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Nifty Chrome Extensions To Speed Up Your Web Design Workflow For Free
By Mikelle Leow, 29 Apr 2019
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Image via Google Font Previewer for Chrome
Aside from keeping your workspace organized—perhaps not classically neat, but optimized for yourself as a creative—the tools you use could help eliminate the clutter in your head and help you move on to the next task more quickly.
Whether or not you have experience in coding, this list of Google Chrome extensions by tech blog Hongkiat could come in handy in upping your productivity levels. If you’re already designing web pages, why not cut down your work process for free?
These plug-ins, including a responsive design simulator and Google Fonts tester, assist some of web design’s most essential steps and simplify them further. Take them as equals to real-world productivity tools like notepads and highlighters on your desk, if you will.
Check out nine time-saving Chrome extensions for web designers, and hop over here for 21 more.
‘Palette Creator’
Image via Palette Creator
If you’re up for some color inspiration, save yourself the effort of pinning mood boards and get some ideas from… single images instead. ‘Palette Creator’ generates color palettes from any graphic, so if you’re considering a branding scheme for a restaurant, perhaps looking up a picture of a bowl of soup would suffice.
To extract a color palette, simply right-click an image and select ‘Palette Creator’, which will prompt a new tab to open with a selection of hues and shades for your project.
‘Google Font Previewer for Chrome’
Image via Google Font Previewer for Chrome
There’s are a number of reasons why Google Fonts are among the most popular typefaces used by brands and designers alike. Apart from being free-to-use, they’re versatile, legible, and load faster. Google’s 915-strong font family directory, however, means it’s not always easy to find the perfect typefaces for your projects.
The ‘Google Font Previewer’ cuts you some slack by letting you apply Google Fonts in your current tab and play around with styling options. If you have go-to typefaces, you can also save them for future use.
‘Window Resizer’
Image via Window Resizer
Considering the numerous screen resolutions that designers and developers have to cater to these days, the ‘Window Resizer’ extension makes things much easier by emulating various browser resolutions for mobile, desktop, tablet and more. Dimension options are completely customizable; you can adjust the screen’s height and width, apply the same settings on another window, or even export them to another computer.
‘CSSViewer’
Image via CSSViewer
Chrome’s ‘Inspect Element’ feature, admittedly, isn’t the friendliest in terms of accessibility or aesthetics. ‘CSSViewer’ helps you better visualize a site’s CSS properties by neatly displaying essentials like an element’s typeface, color or positioning.
‘Stylebot’
‘Stylebot’ isn’t just for your own projects, but it also lets you manipulate the appearance of any website if it’s not to your liking in real time. Simply tweak any element, such as a font, color, visibility, or margin, through the extension’s editor. Once you’re happy with the results, the tool even generates CSS codes that you can use on your own website.
‘Sight’
Image via Sight
If you’re going to be staring at code all day, you might as well do it more comfortably. ‘Sight’ lets you view source code through various themes, as well as change its typeface, font size, and line numbers for easy browsing.
‘Diigo Web Collector’
Image via Diigo Web Collector
Research work doesn’t have to result in countless open browser tabs. ‘Diigo Web Collector’ is an all-in-one research tool that lets you highlight or attach notes on a web page so you can drag and drop them in a document or access them later on another device. You can also share these excerpts with your collaborators.
‘Todoist’
Hailed by publications like Forbes, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal as a powerful productivity tool, ‘Todoist’ is essentially the bookmarking option, but elevated tenfold. Here, you’ll be able to save websites as tasks for later references, color-code excerpts from web pages, manage tasks anywhere—even when you’re offline, and have quick glimpses of upcoming deadlines.
Like what you saw? For more clever Chrome extensions, check out 21 others here.
[via Hongkiat, images via various sources]
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Tuesday, 30 April 2019
Dr. Mercola: The Ridiculous Reason My Best-Selling Book Was Snubbed by The New York Times
Mercola.com
Ketofast
How to Make Fasting Easier, Safer and More Effective
Written by Dr. Joseph Mercola Fact Checked
April 30, 2019
Story at-a-glance -
KetoFasting combines a cyclical ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting with cyclical partial fasting to optimize health and longevity and support safe detoxification
The KetoFast protocol is easier to comply with than multiday water fasting, and provides greater benefits because you’re able to do it far more frequently than you could do multiday water fasting
Many of the benefits of fasting occur when you refeed, and this is why cycling in and out of fasting and feasting is so valuable. Half of the process occurs in the absence of food, while the other half occurs when food is reintroduced
One of the primary reasons for why you would want to fast is to accelerate autophagy. This is your body’s innate cleanout process, in which damaged mitochondria, proteins and cellular components are digested and then recycled during the regeneration phase, which occurs during refeeding
As with other types of extended fasting, you should not do KetoFasting if you are underweight, pregnant, breastfeeding or have an eating disorder
In the podcast above, Chris Kresser — an acupuncturist, licensed integrative medicine clinician and co-director of the California Center for Functional Medicine — and I talk about KetoFasting, the program I developed and detail in my latest book, "KetoFast: A Step-By-Step Guide to Timing Your Ketogenic Meals," which launches today. Within a week or two the accompanying KetoFast cookbook will also be released.
My previous book, "Fat for Fuel," released May 16, 2017, became an instant nationwide No. 1 best seller, beating out the No. 2 best-selling book by a significant margin.1
However, while The Washington Post and some others accurately listed "Fat for Fuel" as No. 1 based on Nielsen ratings for that first week,2 The New York Times (NYT) — considered the pre-eminent list of best-selling books in the U.S. since 1931 — didn't even include it in their top 15.3
Such a blatant omission is highly unusual, so Hay House, my publisher for that book, reached out to find out why the NYT censored it. The NYT replied the book was "disqualified" because too many of the sales went through Amazon. This in and of itself is unusual, considering Amazon is a primary outlet for all books.
Based on what happened with "Fat for Fuel," I expect more of the same with "KetoFast." Still, the NYT was unable to prevent "Fat for Fuel" from becoming a best-seller and fueling a keto revolution that is now the hottest lifestyle trend around, and I doubt the NYT will be able to quell the success of KetoFasting either, even if they decide to repeat their censorship.
From 'Fat for Fuel' to 'KetoFast'
There's no doubt conventional, government-approved advice has utterly failed to help people manage their weight and prevent disease. We're facing overwhelming rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's, with future projections heralding more of the same. We need a radical U-turn, and the foundations for how to accomplish that are clearly spelled out in "Fat for Fuel."
This is why I recommend you read that book first, and implement the nutritional basics of a cyclical ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting before you move on to "KetoFast." You could look at the two books as two parts of a complete lifestyle program, with "KetoFast" picking up where "Fat for Fuel" left off.
The key to weight management and optimal health is to optimize your mitochondrial function — hence, the term metabolic mitochondrial therapy (MMT) used in "Fat for Fuel." In short, if your mitochondria are not functioning properly, none of your bodily systems will function properly, and in order for your mitochondria to work, having the metabolic flexibility to burn fat is essential.
"Fat for Fuel" explains the many metabolic advantages you gain once your body regains the ability to burn fat for fuel, and details how to do it. The initial phase of the MMT program — which ends once your body is able to effectively burn fat for fuel — can take anywhere from weeks to months or longer, depending on how metabolically damaged you are.
While much of the book centers around diet (raising the amount of healthy fat and decreasing net carbs is what pushes your body into burning fat for fuel), it also reviews a variety of other strategies to improve your mitochondrial function, such as cold thermogenesis, photobiology, detox, exercise, the dangers of iron overload and the pernicious influence of electromagnetic fields (EMF).
"KetoFast" is the next phase once you've successfully implemented the MMT program, as it now combines a cyclical ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting with cyclical partial fasting.
Advertisement
Save 44% on a Magnesium L-Threonate 90-Day Supply
KetoFasting Will Amplify Benefits of My Basic MMT Program
The impetus behind "KetoFast" was two major realizations: First, that water-only fasting is a tremendously beneficial health intervention; and second, that while water-only fasting used to be an ideal strategy, the fact that in the 21st century we have increased toxic exposure that makes it potentially dangerous to do extended water fasts.
We're now surrounded by and exposed to some 80,000 chemicals in our environment, most of which are fat soluble, meaning they accumulate in your fat cells. Meanwhile, fasting effectively drives toxins out of fat cells, which can have devastating results if you're severely toxic.
What's more, since you're not eating, you're also not providing your body with the nutrients it needs to effectively neutralize and eliminate those released toxins. My answer to make fasting safer was to devise — based on the best scientific evidence I could find — a fasting program that mimics multiday water-only fasting, while supporting your detox pathways and minimizing the risks associated with toxicity.
The KetoFast protocol is also easier to comply with than multiday water fasting, and provides greater benefits because you're able to do it far more frequently than you could do multiday water fasting.
The caveat, again, is that you need to have done at least a month of daily intermittent fasting and achieved nutritional ketosis as laid out in "Fat for Fuel" before you move on to KetoFasting. Once you're metabolically flexible and can burn fat for fuel, the combination of cyclical nutritional ketosis and partial fasting can further amplify your weight loss and overall health and longevity.
Why Fast?
As mentioned in the featured interview, fasting has a wide range of health benefits, including radically improved sleep, which in turn is a crucial component of good health and longevity. When you're fasting, you'll often find you're sleeping much better, and your cognition typically improves thanks to the biological cleansing and regeneration that occurs throughout your body, including your brain.
In my view, one of the primary reasons for why you would want to fast is to accelerate autophagy. This is your body's innate cleanout process, in which damaged mitochondria, proteins and cellular components are digested and then recycled during the regeneration phase, which occurs during refeeding.
It's important to realize that many of the benefits of fasting actually occur when you start eating again, and this is why cycling in and out of fasting and feasting is so imperative. Half of the process occurs in the absence of food, while the other half occurs when food is reintroduced.
This is yet another reason why I don't recommend longer fasts, as this will prevent you from fasting often, hence limiting the number of cycles of regeneration you get.
Fasting also boosts your readiness score, which means following a fast, you're able to work out really hard. I do KetoFasting twice a week, and on the days following my KetoFast, that's when I do my strength training and load up on protein and carbs. I've found it's a really fabulous and nearly pain-free way to radically improve your metabolic health.
Other Benefits of Fasting
Fasting is also known to provide many other health benefits, including:4,5,6,7,8
Stem cell activation — Stem cells play an important role in health and longevity as they are instrumental in repairing and rejuvenating your cells and tissues. By upregulating autophagy and mitophagy (autophagy in your mitochondria) 9 and boosting stem cells you will lower your risk of most diseases, including cancer10 and neurodegeneration.11
Nutrient composition is important here, and in "KetoFast" I provide details on how to optimize autophagy and stem cell activation processes by eating certain foods (and avoiding others) at the right time.
Releasing ketones into your bloodstream, which help preserve brain function and protect against epileptic seizures, cognitive impairment12 and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Boosting brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which stimulates creation of new brain cells and triggers brain chemicals that protect against brain changes associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.13,14
Increasing growth hormone by as much as 1,300 percent in women and 2,000 percent in men,15 thereby promoting muscle development and vitality.
Lowering insulin and improving your insulin sensitivity; studies have shown intermittent fasting can both prevent and reverse Type 2 diabetes, which is rooted in insulin resistance.16,17,18,19
Increasing levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which helps your body break down fat to be used as fuel and benefits your metabolism.20,21,22
Boosting mitochondrial energy efficiency and biosynthesis.
Lowering oxidative stress and inflammation.23
Improving circulating glucose24 and lipid levels.
Reducing blood pressure.
Improving metabolic efficiency and body composition, modulating levels of dangerous visceral fat and significantly reducing body weight in obese individuals.
Reproducing some of the cardiovascular benefits associated with exercise.
Regenerating the pancreas25 and improve pancreatic function, reversing diabetes.
Improving gut health — While the exact mechanisms are still unclear, I believe fasting helps jump-start microbiome health by increasing bacterial diversity and repairing leaky gut. Overall, fasting facilitates healing of your gastrointestinal tract and enhances the integrity of your gut lining.
Protecting against cardiovascular disease.
Reducing low-density lipoprotein and total cholesterol.
Improving immune function.26
Synchronizing your body's biological clocks.27
Eliminating sugar cravings as your body adapts to burning fat instead of sugar.
Increasing longevity — There are a number of mechanisms contributing to this effect. Normalizing insulin sensitivity is a major one, but fasting also inhibits the mTOR pathway, which plays an important part in driving the aging process.
Safety and Contraindications
For all its benefits, fasting — especially multiday water-only fasting — is not for everyone. As with other types of extended fasting, you should not do KetoFasting if you are:
Underweight
Pregnant
Breastfeeding
Have an eating disorder
This is a small minority of people, and for pregnant and breastfeeding women it's a temporary contraindication. For most others, fasting is likely to provide significant health benefits, and my KetoFast protocol raises not only your chances of fasting successfully but also improves safety, as it's designed to support detoxification.
Why I Don't Recommend Continuous Nutritional Ketosis
"Fat for Fuel" and "KetoFast" both stress the importance of a cyclical ketogenic diet. A common misconception is that because nutritional ketosis is so beneficial, it stands to reason that remaining in ketosis for the rest of your life would be the way to go. I disagree with this approach, having experienced the drawbacks of it firsthand.
For starters, continuous keto can start wreaking havoc with your hormonal system, specifically your thyroid. It's important to realize that nutritional ketosis is a catabolic process, meaning you're breaking things down. This is a good and necessary process, but you also need to build your body back up!
Many advertise the ketogenic diet as something you stay on forever, and I quickly learned that was a bad idea. After some months, you begin to lose muscle mass, for example, which is the complete opposite of what you're looking for, especially if you're older, since you will automatically lose muscle mass with age anyway.
Hence, I strongly recommend cycling in and out of ketosis once you've regained your metabolic flexibility and are able to effectively burn fat for fuel. In other words, you stay in ketosis only long enough to make sure you're burning fat, and then you move into a more balanced approach where you're adding in higher amounts of healthy carbs once or twice a week.
The Dark Side of Water-Only Fasting
I also do not recommend strict multiday water-only fasting, even though historically this has been a very successful and beneficial approach. The reason for my change in view is because our toxic exposures have dramatically increased, which makes fasting riskier now than it ever was historically.
As mentioned, fat-soluble toxins are stored in your fat cells, and when you fast and rapidly lose weight, those toxins are released, with potentially devastating effects.
Matters are made worse by the fact that many people have poorly functioning detoxification systems and simply aren't metabolically healthy enough to metabolize all those toxins. Phase 2 detox pathways in particular tend to be dysfunctional or impaired in many. Toxicity is typically the reason why people feel horrible when fasting. It's not an artifact of the fasting process in and of itself.
Another reason why I don't recommend multiday water fasting is because compliance is so poor. Naturally, if you cannot comply with the program, you cannot reap the benefits. Many would rather lose a foot than go without food for five to seven days straight. My KetoFasting protocol is a pragmatic approach designed to optimize compliance.
Lastly, when you're doing multiday water fasting, you're really limited in how many times a year you can do it. If you did it once a month, which would be rare, you'd still only cycle through the regeneration process just 12 times in a year. If you fast once a quarter, you're down to four times a year. You also have to refeed more cautiously after going without food for several days.
With KetoFasting you can cycle through the regeneration process anywhere from 52 to 104 times a year, and you can jump right into feasting, eating lots of protein and carbs the day you break your fast.
KetoFasting Defined
I do not think it is wise to jump into KetoFasting without doing the preliminary work detailed in "Fat for Fuel." You really need to be metabolically flexible and able to burn fat for fuel before you start KetoFasting. At bare minimum, you should not skip step No. 1 (below). That said, the following is a three-step summary of my KetoFast protocol.
1. Introduction — The first step is to compress your daily eating window to six to eight hours for at least four weeks, meaning you eat all of your calories for the day during those six to eight hours, and for the remaining 16 to 18 hours, you're fasting. Also, be sure to eat your last meal at least three hours before bedtime to avoid creating unnecessary free radicals.
I recommend testing your ketones to confirm that you are in ketosis (which means your body is burning fat), especially if you are heavy to start with, or diabetic, as it might take you longer to shift. Ketocoachx.com is the best blood ketone meter out there and only costs 70 cents per strip. It is a brand-new meter that became available at the end of April 2019.
2. KetoFast days — Once you've restored your metabolic flexibility to burn fat for fuel you can move into the second phase, which involves having a single 300 to 500-calorie meal, ideally breakfast, followed by a 24-hour, water-only fast, once or twice a week.
To determine how many calories you should have at this meal, first calculate your lean body mass by subtracting your percent body fat from 100. (So, if you have 20% body fat, you have 80% lean body mass.)
Multiply that percentage (in this case, 0.8) by your current total body weight to get your lean body mass in pounds. Next, multiply your lean body mass in pounds by 3.5. This is the number of calories you'll want to eat for that meal. The following is a general guide for the nutrient ratios you're looking for in this meal:
Carbs — Less than 10 grams of net carbohydrates (total carbs minus fiber) so as not to replete your glycogen stores. Primarily, your carbs would then be nonstarchy vegetables, seeds or nuts.
Protein — Half of your personalized daily protein requirement, with a focus on plant based protein, not animal protein. If you're younger than 60, a general recommendation for your daily protein requirement would be 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of lean body mass, or 0.5 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass.
Let's say your daily protein requirement is 80 grams. For this meal, you'd cut that in half to 40 grams. The key here is not just lowering your overall protein intake, though; rather, it's restricting branched-chain amino acids (such as leucine, for example), found primarily in meat and dairy products.
The reason you want to restrict branched-chain amino acids at this meal is because they inhibit autophagy — essentially blocking the very cleanout process you're trying to activate through fasting. Aside from plant-based protein, an ideal form of protein to include in this meal is collagen and/or bone broth, which provide great support for your connective tissue without inhibiting autophagy. Chlorella is another excellent protein you can include.
Fat — The remainder of your calories comes from healthy fats such as coconut oil, avocado, MCT oil, butter, olive oil and raw nuts.
By eating just that one 300- to 500-calorie meal and then fasting for 24 hours, you essentially end up having eaten once in 42 hours. This will effectively allow your body to deplete the glycogen stores in your liver, which sends autophagy soaring.
On your KetoFast days, you also need to avoid any supplements you might normally take that will inhibit autophagy. Commonly used supplements that should be avoided for this reason include methylfolate, vitamin B12, exogenous ketones, colostrum and glutamine.
Supplements that support autophagy that you can take during your KetoFast include berberine, ECGC, pomegranate peel extract or powder and organic chamomile tea, as these activate autophagy and will support the process.
3. Refeed day — After completing your 42-hour KetoFast, it's time to feast. This is also the perfect time to do hardcore strength training and load up on animal protein such as grass fed organic steak and/or whey protein, as now you're in rebuilding mode, which includes muscle building.
You can also kick your carbs up to 100 or 150 grams. An ideal sequence for this day is to do your strength training in a fasted state, then have a big meal afterward. Now's also the best time to use your sauna (see below).
As for the number of meals on refeed day, I keep it consistent with my normal intermittent fasting schedule. I simply eat more at each meal. So, for example, instead of having two eggs on my salad, I'll have three on refeed day; instead of having vegan protein in my smoothie, I'll switch over to organic grass fed whey concentrate.
Tips and Tricks
In the featured interview, I also discuss tips and tricks to get you through some of the more common issues people complain about when fasting or going on a cyclical ketogenic diet. Here's a quick summary of some of the key points:
• Cravings — Many struggle with hunger when fasting, but one of the beautiful benefits of intermittent fasting is that once you're able to burn fat for fuel, hunger and carb cravings vanish, since at that point your body is able to access your fat stores and create energy out of your body fat.
This is one of the reasons why you'll want to do intermittent fasting for at least a month and make sure you're in nutritional ketosis before you start KetoFasting. When you are insulin resistant, your body is not able to access and convert body fat to energy in an efficient manner, hence carb cravings and hunger pangs are the norm among sugar-burners.
• Sauna — Aside from a cyclical ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting and cyclical partial fasting (KetoFasting), another key strategy that can help optimize your health span are sauna bathing and thermogenesis, or the cycling between hot and cold exposures.
I specifically recommend using an EMF-free near-infrared sauna for general health optimization but especially when KetoFasting to help with detoxification.
I recommend using your sauna daily but especially the morning after your KetoFast, as at this time your body will be releasing a significant amount of toxins. If you're strength training, consider taking a sauna directly after, and then break your fast with a high-protein meal that has plenty of branched chain amino acids and fresh fruit to stimulate mTOR.
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Mercola.com
Ketofast
How to Make Fasting Easier, Safer and More Effective
Written by Dr. Joseph Mercola Fact Checked
April 30, 2019
Story at-a-glance -
KetoFasting combines a cyclical ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting with cyclical partial fasting to optimize health and longevity and support safe detoxification
The KetoFast protocol is easier to comply with than multiday water fasting, and provides greater benefits because you’re able to do it far more frequently than you could do multiday water fasting
Many of the benefits of fasting occur when you refeed, and this is why cycling in and out of fasting and feasting is so valuable. Half of the process occurs in the absence of food, while the other half occurs when food is reintroduced
One of the primary reasons for why you would want to fast is to accelerate autophagy. This is your body’s innate cleanout process, in which damaged mitochondria, proteins and cellular components are digested and then recycled during the regeneration phase, which occurs during refeeding
As with other types of extended fasting, you should not do KetoFasting if you are underweight, pregnant, breastfeeding or have an eating disorder
In the podcast above, Chris Kresser — an acupuncturist, licensed integrative medicine clinician and co-director of the California Center for Functional Medicine — and I talk about KetoFasting, the program I developed and detail in my latest book, "KetoFast: A Step-By-Step Guide to Timing Your Ketogenic Meals," which launches today. Within a week or two the accompanying KetoFast cookbook will also be released.
My previous book, "Fat for Fuel," released May 16, 2017, became an instant nationwide No. 1 best seller, beating out the No. 2 best-selling book by a significant margin.1
However, while The Washington Post and some others accurately listed "Fat for Fuel" as No. 1 based on Nielsen ratings for that first week,2 The New York Times (NYT) — considered the pre-eminent list of best-selling books in the U.S. since 1931 — didn't even include it in their top 15.3
Such a blatant omission is highly unusual, so Hay House, my publisher for that book, reached out to find out why the NYT censored it. The NYT replied the book was "disqualified" because too many of the sales went through Amazon. This in and of itself is unusual, considering Amazon is a primary outlet for all books.
Based on what happened with "Fat for Fuel," I expect more of the same with "KetoFast." Still, the NYT was unable to prevent "Fat for Fuel" from becoming a best-seller and fueling a keto revolution that is now the hottest lifestyle trend around, and I doubt the NYT will be able to quell the success of KetoFasting either, even if they decide to repeat their censorship.
From 'Fat for Fuel' to 'KetoFast'
There's no doubt conventional, government-approved advice has utterly failed to help people manage their weight and prevent disease. We're facing overwhelming rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's, with future projections heralding more of the same. We need a radical U-turn, and the foundations for how to accomplish that are clearly spelled out in "Fat for Fuel."
This is why I recommend you read that book first, and implement the nutritional basics of a cyclical ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting before you move on to "KetoFast." You could look at the two books as two parts of a complete lifestyle program, with "KetoFast" picking up where "Fat for Fuel" left off.
The key to weight management and optimal health is to optimize your mitochondrial function — hence, the term metabolic mitochondrial therapy (MMT) used in "Fat for Fuel." In short, if your mitochondria are not functioning properly, none of your bodily systems will function properly, and in order for your mitochondria to work, having the metabolic flexibility to burn fat is essential.
"Fat for Fuel" explains the many metabolic advantages you gain once your body regains the ability to burn fat for fuel, and details how to do it. The initial phase of the MMT program — which ends once your body is able to effectively burn fat for fuel — can take anywhere from weeks to months or longer, depending on how metabolically damaged you are.
While much of the book centers around diet (raising the amount of healthy fat and decreasing net carbs is what pushes your body into burning fat for fuel), it also reviews a variety of other strategies to improve your mitochondrial function, such as cold thermogenesis, photobiology, detox, exercise, the dangers of iron overload and the pernicious influence of electromagnetic fields (EMF).
"KetoFast" is the next phase once you've successfully implemented the MMT program, as it now combines a cyclical ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting with cyclical partial fasting.
Advertisement
Save 44% on a Magnesium L-Threonate 90-Day Supply
KetoFasting Will Amplify Benefits of My Basic MMT Program
The impetus behind "KetoFast" was two major realizations: First, that water-only fasting is a tremendously beneficial health intervention; and second, that while water-only fasting used to be an ideal strategy, the fact that in the 21st century we have increased toxic exposure that makes it potentially dangerous to do extended water fasts.
We're now surrounded by and exposed to some 80,000 chemicals in our environment, most of which are fat soluble, meaning they accumulate in your fat cells. Meanwhile, fasting effectively drives toxins out of fat cells, which can have devastating results if you're severely toxic.
What's more, since you're not eating, you're also not providing your body with the nutrients it needs to effectively neutralize and eliminate those released toxins. My answer to make fasting safer was to devise — based on the best scientific evidence I could find — a fasting program that mimics multiday water-only fasting, while supporting your detox pathways and minimizing the risks associated with toxicity.
The KetoFast protocol is also easier to comply with than multiday water fasting, and provides greater benefits because you're able to do it far more frequently than you could do multiday water fasting.
The caveat, again, is that you need to have done at least a month of daily intermittent fasting and achieved nutritional ketosis as laid out in "Fat for Fuel" before you move on to KetoFasting. Once you're metabolically flexible and can burn fat for fuel, the combination of cyclical nutritional ketosis and partial fasting can further amplify your weight loss and overall health and longevity.
Why Fast?
As mentioned in the featured interview, fasting has a wide range of health benefits, including radically improved sleep, which in turn is a crucial component of good health and longevity. When you're fasting, you'll often find you're sleeping much better, and your cognition typically improves thanks to the biological cleansing and regeneration that occurs throughout your body, including your brain.
In my view, one of the primary reasons for why you would want to fast is to accelerate autophagy. This is your body's innate cleanout process, in which damaged mitochondria, proteins and cellular components are digested and then recycled during the regeneration phase, which occurs during refeeding.
It's important to realize that many of the benefits of fasting actually occur when you start eating again, and this is why cycling in and out of fasting and feasting is so imperative. Half of the process occurs in the absence of food, while the other half occurs when food is reintroduced.
This is yet another reason why I don't recommend longer fasts, as this will prevent you from fasting often, hence limiting the number of cycles of regeneration you get.
Fasting also boosts your readiness score, which means following a fast, you're able to work out really hard. I do KetoFasting twice a week, and on the days following my KetoFast, that's when I do my strength training and load up on protein and carbs. I've found it's a really fabulous and nearly pain-free way to radically improve your metabolic health.
Other Benefits of Fasting
Fasting is also known to provide many other health benefits, including:4,5,6,7,8
Stem cell activation — Stem cells play an important role in health and longevity as they are instrumental in repairing and rejuvenating your cells and tissues. By upregulating autophagy and mitophagy (autophagy in your mitochondria) 9 and boosting stem cells you will lower your risk of most diseases, including cancer10 and neurodegeneration.11
Nutrient composition is important here, and in "KetoFast" I provide details on how to optimize autophagy and stem cell activation processes by eating certain foods (and avoiding others) at the right time.
Releasing ketones into your bloodstream, which help preserve brain function and protect against epileptic seizures, cognitive impairment12 and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Boosting brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which stimulates creation of new brain cells and triggers brain chemicals that protect against brain changes associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.13,14
Increasing growth hormone by as much as 1,300 percent in women and 2,000 percent in men,15 thereby promoting muscle development and vitality.
Lowering insulin and improving your insulin sensitivity; studies have shown intermittent fasting can both prevent and reverse Type 2 diabetes, which is rooted in insulin resistance.16,17,18,19
Increasing levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which helps your body break down fat to be used as fuel and benefits your metabolism.20,21,22
Boosting mitochondrial energy efficiency and biosynthesis.
Lowering oxidative stress and inflammation.23
Improving circulating glucose24 and lipid levels.
Reducing blood pressure.
Improving metabolic efficiency and body composition, modulating levels of dangerous visceral fat and significantly reducing body weight in obese individuals.
Reproducing some of the cardiovascular benefits associated with exercise.
Regenerating the pancreas25 and improve pancreatic function, reversing diabetes.
Improving gut health — While the exact mechanisms are still unclear, I believe fasting helps jump-start microbiome health by increasing bacterial diversity and repairing leaky gut. Overall, fasting facilitates healing of your gastrointestinal tract and enhances the integrity of your gut lining.
Protecting against cardiovascular disease.
Reducing low-density lipoprotein and total cholesterol.
Improving immune function.26
Synchronizing your body's biological clocks.27
Eliminating sugar cravings as your body adapts to burning fat instead of sugar.
Increasing longevity — There are a number of mechanisms contributing to this effect. Normalizing insulin sensitivity is a major one, but fasting also inhibits the mTOR pathway, which plays an important part in driving the aging process.
Safety and Contraindications
For all its benefits, fasting — especially multiday water-only fasting — is not for everyone. As with other types of extended fasting, you should not do KetoFasting if you are:
Underweight
Pregnant
Breastfeeding
Have an eating disorder
This is a small minority of people, and for pregnant and breastfeeding women it's a temporary contraindication. For most others, fasting is likely to provide significant health benefits, and my KetoFast protocol raises not only your chances of fasting successfully but also improves safety, as it's designed to support detoxification.
Why I Don't Recommend Continuous Nutritional Ketosis
"Fat for Fuel" and "KetoFast" both stress the importance of a cyclical ketogenic diet. A common misconception is that because nutritional ketosis is so beneficial, it stands to reason that remaining in ketosis for the rest of your life would be the way to go. I disagree with this approach, having experienced the drawbacks of it firsthand.
For starters, continuous keto can start wreaking havoc with your hormonal system, specifically your thyroid. It's important to realize that nutritional ketosis is a catabolic process, meaning you're breaking things down. This is a good and necessary process, but you also need to build your body back up!
Many advertise the ketogenic diet as something you stay on forever, and I quickly learned that was a bad idea. After some months, you begin to lose muscle mass, for example, which is the complete opposite of what you're looking for, especially if you're older, since you will automatically lose muscle mass with age anyway.
Hence, I strongly recommend cycling in and out of ketosis once you've regained your metabolic flexibility and are able to effectively burn fat for fuel. In other words, you stay in ketosis only long enough to make sure you're burning fat, and then you move into a more balanced approach where you're adding in higher amounts of healthy carbs once or twice a week.
The Dark Side of Water-Only Fasting
I also do not recommend strict multiday water-only fasting, even though historically this has been a very successful and beneficial approach. The reason for my change in view is because our toxic exposures have dramatically increased, which makes fasting riskier now than it ever was historically.
As mentioned, fat-soluble toxins are stored in your fat cells, and when you fast and rapidly lose weight, those toxins are released, with potentially devastating effects.
Matters are made worse by the fact that many people have poorly functioning detoxification systems and simply aren't metabolically healthy enough to metabolize all those toxins. Phase 2 detox pathways in particular tend to be dysfunctional or impaired in many. Toxicity is typically the reason why people feel horrible when fasting. It's not an artifact of the fasting process in and of itself.
Another reason why I don't recommend multiday water fasting is because compliance is so poor. Naturally, if you cannot comply with the program, you cannot reap the benefits. Many would rather lose a foot than go without food for five to seven days straight. My KetoFasting protocol is a pragmatic approach designed to optimize compliance.
Lastly, when you're doing multiday water fasting, you're really limited in how many times a year you can do it. If you did it once a month, which would be rare, you'd still only cycle through the regeneration process just 12 times in a year. If you fast once a quarter, you're down to four times a year. You also have to refeed more cautiously after going without food for several days.
With KetoFasting you can cycle through the regeneration process anywhere from 52 to 104 times a year, and you can jump right into feasting, eating lots of protein and carbs the day you break your fast.
KetoFasting Defined
I do not think it is wise to jump into KetoFasting without doing the preliminary work detailed in "Fat for Fuel." You really need to be metabolically flexible and able to burn fat for fuel before you start KetoFasting. At bare minimum, you should not skip step No. 1 (below). That said, the following is a three-step summary of my KetoFast protocol.
1. Introduction — The first step is to compress your daily eating window to six to eight hours for at least four weeks, meaning you eat all of your calories for the day during those six to eight hours, and for the remaining 16 to 18 hours, you're fasting. Also, be sure to eat your last meal at least three hours before bedtime to avoid creating unnecessary free radicals.
I recommend testing your ketones to confirm that you are in ketosis (which means your body is burning fat), especially if you are heavy to start with, or diabetic, as it might take you longer to shift. Ketocoachx.com is the best blood ketone meter out there and only costs 70 cents per strip. It is a brand-new meter that became available at the end of April 2019.
2. KetoFast days — Once you've restored your metabolic flexibility to burn fat for fuel you can move into the second phase, which involves having a single 300 to 500-calorie meal, ideally breakfast, followed by a 24-hour, water-only fast, once or twice a week.
To determine how many calories you should have at this meal, first calculate your lean body mass by subtracting your percent body fat from 100. (So, if you have 20% body fat, you have 80% lean body mass.)
Multiply that percentage (in this case, 0.8) by your current total body weight to get your lean body mass in pounds. Next, multiply your lean body mass in pounds by 3.5. This is the number of calories you'll want to eat for that meal. The following is a general guide for the nutrient ratios you're looking for in this meal:
Carbs — Less than 10 grams of net carbohydrates (total carbs minus fiber) so as not to replete your glycogen stores. Primarily, your carbs would then be nonstarchy vegetables, seeds or nuts.
Protein — Half of your personalized daily protein requirement, with a focus on plant based protein, not animal protein. If you're younger than 60, a general recommendation for your daily protein requirement would be 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of lean body mass, or 0.5 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass.
Let's say your daily protein requirement is 80 grams. For this meal, you'd cut that in half to 40 grams. The key here is not just lowering your overall protein intake, though; rather, it's restricting branched-chain amino acids (such as leucine, for example), found primarily in meat and dairy products.
The reason you want to restrict branched-chain amino acids at this meal is because they inhibit autophagy — essentially blocking the very cleanout process you're trying to activate through fasting. Aside from plant-based protein, an ideal form of protein to include in this meal is collagen and/or bone broth, which provide great support for your connective tissue without inhibiting autophagy. Chlorella is another excellent protein you can include.
Fat — The remainder of your calories comes from healthy fats such as coconut oil, avocado, MCT oil, butter, olive oil and raw nuts.
By eating just that one 300- to 500-calorie meal and then fasting for 24 hours, you essentially end up having eaten once in 42 hours. This will effectively allow your body to deplete the glycogen stores in your liver, which sends autophagy soaring.
On your KetoFast days, you also need to avoid any supplements you might normally take that will inhibit autophagy. Commonly used supplements that should be avoided for this reason include methylfolate, vitamin B12, exogenous ketones, colostrum and glutamine.
Supplements that support autophagy that you can take during your KetoFast include berberine, ECGC, pomegranate peel extract or powder and organic chamomile tea, as these activate autophagy and will support the process.
3. Refeed day — After completing your 42-hour KetoFast, it's time to feast. This is also the perfect time to do hardcore strength training and load up on animal protein such as grass fed organic steak and/or whey protein, as now you're in rebuilding mode, which includes muscle building.
You can also kick your carbs up to 100 or 150 grams. An ideal sequence for this day is to do your strength training in a fasted state, then have a big meal afterward. Now's also the best time to use your sauna (see below).
As for the number of meals on refeed day, I keep it consistent with my normal intermittent fasting schedule. I simply eat more at each meal. So, for example, instead of having two eggs on my salad, I'll have three on refeed day; instead of having vegan protein in my smoothie, I'll switch over to organic grass fed whey concentrate.
Tips and Tricks
In the featured interview, I also discuss tips and tricks to get you through some of the more common issues people complain about when fasting or going on a cyclical ketogenic diet. Here's a quick summary of some of the key points:
• Cravings — Many struggle with hunger when fasting, but one of the beautiful benefits of intermittent fasting is that once you're able to burn fat for fuel, hunger and carb cravings vanish, since at that point your body is able to access your fat stores and create energy out of your body fat.
This is one of the reasons why you'll want to do intermittent fasting for at least a month and make sure you're in nutritional ketosis before you start KetoFasting. When you are insulin resistant, your body is not able to access and convert body fat to energy in an efficient manner, hence carb cravings and hunger pangs are the norm among sugar-burners.
• Sauna — Aside from a cyclical ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting and cyclical partial fasting (KetoFasting), another key strategy that can help optimize your health span are sauna bathing and thermogenesis, or the cycling between hot and cold exposures.
I specifically recommend using an EMF-free near-infrared sauna for general health optimization but especially when KetoFasting to help with detoxification.
I recommend using your sauna daily but especially the morning after your KetoFast, as at this time your body will be releasing a significant amount of toxins. If you're strength training, consider taking a sauna directly after, and then break your fast with a high-protein meal that has plenty of branched chain amino acids and fresh fruit to stimulate mTOR.
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Monday, 29 April 2019
NASA HQ News: NASA Brings Moon and More to Visitors at COSI Science Festival
April 29, 2019
RELEASE 19-034
NASA Brings Moon and More to Visitors at COSI Science Festival
A visitor is immersed in space through a virtual reality tour and learns about space communications.
A visitor is immersed in space through a virtual reality tour and learns about space communications.
Credits: NASA/Tyler D. Fairchild
NASA will host a range of activities and demonstrations, including a virtual reality chair and Oculus Go trip to the Moon, at the COSI Science Festival Wednesday, May 1, through Saturday, May 4, in Columbus, Ohio.
NASA’s exhibit will be in the atrium of the COSI building, located at 333 W. Broad St., from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. EDT May 1-3, then move outdoors to the Green Area for the Big Science Celebration from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 4.
Festival attendees can explore science, flight and space exploration through NASA’s hands-on, interactive exhibits and activities, including:
a virtual reality chair, where visitors can get a sense of what it might be like to sit on the surface of Jupiter’s frozen water moon Europa while watching a video about NASA’s planetary missions;
three activities that demonstrate how sound travels through the air, how humans survive at high altitudes and the altitudes where objects fly;
an Oculus Go demonstration that will take visitors on a trip from Earth to the Moon, and explore space communication with NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite; and,
a model of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and infrared camera, and interactive demonstrations.
Eric Smith, chief scientist for NASA’s Webb Telescope Program, will discuss the telescope’s unique technologies and take questions from the audience beginning at 8:30 p.m. Friday, May 3, in the planetarium of the COSI building.
Media interested in interviewing NASA experts at the science festival should contact Carlos Gomez at carlos.r.gomez@nasa.gov or 216-870-4135.
NASA is charged to get astronauts to the Moon in the next five years with a landing on the lunar South Pole. When we go to the Moon this time, it will be to stay. And then we’ll take what we learn on the Moon, and go to Mars.
Learn more about NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach at:
https://www.nasa.gov/specials/moon2mars/
-end-
RELEASE 19-034
NASA Brings Moon and More to Visitors at COSI Science Festival
A visitor is immersed in space through a virtual reality tour and learns about space communications.
A visitor is immersed in space through a virtual reality tour and learns about space communications.
Credits: NASA/Tyler D. Fairchild
NASA will host a range of activities and demonstrations, including a virtual reality chair and Oculus Go trip to the Moon, at the COSI Science Festival Wednesday, May 1, through Saturday, May 4, in Columbus, Ohio.
NASA’s exhibit will be in the atrium of the COSI building, located at 333 W. Broad St., from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. EDT May 1-3, then move outdoors to the Green Area for the Big Science Celebration from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 4.
Festival attendees can explore science, flight and space exploration through NASA’s hands-on, interactive exhibits and activities, including:
a virtual reality chair, where visitors can get a sense of what it might be like to sit on the surface of Jupiter’s frozen water moon Europa while watching a video about NASA’s planetary missions;
three activities that demonstrate how sound travels through the air, how humans survive at high altitudes and the altitudes where objects fly;
an Oculus Go demonstration that will take visitors on a trip from Earth to the Moon, and explore space communication with NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite; and,
a model of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and infrared camera, and interactive demonstrations.
Eric Smith, chief scientist for NASA’s Webb Telescope Program, will discuss the telescope’s unique technologies and take questions from the audience beginning at 8:30 p.m. Friday, May 3, in the planetarium of the COSI building.
Media interested in interviewing NASA experts at the science festival should contact Carlos Gomez at carlos.r.gomez@nasa.gov or 216-870-4135.
NASA is charged to get astronauts to the Moon in the next five years with a landing on the lunar South Pole. When we go to the Moon this time, it will be to stay. And then we’ll take what we learn on the Moon, and go to Mars.
Learn more about NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach at:
https://www.nasa.gov/specials/moon2mars/
-end-
RenewEconomy/Giles Parkinson: Australia can be powered 100% by renewables by early 2030s, says Garnaut
RenewEconomy
Fair Dinkum Power News & Analysis
Australia can be powered 100% by renewables by early 2030s, says Garnaut
Giles Parkinson 29 April 2019 0 Comments
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Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash
Leading economist and climate change policy expert Professor Ross Garnaut says that Australia could be powered 100 per cent by “intermittent” renewables by the early 2030s, and have a grid that is both reliable and secure and cheaper than it is now.
In the third of a series of six public lectures being delivered by Garnaut in the lead up to the next election, Garnaut says a grid powered by wind and solar, and backed by storage and demand management, could be achieve quite quickly, but it would require the “train wreck” of regulatory failures to be fixed.
“I now have no doubt that intermittent renewables could meet 100 per cent of Australia’s electricity requirements by the 2030s, with high degrees of security and reliability, and at wholesale prices much lower than any experienced in Australia over the past decade,” Garnaut says in his talk last week at the University of Melbourne (a video of which can be seen here).
“More importantly, I now have no doubt that with well designed policy support, firm power in globally transformative quantities could be supplied to industrial locations in each State at globally competitive prices.
“That is around $45 to $50 per MWh today, whenever the power is required. No other developed country has a comparable opportunity.
“That means that we can contribute our fair share to the global effort to contain temperature increases as close as possible to 1.5°C, even if it takes time to make strong headway in other sectors.”
Garnaut sees the electricity sector as the key to cutting emissions across the economy, and for securing Australia’s long-term economic future and as a global base for low-cost industry.
That’s because decarbonising the grid is the quickest and cheapest option, and in turn can lead to zero, or near zero emissions in transport, much of industry and fugitive emissions.
In turn, the decarbonisation of Australia’s electricity grid can play a big role in global decarbonisation efforts, because it could lead to exports of renewable energy in the form of hydrogen or ammonia to north Asia, and then other economies, and through sub sea cables to Indonesia and beyond.
“Australia’s renewable energy is a path to low cost emissions reduction in the rest of the world,” Garnaut says. “And before that, if wet our act together, we can going to find ourselves as the natural home of energy intensive industry.”
In a series of slides, Garnaut illustrates how this is possible. This slide above is probably the most stunning, because it compares the total cost of solar compared to just the operating costs of coal generation over the past 10 years, and looking forward to 2025.
Garnaut notes that solar was significantly more expensive than coal a decade ago, it is now cheaper than just the operating costs of coal.
Further falls in the cost of solar, to around $30/MWh by 2025, and further rises in the operating costs of coal, would mean it would make no sense to make new investments in coal generation from now on. Even with firming and storage, solar and wind beat fossil fuels, as the CSIRO and the Australian Energy market Operator have recognised.
This, he notes, has come as something of a surprise to most of the major global and national institutions, who have been consistently wrong in their estimations of technology costs.
These next two graphs illustrate how.
First is the cost of solar. International forecasts are the shaded blue and green in the middle. The forecasts from Australian institutions, including the Australian Energy Market Operator and even recent ones from the highly conservative Electric Power Research Institute, are ridiculously out of the ball-park.
The actual cost of solar – as reflected in recent power purchase agreements (PPAs) is revealed in yellow. It is far below even the most optimistic forecast. And it will continue to fall.
The same is true of wind energy (above), where the IEA and the global wind lobby were quite conservative in their forecasts, but in Australia the AEMO and EPRI were again out of the ballpark.
Garnaut worries that AEMO – despite its good work in putting together the Integrated System Plans over the last two years – may still be underestimating the cost falls in solar particularly.
He noted this graph which shows that AEMO’s forecasts have been significantly wrong over the last decade, and even with the major adjustments to the starting point every two years, it still downplays the possibility of future cost falls.
Garnaut says the evidence is clear – for each doubling in capacity, there has been a 24 per cent reduction in costs. This has been happening for the better part of four decades, and there is no reason to expect it would stop now,
“The story of the fall in solar PV prices is a triumph for climate policy,” Garnaut says, pointing to the policies in Germany and Europe at the start of the century that underpinned the growth in manufacturing and scale and the subsequent fall in costs.
Garnaut lamented the policy and political debate over renewable energy in the past decade, and the “train wreck of regulatory failure” that would need to be cleared to make room for the underlying economic forces.
This is particularly significant, because it is now widely recognised that it is not economics, or even engineering that is holding back the clean energy transition, but regulatory hurdles that are looming large as the major impediment.
This goes to the wholesale regulatory capture of regulator by the industry, although Garnaut did note the positive influence of AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman and AER chief Paul Conboy.
“Whoever did those appointments should be recognised as Australian heroes,” he said, adding that regulatory agencies are starting to “do their job” and shifting from the old thinking around the synchronous energy system that had dominated perspectives.
Garnaut noted the state-wide blackout in South Australia, and lamented the fact that rather than being seen as a call to action on climate change, it was used – within hours – by Coalition politicians to argue against the use of renewables.
Thankfully, Garnaut said, it did lead to some forward thinking by then South Australia premier Jay Weatherill, who put in his plans that saw the construction of the highly successful Tesla big battery, and the back-up generators that have been used once, but very successfully since then.
“Since the summer of 2016-17, the Tesla big battery, other batteries, the Government’s gas turbines, and more attentive regulatory agencies have made South Australia possibly the most secure region within the National Energy Market,” Garnaut said.
He noted that the one area that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was able to move forward was in the promotion of the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, probably because it “looked like technology that came from the 1950s”.
However, Garnaut said he was concerned about both the expense of the project, and the potential market power. He suggested taking the Snowy 2.0 scheme and putting it into a separate government owned entity that would provide “reliability services” at minimum cost.
Garnaut concluded his lecture by focusing on the opportunity of a zero carbon grid, powered by wind and solar.
“Australia emerged as a major player in global energy in the later decades of the fossil economy. Australia is by far the world’s biggest exporter of coal when you take thermal and metallurgical coal together. It is currently the second biggest exporter of gas, and is headed soon to be the biggest—at great cost to Australian consumers and industry.
“Australia became the world’s biggest exporter of aluminium in the late twentieth century after the Japanese industry, responding to environmental concerns at home, moved to importing metal, and Australia’s low coal costs made it the logical location for new production.
“Australia lost its old advantages in the fossil energy world economy in the twenty first century through developments discussed this evening.
“The rich natural endowment of potential for renewable energy means that when the whole world has low or zero emissions energy, Australia potentially has the lowest cost energy.
“If we secure the new opportunity, unlike the last, it will be sustainable.”
Giles Parkinson
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of Renew Economy, and is also the founder of One Step Off The Grid and founder/editor of The Driven. Giles has been a journalist for 35 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.
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April to be momentous in transition from coal to renewables in US
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by Sophie Vorrath on 29 April 2019 at 12:07 PM
Solar Insiders Podcast: Australia and the art of the stop-start solar policy
by Giles Parkinson and Nigel Morris on 29 April 2019 at 10:24 AM
Victoria solar industry slams pause in rooftop rebate, as phones “stop ringing”
by Sophie Vorrath on 24 April 2019 at 2:35 PM
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by Bridie Schmidt on 29 April 2019 at 1:42 PM
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Fair Dinkum Power News & Analysis
Australia can be powered 100% by renewables by early 2030s, says Garnaut
Giles Parkinson 29 April 2019 0 Comments
share
Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash
Leading economist and climate change policy expert Professor Ross Garnaut says that Australia could be powered 100 per cent by “intermittent” renewables by the early 2030s, and have a grid that is both reliable and secure and cheaper than it is now.
In the third of a series of six public lectures being delivered by Garnaut in the lead up to the next election, Garnaut says a grid powered by wind and solar, and backed by storage and demand management, could be achieve quite quickly, but it would require the “train wreck” of regulatory failures to be fixed.
“I now have no doubt that intermittent renewables could meet 100 per cent of Australia’s electricity requirements by the 2030s, with high degrees of security and reliability, and at wholesale prices much lower than any experienced in Australia over the past decade,” Garnaut says in his talk last week at the University of Melbourne (a video of which can be seen here).
“More importantly, I now have no doubt that with well designed policy support, firm power in globally transformative quantities could be supplied to industrial locations in each State at globally competitive prices.
“That is around $45 to $50 per MWh today, whenever the power is required. No other developed country has a comparable opportunity.
“That means that we can contribute our fair share to the global effort to contain temperature increases as close as possible to 1.5°C, even if it takes time to make strong headway in other sectors.”
Garnaut sees the electricity sector as the key to cutting emissions across the economy, and for securing Australia’s long-term economic future and as a global base for low-cost industry.
That’s because decarbonising the grid is the quickest and cheapest option, and in turn can lead to zero, or near zero emissions in transport, much of industry and fugitive emissions.
In turn, the decarbonisation of Australia’s electricity grid can play a big role in global decarbonisation efforts, because it could lead to exports of renewable energy in the form of hydrogen or ammonia to north Asia, and then other economies, and through sub sea cables to Indonesia and beyond.
“Australia’s renewable energy is a path to low cost emissions reduction in the rest of the world,” Garnaut says. “And before that, if wet our act together, we can going to find ourselves as the natural home of energy intensive industry.”
In a series of slides, Garnaut illustrates how this is possible. This slide above is probably the most stunning, because it compares the total cost of solar compared to just the operating costs of coal generation over the past 10 years, and looking forward to 2025.
Garnaut notes that solar was significantly more expensive than coal a decade ago, it is now cheaper than just the operating costs of coal.
Further falls in the cost of solar, to around $30/MWh by 2025, and further rises in the operating costs of coal, would mean it would make no sense to make new investments in coal generation from now on. Even with firming and storage, solar and wind beat fossil fuels, as the CSIRO and the Australian Energy market Operator have recognised.
This, he notes, has come as something of a surprise to most of the major global and national institutions, who have been consistently wrong in their estimations of technology costs.
These next two graphs illustrate how.
First is the cost of solar. International forecasts are the shaded blue and green in the middle. The forecasts from Australian institutions, including the Australian Energy Market Operator and even recent ones from the highly conservative Electric Power Research Institute, are ridiculously out of the ball-park.
The actual cost of solar – as reflected in recent power purchase agreements (PPAs) is revealed in yellow. It is far below even the most optimistic forecast. And it will continue to fall.
The same is true of wind energy (above), where the IEA and the global wind lobby were quite conservative in their forecasts, but in Australia the AEMO and EPRI were again out of the ballpark.
Garnaut worries that AEMO – despite its good work in putting together the Integrated System Plans over the last two years – may still be underestimating the cost falls in solar particularly.
He noted this graph which shows that AEMO’s forecasts have been significantly wrong over the last decade, and even with the major adjustments to the starting point every two years, it still downplays the possibility of future cost falls.
Garnaut says the evidence is clear – for each doubling in capacity, there has been a 24 per cent reduction in costs. This has been happening for the better part of four decades, and there is no reason to expect it would stop now,
“The story of the fall in solar PV prices is a triumph for climate policy,” Garnaut says, pointing to the policies in Germany and Europe at the start of the century that underpinned the growth in manufacturing and scale and the subsequent fall in costs.
Garnaut lamented the policy and political debate over renewable energy in the past decade, and the “train wreck of regulatory failure” that would need to be cleared to make room for the underlying economic forces.
This is particularly significant, because it is now widely recognised that it is not economics, or even engineering that is holding back the clean energy transition, but regulatory hurdles that are looming large as the major impediment.
This goes to the wholesale regulatory capture of regulator by the industry, although Garnaut did note the positive influence of AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman and AER chief Paul Conboy.
“Whoever did those appointments should be recognised as Australian heroes,” he said, adding that regulatory agencies are starting to “do their job” and shifting from the old thinking around the synchronous energy system that had dominated perspectives.
Garnaut noted the state-wide blackout in South Australia, and lamented the fact that rather than being seen as a call to action on climate change, it was used – within hours – by Coalition politicians to argue against the use of renewables.
Thankfully, Garnaut said, it did lead to some forward thinking by then South Australia premier Jay Weatherill, who put in his plans that saw the construction of the highly successful Tesla big battery, and the back-up generators that have been used once, but very successfully since then.
“Since the summer of 2016-17, the Tesla big battery, other batteries, the Government’s gas turbines, and more attentive regulatory agencies have made South Australia possibly the most secure region within the National Energy Market,” Garnaut said.
He noted that the one area that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was able to move forward was in the promotion of the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, probably because it “looked like technology that came from the 1950s”.
However, Garnaut said he was concerned about both the expense of the project, and the potential market power. He suggested taking the Snowy 2.0 scheme and putting it into a separate government owned entity that would provide “reliability services” at minimum cost.
Garnaut concluded his lecture by focusing on the opportunity of a zero carbon grid, powered by wind and solar.
“Australia emerged as a major player in global energy in the later decades of the fossil economy. Australia is by far the world’s biggest exporter of coal when you take thermal and metallurgical coal together. It is currently the second biggest exporter of gas, and is headed soon to be the biggest—at great cost to Australian consumers and industry.
“Australia became the world’s biggest exporter of aluminium in the late twentieth century after the Japanese industry, responding to environmental concerns at home, moved to importing metal, and Australia’s low coal costs made it the logical location for new production.
“Australia lost its old advantages in the fossil energy world economy in the twenty first century through developments discussed this evening.
“The rich natural endowment of potential for renewable energy means that when the whole world has low or zero emissions energy, Australia potentially has the lowest cost energy.
“If we secure the new opportunity, unlike the last, it will be sustainable.”
Giles Parkinson
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of Renew Economy, and is also the founder of One Step Off The Grid and founder/editor of The Driven. Giles has been a journalist for 35 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.
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SWI swissinfo.ch/Christian Raaflaub: What does the future hold for electric vehicles?
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Swiss strategy
What does the future hold for electric vehicles?
By Christian Raaflaub
This content was published on January 9, 2019 2:31 PM Jan 9, 2019 - 14:31
Chinese boy in a blue car
China Is leading the world towards an electric car future
(Robyn Beck / AFP)
Switzerland has a new strategy to promote greater use of electric vehicles, but the Alpine nation remains far behind leading electric mobility pioneers such as Norway. The Swiss plan comes amid questions about how environmentally friendly electric cars really are.
Sales of electric cars in Switzerland increased by 40% in 2017, compared to the previous year. But the 4,929 electric vehicles sold only represented 1.6% of total vehicle sales, according to the Federal Statistical Officeexternal link.
Graphic on passenger cars sales in Switzerland
(swissinfo.ch)
This compared to Norway, where 20.8% of cars sold that year were electric. By 2025, only electric or hybrid vehicles will be allowed on Norwegian roads.
But Switzerland has new ambitions when it comes to electric vehicles. Last December, the Swiss Federal Energy Office published its “Roadmap for electric mobility 2022external link”, a strategy document which contains plans to increase the share of rechargeable tourism vehicles (electric and hybrid) on Swiss roads to 15%.
Electric vehicles will thus become an “integral part of road traffic in Switzerland” by 2022, the document says. The roadmap was drawn up by over 50 organisations and firms from different sectors, as well as federal, cantonal and communal officials.
Scarce service stations
One of the main challenges for the expansion of e-mobility in Switzerland is the limited network of electric service stations, whose scarcity prevents such vehicles from travelling long distances. The federal authorities therefore want to build 160 high-speed recharging points along main roads. They also say electric cars should no longer be classed as higher-weight vehicles due to their heavy batteries.
In general, the authorities say they want to change people’s view on electric cars and “create positive feelings” about e-mobility.
Behind China
Other countries, such as China, are already much further down this road. In view of the serious pollution problems in Chinese towns and cities, the country wants to discourage new car purchases; new vehicle number plates are only distributed in a lottery system. In 2013, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that a Beijing driver had to wait 72 months to get vehicle plates. The situation is much worse today, according to swissinfo.ch’s Chinese journalists.
But China wants to spur demand for alternative-energy cars. This year it plans to further reduce electric-vehicle subsidies on electric cars and push automakers to innovate rather than rely on fiscal policy, Bloomberg reports.
Electric cars developments are moving ahead at speed. From 2019, Volvo – owned by the Chinese group Geely – plans to produce only electric or hybrid vehicles. And this week, the American electric car manufacturer Tesla opened a huge factory in China.
Europe is losing pace. Several electric car models are in the pipeline, but “it won’t be before 2021, when Volkswagen makes its big offensive into e-mobility, that the German group manages to dethrone Tesla in Europe”, Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a German economist and transport expert at Duisburg-Essen University told the Handelszeitung newspaper.
Environmental impact
Meanwhile, a growing number of specialists are casting doubt on the environmental benefits of battery-powered vehicles. The NZZ am Sonntag newspaper recently wrote that making new batteries causes more environmental damage than the manufacture of combustion engine cars. It said a study commissioned by the Swedish Energy Agency showed that a small electric car becomes more energy efficient than a regular petrol or diesel car after 30,000 kilometres (18,641 miles), while a bigger electric car only does so only after 100,000 kilometres.
The ecological impact of manufacturing car batteries is also overlooked, argue some experts. Battery production requires rare minerals and damages the environment. The NZZ said plans to dispose of millions of used electric car batteries were “as vague as the questions surrounding nuclear waste when the first nuclear power stations were built”.
electric cars
Electric cars
Switzerland aims to scale up e-mobility
This content was published on December 18, 2018 1:59 PM
Translated from German by Simon Bradley, swissinfo.ch
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There are 6 comments on this article.
Write a comment...
"TheDon commented on the content at 09 January 2019 18:37".
TheDon 09-Jan-2019 18:37
VAG already have ridiculously expensive all electric cars available via its Audi brand. We have an i3 which is also very expensive new
Write an answer...
"Lynx commented on the content at 10 January 2019 14:18".
Lynx Lynx 10-Jan-2019 14:18
If I was allowed to swop my petrol car for similar sized electric one, for no extra cost, then I would do so. At current prices, there is no chance of me switching now. However, I might consider a hybrid, which seems to be a good compromise, as there is no need find a charging station.
Write an answer...
"J Beaulieu commented on the content at 14 January 2019 01:59".
J Beaulieu 14-Jan-2019 01:59
Tesla has announced the new assembly plant in China, it is not yet built.
Write an answer...
"Gaz commented on the content at 16 January 2019 03:05".
Gaz 16-Jan-2019 03:05
Science daily 18/12/18 they got a magnesium battery to cycle 2500 times with no deterioration thats a seven plus year life, great for renewables but still we have not addressed the issue of the mandating of passive solar design principles into law, being the point its not the buildings its the prior urban planning not accommodating passive solar design principles. .... which in turn provide better outcomes for active systems which provides better outcomes for renewable which provides a better built and unbuilt environment which means a better cleaner healthier more comfortable life
Write an answer...
"Gaz commented on the content at 16 January 2019 03:06".
Gaz 16-Jan-2019 03:06
Lean electrolyte a game changer....
Write an answer...
"David Jones commented on the content at 11 March 2019 11:50".
David Jones 11-Mar-2019 11:50
It seems in many cases, when some specialists criticize batteries they ignore that the term "battery" simply means a storage device for energy. There are many, many chemistries and the current rare mineral battery types that have established themselves in EVs are only the beginning of this transition. It is almost certain that a different type of chemistry which does not require as many or even any rare earth mineral will eventually replace the current lithium based tech.
Why some people choose to ignore the long term technological versatility of battery powered transportation is hard to comprehend. Or is it that many media outlets cannot distinguish between studies designed to assess the current state of specific technologies versus the long term technological potential of a system & it's overall technology development roadmap for the next 10-20 years?
Long term is the only element that counts when tackling anthropogenic climate change and transportation capability because if your solution is great today and ends up at a dead end in 30 years, it was a pointless endeavour to begin with. ICEVs are a dead end any way you put it, they are unlikely to be competitive with economically batteries if their energy source has to be created rather than extracted and sooner or later this will be the case. That is in addition to anthropogenic climate change damages related to ICEV use.
Write an answer...
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SWI swissinfo.ch: Controversial Tesla police car fleet ready for patrol duty
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Controversial Tesla police car fleet ready for patrol duty
This content was published on April 26, 2019 2:45 PM Apr 26, 2019 - 14:45
Tesla X 100D, part of the fleet
A Tesla X 100D, part of the new fleet, as seen in December 2018
(© Keystone / Georgios Kefalas)
The police force of the Swiss canton of Basel City will be putting two of its new Tesla electric cars on patrol from this weekend, following a row over the vehicles’ purchase and data protection issues.
The canton’s justice and police department said on Fridayexternal link that two of the seven cars ordered were ready for use and that police officers had completed their training.
In addition, the canton’s data protection officer Beat Rudin had completed his final reportexternal link on the high-tech, specially-adapted vehicles, with the force taking on board all eight of Rudin’s recommendations. This included replacing the Tesla SIM card with a Swiss-made one.
Rudin had originally said that the vehicles should not be used until data protection issues had been addressed. In a statement on Friday, he clarified that he had no further objection to the vehicles being used, should the eight recommendations be adopted.
Controversy
In March 2018, the force announced that it was ordering seven Tesla cars as emergency response vehicles. At CHF140,000 ($137,000) each, the Teslas cost considerably more than existing police vehicles, and some local parliamentarians condemned the move as too expensive.
But the force countered there would be lower fuel and maintenance costs, and that the environmental impact would be lower.
A row then erupted in December, shortly after some of the cars arrived, over data protection. The Tesla artificial intelligence system sends out data, such as the position of vehicles. The police force was sharply criticised for not conducting an adequate assessment of data protection risks.
Misgivings again surfaced in February this year after a parliamentary commission in the northern canton ruled that the cars were bought “unlawfully” because public tender rules were not observed.
In total, three of the seven cars have now arrived in Basel. One will be kept in reserve. The other four are due to arrive by the end of the year, the justice and police department said.
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Swiss strategy
What does the future hold for electric vehicles?
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SWI Swissinfo.ch: Switzerland’s open-air voting is now streamed online
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Direct democracy
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Landsgemeinde live
Switzerland’s open-air voting is now streamed online
This content was published on April 27, 2019 8:00 AM Apr 27, 2019 - 08:00
Landsgemeinde
The Landsgemeinde takes place once a year, on the last Sunday of April.
(Keystone/patrick Huerlimann)
On Sunday, the residents of the Swiss canton of Appenzell Inner Rhodes will choose their senator via a traditional show of hands in a tradition known as the “Landsgemeinde”. For the first time, the election will be broadcast live on the internet.
By voting for their representative in Switzerland’s upper house of parliament, canton Appenzell Inner Rhodes will kick off the 2019 federal elections. However, they will be doing it in their own unique style.
The Landsgemeinde is one of the oldest and simplest forms of direct democracy in Switzerland. All registered electors are invited once a year to assemble in the open air to elect the government with a show of hands. Glarus is the only other Swiss canton which still follows the practice but voting is restricted to changes in the constitution and laws or set tax levels.
Cantonal assembly
Ancient form of direct democracy
+ Town square voting: all pomp or pure democracy?
Appenzell Inner Rhodes’ flirtation with a live online broadcast of the Landsgemeinde is a pilot project. The idea is to allow citizens who cannot attend the assembly to follow proceedings live via the canton’s websiteexternal link. The small population of just under 12,000 inhabitants (equal to that in 1850) keeps the Landsgemeinde tradition from becoming completely impractical to implement.
The cantonal government has also decided to continue another pilot experiment introduced last year: simultaneous translation into sign language. The uptake for this service was disappointing and officials hope it will be used more this time around.
In addition to voting on various matters, the Citizens' Assembly will elect two members of the cantonal government and a new senator to the country’s upper house of parliament. The rest of the country has to wait until October 20 to take part in the federal elections.
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Sunday, 28 April 2019
The Guardian /Amelia Hill: Home Office ‘chaos and incompetence’ leads to unlawful detentions, claim whistleblowers
The Guardian
Immigration and asylum
Home Office ‘chaos and incompetence’ leads to unlawful detentions, claim whistleblowers
Handling of UK asylum cases compromised by poorly trained and overworked staff
‘Toxic atmosphere’: the Home Office unit everybody wants to leave
Amelia Hill
@byameliahill
Sun 28 Apr 2019 16.00 BST
Last modified on Sun 28 Apr 2019 21.05 BST
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The Home Office’s visas and immigration centre at Lunar House in Croydon, London.
Chaos, incompetence and bullying of Home Office employees is resulting in failed deportations and the unlawful detention of vulnerable and desperate people, whistleblowers allege.
The Dublin Cessation Team (DCT) – until last week known as the Third Country Unit – is a little-known but crucial department that, under the EU Dublin convention, determines which EU member state is responsible for considering an asylum claim and transferring the asylum seeker to the responsible state.
“Mistakes by overworked, under-skilled, bullied and highly stressed DCT caseworkers are directly and frequently leading to immigration detentions that are later proved to be unlawful,” claimed one source.
Whistleblowers also allege that:
Decisions on whether an applicant can stay in the UK, supposed to take six months, frequently take two years. During this time, applicants are in limbo, unable to work or rent property.
People who have sought asylum are frequently unlawfully detained for up to six weeks in immigration removal centres.
Personal performance targets indirectly encourage employees to reject applications without fully examining whether people have the right to remain in the UK.
People with a strong case to remain in the UK are deported because of poor decisions made by insufficiently trained staff.
Flights for deportations are frequently cancelled when asylum seekers protest on board and pilots refuse to fly.
Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you
Read more
“One of the main reasons the planned deportations don’t go ahead is because a poorly trained, overworked caseworker has gambled that an applicant with a history of kicking off on planes, won’t do it again, so doesn’t give them an escort,” a source claimed. “But then they do kick off and the deportation has to be abandoned.”
Use of escorts is erratic, the whistleblowers said.
Home Office investigated over English test cheating claims
Read more
The sources also criticise personal performance targets given to the asylum team. These targets are so stringent, they believe, that employees feel indirectly incentivised to reject asylum applications.
Caseworkers are given 555 minutes to refuse an asylum application but just 222 minutes to grant one.
“Their justification is that a refusal takes longer to write but the reality is that a grant takes just as much time and effort,” argued one source.
“In one recent case, there were gaps and inconsistencies in an application and it would have been very easy to refuse it. The harder part is to dig around online and properly research why those inconsistencies are there. But that effort would eat into my stats and I would then get a black mark against my performance.”
Poor decisions are also made because insufficiently trained caseworkers are given sole responsibility to conduct interviews with asylum seekers, the whistleblowers claimed.
“These interviews are an asylum seeker’s only opportunity to give their account but if the interviewing officer is not sufficiently trained, how are they going to get that information out of such vulnerable people?” said one source. “The answer is, that they’re not.”
Caseworkers in the decisions team have a different personal performance target: they must score 13.5 points a day. A detention review must take no longer than 90 minutes and a human rights consideration claim no longer than three hours. Every half-hour contributes 0.5 points towards the caseworker’s target.
“You get substandard outcomes because we’re not able to physically consider a claim carefully in that time,” said one of the sources. “The reality is that you will rush it.”
Staff also complain that they are given “totally insufficient” training. They claim they are expected to carry out crucial detention and case progression reviews after just half an hour spent watching a standard level caseworker conduct an online review.
“When I joined the department, I was shadowing someone who had only joined a couple of weeks before me,” said a whistleblower. “They weren’t confident in what they were doing and weren’t able to answer my questions.
“Someone was told to shadow me when I’d been in my role for less than two months,” they added. “That made me very uncomfortable: I didn’t feel I had enough knowledge to train someone else.”
They allege that just 90 minutes additional training is given before a caseworker is told to make the life-changing decisions on whether an applicant should be deported.
“The training is entirely on how to refuse a human rights claim,” one of the sources claimed.
In at least one case, it has been alleged that internal training on conducting asylum interviews was done by an insufficiently qualified member of staff who had less expertise than the caseworkers they were training and who, before joining the Home Office the year previously, had no experience in the area.
Despite the relentless workloads and performance targets, the sources claim that senior managers frequently fail to sign off decisions made by caseworkers for up to two years.
“We’re supposed to interview applicants and give them a decision within six months of receiving their application,” said a source. “But it’s common to have to wait for two years for a senior case worker to sign off a decision.
The TCU was criticised in a report in 2015 by David Bolt, the chief inspector of borders and immigration.
The report found that in 2014 to 2015, the TCU made 2,014 formal requests to EU countries to take back an asylum applicant. Of these, just 62% requests were accepted.
Bolt criticised the TCU for failing to analyse why so many of their formal requests to other countries were unsuccessful and why their removals failed so often.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We value all of our staff who work tirelessly to keep the public safe, protect the UK border and ensure we have an effective immigration system. Any form of discrimination, bullying or harassment is totally unacceptable and we take urgent action where complaints are received or concerns are raised.
“Caseworkers dealing with asylum cases are given extensive training and mentoring to ensure they are able to deal with the complex issues they may encounter, and there are managers and senior caseworkers on hand should they need further advice or guidance.
“We do not comment on specific details of internal complaints.”
The claims come as the National Audit Office launches an investigation into the Home Office over its decision to accuse about 34,000 international students of cheating in English language tests.
The Guardian reported last week that the spending watchdog has launched a formal investigation into how more than 1,000 students have been removed from the UK and hundreds have spent time in detention after the allegation, with large numbers of students saying they were wrongly accused.
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Immigration and asylum
Home Office ‘chaos and incompetence’ leads to unlawful detentions, claim whistleblowers
Handling of UK asylum cases compromised by poorly trained and overworked staff
‘Toxic atmosphere’: the Home Office unit everybody wants to leave
Amelia Hill
@byameliahill
Sun 28 Apr 2019 16.00 BST
Last modified on Sun 28 Apr 2019 21.05 BST
Shares
624
The Home Office’s visas and immigration centre at Lunar House in Croydon, London.
Chaos, incompetence and bullying of Home Office employees is resulting in failed deportations and the unlawful detention of vulnerable and desperate people, whistleblowers allege.
The Dublin Cessation Team (DCT) – until last week known as the Third Country Unit – is a little-known but crucial department that, under the EU Dublin convention, determines which EU member state is responsible for considering an asylum claim and transferring the asylum seeker to the responsible state.
“Mistakes by overworked, under-skilled, bullied and highly stressed DCT caseworkers are directly and frequently leading to immigration detentions that are later proved to be unlawful,” claimed one source.
Whistleblowers also allege that:
Decisions on whether an applicant can stay in the UK, supposed to take six months, frequently take two years. During this time, applicants are in limbo, unable to work or rent property.
People who have sought asylum are frequently unlawfully detained for up to six weeks in immigration removal centres.
Personal performance targets indirectly encourage employees to reject applications without fully examining whether people have the right to remain in the UK.
People with a strong case to remain in the UK are deported because of poor decisions made by insufficiently trained staff.
Flights for deportations are frequently cancelled when asylum seekers protest on board and pilots refuse to fly.
Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you
Read more
“One of the main reasons the planned deportations don’t go ahead is because a poorly trained, overworked caseworker has gambled that an applicant with a history of kicking off on planes, won’t do it again, so doesn’t give them an escort,” a source claimed. “But then they do kick off and the deportation has to be abandoned.”
Use of escorts is erratic, the whistleblowers said.
Home Office investigated over English test cheating claims
Read more
The sources also criticise personal performance targets given to the asylum team. These targets are so stringent, they believe, that employees feel indirectly incentivised to reject asylum applications.
Caseworkers are given 555 minutes to refuse an asylum application but just 222 minutes to grant one.
“Their justification is that a refusal takes longer to write but the reality is that a grant takes just as much time and effort,” argued one source.
“In one recent case, there were gaps and inconsistencies in an application and it would have been very easy to refuse it. The harder part is to dig around online and properly research why those inconsistencies are there. But that effort would eat into my stats and I would then get a black mark against my performance.”
Poor decisions are also made because insufficiently trained caseworkers are given sole responsibility to conduct interviews with asylum seekers, the whistleblowers claimed.
“These interviews are an asylum seeker’s only opportunity to give their account but if the interviewing officer is not sufficiently trained, how are they going to get that information out of such vulnerable people?” said one source. “The answer is, that they’re not.”
Caseworkers in the decisions team have a different personal performance target: they must score 13.5 points a day. A detention review must take no longer than 90 minutes and a human rights consideration claim no longer than three hours. Every half-hour contributes 0.5 points towards the caseworker’s target.
“You get substandard outcomes because we’re not able to physically consider a claim carefully in that time,” said one of the sources. “The reality is that you will rush it.”
Staff also complain that they are given “totally insufficient” training. They claim they are expected to carry out crucial detention and case progression reviews after just half an hour spent watching a standard level caseworker conduct an online review.
“When I joined the department, I was shadowing someone who had only joined a couple of weeks before me,” said a whistleblower. “They weren’t confident in what they were doing and weren’t able to answer my questions.
“Someone was told to shadow me when I’d been in my role for less than two months,” they added. “That made me very uncomfortable: I didn’t feel I had enough knowledge to train someone else.”
They allege that just 90 minutes additional training is given before a caseworker is told to make the life-changing decisions on whether an applicant should be deported.
“The training is entirely on how to refuse a human rights claim,” one of the sources claimed.
In at least one case, it has been alleged that internal training on conducting asylum interviews was done by an insufficiently qualified member of staff who had less expertise than the caseworkers they were training and who, before joining the Home Office the year previously, had no experience in the area.
Despite the relentless workloads and performance targets, the sources claim that senior managers frequently fail to sign off decisions made by caseworkers for up to two years.
“We’re supposed to interview applicants and give them a decision within six months of receiving their application,” said a source. “But it’s common to have to wait for two years for a senior case worker to sign off a decision.
The TCU was criticised in a report in 2015 by David Bolt, the chief inspector of borders and immigration.
The report found that in 2014 to 2015, the TCU made 2,014 formal requests to EU countries to take back an asylum applicant. Of these, just 62% requests were accepted.
Bolt criticised the TCU for failing to analyse why so many of their formal requests to other countries were unsuccessful and why their removals failed so often.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We value all of our staff who work tirelessly to keep the public safe, protect the UK border and ensure we have an effective immigration system. Any form of discrimination, bullying or harassment is totally unacceptable and we take urgent action where complaints are received or concerns are raised.
“Caseworkers dealing with asylum cases are given extensive training and mentoring to ensure they are able to deal with the complex issues they may encounter, and there are managers and senior caseworkers on hand should they need further advice or guidance.
“We do not comment on specific details of internal complaints.”
The claims come as the National Audit Office launches an investigation into the Home Office over its decision to accuse about 34,000 international students of cheating in English language tests.
The Guardian reported last week that the spending watchdog has launched a formal investigation into how more than 1,000 students have been removed from the UK and hundreds have spent time in detention after the allegation, with large numbers of students saying they were wrongly accused.
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McKinsey & Company/Bryan Hancock and Bill Schaninger: Why you should apply analytics to your people strategy
McKinsey & Company
Organization
Why you should apply analytics to your people strategy
April 2019 | Podcast
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Why you should apply analytics to your people strategy
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Bringing advanced computing power and analytics capabilities to bear on people decisions in an organization is crucial to driving lasting and effective change.
In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, Simon London speaks with McKinsey partner Bryan Hancock and senior partner Bill Schaninger about why people analytics matters even more in a world awash with data and more advanced computing and analytics capabilities.
Podcast transcript
Downloadable Resources
Article (PDF-543KB)
Simon London: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, with me, Simon London. A certain breed of executive has always looked down on the people side of management. They see it as soft, squishy, and lacking in hard data. But while that may have been somewhat true 20 or 30 years ago, it certainly isn’t true today. There really is a revolution in progress as companies start to apply big data and advanced analytics to the human side of the enterprise. To talk about the promise and pitfalls of people analytics, I sat down in Philadelphia with McKinsey partners Bryan Hancock and Bill Schaninger. As we’ll hear, Bryan and Bill are optimistic, with the caveat that getting real value from people analytics requires not only technical smarts but also a solid understanding of organizational behavior and a pretty good grasp on how the business actually makes money.
So Bryan and Bill, welcome back to the podcast.
Bryan Hancock: Thank you.
Bill Schaninger: Thanks for having us.
Simon London: So an obvious first question for a nonspecialist is: When we’re talking about people analytics, what are we talking about?
Bryan Hancock: What we’re talking about is bringing data on people to specific business decisions. It can be a decision to hire. It can be a decision on how to configure a team. It can be a decision on where to source people. But it is bringing a data set to people decisions. It’s as simple as that.
People analytics has existed as a concept for a long time. It’s not that there’s anything radical about the idea of people analytics. What’s cool is that now there are new sources of data and advanced computing powers that allow you to do more with the data. But the underlying idea of using data to inform people-related business decisions is not necessarily a new thing.
Bill Schaninger: We make decisions every day about who we hire, how we deploy them, what teams we put them in, what we have them working on. Then we sit in judgment of their performances. Every one of those decisions can be made better with data. Not all those decisions are equally important, so you don’t have to bring it to bear in all of them, but you should probably bring it to bear more than we are doing today.
Simon London: As you say, it’s not an entirely new idea. But what’s the opportunity today? What makes this a particularly important and interesting topic?
Bryan Hancock: I think what makes it a particularly interesting and exciting topic today is a combination of a few factors.
One, there really are new advanced computing capabilities that allow you to factor in more variables and determine more of what really matters. Of course, you can’t just do that independently. It has to be linked to good research in what matters, but the advanced computing power does matter.
There are new and different sources of the data—super exciting and interesting. Those matter.
Also, there is the acceptance, more broadly, of advanced analytics—be it from marketing to sports. That is making people think, “Oh, if I can do this in understanding my consumer or understanding the quality of my first baseman, why can’t I do this for understanding what makes a good salesperson tick?”
Simon London: Talk a little bit about the sources and the categories of data. What kind of data are we talking about here?
Bill Schaninger: There are some interesting pools that I think, in many cases, we hadn’t really connected. Maybe it’s just because we were isolating around the individual employee in a way that wasn’t helpful. So there’s the obvious. There’s the information about the employee: where they went to school, and where they’ve worked. That’s basic.
But then you can also get into things about their attributes, their traits, their personalities. And then you think, “OK, well, what other data do we have?” We can collect data about performance. We can also collect data about the environments they’re in: perceptions of the bo
Organization
Why you should apply analytics to your people strategy
April 2019 | Podcast
Share this article on LinkedIn
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Facebook
Email this article
Print this article
Download Resources
Why you should apply analytics to your people strategy
Share this article on LinkedIn
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Facebook
Email this article
Print this article
Download Resources
Bringing advanced computing power and analytics capabilities to bear on people decisions in an organization is crucial to driving lasting and effective change.
In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, Simon London speaks with McKinsey partner Bryan Hancock and senior partner Bill Schaninger about why people analytics matters even more in a world awash with data and more advanced computing and analytics capabilities.
Podcast transcript
Downloadable Resources
Article (PDF-543KB)
Simon London: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, with me, Simon London. A certain breed of executive has always looked down on the people side of management. They see it as soft, squishy, and lacking in hard data. But while that may have been somewhat true 20 or 30 years ago, it certainly isn’t true today. There really is a revolution in progress as companies start to apply big data and advanced analytics to the human side of the enterprise. To talk about the promise and pitfalls of people analytics, I sat down in Philadelphia with McKinsey partners Bryan Hancock and Bill Schaninger. As we’ll hear, Bryan and Bill are optimistic, with the caveat that getting real value from people analytics requires not only technical smarts but also a solid understanding of organizational behavior and a pretty good grasp on how the business actually makes money.
So Bryan and Bill, welcome back to the podcast.
Bryan Hancock: Thank you.
Bill Schaninger: Thanks for having us.
Simon London: So an obvious first question for a nonspecialist is: When we’re talking about people analytics, what are we talking about?
Bryan Hancock: What we’re talking about is bringing data on people to specific business decisions. It can be a decision to hire. It can be a decision on how to configure a team. It can be a decision on where to source people. But it is bringing a data set to people decisions. It’s as simple as that.
People analytics has existed as a concept for a long time. It’s not that there’s anything radical about the idea of people analytics. What’s cool is that now there are new sources of data and advanced computing powers that allow you to do more with the data. But the underlying idea of using data to inform people-related business decisions is not necessarily a new thing.
Bill Schaninger: We make decisions every day about who we hire, how we deploy them, what teams we put them in, what we have them working on. Then we sit in judgment of their performances. Every one of those decisions can be made better with data. Not all those decisions are equally important, so you don’t have to bring it to bear in all of them, but you should probably bring it to bear more than we are doing today.
Simon London: As you say, it’s not an entirely new idea. But what’s the opportunity today? What makes this a particularly important and interesting topic?
Bryan Hancock: I think what makes it a particularly interesting and exciting topic today is a combination of a few factors.
One, there really are new advanced computing capabilities that allow you to factor in more variables and determine more of what really matters. Of course, you can’t just do that independently. It has to be linked to good research in what matters, but the advanced computing power does matter.
There are new and different sources of the data—super exciting and interesting. Those matter.
Also, there is the acceptance, more broadly, of advanced analytics—be it from marketing to sports. That is making people think, “Oh, if I can do this in understanding my consumer or understanding the quality of my first baseman, why can’t I do this for understanding what makes a good salesperson tick?”
Simon London: Talk a little bit about the sources and the categories of data. What kind of data are we talking about here?
Bill Schaninger: There are some interesting pools that I think, in many cases, we hadn’t really connected. Maybe it’s just because we were isolating around the individual employee in a way that wasn’t helpful. So there’s the obvious. There’s the information about the employee: where they went to school, and where they’ve worked. That’s basic.
But then you can also get into things about their attributes, their traits, their personalities. And then you think, “OK, well, what other data do we have?” We can collect data about performance. We can also collect data about the environments they’re in: perceptions of the bo
Care2Healthy Living/Mary Daly: 9 of the Best Herbs to Grow in Containers
Care2Healthy Living
9 of the Best Herbs to Grow in Containers
tweet
email
By: Mary Daly
April 27, 2019
Do you love fresh herbs but lack the space to grow them in a garden? That’s what container gardens are for. Several varieties of herbs can thrive in containers—even indoors on a sunny windowsill.
Here are nine herbs suitable for container gardens, as well as some helpful container gardening tips.
1. Basil
fresh basil herb in pot
Credit: OlgaMiltsova/Getty Images
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
If you cook up a lot of Italian dishes, a basil plant is a must. Basil prefers full sun and moist, well-draining soil, but you usually can get away with keeping it in a little shade if you must. A sunny windowsill indoors also can work.
In the summer months, you might see white flowers on your basil that ultimately will produce woody stems and less flavorful leaves. “Snip away flowering stems as soon as you spot them to promote new, tasty foliage,” according to the Better Homes & Gardens plant encyclopedia.
Harvest basil by picking as many individual leaves as you need or clipping sprigs and storing them in water at room temperature, like cut flowers.
2. Chives
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
Chives are generally a low-maintenance herb ideal for beginning gardeners.
“Chives grow best in full sun and well-drained soil,” according to Better Homes & Gardens. “They tolerate part shade well and will grow and blossom when they receive at least 6 hours of bright, direct light.” They also self-seed and tolerate transplanting particularly well, making it easy to propagate your plant.
Harvest chives by snipping stems near the soil as needed to add a fresh, onion-like flavor to dishes.
3. Lavender
Light requirements: full sun
Lavender isn’t always easy to grow indoors because of its sun requirements, but it can flourish in an outdoor container garden, as long as you use well-draining soil.
“Every part of the plant is infused with aromatic oil, making this a choice herb to place along pathways or near outdoor seating areas so you can savor the fragrance,” Better Homes & Gardens says.
You can cut entire flower stems to dry for use in recipes or aromatherapy.
4. Mint
mint plant in a container
Credit: Mableen/Getty Images
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
Mint seems like it can manage to grow practically anywhere and everywhere. And that’s partially why growing it in a container is ideal: It won’t spread to places where you don’t want it.
“For the most productive plants with the most flavor, plant mint in soil rich in organic matter and provide consistent moisture,” according to Better Homes & Gardens. “Although many varieties tolerate drought, they won’t grow as well or have as good a flavor.”
Harvest mint in the morning before the sun has had a chance to dry the leaves. You can either pick leaves as needed or cut back stems to promote a fuller plant.
5. Oregano
Light requirements: full sun
Like lavender, oregano also requires a lot of light and would prefer to be in a sunny outdoor container garden. Plus, good drainage is a must.
Try to harvest oregano frequently to prevent the plant from flowering, which diminishes its flavor and produces woody stems. That might mean cutting some to dry for later use. “To dry a large amount of oregano, cut stems back to 3 inches (before flower buds open); cut again in the same way in late summer,” Better Homes & Gardens says. “Dry the stems by bundling them together and hanging them upside down in a dark place with good air circulation.”
6. Parsley
Light requirements: full sun
Parsley also makes a great addition to outdoor container gardens, preferring sun and rich, moist soil. “Place the container gardens on a patio or deck where they receive at least eight hours of bright sunlight a day,” Better Homes & Gardens says.
When harvesting, cut outer stems about an inch above the soil. Use parsley fresh, wrap the stems in a damp paper towel and refrigerate for up to a month or dry the leaves for later use.
7. Sage
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
Sage is a tough herb that can tolerate drought and likes well-draining soil. This makes the plant generally low-maintenance—though adequate watering and ample sunlight make for tastier foliage.
Pick leaves as you need them, or take stems for drying, cutting the top six to eight inches of growth. Plus, don’t hesitate to let the plant bloom if you’re not overly concerned about harvesting top-notch leaves. “Sage’s light blue flowers and gray/green foliage help it look at home in any flower border,” Better Homes & Gardens says.
8. Tarragon
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
If French cooking is your thing, try growing your very own tarragon plant. “With a sunny window and rich soil, you can raise French tarragon indoors,” according to Better Homes & Gardens. “If light isn’t strong enough, stems will likely sprawl and leaf flavor will diminish, but you’ll still be able to savor the licorice taste.”
Cut the leaves as needed — preferably regularly to encourage more growth. And if you’re adding fresh tarragon to hot dishes, do so right before serving, as heat can lessen its flavor.
9. Thyme
potted thyme
Credit: LightFieldStudios/Getty Images
Light requirements: full sun
Thyme can make a great groundcover in your garden that actually deters some pests. But it also grows effectively in containers, as long as it gets enough sun.
Because the herb is native to Mediterranean areas with poor, rocky soil, it prefers to be in a well-draining container—and doesn’t require much care from you. Just prune it to encourage new growth, taking bunches to dry if you don’t need it fresh.
Container Gardening Tips
Variety of fresh herbs in terra cotta pots on a window sill
Credit: grandriver/Getty Images
Growing herbs in containers is typically an easy process, as long as you get a few major components right. Here are five container gardening tips from MiracleGro.
1. Harness the sun.
“In general, choose a spot that receives six or more hours of sun, except in the very warmest regions, where herbs appreciate afternoon shade,” MiracleGro says.
Be aware of each plant’s light requirements, and place them accordingly. A perk of container gardening is it allows you to shift plants throughout the day to more (or less) sunny spots.
2. Provide proper pots and soil.
Many herbs prefer well-draining soil, which also means your pot needs plenty of drainage holes.
“Containers must be large enough to contain the herb’s root system and keep the plant itself upright,” according to MiracleGro. “A good rule of thumb is to choose a container that’s at least one-third as tall as the final height of the herb listed on the plant tag or seed packet.”
3. Water and feed as needed.
Although some herbs prefer drier conditions, you still should keep a regular watering schedule. Follow instructions for individual plant varieties, but in general water when the top inch of soil is dry.
Likewise, some herbs need feeding to continue producing quality foliage. Check the plant’s care instructions to maximize your harvest.
4. Don’t fall in love with the flowers.
The flowers that bloom on herbs are great for attracting pollinators and other animals to your garden. But a flowering plant usually means less tasty foliage for you.
To preserve your herbs’ culinary quality, pinch off blossoms as you see them—though in some cases you actually can use the flowers in your dishes.
5. Learn the best harvesting methods.
It’s important to know how to harvest your herbs to maintain healthy growth. “When you harvest leaves on herbs that grow in clumps (like chives, lemongrass, cilantro, or parsley), pick outer leaves first, working your way toward the center of the plant,” MiracleGro says. “For herbs that have an upright stem with a growing point, like mint, stevia, basil, or oregano, snip individual branches.”
With just a little gardening know-how, you’ll always have fresh herbs at your fingertips.
Main image credit: MelanieMaier/Getty Images
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23 comments
Elizabeth H5 minutes ago
Love all of the above and I grow a lot of them in the ground and in containers.
SEND
hELEN h14 minutes ago
tyfs
SEND
Isabel G20 minutes ago
Nice! I love them all!
By the way.....I used to like showing my appreciation to the green stars I received by sending one back....but now, when I check on my starts received....only a "past member" is the one sending them to me......before it used to be many different people. Has this been happening to any of you too?
SEND
Dr. Jan Habout an hour ago
perfect. THanks
SEND
Jeanne Rabout an hour ago
Thank you for sharing.
SEND
Lisa M1 hours ago
Thanks.
SEND
Lisa M1 hours ago
Thanks.
SEND
Janet B1 hours ago
Thanks
SEND
Gino C1 hours ago
thank you
SEND
Mike R3 hours ago
Thanks
SEND
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9 of the Best Herbs to Grow in Containers
tweet
By: Mary Daly
April 27, 2019
Do you love fresh herbs but lack the space to grow them in a garden? That’s what container gardens are for. Several varieties of herbs can thrive in containers—even indoors on a sunny windowsill.
Here are nine herbs suitable for container gardens, as well as some helpful container gardening tips.
1. Basil
fresh basil herb in pot
Credit: OlgaMiltsova/Getty Images
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
If you cook up a lot of Italian dishes, a basil plant is a must. Basil prefers full sun and moist, well-draining soil, but you usually can get away with keeping it in a little shade if you must. A sunny windowsill indoors also can work.
In the summer months, you might see white flowers on your basil that ultimately will produce woody stems and less flavorful leaves. “Snip away flowering stems as soon as you spot them to promote new, tasty foliage,” according to the Better Homes & Gardens plant encyclopedia.
Harvest basil by picking as many individual leaves as you need or clipping sprigs and storing them in water at room temperature, like cut flowers.
2. Chives
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
Chives are generally a low-maintenance herb ideal for beginning gardeners.
“Chives grow best in full sun and well-drained soil,” according to Better Homes & Gardens. “They tolerate part shade well and will grow and blossom when they receive at least 6 hours of bright, direct light.” They also self-seed and tolerate transplanting particularly well, making it easy to propagate your plant.
Harvest chives by snipping stems near the soil as needed to add a fresh, onion-like flavor to dishes.
3. Lavender
Light requirements: full sun
Lavender isn’t always easy to grow indoors because of its sun requirements, but it can flourish in an outdoor container garden, as long as you use well-draining soil.
“Every part of the plant is infused with aromatic oil, making this a choice herb to place along pathways or near outdoor seating areas so you can savor the fragrance,” Better Homes & Gardens says.
You can cut entire flower stems to dry for use in recipes or aromatherapy.
4. Mint
mint plant in a container
Credit: Mableen/Getty Images
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
Mint seems like it can manage to grow practically anywhere and everywhere. And that’s partially why growing it in a container is ideal: It won’t spread to places where you don’t want it.
“For the most productive plants with the most flavor, plant mint in soil rich in organic matter and provide consistent moisture,” according to Better Homes & Gardens. “Although many varieties tolerate drought, they won’t grow as well or have as good a flavor.”
Harvest mint in the morning before the sun has had a chance to dry the leaves. You can either pick leaves as needed or cut back stems to promote a fuller plant.
5. Oregano
Light requirements: full sun
Like lavender, oregano also requires a lot of light and would prefer to be in a sunny outdoor container garden. Plus, good drainage is a must.
Try to harvest oregano frequently to prevent the plant from flowering, which diminishes its flavor and produces woody stems. That might mean cutting some to dry for later use. “To dry a large amount of oregano, cut stems back to 3 inches (before flower buds open); cut again in the same way in late summer,” Better Homes & Gardens says. “Dry the stems by bundling them together and hanging them upside down in a dark place with good air circulation.”
6. Parsley
Light requirements: full sun
Parsley also makes a great addition to outdoor container gardens, preferring sun and rich, moist soil. “Place the container gardens on a patio or deck where they receive at least eight hours of bright sunlight a day,” Better Homes & Gardens says.
When harvesting, cut outer stems about an inch above the soil. Use parsley fresh, wrap the stems in a damp paper towel and refrigerate for up to a month or dry the leaves for later use.
7. Sage
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
Sage is a tough herb that can tolerate drought and likes well-draining soil. This makes the plant generally low-maintenance—though adequate watering and ample sunlight make for tastier foliage.
Pick leaves as you need them, or take stems for drying, cutting the top six to eight inches of growth. Plus, don’t hesitate to let the plant bloom if you’re not overly concerned about harvesting top-notch leaves. “Sage’s light blue flowers and gray/green foliage help it look at home in any flower border,” Better Homes & Gardens says.
8. Tarragon
Light requirements: partial sun, full sun
If French cooking is your thing, try growing your very own tarragon plant. “With a sunny window and rich soil, you can raise French tarragon indoors,” according to Better Homes & Gardens. “If light isn’t strong enough, stems will likely sprawl and leaf flavor will diminish, but you’ll still be able to savor the licorice taste.”
Cut the leaves as needed — preferably regularly to encourage more growth. And if you’re adding fresh tarragon to hot dishes, do so right before serving, as heat can lessen its flavor.
9. Thyme
potted thyme
Credit: LightFieldStudios/Getty Images
Light requirements: full sun
Thyme can make a great groundcover in your garden that actually deters some pests. But it also grows effectively in containers, as long as it gets enough sun.
Because the herb is native to Mediterranean areas with poor, rocky soil, it prefers to be in a well-draining container—and doesn’t require much care from you. Just prune it to encourage new growth, taking bunches to dry if you don’t need it fresh.
Container Gardening Tips
Variety of fresh herbs in terra cotta pots on a window sill
Credit: grandriver/Getty Images
Growing herbs in containers is typically an easy process, as long as you get a few major components right. Here are five container gardening tips from MiracleGro.
1. Harness the sun.
“In general, choose a spot that receives six or more hours of sun, except in the very warmest regions, where herbs appreciate afternoon shade,” MiracleGro says.
Be aware of each plant’s light requirements, and place them accordingly. A perk of container gardening is it allows you to shift plants throughout the day to more (or less) sunny spots.
2. Provide proper pots and soil.
Many herbs prefer well-draining soil, which also means your pot needs plenty of drainage holes.
“Containers must be large enough to contain the herb’s root system and keep the plant itself upright,” according to MiracleGro. “A good rule of thumb is to choose a container that’s at least one-third as tall as the final height of the herb listed on the plant tag or seed packet.”
3. Water and feed as needed.
Although some herbs prefer drier conditions, you still should keep a regular watering schedule. Follow instructions for individual plant varieties, but in general water when the top inch of soil is dry.
Likewise, some herbs need feeding to continue producing quality foliage. Check the plant’s care instructions to maximize your harvest.
4. Don’t fall in love with the flowers.
The flowers that bloom on herbs are great for attracting pollinators and other animals to your garden. But a flowering plant usually means less tasty foliage for you.
To preserve your herbs’ culinary quality, pinch off blossoms as you see them—though in some cases you actually can use the flowers in your dishes.
5. Learn the best harvesting methods.
It’s important to know how to harvest your herbs to maintain healthy growth. “When you harvest leaves on herbs that grow in clumps (like chives, lemongrass, cilantro, or parsley), pick outer leaves first, working your way toward the center of the plant,” MiracleGro says. “For herbs that have an upright stem with a growing point, like mint, stevia, basil, or oregano, snip individual branches.”
With just a little gardening know-how, you’ll always have fresh herbs at your fingertips.
Main image credit: MelanieMaier/Getty Images
GREAT STORY, RIGHT?
Share it with your friends
tweet
You Might Also Like
Find Inspiration in New York's Most Luxurious Mansions Find Inspiration in New York's Most Luxurious Mansions Mansion Global
High Speed WiFi Booster Takes Greater Accra Region By Storm High Speed WiFi Booster Takes Greater Accra Region By Storm Next Tech
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Elizabeth H5 minutes ago
Love all of the above and I grow a lot of them in the ground and in containers.
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hELEN h14 minutes ago
tyfs
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Isabel G20 minutes ago
Nice! I love them all!
By the way.....I used to like showing my appreciation to the green stars I received by sending one back....but now, when I check on my starts received....only a "past member" is the one sending them to me......before it used to be many different people. Has this been happening to any of you too?
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Dr. Jan Habout an hour ago
perfect. THanks
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Jeanne Rabout an hour ago
Thank you for sharing.
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Lisa M1 hours ago
Thanks.
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Thanks.
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Investopedia/Lisa Smith: How People Fall Into a Debt Spiral
Investopedia
Retirement
Retirement Savings
How People Fall Into a Debt Spiral
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By Lisa Smith
Updated Jul 16, 2018
The world is awash in a sea of debt. People, companies and even nations are caught in a borrow-and-spend cycle that results in ever-increasing loads. For consumers, the path to insolvency often begins at a young age as they grow up witnessing their parents struggle with money and paying off the mortgage or other loans. An endless stream of advertising ("Low credit? No credit? No problem!") reinforces the idea that everyone has debt and that buying on credit is a normal and acceptable activity.
Higher Education, Higher Debt
For young people, the slippery slope continues when they pursue higher education. Since paying for college or a technical training in cash is unfeasible for many people, education loans are the only choice. Unfortunatey, taking out a loan immediately puts your balance sheet in a bad position. You are accumulating debt at a time when you probably do not have enough income to make even a single payment in an effort to reduce the debt balance while you are in school.
Credit cards soon come into play to help you cover the daily costs of living. While your loans are accruing interest and putting you deeper in debt, credit cards up the ante by charging significantly higher rates of interest than what you already owe on the school loans.
Debt spending is further reinforced when you finish school and need a car so that you can hunt for a job or commute to work. This results in a visit to the auto dealer, where you will find yourself confronted by a salesman who cheerfully asks: "What size monthly payment are you looking for?" By the time you leave the dealership, another debt has been added to your burden. Your school loans, credit cards and auto loan are all working hard to eat into the earnings from your new-found job.
A home mortgage comes next. Soon thereafter, the percentage of income dedicated to making monthly payments becomes overwhelming. To reduce the burden, you take out another loan in the form of debt consolidation. While bundling together one's high-interest debts and refinancing them at a lower interest rate sounds like a smart idea, the reality is that most people end up even deeper in debt within just a few years. As soon as their monthly payments decline, their rate of spending increases.
A few rounds of debt consolidation later, many people find that so much of their income is going to pay outstanding debts that they can no longer stay current on other expenses. Eventually, this results in a damaged credit score, which leads to an inability to borrow at low interest rates. High interest rate loans and credit card payments further restrict cash flow, and can lead to bankruptcy. Although bankruptcy may provide a means to reset one's finances and start over, oftentimes it merely acts in a manner similar to debt consolidation and marks the beginning of another debt spiral.
Break the Cycle
The first step in the process of escaping the debt spiral is to stop borrowing money. Credit cards are often the lead culprit in the creation of consumer debt, so put the plastic away. Pay in cash, write a check or use a no-fee debit card to make your purchases. This way, you will see how much you are spending and when the money runs out, you won't be able to spend more.
Next, you should take a close look at your income and expenses. While many people chafe at the idea of living on a budget, the reality is everyone does (unless they've got an unlimited income). If you just can't handle the idea of tracking every penny that you spend, it's still a good idea to periodically review your income and compare it to your expenditures. At the very least, you will figure out whether you are shelling out more than you are bringing in.
The Road to Recovery
Once you've made the commitment to fix your financial problems and taken the time to evaluate your income and your outflows, it's time to take a look at your lifestyle. Making adjustments in your lifestyle will give you the opportunity to implement a plan to put yourself on a firm financial footing.
If your financial evaluation revealed that you do indeed spend more than you earn, you'll need to figure out a way to change that equation. While getting your cash inflows and outflows to equilibrium is an absolute necessity, it is not enough to solve your problems.
You need to reduce your expenses to the point where you are generating a surplus. Alternatively, you can increase your income. Generally, most people are more willing and able to cut expenses than to increase their incomes, so we'll focus on that path. Just keep in mind that changing jobs or taking a second job may be viable options that can help speed up the timetable for reaching your goals.
Reducing your expenses by a meaningful amount may require some serious lifestyle changes. Housing and transportation are two of the biggest costs for most people. Moving to a less expensive residence is often a way to make a meaningful and substantial reduction in your expenses. It may cost a few dollars to make the change, but the long-term benefits often outweigh the short-term expenses.
Similarly, trading in your car for a less expensive vehicle can result in hundreds of dollars per month in savings when your car payment, insurance payment and monthly gasoline bills are all reduced.
Cutting back on discretionary spending is the next step in the process. This step is often the most challenging for people who don't like to keep track of where their money goes each and every day. Even if you are not willing to make a conscious decision to closely evaluate your spending habits and cut out certain expenses, the simple act of paying with cash rather than by credit can help you become more aware of how much you spend and how much you have left in your pocket.
The Next Steps
After you've figured out a method of reducing your expenses or increasing your income to the point where you have a surplus each month, it's time to put that surplus to work. Start by giving some of that money to yourself. Instead of spending that surplus cash, stash some of it away for a "rainy day." It's the 'pay yourself first' concept. Rather than using the money to buy more stuff, setting that money aside creates an emergency fund that you can tap into when you need money in a hurry. If a rainy day arrives and you have to spend the money, replace it as soon as possible. Ideally, you'll want to have enough money stashed away to cover at least several months' worth of expenses. If that seems like a big number, don't be discouraged. Having an extra $50 set aside is a great place to start.
In addition to putting some money aside for yourself, you'll also want to start paying down your debts. Here, are two paths that you can consider. The first, and most mathematically logical, is to pay off your highest interest debts first. This will result in the most financial savings, but if you have large balances on your accounts it may take a long time before you feel like you have made any progress.
If that approach is simply too disheartening for you, consider paying off your lowest balance loans first. While less financially effective, this plan can be more emotionally rewarding. Once you've paid off one debt, you will be more likely to pay off the next one and the one after that. Although this approach isn't the most logical, it provides faster progress which can encourage your new habit.
The Bottom Line
To break the debt spiral, patience is a virtue. Anything that motivates you to take action and stick to your plan is worthwhile. Remember, it took years (perhaps decades) to build up those outstanding balances. Recovery will be a similarly slow process.
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Investopedia is part of the Dotdash publishing family.
The Balance
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and more
Retirement
Retirement Savings
How People Fall Into a Debt Spiral
By Lisa Smith
Updated Jul 16, 2018
The world is awash in a sea of debt. People, companies and even nations are caught in a borrow-and-spend cycle that results in ever-increasing loads. For consumers, the path to insolvency often begins at a young age as they grow up witnessing their parents struggle with money and paying off the mortgage or other loans. An endless stream of advertising ("Low credit? No credit? No problem!") reinforces the idea that everyone has debt and that buying on credit is a normal and acceptable activity.
Higher Education, Higher Debt
For young people, the slippery slope continues when they pursue higher education. Since paying for college or a technical training in cash is unfeasible for many people, education loans are the only choice. Unfortunatey, taking out a loan immediately puts your balance sheet in a bad position. You are accumulating debt at a time when you probably do not have enough income to make even a single payment in an effort to reduce the debt balance while you are in school.
Credit cards soon come into play to help you cover the daily costs of living. While your loans are accruing interest and putting you deeper in debt, credit cards up the ante by charging significantly higher rates of interest than what you already owe on the school loans.
Debt spending is further reinforced when you finish school and need a car so that you can hunt for a job or commute to work. This results in a visit to the auto dealer, where you will find yourself confronted by a salesman who cheerfully asks: "What size monthly payment are you looking for?" By the time you leave the dealership, another debt has been added to your burden. Your school loans, credit cards and auto loan are all working hard to eat into the earnings from your new-found job.
A home mortgage comes next. Soon thereafter, the percentage of income dedicated to making monthly payments becomes overwhelming. To reduce the burden, you take out another loan in the form of debt consolidation. While bundling together one's high-interest debts and refinancing them at a lower interest rate sounds like a smart idea, the reality is that most people end up even deeper in debt within just a few years. As soon as their monthly payments decline, their rate of spending increases.
A few rounds of debt consolidation later, many people find that so much of their income is going to pay outstanding debts that they can no longer stay current on other expenses. Eventually, this results in a damaged credit score, which leads to an inability to borrow at low interest rates. High interest rate loans and credit card payments further restrict cash flow, and can lead to bankruptcy. Although bankruptcy may provide a means to reset one's finances and start over, oftentimes it merely acts in a manner similar to debt consolidation and marks the beginning of another debt spiral.
Break the Cycle
The first step in the process of escaping the debt spiral is to stop borrowing money. Credit cards are often the lead culprit in the creation of consumer debt, so put the plastic away. Pay in cash, write a check or use a no-fee debit card to make your purchases. This way, you will see how much you are spending and when the money runs out, you won't be able to spend more.
Next, you should take a close look at your income and expenses. While many people chafe at the idea of living on a budget, the reality is everyone does (unless they've got an unlimited income). If you just can't handle the idea of tracking every penny that you spend, it's still a good idea to periodically review your income and compare it to your expenditures. At the very least, you will figure out whether you are shelling out more than you are bringing in.
The Road to Recovery
Once you've made the commitment to fix your financial problems and taken the time to evaluate your income and your outflows, it's time to take a look at your lifestyle. Making adjustments in your lifestyle will give you the opportunity to implement a plan to put yourself on a firm financial footing.
If your financial evaluation revealed that you do indeed spend more than you earn, you'll need to figure out a way to change that equation. While getting your cash inflows and outflows to equilibrium is an absolute necessity, it is not enough to solve your problems.
You need to reduce your expenses to the point where you are generating a surplus. Alternatively, you can increase your income. Generally, most people are more willing and able to cut expenses than to increase their incomes, so we'll focus on that path. Just keep in mind that changing jobs or taking a second job may be viable options that can help speed up the timetable for reaching your goals.
Reducing your expenses by a meaningful amount may require some serious lifestyle changes. Housing and transportation are two of the biggest costs for most people. Moving to a less expensive residence is often a way to make a meaningful and substantial reduction in your expenses. It may cost a few dollars to make the change, but the long-term benefits often outweigh the short-term expenses.
Similarly, trading in your car for a less expensive vehicle can result in hundreds of dollars per month in savings when your car payment, insurance payment and monthly gasoline bills are all reduced.
Cutting back on discretionary spending is the next step in the process. This step is often the most challenging for people who don't like to keep track of where their money goes each and every day. Even if you are not willing to make a conscious decision to closely evaluate your spending habits and cut out certain expenses, the simple act of paying with cash rather than by credit can help you become more aware of how much you spend and how much you have left in your pocket.
The Next Steps
After you've figured out a method of reducing your expenses or increasing your income to the point where you have a surplus each month, it's time to put that surplus to work. Start by giving some of that money to yourself. Instead of spending that surplus cash, stash some of it away for a "rainy day." It's the 'pay yourself first' concept. Rather than using the money to buy more stuff, setting that money aside creates an emergency fund that you can tap into when you need money in a hurry. If a rainy day arrives and you have to spend the money, replace it as soon as possible. Ideally, you'll want to have enough money stashed away to cover at least several months' worth of expenses. If that seems like a big number, don't be discouraged. Having an extra $50 set aside is a great place to start.
In addition to putting some money aside for yourself, you'll also want to start paying down your debts. Here, are two paths that you can consider. The first, and most mathematically logical, is to pay off your highest interest debts first. This will result in the most financial savings, but if you have large balances on your accounts it may take a long time before you feel like you have made any progress.
If that approach is simply too disheartening for you, consider paying off your lowest balance loans first. While less financially effective, this plan can be more emotionally rewarding. Once you've paid off one debt, you will be more likely to pay off the next one and the one after that. Although this approach isn't the most logical, it provides faster progress which can encourage your new habit.
The Bottom Line
To break the debt spiral, patience is a virtue. Anything that motivates you to take action and stick to your plan is worthwhile. Remember, it took years (perhaps decades) to build up those outstanding balances. Recovery will be a similarly slow process.
Compare Popular Online Brokers
Related Articles
Retirement Savings
Bloated Budget? How to Trim the Fat
Retirement Savings
When Paying Off Debt with Your 401(k) Makes Sense
Retirement Savings
Using Your IRA to Pay Off Credit Card Debt
Retirement Savings
How to Make Your Own Retirement Fund
Retirement Savings
How to Use Your Roth IRA as an Emergency Fund
Retirement Savings
Top 3 Retirement Savings Tips for 55-to-64-Year-Olds
About Us
Advertise
Contact
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Careers
Investopedia is part of the Dotdash publishing family.
The Balance
Lifewire
TripSavvy
The Spruce
and more
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