The Binary Circumstance

I’m getting tired of the same old blog format and I’m looking for ways to reshape this site into something that is both more visually appealing and non-linear in format.

Another option is to abandon this blog altogether and just start over with something completely different.

After three years and over 2,600 posts, I’m getting tired of saying basically the same thing over and over again even though the message is extremely important. 2,600 posts is the equivalent of about six books. If readers haven’t gotten the message by now, I don’t think they ever will.

For today, I’m just going to post a picture with lots of color in it. This is Summit Lake near Mt. Rainier, taken August 2005.

I’m off to Thanksgiving dinner with friends and I’m not planning to write anything else today.

This article about live-poultry markets is interesting. I think all people who eat meat should see where their meat comes from. I love meat and I don’t delude myself into thinking that it just mysteriously appears one day at the supermarket.

According to BusinessWeek Online, the healthcare industry is keeping the U.S. economy afloat.

If you really want to understand what makes the U.S. economy tick these days, don’t go to Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or Washington. Just take a short trip to your local hospital. Park where you don’t block the ambulances, and watch the unending flow of doctors, nurses, technicians, and support personnel. You’ll have a front-row seat at the health-care economy.

For years, everyone from politicians on both sides of the aisle to corporate execs to your Aunt Tilly have justifiably bemoaned American health care — the out-of-control costs, the vast inefficiencies, the lack of access, and the often inexplicable blunders.

But the very real problems with the health-care system mask a simple fact: Without it the nation’s labor market would be in a deep coma. Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago.

Sure, housing has been a bonanza for homebuilders, real estate agents, and mortgage brokers. Together they have added more than 900,000 jobs since 2001. But the pressures of globalization and new technology have wreaked havoc on the rest of the labor market: Factories are still closing, retailers are shrinking, and the finance and insurance sector, outside of real estate lending and health insurers, has generated few additional jobs.

Perhaps most surprising, information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s, has turned into one of the biggest job-growth disappointments of all time. Despite the splashy success of companies such as Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ), businesses at the core of the information economy — software, semiconductors, telecom, and the whole gamut of Web companies — have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years. Those businesses employ fewer Americans today than they did in 1998, when the Internet frenzy kicked into high gear.

With baby boomers aging rapidly, this trend will not end soon.

It’s been a while since I mentioned my fitness program.

Losing weight the “natural” way, through less calories and more activity, is a slow process. Watching it too closely can defeat one’s efforts because the slowness is discouraging and feels like failure. Plus obsessing about calories makes you think about food all the time.

So a while back I stopped watching the scale daily and started checking weight weekly or even less frequently, like every two or three weeks.

Over time the results can be seen:

Today’s numbers:
Weight: 160.2
Percent body fat: 19.4%
Percent Muscle Mass 40.6%
Waist: 34″

My goal is to get down around 17% body fat.

Check that against were I started. (I actually started even higher, at almost 25% body fat and a few pounds heavier but wasn’t keeping records then.)