My brush with diabetes: Zero-calorie sweeteners and insulin resistance

Over the past few years, I've thought of myself as taking decent care of my body. I went from looking like that, in February 2006, to looking like this, in May 2013:

denis, February 2006	denis, May 2013

The way I did this was through (1) some aerobic exercise, mainly at first, to get some initial weight down; (2) weight lifting, to develop muscle mass; and (3) a rigorous application of my diet, high in protein, restricted in calories, but not otherwise restricted in content.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I recently had a full blood test done - the first one in probably 15 years - and the results for my glucose and insulin were these:

Insulin:  150.5 uUI/mL (reference range: 2.0 - 27.0)
Glycemia: 155 mg/dL    (reference range: 60 - 100)
Glucose:  8.61 mmol/L  (reference range: 3.3 - 5.5)
HOMA-IR:  57.59

I hadn't been fasting when this blood sample was taken; an hour before the sample, I had eaten a breakfast of 410 kCal and 36 g of protein, the rest mostly carbs.

The doctor knew this, and he still assured me, these results were far from normal. A blood glucose level of 155 mg/dL, at any time, is dangerously close to Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. According to the Wikipedia article on Gestational diabetes - which is different, but similar - "When a plasma glucose level is found to be higher than 126 mg/dl (7.0 mmol/l) after fasting, or over 200 mg/dl (11.1 mmol/l) on any occasion, and if this is confirmed on a subsequent day, the diagnosis of GDM is made, and no further testing is required."

But look at how I look! I eat, like, 7 measured meals a day. How could this be?

Two theories:

• Although my diet had been strict about protein and calorie content, and for the most part I had fewer than 3 hours between meals, my diet was extremely liberal in artificial sweeteners. I had them everywhere. In protein bars, which were my go-to convenience food. In protein powder. In my morning cereal. And most of all, in my Coke Zero. I loved Coke Zero and Diet Coke, and I had recently been drinking as much as 3 liters of that per day. A recent study found that artificial sweeteners are associated with Type 2 Diabetes.
• Lack of aerobic exercise. Even though I was in good shape, my exercise mostly consisted of body weight exercises, such as push-ups, pull-ups and squats. Prolonged exercise counters insulin resistance, and I wasn't doing enough.

So the doctor did what he could - prescribed me metformin, which lowers blood glucose - and I also did what I could; removed all artificial sweeteners from my diet, and started using the treadmill for 45 minutes a day, most every day. Two weeks later, I did a proper fasting for 10 hours before the blood test, and the results were as follows:

Insulin:  6.00 uUI/mL (reference range: 2.0 - 27.0)
Glycemia: 77 mg/dL    (reference range: 60 - 100)
Glucose:  4.27 mmol/L (reference range: 3.3 - 5.5)
HOMA-IR:  1.13

All normal! So I'm not going to be diabetic for now, after all.

Still, in addition to the exercise, and avoiding aspartame and sucralose, this was after 2 weeks of metformin. Since my insulin and glucose are both decent now, my doctor and I decided to try without metformin, but keep the lifestyle changes. We'll see what happens in another test, in about 3 weeks.

The role of zero-calorie sweeteners

Given my experience, my theory on zero-calorie sweeteners is this. When you eat something that tastes sweet, your pancreas releases insulin in expectation of a spike in glucose. But it just so happens that you had a zero-calorie drink sweetened with aspartame or sucralose, so your body isn't getting any glucose. Instead, you only get flooded with insulin. The big insulin spike causes the cells in your body to consume the glucose in your blood, and now: (1) you feel hungry, having burned through available glucose; and (2) since there's now all this insulin and no glucose, your cells develop a measure of insulin resistance.

I had been doing this to myself a lot. I liked to drink a Coke Zero or Pepsi Light after a meal, to "help with digestion". I did this because I felt heavy after a meal if I didn't, but refreshed if I did; perhaps the reason I felt refreshed was the insulin spike causing the body to absorb glucose. But shortly after I drank the Coke, I felt hungry: perhaps, all the insulin had caused my glucose to go low. Because it still wasn't time to eat, I had another drink, and then another. I had been spiking my blood insulin level, without ingesting calories my body was expecting. So I developed insulin resistance, and this showed up in the test.

Since I cut all zero-calorie sweeteners from my diet, I've found that following the diet has been easier. I now get hungry at the right time, instead of all the time.

If you are trying to lose weight, my current recommendation would be to avoid all foods with zero-calorie sweeteners. They may look appealing, but they'll just make you hungrier. And as the latest studies suggest, they may lead to Type II Diabetes, even independent of weight loss.

Slovenia's crisis

A good post about Slovenia's economic troubles:

Slovenia Is Not The Next Cyprus, but That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not in Trouble

To summarize my take on it:

When the global economic crisis hit, countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia took immediate austerity measures. This had the short-term effect of deepening the crisis, but their economies recovered swiftly thereafter, and have been doing well since then.

Slovenia, on the other hand, had massive protests against austerity, and so austerity measures were not implemented. Instead, the state used its control over major banks to influence lending decisions in an attempt to prop up the economy. As a result, the share of non-performing loans held by Slovenian state banks rose from 2-3% in 2007, through 5% in 2009, all the way to 30% in 2012. Part of this was corruption, but you don't get to 30% of non-performing loans through corruption alone; not in Slovenia.

Now the banks are broke, and need a rescue, and the suffering endured as the crisis is dragged out will have been higher than if the population had allowed austerity measures to happen when they were needed.

Much like Greeks, the Slovenian people brought this upon themselves. They cherish the illusion of having things for free - so they pay for them much more dearly, later.

Glimpses of rarely observed reality #2

This story was related to me by my wife. I thought I should write it down before the memory becomes too old to be trusted. It may already be too old; it has been 20 years since this experience.

J was 9 years old when this happened, but the story starts before that. J's parents had a close relationship with a neighboring family; the families frequently visited. The neighbor's wife, M, was living with cancer, which she first developed about 15 years prior to these events. She had a strong will to live, and tried everything she could - modern as well as alternative medicine. She had quite a few "bioenergists" working with her over the years. Some helped her for some time; others refused to treat her.

Around the time of these events, M was receiving help from a bioenergist from Rijeka. Apparently, this bioenergist taught M how to tap into his energy if she needed to, when her disease took a turn for the worse. Some time later, the bioenergist died.

When J was nine, she was with her grandmother during a period when M's battle with cancer took a turn for the worse. At about the same time as M was hospitalized, J woke up one morning feeling sick, and needed to vomit. Ten minutes later, she needed to vomit again, and then again, and then again. Her parents were called, and took her to a primary care physician, who sent them to a nearby children's hospital. The hospital performed a variety of tests; blood work, urine tests, gastroscopy, tests for meningitis, a bone marrow sample (which she recalls was exceedingly painful). Meanwhile, J continued to vomit, she could not eat, and needed infusions to stay hydrated. If she did start to vomit, she was unable to stop.

After several days, the hospital was unable to determine the cause of her illness. The diagnosis was "stress". J's condition had improved slightly, most likely due to the infusions, and she was released into the care of her parents. She was nevertheless very weak, and was unable to sit up, even during the trip home. During the trip, she felt nauseated and exhausted. Upon returning home, J was too weak to do anything herself; she could not stand or walk, nor wash herself.

Shortly after, J's parents called a bioenergist. Upon her arrival, she observed that the child had practically no energy left, and that her energy was draining. She began their first session the same evening, "channeling energy" to J through hovering hands. J recalls how, even though the bioenergist did not touch her while hovering, the proximity of her hands felt very warm; but the hands themselves were cold when she physically touched them.

The following day after the bioenergy session, J was able to get up and wash herself. Her condition improved from there, slowly. She was able to start eating again, still vomited from time to time, but increasingly rarely. The bioenergist continued to visit at first; as J improved, she would then visit the bioenergist. After several weeks, J was back to her former self, and apparently healthy.

About a year later, J was in school, when she suddenly fell ill in the middle of a classroom session. She became nauseated, started to visibly sweat, and got a terrible headache. Her teacher was concerned, and called J's parents. J's mother came to pick her up and took her home. J laid on the couch for the rest of the afternoon, continuing to feel sick and nauseous, when eventually, the phone rang. It was someone calling to inform J's mom that M had died, finally succumbing to her battle with cancer.

By the following day, J felt well again, and went to school.

Roland's Roasted Soybeans (Edamame)

Just today, I found this product in our local store (Auto Mercado in San Jose, Costa Rica). If they have it here, they're pretty sure to have it most places in the US:



Never mind the "feng shui" crap. This is the perfect snack!

• It's tasty in a similar way as roasted nuts (just less fatty).
• Whereas nuts are largely fat, with some protein, these roasted soybeans claim to have a large portion of protein, with the remaining content balanced between fats and carbohydrates. (And none of the fats are saturated! If it matters.)
• It's filling! Eating the same amount of nuts just leaves me wanting more nuts (and calories), but eating 30 grams of this is satisfying.
• At 13g of protein per 130 kCal, I could literally eat this all day, and not depart from my diet!
• It has a better protein/kCal ratio than most protein bars, without the overbearing sweetness!
• All dat fiber, it helps you poop! (Probably.)

Yummy. I'm sure most people will continue to prefer their Doritos, but I love to have this as an option for when I would otherwise crave junk food (which for me is all carbs or fat, and no protein).

Bitcoin needs a secure hardware wallet with 3G capability

The greatest obstacle to Bitcoin's widespread acceptance is this:

• The only way to actually own BTC - as opposed to trusting others to manage them for you - is by installing wallet software on your desktop PC or tablet.
• The only way to purchase things conveniently online is with a credit card, or an equivalent. Online credit card transactions can be charged back for months afterwards, which makes them useless to buy BTC.
• Therefore, the only way to acquire BTC on a moment's notice is by going out and paying someone cash, or some other payment method that's final.

So, where you can buy BTC conveniently and on a moment's notice, you can't use it (unless you bring a laptop or tablet with connectivity in that particular location). And where you can use BTC, you can't easily buy it (at home at your PC).

If it was just that, this would be resolved in time as more people start to go around with Bitcoin-capable smartphones, and/or 3G tablets.

But there are more problems:

• If BTC is widely adopted, most people running Bitcoin wallets on their computers, smartphones and tablets will be hacked. Regardless of the platform. There will be no safety. If there are millions of iPads out there with BTCs on them, they will be hacked.
  
  Let's not kid ourselves, 95% of the population aren't savvy enough to dodge an elementary exploit, or patch the applications they're using. No one can defend against a zero-day attack.
  
  Software security will not improve, because 95% of developers can't write secure code in the first place, and even the 5% who can, make mistakes.
• Because of Bitcoin's irreversibility, even people who trust others to store Bitcoins for them, will have their accounts hacked. This will be done much more relentlessly than with people's bank accounts. The law can chase after fraudulent bank transfers, but they can't chase after stolen BTC.

---

What would solve these problems is a practical, secure hardware wallet. A rock-solid, mobile-phone-like device - think rugged like a Nokia - dedicated to Bitcoin.

Why not just a regular smartphone?

A mobile phone that has other functionality on it, let alone an open platform for applications, is at least as hackable as an unpatched Windows PC. Put Bitcoins on millions of smartphones like that, and watch them get jacked while you're out shopping. A device with a narrow focus can be made secure. An open platform can't; not with today's platforms.

A secure hardware wallet would be a brilliant way to get Bitcoins into people's pockets. The wallet can come preloaded with Bitcoins! You could preload it at the point of purchase, with whatever amount the customer wants.

The wallets would have 3G connectivity, so they would work anywhere where there's a mobile phone signal. They would be able to discover other nearby wallets, and make it easy to make payments to them.

To keep cost reasonable, the wallet would have to be a "light" Bitcoin client. It wouldn't store the entire Bitcoin transaction history, but would rely on super-nodes to handle that. However, it would store the private keys that control access to your Bitcoins, and would be the only device capable of spending them.

If someone does that, Bitcoins are bound to take off.

Bitcoin overvalued, given its current usage potential?

These are approximate currency emissions for various established world currencies - from large to small:

                        Euro (EUR)  1035 billion USD
                   US Dollar (USD)   850 billion USD
             Chinese Renmibi (CNY)   492 billion USD
                 Swiss Franc (CHF)    50 billion USD
           Australian Dollar (AUD)   32 billion USD
           Costa Rican Colon (CRC)   1.7 billion USD
    Eastern Caribbean Dollar (XCD)   1.1 billion USD

Sources: major currencies, CRC, XCD.

The total number of Bitcoins mined so far, and potentially available for use (not accounting for people who lost their keys), is nearly 11,000,000. At $140 per Bitcoin, the current value of Bitcoin emissions is $1.5 billion.

This is larger than the Eastern Caribbean Dollar (used by some 600,000 people, as well as partially in off-shore banking). It is almost as much as the Costa Rican Colon (national currency for some 4 million people).

Does Bitcoin even have 4 million people who have access to it? Does it have 600,000 people who use it on a daily basis? It seems doubtful.

According to the 2010 Federal Reserve Payments Study, in 2009 there were 115 billion of just non-cash transactions in the US:

    Checks        24.5 billion
    ACH           19.1 billion
    Credit card   21.6 billion
    Debit card    37.9 billion
    Prepaid        6.0 billion
    ATM            6.0 billion
    Total        115.1 billion

In the US in 2009, that averages out to about 1 non-cash transaction, per person, per day. I have no estimate for the number of cash transactions in addition.

Meanwhile, the average number of Bitcoin transactions per block right now is 335. That's on the order of 50,000 transactions per day. Drawing a parallel to USD, that's, perhaps... equivalent to 40,000 people regularly using Bitcoin? But with many of those transactions being speculative, due to recent publicity it has received?

Bitcoin has promise, but it has major shortcomings that have not yet been overcome.

If it becomes more successful, those who benefit from the current financial system may act to make exchanges into and out of Bitcoin a lot more difficult - it may become a currency only exchangeable in black markets.

It does not seem to me that a price of $140 reflects real, long-term demand for Bitcoin that's sustainable given the options that exist right now. If you're buying it at $140, you're making a bet that it will be more successful in the future, and it won't run into major obstacles.

That may turn out to be the case, but the more the price goes up, the more it's jumping to a conclusion before it has happened. In other words, a gamble.

Just another reason I deeply dislike Apple

Apple's iCloud service will silently discard emails containing words or phrases Apple has chosen to ban:

A reader called Steven G. alerted Macworld sister site, Infoworld, to the issue. His email goes to some length to explain how he discovered that the phrase was banned:

Steven G says: "A screenwriter was delivering a PDF attachment of a draft of his script to the project's director, by emailing it from his iCloud/MobileMe account to Gmail. The problem? The script would never arrive, no matter how many times he would send it. But sending other PDF documents worked fine."

He began experimenting with the file, turning the screenplay to a PDF and ZIP and then encrypted the file using Apple's encrypted archive format. But it came with an unusual "Not Virus Scanned" message appended to the subject field. He began to suspect that something inside the file was failing and then started to cut it into smaller parts to send it.

Steven G. writes: "AND THEN I SAW IT -- a line in the script, describing a character viewing an advertisement for a pornographic site on his computer screen. Upon modifying this line, the entire document was delivered with no problem."

You don't control an Apple device. An Apple device controls you.

The horrid beeping of Tripp Lite UPS

The power goes out in Costa Rica every once in a while, so I bought a small UPS, just for the modem, so that internet access would not be disrupted during short outages. It so happens that the UPS is from Tripp Lite.

It turns out, whenever the power goes out, the UPS announces this fact by beeping. In a very loud, annoying, high pitch. Over and over again. Every several seconds. Three times in a row, and then again.

So I bought a UPS so I could continue working when there isn't power. But then, when the power goes out, I can't work because the UPS becomes so distractingly loud.

It doesn't matter if it's day or night, either. If the power goes out while I'm sleeping, I don't really care. But the UPS will make absolutely sure to wake me up!

There does not appear to be any button to disable this horrid beeping. The only cure I've found is to turn the unit off. At which point, it's as good as having no UPS.

US politics and the "Fiscal Cliff"

Reddit user Kanpai posted this excellent summary of US politics over the past several years, explaining the "Fiscal Cliff":

There is no real easy way to explain this; there are a lot of moving parts in our political system. Remember that politics is a product of the actions of literally millions of people - so cause and effect can be hard to discern. Our current situation is the result of multiple factors. First of all, you have the congressional makeup right now. In the senate, the democrats have control. In the house, it's the republicans; in particular though, these guys are really more obstinate and conservative republicans than in the past. How did we get here? Over the course of the last decade, the Bush years really shifted our country to the right. Even though his policies became unpopular later, his administration was really good at getting their agenda passed, so by the 2004 election, most congresspeople were neoconservative, establishment republicans. Pretty right wing, but old dogs who knew how to do business. By 2006 though, things had really begun to sour for Bush. It was a big year for democrats, and they took the house and senate. Then 2008 happened and Obama and more dems were swept in. So the dems had a big majority for a while, but they couldn't do anything with it, for two reasons - one is that their party is more diverse/divided on issues then the repubs, and the other was that the elections were more historic events (first black president) and commentaries on the current republicans then votes of approval for a super liberal agenda. So the dems had trouble getting a lot of work done, even though they owned congress. As a reaction to that lack of accomplishment, we had the tea party election of 2010.

The thing about the tea party is that they are kind of the 'last hurrah' of modern(2000's) republicanism. They come in on a big wave in 2010, take control of the house, and are ideologically united - with each other. So they are able to be a real force in congress since they are all on the same page. Their policies aren't really that popular with the country at large though, and demographically, the writing is on the wall for them. One thing a lot of political analysts took away from the 2012 election is that with the number of young women and latinos voting vs old white people, the electorate is going to become more liberal in future elections. Fortunately, it was a bit of luck for conservatives that this all happened in 2010, because every decade the US does a census, and state governments redraw the lines for voting districts. Since the repubs had control of MANY statehouses when this happened, they drew all the maps as favorable to them. This is the most important part of this whole thing. Now a whole bunch of districts are reliably republican, but only in the sense that A republican will win. Primary challenges actually drive these districts to be even MORE conservative then they have already been modified to be through the redistricting. So the result is a house that is much more conservative then the actual country they serve. These guys have no incentive to compromise either, because they set it up so that the only of their constituents that matter are the super conservative ones.

What that makeup of congress translates to is, the party in control decides if bills come up for a vote at all. Now, to pass bills, you have to pass two separate bills in each chamber, reconcile them into one big one in a cross-chamber committee, and then re-pass the new bill in both houses. That's a lot of work and cooperation for two groups that hate each other. So the republicans agreed when Obama was elected to not allow him to pass ANY legislation. They actually said it, you can go and look it up. They would purposefully run the country into the ground, betting that the president would be more likely to be blamed then them. This is actually a popular strategy for them, they have been shutting down the govt. as a political act for decades.

So the republicans are united only in the sense that they can agree to do nothing but cut taxes and slash spending. The democrats operate less as a party and more as a conglomeration of people elected as a rejection of insane tea party mentalities, and because their majorities are always so thin, they can't get anything done. Now you can see the party context for the actual battles they face, like...

The fiscal cliff! This actually refers to 2 different things. First is that the United States has what's called a debt limit. It's number agreed upon by congress as the maximum amount of debt the US is allowed to take out. This number is essentially meaningless, since they raise it pretty much constantly whenever they need to. Our debt is really on the ups right now - part of that is inflation, the other part is the money we spent on bailing out the economy and the wars. We'll get to what that means later. Although under Bush the republicans raised the debt limit often and without objection, last year they became allergic to it and used it as a bargaining chip to cut spending. Now, fucking with the debt limit is a bad idea, because it literally puts a big halt on almost the entire government. Technically. So the dems had to scramble to make a deal. In the end, Americans hated how it all played out on both sides, so the deal that went through everyone hated - it said if congress can't figure out how to cut spending by next year, it would automatically trigger huge, painful cuts in places both dems and repubs didn't want. So 2012's fiscal cliff was both re-upping the debt ceiling and passing something to avoid these cuts, all while still trying to save money - and in the context of the individual democratic and republican politicians and their races, which i explained a bit earlier. The result is a nearly intractable situation, since no one has much incentive to compromise.

But, they have to compromise! you say. Otherwise, the cliff! The media said! Well, the amusing thing about this so-called 'cliff' is that it wasn't. The treasury secretary has 'emergency measures' that can delay the debt limit from triggering for a few weeks/months - in fact, he's using them right now, since we never actually came to a deal on the limit. As for the triggered spending cuts (which we did avoid), they wouldn't have mattered right away anyway either. Many govt. departments, including the IRS, made statements at the end of the year saying they would NOT make any changes if a deal was not in place, as they expected one would appear eventually, if not by the deadline, and converting depts. to these new rules which would've ultimately been reversed would've been a waste of millions of dollars.

So, to recap, the parties are at serious ideological odds right now, because the dems only get elected by being broad and varied, so they can't agree on anything, and the repubs only get elected by uniting to a rigid ideology of doing nothing. However, none of this matters because the media, always looking to create excitement, scared up a big story about a fiscal 'cliff' which was really more of a soft slope.

To explain the plan B vote, which I missed the first time: Boehner was basically in this situation during the fiscal cliff. He could go in and negotiate with the president and then back with his party to find something both would agree to. The president would get the senate to support the plan, and it would pass the house through republican support. That failed. Then he tried his own plan, with the idea being they'd pass a more conservative plan on their own through the house, let it fail in the senate, and hope everyone blamed the democrats. He couldn't even get his own party to support that. So his last and worst option was to renegotiate with the president on a bill that house dems and whatever moderate republicans he could scrounge up could pass. And that's what happened, and the republicans hated him for it. He's not super good at his job, but it's mostly that, as this post is designed to explain, the tea party usually has no reason to compromise.

If anything, Obama's second term will be less partisan than it was the last 4 years, just because of the demographic shifts the republicans are facing. These tea party guys face a dilemma: stay right wing and ensure re-election until your district re-purples and you go out like the dinosaurs; or move to the middle to try and save your political career, but guarantee a vicious primary where you have to slide back to the right anyway. Only time will tell, and it's important to look at all these individual parts to understand political motivation instead of pinning it on some grand, behind-closed-doors conspiracy. Everyone's just trying to make their dollar.

This is how I lose weight

This is how I lose (and maintain) weight.

Advantages:

• If you stick to it, it works. Reliably.
• Spreadsheet tells me when I can eat, how much I can eat, and how much protein I should get in the near future.
• It helps me follow a nutrition plan where I eat 20 or more grams of protein in every 3 hour window, and 130-160 grams of protein every day. This means I actually lose fat, instead of muscle, and keep most of my muscle mass.

Disadvantages:

• Requires an aptitude for numbers.
• Requires food with nutritional information, and/or constant look-ups on a site like TheCalorieCounter.com.
• Requires weighing most items you consume, i.e. all items where the nutritional information is not framed for a practical, reliable serving.
• For meals consisting of multiple ingredients, requires a cook willing to weigh every single ingredient, as well as the end result.
• Some exercise is still necessary. You don't get any protein while you sleep. Muscle will atrophy if unused.

I've been using this system for 6 years. It has evolved from pen and paper to the spreadsheet on the screenshot.

It's a demanding system. However, if you aren't genetically gifted, in my opinion it's the only way to reliably lose weight, short of surgery.

My natural appetite is high; I'm attracted to low protein food high in sugar. If I stop sticking to the system for a period of several months, I lose all sense of how much calories is what, and find myself eating servings double the size I should be.

If you want to lose weight, hit the gym, lift weights, build muscle, and stick to this system.

AA sells impossible connection, blames gov't, declines responsibility

So I needed to go to St. Kitts, and purchased a return ticket on American Airlines from Costa Rica to St. Kitts, via Miami.

It turned out the return connection didn't have enough time to make it through immigration in Miami. I was not unusually held up in any way - I even ran from the airplane to immigration. It's just that the lines this time of year are so long, by the time I was through, I missed the connection to Costa Rica.

The surprising part is, American Airlines declined responsibility. "We have no control over immigration," they said. Yes, but you put millions of passengers through Miami every year. You know how long the lines are. Why do you sell tickets for connections which you know a person can't possibly make?

"We won't pay for your hotel if you were delayed at immigration," they said. But I wasn't delayed - not compared to any other passenger. I just went through the normal process.

"The connection time is legal, you had one and a half hours to get through immigration." What does that mean, legal? "It means that you had enough time." But I didn't have enough time. I went through the process I had to go. I even ran from the airplane to immigration. How could I have possibly done anything more?

"We spoke to the government numerous times, it's not our fault they don't have enough agents. It's always going to be like this when government is involved." But you sold me a ticket knowing full well how long the lines are going to be this time of year. And if your argument is that government is bad at planning, how come I needed to stand in line another hour, to have this conversation with you?

"Best we can do is a discounted rate at a shitty hotel so you pay $80. Also your next flight is 24 hours from now, and we will give you a discounted rate for only a day. You can also spend this time at the airport."

American Airlines. "Responsibility. We've heard of it."