Caution...Speed Bumps Ahead

     This year ahead begins with some trepidation on my part; and I thus apologize if this post seems a bit brutal at times, even perhaps unreadable or something off the mark from the usual.  But let me explain just a bit before beginning.  Part of this malaise was of my own doing: reading too much, listening to the news, allowing myself to grow anxious over things I could not really change, at least in the political and the financial world.  And as with the last post on the fires in Los Angeles, there seemed to be so much chaos now seeming to be bubbling up in torrents.  So let me take just one paragraph to blast a few such things out to you.  Who knew that Wyoming would pass a host of laws to encourage continued coal use, including a $1.2 million fund in 2021 for the governor to sue any state that wished to use clean energy instead of Wyoming's lignite coal (wrote Sierra: In 2019, Wyoming's largest utility, PacifiCorp, which delivers electricity to six western states, issued a report stating that 60% of its coal plants were uneconomic).  Wyoming was soon followed by North Dakota, Kentucky, Indiana, Utah,  and West Virginia, each passing similar legislation to keep coal mines operating. Today, coal accounts for just 20% of our energy needs (ironically, wind has provided 20% of Wyoming's energy needs as far back as 2021).  But it was in those past three years that anti-ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) funds began popping up to promote fossil fuels, with one fund gaining 80% of that initial surge of funding: Strive Asset Management run by Vivek Ramaswamy (the proposed Trump pick's public offering symbol is $DRLL).  Other states jumped on the same bandwagon to invest taxpayer monies (often people's pension funds): Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Montana, and Texas, moves which have so far cost Texas alone some $300 million in extra interest, wrote Sierra.  No matter because Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis has introduced a bill to have the US sell off its gold reserves in exchange for the crypto currency Bitcoin, something Trump has admitted to exploring, wrote Business Insider.  And if this seems all about money (wrote USA Today, Trump is selling MAGA: ...guitars in acoustic ($1,250) and electric ($1,500) models, with signed instruments going for $11,250.  So far this year, Trump has endorsed $400 gold sneakers, $59.99 God Bless the USA Bibles, and $100,000 gold watches.), a reminder that it sort of is.  Trump is the first President not to sign an ethics agreement that limits donor contributions; wrote The Guardian: Because no agreement is in place, donors --including foreign nationals-- can give unlimited amounts to Trump's incoming administration without public disclosure.   It should also be noted that if all of Trump's cabinet appointees are approved, they would be the wealthiest administration in US history, with the majority of them being billionaires, wrote Economic Times.  Final tally numbers: Trump 49.86 of the popular vote, Harris 48.26 (the first time a GOP presidential candidate has won the popular vote in 20 years).

    This isn't me ranting about sour grapes, but rather the life-is-unfair disparity making itself evident.  Wrote Bloomberg: The net worth of the world's 10-richest people rose $63.5 billion the day after the election...Tesla CEO Elon Musk alone saw his wealth increase by $26.5 billion.  Business Insider reported that a French trader wagered $30 million that Trump would win and "...has thought to have made $85 million when Trump won."  Who has $30 million to wager on a single bet?  Or wear a $900,000 watch?  Quite a few people, apparently.  The magazine 1843 wrote of one woman asking her butler to track down a pair of shoes she wanted, then reserved a first class seat on a plane to have those shoes --nothing else-- flown from the boutique in Hawaii to her place in Dubai.  All of this seems unreal when contrasted with new mothers in the US finding out that 44% of them are not covered by the Family & Medical Leave Act because it only applies to businesses with more than 50 employees.  Or that the push for privatized Medicare such as the Medicare Advantage plans hyped by Dr. Oz, can lead to more frequent treatment denials by the insurers, wrote Yahoo Finance.  Or that Foreign Policy estimated it would cost $88 billion annually to "arrest, detain, and deport just 1 million people a year."  And noted The Wall Street Journal: About two-thirds of workers who pick fruits and vegetables and spread pesticides on U.S. crop farms are migrants, and 42 percent aren't authorized to work here, according to a Labor Department report.  CNN reported than in 2024, the estimated net worth of homeowners nationally was $400,000 but just $10,400 for renters, and that rents went up 20% in that year.  All this while 65% of food banks in the US reported increased visits.  And satellite readings show that our fresh water supply --as in the volume of nearly 10 Lake Tahoes-- has shifted out of our reach as aquifers don't replenish, reported a new study in Surveys in Geophysics.   Wrote Stop Sugar Burning on why sugarcane burning in Florida is banned if the winds blow toward the affluent Palm Beach area: The wind-based sugar cane field burning regulations were put in place to spare the more affluent communities to the east but resulted in concentrating all of the burn pollution on the lower-income Glades communities to the west.   And while Spain and the EU have stricter humane treatment laws for raising slaughter animals, North Carolina officially prevents any lawsuit against their methods of pig production, wrote Vox (the waste pools from North Carolina's nearly 9 billion pigs annually raised for slaughter, were leaching into the ground water; Iowa produces 3X more pigs than North Carolina).  But toxic chemicals go far beyond what's being burned in Florida or released in North Carolina, as in the chemicals found in the waters around Seattle.  The culprit may be 6PDD, a reaction from just one of over 400 different chemicals used to make tires for our vehicles and being released microscopically into the air as we drive, wrote a study from the University of Washington (the study was initiated after spawning salmon were dying before reaching their headwater; as one author of the study told Sierra: We usually see like 3,000 chemicals in the creek, even though 98 percent of those, we have idea what they are.)

Editorial cartoon: Matt Davies, Newsday

     "We are overwhelmed," said one 100+ mph driver in an anger management class for such drivers, wrote a story in The Washington Post: You blame other people.  You blame other things. You blame others on the road for how they're driving or whatever it is.  But you play a part in everything...It's, "Hey, look at this."  "Look at that."  "Should we look at this?"  "Should I look at that?"  People are just losing it.  There was even an ad from the Veterans Association saying: Veterans, when you're struggling, soon becomes later becomes someday becomes...when?  Don't wait.  Reach out.  Except people aren't exactly reaching out but tuning out, wrote The Guardian: Call it the great tune-out of late 2024.  Added The Hollywood Reporter: There is something rebellious in denying all that yelling and arm waving for your attention.  Here  was Bloomberg's take: A future historian looking back at the social and economic trends of the past decade might be struck by how thoroughly dysfunctional the most powerful nation on Earth has become.  Despite extraordinary technological change and respectable economic growth, the well-being of most Americans has been declining.  Even many of the winners are deeply anxious about being able to pass excesses on to their children.  And we've run up an unsustainable public debt, with no solution in sight...Why?  An analysis of hundreds of crises over the past thousands of years by my research team identified a common precursor: a situation o "elite overproduction."  Simply put, it's when too many wannabe elites are vying for a fixed number of power positions.  It's like a game of musical chairs, except the number of chairs stays constant, while the numbe of players is allowed to increase.  As the game progresses, it creates more and more angry losers.  And some of those turn into "counter-elites" -- those willing to challenge the established order: revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia, or Fidel Castro and the Barbudos in Cuba.  This is the reason why complex societies end up in end times.  It's as if that slogan from the Civil Rights days has returned: Respect existence or expect resistance...

      If this sounds unusual, you may be surprised to find that all of this may merely be history repeating itself.  In his book Same As Ever, author Morgan Housel argued: History is filled with surprises no one could have seen coming.  But it’s also filled with so much timeless wisdom.  If you traveled in time to 500 years ago or 500 years from now, you would be astounded at how much technology and medicine has changed.  The geopolitical order would make no sense to you.  The language and dialect may be completely foreign.  But you’d notice people falling for greed and fear just like they do in our current world.  You’d see people persuaded by risk, jealousy, and tribal affiliations in ways that are familiar to you.  You’d see overconfidence and short-sightedness that reminds you of people’s behavior today.  You’d find people seeking the secret to a happy life and trying to find certainty when none exists in ways that are entirely relatable.  When transported to an unfamiliar world, you’d spend a few minutes watching people behave and say, “Ah. I’ve seen this before. Same as ever.”  His blog also added this: Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?  What do I desperately want to be true, so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?  What is a problem that I think only applies to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me?  What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing?...Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it?  What do I ignore because it’s too painful to accept?  How would my views change if I had 10,000 years of good, apples-to-apples data on things I only have recent history to study?...Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?

     A new study showed how important listening with empathy can be, especially when more of us do so.  The article appeared in Scientific American...When psychologist Sara Konrath set out to investigate empathy in the U.S., she found that it had been in decline for decades.  She tracked Americans’ self-reported empathy levels between 1979 and 2009 and found that people were increasingly less likely to agree with statements such as, “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”...Polarization has been increasing, meaning that people see the world in fundamentally different ways and trust one another less.  What’s more, recent studies show that people shrink back from the mental effort it takes to understand what someone else is thinking and feeling.  Meanwhile rates of loneliness, resentment and depression in the U.S. are high...But empathy for someone whose experience feels alien—the person who disagrees with you online, the man in a tent outside the subway or even a cousin who spouts extremist views—is a different matter.  A host of disquieting unknowns arises: Is identifying with this person going to put you in danger? Will it compel you to sacrifice something important, such as time, money, tranquility?  When such anticipated costs overwhelm people, they’re more prone to withdraw altogether rather than trying to understand where the other person is coming from...But larger structural forces are likely at play, too.  Wealth inequality in the U.S. has steadily risen since the 1980s, and people in rarefied income brackets often have little motivation to understand the struggles of those at the poverty line.  “We’re much more segregated economically nowadays,” Konrath says.  “That can impair our ability to see and to care and to have those people be our neighbors and friends that we naturally want to help.”  Another study came from Oxford asking, are there differences in empathy because of your political beliefs?  Answer: yes....

      Personally, I don't pretend to be a predictor of things to come, or a pundit who knows historical trends.  Things may turn out for the better, or for the worse, or simply stay the "same as ever."  But Bloomberg painted a somewhat optimistic view of what most of us thought we knew:  The Up Wing, an Australian website founded in 2024, recently reported that vaccines have reduced infant mortality by 40% over the past half-century and that global economic growth has lifted more than 1.3 billion people out of extreme poverty.  Recipients of the weekly newsletter Fix the News have learned that Africa has reduced deaths from infectious disease by 42% since 2015, that fatality rates from drug overdoses in the US have fallen for seven months straight and that solar power installations are accelerating around much of the world and global capacity recently hit 2 terawatts.  “Our view is that the world is bad but that it’s better in most ways than people imagine. It’s probably the best time ever to be alive,” says Keith Moore, head of editorial at the Gapminder foundation, which is headquartered in Stockholm.  The organization’s site quizzes readers to reveal their misperceptions on migrants (only 15% are refugees who flee their homes), population growth (it’s slowing), beef consumption (humans eat more fish) and other issues.  “One place they do overestimate progress is on climate. People think we are transitioning faster than we actually are,” Moore says.  Even those who typically read climate news with a deep sense of foreboding can find a few reasons for hope.  More than 40% of the world’s electricity came from zero-carbon sources in 2023 for the first time, according to BloombergNEF.

      In her book The Serviceberry, Anishinaabe author Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote: Enumerating the gifts you've received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need.  Recognizing "enoughness" is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.  Data tell the story that there are "enough" food calories on the planet for all 8 billion of us to be nourished.  And yet people are starving.  Imagine the outcome if we each took only enough, rather than far more than our share.  The wealth and security we seem to crave could be met by sharing what we have...When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear.  I don't mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal "payment."  I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving...I suppose in an industrial economy "production" is the source of the flow, rooted in human labor and the conversion of earthly gifts to commodities.  But so often that production is at the cost of great destruction.  When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn't it time for a different system?  One thing is certain...we'll soon find out.

Photo of moai on Rapa Nui: Luigi Farrauto/ Getty Images