My brother Steven and his son Daniel are visiting, so we’re taking them out for lunch to celebrate our 33rd wedding anniversary.

What if—and hear me out here—instead of trying to bribe women with weird tax credits to try to get them to have more children, we just made it much cheaper and easier to raise a child? Free health care, free education, free day care, mandatory time off to deal with medical or family issues… Stuff like that.

In my experience cats are much better than dogs at realizing when you’re sick and need some rest and comfort. So I’m a bit surprised that Ashley is doing such a good job of it today.

(I just have a cold. No big deal.)

The NYT article linked below talks to several people with anxiety or OCD, and somewhat reasonably comes to the conclusion that the Oura ring and similar devices are not for them.

I have a different perspective.

I wear an Oura ring and check it daily, and I’ve had none of these problems. I take what it tells me seriously, but I never let it override my own opinion on how I’m doing.

One fairly new feature is a warning when your metrics (temperature and resting heart rate in particular) suggest that you might be coming down with something. Even though I’m somewhat prone to hypochondria myself, it hasn’t been a problem for me.

Wednesday this week it warned me that I might be coming down with something. I felt fine, so I was inclined to ignore it. By evening I’d realized that I was coming down with a cold. (I felt pretty crappy all day Thursday. Today I feel nearly all better.) Although I was inclined to ignore it, I did take it seriously enough to skip my workout that day, which was probably a good idea.

I did react rather strongly the first time I got that warning, but only because I was visiting my 92-year-old mother, and didn’t want to risk passing something on to her. So I took the warning seriously enough to get and take a Covid-test and to wear a mask around my mom. Maybe that was an over-reaction—I wasn’t sick—but I am sure happier over-reacting than I would have been under-reacting and passing Covid on to my mom.

My brother teases me constantly for wearing such a thing, but I fall very much in the category of people who think, “Why not have as much information as possible?”

“They were like, ‘This is just not necessary information for a healthy, able-bodied person to have.’”

Source: Do You Have ‘Oura Paranoia’ From Having Too Much Information About Your Body? – The New York Times

As an annoying privacy/security nerd of longstanding, I’m very pleased to hear this:

Plenty of annoying nerds have been ringing alarm bells since the 90s, going on about code and privacy and open source software and FREEDOM, mostly in annoying ways. And it is genuinely annoying, even to me, to say this, but they were right all along.

Source: Digital Fascism is Still Just Fascism – emptywheel

“Ashley! You have your chin on my clean sweats!”

“I do not!”

Me, to our dog Ashley: “You’re such a good dog! I don’t know a dog that’s good gooder!”

Jackie: “Good better.”

Me: “Man, English is hard even for native speakers.”

I’m pretty down on AI. I view Large Language Models as a very expensive way to generate strings of words. Other things that were called AI when they were purely speculative (for example, chess-playing computers), quit being called AI once the thing actually existed.

I know there are other people who find AI useful as a way to minimize the amount of work they need to do, although again I’m very dubious—as soon as you let AI do something for you without double-checking everything it does, it’s going to screw up badly. (That is, you are going to to use an expensive, environmentally destructive, copyright-thieving tool to screw yourself up badly.)

It’s from that perspective that I can see this odd, narrow use of an LLM perhaps useful. (I actually got this idea from a fitness YouTuber, but he said he was going to delete his video, so I don’t see much value in linking to it.)

His suggestion was to use an LLM as a journaling tool. Each day, in the morning or in the evening, dictate a journal entry to an LLM. Do a kind of a brain dump of all the things that are worrying you or exciting you. List the things you need to do and the things you’re expecting other people to do. List your good ideas. List your long-term plans and your progress on your long-term plans. List your successes, your failures, your anxieties, interesting facts you came upon during the day, and so on. Then, once you’ve finished your brain dump, ask the LLM to organize those lists: Give me a list of things to do today. Give me a list of blind spots I haven’t been thinking of. Suggest a plan of action for addressing my issues. Tell me if there’s any easy way to solve multiple problems with a single action.

Now, I think it’s very unlikely that an LLM is going to come up with anything genuinely insightful in response to these prompts. But here’s the thing: Your journal isn’t going to either. The value of journaling is that you’re regularly thinking about this stuff, and you’re giving yourself a chance to deal with your stresses in a compartmented way that makes them less likely to spill over into areas of your life where they’re more likely to be harmful.

The things LLMs do—like generating summaries, making lists, expanding on ideas, suggesting alternatives—are really risky in any use case where getting it right matters. We all know the stories of people who used an LLM to write a legal brief, and the LLM hallucinated citations to cases, complete with footnotes, that were all lies. But I think in this case, none of those things matter much.

You aren’t required to have footnotes in your journal, or even to tell the truth. If you ask your LLM-supported journal to suggest blind spots that you’ve missed, and its suggestions are all either obvious or completely off-point, it costs you nothing but the 10 seconds you waste reading the list. If you say, “What are the top five things I need to get done today?” and it gives you a list that doesn’t include the very most important thing, you’re probably going to notice and get that thing done anyway.

Without having tried it, I can imagine that this might be a useful tool, or at least a harmless one. If all having the LLM in the background does is provide a bit of novelty that gets you started journaling again, even just that seems worthwhile.

One risk to keep in mind: If you’re telling an LLM things that are confidential—business secrets, personal secrets, other people’s secrets—you can’t have any confidence that the LLM isn’t going to feed all that info right into its training data and spit it out to some other LLM user. But pretty soon we’ll all be able to train up our own personal journaling LLM that doesn’t share its info with others, so I don’t think that’s a long-term problem.

Of course, I’m eliding the ethical problem of LLMs having been trained on stolen texts, but I don’t think that’s something the users are obliged to try to fix on their own. Rather, the creators of LLMs should be forced to turn their revenues over to the copyright holders of the people whose texts were stolen.

If you’ve been journaling with an LLM, I’d be interested to hear about it. And if you know of an adequately powered LLM that can be run on a personal computer without sharing any data off the machine, I’d be interested in hearing about that too.

I wanted a workout to practice my Meyer fencing stance—a workout more interesting than just standing in the stance for a minute or two.

Mark Wildman, in one of his a live Q&A videos, suggested the mace drop swing as a useful exercise for someone doing longsword. (It was in response to a question I asked about improving arm strength and endurance for holding your arms forward and overhead at full extension for extended periods, as one does in longsword.) He had suggested doing it in Warrior 2, but specifically mentioned that you could do it in whatever stance went with your longsword style; it just got harder as your stance got wider.

Besides being boring, just standing in a Meyer stance for a minute or two seemed like a missed opportunity; even a modest challenge to your stability in the stance seemed like it might pay off in strength, flexibility, and control of your stance.

So here’s the workout I came up with:

Get in your best Meyer stance, with your mace in your front hand. Execute 5 drop swings, checking your stance after each rep. Shift the mace to your rear hand and repeat. Take one passing step forward. (Your mace will now be in your front hand.) Repeat five swings with the front hand and five swings with the back hand.

That’s one set.

Here it is as a video:

My plan is to gradually add sets until I can comfortably stay in the Meyer stance for 5 or 10 minutes, to build the habit and capability of keeping a good stance while it is challenged by a shifting weight.

I think my stance is okay here. Of course, there isn’t just one Meyer stance. This image from Meyer’s treatise show the range pretty well:

The front two figures are both in what I think of as a basic Meyer stance. The two figures behind them are also in Meyer stances, the one on the right in something of a lunge, the one on the left in a more upright stance.

My drop swings clearly need a lot of work (do not copy mine!), but that basically comes along for free as I do the stance workouts. (I wrote a post called Fitness training for longsword, Mark Wildman style that embeds two Mark Wildman videos of the Warrior 2 stance mace drop swing, if you want to see someone doing it better.)

I’m doing the swings with my 5 lb mace. I have a 10 lb mace that I’ll want to move up to, once I have the drop swings a bit more under control.

Some time ago I made a mistake. Ashley was out on the patio, and didn’t want to come in, but I needed to leave. So I bribed her back in with a treat. This turned her into a monster. Knowing that she could get a treat for coming back in, she started resisting ever coming back in without a treat.

Breaking her of that behavior by just not giving her treats to come back in would probably have worked eventually, but it seemed like a lot of difficult work.

So I came up with an alternative that has worked pretty well.

What I do now is never bribe her back in with a treat, but if she comes in when I tell her to—if she does what I want without resistance—once a day I’ll reward her with a Greenie (one of her favorite treats). (My wife does the same, so Ashley gets two Greenies most days.

This puts us very much on the right side of behavioral conditioning. Since it’s an intermittent reward, it’s powerfully effective. And as long as we’re pretty good about only giving her the treat when she does exactly the right thing, she’ll start doing exactly the right thing every time, in hopes of getting the rare reward.

As I say, it has worked pretty well. There are a couple of things that aren’t quite perfect.

First, since she has learned that what she needs to do is go out and come back in again, she has started asking to be let out and then coming right back in again, hoping for a treat. We can deal with that simply by not giving her a treat when that’s what she’s done.

Second, and this is more a source of amusement than an actual problem, when the weather is bad and she doesn’t want to go out, she’ll go to the door, wait for me to open it, refuse to go out, wait for me to close the door, and then sit down to get her treat. I can totally understand her logic here: Isn’t just not going out the same as going out and coming right back in again?

She’s a good dog.

Anyway, shared in case other people are trying to cure their dog of demanding a bribe to do the right thing. Wait for your dog to “do the right thing” on its own, then give it a treat very occasionally. The dog will catch on pretty quickly.

We have benefited enormously from the vast economies of scale in the vaccine industry. Because childhood vaccines were mandated, the companies that made them could be confident that they’d be able to sell large numbers. That made it worth both doing the research and investing in capacity.

Even flu vaccines have benefited, because government agencies got a bunch of scientists to come together and produce their best guess as to what strains to vaccinate against each year, so that there only had to be one vaccine that everyone got, and mandating that insurance companies had to pay for it.

But with the current administration in the U.S. suggesting that vaccines are generally bad, I fear we’re going to see less of that: fewer mandates are going to mean fewer vaccines being administered. Obviously that’s going to mean more sick people, which is really bad. But almost as bad, it’s going to reduce the economies of scale, meaning that the per-shot cost of vaccines are likely to rise significantly.

This all got me to thinking, what would a post-mandated-vaccines world look like?

Well, only smart people would buy vaccines, and only rich people would be able to afford them.

How many people are both smart and rich? And how rich would you have to be? Depending on how much prices went up, maybe only the top 50% would be able to afford them, maybe the top 10%, maybe the top 1%.

One small upside might be that boutique vaccine shops could find it worthwhile to make better vaccines—modestly better effectiveness, modestly reduced side-effects—because there’d be vaccine competition.

Really, though, there was always a strong push for that stuff for mandated vaccines, because if you’re going to give out 300 million doses, even a tiny improvement is going to really matter.

Still, I read a year or so ago about a version of the Covid-19 vaccine that produced much longer-lasting immunity being discontinued because they couldn’t sell enough of it, because it wasn’t mandated. That’s the sort of thing that might get better in a post-mandate world.

Won’t be a net win for society. Probably not even a net win for the 1% who can afford whatever bespoke vaccines they want, because it costs billions to research and test a vaccine, and even the 1% can’t afford that, unless they all get together and fund joint projects.

These thoughts brought to you by me getting my Covid shot now rather than waiting until just a few weeks before I go visit my 92-year-old mother—because who knows if it’ll be available then?

Went for a 3.3 mile run yesterday, with a time much too slow for me to be willing to mention it here. (I don’t know how much of the slowness was the previous day’s sword fighting training and how much of it was yesterday’s extreme heat, but boy was it slow.)

Slow as it was, I had a great time.

On Jackie’s last visit to see our friend Rosie, they visited a Navajo trading post, and Jackie bought a Navajo blanket. This morning we got it hung up in the living room.

This is directly over my living room chair, a spot where I’ve long resisted hanging framed pictures, out of an irrational fear that they might fall on my head. With a small blanket, I figure it’s no big deal.

Early in the pandemic I bought a set of gymnastic rings, started training with them, and got great results. They have a few downsides, though: Since I hang them up outdoors it’s no fun to us them when its cold or wet or windy. Also, the easiest place to hang them up (the basketball court) is kind of out in public. I don’t really mind people watching me workout, but occasionally it’s a little awkward.

Especially during the winter, I’ve largely switched to steel club exercises. I can do them in my study, they’re a similarly good workout. Besides that, they add an element of rotation which I find useful to support my fencing.

One downside of club (and kettlebell) exercises is that they’re really not practical to do to failure.

Exercise machines are great to do to failure. With little or no risk of injury, you can know that you’ve gotten the maximum stimulus to strength and hypertrophy. With kettlebells or clubs, training to failure means that a big steel weight goes flying out of your hands and into whatever happens to be in the vicinity—a terrible idea.

The rings are closer to weight machines. I use them almost exclusively for three different exercises: inverted rows, dips, and pull ups. Do any of them to failure and all that happens is you don’t finish a rep. I suppose actual gymnasts do various sorts of inversions and such, where it might be dangerous to fail a rep. That’s not an issue for me.

Anyway, this morning I got my rings out, put them up at the basketball court, and did a version of the same circuit I did many times over the past five years. I did three rounds of:

Jump rope

This was mainly just to get/keep me warmed up for the rest of the round. I did sets of 100 jumps, and was pleased to find that I could still do them with just one or two misses in a set.

Inverted rows

These are a way to work the lats. I’ll hope I can do pull ups again soon, but even then I’ll probably stick to inverted rows for half my lat exercises. I did sets of 8 rows to failure, which is exactly what I was going for.

Slamball hunter squats

This exercise comes from Mark Wildman’s slamball program. You powerclean a slamball, do a double-pivot to turn 90 degrees to one side, which leaves you in a stagger stance. Then you drop down to a hunter squat (about mid-way between a squat and a lunge), holding the slamball in front of you. Then you stand back up, double-pivot again to face forward, and drop the slamball. Then you repeat, pivoting the opposite direction.

I was doing it with a 15 lb slamball, which isn’t terribly heavy, but I was too lazy to carry my heavier slamball out to the basketball court.

I did sets of 6 to 8 reps (3 or 4 each direction), which isn’t enough to reach failure on my legs. I either need to do more reps or else bite the bullet and bring out the 30 lb slamball.

Dips

Somewhat to my surprise, I actually manage to do 1 dip! That was all I managed though, so I satisfied myself with doing negative dips for the rest of my reps. But if I can do 1 dip, being able to do sets of 3 or even 4 is not far off.

Hollowbody hold

This was easier than I’d expected, I guess due to the Mark Wildman ab exercise program I’d been doing for a few months now. I did a 45-second hold each round.

I did a total of three rounds, which is what I did for most of my rings workouts in years past. It felt like a legit good workout.

I’m thinking two of those workouts per week, plus two club workouts per week, plus two runs per week (a long run and a fast run), would add up to a great, well-rounded exercise routine. Of course, I’ll also want to do a fencing class as well, adding up to seven workouts per week, which is perhaps a bit more than would be wise, but I don’t see any alternative.

The flowers in bloom on our patio.

I’ve been hearing for years about how much trouble Social Security is in, and how pretty soon there won’t be enough money left in the trust fund to pay everyone’s pensions in full, and how we’ll have to raise taxes or cut benefits. That’s almost entirely false.

The Greenspan commission that restructured Social Security back in 1983 got almost everything right (which is why we haven’t needed to change Social Security tax rates, diddle around with the cost of living adjustments, nor change the age at which people retire for forty years). The one thing they got wrong?

Back then, about 90 percent of all wages were subject to Social Security payroll taxes. Today, that’s dropped to around 82.6 percent as more income has shifted above the taxable maximum.

Source: Actually, Social Security Nailed It In 1983

The most common suggestion for “fixing” Social Security is to get rid of the ceiling on the amount of income subject to the tax, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Getting rid of the ceiling would decouple the size of the eventual pension from the size of the income that earned it, which would give conservatives yet another hook for criticizing the program.

The right fix is to boost incomes of those at the bottom, so that once again 90% of all wages are under the Social Security tax ceiling.

Making sure that lower-income people earn enough money to live on will fix Social Security as a side-effect.

Pretty cool, eh?

In the run-up to the campaign I saw reports of young people, frustrated that Biden hadn’t managed to do the huge student loan forgiveness that he’d tried to do, say that they weren’t going to vote for him or for Kamala. “If he can’t get this thing done, why should I support him?” Here’s why:

“Beginning May 5, the department will begin involuntary collection through the Treasury Department’s offset program, which withholds payments from the government — including tax refunds, federal salaries, and other benefits — from people with past-due debts to the government. After a 30-day notice, the department will also begin garnishing wages for borrowers in default.”

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/student-loans-default-referred-debt-200132438.html

Remember Verner Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, and its “net of a million lies”? I wonder what he’d write about a “net of a billion bots talking to each other.”

Clearly the move here is to come up with a large language model that writes really good prose that advocates for the policies that you want.

The draft says the department must greatly expand its use of artificial intelligence to help draft documents, and to undertake “policy development and review” and “operational planning.”

—https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/20/us/trump-news#trump-state-department-overhaul

No doubt other people thought of this before me. I wonder how far along they are?

Poor Ms. Feuerstein. She just suffers and suffers. I bet she’s as tired as the rest of us of the Leopards-Eating-Faces jokes.

China has long relied on the U.S. for soybeans. But with new steep tariffs, it is likely to look even more to Brazil and Argentina.

Source: How Trump’s Tariffs Could Hurt US Farmers and Benefit Brazil – The New York Times

When Ashley was a puppy, she was pretty bad about chewing up stuff. As a stop-gap measure, we piled a bunch of stuff on the window seat, which put it out of reach of puppy-Ashley’s jaws.

The stop-gap ended up lasting about two years. But today I finally cleared the window seat, so Jackie and I can sit and look outside.

It’s a very nice place to take morning coffee.

Jackie has a Big Grove old fashioned, which she says is very good. I have the Destilh ILL-IPA. I haven’t had one since they closed their local restaurant early in the pandemic.

As she does, Ashley has once again found her place in the sun.

“This isn’t what we voted for!” scream a bunch of American racists and fascists who voted for exactly this.

Many politicians and financial analyst types are suggesting that the Fed should “look through” tariff-induced price hikes. Superficially this makes sense, because a one-time cost increase is not the same thing as inflation. Unfortunately, we know that the results are bad.

The example I’m thinking of is the price shock from much higher oil prices due to the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. As that price shock moved through the economy, first oil prices went up, then gasoline prices went up, but very shortly all prices moved up, because every business faced higher energy costs, and needed to pass at least a fraction of them forward. And then, of course, all the businesses that bought things from those businesses needed to raise their prices further, and workers started demanding higher wages because their costs were going up.

The Federal Reserve tried to “look through” that price shock, not raising interest rates, even though prices were rising. As I say, this makes sense. The one-time price shock will move through the economy, raising many prices by various amounts (depending on how much the inputs for each particular item increase in cost, and the market constraints on price increases for each particular item). Once that all works through the economy, the prices increases should stop.

In fact, raising interest rates could easily make things worse, because the cost of credit is another cost to nearly all businesses, so it’s just another expense that they have to pass on, and it’s a cost to employees, that they’ll want to recover in wage negotiations.

But we know what happened: Inflation rose enough that the Fed eventually decided that it needed to raise interest rates. Higher interest rates hurt the economy, threatening to produce a recession. The Fed cut interest rates to head off the threatened recession, which led to inflation, which led to the Fed raising rates again, etc.

The result was the stagflation of the 1970s, which only ended when new Fed chairman Paul Volker raised rates high enough to produce a severe recession, and then kept them high for long enough to wring the inflation out of the economy.

To me it’s clear that “looking through” the “one-time” price shock of higher tariffs will produce the same result. The Fed can probably mitigate it by holding rates at their current levels until the price shock works its way through the economy (which will probably take a least a year, because many prices (wages, rents, etc.) are only renegotiated annually), and only cut rates after price increases settle back down to close to the Fed’s 2% target.

I assume the Fed governors know this. Do they have the courage to take the right action? Only time will tell.

For years I worried a lot about daily routines. (Just click on the tag for “daily routine” and you can find literally dozens of posts on the topic.) Of late, that seems to no longer be the case. It’s been years since I posted on the topic.

A few days ago though, my brother mentioned me in a toot on daily routines, which prompted me to wonder what my current daily routine actually looks like. Turns out, I do have a daily routine, that I stick to pretty well (with minor adjustments for errands, medical appointments, etc.).

Unsurprisingly, it’s rather sun-aligned.

(6:00 AM) I get up around dawn, which is at different times at different parts of the year, but is around 6:00 AM right now. I drink a (ginormous) mug of coffee (or two). I spend some time dicking around on the internet, check my social media feeds, chat on-line with my brother, and get an update on our mom (who lives with him). I also check my Oura ring, to see how well I slept. (That’s a joke. Of course I know how well I slept. But the information my Oura ring provides is nevertheless sometimes valuable.) We usually do the Jumble via chat during this time as well.

(6:40 AM) Around sunrise I take the dog for her first walk of the day. That’s been around 6:45 lately, but is getting earlier every day just now.

(7:00 AM) After first-walk I might have a third cup of coffee, but I proceed to fixing and then eating breakfast.

(8:00 AM) After breakfast it’s time for the dog’s second walk. This is the long walk of the day. In bad weather it might also be just 20 minutes, but is usually at least 40 minutes, and in really nice weather might be an 90 minutes or longer.)

(9:00 AM) Once I get home from second walk, I proceed to my morning exercises, which I ought to be able to do in 20 minutes or so, but which often stretches out to twice that long. I’m working to shorten it, so I have some hope of getting something else done during the day.

(9:30 AM) After morning exercises (which is really a stretching/flexibility/mobility routine), I proceed to my workout, unless it’s a rest day. That takes 40 minutes to an hour.

Since I started drafting this post three or four days ago, I’ve been tracking the start and end times of my morning exercises and my workouts, with an eye toward collapsing the total time for this stuff down to the 60–80 minutes that it should be. If I can do that, I should be able to finish no later than 10:30, which should give me most of three hours available to get work done, before I need to break for the main meal of the day.

(10:30 AM) Get work done!

(1:00 PM) Jackie and I have moved our main meal of the day to 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM, which provides just a bit more flexibility for getting work done in the morning (although that time gets used up if I need to run an errand, or if I’m fixing lunch that day). Ashley usually gets her third walk of the day either right before or right after lunch.

I generally don’t even try to get anything useful done after that. I might take a nap. I might read. I might spend some more time dicking around on the internet. Just lately, I’ve been trying to get a backup server configured so that my brother and I can backup our backups to each other’s servers, meaning that we’ll have off-site backups.

(4:15 PM) At 4:15 PM we have our cocktail hour call with Steven and my mom. We’ve all cut back on alcohol consumption, so we usually drink water rather than a cocktail, but we’re sticking with the call. It means I get to talk to my mom nearly every day.

(4:45 PM) After cocktail hour I take Ashley for her fourth (and now, finally, last) walk of the day. When she was a puppy I had to take her for eight walks a day (to keep her from peeing in the floor). That ramped down pretty quickly to seven and then six, but it took a long time to get her down to five and then four. But this is actually much more convenient for me, as well as being enough walking for both of us. (I average over 12,000 steps a day, even in the winter. In the summer it’s more like 15,000.)

(5:30 PM) After fourth-walk I usually sit down to watch some video entertainment with Jackie, or else read some more.

Jackie goes to bed quite early most days, a remnant from her days working at the bakery (when she had to get up at 4:00 AM).

I generally like to go to bed a couple of hours after sunset, although not that early in mid-winter nor that late in high summer. Just lately I’ve been aiming to take Ashley out of the patio for one last peeing opportunity in time for me to get to bed around 9:00 PM.

There’s some variability, of course. Mondays I do Esperanto in the early evening. Wednesdays there’s (just recently) a gentlemen’s lunch. Thursdays there lunch with some former coworkers, that’s been going on in some form or another for decades now. Sunday afternoons (and when I’m feeling fit enough, Tuesday and Thursday evenings) there’s sword fighting.

As I said above, the main value of this post to me seems to be around how I might get my warmup and workout done more compactly. I think I’ll write about that soon, and if I do, I’ll link to it here.

Some financial commentators are suggesting that the hit to the economy from the new tariffs will push the Fed to lower interest rates, but I don’t see it. The tariffs will push up prices, so the Fed will feel it needs to stick with higher rates for longer.

The result will be exactly as I forecast months ago: the coming stagflation.

Some months ago my elbow started hurting. (The little bump on the inside of my elbow joint was where it hurt.) I don’t think it was a sword-fighting injury; I think it was a dog-walking injury—but the sword fighting seemed to aggravate it.

So I did less sword fighting. I switched from three times a week to just twice, and then just once, and then I quit going altogether. Then last week I traveled to Amherst to visit my brother and my mom, and just about didn’t exercise at all while I was on that trip. My elbow got steadily better, so that for about a week now, it hasn’t hurt at all.

So yesterday I went back for a sword-fighting class!

The class was kind of abbreviated. At the beginning of class we did a bearpit for a member’s birthday, so I got to do three passes at longsword. Then we did an actual class on rapier fencing. Then we were going to switch to longsword, but there was a tornado warning, and we all stopped to stare at our phones, looking at weather radar and texts with friends and relations in the area, making sure we were all okay.

Turns out that’s just a well. My elbow seemed to hold up fine during class, but today it’s a bit twingey again, so I’m glad I didn’t aggravate it more.

This pretty clearly means I’m not ready to go back to three-times-a-week training, but maybe it doesn’t rule out once-a-week training.

I’ll see how my elbow feels over the next few days.

“total abortion bans come at the cost of more than 36,000 residents per quarter.”

Source: Are People Fleeing States with Abortion Bans? | NBER (Link to page that links to the pdf of the study.)

Via Emily Peck, via Slate Money.

It’s warm enough that Ashley’s place in the sun is almost entirely in the shade.

Daffodils and squills! The squills were my idea, but Jackie did most of the work in our little flower garden, except that the lilies, which won’t bloom for another couple of months, were left by the previous member.

“… food delivery giant DoorDash announced a deal Thursday with buy-now, pay-later outfit Klarna, offering hungry consumers “the added convenience of Klarna’s seamlessly integrated, flexible payment options while shopping.”

Source: Almost Daily Grant’s Commentary

Of course. Who doesn’t think it’s a good idea to spread the cost of your lunch over a few weeks or months?

Outside a Chinese restaurant near the Big Y, a big ol’ flock of (I think) Black Vultures. (Not Turkey Vultures, which are the only kind I can recognize.)

The first crocus, the first squill, and the soon-to-be first dafodills.

Ashley likes nothing better than tussling with another dog. In this case, with Roxie.

I’d like an app that could take my various social media feeds, the RSS feeds I used to follow (until my feed reader broke), and the various news sources that I subscribe to, and find all the articles that I really want to read, and present them to me in a useful order.

Of course it needs to do a lot more than that. It should watch me read them, pay attention to which posts I linger on, which ones I follow internal links in, etc., and try to learn what I actually want to read. (And then give me more of that stuff in the future.)

It would also be nice if it noticed when I read something by a new person I don’t follow (because it was boosted by someone I do follow), and consider following that person as well.

And by “in a useful order,” I mean the AI should understand which articles are full of background information versus covering the latest breaking news, and present the background information first—unless it’s background information that I already know. In that latter case, it should just offer a link to the background information, in case I feel like I need a refresher. It should also present the information grouped by topic (so, news first, then economics/business news, then science news, then the very narrow sorts of cultural news that I want to read).

For years I’ve heard about double-yoked eggs, but this is legit the very first time I’ve ever broken an egg and had it turn out to be double-yoked.

On my way to UI Con.

Got in a very nice run today with Ashley, going 2.46 miles in (despite what the image says) 33:41. Ashley was a Very Good Dog on the run, despite just a little bit of grabbing the leash in her jaws after we turned back toward home. 🐕 🏃🏻‍♂️

This time not only did Ashley find her place in the sun, I found mine as well.

We have reached the time of the year when the sun shines directly into my eyes when I’m sitting in my chair in the living room. Ashley is cleverly sitting just out of the direct sunlight.

For years now I’ve been fixing the same little feast for valentine’s day: rock Cornish game hen, Uncle Phil’s long grain and wild rice, and flourless chocolate cake.

It’s inspired by the very first meal I cooked for Jackie, just a few days after we started dating.

This year I made numerous mistakes in timing and measuring—kinda weird, since I slept so well last night. Fortunately, a modest amount of scrambling and fixing managed to make everything come out delicious!

Several times in my adult life I have suffered a bout of very poor sleep, usually due to life stress. One of those times, six years ago, coincided with the Oura ring becoming available. So I bought one.

Buying a ring, of course, doesn’t help you sleep better. The Oura ring just offers metrics on your sleep. It’s up to you to make sensible use of that data.

Besides buying the ring, I went down the rabbit hole of reading about sleep. In particular, I read the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Based on that book, and a lot of reading of internet articles on sleep, I started trying to get 8 hours of sleep a night, as measured by my Oura ring.

Of course that’s not what the “8 hours of sleep” number ever was. The number was always a “time in bed” number, assuming that you spent an average fraction of that time actually asleep. (Some people might actually need 8 hours of actual sleep per night, but that’s not what the number referred to.)

I conducted various experiments (which is what the Oura ring makes possible), but about the only way I could get 8 hours of actual sleep (besides being really, really tired) was to spend 10 or more hours in bed. Rather pleasant on the right sort of day when you’re in the right sort of mood, but not really a practical lifestyle, even for someone like me who doesn’t need to go work a regular job any more.

I did the sensible thing, which was to mostly not worry about it, and just try to get plenty of sleep. And I did okay. My average sleep score from my Oura ring over the 6+ years I’ve had it has been 84. (That’s one tick below the cut-off for “excellent” sleep.)

Just lately though, I’ve made another tweak to my “sensible sleep” strategy (which will no doubt seem extremely obvious to anyone who has never had an extended period of very bad sleep): I quit trying to extend my time in bed in an effort to try and get 7 or 8 hours of actual sleep.

Like all sensible people, I’m back to just going to bed when I feel sleepy, and getting up when I wake up feeling refreshed.

My Oura ring likes the results:

In part this was due to hearing an interview with the author of How to Sleep Like a Caveman by Merijn van de Laar. He reports that Hadza people spend a very typical amount of time in bed, but only spend a little over six and a half hours of that time asleep.

Of course the smart thing to do is to go entirely by feel: If you wake up feeling refreshed, you’re probably getting enough sleep. If you get sleepy during the day, maybe take a nap.

The Oura ring is for when that simple, sensible strategy doesn’t do the trick.

Some years ago we got this glorious orange Le Creuset braising pan, and since then I’ve been inclined to braise everything I don’t grill. Contents today: venison rib chops—something that probably would grill very well, but Jackie likes the way I braise it, so that’s what I’m doing.

Do you think, with 25% aluminum tariffs in the offing, that bottled beer will make a comeback?

I was preparing a honey-mustard glaze to put on a ham. The recipe called for dijon mustard, honey, and dark brown sugar—that last, presumably, to make it caramelize nicely. The new jar of honey I opened had crystalized rather completely. So I skipped the brown sugar, and just put in twice as much honey.

It was delicious.

Now I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth updating the recipe, given that I can’t expect to have crystalized honey on-hand all the time.

For most of my adult life, trying to use “intuition” to decide on rest days would have been a terrible idea. If I’d let myself say, “Hmm. I don’t really feel like a workout today,” I’d scarcely have worked out at all. Instead, I came up with a schedule, and stuck to it, either well or poorly.

When I stuck to it well, I’d see progress. When I stuck to it poorly, I wouldn’t.

Starting around 5 years ago or so, something changed in my brain: I started really enjoying my workouts.

Partially, it was that they were working well, which is just satisfying. But it was more than that. First, I noticed that I felt better after a workout. Then I started feeling better during a workout. Instead of it being hard to motivate myself to work out, I craved workouts.

People who knew me were mildly disturbed by this. It was unlike me. It was certainly unlike them. I would not be surprised if they began to suspect that I was some sort of pod-person.

Because I wanted to work out nearly every day, I would sometimes wonder if I was over-training (or under-recovering), but that’s not trivially easy to determine in the moment.

I’ve long tracked my workouts, but not really in a consistent way—I’d just write down what I did that day. Sometimes I could look back and say, “Wow. That looks like a serious workout,” and other times I’d look back and say, “Was that really a workout?” But often times it wasn’t clear either way.

Just lately though, I’ve been doing the Mark Wildman workout programs that I mentioned a few weeks ago. That gives me a pretty consistent metric. I’m doing three different programs, each of which has 4 to 7 different levels, each of which can be done with an almost infinite range of weights, but they all have a consistency in design: start with a light weight, work up in complexity, then bump up the weight but go back down in complexity. If you’re consciously attempting to make progress, then it’s pretty easy to make each workout “count” as a workout, while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout.

But while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout is good, it is possible to do that, and yet get over-trained, simply by doing too many workouts with inadequate recovery.

So, today I went back over my past 3 months’ training log entries. For my first cut at this, I’m just counting rest days. I figure that I want to work out either 5 or 6 days a week, which makes any week where I have either 1 or 2 rest days a “good” week.

In the past 13 weeks I’ve had 1 week with 0 rest days, 1 week with 3 rest days, and 1 week with 4 rest days. All the rest were “good” weeks with either 1 or 2 rest days.

That’s just about perfect. The usual advice is to take a “deload” week every 4 to 6 weeks, so 2 weeks out of 13 being weeks with extra rest just about hits the nail on the head. The one week with 0 rest days was probably just an artifact of rest days falling outside of one calendar week—not a big deal, as long as it’s rare.

Anyway, the intuitive rest days seem to be working well. I’m getting in my workouts, and I’m getting in adequate rest. I guess I can stick with it for a while.

Today’s workout was 2-handed club swinging followed by abs.

The main workout went fine, but when I started the ab workout, Ashley had come upstairs. She found the postures of my workout (hollow-body, plank, etc.) to be very provocative, inspiring her to want to help.

“help”

I made a couple of political donations during the last election cycle. Now, every single day I get an email request for another donation, with some statement along the lines of:

“We are rapidly approaching the first fundraising deadline of 2025.”

But, you know what? I don’t care diddly-squat about fundraising reporting deadlines. What I want to know is what you’ll do with my donation to advance my priorities. Your artificial “deadline” means nothing to me, so as soon as you start talking about a reporting deadline, I stop reading your begging letter, and go on to my next email message.

Jackie and I call this path, along the top of the berm along the north edge of our little prairie, the High Road. There used to be a Low Road (down by the creek) and a Middle Way (in between), but they’re no longer mowed.

The sunrise is just a bonus.

While waiting for the bus to go to my Esperanto group meeting last night, I admired how these clouds were nearly the same orange as the barrels under them. (The water main break is fixed, I think. Now they need to fix the road.)

🎶 These snoots were made for boopin’, and that’s just what they’ll do! / Sooner or later these snoots are gonna boop all over you (do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do) 🎶

A group of friends and I agreed last week that the most likely result of the most likely policies coming out of this administration is stagflation.

Talking about it reminded me of the Wise Bread post I wrote All about stagflation, so I re-read that. I think has held up pretty well, even though circumstances (financial crisis followed by a pandemic) meant that things didn’t play out as I’d expected. Even so, I think the analysis of how to produce a stagflation is right on: raise interest rates to bring down inflation, but then panic when it’s clear that you’re in danger of producing a recession and cut rates before you’ve gotten inflation under control; repeat until you have high inflation and a recession.

That is, stagflation is usually the result of a timid Fed, that’s afraid to do its job.

The thing is, the policies that I see coming (tariffs and tax cuts) will produce stagflation even if the Fed does a great job. The tariffs directly raise prices, and the tax cuts (through increased deficits) raise interest rates, producing a recession.

In the Wise Bread article I warn that it’s tough to position your investments for stagflation. The reason is that inflation makes the money worth less (helping people with debts, but hurting people with money), while the recession hurts people with debts and people with investments.

Upon reflection though, I don’t think it’s quite that bad. In fact, it’s really just regular good financial advice:

1. Avoid debt (you’ll get crushed by a recession faster than you’ll get rescued by inflation).
2. To the extent that you have assets, move them into cash (initially you’ll get screwed by inflation, but pretty soon rising interest rates will save you).
3. Limit your investments in stocks, and especially limit your investments in your own business (both much too likely to get crushed by recession).

Basically: live within your means and stay liquid.

Some years ago I came this close to setting up a rule that any email message with the word “webinar” in it be sent directly to spam. I never got around to it, and I guess I’m glad I didn’t, because I just attended a rather interesting webinar on “Fixing Chicago Union Station” by the High Speed Rail Alliance.

Sign the petition!

Enjoy the poster below, which is very cool, even though unrelated to Chicago.

I told Ashley that she’s “The number one girl in my eyes.”

Then I had to carefully explain that this did not mean that she should boop me in the glasses with her snout.

“A goofy number of guys think they’d win against a grizzly when they’d lose to a Canada Goose.”

— One of the sword fighters in my HEMA club

I don’t know, but I assume this is happening because I block scripts from sites other than the one I’ve gone to visit from running in my browser.

I wasn’t going to turn on scripts, because it didn’t seem important to visit this particular page, but in the time it took me to capture the image below and write this text, the page seems to have decided that I am human after all!

It was really too cold outside (2℉) to pose for photographs, so I brought Ashley inside before taking a picture.

Then, after taking her jacket off, I fixed myself a hot cocoa.

But no hot cocoa for the doggo. Poor thing.

I don’t think of myself as someone who wishes ill for others. I genuinely do not wish for anyone to come to harm. But I’m struggling just a bit with schadenfreude right now.

Take, as an example, the wildfires in California. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, these fire events were not just entirely foreseeable; they were actually foreseen forty years ago. And yet, there are tens of thousands of people who apparently made the calculation that the views from a house on a hillside at the urban-chaparral interface were so good it was worth taking the risk—and especially so, given that a large fraction of the costs of fighting those fires, and insuring against financial loss, could be spread to other people. People like me.

I think I’m allowed a bit of, “I hope you are enjoying the entirely foreseeable consequences of your choices.”

As another example, take the snow about to hit New Orleans:

By Tuesday, the winter storm will drop freezing rain, sleet and likely several inches of snow onto south Louisiana, including in New Orleans, Metairie, Slidell, Baton Rouge and Lafayette.

I have to admit that when people in red states face an extreme weather event that’s entirely to be expected, a certain part of me thinks, “Well, you could have voted for politicians and policies that would have greatly ameliorated climate change, but you didn’t. Enjoy the entirely foreseeable consequences of those choices.”

And, as a non-climate example, apparently a lot of black and brown male voters refused to vote for Kamala Harris. I suspect many of them will be surprised and saddened by the utterly predictable deportations of friends, family members, neighbors, coworkers, and employees over the next few years. And I will be very sad about that—sad for the people deported and their friends and family, and also about the dreadful police actions that will be required to make them happen. But I hope I will be excused from feeling no sympathy for the bosses who find themselves having to pay up to get workers who haven’t been deported, and very little sympathy for the people who voted for these policies and find that everything they want to buy costs more.

“Welcome to the entirely foreseeable consequences of your actions as well.”

I had one of these accounts whose rate never went up as interest rates rose. I kept it longer than I should have, but I eventually switched banks. (I wasn’t going to switch to their higher-rate “Performance Savings,” because screw that. They can pay a market rate, or they can lose my business.)

[Capital One] operated two separate, nearly identically named account options — 360 Savings and 360 Performance Savings — and forbade its employees to volunteer information about or marketing… the higher-paying one, to existing customers.

Source: NYT

Zone-2 cardio has been having its moment. That comes from a lot of sources, but unfortunately a big one is Peter Attia. I say “unfortunately,” because Attia seems to have a weird, compulsive sense that zone-2 cardio work needs to be, I don’t know, pure in some way, rather than just being enough to promote good metabolic health.

Attia suggests that you do your zone-2 work on a treadmill, stationary bike, or rowing machine, so you can be in control of your effort level at all times. Then you can just get into zone 2 and stay there for 45 minutes.

I think this is crazy, and not just because 45 minutes of steady-state activity on a treadmill or stationary bike would be excruciatingly boring.

I do my zone-2 cardio with a mixture of walking my dog, running and occasional hikes. Walking the dog isn’t perfect, because the dog keeps stopping to get in her sniffies, and no doubt my heart rate drops out of zone 2. Running isn’t great, because my heart rate probably spends a lot of time in zone 3 or zone 4. A lot of it is zone-2—at least, I can talk while I run, which is one of the tests for zone-2. (I run very slowly.) The hikes are probably perfect zone-2 cardio, but are a big time commitment in a single day.

Attia suggests that you optimize your cardio workouts by getting 3 hours a week of zone-2 cardio, which can optionally be divided into 4 45-minute workouts. And I’m sure that’s fine. But I suspect that getting in a couple of runs a week, along with a good bit of dog walking, is going to check the zone-2 cardio box no problem.

My theory (and I am not an MD, nor even a PhD in exercise physiology, but still) is that this is fine. You don’t need to get 45 minutes of pure zone-2 cardio to be metabolically healthy.

As I see it, the test for whether you’re getting enough zone-2 cardio is whether or not you can engage in a moderate level of exercise for an extended period—a 3-hour hike, let’s say. If you’re metabolically healthy you can go on and on at a moderate pace, because you’re doing it almost entirely aerobically.

If you can do that, you’re getting enough zone-2 cardio, regardless of whether your sessions are 45 minutes long, and regardless of whether they add up to 3 hours a week. If you’re not metabolically healthy, even going at a moderate pace is going to push you into anaerobic metabolism, which will quickly become impossible to maintain.

It probably is true that you need to get in 3 hours a week if you’re going to be able to go on long, long hikes. But the idea that they need to be pure zone-2 sessions, rather than mixed sessions at all different levels of intensity, is just crazy.

For the first time ever, actually took the time to properly caramelize the onions, meaning that this batch of French onion soup was a real success.

About a decade ago, thanks especially to finding the work of Katy Bowman, but also from taking an interest in parkour and similar disciplines, I came to realize that movement was a better model for healthy activity than exercise.

Then came the pandemic.

For a lot of reasons—in particular, the loss of the opportunity for moving with a community—I found that returning to exercise suited me better, especially in the early days of the pandemic. (Follow that link for a pretty good post about where training falls on the movement vs. exercise spectrum.)

Over the past year I realized that it’s been five years now that I’ve prioritized exercise over movement, despite the fact that I still think that movement is the better choice. But when I started thinking that I should start trying to emphasize movement more again, I realized I already have been.

The biggest way that movement has snuck back into my practice is HEMA (aka sword fighting). There is some exercise involved in training for sword fighting, and it is certainly not a complete healthy movement practice all on its own, but it is moving, for a purpose, with a community—things I had been lacking for years.

The next biggest has been walking. In particular, dog walking. It’s not that walking has snuck back into my practice. I have always been a walker, and all that getting a dog changed was that now I walk every single day, instead of merely almost every day. (Even during bad weather, I average at least 12,000 steps per day. When the weather is nice, I top 15,000.) What having a dog changes is that now the walking is not exercise. It’s movement, because I’m doing it for a purpose that has nothing to do with “getting some exercise,” and rather is about making sure my dog is getting what she needs.

I still do some exercise. In particular, I’ve paid up for four workout programs by Mark Wildman: His two club programs two-handed and one-handed, his slamball program, and his “actual action hero” ab program. I skipped getting a kettlebell program (I’ve been doing kettlebells long enough that I feel like I know how to integrate them into a fitness routine, plus my sore elbow seems to be aggravated more by kettlebell moves than by club or slamball moves.)

I’m really pleased with the two-handed club program, which adds to the basic swinging moves a set of lunge moves, a set of squat moves, and a set of ab moves (that work toward a get-up).

The one-handed club program is also good, but much more technical and specific. It’s purpose, I guess, is to improve your alignment and structure, which is cool (and which I expect will be useful for sword fighting), but it doesn’t look like it’s going to do a lot for overall fitness.

The ab program is interesting. Mark Wildman wrote it for his friends who are stunt people, who needed a program that could be done in a very small space (basically a yoga mat on the floor of a trailer, which is what stunt people live in on-set), that focused not on making your abs look good (although it definitely will) but rather on building the muscle, strength, and control to do the sorts of moves that stunt people need to do. It’s designed to be done in just a few minutes every day at the end of your usual workout. It has 50 moves, and it gives you a different combination of them every day for up to a year (assuming you can work up to doing continuous ab work for 14 minutes a day, five days a week.

So, I do continue to exercise, because it seems useful, and it suits me, but I’m going to resume trying to prioritize movement going forward.

I lived in Los Angeles briefly in 1986. While I lived there, my dad sent me this book:

It talked about landscaping to minimize fire, flood, and mudslide risk, but my key takeaway was, “Only a moron would live in Southern California,” and I moved away before the end of the year.

It was a government publication, so the PDF is available: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr067/psw_gtr067.pdf

Roxie and Ashley romping in the snow, at the dog park. 🐕