Benefits of being prepared. Notes on exercise. Bitcoin, gold, and what else? View from the Overton window.

20240516

The power was out when I woke up this morning.  Oksana found that there was a scheduled outage from midnight to 9:00 AM.  I had read they were going to do this sometime.  The Russians destroyed quite a bit of our generation capacity over the past couple of months.  They need to allocate remaining capacity fairly.  I had wondered why Kyiv wasn't affected.  Now we are.  There was no light when I went to shave.

I remember how awkward it was in Bethesda when a storm would blow trees down, knocking out power for a day or longer.  We simply hoped for the best and waited it out.  After a couple of winters of this stuff we are prepared.  First step was the fifteen-minute task of bringing the butane tank out of the shed and the gas burner out of the attic, then hooking them up.  The gas burner will stay in the kitchen for the foreseeable future.

Next step was to check the Internet.  The direct current battery backup about which I recently wrote held the whole nine hours – far longer than the batteries on our PCs.  It is better in every respect than the alternating current UPS we had been using: smaller, quieter, longer working, cheaper, and FWIW, uses less electricity. 

This is the impetus I needed to get Oksana to fill the second butane tank, now while we can.  The indoor space heater I bought uses 320g of butane per hour.  A bottle of gas holds 27 liters, 11kg or 24 lb. So, theoretically, one bottle will support a bit more than thirty hours' operation.  Butane has 21640 BTU/lb. I read that 16,000 BTU is enough to raise the temperature of a 5 meter square room by 25° Celsius.  Our SIP panel house has pretty good insulation.  That heater should keep the pipes from freezing.  In fact, we can probably keep fairly comfortable if we are without electricity for a week or so. 

Now that we have a car to easily bring tanks to be refilled, our two tanks should be enough.  If it appears questionable, we should have time enough to buy a 50 liter tank to supplement these.  It is a far cleaner solution than the charcoal I wrote about two years ago.  We still have about 200lb of charcoal, 13000 BTU/lb, as a deep backup.  We can use that to cook while we heat the house with gas.

It seemed to me that I kept my 80RPM stationary bicycle pace up faster and longer than I had any right to expect.  Here's a speech about it from just three years ago,  and another from around the same time about my career as a bicycle commuter. 

I wondered how long it would last.  Now I'm starting to learn.  My pace fell abruptly  from 80 to 70 when I had the exercycle tuned.  The resistance increased after the repairs.  But after that it fell again, first to 65RPM in the winter of 2023, and now 60 in the winter of 2024.  A series of colds kept me off the machine for most of the period from November through March, since which I have only gotten back up to 60.  I still sweat about as much, and still manage to spend half an hour a day, but I suspect I'll never see 65 RPM again. 

I am also slower and more cautious biking on the streets.  Still go the same distances, but with the derailleur down about one notch.  I have a greater sense of my own mortality, the recognition that a serious accident could permanently end my biking career.  If I want to keep biking with the girls for the next decade, I had better take it easy.

I didn't put any money behind a couple of my intuitions this year.  First I wrote that Bitcoin had gotten ahead of itself at $72,000, then that after gold's sudden spurt to $2,400 it would tread water for a while.  They fell, but they all recovered a lot last week.  Though there could be another pause, my bet is that they will all head higher.  My logic has been consistent for more than a decade.  Governments throughout the world, the US in particular, are using the printing presses to paper over increasingly large deficits.  It cannot end well.  It has gone on longer than I or much of anybody would have thought possible. 

Unrealistically low interest rates allowed unrealistic inflation in housing prices.  Increased rates, and thus increased mortgage payments, means it will be hard to sell them at current inflated prices.  Moreover, demand will fall as aging baby boomers attempt to sell to smaller, poorer cohorts of Gen X and Millennials, who are also not forming as many families and don't need as much space.  In my opinion real estate is no longer a good place to park money to avoid inflation.  Diamonds are out - Chinese have gotten pretty good at making gemstones in the laboratory.  That doesn't leave much except Bitcoin and precious metals. 

F. Roger Devlin is always on the edge.  I recently posted a re-review of his Sexual Utopia in Power from ten years ago.  He is right, as in right outside the Overton window of things you can talk about.  This time his theme is that the window has shifted.  He writes a book review of The Unprotected Class, in which he notes that it is finally becoming acceptable to talk about how straight white men have been being shafted for the last half century.  We have had enough.  It is a topic I have addressed off and on, writing on my web site about the experiences that led me to divorce and leave the United States in 2006-7.  While I'm glad it is coming out in the open, I'm equally glad to have left when I did.  My kids are doing all right here. 

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man continues to tinker with what looks like a long article on raising daughters.  I'm in no rush.  I doubt it will be widely read, and if it were to be, it would probably be met with outrage.  The theme is something to the effect that all of human society has become less tribal and communal, more individualistic since the Enlightenment.  Women were the heart of the family and the community, always less individualistic than men.  Realizing their individualism forces an uncomfortable choice between family and children on one side and career on the other. 

Graham