Category: Dividend Income

Here is the dividend income report for August, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $309.70. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $6589.89.

The income for August, 2022 was $219.36, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of August was $6135.89.

My job situation is up in the air. I am not assigned to a project at the moment, so I might be let go. Part of me would be glad to leave, although I have nothing lined up. If I can stay for a couple of more years, I can get some nice benefits. If you leave the company and you are at least 55 years old and you have been with the company for at least ten years, they will provide health insurance for life. Granted, a lot of companies have rescinded benefits. And I really do not like the direction the company is going in; they are a large consulting firm, and they seem to care more about getting clients to use expensive software from the vendors than building robust applications and teaching them how to use technology themselves. Two and a half years is a long time to deal with this stuff. I am sick to death of anything from Microsoft and I would love to stay in tech and never touch anything Apple or Google or Facebook or Microsoft ever again. And I would love to deal with people where I can say I am tired of Big Tech, and not get the regurgitated response that I have to use big vendor garbage because everybody else does.

If I leave, I will transfer a lot of money from my Roth 401K to my Roth IRA. I might load up on Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF, XYLD. The payout varies from month to month, but I might be able to get $1000 a month from it. I might alternate what I do with that money each month: One month reinvest the dividends and buy more shares of XYLD, then the next month have the dividends go to cash, and use that to buy shares in one of the other ETFs I have. If I could do that, I would be adding as much each year as the yearly contribution limits. The risk is I would be putting a LOT into one fund. I will see what happens in the next few weeks.

If I had ten times as much XYLD as I do now, then I think that could cover my expenses today. Granted, I cannot touch it for a while since it is in an IRA.

There was an article on Yahoo Finance recently saying that if you have assets and/or income to cover your expenses 36 times over then you do not need an annuity. I know a lot of people think annuities are not worth the fees, expenses and restrictions, and the site this article was taken from really pushes annuities. Nevertheless, I thought it was an interesting statistic. My goal is to live off of the dividends and not touch principal.

I saw a few other articles on Yahoo Finance that I thought were interesting. And infuriating. It was more bellyaching about the debt. The kind that only seems to happen when we have a Democrat in the White House.

One of them is ‘Mind-blowing’ US debt binge amid high interest rates is threatening financial stability, Larry McDonald says. This guy runs a site called The Bear Traps Report. I had never heard of this guy before, I just saw an article about him on Yahoo Finance. Where were these guys when Trump and Rethuglicans cut taxes on wealthy in 2017? That had an effect on debt too, and cutting taxes has never made the federal government spend less. There were not too many articles pointing out the conservative bait and switch that happens over and over again, unless you go to Daily Kos. Anyone who tells you the media is liberal is delusional.

Conservatives do the same bait-and-switch all the time with taxes. Cutting taxes (especially on the wealthy) will cause the federal government to cut spending, and shrink the debt, yield more federal revenue, and grow the economy like gangbusters. Likewise, raising taxes or letting cuts expire will cause us to become a third-world country.

Bill Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which raised taxes on the wealthy. Rethuglicans told us it would be doom for us all. Full stop. But I remember the 1990s as being pretty good. Maybe it is because I was in my 20s at the time, but jobs were plentiful, interest rates were low, and people had hope for the future. Conservatives might say that raising taxes on rich people did not crater the economy because of, say, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, or all the spending companies did to prevent their systems from crashing due to the Y2K bug. But that is the bait and switch: they make simple, even simplistic, predictions, and when they do not pan out they appeal to the very complexity they denied when making their predictions.

If you look at some graphs of economic data, it is impossible to see the effects of tax cuts or the expiration of tax cuts. The slopes are not constants, but we do not see the dramatic effects that conservatives always tell us we are going to see any minute now.

Here is a graph of federal expenditures from 2001.01.01 to 2023.04.01. Here they are from 1999.01.01 to 2023.04.01 so we can see the Clinton years as well. Where is the glorious prosperity from the Bush and Trump tax cuts? Where is the crushing depressions from Clinton, Obama and Biden? Hard to say from this graph.

Here is a graph of US GDP from 1993.01.01 to 2023.04.01. If you did not have the years to guide you, I do not think you would know which years were under Democratic or Rethuglican presidents.

Here is a graph of total public debt from 1993.01.01 to 2023.04.01. Yes, Obama’s slope is steeper than Bush’s, but Bush’s is steeper than Clinton’s. And the Trump years look like the Obama years. The graph is noticeably steeper in the Biden years. I guess we are still feeling the effects of that nasty pandemic that Trump told us would miraculously go away in April 2020 [Note 1]. A lot of people think that if a politician has the magic “R” after their name then they know what they are doing. We can safely assume the opposite: Rethuglicans have no idea what they are doing.

And Obama was dealing with the fallout of Bush. I do not think the Great Financial Crisis was caused by tax cuts. Deregulation was the cause. Yes, some of the deregulation happened under Clinton, but then why didn’t the Bush administration undo it? Conservatives are always telling us they know how the world works. At least that what they say until everything falls apart on their watch.

And if the media was even 1% as “liberal” as a lot of people seem to think, none of these bozos would get elected to be dog catcher.

I have written about the conservative bait-and-switch on taxes here and here. And when conservatives realize they have no arguments left, they will usually say, “But don’t you want to pay less tax?” Yes, that would be nice, but I do not think we should pile debt onto ourselves or our posterity. I would like to understand reality as it is as opposed to living in a fantasy world. And if you want to live in a nice country, you have to pay for it.

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Note 1: Per this page at CNN (link here, archive here), on March 1 the US was seeing 3 new cases a day; on March 31, it was 19,337 cases a day.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each August from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2023-08	$6589.89	$309.70	$1236.42	$1053.31
2022-08	$6135.89	$219.36	$1195.56	$1001.53
2021-08	$5069.04	$207.39	$856.33	$899.01
2020-08	$4822.38	$205.28	$790.58	$910.30
2019-08	$4373.04	$63.10	$788.78	$697.89
2018-08	$2970.08	$48.14	$549.51	$540.48
2017-08	$4021.30	$581.69	$558.23	$546.50
2016-08	$3539.84	$522.20	$493.44	$493.92
2015-08	$3084.90	$406.45	$427.26	$422.22
2014-08	$2456.27	$323.94	$348.41	$323.64
2013-08	$1978.40	$305.11	$279.05	$287.74
2012-08	$2110.57	$316.04	$280.53	$277.00
2011-08	$1878.52	$322.35	$254.56	$225.45

Here are the securities and the income amounts for August, 2023:

• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $37.76
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $202.52
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $18.90
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $50.52

 

Big Jim says he doesn’t care what women think about his dick, as along as they keep thinking about it.

Painting of The Lute Player by Caravaggio (1571 -1610); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain. Other images from St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED site.

Here is the dividend income report for May, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $288.94. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $2880.63.

The income for May 2022 was $151.63, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of May was $2549.21.

I do not have a whole lot to say on corrupt-o-currency this month.

One of the causes of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was duration mismatch. They bought long-dated bonds while interest rates were low, and as rates increased, they had solvency issues. I would argue that knowing how to deal with interest rates is something banks are supposed to know how to do. Just a guess: if rates are low, borrow bonds with short durations. My bank is a bank in Texas that has about $50-$55 billion in assets. They are in the asset size range ($50B to $250B) that was covered by tighter regulations when Dodd-Frank was passed, but then became exempt after the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act passed in 2017. Until spring of last year, they were paying my about $2-3 dollars in interest in my savings every month. Now for the past few months it has been $85-100 a month. So if my bank could handle rising interest rates, perhaps the people running SVB were just not good at their jobs.

In addition to duration mismatch, Michel de Cryptadamus says SVB went under due to dodgy loans to the usual SV trash: crypto bros, entitled VCs, founders of companies that do nothing useful (article here, archive here).

I do not have a whole lot to say about corrupt-o-currency this month. You can keep up with what is going on by going to Molly White’s newsletter (Mastodon link here) and reading the articles by Amy Castor and David Gerard (link to David’s Mastodon here; I do not think Amy Castor is on Mastodon).

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each May from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2023-05	$2880.63	$288.94	$861.81	$1043.10
2022-05	$2549.21	$151.63	$750.34	$916.72
2021-05	$2500.04	$160.93	$742.94	$882.58
2020-05	$2450.65	$179.08	$747.49	$909.85
2019-05	$2006.71	$150.95	$592.51	$638.08
2018-05	$1321.55	$44.66	$398.51	$542.66
2017-05	$2346.62	$531.68	$553.90	$530.30
2016-05	$2059.52	$436.85	$479.79	$477.37
2015-05	$1803.11	$361.99	$411.92	$402.51
2014-05	$1411.19	$280.01	$304.77	$306.30
2013-05	$1141.24	$242.65	$260.91	$288.11
2012-05	$1268.97	$258.15	$257.13	$270.51
2011-05	$1114.84	$266.55	$233.03	$194.61

Here are the securities and the income amounts for May, 2023:

• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $48.41
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $187.52
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $16.10
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $36.91

 

Big Jim was cataloging artwork in Org Mode, and does not have anything to say at the moment.

Image of “Hercules at the Crossroads” by Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787); image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for December, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $3,145.22. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $12,185.76.

The income for December, 2021 was $3,408.55, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of December was $10,951.48.

This is the sixth month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

Honestly, I have been kind of tired over the past few weeks: job, economy, worrying about money, etc. I am tired of reading about bitcon and corrupt-o-currency, tired of thinking about them, tired of hearing about them. I wish it would all just go away. As Emily Gilmore would say, it all just nonsense. Anyone who is into it is either a scammer or stupid. It’s bad enough dealing with people who think capital gains is the answer, or tax cuts are the solution to all the world’s problems, and then turn around and tell you the world is complicated when tax cuts do not make anything better. The Big Lie. QAnon. Monotheism. People who haven’t realized the only intelligent amount of booze is none. Generally the same people who are too stupid or too much of a jerk to grasp the concept that universal statements are not invitations to come up with exceptions. I need a break from it all.

In the past year I got RWR in both IRA accounts. Right now they are both underwater. I know I said we should not rely on capital gains; that does not mean I want my stocks to go to zero. The goal is to live off the dividends and never touch principal. I think some sectors of real estate will have some issues. I also think rising interest rates will help here. The plan is to hold these for the rest of my life.

I am still concerned I might not make it with the funds I have. My 12-month moving average after estimated taxes (which is not part of this report) would not cover my rent today, let alone my rent in 20 years. Granted, if I had my 401(k) from work in dividend ETFs, I would have much higher income. I know I have been saying for a couple of years that the end may be soon. I am still in that in-between state.

Here is a table of the number of Dividend Champions, Contenders, Challengers, and a total of all three for the first week of each January from 2011 to 2023. The methodology changed from 2021 to 2022, but I think it is still a good comparison. I am starting to wonder if the number of Champions will ever crack 140.

Year	Total	Champions	Contenders	Challengers
2023	723	130	348	245
2022	708	127	302	280
2021	729	139	308	282
2020	866	138	265	463
2019	864	131	205	528
2018	822	115	220	487
2017	768	108	227	433
2016	753	107	250	396
2015	611	106	246	259
2014	476	105	210	161
2013	458	105	183	170
2012	448	102	146	200
2011	447	99	141	207
2010		98	62	N/A
2009		125
2008		138

I have been looking at some posts on the Dividends subreddit, and I am thinking about going back to individual stocks. It is more likely that my income would go up. I am not clear why a dividend growth ETF would have a variable payout from one quarter to another. Granted, there are always companies cutting dividends and others joining the club, but I still think the payouts should go down less often than they do. This phenomenon is not just in the DGI ETFs that I have been in from Vanguard and State Street, but Black Rock’s as well. Granted, stocks can cut or freeze their dividends, but with individual stocks there is more upward momentum. One reason I stopped with individual stocks is that it is a lot of work entering all that information. I have a customized spreadsheet that cannot be automated, and I think most banks and brokers do not know what GnuCash is. I think most of the gain I got from ETFs was in the international ETFs.

Here are the 2021 and 2022 amounts for the securities that I own, with the differences. Yes, I know this is off for 2022. I might have entered something wrong in one sheet in my spreadsheet; I am willing to live with it.

Security	2021 Income	2022 Income	YOY Change
BND	1796.89	1907.55	110.66
BNDX	453.20	163.47	-289.73
LAND	204.55	46.10	-158.45
RLI	315.22	0	-315.22
RWR Reg	0	504.12	504.12
RWR Roth	0	853.13	853.13
SDY	3616.80	3501.55	-115.25
VPU	943.49	1053.15	109.66
WDIV	3080.13	3508.98	428.85
XYLD	473.24	620.80	147.56
Sold	67.96	0	-67.96
Total	10951.48	12158.85	1207.37

I have noticed on the Dividends subreddit they love SCHD. I plan on looking at that fund, and at its underlying index. Some of them really love SCHD over there. It is almost like a religion with some of them: And the lord spoke “thou shalt only buy” and lo, the believers prospered. The sinners sold and their fields lay barren and bereft of hope. Still, buying DGI stocks or ETFs and never selling is an idea I can get behind.

Another goal for this year is to follow a few more of Ron DeLegge’s ideas: Make a written investment policy statement, and try to pick a commodities ETF.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each December from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-12	$12185.76	$3145.22	$1296.91	$1015.48
2021-12	$10951.48	$3408.55	$1346.62	$912.62
2020-12	$10541.51	$3490.60	$1294.16	$878.46
2019-12	$10515.13	$3611.13	$1343.15	$876.26
2018-12	$6971.76	$2313.99	$1165.08	$580.98
2017-12	$7536.98	$1837.78	$913.40	$628.08
2016-12	$6076.53	$1027.76	$605.28	$506.38
2015-12	$5472.07	$954.52	$575.86	$456.01
2014-12	$4438.02	$909.86	$481.67	$369.80
2013-12	$3406.20	$594.59	$344.05	$283.85
2012-12	$3585.01	$686.10	$386.41	$298.75
2011-12	$3091.99	$514.94	$323.40	$253.92

Here are the securities and the income amounts for December, 2022:

• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $169.72
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $13.66
• Vanguard Utilities ETF VPU ETF: $278.12
• SPDR S&P Dividend ETF SDY ETF: $984.34
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF RWR ETF: $164.89
• SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF RWR ETF: $328.31
• SPDR S&P Global Dividend ETF: $978.89
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $178.06
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $49.23

 

Big Jim has a principle of never touching the principal.

Painting of the Anunciation at the Church of San Salvadore by Titian (1488-1576); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for November, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $278.11. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $9040.54.

The income for November, 2021 was $166.06, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of November was $7542.93.

This is the fifth month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

Before I continue writing about why bitcon and corrupt-o-currency are stupid, I should mention another no-coiner. I have written about David Gerard and his blog Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. He has weekly updates on what is happening in the world of corrupt-o-currency. I should also mention Amy Castor. He and Amy alternate the weekly report. Her blog is low-contrast, but you can read it in Reader View.

Six months ago there were a lot of bankruptcies in corrupt-o-currency: Voyager Digital, Three Arrows Capital, Terraform Labs, Celsius Network. A firm called FTX started buying other corrupt-o-currency firms, and a lot of people thought they were going to help the sector stabilize. Now FTX has gone bankrupt. The first wave of collapse brought bitcon from $30K to $20K. This wave has taken it from $20K to $17K.

Some bitcon maximalists think this will not hurt bitcon in the long run. One of David Gerard’s ongoing gags is to explain how something bad is actually “good for crypto” or “good for bitcoin”, because whenever anything happens that looks terrible, there is always someone who says “This is actually good for crypto because…” or “This is actually good for bitcoin because…”. Well, for those people, the hamster wheels in their brains are working overtime, because a lot is happening.

Blockchain is just a trojan horse for bitcon. When bitcon first came out, a lot of people who were not glibertarian dudebros asked what good is this? And the answer was: the magic is not bitcon itself, but the blockchain! For a long time you could not buy other coins directly. You had to go fiat -> bitcon -> some_other_stupid_coin. Then NFTs came along, and only two types of people thought they were any good: People selling them, and the first wave of buyers. It became a solution in search of a problem. Blockchain, NFT, alt-coins, ICO, web3: It’s all just a way to push bitcon.

Shipping company Maersk and IBM made a platform that used blockchain to manage global trade. They are shutting it down. I wrote a few months ago that Walmart is using blockchain to manage their supply chains in Canada. The vendor is DLT Labs, and their news page has not had any updates since then. Perhaps Walmart stopped using it and DLT Labs hasn’t mentioned it. Or at best DLT Labs is looking for a second customer for The Answer To All The World’s Problems. Back in 2017, blogger Tim Bray pointed out even then that we should have seen more success stories with blockchain. He mentioned other technologies that made life easier for developers and admins: Unix, C, Java, REST, cloud.

And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got [tasks] done and helped people with their jobs.

That’s not happening with blockchain. Not in the slightest. Which is why I don’t believe in it.

Maybe Walmart is expanding their use of blockchain with another vendor. Given what little I know about Walmart, they would not tell anyone. Maybe there are a few niche cases for blockchain. Maybe it will change the jobs of a few (hundred? thousand? ten-thousand?) people out there. But it’s not the web, it’s not Java, it’s not Rails, it’s not cloud.

I cannot find it, but there was a tweet from someone who said if you look at the chart for bitcon, you can almost see the moment it went from a toy for anarcho-glibertarians to a speculative asset for the masses. Well, the masses speculated, and they lost a lot of money.

Bitcon is the paradox of glibertarianism writ large: Glibertarian dudebros are always complaining about the guv-ment telling them what to do. Yet they have no problem trying to force changes on society that nobody asked for.

I have been gathering notes with links and comments from various sites about bitcon and corrupt-o-currency. Perhaps at some point I will get around to making it into a blog post and clear all that stuff out. Honestly, I wish bitcon and corrupt-o-currencies would all just go away. A few bloggers and lecturers have said they want it all to “die in a fire” (see here and here). Given that climate change is already an issue, there is a chance that bitcon won’t just die in a fire; it might take all of us with it.

As Amy Castor and David Gerard have pointed out, every firm in this sector is as Quadriga as they can get away with, until they cannot.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each November from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-11	$9040.54	$278.11	$968.22	$1037.42
2021-11	$7542.93	$166.06	$824.63	$919.46
2020-11	$7050.91	$196.63	$742.84	$885.10
2019-11	$6904.00	$126.48	$843.65	$768.17
2018-11	$4657.77	$50.86	$562.56	$541.30
2017-11	$5699.20	$560.60	$559.31	$560.58
2016-11	$5048.77	$506.98	$502.98	$500.27
2015-11	$4517.55	$460.83	$477.55	$452.28
2014-11	$3528.16	$291.27	$357.30	$343.53
2013-11	$2811.61	$252.75	$277.74	$291.48
2012-11	$2898.91	$247.99	$262.78	$284.49
2011-11	$2577.05	$246.37	$232.84	$240.81

Here are the securities and the income amounts for November, 2022:

• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $48.60
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF BND ETF: $167.53
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $12.34
• Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $49.64

 

Big Jim is trying to be as Captain Kirk as he wants to be. He is doing better than the corrupt-o-currency sector, but not as well as he wishes.

Painting of the Storm on the Sea of Gallilee by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669); image from Wikipedia, missing since 1990, assumed allowed under public domain.

Here is the dividend income report for October, 2022.

The monthly dividend income came out to $467.39. The yearly income total for 2022 through the end of the month was $8762.43.

The income for October, 2021 was $465.25, and the yearly income for 2021 through the end of October was $7376.87.

This is the fourth month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

The price of bitcon is just above $21,000 today. It was stuck below $20,000 for a few weeks, then jumped up to above $21,000, and since has slightly declined, but still flat. Dave Gerard and Amy Castor both think the price is being manipulated. Given how the economy is grinding along, it is odd how The Answer To All The World’s Problems is in a tight range.

I watched a few episodes of the Rational Reminder channel’s Understanding Crypto Limited Series. I have only watched a few out of order. So far I like them.

It seems like every one has a comment from someone complaining that the guest is anti-corrupt-o-currency and not objective, why don’t they have $SOME-CRAZY-DUDE on? Why should they? There are PLENTY of pro-corrupt-o-currency channels on YouTube. I have not kept track of these commenters, but I wonder if these same commenters are asking those pro-corrupt-o-currency channels to have anti-corrupt-o-currency guests. I would say the corrupt-o-currency crowd doesn’t want an objective discussion. It’s like talking to Jordan Peterson fanboys: context, you haven’t read this, blah blah blah. The hosts are financial advisors; their goal is to do what is best for their clients. If they say corrupt-o-currencies are bad, maybe it is because corrupt-o-currencies are bad. All the pro-corrupt-o-currency people are talking their book, or just old men yelling at clouds. A lot of them are like Donald Trump or Peter Thiel: rich guys who despite all their money are really angry for who knows what reason.

One commenter on the episode with Bruce Schneier suggested Greg Foss: “olearly and foss have strong personalities and have strong onscreen presence and they’ll likely overpower the hosts”. I googled this Greg Foss and looked at a few videos with him on YouTube. He does not have a “strong personality”. He is just an asshole who yells a lot. A lot of people think “loud” means “strong”. It doesn’t. Generally loud people are stupid. You can just nod your head, they think you agree, then they go away none the wiser, not even remembering what they spewed out in the first place. Greg Foss looks like he has never had an actual conversation with anyone. He just yells whatever is brain is vomiting. Can you imagine this guy meeting Alex Jones? They would spend hours yelling at the clouds before noticing each other. News flash: us quiet people can yell back when we need to. Yelling is not a super power.

In one of the videos I saw of Foss, he was going on about the deficit. I pretty much stopped there. These idiots never have a problem with the deficit when conservatives cut taxes for the wealthy. It does not lead to more economic growth, wealthy people do not expand and invest, and the tax cuts do not force conservative governments to spend less. But when a progressive adminstration comes in, oh my god, the debt!! Will nobody think of the children?!?!?! Living life in all caps makes you look stupid. Living life in all caps while sucking up to the wealthy means you are stupid.

A lot of people treat corrupt-o-currency like another speculative asset, even though the world already has a lot of speculative assets; some of them actually have cash flow. Other say bitcon is a hedge against inflation. Isn’t gold a hedge against inflation? Why do we need bitcon when the world has gold? A lot of the bitcon-men do not want to spend their bitcon, they just want to hold it. Warren Buffett pointed out that gold is inefficient: You have to mine it, then you have to store it somewhere secure and pay insurance. So you pay money to dig it out of one hole, and you pay more to stick it in another hole. The bitcon community looked at that and thought: We can be even less efficient than that. Why not just use gold? I guess bitconners really are just misanthropes.

Schneier says that corrupt-o-currency is trying to solve social problems (or what are problems for some people) with technology. The host asked why corrupt-o-currency bros are trying that, and Schneier said, “Because it would be great if you could do that.” It reminded me of the quote from Big Jim from last month: do not confuse the way things are with the way you want them to be.

First one was a programmer named Daniel Mescheder who explained blockchains, bitcon, and proof of work. He had a few points that were also made by another software developer named Stephen Diehl, who authored the articles The Case Against Crypto and Web3 is Bullshit. It all sounds great until you need to have your blockchain interact with the rest of the world. Getting real money in is easy, but getting it back out always seems difficult. It’s like a roach motel for money. Mesheder said some blockchain people want to put land ownership records on the block chain. But if he claims your land, he cannot just wave his blockchain at you. We need some sort of real-world enforcement, or some way to resolve disputes. And if you are relying on someone for enforcement, can’t you rely on them to store the data on the chain? One issue he did not mention is: what is to stop someone from making another blockchain for the same land? Diehl mentioned multiple coins. There have been some blockchain/coin companies that paid people in their tokens instead of dollars. Diehl compared this to wildcat banking. I do not want to pay every monthly bill in another currency.

The topic of immutability came up a few times. Ethereum rolled back a hack, so it’s not really immutable. The only reason bitcon is immutable is that nobody wants to roll back. But it’s all just stuff people made up; they could roll it back. The reason that will not happen is that a lot of people are invested (literally and metaphorically) in the status quo. Bitcon is just “too big to fail”. The sort of problem with the current financial system that bitcon was supposed to solve.

Another episode was with David Gerard. As you can imagine, he said there was no point in any of this.

A lot of the justifications for corrupt-o-currency are circular reasoning. One justification for blockchain is to manage “digital assets”. But nobody was talking about digital assets until blockchain. So we need the blockchain to manage what is on the blockchain.

In other news, Kroger buying Albertsons, and the PE firms that own Albertsons are paying themselves a dividend (discussion on Hacker News; some states are trying to stop the “dividend”). Per the linked article on HN, the $4B extraction is about all the cash Albertsons has on hand. The PE firms have owned Albertsons for 7 years. If they haven’t made a profit, it’s their own fault. Paying out all your cash at once is stupid. It’s like they looked at Elon Musk buying Twitter and said, “We can top that.” I think we should stop calling these one-time payments “dividends” and call them extractions, or bloodlettings. Just as there are public benefit corporations whose charters say they have to be run in a sustainable manner, perhaps there should be a type of corporation that is centered on long-term sustainable dividends and prohibits stock buybacks.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each October from 2011 through 2022:

Month	YTD	Amount	3MMA	12MMA
2022-10	$8762.43	$467.39	$948.63	$1028.09
2021-10	$7376.87	$465.25	$838.41	$922.01
2020-10	$6854.28	$195.26	$745.73	$879.26
2019-10	$6777.52	$291.83	$822.53	$761.86
2018-10	$4606.91	$1130.39	$561.66	$583.77
2017-10	$5138.63	$341.83	$566.34	$556.11
2016-10	$4541.79	$281.09	$508.05	$496.43
2015-10	$4056.72	$312.23	$459.42	$438.15
2014-10	$3236.89	$243.87	$368.19	$340.32
2013-10	$2558.86	$184.81	$295.19	$291.08
2012-10	$2650.92	$225.14	$285.46	$284.35
2011-10	$2330.68	$208.90	$258.17	$238.44

Here are the securities and the income amounts for October, 2022:

• Vanguard Utilities ETF: $295.86
• Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $160.25
• Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $11.28

Big Jim encourages strangling loud people. They deserve it.

Painting of the Temptation of Christ by Tobias Verhaecht (1561–1631); image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under public domain.