Run the Numbers

     It seems like simple advice, that of checking something out before diving in.  This can be anything from a home improvement to investing in something: how long will it take to break even, will you break even, is it even worth the trouble?  One example of this may be with those of you nearing the age of taking your Social Security benefits.  And when you dive into the topic of when to take them, pretty much 95% of sites will advise you to wait, all in order to maximize your payments.  So let's run the numbers (and here I use totally hypothetical numbers for ease of showing the figures).  Suppose at 62 you would receive $1000 monthly, but by waiting until the full age maximum of 67 or 68, you would increase that amount by 50%, or $1500 per month (again, these are hypothetical, and you can wait until 70 to get "even more").  Now, that $1000 per month at age 62 equals $12,000 per year, and multiply that figure by the 5 years you would wait (if you waited until you hit that 67 mark) and you have $60,000.  Okay, stay with my here...now jump to that $1500 figure, which equals the extra $500 per month because you waited.  Divide that into the $60,000 you let slide by (by not collecting at 62), and you are now at the age of 79 before you would break even (60 divided by 5 = 12; and 67 years old + 12 years = 79).  After that (at age 79) you would begin actually making "an extra" $500 monthly (because prior to that, you're only breaking even).  You wouldn't be alone in waiting since the majority of my friends have either waited or are waiting so that they can "maximize" their payout.  My wife and I ran the numbers and found that our break even point for collecting our Social Security payments would put us somewhere near the age of 88 before we "broke even."  Would we even live that long?  And if so, what shape would we be in?  Many of my friends are encountering bouts of dementia, or physical ailments, all while far away from their mid- or late-80s.  We started collecting our Social Security at 62.

     Of course, everyone is different, and this was merely the way my wife and I viewed such matters.  Perhaps you feel quite healthy, or your financial person (we don't have one) has advised you to hold off a bit, or truth is (lucky you), you simply don't need the money.  And do bear in mind that I have ZERO professional financial education (hey, maybe Trump should appoint me to some Cabinet position since I would also have NO experience or qualifications).  But now jump to something such as adding solar panels to your home.  Long before Trump took away government financial incentives for adding any form of renewable energy to your home (or vehicles), there was a government site that used satellite imaging to analyze the solar efficiency of your home roofing (our home came in at 64% although Trump ordered that site taken down as well).  With an average installation cost of $25,000 for adding solar panels, we again ran the numbers and found that even the most efficient solar installation at the time wouldn't come close to paying back even half of that investment, not to mention that many of the startup companies that pitched their low-cost panels and batteries went out of existence far ahead of the 10-15 year life of their products.  Admittedly solar production had started to improve, at least until Trump arrived and eliminated any previous government rebates; but you can still find out your own solar possibilities from Google's Project Sunroof (based on those readings, our return still remains at about $500 per year savings, which is just a few hundred dollars less than what we pay annually for our current electrical utility, including the hot summer months of using air conditioning, so again, we'd only be "getting back" about $600 per year which would mean a break even point of nearly 41+ years); in addition our utility company has its own Blue Sky wind project to supplement its production, which we contribute to).  So that's yet another area to "run the numbers," if so inclined.

     But as long as we're on the subject of numbers, take a guess as what is the third largest economy after China and the US? -- hint: it's not a nation.  The third largest economy, at a low-estimate of $27 trillion, is cybercrime, wrote The London Review.  And while the previous post talked of how good AI programs are at talking therapy, scammers have found them even better at bilking people out of their savings.  Yes, romance scams still have their place (the article notes that a scam takes place in the UK every 15 seconds with the men losing an average of £3500 and the women an average of £9000); here in the US, such scams still target those 68+ folk just starting to get their Social Security (and those so taken often lose their entire life savings so Social Security often becomes their only income).  But the scammers have discovered that the real money is no longer in romance because the new customers are younger, far younger, and they're hungry for jobs and/or medical advice.  As an article in The NY Times wrote, today's college graduates face the "grimmest" job market in years.  And yet, wrote Bloomberg: Wall Street bonuses jumped last year, with the total pool rising to $49.2 billion —the largest in records going back to 1987. The average bonus?  $246,000 (yes, that bonus is in addition to their pay).    

     So the temptation is there for many to find that lucrative job, and with that are 10 major job scams following right behind, wrote Forbes.  Take this example from AARP: After a layoff in 2023, Ron O'Brien, 65, a corporate communications executive from Boston's North Shore, went back to school to learn more about AI in the workplace.  In May 2025 he got an unsolicited email about a $300,000-a-year work at home job with a Chicago medical device company.  O'Brien applied -- and entered an elaborate AI-powered scam.  "The company was real," he says.  "It turns out the job wasn't."  Scammers set up a text interview via WhatsApp.  "I realized I was chatting with a chatbot," O'Brien says.  "It was actually processing information I was providing and commenting on it, saying things like, 'That's interesting, Ron, tell me more.' "  The criminals followed up with a 10-page job description which O'Brien thinks was also created with AI tools.  Then came a 30-minute phone interview.  "The voice they generated matched the ethnicity of a real company employee," he says.  "I realized it was a bot.  It was incredibly responsive.  I kept looking for mistakes, but there were none."  When the scammers quickly set up a video chat and offered him the job, O'Brien got suspicious.  "Something was fishy," he says.  "Things like this don't happen in three days."   During the call, he texted his wife that it looked like a scam -- but mistakenly sent it to the scammers.  They hung up.  O'Brien suspects he would have given sensitive banking and other financial information stolen if he had continued.  Side note: I am approached pretty much daily by Linkedin and other such groups offering writing or editing jobs, all of which are likely fake "job" offerings...but for you Gen Z'ers, just lure a bunch of people onto cruises and you could make $350,000 annually, wrote Bloomberg (what??).

     The AI algorithms are getting so good that even major scam operations such as those in parts of Asia are finding that they have less and less need for enslaved "employees" since todays bots can produced accurate pictures, logos, voices and videos, and do it 24/7 without tiring.  Such scam operations have even paid Zuckerberg's Meta $49 million "to run deepfake videos of politicians and government appointees --including President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders-- hawking scams, including fake government stimulus checks and benefit cards on Facebook and Instagram," wrote the Tech Transparency Project.  One should note that not only does Zuckerberg's Meta own both Facebook and Instagram, but it was recently ordered to pay fines of $375 million in New Mexico over allowing child predators access to its platforms, this being in addition to the nearly $1 billion it's been fined over the years by the European Union on data breaches.  And that viral image of Trump as Queen Marie, a monarch who lavish lifestyle and unconcern for the masses was often quoted as saying (albeit now thought to be mistakenly so) "let them eat cake" when asked about her starving subjects, is but one example of how quickly and easily AI can manipulate images (although in my opinion, if Trump were offered the job to become a monarch, even if as a queen, he might just take it).  And those trillion dollar companies? -- just 10 companies own nearly as much as that $27 trillion mark of cybercrime, with $15 trillion of that coming just in the last 3+ years.  But imagine if just one of those trillion dollars is the interest the US pays each year on its debt, wrote Fortune.  Yes, our debt is now so astronomical that the interest alone costs us taxpayers a trillion dollars (with a "T") each year, an amount that is expected to double in ten years.  And how does the US dole this out?  Try the number $3 billion.  That's what we taxpayers pay every day (not counting the estimated $1.43 billion being spent daily on Trump's war with Israel in Iran).  

     But wait, look closer and you'll find that AI and scammers are after yet another field...your medical data (insurance fraud is in their sights); and what better place to start than with X-rays.  Wait, AI is making fake X-rays?  Well, at least scammers are now using AI to do so.  And why not since the recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 1 in 3 Americans have turned to AI for advice on medical conditions and treatments.  And while nearly 77% of those polled said that they were worried about their privacy, it went on to add: Despite these privacy concerns, about four in ten (41%) of those who have used AI for physical or mental health (amounting to 13% of all adults), say they’ve uploaded personal medical information into an AI tool or chatbot.  

Graphic: Fen Christiansen/Scientific American

     Numbers are with us everywhere, even those first few digits on your credit card to identify what card you're using, wrote Scientific American (and yes, an algorithm tabulates each result to 75 to verify it's valid...what??).  And dotted "numbers" too small to be seen by the naked eye, are printed out and time-stamped from our printers.  It was those microscopic dots that led more than a few Pokémon card collectors (often paying $20-30,000 per card) to realize that scammers had tricked them.  One software engineer told Popular Mechanics, "I put off owning a home.  I put off a lot of other things that I would like to do that I can no longer do.  If I'm just honest here, I'm pretty embarrassed."  He had invested $500,000 on just 12 cards (all were fake).  Added the article: "I always view grading (and holder technology) as an arms race," says Paul Lesko, a St. Louis-based plaintiff's litigation attorney with a practice that also involves collectibles.  "The grading companies come out with new technology and holders that apparently nobody can fake, and then obviously, at some point, people can figure it out...When is the technology going to get so good that people can't copy it?  That probably never will happen, because technology increases for both sides."

     If this sounds way too confusing to process, you're in good company.  Today's scammers and politicians and heads of tech companies have gotten to be experts at talking doom and salvation at the same time, all to grab more of your trust...and then your money.  As John Lanchester put it in his excellent summary of the birth of AI in The London Review (well worth reading, in my opinion, especially to see how quickly and almost by luck, AI came to be): ...talking about the existential risk to humanity posed by AI is also, let's face it, a wonderful marketing tool.  This stuff is powerful --so powerful, too powerful-- it might even kill us all!  Roll up, roll up, and ask it to design a poster of the world's cheeses in ascending order of strength -- before it kills everybody!  Our tech overlords like the idea of being Thomas Edison, genius inventor-businessman, but they often have more in common with P.T. Barnum, genius of marketing and hype.  And if those markets crash and the bubble pops?  Bye-bye Wall Street bonuses, bye-bye 401k's, bye-bye savings...doom and salvation.  Those high gas prices?...only a few more weeks, promise.

     And yet despite all these tales of trillions of dollars and scammers and corrupt politicians (my state of Utah was listed as the 2nd most-corrupt state in the US by the World Population Review), I remain optimistic.  For one, my state's Republican-dominated legislature failed for the 5th time (yes, they tried FIVE times, all using taxpayer money) to overturn a voter-approved proposition against gerrymandering, this despite loads of additional outside money pouring in, including money from Trump's reelection campaign fund (re-election?  Really?).  To the dismay of our ultra-conservative legislature, the everyday people, the voters, won again and again!  But really, was that alone enough to make me optimistic?  Am I kidding myself?  Not at all.  Real optimism, wrote Dr. Deepika Chopra in her recent book, differs from just having positive thinking: While an optimistic outlook often promotes positive emotions and feeling positive can help us think optimistically about the future, it's important to draw a distinction if you want to harness the true power of real optimism without succumbing to problematic thinking...we cannot live authentically if we pretend that life isn't occasionally shitty.  Optimism, by contrast, invites you to look toward the future no matter what your present circumstances.  It is a way of thinking that on the whole, future events will be positive rather than negative; good outcomes will outnumber bad ones, and even the bad ones are temporary.  This was made clear in a book on Charlie, the 109-year old neighbor of journalist David von Dhrele.  In it, the author wrote that Charlie witnessed a "century of upheaval": ...and that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation, an inventive nation -- a nation of Charlies in the roller-coaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.  One could say that Charlie is each of us, seeing it all play out again, the doom and salvation of hucksters and politicians.  But like Charlie, we as a people remain rightfully optimistic.  So if you choose to watch the video below, consider it an exercise in counting...not to 10 but to 7.  With each measure just count: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 -- 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and you'll discover that each stanza repeats in 7's.  While not the only piece of music to do this, this probably remains the only rock song to be written in such a signature and to become so well known (for you musicians, that's 7/4 time).  Ah the world of numbers...Fibonacci, where art thou?  Apparently, everywhere...like money and equations (4-3=1).