Costco has Wagyu burgers from New Zealand!

 Costco is terrific!

They had something new last week when I was in there: Wagyu beef from New Zealand!

75% lean, 25% fat too, so delicious on the grill! You get 12 for $19.99 -- $1.67 each!

They also have the more rounded looking patties on Costco.com for $119.99! 

 Bon apetit!

A compelling story from World War Two's U-boat war

My friend Lucy and I have been exchanging reading material over our summer birthdays for maybe 20 years. This year the top of my list was this one:

It focuses on the Wrens, a group of young women tasked with figuring out a strategy to keep German U-Boats from starving Britain into submission.

A quote from the book:

In December 1939, researchers from the University of Cambridge had tested whether Britain could survive with only domestic food production if U-boats forced an end to all imports. After subjecting themselves to a tough regime of work and a minimal diet, the researchers and their volunteers found  that they could survive, while  noting a 'remarkable' increase in flatulence ..

Fuel and clothing were worse .... rationed by 1941.

The solution: a game. The idea was to give sea captains the same look at the battle space they might get at the helm of their ships:

The game helped Britain come up with anti-U-boat tactics that turned the tide and kept the essential convoy goods coming throughout the war.

This is my favorite nonfiction read of 2020 so far. Five stars!

Audiobooks Vs. Podcasts: two extremes

There has been an explosion in good podcasts recently; there are enough out that they tend to make my Audible subscription recede into the background when I don't have a super-compelling audiobook at the top of the stack.

A recent pair of examples:

It took me a while to get into this one ... it's a very somber war story. It's based in some future where there is faster-than-light travel and some part of humanity has splintered off and become "savages" with different/greater capabilities and who think it's their duty to wipe out the previous version of humanity.

OK ... I gave this enough time to get to the moderately-compelling last part of the book: "Colonel Marx" is revealed to be ... well, I won't spoil the story by giving this one but overall ... well, 3 stars. I paused every time I had a marginally compelling podcast to listen to.

A vivid contrast:

This is the end of a trilogy that starts with The Collapsing Empire ... the first two of these are compelling enough, but not a blockbuster like this one. I stopped most podcast listening and even stayed up later than usual to listen to the end of this one ... one of the most fun endings of a novel I've experienced in a long time! (Even better than Scalzi's Android's Dream!)  Five stars!

Since I finished this two nights ago I have been catching up on podcasts, notably Marketplace, Freakonomics and Radiolab ...

I started "rereading" (via audiobook) the first of the trilogy to see if the first two were more fabulous than I remembered ... not so far. I wouldn't be surprised if everything was to set up the fabulous third book, sneaky and talented Scalzi!

RoundUp (glyphosate) causes cancer ... but don't look for it on the label!

The New York Times published this today ... Looks to me that the preponderance of the evidence shows that Roundup (glyphosate) causes cancer:

Part of the agreement is that Bayer (owner of Roundup) can't be forced to put a cancer warning on the label.

That's why I'm telling you ... OK?

How the gold standard in our minds messes up our economy

For decades the U.S. and other countries in the developed world were on the gold standard, making sure that they didn't issue any more paper money than their holdings in gold could support. In the U.S. the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce, so you couldn't inflate the currency very much at all before investors around the world cleaned you out of your gold reserves.

The gold standard sounds good to many, having money that's "based on something" rather than "just paper." But the effects of the gold standard are a real drag on a modern economy. If you need to do some things that are up for the U.S. right now:

• $1 trillion infrastructure investment ... just a start, according to many experts, proposed again today by Trump

• $2 trillion or more for supporting the country through the pandemic that is "just getting started" according to many public health experts

• All the regular trillions for all the regular stuff that goes on in the U.S. as normal ...

If you start to bump up against the gold in your vault, where do you cut at a time like this?

I just read an excellent book that explains the explains the situation in detail:

Fortunately we ditched the gold standard in the U.S. for good in 1972 ... unfortunately not many noticed how different a "fiat currency" regime such as those now in place in the U.S., Great Britain and Japan, among others, operates:

• There is no fixed quantity of money ... the central banks (Federal Reserve in the U.S.) can create as much money as needed by changing accounting entries in their computers
• The only real limit is inflation, and as we in the U.S. have seen the last few years, the economy can take a whole ton of extra money sloshing around it with "quantitative easing" and all the money that Congress and the Fed threw into the mix since the 2008 financial crisis ... no inflation, not even the 2% target that the Fed says it wants!
• There's no reason for a fiat currency country EVER to default on a payment ...
• And certainly not a social security payment, which is supposedly "underfunded for the long term" and blah blah ... not so.

Dr. Kelton was on Senator Bernie Sanders' staff for some years and lately has reportedly been consulting with the Biden campaign ... Let me end this post by letting you hear from Dr. Kelton herself:

Michael Lewis interviews "Inner Game of Tennis" author

Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors; his books include The Big Short, Liars Poker, and several other excellent titles.

Michael Lewis

His podcast, though Against the Rules, has emerged from the large pack of podcasts now in existence and now is one of the best I know of.

This season he's focusing on the "rise of coaches" and these are so far even better than his first (excellent) season on "referees."

The episode "The Coach in Your Head" is an interview with Timothy Gallwey, the author of this book:

I bought a copy of this book shortly after it came out and appreciated it for what it was (tennis instruction as I was playing in those days), but what I didn't know was that Gallwey was inundated with requests from corporate executives and others to "do what you did for the tennis players."

The coaching stories discussed in this episode of the podcast are fascinating, from corporate executives

To firefighters:

To his daughter, Dixie, trying to improve her hitting so college softball coaches would notice her:

Probably not Dixie but I couldn't find a picture of her

Anyway, fascinating stuff ... five stars!

Modern job hunting hacks 2020

... is published on Medium ... Thanks for reading!