Happy Summer 2020!
Where to find Meep (and more)
Howdy all — I have plenty of posts upcoming on fiscally-stressed states and cities, pensions, and mortality trends. But I have a webcast coming up on Wednesday that I need to finish the slides on, etc., so I don’t plan on posting til Thursday, if not Friday. [not to mention the day job]
In the meantime, I’d like to share some links that may be of interest to you.
The blog (and substack)
The mother blog is STUMP: stump.marypat.org, which has existed since 2014.
Quick history: I have had marypat.org since Stu gave it to me for a Christmas gift in 1999. I used to keep a text-based diary there, dating back to 1996. (yes I ported it over from a college account.) I started blogging about pensions about 2009 or so, and got picked up on some group blogs [owned by other people]… which later went poof. Stu came up with a solution for me in 2014, and I’ve been blogging here since.
The child blog on substack: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/. This goes back only to March of this year.
A reader [thanks, reader!] recommended using substack so that people could get email notifications of my posts. The blogging software I use is called textpattern… and it’s not very modern. [I’m old that way]
I can easily copy my posts from STUMP over to the substack, except… well, I’m wordy. There are length/data limits on substack posts. A different reader [howdy, different reader!] noticed that there was a post with a lot more GIFs on STUMP than substack.
I admit it.
This is the post — on Calpers using leverage. If you’d like to compare, here is the substack post. It’s not really worth your time to discover which GIFs got whacked, but hey, different people find different things interesting.
In any case, in the future, I will link to the STUMP post on substack, because I can be as crazy as I like on the website I own, but others aren’t as indulgent.
Actuarial Outpost links
I don’t blog every piece of public pension & public finance info I come across. But I do share it at the Actuarial Outpost.
You don’t need to have an account to read material there. Feel free to bookmark the following links to check for updates. Sometimes other people add to my threads, but it’s mostly me, primarily because I have news feeds alerting me on these topics.
Public Pensions Watch 2020 – note, I have posts on public pensions going back to 2008, but the threads got too long. Read the first post of each to get links to all of them.
Son stores dead mom in backpack and related pension fraud tales
That last thread is a bit of fun.
Other places I live – not much public pensions here
Twitter: meepbobeep
LinkedIn: Mary Pat Campbell
Facebook: Mary Pat Campbell (this is mainly me sharing duck pictures. Yes, really.)
Have some ducks:
YouTube (personal): Mary Pat Campbell
YouTube (not-so-personal): Meep’s Math Matters
Goodreads: Mary Pat Campbell
tumblr: Croton Falls Heights (these are clips from old newspapers)
Example from my tumblr: On of efficacy of saying "don't call them pennies"
livejournal: meep.livejournal.com
I have defunct accounts all over the place, but these are the ones I actually look at.
Books!
I read all the time. It’s split between audiobooks (usually classics I get through hoopla) and e-books (mainly Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels and Agatha Christie).
Anyway, my most recent videos covering books I’ve read:
Read broadly, think in a focused manner
In general, I am very happy to explain to anybody the ways in which I think. [How happy the people are on the receiving end… well….]
In general, I try to read broadly, and I do try to share a wide variety of links on public pensions, public finance, etc. Including linking to people I don’t agree with… if only so I can rebut them.
The thing is, I have two goals. First, to determine the truth of a certain situation:
The second is to be effective in letting other people know about this truth.
In some cases, I don’t write about certain things I find out… or I delay conveying it. In some of the cases, I don’t share it, because I know it won’t have any good effect at all. People don’t want to hear it [most common], or will distort it [much less often a motivation]. So far, the one post I sat on the longest was one on suicide. I started this post in 2014 and posted it in 2017.
The posts I’m least likely to put up are related to mortality: people really don’t want to hear about it, and I’m about the only person I know really into thinking about these trends. And yes, I know lots of people who are paid to look into it. (I’m not. Currently.)
And no, don’t ask me (right now) about COVID-19 mortality and public pensions. The answer to the question you’re thinking about is: not enough. I will likely revisit it within the next year, but still not soon.