Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post G25-002: Bee emergence.

 

A few days of warm weather, and my mason bees are emerging.

You have to read between the lines on various internet write-ups of bee emergence, but I’m pretty sure what you see above is a crowd of young male bees, doing what young males do best.  That is, hanging out, accomplishing nothing, and hoping to get laid.

The male bees emerge first.  And I guess they look forward with glad anticipation to the emergence of the female mason bees.

I’m still not entirely sure what the emergence box is for.  And I’m not sufficiently interested to stick a camera inside to see what’s going on.

Anyway, we got down to 5F this winter, and it doesn’t seem to have done these over-wintering bees any harm.

My next-most-recent post on bees is here.  It’s pretty much a summary of everything I think I know about attracting mason bees.

Post G25-001: Finishing off my mason bee hotel duties

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

 

Oh the price of gold is rising out of sight
And the dollar is in sorry shape tonight
What the dollar used to get us now won’t buy a head of lettuce
No the economic forecast isn’t right
But amidst the clouds I spot a shining ray
I can even glimpse a new and better way
And I’ve devised a plan of action worked it down to the last fraction
And I’m going into action here today.

From:  I’m changing my name to Chrysler, recorded by Arlo Guthrie.

Gold blew through $3100 an ounce this morning.

When the stock market is making new highs, everybody steps up to take credit for it.

But gold?  Nope. Nobody ever takes credit for a rising price of gold.  Given the cheapness and ubiquity of public lies these days, you’d think some prominent braggart would try.  But nobody ever tries to own a rise in the price of gold.   That’s because a rapidly rising price of gold is never good news.  And peaks in the price of gold tend to occur when the 💩 is in the process of hitting the 🚁.

What caught my eye about $3100 is that this has to be getting close to setting a new record for the price of gold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.  (In the modern era, where the dollar price of gold has been allowed to float.  Post-1970, say.)

If I take the prior price peaks (red arrows I added to the chart above) and use the BLS inflation calculator to express them in 2025 dollars, I find that we’re now just 14% below the all-time high price of gold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.

So, when Guthrie sang about the rising price of gold, in the context of the 1979 bail-out of Chrysler, following two Arab oil embargoes, the resulting energy crises, two long, deep U.S. recessions, and the near-destruction of the U.S. auto industry with its lack of energy-efficient cars, in a context of persistent double-digit rates of inflation … the price of gold, in real terms, was somewhat higher than it is today.

I’m trying to take some comfort in that.  Either things aren’t as bad now, as they were then.  Or they aren’t as bad, yet.

Either way: Eat, drink and be merry.

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 #2111: Of arctic ice and rosemary.

 

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

This saying is attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

This post is just a reminder that, in addition, you cannot fool the laws of physics any of the time.

Stuff’s melting.  Is anyone surprised?  Is anybody paying attention?

The full article is on the National Snow and Ice Data Center website:

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/analyses/arctic-sea-ice-sets-record-low-maximum-2025

I don’t normally repeat the news, but I only just stumbled across the fact that Arctic sea ice hit a new low this year.  It peaks right about this time every year, and this year’s peak extent is the lowest in the roughly 50-year record.

No surprise, given the underlying trend.  The north polar ice cap has been shrinking slowly for about as long as there has been a satellite record of it.

The loss of reflective polar sea ice is an important positive feedback serving to accelerate the pace of global warming/climate change.  It lowers Earth’s albedo.  Dark open ocean absorbs more light energy than reflective white ice does.

If you don’t quite grasp why anyone should care about climate change, focus on a large net loss of arable North American land over the next century, as the climate changes.  Less food.  But with a growing world population.  And while that’s happening here, that’ll be happening across the world, as the (soil of the) the continental interiors warms and dries in response to climate change.

People also lose track of how long additional C02 emissions affect the climate.  The stuff coming out of your tailpipe will still be warming the earth centuries to millenia from now.

People forget about the two or three decade time lag in the global warming “pipeline”, due to the mass of the earth, relative to the small top-of-the-atmosphere energy imbalance.  Even if a miracle were to happen today, and atmospheric C02 were to stabilize, we’ve got three decades of warming “in the pipeline” as the earth’s surface temperate slowly adjusts to the energy imbalance that today’s level of C02 is creating.  That temperature increase is how nature restores the planet’s top-of-atmosphere energy balance.

And people forget how long energy-using devices last.  The majority of today’s new cars will still be on the road 15 years from now.  A new furnace?  Maybe 20 years.  A new house?  Maybe a century.  And for that entire century, a new house with natural gas heat will be pumping out tons of C02 per year.  Year in, year out.

Did the Biden Administration push the electrification of transport?  Sure did.  That’s because a world in which we drive gas vehicles, as we do now, but that still looks like our current world, is a pipe dream.  It’s not a feasible outcome.  The only way to hold onto a world whose climate is as benign as the climate in which civilization has flourished is to halt the buildup of C02 in the atmosphere.  Did the Biden administration push for more electrical transport than we seem to need right now?  Sure did.  Because “right now” isn’t the right time frame.  Twenty years down the road, as today’s new cars are finally heading off to the scrap yard  — twenty years of global warming in the future — look back and see how that modest push toward electrification looks then.

Global warming in your back yard:  The northward migration of the USDA plant hardiness zones.

Source:  Maps are from USDA.  I added the line marking the boundary between hardiness zones 5 and 6.

Maybe the easiest way to see climate change happening in your lifetime is to pay attention the good old USDA plant hardiness zones.  Every home gardener is at least passingly familiar with these, because these are a guide to what will and won’t overwinter in your climate.   The zones represent 10-degree-F increments in the coldest likely wintertime temperature, and are simply based on the coldest observed temperature in an area over the previous 30 years of weather data.  They get split into -a and -b halves, based on a 5F difference in coldest expected temperature.

In Zone 7b, for example, I should expect temperatures to go no lower than 5F.  This past winter it hit 5F here, and that killed a rosemary bush that I’d been growing for the better part of a decade.  Rosemary, I now find, is only hardy to USDA Zone 8.  Which I have now proven the hard way.

Turns out, these every-day use USDA plant hardiness zones are extremely sensitive to global warming.  I think that’s because they reflect the coldest wintertime temperature you should expect in an area.  That coldest temperature will occur in winter, at night.  And global warming has its strongest effects at night, and in winter.

So, even though global warming has done almost nothing to the U.S. so far, and certainly not much in terms of average US land temperature, the impact on minimum annual temperature — what determines the USDA hardiness zones — has been large enough to be easily visible.

On the maps above, the Zone 6 boundary moved north about 200 miles, in 33 years.  That’s ballpark for all of the zones, on average, over this period, but the movement north is fastest in the center of the continent, away from the coasts.

In Northern Virginia, over the same period, Vienna moved from just inside Zone 6, to just inside Zone 7.  Or, rather, the zones slid far enough north over three decades that one full zone slid past Vienna, VA in 33 years.

Same phenomenon.

But 6 miles a year is 600 miles a century.  Project that out, and a century from now, Iowa ends up with the climate that west Texas has now.  Just from that slow, 6-miles-a-year, northward migration of the climate zones under global warming.

Without too much exaggeration, let this continue, and today’s children will get to see the sagebrush desert of the U.S. Southwest take over the U.S. Midwest.  Let it go two centuries, and the current climate of Mexico will occur at the Canadian border.

With everything you think that would imply for U.S. food production.  Amber waves of grain?  That’ll be just another obsolete concept.

Merely from allowing the current observed rate of change to go unchecked.

As a society, we seem to have become too stupid to survive.

Conclusion

If civilization survives, the Republican Party’s head-in-the-sand policy toward climate change will go down as the stupidest, most costly, and most damaging thing ever done by a political party.  Wars included.

Except possibly for encouraging increased use of fossil fuels.  That would be even stupider than doing nothing, at this time.  But that also seems to be firmly embedded in the Republican agenda.

I can only hope that they are as effective at that as they were at helping U.S. coal miners.  The promise to do that being central to Trump’s prior win.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

On global warming, I’ll have to listen to the Republican party parroting Russian disinformation for the rest of my life.  Fact-free spin and bullshit seems to be their preferred fuel these days.

But I will die with the certain knowledge that if civilization survives, the stupidity of encouraging faster global warming will be universally recognized.  By whatever portion of the population manages to survive the mass die-offs that will result from a world-wide reduction in arable land.

(As an afterthought, will the Arctic save us?  No.  Only if you live on a Mercator Projection.  And only if you think you can grow crops without topsoil, as the last ice age scraped most of Arctic North America down to bedrock, and deposited that topsoil in the U.S. Midwest.  (See Canadian Shield).  Some fraction of the population will likely survive there under even the most extreme warming scenarios.  But most citizens of the U.S., and the world, will have starved long before there’s any Arctic dividend to share.)

Post #2110: Filibuster is a one-directional filter, an apology for Democratic inertia.

 

This is a  brief note-to-self on the one-way nature of the filibuster.

The Democrats in the Congress seem to be getting some grief for not doing much to stop the dismantling/destruction of fill-in-the-blank (the Federal government, NATO, international trade, our system of justice, and so on).

And while that is true, to all appearances, I think it’s mostly the case that there’s not much they can do.

Which brings me to the filibuster, as I understand it.  In the Senate, if the majority is under 60%, the minority party can use the filibuster rules to stop new legislation from being passed.  Or considered.  Whatever.

The operative phrase there is “stop new legislation”.  The filibuster allows the (significant) minority party in the Senate to stop the opposing party’s new legislative initiatives.

But suppose stopping legislation isn’t your problem.  Instead, in this case, you are begging for The Senate to Take Some Action.  (That’s more-or-less what you’re calling for.  Which, for the Senate, I think means passing something.)  And nothing is happening, despite apparent gross overstep of the Executive.

In the current situation, the filibuster doesn’t do spit for the minority party.  The action of the majority can be stopped.  The inaction of the majority can’t.

As I see it, Republicans in the Congress have given up enforcing some basic tenets of the Constitution.  Which, as with all laws, only really exist if they are enforced, or at least believed to be enforced.

I can only assume that, in exchange, this allows the Executive to do things they (Republicans in the Congress) agree with, without having to pass laws to achieve those outcomes.  An ends-justify-means thing, maybe.

The moral of the story is that if the Republican Congress won’t enforce the Constitution — and I think Jan 6 made that clear — those parts of the law that would require the Congress to step up to the plate are suspended.

This is as good an explanation as any of having entered an era where any legal fig leaf will do.  Hence the spate of hitherto-unrecognized national emergencies.  E.g, Fentany smuggling at the Canadian border justifies a 25% tariff on Canadian metals and machinery.  And if that just chops apart the North American car assembly system — except maybe Tesla — then, well, oops.

This is classic bad policy-making.  And it’s what we get, with an autocrat.

Conclusion

I don’t think the Founding Fathers anticipated having a branch of government simply refuse to defend its legal prerogatives.  That is, a Congress enabling the President to do as he pleases.

At the extreme, if the House won’t impeach, and the Senate won’t convict, no matter what, there can be no constitutional crisis.  The flip side of which is that any law that requires enforcement by action of the Congress is effectively suspended for the duration, at the convenience of the President.

And for the minority party of the Senate, where filibuster is your main tool, I think you’re just kind of out of luck.  You’ll be allotted your time to speak in public hearings.  I think the Senate still functions to that extent.  Beyond that, it’s a Republican Congress, they seem to be OK with this, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

Two years of this is locked in.  Plan accordingly.

Post #2109: A glimpse of clarity

 

Dual State 

I don’t normally say “you should read this”, but you should read this, in The Atlantic:  America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State, by Aziz Huq.  That term — the dual state — crystallized a whole lot of what’s been going on.

Read.  Or read not.  The full thing is behind a paywall.

It’s not something that can be easily nutshelled.

The economic gist is that continued rule-of-law, for the little people, is of great economic value.  In essence, it’s increasingly harder to do normal business as civil order breaks down.  E.g., Nobody’s stupid enough to turn off the electricity over an ideological difference.  So far.

The end product is the dual state.  Partly, it’s a place that seems to be governed in a fairly normal fashion (particularly if you are fairly mainstream), but with an increasingly large “other” sphere of government run as if it were unrestrained by law, essentially life at the whim of the King-and-Advisors.

You hope you’re living your life outside of their sphere of interest.

You keep on keeping on.

And you wish somebody could keep that lawless behavior in check.

But if the House won’t impeach and the Senate won’t convict, there can be no Constitutional crisis, because the Congress (currently) will not invoke the powers granted to it by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court doesn’t impeach.  The Congress won’t.  Ergo, no Constitutional Crisis.

Subscribing.  I’ve been doing a lot of subscribing.  It’s the least I can do.  Or damn near.  And occasionally I read something that clarifies the picture.

First they came for the Socialists,

This entire genre of memes can now be classified as common corollary of the dual state.

If, at first, neither the King nor his minions take exception to you, then, presumably, you are OK.  At least in the sense of being safe, for now.

You do have to worry, though, if there’s not some sort of internal dynamic at work.  To maintain something like this, don’t you always have to have an an enemy.  And, as you succeed in cowing/conquering your enemies, don’t you nedd a continuous supply of fresh enemies?  At which point, you turn from a simple yes/no safe/not-safe binary, to more of a continuous variable:  If there’s an enemies list, and there’s an imperative to keep it fresh, then how far down the list are people like me?

All else aside, the size or extent of that safe space remains unknown.

Putting aside the entire issue of that the unsafe space — the “whim of the King” portion of Dual Government — should not exist.

Canada

I see so much peppy upbeat messaging about what’s gone on in Canada recently.

Au contraire mon frère.

What we’ve seen, mostly, is how people pull together in the face of a common external enemy.

Not sure that’s a great lesson to be offering the folks next door, right now.

Conclusion

The Atlantic article by Huq (above) noted that not all dual states end up in massive wars.

Cold comfort is better than no comfort at all.

 

Post #2108: AIOMG

As in, OMG, I didn’t realize AI could do that.

If you think you’re having those AIOMG moments more and more frequently, that it is not your imagination.  AI is improving and morphing faster than you — or at least, I — would have believed possible.

A month is like a year, stuff that’s two months old is passe.  This stuff is improving not at the speed at which software improves, but at the speed of learning.

It’s hard to know where to start.

Join the Borg

After doing my last post, I realized that now I can easily post transcriptions of my own voice recordings. 

In effect, the written transcription of a one-person podcast. 

So I'm using my phone like an old-style dictaphone, turning it on and off after I compose my thoughts and come up with a complete sentence.

Weirdly, I find that this has much the same effect on my language processing as does using a typewriter. 

There's a real premium on getting your shit together first and then speaking, and not the other way around.

Dictation is nothing new.  Anything voice-activated or with speech-to-text capability already does this.  My TV remote does this.  Everybody’s phone does this.  And so on.

And it’s not as if I haven’t tried this in the past.  But the speech-to-text function in (say) 2013 Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired.  I tried to integrated it into my business, but it was so error-ridden as to be worse than unusable.

Whereas this current generation of AI-driven speech-to-text produces perfect transcriptions.  Or, if not perfect, then about as close as one could possibly hope for.

And it’s a different thing to do it for my own self, for this purpose.  I’ve already had somebody knowledgeable tell me to try this, if for no other reason than to offer the consumer a choice of format.  But I never thought I might substitute talking this blog, for writing it.

What I’ve done above is a bit different because I did it dicatation-style, not podcast-style.  That is, the transcript is meant to be used as-is, with little or no editing, as a written product.  This requires taking the time to compose and speak in complete, logical sentences.  So I’m not sure how much time this saves, relative to writing it out from the start.

But it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to practice doing that, every once in a while.  That is, thinking before you speak.  Not in an attempt at censoring myself, but merely in an attempt to speak coherently, instead of the usual logorrhea.

Transcribed podcasts, by contrast, are meant to be interpreted as conversational English.  Even when consumed as a written transcript.  There, the transcription is not intended to read as if it were … written, if you get the drift.  Even if you take out all the uhs and ers, it’ll be as non-linear and piecemeal as conversation is.  Even the best off-the-cuff speakers will break many rules of written grammar.

The death of knowledge-worker career paths for middle-class upward mobility.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a fellow who's deeply involved with AI. And the one thing we agreed upon is that AI is going to kill entry-level positions and mid-level positions in the knowledge worker industries. I think this shuts down a common path to upward mobility for the current middle class.

And for sure, it ain't going to do anything good for Vienna, VA property values, because we are in the middle of a knowledge worker area. 

What this does to the value of an education is anybody's guess, but my guess is that it reduces it on average substantially with all the knock-on that implies for the U.S. education industry.

This is AI replacement theory, in a nutshell, first discussed in:

Post #2103: This and that.

And the whole operation is now driven by firehoses of money.   Those firehoses deriving from the elimination of (forerly) paying, staffed junior positions.  The work model moves from Principal and junior staff, to Principal and some AIs.  The first person to be able to claim to eliminate or reduce job X, Y, or Z can grab some of the savings from elimination of those (paying, human) jobs.

This, not unlike any other labor-saving invention, ever.  It’s just that, in part, it’s labor that I used to do.  This time they’re coming after my job.  If I still had a job.

 

Conclusion:  This seems like the final shredding of the U.S. middle class.

My brain is having a hard time adjusting to the fact that it is now largely obsolete.  I am not alone in this feeling.  Just today, my wife commented that many of the jobs she held, earlier in her life, will be all-but-eliminated by AI.

I note, parenthetically, that the rapid, flawless transcripts (in plain text, above) are from TurboScribe, which costs $20 a month ($10 if I’d commit to a year).  Practically speaking, unlimited use.

There used to be a profession of “transcriptionist”.  I can recall it taking week(s) to get the transcripts back from monthly public meetings.  I haven’t checked, but I’d bet that’s a thing of the past.

Intellectually, I get it.  I grew up in the pre-calculator era, when arithmetic was done with paper and pencil.  Those arcane skills have been essentially useless for decades, and I have not overly mourned their loss of relevance.

Intellectually, I realize that professions wax and wane in their economic importance.   E.g., the fraction of the work force engaged in broad categories such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and so on have changed over time.

Of late, I’d say that the urban information worker, broadly defined, was King.

And, AI may not de-throne him, but for sure, it’s going knock down the population employed in that “industry” a peg.  Anybody who makes their living doing the grunt-work of knowledge work — the junior attorney, the research assistant, the para-this or para-that — I’d expect that a lot of those jobs are going and they’re not coming back.

By contrast, I draw a sharp distinction with robotics.  I’m guessing that anybody who actually (in whole or in part) handles solid objects will be OK.  An AI-equipped robot is still a robot.  I don’t expect (e.g.) robot electricians any time soon.

As a final Vienna Lemma:  Areas that benefit greatly by the presence of many information workers will likely be adversely affected, economically, by the next phase of the AI revolution.

I bet property prices around here are going to take a hit.  To some small degree, from the first round of attacks on Federal employment.  But more generally, Vienna is like the epicenter of housing for an affluent information-worker-centered workforce.

We’ll see.  It takes a lot to rattle the housing market in this area.  Even in 2008, when the housing bubble collapsed (and nearly took the U.S. banking system with it), real estate prices in Vienna were merely flat-ish for a few years.

At any rate, a significant decline in real estate prices would be interesting, for at least the reason that it hasn’t happened here (in Vienna, VA) for a long time.

Maybe we’ll finally see the end of the tear-down boom.  But I’ve predicted that several times before.

Post #1959: Town of Vienna, slowdown in the tear-down boom?

Post #2107: Vienna Town Council FY 26 Budget Work Sessions 3/15 & 3/17

 

In this post, I use two different off-the-shelf AI products to transcribe, then summarize, about ten hours of budget discussions by the Vienna Town Council.

If that sounds like your idea of a good time, then read on.

Source for image above:  From reporting by Angela Woolsey at Fairfax Now.

The problem in a nutshell

By Claude Monet – https://www.artic.edu/artworks/64818, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80548066

I’m trying to find a needle in a haystack.  The needle is the word “aquatic” or “pool”.  The haystack is the roughly 10 hours of audio recording, for the marathon Town Council work sessions on the FY ’26 (year-starting-July-’25) budget.

For reasons that hardly matter here, I want to know what Town Council said, in their Town budget work sessions,  regarding funding a proposed municipal pool.  That, because a friend brought that Fairfax Now headline, above, to my attention.  Whereas last I heard, anything having to do with that pool decision was postponed until August.

The problem is, Town Council’s entire discussion of this issue might be just a few seconds, if they said anything at all.

And that’s out of about 10 hours of recorded discussion for those two work sessions.

How can I efficiently search that much audio, for what may (or may not) be a tiny snippet of discussion?

Surely, searching (and summarizing) a nice, structured discussion like this is a task made for AI.

If one AI is good, two must be …

… necessary, sometimes.

In this case, I used Google’s NotebookLM as my AI research assistant, to sift through the information and answer my questions.

But first I needed to call in a specialist — TurboScribe — to do the heavy lifting of converting the 10 hours of audio recording of the Town Council work sessions into a written transcript of what was said.

In any case, NotebookLM (the AI research assistant) choked on those big audio files.  It’s not clear why.  I was forced to back up a step, and use an AI specializing in transcriptions, and get the audio transcribed to text.  Then I fed those (relatively tiny) meeting transcriptions to NotebookLM, along with the proposed budget itself (from the Town’s website), and a handful of short .pdfs that the Town had posted on Granicus, for these budget work sessions.

(Meeting transcripts are probably worth doing in their own right, given how little it costs.  From my standpoint, $20 a month (or $10, if you’ll pay for a year in advance) buys me almost unlimited audio-to-text transcriptions.)

I note that all of this — the transcription of the audio, and the production of the summary of the content — was via simple drag-and-drop interface, along with some cut-and-paste.  Plus asking a question or two.

Once I figured out what to do, it really didn’t take much skill to execute it.

Step 1:  TurboScribe conversion of audio to text.

I broke the day-and-a-half of audio discussion into three files.  TurboScribe then produced the following three transcripts:

TRANSCRIPT of March 15 2025 work session PART 1
 TRANSCRIPT of March 15 2025 work session PART 2
 TRANSCRIPT of March 17 2025 work session

A link for the full .pdf documents on Google Drive is in the final section below.

I didn’t check the quality of the transcripts beyond noting that the Mayor’s opening statement (above) reads pretty much as it should, and about as I recall it, from the Town’s video of the meeting.

The language may look awful as-written, but that’s normal.  I can recall being horrified the first time I ever read one of my presentations transcribed.  The broken sentences and such above, that’s all perfectly normal, and (see for yourself on the Town’s video of the meeting) the Mayor’s opening speech was completely coherent as spoken word.  This is just a weird-but-true way about how English works.  The informally-phrased spoken word can be perfect understandable, and yet break every rule of written grammar.

Step 2:  Using Google’s NotebookLM to summarize the information.

I fed the three transcripts (plus the proposed budget itself, and a few sparse supporting documents posted with the work session) to Google’s NotebookLM.

At this point, things get a little tricky.  The sticking point is that if I include the actual written budget document as a source, NotebookLM tends to crib its answers from that.  And so, what you get in many cases is simply a summary of the Town’s party line.

So, if I ask for a FAQ about the budget discussions, I can get this:

First FAQ, including town budget, party line

But if I exclude that big, written budget document, I get a much vaguer and more free-form summary:

First FAQ, EXcluding town budget, unbalanced results

Finally, when I asked NotebookLM a pointed question about funding for an aquatic center or pool, the results suggest there was no useful discussion of the topic.

Pointed question, two answers

Finally, I can answer this “pool” question more directly simply by searching the transcripts for “pool”.  There was only one brief discussion, in the 3/17/2025 session, and it seemed to confound the possible municipal pool with some aspect of replacing Patrick Henry library.

Conclusion

Bottom line, near as I can tell, there was no substantive discussion of the budgeted operating reserves for the pool.

Page A-9 of the budget lists the $200K operating reserve for the pool.  But this item appears to have drawn zero discussion over this day-and-a-half of Town Council work sessions.

More generally, even though this was a rough cut, I think I can see the value in using AI this way.  Practically speaking, I’m not going to listen to 10 hours of audio.  Practically speaking, having an AI listen to that, and then asking the AI questions, is a lot more efficient.

The .pdfs with the transcripts and the Google NotebookLM output can be accessed on Google Docs, at this link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hnYVVRLNuS83IScEZunlgsxzs0sAEy-b?usp=sharing

Addendum:  A note on outputting documents from NotebookLM.

One of the obnoxious features of NotebookLM is that, as far as I can tell, it has no export functions.

It will produce nicely-formatted documents, but only within NotebookLM itself.  My sole option was good old copy-and-paste, and everything I pasted those copied documents into (e.g., Word, WordPress) simply dropped all the formatting.  Which made those essentially un-readable.

I read a lot of advice on how to get around this, all of which either was nonsense, or simply did not work for me.

Turns out, the trick is to cut and copy the NotebookLM documents, and paste them into a Google Documents document.   Apparently, whatever NotebookLM writes in, it’s the native formatting for Google Docs.  And when you do that — if you keep it all in the Google family — then the formatting is largely preserved.

And then, Google docs will allow you to export the document in more-or-less any format you wish.  Which is how I produced the summary .pdfs in the folder above.

Addendum:  I’ve seen this “analysis-tool-as-data-roach-motel” gambit before.  That is, products where, once your data checks in, it never checks out again.

So, intentional or not, the lack of an export tool that I can use directly, from  NotebookLM (a paid version of it, no less) — that has the same feel to it.  It doesn’t want to let go of (what I consider to be) its end product.

At some level, I’m satisfied that I have stumbled through a way to get some useful, blog-able product, from it.  And I am unsurprised that this involved using yet more Google products (Google Docs, in this case). 

It’s the way the world works.  Deal with it.

Post #2105: From Citizens United to Citizen Musk.

 

The perfect post to write on a drizzly, overcast day.

I woke up grumpy this morning and have seen no reason to change.

From Citizens United to Citizen Musk.

I think there’s an obvious line to draw between the first, and the second.

If you step back from it, Musk effectively bought (partial) control of the Federal government for a mere quarter-billion dollars. Which, when all is said and done, is pocket change for a guy with a net worth in the hundreds of billions.

So … if that’s now OK … aren’t there a whole lot of other similarly-well-off people for whom that amount might likewise seem like a trivial investment?  If nothing else, you can’t take it with you.  No shortage of uber-rich old people in this world.

And so, this morning, my bet is that the current odd regime — Trump/Musk whatever-it-is — is just the first.

Eventually, I think the Supreme Court will figure out that what they did, not in theory, but now in actual practice.  They put the Government of the United States up for sale.  Not just to the current whatever-it-is Trump/Musk thing.  But the likely string of similar ones that will now replace it, as ownership of the Federal government changes hands.

The technology has been proven, so to speak.  Do you have a strong personal interest in the direction of Federal government?  Is that direction radically different from the direction it is taking now?  (Answer:  Yes, because if not, you’d work through the existing government, not remake it.)  Do you have a spare quarter-billion to spend?  Do you have a Dr. Strangelove-ian uncontrollable Hail Victory! urge?

I think a lot of people might qualify, based on the first three questions, anyway.

And, like America’s Cup, it only takes one or a few of the super-rich, every four years or so, to keep the game going.

So, just at a time when AI has supercharged the effectiveness of propaganda, where disinformation is already rife in an America stupid enough to get its “real” news from social networks …

The Supreme Court opened and allows this pathway to control of the Federal government.

And … yeah, that’s going to turn out to be a bad thing.

But we’re stuck with it.  With Trump/Musk, and its similar successors — until Citizens United is reversed.  As I see it.

Until that time, anybody who thinks he can fill Musk’s shoes seems legally welcome to take a shot at it.

So, I say, think of Musk not as the interloper, but as the pioneer.

And have a nice day.

Post #2104: Ninety pounds and still a loser.

 

My weight loss has now reached the point of being boring.  To me, I mean.  I’ve always been able to bore other people with it.

In any case, as I pass 90 pounds lost, two months after I passed 80 pounds lost, all I need do is rewrite the prior post, plugging in the current numbers.

This morning I weighed 205 195 pounds.  So I’m calling it 80 90 pounds lost, in just under a year and a half, since I embarked on this course back in September 2023.  My BMI is now just under 28 over 26.  If I can lose another 20 10 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.

Otherwise, I just seem to have settled down to a sustainable routine.

I have posted on this topic before.

This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.

 

1:  Wardrobe turnover speeds up as you get thinner.

Socks, gloves, and hats are the only clothing I retain from my obese days.  Everything else has gone to the thrift shop/rag bag.  Underwear, outerwear, and all that fits between.  And shoes, as my old shoes were both too loose and too stiff-soled for a lighter me.

At first, passing along my now-oversized clothes was kind of exciting.  It wasn’t merely the positive reinforcement.  It felt a bit risky to get rid of my 2XL stuff.  The promise being that I’d never again need it.

But it’s edging into pain-in-the-(less-voluminous)-butt territory.  It seems to me that, far from settling down as I near my target weight of 185, the pace of change has sped up.  I’m getting rid of too-large jeans that I bought new, maybe half a year ago.  Ditto for putting holes in belts that I know I’ve modified recently.

Turns out, that’s not an illusion.  A little simple (?) calculus shows that, for a constant monthly weight loss, your reduction in waist size speeds up as your waist gets smaller.

Formally, model the male torso as cylinder of fat, of radius R.  Belt size is the circumference of the cylinder, 2πR.  Your weight is proportional to πR2H, the volume of the cylinder of height H.  Calculus tells us that the derivative of weight with respect to radius (d(πR2H)/dR = 2πRH.  That is, it’s proportionate to your belt size.  So, if I lose the same amount of weight every month, I have to lose more inches off my waist at a lower belt size, than at a higher one.  Bottom line, between where I started (46″) and now (36″), if I continue to lose weight at a constant five pounds per month, I now have to re-size my clothes about 25% more often (46/36 =~ 1.25). 

It’s not a huge effect, but it’s dead opposite of what I expected.  I expected the changes to slow down as I approached my target weight.  But, in fact, if the weight loss occurs at a constant 5 pounds per month — a consequence of aiming for a roughly 500 calorie deficit each day — wardrobe changes speed up a bit as I get thinner.

That’s just a consequence of there being less of me, to contribute to the five-pounds-a-month weight loss.

2:  I enjoyed my last gym workout.

I recognize the above as a properly constructed sentence.

But I do not recognize it as anything I was ever likely to say.  Nor, to my certain knowledge, had I ever said anything remotely like that in the past.

Until my last trip to the gym where, after doing some token weight-lifting, I did the ultimate old-guy thing.  I spent an enjoyable, low-intensity hour on the elliptical, sweating in time to the oldies.  Courtesy of:

Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

Anyway, between the weight loss, and the obvious beneficial knock-on effects on (e.g.) the bones of my feet, being in better shape, and eating adequate protein, I’m feeling pretty chipper, physically.

Post #2023: Protein supplements and building muscle mass.

I’ve never hugely disliked going to the gym.  I’ve been doing it all my adult life.

But this whole enjoying-the-workout thing is a new one on me.

Conclusion:  Sometimes boring is good.

I have no diet secrets to offer you.  At this point, I think there are no diet secrets.

Weight loss is all about calories eaten, versus calories burned.  From that standpoint, all calories are equal, and it makes no difference what you eat.  Only how much.  There are no magic weight-loss foods.

Your new diet is forever.  If I go back to eating as I used to eat, I’ll go back to weighing what I used to weigh.  With the obvious-but-needs-to-be-stated corollary that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as you get there.

Your tastes will change.  Or, more properly for me, my cravings changed. I’d heard people say that would happen, but I absolutely did not believe it until it happened to me.  I still like all the foods that I used to eat, back when I was fat.  But I don’t eat them now.  And, importantly, I don’t miss them.  I don’t crave them.

Slip into your new diet slowly, by identifying and correcting the worst dietary faults first.  For me, this started with eliminating booze.  Once I was sober, then my habit of eating “starch bomb” meals (e.g., bowl-of-pasta) was clearly next up on the had-to-go list.  So that went.  And so on.  Until I eventually got to how and what I eat now (mostly salads, fruits, whey protein, lean meat, non-starchy cooked vegetables.  And cheese.

But that’s me. A life without cheese is a life not well-lived.

But you?  You eat whatever and however you want, as long as you keep within your calorie limit.  And, eventually, you’ll get smart enough to avoid the foods that make that hard for you to do that.  You’ll figure out what works for you, over time.  You evolve your own diet.

Lose two ounces a day.  Aim for no more than a pound a week weight loss.  Use an on-line calculator to determine your daily calorie needs as a sedentary person.  (See below for accounting for exercise).  Subtract 500 from that to get your daily calorie target.  Eat that many calories, roughly.  Assess the accuracy of that estimated 500-calorie-a-day calorie deficit by crudely tracking your weight and monitoring your level of hunger.

You’ll get a lot of dieting advice on eating specific foods, and avoiding others.  Some diets want you to exclude entire food groups (e.g., no carbs, no fat, etc.).

That sort of extreme skewing of your food mix may work for you.  But what works for me is eating a balanced diet, with just three twists.

First, everyone agrees that you should avoid “starchy carbs” or “refined carbs”.  I’ll agree, to the extent that any servings of that need to be kept small.  So, I still eat bread, but only in the form of the occasional 100-calorie slider roll.  But I no longer eat pasta, even though that was a mainstay in my obese days.  In any case, large portions of simple carbs mess up your metabolism.  An hour later and you’ll be hungry again, metaphorically speaking.

Metabolism-wise, having a big portion of some high-glycemic-index food is not doing yourself any favors.  Doing that routinely, even more so.

Second, savory “ultra-processed” foods — I’d guess Doritos are the poster child there — I cannot have in the house.  Because, even after all this time, I’ll binge them if they are around.  Hilariously enough, artificially-cheese-flavored rice cakes fall into this category.  Rice cakes?  They are only 45 calories each, but I end up inhaling them if I start eating them.

Compare that to, say, a nice, savory cabbage soup.  Even though I make a fine cabbage soup, somehow I seem to have no trouble, whatsoever, stopping after one bowl of cabbage soup.  It’s tasty.  Sometimes it’s borderline delicious, in a cruciform-vegetable kind of way.  But it just doesn’t hot-wire my brain and light it up the way the artificial cheese flavor does, in those rice cakes.

So, I respect my limit and just don’t go near the stuff.

Third, as noted, I use whey protein powder as a significant source of low-calorie protein.   Otherwise, with so few calories available daily, to meet the USDA protein recommendation, I’d have to eat nothing but meat.  More-or-less.

In particular, I have found “protein pudding” (the Jello variant) over frozen berries to be a mainstay of my diet.  It tastes like sweet chocolate ice cream, but provides as much protein as a serving of meat.  I also put the flavored stuff in my coffee, in lieu of milk or other coffee creamer.

I offer no apology for resorting to these artificial products (whey powder, Jello sugar-free pudding).  Without them I’d have a hard time meeting both my daily calorie maximum (~1700 calories) and my daily protein minimum (1 gram protein per KG body weight).

Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

Beyond that, I just eat in small amounts.  Space those out over the day.  Absolutely standard diet advice.  So I eat three or four small (300-calorie) items (e.g., salad with salad dressing), plus three or four 100-calorie snacks (e.g., an apple).  Plus however much cheating I feel comfortable with that day.  And makeup calories for any extra burned at the gym.  All with an eye toward eating an average of about 500 calories a day less than what I need to maintain my weight.

Exercise calories are accounted for separately, as I do it.  On days when I exercise at the gym, I eat to make up for those additional calories spent.  (But note that you must net out your basal metabolic rate from whatever calorie count you get for a given exercise.  E.g., if I burn 600 calories in an hour on the elliptical exerciser, I get to eat an additional 400 calories of food that day.  The 200/hour slippage is the calories I’d have burnt in that hour merely by being up and about — calories already accounted for in the “sedentary calorie need” calculation done at the very start.

Practically speaking, this adds a whole new dimension of “bonus” to exercise.  I get to eat more, on a gym day.  Not hugely more.  Ideally, only as much more (in calories) as I burned at the gym.

And that’s it.  No secrets.  Aim for slow weight loss.  No alcohol.  Avoid large servings of anything with a high glycemic index.  Eat lots of fruits and non-starchy vegetables.  Get plenty of roughage.

Lift weights to keep up your muscle mass as you diet.  Eat a gram of protein a day per kilogram of body weight.

In hindsight, all I’ve done is follow standard, mainstream dieting advice.

But only as a last resort.