#old age

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Quaeris, quid doceam? Etiam seni esse discendum.*

Seneca

You ask, what may I teach? That an old man must learn too.*

Marcel Duchamp plays chess with Eve Babitz, 1963.

#seneca #latin #classical #quote #old age #wisdom #maturity #ageing #growing old #teaching #eve babitz #chess #marcel duchamp #arts #culture #art

[4yuel]

#old age #aesthetic #moodboard #mbs #mb #flowers #bouquet #humanity

[dk-thrive]

Age is giving me the two best gifts: softness and illumination. It would have been nice if whoever is in charge of such things doled them out in our younger years, but that’s not how it works. Age ferries them across the water, and they will bring us through whatever comes.

— Anne Lamott, from "All that is true about aging is illuminated on a walk" (NY Times, March 14, 2024)

#anne lamott #soft #gentle #empathy #peace' #illumination #middle age #aging #old age

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Biden wants to ban ripoff “financial advisors”

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Once, American workers had "defined benefits pensions," where their employers promised to pay them a certain amount every year from their retirement to their death. Jimmy Carter swapped that out for 401(k)s, "market" pensions where you have to guess which stocks will be valuable or starve in your old age:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

The initial 401(k) rollout had all kinds of pot-sweeteners that made them seem like a good deal, like heavy employer matching that doubled or even tripled the value of every dollar you put into the market for your retirement. But over the years, as Reaganomics took hold and workers' power ebbed away, all these goodies were clawed back. In the end, the market-based pension makes you the sucker at the poker table, flushing your savings into a rigged casino that is firmly tilted in favor of finance barons and other eminently guillotineable plutocrats.

Neoliberalism is many things, but most of all it is a cult of individualism. The fact that three generations of workers are nows facing down retirement without pensions that will provide them with secure housing and food – let alone money to see the odd movie, buy birthday gifts for their grandkids, or enjoy a meal out now and then – is framed as millions of individual failures, not a systemic one.

In other words, if you are facing food insecurity and homelessness after a lifetime of hard work, it's because you saved wrong. Perhaps you didn't save enough (through a 40-year run of wage stagnation and skyrocketing housing, health and education costs). Or perhaps you saved wrong, making the wrong bets on the stock market. If you can't afford to run your air conditioner during a heat dome, that's on you: you should have been better at stocks.

Apologists for this system will say that you don't have to be good at stocks – you just have to pay an Independent Financial Advisor to pick the stocks for you and you'll be fine. But IFAs don't work for free! What if you can't afford one?

Enter "predatory inclusion" – the practice of offering scammy, overpriced and substandard products to poor people and declaring it to be a good deed, because otherwise, those poor people would have to do without. The crypto bubble relied heavily on this: think of Spike Lee and others shilling for pump-and-dump scams as a way of "building Black wealth":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/business/media/cryptocurrency-seeks-the-spotlight-with-spike-lees-help.html

More recently, Intuit and other scammy tax-prep services have argued against the IRS's plan to offer free tax preparation as bad for Black and brown people, because it will deny them the chance to be deceived and ripped off with TurboTax:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

Back in 2018, Trump won the predatory inclusion Olympics, when his Department of Labor let the Fifth Circuit abolish the "Fiduciary Rule" for Independent Financial Advisors:

https://www.investopedia.com/updates/dol-fiduciary-rule/

What was the Fiduciary Rule? It said that your IFN had to put your interests ahead of their own. Like, if there were two different funds you could bet on, and one would pay your IFN a big commission, while the other would be a better bet for you, the IFN couldn't put your retirement savings into the fund that offered them a bribe.

When Trump killed the Fiduciary Rule, he proclaimed it a victory for poor people, especially Black and brown people. After all, if IFNs weren't allowed to accept bribes for giving you bad financial advice, then they would have to make up the difference by charging you for good advice. If you couldn't afford that advice, well, you'd have to make bad retirement investments on your own, without the benefit of their sleazy self-dealing.

The Biden Administration wants to change that. Biden's Acting Labor Secretary is Julie Su, and she's very good at her job. Last spring, she forced west coast dockworkers' bosses to cough up the contract they'd stalled on for a year, with 8-10% raises for every worker, owed retroactively:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

Su has proposed a way to reinstate the Fiduciary Rule, as part of the Biden Administration's war on junk fees, estimating that this will increase retirees' net savings by 20%:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-11-07-julie-su-labor-retirement-savers/

The new rule will force advisors who cheat their clients to pay restitution, and will require them to deliver all their advice in writing so that this cheating can be detected and punished.

The industry is furious, of course. They claim that "The Market (TM)" will solve this: if you get bad retirement savings advice and end up homeless and starving, then you will choose a different advisor in your next life, after you are reincarnated (I guess?).

And of course, they're also claiming that forcing IFNs to stop cheating their clients will deny poor people access to expert (bad) advice. As the Financial Services Institute's Dale Brown says, this will have a "negative impact on Main Street Americans’ access to financial advice":

https://www.fa-mag.com/news/legal-challenge-predicted-for-new-dol-fiduciary-proposal-75257.html

Here's that rule – read it for yourself, then submit a comment expressing your views on it. The government wants to hear from you, and administrative law requires them to act on the comments they receive:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/03/2023-23782/proposed-amendment-to-prohibited-transaction-exemptions-75-1-77-4-80-83-83-1-and-86-128

Su is part of a wave of progressive, technically skilled regulators in the Biden administration that resulted from a horse-trading exercise called the Unity Task Force, which divvied up access to top appointments among the progressive wing and the finance wing of the Democratic Party. The progressive appointments are nothing short of incredible – the most competent and principled agency leaders America has seen in half a century:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

But then there's the finance wing's appointments, like Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, who ruled against Lina Khan's attempt to block the rotten Microsoft/Activision merger (don't worry, Khan's appealing):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

Perhaps the worst, though, is Biden's Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, a private equity ghoul who did a stint for the notorious wreckers Bain Capital before founding her own firm. Raimondo has stuffed her department full of Goldman Sachs alums, and has sidelined labor and civil society groups as she sets out to administer everything from the CHIPS Act to regulating ChatGPT.

As Henry Burke writes for the Revolving Door Project and The American Prospect, Raimondo's history as a corporate raider, her deference to the finance sector, and she and her husband's conflicts of interest from their massive stakes in companies she's regulating all serve to undermine Biden's agenda:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-11-08-commerce-secretary-gina-raimondo-undercutting-bidenomics/

When the administration inevitably complains that its popular economic programs aren’t breaking through the media coverage, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The Unity Task Force gave us generationally important policymakers, but ultimately, it's a classic "pizzaburger." If half your family wants pizza, and the other half wants burgers, and you serve them something halfway in between that makes none of them happy, you haven't made a wise compromise – you've just made an inedible mess:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/08/fiduciaries/#but-muh-freedumbs

#pluralistic #julie su #fiduciary rule #intergenerational warfare #aging #retirement #401ks #old age #pensions #finance #pizzaburgers #Gina Raimondo

[nemfrog]

"To die is to be reborn." n.d.

Internet Archive

#immortality #tomb #death #rebirth #sun flares #sun rays #old age #youth #nemfrog

[globalriseofblackpeople]

Life is forever changing . Never stop living

I love this perspective

#black power #knowledge #perpective #black knowledge #life #old age #reinvent yourself #self knowledge #self worth #self expression

[theriu]

Thinking about how genuinely frightening it is how much we as a society have been conditioned to dismiss old people. Like. That’s literally going to be every one of us who doesn’t tragically die early, guys. Take a look at literally anything for the elderly and imagine yourself there in a few decades.

Do you look forward to being sneered at and/or treated as invisible because your natural effects of old age inconvenience the younger set? (It’s so much easier to pretend you don’t exist or matter, you see, than to be inconvenienced, or acknowledge they will face the same reality one day.)

Do you want to be shuffled off to a virtual prison staffed by jaded workers when you are too old/infirmed to live in your own house? (There are many nice nursing homes, but there are many more not-nice ones, and too few altogether.)

Do you look forward to only seeing your kids and maybe grandkids once a month (if that) because it’s too much trouble in their busy schedules to come visit you?

Do you look forward to a large division of society advocating that you be euthenized before your time because it’s more “humane” (because you’re an inconvenience, not a person)?

It IS hard to remember to care for and visit the elderly people in our lives. I am as guilty as anyone of this. But I think on a broad scale, we really need to consider treating the elderly with at least as much consideration as President Coin treated Snow in the final Hunger Games book: giving the person in her power special comforts and respect (even knowing they will die) so that if/when she is in someone else’s power in a similar way, there will be a precedent that she should also be treated well. The difference here is the elderly haven’t committed a crime—they are literally just Us In A Few Short Years.

Do it for selfish reasons if no other. Advocate for the elderly. Prepare the way for your own peaceful later years.

#River ponders #Hunger games mention #Elderly #old age

[mrscakeishere]

I've only briefly been on Tumblr milling about in GO, OFMD, and Loki spaces and I'm taken aback when I see people describing the main characters as "old," or worse, "really old." This is for two reasons.

1) They're either a little older, or in the case of Loki, younger than me so all I see are a bunch of dudes my age. So when I read the word "old" I think, wait, that means I'm old, which is confusing because outside of my body's opinion of the situation, I don't feel particularly old.

2) When I hang out with friends in their twenties and early thirties and say, "just wait until you're old" or, "I'm pretty old", their reply is always, "you're not old!" And now I know, as I have always suspected, they're lying...And that I have very kind friends.

#good omens #loki #ofmd #tom hiddleston #owen wilson #michael sheen #david tennant #rhys darby #taika waititi #old age #i seriously never thought of any of these dudes as old until i got on tumblr #middle-aged yes #old no

[simplymarge1974]

#good old days #old age

[sportsandlaughs]

#pizza #body #fitness #old #old age

[blackswaneuroparedux]

C'est injustice d'excuser la jeunesse de suivre ses plaisirs et défendre à la vieillesse d'en chercher.

- Michel de Montaigne

#montaigne #michel de montaigne #quote #french #philosopher #philosophy #old age #youth #young #generations #dance #tango #dancing #pleasures #scent of a woman #al pacino #gabrielle anwar #film #movie

[christenhelm]

#garden #gardening #homestead #self sufficient #quotes #old age

[dk-thrive]

One thing is certain, and I have always known it — the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence,

—May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal (W. W. Norton, April 1987)

#aging #old age #joy #music #books #poetry #silence #peace #quiet #twilight

[geritsel]

A pick of Francisco Goya's private album of 'Witches and Old Women' (Brujas y viejas).

#francisco goya #drawing art #spanish art #old age #madness

[startrekvsfaceapp]

I am now one Capaldi in age

#doctor who #peter capaldi #old age #geriatric

[evilhorse]

I must be getting stupid…in my old age…

(All-Star Comics #58)

#all-star comics #justice society of america #jsa #super squad #green lantern #alan scott #dr fate #kent nelson #robin #dick grayson #old age #ribbing #far from home #earth two #gerry conway #ric Estrada #wally wood #dc comics #comics #70s comics #bronze age comics