The art of bread making

This is a video showing how bread is made in the traditional way sans yeast.  The video was made by a small baker called Artisan Lavinia in Oregon House, California.

It is rarity to find such a process in use even among those selling so called gourmet products.  Some bakers that use a traditional process are featured in the WSJ article titled Can You Carbo-Load Your Way to Good Health?

How to die

A morbid topic, but I came across a discussion on bogleheads about how to die.  It posted a link to this article titled How Doctors Die.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

It's a sobering article worth a read.

Closely related are Death with Dignity laws.  As of this writing, five states -- California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Washington -- and Washington DC have laws for this.

How long has that food been sitting on the store shelf?

I read with some amusement that there were changes being planned with respect to the sell-by dates on food items.  The changes are being done to allow people to understand it's safe to eat stale food; i.e. don't discard something just because it's past the sell-by date.   Is this a sign of society advancing?

Why aren't manufacturers required to put the date packed on such items?  That would give the consumer immediate information about how long the food has been sitting around.  The practice of putting the date packed is actually quite common in India and it's disappointing that it is not used in the US.

Some products do actually have the packed date encoded, e.g. Manna bread, and it is not uncommon to find product sitting in the frozen section for 9+ months.  I don't care if that's within what the company considers acceptable, it just seems too long.  With all the technology for supply chain management, there should not be a need to have food sitting on shelves that long.

And then I've come across some products sold in the frozen section that have neither a packed date nor a sell-by date, e.g. Berlin Bakery bread.  This one is scary because now we have no idea how long the product has been sitting in freezers at the distributor and then the store.

Some products go above and beyond give you even more information.  Bariani olive oil, for instance, encodes the harvest date and packed date.

I typically pay attention to these dates when buying food products.  Several times I have come across products on the store shelf that are past their use-by date, so even though store staff are supposed to be checking for this kind of stuff, they probably don't.  In this day and age with smart everything, there should be some way to alert store staff that they have stale stuff sitting on their shelves.

The lack of availability of a sell-by date on items sold in bulk bins usually keeps me away from those.

Why do people prefer SUVs?

I don't like SUVs and pickup trucks.  They are too high and if one is in a car behind an SUV, then one's ability to look ahead for road signs, traffic, and curves in the road is severely compromised.  They also tend to be heavier, thus exhibiting poorer braking and handling in emergencies, and also consume more gas than a car.  SUVs are supposedly built to be driven off road, but most of them will never actually be taken off road.  So I started to ask myself the question as to why people prefer SUVs?

One day, I had sort of an epiphany--since the roads are so bad, so ridden with potholes and undulations, even a trip to the neighborhood grocery store feels like an off road experience.  Of course, I happen to live in CA which is a state with one of the worst road conditions.  Looking at the data in the link, I shudder with the thought of what it's like to drive in Washington DC which is reported as having 91% of its roads in poor condition.  Also, as mentioned in the article, these bad roads end up costing drivers hundreds of dollars in repairs for damaged tires, rims, and suspensions.

SUVs with their larger wheels and tires are able to better weather the pothole ridden roads, so perhaps it makes sense that people prefer them.  Their owners probably find the ride a lot more comfortable relative to a car.

The condition of the roads makes me wonder where the tax monies are going.  Around where I live, the average time between a road being repaved/repaired and new potholes showing up is no more than a few months.  It's 2017--surely the technology exists to build longer lasting roads.

Why self-help books don't work

I cannot think of how many times people offer well-meaning suggestions -- "hey check out this book" or "listen to this podcast".   I went through a phase in my life where I was a self-help junkie.  I spent hours in the self-help aisles at Borders and Barnes & Noble (yes, this is back in the day when they were still doing well) previewing many books and buying a good fraction of them.  At some point, I started noticing that I really wasn't getting much out of these books.  In fact, I got to a point where it sickened me to even think of self-help books.  Why?

There's a formula to these books

They are typically about a subject that bothers the vast majority of people, e.g. anxiety, anger, weight management, becoming free from the daily grind, etc.  The book usually starts out with the author's story of why and how they got interested in the subject.  Then they proceed to discuss the science or research around that problem.  And finally they offer a basket of solutions and discuss success stories.  If one reads enough self-help books, one will immediately become aware of the pattern and also the repetitiveness of the solutions across different authors.  The same is true for TV shows and documentaries.

Success stories are always available, but one must realize that these are far from the norm.  For every college drop out that makes it to billionaire like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, there are a million others that dropped out of college to follow their passion and failed (well maybe some small percentage made it, but not quite as big).  In other words, this is not much different from the roll of a dice.  There is no formula to it.  The same goes with success stories for regaining physical health or learning to overcome psychological health issues.  For every one that succeeds, there are a bunch of others that tried the method and failed.

Does that mean that self-help books are useless?  At this point, I do consider the vast majority of them near-useless.  Reading them is basically akin to buying a lottery ticket.  Chances are, even if it works for one, there are 100,000 others for whom the advice did nothing.  So the odds are stacked against the average reader.  Next time you read a self-help book and practicing the advice doesn't work for you, don't be ashamed or disappointed.  Just realize that you fell for the trap of the self-help book!

(This is my personal opinion, of course.  Others may have had better luck with them.)

How to think about money?

This was the question asked in one of the financial discussion forums.  Here are my thoughts on this subject.

Money is like grease. In sufficient quantity, it makes everything in life go smoother. Too little and you hear squeaks all the time. Too much of it, and it doesn't help things as much, and in fact can cause things to gunk up if it's used without measure.  People with "old money" tend to be much better at managing it.  And, just like grease, money by itself cannot fix a broken machine (whether that machine is health, family, etc.).  An extreme lack of money can cause certain areas of one's life to breakdown (inaccessible healthcare, unable to take advantage of opportunities for education, stress in relationships, etc.).

As I dabble with new age beliefs, I am starting to see how it is very limiting to think about money the way many "responsible" folks do. We think of it as a limited resource and one that can only be earned through hard work and discipline. More and more, I'm finding out that is not true. There are so many examples to the contrary. People born into wealth have different beliefs about it as do people "in the zone".

A few more thoughts on what I have found true in my life with respect to money.  When one is "hungry", one is extremely susceptible to falling for elaborate scams, and must therefore be on guard for them.  When one is "full", it becomes a lot easier to spot such scams, and therefore stay away from them.  Also, people with low self-esteem will often let themselves be scammed even though they can see it, just because they are afraid of being alienated by the scammer.

Stealth inflation

When most people think of inflation, they think of the headline numbers being published like the producer price index (PPI) or some variant of the consumer price index (CPI) such as the CPI-U (CPI for urban consumers.  While those methods are itself are debatable, what I'm going to talk about is a little different.

This is really about how planned obsolescence is engineered into products.  Everything is affected from mundane household items like paper towels, garbage bags, and toilet paper to small and large appliances (toasters, refrigerators, etc.), to furniture, clothes shoes, computers, cars, you name it.  Basically, companies are able to engineer their products precisely for a certain lifetime.  Where companies took pride in building products that were practically indestructible and would last a lifetime (e.g. a washer or refrigerator that would last 30 years with no problems), they now engineer their products so that they last 5, maybe 7 years.  Financial engineering has allowed them to set aside money to deal with warranties and buybacks.  In the process the expense is being borne by the consumer.  Where you might have bought such an appliance for life, you now need to buy 8-10 of them over that same period of time.  On paper it looks like you're getting a lot of features for the same amount of money, but in reality, the quality is gone and you're really paying 6-8 times.  This kind of inflation is not reflected in any of the indices mentioned above.

Where I used to buy clothes that would last forever, it feels like I'm constantly wearing them out every few months now.  Where I could buy a pair of shoes and have them last a year, they are now gone in 3-4 months tops, usually even sooner.  The price of a pair of shoes is the same or lower, but it's now made of such poor quality, it just doesn't hold up.  In this process, we have not only lost our money, we also waste more time shopping and also spend many futile hours looking for something that might be of better quality.  Does better quality exist?  It does, but even that is hit or miss, and usually only with luxury brands.  To get decent quality from a pair of shoes, one would have to pay about 5-10 times what one might pay for a "normal" pair.  And yet, going with a luxury brand and paying that much may or may not yield a better product, so it's a roll of the dice.

What is most frustrating is when things fail in unpredictable way, e.g. trash bags puncturing and making a mess of everything.

Best of all companies will then send a survey to ask your perception.  There's probably an executive at that company saying "if people aren't complaining, we're building in too much quality and we need to reduce it."  In this way, they target a delicate balance where they achieve decent reviews (typically written by people who haven't owned the product long enough) and a few bad reviews (from people that experienced the product fail unexpectedly and actually bothered to write a review).

Planned obsolescence coupled with offshoring of manufacturing to cheaper locales has kept inflation in check.  What happens after every ounce of quality has been engineered out of the product and there are no other lower cost locales to move manufacturing to?  That's when a "new and improved" product is introduced (still worse than the original one) at a higher price, and that's when we start seeing regular inflation.

It's going to be a slow and painful journey into the future.

A new business model

Purely my perception--with planned obsolescence, we're seeing the emergence of a new business model.

The model works as follows.  The company builds a product with bad quality and starts selling it.  The majority of people won't complain.  For the small percentage of people that complain, the company simply issues a refund (if the customer complains to the store) or coupons for more free bad product (if the customer complains to the manufacturer).  Manufacturers have a finance department that determines how much funds need to be set aside for issuing such coupons and refunds.

Product quality, which was the primary driver of brand loyalty, has now been replaced by loyalty programs (rewards points) and marketing. But loyalty programs are itself an illusion--they encourage one to buy sub par quality, overpriced goods, in exchange of a tiny percentage of the purchase in rewards.

Legislation to the rescue?

France recently passed a law to require appliance manufacturers to display how long their appliances will last and how long spare parts would be available for the same.

Imagine if all products required that?  There would less room to cheat.