2026-09-20 14:11
Sleeping well is the best revenge. Like they always say.
Sleeping well is the best revenge. Like they always say.
I worked in computer security for most of my career. I worked on Unix security, then phone operating system security, then Bluetooth security. It was largely thankless work.
The issue was that no one wanted to work on a secure computer. Every security feature was a small obstacle to the user getting work done. Security features tended to get turned off or worked around. Certainly nobody was willing to pay more to buy a more secure operating system.
The secure Unix system I worked on was pretty secure. It had great security features that made it easy for users to do their work with considerable confidence that neither outsiders nor other users on their computer could hack their way in.
The federal government required that all computers purchased by anyone for any government office be evaluated to the level of security that our system offered. Over a period of years, our system was the only evaluated system available.
Guess how many we sold?
Zero.
Every government office that was buying computers asked for and got an exception to the requirement that they buy a system like ours.
That’s how much people hate security features in their computers. They slow you down. They make it harder for you to get your work done. They make your system different from other systems, so you have to learn new stuff.
It is from that perspective that I’m dismissive of AI hacking tools. Yes, they can hack computer systems, but that’s because people have preferred computer systems that are hackable. It will take a bit of time to go back and redesign and rebuild those systems with security in mind, but not long. How to do computer security is a solved problem. The knowledge is broadly distributed. It’s just a willingness to put up some minor inconveniences that’s been the obstacle to having broadly unhackable computer systems. Maybe with AI hacking tools quickly hacking into every insecure system out there (which is virtually all of them), people will finally be willing to accept the cost and inconvenience of secure systems.
At any rate, it’s no reason to regulate AI. Just a reason to enforce our regular laws.
In 1981—the last year I was in college and the first year I was working at a real job, long-term interest rates got very high. I thought this was great. (I wasn’t in the market to take out a mortgage, but rather was starting to save money.)
I actually spent a lot of time calculating how much money I’d need to save and invest in long-term treasury bonds, in order to support myself without needing a regular job. I can remember when long rates got up around 14%, thinking that, since I could live on around $20,000 a year, I’d need a base amount of about $143,000 invested, plus enough extra to cover taxes, and to reinvest against inflation, totaling perhaps $300,000.
I was ahead of FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early), and I rather missed out on the “reduce spending” half of the idea, so I didn’t make much progress toward my $300,000 goal for the first several years. It wouldn’t be until the early 1990s that I figured that part out, and by then interest rates were a lot lower. Worse, they were falling pretty fast, making the whole thing a lot harder.
Rates kept moving against my goals pretty steadily, right through the great financial crisis in 2007, and then again during and after the pandemic in 2020. Of course inflation was falling until after the pandemic, making it seem a bit less difficult to invest enough that the return would support me even after allowing for inflation. (And, as a bonus, the Treasury started issuing TIPS, which adjusted their value to keep even with inflation, and paid their interest rate on the adjusted value. You still had to invest enough to cover inflation, but a lot of the risk and guess-work was removed.)
Now, finally, rates are moving in the right direction again. The 30-year TIPS is now paying an inflation-adjusted 3%.
The inflation calculator at the BLS says that $20,000 in 1982 is equivalent to $71,046 today. At 3% you’d need to invest $2,368,186 in TIPS to bring in that much cash. (But you wouldn’t have to worry about inflation.) Weirdly, the same BLS calculator says that the 1982 equivalent would have been $666,666. So just over double the $300,000 that I imagined would have sufficed back in the day. Which is perfectly reasonable, considering that back in the day I could have gotten 14% on my money.
Anyway, after a long period during which it was impossible to invest for a real return on a safe asset—what you want to do, if you’re doing the FIRE thing—we are finally back to having that option. It’ll be good for people like me. I think it’s good for the economy as well, even if it sucks if you want to take out a big mortgage so you can afford to buy a bigger house than you need.
I am almost completely unconcerned about the “dangers” of AI that I’m hearing about.
In particular, I’m completely unconcerned about the danger that terrorists (or bored high school students) are going to use AI to make a bioweapon. I guess the concern is that AI will be able to try thousands of changes in the time a human could try three? That is different from what evolution has been doing for two billion years in no way whatsoever.
Similar only in that it is another AI danger that’s easily ameliorated, is AI-facilitated hacking, which the AI firms want us to come up with regulations for.
The fact is, we scarcely need any new regulations at all. Just an ordinary legal structure where, if someone using AI does something improper, the legal and criminal liability falls equally on the person prompting the AI and on the company that wrote the AI.
Of course, if the harm passes through someone else who’s supposed to be taking due care (such as your bank or broker) that person also has ordinary responsibility. (So if an AI helps someone steal your retirement account, the broker holding your retirement account has to make you whole, just as if they had handed your money over to someone who hadn’t used AI. About the only AI-related regulation needed is something making it clear that the broker can not only sue the criminal who stole it, but also the AI firm whose tool was used to effectuate the crime.)
My point is that all those supposed horrible dangers are perfectly ordinary, and there is no need to do anything special at all.
What’s really interesting is why are the AI firms and AI scientists trying to gin up all this worry? Could it be that they can see that without some buy-in from governments the companies are all going to collapse in short order?
That’s my best guess.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a bunch of downloadable guides to tell cashiers and tellers (and ordinary folks) how to identify genuine currency.
So now seems like a good time to mention that a couple of new U.S. currency note designs came out while I was writing for Wise Bread, and each time I wrote a post or two about them:
And, of course, I wrote a general article on spotting counterfeits.
Many Americans want fewer immigrants, primarily because they worry that immigrants are competing with native-born U.S. citizens for jobs. There are of course other reasons. Some people are racists. Some people imagine that immigrant populations will include radicals or terrorists. But I think the jobs one is the big one.
I think I see a good way to fix this particular problem. A good enough way that we probably don’t even need to have visas, or immigration checks at the borders. Most important, we wouldn’t need to have a police state with ICE agents sweeping up brown people and demanding to see their papers.
My idea is simple: add a tax surcharge—perhaps 15%—on companies, on the payrolls of immigrants, legal or not. (Plus a twist I’ll mention in a minute.)
This fixes several problems at once.
First, it means people can quit arguing about whether companies are hiring immigrants because of their skills, or just because they’re cheaper or more willing to work long hours, or whatever. If companies are willing to pay an extra 15%, they’re definitely in need of the skills. (Maybe the ideal rate is 10% or 20%. It should specifically be enough that companies will hire native-born workers if they’re capable of doing the job, because they’re cheaper than foreign-born workers after taxes. A bit of experience will show us the ideal rate.)
Second, it’ll raise wages and salaries for Americans, because even a big raise would be cheaper than hiring an immigrant.
Third, it’ll greatly reduce the cost and trouble of the numerous visa programs. In fact, we can probably just get rid of visas. Anyone can come to the U.S. and work, as long as their employer pays the surcharge.
Of course this only works if employers actually pay the surcharge—and why would they do that, if they’ve been cheating on employing illegal immigrants all along?
Well, the twist I mentioned above is to solve that: Make the statute of limitations on this tax ridiculously long. Maybe 35 years. Add on some severe penalties for non-payment as well—double the original bill, plus interest and the ordinary penalties for unpaid taxes.
Oh, and spread the liability around. If the immigrant is technically employed by a contractor, but he or she works at your site, you’re also liable for the surcharge. (I don’t expect it would be possible, but I’d like to see the CEO be personally liable for the surcharge, in cases where the corporation went bankrupt somewhere along the line.)
With a policy like this in place, employers—instead of looking the other way when they suspect someone is an illegal immigrant—now really want to know. Because they either have to pay the surtax now, or else they’re on the hook for double that money for years into the future.
I’m thinking of 35 years, because it’s long enough that the immigrants might be reaching retirement age about then. If we throw in a little incentive—perhaps 10% of the tax collected—they might be willing to report all their former employers when they’re ready to retire. Remember: They don’t owe any extra tax—the liability is all on their employers. But they can collect that little 10% as a boost to their retirement by ratting out three decades of tax-cheating employers.
I think this solves everything.
Since everyone is legal, there’s no need to worry about whether someone is “documented” or not. No need to worry about visas. No need to check anyone’s papers.
Oh, there’ll still be a need for papers—employers will want to be sure a potential employee is a citizen—there’s just no need for the police to check them. And of course, some citizens might have trouble coming up with papers. But those problems are no worse than they are already, with the bonus that they can be sorted out at leisure in ordinary courts, rather than in special immigration courts with people in detention. Citizens can show they’re native born all sorts of ways, just like they do now if they need to get a passport, but don’t have a birth certificate. Naturalized citizens have naturalization papers, plus there are other records.
Companies can copy and maintain the documentation to show that their employees were citizens, or else pay the taxes.
Nobody is “illegal.” Anybody can call the police, get a drivers license, get car insurance, send their kids to public school, go to the doctor, all without any worry that they’ll be deported. (Of course, they might not stay long, if they don’t have skills that justify their employer paying an extra 15% tax to employ them, but that’s okay too.)
We can save a bunch of money on border security, because anybody can come into the country, as long as they’re willing to compete with the locals at a 15% disadvantage.
My main interest here is in getting rid of the need for police-state behaviors on the part of the government. If everybody is legal, there’s no need for them. My secondary interest is in living in a more diverse community. I like having foreigners around. I like living among a diverse ethnic population. I think it could be awesome.
As a bonus, those extra taxes will fund quite a bit of extra government spending. Maybe even makes some headway on the national debt.
I had completely forgotten about this post, written more than 20 years ago, even though I went on to write about exactly this topic for Wise Bread for years.
This post was about the difference between playing at being poor (which gives you a bunch of psychic benefits) versus actually being poor:
Playing at being poor means living in a cheap apartment, eating cheap, healthy food prepared at home, having only one car (and not a new one), and so on. It’s really only a matter of giving up stuff–and not even all stuff. You can easily justify an extravagance or two. You might give up cable, but have a cable modem. Give up movies, but go to plays. Give up coffee shop coffee, but buy Jamaican Blue Mountain for home. In many ways, it’s the way I live now. But I try not to be smug about it. I know the difference between what I’m doing and being poor.
Being poor isn’t frugal or safe or healthy. Being poor means skipping an oil change because the alternative is skipping lunch for ten days. Being poor means living in a dangerous neighborhood. Being poor means wearing shoes that hurt your feet.
The difference is a matter of capital. Having capital is frugal. If you have capital you can play at being poor and actually live more cheaply than a real poor person. A frugal person’s car lasts a lot longer than a poor person’s. You can buy when things are cheap, instead of paying whatever price they happen to be when you simply can’t do without them any longer. Similarly, it’s safer and healthier.
Source: 2002-03-06
There’s a bit more if you click through.
Me (giving empty electrolyte supplement to my wife to carry back to the kitchen): I had foot cramps in the night last night.
Jackie: You had [mumble mumble]?
Me: Foot cramps.
Jackie: Oh. Okay. That makes sense. I thought you said foot prints.
Me: You mean, like foot prints at a murder scene?
Jackie: I hadn’t thought of that. I was thinking maybe muddy footprints on the carpet.
My brother and I are creating an on-line magazine called Elegant Lich.
Our plan is to publish science fiction and fantasy stories. You can read our planning blog here: https://blog.elegantlich.com/
We spent some time looking into creating an Illinois LLC, but are currently leaning against that idea. It would be a lot of work to get it all done and to keep the paperwork right going forward. And although (in Illinois) it wouldn’t be too terribly expensive, it would still cost a large fraction of the cost of putting out an issue of the magazine. So instead we’re thinking we just won’t call it a business, but rather just a hobby. There are some things we wouldn’t want to do if it’s just a hobby (such as sell stuff), but it’ll save us time, money, and trouble.
Our tentative cover art is by the guy who did this woodcut as well:
Walking the dog at sunrise this morning, I paused while walking down the high road through the prairie to capture this photo.
Normally I want to respond to every report that suggests that cannabis has very few studies backing up its effectiveness to point out, “That’s because doing such a study was illegal for most of the past century.” But this time I’ll just say, “Point to a few approved drugs with ‘real benefits’ that aren’t ‘limited to only a few conditions.'”
A major review finds medical cannabis widely overestimated and potentially risky, with real benefits limited to only a few conditions.
Source: ScienceDaily
I often hear walks described as preprandial or postprandial, but I never hear meals described as prepromenadal or postpromenadal.
What’s up with that?
I’m not so sure that there isn’t some hay to be made around insisting that AI firms should be distributing half their profits to the writers whose works they stole to train their models, but I also agree with Cory that it’d be a mistake to do that in a way that broke using the internet to provide citations for dictionaries.
If you’re interested, like I am, in how and why copyright might not be the best tool for helping writers make a living writing, you’ll definitely want to read Cory’s latest at Pluralistic:
The AI copyright fight isn’t being fought to protect your wages – it’s being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss.
Source: Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My brother @stevendbrewer, (who shared this with me) and I are not AI natives, or even AI immigrants. I guess we’re AI foreigners. Maybe AI refugees.
(My brother warns me “People get offended when you say ‘refugee,'” so I was all, “Ooh! I’ll post that immediately!” He claims to be more an AI refusenik, while suggesting that I’m more AI-curious.)
Oh, the humanities!
Source: Michał “rysiek” Woźniak · 🇺🇦: “I am shocked. Nobody could hav…” – Mastodon 🐘
That’s the only thing that a podcast is. If it’s not an RSS feed, or if doesn’t link to MP3 files, it’s not a podcast.
Most especially, a YouTube channel is not a podcast.
There are a lot of reasons for that, but here’s the biggest:
And now, our YouTube channel—with 26,000 subscribers—will be disabled just in time for my book launch.
Source: YouTube Moves to Ban Nerd Reich Podcast
If you have a podcast, no one can disable it. You can host it anywhere, and if your host makes you stop, you can just get another host and point your URL there. Anyone can listen to it. All they need is a any podcast app. Or even just a web browser. No one can stop you from posting episodes, and no one can stop your listeners from listening to them.
But that’s only true if you have a podcast. If you have a YouTube channel instead…. Well, in that case, YouTube can stop you.
It rained yesterday, but not all the time. I was able to get Ashley out in the gaps pretty well. After raining all night, it seemed it was going to rain all morning as well.
I offered Ashley a chance to go out on the patio, and she declined. A bit later, after she indicated that she really wanted to go out, I put on my raincoat and put the leash on her and tried to take her out the front door, but she wasn’t having it. Just a few minutes later, she came and told me she needed to go out, so I tried again, and this time I actually dragged out out the door, into the rain. But No. She went about three feet out the door, then solid turned around and headed right back.
It was a classic case of Ashley wanting to go outside, but not to the outside that actually existed. She wanted me to take her to some other outside.
So I went back to my laptop and my third coffee (twice set aside, but still warm enough) and waited for the rain to let up a little. And it did let up a little, and I got Ashley out then.
We saw an opossum! He was a Very Handsome fellow, with a white face, a naked pink tail, and sleek counter-shading on his body, (I think the sleekness may have come from being very wet.)
Ashley, of course, wanted to play with the possum, and we chased it back and forth (the possum going through the shrubs next to the building, and us going around the shrubs). At some point the possum managed to get out of sight long enough for me to drag Ashley away.
By then the rain had gotten hard again, so Ashley let me take her home, where I did my best to dry her off. But as you can see, my efforts were only partially successful.
There is a flood warning. I’m always a little amused by flood warnings in Central Illinois, because it is so, so flat here. Yes, it is flooding. The little creek is over its banks, sorta. But as soon as it gets over the top of its banks, the water just spreads out. Before it could get high enough to threaten my house (a few feet above creek level), the water would have to flood literally thousands of acres all around us.
I really like summer. I even like the heat, but I especially like long, sunny days. However, even for me, the longest days of summer are kinda. . . . long.
What’s perfect is the day length in, let’s say, July. When the sun rises no later than 6:00 AM, there’s daylight to wake me up when I want to get up. And when the sun sets around 8:00 PM, it gets dark right around the time I’m ready to wind down ahead of getting ready for bed.
As we head on to mid-August, though, although the temperatures are still fine, I’m no longer so happy with the sunrise and sunset times. Today the sun didn’t rise until 6:04, which isn’t much after 6:00, but is a sign of the approaching dark days. Similarly, it’s been a full week since the sun was still up at 8:00 PM—another sign.
This morning I realized that I should refer to these two things—sunrise after 6:00 AM, and sunset before 8:00 PM—as two horsemen of the Darkpocalypse.
Back in the days when I had to work in an office, this mid-August transition would ruin the fall for me. I’d get so wrapped up in dreading the winter, that I couldn’t enjoy the objectively great conditions of the second half of August, all of September, and usually most of October as well. It was very sad to have nearly a quarter of the year ruined that way.
I should probably add a “darkpocalypse” tag, and go back and put them on all my posts about SAD.
Horsemen traditionally travel in groups of four, but if there are two more, I haven’t identified them yet.
I’ve been warning about the current stagflation since the beginning of last year. It’s good to see others are catching up.
Stagflation, the Scourge of the 1970s, Is Back by Phillip Braun
One point the opinion piece makes is that the one bright spot in the economy—the stock market—is actually (in line with what I’ve been saying about how the markets and the business news have this all completely wrong) a “severe systemic risk.”
Some years ago, I wrote an article on living off capital and published it as a guest post on another financial blog. The old link to it is dead, and a google search doesn’t turn it up any more, so I thought I’d go ahead and repost it, hosted here on my own blog.
People who come from wealthy families learn how to live off capital. The rules are taught along with all the other things they learn from their parents—how to dress, how to eat, how deal with bankers and trust officers. But even though most people don’t learn the rules, living off capital is just a skill, and it’s one that everybody should learn, because everybody lives off capital sometimes.
People usually think about living off capital in the context of retirement, but that’s just one (albeit important) example. Perfectly ordinary transitions, such as losing a job and having to find another, also amount to living off capital. There is also the broad swath in between: Living off capital for longer than just the length of time it takes you to run through your emergency fund, and doing so without the institutional support—social security, medicare, maybe even a pension—that comes along with retiring at an ordinary retirement age.
If you’ve got a lot of capital—that is, if you’re wealthy—then living off capital is easy: You invest enough in treasury bonds that you can live off the interest.
It’s not trivially easy, of course. You have to allow for taxes. You have to allow for inflation. You have to have some sort of cushion or reserve in case your investment return falls. But, generally, living off your income is straightforward.
You allow for taxes by setting aside enough of your income to pay your taxes. This isn’t hard, even if you have to file quarterly estimated taxes, but you have to do it yourself; you don’t have an employer automatically taking care of it for you by deducting it from your pay. Screwing up is expensive—screwing up badly may even be criminal.
You allow for inflation by reinvesting enough of your income to preserve the value of your capital. If your money is in US dollars, TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) will do exactly that. The principle value of the bonds increases automatically to keep you even with inflation, and the interest is paid out on the inflation-adjusted principle, so your income rises with inflation as well.
(The adjustment is based on the Consumer Price Index while what matters to you is your own cost of living, so you can’t entirely delegate the job of allowing for inflation, but TIPS will do most of the heavy lifting.)
You allow for reversals by having a cushion somewhere. Ideally, have two cushions: First, a reserve fund with enough money to cover any unexpected expenses. Second, some flexibility in your cost of living, so that a decline in income can be matched with a decline in spending.
The wealthy have other concerns than just supporting themselves—they want to pass down an estate. Because of that, they teach their kids this rather conservative version of living off capital. If you only spend your income, and if you reinvest enough to keep even with inflation, then you’re preserving your capital intact. (If you reinvest more then the minimum, or if some of your capital is invested for growth, than you can be growing your capital at the same time you’re living off it.)
If leaving an estate is not a concern for you, then you can spend more than just your income.
There’s a common rule of thumb that (if you have a well-diversified growth portfolio), you can probably spend about 4% of your capital and still expect to have more capital the next year. That won’t be true every year (it was really, really not true in 2008, for example), but historically it’s been true on average.
Still, the wealthy know that spending capital is a bad idea. Anytime you spend more than your income, you’re in danger of entering a death spiral: Your reduced capital earns less money so you have to spend even more capital to support your standard of living; repeat until broke.
A lot of people have back-tested versions the 4% rule, looking at historical periods to see if following that rule ever led to a death spiral. From what I’ve seen, it looks pretty good, but the current circumstance is going to put it to a particularly harsh test–especially for people who started living off their capital in 2007.
If you can afford it, choosing to spend only income is a safer strategy. If you can’t, you probably ought to accept that at some point you’ll have to earn some more money—and if you’re going to do that, sooner is probably better than later (before you’ve depleted your capital). Happily, a pretty small amount of money can make a big difference, if you’re right on the edge of being able to live on capital. Every dollar you earn is a dollar of capital that can go unspent.
If you were really rich, the safest thing to do would be to invest enough in TIPS that the income would support you. Then you could invest the rest of your money however you liked. Most people aren’t that rich—at the moment you’d need close to $2.5 million invested in TIPS to earn an inflation-protected $50,000 a year. Treasurys without inflation protection are earning more than twice as much. (Of course, you have to reinvest a big chunk of that to keep even with inflation).
Dividend-paying stocks can earn still more money, and dividend growth can provide some amount of inflation protection (as can capital gains). in recent years it has been tough to invest for dividend yield, but even with the recent recovery in the stock market, there are plenty of companies paying a reasonable dividend now—there are more than 40 companies in the S&P 500 whose dividend yield exceeds the yield on a 30-year treasury. None of those will be as safe as treasurys, but at least there are some options now for someone looking for income.
If you have it in you to be a landlord, there’s also the option of earning rent on real estate investments.
You can arrange the mechanics several different ways. The simplest version is simply to have the income from your investments directed into your checking account and use it to pay your bills. A slightly more complicated version would direct your income into the savings account where you keep your reserve fund, and then transfer money from there into your checking account. That makes it easier to even out the month-to-month money flows, which tends to be necessary because stocks generally pay dividends quarterly and bonds generally pay interest semiannually.
(If a lot of your capital is tax-sheltered in an IRA, 401(k), or similar vehicle, the tax rules make it more complex to use that capital for spending, but there are rules for handling the case when you’re actually retiring early.)
The key step–the one that rich families make sure that their children know—is to evaluate your capital every year: Make a new budget with your projected expenses for the following year, and then reinvest enough of your surplus that its earnings will cover any increase in your cost of living.
If you don’t have enough of a surplus to do so, you were living beyond your means.
It’s easy to do this by mistake. Even most people with a budget don’t know their cost of living accurately enough to know if they’re properly accounting for things like those large-but-rare expenses like a new car or a new roof, and any particular category of expense can rise much faster than overall inflation. (Think health insurance, college tuition, and fuel.)
People who are accumulating capital (rather than living on it) can use each year’s new savings as a buffer—even a major un-budgeted expense can often be covered out of this year’s planned savings without needing to dip into capital. Someone already living off capital doesn’t have this option. They have to provide their own buffer out of their reserve.
There’s a second reason that a reserve is essential: The income earned by capital fluctuates. Anyone living off capital right now knows this quite acutely—the rate paid on Treasury securities is at generational lows. Other investments (such as dividend-paying stocks) earn an income that doesn’t necessarily shift in lock-step with treasurys, but can still go down—particularly during a recession.
The children of rich families learn that the key technique for stabilizing your earnings from capital is diversification.
You should diversify across time by investing some of your money in long-term treasurys, which will pay a fixed rate for a long period (decades). That offers some stability, but has two downsides. First, it while it protects you from falling rates, it makes it harder to take advantage of rising rates. Second, if all your treasurys mature at once, you might have to reinvest the whole sum at a much lower return. Avoid that making sure that your long-term securities mature in a staggered fashion. (Arranging for a fraction of your long-term securities to mature at regular intervals is called setting up a ladder.)
You should also diversify across kinds of investments by investing in more than one kind of vehicle. As attractive as TIPS are for someone living off capital, you probably want to have some of your money invested in ordinary treasurys, in stocks, and maybe in real estate. Other options (such as owning a business) are worth considering as well. This reduces the chance that your income streams will all fluctuate in the downward direction at the same time.
Other kinds of diversity are good as well. Consider investing in foreign treasurys as well as US issues, and maybe in corporate or municipal bonds.. Your stock investments should include multiple companies in different industries, and should include foreign companies as well as domestic ones.
The other key for dealing with a fluctuating income is to have a flexible cost structure, so that you have the option to cut your expenses, if necessary, to match your diminished income.
Those are the basics:
Learn those skills and you’ll have as much ability to live off capital as someone who grew up in a wealthy family. Then you just need the wealth.
I’m a little surprised people are still studying this, since it’s been studied before with the same results:
After 12 weeks, researchers found no meaningful differences in weight gain, body composition, or cholesterol levels between people following the low-dairy diet and those eating three servings of dairy each day. Participants consuming more dairy, however, showed improvements in blood pressure and consumed more calcium, protein, and vitamin D.
“Those that had three servings of dairy didn’t have adverse levels of blood cholesterol or lipids or evidence of insulin resistance,” says Anderson.
Source: For decades, we were told to choose low-fat dairy. New research says otherwise | ScienceDaily
I would argue that that full-fat dairy is “minimally processed.” (Mixing the milk of multiple cows, pasteurizing, and homogenizing, means it’s not unprocessed.) I argue that skimming off half (or nearly all) of the fat crosses the bar to “processed,” but even if you don’t draw that line where I do, it’s still more processed. And just on general principles, I generally assume that less-processed food is better than more-processed food.
But with full-fat dairy you don’t have to go by general principles. We have multiple studies over years and years that show unequivocally that it’s healthier food.
And, I guess, now we have another.
That’s not what I learned in 4th grade.
If, like me, you had any sort of reasonably balanced portfolio at the beginning of the year (or the beginning of last year), it’s worth observing that it is almost certainly way, way out of balance.
If so, this is your reminder to rebalance your portfolio.
Doing so is admittedly really hard to do. If you had a 60:40 (stocks to bonds) portfolio at the beginning of last year, you might very well have 70% or 80% invested in stocks now, and that probably feels great. You feel like a genius, letting your profits run. If there’s anything better than having 60% of your portfolio grow at 20% a year it’s having 80% of your portfolio grow at 20% a year.
But you know it’s a terrible idea. It’s bad enough to have 60% of your portfolio lose half its value. Having 80% of your portfolio lose half its value is much, much worse.
Knowing that it’s hard, let me point out a little thing that might make it a little easier right now: Bond rates are up nicely. You can get nearly 5.25% on 30-year bonds, or almost 3% on inflation-adjusted bonds. That’s good enough that you don’t really need to agonize about whether you can expect a capital gain or capital loss on the bond. Just buy it and take the coupon.
Of course, I have no idea what balance is right for your portfolio. Maybe it’s 60:40. If you’re young, maybe it’s 80:20. If you’re retired, maybe it’s 35:65. But if you had a sensible balance a year or two ago, and you haven’t rebalanced, it is now way out of whack.
This is your reminder to fix that.
My brother just got email asking if he’d ever thought about upgrading his website with “an engaging video to explain what you do?”
My reply was:
Ooh! An engaging video!! I never thought of that!
I figured I’d go with either a tedious video or an annoying one.
That’s what everybody else does.
Steven pointed out, “I don’t think a video that actually explains what I do would be very engaging.”
Light exposure is good for you. All the different frequencies are good for you. This has led many people to try to tweeze them apart: tanning beds, red-light panels and masks, therapy lights, etc. It turns out, sunlight is best consumed whole, just like food.
I should mention that by inclination, I’m rather vulnerable to getting this wrong. I wrote at some length about how, because of the sort of person I am, I simply like the idea of figuring out all the nutrients I need, and then trying to construct a diet that provides all those things. Similarly, I like the idea of coming up with a perfect workout plan, and then getting all the movement that I need by hitting all the right exercises. But, if you follow that link, you’ll see that I eventually realized the whole notion was just wrong-headed.
There is no need—in fact, no value—in tweezing apart the nutrients in food. Just eat a varied, whole-food diet and your body will get it right. The same with movement. Just engage in a wide range of diverse movement, and your body will become highly capable of moving in all those ways, (and if your “movement diet” is adequately diverse, your body will become fairly capable of all sorts of movements you don’t even practice).
The same is true of sunlight. That’s the main message of In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen.
The book is consciously modeled on Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, which systematically destroyed the notion that you could build up a diet that optimized all the nutrients. And its message is very similar. Sunlight is best consumed whole, just like food.
All of the different frequencies are good for you:
“But what about skin cancer!?!?” I can hear you asking from here.
The book is well worth reading, because just the information on skin cancer is worth the price of the book (and it takes half the book to adequately deal with the subject). Because there’s so much of it, it’s not really practical to try to summarize it here, so I’ll just mention that “Don’t get sunburned” is much better advice than “Put on sunbock,” or even “Stay out of the sun.”
I figured this out years ago. I’ll use sunblock if I’m going to be out in the sun so long that I might get sunburned—I needed it for a snorkling trip to Buck Island, for example. Otherwise, I use a combination of changing my clothes, taking advantage of shade, and limiting my time out in the midday sun. But I don’t minimize my time in the sun. I maximize my time in the sun, while making sure not to get sunburned. At this point in the summer (having gotten a modest amount of sun every day since the weather turned warm) I’m okay for up to about 40 minutes of mid-day sun. And I try to get that nearly every day.
Here’s one statistic, that I’ll let stand in for dozens of others about the advantages of sun exposure. The UK Biobank has data on health outcomes for hundreds of thousands of people. A researcher Jacobsen mentions went in and counted:
… in the fifteen years of tracking, a total of 40 people had died from skin cancer attributable to too much UV light, while 2,982 people had died from diseases attributable to a deficiency of sunlight.
The final third of the book is about artificial light, and makes the case that too much light at night is just as bad as too little light during the day.
Again, this is something that I figured out long ago. All the “sleep hygiene” stuff makes it clear that you want your sleeping space to be very dark, and there’s no doubt that getting enough high-quality sleep is probably the best thing you can do for your health, maybe even above good nutrition and plenty of exercise.
The prescription is almost trivially easy: Get outside at dawn. Get as much sunlight as you can without burning during the day. Within a couple of hours after sunset make your space as dark as possible and get some sleep.
In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen. Highly recommended.
A guy I follow on micro.blog, after having to go through four or five steps just to read a Substack post, posted “Substack? What are you for?” To which I replied: “As near as I can tell, it’s there to monetize the writing of Nazis, with enough non-Nazis to provide some cover for the firm.”
My brother chimed in to point out, “You can subscribe to nazistack blogs with an RSS reader,” which is something that I hadn’t really thought about.
I’ve been avoiding any newsletter on Substack for a couple of years now, because of the “Nazi bar” problem. Even so, I’ve ended up with a couple of subscriptions to Substack newsletters, because a couple of non-Substack newsletters I subscribed to moved there, and Substack let them just subscribe me without asking. And because I wouldn’t have subscribed if I wasn’t interested, I didn’t unsubscribe from every one of those.
Now, though, based on Steven’s good idea, I’ve gone in and added those newsletters to my RSS feed. Now I can unsubscribe from those newsletters, and still see their content—in my feeds, which is the best place to see it anyway!