I Live in Iowa: Week 164

What a week! Seriously, I had a pretty big event, life changing I would say. However it is so serious it deserves it's own post on another day this week. I'll get to it, don't worry. Suffice to say what I have to talk about was more than a year in the making, the public announcement can wait a few more days.

Work has been crazy! We had a colleague move to another area and he is not being replaced. The short story is my workload just went from not so big, to pretty big. I am now responsible for "sheparding" as I like to think of it, many more parts along the development process. The vast majority of work has been done to everything already, so it's manageable to be responsible for so many parts, I'm not working 70 hour weeks or anything crazy. I learned a tip recently, drive home slowly. Often we, at least I, leave work in a rush and the stress of work gets carried into the next activity for the day. I have been learning to take it easier and more relaxed. So I have been driving home after work slower and by the time I get home I have a smile on my face again. 

That being said, taking on all of this extra work recently I hope is noticed. I will tell you what, a thank you and a little recognition for doing "what you are supposed to do" or your job goes a long way. 

Running was a really good week. For the near future, I am going to give my mileage in leagues because the numbers are getting a little ridiculous to non runners and sedentary people. I ran 36.7 leagues this week including a 20 minute tempo and a half marathon trail race that I was second to Scott Gall in. Look him up, except for him being 40 I don't feel bad losing to him at all. Plus I ran the course faster than last year despite being in worse shape. It might just be that the mileage is starting to make a difference again. 

My parents were also in town Friday night and Saturday morning to see me race. You should have heard my mom when I jumped a guard rail "whoa!!"  Funny story, my mom didn't tell my grandma about my dad until the second time he asked her to marry him. 

I did go out once and played some cranium at a friend's house too. I have pretty great friends!

That just leaves the big news, and you just have to wait for that.

I hope you had a good week. I usually don't say it explicitly but I struggle a lot in my life, with relationships, work, running, selfishness, and plenty of other sins, and while I always try to put a positive spin on my life here on my blog, it certainly isn't all roses. I ran more miles this week than some runners run in a year, and more than some serious runners run in a month. Yet there are dozens of weeks where I just can't or don't get that kind of volume. In other words, I sincerely hope that you can look around yourself and smile at how blessed you are and tell someone you love her or him, despite the challenges of the day.

Sunk Costs versus Opportunity Costs

Sunk costs are the time and effort we have put into something already.

Opportunity costs are what we are giving up to do a given activity in the future.

Most people value sunk costs more than opportunity costs. In other words we value the past more than we value our future. Yet, is that really the best way to go through life? I mean, the future opportunities could be very positive from making a change. This is the tension of change. The pull to continue the way things always have been or the pull to do something different. The point is, life has hard decisions about your future. Change can be very difficult. Yet it is change, and a new opportunity that can redirect the course of your life. Sometimes the opportunity costs of doing what we always have done become too great to ignore and we need to make a change.

It's Hard... Until It's Not.

Sometimes it feels like I am banging my head against the wall. Okay, it feel like that a fair amount of the time. However, there often comes a point, when the wall no longer exists. There comes a time when it is not hard any more. Struggling to up my mileage I wasn't getting even 90 miles a week. This week I might get 110. Diffusion was confusing, until one day it made sense. We couldn't figure out how to solve a highly stressed structure, until we tried a simple solution that worked.

Many things in life are a struggle, and many always will be, but for some things there comes a day when it is no longer a struggle, when our weaknesses have become our strengths.  It's funny how things work out.

Capital in the 21st Century: The Question of the Public Debt (Chapter 16)

Funny story, many of the people who say we need to reduce our public debt, at least in the United States, are the same people with millions and billions of dollars lending money to the United States and earning some interest off of that money. While we think of the public debt as money spent on services for the poor, at least that’s how it seems to come off in the media, the reality is the rich are lending to the government to do a service and earning interest on that debt. You are welcome to disagree with that assessment, and I am paraphrasing from the book, but please don’t try to convince me that foreign governments own all $14 trillion of our national debt.

This was a wide ranging chapter, from the national debt of European countries and their repeated failures, or procrastination toward a central government for the Eurozone, to climate change, the Cyprus banking crash, and discussing central banks in general. In fact, I will just summarize this chapter by sub section.

Reducing Public Debt: Tax on Capital, Inflation, and Austerity

Basically, there are three ways Piketty suggests to reduce the public debt. And before I go any farther, since this book is being touted by the tax reducing crowd as communist and liberal, it is worth say Piketty seems against any national public debt, although the reality is some number, maybe 10% of GDP, maybe 50% of GDP (but certainly not 90% or 100+% of GDP) may be appropriate. He does say that the way to decide on the level is through democratic debate in a parliament or congress, which is how the USA has arrived at our enormous national debt. In short first is the tax on capital he previously suggested, although he suggests in this chapter a one time, or maybe annual for five or ten years, a large tax with top marginal tax rates of 10% or even 20% on those with many millions or billions of euros. This is a no brainer because in Europe there is roughly six or seven times the amount of private wealth as public wealth, which is about equal to the public debt. In other words, In other words, the public debt in Europe could be erased and for every $6 of private wealth there would now be $5. Of course this progressive tax on capital would affect billionaires a lot more than people like me who have a net worth closer to the value of a Ford Focus. The second way is through inflation, which is the most common method, and quite effective. Inflation helps people (or governments) who are in debt. However, runaway inflation can happen rather easily and that is why most central banks are focused on not letting it happen. In a high inflation environment people can suffer from “minor” setbacks like not getting a raise that keeps up with inflation. There are many other issues with inflation, most of which I have trouble relating to because they happened before my time. The third way is austerity, which is not pleasant either. Apparently England in the 1800s had a lot of austerity because after the Napeolinc wars in 1815 they had debt that was around 200% of GDP. In short, austerity hurts because all of the services we like, grind to a halt. 

Does Inflation Redistribute Wealth?

Inflation can be an issue because some people, usually those with the most money to invest have the ability to move their money around when inflation is happening and mitigate the effects of it. However, the person with only $1000 in the bank, in a saving account will be losing money each year earning a lower interest rate than the rate of inflation.

What Do Central Banks Do?

Good question, they lend money to governments and companies out of thin air. Now, the actual amount of wealth does not change. They loan another $100,000 to a company, who suddenly has $100,000 in cash, and a new $100,000 debt. The sum is zero. That’s essentially what central banks do. And they do it in a way that inflation will not increase more than 2% a year. This was a long section like eight pages, I’m not going to cover it all. A strange thing about central banks is that they are part of the government, but independent of the government. In other words, every time they have had an increased role in the world has been during a time of crisis where the solution and role of the central bank has not totally been thought through. When the government closed last year in the US for a couple weeks, the month before the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) had resorted to emergency measures, which people didn’t even know if they were legal or not. As an example of what the Fed or any central bank can or cannot do, when the US bailed out General Motors, it was the federal government who made the loans and terms, not the Fed, who simply processed the loan you could say.

This goes back to the rich lending to governments who pay interest and then provide services to the poor. In other words, Wal-Mart and McDonalds surely have some money in US Treasury Bonds and then encourage their workers to take advantage of US government programs like SNAP (food stamps). In other words, instead of paying each worker $100 more a year, they lend $100 to the US government who pays, maybe $1 or $2 in interest (at current rates) back to the company. For the record, I made up those examples, they may not be true, but I would expect both companies do own US bonds and pay workers minimum wage. Although it is a stretch to encourage workers to use governement services for the poor.

The Cyprus Crisis: When the Capital Tax and Banking Regulation Come Together

This section is about an off shore banking haven for Russian Oligarchs and a one time tax on capital that was challenging due to very little transparency in banking. In short, most of my readers are US Americans and for better or worse might not know that last year Cyprus had a banking crisis, but the point is transparency in banking is a good idea and a tax on capital has happened recently, without the world falling apart.

The Euro: A Stateless Currency for the Twenty-First Century?

Piketty is amazed at the Euro, that it was created, without any sort of central parliament or democratic government. Which leads into the next section...

The Question of European Unification

The author is French, so I must apologize that this is not centered wholly on Americans. I’m kind of joking, because we live in a global society and we all know that, right? But I’m also not joking because a large number of Americans, maybe 65%, do not have a passport and are somewhat ignorant of the global economic environment we inhabit. This is a four page section where he argues for a central Eurozone parliament and a collective national debt instead of debt being done by individual countries. This is due to Greece, Italy and Spain taking out loans at low rates because they were in the Eurozone, but then running into trouble because their taxation and spending were not in line with other more fiscally conservative countries in Europe (cough, Germany, cough). Piketty seems to think that greater European unification is coming, although it may take decades. Of course, he says that as a Frenchman, and from my point of view the French and Germans, more than any other two countries, want a common currency (and maybe even budgetary government, but I haven’t thought that out...) because they do not, absolutely do not, want to go to war again.

Government and Capital Accumulation in the Twenty-First Century

The rich are going to get richer. As long as the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the growth rate (g) and I mean the compound growth rate of population and productivity together (which equates to the GDP growth rate), the rich will get richer. However, if a tax on capital can bring r=g, oh boy... now we’re into the “golden rule of capital accumulation”! Which leads into...

Law and Politics

This is a short section, despite the title, about how parliaments, and not judges, should decide on matters such as the public debt, through open democratic debate representing the will of the people. Matters like hundreds of billions of dollars of public debt, and new debt, are too important for one person to decide.

Climate Change and Public Capital

This is what everything usually seems to come back to, energy. For example, of all the oil and natural gas that comes out of the ground, how much should be owned by the citizens of the country (or county or city or state) that it comes from? Alternatively, assuming that there is a hurricane like Hurricane Sandy or Hurricane Katrina that happens again (and there will be, I will bet on it) and in the next 100 years many hurricanes, forest fires, floods, droughts, and other natural disasters related to climate change, what is the discount rate we give to those scenarios today? I love the concept of a discount rate! I’ve written about it before, the basis is, what do you expect the change to be per year on average over a long time, 1%, 3%, 5%? Because that figures into your planning. The point being even the economists agree with the climate change scientists that climate change will cause expensive damage to the world we know today, but they disagree about discount rate we should give ourselves when planning for that future (good thing economists don’t sell insurance). I mean, given a discount rate of 1%, we need to make major changes today to how we deal with climate change. Given a discount rate of 5%, we can expect that only a small effort is needed today to prevent the tragedies of the future. (So that this makes more sense, think of it like this, a discount rate of 100% would mean that it will not happen this year, but will definitely happen next year.)

Economic Transparency and Democratic Control of Capital

Again, I feel that the idea of transparency of capital is a critical feature of this book that most people are ignoring, maybe because very few people have finished reading it. My dad never wanted door locks within our house because he did not want us keeping secrets from each other. It made me mad at times, but now I openly blog about my life five days a week, and I understand that transparency and honesty are values I hold dear to me. It is the same with capital, wealth, money, etc. Once we know what exists we can decide as a group, as a country, or as a world, what we want and who might have the ability to pay a little more for such things, but of course the first hurdle is even knowing what exists.

Well, only a few pages for the conclusion left. I have to say, finishing all of the chapters I mostly agree with the author, financial transparency (honesty) and a global tax on capital both make sense to me.

I'm tired.

Most of the reason I am tired is from trying to increase my mileage. That involves trying to run in the morning as often as I can, which is tiring getting up that early. In the afternoons, it involves running more miles than I feel like running. It's like trying to dig myself in a hole just deep enough I can get out of it every day and dig another hole.

Secondly, I’m tired from Everest. Honestly, I’m not thinking about it too much these days. That being said it comes up in conversation probably more than once per day. I feel like I am shying away from some public social events because I fear it will come up and people will want to hear about it. I want to share, but it’s not a pleasant memory for me, and emotionally it takes something out of me when I tell another person. 

Third, traveling has gotten to me. This past weekend I just ran and laid around watching movies. It was amazing. I slept a like nine hours a night both nights, and almost napped both days. It was quiet and I had some time to reset from the barrage of activity that my summer has been.

Fourth, work certainly has it’s ups and downs as last Thursday demonstrated. I'm pretty good about not bringing work home with me, but if you have a bad day at work, and I mean emotionally draining because I care about doing my job well, it's really hard to come home and flip a switch and suddenly be full of energy and happy. 

I am growing to dislike more and more the phrase, "How's it going?" Because the response is supposed to be "good" and that's a lie a fair amount of the time. Sure I'm doing good compared to the situation of most people in the world, but for my average I am certainly hitting below average some days and I just want to say, "it's going pretty bad." No one wants to hear that. It's so easy to live in a Stepford, everyone is a little above average, world. I try hard to be honest. I don't always say what's on my mind because often it's not relevant to the task at hand, other times voicing my opinion would not help build relationships. In short, I'm tired. I've had better months, better summers. I feel like I have the authority to make a difference in my life, yet I sit there and do the same things that bring me success because I'm tired of failing. 

I Live in Iowa: Week 163

Another week in the record books. I don't think it would be wrong to say I can be an emotional person. My head has been up and down this past week. Some highlights…

Thursday, what a day! I am hosting a coworker from India and this was his last day in the office, so an eventful day in any regard. However, around 11:30 AM in a meeting we learned that we had failed a test. I won't go into the specifics, but let's just say failing this test was easily going to cost tens of thousands of dollars, and a hundred thousand was not an impossible unexpected cost from failing this test. I went into overdrive sending emails and calling people to basically get the rework started and get the manufacturing progress stopped, that day. The short story is this should not have been tested so late in the program. Quickly this escalated above me to managers and supervisors as we went about damage control. However, around 3 PM, as I'm still on the phone talking about this issue, I get a call on line two that the test was not done according to our internal specifications due to another product breaking the fixture recently. A quick rerun of the test results ignoring the erroneous test and substituting a similar test, and the news comes back, we passed!

How to waste an afternoon…

Then we went out for a wine tasting and out to eat a steak as a goodbye to our coworker who is leaving. Needless to say, by the time I went to sleep Thursday I was done. I ran twice, I did some social hosting, I had an emergency at work, that was declared not an emergency later that day.

I ran 87 miles this past week. I'm struggling to get my mileage into the 100s, but I've been in the high 80s the last few weeks. It takes time for the body to adapt to stress and recover and be able to handle ever higher mileage, and I feel I am getting there, but I am not there yet. On a side note, I think I might start popping a 27 mg iron pill every day instead of only two or three times a week. I've done that the last few days and felt much better.

Friday I spent an hour in a kevlar canoe with the best local paddler learning about paddling sports. Why am I dabbling in something new? If it goes anywhere I'll let you know.

The summer is ending, and I am sad about that. I am sad because I feel that opportunities are slipping through my fingers and I am doing nothing about it. To some extent we all live in the real world and our own fantasy world, but where does one end and the other begin? What is just my imagination and what is real?

I have NOT decided if I will return to Mt. Everest.

I told people I would not even make a decision about returning until August. I think a fair number of people expected me to announce a decision August 1st, and annouce I would return. Well, I'm not going to because I have not decided anything.

This is not an easy decision to make. 16 people died in one minute, not because of their skills, but because a serac collapsed and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yes, I still want to know if I have what it takes to climb to 29,000 feet without oxygen bottles, but after seeing others who have been without supplemental oxygen at nearly that altitude, and my own running and climbing exploits at altitude, I think I could walk to 30,000 feet.

Given the Sherpa strike and other experiences, part of me never wants to return to Nepal. To be honest, compared to Rwanda, Pakistan, Costa Rica, and most places I have traveled, Nepal was one of the least friendly places I have been. Most fun and exotic places to travel there are so few tourists that the locals have a pleasure helping the foreigners. In Pekanbaru, Indonesia a teenager walked around with me for over an hour just to show me around and help translate. In Rwanda a man I met the night before volunteered to go on a five mile run around his village with me the next morning, and we had a good run. In Pakistan our high altitude porter invited us into his house for a meal as we were leaving Baltistan. In Nepal, no one ever invited me into their house. They have had so many tourists that to them I am just another dollar sign.

My friend put it this way when discussing Nepal and the Everest region, "in a rural place a store ower is just happy you stopped at his shop. In the Solokumbu they wonder how much money they can get from you."

Yet I still have the question whether I can walk to the highest point in the world in my head. I also have friends there, and Asian Trekking was tremendously accomodating. I would have no reservations going on an expedition with Asian Trekking again, except to hope the other clients had high altitude and technical climbing experience.

Honestly, I might not make a decision until December. Physically I want to run another marathon. A 2:30:20 marathon PR is painful because it is less than one second per mile away from being a 2:2X marathoner. Mentally, I feel like I have already climbed Everest. Financially, I don't want to blow all of my money and I am really enjoying paying off my debt.

Honestly, I have been trying hard not to think of Everest and Nepal and I am doing a decent job of that. I am certainly not quitting mountaineering, there are five mountains in Pakistan I am interested in attempting, not to mention plenty of little routes in the USA I have not tried.

What does my future hold? I don't know. Regardless, I would like to get out to Colorado, or maybe even Washington, over New Year's for some technical mountaineering if anyone wants to join.