Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter point to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent. It was the first increase in three years and the vote was unanimous. The reason given was inflation, which ran at 3.4 percent in August. Raising rates is how the Fed cools an economy off. Borrowing gets more expensive and people spend less. The chair who signed off on it, Kevin Warsh, is the man the president picked for the job in May.

Nine days earlier, at the first Republican midterm convention, the president promised a five thousand dollar dividend to every adult citizen if Republicans take the House and the Senate in November. There are roughly 270 million adults in the country. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that prices out federal spending, put the cost above 1.2 trillion dollars and said it would more than double next year's primary deficit. No method of paying for it was described. The national debt passed 40 trillion dollars this month. Congress would have to approve the whole thing before a single check went out.

The reaction inside his own party split. Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio said he would draft the bill to authorize the payments after the election. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas asked voters how they planned to spend theirs. Other Republicans said putting that much cash into circulation would push inflation higher and leave the country's finances worse than it found them. Set the two moves side by side and you can see the problem. One institution spent this week making money harder to get because there is already too much inflation. The other is offering to put 1.2 trillion dollars into the same economy.

Here is the part that lands on you. The Fed raises rates when there is too much money chasing too few goods. A check to every adult in the country is more money chasing the same goods. If that check ever gets written, the Fed's entire job is to answer it by making borrowing cost more. That answer shows up as your mortgage rate, your car payment, and the balance on your card. The five thousand dollars is not free money. It is money handed to you at the front and charged back to you at the other end.

Photo: Pexels.

BMI was not invented by a doctor. It came from Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and mathematician working in the 1830s. He was not trying to diagnose anybody. He was trying to describe the average man in a population. The population he measured was western European men. It was statistics. It was never a health test.

The formula sat around for over a century until it got renamed the Body Mass Index in 1972. Now it is the number on your chart at every physical you have ever had.

Here is all it does. It takes your weight and divides it by your height squared. That is the entire calculation. It has no idea what you are made of. A man who lifts four days a week can land in the overweight column carrying very little fat. A man who has never trained in his life can land squarely in the normal column while carrying fat packed around his organs, which is the kind that actually does damage.

This is not a fringe complaint. In June of 2023, the American Medical Association adopted a policy saying outright that BMI alone is an inadequate measure and should be used alongside waist circumference, body composition, and visceral fat.

What actually tells you something is your bloodwork and what you are built out of. Fasting glucose or A1c tells you how your body is handling sugar. Triglycerides and HDL tell you how it is handling fat. ApoB or LDL tells you what is moving through your arteries. Blood pressure tells you what the pipes are under. Waist circumference tells you roughly where the fat is sitting. None of those cost much and most of them come standard on a physical if you ask.

Your weight is one number about all of you at once. Your bloodwork is a dozen numbers about specific things that are either working or not. One of those is worth knowing and the other one is a rounding error from the 1830s.

Private equity is one of those phrases men hear constantly and almost never get explained. Here is the whole thing in plain terms.

A firm raises a pile of money from pension funds, university endowments, and wealthy families. It uses that money to buy an entire company outright. Most of the purchase is borrowed and the important part is where the loan lands. The debt goes onto the company that was bought, not onto the firm that bought it. The firm runs it for three to seven years, tries to make it more profitable, then sells it. If it works everybody upstairs makes a great deal of money. If it does not, the company is the one holding the debt.

The move that has reshaped your town is called a roll up. A firm finds an industry made of thousands of small independent operators, buys one good one as a base, then buys dozens or hundreds of the others and runs them all under one name until the whole thing is big enough to sell.

Look at where that has gone. More than 13 million Americans now work at private equity backed companies, spread across more than 21,000 businesses. Private equity firms own roughly a quarter of the hospitals in this country. In 2024, the dental industry saw 161 private equity deals which is more than any other part of health care. Veterinary chains, nursing homes, and the staffing companies that run emergency rooms have all gone the same way. The sign on the door did not change. The owner did.

It is not automatically bad and it is worth saying so. Capital and scale can fix a badly run business and plenty of owners were glad to sell. The problem is the incentive. A return in five years is not the same thing as a business in thirty. That shows up in the numbers. One widely cited 2021 study found that nursing homes bought by private equity had roughly a ten percent higher death rate among Medicare patients.

One correction worth making because the claim gets stretched. Private equity does not own most American businesses. Most American businesses are tiny. What it owns is the middle. What I mean by that is the companies big enough to matter in your town and small enough to buy without anybody noticing. Your dentist. Your vet. The emergency room you would drive to tonight.

Being on time costs you nothing. Being late costs you something every single time and most men never notice they are paying it.

Here is the problem. The man who is late does not think of himself as rude. He thinks of himself as busy. From where he is sitting he was handling something that could not wait. Usually he is right about that. The other guy cannot see any of that. All he sees is an empty chair and a clock. What he takes from it is that his hour was worth a little less than yours.

The fix is simple. Most men time the drive and nothing else. They do not count the parking, the elevator, the wrong floor, or the two minutes spent finding the right door. Start from the time you need to be in the chair and count backwards through all of it. Then leave ten minutes before the number you get.

The chronic version costs more than the individual moment. People stop putting you on things where timing actually matters. Nobody announces it. You just stop getting the call.

So leave earlier than feels reasonable. If you get there early, sit in the car. When you know you are going to be late, send the message the moment you know it. Do not wait until you are already ten minutes past. A message that arrives early is information he can actually use. A message that arrives after he has been sitting there is just an excuse.

Nobody in the history of the world has ever thought less of a man for showing up early.

British and German troops together in no man's land, Christmas 1914. Photo: Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons.

Christmas Eve, 1914. The war was five months old and already nothing like anyone had promised. British troops in their trenches heard singing coming across no man's land. Carols, in German. Then they saw lanterns and small fir trees propped up along the German parapet.

Men started shouting across. On Christmas Day, they climbed out and met in the middle. They traded tobacco, food, buttons, and cap badges. They took photographs of each other. In some places they kicked a ball around. Historians still argue about how organized any of those games were though one German account records the final score at three goals to two.

Roughly a hundred thousand men took part in truces along the line that week. No general ordered any of it. It came entirely from the men in the holes.

What happened next is the part worth keeping. Both high commands moved to kill it. The German army issued an order on the twenty-ninth of December calling fraternization treason. The British followed on the first of January, requiring court martial for any officer who allowed it. Smaller truces happened in 1915 and 1916 and even 1917. None of them came close to that scale.

Take a minute to think about this. Men who had been shooting at each other for five months, who had every reason on paper to hate each other, put it down inside a day when nobody was making them keep it up. They had to be ordered to start again.

Most of what looks like hatred between ordinary men is arranged somewhere above them. It is worth remembering the next time you are told who you are supposed to be against.