World-Class Fitness

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.”

This short mantra was taken off of CrossFit.com, a site my cousin introduced to me a couple of weeks ago. I figured I could not sum up their principles in any more concise a manner than they could, so for this post I just took the statement from their site. When I first went to the site it seemed almost anti-climatic after what cousin my told me, “would change my life”. However, if you take your time and really look around the entirety of the site you will agree it is an amazing piece of work these guys have put together. The best part of this site is the WOD (workout of the day), which they put up each every day for free so that visitors to the site can continue to train with variation.

Admittedly I can not come anywhere near doing all of these routines on a daily basis, however, it gives me high goals and doing any of the exercises as supplements to your current workout should help with all sorts of strength gains. Not only do these workouts go after compound exercises that stress some of your largest muscle groups, there are videos of every exercise they do so that you can learn them from watching others perform the routine.

National Data

So after posting the market data blog a few days ago I have been looking up more information that I thought some people might find just as interesting. It seems like it is rather hard to find all the big numbers for our nation on one site, so as a result you have to go to a few pages.

To find information on GDP, unemployment, inflation, and a few other economic indicators it turns out WSJ.com comes through again. In fact a link on the same page as the market data one I posted earlier will take you straight to the numbers. For conveinance sake, I will post a link to this as well on the right hand side of the blog for future use.

It turns out the national debt and budget are much are harder to find on one website and you have to do a fair amount of digging around. If you look under the U.S. Treasury website where they are supposed to post it, you will find the national debt under a link entitled MSPD, or monthly statements of public debt. You will then learn the national debt is currently at 9.1 trillion dollars and probably decide you do not really want to look that number up again. If you are so inclined, however, you can go here and choose which month to look over.

I would also like to use this post to point out for those readers who are unaware that The New York Times online paper is now totally free. There are no member only areas anymore and it is a very fast and easy way to get the news without finding a real paper.

Voter Registration

With the California primaries coming up I thought it might be nice to write a short blurb about voter registration. You can go to this link on the California Secretary of State website to register to vote. It is also important to know that the primaries are a “modified” closed primary meaning you can only vote for a party you are registered to unless you decline to state and the party says it is ok to vote in their primary.

I would also like to point out that the only way to change anything you disagree with is through elections and that whether or not what you vote for passes, you should not complain if you do not voice your opinion at the polls. As the linked site informs you must have your voter registration postmarked no later than January 22 if you wish to vote in the primaries.

Market Data

After writing my last post on the Fed I thought it might also be helpful to include some current market data for the economy. So included in my links section on the right side of the page is one called Market Data. This link leads to the Wall Street Journal’s market data center where you can easily look up several different and important current market indicators.

Some of the most important listed are the current DJ Industrials, S&P 500, Treasury Bills, futures for commodities such as oil, currency exchange rates, and of course the federal funds rate from my last post along with the prime rate. These are not even close to the only data listed on this page and I hope you will find some of it useful for decision making.

The Fed

I have recently been reading Alan Greenspan’s book The Age of Turbulence and I am pretty fascinated with the way the Fed works as a result (that and I am an econ major, hence me reading the book to begin with). With that in mind I have set out to better understand what it is the Fed does and how it does it.

The Fed is the central bank for the United States and is in charge of monetary policy with the main goal of controlling inflation. With that in mind they have used varying methods to try to stabilize the economy over the years. The most effective way of keeping inflation in check has been to control interests rates, since a lower interest rate means more spending and a higher one means less spending. More spending drives prices up and causes inflation to ensue.

The most important interest rate is the federal funds rate which is the rate that banks loan money to each other. The Fed sets a target federal funds rate and then tries to keep it there by performing what are called open market operations. These are when the Fed buys US Treasuries in order to alter the amount of money in the economy. When there is more money in the economy it is easier to access, which results in lower interest rates. When there is less money in the economy it is harder to get and this causes banks to raise their interest rates.

Knowing the federal funds rate is important to know for a number of reasons. First, it is an economic indicator and once you get the feel for it you can tell what the Fed believes the economy is doing. All businesses pay close attention to the Fed meetings to see if they will raise or lower the funds rate as an indicator of whether the economy is going into a recession or boom. Also, it is used as the base for many other important interest rates including the prime rate, which is the standard rate used by banks to make many loans and often the underlying rate used in variable rate credit cards.

Freedom

I would like to take this time to write about freedom for a minute because it has come up a few times lately. It seems to me that the idea of freedom or liberty is rather warped. What does it mean to live in freedom? To me the answer would simply be that freedom is a state of mind. To live free of any fear would be living in freedom. Does someone else give you that right?

Again, the answer to that question seems rather straightforward to me. It is a simple no. Living in a state of fear is also a state of mind and that is up to you to control or choose. When you say you are afraid you should probably ask yourself just what it is you are afraid of.

Now I said at the beginning that it has come up a couple times lately and I was referring to Veteran’s Day, a couple country songs I have heard lately that pay tribute to soldiers, and just simple bumper stickers that say support our troops. All these things seem rather stupid to me in very simple ways. First, how much money would it take for you to kill someone? Well apparently it is yearly salary of a marine for many American’s that have chosen to enlist.

So why exactly should I support them or the veteran’s that came before them? Well it has been told to me that for many people it is the only way out of an otherwise bad life and that it gives them more chances for a better life. I can only ask myself the previous question, if I were offered the chance to leave a “bad life” with “no opportunities” and all I had to do was kill someone, would I do it? The answer to me is again simple enough, of course I would not. There are other ways to give yourself opportunities and a descent chance in life.

Finally, if everyone made the decision to just not join a military force there would be no wars, as there would then be no troops to fight them with. Of course I have been told that is unrealistic as other countries would still have military forces and they would then be able to invade us and subjugate us against our will. Well that may well be the case, but I and everyone else who chose not to participate would not be the cause of the suffering and that is something I can live with.

If this all seems too extreme for you to think a reality then I think it would be wise of you to read up on the nation of Tibet which has lived as a refugee outside the territory of Tibet for decades peacefully rather than fighting in any way. I just do not see any reason why us being invaded by another country should be reason to be militaristic ourselves. There are worse things in life and one of those is living with the knowledge that you are responsible for killing.

Fighting Poverty and Spreading Awareness

A while back I mentioned that there are 2.7 billion people living on less than 2 dollars a day. That is almost unbelievable to most Americans and really puts the relative poverty, that we face in America, in perspective compared to the absolute poverty that nearly half the world faces. Since first reading about this and other health issues, I have become increasingly interested in the global fight to end poverty and preventable health issues that so many face.

After reading many articles and a few books on this subject I have found a few easy things that everyone can do as a normal American consumer to help the billions in poverty. Kiva.org, (Product)Red, and the ONE campaign are all things that can potentially make a huge difference.

Kiva.org is a group that allows anyone with a credit card to make personal loans from their own credit to others in poverty stricken countries all over the world. It is based on an idea called micro credit, which is the idea of giving small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries that do not have access to collateral in order to establish their own business and raise themselves out of poverty. This is not charity, but simply a way of providing financing options to those who can not go to traditional banks. To learn more about the idea of micro credit you can read the book Banker To The Poor, by Muhammad Yunus who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

(Product)Red is a new kind of business platform that essentially provides a certain percentage of profits from consumer goods to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria. Those happen to be the three most fatal diseases in the world, take millions of lives each year, and are easily preventable by prescription drugs that are not available to poor people. Many of these drugs cost under a dollar for each dose and for the people making under a dollar a day this is still too high. So far, Motorola, American Express, GAP, Armani, Converse, and Apple have all made Red products that you can buy, with some of them contributing up to 50 percent of the product purchased to the Global Fund. It has already raised over 35 million dollars since its inception in March of 2006.

The ONE campaign is mostly about awareness and advocacy for the fight against poverty. As of now it has 2.5 million members. You can get a white ONE wristband to wear and spread the awareness, as well as, signing the declaration on the website saying that you are committed to hold your government representatives responsible for legislation to promote the elimination of poverty from our world. Poverty is definitely a social construction and it can be made into a thing of the past if the world is willing to believe that everyone has a right to basic necessities such as food, water, shelter, and their health from infectious diseases.

Bay Area Trip

All of my posts to this point have been rather instructive in nature, or so I have planned at least, so this will be the first one that is more a release of thoughts. I am up in the Bay Area right now looking at some schools that I have not been able to see yet. So far I have seen UC Berkeley, Stanford, Santa Clara, Dominican University and tomorrow I will be going to UC Davis.

Here are a few photos from Berkeley,

The first building on Berkeley,

Stanford,

Church at Stanford,

Looking back out of the entrance of Stanford, Palm Drive and The Oval

Inflation

So I am not entirely sure how many people check to see that I am an Economics major in the About Me section, but that is what it turns out I am. So naturally my friend figured it would not be to hard for me to explain a few simple economic phenomena to her the other day, one of which was inflation. She basically asked why it exists and I stumbled around trying to explain it for a while and that made me a little frustrated with myself and I went straight home, pulled out my old Intro to Macroeconomics book and looked it up.

Inflation, according to my book, is a process in which the price level is rising and money is losing its value. Basically the price of things as a whole have gone up and your money is now worth less than its previously was in terms of your ability to purchase these goods. There are several ways for this to happen, the two most common of which are demand-pull inflation and cost-push inflation. Demand-pull inflation is where the demand for a good is suddenly higher and the price of it is then bid up by consumers. Cost-push inflation is where the cost of raw materials may rise and this in turn makes the end good more expensive. When the cost to make the good goes up, surprise surprise, so does the final product. These are the basic ways in which inflation can occur and by no means the only ones, its a rather complicated process it turns out and I feel a little better after refreshing my understanding as to why I could not explain it immediately.

However, how do we control inflation and why do we not try to make inflation zero, are two good questions that I also tried to answer. The answer to the first is that the Federal Reserve Bank is usually charged with controlling inflation by controlling the interest rates. If the Fed lowers the interest rates then people will be more willing to consume; if the Fed raises the interest rates people will be encouraged to save and discouraged from spending as the cost of loans goes up with higher interest rates. Knowing these are the two main ways in which inflation are controlled makes it a little easier to see why our inflation is normally kept to three or four percent instead of zero. If the Fed tries to curb inflation all the way to zero by raising interest rates, it is in effect cutting the spending habits of the people and the economy will slow and this can lead to recession. If the Fed lets interest rates become zero people will be glad to spend and borrow as much as they want and inflation will quickly rise at a pace that is quite harmful to the economy.

As you can see, by allowing some inflation to occur it is actually good for the economy because it promotes consumption, which is the basic building block of our economy. When people see that there is inflation in the economy they should not make the jump in reasoning to assume it is bad and that they can no longer afford things or that the government is not doing its job, but rather ask themselves how much inflation is occurring and whether or not it is a healthy amount.

Shelfari: Catalog Your Library

As with most of my recent posts, this one will explain an online social network, in particular one used for book lovers. After getting this blog up and running and attempting to use it in order to share my interests and the things I believe to be important, I began to get the idea that one of the more important parts of me are the books that I read in my spare time and decided I needed a way to put them up for everyone to see. It was at this point that I started searching for online applications that could perform this task for me. I found three such services, LibraryThing, aNobii, and Shelfari.

The first was LibraryThing, which is incredibly intensive with more than 17 million books registered and access to over 80 libraries including Amazon.com and the Library of Congress. Although it had the best ability to track your books, it was the ugliest of the three websites and not necessarily the most intuitive or well set up. The biggest drawback to this site and that which made me decide not to go with it, is the fact that after logging 200 books for free you have to pay a 25 dollar one time fee for life to register any more. Although 25 dollars is not a lot of money, it is certainly more than either aNobii or Shelfari, which are both free not matter how many books you catalog over your life.

The next one that I found was aNobii which allows cataloging your books and putting them into several categories. It was also extensive in its search capabilities, looked better than LibraryThing, however, I felt the site was simply to busy and a bit to hectic for my tastes.

Finally, I was led to Shelfari, which was named as one of the 10 most beautiful online social networks and was very user friendlier and not cluttered by any unneccessary links and advertisements on the sidebar. It also allows to put your books onto your shelf, your current reading list, your favorites, and my favorite, the wish list. This lets people quickly see the difference between books you have finished, books you are reading, and books you hope someone might get you so that you may read them in the future.