Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Two weeks ago I wrote about filing my taxes and remarked that my effective federal tax rate for 2024 was 19%. I noted that's a lot lower than many people think their taxes are— not because my rate is low, but because most people way overestimate their tax rate because they don't understand how income tax works. And I don't mean misunderstanding the intricacies of complex tax situations; I'm talking about completely failing to understand the basics of how tax brackets work. And that includes a lot of people I've met in school and through work—intelligent people, people who attended highly competitive schools, people who've earned STEM degrees, people who are professionally employed and well paid.

Let me illustrate this through an example or two. Let's say Alice earns a gross pay of $120,000 a year. That's reasonably good money, BTW. It's just over twice the 2024 US median individual income of $59,228 (per the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

So, what's Alice's tax rate? Well, let's start by looking at the tax brackets for 2024:



This table is straight from the IRS, at Federal income tax rates and brackets.

You might look at the table and say, "Ah, Alice's tax rate is 24%"— because her $120k/yr is in the 24% tax bracket. If that's your conclusion, you're wrong— twice.

Of course, it could be worse. You could be like a professional colleague, "Brian", who complained to me that his federal tax rate is 50%. He didn't even look at an actual chart like this; he just repeated a bullshit number from a political bellyacher who tells lies on his radio program/podcast every day. 🙄

Okay, but why is Alice's "I pay 24%" estimate wrong? Twice?

First, it's wrong because tax brackets are graduated. If you're "in" in the 24% bracket, you're not paying 24% on everything, just on the portion of your income over the threshold for the 24% bracket. Parts of your income are taxed at the lower bracket rates of 22%, 12%, and 10%.

Second, Alice doesn't actually pay 24% on anything— because she's not actually in the 24% bracket! That's because there's an effective bracket of zero percent that's not indicated in the table above. Pay careful attention that the table is indexing taxable income— and taxable is not the same as gross. Two common deductions ordinary taxpayers enjoy are the standard deduction and a 401(k) deduction. For 2024 the standard deduction was $14,600. And let's say Alice put a modest 6% of her gross income, or $7,200, into her 401(k). Together these reduce her taxable income to $98,200. Alice is in the 22% tax bracket!

Now that we have Alice's taxable income, $98,200, we can figure her tax. No, it's not $98,200 x 0.22 = $21,604. Remember, the rates are graduated. She pays 10% on the first $11,600 out of $98,200, 12% on the next $35,550, etc. Alice's tax bill on her $98,200 taxable income works out to $16,657.

Alice's tax bill is $16,657. On a gross income of $120k. Thus her overall federal income tax rate is 13.9%.


There are other taxes, of course. Assuming Alice's income is all from wages, it's subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes. Those would tally $9,180 in this example. Combining that with her federal income tax brings her total tax paid to Uncle Sam to 21.5%. But even that is less than half of Brian thinks she's paying.

Non-Vegas Vegas Weekend Travelog #1
Henderson, NV - Fri, 14 Feb 2025, 9pm

After 4½ days of work meetings wrapped on Friday afternoon it was time to shift gears. I shifted from being in Las Vegas and ignoring all the glamor and gambling for work, to being in Las Vegas and ignoring all the glamor and gambling for leisure! Instead of me flying home Friday evening I had bought a ticket for Hawk to come out and join me. And it was even Valentine's Day.

"Wait," you might wonder, "Don't you mostly ignore Valentine's Day?"



Yes, I do! The main thing I've done on Valentine's Day the past several years is go to work. And that's partly because my company nearly always schedules SKO on the week of Valentine's Day. I guess they get a cheaper rate or something as other companies are trying to give their employees a break by not scheduling mandatory offsites that week. Mine even ridicules Valentine's Day as fake holiday.

It's a good thing Hawk and I agree. 😂

But even so, just because I roll my eyes at Valentine's Day doesn't mean I want to stay at work on Valentine's Day. Especially on a Friday after a long week! I skipped out from a post-meeting round of drinks with my department head at 5:05pm and boarded a Lyft car to the airport.

At LAS I met Hawk in the baggage area. Her flight had landed 10 minutes earlier. We scooped up our large bag once it hit the conveyor belt, called another Lyft car, and rode to our hotel for the next 3 nights.

We're totally off-Strip for the weekend. We're out in Henderson, at a Marriott Residence Inn. The closest thing to gambling around here would be trying the runny scrambled eggs at the breakfast buffet in the morning. 🤣

For dinner this evening we walked to a Mexican restaurant a block or two away. The walk was actually more than we bargained for as the temperature was dropping and wind was gusting. Oh, and the sidewalks out here aren't meant actually to be used. But the food was good. We both enjoyed the dish of guacamole we split as an appetizer. It was as good as our best homemade. And when they brought more out with her taco she set the remainder of first dish aside to take back to the hotel. I had quesabirria which was way more filling than I expected, so I took some of that back, too, to save for breakfast tomorrow.

We're back at the hotel now, and I'm crashing hard. Even though it's only 9pm I'm not too surprised as it's been a hard week for me. I haven't gotten to bed before midnight or gotten more than 5½ hours of sleep a night the past several days. So, going to sleep at 9:30? I'm due.

Yesterday I wrote about how and wny I hate Las Vegas. Here's another reason to add to the list: I usually get sick after visiting Vegas. It's a combination of the latent cigarette smoke and all the people in close proximity to one another indoors. I am sick right now from my trip earlier this week.

On Friday I had no particular symptoms other than feeling washed out. I figured that was understandable as I'd been traveling for two weeks and was running a sleep deficit. I went to bed early, before 9pm. Overnight into this morning I developed a chest cold. My primary symptoms are a cough with a bit of phlegm, wheezing, and dull all-over body aches.

You might be wondering, as I was....



ArE tHeSe SyMpToMs CoViD?!?! Because the sad thing about Covid-19 having become endemic is that pretty much every time you get symptoms shared with the common cold you gotta wonder if you need an urgent doctor's appointment to get some Paxlovid.

Well, I took an at-home test today, and the result is negative. It looks like I just have a common cold. Yay, getting annual Covid booster shots!

Even so, this cold is likely to get worse before it gets better. Just 15 minutes before I started writing this I started getting chills and shakes. They've subsided now, but I think I'm still going to go to bed early, by 9pm, again tonight.

Update, 4 days later: It's Covid. I tested positive on Wednesday. This test was a false negative.

Thanksgiving '24 Travelog #2
37,000' over Iowa - Sat, 23 Nov 2024, 12:15pm

Well, our flight from Oakland actually did leave on time today. Right now we're somewhere over Iowa and still on track for an early arrival in Baltimore, Maryland. I had to look out the window to make sure blurry vision wasn't causing me to misread the flight map....



Of course this is one time I don't care if we get in 30 minutes late. My schedule works either way. I took the hit on catching an early flight today, including going out of my way to drive to Oakland airport at oh-dark-thirty and then pay through the nose for parking, to prevent against an all-too-likely flight delay scrambling my evening plans.

If this flight does arrive early it'll have another benefit: it's shorter. The scheduled time of 5h10m is a long flight with Southwest. They don't offer meals onboard, even for purchase. The only food is a small bag of pretzels or cookies, and soda served one small cup at a time. Knowing this I packed a few protein bars and filled a water bottle at the airport. Though today the cabin crew has been generous and brought us the full can to drink!

We'll see if this flight continues to track to an early arrival. I have every confidence that Southwest, or air traffic control, or ground operations at BWI, will find some way to delay us before we get to the gate.

After being exposed to Covid-19 last week I took an at-home test on Saturday. It was negative, thankfully. But I didn't stop there. Guidance is to test again 5-7 days after exposure even if no symptoms have appeared.

But did symptoms appear?

Part of the New Normal of living in the post-pandemic world— more accurately, the Covid endemic world— is that every time I get a stuff nose, every time I cough more than twice in a row, I wonder, "Could this be Covid?!"



I tested negative again today, so those scattered coughs were just coincidental. I did not catch Covid-19. Hooray, immune system boosted by multiple shots of the vaccine!

I want to repeat that I'm happy my colleague told us he tested positive for Covid. A lot of people would not have. In this situation it arguably didn't matter to me since I didn't actually get sick. But I may have gotten sick, and quite probably someone in the room of 20-25 people with him did get sick. It's better to know and to know to get tested. Notifying us was a class act.

Today Vice President Kamala Harris picked a running mate for her 2024 presidential campaign. From just minutes after President Biden ended his campaign and Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, political pundits were already describing the kind of person Harris would have to pick to make her ticket palatable to middle America....



So I thought, why not pick a Midwestern White guy with experience running a presidential campaign, someone who's also familiar with the Biden/Harris administration, someone who's got executive experience, say, running a cabinet level agency....



Oops, when the pundits said "Midwestern White guy" they left one thing unsaid...



Sorry, Mayor Pete.

Like a lot of people in the US I got an email message recently from the Social Security Administration (SSA) that their login process has changed and I would need to set up my new credentials. BTW, it's not a scam or phishing attempt; it's a real thing. And yes, I have an online Social Security account.

...No, I'm not earning Social Security. I'm still probably umpteen years from filing for benefits. But I created an account on their website many years ago because I'm curious about the money I've been paying in to the system since my first paycheck job at age 15.

The need to set up new login credentials for SSA was my prompt to visit the site to figure out the answer to a question I've been wondering about for some time now. What would my SS payments look like at regular retirement age if I retired early vs. worked several more years? I thought I'd have to poke around the site to and do a lot of numerical modeling on my own to answer that. To my pleasant surprise SSA now has a retirement calculator right there on the main page after logging in that can answer that question.



This chart shows the SS payments I'd earn, estimated, umpteen years from now if I stopped working— i.e., stopped paying in to the system— today. Actually, it's an estimate if I stopped paying in as of 12/31/2023, so I'm already a bit ahead of these forecasts with work and payments in 2024. The key is that value shown in blue in the middle drop-down box above the graph. I put in zero as my future annual salary. Already I've got a decent estimate benefit coming my way in the future.

To model out the difference between retiring early (in my early 50s) and continuing to work several more years I also put a larger number in that middle drop-down box. The difference if I work another several years, maxing out my SS benefit, is... not huge. I mean, it's also not trivial. I'm not including the second chart here, but the difference was about $300 a month if I file at first eligibility at age 62 and $500 a month if I want until the Full Retirement Age of 67. An extra few hundred a month is nothing to sneeze at... but it's also not a game-changer relative to the size of the benefit I've already earned.

What this exercise tells me is that even if I choose to stop working soon, in my early 50s, I've got a decent social security benefit waiting for me years down the road, thanks to what I've already paid into the system.

As we walked through a leafy residential neighborhood in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin on Sunday we saw— and heard— cicadas. These insects only come out once every 17 years (or 13; see below), and it had been more than 2x17 years since since we adults in the group had experienced their swarm.

At first we saw just a few cicadas in a tree next to us. As we lingered for a few minutes looking at them, the cicadas seemed to get more bold around us. They started flying around us, bumping into us, and even landing on our clothes and skin. One landed on my brother-in-law's shoulder, for example:



Bugs bouncing off and landing on our bodies was disorienting at first. I mean, the natural response when an insect buzzes around your face or lands on your skin is to swat it away. But the cicadas were kind of mellow. They weren't trying to bite us; it's like they were just resting. Or maybe exploring. Or maybe looking for a ride. Plus, swatting at them was kind of... ick... because they're so big they'd make a big splat if we squished them. 🤢

As we walked toward the house where roleplaying games and D&D were created the cicadas got thicker. Here's a quick video showing the swarm growing around us:



Prior to this spot my brother-in-law and I were already joking that we were exercising every horror movie trope, walking into danger with a swarm about to devour us. In the video you can hear me joking that I can practically hear the scary horror movie soundtrack rising around us. ...And BTW, the sound you actually hear in the video is the drone of literally thousands, maybe literally tens of thousands, of cicadas around us. 😨

Cicada Facts

If you're wondering why we're seeing cicadas in 2024 when you saw them last year or a few years ago, the reason is that there are a number of different regional broods that emerge in different years. There are a number of articles and diagrams about this you can find online. Here's a map I found in an Encyclopaedia Britannica article:



A similar chart is in this article on Vox.com from May 2024.

We're in southern Wisconsin, in the dark brown region of this map. The area is part of Brood XIII, which was predicted to emerge this year (2024). You can see from the map coloring and legend that other broods emerge in different years. Most broods are on a 17 year cycle, though a few emerge every 13 years.

Curiously the map shows a square in the very southeastern corner of Wisconsin with no cicada brood. That aligns to our observations as that's where my sister and her family live, and there are no cicadas in their town or nearby towns.

There's been quite an uproar in the press over the last several days about a manipulated photo of Princess Kate and her kids. Kensington Palace released the photo a week ago to combat rumors that the Princess of Wales, who's not been seen in public since abdominal surgery, is in ill health or even dead. The picture shows her happy and healthy with her 3 children.

The uproar over this seemingly innocuous photograph arose quickly. Numerous photographers and digital image editors online quickly spotted small artifacts in the picture indicating it had been manipulated— or "photoshopped", as many call it.

In this particular picture all the artifacts are small. There's nothing so obvious here as a person with a third hand (because one was digitally added to the picture) or a curved doorway in the background (where someone "bent" the image, e.g., to make someone look curvier or slimmer). But still, it's become a scandal. "Water-Kate," some are quipping. Everyone from celebrities to even The Onion are bagging on Kate. In fact The Onion offers satirical recommendations from celebrities on how to 'shop better (12 Mar 2024).

Lost in the shuffle amid all the jeering and laughter is the reality of just how common "photoshopping" is in photography.

The term "photoshopping", BTW, refers to Adobe Photoshop, a powerful image manipulation tool published by Adobe. Photoshop has been common in industry for a long time. I started using it personally 30 years ago as a graduate student in 2D/3D computer imaging.

Pretty much all professional images you see online or in print have been processed through Photoshop or a tool like it. A good many image shared by amateurs have been "photoshopped", too. Virtually every image I publish in my blog has been touched up in Photoshop. Does being literally "photoshopped" mean they're all fake?

Just because an image has gone through Photoshop does not mean it is fake. There have been a number of interesting posts about that on X this week by Pete Souza, a respected pro photographer who worked in the Obama whitehouse. Souza took some of the most iconic photos of Obama during his time in office, including the famous photo in the Situation Room of the president and his team receiving live updates of Seal Team Six apprehending Osama Bin Laden. His thoughts are nicely summarized in a recent Buzzfeed article (15 Mar 2024).

As Souza explains, it's pretty much de rigeur for photographers to touch up pics by brightening or darkening, fixing highlights and shadows, and adjusting color balance. BTW, these are all modifications that could be done back in the days of film and paper photography, though they were very time consuming and required more skill than needed today with software like Photoshop. And for decades publishers have, correctly, accepted these alterations as reasonable.

Where publishers drawn the line on "Photoshopping" pics is adding, removing, or changing content from the image. Well, some publishers do that. In photojournalism it's not okay to remove an unwanted person from an image or edit the subject to make them look taller, slimmer, or curvier. In advertising, though... well, it's pretty much the rule that parts of the image have been faked to sell better.

In my own pics I do all of the things Souza talks about as normal. I adjust brightness levels and color curves. I also sharpen virtually all of my pics. That's because I keep in-camera sharpening set low as I don't particularly like it. Moreover, I apply sharpening anyway after resizing pics for online.

I also occasionally do the things Souza describes as no-nos for photojournalism: I edit out, or alter the shape of, people in the pics! I did that in one of the pics I shared earlier today from our hike at Flag Hill. Hawk was in one of the pics, a small figure in a wide shot, and her appearance was both distracting and unflattering. Since she was a small element of the pic I was able to edit her out pretty easily— by knowing what to do with Photoshop— and we both agreed the pic was better as a result.

In Session 8 of my City of the Dead D&D game, possibly the last session, the PCs returned the cursed ruins of Graymount. This time they weren't coming to explore, they were coming with a plan of attack. You could say they... had a bone to pick.



And the City of the Dead obliged.

The group felt like pros at passing through Graymount. They'd already been there a few times so the surprises were no longer so surprising. They knew where to watch out for collapses under the main road. They knew where undead were likely hiding. They even knew about the crows.



The crows led the city's attack. Perched ominously along the edges of abandoned buildings near the center of town they first merely watched the group approach. The group had already seen that they act with a collective intelligence, though. As if on some cue the birds dropped from their hundreds of perches and swarmed around Herran, the group's forward scout, attacking him and sickening him with their stench.

Like I said, though, the group was ready for this. They knew that Herran's two swords and multiple attacks per round would do nothing against the swarm. But Meraxes's fireball would. Herran waited for the attack, let the crows form up in a tight swarm around him, then retreated 20'. That was Meraxes's cue.



With a sudden FWOOSH! the entire width of the street where the crows swarmed erupted in flames. Birds by the hundreds fell to the ground, dead.\

...Cruelty to animals? Maybe. But the group was convinced their apparent collective intelligence was evil intelligence— that they were pawns of a vampire controlling the city. And if you've watched crows in real life, you know that when they gather in groups they basically turn evil anyway. 🤣

The crows were distraction. Again, though, the PCs knew it was a distraction. They were ready for what came next.



Undead creatures came spilling out of crumbling doorways and alleys between buildings. Human-ish in appearance but clearly no longer human, with mottled decaying flesh drew tight across clearly visible bones and hair falling out in clumps, they surged forward. Mouths opened to reveal sharp teeth. Eyes burned like hot coals in their sunken sockets.

These were ghouls. And ghasts! The latter being more powerful versions of the former.

Ghasts are not only tougher and stronger but have a more potent paralyzing touch. And they carry a powerful stench. The reek of death surrounds them. It's overwhelming. It can sicken a person and bring them to their knees.

The group was ready for this, too. They knew they'd be surrounded. They kept a relatively tight formation, minimizing chances for the snapping and snarling monsters from beyond the grave to get in between them. Astrin and Herran held the front. Duncan guarded the rear with gusto, guiding his trained warhorse with his knees while wielding his katana with both hands. Terence and Meraxes in the center stayed astride their horses to work magic.... though Meraxes soon had to dismount as her horse, the only one in the group not trained for battle, started panicking at being attacked by ghouls.

And there was still more coming. More onslaught. Remember that mule you left for dead?



It remembers you!

Continued in next entry....