Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2102: How high is that helicopter? Part 1.

 

Is there an easy way to determine the altitude of a low-flying aircraft?

After looking over my options, I’m going to try an antique optical rangefinder.

I bought it on Ebay.  I’m currently waiting for it to arrive.

Background

I was awakened last night by yet another low-flying helicopter, here in the DC ‘burbs.

The noise from these ranges from merely obtrusive, to loud enough to rattle the windows.  Below is a recording of one of the several that passed overhead today, taken from my back porch.  It doesn’t quite stop conversation, but you do have to raise your voice a bit.

This is normal for the DC area.  There are a lot of military and other government high officials stationed in this area.  These folks tend to get shuffled from place to place via helicopter.  Unfortunately, one of the well-used north-south routes passes directly over the Town of Vienna.

Is it really that loud, or is flying low?

In theory, nothing should be flying below 1000′, in my area.

But in the past, that has been an issue.  I recall that, many years ago, some Vienna Town Council members complained to various authorities about noise from low-flying aircraft, and got the “minimum 1000′ for the TOV” as part of the answer.

This got me thinking about measuring a passing helicopter’s height.

(Luckily, I am hardly the first person to have had an interest in this.  Luckily, I say in hindsight, because that way, my Google inquiries would not attract undue attention from the authorities.)

Turns out, there is no good way for an amateur on the ground to measure the height of an over-flying helicopter.  At least, none that I’ve come across.

But seriously, how hard can this be.

If nothing else, think of it as a way to rule out bad pilot behavior (low flight altitude) as an explanation for a loud helicopter fly-over.  (With the obvious alternative explanation being “that was a loud helicopter”.   Which, given that these may be military aircraft, is always a possibility.)

So, are those overflights loud because they are loud aircraft, or are they loud because they’re flying well below 1000 feet?

Optical rangefinders that won’t work

First, there are “laser rangefinders”, not intrinsically different from a laser tape measure, just more oomph and maybe some specialized optics.  But first, I ain’t pointin’ no laser at no aircraft, period.  Let alone a low-flying (likely military) helicopter.  Plus, the ones available for civilian use (e.g., laser tape measure, laser golf or boating rangefinder, rangefinders for hunting big game) probably won’t work for this use anyway, owing to the small visible target.   I get the impression these laser rangefinders (e.g., for golfers) can find the range to a hillside or location on an open lawn, but they aren’t designed to find something as optically small as a helicopter flying at 1000′.

I’m also brushing aside all the military “passive-optical” (coincidence and stereoscopic) rangefinders.   These are WWII-era and earlier tech with mirrors, prisms, and such.  If nothing else, aside from having to own one (they tend to be big, to get you the best separation of the two lenses), you’d have to have the forethought to have it handy, and set up, just as the helicopter was flying by.  Plus, those are all expensive military collectibles now.

 

A vintage civilian non-laser coincidence rangefinder, via Ebay

 

Source:  Ebay.

I can vaguely recall hand-held purely optical rangefinders, from the pre-laser era.  These are the vastly smaller, and likely less accurate, analogs of military coincidence rangefinders.  But they worked the same way, using two widely-separated lenses, then measuring how much you need to move the image from one eyepiece, until it coincides with the image from the other.

I bought one on Ebay.  Above, you see a RangeMatic 1000.

This allows you to measure distances to 1000 yards, with some modest degree of accuracy.  It looks like it should be more than adequate to allow me to identify helicopters flying at 500 feet, rather than at 1000 feet.  It looks like the difference between 150 yards and 300 yards is about an eighth of a turn of the dial.

This, if it works, will give me the line-of-sight distance to the helicopter.  That only tells me the height of the helicopter if it flies directly overhead.  I’m going to need to add some sort of mounting and an inclinometer.  The line-of-sight distance, plus the angle of elevation above the horizon, should allow me to infer the height of the helicopter over ground.  (In fact, that’s easy enough that I don’t even have to look it up.  Height above ground is the sine of the angle of elevation, times the straight-line distance to the object.

Thus ends this task, until my Ebay’ed optical rangefinder shows up in the mail a few days from now.

Estimating overflight height by apparent size.

The very crudest golfing range finders work by using the height of the pin (the stick-with-flag that marks the hole).  These pins are a standard size, and the simplest golf rangefinders simply place the apparent size of the pin on a scale — the smaller it is, the further you are away from it.

Other purely optical methods seem chancy.  In theory, if I could identify the model of helicopter, I could infer distance by measuring how how big the over-flying helicopter appears.

This is more work than I care do do.

Can I determine the height of a passing helicopter, purely from its sound?

Source:  Reference BBC.  Photo by Joe Pettet-Smith

First, an interesting historical side-note.  Listening for approaching aircraft is not a new idea.   As I understand it (likely from seeing it on YouTube), in parts of Great Britain, big, cast concrete parabolic sound reflectors still stand along the coastline.  These concentrate (and effectively, amplify) incoming sound waves.  These were used to detect the sound of incoming aircraft while they were still miles offshore, prior to the implementation of radar during WWII.  Reference BBC

This is one of those weird things that is clearly possible, from first principles.  Maybe not even terribly difficult, as a one-off proof of concept.  But for which you can buy no ready-made unit.

Sound travels about one foot per millisecond.  Two microphones, 100′ apart, would therefor experience about a 100-millisecond (or one-tenth-second) difference in when they “heard” a sound at ground level.

For this approach, I’d use some microphones, some recording gear, and the speed of sound, to triangulate where a near-surface sound is coming from, based on when (precisely) that sound shows up, at microphones placed at known locations perhaps 100′ apart.

The theory is easy:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location

Start with the concept of a gunfire locator or gunshot locator.  These (typically) use a widely-distributed set of microphones to detect and locate gunshots.  Once a gunshot is detected, these use “standard triangulation methods” to estimate the direct and distance to the gunshot.

(There are crowdsourced versions of these:  https://github.com/apispoint/soter, but that seems limited to categorizing a noise as a gunshot, not pinning down the location.)

Substitute helicopter noise for gunshot, and do the math in 3-D instead of assuming location on the ground, and that’s what I’m after.  Something that will give me a fairly precise location of a helicopter flying overhead.  From the noise of it alone.  So that I may then calculate the height above ground, from that location.

In two dimensions, you only need two microphones — think, two ears — to identify the direction that a sound is coming from.  Per Wikipedia, that’s all about the lag between the time the sound hits one ear, versus the other.  To quote:

Where:

  • is the time difference in seconds,
  • is the distance between the two sensors (ears) in meters,
  • is the angle between the baseline of the sensors (ears) and the incident sound, in degrees
  • c is the speed of sound

But that only works (pins down a unique direction) if you’re working in two dimensions.  And one pair of microphones provides no clue as to distance.  Just direction.

If you work through what you do need, to pin it down in three dimensions, a minimum rig would need four microphones, arranged like the corner of a cube.  This provides a pair of microphones in each of three dimensions.  The further apart the better, as these are going to be used to estimate a helicopter height of maybe 1000′.

The rest should be math.

But this solution involves a lot of hardware, no matter how I figure it.  Four microphones or recording devices, wires to connect them to a central station, and a four-track sound recorder.

This would be a difficult and expensive solution, so I’m not going to pursue it further unless the RangeMaster 1000 fails to do the job.

Conclusion

I’ll have to wait for my antique optical rangefinder to arrive before I can bring this to a conclusion.

My belief is that a simple hand-held “antique” optical rangefinder, plus something to measure the angle of elevation, should provide all the accuracy I need to distinguish helicopters flying at or about the 1000′ ceiling, from putative “low flying” helicopters at (say) 500 feet.

My guess is that these helicopters are merely loud, not low.  But I should be able to validate that with this simple bit of equipment.

Post #2101: Anyone who is surprised when we no longer have free elections is not paying attention.

 

This is just a note-to-self.

And it’s just a simple matter of logic.

With all the broad new powers being claimed by the current Republican President, and the purge of the military (including the JAGs), the FBI, and our national security apparatus …

… do you really think they’re going to let those new powers fall into the hands of a Democrat?

And so, if our excursion into South American-style goverment-by-oligarchy somehow proves unpopular with the masses, it’s pretty much a given that free and fair elections are history.

I would say, plan for the future accordingly.

In any case, I’m just putting down a marker, with this post, in case somebody is somehow surprised, three and a half years from now.

Post #2100: Measuring road salt in drinking water, a summary.

 

This might make a good science fair project for somebody, so I’m giving this topic one final, compact write-up.

If you live in an urban area that draws its drinking water from a local river,  or other nearby flowing surface water …

… and you live in a climate where they salt the roads for winter storms,

… and the weather cooperates, in the form of some distinct road-cleaning rain or melt event following a winter storm,

… you can easily infer the presence of road salt, in your drinking water,

… with a cheap ($6) total-dissolved-solids (TDS) meter, a water glass, and some patience.

 

In my area — where the Potomac River is the main source of drinking water — it takes about ten days from the time the rain washes the salt off the roads and parking lots, until that salt shows up in the drinking water.  YMMV.

See posts 2085, 2086, 2088, 2089, 2090, 2091, and 2092 for background.

The required background, as a series of true statements.

We use a lot of road salt in the U.S.  Google’s AI tells me we use 20 million metric tons of it a year.  The same AI tells me we have about 230 million licensed drivers.  So I make that out to be just under 200 pounds of road salt, per licensed driver, per year.

The accepted EPA threshold for “salty taste” in the drinking water is 250 parts-per-million chloride ion.  Assuming I did the math right, 200 pounds of salt (60% chloride by weight) is enough to impart a salty taste to more than 50,000 gallons of water.   Or, enough to impart a salty taste to 0.7″ of rain, on your standard suburban quarter-acre lot.

That’s all by way of saying that, “outdoors” is a big place, but that’s still a lot of salt, even when spread outdoors.  Enough salt that you ought to be able to notice it, in the environment.

The negative effects of road salt use are well-known, including corrosion (of cars, bridges, rebar in concrete …) and pollution of surface and ground waters with the salty runoff.  In particular, nothing that lives in your local fresh-water environment really likes being subjected to a salty water.

There has been a prolonged push in the U.S. to use less road salt. Seems like that started in the late 1990s in New Hampshire, where they were discovering problems with water wells that had been, in effect, poisoned by prolonged use of salt on nearby roadways.

State DOTs and others do not use salt to melt the snow off the roads.  They plow the snow off the roads.  The salt is just there to achieve “disbondment”, that is, to prevent the packed snow and ice from freezing solidly to the pavement.  So that they can plow down to bare pavement.

The desire to use less road salt led to the now-common practice of brining the road surfaces prior to snowfalls, one of a set of techniques known as “anti-icing” (as opposed to after-the-fact de-icing).  If weather conditions are right (e.g., no rain prior to the snowfall), spraying the roads with a thin layer of salt water, then allowing that to dry, achieves “disbondment” of the initial snowfall with minimum use of salt.  Brining uses roughly one-quarter of the salt that would be required to achieve the same road-clearing result, if spread as rock salt.  (Source:  Brine Fact Sheet, 2016, American Public Works Association.)

That thin layer of salt creates a weak spot in the snow/ice layer that forms on the road.  That weak layer is what creates the “disbondment” of the ice and the underlying pavement.  That “disbondment” allows the plows to scrape the snow off the road, to get down to bare pavement.  Rock salt is also there for the disbondment, it just achieves it less efficiently.

Some of the sodium in salt tends to stay local.  This is what “burns” greenery near salted areas such as sidewalks.  But the chloride in salt travels along with the runoff, plausibly (around here) in the form of calcium chloride, formed as sodium was exchanged for calcium in the soil.

A “total dissolved solids” meter measures the electrical resistance of water, and so indirectly measures the concentrations of ions in the water.  Around here, in normal times, that would be mostly calcium and carbonate ions, as that’s the main dissolved mineral contributing to our roughly 10 grains of water hardness in this area.  But ions are ions, whether they be from calcium carbonate or sodium chloride.  And so, a total dissolved solids meter will react to salt in the water, as it would to any other ions in the water.

As a result, to the extent that road salt gets into my drinking water, this should generate a predictable rise in total dissolved solids, as measured in my tap water.  Each time the salt is flushed off the roads (by rain, say), I should see a rise in TDS in my tap water, with the appropriate lag.

In Fairfax County, it takes about a week for water to work its way from the filtration plants to the furthest taps in the system.  This is known, because Fairfax flushes the system annually (switching from chloramine to chlorine during that period), and it warns citizens about the resulting change in the smell and taste of the water, annually.  And in that warning is the factoid that it takes about a week.

All you need to track TDS in your drinking water is a cheap ($6 via Amazon) total-dissolved-solids meter, and patience.  The patience is required because, with a cheap meter, you’ll only get stable results if you allow the tap water to sit long enough to come up to room temperature.  (The underlying conductivity measurement is quite temperature-sensitive, and the cheap TDS meter that I bought takes forever to adjust to the water temperature.)

If you’re worried about your meter’s reading drifting over time, keep one water sample permanently, and use it for a reference.  Re-reading the TDS in that “reference” sample will show you that your meter’s reading is stable.  (Or, at least, that’s what it showed me.)

And, voilà:

As noted, these peaks in tap water TDS are ten days after some weather event that flushed a lot of road salt into the local creeks.  (Typically, a rainy day.)

Although the timing and magnitude are right, I have not proven that this is purely the effect of salt.  Maybe TDS goes up after every rainstorm, salt or no salt?  I think that’s unlikely, but I can’t rule it out until weather conditions are right, and we have a rainy day with no remaining salt on the roads.

Conclusion

I’m pretty sure the peaks in tap-water TDS, shown above are driven by road salt being washed off the roads.  Water filtration (short of reverse-osmosis) does not remove salt (or chloride) from the water.  And, because we drink river water, not well (ground) water or water stored in large reservoirs, that salt then shows up, in short order, in the water.

All of which tells me that these peaks look about right.

I’d like to have double-checked that it is salt, by being able to taste the saltiness in the water, but the increase in TDS was not large enough to cross the commonly-accepted threshold for salty taste (250 ppm chloride ion in the water).

Ultimately, all that’s left to show is to show that such TDS peaks don’t appear, 10 days after a rainy day, when there isn’t salt on the roads.  That way I can rule out that these TDS peaks are simply related to rainstorms.  Leaving salt (moved by rainstorm) as the only plausible explanation.

Again, the beauty as a science fair experiment is that all it takes is a cheap TDS meter, a water glass, and patience.

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 …

The current push to fire Federal workers is all about purging the bureaucracy.  This is standard operating procedure for autocrats.  You won’t see a modern autocratic takeover of a former democracy without it.

In case you were confused, this explains why (e.g.) Musk et al. keeps going out of their way to insult Federal workers gratuitously, why the firings are so slap-dash, and why the dollar total of claimed savings seems to be treated as a joke, not worth checking for accuracy.

All of that, because if your primary goal is simply to purge the bureaucracy so that you can replace it with your loyal partisan hacks, none of that matters.  Heck, insulting Federal workers is a feature, not a bug.

It’s not about making any material savings in tax dollars, because everyone who has even the faintest idea where the money goes realizes that the dollars you can save by reducing the federal workforce itself are small.  Most of what the Federal government does is make transfer payments.  Take taxes from some, give that money to others.

Source:  SSA.

For example, Social Security is 20% of the Federal budget.  The entire overhead of Social Security — Federal workers, contractors, their offices and equipment — accounts for about 0.5% of Social Security costs.  The other 99.5% is payments to the aged, blind, and disabled.  Administrative costs of Social Security have been below 1% of total costs since 1989, so this isn’t exactly some new development.

Sure, Republicans get their jollies cutting the EPA.  And, apparently, they’ve now jumped the shark on “starve the beast”, and simply plan to reduce IRS employment until the government is no longer able to collect taxes, and so goes from starvation to bankruptcy.

Source:  Citations given below.

But the bottom line is that compensation of civilian employees (i.e., not the uniformed services) amounted to $271B in 2023 (reference:  Congressional Budget Office).  Or, about 4% of total Federal outlays of around $6.75T (reference:  US Treasury).

By reference, the current annual budget deficit runs around $2T per year.  You can fire them all, and it’ll hardly make a dent in the deficit.

Worse, there are some areas where the Federal government really does hire people to do the work, not just to move the money.  But the three agencies with the largest civilian Federal workforce are Defense, Veteran’s Affairs, and Homeland Security.

If you are wondering why the Veteran’s Administration is on that list, it’s largely because the VA runs more than 1000 health care facilities, including (as I recall) about 160 hospitals.  That, along with many outpatient clinics, skilled nursing facilities.  And about 150 national cemeteries, as veterans retain a burial benefit, and can claim the right to have their remains buried in a VA cemetery.

Don’t confuse “purging the bureaucracy as part of a power grab” with a genuine effort to balance the budget.

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.

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 lists of potential savings 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.

Edit 3/5/2025:  Weight loss resumed when I stopped eating too much. I’m now under 200 pounds and on track for a target weight of 185 sometime around the end of May. 

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.