Everyone uses money and almost no one knows how it works.

One can be a billionaire and have zero cash. I have no idea (nor do I care) if Trump is a billionaire or not, but that tweet above is just not how money nor net worth works.

For instance, at one point Elon Musk was a billionaire on paper but had his entire fortune tied up in various companies — his own money at risk, in other words. He was a billionaire many times over but didn’t have enough free cash to buy damn lunch. This is a completely possible thing. In my own life I’ve had loads of money on paper — all of it tied up in accounts for various reasons I could not touch without huge penalties so I had to borrow money even though on paper, I was (relatively) wealthy.

It matters not, in other words, how much cash is in your bank account as to how much “money” (and remember, various forms of money is fungible, it’s just some are not very liquid) you have.

I realize that most Twitterers and Tumblrites have little experience with not scraping by, but you can definitely have an assload of money and no free cash flow. Happens all the time.

I admire programmers because that’s something I could never be.

I can program just fine, when I care to. It’s not math and not really math-like (despite what you’ve heard) so I have no problem with it cognitively. However, I absolutely despise debugging and dread doing it. It’s a horrible despair-filled activity that vitiates all life and all hope. I’d rather wrench out my own fingernails than debug a broken program for two hours. Been there, done that — no desire for a repeat.

Thus, I admire people (like my partner) who can do that, as it seems about the most difficult and for me the least rewarding activity on the planet.

Since debugging is 80%+ of programming, it is not a vocation I want any part of.