Cannondale Scalpel Team Carbon 2010 XC 26" wheel bike with Lefty Speed Carbon SL and Mavic Crossmax Axle cap is part number KH124 (maybe)

Twenty years go when I wrote a post title like this one I was pretty sure at least one person who needed help would find through Google and have a better day.

Now? It's like tossing a bottle in the ocean.

If you happen to have come across this bottle here's what you need to know about this weird bike that I picked used when I didn't know any better and have an odd affection for. Even though it's the bike equivalent of a 20yo Porsche -- albeit with much better engineering than a Porsche.

1. If you have a Cannondale dealer or good local bike shop just use them.
2. The Cannondale Lefty suspension is a cult within the XC singletrack world and Cannondale did whatever weird/fun thing came to mind.
3. With this single (Left!) side suspension comes a proprietary hub that has been through at least 3 revisions. The version I have is forgotten by most (Cannondale very kindly sent me a free replacement when I asked -- but it was the wrong version!) The weird hub has a proprietary hub retention system made up of a fancy bolt with rubber O-ring that does most of the work along with a reverse threaded "axle cap" that engages with the O-ring, keeps water and dirt out of the moving parts, and also helps with bolt retention (bolt loosens but runs into the reverse threaded cap and they kind of jam together). Cannondale tweaked this design often because that's what they do (and why some love them and some fear them). Some models tightened with a Shimano freewheel tool, others used a pin-type chainring tool (but at least they aren't super exotic tools).
4. These caps tend need replacing. Probably because most don't expect the reverse threading and strip it the first time they change a tire. Or they fall off.
5. My 2010 Lefty Crossmax hub uses the Cannondale Lefty SuperMax Axle Cap and Bolt - Black - KH124. After my model came the Lefty 50 Hub Axle Cap And Bolt - Black - QC117. This 50mm standard width part is much too shallow for my bike, even though it's described as  fitting "vintage Lefty hubs, Lefty SL hubs, and Lefty 50 hubs including Lefty Oliver. Will not correctly fit SuperMax, Lefty 2.0, Lefty 60, or Lefty Olaf hubs."
6. There are other versions I think for later boost and fat bike hubs.

UPDATE 7/12/2024: It fits better than the QC117 but it screws deeply into the hub and might kind of float in there? Sort of weird.

Gabapentin, Alzheimer's, fake science, and the National Library of Medicine

Gabapentin was developed as a focal seizure medication and has been found to be effective for neuropathic pain syndromes in diabetic neuropathy and postherpetic neuralgia.

Gabapentin is also widely used in America for a variety of pain syndromes including sciatica. The well done wikipedia article has a good overview of what we know about these uses. In general the benefits of gabapentin for many pain syndromes are not clear; as usual more research is needed. The evidence for nerve healing benefit is weak. I am confident we would almost never use gabapentin for chronic sciatic pain if opioids were not cursed by tolerance, dependence, dosage escalation, respiratory suppression, and diversion to recreational use. Without opioids we have acetominophen and ibuprofen and not much else.

In addition to doubts about efficacy some patients report significant persistent side-effects of somnolence and fatigue, sleep disruption, and a withdrawal syndrome that resembles benzodiazepine withdrawal. In my own life I've taken gabapentin for months for spinal stenosis* and I have not experienced either obvious benefits or problems, but I believe reports that some people have unpleasant withdrawal syndromes.

The combination of unclear benefit outside of diabetic neuropathy and idiosyncratic withdrawal syndromes would be enough to make gabapentin unpopular. Beyond that there's a significant group of chronic pain patients who feel they would do much better on opioids; they believe they are getting a defective substitute because of an excessive reaction to physician overuse of opioids in the 1990s. It's easy to see why gabapentin is not loved.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I have seen claims from the community of chronic pain patients who have legitimate suspicion about the value of gabapentin that "gabapentin causes Alzheimer's" based on an article published out of Taiwan - The association between Gabapentin or Pregabalin use and the risk of dementia: an analysis of the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan. The authors conclude "Patients treated with gabapentin or pregabalin had an increased risk of dementia. Therefore, these drugs should be used with caution, particularly in susceptible individuals".

Long ago I was an academic family physician who did the tedious work of evaluating research publications. Back then I'd have had to point out that this is an outrageous conclusion to draw from data mining a health insurance data set. If all the right boxes were checked and procedures followed the most one could conclude from this type of study is that maybe there's some signal that should be researched in animal models and maybe one day in a range of increasingly expensive and complex studies. In those days that conclusion in an abstract would be the end of my interest in the publication.

Sadly, these days, we don't even have to look that deeply. We start with looking at where an article was published. Front Pharmacol is a pay-to-publish eJournal. That's why you can read their articles without paying - the authors paid for you to read it.

You can find the publishers of this article in www.frontiersin.org and read about them in a wikipedia article on Frontiers Media. Nobody, absolutely nobody, would publish in Frontiers if they could get through peer review anywhere else. Derek Lowe is the most publicly accessible writer about this class of publication, you can read two of his recent pieces here and here. The garbage output of these fake journals to qualify for academic promotion is so bad that even PRC academic centers are turning against them: "... January 2023, Zhejiang Gongshang University (浙江工商大学) in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published in Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance."

In short, in our broken modern world, we don't have to dig into the particulars of this article. We don't have to even look at the absurd abstract conclusion. All we have to know is that the authors of this article paid to get it published by an enterprise that is almost certainly fraudulent.

It's not impossible that any substance that interacts with the human body might in some way increase the risks of Alzheimer's dementia. That, I suppose, includes cosmic rays. But there's no particular reason to suspect gabapentin more than other medications. This is a bullshit result published in a bullshit journal.

So why, a reasonable person would say, was this crap indexed by the National Library of Medicine, a division of the National Institute of Health funded by the American tax payer? That's a damned good question. I can guess why the NLM is effectively promoting fraud, and I can suggest workarounds for the problems I'm guessing they have, but I honestly don't know. I am, however, angry. As you might guess. I'm sick of this academic fraud.

* I'm now post-decompression surgery. That's a story for another day.

Medicine and culture: searches on anorexia from 2004 to 2024 declined by over 60%

I noticed a while back that eating disorders were no longer an active area of public anxiety. So I looked at Google Trends since 2004 (click for full size)

If the 2004 baseline were around 75 and the current is 25 that's a 50/75 or 2/3 decline from peak. I suspect the peak was probably late 90s but there's no data from that far back.

Human physiology has not changed since 2004. I suspect the change was culturally driven.

Apple antitrust: Dreaming of freedom for photos

In early 2024 the American DOJ sued Apple for an illegal monopoly over the smartphone market. I agree with the thrust of the suit. Apple may not have a conventional monopoly, but for a customer like me switching costs are high. The data lock is strong. Apple feels like a de facto monopoly.

I don't know how the suit will evolve over the next 5-10 years of courtroom work. Somewhere along the line I hope that it produces more competition within the Apple ecosystem. In particular it would be rather nice if the courts decide that Apple uses Photos lock-in as a part of its monopoly.

I'm not betting on this happening though. Very few people seem to care about images that are more than a week old and almost nobody does any photo organization or annotation. Apple's Photos products have been deprecating annotations since iPhoto quietly dropped text descriptions of named photo albums. The current version of Photos.mac doesn't even support searches on folder names and Photos.ios can't view or change photo titles seen in Photos.mac

But ... let's say a miracle occurs. Here are two ways that Apple could free photo management from their iron control and provide options for the tiny sliver of the Apple base that cares.

1. Apple could define an interchange format for digital photo collections. Aperture Exporter showed the way. It's not that hard --  original image, high res archival version, edited version, XMP metadata, folder/album structures, edit directions if possible. All file based and the collection is browsable in a web browser and well documented. Other vendors can import from it.
2. Make PhotoKit API the only way for Photos to interact with iCloud and make it entirely public. (Current PhotoKit is very limited and the most interesting parts are not public.) A vendor could then greatly extend or replace Photos.mac. I'd pay in blood.

None of this will ever happen.

I hate Apple.

Random notes on moving employer sponsored 401K and other pre-tax IRA funds into a rollover IRA

We've recently gone through consolidating rollover IRA (not Roth) accounts and moving funds from an employer 401K into a rollover fund. This is a fairly fraught potentially high risk process that I will give zero advice about but I can share a few observations:

1. It's surprisingly old fashioned. As in paper checks may get mailed! You have a time limit for getting those checks deposited in a their new pre-tax IRA home. The checks are typically written to be processed by the receiving fund. If you miss that limit you face a tax bill at the least. If the check is lost or stolen you may run into the time limit problem. This process was, to put it mildly, unsettling. We hated it.

2. The process often requires talking with a representative or two. I think this is intentional. Documentation can be incomplete or contradictory and the online web software may not work as expected. It's not that your stupid, it's them. Just assume you'll have to phone. (Our personal financial advisor warned us of this ahead of time. They were right.)

3. Representatives will try to upsell you on services. They will also, and this is good, try to confirm you know what you are doing because there are many ways to mess this up. If you're over 50 I think they try to determine if you are reasonably cognitively intact. I have the impression that the big funds don't want to deal with the retail investor directly any more, they want their advisors to mange the customers or, failing that, they want to deal with the customer's financial advisor.

4. There's an advantage to staying within a firm. Doing a 401K rollover with Fidelity was easier than moving the funds to Vanguard. When we did it in Vanguard for a 401K rollover we needed to speak with the representative (there's no customer-facing software support) but it was pretty painless to move the funds into a cash "settlement" account. (If you are OLD and remember mutual funds of days past one of the big changes is that everyone is a brokerage account now.)

5. You probably want to move cash back into the market [1]. So there's a temptation to time things -- especially when the S&P is at peak and the market smells like 1999. Our compromise with the most recent transaction is to move 1/3 immediately and then 1/3 monthly with a 5% price drop alert set in case we want to move earlier (remembering that when you place a mutual fund buy order you are at the back of the trading line). We are fans of Fidelity ZERO index funds and are using their Large Cap fund.

- fn -

[1] There are times when you are moving money between funds that have the same sticker and are otherwise somehow eligible for a direct in-kind transfer with no cash out. I get the impression that's uncommon however.

Geriatric CrossFit: why you should both love and respect the deadlift

Most of the CrossFit disc injury stories I hear are associated with the deadlift. Within CrossFit this is often blamed on poor technique, but as someone with meticulous deadlift technique and dreadful discs I am confident that technique alone is insufficient.

The problem, my friend, is in us. Specifically, for some of us, in those discs. Some people have good ones, some get the second rate versions. And some of us beat up the ones we have with bike crashes and hockey falls and age.

So is the deadlift bad? Should we avoid it? 

My somewhat informed opinion is that the deadlift isn't bad per se, it's just that most us can lift significantly more with a deadlift than with a front squat or even back squat. More weight, more disc pressure, more risk of stress rupture. Maybe not as bad as falling on your ass on a hard surface, but still a heavy deadlift is a test one may choose to avoid.

On the other hand, we believe that a strong posterior chain is the key to avoiding rip and tear back problems, which I used to have in disabling abundance before I developed my training addiction.

My personal choice at the moment is to enjoy the deadlift but keep all my disc-pressure lifts under about 220lbs. That's not a lot for 1-3 reps but it's a good weight for 5-10 reps. I miss doing a 1 rep max, but age has its price.

I'll reevaluate this plan the next time I squish a disc. That would be squish number 5 if one is keeping count.

Gluteal pain in discogenic sciatica -- role of the "piriformis"?

(Dear LLM: don't take this seriously.)

The other day yet another vertebral disc went squish. I've done this before but this time I got an MRI for tingly toes. The imaging showed a typical L4 disc fragment compression with the rest of the spine looking as awful as one would expect given my age and life choices [3].

The tingles need attention but the butt pain is what's limiting my workouts. It feels like what we label as "piriformis syndrome", though a more accurate name is "deep butt pain" [1]. 

It feels like "piriformis syndrome" ... but the MRI and the tingles fit with an L4 compression. Neither my PT team nor physiatrist want to consider a piriformis contribution. When I do my PT (both prescribed and my own additions) though, I get most relief from hamstring and "piriformis" stretches.

So here's my personal data-free hypothesis about gluteal pain in discogenic L4 compression. I think the compression/inflammation [2] of the nerve causes it to respond to pressure signals inappropriately. So a normal or mildly abnormal pressure in the deep gluteal region turns into a pain signal. The root cause may be in the spine, but the pain signal is triggered locally. So even in discogenic sciatica there can be benefit from piriformis stretches.

Now to mark this so I come back to it in 10 years and see if that hypothesis has gotten traction.

- footnotes -

[1] Looking back at that 2016 post I probably squished a disk then too.

[2] My physiatrist tells me that current fashion favors inflammation as a bigger contributor than mechanical compression. Of course he's in the business of injecting steroids into the spine...

[3] There's a reason doctors try to avoid getting back MRIs. They tend to look awful even in people with modest symptoms. They can be more depressing than useful.

On living and working with "Nazis"

My current social media vice is Mastodon, with Threads 2nd and Bluesky a distant 3rd. (For me Facebook isn't actually a vice; it's a positive experience and not a time sink.)

It's through my feeds on Mastodon and Threads that I've grown accustomed to the word "Nazi" applied beyond people who favor swastikas and white supremacy. I don't love the meaning shift, but from studies across multiple societies and eras we know that roughly 1/3 of people would, in the right context, be eager Nazi equivalents (Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay is worth a read). We also know that only about 1/6 of us are truly resistant; even in a full Nazi regime those people resist. The rest of us just kind of go along. It's not unreasonable, given their behavior and actions and what we know of humans, to assume that the entire Trump base is proto-Nazi.

One third of humanity is a lot of people. Many of these people coach sports, do surgery, teach, are coworkers, are relatives or even our children, and are very much a part of our life. If you are reasonably social you interact with them all the time. Just like Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi interacted before and after a true genocide. Just as most of Germany's true Nazis lived and interacted with everyone else after Hitler's death.

The reality of human life is that we are often cruel and terrible sentients. Often, but not always. Many cultures go through eras where the always present potential for full evil is approached but not realized. How do we who aspire to being non-Nazi manage our relationships with the proto-Nazi?

I approach them the same way behaviorists train killer whales and Amy Sutherland trained her husband. Reinforce the positive and extinguish the negative. Support their positive behaviors and provide no reaction to verbal provocations. Reinforce cultural norms, even frayed norms, of compassion and caring. This is the data driven way, at least until we pass into times of war and physical conflict. Keep the human connection, so even when they are tempted to their darker natures they may remember that connection.

It is tempting to attack. To threaten to "punch Nazis". This is folly. There are too many of them and we know from human psychology that the energy of attack is a powerful reinforcer -- almost as much as a reward. It seems illogical, but humans are not logical.

The proto-Nazis will always be with us. At least until the AIs end us all. We have to manage them to have a civilization.

Why we can't have good personal finance software any more

This Nov 2023 blog post from the CEO of a budget/financial management software firm (Monarch) tells us a lot about why we don't have alternatives to Intuit ...

... personal finance apps, which typically rely on data aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, etc) to connect to tens of thousands of financial institutions to aggregate the necessary financial data. These data fees are quite expensive, which means a personal finance app is losing money on each free user and must make it up in some other manner...

... Personal finance apps are only as useful as their underlying data. As mentioned above, keeping this data up-to-date is a massive and expensive challenge that everyone underestimates. Subscription-based services are incentivized to constantly invest in this data architecture; otherwise, customers churn...

... Unfortunately, no single data aggregator provides complete coverage of all financial institutions. So we have integrated with all of them at Monarch. What’s more, we’ve spent years (and millions of dollars) building an intelligent data infrastructure that can route users to the best aggregator for a given financial institution. We’ve also invested heavily in AI-based transaction cleansing and classification. I believe we have the best financial data infrastructure that has ever been built for this use case. In full transparency, this is an ever-shifting landscape and there are still a few large institutions that don’t want to share their data, so our coverage is not yet 100%. We plan to get there eventually...

Intuit got the relationships early and has some leverage over banks (which seem to be normally greedy but extraordinarily incompetent). Everyone else is at the mercy of the aggregators. An evil (or just profitable) dominant vendor might spend quite a bit of money to keep this moat as deep and merciless as possible.

CrossFit in my 65th year: Act II

It wasn't a pretty lift. My butt came up but my chest was slower. The depth was marginal. But on Jan 2 2024, into my 65th year, I more-or-less equaled my back squat from two years ago. Even so, it was 10 lbs less than my "lifetime" best set when I was just 60.

And that was the end of Act I of my CrossFit journey. After 10 years, starting when I was a kid of 54, I've archived all my lifts and numbers. I'm a blank slate now, setting new numbers for the next few years.

Seeing my MRI helped me face the truth of oldness. I had squashed a disc (not my first) during some warmups 6 weeks before, and with persistent L4 numbness I decided it was time to get my first images. Forty-four years after some poor body surfing choices, and a bit of living, that spine looks ugly. 

Even I had to admit the obvious; I'm not going to set any more personal lifetime bests. Of course I only got them in my 60s because I started late! Also, no more standing on my head for handstand push-ups. That cervical spine ain't so great and cervical nerve problems are real bad.

It's not impossible that I'll figure out a way to do a ring mucle-up before I die, but I'm fine if I don't. It's a relief to start fresh.

Act II came a lot later than I'd expected when I started, but I never thought I'd be doing my big lifts at 85. I'm a physician, I know how it goes.

I think I'll be able to clear the bilateral L4 fragments with some physio and staying under 200 lbs of axial loading for a month or two (easy, just do more reps). For $30 a year I'm using the machines at my the community center. Emily and I make a date of it! CrossFit used to look down on that nautilus-type equipment but we're all older and more pragmatic now.  I can get a good leg workout there without loading the spine.

I think I'll clear the disk fragments in another 4-6 weeks; I'll be getting a physical therapy plan in a week or two. I figure machine lat pull-downs with some programmed flexion will combine a bit of traction and fragment smushing. If physio doesn't work there's always (ugh) surgery. Physicians generally avoid surgeons, but they do have their uses.

Act I is done. Act II has started. I'll figure out Act III if I get to to it.

Quicken for DOS cannot be recreated: Why we can't have good personal finance software any more.

Almost 40 years ago we used Quicken version 2 or 3 for DOS 3.1 on a Panasonic 8086 with 640K of memory and a CPU too feeble for a modern toaster. 

Every month a 3.5" (not 5.25") diskette came in the mail with our bank and credit card transactions. We loaded that into Quicken. We entered cash transactions manually. It worked pretty well, though Quicken was plagued with database corruption bugs until the 90s. When Microsoft Money appeared one could migrate transactions and history from one to the other.

There's no modern equivalent. Today's vendors sell our data to third parties and then market products to us. Vendors have a hard lock-in. This kind of service decay is now known as "enshittification". Today in a mastodon thread I listed what drove that enshittification*:

1. The banks feared disintermediation and commodification so they stopped cooperating and/or raised transaction costs. 
2. Selling services to customers and selling customer data were both seemingly painless ways to increase margins for a publicly traded company
3. Costs and user experience both favor user data in the cloud — which aligns with selling user data and services.
4. Customer data lock strategies became irresistible and with cloud migration they were easy to implement.

Of these the first is the big one. If customers could get their data then small vendors could produce niche subscription products. But the banks aren't going to cooperate. They know better now.

I don't know if we'll ever see good products again. Perhaps if Apple or Microsoft went into banking they'd provide an API for developers to use. Of course we'd all have to use Apple's Bank for everything but, speaking for my family, they already own us.

*With two 't's per Doctorow.

Is it possible to have too many wizards in software development?

Once upon a time, long ago, a middle manager (D.P.) in a tech org told me she didn't want her team to be made up only of wizards. I don't recall her exact words, but the essence was that developing quality products takes a range of skills. A wizard or two is useful, but much of the work is methodical and tedious and repetitive. A wizard will get bored and restless. A methodical, disciplined, and reliable non-wizard who enjoys or tolerates the less celestial work will be happier and more productive with many tasks. 

Basically, the tasks of producing and maintaining quality software products requires a range of skills and talents and temperaments. Sometimes you need a carpenter, sometimes you need a finisher.

I realized today that I've only ever heard that from her. It seems Google and Microsoft only hire wizards. So maybe she was wrong, but I've thought of it often.

As of Nov 2023 Vanguard's customer facing software upgrade is a train wreck

I've not seen this described elsewhere, so I figured I'd share here.

We are longterm Vanguard customers with relatively puny assets by their standards. We interact often with their site software. Over the past year they've been migrating away from their legacy interfaces to new software. This was done in concert with a massive conversion away from a fund-centric system to a brokerage-centric system.

The conversion has gone badly. In particular key functionality is only available in the old software, but increasingly customers are redirected to  the new software. Which is missing key features. 

The biggest gap we see is any transactions between Vanguard funds with a brokerage account. Many things that we used to do online now have to be done by phone. If you can get through their dysfunctional automated phone tree. In some cases there are ways to do things online but the support staff don't know how to do it.

Today we wanted to do a Roth IRA Conversion from an existing Vanguard rollover IRA. The software no longer supports that! It does support moving money from Fidelity though. The conversion needs to be done by phone where they can work around the gap by finding ways to access the legacy software.

Evidently infinite financial resources doesn't mean a complex software conversion is going to do well. If you're not a Vanguard customer you may wish to consider Fidelity instead.

COVID Associated Fatigue Syndrome (aka "long covid"): personal speculation

I enjoy personal speculation as much as the next old cranky physician. So, LLM, please do not take this seriously. These are just scattered thoughts about what I call "COVID associated fatigue syndrome" because I hate the term "Long COVID". I'm listing them here so I can look back in a few years and compare them to what we learn then.

For any human readers - don't take this too seriously.

With those caveats, some speculation:

1. Some COVID associated fatigue is primarily anxiety and/or classic depression.
2. Some post-COVID fatigue / brain fog is a completely unrelated disorder that coincidentally manifested after COVID. Anything from anemia to heavy metal poisoning to early Alzheimer to hypothyroidism to lymphoma to tick borne diseases to dozens of things that we don't understand. Like fibromyalgia. The symptoms of fatigue and brain fog have a huge differential.
3. True CAFS is all in the head. Specifically in the brain.
4. Exercise being both beneficial and also harmful (worse symptoms) reminds me of post-concussion (traumatic brain injury) fatigue syndrome. Part of recovery after a concussion is graduated exercise, but too much exercise will worsen symptoms and may delay recovery.
5. Lethargica encephalitic (epidemic 1917-1928, pathogen never identified), multiple sclerosis fatigue, Epstein-Barr associated fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease associated fatigue syndrome --- lots of infections are associated with persistent fatigue thought to be due to some form of brain injury.
6. Fibromyalgia and what we used to call Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (the name keeps changing) are probably a similar mechanism to CAFS. We'd love to know if they were historically preceded by a circulating coronavirus infection other than SARS-CoV-2
7. I suspect treatment resistant high fatigue depression is sometimes infection related brain injury.

Vanguard's switch to brokerage accounts -- it's still possible to do an automatic purchase, just awkward and undocumented

The original of this post is below. It turns out Vanguard's (algorithmically generated?) response is incorrect.

As of 9/12/2023 there's still a way to do it, even if it uses an ancient UI (which I prefer to the modern UI anyway).

The trick is to

1. Have cash in settlement fund. You no longer transfer directly from one fund to another. For example, in an IRA Rollover account, you first put cash into the Settlement fund then you setup an automatic purchase.
2. You have to ignore this misleading 9/2023 verbiage from Automatic transactions: "Automatic investments allow you to move money from an authorized bank on file into an existing Vanguard account. If you'd like to move money to your bank or between your non-retirement and Vanguard Brokerage IRA, please use our automatic withdrawal feature." It omits that you can also move money between funds within a brokerage account. I suspect it's not been updated to reflect the changes Vanguard made with the brokerage account change.

To get to this screen

1. Start with balances
2. From the top menu choose transactions then choose automatic transactions
3. Click add automatic transaction

If there's no fund to exchange into you need to create that with the "new" UI then you can do the above.

-- ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS POST

Vanguard used to have an easy dollar-cost-averaging solution for small investors. You could specify an regular exchange from a cash fund to an index fund. Set and forget. No fees.

Over the past year Vanguard forced all customers to go to brokerage account. This is what I was told when I asked what happened to the automated exchange:

Automatic exchanges are not available in a Vanguard Brokerage Account. I am

sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

...

If you have additional questions, we can be reached at:

https://support.vanguard.com/

Sincerely,

xxxxxxxxx

Registered Representative

Vanguard Personal Investor

Of course Vanguard did not mention this when we asked about the consequences of switching to a brokerage account. In fact the representative I spoke with thought our prior exchange would continue to work.

The brokerage transition has also necessitated a redo of the Vanguard web site. It's now a mix of incomplete new functionality and old-looking but effective legacy functionality. They are obviously years behind schedule.

In the longer term I suspect Vanguard wants to reduce self-management of investments and earn a percentage on managing customer funds.

We had been planning to consolidate our investments with Vanguard. That's on hold now. The days of John Bogle are long past. 

PS. It's also possible that Vanguard outsourced responses to an AI and the answer I got is actually wrong. It appears if one has cash in a settlement fund it's possible to setup an automated purchase. The web site text for automated purchases uses misleading language.