How to Be Less Bored in Retirement

I got back in touch this past week with a long-time friend (we'll call him "J" in this piece) from the technology industry, who admitted he was "bored" being retired for the last 4 years.

 Here are my suggestions:

Y Combinator

This is, of course, the famous startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. J was intimately and successfully involved with 6 or 8 startups during his career, so he's well qualified and would of interest to this organization, I'd think. Maybe to start a Seattle branch?

Makeover

This is a traditional method for making oneself feel different ... 

Take up a New Game

Golf

This a traditional retirement pastime ... its characteristics:

• It's expensive (not an issue for J)
• It's time-consuming (maybe just what one wants?)
• You get "variable reinforcement" ... the same stimulus that keeps rats running through mazes
• There's a handicap system that allows differing levels of ability to play together fairly
• It takes years of practice and play to become proficient
• A good book on golf is:
  
  
  

Poker

There are at least two classes of poker play:

• no limit and pot-limit
• low fixed limit

You can see examples of play of no-limit on YouTube, for example:

Much more tractable for a beginner: low-limit poker. The book you want in this case is

A place to try either type of game around Seattle is Fortune Poker in Renton.

Bridge

I learned bridge from my mom starting at about age 8. But the game is dominated by Old People, so the retired are well represented.

My two-question qualifying survey to find if you are interested in bridge:

• are you analytical? (A bonus for techies: there's an intentionally limited communications protocol as part of the game.) J places out of this one, having worked in tech industry for decades.
• are you competitive? If you will hit a tennis ball back and forth across the net for more than a few minutes without keeping score, this game is probably not for you. 

Bridge is:

• cheap -- only cost is deck of bridge cards (make sure to get bridge cards, not poker cards as you have to keep 13 in your hand for starts)
• sociable -- you play with a partner against at least one other pair

The downsides:

• the pandemic had a negative effect on in-person play; a couple of the local bridge clubs folded
• it takes years to become proficient (for most people)

To get started: ACBL 

Try a Non-Standard Charity

The one I'm most familiar with is this one:

There are certainly more examples around, but this is the one I know best

Tack Against the Culture

Cultural assumptions suffuse everything we do. But which ones of these are wrong?

I first read this book when it came out in 2015:

I found this fascinating! Like everyone else in America, I had been bombarded with the "red meat and saturated fat are bad for you" ... but this book, by a journalist who was assigned to cover restaurants found that (a) the meats and cream sauces and whatnot she tried were delicious ... and she lost a lot of weight. (She had been a vegetarian up to this point.)

It's a pretty dense book that makes the case: saturated fat is good for us. 

I had switched from margarine to butter in 1988, but I still had red meat in a different category until reading this. 

There's also a chapter on vegetable oils that I missed the first time until I saw this discussion on YouTube:

After I saw this, I tossed my (delicious) Costco (canola and/or sunflower oil) potato chips.

My wife and I are now engaged in a lobbying effort to try and persuade a local favorite restaurant to switch from these oils to butter, beef tallow, or one of the other saturated fat oils.

Another thing I think I've learned: carbohydrates in general and fiber in particular are unnecessary to the human diet:

I could be wrong about all of this, but it makes sense to me and the lobbying effort keeps life interesting.

Get a pandemic puppy

J, I don't know if you already have pets, but this could add an aspect to life that you've missed up to this point if not. You can tack against the culture with this one, too:

Or relax and go with the cultural mainstream:

That's It ...

I hope this was helpful to J and any other readers. Comments welcome!

The Best Internet Service is ... (the one I already have, plus my phone hotspot?)

 I am visiting my wife's family in SW Michigan; they have Xfinity (aka Comcast) internet service. Late evening Wednesday night I was up discussing books with my niece and tried my computer on the wifi network in their home.

I have been using the "speed test" that just comes up when you Google "speed test" to tell when my home (T-Mobile) needs a reboot, which sometimes it does once or twice a day. But I tried it on the Michigan Xfinity service and wow, 100 megabit download; 50 upload! Really fast DNS response (one of the problems with T-Mobile) ... I said to myself: I'm getting this when I get back to Seattle!

But! Then I tried it at "prime time" (6:30 pm local time) and it ... crawled. Oh, right: Comcast back end infrastructure is shared among all users ... and Comcast has apparently oversold it based on the back end equipment they have. I was trying to do a timesheet for my job, which I do online every Friday night. I couldn't get it to respond even at 10pm ...

I then looked at Astound (formerly Xwave) ... but their online reviews were terrible ... multiday outages way too often!

I finally resorted to my phone (a Google Pixel 6) hotspot, which peaks at about 10Mb/second, got done what I needed to do, and turned it off!

So: T-Mobile is not shared and plenty fast enough when it doesn't need to be rebooted (despite slow-ish DNS response sometimes) ... so I guess I'll stick with that, of course with my phone hotspot as backup.

 

All aboard for a cross-country train trip! (See if this is for you; I think I'll pass next time!)

 I took my first long sleeper-car train trip this past week, due to curiosity about it after seeing YouTube people going on about the subject:

First: my points of agreement with this gent:

1. The scenery is largely spectacular and difficult to get to any other way. I enjoyed the mountains and even spots I'd never seen like Napierville IL, a tidy farm community.
2. The food was better than I expected.
3. Having only one power outlet is inadequate; I took a power strip with me after seeing this video.

But!

Starting with the food ... I was on for 83 hours (Coast Starlight and California Zephyr) not just 52 like this gentleman, and though the food is pretty tasty, there's no way to customize it at all (not helpful for the restricted diet I'm on for these next few weeks)... and the menu is the same, I expect for months. To get anything different, you have to pay extra for the "canteen" on the bottom  level, which I didn't even visit until the last day to see where it was.

Also: no wifi anywhere on any of the three trains I was on, nor in Sacramento station ... only when I got to Union Station in Chicago was there wifi ... which blocked the VPN I needed, making it useless. I fired up the wifi hotspot on my phone that I had been using all across the country, but inside the building there at Union there wasn't enough signal to do a video meeting that I needed to do.

Back to the physical environment: I was also in a roomette, and found it challenging to sleep even without getting the bunk bed involved. The train rattles and shakes at high speeds on part of the track, and there are often train "whistles" (horns, really) at all hours ... I blocked some of this out with earplugs, white noise and a sleep mask. But there were other sources of noise in the room like two clothes hangers on the wall that *banged* every time the train jiggled until I finally took them down and separated them.

This made me think of a NOVA show from 2017  Why Trains Crash:

Basically the most common problem was the engineer not realizing what section of track he was currently on, and going too fast for conditions. The solution is Positive Train Control, where a computer limits the speed and has a GPS link knowing where the train is at all times.

It looks like PTC  is working everywhere now (hooray!) we survived despite speeds up to 89 MPH .

The bathrooms are very much like airplane bathrooms, with one notable exception: the indicators that say OCCUPIED are all broken (on the superliners -- not so on the "local" I took from Chicago to Kalamazoo).  So it was very common to somebody rattling on the handle trying to get in and my having to say loudly "I'm in here!" Not my favorite by half.

The Announcements come any time between 7am and 10pm (in whatever time zone and everything goes to everybody ... why have the "first call for breakfast" repeated to everybody already in the dining car? And there could/should be a way for individual controls to block all except the extremely relevant ones ("this is your stop coming up in 30 minutes") and ("the train is on fire -- head for the nearest exit!")

Currently somebody on staff has to let every individual know directly "your stop is coming up" 

during these "quiet hours" ... I presume the "quiet hours" would be suspended if the train caught fire.

The staff worked feverishly to keep everything running, respond to call buttons to change out the roomettes from "sleeping" to "sitting" and back. Two things about this:

• My sinuses are an indicator that things aren't as clean as they need to be. I had a sinus infection that kept going for years until I started changing the pillow cases every couple of days ... Anyway, they went off after a day and a half on Amtrak, and it struck me that these little roomettes are uncleanable with the time and technology available.
• It turns out to be very possible to lose items under the bed when it's converted from daytime "chair mode" ... I thought I had lost my toothbrush on the Coast Starlight when I changed in Sacramento, but it turned out that it had wriggled under the bed with a couple of other "where the heck is it?" items.

Speaking of changing trains: you don't have much time, and if the change does happen early a.m. or late night, everything could be pretty much closed, unlike major airports where there are always a few facilities open 24/7. In Sacramento the station itself was open, but the only restaurant didn't open until later in the morning... otherwise there were restrooms with a code number lock (no surprise) that the Even Older Guy than I am couldn't get right in three tries and the thing locked for 30 seconds or so before allowing a more nimble-fingered person to get us in. But then there didn't seem to be any water in either of the sinks. I used most of a bottle of water I had with me just to wash my hands. (I later saw another section of the large bathroom where the sink did have water.)

Also in Sacramento, I purchased another bottle of water from the vending machine before the ticket agent approached me to scan my ticket. She then printed me a new hunan-readable one to supplement the QR code one I had up to that point. She then invited me to the "reserved seating area" for sleeping cabin passengers only, where there were exciting facilities like salted peanuts and cookies and little bottles of water free for the taking. So I grabbed a package of peanuts for breakfast along with more water to take with my morning pills ... and finally found a place to charge my phone at a power strip where the water-chiller box was plugged in. Whee!

There was a sign saying "this area under video surveillance" so I later asked the guy behind the desk if could leave my stuff (50 pound suitcase, backpack with 3 laptops + iPad, another too-heavy bag with pill bottles and other stuff) and he said "sorry, that's at your own risk".  So I wrestled it all with me into the bathroom stall, on which trip I found the exciting other working sink.

Overall, not my thing ... but if it's looks like something you want to do, my suggestions:

• Spring for the private room instead of the "roomette" like I got ... you get a private bathroom with shower with this. +$400 or so from the roomette price
• Visit the canteen earlier than I did to see what other food options they had available

Otherwise: see you at the airport!

Cholesterol: how did the medical establishment get this so wrong?

1. The Cholesterol Myth 

I've been reading about cholesterol and the failure of the medical establishment to establish the links between cholesterol levels and the diseases they asserted that these levels caused, mainly heart disease ... since the late 1980's.

It turns out we've learned a lot since the article mentioned above was published, but nothing to change the basic conclusion. Recent research is in this book:

A useful shortcut to a marker of cardiovascular health is this ratio:

                            Triglycerides /

                             HDL cholesterol

Anything 2 or below is supposedly excellent; mine was 1.31 recently when I had these levels checked.

2. Statins: the "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist

Statins like the bestselling Lipitor are supposed to lower cholesterol, and I guess they do. But what they don't do is prolong longevity, and they come with a whole host of side effects including muscle weakness / pain, digestive issues and others ...

3. Saturated fat: there's no evidence it's harmful

The book on this one is:

The author is Ms. Nina Teicholz. This one is also well worth reading.

Perhaps over your favorite breakfast?

Helium mining update: further price slide in $HNT (no way to go but up?)

 Bitcoin, instead of being  a store of value, turns out to be mostly a wacky speculative asset:

And the other coins, including our favorite $HNT, tracked them down. My analysis a few weeks ago  assumed a price of $18, which was near the bottom of the range it had been trading ... but right now: 

So: projecting out 5 years seems ... crazy! I guess I'll just let my little miner keep running; so far it's earned 0.88 $HNT, which is $8.36 .... wheee!

Why I stopped taking Vitamin C

 I've been taking 2000mg of Vitamin C for quite a while now:

I have read various promotional screeds about Vitamin C over the years, including (I seem to recall though I can't find it) a recent one from noted health expert Jeff Bezos.

But since the FDA isn't allowed to rule on the safety and efficacy of any of these supplements, where is one to turn?

The answer: ConsumerLab, a service to comb through scientific publications to show us the real ones ...

Including this one on Vitamin C a few days  ago, saying that people with the most vitamin C in their blood had a higher risk of death from all causes!

I have a tangerine most days, so that's enough for me from now on. Thanks to ConsumerLab for bringing this to my attention. Sheesh!

Helium Miner results suffer from bitcoin slide; how to cash out?

My analysis last week assumed the $HNT price at $18 after five years, but this week it's gone in the wrong direction, right now $13.72. 

Also it looks like I might have done better with a Bobcat Miner ... I will probably get another one in a few weeks and see if that's true or not.

As for cashing out ... I found it a little confusing; there's a "wallet" in your Helium mobile app that shows 0 dollars (plus your $HNT holding in tiny type) until you sign up with another crypto service like Crypto.com or Coinbase.

Here's a YouTube video that explains it pretty well, I thought:

The helium price has ticked down a bit more: $13.62, so right now my $HNT stake is worth $7.93. Whee!

Daylight Savings Time: how to handle it from here

 Miracle of miracles: the Sunshine Protection Act passed the U.S. Senate! Unanimously! 

So it should sail through the house and be on Joe Biden's desk for his signature any day now, right?

Not so fast ... all of a sudden a bunch of whiny sleep experts and others have come out saying things like:

• "We've evolved to be synchronized with daylight, so we should really be focusing on staying on Standard Time, not Daylight Time!"
• Melatonin only works when it's getting dark, so this will mess up sleep!
• "Little children will have to go to school in the dark in the winter! This is baaaad!"

So to keep us from missing the opportunity to get this done ... I propose the Light Up All the Little Kids Waiting for the Bus rider for this bill. Since the last time we tried this (Nixon administration), there have emerged a bunch of cheap LED headbands:

This one is $19.99 from Amazon ...

Let's allocate enough money ($100 million?) to get one of this for any little child who wants one.

OK? Let's not miss this opportunity!

Week 2: Miner gets to work!

My Helium miner started producing a trickle of the $HNT token it produces. So far I've made 0.41 $HNT, which is worth $7.22 at the current $HNT price of $17.62.

This shows one factor to consider: $HNT was about $24 when I started looking at this about a month ago, which would have made my little snippet worth $9.84.

Oh well; looks like $HNT pretty closely tracks Bitcoin, which is down with the rest of the stock market over the next month.

How far away is my breakeven point? Clearly this can't be predicted with any precision, as the $HNT price could go anywhere at any time. So I'm going to just assume $18. I've been generating $HNT for a week now (the miner was "syncing" for a few days until then.

So if the mining rig cost $585 and it makes $7.38 per week, that makes the breakeven point 79+ weeks away.

Let's go out 5 years with the same assumptions:

7.38 x 52.5 x 5 = $1937.250.

That's $1352 or so when subtracting out the capital cost. Not bad!

Also:

•  I'm neglecting Internet and electricity cost ... both are tiny.
• I'm assuming the hardware is reliable enough to run without a glitch for 5+ years

Next week I'll figure out how to convert the $HNT into real $$$ and move them from my virtual wallet to my real wallet  and will post the details here! See you then.

Week 1: Helium Miner installed and syncing

 I received the Helium network miner yesterday and got it installed (see below).

The helium network map looks pretty saturated with hotspot nodes:

But in my (new) neighborhood, not so much; there are my new one and two more visible.

I may be able to get more range by moving my miner up ... we do live near the bottom of a pretty steep hill, which may be blocking some signals, I guess ...

Payments are determined by the number of nodes you can reach and how capable/powerful those nodes are. So I am motivated to increase my node's visibility on the network if I can do that without too much trouble.

Helium apparently uses '3 words' addressing ... my node's ID is quite festive:

                            Bubbly Beige Ant

Helium is based on blockchain technology, which is the basic idea behind bitcoin. My node is still "syncing" with the blockchain so hasn't started earning money yet.

Anonymity reigns ... I of course had to give my name and address for shipment and payment of the miner, but Helium doesn't ask for any of that to register you on its network. It has a 12-word password scheme that's generated when you log in that's like a Bitcoin password but more easily readable. Make sure you keep a record of it!

And make sure that your local node is up and listening before you assume it's registered. I goofed on this to start with ... it connects with your phone via bluetooth to start, but bluetooth is only active for the first 10 minutes it's up. So I had to press the pairing button to wake it up and then I got the node set up as Bubbly Beige Ant.

So: still down the $587.87 capital cost of this box, plus a smidgen of electricity.

More next week!

Crypto mining that's socially useful ... and can make a bit of money too!

I recently read a book on the background and the highly dysfunctional team behind Ethereum, one of the leading crypto "coins":

 

Some of the principals behind this coin made boatloads of money. I missed the whole crypto investment thing until I bought $5 worth of Ethereum and $5 worth of bitcoin several months ago via the Webull app. My account is up 52% from inception in early 2021 ... but current value is $222.06: not a life-changing amount.

The New York Times had an article a couple of months ago about a socially useful application of crypto mining. 

I recently moved into a more densely populated area that it seemed to make sense for me to try this, so this week I took the first step of buying the equipment. It was $587.87 and will be here soon.

I'll update the blog every week on my results on this project; watch this space!