Re: How to live on $500/month?

Gary James <none@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

On 16 Mar 2007 02:49:20 -0500, Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Gary James <none@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

In an unorthodox way, Allan is a very accomplished person. I doubt
he will have any real problem as he gets older. The money that a
man like Allan makes, is not usually subject to SS taxes. That is
probably why he will only collect $500.

In addition to getting a lot of bad advice, I also get a lot of denial.
When I said that I don't believe I will ever have another job, I meant it,
and when I said that when I retire, all I will get from Social Security
is $500/month, that is true.

I wasn't questioning your honesty. No offense intended.

None was taken. I wasn't responding to a suggestion of dishonesty but to
the possibility that your comment, combined with certain details of the
discussion, could be misinterpreted. Specifically, we have been discussing
two kinds of earnings that do not contribute to Social Security:
(1) subsistence support at various research institutes
(2) sizable earnings, such as from the job in South Korea, which are not
taxed due to reciprocal agreements between South Korea and the US.
Both involve contacts I have with mathematicians around the world.
Since your comment didn't clearly refer to (1), it could possibly have
been misinterpreted as referring to (2). With the latter interpretation,
it would have led to very different conclusions about the nature of the
problem.

I also need to clarify that I could have been confused by the order in
which various postings appear on various people's browsers, so the information
about the South Korean job might not have appeared at the time you posted
your article. In particular, I'm not criticizing your writing.

I have no idea which foreign country would be cheapest for a retiree
to live in. But I saw a TV program back before the collapse of the
Soviet Union (1980s) in which many American SS retirees were shown
living in Poland. These people all had a minimal Social Security
income but were able to enjoy a nice apartment, restaurants and
theater in Warsaw. My memory of that program was that their standard
of living was greatly enhanced in the Bloc nations.

That's very interesting. In the case of Poland, I think I saw something
on PBS a few months ago about how there is a recent upsurge of interest
in Jews and Jewish culture in Poland. This has a lot to do with tourism.
I don't remember details but apparently sp,e Poles are trying to learn Yiddish
and to reproduce features of stetl life and Klezmer music, etc. The Poles
who do this are, in general, not Jews, there being something of a shortage
of Polish Jews since the Holocaust. I don't know how they would feel about
receiving a thoroughly assimilated American atheist of Jewish descent in
that connection, but I wondered about it at the time I saw the PBS story.

I realize that was a long time ago but maybe the principle still
holds. I would check out any communist country that would allow
entry. How ? I don't know, but the info must be on the internet
somewhere.

Unfortunately, all Communist countries I know of are dictatorships and
it probably wouldn't take me long to get into legal difficulties, since
I tend to say what I think.

I think this question of relocating to foreign countries is very instructive
and also very healthy. For one thing, one has to sift through a lot of
information on conditions in other countries. And, more important, one
has to consider those conditions as possibly impinging on one's own life,
and that is an intellectual and empathic experience from which Americans
are usually exempt.

Returning to your comments: you have pointed out a couple of websites
containing, respectively, some autobiographical information about me
and my picture. I don't know if you actually looked at my website but,
now that you've drawn attention to it, I would like to point out some
of the things one can read there.

Just go to http://www.swiss.csail.mit.edu/~adler
and click on any of the following:
MAGIC
MATHCULT
LABYRINTHS

MAGIC has lesson plans I helped some middle school teachers write on
magic squares and their higher dimensional analogues, including some
contemporary research.

MATHCULT has "minutes" of a free public seminar I ran, aimed at a general
audience without math background, called "Mathematical Culture" (hardly
anyone showed up, but I think that others in the coffee shop did observe
what was going on, so it's hard to say there was no interest in it or benefit
from it).

LABYRINTHS is my sporadic journal, devoted to articulating some of my
experiences teaching myself subjects other than mathematics (I already
have a lot of places to publish mathematics). So far, there is only one
issue of LABYRINTHS. One reason for this is that it takes a long time to
have something to say about subjects one knows nothing about.

These three items (MAGIC, MATHCULT and LABYRINTHS) pertain to education.
MAGIC reflects a collaboration between me and two middle school teachers
and presupposes that the education will take place in schools under the
usual conditions, a mode of education I like to refer to as "bureaucratic"
and which I don't like much. The other two, MATHCULT and LABYRINTHS, represent
experimental efforts in pursuit of a concept I like to call "non-bureaucratic
education". I like to do such experiments and to make their results freely
available, as I have done at my website. In the last several years, I haven't
done so because giving away my labor while not having an income, indeed while
not being certain of being able to keep a roof over my head, is just too
depressing. Once that problem is solved, I look forward to going back to
doing educational experiments (in addition to my research, which I do under
all conditions) and making their results freely available. I'm not sure
exactly how to articulate the difference between being depressed about
doing unremunerated educational experiments and being happy about doing
unremunerated mathematical research, but I think the point is this: when
I do my research, the activity involves the relationship between me and
mathematics, and doesn't involve interacting with other humans. On the
other hand, when I do educational experiments and when I distribute the
results freely, that does involve other people, who then become a factor
in the pleasure I take from the activity.

If I do find that relocating to another country is the best way to solve my
problem of supporting myself, those experiments will, in the future, take
place on that country and not in the US, and it is their citizens who will
be my primary students. That's ok with me, if it comes to that, especially
if they appreciate it.

Anyway, I did want to point out LABYRINTHS and MATHCULT, just in case someone
here might find them interesting. I don't care much for MAGIC, which I would
prefer to rewrite so that it is addressed to the students, rather than to
their teachers.
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler <ara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.
.

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