Government gives Americans 3,600 new reasons to fight over custody starting today

by philg

Today is the first day when a “parent” can get a $3,600 per child fully refundable tax credit from the U.S. government. This is a fully refundable credit, i.e., it turns into $300 per month Given that roughly half of American children don’t live with two biological parents, that means that the cash implications of winning “primary parent” status are more significant than ever. If there are two children, for example, and the parents have equal incomes, a 60/40 parenting split might result in a 2:1 different in spending power between the winner parent and the loser parent (state-by-state differences in child support formulae are substantial).

For plaintiffs who were on the fence regarding making a domestic violence allegation, for example, in hopes of enhancing prospects for obtaining primary custody, now there is an additional $7,200/year at stake (comparable to working 1,000 extra hours per year at the current federal minimum wage). For comparison, $7,200 per year is more than a Swedish plaintiff could obtain by having sex with the richest billionaire in Sweden. It is also more than a plaintiff could obtain by having sex with the richest defendant in Germany.

(The current wave of inflation that is washing over the U.S. also makes family court litigation more critical. See “Profits from Marriage and Child Support Depend Heavily on Inflation Rates” within the Quirks chapter:

Nominal rather than real (inflation-adjusted) investment income is included in every state’s child support formula. Consider a defendant with $2 million in premarital savings and a 2-percent real return on those savings. With inflation at 1 percent, the nominal return will be 3 percent or $60,000 per year. If inflation goes back up to a Jimmy Carter-era 10 percent, the nominal return will be 12 percent and investment income for child support purposes will be $240,000 per year, four times as high despite the fact that the real return on investment is the same. The effect of inflation in Wisconsin, for example, with its 25 percent of gross income rule for two kids, is an increase in the child support plaintiff’s share of investment income from $15,000 per year up to $60,000, far exceeding the $40,000 in real return.

The value of property division can also be boosted by inflation. Consider a jurisdiction where a divorce plaintiff is entitled to a roughly 50 percent share of any appreciation in the value of premarital savings. If the real value doesn’t change, but inflation is 10 percent per year, the separate property will double in nominal value over a 7-year period. A plaintiff who sues for divorce after 7 years will thus obtain 25 percent of the value of the property by collecting 50 percent of the appreciation. In a no-inflation environment, the share would be 0 rather than 25 percent.

If we’re going to have inflation plus extra government-sent rewards to the parent who wins custody, might the second best career choice in the Biden era be divorce litigator? (first best, of course, is child support plaintiff after having sex with a high-income partner!))

Related:

  • “New $3,000 child tax credit could raise issues for divorced parents” (CNBC, a little out of sync with the fact that never-married-to-begin-with is a common status for plaintiffs and defendants in U.S. family courts)
  • A section asking whether it makes sense to run a court system to pick winner and loser parents: What does [Linda Nielsen, professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University] think of the winner/loser custody system that prevails in most U.S. states? “A lot of social scientists say that a court cannot possibly pull together enough custody evaluators and psychology experts to accurately predict what is going to be the best parenting plan for each child in a particular family ” responded Nielsen. “The premise that custody evaluators can always give an objective recommendation is flawed. It is not like a driving test or a math test. There may be no standard set of credentials for custody evaluators. There is not necessarily consistency from one evaluator to another and many of the measures used in these evaluations were not designed for that purpose.. A psychologist can’t walk into an intact family, do an assessment and determine which parent is better for which child at which age in that family – or who will be the better parent four years from now. So why bring that difficult task into family court?” Nielsen says that a deeper problem with courts picking the “better parent” at the time of divorce may be that the judge is answering the wrong question. “It doesn’t matter who is a better parent at the time of the divorce,” says Nielsen. “I ask students [in a Wake Forest University Department of Psychology course] ‘Was your mother or father the better parent when you were 6, 10, 16 years old? Now answer the same question for your brother or sister. The answer is different at each age and, with siblings, depending on the personality of the siblings and the parents. The importance or effectiveness of each parent will go up and down as the child ages, which is one reason that children who are in shared parenting arrangements do better than children who spend less than 35 percent of their time with one parent.”
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Jet traffic jam on the way to hear Bill Gates talk about climate change

by philg

“FAA Throttles Bizjet Traffic To Idaho Billionaires’ Conference” (AVweb):

There were so many business jets headed to the 38th annual Allen and Company conference in Sun Valley that the agency had to throttle traffic to Friedman Memorial Airport, which is 13 miles south of the famed resort town.

Like many small mountain airports, Friedman has a single runway (13/31 7550 x 100) and while that seems ample, it’s also at 5318 feet. Idaho is also in the middle of a historic heat wave so density altitude has been a lot higher than that during the heat of the day. Despite the constraints, dozens of aircraft, from Citations to Global 7500s were funneled into the facility and crammed onto the ramp. Keynote speaker was Bill Gates, who delivered a speech on climate change.

Some good life advice from my own March 2016 trip to Sun Valley:

And we made it out of Idaho at a near-jet speed:

The approach plate for KSUN:

Note the 1600′ minimum ceiling required, i.e., better than VFR minimums to do an instrument approach. There is a somewhat lower procedure available, but only to those whose aircraft have heroic climb rates.

Related:

  • “Bill Gates joins Blackstone in bid to buy British private jet services firm” (Guardian): … an approach to buy Signature, which handles more than 1.6m private jet flights a year. … According to a study by academics at Lund University, Gates is one of the world’s biggest “super-emitters” due to his regular private jet travel. He took 59 flights in one year travelling more than 200,000 miles, according to the report, which estimated that Gates’ private jet travel emitted about 1,600 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That compares with a global average of less than five tonnes per person.
  • U.S. local and federal governments respond to an urgent safety situation (it is a mystery to me how we haven’t lost a billionaire or two if they’re actually using the airport closest to Sun Valley)
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Effect on children’s wealth when parents move to Florida

by philg

Happy Bastille Day! Let’s look at the likelihood of kids being able to afford that trip to Paris…

Taxes weren’t a factor in our decision to relocate to Florida, but it is interesting to look at how a parental move to Florida can affect the wealth of children. I built a spreadsheet positing an already-sort-of-rich Massachusetts resident who moves to Florida 30 years prior to his/her/zir/their death (e.g., will live in Florida from 52 until 82, the median age at death of a COVID-19 victim here in Maskachusetts). The assumption is that this person will pay the top rates for any progressive taxation scheme. Since big numbers are tough to work with, I looked at the effect on the margin. The parent decides not to buy a $100,000 C8 Corvette (marked up from the $60,000 list price in our “no-inflation society” (TM)) and instead invests the money in the stock of a standard C corporation, to be saved for the benefit of the children. Keep in mind that this is a post-tax $100,000, which might have required earning $200,000 pre-tax (or, for those who prefer not to work, having sex with someone who earns a reasonably high income; see Real World Divorce for state-by-state child support profit calculations).

I started by assuming that the government isn’t lying to us and therefore use an inflation rate of 3 percent. If we assume real profits of 4 percent, that gives us a nominal return of 7 percent. The company pays 24.6 percent state and federal corporate income tax (Tax Foundation/OECD). We assume that these dividends are qualified and therefore a federal tax of 23.8 percent is due (20% plus Obamacare surtax). Maskachusetts income tax is 5 percent vs. 0 percent in FL. [2023 update: the MA tax rate on successful people was bumped to 9 percent via an amendment to the state constitution in 2022. The wealth difference would be larger for high-income people, therefore.] We assume that there is some way to invest these dividends and get a 5 percent annual return. When the 82-year-old is killed by Delta Epsilon Zeta variant COVID, Massachusetts estate tax takes 16 percent of the accumulated total while the Feds take 40 percent. Florida has no estate tax. Thanks partly to the miracle of compound interest and partly to the miracle of inflation, the $100,000 invested would have turned into $956,012 in a no-tax environment. In the Florida environment, however, it turns into $391,526 at death. In the Massachusetts environment, $275,287. Children end up 42 percent richer if the parent moves.

[As noted above, for children of the successful, the difference would now be larger due to the 5 percent income tax rate having become 9 percent. I redid the spreadsheet. The MA net goes down to $265,821, so the children of the FL resident become 47 percent richer.]

(You can check my calculations in this Google spreadsheet (downloads in Excel format; also available as a Web page).)

What’s the effective tax rate? In “I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less.” (NYT, 2010), Harvard professor Greg Mankiw calculated the total marginal tax rate on additional earnings for him was 90 percent (assuming that his goal was to help out his children). If we look the profits in nominal terms, subtracting the original $100,000 investment, we find that there was $291,526 profit in Florida compared to $856,012 in the no-tax case. Florida didn’t take anything, but the Feds and maybe some states via corporate income tax took 66 percent. In MA, the nominal profit was $175,287, resulting in a tax rate of 80 percent. What if we look at this in real terms, though. The $100,000 would have grown to $242,726 just from inflation alone. If we subtract this from the MA net of $275,287, the result is a total tax rate of 95 percent, since the real after-tax profit was only $32,561. The tax rate for the Florida residency case comes up to 79 percent of real after-tax profits (again, because of Federal taxation, not because Florida has an income or estate tax).

What if we assume the same real return on investment for corporations, but set inflation at 8 percent and therefore nominal earnings are 12 percent? The effective tax rate for a Floridian is remarkably stable, moving up to only 81 percent (from 79 percent). The effective tax rate for the person who lives and dies in Massachusetts, however, is 98.6 percent. (See revised spreadsheet (or as a Web page).)

What if the parent is a genius at picking stocks and he/she/ze/they selects only those with 8 percent real earnings (11 percent nominal)? The numbers are fairly stable, with the Florida corpse being worth 43 percent more. The Massachusetts real tax rate falls to 88.5 percent (from 95 percent).

Loosely related, a statue celebrating the “world’s first commercial airline flight,” which operated from St. Petersburg to Tampa beginning in 1914. The airline was started by Thomas W. Benoist, who died in an accident in 1917… stepping off a streetcar.

Wikipedia says that the signs should be amended to read “first fixed-wing scheduled airline” because the Germans were operating Zeppelins earlier. (The photo is from the St. Petersburg Pier, June 2021.)

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Fireworks anxiety supplants Coronapanic for one weekend here in Maskachusetts

by philg

We were out on the highway over the July 4th weekend for a quite-possibly-illegal visit to New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die” on the license plates, but the state was about average in terms of restrictions on residents justified in the name of COVID-19 (ranking)).

For 16 months, Maskachusetts has used its enormous highway signs to hector residents regarding the need to wear masks and/or the need to go through an elaborate online process to reserve a vaccine (it is apparently too challenging to run a vaccine clinic at a rest stop and change the sign from “go to a URL” to “go to a rest stop”). Over the July 4th weekend, however, the signs were changed to hector residents residents regarding the potential of imprisonment and/or fines if they set off fireworks (even sparklers are illegal in MA). A few days later, the signs were back to telling residents to visit a URL to begin the process of ascending into the ranks of the vaccinated.

From a ski resort in NH:

Sabbaday Falls after the big rain:

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Did lockdowns turn richer Americans into dragons hoarding gold?

by philg

Americans who were at least moderately rich, e.g., incomes above $100,000 per year, prospered financially through a year of lockdown. They got paid the same or more. They didn’t have to spend money or time commuting. Their stock market and real estate holdings zoomed (so to speak) up. Since they couldn’t buy restaurant meals or travel, their earnings piled up. (See “During Covid-19, Most Americans Got Richer—Especially the Rich” (WSJ): “U.S. households gained $13.5 trillion in wealth in 2020. … More than 70% of the increase in household wealth went to the top 20% of income earners. About a third went to the top 1%.”)

Where have we previously seen someone who stays in one place for a year or more while surrounded by valuable items? Beowulf! At the end of the poem (more than 1,000 years old), our hero confronts a dragon whose lived experience for 300 years has been #StayHomeSaveLives while his/her/zir/their golden treasure appreciates. Mx. Dragon is almost as stuffed with cash as a Seattle divorce plaintiff, but never spends any of it.

Related:

  • “Dragonomics: Smaug and Climate Change” (Richard Fahey, a grad student in English at University of Notre Dame): “I would suggest that Smaug may be productively read as a representation of climate change, in the sense that the dragon is a force of smoke and heat which destroys ecosystems and disrupts the environment in much deeper and more long-lasting ways. … At the center of our modern struggles with dragonomics, I would argue, the problem of avarice endures. It is greed, especially from the fossil fuel lobby and the major energy companies (many linked to nations themselves), which have stalled and prevented developments in renewable energies in order to reduce our carbon footprint. … Dragonomics is not simply about making money, it is about plundering it and more importantly hoarding it.”
  • source of image above

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Could discrepancy between vaccine effectiveness in the U.K. versus the U.S. be caused by incompetence with medical records?

by philg

George’s comment on Coronavirus kills the vaccinated in the UK, but not in the U.S., which quotes Mx. Fauci saying “If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated.”:

Got to love the 99.2% number, specially the .2 added to 99.

By highlighting the absurd precision, I wonder if George has explained the root cause of the discrepancy between U.S. data and U.K. data, in which roughly half of the people dying from COVID-19 were previously blessed with the sacrament of two vaccine shots.

The U.K. is competent at keeping medical records. The U.S. is not. The U.K. has a central database to go with its National Health Service. With the exception of the VA hospitals, the U.S. has hundreds of $billions wasted on mutually incompatible databases, each one a silo for an individual hospital or hospital group.

Why couldn’t Saint Fauci find more than 0.8% vaccinated among the deceased? The better question is how he/she/ze/they was able to find even one vaccinated person given that there is no central database of the vaccinated, that to ask the “Are you vaccinated?” question violates HIPAA, and that hospitals have no incentive (and maybe no mechanism) to report the death of a vaccinated person.

Readers: What do you think? Unless an American dies with his/her/zir/their vaccine card stapled to his/her/zir/their forehead, how is anyone supposed to know whether he/she/ze/they was vaccinated?

Related:

  • “EHR Use, High Administrative Burden Driving Healthcare Spending” (August 2018): “Since 2011, the federal government has spent $38 billion requiring doctors and hospitals to install electronic health records systems through the Meaningful Use program in Medicare and Medicaid,” noted Alexander. … Persistent problems with health data exchange and interoperability further diminish the value of EHR technology. Health data exchange and interoperability solutions are available to streamline health data exchange and eliminate the need for paper health records, but this additional technology costs money.
  • Sweden may be recording COVID-19 deaths differently than other countries (the Swedes have one big database and use it to tag COVID-19 deaths within 30 days of a positive test; Norway relies on subjective evaluation by a physician and the physician taking the initiative to report)
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Longest terms and conditions document for consumers? (177 pages at National rental car)

by philg

Signing up to the National Emerald Club since the U.S. is mostly out of rental cars and Hertz, Avis, and Enterprise are no longer sufficient….

How long are these Ts & Cs?

Is this a record? Here’s some of the stuff that I’m supposed to read now and remember perhaps a few years from now when it is time to visit Nicaragua:

On the other hand, maybe it will be sooner. The ruling party there seems to realize, as we do, that preventing citizens from hearing opposition voices is the best path to stable government: “Fifth presidential candidate detained in Nicaragua; 15 opposition leaders now detained in total” (CNN, June 21). Certainly, Nicaragua can teach us a lot about how to control COVID-19. As of June 22, the country had suffered 188 COVID-19-tagged deaths in a population of 6.5 million. Compare to New Jersey: nearly 26,377 deaths in a population of 9.3 million (Census 2020, though it is unclear if Census documents account for the undocumented.)

Readers: Who has ever seen a longer terms and conditions document from a company offering goods or services to consumers?

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“The virus is evolving quickly and efficiently” but we can beat it with vaccines

by philg

“We’ve Come So Far With Vaccines, America. Now Keep Going.” (New York Times, July 3):

Seven months after the first shots were authorized for emergency use, 66 percent of adults — more than 100 million people — have received at least one dose. That’s not the 70 percent President Biden was aiming to reach by July 4, but it’s close, and it’s an impressive figure.

It is comforting to be reminded that Joe Biden was the president primarily responsible for the rapid development and purchasing of these vaccines. Uncle Joe takes care of us all!

But it’s too soon to declare total victory. The world is still locked in a desperate race between the coronavirus’s ability to evolve and society’s ability to vaccinate, and America’s lead in that race is precarious. The virus is evolving quickly and efficiently. Given enough time and enough susceptible hosts, it could still mutate its way around the human immune response and beyond the ability of existing vaccines to help. If that happens, the United States, and any other nations that have made such progress, will be forced backward.

If the vaccine evolves quickly and efficiently, what is the point of a vaccination project? If everyone in the U.S. were vaccinated tomorrow against all of the version of SARS-CoV-2 that exist in the U.S., wouldn’t a new variant arrive through the fully open southern border on Monday? From “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies” (Politico):

The Biden administration is reversing a series of Trump-era immigration rulings that narrowed asylum standards by denying protection to victims of domestic violence and those who said they were threatened by gangs in their home country.

In other words, anyone who can utter the words “my spouse hit me” or “a gang wants to kill me” is entitled to live in the U.S. for at least several years until a judge evaluates the truth of the statement (absent psychic powers, how is a judge supposed to figure this out?). Several years is certainly long enough to spread mutated SARS-CoV-2.

(The border is perhaps not “fully open” given that Kamala Harris tells migrants not to come to our party with some strong words.)

We don’t believe that if we gave 100 percent of humanity a flu shot we would eliminate influenza, right? Why do we believe that we can beat a “virus [that] is evolving quickly and efficiently” with our fairly sluggish vaccine system?

The scientists at Facebook told me, on April 30, that we can “end the pandemic” by adding a vaccine profile frame (Facebook previously granted FDA approval to vaccines):

What about Facebook today?

I would so love to meet the folks who believe the things that Facebook says aren’t true! Separately, one thing that is interesting about Facebook’s scientific information campaign is that it isn’t signed. Plainly Facebook has a deep bench of medical expertise, but who are the physicians and public health PhDs who authored the material that Facebook puts out? A typical newspaper article is signed by a journalist or two and approved by an editor whose name can be looked up. Quotes and opinions in the article will generally be attributed to a person whose professional background can be researched.

Circling back to the original topic… How is it possible to simultaneously believe that the virus is evolving rapidly and efficiently AND that vaccinations against a particular genotype (or set of genotypes) will prevent the virus from thriving?

Related:

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Medical School 2020, Year 3, Week 24 (Internal Medicine, Week 6)

by philg

Last week before exams and our first break for the year. Sleek Sylvester, Ditzy Diane, and I are worn out, our motivation waning. We have a new team of residents for the last three days and none of us have the desire to impress them. The senior resident: “Let us know if you have any questions. You guys can just study if you want. We’ll let you know if anything exciting is happening.”

We are actually helpful on Monday during rounds, having previously admitted many of the patients on our service. We provided the only continuity of care for these patients and were tasked with presenting a formal H&P for each of our three patients to the new team.

We also play “Stump the Med Student” on rounds. A 36-year-old gas station clerk, whom I admitted three days ago, has acute renal failure from multifactorial causes — hypertension, uncontrolled diabetes, and three-month long ibuprofen use. He stopped taking his diabetes and blood pressure medications five years ago. The senior resident asks, “Why is his sugar low and his Hemoglobin A1C in the normal range if he is an uncontrolled diabetic?” Sleek Sylvester, Ditzy Diane, and I put our heads together and come up with nothing. “Insulin is cleared by the kidneys,” explains the senior resident. “If you see a patient whose diabetes suddenly becomes remarkably well-controlled after years of noncompliance, it’s likely a result of his kidneys failing, not that he has seen the light and has started to listen to your every piece of advice. It’s ironically the first sign of a serious complication. Our patient likely will be on dialysis for the rest of his life. I don’t think his kidneys will recover.” He concludes: “Well, I’ve done my job for the week; go study.” 

After rounds, we do UWorld questions in the lounge, disrupting the residents who are trying to get their notes into Epic. We relocate to the cafeteria for lunch and find Geezer George and Mischievous Mary. Geezer George is doing his elective orthopaedic rotation. “I’m determined to do ortho. I am ready to be miserable through the application process.” Are you concerned about getting into a residency program? “Yes, but my mentality is if the average step score is 245 for ortho, and I know people with 260 are being accepted, that also means they must be letting people in with 220.” Sleek Sylvester questions his symmetric Bell Curve assumption: “Why stop there. People get in with 270, that means they are letting people in who barely passed!”

Jane has had a slow end to her Ob/Gyn rotation with no surgeries scheduled for Monday. She did, however, enjoy M&M (morbidity and mortality) conference. “The attending was pimping the residents. I was like, Bitch, don’t stop! The residents were squirming, it was great.”

I arrive for the three-hour 8:30 am NBME clerkship exam on Thursday at 8:00 am. Type-A Anita and Southern Steve just finished their radiology rotation. They struggled to stay awake in the dark reading room while getting pimped by the radiologists. “The radiologist would put up a study, and select one of us to give an impression on what is wrong. We would utterly fail most of the time.” Steve: “Do you remember that one abdominal CT? We kept focusing on what we were convinced was a hernia. Turned out to be just a normal penis… Apparently there was small bowel thickening from gastroenteritis.” Anita: “Boy, did he get a laugh out of that.”

Internal Medicine exam questions focused on adverse effects to medications (e.g., Stevens-Johnson syndrome in anti-epilepsy medications), management of acute coronary syndrome, and several rare autoimmune disorders.

On Friday starting at 9:00 am, I had two 15-minute encounters with standardized patients, each followed by a 10-minute write-up. One patient was suffering from new-onset chest pain patient while the other had worsening shortness of breath from CHF versus COPD. We are alone with the “patients” while a video recording is made. Our grade is based on a review from the standardized patient (“Did the medical student empathize with my situation?”; “Did the medical student cover me appropriately during the physical exam?”; “Was the medical student’s interview organized?”), a review of the video by a physician or another standardized patient, and the quality of the write-up, again reviewed by a physician or another standardized patient. This prepares us for the pass/fail fourth-year Step 2 Clinical Skills (CS) exam (good news: 98 percent pass rate; bad news: the all-day test costs $1,290 plus travel expenses to a designated testing location, e.g., Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, or Philadelphia).

Statistics for the week… Study: 8 hours. Sleep: 5 hours/night; Fun for me and Jane: visit her sister and one-month-old nephew. Not fun for Jane’s sister: We practiced testing the baby’s primitive reflexes.

The rest of the book: http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020

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A masked family walks into a crowded unmasked restaurant

by philg

I had breakfast at Red’s Kitchen and Tavern in Peabody, Massachusetts today. Occupancy was at least 80 percent. None of the customers were masked (partly due to the fact that they were eating!). None of the cooks or servers were masked. The hostess was not masked. In walks a family of four, the parents perhaps 40 years old. Both parents and their middle school-aged children were wearing cloth/paper masks of the kind that #Science says provide almost no protection to the wearer (but, as demonstrated in Peru and the Czech Republic, when ordered for the general public and enforced by the police and military, can protect a whole population!). They kept their masks on until their food was served.

Our governor’s 69 emergency orders are no longer in effect so they didn’t have to wear masks by law/regulation/dictate. This is the North Shore, not Cambridge or Boston, so there was no apparent social pressure to wear a mask. There was no immediate social pressure to wear a mask from anyone else in the restaurant. Why would they wear a mask? #AbundanceOfCaution is the seemingly obvious answer. Except if that were the explanation, they would have simply stayed home and prepared groceries previously delivered by an army of Latinx essential workers. Why go into a crowded restaurant and rely on 3-cent paper surgical masks as PPE? Or, if slightly less cautious, wouldn’t they have gone to a drive-through and eaten in the COVID-19-free environment of their automobile? Or, if God had told them that they had to eat in that very restaurant that very morning, they could have worn N95 masks that would have had some chance of filtering out incoming Delta variant.

I don’t begrudge them their moderate level of coronapanic. One of the great things about Florida is that each resident is free to choose his/her/zir/their own level of coronapanic. I’m just wondering what moderately coronapanicked people are doing in a crowded restaurant in which nobody else is masked!

On a mostly unrelated note… here’s a $5 item from the Whole Paycheck in Bedford, MA:

I’m wondering why this is effective marketing. For the righteous who wish to purchase based on victimhood status, wouldn’t it work just as well to put a photo of the owners, maybe with traditionally female names attached and dressed as what we used to call “women”? The “Women Owned” legend risks, I would think, discouraging haters from buying. The Neanderthals who refuse to sort vendors by victimhood category may yet be happy to buy from “Judy and Kate” (just as they were happy to buy from Home Depot when Marvin Ellison was a top executive there and they’re happy to buy from Lowe’s now that Mr. Ellison is CEO, but they might not want to buy from Lowe’s if it put a big “Black-Managed” sign on the front).

[Disclaimer: I went into the Whole Paycheck to return an Amazon purchase (the Army of the Essential picked the wrong item off the shelf), not because I would ordinarily be pretentious enough to shop there. I did buy a watermelon on the way out, which turned out to be terrible. A replacement watermelon from Shaw’s (a regular supermarket for regular people) was vastly superior.]

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