We're doomed? Another Trump presidency in the USA

The US Republican party has long led the world in fear mongering. China has been expanding its influence under President Xi for many years. Putin wants to restore Russia to his vision of its great and glorious super-power past. Climate change is causing droughts and floods and ruining agriculture in more areas like Syria and northern Africa.

Now that the Republicans are in power it seems inevitable to expect more militantism and militarism? 

But now the stakes are real, they are global and the US Republicans' key solution, mass deportations, are worse than applying a band aid to a broken leg, it will exacerbate the situation. The real solution is cooperation, not confrontation.

Attending to the demands of Putin, Netanyahu and Xi, erecting a Mexican wall and mass deportations will not stop wars or refugees. Myopia brought Trump back to power but refugees who are starving or made homeless by wars will move. They have nothing to lose. Europe may feel the brunt of the refugee flood, although the escalating threat of the Russian war machine may deflect an even greater flood to the US. There is a way out. The military expansion must be stopped and climate change must be addressed. This will require leadership, diplomacy and compassion. Some previous US leaders may have been up to this daunting task. The Trump regime cannot see past its own navel. 

Questions on the current election

1. Did we lose because :-

a) normal voting dems stayed away

b) Reps recruited more first time voters

c) Normal voting Dems flipped

2. What percentage of voters did not vote (cf to average election)

3. Did a Rep strategy flip Dem voters

4. Did a Dem strategy flip Dem voters

5. Did an outside strategy flip Dem voters (eg Russia, the media etc)

Questions on next 4 years

1. What is our start point - inflation, unemployment, GDP, global snapshot, the environment etc

2. What has Trump threatened to do - tariffs, Ukraine, Nato, immigration, healthcare, environment etc

3. How is the US doing after 1, 2 3, 4 years?

4. How is the world doing after 1, 2 3, 4 years?

Answers:

<BBC radio> 

1. Most Latino men (54%) voted republican. Perhaps in protest at the Dems treating them as a monolithic block and asking them how they'll feel when Trump starts deportations. Dems need new approach.

2. People are amused by Trump - it's a personality cult

3. Biden took Trumps deportation stance and did even more

4. Trump got the black vote as they also believe in deportation

5. Harris was an afterthought - Dems should have chosen a proper candidate

6. Trump convinced the Working Class that he could make their lives better

7. Dems should shut up about their Woke issues and focus on placating the working class

8. Biden should have dropped out much earlier

<Me>

Inflation/cost of living stories stuck in the mind of the working class - people wanted change

<the Atlantic>

Inflation hit hard. Prices stayed high. People refused to believe they were better off!

Predictions

1. Trump will withdraw Ukraine support who will sign peace deal ceding much of country to Russia

2. Israel will delete Palestine. Huge refugee crisis for Europe - none allowed into USA

3. Russia will take over Moldova and start on other countries

4. China will plan Taiwan invasion

5. Tariffs will increase inflation to 9%

6. Unemployment will increase to 5%

7. All US courts will turn Republican

8. Oil price will decrease as drilling expands

9. Climate will deteriorate - EPA will be neutralized

10. Abortion will be banned

11. Trump will appoint enemies to all key posts

12. Kennedy will ban vaccines and fluoride

13. Obamacare will be deleted .... no! he's tried and failed before but he will trim it.

14. Food/housing prices soar as immigrants disappear

15. Crime will increase

16. Student debts will increase and not be forgiven

17. Trump will stop all court cases against himself and his friends

18. Medical costs will soar

19. Democracy in the US may end - through increased gerry mandering and voting rights restrictions

20. Trump will try to dumb-down k12 education (dumb voters vote Trump!). States will have to pay for proper education. This will save Federal money and drive teachers away. The "Free university" will fail.

Previous Trump admin record <Politico>

Summary: 

Hurt workers/poor in overtime pay, safety, harassment, food aid, black housing and student debt. Tax cuts for rich. bad bank safety

Hurt environment through EPA, car exhaust, toxics control, env reviews

Hurt world - exited WTO, imposed tariffs, insulted everyone

Good things - fought monopolies and financial crime

Blatherings - Obamacare, anti-Russia/China

1. Hurt public by :-

  a. reducing work safety

  b. stopped many workers getting overtime pay

  c. stopped workers from fighting harrassment from their employers

  d. reduced food aid for the poor

  e. made it harder for blacks to get housing

  f. increased students being swindled (more debts) 

2. reduced global trade - exited WTO

3. Put religion back into schools

4. cut taxes - a sugar high - bad for the economy 

5. Increased global warming by:-

  a. gutted the EPA

  b. made cars more polluting

  c. decreased toxic chemical regulation

  d. reduced environmental overview of infrastructure projects

  e. increased oil production

6. reduced legal immigration (H1B)

7. reduced banking safety measures

8. Good things Turmp did :-

  a. increased prosecution of financial crimes

  b. supported Obamacare (accidentally)

  c. fought corporate monopolies

  d. made policies to confront Russia/China

9. helped farmers (hit by foreign tariffs retaliating against US tariffs)

Biden's economic legacy (compiled 9nov24)

created 16 million jobs, grown economy by 12.6%

GDP $29,350 billion … grown for last 10 quarters

GDP/capita $65,020 (2023) 

GDP growth 2.8%

unemployment 4.1%

Inflation 4.1%

Fed funds rate 4.83%

House income $80,610

home credit card debt $10,700 wallethub

NAtional debt $30.9 trillion

exports $268 billion

imports #352 billion

Trde deficit $84 billion????

buget deficit $1.8 trillion

budget balance-$1.05 trillion

real personal spending $47,783 … seems very high!

ratio expenditure/GDP 36.8%

military spending $877 billion ($2,220/person in 2015 dollars)

Bond yields 30yr:4.5% 5yr 4.12%

Pop growth 0.38%

fertility 1.66 kids/woman

death rate 10.4/1,000

Enjoying the fresh air - quantifying your exercise regime

 As I get older I find myself more interested in quantifying my exercise effort. I wish to keep my weight down, enjoy the great outdoors and most importantly, live a long and healthy life. However, gone are the days of marathons and PRs, and now I have a slight heart issue. As several friends have run themselves into an early grave, I want to ensure that I avoid my ultimate personal worst run. 

I run about 30 miles a week, far more than most people of my age, and I’d like to measure how hard and how much I’m working out. Specifically for my workouts, I want to monitor 

 a) the total expended energy (workout Load)

 b) the average energy expended per unit time (workout Effort)

 c) the peak energy expended per unit time. (workout PeakEffort)

 d) work per mile or vertical distance

I want to do this without fancy equipment or lots of statistical  analysis. Let’s look at each, but first let’s see how we measure workouts.

NB: I have a spreadsheet you can use if you like. ping me.

Workout Measurements

I use 4 metrics:-

a) Workout Effort

b) Workout Load

c) Peak Effort

d) Work rate (per min or mile or vertical distance) ... and inverses

e) Lactose Threshold

Inputs

You need to record only 5 things 1) average heart rate, 2) workout duration 3) maximum heart rate 4) distance 5) elevation gain

How hard was that workout? This you can measure from heart rate performance. If your heart rate stayed at the resting heart rate (Hr) then you didn’t work out, you slept instead. If you did a very, very short HIIT session then your heart rate was probably close to the maximum heart rate (Hmax). By the way, I do NOT do HIIT sessions (see “personal worst” above). 

On a normal workout you need to measure your average heart rate (Hav). Then a greater Hav during of the workout means your Load was greater. Sure, but by how much? As we age, our hearts age, our fitness decreases and so an Hav of say 140 beats per minute (bpm) is quite low for a 25 year old but it’s absolutely knackering for a 66 year old like me. 

So we really need a comparison. We need a measure of our possible heart rate range and this needs to change as we age. There’s a measurement called the Hrr, heart rate reserve, which is the difference between your resting heart rate your max heart rate. So Hrr is really a yardstick for your heart, it shows you what’s the range over which you can push your heart, and it’s linked to your age by your Hmax. You get Hmax from (220 - your age) or (206.9 - (0.67 x age))  - unless you have access to a sports physiology lab and piles of cash so you can get a proper test. You will also need your resting heart rate, Hr, which probably means you need to wear your fitness watch or monitor thing, to bed a few nights. Note that this will be lower than the heart rate you get just sitting around the house watching the telly or relaxing

 Then the Hrr = (Hmax - Hr)

So now you can compare your workout’s average heart rate Hav to the possible range over which you can push yourself, your Hrr. Of course you need that as a relative amount (percentage) because your 25 year old heart could operate over a much wider range than your 65 year old heart (eg (195 - 60) > (155 - 60) ). 

Workout Effort

As I’ve defined the Workout Effort as the average energy expended per unit time, the formula for this is

Effort = (Hav - Hr)/Hrr

Or, in English, how much above my resting heart rate did I keep my heart working during the workout, as a percentage.

Workout Load (or total effort)

As I’ve defined the Workout Load as the total expended energy during the workout, the formula for this becomes

Load = Effort x workout duration

Or, in English, for how long did I keep my heart rate working at this effort during the workout

NB: This is a relative load rather than an absolute load, ie how hard did I push myself compared to my absolute maximum (when Hav=Hmax). 

Workout Peak effort

We can only get this from looking at minute by minute heart rates rather than the workout’s average heart rate. So, you can get this as Hpeak from Strava, probably most other apps, but it’s not in Apple Watch fitness, you need to go to the Apple Health (which is annoying). So we get,

PeakEff = (Hpeak - Hr)/Hrr

Work Rates

There are several ways to measure the work rate. per mile (and miles per work) 

Work/min - W/min = load/duration

Work/mile - WpM = load/distance

Miles/unit work - MpW = distance/load 

Work/elevation gain - WpV = load/vertical gain

These may sound arbitrary but in combination may be useful over the long term. For example, if MpW increases over the year that means you can go increasingly far without stressing your heart. However, this assumes your runs haven't changed! So, check that WpV and W/min don't change. So a good graph would be MpW and WpV and W/min over time. Actually, the WpV is less informative eg you can still work hard even if you have a net downhill - which is hard to graph - so we won't graph this.

Best long term Performance gauge: If you graph MpW and W/min then if your performance is improving then we'd expect to see MpW increasing and Work/min decreasing (or staying the same) over time.

Lactose Threshold

To train best you should train around your Lactose Threshold (I'll add stuff about this once I've done a calibration run to figure out what mine is). Apparently*** this is 80-90% of my max heart rate Hmax (so if Hmax=155 then LTR is 124 - 140 bpm).

These are the metrics I use, they’re all available from Strava or Apple Watch and can be put into a spreadsheet easily. 

Charts

Miles per Work

You can chart lots of things. For example, plotting distance/Load over time you can see that at the end of June I was performing the worst but then things got easier in the first week of July. That was because of the two hard and hilly runs on 6/22 and 6/24. 

Best long-term Performance gauge

An even better gauge of long-term performance is to plot MpW and W/min. If your performance is improving then we'd expect to see MpW increasing and Work/min decreasing (or staying the same) over time. In the plot below, we can see that towards the end of the period I was covering slightly less distance but working harder.

Notes on Relative Effort, Zones, Trimps, RPE

There are other workout measurements. I don’t use them primarily because they’re too tedious and slow to calculate or they’re based on younger people or hidden algorithms. As Albert Einstein said, keep it simple but not simpler.

Workout zones - these are an artifact based to some extent on the lactose threshold of athletes. Firstly, they need to be calculated based on your resting heart rate, which is possible in Strava but I want custom zones due to my heart issue (which appears under load) and Strava doesn’t actually use custom zones.

Trimps is a way of using workout zones and comes in a variety of forms (eTrimp, iTrimp etc)

Strava has the Relative Effort. Its calculation is hidden but I think it accumulates previous days’ workouts and possibly Trimps. This is totally useless to me

RPE, the Perceived Rate of Exertion is more of a smeared out wishy washy way of doing my calculations, at least as far as running workout is concerned.

Maximum Heart rate, Hmax is either  (220 - your age) or (206.9 - (0.67 x age). I use the former, not the latter (Borg calculation). This is because, while I have got up to the Borg Hmax value, I don’t want to have a heart attack just to prove a point. the (220-age) apparently underestimates Hmax but listen to your heart!

Enjoy your working out 

no worries

Norm

Addendum

1. I forgot to mention, naps - take naps. They're good for you :)

2. Just to show you how utterly useless Strava's performance metrics are consider this snippet from my spreadsheet below.

Strava thinks the Releative effort os only 56 and 60 (rows 15 and 17) despite the runs being knackering with Peak Efforts near 100%, Loads of 99% and 104%. Whereas it reckons that row 9 has a Strava Rel Effort of 148 ... almost 3 times as hard! Crazy!

3. It is easy to use AI to write a program to calculate the workout metrics. Attached are the Specs used to generate a python 2.7 using ChatGPT 3.5. It runs fine on MacOS.

Specs details

i need the following program.  inputs age (age) in years (a real number between 6 and 120), resting heart rate (Hr) in bpm (between 30 and 130), run duration (t) in minutes and workout average heart rate, (Hav) in bpm (between 30 and 230), workout peak heart rate, (Hpeak) (between (between 30 and 230). It outputs a blank line the maximum heart rate Hmax = (220- age), heart rate reserve Hrr = (Hmax - Hr) and Effort = (Hav-Hr)/Hrr. It also outputs the Load=Effort*duration/100 and the PeakEffort=((Hpeak-Hr)/Hrr). The Effort and PeakEffort are output as percentages It needs to run on a Mac laptop in python 2.7

4. Writing the workout calculator in a spreadsheet program is much easier. That's what I do as I want the history in any case.

5. Using AI to write an smartphone app to calculate the workout metrics is a bit harder. I'll do that later

6. the Chrome browser extension called Elevate gives you some extra performance details but I'm not convinced of their validity

References

*** https://marathonhandbook.com/average-lactate-threshold/

Africa - how the West destroyed our homeland

African History

Africa was destroyed by the Europeans and Americans. They continue to subjugate and castigate the people of Africa and refuse to consider recompense for their barbaric actions. Africa’s wealth was stolen and an entire generation of the most productive and vibrant youth were transported and enslaved. The economies, laws, cultures and political systems were systematically and deliberately torn apart, not just at the national level but also at the community, tribal, village and even family level. The Europeans and Americans blame African tribalism for its current woes when in reality it killed the countries and continues to make sure that it cannot rise from the ashes.

Mankind, homo sapiens sapiens originated in Africa. One theory is that plate tectonics made the climate unstable putting pressure on homonids to adapt. This theory is valid for the rift valley but the oldest known humans come out of South Africa and Namibia.

Be that as it may, the Africans formed small bands separated by dense jungles, rivers deserts, and plains. They thrived on primitive technology through the stone age and into the iron age. The bands untied often forming kingdoms and empires. These empires were impressive and long lasting. The best were in Sudan, Nigeria and Mali.

These kingdoms lasted for centuries and with them the mores, cultures, laws and traditions became deeply ingrained. The Africans were expert farmers, hunters and miners and skilled craftspeople.

One tradition that was emphasized by Europeans and Americans was slavery. Villages on the fringes of a kingdom or Empire would break away to form new kingdoms and in so doing, invade other villages and enslave the inhabitants. Slavery has been misrepresented by European. The slaves were skilled and valuable and usually kept their old jobs just with new masters. They were also much more like Medieval serfs or crofters than slaves, being able to marry as they wished, buy their freedom and sell their wares. However the bulk of their labour benefitted their new masters rather than their old masters or villages. As the boundaries of the Empires and kingdoms ebbed and flowed the populous would go in and out of slavery and see a succession of masters. This did little to change their daily lives and the laws and cultures remained steadfast.

When the white man penetrated the jungle he often came across cities and kingdoms that surpassed those in Europe. The kings possessed a public bravado designed to impress and intimidate visitors with a show of power and strength. However, they never made guns which the European possessed from the early 18^th century onwards.

The Africans traded with the Europeans through Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and so on via trade routes across the Sahara doen into cetral Africa. They began trading earlier with the Arabs out of Egypt, Ethiopia and West Africa. The Arabs were savvy merchants and expert sailors and African goods such as ivory and gold was popular throughout the Middle and Far East.

The French in particular found African gold very useful and invaded Morocco overthrowing the northern Empire and establishing colonies along the southern Mediterranean. In Angola and Mozambique the Portuguese founded a small colony which they extended deep into the interior destroying villages and cultures with reckless abandon.

The real demise of Africa was due to the European need for gold to fund their wars and the European and American need for slave labour. The Spanish raped South America to fund their attempts to invade England, Portugal and as much of Europe as they could.

The other European countries turned to West Africa for its gold. Meanwhile the Americans had virtually exterminated the indigenous native who, they complained, tended to die too much to be of much use as slaves. The Africans on the other hand were expert craftsmen, superior farmers to the Europeans and their death rate was only around 25%. Having seen the English use the African slaves to build up their colony in the West Indies they turned to Africa.

Enslaving West Africans relied initially on trade and later on deception and trickery. At first the Americans bought slaves, cloth, iron goods and so on from the costal West African kingdoms. These kingdoms obliged with the slaves found in the outlying villages. The Americans paid the Kings with guns but forbade their local manufacture.

The demand for slaves quickly outstripped the supply and the Kings sent raiding parties upriver and across the land deep into the jungles to capture more slaves. Several Kings saw the writing on the wall and refused to cooperate. However their neighbours quickly earned more guns and overthrew these Kings and thus the American push for slaves quickly decimated the West Africa of its young, strong and productive populous.

At the same time the raiding parties destroyed village cultures and laws and the downward spiral of millennia of culture penetrated deep into the centre of the continent.

Meanwhile, the Europeans, in particular the French and English decided that what they really needed was colonies so that they could have a steady income stream from Africa. The destruction that the Portuguese had started the other Europeans soon quickly turned into a rout. Under the guise of “civilizing the savages” the Europeans systematically took apart the entire African way of life utterly destroying the rules, laws and traditions created over thousands of years. This callous and calculated destruction left the Africans very vulnerable. The laws and traditions were vital to their very survival, without them they were open to bandits, thugs and robbers and without storing their harvests of grain and produce they were susceptible to starvation and disease. Further, with the bulk of their youth transported and enslaved the very old and very young were too feeble to fight back.

The rape of Africa is particularly severe in the case of the Belgian colonization of the Congo. Africa’s biggest and most productive river had supported thriving communities along its bank and tributaries. These were cruelly exploited by the Belgians, thus the rule of law and order was replaced by guns and warfare.

The Europeans never once made any attempt to “civilize” the Africans. There was no repayment for the theft and atrocities visited upon the natives. Right up to 1985 South Africa insisted that migrant workmen leave their families for years at a time and live in enclosed communities near their workplace. This effectively broke families apart. Ironically, the men had no work in their home countries because the Europeans had utterly destroyed their economies, infrastructures and political systems.

It is time for the perpetrators, Europe and America, to pay for their crimes. Africa deserves an extensive programme of recompense, something that would put the Marshall plan in the shade. Descendants of slaves can be compensated. Stolen gold and artifacts can be returned but how can the culture and traditions, the heritage of centuries be restored?