The Real Reason To Lock Doors In Tahoe

People in law enforcement will tell you to lock your doors. They know better than to think, "My neighborhood is so safe, we don't lock our doors." They know the standard upside/downside aspect of door locking. The upside is, locked doors may save your life. The downside is that you have to turn the knob. Pretty clear choice, right?

In Tahoe, we have another reason to lock doors! Bears know how to open doors. House doors. Car doors. 

Do you want to walk in on this guy as he goes through your refrigerator?

My wife and I stood on the other side of our slider and watched a young bear - probably two years old or less and only 150 pounds - carefully hooking his claws onto the edge of the glass. He didn't mind that we were just inches from the glass telling him to go away. My wife banged pan lids together like cymbals. Maybe he thought the percussion meant a party was going on, a party with party food. Had the door been unlocked, he would have come in even though we were there. Fortunately, the door was locked. He eventually gave up.

Some neighbors down the street woke up to the barking of their dog. They went downstairs and found the living room slider open and a bear in the kitchen. The bear didn't mind the dog. It had more important things on his mind. Like mint chocolate chip ice cream.

A woman we know was camping with her boyfriend. They woke up to the honking horn of their pickup. When they shined flashlights, they saw that a bear had gotten inside the truck and managed to close the door while it was inside. Panicked, it ripped the inside of the truck apart. And every time it spun around, it bumped into the horn

Of course, just like human burglars, bears can enter a house or vehicle even if it's locked. But, also like humans, bears tend to take the easiest targets. A potential food source that isn't locked up is the most attractive.

Takeaway? Lock your doors.

Warning, Charities May Be Stealing Your Money. Here's What To Look For.

As some of you know, my new title, Tahoe Payback, has a backstory about scam charities.

I expected to get a lot of blow back from people protesting the very concept that not all charities are squeaky-clean good. I also expected to get trolled from people who are in the scam charity business and don't like that I'm bringing some attention to issue.

Instead, I've gotten many emails from people who have worked for and seen the inside of charities, both good and bad. Every person has supported what my book reveals. Some have been very vocal about how important it is to inform the public about scam charities. Some have seen fraud up close and are outraged.

It occurred to me that I should offer a few points about how to tell a good charity from a bad one.

First, let me explain that there are, in my mind, three major categories of charities.

1) The first category is small charities, often local to a single area, that are run by volunteers. These charities, whether they provide soup kitchens or homeless shelters or college scholarships for local high school students or literacy programs for poor kids or rescue organizations for abused animals or shelters for refugees are almost universally good. The key, to me, seems to be that they are run by volunteers. When no one is being paid by the charity, no one seems to look at the incoming revenue as a potential personal bonanza. Add to that a requirement that two people have to sign off on every expense and you end up with a clean non-profit that is run by people who only want to do good stuff. I could add that my limited research suggests that these charities nearly always have annual revenue under $1 million.

2) The second category is large charities with a nationwide or even international footprint.  These are the names we all know. Because they have a high profile, there is a fair amount of oversight from not just their board of directors but also from the press. Yes, their CEOs make very large salaries. And yes, the charities have huge revenues (often in the billions of dollars a year) that allow for an enormous range of expenses that are hard to track. And yes, when you take a close look at their 990 form filings (that by law are public) you often see uncomfortable things, like no fundraising expense listed on the "fundraising expense" line. We know they hire telemarketers to fill our mailboxes with solicitations and call us at dinnertime. But they bury those expenses in categories like "program expenses." Why? To make it look like they spend a greater proportion of their revenue on charitable activities.

When a huge charity fudges the numbers, it makes for a lot of discomfort. Why not just be honest? We are trusting them with our hard-earned donations. Why shouldn't they just tell the truth?

The bottom line is that while the huge charities do good work, they also engage in shady reporting. But in the end, they are probably worth supporting.

3) The third category of charities is the mid-sized ones, with annual revenues from $1 million to $100 million. These are the ones that seem to be fertile territory for fraud. Why? They aren't big enough to get lots of scrutiny from the general public or the press or the state attorneys general. The directors on the boards are often friends of the person running the charity. Those board members may share in the benefits that come to the management of an unscrupulous organization. The charity is small enough that there aren't a lot of employees who might get a good sense of what's going on and report it to authorities. Like any small or medium sized business, there is often just one person who is "in charge" and who really knows what's going on. And every other employee just does as they're told. If the person or people in charge manipulate the revenue and the required IRS 990 filings to produce a huge personal benefit to themselves, who's to know? A charity that takes in $1 million plus each year can send along a majority of the revenue to "business expenses" that ultimately end up in the manager's pocket.

How, you ask? While my book Tahoe Payback explains some of the ways, I'll just mention one here. A charity can hire a fundraising company to raise revenue. The fundraising company can charge a huge percentage of the incoming revenue as a fee to raise the money. The charity might end up paying 85% to the fundraising company, justifying the expense by saying that keeping only 15% of the money is better than nothing. So, even if the fundraising seems an excessive expense, is that wrong or is it just unfortunate?

Consider this: What if the fundraising company is a for-profit company owned by the manager of the charity? Or maybe it's owned by the charity manager's brother-in-law or son. However unethical that seems, it's legal. And it happens all the time.

If you have no ethics or moral code, you can set up a charity that claims to help kids with cancer, and you can send out mailers with pictures of seriously ill children. You might collect tens of millions of dollars from people who think they're improving the lives of sick kids. But most of the money those hard-working contributors send in goes directly to the fundraising company, which, in actuality, is your own bank account.

Outraged? Me too.

How to tell if a charity is like that? First, notice the solicitations they send out. If they are garish mailers with little windows showing cash or check inside, if they have lots of scary writing on the outside of the envelope, if the letter inside shows heart-stopping pictures of starving children or wounded veterans or old people with dementia, consider the charity very suspect. These are tactics you'll recognize from supermarket checkout tabloids. If the solicitation makes a bold play on your emotions and your sympathies, look out. Next, Google the charity's name accompanied by the words, 'legitimate or scam.' Spend some time reading the links that Google sends you to.

Another educational approach is to Google 'Worst charities' and see what organizations like CNN or Forbes say about them. Go to those 'worst' charity websites and notice the tactics they use to solicit money. This is your primer on what to watch out for.

One more thing: There are many agencies that rate charities. Most of them are non-profits themselves, and some if not most of the rating agencies are run by the charities they recommend! Yes, it's appalling.

So my recommendation is this. Find small, local charities that benefit your community. Charities that are 100% run by volunteers. Fund them. Don't fund any charity that comes to you with a fancy sales job. Whether you have $100 to donate or $1 million, if you send it to a company that tries to coerce you with pictures of people in great stress, your money may go to pay for the private airplane of the person running the charity. Instead, use your money to pay for, as an example, the local soup kitchen's grocery bill. Because the kitchen is run by volunteers, you can visit and actually see what you are funding. If the charities you choose to support provide services that you can personally see, and no one is getting paid with your donation, you are a thousand times less likely to waste your money.

There are thousands of good non-profit companies out there doing good work. They are mostly run by dedicated volunteers. And they almost never use slick sales brochures and over-the-top, hence revolting solicitations to hustle your emotions.

Good Luck!

Bears Like A Morning Walk, Too

Life in Tahoe...

I was out early on a recent morning, before any cars or dogs and joggers had appeared. Along came a nearby resident. He stopped and turned toward me and took a long look, wondering, I suppose, if my presence might represent any opportunities. A fresh-baked apple pie I'd left out to cool? Groceries forgotten for a moment in the open back of the car? He obviously decided that I was boring, and he turned and strolled down the street.  

Beyond Astonishment, Solar Eclipse 2017

Like everyone else, we'd seen partial solar eclipses. The moon moves in front of the sun, and, looking through special really dark glasses you can see it. But when the moon completely blots out the sun, you can take off your special glasses and see the sun's corona. It is Magic.

In all of the solar system, and, probably, in all of most other solar systems, there is nothing so amazing as a perfect, total solar eclipse. Many people probably just think that a solar eclipse is a curiosity, beautiful to see if you get the chance. But the fact that our moon is the perfect size and distance from us to occasionally block out the sun, is amazing. For you geek wannabes, the moon at 2159 miles in diameter is about 1/400th the diameter of the sun (864,576 miles in diameter). And the sun is about 400 times as far from us as the moon. So line them up, and they take up, from our viewpoint, an equal size in space. How amazing is that?

This photo was actually after totality, i.e., the moon began to nibble at the sun at the 1 o'clock position on the dial, moved from upper right to lower left, and exited its passage at 7 o'clock on the dial. The actual time of passage where we were was from a bit after 9 a.m. to a bit after 11:30 a.m.

My wife and I had never seen a total eclipse. So when I first became aware of the eclipse, I started doing a little research on the most reliable cloudless weather in the path of totality. A year ago, I made hotel reservations in Boise, Idaho, which wasn't actually in the path of totality but was a mere 70 miles down the interstate from not just totality but the center of totality. For those of you who aren't closet science geeks, the reason that mattered to me was that the total time of totality varies from slightly over 2 minutes in the center of the path to just seconds near the edge of totality. I figured if I were going to drive for the better part of two days each way, I wanted to get the maximum effect. 

After all, a four-day round trip to see a two minute show that might not even happen due to cloud cover, was a bit of a gamble. How did it turn out? It was astonishing! 

Here's why. In a partial eclipse, even one with as much as 99% coverage by the moon, the portion of the sun that is still visible shines at its full power. So even though there is just a tiny bit of sun showing, it is still like having a super bright spotlight shining down from the sky. The overall world darkens a lot, and the birds start flying around trying to figure out what's going on. But you still can't look directly at the sun without your super dark glasses. 

But when you upgrade your eclipse from 99% to 100%, it feels like upgrading from the concept of God to actually sitting down with her in the flesh and sharing a beer. 

This is known as the Diamond Ring effect. A moment before totality and a moment after totality, you see what looks like a brilliant gem. This is the sun's light just barely bursting around the edge of the moon.

Totality is something difficult to describe. Here's how it played out. 

We left our Boise hotel at 5 a.m. and drove west into the most eastern part of Oregon, a place called Huntington. Along with Madras a couple of hundred miles to the west, Huntington has a weather history that places it in the most reliably sunny places in the country for this time of year. 

We pulled off the freeway at a marvelous place called Farewell Bend State Park, a beautiful, grassy, place on the Snake River, which flows all the way from Jackson, Wyoming to the Columbia River. Farewell Bend has a deep history involving all of the settlers traveling the Oregon Trail beginning back in 1843. Some paused in Eastern Oregon and decided to make a new life farming the dry rolling hills. Other said their goodbyes to fellow settlers and headed on down the Snake River on their way to the West Coast.

We waited, along with hundreds of other eclipse watchers, as the moon slowly ate into the sun. It was cool to see, but it was nothing that any of us but the children in the crowd hadn't already seen before.

As the moon covered most of the sun, we began to notice that the landscape was less bright. The light was whiter and harsher as if the sun were a very bright parking lot light. As the moon covered more and more of the sun, the speed of change seemed to increase. The temperature dropped from quite warm to cool. I pulled on my sweatshirt. Birds started taking to the air as if suddenly realizing that their evening ritual had fallen behind. The total time it took for the moon to reach totality from after it first began nibbling on the sun was a little over an hour. Totality where we were was 2 minutes and 9 seconds.

As totality approached, it seemed that the moon's movement sped up further. In a moment, the coverage was nearly complete. The tiny bit of direct sun that still appeared was brilliant, far too bright to look at without the special glasses. Then, the culmination of the long wait came, and the magic moment happened, sooner than maybe anyone expected.

It was almost a shock. The last bit of direct sunlight shut off as if someone had flipped a switch. In a moment we went from a very small bit of very bright sun to a not very dark night. 

We saw a bright glow at the point where the last bit of sun had been. This is the effect that many describe as looking like a diamond ring. In a moment, that glow also disappeared. Then the dominant feature in the sky was the corona of the sun, larger for us than in the picture below. It stretched out twice the diameter of the sun. It was one of the more amazing things I'd ever seen. Everyone gasped. Some made awe-struck whoops. Then there was a hush.

Think of the corona as the undulating atmosphere of the sun. It extends millions of miles above the sun's surface. And, in one of the great mysteries of the sun, the corona, at a million degrees or more, is much, much hotter than the sun's surface, which is relatively cool at less than ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. 

The entire crowd was transfixed at this sight.

After our first astonishment, we took a moment to look around. Venus and another planet were visible in the dark sky. A few stars shown. At the horizon in all directions was a sunset-like glow coming from the surrounding land - 35 miles away - that was outside of the band of totality and still in sunlight.

Totality is beyond description. The entire crowd gasped in unison.

How would I rate this experience? I've never formulated a bucket list of things to do and experience before I die. But if I did, this would be near the top. How would I characterize a two-minute event that I spent four days driving to see? Absolutely worth it.