Philip Brewer

Ashley would like to make it Very Clear that the number of treats provided so far are Insufficient.

Let me start by saying that, judging from his previous term, most of what the incoming president says has no particular bearing on what he’s going to do. But I think a few trends look likely enough that it’s worth thinking about the results on the dollar’s value.

The things I’m thinking of are tariffs and tax cuts, which I expect to lead to higher inflation and larger deficits, both of which will lead to higher interest rates.

Tariffs

The president can impose tariffs on his own, with no need for congressional action. Whether we’ll get the proposed 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, or whether that’s just a bargaining chip, I have no idea. But I think some amount of tariff increase will be imposed, which will feed through directly to higher prices.

That’s not to say that tariffs are necessarily bad (although usually they are). But they do feed through to higher prices.

Tax cuts

Tax cuts need to get through Congress. If the Republicans get the House as well as the Senate, it’s highly likely that legislation will preserve the 2017 tax cuts set to expire next year, and probably some additional tax cuts, such as a much lower rate on corporate income. It’s also possible that we’ll see the proposals to cut tax rates on tip income and on overtime pay enacted, although I doubt it. (The incoming president only cares about his own taxes, not about those of random working-class folks.)

The main thing taxes cuts will do is dramatically increase the deficit. The tariffs will bring in some countervailing revenue, but not nearly enough to fill the gap.

Other things that raise inflation and cut revenue

There are all kinds of other proposals that were bandied about during the campaign, such as deporting millions of immigrants, that raise costs both for the government, leading to higher deficits (the labor and logistics both cost money, and not a little) and for employers (they’re employing the immigrants because their wages are lower), which they will try to offset with higher prices.

What this means for our money

Rising costs will feed directly into higher prices, which is going to look like inflation to the Fed, so I think we can expect short-term interest rates (the ones controlled by the Fed) to get stuck as a higher level than we’d otherwise have seen.

At the same time, lower taxes will mean lower government revenues, leading to larger deficits. For years now, the government has been able to get away with rising deficits, but I doubt if the next administration will have as much success in this area. (Why not deserves a post of its own.)

My expectation is that higher deficits will mean higher long-term interest rates, as Treasury buyers insist on higher rates to reward the risks that they’re taking.

So: Higher short rates and higher long rates, along with higher inflation.

What to do

I had already been expecting inflation rates to stick higher than the market has been expecting, so I’d been looking at investing in TIPS (treasury securities whose value is adjusted for inflation). I’m still planning on doing so, but not with as much money as I’d been thinking of, for two reasons.

First, I’d been assuming that money market rates would come down, as the Fed lowered short-term rates. Now that I think short-term rates won’t come down as much or as fast, I’m thinking I can just keep more money in cash, and still earn a reasonable return.

Second, I’d been assuming that treasury securities would definitely pay out—the U.S. has been good for its debts since Alexander Hamilton was the Treasury Secretary. But the incoming president has very odd ideas about bankruptcy. As near as I can tell, he figures the smart move is to borrow as much as possible, and then declare bankruptcy, and then do it again. It worked for him, over and over again. I’m betting that Congress won’t go along with making the United States do the same, but I’m not sure of it.

Of course, if the United States does do that, the whole economy will go down, and my TIPS not getting paid will be the least of my problems.

I’m only surprised this doesn’t happen way more often. Surely a lot of people go into health research precisely to try to cure illnesses they have. If they come up with something very promising, why not try it on themselves?

A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation.

Source: Nature

After the last 8 or 16 years, I shouldn’t be surprised that racism and misogyny would motivate an actual majority to go to the polls and vote against their own interests. (Not to mention the interests of the United States, the Western world, and all human beings who live on this planet).

Because I am not as clever as Cory Doctorow, I just frittered away 15 minutes setting up my domain to be verified as my Blue Sky handle: [bsky.app/profile/p...](https://bsky.app/profile/philipbrewer.net)

I post almost nothing there—basically, just links back to my blog here—but you can go find me there with the other cool kids who are not as clever as Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) writing for the economics journal “Duh!”:

I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.

Source: Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification

Ashley caught the vole living by our front door yet again. This time the vole did not survive.

The picture below is of a dead vole. Sorry not to be able to hide it behind a content warning. Just move along if you don’t want to see it.

Ashley caught a vole! I wouldn’t let her eat it, because who knows what parasites she’d get from eating a raw wild animal, but she took it very well when I made her drop the vole.

It seemed to have survived being in Ashley’s mouth for several seconds. So Ashley will get to try to catch it again!

Have I mentioned lately how jealous I am of Ashley’s lean, muscly physique? #dogsofmastodon

Halloween is one of my two favorite holidays (the other being Groundhog’s Day), but last year we had a slight mishap: The kids who knocked on our door had already opened the screen door, so when I opened the door, Ashley ran outside and chased the kids around.

She was really just doing zoomies, but the little kids were very reasonably terrified to be chased by a dog.

So this year we’re not going to open our door. But we will be giving out candy. There’ll be a bag on our doorstep, with this sign on the door itself.

I’ll put it out at 5:00 PM or so, and then do my best to remember not to open the door until trick-or-treating time is over.

It seems like every business now has its own app, which usually offers remote ordering, as well as discounts. I do my best not to use any of them, because they demand (and transmit to the business) all sorts of private information from my phone. This seems to me like something my phone ought to fix.

It ought to be pretty easy on the phone to provide a virtual machine which only passes to an app whatever information the phone owner wants to pass on. For example, you could configure a video loop to provide, if the app wants to turn on the camera, or an audio file to provide if the app wants to turn on the microphone.

You could get quite fancy about things like location, if you wanted to. For example, a fast food app could be provided a random location, but one that was a configurable distance from the fast food restaurant. (I’m imagining that the fast food apps either already do, or soon will, adjust the price based on where you are. For example, if you’re already in the parking lot, they can raise the price, assuming that you’ve already decided to buy from them. They can cut the price if a competitor is closer to your location, to reduce the chance that you’ll stop there instead. The phone could pick a location to maximize your discount, to the extent that people had been able to figure out and share the algorithm.)

These sorts of tweaks would be easy to implement, but there’s no functionality in phones to provide them. It’s as if the manufacturers of the phones want to rat you out to every business with a phone app.

I resist by strictly limiting which apps I install on my phone. But I’d be a lot happier with a virtual machine which would put me in control of what data about me those installed apps could get.

I’m a bit surprised that the billionaires are so blasé about a fascist taking over the government. Yeah, yeah—maybe their taxes will go down. But maybe not—Trump only cares about his taxes, not theirs.

More to the point, don’t they know what’s been happening to the billionaires in China and Russia these past few years?

I do not understand why anyone would want their drivers license on their phone (iPhone Driver’s License Support Expands to Iowa). It purely facilitates a cop taking your phone away and doing who-knows-what to it.

Maybe on a burner phone….

For much of my life I thought that the key to losing weight was just exercising more. Especially in the mid-1980s, when I lived in Utah and California, I’d get out for some long hikes in the mountains and deserts and think, “If I could just do this all the time, it would be easy to maintain a proper weight.” That turns out to be both true and false.

The fitness influencer types like to say things along the lines of “You can’t outrun your fork,” meaning that you simply can’t burn enough calories to get ahead of eating way too much. I knew that wasn’t completely true. Read about any long-distance endurance athlete (ultra-marathoner, Tour de France rider, etc.) and you’ll have a window into really extreme efforts to eat enough just to keep going, let alone enough to recover for the next day’s effort.

I also have a slightly more ordinary example. A couple of guys I knew tried to bicycle around Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, and had to abandon the effort halfway through, because their riding (100+ miles per day) burned so many calories (perhaps 5000 calories on top of their basal metabolic rate, so maybe 7500 calories per day total), they ran out of money for food.

It’s tough to eat 7500 calories per day even without the financial limit, so it seems like, if you have all day to do nothing but exercise, and the will to exercise hard for several hours a day, perhaps you could “outrun your fork.”

Recent research shows that this is not the case, except in the very short term. People who are very active all day, like hunter-gatherers (but also subsistence farmers, and laborers of other sorts), burn more calories than people who are sedentary all day, but only modestly more.

A recent study showed that among of Hadza people, activity was almost insignificant as a predictor of total energy expenditure. They were remarkably active, but their calorie consumption was pretty ordinary. The study suggests that body size is just about all that matters

In that study, average total energy expenditure among Hadza men was 2649 calories per day. The average is higher among western men, but only because their body size is greater. (Hadza men averaged 50.9 kg (112 lbs), while Western men averaged 81.0 kg (179 lbs). Differences in BMI are more stark, with Hadza men having a BMI averaging 20.3, while Western men’s BMIs averaged 25.6.)

The point here is that it seems like your biology is attuned to wanting to eat 2600 calories and wanting to burn 2600 calories. (Adjust for frame size. It seems the Hadza men averaged about 5′ 2″.) You can be sedentary, under-eat to match, and not gain weight, but it’s not in tune with what you’re body wants, so you’ll be hungry all the time, as well as having all the side-effects of under-movement.

You can also try to exercise enough to burn more than 2600 calories, but it seems that as soon as you go over that level, your body starts trying to compensate—turning down whatever is easy to turn down, such as your immune system, and muscle-building system.

That doesn’t happen immediately. If you go on a century ride you will burn the extra 5000 calories that simple arithmetic would suggest. That would probably continue if you went on a three-day bicycle tour. But pretty quickly—probably just in a week or so—less-essential body functions would ramp down (and of course fatigue would ramp up) bringing your total consumption back down toward 2600 calories.

You can see how this would work well for hunters. You go for a hunt one day (or two or three days), hiking or running for miles, finding prey, tracking it, and finally killing it. Then you (and your whole tribe) have lots of food to eat for a day (or two or three). During extended periods of excess activity maybe your immune system and muscle-building system ramps down, but then during periods of ample food and less activity, maybe it ramps up extra, allowing for full recovery.

Consuming more calories than you burn for more than a few days, however, quickly leads to problems. Increased fat storage is probably the least of them. Insulin resistance is another. Systemic inflammation is another. Those extra calories will go into the things that get turned down when you’re extra-active, such as the immune system. I don’t know that there’s any evidence, but an obvious possibility is that a lot of auto-immune disorders are just an immune system that never gets turned down because people are never active enough to burn more calories than they eat, if only for a day or two.

I think it’s true that you can’t out-exercise excess calorie consumption. However, you can definitely under-exercise—and trying to under-eat to match that will also cause problems. Humans evolved to thrive with an ideal level of activity.

It’s also true that you don’t need to hit that particular level of activity and food consumption every day. In fact, I’m sure you’d be better off to be moderately active most days, and then very active 1–3 days a week. My long-ago dream of being able to hike 10–15 miles every day and then eat all I want turns out to be a terrible idea. Rather, you want to walk 5 or 6 miles most days, and then hike 10–15 miles just once or twice a week. (Feel free to swap in bicycling or rowing or whatever you like for the long days of vigorous activity, although you probably want to keep in the basic walking if you possibly can.)

In Central Illinois fall colors are often a bit diffuse: the early trees turning brown and losing their leaves while the later trees are still green, with only a few trees showing their full autumn colors.

This year is something of an exception.

I bet a few letters of marque and reprisal issued to privateers could put a stop to that.

Russian Oil Flows Through Western ‘Price Cap’ as Shadow Fleet Grows – The New York Times

I keep seeing posts urging me to check my voter registration while there’s still time to register if my registration has been improperly deleted, and thinking, “Oh, right. I haven’t done that! I should check!” And then I remember that I voted last week, so I’m all set. Phew!

At 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of the month, the county tests its emergency sirens. #dogsofmastodon

The very first month we had Ashley, we happened to be walking right under one of the sirens at the moment it started up. Ashley started howling along with it, which made me laugh. And Ashley looked a little embarrassed, thinking she’d done something wrong. I didn’t want that, so I started howling as well.

Since then, Ashley and I (and Jackie when she’s with us) have howled along with the emergency sirens every month.

Our neighbors have not complained, although I suppose they think we’re rather weird.

I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.

I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”

It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.

Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.