Ghost like Swayze → ZIRP Hangover → Battle of Appo-my-tax

Hey Neighbor. There’s the meeting and then there’s the meeting after the meeting about the meeting and how bad the meeting was. According to new research out of Harvard (the University) and Asana (the glorified spreadsheet), 36% white-collar workers now make a habit of sidebarring.

According to common sense (the human intuition), it’s the other 64% you gotta worry about.

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Nom Nom is one of the best dog foods out there according to my very opinionated dog. When the Nom Nom Beef Mash bowl comes out, her eyes light up. She knows I’m taking care of her, which is only fair. After all, she takes care of me.

A little bit of Nom Nom always winds up in my beard thanks to after-dinner kisses.

→ College grads aren’t banging and The Economist is on it. According to the 180-year-old publication, “even after controlling for age, drinking habits, employment, health and marriage status, a university degree is associated with 7-8% less frequent sex, on average.” The trouble seems to be too much work, too much housework, and to much carework. The solution? Treat coitus as homework, which in a way it is. (READ MORE)

→ In a new Fortune interview about work-life balance, AirBnB founder Brian Chesky describes how he manages his time: “My parents, growing up, would mow the lawn, clean their house, do the dishes…. I’ve tried to automate as much as I can, so the time I spend is spent doing either work or true leisure activities.” Fair enough, but… what does “automate” mean here^[1]. Either this guy has a dishwashing robot or he’s conflating proles and droids. (READ MORE)

→ On a somewhat related note, a prominent investor recently posted the following to LinkedIn: “The poorest centi-millionaires in the world are those in the US. Everywhere else, centi-millionaires have tons of servants, pay no taxes, always fly private, and live like kings. In the US, a lot of centi-millionaires still flying Southwest.”

Upper Middle Research identifies readers with professional expertise and matches them with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour (probably during lunch) and keep them abreast of what’s going on in their field.

If patriotism requires selflessness, what do we call a selfish class?

Because of shit that went down in the 1860s, Americans tend to conflate secession with violence. But soft secession is possible. It’s what happens when the state allows a group of people to exempt themselves from the constrains and obligations imposed on fellow citizens. The so-called “Secession of the Wealthy” has been going on for years in the form lawfare and pathological tax avoidance, but now the secession of the Upper Middle is gaining steam.

The Fort Sumter moment for the secession of the wealthy came in 2008 when Obama bailed out the bankers who had bombed the American economy, effectively teaching them that risk could be redistributed in lieu of money. For the Upper Middle, it came a few years later.

In 2020, a bunch of Erewhon shoppers formed “Advocates for Malibu Public Schools" to push for their community’s secession from the Santa Monica school district. The conflict that ensued didn’t get much play outside LA because it looked like rich-on-rich violence. The median home price per square foot in Santa Monica is $1,200. The median home price per square foot Malibu is $1,700. Even if the citizens of Malibu moved to hoard their tax dollars and build a castle for their kids – like that one in 10 Things I Hate About You^[2] – Santa Monica would be left with… a very nice school. 

But the low-stakes nature of the fight underscored a high-stakes trend: Trickle-down secessionomics. Wealthy-but-not-megarich people clustered in homogeneously wealthy communities (rather than on the “nice side of town”) had begun hoarding rather than redistributing tax dollars. Between 2000 and 2016, 63 communities split off from school districts. Between 2017 and 2019, the pace picked up and 10 more communities did the same. Many of these secessions (Birmingham, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge) effectively re-segregated southern schools, but plenty simply split Volvo XC40 communities from Porsche Cayenne communities. For the last few year, Maine, which is about as diverse as a Noah Kahan concert, has been at the forefront of the trend.

This trend has been made possible by brain drain or, better put, brain puddling. A study conducted at Iowa State in 2003 demonstrated that despite a sharp increase in the number of Americans getting bachelor degrees, roughly 60% of the counties (many rural) experienced a net loss in educated residents between 1970 and 2000. As it turned out, the trend was just ramping up. In the 2010s, ambitious folks clustered in cities, got busy to Pure Heroine (the album) and began establishing high-income households in specific towns and neighborhoods that prioritized their interests. 

Case in point, Lost Creek. 

In May of last year 91% of the residents of Lost Creek, a wealthy (median income: $149K), purple (52% Trump in 2020) enclave west of Austin that had been annexed by the city in 2015 , voted to “disannex,” a process permitted under Texas law when “residents of a particular area disassociate themselves from a municipal government’s control and jurisdiction.” Locals cited crime as their principle concern. The number of break-ins (to million-dollar homes) had increased since the Covid-winning city slashed the police budget in 2020. Rather than engaging politically, the residents of Lost Creek basically said, “We out.”

It’s an increasingly common approach. In 2022 SmartAsset’s content team used IRS data to document the “flight” of households earning $200K a year from California (-3,226), Illinois (-1,323), and Massachusetts (-1,102) to Florida (1,786) and Texas (1,660). Long story short, high-earners moved to states with no income tax. Obviously, these tax refugees still pay property taxes that support schools, but those schools tend to be very nearby.

With Trump pushing for the replacement of the federal income tax with tariffs, it’s becoming clear just how extreme Upper Middle secession could become. Though it’s unlikely to be as extreme as the secession of the 1% – who appear to be decreasingly subject to U.S. law – it already begs certain questions about whether succeeding and seceding are now conflated in the American mind. And, if so, if succeeding is, by some kind of psychological transitive property, conflated with violence.

→ White Lotus is all in on caftans, which (anecdotally) seem to be catching on with non-septuagenarians. Makes sense. The sundress feels flirty. The caftan feels day drunk. Not a hard choice these days. (READ MORE)

→ Cristiano Ronaldo’s YouTube channel (74M Subs) has started showing Padel, the Spanish(ish) sport that has seen a 2150% increase in participation in England in the last few years. The boom is coming.

→ Trump is trying to broker peace between the PGA and LIV as a planned merger moves forward. And you know what… it’s good to care about something. (READ MORE)

→ The word for that thing when dogs lay down with their back legs behind them is “Kippering.” This is a profoundly February-coded behavior.

→ Watching the SNL50 episode (and all the celebrity tailgating around it), one thing that stands out is the cultural importance of “Lazy Sunday,” Andy Samberg’s 2009 rap about going to see the Chronicles of Narnia^[3]. An early YouTube hit, “Lazy Sunday” was not Lonely Island’s best work ever (Popstar, come at me) or even that year (“Natalie’s Rap”), but it appealed to the suburban children of the former “counter culture” types that celebrated John Belushi into an early grave. The torch was passed in the form of Red Vines.

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Wear a pair of Jacque Marie Mage glasses and it means something (inexplicable creative job). Wear a pair of Moscots or Oliver Peoples and it means something else (did well in high school, sexless marriage). Wear Warby Parkers and it means nothing at all.

Between 2008 and 2021 (arguably not 2016-2019, but shutup) a “Zero Interest Rate Policy” allowed startups focused on scale over profit to borrow cheaply and pump funds into performance marketing. Because cheap money and social networks made “blitzscaling” possible, these companies reverse engineered products from click-through rates, creating vibeless dreck. Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper Mattresses, and Stitch Fix are ostensibly different brands, but are they really?

As soon as the ZIRP period ended, the companies that had actually made the push onto the NYSE went womp womp. A luxury boom followed. Still, formative consumer experiences form consumers, which is why most Upper Middle Millennials still suffer from some version of the ZIRP Hangover, a deeply internalized feeling that a product that is good enough is good enough. But solution-oriented products^[4] don’t solve our big problem: finding meaning.

→ Breakfast joints are getting absolutely crushed by coffee and egg prices. If you don’t want that great greasy spoon diner to shut down, now would be a good time to go full croque madam. Thinking of it as an investment. (READ MORE)

→ Over the weekend, details emerged of a massive pump and dump scheme involving Javier Millei, Argentina’s weirdo President. The rug pull was a much worse version of the Trump coin debacle, but it was also indicative of a broader trend toward insider selling, folks in the room (corporate officers) legally shedding shares. Insider selling is up bigly at most publicly-traded American companies. That doesn’t suggest everyone is getting rug pulled, but it does suggest that risk is trickling down faster than money. (UMMM… TESLA)

→ Gen Z professionals (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) are non-combatants in the corporate war on middle management. The FT spends 715 words explaining this phenomenon, but Sartre’s only needed four: Hell is other people. (READ MORE)

[2] 10 Things I Hate About You is really good and that school, which is in Tacoma, is really pretty. Incidentally a lot of Microsoft execs kids go to that school and Bill Gates is one of the only tech billionaires calling for higher tax rates. What a cuck, right?

[3] Chris Parnell never gets enough love. Dr. Leo Spaceman remains the best SNL character not on SNL. You cannot convince me he wouldn’t have crushed as an insecure Ghostbuster.

[4] Arguably – I would argue this – the last major ZIRP brand is Vuori, which makes sweatpants you can wear outside the house for people too old to be wearing sweatpants outside the house. What’s interesting about Vuori is that they are growing rapidly post-ZIRP, which means they are unbelievably efficient with their marketing spend. This is why all the ads you see on Instagram are starting to look like Vuori ads.