Peak technology

I am of the opinion that we have reached the peak of technology that benefits people at large.  From here on out almost all technological developments will be in the area of mass surveillance--monitoring driving, consumption habits, health, etc.  I'm not sure how this information will be misused, but misused it will be.

Technology is continuing to be abused in many ways.  AI is imperfect and will adversely impact the lives of those that are incorrectly classified as false positives in whatever the AI program is looking for.  This is likely to cause a lot of pain for those people.

PWM, temporal dithering and headaches with newer Apple displays

iPhones

Most new smartphones use a display technology called OLED.  These displays use a technology called PWM (pulse width modulation) for dimming the display.  This creates a flicker, which while not perceptible to the eye, can cause all kinds of symptoms -- headaches, nausea, etc.  Every time I have tried the newer iPhones with OLED displays in the store, I find I immediately feel eyestrain.  This has kept me from buying one of them and I have stuck to an iPhone with the older display technology called LCD.

If you have had issues with newer phones, you might be sensitive as well.  This article sums up the problem nicely.

PWM may not be the whole issue.  There's also refresh rates (which impacts the smoothness of scrolling), addressed to some extent by ProMotion in some newer iPhones, and also temporal dithering.  More on temporal dithering below.

MacBooks

With newer MacBooks, a small, but not insignificant, number of users, including myself, have experienced really bad headaches when using them.  A few things that I did to try and mitigate the problem included turning off true tone, turning off auto brightness, and turning off dimming when running on battery.  None of these helped.

Digging deeper, I discovered that there's a feature called temporal dithering that Apple implements in order to render a larger number of colors than the display is natively capable of.  Unfortunately there is no way to turn this off using native controls in macOS.

In some of the forums, it was suggested that SwitchResX is an app that can be used to disable temporal dithering by setting the display to render millions of colors rather than billions of colors which is the default.

Another useful tool for checking various aspects of displays such as pixel inversion is the Lagom LCD monitor test pages.  Testing side by side with a Dell XPS, the M1 MacBook Air showed noticeably more flicker.

Finally, Iris is another tool attempts to get around PWM with laptops by using an app to control brightness and filtering colors in a way that makes the display experience easy on the eyes.

References

• OnePlus is more important than you think, especially for people like me
• Exclusive: Ultra-bright displays are destroying our eyes, but the OnePlus 12 gets it right
• TÜV Rheinland Intelligent Eye Care certification
• Disabling dithering on Apple silicon Macs using Stillcolor.
• Flicker Sense -- Issues with flicker in LED lights and displays and how to report them
• Is the iPhone 17 PWM setting a scam?
• MacRumors long-running thread on eyestrain
• r/PWM_Sensitive

Planning for retirement

 Placeholder for useful links for retirement planning.

• State-by-state guide to tax burden on retirees

Some thoughts on ZIRP/NIRP

ZIRP stands for zero interest rate policy.  NIRP stands for negative interest rate policy.  As governments and corporations are awash in debt, ZIRP and NIRP appear to have been embraced whole-heartedly by central banks.

As the federal reserve started to lower its benchmark interest rate back towards zero (it is zero as of this writing), I started to think about what this means for fixed-income investments if they decide to go from ZIRP to NIRP.

In some of the online forum discussions, folks said a drop of 0.5% in interest, e.g. from +0.25% to -0.25% is the same as, e.g., a drop from +0.5% to 0%.  To show that this is not really accurate, I presented the following example.

Lets say to have $x to invest at an interest rate of r% for a length of time t.  Then as t goes to infinity:

• if r > 0, then the balance, x goes to infinity.
• if r = 0, then the balance stays exactly the same at x.
• if r < 0, then the balance x goes to 0.

In other words, with a negative interest rate, one's balance starts reducing over time and eventually goes to zero.  I hope we (the US) don't get to NIRP, but with the economy the way it is, there's no telling.  Japan and the EU have been in NIRP for a while now.  Large corporations have benefited from this.  LVMH for example had an offering of negative yielding bonds to finance its purchase of Tiffany & Co.--a case of investors actually paying LVMH to borrow their money!

The downsides of ZIRP and NIRP

Some of the down sides of ZIRP and NIRP are:

1. It penalizes savers and those that depend on interest for fixed income.
2. It causes people with money to speculate on assets such as stocks and real-estate. 
3. It causes real-estate prices to rise so houses are out of reach of the middle class without taking on excessive debt and becoming house poor.  This also means that any extended dip in house prices and employment can stress banks as their loans go bad.  This is what happened during the housing crisis.
4. It forces pension funds to speculate in stocks in order to meet their obligations.  This means that any extended dip in stocks will cause a number of these pension funds to become insolvent, putting their ability to pay out pensions at a risk.
5. It leads to rampant financial engineering by companies where they take on long term debt to buy back their own stock enriching their stockholders and executives.
6. It exacerbates wealth inequality in society since people that are wealthy to begin with (e.g. private equity, hedge funds, large businesses) have access to cheap money that retail investors and small businesses do not.

#3 and #4 pretty much mean that once ZIRP/NIRP are used by the central bank, the entire economy becomes dependent on frequent and larger interventions by the central banks.  At some point in time (I think we are already there now) the central banks own the entire market and there is no more real price discovery.

Proponents of ZIRP/NIRP argue that the pros outweigh the cons.

How to invest in a ZIRP/NIRP environment?

This is hard question to answer and I'm not really qualified to do it, but here are some of my thoughts.

Simple investment in savings and CDs are not likely to yield much.  I'm not a big fan of "yield chasing" where you open an account with an online bank only to have them reduce their rates a few months later.  Typical yields in a ZIRP environments are close to zero, lower than 0.1%.  That amounts to an annual return of less than $1000 on each $100,000 invested.  And then there's typically taxes that need to be paid even on those measly returns!

I don't like the idea of being forced to invest in stocks especially since there's an ethical dilemma where I don't want to support the kinds of financial activity that is destroying people's lives.  I know stocks will go up (don't fight the fed, as they say), but still.

Gold is an option, but one has to be careful of the pitfalls of investing in various types of gold and the possibility of price manipulation.

Treasury products such as I Bonds and EE Bonds are a possibility but you have to create and manage an account with treasurydirect.gov and some folks have reported less than desirable experiences when needing any kind of customer support.  The products also aren't as liquid--minimum holding period, interest penalty if cashed within a certain time period, etc., and there are annual limits on the amount that an individual can buy each calendar year -- $10K of each as of this writing.

If I figure something out, I will update this post.

In the meantime, this is what the chair of federal reserve thinks savers should do.  It just amazes me that the chair of the federal reserve and many politicians equate a 401(k) with risk assets.  It doesn't have to be that way.  Most 401(k)'s offer a stable value fund or money market fund as an investment option.  Those 401(k) savers are not benefitting from the federal reserve's policies.

Update 06/27/2020

The fed made a statement saying they will keep rates near zero until at least 2022.

Water hardness

I was trying to find out whether I would benefit from using a water softener with my dishwasher.

First, I contacted my local water supply and they pointed me to this report:
https://www.roseville.ca.us/UserFiles/Servers/Server_7964838/File/Government/Departments/Environmental%20Utilities/At%20your%20service/Water%20supply/Water%20quality%20reports/EU_WaterQualityReport_2018_DigitalVersion.pdf
The report has a line that says the water hardness is 24 ppm if coming from the lake or 90-250 ppm if coming from groundwater. Based on my ZIP code, I was also told that my area is serviced entirely from the lake.

However, the appliances measure water hardness in degrees of hardness.

So I found this calculator:
https://www.lenntech.com/calculators/hardness/hardness.htm
I plug in 24 ppm and get 1.35 German degrees of hardness.

Over to the dishwasher manual and I see a line:
"Water supplies with a hardness level higher than 4 gr/gal (4 °d) needs to be softened."
Going by that it looks like I would not benefit from having or using a water softener.

2019 Acura RDX Tech SH-AWD review

Here's a brief review of the 2019 Acura RDX with the Technology Package and SH-AWD.  I was mostly drawn to the car for its seat comfort.  The Technology Package is one level above the base model.  I chose it mainly because I wanted parking sensors and leather seats.  Otherwise, the base model would have been adequate.

Features I like:

• Seat comfort.
• Headlight intensity -- illuminates the road very well.
• Quality of materials.
• Interior and exterior design.
• NSX inspired shifter/center console.
• Steering, handling, power.
• Ride comfort.
• Cap-less fuel filler.
• Option to automatically reset trip computer on refuel.

Features that are OK but that could be improved:

• The padding in the seat pan could be better so that it removes pressure from the low back.  Look at Volvo and Tesla, for example.
• Gauges could be made less busy.  No need for km/hr and mph at the same time in a digital speedometer.
• When switching between displays in the center, it would be better if they didn't shrink, then switch back to normal size after a delay.  And re-do the information to be less wordy.
• Better ambient lighting.  Map lights feel underpowered.
• Change to a touchscreen infotainment.  Existing setup is prone to hunting unless you look at the screen and at the touch pad, which means we're not paying attention to the road.
• Better implementation of rear camera.  Currently unusable in rain, leave camera on for a few seconds when switching from R to D, more accurate guidelines (lines don't match up with the where the car's wheels are).  (Advance trim would help with rain since it has a camera washer.)
• Move the BSI (blind spot indication) from the A pillars to the mirrors.
• Road departure warning is overly sensitive, especially on internal roads.
• Lane keep assist doesn't work very well.  It keeps asking for the driver to take control.
• Lane departure warning is too sensitive and keeps buzzing even when within the lane.  I was forced to disable it.
• Quality control issues.  Several rattles and issues with the audio system.
• Interior could be quieter.  I registered 90+ dB on the highway using the Decibel X app on my iPhone.   The quietest cars register somewhere in the mid 60's.  (Advance trim would help since it has acoustic side glass.)
• MPG. Fortunately gas prices are muted and will likely remain that way as more cars switch to hybrid/electric drivetrains.
• No way to turn the headlights off when the car is moving in the evening.
• The chrome pieces on the steering wheel, but especially on the center stack, can sometimes, depending on how the sun is hitting it, reflect blinding light directly into the driver's eyes.  Should be replaced with something non-reflective.
• Rear visibility, especially the sides is very poor.
• The parking sensors don't extend to the sides of the bumpers and only warn about objects directly in front of or behind the car.
• Software updates are over the air, but map updates must be done via USB and the upgrade process is kludgy and prone to failure, causing a lot of frustration.  I discovered that the system doesn't like the USB drive to be larger than 64GB, and that is must not be a Sandisk!
• OEM tires are noisy.

Tip: When you're on a call, the multi-information and navigation displays are covered by a message saying "call in progress".  To be able to view the displays, one has to hit the "back" button on the steering wheel.  Without that, it is not possible to view the trip computer or miles remaining, nor is it possible to view the map or access the navigation.

Problems I have had with the car

• Crackling speakers: Intermittent problem that I noticed since the car was new.  Not fixed.
• Squeaky tailgate: Happened around 5000 miles.  Fixed under warranty.
• Whistling when engine starts or shuts: Happened around 7000 miles.  Fixed under warranty TSB.
• Infotainment will prompt for update even though no update is available.  Fixed in D1.2.1.
• Rubber lining near the tailgate lock has a gap.  Fixed under warranty by adjusting the lining.
• Ticking sound when starting the engine.  Intermittent problem.  Fixed under warranty by adjusting the PCM bracket.
• Numerous rattles all over the interior started to appear after about a year.  Not fixed.
• When starting on a trip from home the infotainment system booted up and threw an error "Unfortunately, AcuraLauncher has stopped".  Did not happen again on the return trip.  Not fixed.
• Received recall notice from Acura to replace the fuel pump motor.
• Clock doesn't automatically adjust for daylight savings even though all clock settings are auto (detect time zone, set time, etc.).  Fixed by changing to manual mode for settings and, after some time, switching back to auto.  (Update: Continuing to occasionally see problems with the clock being off by an hour.)
• Intermittently started to get a warning for "Drive mode change unavailable" at the bottom of the infotainment display.  Not fixed.
• Parking sensors are being triggered in rain without any reason.  See video.  Not yet fixed.
• Transmission got stuck in gear one day.  It wouldn't change gears and I had high revs and unable to gain speed.  Turning off the car reset the problem and when I took it to the dealer they were unable to reproduce it or find any error codes.  Not fixed.
• Had a leaking rear shock that made a creaking sound when going over bumps.  This was at around 45K miles.  It was replaced under the extended warranty that I had purchased.

2023 RDX

In March 2023, I decided to trade the 2019 in and get the exact same car except the 2023.  There were several improvements I noticed which I will write about later.

So far, I have had the following problems with the 2023:

• Squeaky brakes when backing up.  Not fixed.
• A failed transmission when the car had a few thousand miles.  The symptom was whistling noise at highway speeds.  Replaced under warranty.  
• AIS stopped engaging at around 30K miles.  Battery was replaced under warranty.  However, AIS still would not engage.  Not fixed.
• At around 33K miles, time in the infotainment would always reset to 4:00 at startup and start counting from there.  Location in GPS always showed car parked at home.  Infotainment system was replaced.  As a side benefit I got full wide-screen Apple CarPlay immediately following the replacement.

Additional Info

• RDX videos on the Acura YouTube channel
• MotorTrend's long term review of the RDX
• 2019 RDX Maintenance Minder

Being positive vs peaceful to manifest good health

I often hear well-meaning friends and relatives say "be positive", which doesn't resonate with me because I don't believe in faking it.  I recently came across this video where Deepak Chopra says:

@ 6:15

It's not that you have think positively all the time.  You have to get in touch with your emotions, you have to share them with somebody that you love, you have release them, you have to express them, because if you repress emotions that creates its own biology too.

@ 8:30

A peaceful mind is more important than a positive mind.  Because a positive mind can be working really hard at it, can be stressful to be positive all the time.  But when you're at peace, that's a wholly different thing because all the biochemistry of anxiety disappears.