Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2128: One hundred pounds and done: The end of my weight loss.

 

I weighed 185 this morning.

For the first time since high school, I’m not overweight.  I have reached normal weight, based on my body mass index (BMI).   No drugs involved, just diet and exercise.

Even as recently as last year, I thought this was an impossible goal.  I was more-than-satisfied with the results when I finally made it to “overweight”, rather than “obese”.

But “normal”?  Not in my wildest dreams.

And now that I’ve made it, it’s kind of an anticlimax, really.  As I explain below.

Let’s just get all the standard successful-weight-loss stuff out of the way.

Based on what I see on the internet, I have to start this post by crowing about my weight loss in as many ways as possible.  Show some pictures of me holding up some now-comically-large clothing.  Maybe some side-by-sides of obese-me versus normal-me.

Skip that.

I’ve lost 100 pounds, from 285 to 185.  I’ve lost a foot off my waist, from 46″ to 34″.  I don’t think I need to belabor it.

This resulted in all the changes you might expect, and then some.

I’ve lost enough weight that I’ve had to adjust not just my clothing size, but a bunch of other things, as detailed in my prior posts on weight loss.  Shoes.  Eyeglasses.  Bed.  Patio furniture.  I hit another one just yesterday:  I’ve lost so much weight, I’ve had to reset the suspension on my bike.  I thought the air shock suspension on the bike had gone flat.  To the contrary, it’s just way too stiff, having been set for a guy who weighed 100 pounds more than me.

Turns out, there’s a lot of stuff in your life that conforms to how fat you are, and it takes quite a while to find it all, once you’ve lost the fat.

Surprisingly not difficult

I’m also supposed to belabor the struggle, how difficult things got as I got thinner, and on and on.  Those awful weight plateaus, and the effort it took to break through them.  As if it took some sort of super-human willpower to get through this.

But that just didn’t happen.   As you can see above, the weight came off almost like clockwork.  Even now, I’m pretty sure I could just continue losing weight until I starved myself to death.  The point being that nothing about my body’s reaction to weight loss did anything to stop further weight loss.

That’s not to say that this was costless or effortless.  I have, in fact, changed more-or-less everything about what and how I eat.  Put up with some hunger.  Had some bad days.  And so on.

But the facts are that:

  • I proceeded slowly.  I didn’t try to jump into some all-new lifestyle.
  • I changed my diet initially merely by addressing my worst bad habits, starting with alcoholism, and working down from there.
  • I monitored the results and adjusted as necessary.
  • As my diet changed, my cravings faded, and my sense of hunger faded.
  • And, eventually, I settled on:
    • a modest 500-calorie-per-day deficit,
    • eating nothing but small meals and snacks throughout the day,
    • eating no (or nearly no) starch, “empty calories”, junk food, fast food, or takeout food.

The fact is, although I started off merely trying to achieve sobriety, I ended up with an almost-completely-conventional weight loss program.

In the end, I aimed for very slow weight loss (5 pounds a month).  The theory is that this prevents your body from over-reacting to the calorie restrictions.  And, near as I can tell, that worked.

I eat a ridiculously healthful diet, but not by choice.  Turns out, if you restrict your calories, and you want to meet your RDAs for nutrients, you have no choice but to eat high-nutrient-density foods.  Just as a matter of arithmetic.  If you only have a limited number of calories, you have to eat foods with a lot of nutrition per calorie.  Fruit, vegetables, fish, lean meat, cheese, nuts.

I’ve had to resort to whey protein powder as a protein source.  Otherwise, to meet a dietary protein standard (1 gram per kilogram body weight, per day), I’d have ended up eating nothing but meat, all day long.  Whey protein gives you high-quality protein for the fewest possible calories.

Otherwise, I eat what I want.  For example, I put high-fat blue cheese dressing on my salads.  Why?  Because I like it.  Every piece of diet advice says to use vinegar or some other no-cal salad dressing.  But without the fat, my body simply does not register salad greens as food.  So I eat high-fat salads.   So sue me.

Under my weight loss plan, any food is fine, as long as three things happen:

  • I stay within my daily total calorie limit.
  • The food is not a high-glycemic-index food or otherwise stimulates hunger.
  • The food is not “empty calories” (except possibly in small amounts).

Separately, regular exercise, properly timed, has two direct and obvious benefits. 

  • Sure, it burns some calories.
  • But, it also temporarily kills your appetite, and takes up time that you can’t spend eating, or thinking about eating.

Every other day, my wife and I hit the gym mid-morning.  The principal advantage of mid-morning exercise is that it resets that day’s “diet clock”.  We’ll get back from the gym around lunch time, and at that point, my combined diet-and-exercise calorie total for the day is negative.  I won’t hit “break even” until about 2 PM.  And so, in effect, I get to eat a day’s worth of food, in the last eight or so hours in the day.  Plus, being able to eat a bit more, on gym days, is a great incentive to get to the gym.

Finally, the only big downside, so far, is that I have a wrinkly tummy.  (And probably ass, but I can’t see that in the mirror, so I don’t much care.)  Wrinkly enough that it looks weird.  I’ll wear a rash guard when I go swimming, and that’ll cover that.

What’s next?

Not much.  That’s what makes this such an anti-climax.

Now that my weight should be stable for a while, I’m going to buy some summer clothes.

I’ll eat maybe another 500 calories a day.

That’s about it.

Conclusion

My unshakeable conclusion is that more-or-less all the standard, mainstream diet advice — such as you might get from a physician or other medical professional — is correct.

Don’t:  Be an habitual drunk, eat junk food, eat empty starch calories, eat without limit, be sedentary, eat large amounts of sugars, starches, and other high-glycemic-index foods.

Do:  Eat high-nutrient-density foods, subject to a calorie limit, and get regular exercise.

That’s boring advice.

But sometimes boring is good.

Post #2127: Oh, the price of gold … IV

 

Gold blew through $3100 $3200 $3300 $3400 / ounce this morning.

Source:  Kitco, Inc.

We’re now a little over $100 below the all-time high price of gold, in real (CPI-adjusted) dollars.

The last time the price of gold was at this level, in real terms, was the end of 1979/start of 1980.  Not quite half a century ago. Continue reading Post #2127: Oh, the price of gold … IV

Post 2092, revised. These were a few of my favorite things.

 

Edit:  It’s now looking like an independent Federal Reserve is soon to be toast.  Back when government elites had to follow the law, it would have been illegal to replace the Fed chair before the term is up.  But that’s history.

Looking on the bright side, this will solve our toilet paper shortage once and for all.  Give it a couple of years, and you can just reach into your wallet if you’re caught short.  That’s what the dollar will be good for, once we’ve gone full banana republic with our currency. 

The price of gold has been rising out of sight?  My guess is, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 

I’m moving my paper assets into anything-but-dollar-denominated-investments.  For the little people, like me, normally, foreign investment accounts would greatly increase likelihood of an IRS audit.  But now that the IRS staff has been cut, I guess I can just laugh at the IRS the way the rich do. 

In any case, better that, than staying invested in nothing but dollar-denominated assets, while control of the Fed is seized by the economic geniuses who think that huge tariffs, changing daily, are brilliant economic policy.

Thank God Trump established a U.S. cryptocurrency reserve ahead of time.  Such foresight! /s

Original post, from 2/6/2025, follows.

These are three things that I try to bring to mind, as I read the news, and the Trump Takeover unfolds.

I take it as given that the reader knows this Presidential transition is not normal.

And that breaking stuff is easy.

In order, my three main points of reality-based comfort are:

The Fed

Source:  Via Wikipedia, “By AgnosticPreachersKid – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6282818”.

It makes a nice mantra.

I chant that, in my mind, to calm the jumpies that I get, whenever I start thinking about who now has access to what, where, within the computer system that literally makes U.S. Government payments.

Sure, they’ve let the barbarians into the Treasury, and while that opens the door to all kinds of potential mischief and avoidable security issues, I should stay focused on the dollar.  Because everything I own is denominated in those.

So, who makes (creates) the dollar anyway?  And, likewise, who runs the banking system?

The answer I come up with is the Fed. Not Treasury.

At which point I breathe a sigh of relief.  And try to fix that fact firmly in my head.  The (security of) the dollar depends on the Fed, not the Treasury.

At least for now.  I think.

This, despite the Treasury being tasked with creating the physical tokens we exchange as money, in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.  But a) don’t confuse that with real money, and b) they do that, in effect, under license and control of the Fed, as the bills themselves are Federal Reserve Notes.  It’s why even the lowly $1 bill has a unique serial number on it.

Global warming

The science there is pretty good.  We’ve got a handle on the major trends, under a business-as-usual scenario.  No shortage of credible warnings.

Without a doubt, the pro-fossil-fuel, anti-renewable, climate-change head-in-the-sand posture of the Republican party, at this moment in time, will eventually stand out as having been spectacularly dumb.

Even if I’m an optimist on this — a position that does not come naturally to me — and assume we’ll eventually get a handle on climate change, our descendants will curse us for at least the easily-avoidable costs we now impose.

Better not to burn it.  If you can avoid it.  That’s the minimal answer to fossil fuels.

By that lowest-bar criterion, Republican global warming policy flunks.

Science ain’t going nowhere.  All this anti-science nonsense, in the long run, all of that loses. 

It may take a while.  But it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Medicare?

 

I read where Musk’s Team was going to identify fraud in the Medicare program.

I’ve been around Medicare most of my professional life. FWIW.  So this was a very comfortable topic for me.

And I said, fraud in Medicare?  I’d bet you can find some. 

There always has been, always will be, fraud in Medicare.

Ideally, you’d like to keep it to minimum. As would any insurer.  Or any sane individual, for that matter.

My point being that it’s not as if this issue of fraud has passed unnoticed.

To the contrary.  I can vaguely recall the Medicare program having, effectively, competitions among contractors, to see who could flag the most fraud.  And I vaguely recall that IBM and Watson itself took on this task, at some point.  But without anything much happening.  My memory or not, there’s too much money to be made in stopping it, if nothing else.

Thus, I see a proposal to throw de-identified Medicare claims data up against the latest AI, and … see what sticks?

Not a bad idea. 

I’d be surprised if it hasn’t already been tried. Twice over.  Perhaps Musk has access to a “better” AI?  Perhaps the Medicare claims processors were behind the times?  Or perhaps not. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, or the problem remains ill-suited to AI.

In any case, fraud in Medicare claims.  Been there.  Done that.

I’d bet they’re going to find some.

But no more than anybody else.

But if so, that would be reassuringly normal.  Everybody takes a hack at fraud in Medicare.  To the point where I’m pretty sure there ain’t no low-hanging fruit.  Or not much.

But I recall that Medicare got stung badly, recently, by a novel scam that involved buying up dying DME suppliers, and thereby obtaining the existing DME suppliers’ licensure (registration?) with the Medicare program.   Whoever bought up those dying DME businesses then abused that portfolio of strategically purchased DME suppliers’ credentials.  A lot. Billed the fill-in-the-profanity-here out of them.

Then, last I heard, successfully skedaddled with the cash. 

A notable black eye for Medicare, at the very least. That’s where I lost the thread.  But that’s a novel and well-thought-out scam.  Perhaps that was a one-off.

Separately, when you get right down to it, this Administration knows a thing or two about Medicare fraud.  Here’s a Washington Post article about the several Trump pardons of individuals convicted of serious Medicare fraud (reference).  It’s not often that you get a name to attach to a $1B Medicare fraud scheme.  In the context of “pardoned by the President”.

 

Conclusion

 

This morning, the plants in my yard are weighted down with a quarter-inch of accumulated sleet.  Meanwhile, the sleet has turned to sporadic rain.

I am sitting in front of a lit wood stove, as I write this.  Between the weather, and the way the USA is headed, I needed some fire.

Something basic.  Comforting.  But real.  Something I think I understand.

I want my life to be more along the lines of a stack of kiln-dried firewood.  And a bit less like a dumpster fire.

If that’s not too much to ask.

Post #2126: Oh, the price of gold is rising out of sight, III

 

Gold blew through $3100 $3200 $3300 / ounce this morning.

 

As noted in prior posts, an increase in the price of gold is never a good thing.

By my reckoning, we’re now a couple of hundred dollars off the all-time high, in the real (inflation-adjusted) price of gold, in dollars.

My interpretation is that three months of Trumpism managed to do for Russia what 15 years of agitation by the BRICS countries could not.

By reneging on our international commitments, turning on our former allies, aligning ourselves with Russia, and giving an absolutely ignorant crew of knuckleheads complete control over tariffs …

… I do believe we’ve managed to destroy the dollar’s role as the key international currency AND cripple much of our industrial capacity.  In one fell swoop.

Restated, by setting large and rapidly changing tariffs, with no policy goal beyond making The Leader happy, we’ve slit our own throats.

It’s just going to take a few months for that to be completely obvious.

Putin’s ROI is beyond calculation.

Post #2124: Tax day bullet fee.

 

Tax day felt different this year.

I considered, then rejected, asking for an extension for filing.

Not because I hadn’t filled out the 1040 yet.  Not even because I owe a lot of tax this year.  Which, by my middle-class standards, I do.

Because it galls me to pay money to the incompetent asshats who are currently in the process of running the country into the ground.

It feels like a bullet fee.  (The fee that certain governments charge, to the family of an executed prisoner, ostensibly to pay for the ammunition used by the firing squad.)

Like I’m paying them, for killing my country.

But also because I’m confused about whom I am sending my Federal tax dollars to.

In the past, when the U.S. still operated under the basic framework of the Constitution, I was sending my money to the Congress.  (Even though the Treasury Department collected it).  That’s because the Congress determined how that money was spent.

But now, apparently, the President can pretty much do as he pleases, tax-and-spending wise.  Though I guess if it’s an income tax, it still requires an act of the Congress.  For now.

In any case, as I read it, with respect to your 1040 and April 15th, you can legally delay filing, but you can’t legally delay paying.  Or, at least, not you, the little guy.  The IRS form on which you request a delay in filing your return very specifically requires you to pay an estimate of the tax that is due.

So, if I want to stay within the law, being just a citizen, they get my money whether I file on time or not.  A filing delay is just a delay in providing the supporting paperwork in the form of a tax return.

The only way I can see not to pay, is not to file, period.  And after a lifetime of being a law-abiding taxpayer, I can’t see me doing that.

So I did my taxes on autopilot.  And Turbo Tax.

Held my nose.

And gave the Federal government my money.

And so helped them continue to kill off what’s left of the U.S.A.

Once you have paid him the Danegeld, you’ll never get rid of the Dane.

Post #2123: Oh, oh, otolith.

 

Yesterday morning I sat up to get out of bed and was dizzy.  Sitting in bed.

I thought, “That’s new”, and then “That’s not good”.

Right on both counts.

See epilogue on vitamin D.

To cut to the …

Vertigo.  An inner-ear problem.  Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV).  When in doubt, see what the Mayo Clinic says.  And Cleveland Clinic.

You have rocks in your ear.  Little tiny bits of calcium carbonate.  They help form your innate accelerometers.  But sometimes, they break off and bits of them travel.  Particularly if you are old.

If they end up in your circular canals — where your sense of balance hangs out — then, in various ways, the stuff hits the fan, balance-wise.  Anything from instability when standing, to full-out puking-as-the-room-spins.

But, per Mayo, above, one can use the Epley procedure to try to move the offending rock chips back to where they belong.  Or, at least, to where they’ll do no harm.  Or something.

The Epley procedure.

The Epley looks benign enough, per the writeup at the Cleveland Clinic.  Turn your head to one side, lie down, turn head and torso in the other direction, sit back up.  Three of that, and you’re done.

Weirdly, there appear to be at least two reputable versions of the Epley procedure.  I would characterize one of them as emphasizing speed at some phases of the operation (the Cleveland Clinic version), versus a go-slow, wait for the symptoms to clear, then hold-each-pose-for-half-a-minute method (which is how I read the Mayo version).  Citations above.

As the potential puke-er and puke-ee, I chose the Cleveland Clinic get-this-sucker-over-with version of the Epley.  Even with that, I aborted one attempt. Couldn’t follow through on it.  Had to sit up and hope it went away.

What they don’t tell you is that the first maneuver — tilting your head that way, and lying flat — that’s designed to set this whole vertigo thing off, about as hard as it can be set off.  In my case, right on up to — but not passing, thanks to aborting one of the attempts — the puke level.

For me, at some point, doing the Epley maneuver was very much like stifling a gag reflex.  At least, doing it the second and third times was.  Doing it the first, time, you don’t know quite what’s coming.  But you are intentionally causing something solid to strike the extremely sensitive nerve cells in your circular canals — a place where only fluids should abide.  The nerve cells in your inner ear REALLY don’t like that, and they let you know accordingly.

I made it through the recommended three Epleys, start to finish, but I was nauseated and sweating heavily for the next half-hour.

I would not have voluntarily undertaken a fourth.

But first, which ear/side is the problem?

Oh, golly, you’ll know.  Put some pillows on your bed, turn your head 45 degrees to one side, and lay back on your pillows.  (Essentially, do a half-baked version of the first step of the Epley procedure).  If this problem — an otolith — is in that downward-facing ear, this should trigger vertigo.   Be prepared.

Retold:  First figure out if you have this problem, and which side it’s on, by the “lay back on pillow” method just above.  The vertigo was clear as a bell for me, and then some.  And then, proceed to the full Epley, if needed, and if and as able.

A key risk factor

I saw a doctor about it today, and she mentioned that a visit to the dentist is a risk factor for this happening.  Something about the lie-back-and-say-aah position opens up a path for these to little calcium carbonate chips to escape into the circular canals.

I further note that one of the Epley procedure writeups emphasized the importance of hyperextending the neck, for bringing the head at least to fully flat, and beyond flat (hanging off the edge of the bed),within reason, if possible.

Finally, I note that I’ve recently taken to lying down completely flat, in bed, for extended periods.  Basically, I’ve been trying to sleep on my back, without a pillow.  And the morning when this started, I sat up quickly, directly from that position.

And was dizzy.  From an escaped otolith.

Coincidence?  I think not.

I think the moral of the story for me is don’t do that.  Don’t sleep flat on your back, with no pillow, and if you do, don’t go from that position to fully upright in one motion.

R-E-L-I-E-F

Some people get what is described as “immediate relief” from the problem, after doing a set of three Epleys.  It goes away, just like that.

No such luck here.

But the gross symptoms finally disappeared that night.  Sometime in the middle of the night, I stopped getting dizzy if I turned onto my right side.

Once you get comfortable with this, it’s pretty weird.  For example, there’s about a three-second delay between turning over, and getting dizzy.  And then the episode of dizziness stops.  No idea why there’s that little delay, no idea why it stops, but plausibly both are related to the movement of my wandering otolith.

My balance still doesn’t feel A-1.

So what else is new.

(But seriously, there seem to be lingering effects.  Not the room-spinning vertigo of the acute phase (apparently caused by/associated with involuntary eye movements (nystagmus).  But seemingly more balance issues than usual.  Or I’m noticing it more than usual.)

Conclusion

A reminder of frailty is never fun.

I’m trying to take renewed joy in (e.g.) being able to walk around.

But, whatever happens, I just have to live with it.

That’s a fact of life.  Doubly so with age.

Epilogue:  I’ll take some vitamin D with that.

It’s unsurprising that vitamin D might play a key role here, as the same bone-building mechanisms that occur throughout your body also apply to the bones, rocks, and minerals in your inner ear.

Anyway, that’s my vitamin D level, above.  Barely sufficient, as of two days ago.

I realize that one of the risks of eating few calories for weight loss is a high risk of missing critical nutrients.  I realize that vitamin D levels drop in winter.  And this, being roughly the end of winter, should mean that they are about as low as they are going to get.

But how can I have low vitamin D levels, when I eat (a small portion of) salmon a couple of times a week?  If you ask Google for foods that contain a lot of D, salmon is right at the top of the list.

Surprise.   Wild salmon has a fair bit of vitamin D.  Farmed salmon does not.  The assertion that salmon is a good source of vitamin D is based on the USDA data, which in turn are probably so old they predate the widespread practice of salmon farming.

The upshot is that I’ve added few thousand units of vitamin D supplements to my daily routine.

I can’t blame the problem on low vitamin D.  But it surely doesn’t help.  And the lack of D in my diet is cheaply and easily correctable.

Post #2122: The Turing Test Inverted, a.k.a. the Truth-in-AI Act of 2025

 

Twenty years ago, only evil genius super-villains used AI.

I know this from watching The Incredibles (2004) last night.

And when an AI spoke, it sounded all robotic ‘n’ stuff.

This morning, I woke up and decided that wouldn’t be a bad thing, here in 2025.

Not the super-villain part.  We have enough of that going on already.

I’m talking about requiring spoken-language output of AIs to sound “robotic”.  And so require that AI spoken output be easily recognizable to humans as machine-generated speech.

Hence, the need for a Truth-in-AI Act.

Truth-in and commercial speech

Many laws bar deception in various forms of commercial speech.  Truth-in-advertising laws.  Truth-in-lending laws.

Materially mis-representing something you are selling is already against the law.

The Truth-in-AI law would just be another layer of that.  It would say that you can’t send me AI-generated speech without making it clear that it is AI-generated speech.

Cue tape

 

By Birchflow – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146074295

 

I’m old enough to know why the AI’s speech is so disjointed in The Incredibles.

It harks back to the days when the only way to create fake audio of a person’s voice was to cut-and-paste audio tape recordings of that voice.   Literally snip and tape together carefully selected sections of audio tape.

The result was definitely a sentence — almost surely saying something inappropriate — in the voice of the original tape recording.  But the sound of each word was taken completely out of the original context. 

This is what the oddly lilting speech of the autopilot in The Incredibles was modeled after.

Even today, we have vestiges of “robotic voice” in (e.g.) legacy systems that will send you a security code over the phone.  Each number is pronounced as a stand-alone entity. So that 111 is pronounced one-(pause)-one-(pause)-one.  And not “a hundred and eleven”.

But seriously

Post #2052: A 15-minute podcast summarizing the issues for a proposed Vienna pool/gym.

The power of AI to persuade (and mislead) the masses largely hinges on not being able to tell that the results are AI-generated.

AI already passes the simple version of the Turing test.  You can hold a conversation with one, and not know that you’re not talking to a human).

And, as it turns out, being unable to tell AI from reality is a bad thing.  This is surely true for AI-faked videos and photos.

It’s also true for audio products like fake two-person podcasts, as referenced above.

For free, the Google AI product NotebookLM will produce you an outstanding and persuasive two-person podcast.  Feed it only the information you want it to see, and it will say what you’d like it to say.

I was appalled at how persuasive that free, easily-created two-person podcast was.

But if you took the exact same discussion, and made the AI actors “talk like robots”, it would not be anywhere near as persuasive.  All of the brain-bypassing emotional appeal of the two warm human voices would be lost.

You’d have to rely solely on the logic and sense of the underlying argument.

And I’d say we’re desperately in need of that these days.

Conclusion

If I took horsemeat, and labeled and sold it as hamburger so that I could sell it, I’d be liable for fraud.

But if I take an AI-generated “conversation”, and put that out there as if it were human, so that I can “sell” it to the audience — that’s A-OK?

We have to start dealing meaningfully with AI’s outstanding ability to deceive.

If passing off a horse for a cow is illegal, then passing off an AI for a human should be as well.

No more of this sounding-like-a-human stuff — that’s a good start.  Even if that can only be applied to commercial speech.

Post #2121: EV charging drama.

 

A couple of years back, I took a look at the EV charging market around me, and concluded that it was just a mess.

(Tesla excluded.  This is really a rant about the non-Tesla car charging market in my area.)

Now FF to the present, and … it’s still a mess.

My only solid conclusion is that it’s worth signing up with a charger network or two.  Not out of brand loyalty, or for the nominal discount.  I’ve signed up with my local charging provider (EVGO) just to avoid having to use the totally-exposed-to-the-elements frequently malfunctioning outdoor credit card readers that seem to be standard on EV charging stations.

The lesson being that even if all the high-voltage stuff works right, if the charger can’t read your credit card, you’re still out of luck.

The bottom line is that the electrical energy that costs less than $4 at home, cost about $16 at my local EVGO fast charger.

OTOH, an hour at the fast-charger accomplished what would have taken about 20 hours of charging at home.

DC fast-charging is bad for your car’s battery, anyway.  The fact that it’s expensive is just further validation of charging at home whenever possible.

Probably better to know how it works before I need to use it.

I guess knowing-how-to-fast-charge fits in with flashlights and other preparedness gear.  If there comes a time when you need to use a fast-charger for your car, it’s probably best to know how it works, already, rather than wait to figure it out on-the-fly, when you really need it.

And so, even though I’m a 120V at-home charger 100% of the time, I got a notion to fast-charge my Chevy Bolt.  Just to make sure I could do the entire transaction.

I settled on the nice EVGO station next to the Safeway where I get my groceries.

Probably better to know what it costs, before I buy it.

Turns out, I have to drive to the EVGO car charger in order to have any idea what it costs to charge there.

Shouldn’t the economics/transaction part of this be relatively drama-free?

I mean, it’s not like the technical side of fast-charging is without issues.  Things can go awry as you try to fast charge EV A with Charger B under Conditions C.   If nothing else, the temperature of the battery matters.  So there’s plenty enough to worry about, there.

Anyway, I’m not at the point of finding the technical issues.  Because, stubbornly, I want to know how much the damned thing costs.  Roughly.  Before I pay.  And at this point, I’m betting the answer is, hey, we’ll bill you the right amount, don’t worry.

What’s your over/under bet on the transaction?

Here’s your chance to play The Price is Right, on the spot purchase of 25 KWH of electricity, using an EVGO fast-charger for my slow-charging Bolt, today, at my local EVGO station.

I’m guessing this little preparedness exercise is going to cost me like $30.

That, as a one-off customer in a slow-charging car.  Buying from a public charger with (so far) absolute lack of transparency about their rates.  Just from the smell of all that, I’m guessing my $4 at-home slow charge will cost me $30.

It’s now 1 PM on a sunny Saturday, and I’m off to fast-charge.

Don’t judge me.  Maybe this is how economists have fun.

Useless additional details follow.

Gentlemen may cry Price, Price — but there is no price.

I admit to being an economist.  And cheap.

Despite these handicaps, I don’t think I’m asking too much, of any vendor, of any good or service, that I get to see what the price is, before I agree to pay it.

Today’s challenge:  Can I determine how much it will cost to charge my Chevy Bolt at the local EVGO station, before I sign up for anything?

(Spoiler:  No.  That’s how it looks at the moment.)

Or, the more generalized version, how much (information and money) do I have to fork over and agree to, before they’ll tell me their rates?

Or, not to spoil the punch line, the even-more-generalized version, being, will they ever tell me their rates?

My point being that the lack of any price transparency, for what is a pretty simple deliverable, is really irksome.

There are plentiful technical issues, that I’ll try to get to some, at some point.

But, after nearly half a hour of digging, I finally came across a footnote in a section on a page, referred by a map, linked by the EVGO help section, which I only found because Google stumbled across it for me.

Pricing for EVgo DC fast charging is determined by charger location, your plan, and, for per-minute locations, the maximum power level your vehicle can accept. Real-time pricing is available in the app or at the charger.

Completely true, yet completely unhelpful.

The at-home benchmark

The at-home cost of this would be about $4, for 25 KWH plus charging losses.

I need like half-a-battery’s worth of charge.  Call it 25 KWH, for this Bolt. That 25 KWH recharge costs me well under $4 at my current rate of 12 cents or so, per KWH (Virginia Power).  Tossing on an additional 10% tax for energy losses in the charger and battery.

Given that the at-home cost is under $4, I just want a rough idea of how much it’ll cost to use this EVGO station.

I know it’ll cost more.  I realize it’s complicated, e.g., they’ll charge for the time occupied, and the electricity delivered, the former to ensure you don’t just park, walk away, and hog the spot.  So there’s a charging formula somewhere, not a simple flat rate per KWH.

But so far, I have been able to find anything remotely like pricing or cost information, anywhere.  Not even in comments (e.g., on the PlugShare app.)

So, off to I go.  To see if I can figure out their rates, if nothing else.  Worst comes to worst, I can sign up for their app on my phone, then see what they feel like charging me.

Like a normal American.

To be continued.

Results:  Success

Sure enough, the process was balky.  At least this first time.

It took a few tries to get the charger a) to talk to the car, and b) to take my credit card.  (I now see a big reason to sign up with EVGO is that they’ll have my credit card info and I can skip the @#$#W! exposed outdoor credit card readers.

Near as I can tell, the credit card readers on these machines are an afterthought.  Having run into this issue multiple times now, on EV chargers, and almost never on gas pumps, I have to wonder who thought that having a card reader totally exposed to the elements (e.g., no roof) was a good idea.

The total bill was about half what I expected it to cost, above. But that works out to $0.56/kwh, or about 4.5x as expensive as charging at home.  Charging the car 20x faster than I can from a 120V wall outlet.

None of the experience was hugely out of line with what I expected, except that the car was slow to charge.  (These chargers are capable of putting out 50 KW, but my car would only charge at 25 KW.  At that rate, a full charge would take a little over two hours).

I won’t be fast-charging again until I need to.

At that $0.56/KWH average rate, the electricity at this fast-charger was about twice as expensive as gasoline would have been, to get me the same number of miles, in an efficient hybrid car.  I went through that calculation in:

Post #1705: When is electricity the cheaper motor fuel?

By contrast, when charging at home, electricity is about half as expensive as gasoline, per mile.  That’s based on $3.36/gallon for gas, and $0.12/KWH for electricity.  That was true not only for my wife’s plug-in Prius Prime, but for almost all the dual-fuel (plug-in hybrid) passenger vehicles listed by the EPA.  Click the link for the post above to see the full list.

Post #2120: Oh, the price of gold is still rising out of sight

 

Gold blew through $3100 $3200 an ounce this morning.

 

As noted in prior posts, an increase in the price of gold is never a good thing.

Looking on the bright side, a good chunk of this last push was merely from dollar going down the toilet. 

That should happen because gold is an internationally-traded commodity.  It’s a global market.  When the value of the dollar falls, the value of gold, expressed in those dollars, rises.

I guess I need to start a countdown or something, as by my calculation, if gold tops $3519 (or so), that will be its all-time high in inflation-adjusted (CPI-adjusted) terms.

So, right now, gold is just (1- $3234 / $3519 =~) 8% below its all time high, in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.

I described the economic conditions under which gold set its previous high, in a recent post on this topic:

Post #2112: Oh, the price of gold is rising out of sight

Before that, my most recent prior post on this topic was from half a year ago:

Post #2017: The price of gold is up. That’s never good.

Post #2119: Schrödinger’s Tariff, II

 

Further reflections on our current tariff situation.

Photo Source, Nobel foundation – http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1933/schrodinger-bio.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6209244

 

 

 

 

 

Point 1:  This sort of thing — the current tariff situation — is part and parcel of the “unitary executive” package that MAGA installed in the Federal government.

1.1  If you concentrate all the power in the hands of an individual, as the MAGA party has succeeded in doing, here in the U.S., with few-to-no effective restraints (e.g., Congress cedes control, Supreme Court defers, ignore everybody else),

1.2  And if The Leader has some wacky ideas, is unteachable, perhaps easily influenced, aging, …

1.3  You’re stuck with The Leader’s decisions, anyway, because that’s how you set it up.

Stripping away our long-standing system of checks and balances is an inherently high-variance strategy.  People imagine great governing by a philosopher-king.  But you can get kleptocracy. Sometimes kakistocrasty.  Not to exclude both at once.

And sometimes, in some important areas, unleashing The Leader is a dangerously crazy thing to do.

In hindsight, I’d like to think that a lot of our leadership now realizes that giving this man (the President), this weapon (unlimited control over tariffs) was not a good idea.

But as long as the House continues to take this lying down, there is no off button.

Checks and balances.  Maybe God got that part right.

I miss checks and balances.

Addendum:  And, after reading Krugman’s piece this morning, I’d maybe go so far as to say that the fundamental uncertainty of unitary-executive decision-making is incompatible with the traditional role of dollar-denominated assets as safe-haven assets.  These idiots may have just managed to dislodge the dollar from its role as the foundation currency of the international financial system, because we can no longer be trusted.

Point 2:  Do we need a Central Committee now?

How do other authoritarian regimes avoid this problem?  This problem being the potential for The Leader to make spectacularly crap decisions, against all sane advice?

Maybe they don’t.  Here I’m thinking of some of the initiatives under Mao, at least some of which almost surely impoverished the Chinese people.  Stalin’s planting of Lysenko’s wheat, maybe.

So, this may simply be an unacknowledged downside of the unitary-executive approach to Federal government.  You will get some nut-job decisions on really important issues, and you have given yourself no recourse.

Anyway, if we’re tossing all the old-fashioned checks and balances, is it really optimal to put nothing in their place?  That’s looking like a big “no”, to me.

So I wonder if we might take some clues from successful autocracies elsewhere.  Maybe we need some new entity — the King’s Privy Council, the Party Central Committee, the Gang of Eight — to provide some filtering beyond whatever occurs within The Leader’s brain.

I don’t think a Cabinet full of sycophants fulfills this role.  I wish the MAGAs would come up with something that does.  They’re running this show.