For The Archives -- Even On A Military Salary -- June 12, 2024

Locator: 47831FORTHEARCHIVES.

My only source of income from 1997 to 2007 was from the USAF.

It is well known -- or at least many say that -- that the military does not pay its members well. I certainly heard that often throughout my career; that I could do much better "on the outside." Someday I may talk about that; whether that was true or not. [I felt early on that money / income / financial status was not the only way one measured success / a life well lived.]

Whatever.

I don't have my pay stubs in front of me but I think my initial annual salary was in the range of $25,000. I don't know. I don't remember. I could be way off. 

Later: from the internet, the 1980 military pay chart, a captain (an O-3 with at least four years of service): $1,614.90 / month, or $19,378.80. In addition to that, I would have earned various "special pays." I was not yet a flight surgeon so I did not earn flight pay. So, $25,000 per annum is a pretty good wag.

Whatever.

But, I invested "to the max" when I was on active duty. Our two daughters graduated from very expensive colleges; and both were debt-free before I retired. 

We never lived "very well" when it came to material things; we generally lived in substandard housing, particularly when we lived overseas. We moved a dozen times and always lost money in a move even though the military "paid for the move." It always took two years to recover financially from a move.

As noted, I invested "to the max" while on active duty. I started a brokerage account for each of our two daughters. When they got married, I quit following those accounts and to this day have no idea what their accounts are worth.

I am visiting one of the two daughters in Portland, OR, this week. I knew I had invested in a tech / chip company early in my investing days. It was the only chip company in which I invested and it was in the younger daughter's account. That chip company has done very, very well recently, so I was curious. I asked my daughter how much that investment had grown; what it was worth today.

She told me: it has just hit the six-figure threshold. I can't imagine what my initial investment in this particular chip company was but it couldn't have been more than $5,000 and even that seems like a stretch. I'll bet it was a couple of thousand dollars. It never paid a dividend, if I recall correctly.

It's not AAPL and it's not NVDA but it is a well-known chip company today. At the time I bought it, I don't think "anyone" had really heard of it. I made a one-time investment -- again, that's why I doubt it was as much as $5,000 -- and then "forgot about it." I tracked it periodically but then lost track of it until tonight. 

Pure luck. I came across the company while reading some "science" magazine ... I think it was Scientific American. The company was a start-up at the time. Long story. Associated with Sprint, my cellphone carrier. [Later: the Sprint name as a stand-alone company came into being in 1987, which is about the time I was just getting into investing. I recall my first equity investment was in 1984.]

The point is that even on a military salary .... fill in the blank.

For the archives.

Oh, my only source of income. My bad. I wrote that my only source of income was my military salary. I forgot that my wife worked for a couple of years when we were stationed in Bitburg Air Base, Germany. Her entire salary was put into her IRA and other investments after her IRA was maxed out. She started taking RMDs several years ago -- enough to cover at least one Norwegian cruise for both of us each year, had we so desire -- and yet her IRA is almost as much as when she first started taking RMDs. [Later: as of June 18, 2024, her IRA now exceeds -- despite taking distributions for the past ten years at about 5% per year -- what her IRA maxed out when we quit contributing.]

*******************************
My Covid Library

Link here.

I will be adding a commentary by Dr Anthony Fauci to that library.

Link at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/anthony-fauci-covid-trump-white-house-response/678491/.

I flip-flopped on the Covid-19 story, and I flip-flopped on Dr Fauci. I now feel very, very comfortable about that entire period.

The timeline per Dr Fauci:

January 1, 2020: a reporter call Dr Fauci, at home, on a holiday, to ask about "something strange going on in China.' Fauci was unaware; said he would "monitor," as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Early days, January, 2020: information hard to come by; China, secretive. Fauci reaches out to Bob Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Redfield already in contact with his counterpart in China, Geore Gao. Initially, Gao: "nothing to be seen here." Then, days later, Gao: very, very concerned.

January 3, 2020: forty-eight hours after the January 1, 2020, reporter's phone call --  Fauci with a group at the National Institutes of Health: "we don't know what's going on in China." Meeting chaired by Vaccine Research Center Director John Mascola. Fauci said, at that meeting, "We are going to need a vaccine for whatever this new virus turns out to be." [Conspiracy theorists: how much did Fauci know and when did he know it?]

At the meeting: Barney Graham, one of the world's foremost vaccinologists. His group had been working with mRNA and Moderna, research conducted for many years by Karikó and Drew Weissman. [Story jibes with all I've read. Much could be said here but I need to move on.]

FDA had never approved an "mRNA vaccine."

January 10, 2020: scientists uploaded the SARS-CoV-2 sequence to a public data base. [Conspiracy theorists: how much did Fauci know and when did he know it?]

January 20, 2020: US identified first known case of the novel coronavirus; a 35-y/o male, arriving home, Washington State, from Wuhan. The US had already begun screening [international] passengers at several US airports.

January 29, 2020: White House had just convened a meeting to discuss how to evacuate US citizens from Wuhan. President Trump in charge. 

January 23, 2020: photograph seen of the Chinese government erecting a 1,000-bed prefabricated hospital. How many infected in China at that time by the "new" virus? At the time, 25 Chinese people had died of Covid; 800 were infected; by the end of January, new cases being identified by about 25% per day.

January 30, 2020: China reports more than 9,000 people infected; 213 people dead, due to Covid.

January 30, 2020: worldwide, the number of infections in a single month had surpassed the 2002 - 2003 SARS outbreak.

January 31, 2020: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, the CDC's Bob Redfield, and Fauci, explain the details of a proposed travel ban to the president. [Meetings with presidents take time to set up; and briefers are vetted through several "preliminary" meetings with White House staffers.]

February 11, 2020: WHO officially designated the disease caused by the novel coronavirus as COVID-19; now spreading relentlessly around the world. The CDC was "stumbling badly." -- Anthony Fauci.

February 25, 2020: Nancy Messonnier, director of immunization and respiratory disease, CDC, recommended to the US government (recipients of that message not identified in this essay) to prepare to close schools, and work remotely. "The media erupted, the stock market plummeted nearly 1,000 points, and Trump was furious.

February 26, 2020: VP Mike Pence took over for Alex Azar as the head of the White Hosue coronavirus task force. [Should be say, "the novel coronavirus"?]

March 3, 2020: a longtime Fauci colleague from Seattle notified Fauci that COVID was identified and spreading in Seattle.

Undated, but about that time, an Oval Office meeting. Trump still suggested the "seasonal flu" vaccine was the "drug of choice."

March 8, 2020: Fauci appears on 60 Minutes. Fauci: "people should not be walking around without masks."

March, 2020: the month COVID became frighteningly real to Americans.

Undated, abut about this time: President Trump getting advice from Laura Ingraham on the use of hydroxychloroquine. [Think "Mexican peach pits to treat stage 4 cancer."]

The first three months.

*******************************
Aristotle, Politics, Science

How fortuitous to be reading these three books right now, at the same time, looking back on Covid:

The Politics of Aristotle, translated with an introduction, notes and appendixes, Ernest Barker, c. 1958, withdrawn from the library 6/24.

The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War, Caroline Alexander, c. 2009, withdrawn from the library 2/24.

The Greek Myths, Complete Edition, Robert Graves, c. 1955, 1960, withdrawn from the libary 6/24.