Review: Stronger

Stronger is a badly written book about an important topic. The book's subtitle promises to tell you everything about muscles and strength training, but then immediately spends an absurd number of pages explaining what the Greeks thought about the human body and what muscles were. Not only were the Greeks absurdly wrong, it has no relevant to the topic of the book. A decent editor would have slashed a good 30% of this book and it would have been a much better book.

The book spends an inordinate amount of time on two characters, Jan Todd (at one point the strongest woman in the world), and Charles Stocking, another record-setting powerlifter. Their stories are perhaps interesting, but to be honest, anecdotal data is worthless for the typical rank and file athlete or normal person trying to live their life.

The book is clearly biased towards considering strength training to be much more important than regular doctors believe. What's surprising to me is how little research there actually is on strength training, and how recent the studies are (the earliest appear to date from the 1990s). There are interesting studies described in the book, including one study that focused on geriatric residents at a nursing home, some of whom could barely raise their hands at the start of the program. The study showed that even at that age it's possible to build muscle, and the effects are awesome --- some residents went from being in a wheel chair to being able to walk around with a walker. Others went from walkers to just a cane, and some went from needing a cane to not needing one. Clearly, strength training is useful at any age and can help folks.

Where the book falls over is that there's no study of injury rates. My experience with weight training (progressive resistance training is the new medical term that the book taught me) is that as you get older, there becomes a very thin line between sufficient stimulus to get stronger, and too much stimulus which leads to injury. The book doesn't talk about it, there are no studies, and pretty much I think you'd have to hire a professional personal trainer to calibrate you properly and walk you through increasing resistance. That's great if you're rich. Not so great if your schedule can't fit in appointments and stuff like that.

The book is convincing in terms of telling you that you need strength training, and that the importance of it increases as you get older, and that it's never too late to do more strength training. It definitely debunks the regular doctor's advice that "walking is sufficient exercise for anyone." It clearly isn't, and the book isn't shy about telling you. But beyond that, the book kinda just fails.

There must be a good book about strength training and how to do it properly at lowest risk of injury, but this one isn't it.

Review: Abundance

 Abundance is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book about what they called supply-side liberalism. It's an indictment of the systems built in the 1960s and 70s to prevent government abuse that no longer works in today's environments. While the old 1960s liberalism is about being able to sue government in order to stop it from building a freeway through your neighborhood, that same set of rules is now blocking the need to build sufficient housing for people to live in in our most vibrant cities, or green energy projects in order to power the green energy transition:

the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects. We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes (kindle loc 67)

Worse, the inability of government to deliver needed housing, energy, or transportation projects creates an opening for the right wing to claim that government doesn't work, or that the problem is immigrants coming into the country, or to take an axe to the NIH and NSF in the name of cutting taxes.

political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government—and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”23 In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won by shifting almost every part of America to the right. But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance. Nearly every county in California moved toward Trump,24 with Los Angeles County shifting eleven points toward the GOP. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Philadelphia County shifted four points right, Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Cook County (Chicago) shifted eight points right. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted twelve points right, Queens County shifted twenty-one points right, and Bronx County shifted twenty-two points right.25 Voting is a cheap way to express anger. Moving is expensive. But residents of blue states and cities are doing that, too. In 2023, California lost 342,000 more residents than it gained; in Illinois, the net loss was 115,000; in New York, 284,000.26 In the American political system, to lose people is to lose political power. If current trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right; even adding Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to the states Harris won won’t be enough for Democrats to win future presidential elections. (kindle loc 261)

The book explores housing, energy, our science funding process, and manufacturing. Much of this is driven by the federal government, which obviously the Democrats can do nothing about as long as they're out of power. But local issues like housing and energy can and should be done by blue states, and the authors point out that they need to be done by blue states.

The book has lots of ideas, and is interesting as well as a quick read. The Democrats cannot keep selling pro-illegal immigration, DEI, anti-Asian discrimination, and antisemitic messages as the voters have showed in the last election that they're not buying it. This book provides a playbook for the Democrats for a compelling, non-zero sum vision of the future, if a brave politician would listen. You should read it.

How to buy digital editions of my books

 I finally noticed that the website hosting the purchase links for digital editions of my books went dead. (No thanks to Google)

I've temporarily resurrected them here:

Buy An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups $24.95:
Buy Startup Engineering Management: $24.95:
Buy Independent Cycle Touring $9.99:

Review: Normal People

 I don't know how Normal People made it into my borrow list from the library, but when it showed up I read it and found it easily readable and short, so just read it in a few nights.

A combination of a romance and coming of age story, it traces Connell and Marianne, who start the novel as high schoolers and finish the novel having graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The story of their on-again/off-again relationship is super-cringe, with you wanting to reach into the page and shake the characters for poor decision making or self-awareness over and over again. For instance, Connell likes Marianne so much that when she suggests that he apply to Trinity College as an English major instead of Galway for Law, he does so. Yet when it comes to the equivalent of the prom he asks some other girl out and is puzzled that Marianne treats this as a rejection, even when his own mother (who cleans the house for Marianne's family) storms out of his car after learning what he did!

Anyway, both characters do incredibly silly things, though Marianne's mistakes are much less dumb than Connell's (though her choice in men other than Connell is very much suspect). The book does a good job of exposing readers to the Irish college system.  For instance, the merit-based scholarship in Trinity is given through a series of exams, and there's no means testing, so even though Marianne is rich she still gets it. This is a far cry from what you see in American universities.

I read the book to the end, but as with much mainstream fiction, scratch my head as to why people think this is particularly good reading. Young people will make mistakes, and care too much about what other people think, and lack self-awareness. At the end of the novel, the characters still lack self-awareness though at least they've realized that they love each other. The whole thing makes me think of mainstream fiction as a dumb genre. It doesn't even have the insights that Ender's Game or A Fire Upon the Deep engenders.

Review: Careless People

 Careless People is Sarah Wynn-Williams' memoir of her time at Facebook as Manager of Global Policy, a position she herself created and pitched at Facebook before becoming an employee. In some ways, it's predictable --- anyone joining an American corporation during these times of end stage capitalism as an idealist is bound to be disappointed. Anyone who read Lean In and not realize it was a propaganda piece written from a place of extreme wealth probably deserved to be disappointed.

One of the lobbyists, a woman in her forties, pulls me aside to say, “Don’t take the book seriously. It’s just a way to make you feel bad about yourself. Which is what Sheryl does.” She thinks I have stars in my eyes. I’m embarrassed to admit that maybe I do, so I just nod.  (kindle loc 1262)

They don’t discuss the real secret behind maintaining their work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: it’s undergirded by their multimillion-dollar paychecks.  (kindle loc 1519)

 Of course top corporate bosses are hypocritical. Of course those people have multiple nannies. And of course, Facebook enabled and embetted extremist politicians getting into power in both the USA and elsewhere. None of this should surprise you. There's a huge section in the book about Facebook's willingness to break all rules of decency to get into China (it failed), but that's consistent with all the lying people inside Google did in order to get Google to invest in China. (And it wouldn't surprise you that most such people would justify it by saying if they didn't lie, someone else would lie and get paid the ginormous amounts of money to do so)

Ultimately, one of the worst things about entering into a free trade agreement with China was that rather than introducing democracy and encouraging public dissent in China like the neo-liberals thought, the Chinese seized on the opportunity to corrupt American public institutions and used them to serve their political purposes. It was definitely not a good trade.

The book has a ton of juicy stuff, including Sandberg's attempts to get the author in bed (literally, not metaphorically) on a transatlantic flight. It included all the crazy events leading to the author's poor performance review at the end that justified her firing (though she must have signed a nondisclosure agreement given that there's no mention of a severance package).

On the one hand, you read this and nod, knowing that Facebook had always been awful. On the other hand, you can't help thinking: "You pitched your dream job. You got it, and you probably were paid extremely well. What made you think you got to be a do gooder at the end as well?" In the end, the book fully justifies the statement I made once that Remains of the Day is still the ultimate silicon valley story. Kill yourself to work for a boss, never take a day off, and then find out in the end that you were working for a Nazi all along. Sounds familiar? It should. The difference is that in 2025, the Careless People won and you have no choice.

Review: Why Your Bike Is Made in Asia

 Why Your Bike Is Made in Asia is Bill McGann's memoir of his career first as a bike shop owner, then as a wholesale distributor (Torelli) importing bicycles from both Asia and Europe. Just like in the auto industry, the bike manufacturing industry in Japan, Taiwan, and China simply out-competed the European manufacturers on price, quality, and sheer industry. (By the way, I only remember the name Torelli because they'd imported some rims that were the worst rims ever made, breaking steel core tire levers trying to get tires off and on rims that were just a little too big)

Overall, the book is easy to read --- I'd bought it and finished it in the same day, starting with the invention of the bicycle and explaining that one reason cycling never took off in the USA was that the tire industry in the US was dominated by a company that refused to manufacture clinchers, ensuring that bicycles in the US were unreliable to the point where people preferred to walk than to ride a bicycle.

The first thing that struck me was that most of the US bike industry was really badly managed. Schwinn, for instance, was in its 3rd generation of being managed by a family member, and of course, its incompetence ensured that it never produced lightweight bicycles to compete with European (and later Asian) imports. The manager suffered severely from Dunning Krueger, and blamed everyone (including his employees who voted to unionized after being treated badly) for his failure. What I wish the book covered was actually the American success stories like Trek and SRAM:

Despite that hiccup, as a result of superb management and a good instinct for what Americans wanted to buy, the Wisconsin company went bravely on without me. Trek went from strength to strength and by the 1990s had far surpassed Schwinn in sales. Trek showed that the failure of American and European producers to compete with Asian factories was not the fault of location or workforce. As is nearly always true, the suits in the upstairs offices were to blame. (kindle lopc 1335)

The American manufacturers that succeeded had to compete against Asians who were cheaper, and Europeans who had a local market where cycling was much more popular, and Bill McGann had no insights to give us as to how they did so. Names were dropped like Jobst Brandt (curiously referred to as a bike historian!) and John Neugent. We read about the invention of Mountain Bikes by Tom Ritchey, Charlie Cunningham, and Joe Breeze, and the rise of Specialized taking over the mountain bike industry. The founder of Specialized, Mike Sinyard, was described as possibly the best businessman in the industry but we also do not get any special insight about why he was so great. Bear in mind the Specialized never manufactured in the US and so his wheelings and dealings to get his bikes imported and sold is a big deal. We also never get into how Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) became so dominant in part supply. We do get a treatise in indexing (which Shimano invented) and praise of it as being super reliable whereas in my personal experience, indexing works for precisely 3 months after which it never works again.

It's clear from reading the book that it has several limitations and gaps that need to be filled in if it's to be more than just a memoir of some bike guy who had next to no influence in the industry but nevertheless managed to acquire quite a bit of wealth doing so.  Nevertheless, it's a short read, and cheap at $4, and if you don't know most of this (which I didn't) is well worth reading.