Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2099: MAC Zoning retail.

 

Vienna, VA approved four buildings under the now-repealed Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) zoning.

The Chik-Fil-A/Car Wash is what it is.  The current owner of that Chik-Fil-A franchise is at least the second owner, since this building went up around six years ago.  Unsurprisingly, the sidewalk-based seating, 20′ off a busy arterial highway, remains empty 24/7.   I don’t think anyone would mistake that area for a vital and happening corner of town.

The old folks home (Sunrise assisted living) has a no-name coffee shop at street level, for its token retail, as required under MAC.  This appears to be a captive enterprise, that is, commercially, it’s part of the assisted living facility.  But as a result, if there is a more moribund “retail” location in Vienna, that remains open for business, you’d be hard pressed to see it.  I live around the corner, and I’ve never seen anyone go into or out of that establishment, nor have I ever seen anyone sitting close enough to the windows that I could make out the figure of a person.   For all intents and purposes, the coffee shop might as well be purely decorative, as it appears completely unused.

Vienna Market has a little row of hard-to-get-to-shops with no street-level parking.  But it’s OK that they are awkward to use, because they’re all empty.  They’ve stood empty in the roughly four years since that townhouse development was finished.  I noted the other day that they finally removed the construction barrels from around the steps going down to those shops.  But those shops are still dark.

The Town also approved a big apartment block at the corner of Maple and Nutley, 444 Maple West.  The builder tore down the existing buildings some years ago, and is now getting grief from the Town for leaving it a vacant lot for so long.

But the important thing is that, as of now, none of the retail space in that proposed new building has been rented.  In fact, per this recent reporting, potential renters shown at the original presentation for the building either were imaginary, or pulled out.  The result is that ” … marketing materials show all suites as still available for leasing.”

Conclusion

And yet, the actual retail scene on Maple Avenue appears healthy.  There isn’t an excessive vacancy rate.  There are no large unused retail spaces.  (The biggest exception is, I think, a disused stand-alone bank branch on the west end of Maple in Vienna.)

That said, at this point, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that MAC zoning has not resulted in the explosion of “destination retail” that had been touted by the (then) Mayor and some members of Town Council.

Instead, new construction, at new-construction rental rates, appears … difficult to lease, to say the least.  Un-leasable, so far.  That suggests that retail in Vienna is “saturated”, for want of a better word.  What’s already there isn’t doing badly.  But building new space, at high rents, doesn’t appear to be a viable strategy.

Afterthought:  Relic retail?   I wonder about the extent to which some of our existing retail is, like our private outdoor membership pools, a relic of an age of lower land prices.  Relics, in that they continue to function, as-is, but they wouldn’t (possibly, couldn’t) be produced at current land prices.

Post #2098: If they ever get serious about cutting the Federal deficit …

 

It’s not as if cutting Federal spending is some brand-new idea.  It’s not as if nobody has noticed the Federal budget deficit before.

But if the current regime were serious about the budget deficit …

There are already plenty of well-thought-out options. To the point where if you expect some sort of miracle to occur, and huge sums suddenly to appear, you’re not quite sane.  Or if you think any fix is easy, ditto.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Executive Office of Management and the Budget (OMB), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and (I think) the Congressional Research Service (CRS) all have created extensive lists of options for reducing the Federal deficit.  Not to mention all the various private-sector entities that have been chiming in on this for years.

Even the most superficial study shows why those remain options, and have not been implemented.

A quick and obvious lesson from CBO’s budget options list.

The CBO web page on this issue (https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options) lists so many options that they give you a search function, with limits.

Let’s say you’re in a mood to think big, and you’re only interested in items with at least half-a-trillion-dollars in deficit reduction (over a ten-year budget window).   No problem.  Above, you see the first dozen such half-trillion-dollar items on the CBO list.

Bear in mind that the CBO-listed dollar amounts are for a ten-year budget window.  So, with the deficit currently running around $2T a year, you’d be need for a total of $20T in savings, off this list, to claim to come close to balancing the budget.

Lesson 1:  You’d have to do all of the above, and then some, to come close to balancing the budget.

Lesson 2:  Notice how many lines say “waste, fraud, and abuse”.  None of them.  Instead, essentially every item consists of either raising taxes, or shifting costs to the states, businesses, or citizens.

And the rest …

You can find similar types of “savings” lists from GAO. 

As if this writing, the OMB website appears to have been wiped and replace with pro-MAGA pap.  It’s now a great source for pretty pictures of the President and First Lady.  It no longer appears to offer any information whatsoever to the public.

 

Conclusion

None of this is news to anyone who has ever given this 10 minutes’ worth of research.  Surely, the MAGAts who’ve taken over the Federal government know this.  And therefore anyone can infer that, whatever they’re hoping to accomplish with “DOGE” chaos, addressing the budget deficit isn’t one of them.

It’s just icing on the cake that these folks now have unfettered access to every Federal tax return.  What could possibly go wrong with that?

The Federal government used to have rules.  For reasons.

Now, apparently, whatever you can grab, its yours.  Just make up a plausible-sounding reason, and you’re good to go.

Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

 

One of my local thrift shops had a two-for-one sale on music CDs.  A dollar a disk, for any music CD on the shelf.

I decided to gamble a few dollars.

I got more than I bargained for, in a good way.

Ripping thrifted CDs.  One part nostalgia.  One part entertainment.  One part psychotherapy.

Zero parts algorithm.

Continue reading Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

Post #2096: Fire and fat, on a snow day.

 

Snow day today.

No need to shovel it, is my guess.  Rain and above-freezing temps should take care of it in short order.  Streets are already clear, as shown.

This, in contrast to the last one, where the snow and ice hung around owing to the much colder weather.

It’s shaping up to be just a short-lived covering of the snow-sleet-rain-freezing rain-drizzle delight that is  “wintry mix”.

It’ll soon be gone.  Let it be.  Plus, I don’t much feel like shoveling.

Part 1:  Fire

Wood.  Think of it as natural gas’s costlier, stinkier, noisier, whinier cousin. Just in case you were thinking how lovely it might be to heat with wood.

Sure, wood is a perfectly usable home heating fuel, if you’ve got an appliance to burn it in.  Which I do, in the form of a modern fireplace insert.

But I thought over the pros and cons, and in my situation, I decided against burning wood for home heating.  For a lot of reasons.

But now I’m back to burning firewood, to heat a part of my house.  In the burbs.

When, in theory, the same part of my house could be heated quite nicely with gas-fired hot-water baseboard heat.  Run off a 95% efficient boiler, yet.

Heating with wood, in the circumstances as described, is every bit as dumb as it sounds, from any number of perspectives, including but not limited to cost, outdoor air quality, indoor air quality, convenience, noise level, waste disposal, required routine maintenance, and so on.

In this context, wood has maybe three saving graces.  The big visible fire in a modern glass-fronted wood stove looks nice.  As a fuel, it has lower carbon footprint than natural gas or (in my area) electricity. (The wood I burn was atmospheric C02 just 10 years ago, on average, based on a typical 30-year-old tree limb or trunk in my firewood.  But due consideration must be given to the (very large, very brief) atmospheric warming effects of the resulting soot emissions.) And, third, it’s robust emergency heat. 

I’m burning wood because my gas-fired baseboard heating system is busted.  And that system, alone (no heat pumps) heats the ground-level (den) of the house.  A pipe in that hot-water baseboard heating system froze and burst, during the recent cold snap.  Not the first time this particular pipe has done so.  But until I feel like peeling the siding off that corner of the house to get to it, that system is going to stay broken.

In any case, the fire inside a modern glass-fronted wood stove is a practical thing of beauty.  Looks nice, and your toes can get toasty in front of it.  But all things considered, out here in the ‘burbs, I think it’s best to treat it as an occasional luxury.  And, rarely, use it as true emergency heat.

Or, as I’m using it now,  heat when you have no reasonable alternative.

Wood heat is both a chore and a health burden on you and others.  Burning it all day, every day, makes little sense in my circumstances.

 

 

Part 2:  Fat.  A brief essay an aerobic exercise after significant healthy weight loss, for a 66-year-old guy.

Thanks to 80 pounds of weight loss, I can now do some aerobic exercises “like a younger me”, so to speak.

This has a tinge of the surreal to it, because I still feel like an old man.  Practically speaking, the only way in which I feel lighter is when going up and down stairs.  Arguably, my joints hurt less now (than they did when I was obese).  And my feet.  But in general, the whole apparatus — my muscoloskeletal system — still creaks and cracks and groans and aches.  As does, metaphorically, the rest of me.

The upshot is that you kind of turn back the clock …

… but only on your level of fitness.

The jalopy runs faster after a tune-up.  But it remains a jalopy.

Objectively — and not exactly a high bar — for any sort of aerobic or strength-to-weight exercise, I’m a lot more fit now than I have been for decades.  But I still feel like an old man.

Never dealt with that combination before.  I can’t find any one word that quite describes the experience.

Post #2095: Diets have an end point? Whoa.

 

And I can choose an end point?

Really?

Shouldn’t a successful end-of-diet be, at most, a once-in-a-lifetime experience?

I’ve never had a diet succeed before, so how I am supposed to know what success looks like?  Metrics.  I need some metrics.  Am I there yet?

Or, more gently, it appears I’ve never given this whole end-of-diet thing much thought.

Which, again, is entirely reasonable.  A chronically overweight individual might experience dieting” or “diets” repeatedly, but, ideally, any one such individual would only need to experience successful end-of-diet once in a lifetime.

Put another way, if the weight loss is sustainable, then, by definition, it’s not something you need to do twice in a lifetime.

But, beyond the obvious — the dietary changes must be permanent — I guess I hadn’t really thought about it much.

It, being, effectively, the dietary hereafter.

I am unprepared to state a good end point for my diet, for at least two reasons.

First, and most obviously, I never thought I’d get to this point.  That, based on a life-long history of failed diets.

Second, in the heat of battle, you’re not focused on the ensuing peace.  To be losing weight at a steady clip is enough.  Where to stop?  Beyond my planning horizon.

In any case, if you start off fat enough, as far as weight is concerned, down is good.  Subject to not trashing yourself.  So things are simple.

But the idea that I might be able to choose and keep the end point?   Pick a weight/body type, within reason?  That really hasn’t quite registered yet.

Is big-boned a myth?

Let’s just stop right there.

Can I choose?   To what extent can I choose?

Can I actually, within some range, choose a body-type (for want of better term) at which I end up, with this diet?

Or, by contrast, aren’t some people just sort of naturally fat?

BMI aside:

To clarify, I’m not talking about the well-known discrepancy between BMI and body fat for (e.g.) body builders.  Let me just grant that some people are “big boned”, defined as low body fat despite high BMI. 

But.

But, first, that doesn’t mean that I was big-boned.  Though that was always a comforting way to dismiss some of my life-long excess weight.  But it’s the rare person that would be the significant exception. 

Body builders are well aware of the issue.  But hoi polloi rarely have the heavy musculature (or, I guess, big bones) that would put them far outside normal BMI guidelines.

 

Or maybe your fat is like an ice cube.

Transparent blue vector ice cubes and water drops

I always thought I was kind of naturally fat.  As a fat person, naturally.

But now I’m beginning to accept an alternative hypothesis.  Maybe my fat is like an ice cube.  It’ll melt, if I keep up the heat long enough.  In this case, if I keep up a modest calorie deficit long enough.

Maybe to a close approximation, your body fat percentage is just the long-term residual between energy intake and energy expenditure.  No more, no less.

Like a glacier.

But, I do not now wish to make the same logical mistake in reverse.  Maybe, all throughout my life, my body fat percentage could have been adjusted within a fairly wide range.  That’s no evidence that everybody’s fat works like that.

Conclusion

 

That’s quite enough diet therapy for one day.

It was enough to discover that I really don’t have a good idea of what end-of-diet is like.  I get the fact that your eating patterns must remain permanently changed.

Beyond that, I never thought about it much.  Never had to.

For now, “down is good” is all I need to know, about my weight.  I’m under 30% body fat, by several estimates, but not by much.  I haven’t even reached the upper cutoff for healthy weight (20% body fat) per NIH.

Body fat percentage points erode slowly.  Chance of overshoot is slim.

But now that my diet may be ending of its own accord (or not, we’ll see), it’s time to get up to speed on the topic of where best to stop, if you have the luxury of choosing the end point.

 

An addendum contrary to the laws of Nature.

 

Weirdly, the only piece of diet puzzle that doesn’t fit is that, to the best of my recollection, the last time I weighed 185 was when I was in high school.

So, I can weigh no more than I weighed in high school, if I want to have a normal weight?  That’s per the NIH BMI chart.

Odder still, I might actually be able to weigh that, at age 66, while being in good health?  That should occur if I can manage to maintain a daily calorie deficit of about 500 calories, for another few months.

Something about all of that seems unreasonable.

Contrary to the laws of nature or something.  That older inexorably means fatter.

But until I come up with something better, that’s the goal.

Funny how a round number becomes a hard target.

Post #2094: Eighty pounds and no further progress.

 

After losing a total of 80 pounds, at a steady rate of five pounds a month, my weight loss has stopped.

I reached 205 in the middle of January.  I still weigh about that.  I have not yet glimpsed 200 on the scale.

 

Is this because:

A)  In some mysterious and unspecified way I have permanently slowed my metabolism by dieting, and thus am now doomed never to reach “normal” weight of 185 pounds? Do I simply now have a slow metabolism?

B) My body simply wants to be 205 pounds.  (Though, if so, I wish it had spoken up sooner.)  And so, nothing I could ever stand to do will ever get my weight below that “natural” level.  I am now doomed never to reach a “normal” weight of 185 pounds?  Am I simply “naturally fat”?

OR …

C) I’ve been eating too much.

After checking with the oracle, all indications point to C.

Teaspoons are tablespoons, and other things that suck about dieting.

Above, that’s a 300 calorie peanut butter sandwich.  It consists of a slider roll (about 3″ in diameter) and two tablespoons of peanut butter.  I know the sandwich contains exactly two level tablespoons of peanut butter, because I took the time to measure it.

The peanut butter is the thin brown line barely visible between the two halves of the roll.

I was appalled by this sandwich.  First, by how little peanut butter that was.  But mostly, by how much peanut butter I had been routinely using, of late, when I made one of those freehand, without measuring anything.

And as goes peanut butter, so go most of the portions I’ve been eyeballing.

A common teaspoon, in the silverware drawer, is typically about a tablespoon, in terms of its capacity.  My coffee cup (mug) is more than two “coffee cups” worth of coffee.  My smallest soup bowl, comfortably full, holds about a bowl-and-a-half, as calorie lists typically equate “a bowl of soup” to mean an 8-ounce cup.

I knew all of that, intellectually.  But, somehow, of late, I’d been turning a blind eye to it.

Funny how your mind will play tricks on you.

Particularly if you want it to.

Recalibrating and downshifting

I have committed that most basic sin of long-term weight loss, portion creep.  This is such a common thing that essentially all guides to long-term weight loss tell you to guard against it.  If you don’t routinely measure everything, then once in a while you need to do that, if only to remind yourself of what the portions of food should be, to match the calorie counts you’re using.

To be clear, portion creep doesn’t occur at random.  It has not, for example, inflated the amount of lettuce I eat weekly.  I have not suddenly been faced with a large weekly bill for cabbage or cucumbers.

Instead, the fact that portion creep only occurs for high-calorie, typically high-fat foods, tells me that this is not simply sloppiness.  It’s my brain, working to sabotage me.

And so, for a week or two, I’ll be measuring out “the good stuff”, meaning, energy-dense foods.  Things that are high in fat, mostly, but also starches.  Just enough to remind myself of what the actual portions are, that correspond to the calorie counts I’ve been using.

It’s also worth nothing that the problem items are energy-dense foods that don’t naturally come in fixed quantities.  Of which peanut butter and salad dressing are the poster children.  But also including cheese, meat, and some soups.

In the end, this is just the flip side of the volumetrics approach to dieting.  With volumetrics, you eat lots of items with low calorie density (calories per ounce).  Which boils down to non-starchy vegetables, fruits, and a smattering of other items.

More lettuce.  Less salad dressing.

It’s not rocket science.

Conclusion:  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Source:  Amazon.

After more than a year, and 80 pounds of weight loss, my diet has ground to a halt.

I’d love to blame my metabolism.  Or my genes.  Bad luck.  Astrological sign.  Tariffs.  Republicans.

Anything but point the finger at myself.

But the fact is, weight loss at this pace is based on just a 500-calorie-per-day energy deficit.  And it doesn’t take much screw that up.  A heavy hand with a few high-calorie foods will do it.

So, maybe this is the end of my weight loss.  Maybe not.  Maybe these excess calories are merely the symptom of my body finally getting tired of losing weight.  Maybe I won’t be able to stand going back to a true 1500 calories a day or so.

There’s only one way to find out.  And that’s to be strict about everything I eat, for a while, and see if the weight loss picks back up.  Or see if I’ve reached the end of my diet.

Post #2093: Explaining Trump trade policy. This one secret changes everything!

 

The Wall Street Journal characterized the Trump tariffs on Canada and Mexico this way:

That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?

In this post, I’m going to explain what the WSJ and more-or-less all other professional economists are getting wrong about this issue.

This one trick insight changes everything.

The WSJ editorial page may have been a bit blunter than some.  But it’s a fair reflection of informed opinion on this topic.  It’s almost no exaggeration to say that everyone with any professional interest in economics, international trade, or foreign affairs has been baffled by the reasoning behind the Trump tariff proposals.

But maybe, just maybe, these tariffs are not as irrational as they have been made out to be. 

I believe that all the professionals in international trade misunderstand the simple policy logic that drives us inevitably to these tariffs.

I claim that the fundamental error that professional pundits are making is in thinking that these tariff have anything whatsoever to do with U.S. international trade policy.

The inescapable logic of the Trump tariffs.

Viewed as trade policy, these tariffs are every bit as dumb as the WSJ said.  But viewed from a different perspective, they make absolutely perfect sense.  And that’s because these tariffs aren’t Federal trade policy, they are Federal income tax policy.

Huh?

The income tax cuts from the first Trump administration are set to expire.  Depending on who’s doing the estimate, those tax cuts cost the Treasury $300B to $400B a year.  Ish.

To get them extended, without increasing the deficit, you need to find at least $300B a year to make up the loss.

And, to increase the difficulty factor, you’re a Republican, so raising a tax on anything is out of the question.

What’s the easy, no-effort way to achieve that goal of finding $300B a year, without increasing Federal tax revenues?

First, you must adamantly insist that tariffs are not taxes, and that Americans don’t pay for import tariffs.  No matter how stupid everyone who knows anything about anything says that assertion is.  You must insist that tariffs are not taxes, because you, as a modern Republican, are not allowed to raise taxes.

Next, you sort your trade partners, from high to low, in terms of dollar value of imports.  Pick a good round number like 25%.  And go down the list until 25% of the value of imports exceeds $300B.

Even though, again, anyone who knows anything about trade policy will tell you that makes no sense.  I mean, you haven’t even focused on the countries where we have the biggest trade deficit.  You haven’t (say) accounted for strategic materials, or domestic industries that depend on imported parts, or your own vulnerability to retaliatory tariffs.

Instead, you’ve sorted our trading partners by descending order of value of imports (only).

That’s literally as deep as the thinking goes.  Because that’s as deep as it needs to go, to achieve the goal.  Which, recall, is domestic income tax policy, not international trade.  And that’s because the value of imports (less reduction in demand, when the tariffs are imposed) is what determines your revenue.

Now see how far down the list you need to go, before you get your $300B a year.

Answer:  Canada, Mexico, and China.

And suddenly, the entire two-part “policy” snaps into focus.

These tariffs have nothing to do with trade policy, America’s position in the world, or anything else that a reasonable person might consider.

Instead, look at what this policy consists of:

 Part 1:  You must keep insisting that tariffs are not taxes, because you are not allowed to use the t-word, as a Republican.  This part of the policy is required, because the goal is to raise Federal revenues significantly without saying the t-word (taxes).  So everybody has to agree that tariffs are not taxes, and that Americans do not pay their cost.  Even though everybody who knows anything about international trade will tell you that’s incorrect.

Part 2:  Target countries not in terms of our trade deficit with them, or other practical considerations like impact on U.S. industry, but solely in terms of the value of what we import from them.  And that, too, makes sense, because import volume is what determines your tariff revenue, less the reduction in demand that will occur once prices rise in response to the tariff).

Why is it now 25% each for Mexico and Canada, and 10% for China? My guess is, that’s because that’s when they hit the required projection of tariff revenues that they need. Why are we now talking about tariffs on everything, from all countries, characterized now as “reciprocal tariffs”? Best guess, the revenue target has changed, or the estimated revenues from the existing tariffs have changed.

Conclusion

Sometimes it’s difficult for really bright people to understand how not-so-bright people think.  Or for those with expert knowledge to understand the rank amateur.

If the Trump tariffs appear divorced from any rational thinking about international trade, that’s because they are.

But from the Trump administration standpoint, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.  That doesn’t mean that they were done at random, or that they were otherwise harmless.  Merely that trade policy was not the point.

Instead, import tariffs are simply a) a potentially large source of revenue that b) you can claim is not a tax.  From that perspective, this two-part policy makes perfectly good logic.  If not much sense.

It’s only a bit of a poetic justice that you get to keep your tax cuts largely favoring the wealthy, by substituting tariffs whose burden falls disproportionately on the poor (for the simple reason that the rich have a high rate of savings.) 

Thus, the secret to understanding the logic of the Trump tariffs is that trade policy is just an innocent bystander.   If what you really care about is extending tax cuts, then, eh, if your solution messes up North American manufacturing for the next decade or so, so be it.  

Republicans have agreed to hold hands, close their eyes, and claim that import tariffs are not taxes on Americans.  And ignore how badly this screws up big chunks of U.S. manufacturing, starting with automobiles.

And, ka-ching, there’s the free $300B in revenue you need to extend the existing tax cuts.

Which is what really matters.

Wonky addendum:

Note, by the way, that if this goes through — if those tariffs are counted as revenue, against the Treasury’s losses from the tax cuts, then …

… well, back in the day, when rules still existed in the Federal government, then those tariffs would be permanent.  Or, at least, as permanent as the tax cuts that they funded.

(This, from PAYGO, originally developed around 1990, and, as of 2019, fully in force in both the House and the Senate.  Any legislation passed by the Congress had to be paid for by a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, unless an exception is made, by a supermajority vote.  Here’s a rather complicated explanation from Wikipedia.)

I’m not sure how this would work, under PAYGO, as the tariffs are not based on legislation.  But I would bet that there’s a way for Republicans to claim the money, as they extend the Trump tax cuts.

So, to be clear, this is once again completely unlike normal tariff policy.  If these are put into place, and Republicans (at least mentally) count the revenue against the losses from the tax cuts, then these tariffs must be, for all intents and purposes, permanent.

Luckily (?), there appear to be no rules whatsoever governing the Federal government now.  So we don’t have to worry about these becoming permanent.

Post #2092: Salt rising — through 2/21/2025

 

In this post, I’m documenting the progress of my road-salt-in-my-drinking-water experiment.

Recall that:

  1. We had a half-inch of rain Friday 1/31/2025 that washed away the piles of road salt that remained from an earlier winter storm.
  2. It should take about a week for water to work its way from the Potomac River to my tap, per Fairfax County.
  3. Nothing filters salt out of the water, so the salt that got washed off the roads should show up in my tap any day now.
  4. After correcting for operator error, my tap water has shown a steady 210 ppm (parts-per-million) TDS (total dissolved solids) for the entire past week.

I am pleased (?) to report that last night’s water sample clocked in at 232 ppm.  And as of 2/8/2025, it had risen to 242 ppm.

Assuming that was not a fluke, I expect that was the beginning of the salt passing through my fresh water system.  The timing is right, in any case.

I’ll be tracking this for another few days, and will continue to document the results, here in this post.

Update 2/21/2025 sample.  The next salt spike appears in the drinking water right on time,following the ~2/13/2025 runoff of the most recent road salting.

 

Between the time of the rain, and now, my tapwater’s TDS increased by about 100 parts per million, against a relatively stable baseline of about 200 ppm baseline. The peak occurred about 10 days after the salt-clearing rainstorm.

But even if that entire increase is, in fact, due to chloride ion from road salt, we still won’t taste it in the drinking water.  The 100 ppm (presumed) chloride ion concentration in the drinking water is well below the threshold (250 ppm) above which (some?  many?) people will detect a “salty” taste to the water.  The bottom line is that, so far, this should not be a generally taste-able water saltiness event.

And that’s a good thing.

In addition, it is far from proven that the uptick in TDS of my tap water is even due to road salt.  E.g., maybe this happens after every significant rain.   But I’m betting that’s the road salt.  And even if it is driven by road salt, there has to be more in the TDS increase that just chloride ions.

It doesn’t matter.  Won’t taste this amount of salt in the water, no matter how you slice it.

In summary, there was a modest increase in my tap water’s TDS.  Timing is about right for this to reflect “salt in the tap water”, from road salt runoff of 1/31/2025.  But nothing has been proven, except that, even worst case, the ion concentration is not nearly enough to give the water a salty taste.

Edit:  As of 2/13/2025, we’re midway or better (?) through the “runoff” step of a new road salt runoff cycle.  Or, if not midway, we’ll get there and beyond today, with a predicted high in the low 50s.)  And so, we should see a smaller, smearier version of this most recent drinking water salt pulse … 2/21/2025.  It’s not clear that this simple rig, or any simple rig, would reliably let you “see” a pulse that small and ill-defined.  (And that’s assuming the measured TDS number for tap water is otherwise pretty steady from day to day.) 

OTOH, it’s no hardship to keep this going.  Just KISS.  All it takes is this cheap TDS meter, a drinking glass, and patience.

Use just one glass.  Test the water twice a day.  But you need to let that cold tap water stand a good long while, if you want a reliable reading out of a slow-read $6 meter.  So, let each sample sit half a day.  Covered.  AM and PM,  you use (and rinse) the meter, dump that water sample, run the tap and replace the water sample, and set it aside, covered. Then leave it alone.  Until it’s time to do all that again.  Repeat twice a day.

It’s idiot-proof.  And sometimes that’s a good thing.

Post 2092: These are a few of my favorite things.

 

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 #2091: Blah blah blah blah salt blah blah blah. Part 3: Operator error.

 

Edit 2/7/2025:  One week since a half-inch of rain washed away the remaining salt on the roads … and no sign of salt in the water yet.  TDS (total dissolved solids) readings for properly aged (i.e., room-temperature) water samples are steady at 210 ppm, plus or minus some single digits.

 

Recall that, as of my last post, my road-salt-in-drinking-water experiment was floundering.  My tap water was showing far more variation in measured total dissolved solids (TDS) than seemed reasonable.

Turns out, that’s because a) my tap water is cold, b) temperature strongly affects the conductivity of water, c) this $6 meter measures and adjusts for temperature,

d) extremely slowly.  And e) I’m not exactly a patient person.

I didn’t wait anywhere near long enough for the meter to adjust to my tap water temperature.  And going forward, I’m not going to stand around for a quarter-hour holding this meter in a glass of water, waiting for the temperature adjustment to reach equilibrium.

The solution is simple.  I have to let the glass of tap water sit for a couple of hours, and come up to room temperature.   Then measure TDS.  Once I do that, these “well-aged” water samples all provide consistent readings for parts-per-million total dissolved solids.

Properly measured, my tap water TDS has been around 210-215 ppm TDS for the past three days.  A little higher than the 170 ppm I expected based on “10 grains of hardness” of the water.  But definitely in the ballpark.  And seemingly stable.

Hey, maybe I’m not crazy.  It does, in fact, take about a week for water to pass through the Fairfax County drinking water system.

The presence of a stable, measurable baseline is important for this experiment.

And yet, as I go day after day without an increase in TDS, I begin to wonder whether I just imagined the salty-tasting tap water of winters past.

I expect road salt runoff to produce a big upswing in my tap water TDS, Wednesday-ish of this week, best guess.  That’s based on last Friday’s half-inch of rain washing (almost) all the remaining salt off the roads.  And my vague memory that the salt taste showed up on-order-of a week after road salting.

FWIW, I finally found confirmation that it takes about a week for water to move through my local water distribution network.  When Fairfax flushes the water mains, they change disinfectant chemicals.  Depending on where you are in the system, those chemicals may take up to a week to show up in your tap, and a week to go away (reference).

Depending on your usage patterns and location within the distribution system, it could take up to a week for your drinking water to transition from combined to free chlorine at the beginning of the flushing program, or from free chlorine to combined chlorine at the conclusion of the flushing program.

The upshot is that a) we may still be a few days away from salt showing up in my tap water, and b) while it has taken me a while to figure out how to use my $6 TDS meter, there’s no harm done.

So far, properly measured, the TDS in my tap water has remained steady at around 210-215 ppm.  If a flush of road salt passed through the system, that ought to stand out pretty sharply against that steady background rate.

 

The full story

  • This meter measures water’s electrical conductivity.
  • That conductivity is increased by ions in the water.
  • Such ions are generated when minerals and salts dissolve in water.
  • Thus, the meter can infer the amount of ions in the water, from the water’s conductivity.
  • It then translates that into something the user can understand, such as parts-per-million total dissolved solids (TDS) or salinity.   Depending on the end-use market that is being targeted.

Source:  Mettler Toledo white paper, “Reducing Measurement Error in Conductivity Readings”.  Annotations in red are mine.

 

  • But water temperature strongly affects conductivity.  A 9F decrease in water temperature creates a more-than-10% reduction in water conductivity.
  • Hence, this measurement typically requires temperature correction. The goal is to measure the water’s conductivity, adjusted to some standard water temperature.
  • And this $6 TDS meter includes that temperature correction via a built-in thermometer (and presumably a look-up table on a chip, or something).
  • But the meter is excruciatingly slow about doing that.

I finally got the bright idea of sticking this meter in a glass of ice water and see how long it took to display a temperature of 0 C. 

I gave up, it took so long.  I got tired of holding the meter in the ice water.  I’m guessing it would eventually get there, but it would take five or ten minutes to do so.

In any case, that adjustment is so slow that what I interpreted as the meter reading “setting down” to a final value, in just a few seconds, was nothing of the sort.

And that’s what tripped me up.  With incomplete temperature adjustment, cold water registers as “cleaner” water (lower TDS), owing to the lower conductivity of cold water.

Conclusion:  Never rule out operator error

On the on hand, I could blame the meter for being so slow to adjust to different temperatures.

On the other hand, it’s up to the meter operator to use it correctly.  Or spend the big bucks on one that works faster.

In any case, for $6, I got a very smart meter.  Smart enough to do the temperature correction for me.

But the hardware?  That’s still the best that $6 can buy.  It’s fine, as far as I can tell, but there’s no expectation that $6 bought me some kind of heirloom-quality super-tool.

And, as it turns out, what I got for $6 is a meter that works, but takes forever to settle to a final reading, owing to the glacial pace of adjustment of its internal temperature sensor.

Which I consider fair, for $6.  That it works at all is kind of a miracle.  That was unkind.  What I should have said is “more than fair”.

Now that I know that the temperature correction takes forever to register,  all I need to do is let my tap water samples warm up to room temperature.

And poof, what seemed like a ridiculously inconsistent meter turns out to be … pretty consistent.

Well worth the $6.

I probably need to buy some distilled water, for another buck or two.  Not to test the meter, but to rinse it after I’m done.  By device design and by common acclaim, I get the impression that I’m never supposed to let anything touch the electrodes but water.  Which precludes wiping the electrodes dry, in any fashion.  But, I think that if I just let the little electrodes air-dry, after tap water, I risk “poisoning” the electrode surfaces over time with calcium carbonate deposits, a.k.a., water spots. This, by analogy to premature dulling of un-dried razor blades by the thickness of water spots (Post #1699).

Distilled water, by contrast, leaves nothing behind when it evaporates.  So you don’t dry them, you rinse them with pure water and then allow them to air-dry.

Otherwise, the experiment is now on track.  I have documented a stable baseline of around 215-225 ppm dissolved solids in my (room-temperature) tap water.

I just need to give it a few days for the road salt to work its way from the Potomac River to my water faucet.