Talking with my mom about redoing the house and realizing some of the gap between us is I have since childhood played video games where “ma\ufffcximizing efficiency of build order” is a key mechanic, ultimately dating to WWII planning exercises
Talked to my dad today, he had been texting for a while and saying that he had important information about my future as scion of the dynasty and then rescheduling like that time my mom kept putting “watch cheesy PBS sex special w/Kontextmaschine” on her calendar when I hit puberty
Which was like he said one thing about how co-trusteeship works and then he drifted off into broad advice
Which was clearly an old guy’s sense of investing*, like dividends dividends dividends and a sense of index funds as wrong as compared to like, personally picking stocks off the Wall Street Journal?
Which hoo boy, made me look back and think, “you know the whole time I was on the floor while we watched Lou Dobbs Moneyline, you knew Bloomberg terminals existed, right?”
And I asked him about land and he talked about rates of return and generic chaff and I was like “yeah, you moved to land in the 70s hyperinflation, tell me about that” And he just had no idea what I was talking about
So two possibilities, one of which is as I’d experienced from his driving back from airports, he’s kind of old and senile now and remembers things more in terms of the people who were there “Bob and Jerry and Bill Wester, etc”, though I did manage to extract that speculatively buying parcels you expected to soon connect to utilities based on local knowledge was particularly an angle for lease to national chains who had no local knowledge to begin with and are planned for standardized prebuilds
The other being the possibility that the whole time he was really the classic Boomer right place/right time position and had little particular input on that and if now he realizes it’s time to pass the baton and does it by refusing to hand over the reins until he’s dead and giving me some incoherent half-remembered advice about how to succeed in 1975, how Boomer is that?
* I mean this not like “his risk/return ratio is calculated as for a retiree” but like “he internalized this stuff in the LBJ administration at latest”
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