that would inevitably spring up), the counties and towns would arrange for private lenders to enter the picture, and help homeowners essentially buy back his own house, only at a current market price. Just like that, the homeowner is no longer underwater and threatened with foreclosure. (...)

But MRP’s role aside, this is also a compelling political story with potentially revolutionary consequences. If this gambit actually goes forward, it will inevitably force a powerful response both from Wall Street and from its allies in federal government, setting up a cage-match showdown between lower Manhattan and, well, everywhere else in America. In fact, the first salvoes in that battle have already been fired.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement

I work on retirement policy, so friends often want to talk about their own retirement plans and prospects. While I am happy to have these conversations, my friends usually walk away feeling worse — for good reason.

Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.

In my ad hoc retirement talks, I repeatedly hear about the “guy.” This is a for-profit investment adviser, often described as, “I have this guy who is pretty good, he always calls, doesn’t push me into investments.” When I ask how much the “guy” costs, or if the guy has fiduciary loyalty — to the client, not the firm — or if their investments do better than a standard low-fee benchmark, they inevitably don’t know. After hearing about their magical guy, I ask about their “number.”

To maintain living standards into old age we need roughly 20 times our annual income in financial wealth. If you earn $100,000 at retirement, you need about $2 million beyond what you will receive from Social Security. If you have an income-producing partner and a paid-off house, you need less. This number is startling in light of the stone-cold fact that most people aged 50 to 64 have nothing or next to nothing in retirement accounts and thus will rely solely on Social Security.

Even for those who know their “number” and are prepared for retirement (it happens, rarely), these conversations aren’t easy. At dinner one night, a friend told me how much he has in retirement assets and said he didn’t think he had saved enough. I mentally calculated his mortality, figured he would die sooner than he predicted, and told him cheerfully that he shouldn’t worry. (“Congratulations!”) But dying early is not the basis of a retirement plan.

If we manage to accept that our investments will likely not be enough, we usually enter another fantasy world — that of working longer. After all, people hear that 70 is the new 50, and a recent report from Boston College says that if people work until age 70, they will most likely have enough to retire on. Unfortunately, this ignores the reality that unemployment rates for those over 50 are increasing faster than for any other group and that displaced older workers face a higher risk of long-term unemployment than their younger counterparts. If those workers ever do get re-hired, it’s not without taking at least a 25 percent wage cut.

But the idea is tempting; people say they don’t want to retire and feel useless. Professionals say they can keep going, “maybe do some consulting” or find some other way to generate income well into their late 60s. Others say they can always be Walmart greeters. They rarely admit that many people retire earlier than they want because they are laid off or their spouse becomes sick.

Like the nation’s wealth gap, the longevity gap has also widened. The chance to work into one’s 70s primarily belongs to the most well off. Medical technology has helped extend life, by helping older people survive longer with illnesses and by helping others stay active. The gains in longevity in the last two decades almost all went to people earning more than average. It makes perfect sense for human beings to think each of us is special and can work forever. To admit you can’t, or might not be able to, is hard, and denial and magical thinking are underrated human coping devices in response to helplessness and fear.

So it’s not surprising that denial dominates my dinner conversations, but it is irresponsible for Congress to deny that regardless of how much you throw 401(k) advertising, pension cuts, financial education and tax breaks at Americans, the retirement system simply defies human behavior. Basing a system on people’s voluntarily saving for 40 years and evaluating the relevant information for sound investment choices is like asking the family pet to dance on two legs.

by Theresa Ghilarducci, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos

Let My Mother Go

On the way to visit my mother one recent rainy afternoon, I stopped in, after quite some constant prodding, to see my insurance salesman. He was pressing his efforts to sell me a long-term-care policy with a pitch about how much I'd save if I bought it now, before the rates were set to precipitously rise. I am, as my insurance man pointed out, a "sweet spot" candidate. Not only do I have the cash (though not enough to self-finance my decline) but a realistic view: like so many people in our 50s – in my experience almost everybody – I have a parent in an advanced stage of terminal breakdown.

I didn't need to be schooled in the realities of long-term care: the costs for my mother, who is 86 and who, for the past 18 months, has not been able to walk, talk or to address her most minimal needs and, to boot, is absent a short-term memory, come in at about $17,000 a month. And while her insurance hardly covers all of that, I'm certainly grateful she had the foresight to carry such a policy. (Although the carrier has never paid on time and all payments involve hours of being on hold with its invariably unhelpful helpline operators – and please fax them, don't email.) My three children deserve as much.

And yet, on the verge of writing the cheque, I backed up.

What I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother's bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering – who can so conscientiously facilitate it?

"Why do we want to cure cancer? Why do we want everybody to stop smoking? For this?" wailed a friend of mine with two long-ailing and yet tenacious in-laws.

Age is one of the great modern adventures, a technological marvel – we're given several more youthful-ish decades if we take care of ourselves. Almost nobody, at least openly, sees this for its ultimate, dismaying, unintended consequence: by promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death we have created a new biological status – a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service – indentured servitude, really – and resources.

This is not anomalous; this is the norm.

The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one's sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are – through careful diet, diligent exercise and attentive medical scrutiny – the harder it is to die. Part of the advance in life expectancy is that we have technologically inhibited the ultimate event. We have fought natural causes to almost a draw. If you eliminate smokers, drinkers, other substance abusers, the obese and the fatally ill, you are left with a rapidly growing demographic segment peculiarly resistant to death's appointment – though far, far, far from healthy.

by Michael Wolff, The Guardian |  Read more:

#8, Sun Set Series

Fleur Van Dodewaard

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Scott Fraser, Metronome
oil on panel, 1990

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Will You Still Medal in the Morning?

Home to more than 10,000 athletes at the Summer Games and 2,700 at the Winter, the Olympic Village is one of the world's most exclusive clubs. To join, prospective members need only have spectacular talent and -- we long assumed -- a chaste devotion to the most intense competition of their lives. But the image of a celibate Games began to flicker in '92 when it was reported that the Games' organizers had ordered in prophylactics like pizza. Then, at the 2000 Sydney Games, 70,000 condoms wasn't enough, prompting a second order of 20,000 and a new standing order of 100,000 condoms per Olympics.

Many Olympians, past and present, abide by what Summer Sanders, a swimmer who won two gold medals, a silver and a bronze in Barcelona, calls the second Olympic motto: "What happens in the village stays in the village." Yet if you ask enough active and retired athletes often enough to spill their secrets, the village gates will fly open. It quickly becomes clear that, summer or winter, the games go on long after the medal ceremony. "There's a lot of sex going on," says women's soccer goalkeeper Hope Solo, a gold medalist in 2008. How much sex? "I'd say it's 70 percent to 75 percent of Olympians," offers world-record-holding swimmer Ryan Lochte, who will be in London for his third Games. "Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do."

The games begin as soon as teams move in a week or so before opening ceremonies. "It's like the first day of college," says water polo captain Tony Azevedo, a veteran of Beijing, Athens and Sydney who is returning to London. "You're nervous, super excited. Everyone's meeting people and trying to hook up with someone."

Which is perfectly understandable, if not to be expected. Olympians are young, supremely healthy people who've been training with the intensity of combat troops for years. Suddenly they're released into a cocoon where prying reporters and overprotective parents aren't allowed. Pre-competition testosterone is running high. Many Olympians are in tapering mode, full of excess energy because they're maintaining a training diet of up to 9,000 calories per day while not actually training as hard. The village becomes "a pretty wild scene, the biggest melting pot you've been in," says Eric Shanteau, an American who swam in Beijing and will be heading to London.

by Sam Alipour, ESPN |  Read more:

Photo: Olivia Harris/Getty Images

Not Your Dad's Golf: Portland Urban Golf Club

It's an overcast Saturday afternoon in Portland. A man in his late 20s with or without a beard rides his fixed-gear bike down the street, a pant leg rolled up so as not to get caught in the spokes—and then OUCH. A tennis ball hits him right in the spine. He looks back, and there's a group of people dressed in some over-the-top argyle outfits cheering and holding their golf clubs in the air.

It's just another Saturday in Portland—and someone saved a stroke by nailing the biker.

The Portland Urban Golf Club was formed by Scott Mazariegos back in 2005. An interaction designer with Adidas by day, Mazariegos was bored with his standard rec-league kickball team when he came up with the idea of mapping out a golf course in the streets of an industrial district in Portland. (Urban golf traces its roots back to early-90’s Germany. Mazariegos stressed that he didn’t invent the sport.) Lampposts, couches, and anything else they can find are used as holes, and tennis balls replace golf balls because, again, this is a golf course, literally, in the middle of a major American city.

The group started back in 2005 with around 20 or so members, and now a regular round—18 holes, usually starting around 3 p.m. on a Saturday; they used to start at noon, but, as Mazariegos said, “It turned out to be a very long day of drinking”—brings out anywhere from 40 to 150 members depending on the occasion.

Cops showed up that first day because, you know, there were people playing golf in the streets of downtown Portland, but after seeing that the golfers were playing with tennis balls, the officers let them be. A few of them even wanted to join in, according to Mazariegos.

“There are holes that are your standard, down-the-road, dog leg to the left, dog leg to the right,” Mazariegos said, as if anything at all about this is standard. “A hole can be anywhere from a block to five blocks, depending on what and where we’re playing.” Some holes are trickier, involving overpasses and barbed-wire fences. Currently, the Portland Urban Golf Club has 22 designed, mapped-out courses, with four more in the works.

There is no par, and most people don’t keep score. When the group first started, the vast majority of the golfers had never played golf—or any other sport—before, so they gave out trophies to whoever had the highest score. “There’d be these people who’d never even gotten off the couch,” Mazariegos said, “and they’d get a trophy at the end of the day.”

The group stops at a bar every three holes and then moves on to the next trio of alleyways and chain-link fences. Some take it seriously—bets get placed, beers get bought—and others don't really care about anything other than just being there and being a part of it all. You get to deduct a stroke for every public transportation vehicle hit, every bike rider clocked, and every time your ball gets run over by a car. Seriously.

by Ryan O'Hanlon, Outside Magazine |  Read more:

Photographer: Scott Mazariegos

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