Mark Carroll's Journal

Britain has many nice fancy buildings and engineering marvels whose origins coincide with the the height of its colonial era. I surmise that the colonies were exploited such that their wealth turned into shiny domestic things. In visiting Paris and seeing the many old, grand buildings, and noting that France also had many colonies, I wonder if my theory holds analogously there too.

Glasgow's Victorian buildings seem to have developed a bit of a habit of collapsing and burning down. I can't help but suspect that, as we all end up as second-tier powers, it's nice to have the shiny things (if we don't think about why we have them) but there's going to be decreasingly many, no longer is there means to create them. They're valuable but perishable leftovers of a past era.

I did not feel like thinking or moving at all this morning but, after enough resting, by this afternoon a little energy had accumulated. I did file my 2025 FBAR with FinCEN and went on to figure enough of my US taxes to discover that a combination of higher thresholds and lower income (I was made redundant last year then took a new job on a lower base salary) means that I should be able to skip itemizing deductions. This is great news because the calculation of pro-rated foreign tax paid on not-excluded income, and of mortgage interest paid (not easily obtained from Barclays), all converted from GBP to USD for when each happened, is quite a pain.

I also did some travel and attraction ticket planning for our coming trip to Paris, last time I was a tourist there we still had the Carte Orange. I even (finally) got around to responding properly to an e-mail from a relative. Maybe I'll yet get around to opening and filing pending mail.

Today is my first day of leave from work for over the Christmas break. This morning we sent the boys off back home to Asia to visit family, now it's just me and R. I am relaxing on the sofa with our dog L. while R. brings some sanity to the kitchen storage. I already feel my headspace increasing and have been getting some small postponed things done. Many more await.

I am quite good at sleeping. Given the opportunity, I can do plenty of it. This morning, I dreamt we lived somewhere else and I spied a sizable swirly unnatural-looking Weather Thing approaching, and turned to R. to strongly suggest that we leave the house now and drive elsewhere.

Again, I thought back to high school where one of my math teachers figured Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a regular dodecahedron and, looking at one, I wonder what the straightforward strategy is for doing that. I like to think that enough staring and turning would help make it clearer. Now, this is where I wish I had a large desktop system with lots of PCI-e slots for used RTX 3090's or somesuch: it's the kind of thing I'm happy to try idly chatting to some opensource LLM about. It's not as if anything's riding on the answer. Perhaps they're rather better at classic book suggestions than anything analytic though.

I also got to wonder about mobile telephony. ( How might routing work? )

My mention of idly chatting to LLMs reminds me, I have three sizable pending purchases in mind: such a desktop AI system, a small laptop for use while commuting, and a cross-trainer. The interesting question is how to prioritize them though clearly the first there should actually be last while I cross my fingers for the bubble bursting. Also, I'm reluctant to spend too freely until I'm more ahead of the higher-interest debt.

In the meantime, I've found that, as usual, BBC iPlayer didn't exactly help me discover that there's recent Later… with Jools Holland to provide me with a somewhat alternative musical backdrop, albeit a considerably mixed bag of such. I've been enjoying ex-BBC's Stereo Underground recently which is also nicely varied. Given that it often plays the music of my childhood, it makes me wonder: I think of all the energy of especially some of the more punk-ish songs, and how exciting life seemed to me at the time, especially with books filling my head with new intellectual worlds to wrestle with. There's something there I'd be interested to recapture, about possibility and choice, about who I am and what I pursue. I may not quite know which destinations make sense but one of the many wonderful things about R. is how supportive they are.

Late one evening back in July, I boarded a CrossCountry train at Edinburgh Waverley that then failed to proceed further. In the end, my journey was delayed by an hour so, under the Delay Repay scheme, I was supposed to be eligible for a refund.

CrossCountry's claim process wanted a QR code and and a ticket number. Unfortunately, I was using one of their flexi season tickets in their mobile app, which prevents screenshots, and the day's ticket wholly disappears once the day is done. So, I asked their customer service people how I can claim. I asked several times and got no useful response at all.

Eventually, I fell back to an effective last resort: post them a paper letter. This triggered a slow sequence of back and forth by e-mail but, last week, they finally paid me my refund. It's absurd that it took three months, and probably cost them as much to deal with me as the £7.55 they paid me, but I still don't have my answer as to how people with those tickets are supposed to claim.

My weight remains much higher than it should be, indeed much higher than it was when I lived in Eastern Tennessee, but I am grateful that it at least seems to be remaining stable. In time, as I improve my diet and exercise, it may thus drift back downward. Also, on a health note, we just got our influenza vaccinations, paid for by the family medical coverage from my employer, Addepar. Somebody from Spire Global reached out to me to see if I'd like to work on a project there but, while I'd love to be working locally in Rust on space systems, they pay less and don't appear from the outside to be as pleasant a place to work at this time. With Addepar, at least I am getting to learn a little of complex financial instruments which is differently interesting.

My work is sometimes entertaining in further overloading the acronyms in my head. Recent examples include:

acronym	what I first thought	what it meant
AMA	against medical advice	ask me anything
PTSD	post-traumatic stress disorder	position time-series data
UVF	Ulster Volunteer Force*	unit verification failure†

^*I was born into 1970s Britain, the Troubles were in the news
^†for instance, how much stock someone owns today should be what they owned yesterday plus buys less sells, we check that's so

R. and I sometimes head into Edinburgh on the train for in-office work, sometimes on separate days, sometimes together. Today, R. went in, and I stayed home and helped out with pet care. I hope that I am becoming more productive as I grow more familiar with my employer's codebase. I also look forward to getting around to personal programming projects at home but not quite yet it seems, still I have to figure how and when to fit that in. A task this evening is to schedule our influenza vaccinations. COVID-19 vaccinations are becoming a distant memory, it's a pity our BUPA health insurance doesn't reimburse them.

( Our expensive family visa journey continues. )

I read John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In which was gentle and engaging. Whether in science fiction or fantasy, I always enjoy insight into a fairly non-human character. Definitely a nice enough way to pass the time. (Though, R. noted that it is far more gory than I had noticed, somehow that all passed me by.) I might be running out of television to watch, though. There is a bit more Chief of War left but it is far more buttocks than smiles and R. noted arrant ahistoricity in the portrayal of Zamboanga (languages, buildings, clothing). We are giving The Mayfair Witches a try on Netflix, R. read the books long ago.

A local Tesco Express convenience store has opened quite near us so we have a very handy source of heavily discounted food that must be sold before it turns into a pumpkin, assuming it isn't already one. So, among other things, we found ourselves eating sandwiches recently. With luck, the store will soon correct their loud alarm siren that warns whenever somebody outside walked near the customer entrance.

Just on my walk to work this morning, twice I had to dodge tourist groups blocking the entire pavement. I thought that I had avoided this in escaping Cambridge, England, but apparently not. Not being attired for leisure, I occasionally have people ask me for help with local navigation. At least, a no-steps route at the Edinburgh end worked well for me today and took little longer. I don't feel enormously steady on many-steps and can experience some vertigo so it would seem foolish to make a frequent habit of them.

In considering the prospect of moving house a little south, it occurred to me that Glasgow's buses are best avoided and the south-side trains will go up to Central, not Queen Street from where the better Edinburgh trains depart. If I want an easy commute, it behooves me to remain near a subway station from which I can easily transfer at Buchanan to Queen Street. I wonder if there is any prospect of finding a garden flat (so better for L. the dog) in our youngest's school catchment area within easy reach of the subway; it seems a tall order.

At the last part of my way home tonight, I stop to pick up the car from a local car park. I left my parking space clear because the electricians are fixing a light above it. I did so on a previous day when there was word of their arrival, on which they helpfully spent their time partly on other activities that did not require cars to have been moved. So, second time lucky, one hopes. That first was a while ago, their work was interrupted by an unexpected-by-us holiday on their part.

Pensions guys presented to us at work and got me to thinking: I have a mountain of debt at a reasonable APR and I am in a high income tax bracket. I don't have much in pension savings so old-me will be in a low tax bracket. I expect that my debt grows faster than my pension. However, I can pay pre-tax money into my pension. So, better to direct spare post-tax money toward the debt or pre-tax into the pension? I wonder if a cranking of approximate numbers yields an obvious correct answer. It would be nice to not think about secondary factors like less debt means better APRs or that I can deduct paid mortgage interest from my US taxes.

Years ago I implemented a composable simulation language into which, were it handy now, I could easily plug these questions for a year-by-year simulation. Back when working on demonstrating that technology's application to financial planning, I was amused that such inevitably led to the question, when do you plan to die?, so this pensions question is a nice exception in that I can simply optimize for starting far-off retirement in the best position.

Having already complained about the IRS expecting expats to file taxes but often requiring them to have a US telephone number, I should note that I was lucky enough to set up my EFTPS account before allowing my US cellphone plan to lapse and I have remained able to use it since.

An interesting aspect of US taxes is how individuals have many options for how to file. Some of those choices affect and may even constrain future years. In my limited experience, this is in marked difference to the UK where, as an individual, if I must file at all then I just tell them what happened and they go away and figure it out for me and explain what they did.

As a US expat, a particular set of choices is how to handle my employment income. I can try excluding it using form 2555, I can try to get credit for the tax paid using form 1116, I can try deducting that tax on Schedule A, etc. (I itemize because I can deduct my mortgage interest.) Furthermore, I can combine these: e.g., excluding part of the income then applying another form to the pro-rated remainder. Then, I get to try out different form 1040 tax worksheets to see how it works out in each case. So far, I've not needed form 1116 but it's always worth checking. Annoyingly, a few years ago they changed the law such that I can't deduct UK council tax, though at least my reading of the US-UK tax treaty suggests that I can deduct my payroll-deducted pension contributions. (There's also a social security treaty that can be useful for self-employment tax.)

( Listening to old music )

( Playing more with AI/LLMs. )

( Money is tight. )

It occurred to me to try to remember all fifty states of the US. I thought I would do better, I could recall only forty-seven, my daughter did better and faster. I shan't disclose which I forgot in case a reader wants to try. It was annoying to note those I did forget: a reader here lives in one and I was open to moving to it a few years ago, and I used to work with a couple of people who hail from another.

It was interesting to hear of the flight chaos caused by London Heathrow's power loss, so many flights diverted and passengers ending up all over Western and Central Europe. That must have caused all sorts of problems and taken the airlines quite some effort to recover from.

We had a pet food delivery from Amazon (insert hisses and boos to taste) shortly after half-past seven on a Sunday morning which impressed neither me nor R. At a glance, I failed to find a summary on their website of when they think is reasonable to make residential deliveries but at least we now know that it may happen again.

I was thinking how tricky interest rate calculations might be for institutions. One typically wants to quote an annual percentage but give interest more often than that. In terms of how the payments add up to the annual total, we certainly don't want that sum to be less than the quoted percentage but we would also rather it be as low as possible. Yet, when we pay interest, it's not like we pay exactly a twelfth root or whatever, or probably even calculate roots as precisely as we could, and we somehow round each payment to probably just a couple of places depending on the currency we're using. Further, absent withdrawals, the interest payments increase steadily due to compounding. In practice, I wonder how institutions deal with such payment calculations where each is rounded yet what matters is the sum of the payments.