A couple of times, when Ashley was out on the patio and wanted to stay out, but I needed her to come in for some reason, I bribed her in with a treat. This turned out to be a terrible idea, because she started always refusing to come in when I opened the door, hoping for a treat.
So I switched things around. If she came in as soon as I opened the door, sometimes I’d give her a Greenie (one of her preferred treats). I did it just sometimes, because Greenies are big and more than a couple per day would start being a significant part of her total food consumption. But also because “intermittent reinforcement” is more effective at training a particular behavior than consistent reinforcement.
It has worked pretty well, except that now she constantly wants to go outside and then come right back in again, hoping for a treat. It’s better than refusing to come in, and better than hesitating at the door, hoping for a treat, but it’s still not perfect.
However, after having wanted to go out on the patio half a dozen times already this morning, she got her treat the last time. And as I type this, she is sitting comfortably on the sofa. Maybe she’s figuring out that she only gets one Greenie from me per day. (She also gets one from Jackie. I’ll watch to see if she pesters Jackie to let her out until she gets that treat.)
This was supposed to lead into being some sort of metaphor for getting myself to write more, but never seemed to get there.
A side note: My last-month's newsletter didn't go out, due to a configuration error on my part. A couple of pretty good posts from that month were worth reading:
https://www.philipbrewer.net/2024/12/29/libertarians-crypto-bros-tech-bros-and-incels/
https://www.philipbrewer.net/2024/12/05/fancy-dress-fencing/
Check those out, if you're interested.
Here's this month's stuff:
2025-01-09 08:26
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
Moving back toward movement
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.
Zone 2 cardio for the non-anal
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.
Struggling with Schadenfreude
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.”
Our new upcoming stagflation
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:
- Avoid debt (you’ll get crushed by a recession faster than you’ll get rescued by inflation).
- 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).
- 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.
