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Post #2012: Week 2 of my readership drought. Apparently, potty mouth was not the problem.

On the plus side, I’m learning a whole lot more about how the Internets work.

On the downside, perhaps Warren Buffet said it best:

"If you've been playing poker for half an hour and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy."

The long and the short of it is that Google (search) hates me, as of about two weeks ago.  Likely, this is due to an update in Google’s search algorithm that occurred mid-August.  And not due to anything I have done (lately) to offend Google.

Long may she rule.

More seriously, I have tried to figure out what changed, and

  1. I still have no clue.
  2. I still  have no firm idea of how to get a clue.
  3. In the meantime, I’ve gotten in bed with the Devil.

Speak of the Devil

Bullets 1) and 2) should be self-explanatory.

But before I get to Bullet 3), explain this to me.  When I asked Gencraft’s AI for a picture of “get in bed with the Devil”, it had absolutely no problem spitting out male devils.  Such as the guy on the left up there.  But when I said “get in bed with a lady Devil”, or “female Devil”, I had to put the system in Anime mode to be able to squeak that one picture past the censors.  Every other attempt at a lady Devil in bed got me the spilled-ice-cream-cone-of-death black-and-white graphic at the very top of the post, presumably for being risque.

I do not quite know why that is true.  Yet I am amused by it.

This shares ignorance, but not amusement, with my current situation with Google Search.  I do wonder if Google has somehow inserted some AI-rule-making, which would mean that not even Google itself would know why Google Search no longer finds me.  I think “connectionist garbage” is the term for what you get when you try to dissect an AI to learn what it was thinking.

So, getting in bed with Devil.  By bullet 3) above, I mean, with all due respect to that most gracious of near-monopolies, Google Search, that I installed Google SiteKit as a plug-in for this WordPress-based blog.

What I didn’t realize, when I did that, is that Google was going to insert code into my web pages.  Which, admittedly, and in 20-20 hindsight, was stupid on my part.  Nonetheless, when I went to the top of one of my blog pages and asked my browser to “inspect” the underlying code, I felt just a little unclean to find this, sketched below, as part of the web page you are currently reading:

<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) snippet added by Site Kit -->

<!-- Google Analytics snippet added by Site Kit -->

(See below)

<!-- End Google tag (gtag.js) snippet added by Site Kit -->

Below:  I took out the actual code, above, so as not to offend.

The omitted code starts <script> , and ends with </script>, so, you know, all other things equal, even though I don’t read this computer language, kinda think this might be html? Javascript?  Beats me.  Anyway, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that the thing Google Sitekit inserted is a script. 

And it gives a big ol’ shoutout to Google Tag Manager, and passes some sort of fixed ID, which I guess … ID’s me?  For Google’s purposes.  Yeah, it’s a good thing.  So says Google, so it must be so.

But in addition, or possibly because of some implementation of this Tag-Manager thing, I now have access to Google Search Console.  This turns out to be the place where Google tells you everything that’s wrong with your website.  Of which, I seem to have a bounty.

Anyway, Google Search Console is where I am now learning that:

  • Google appears to have found massive problems with my website,
  • But I can’t quite figure out what the hell Google is talking about.

To be clear, I wrote complex computer programs for all of my professional life.  But now, with this stuff?  Here’s my generic algorithm for trying to look into any dimension of this problem.

START

STEP 0:  Come across a term that I don't understand.

STEP 1:  Look up Google's definition of that term.

STEP 2:  Find a term in that definition that I do not understand.

GOTO STEP 1

END

And that infinite do-loop is where it stands, in terms of the technical side of this inquiry.  Presumably, I’ll make some headway, or I won’t.

A deeper philosophical issue

Do do I care about readership or not?

There were a couple of times in the past when this blog actually served some purpose.  During those times, sure, readership was desired.

But those are now ancient history.  These days, I write this mostly for myself.  So, believe it or not, there are benefits to doing this even if I’m the only reader.

Use 1:  Writing enforces rigorous thinking and fact-checking.  For one thing, I find that being forced to write something out does wonders for getting my thinking straight on an issue.  I’m not the first to say that.  I had an economics professor, JRT Hughes, who put it something like:  “Writing is good because it allows us to check the logical consistency of more than just adjacent sentences.”

Use 2:  Diary, particularly garden diary. For another thing, a blog is a good way to mark events.  That’s been particularly useful for the garden.  But the result is that this blog is part diary.  (Which is guess is the original intent of web log, now blog.)

Use 3:  Generating and sharing novel information, analysis, and DIY.  In addition, I use this blog to document any useful thing I’ve made, or insights that I think I’ve made.  That can be as dumb as yep, I really did patch my driveway by hand, here’s how it went. Mostly these are things where either I’m glad somebody offered some hints on the internet, or where I wish somebody had.

Something as prosaic as the price and availability of canning jar lids.  Or something a little more highbrow and sciency-y.  Microplastic.  PFAs.  Documenting the northward creep of the USDA climate zones.  My Teutonic two-tier testing series (e.g., Post #605) gives me a few “Flowers for Algernon” moments when I re-read it now.  The best intellectual exercises that ample free time and intense boredom can generate.

Use 4:   Biting social commentary.  Well, I’m amused by my own, even if nobody else is.

Of those current uses, all my hits were on 3).  Garden hints are popular, DIY stuff is somewhat popular.  My most popular post ever was on making a cheap heated outdoor faucet cover.  And, to be clear, those are often just as much to make note of what I did or found, than to make advice generally available to random Google-Search-driven strangers.

So … nah, not really.  It’s a kick when I get a lot of hits on some technical article.

But I don’t need that to fuel this blog.  Much.

I will continue to investigate my situation vis-a-vis Google Search — may the very electrons of the internet sing her praises — and if there’s something I can easily fix on this website, I will.

Maybe I’ll finally learn how the internet actually works.

Post #2009: Punished for potty mouth?

 

This blog lost about 2/3rds of its daily visitors, on or about August 20, 2024.  That, against a months-long backdrop of steady daily page views.

“Tarnation”, I muttered, “what in blue blazes happened?”

Hopping horny-toads, what flea-bitten varmint did this?  I’m-a-gonna blow ’em to smithereenies.

I write this blog mostly to amuse myself and a select few friends and relatives.  But almost all of my page views are from strangers who find my how-to/technical information articles via Google.  For example, my most popular post, by far, shows how to make a cheap heated faucet cover to keep exterior faucets from freezing.

And, upon re-reading the last couple of weeks of posts, I think I’ve found the problem.

I’ve been cussin’ too dang much.  (And/or, Google just upped its standards in that area.)

To put that more technically, many savvy observers believe that curse words negative affect your search-engine optimization (SEO).  In theory, that’s not supposed to be true.  In practice, it appears to be true.  And the only thing that stands out about my most recent posts is frequent (but humor-focused) use of swear words.

Google search generates more-or-less all of my referred traffic, so the only plausible explanation for the drop is that something has put me on Google’s bad side.  Upon re-reading my most recent output, the gratuitous curse words stood out as the likely culprit.

An alternative explanation is that Google’s August 2024 update to its search algorithm found something else that it didn’t like about me.  Turns out, quite a few websites saw a big decline in traffic just about the same day mine did.  In theory, if I can cut through the technical barriers, there is a way for me to use the Google Search Console to see if there’s an issue.  But that requires modifying the website and/or the DNS listing, neither of which I particularly want to do.

The lesson is that if our monopoly provider of search services takes a dislike to you, you’re toast.  Whatever Google decides more-or-less determines how the internet runs.

Google giveth, and Google taketh away.

I’ve now gone back and cleaned up the past couple of weeks’ worth of postings.  I’m hoping for the best.

We’ll see if Google can find it in her heart to forgive me.  Whatever it was that I did to offend her.

Post #1992: Minimum wage.

 

This post started off to be a cut-and-dried presentation of the real (inflation-adjusted) value of the Federal minimum wage.

So let me get that punchline out of the way:  $7.25 in January 2009 is the about the same as $10.79 in June 2024 dollars.  So says the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), via their graphically-challenged but zero-nonsense inflation calculator:

So, I’m done.  That $7.25 has been the Federal minimum wage since 2009. No matter how you slice it, that $7.25/hour appears low in real (CPI-adjusted) terms. Compared to … ah, you name it.  But in particular, compared to what it was in 2009, fresh off the last increase in the Federal minimum wage.

But so what.  Again to cut to the chase:  Of late, a lot of states have set their own binding state minimum wage laws.  Nowadays, the majority of states (and overwhelming the majority of employed population) have minimum wage laws that effectively supercede the Federal minimum wage law.

One thing of interest to me is that the jump from $7.25/hour to $12/hour, in three years, doesn’t seem to have increased Virginia unemployment markedly.  I mean, just at a glance, Virginia’s current unemployment rate is 2.7 percent.  That’s pretty good.  Just sayin.

Finally, nothing is free.  If, in the end, people who eat a lot of fast food ended up paying for that increase in the minimum wage … that’s not a terrible outcome.  We’ve long imposed sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco.  Think of it as one of those.

 

Round up the usual suspects.

Source:  Wikipedia.

I was struck by how much this map resembles just about every other map of America I’ve looked at recently.  With a couple of exceptions (e.g., Florida), it’s very much like every other Dems-vs-Republicans map I’ve seen.  By color, that could easily be a map of state mask mandates during the pandemic.

Well, here, test your prejudices.  If I told you that a handful of states literally have no legislation at all, regarding minimum wages — no mention of the concept in their laws — which states would you guess those are?   If you started in the Alabama/Missisippi/Louisiana area, give yourself an A.

Anyway, coasts versus interior, with a few exceptions.  Florida stands out as unnaturally progressive, given their general bent.  Otherwise, pretty much the usual suspects.

Virginia minimum wage law.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED)

The first punchline is that the Virginia minimum wage remains at $12/hour.  The story appears to this:  In 2020, Virginia raised its minimum wage, but at that time, required another vote for the portion from 2023 to 2025 to take effect. (That cautious approach is typical for Virginia state government, I’d say.)  The  conditionally-scheduled increase from $12 to $15/hour, from 2023 to 2025, was passed by 2024 the legislature, vetoed by the Governor, with veto sustained by the Virginia House.  (Weirdly, I can find virtually no press coverage of the Governor’s veto except this except this write-up from a legal firm).

So it stays at $12.  I have no idea what happens next, if anything.

The details of the Virginia minimum wage law are interesting.

For example, some types of jobs are categorically exempt:  Agricultural workers, as is traditional, but also … golf caddies?  I swear it says so in statute.

And prisoners.  Virginia’s minimum wage law does not apply to prisoners.  Nor does the Federal minimum wage law.  The more I read about prison labor, the less I want to know.  In Virginia, the law at least specifies that the resulting products have to be sold to government and related entities, and not sold on the open market (based on this statute), unless with specific approval of the Governor.

Does the Virginia minimum wage law cover tipped workers, or not?  My short answer is … yeahno.  Yeah, if I got it right, in theory, tipped employees are guaranteed $12/hour in combined wages and tips.  And, in determining the legal minimum hourly wage for a tipped employees, employers can assume enough tips that the legal hourly wage is … $2.13, per the U.S. Department of Labor.   Same as it always was.  (With the understanding that if the employee wants to demonstrate that the combined wage and tip income is habitually below $12/hour, so that the hourly wage paid by the employer should go up, the employee has to retain and show all tips to the employer, to establish the typical hourly tip income.)

The crazy-beyond-crazy sleeper is the definition of “tipped employee”:  A dollar a day.  In tips.  Federal law defines a tipped employee as anyone likely to make $30 or more, per month, in tips.  States just follow suit.

We who live in the era of the tip jar have to wonder just how old that $30/month figure is?  Answer:  In round numbers, that hasn’t been updated in half a century.  I finally tracked that down (California State University Office of the Chancellor, Google Link to pdf), emphasis mine:

 20 As amended by section 3(a) of the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1977, effective January 1, 1978. Prior to January 1, 1978, the dollar amount was $20.

As an economist, I have long viewed the ubiquitous tip jar as rational reaction to the abysmal minimum wage.  Two sides of the same coin, as it were.

But with this mismash of state laws, I no longer understand how to think about the tip jar in retail settings.  I need help.

Dear Kamala:  Please post Federal guidelines on tipping.  TIA.

This request flows from what I see as the unfortunate but true connection from adequacy of the minimum wage to tipping.

Kamala Harris, please threaten to push for a modest raise in the Federal minimum wage.  Currently $7.25, last increased in 2009.

But wait, didn’t I just get through showing that, these days, the Federal minimum wage hardly matters?

Answer:  Yes, that’s why this is a genius idea.  If the Dems are for it, the Republicans must be reflexively against it.  Even if it does almost nothing.

I want to hear the sound of Republicans collectively hocking a loogie on the very idea of a minimum wage.  (As a bonus, perhaps some will go on to heap scorn on child labor laws.)

More to the point, I want that collective Republican “patooey” to be heard clearly by 20-something working stiffs, particularly in the four battleground states circled above.  I don’t think anything could sharpen up the difference between the Dems and Republicans any more.

Secondarily, it would be fun to see the hoops many Republican governors would have to jump through to lambaste the lefty-libs for this notion, in those cases where their own state minimum wages are well in excess of the current Federal level.  Such states include Florida and South Dakota.

Fun, for much the same reason that watching Jeopardy! is like watching the Supreme Court.  We all know the answer.  All the art is in carefully phrasing the question that gives you that answer.

Plus, raising the Federal minimum a bit might help some of the lowest-paid.

You never know.

Stranger things have happened.

It’s up to the Congress anyhow.  So if the House is against you, you can blame them if nothing happens on this front.

Vice-President Harris, while you’re at it.

Howsabout taking a look at the Fair Labor Standards Act.

I mean, a dollar a day?  That’s in your law.  It’s how you define a tipped employee.  As documented above, that figure dates to 1977 legislation.  No huge exaggeration to say that it’s now a half-century out-of-date.  (N.B., per the BLS inflation calculator, $30 in 1977 is the equivalent of more than $160 today.)

Where you find one dusty old cobweb-covered provision, you’re apt to find many.

Haven’t you heard grumblings abut “wage theft”, from the masses?  I think this whole accounting-for-tips-of-tipped-employees thing is a source of grievances,  Wouldn’t it be nice to show some concern for what amounts to a common grievance of the poorly-paid?  That’s not to say that each such grievance is justified, but at a minimum to acknowledge that it is a grievance.

Or do you feel that the current system works well for such people, and nothing needs to change?  Or even, more narrowly, nothing in that law needs to change.

Or something else entirely.  Can’t rule that out.

Conclusion:  Why do the Heathen Rage?  Dead ends.

Best guess, many of them are not well off, and nothing about that looks like it’s going to change.

That’s my view of the root cause of disaffected youth.  In any case, I keep reading that The Youth are Disaffected.

And I keep meaning to look up that word.

Disaffected:  Dissatisfied with the people in authority and no longer willing to support them.  Per Google.  I think the nuance is more “indifference to what happens”, rather than those of the more active “burn it all down” persuasion.

My guess is that much of that, in electorate Youth (typically defined as 18-25 sometimes 18-29), comes from people who are (or perceive that they are) in dead ends.  Dead end job, dead end society, dead end politics. From that mindset, thing’s aren’t great now, there’s no obvious path by which they can get better, so there’s not much in it for them, for preserving the current system.

Not that all dead ends are remediable.  For goods and some services, American labor is in head-to-head competition with (e.g.) much lower-paid Chinese labor.  I don’t expect Amazon to be dominated by U.S.-made products any time soon.

So a bit of disaffection is warranted.  Google “disappearance of the U.S. middle class”, and you’ll get the drift.

Toss in some global warming, for sure. The Youth are screwed, the only questions are how much and how soon.  As a country we appear deadlocked on doing much about either.

Ponder retirement in their shoes.  Lifetime savings from working near the minimum wage?  Get real.  Top that off by looking at likely Social Security benefits 40 years from now.  Under no circumstances ponder Medicare.

Finally, purely based on anecdote, I think the prevalence of sub-middle-class -end jobs in America today is why The Youth really resent well-to-do geezers who won’t retire.  To them, old people who have made their fortunes, but continue to work, aren’t inspiring examples of living life to the fullest.  They are clogs in the pipeline of upward mobility.

“Boomer”.  An epithet used by The Youth in place of “old person, please do us a favor and die soon”.

And yet, even if there are some valid reason to see the world as full of nothing but dead ends, we really can’t afford to have the disaffected determine the election.

My feeling, FWIW, is that the arrow of time points in one direction.  You can’t steer a car by looking in the rear view mirror. Or fill in your favorite metaphor.

There is no way to go back to the future.  At best you can try to face forward as you stumble into it.  I just have to say the phrase “national climate policy”, and my choice is made.  With the idea being that some (Dems) beats none (Republicans).  And both beat pretending that climate change isn’t a threat, and using that as pretext for promoting greater use of fossil fuels (Republicans).

Drill, baby, drill.  As national climate policy, that’s a flunk.

So, Harris it is.  She’s got my vote.  I hope she’s up to the task.  The sooner she goes beyond criticizing Trump, and actually puts something useful on the table, the better.

I think there’s no better place to start than policies directly affecting low-wage workers.

Post #1991: My bike made a funny noise the other day …

 

 

Caution:  This post is an aging-related first-person anecdote.

… as I was riding it.

Sort of a creaky-cracky sound.

I assumed it was something amiss in the drive train, as the sound came and went right in time with my pedaling.

Tried to suss out what it was.

Turns out, it was my knees.

Whoa.  That noise, coming out of my knees?  Oh, that’s unambiguously bad.

In my defense, I’d never been in this situation before.  On the plus side, I did eventually figure it out.  And turned around, and headed home, and eased up.

So, I eventually did the mostly-right thing.

It just takes me a while to make up my mind.

Post #1987: Just another bit of Future Shock.

 

Yesterday I tried to buy a garlic press that wasn’t made in China.

Literally, anywhere but.  After looking at Amazon listings for maybe 15 minutes, I could not find one.

And, to be clear, I don’t mean “made in the USA”.  I mean, made in any country other than China. 

But, among 20 Amazon listings examined, of the half that had explicit country-of-origin information, all of those were made in China.

Its not a huge surprise that I failed.

The only thing of interest was the breadth of the failure.  China, Inc. doesn’t just cheaply mass-produce a single, widely-sold model.  As might have been common perception in my youth.  Today, by contrast, on Amazon, as searched below, China produces every make-and-model for which country of origin information is listed.

Source:  Gencraft AI.  The prompt was … Rosie the Riveter holding a garlic press.

Methods:  (As if anyone cares.)  Two searches on Amazon for “garlic press” (less the quotes) are shown below.  Top is “featured”, which is how Amazon presents it to you, by default.  And then sorted by (descending) average customer rating.  (Other sorts were examined, but were uninteresting, e.g. cheapest first).

Aside from the occasional lemon (squeezer, N/A below), I slashed through those products for which China was explicitly listed as the country of origin, on Amazon.  And question-marked the ones where nothing was listed, or only a coy “imported” or similar non-specific phrase was listed.

Featured by Amazon:

 

Sorted by top customer rating:

Of the listings for which explicit country-of-origin information was given, all said “China”.  With red slashes above.  With one exception (U.K.?) which turns to be an error.  That’s actually made in China, but you have to work to ferret that out.

The bigger surprise was the about half the listings don’t show any country-of-origin information.  Once upon a time, I thought there was a legal requirement of some kind, that anything sold retail, and not made in the U.S., must show country-of-origin information.

As with many things, I may mis-recall that.  Or it’s one of the quaint laws from my youth that has been allowed to pass into irrelevance.  Further, that might only strictly apply to the physical package.  And may be unenforceable (see, e.g., Pur canning lids at Ace Hardware, Post (G22-002).

In any case, the device listed with the U.K. as country of origin was wrong.  I finally tracked the same item down on the Williams-Sonoma website, where they plainly say that China is the country of origin.  A letdown, for sure, but at least Williams-Sonoma didn’t dodge the issue.

No coy “imported” from Williams-Sonoma.  They named names.  That’s laudable, if perhaps not profit-maximizing.

Conclusion:  Pardon my Future Shock.

Source:  My back porch.

The results of my search are even more boring than they first look.  Or scary, depending your your viewpoint.  No shock that every (fill-in-the-blank) you can buy on Amazon is made in China.

But, having grown some garlic, I now would like to buy a device to let me use it without peeling it.  (Fresh, I find it like-onto-impossible to peel it.  As if peeling garlic were ever a pleasant chore to start with.)  It appears that my sole option for a garlic press is to buy one manufactured in China.  (Or get an ancient one in a thrift shop.)

Upshot:  I can have any garlic press I want.  As long as it’s made-in-China.

This is just a small contributor to my permanent state of Future Shock.  Which, briefly, is an unsettled feeling due to the rapid rate of change of your own culture, by analogy to “culture shock”, for a displaced person.  It is culture shock, but the culture I am unfamiliar with is my own.

(I think Future Shock is a good part of what drives Trumpism.  But that’s for a different post.  But trends are what they are, no matter how much you yack about them.  U.S. coal industry employment, below:

Partly, I experience a lot of Future Shock just because I’m old.  E.g., I will likely never get used to (e.g.,) electronic restaurant menus, to be read on-the-fly, on a phone.

But partly, it’s just plain weird out.  Here in the U.S.A..  What passes for weather here.  What passes for politics here.  And so on.

Universal mandatory made-in-China is just a tiny part of that.  Not the most disconcerting thing in my world.  Not by a longshot.  But it’s off-putting.  

I’m stubborn enough that I’m going to check my local thrift shop(s) before I spend a dime on a made-in-China garlic press.  Even a well-made-in-China press.  Just because I’m old, I guess.  I’ll see if I can find a functioning antique in my local thrift shop.

The Functioning Antiques. Great name for a rock band, as Dave Barry used to say.

Post #1985: Some comments on decaffeination and weight loss.

 

Ironically, one thing I cannot do, without caffeine, is expository writing.

Perhaps the only useful point of this post is that a) I need caffeine and b) it makes me hungrier, some hours later.  Caffeine is no friend when dieting.  That’s my conclusion.  That, despite its direct effect on speeding up your metabolism.  I find that it amps up feelings of hunger, later, relative to how hungry you would have felt, had you not consumed it in the first place.  For me, in the context of dieting, that drawback outweighs any putative effect of speeding up metabolism.

The rest is just detail unlikely to apply to the typical reader.

If I can lose just 15 more pounds, I’ll be overweight.

Source:  The Gummint.  https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmi_tbl2.htm

And that’s good news.  Because it beats being obese, which is where I’ve been for roughly the past four decades.  But that’s water over the dam.  Today, counting from my highest-remembered weight (285?), to yesterday’s gym-dehydrated low (235), I’ve now lost about fifty pounds, in a little over ten months.  BMI-wise (above), I’ve gone from the solid 37 charted above, leftwards on the chart, to be an aspiring 31 BMI.

Just two clicks away from merely being overweight.  Huzzah.

For you, and you alone, I now reveal all my weight-loss secrets.

Alcohol

My weight loss mainly stems from failing to drink a thousand calories of ethanol nightly.  That started in September of last year.

I can therefore recommend giving up heavy drinking, if and as applicable, in favor of abstinence, as a good starting point for weight loss.  For me, weight loss simply ensued.  There was a brief period of rapid “water weight” loss, followed by a slow but steady pace of “real” (i.e., fat etc.) weight loss.

I attribute the sustained, slow weight loss more to improved general health than to the direct effect of foregoing the alcohol calories.  If nothing else, once I quit drinking, I ate more.

TMI.

Long and the short of it is that having one’s liver working well reduces one’s hunger pangs.

And that helps a lot if you’re trying to lose weight.

Who’d have guessed, given the central role of the liver in human metabolism.  /s

Wheat

Wheat’s my frenemy.

(Rant:  Just FYI, I took a dislike to the term only when I spelled it from its pieces (friend and enemy) — so, frienemy — and got the evil red underline of bad on-line spelling.  I don’t grasp why spelling butchery is allowed to accompany creation of the portmanteau word.  Allow stuff like this, and the next thing you know, kids will pronounce Bros. to rhyme with snows, instead of others.).

I used to crave (e.g.) pasta, even as pasta increasingly disagreed with me.  Sometime between last September and this past January, it occurred to me that I should try saying adios to wheat. 

So that’s what I did — mostly.

I guess the issue is how frequently the old me would resort to something like spaghetti or ramen as a meal in itself.  That is, make a quick meal or snack almost purely from carbohydrate.  Call that a starch bomb.

Metabolically, starch-bombing yourself has to knock you somewhat off-kilter.  It may not be as extreme as eating candy bars to quiet a rumbling stomach, but it’s in the same family.  It might be reasonable to expect some blowback down the road, in the form of increased hunger later.

My point being that any resulting weight loss attributable to abstaining from wheat may or may not be due to anything particular to wheat, it could be due simply to easier avoidance of starch-bomb meals.  As, in the past, and for most of my life, my favorite quick meal was real pasta in any of its glorious forms.

While gluten-free pastas exist, they are at best an adequate substitute for real (wheat) pasta.  They are food, but they do not do not exactly whisper “eat me”as I eye the pantry.  They are food in the sense of being a source of calories.  FWIW, my favorite gluten-free pasta is corn-based elbow macaroni from Barilla.  It’s good when freshly cooked but does not refrigerate/reheat well once cooked,   The 12-oz box if it rehydrates to roughly the same volume as the 16-oz package of real pasta, which in turn gives Barilla elbows a light “mouth feel”, which is a plus in a gluten-free pasta.  In any case, it’s a quick meal of sorts, with red sauce and cheese.

At some level, it doesn’t much matter whether wheat has some undefined properties that something-something-something and boom, you’re fat.  Or whether it’s just a case that a ban on wheat greatly reduces my consumption of high-starch meals.  I may eat some wheat, but I won’t buy (e.g.) boxes of real (wheat) pasta, thus ensuring less opportunity and less temptation to go for a quick starch-bomb-type meal.

And that’s good.  I think.  Either way works for me.

That said, it’s a hassle to avoid wheat.  Mostly when eating out.  But I don’t have to avoid every bit of it, as if I had celiac disease.  I just no longer make a meal of it.

 

Caffeine, the world’s favorite drug

Source:  American Chemical Society

Finally, I stopped consuming caffeine somewhere around February of this year.

Caffeine is the joker in the deck.  For me.  YMMV.

It’s the lowest-common-denominator, drug-wise.  It’s everywhere.  For example, the recently-passed revised zoning regulations in the Town of Vienna, VA mandates that any redevelopment of retail space along the Maple Avenue corridor must contain at least one coffee shop for every 20,000 square feet of ground area.

/s (But we do have a lot of coffee shops, in what is nominally a town of population 16K.)

But caffeine, like its big brother speed, has some undesirable metabolic side-effects.  At the very least, it can enable self-abusive behavior by being able to shock you awake chemically, despite being in a state of fatigue or generally poor mental or physical condition.

For sure, caffeine has direct effects that suggest it should help you lose weight.  Caffeine revs up both your nervous system and your metabolism.  Raises blood pressure.  Lowers reaction times.  Speeds digestion and elimination.  The whole shootin’ match runs faster under the influence of caffeine.  Or, at least, mine does.  Which should (and I think does) mean that you burn more calories.  (Pretty sure all of that is true, but I’m not going to check references.)

So what?  Don’t people say your energy will rebound, a few days to a few weeks after you stop all caffeine?  So, over the longer term, caffeine should make no difference one way or the other, for your metabolism.  Shouldn’t it?

That’s what they say, and it may even be true for some.

Not for me, a 65-year-old man.  Not if you mean “rebound back to your prior, caffeinated level”.  My decaffeinated energy level did not return to my prior, caffeinated level.

Instead, I’m slower at all speeds, once I’m decaffeinated and past the detox period.  Absent caffeine, all my gears, mental and physical, seem to have dropped down a notch.

But this may not be such a bad thing, for losing weight.  Even if the main effect of caffeine is to speed up your metabolism (which should help you to lose weight), let me make the case for de-caffeination helping weight loss.

First, I don’t miss the post-caffeine hunger pangs I used to get.  So all that “speed up your metabolism” jazz sounds great, until you realize that means that you’re just going to get that much hungrier, that much sooner, as your body burns through your short-term reserves faster under the influence of caffeine.

But more importantly, all my reactions are more muted when I’m de-caffeinated, including my reaction to being hungry.  Absent caffeine, I don’t so much react to hunger as recognize it, and realize that I should eat something.   Eventually.

I haven’t lost my appetite.  But my hunger no longer screams at me.  It’s more of a nag now.

I have no idea how long this blessed state will last.  I can’t really say exactly what caused it.  But if I could bottle and sell it, I’d be a billionaire.

In any case, weight loss without undue suffering is news to me, as an adult.   Never experienced it before.  (Without weight loss drugs, I mean.  I have no experience of that.)  I attribute the relative ease of weight loss, in part, to not being routinely strung out on caffeine, due to a general “dampening” of feelings of hunger that comes with being fully de-caffeinated.

Alternative, it might be due to a synergy or threshold effect from the combination of no alcohol and no caffeine.

Maybe the Mormons are onto something?

Or maybe it was Dick Gregory.

So there you have it:  I’m uncomfortably numb.

I’m closing in on 50 pounds of weight loss.  Give it another couple of weeks, and I’ll be there for real, and not just glimpsed at my dehydrated lightest.

So far so good.  I don’t seem to be losing much muscle mass, based on the weight machines at the gym.  And I feel better.  Mostly stuff that one would expect. Think about taking off a 50-pound backpack, and you’ll get the gist of it.

Never drinking caffeine has some major downsides.  I’m just plain dumber without caffeine.  So I cheat.  Or, more specifically, I drink some caffeine, occasionally.  Mostly when I’m trying to write something.  As now.

But the big unexpected upside to going caffeine-free (or nearly) seems to be reduced feelings of hunger.  Turning that around, maybe, in hindsight, a caffeine-driven lifestyle adds to the likelihood of overeating.  For some.

For sure, I do not consider caffeine to be a help to dieting, as is sometimes suggested.  For me, it is a hindrance.

Back on task, if I lose fifteen pounds more, I’ll be classified as overweight, not obese, per my body-mass index (BMI).

But I do lot live and die by the BMI table.  Mostly, that’s because I’d have to lose another 60 pounds to achieve normal weight, per BMI.   Like that’s going to happen, absent widespread famine or terminal illness.  For my height, “normal” BMI is less than I weighted when I graduated from high school.

Hey, I’m big-boned.  I’ll settle for “not obese”.

In any case, the only way I can describe it is that this weight loss has been easy, so far.  (I mean, after I got various addictions under control.  After that, it’s been almost effortless.

I just eat “moderately” and I lose weight slowly.  What a concept.  I sure wish this had happened earlier, and I hope it never goes away.  Weight loss without suffering.  What a concept.

When I reach for explanations of this apparent sea-change in me, one explanation is that, when I gave up alcohol last year, something in my brain broke.  I seem to have lost all sense of “craving”.

Not just craving for alcohol, which is fantastic.  (Truly, if I hadn’t lost that craving, I would not have been able to achieve a prolonged period of abstinence.)

But in a classic case of baby and bath water, I seem to have tossed out any sense of “craving” in general.

This makes for a dull(er) life, but is a real asset when it comes to losing weight.

In any case, I seem to have ended up in a state of being … uncomfortably numb?  I’m not blissed-out all the time.  If nothing else, that would be hugely abnormal for me.  Instead, I (e.g.) get hungry, but most of the time I can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

From a weight-loss perspective, that’s ideal.

While 90% of this change that is mental, surely the other half is physical.  (With apologies to Yogi Berra).My metabolism is on a more even keel.  That starts with a lack of ethanol calories, but proceeds from there to a ban on wheat-centered meals like ramen or pasta, leading to fewer starch-only or starch-heavy meals.

And ends with respecting caffeine for the drug that it is.

I do admit, however, that a potential alternative explanation for sustained, seemingly effortless weight loss would be some form of cancerous tumor.  As opposed to my change in lifestyle.

But if so, hey, at least I’ll die thin.

Ba-da-bing.

It has been a bit weird, losing this much weight.  I’ve changed clothing sizes, but that’s to be expected.

I didn’t expect to resize items that I would never have associated with being fat or thin.  Things like my bicycle seat (the butt-to-pedal distance has changed?).  The strap on my bike helmet (my head/chin now has a smaller circumference?)   I’ve had to shorten my watch band.  I didn’t even know I had wrist fat.  Let alone lose enough of it to matter.  But the steel watch strap does not lie.

And yet, this amount of weight loss has been surprisingly far from a life-changer.  Some things are easier.  Again, imagine taking off a 50-pound backpack.  But on the whole, it’s been less of an improvement that you might think.

The biggest disappointment is my skin.  I need to devote an entire post discussing the various snake oil treatments available for stretch marks.

/s. I think.

I feel lighter, yes.  Younger, no.  Guess I’ll have to settle for that.

I gotta go eat something.

Post #1983: Commentary on the recent Presidential debate.

 

Post #1894: Commentary on the NY Times/Siena College poll results.

From my November 2023 post, shown above, regarding a Siena University poll:

Here’s my take on the main message:

Biden’s too old.  

And other stuff, sure.

Weirdly, the main writeups seem to skirt this issue.  But to my eye, this is something that everybody agreed on.

Separately, smears work, disinformation wins. 

...

But if my only alternative to Biden is Trump, then “too old” doesn’t exist.  If Biden’s breathing, I’m voting for him.

Nine months since that Siena U. poll, and I’d say that pretty much nothing has changed.

Luckily, this Presidential race is very much a case of needing to outrun the bear.  You don’t have to be fast, to outrun that bear.  You just have to be faster than the person you’re running against.

And so, thankfully, Biden doesn’t have to be a great candidate for President.  He just has to be a better alternative than Trump.

And I’d say he has that knocked.  For me, if forced to choose between an old guy who struggles to keep his head on straight, but hires the best and brightest, and understands America’s place as leader of the free world, versus a dictator-smooching adulterous shameless liar who hires his relatives for key jobs and seems dead-set on destroying the American system of free and fair elections … I’ll take the old(er) guy any day.

Not much of a defense of the Democratic candidate, but given his opponent, it’s all that’s necessary.

Post #1982: Will the real political donation limit please stand up?

 

 

It has reached the point where half of my incoming emails are spam from the Biden campaign. 

These emails are all solicitations for donations.  Given that this is all coming from the same source, you’d think they could figure out a way to limit it to one-a-day, or some such.  With this volume, they have crossed the line between persistent reminders and simply being annoying.

In any case, today it finally dawned on me that I could unsubscribe.  This is an odd thing to do, given that I never subscribed to anything in the first place.  But, semantics aside, as long as it gets them to stop, that’ll do.

The point of this is that I am baffled by Federal campaign finance limits.  Every time I hear about the latest multi-million-dollar fund raiser by either candidate, I keep coming back to what I thought the law said, regarding contribution limits:  $3,300 per person, per candidate, per election.  Like so:

Source:  FEC.

Normally, I’d just chalk that up to the norm for modern America, which is that there are no binding rules for the rich, only for the little people.  So, of course candidates can hold $100K/plate fund-raising dinners, for their campaigns.  At the same time that hoi polloi are limited, by law, to $3,300, if donated to to a candidate’s campaign.

I would do that, except that among my emails from the Biden campaign is a request to donate $5K. Like so, from my in-box:

How on earth can the Biden campaign solicit a donation for $5K, from a mere commoner like myself, when the legal limit on donations to a political campaign, for an election, is $3,300?

I realize there are no binding limits on what the wealthy can spend to try to influence politics.  But if there are no real limits to what the average Joe or Jane can spend, I sure wish they’d revise the law to make that clear.  The current situation — a $3,300 limit which just about everyone seems to be able to avoid, one way or the other — turns Federal campaign spending limits into more of a joke than they already are.

 

Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?

 

It is not from being too cheap to buy a new belt.  In most cases.

In reality, a guy with a beer gut has no choice.  Belts seek the geodesic, that is, the path of least distance.  In this case, the path is around your midsection at the belt line.  If you have big gut, and buckle your belt at your navel, it’ll sag.  Maybe not immediately, but soon.

 

Left to its own devices, your belt ends up below your gut, at your personal geodesic. Continue reading Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?