For maybe three purchases of celery, bought in 2023 from different stores, the fibers or strings in them were so tough that we could not chew them to point of chopping them into small enough pieces to comfortably swallow. We would chew away for several minutes, masticating and swallowing most of what we bit off from the stalk, but this left a tangle of intact strings in our mouths, to be spit out. Prior to 2023, we never recall having a batch of celery that was simply inedible like this. For at least one batch we were so disgusted that we just threw it out.
I tried steaming a couple of stalks for a minute or so in microwave. This turned most of the celery into unappealing mush, whilst doing the stalks no apparent harm.
For the most recent bunch of unchewable celery, I finally got wise and harnessed the vast power of the internet to solve this problem. I did not have to invoke ChatGPT, so I was perhaps spared an AI hallucination regarding string theory. A simple DuckDuckGo search (this search engine respects your privacy, unlike You Know Who) found there are at least three reasonable ways to strip the offending strings out of a celery stalk. This article from Kitchen Ambitions does a great job describing these three ways:
( 1 ) Carefully snap the stalks in half the correct way (it is obvious when you think about it; or see the article), leaving the two halves connected by the strings. Then you can peel the strings down the lengths of the stalks. This is the easiest and cleanest way. I found I usually had to do a second round of snapping and peeling to get the rest of the strings.
Or
( 2 ) At one end of the stalk, use sharp knife to tease up the ends of several strings at a time, and peel them down the length of the stalk.
Or
( 3 ) A brute force approach is to use a vegetable/carrot peeler. This does work, but removes more of good celery along with the strings.
Hurray for economical life hacks – – the internet knows everything.
The spread of highly-contagious and sometimes fatal Covid-19, and the responses to it (lockdowns and then trillions of dollars of federal giveaway money to mitigate the effects of the lockdowns and now huge interest rate hikes to counter the inflation caused by that giveaway money) have been arguably the most economically momentous events of this decade so far. Thus, it behooves us to keep an ongoing eye on this beast, since it seems to keep coming back in waves.
We all know that Covid is spread by little “aerosol” droplets coming out the infected people’s mouths and noses. Those aerosols are mainly generated by speaking and singing. So being in a room full of talking or singing people (e.g., a happy convention or bar, or a hymn-singing church) can be a super-spreader situation.
I have reasons to try to avoid respiratory diseases, and so I attended church on-line or outdoors for most of the past three years. The Covid numbers finally got low enough this spring that I started attending inside, and even going unmasked the past two months.
Alas, Covid cases and hospitalizations are back on the rise, it seems due to the new Eris or EG.5 subvariant. Like the infamous omicron variant of a year ago, it is very transmissible and resistant to existing vaccines, but is not as deadly as the original strain. Much of the population has some immunity due to vaccines and/or prior exposure. Also, antivirals like Paxlovid are widely available to help mitigate symptoms. Still, a case of Covid often makes for an uncomfortable and disruptive week or two, and can still be fatal or debilitating.
So, I have done a quick amateur scan of the internet, trying to get a fix on what to expect. One thing that stands out is that actual case numbers are far higher than officially reported, for a couple of reasons. One is that the rigorous, systematic reporting of cases has fallen off, since Covid was deemed no longer an emergency. Also, with the end of free test kits and the generally more lax public attitude (we just want to be done with this), there is far less testing done than in 2022. (In communities with systematic testing, it turns out that the best way to track Covid is by analyzing wastewater).
Will the Latest Vaccines Save Us?
The vaccine story seems somewhat mixed. The latest booster vaccine, to be available around October, will target the XBB.1.5 subvariant, which is what was mainly circulating earlier this year. However, it is expected that since EB.5 is closely related to XBB.1.5 (both of these are of the general omicron family), the booster will confer some immunity to EB.5. That is the good news.
The bad news is that the public’s uptake of boosters in general is well under 50%, so we may expect EB.5 or whatever the next subvariant is to continue to circulate, and probably surge during the colder months when respiratory diseases tend to spread. Also, vaccines do not really stop you from getting Covid, they mainly act to mitigate the symptoms by helping your body’s defenses to react faster.
Starting next week, I will resume wearing an effective KN-95 or my preferred KF-94 mask at church and other venues where a lot of people are talking or singing.
A stopped clock is occasionally right. And so are perma-bears, those commentators or analysts who continually predict that GDP and stocks will plunge – perhaps in the next quarter, but more often say six months from now. (And that deadline keeps getting pushed back every six months).
When I was first getting started investing, I was overly influenced by these seemingly cautious and sober souls, and I consequently lost out considerably compared to my colleagues who blithely stayed fully invested. So I hold my native pessimism in check when investing, and stay mainly in the market, but with a little cash in reserve just in case The Big One hits.
All that said, I do try to sample various points of view. If I have been mainly seeing positive chatter, I turn to my favorite perma-bear, an analyst named Jeffrey Snider. His YouTube channel is called Eurodollar University, and he runs a subscription service as well.
Jeff seems like a genuinely nice guy, who believes that his dire readings of the macroeconomic tea leaves are helping folks avoid disaster. His demeanor is more like an earnest teacher, not a huckster trying to sell something. I should add that he offers meaningful insights on the Eurodollar scene, which is globally significant and which most analysts do not understand or even recognize.
But Jeff’s bias is nearly always toward the negative, and it is something of a good-natured joke among his viewers. Typical comments: “ The market can remain irrational longer than Jeff can stay pessimistic” and “Jeff is the best on Youtube. I watch his videos every night right before I go to bed. In less than 5 minutes, I’m in a semi-conscious coma. Its better than any sleeping pill. That smooth soothing voice extoling the virtues of a collapsing economy works wonders. A++”.
Well, what is the bear-meister saying now? He claims that the seemingly red-hot employment numbers that have been reported in recent months are less hot than they appear. I will paste in a few snips from his recent YouTube, It Just Happened…The JOB MARKET JUST BROKE!! .
One point he makes is that there has been a persistent, inaccurate bias to the upside in the payroll numbers reported by the BLS. These big numbers are what gets reported; what does not get reported so much is, month after month, these monster payroll increases are quietly revised downwards, often by substantial amounts:
Even with the adjustments, these still seem like large increases in employment. Undaunted, Jeff pokes holes in the hot labor market scenario by claiming that full time employment is actually stagnant; it is the rise in part-time workers that creates the seemingly large army of the newly employed. The fact that total hours worked has plateaued seems to support his case here:
Another factor is worker hoarding. Employers were so burned trying to scramble for workers during the 2022 reopening-from-Covid that they are keeping their workers on payroll (even part-time), just in case the economy picks up and they need to pull them in full-time. A case in point is manufacturing. New orders are down considerably this year, and headed even lower, yet manufacturers have not cut their workforces appreciably:
If orders stay low for a long enough time, however, the manufacturers will have no choice but to start massive layoffs.
As another indicator of labor market softness, temporary workers may be a leading indicator of employment trends. They are not such a core part of a company, so there is less hoarding of them. And temporary help services have been in a steady decline this year, which is consistent with a cooler economy:
Sell Everything??
As I said, it is worth considering all sides. I think the specific points mentioned above are all valid ones. I would add that if students actually start payments on all those loans which taxpayers and the Fed have subsidized for the past three years, that will finally put a crimp in the spending. Also, the surprise downgrade of U.S. federal debt by the Fitch rating agency , and resulting jump in interest rates, has finally gotten people talking about out-of-control government spending, for one week anyway. Also, the great China-reopening that was supposed to jump-start the global economy seems to be pretty flat.
However, a couple of counter-points to the bearish narrative:
First, even if manufacturing is rolling over, in the U.S. it is fairly small relative to services. At least in some geographical areas, my anecdotal reports say that it is still a challenge to get good workers to do services.
Second, the tidal wave of cash from pandemic giveaways that washed into our collective bank accounts is still not depleted. Consumer confidence is high, and we are spending freely. This economy is a big, big ship, and it is still steaming full ahead, brushing aside high interest rates and yield curve inversions. The recession seems to continually recede. There will inevitably be a downturn someday, of course, but absent some geopolitical event, I think it may take some time for it to arrive.
And finally, even if the long-awaited recession does arrive, it may not necessarily be so bad for stocks. Since the 2008-2009 Great Financial Crisis, the Fed has taken a very active role in supporting the markets. Wall Street has been conditioned to expect the Fed to flood the system with money if a serious downturn occurs. Also, the Street is betting that there will be enough howls of pain over the high interest being paid on the federal debt that unbearable pressure will be brought on the Fed to loosen up; the vaunted independence of that institution will be put to the test, with Congressional threats to alter their charter if they don’t cave to pressure. And so, “[economic] bad news is [investing] good news”, in contrast to the pre-2008 world. Furthermore, federal deficit spending ramps up during recessions, and as noted in The Kalecki Profit Equation: Why Government Deficit Spending (Typically) MUST Boost Corporate Earnings , this deficit spending tends to boost earnings.
And so even if Jeff Snider is correct that the economy is rolling over and will soon slide downward, this may not give investors a very useful signal. As another one of his YouTube viewers has commented, “This channel is a masterclass in learning that knowledge about the macro environment does not provide an edge in markets.”
We all know we ought to reduce our CO2 generation to mitigate global warming and to conserve limited fuel reserves. Without descending into a tussle over exactly how man-made it is or whether it is part of a natural cycle which may turn soon to plunge us into yet another ice age, it does seem clear that the earth is experiencing a warming trend with possible serious consequences, and it is obvious that fossil fuel reserves (oil, natural gas, coal) are finite.
Although domestic cooking in developed countries comprises only a tiny fraction of total energy consumption, this is not true in some regions. Some 2 billion people still cook over fires of wood, charcoal, or animal dung. It is usually the women doing the cooking over these fires, inhaling smoke with all its consequences. Also, it is again women who largely end up gathering the fuel. All this gathering and fire-tending consumes time which takes away from other tasks like raising food. Also, women are often assaulted in the forests while they are foraging for wood.
It is possible to construct devices which capture enough of the sun’s rays to cook food (more technical details below). Many NGOs try to help people in poor, mainly sunny/tropical regions and in refugee camps to purchase or construct solar cookers. It is possible to set up cottage industries for locally making and selling these devices at low cost. It is just a win-win-win. Solar Cookers International specializes in this work, and has developed and shared some of the most useful technology here. They claim some four million solar cookers are in use, and present figures for how much CO2 emissions and money for fuel are saved.
Why is this relevant to us in the West? Well, if we care to help the lot of the less-fortunate, we can give money to support these solar cooking initiatives. As noted, they can help the well-being of people, especially women, in many ways. A less-obvious impact of us using solar cookers in our own homes is that folks in other lands are aware of our life-styles. It turns out that a non-trivial barrier to wide-spread adoption of solar cooking is that they are suspicious of Western aid workers promoting a method of cooking that no one back in the developed countries uses. If solar cooking could be more visible in our lifestyles it would have a significant effect in lands where it is really needed.
And getting around to our more personal motivations – it is kind of intriguing and rewarding to cook directly from the sun. On a hot day, it can mean cooking a casserole without heating the oven/kitchen. You can do great projects with kids (your own or others), designing and making and using solar ovens. And of course, you can signal your virtue by reducing your CO2 footprint.
If you find yourself in some situation when you have no other means to cook, a solar cooker could be a life-saver. To temper this reality, however, in most temperate regions there will be many days without sufficient sunshine to make these work. Also, they are often much slower to heat up and cook than conventional stoves, so you need to plan ahead. That said, if you have a sunny morning or afternoon, you can put your pot of rice or whatever out to cook in the sun, go about your business, and come back in 2-3 hours, knowing your “solar crock pot” will have simmered your dish without burning it.
Types of Solar Cookers
I find the technical details here fascinating, but I will skip the juicies here and just briefly describe how these things are made and how they work. In all cases, there are some mirrored reflecting surfaces which concentrate the sun’s rays onto a cooking pot. For reflecting surfaces, one can glue aluminum foil onto cardboard. However, the foil grows dull with time, so it is better to use some kind of aluminized plastic surface, such as car windshield reflectors, mirrored craft adhesive sheeting, or even the insides of potato chip bags. Usually, the pot is in some kind of enclosure which is transparent to let the sunlight in but traps heat around the pot.
There are a number of configurations that work. A description of various designs, with illustrations, is here and here.
Perhaps the most minimalistic solar cooker is the panel cooker. Here, the pot is enclosed in a clear oven bag or within two glass bowls. Segmented or curved reflective panels are arranged to reflect the sun on the pot from multiple angles. Solar Cookers International’s Cookit ($50) is said to be the most widely produced solar cooker, and it is of this design. There are many DIY designs floating around, including ones made from bent car windshield sun screens. A high-end, high-performance panel solar cooker is the Haines 2 ($100). These panel cookers lose effectiveness in cold, windy conditions, due to excessive heat loss.
Another design that people make a lot at home (see the internet) is a box solar cooker. Typically, you use a smaller cardboard box within a larger box, with the spaces between the two boxes filled with some kind on insulation (e.g., crumpled newspaper). A hinged glass lid and some reflecting panels on top of the box complete the device. A very expensive ($450) but very effective box-type solar cooker is the All-American Sun-Oven. This can function year-round, but takes up a lot of space in storage.
In tropical regions with the sun high overhead, there is some use of a plain, large parabolic mirror which can focus a very hot spot of sunlight onto the bottom of a pot or pan suspended above the mirror.
A more recent, high-tech approach is the line of solar cookers from Go-Sun. These feature smallish parabolic reflectors that focus the rays on a long, skinny cooking tube inserted in a double-walled glass tube with vacuum insulation. These cookers have only medium size capacity, but cook food really hot, really fast (e.g., can bake biscuits) and are not affected by cold weather. So, they are the most convenient and versatile cookers in many ways, although they do best with relatively solid foods like hot dogs or breads or cut-up meat or vegetables, not with liquidy loads like stew or soup or simmering beans. (Full disclosure: I caved in to my itch for one of these things, and have put it on my birthday list).
The late Dallas Willard, a professor at USC, wrote on a variety of subjects touching on moral philosophy. In 2006 he addressed the topic, “The Business of Business”. He noted that the spontaneous, obvious answer today to the question, “What is business (manufacturing, commerce) for?” would be: “The business of business is to make money for those who are engaged in it.”
But there is a tension here. Willard notes that that is NOT how businessmen/professionals present their raison d’etre :
“No business or other profession that advertises its ‘services’ announces to the public that it is there for the purpose of enriching itself or those involved in it. With one accord they all say their purpose is service, not serve-us. I have never met “professionals” who would tell their clients that they were there just for their own self-interest.”
This ambiguity in the role of businessmen/women (or “merchants”, as they used to be called) is not new. Willard reaches back to the writings of John Ruskin who remarked in 1860, “The fact is that people never have had clearly explained to them the true functions of a merchant with respect to other people.” Ruskin went on to place what we today call “business” among the “Five great intellectual professions” necessary to the life of “every civilized nation.” With respect to the nation:
“The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.
The Pastor’s to teach it.
The Physician’s, to keep it in health.
The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it
The Merchant’s to provide for it.”
Ruskin added: “And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.” The soldier to die “rather than leave his post in battle,” the physician “rather than leave his post in plague,” the pastor “rather than teach falsehood,” the lawyer “rather than countenance injustice.” (Indeed!)
But what of the merchant? What is it that the merchant (businessman) would die for rather than do?
Well, the main function of the merchant or manufacturer in Ruskin’s view is to provide for the community, not simply make money for him/herself:
It is no more his function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend. The stipend is a due and necessary adjunct, but not the object of his life, if he be a true clergyman, any more than his fee (or honorarium) is the object of life to a true physician. Neither is his fee the object of life to a true merchant. All three, if true men, have a work to be done irrespective of fee…. That is to say, he has to understand to their very root the qualities of the thing he deals in, and the means of obtaining or producing it; and he has to apply all his sagacity and energy to the producing or obtaining it in perfect state, and distributing it at the cheapest possible price where it is most needed.
Ruskin also noted that since the merchant has direct control over those who work for him, “…it becomes his duty, not only to be always considering how to produce what he sells in the purest and cheapest forms, but how to make the various employments involved in the production or transference of it most beneficial to the men employed.”
Furthermore, if the enterprise falls on hard times, it is the duty of the CEO (or other top management) to share fully in the hardships suffered by the other employees: “As the captain of a ship is duty-bound to be the last to leave the ship in disaster,…so the manufacturer, in any commercial crisis or distress, is bound to take the suffering of it with his men, and even to take more of it for himself than he allows his men to feel; as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son.”
In a similar vein, activist lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1912 said at a Brown University commencement address:
The recognized professions…definitely reject the size of financial return as the measure of success. They select as their test, excellence of performance in the broadest sense—and include, among other things, advance in particular occupation and service to the community. These are the basis of all worthy reputations in the recognized professions. In them a large income is the ordinary incident of success; but he who exaggerates the value of the incident is apt to fail of real success…In the field of modern business, so rich in opportunity for the exercise of man’s finest and most varied mental faculties and moral qualities, mere money-making cannot be regarded as the legitimate end.
Willard drily remarked, “Texts by Ruskin and by Brandeis, along with similar ones, are not popular references in our schools of business today.” My own personal observations are that the nobility of the management and entrepreneurs seems to scale somewhat inversely with the size and age of the enterprise. It gets tricky to start assessing degrees of moral rectitude here, because in classical exchange theory, any voluntary transaction (buying/selling goods, agreement to work for certain wages) brings benefits to both parties, and to society as a whole, quite apart from any conscious intent of altruism.
At large end of the scale, we see CEOs who drive big companies into the ground and then waltz away with multimillion dollar golden parachutes; no sharing of the employees’ hardships at all.
And for many Wall Street dealmakers, it truly is all about the money: float a couple billions in junk bonds, take control of some company, force the company to pay you fees, load the company with your crappy debt, and walk away with a cool billion or so. Or take a short position in a publicly traded company, publish a bogus report (“short attack”) alleging horrible malfeasance at the company, driving share prices down, close out your short position at a huge profit, and move on to the next victim. These seem to be purely predatory actions, taking advantage of the system to make a buck with no clear redeeming social value.
At the other end of the scale, the (often youngish) folks starting a new software firm, the idealistic couple chucking fast city life to try to make a go of a coffee house or BnB in a small town, the plumber with an associate, all of these I think are very serious about providing the public with a good product/service, and may tend to take care of their employees and also to put a lot of their own personal skin (savings, a lot of extra time) in the game to get these enterprises going. The younger Henry Ford famously fought to pay his employees high wages, over the objections of company shareholders, who wanted more profits to accrue to them. I know personally two men in the greater Trenton, NJ area who (as an expression of their religious values) intentionally conduct computer-related businesses such that they can provide employment to disadvantaged local young men.
Maybe when an enterprise gets large enough that, to management, its employees and its customers become numbers rather than individual people is the point where the transition to pure greed as the fundamental motive occurs, even if it proves prudent in support of profits to maintain policies and communications which promote the welfare of customers and employees.
Many of us desire at times to overcome insomnia, anxiety, brain fog, depression, or some other mental/emotional hindrance. Some common interventions include healthy lifestyle changes like better diet, drink more fluids, and exercise (all of which we should just do anyway), and more expensive therapies such as counseling or doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals. These all have their places, but (in keeping with an economics blog) I’d like to call attention to another treatment modality which seems quite cost-effective and harmless*.
It has been known for decades that the electrochemical activity in our brains occurs in measurable waves. “Alpha waves” are pretty well known as a state associated with calm attention, and can be attained by meditation. These waves operate at a frequency of about 10 cycles per second, or 10 Hertz (Hz). Deeper meditation and sleep are associated with slower frequencies, while intense attention and problem-solving thought operate at faster speeds.
Ideally, your brain would automatically generate the right waves for the situation you are in, and for the most part it does. However, for some folks, their brains don’t make the most effective waves much of the time, and even for more normal folks, it can be helpful to tweak it now and then.
Ways To Shape Your Brainwaves
There are three main avenues for you to manipulate your brainwaves. These are indirect methods, neurofeedback/biofeedback, and direct stimulation. Some indirect ways are to practice various types of mindfulness or meditation, which usually move you towards alpha waves, or intense exercise can lead to alpha in the subsequent rest session.
A direct route, which involves training yourself, is to don some sort of device on your head that measures brainwaves or a correlate such as cerebral blood-flow or heartbeat, and feeds back to let you know what your brain state is. It turns out that humans (without being to explain how) are able to learn to shift their brain states if they are given feedback on whether they are getting closer or further from some desired target. Consumer devices are available in the $400-$1400 price range that can do this with varying degrees of sophistication and requiring various degrees of training and effort. More extensive and targeted training of specific frequencies in particular spots in the brain is done in the offices of neurofeedback clinicians, often as an adjunct to talk therapy. The neurofeedback can calm the animal-level fear/panic/emotional noise, such that the client can relate therapeutically with the counselor. This can be very helpful to address specific pathologies including depression (and here), anxiety, PTSD , reactive attachment disorder, and maybe even autism, but naturally it is expensive to go through a course of say ten sessions with a highly trained professional. Unfortunately, you cannot count on routine coverage by insurance.
Direct Audio-Visual Stimulation
A less-expensive way to achieve a desired brainwave state is to present yourself with (say) 10 Hz stimulation of light and sound. The theory is that your brain waves become “entrained” along with these external stimuli. Hence the name audio-visual stimulation or audio-visual entrainment (AVE).
There are many YouTube videos claiming to have embedded alpha or other frequencies. These videos often have many comments from appreciative users claiming calming or other effects, so they are certainly worth a try. The price is right. However, research studies cast doubt on whether sound alone is very effective at creating specific brainwaves. Light stimulation has been shown to evoke e.g., alpha waves.
What has been shown to work well are systems where you don headphones for the sound and lightweight “goggles” (thin opaque glasses with LEDs on the inside). Studies have shown this to help with ADD, anxiety, depression, and migraines. Perhaps the most widely produced AVE devices are the “DAVID” models from MindAlive. MindAlive is headed by David Siever, who has spearheaded numerous studies of AVE.
The AVE devices can quickly move you into desired brain states, in the comfort of your home, for just a modest (~ $400) up front cost. You can use them with your eyes open or closed. They are perhaps more usable for children and seniors than the neurofeedback modalities, where the client has to engage with some feedback and learn to make their brainwaves go where they should. [1] With AVE, you just sit back and relax and let the sound and light carry you along. However, AVE is something of a blunt instrument, stimulating the auditory and visual and linked centers in the brain, whereas regular neurofeedback can train say two specific spots in the brain to two different specific frequencies, and has more enduring effects.
My Experience with AVE
I have owned a DAVID for many years. I and my family members have used it off and on, when we happened to feel a need for it. We all find that straight down the middle 10 Hz alpha sessions make us feel just plain good, positive, calm, etc. This can help cure anxiety (mind too fast, hard to focus) or sluggishness (mind too slow). It only takes about ten minutes exposure to the 10 Hz to get us in “the zone.” [2] On most mornings, when I wake up feeling OK anyway, I don’t bother with it. But it is good to have it around as needed. We find the feeling from an AVE session sticks with us for a number of hours.
AVE has been shown to help with seasonal asset disorder (SAD). That makes sense because SAD is about light deprivation. I had a bit of SAD when we lived in a house with few windows, and tried my DAVID for that. It did help, but it turned out to be more satisfactory and less bother to just use a big bright sunlamp at the breakfast table.
We find the slower AVE sessions useful to combat occasional insomnia (where mind is anxious or racing) and even to help with pain. A month ago I had some serious pain from an injury, that was so bad I could not sleep. These slow programs (3.5-7 Hz) did help to divert and relax my brain and help me get to sleep. Again, the effects can be enduring. If we have used a really slow, say 3.5 Hz, program to knock us out at night, we often are sluggish the next morning, so we reset our brains with some 10 Hz alpha. For sleep, I usually prefer a 7-7.8 Hz protocol that does nicely slow and relax my brain, but does not leave me groggy in the morning.
The literature and the operator’s manual recommend slightly faster waves, e.g. 14 Hz “beta” waves as a normal morning waker-upper, like a cup of coffee. These faster “Brain Brightening” protocols have shown benefits for seniors. My family does not necessarily find 14 Hz enjoyable. It sometimes feels feels tiring.
One the other hand, the 14 Hz protocol can sometimes be quite helpful as a pick-me-up. Early one winter, I was feeling sluggish and low, not wanting to get out and exercise, and was nearly ten pounds over my normal weight. It probably had something to do with an extended road trip (stress, food) plus Thanksgiving (food) and the reduced sunlight hours, including daylight savings time ending, plus a stretch of cloudy/rainy weather. I did use a sun lamp to get more photons into my head, but that didn’t cut it. I decided to push myself and use the 14 Hz flashing lights, instead of the comfy 10 Hz, to get more of an activation. It actually worked out well. Three mornings in a row with the 14 Hz, and I felt “reset” to a more energetic, optimistic me. So score one for beta waves.
A couple of us have experimented even faster programs, around 18-20 Hz. That gave an unpleasant buzz, which persisted. I think if I had to drive a truck all night, it might be useful for keeping me awake and alert. After these high frequency sessions I soon used the 10 Hz program to reset to my nice smooth alpha. It is nice to know that if I go too high or low on an entrainment session, I can always recover by using the 10 Hz alpha session [3].
At any rate, I am a satisfied customer and I think this is a cost-effective treatment modality for amateurs to use, or for therapists to prescribe.
* If someone is susceptible to seizures, they should avoid any device like this with repetitive flashing lights.
ENDNOTES
[ 1 ] There is a newer, less-studied technique called LENS that kind of bridges between classical neurofeedback and AVE and trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). “Transcranial” means the stimulation is from coils outside your skull. Straight TMS is approved by the FDA for treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), migraines, and smoking cessation. With LENS, the brain waves are monitored with electrodes, and this information is used to shape special synchronized electromagnetic stimulation of the brain (from outside the scalp). This stimulation is keyed to the existing brainwaves, which may make it particularly effective, e.g. for reducing anxiety and helping with PTSD and traumatic brain injury (e.g., from military explosion exposure). This LENS technique is also called direct neurofeedback, in contrast to the standard neurofeedback, where the client must actively muster the altered brainwaves via training.
[ 2 ] Many of the canned protocols in the DAVID devices begin with about ten minutes of transitional sound and light pulses. These “dissociation” segments are intended to help users transition from their starting brain states and move to the final target frequencies. But we find these segments to be an unnecessary waste of time. We fire up a program, do something else for 8-9 minutes, and then don the headphone and glasses and dive right into the desired frequency, with only 1-2 minutes of dissociation.
One other user tip is that there is some virtue in starting with the lights a little dim (which I do by either playing with the Intensity setting, or by holding the goggles an inch away from my face), and by tapering down the brightness at the end of a session as you reenter the real world. With the David, you can push a pair of buttons to have it automatically ramp down light and sound intensity over the course of a minute or so.
[ 3 ] There is some evidence that super-fast AVE, at 40 Hz, stimulates cerebral bloodflow which can do marvelous things with the brain, such as mitigate Alzheimer’s degeneration.
ChatGPT and related AI have been all the rage these past few months. Among other things, “AI” became the shiny object that companies have dangled before investors, rocketing upward the shares of the “Magnificent Seven” large tech stocks.
However, a recent poll by computer security firm Malwarebytes notes a marked turn in the public’s attitude towards these products:
It seems the lustre of the chatbot-that’s-going-to-change-everything is starting to fade….
When people explored its capabilities in the days and weeks after its launch, it seemed almost miraculous—a wonder tool that could do everything from creating computer programs and replacing search engines, to writing students’ essays and penning punk rock songs. Its release kick-started a race to disrupt everything with AI, and integrate ChatGPT-like interfaces into every conceivable tech product.
But those that know the hype cycle know that the Peak of Inflated Expectations is quickly followed by the Trough of Disillusionment. Predictably, ChatGPT’s rapid ascent was met by an equally rapid backlash as its shortcomings became apparent….
A new survey by Malwarebytes exposes deep reservations about ChatGPT, with optimism in startlingly short supply. Of the respondents familiar with ChatGPT:
81% were concerned about possible security and safety risks.
63% don’t trust the information it produces.
51% would like to see work on it paused so regulations can catch up.
The concerns expressed in the survey mirror the trajectory of the news about ChatGPT since its introduction in November 2022.
As EWED’s own Joy Buchanan has been pointing out specifically with regard to citations for research papers (here, here, and in the Wall Street Journal), ChatGPT tends to “hallucinate”, i.e., to report things that are not simply true. In the recent working paper “GPT-3.5 Hallucinates Nonexistent Citations: Evidence from Economics” , she warns of the possibility of a vicious spiral of burgeoning falsehoods, where AI-generated errors which are introduced into internet content such as research papers are then picked up as “learning” input into the next generation of AI training.
Real-world consequences of ChatGPT’s hallucinations are starting to crop up. A lawyer has found himself in deep trouble after filing an error-ridden submission in an active court case. Evidently his assistant, also an attorney, relied on ChatGPT which came up with a raft of “citations to non-existent cases.” Oops.
And now we have what is believed to be “the first defamation lawsuit against artificial intelligence.” Talk show host Mark Walters filed a complaint in Georgia which is:
…asking for a jury trial to assess damages after ChatGPT produced a false complaint to a journalist about the radio host. The faux lawsuit claimed that Mr. Walters, the CEO of CCW Broadcast Media, worked for a gun rights group as treasurer and embezzled funds.
…Legal scholars have split on whether the bots should be sued for defamation or under product liability, given it’s a machine — not a person — spreading the false, hurtful information about people.
The issue arose when an Australian mayor threatened to sue the AI company this year over providing false news reports that he was guilty of a foreign bribery scandal.
Wow.
Thousands of AI experts and others have signed an open letter asking: “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”. The letter states that “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” It therefore urges “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4…If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium…AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”
Oh, the irony. There is reason to believe that our Stone Age ancestors were creating unreal images like this:
whilst stoned on peyote, shrooms, or oxygen deprivation. And here we are in 2023, with the cutting edge in information technology, running on the fastest specially-fabricated computing devices, and we get…hallucinations.
This past week, smoke from wildfires in Canada once again drifted southward and gave very unhealthy air in parts of the U.S. Several sources I checked indicated that it is unrealistic to expect human effort to extinguish these fires (see here , here, and here). The Canadian forests are just too huge in relation to the fire-fighting resources. What usually happens, even during a normal fire season, is that summer fires just keep burning until they are dampened down by winter rain, snow, and cold. Most of the fire-fighting efforts are devoted to saving communities that are in the path of the flames.
Thus, we may expect periodic episodes of unhealthy air for the next several months. The most hazardous smoke particles are those less than 2.5 microns in size. Particles this small make it past your body’s defenses and penetrate deep into your lungs, promoting a number of serious medical conditions. These smoke particles are made of toxic chemicals like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
What to do to protect yourself? A first line of defense is to don an effective mask, even indoors. We all probably have Chinese KN95 or Korean KM94 masks left over from pandemic days, and (properly fitted around the nose) these should filter out most of the smoke, including the particles that are less than 2.5 microns. (I prefer the more-comfortable KM94 masks, as discussed here.) These masks are supposedly about as effective as the more-rigid N95 masks that are the U.S. standard.
Air Filters in Your Furnace
See here for some general tips on dealing with smoke in the home, e.g. damp-mop non carpet floors rather than vacuuming, to avoid shooting settled particles into the air. However, what is really needed is some means to filter the smoke out of the air in your home, otherwise over time the air inside may be as polluted as the air outside. All furnace/central air conditioning systems have a filter in the circuit. A simple solution would be to use an air filter which can catch the smoke particles. The problem here is that the better the filter is at catching small particles, the more restrictive of air flow it is.
Most air filters are rated according to MERV values. MERV 13 filters can remove most smoke particles in a single pass. Unfortunately, most home heating/cooling systems cannot handle that much restriction in air flow; the fan motor would get overloaded and perhaps burn out. One solution here is to install a parallel air filter, with its own booster fan, using a MERV 13 filter. Here, only part of the home air circulation goes through the MERV 13 filter on each pass, but with time most of the home air gets cleaned.
Another approach is to install a MERV 11 or (if your furnace is newer) MERV 12 filter in the furnace. A MERV 11 filter might only capture around 25% of smoke particles per pass, but in the course of a day your whole house air volume should pass through the filter several times. If you have a common size air filter, you can probably get a MERV 11 that would fit on Amazon or at a local big box store. For uncommon sizes, try here.
Make Your Own High-Capacity Filter Box
In addition to working with your furnace/air conditioning filter, you can buy a compact stand-alone air purifier for your home. This Shark HP202 model will provide a continuous read-out of air quality.
For even more air-cleaning muscle, you can make a box-style air purifier by duct-taping together four MERV 13 furnace air filters (four sides of a cube), and adding a box fan on top. Instructions (including YouTube links) for doing this are here, with further details here. These diagrams give the general picture:
An example of a finished product is below; note the red tape covering the outer part of the fan outlet. Blocking that outer area, giving a smaller diameter opening for the air to blow out, increases the net air flow significantly. (It prevents back-eddies of air around the edges).
It turns out that the air flow through one of these home-made air filters is so high that, even though the per-pass capture efficiency is lower than a HEPA filter, the home-made filter box can remove more particulates from a room than a store-bought HEPA filter.
I have made two of these filter boxes so far, using premium and regular filters. They have worked quite well in clearing the smoke from our rooms: the benefit is well worth the cost of parts and labor. See here for more on my experiences and construction tips.
Some on-line resources:
Accuweather seems to have straightforward reporting of air quality, including specifically the less than 2.5 micron particles. (Search on your location, then find Air Quality and click Details).
NOAA provides a real time satellite map of smoke patterns (click on “Surface Smoke”), but don’t rely on their color coding to decide whether your local condition is orange or red.
This web site from Natural Resources Canada shows locations of current wildfires in Canada. See Overlays for the meaning of the symbols; red denotes fires that are out of control. You can click Fire Perimeter Estimate to see the enormous extents of some of these fires.
One of Warren Buffet’s most famous quotes (channeling the venerable Benjamin Graham) is: “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.” He thus rationalizes buying top-quality companies or stocks, even if their price is not beaten down. So, allow me to explain why I put over $100 into a single, not-very-large raspberry plant.
In various earlier homes I have lived in, I have grown raspberries. To my way of thinking, this is an ideal crop for a home gardener. You can get maybe five bare-root dormant plants from a gardening supply house like Burpee in the early spring, plant them in the ground, and by that fall have a crop of sweet, flavorful berries you can eat right off the bush. And then you have a perennial bed that will fill in with even more canes each year. The “everbearing” (“fall-bearing” or primocane) varieties like Heritage or Caroline can produce from June through early October, depending on your climate zone. Not many pests attack raspberries, and the only maintenance needed is pruning, fertilizing, and watering during droughts. They do need nearly full sun, and well-drained soil.
I now live in a townhouse, However, I did want to grow raspberries, partly for the fun of growing my own food, partly out of nostalgia, and partly to give my grandson the experience of picking food from a plant instead of from a grocery store shelf.
The townhouse I live in now only gets nearly-full sunlight at one corner of the house. There is no appropriate garden bed there, so I need to use a container. Raspberries normally grow 3-4 feet tall, with roots that go down maybe two feet. I did not really have the space for a two-foot high/two-foot diameter container, and such a large container would be hard to move around. So last year I tried to grow a regular raspberry (Glencoe variety) in maybe a 14-inch x 14-inch pot. It was a total fail. The root space was just too small for this large a plant, I think.
So this year I regrouped, dug deep in my wallet, and bought a special dwarf raspberry called “Raspberry Shortcake.” This variety is bred to grow in small spaces. This plant is mostly supplied in a #1 size pot (nominally 1 quart, but actually smaller). I was impatient and wanted a larger plant that would bear fruit this year, so I spent more and bought a larger (# 2 pot) plant from Plant Addicts. It arrived in late April, and I transplanted it to a 16” x 16” (40 cm x 40 cm) plastic pot from Better Homes and Gardens. This pot is white, which I hope will reflect some of the sun’s heat during the summer.
This is a summer-bearing (floricane) raspberry, so it will only bear fruit for a few weeks in June-July. However, there is a new Asian fly pest spreading in the U.S. that attacks raspberries later in the season, so it may be best to avoid the fall-bearing varieties now anyway.
The plant had been pruned back to several slender, woody stems about ten inches high. Each of these stems has since put out several side shoots, most of which have now borne clusters of berries at their tips. I have enjoyed several dozen berries, and they are still coming. Also, I have had the pleasure of seeing my grandson pick and eat berries off the bush. I am a satisfied customer. Photos:
And close-up on the berries:
This plant cost me $72 ($57 plus $15 shipping). We got lucky with the pot, paying only about $22, when you can easily pay twice that for this sized pot. Potting soil was another $15. So about $109 all-in.
Obviously, I could have bought many little cartons of raspberries in the store instead for $109. I paid a high price for my plant, but got a value that I am satisfied with.
POSTSCRIPT: Just for completeness, to inform other would-be buyers of this plant – – it’s berry production peaked in mid-June here in U.S. growing zone 7a. It continued to produce a few berries a day till the end of the month. Since about July 1, it still produces perhaps an average of one berry a day, with 6-7 visible on the bush at any one time, but they are not ripening properly. Sometimes they just fall off before they are ripe, but most often they ripen very unevenly: some of the little “drupes” turn dark red (and then sometimes fall off) while the rest are still whitish. This may be a reaction to the heat, it is sunny and has hit 90 degrees F nearly every day, so the soil around the roots in the pot is way hotter than it would be for an in-ground planting . Anyway, none of this takes away from the satisfactory performance in June.
Post-PostScript: After watering the plant more frequently to let it transpire like crazy in the heat, and also after I loosely wrapped a 14-inch high strip of aluminum flashing around the pot to deflect some of the sun’s rays, the berries seem to be ripening better…getting 1-2 berries a day, though July 15, though they really are petering out now.
I write about various topics, usually with at least some loose connection to economics. Sometimes these are fairly macro issues, other times there are specific, actionable observations. For instance, back in March of 2021, we inferred from the critical shortages of semiconductors that car manufacturing would be severely crimped, likely leading to big price increases in cars. Our post “Chip Shortages Shutting Down Auto Assembly Lines; Buy Your Car Now Or Else” came out just in time (red arrow below) to alert the readership here:
But now, a price increase of more ubiquitous import looms. Most of us were not in the market for cars in March of 2021, but some 81% of us eat chocolate, with the average American consuming about 9.5 pounds a year. Indeed, 50% “cannot live without it every day.”
And so, it is with a heavy heart that I bring warning of a rise in the price of chocolate. Back in pandemic lockdown, I was bored and speculated a few bucks in cocoa futures, as tracked by the NIB exchange traded fund. My shares went up, and then down, and I sold out to limit losses (which was a good move at the time), and moved onto other investments.
Imagine my surprise when I randomly checked on NIB this week and saw the price ramp-up in the past few months:
A quick internet search led to a CNBC article which confirmed my worst fears:
“The cocoa market has experienced a remarkable surge in prices … This season marks the second consecutive deficit, with cocoa ending stocks expected to dwindle to unusually low levels,” S&P Global Commodity Insights’ Principal Research Analyst Sergey Chetvertakov told CNBC in an email.
The price of cocoa will feed into the price of consumer chocolate products, especially dark chocolate which has more actual cocoa content. And the price of sweets generally will rise on the back of sugar prices, which stand at 11-year highs, driven again largely by weather.
There is still time to stock up ahead of the hoarders…
Economist Writing Every Day 
