"Doomcasting"

 

The previous post generated a comment accusing me of "doomcasting". I don't take umbrage at the comment because one's perception of a sporting event is influenced hugely by where you are sitting in the stadium.

The toffs-and-swells in the box seats experience one game. The folks in the cheap-seats experience a different game. The athletes sitting in the winning-team's dugout experiences a very different game than the team sitting in the loser's dugout. And the custodians who clean up the bleachers after the game will have their own impressions.

Sorting through the options

One possibility is that the comment was submitted by a troll or an animated spam-bot and should be summarily dismissed out of hand.

The other option is that the person who wrote the comment truly believes what they wrote. So ERJ is going to put on his Forensic Psychologist's hat and paint a picture of that true-believer commenter.

The commenter was a guy

Not a huge leap. At least 80 percent of my readers are men. That is not good or bad, it just is.

The commenter is younger than fifty

Maybe much younger. It is hard to be casual about inflation after you had first-hand experience with it. My first house cost 50% of my (single-income) annual gross pay. I purchased it three years after I graduated from college. It was in a "safe" neighborhood and the majority of my neighbors were widows and very-young families.

The current median HOUSEHOLD income is about $60k/year and the median house price in the US is over $400k. To a young person, that kind of ratio is "normal" because they never knew anything different. That isn't 50%, it is 667% of annual income. Big difference!

 

Median house price last two years of Trump and 3.7 years of Harris/Biden

 

30 year mortgage rates last two years of Trump and 3.7 years of Harris/Biden (Source)

THis is a double-whammy because your first house-payments are almost entirely interest, so it is basically a multiple of the closing price * interest rate. Trump's last two years were $320k * 3.5% while Harris/Biden mid-term was $430k * 6.2% or about 2.3 TIMES HIGHER.

The commenter (or a family member) works in the public sector or for a public-sector affiliate

As-of 2023, three-quarters of all Federal Employees worked at least two-days-a-week from home and many worked five-days-a-week from home. It is very easy to think about crime-rates as "somebody else's problem" when you can cocoon in your swanky house in Bethesda, MD and phone-in your work performance.

Affiliates would include healthcare, road-construction and military equipment vendors. They are extremely insulated from the buffeting of the "real" economy.

Other affiliates include NGOs who are drinking from the money-firehose to import thugs from shit-hole countries.

The commenter does not have a gut-feel for lag-times in human judgement

Alan Greenspan coined the term "virtuous cycle". The psychology of inflation is the opposite of that. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Stores adjust prices to sell goods based on the price they EXPECT to have to pay for the replacement stock. Employees demand wages based on the prices they expect to have to pay next year, next month, next week and tomorrow as inflation heats up.

Obama famously blamed George W. Bush for problems even after being in office for seven years, so the idea that some kinds of problems need time to fester and incubate is not totally foreign to Progressives. 

Depending on your perspective

Every "doomcast" predicted in 2020 came true

or

Not a single dire prediction came true.

What happens if Kamala wins? Chaos.

 

Chaos

Not to be dramatic, but the key characteristic of chaos is that chaos is unpredictable. By definition, it is impossible to predict the unpredictable. What CAN be predicted is how groups of people will RESPOND to chaos.

Visualize that you are driving on Interstate 40 or I-70 across the western plains. You can see for miles in every direction and it is very clear that there are no hazards that will intersect your path. If you were so inclined and your vehicle and tires were up to the task, there is no reason that you could not safely drive at 140 mph.

Now visualize driving through a slum on a foggy day. You KNOW there is chaos out there even if you cannot identify specifically WHAT hazards were intersect with the time-bubble of your path. Potholes, stalled cars, kids dropping rocks from overpasses, druggies passed out in the street, "sharps" that will puncture tires, gangs, car-jackers blasting through red-lights... Fifteen miles per hour might be pushing your luck. The irony is that some hazards, like the gangs, are best navigated at high-speed. Screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.

Implications

• Time horizons will be compressed...and then they will be compressed even more.
• Investment horizons will be pulled in. 
• Businesses will stop building production plants and investing in product development. 
• Oil companies will stop drilling and start deferring maintenance on infrastructure. 
• Unions will refuse to sign contracts with long durations which will guarantee more frequent labor strife. 
• New construction of housing will dry up. 
• Interest rates will rise and long-term loans will be very difficult to obtain.
• Individuals will be less willing to invest in speculative "upgrades" to their skills.
• Birth-rates will fall off a cliff.
  
• Only the insane will join the military which will force a return to the draft, probably with elaborate safeguards to ensure DEI quotas.
  

Presented without comment

 

Where did the bug go?

Having grown up in the mid-West, I have very clear memories of my dad's station-wagon driving through clouds of big, fat bugs which hit the windshield like hail. I remember Dad needing to clean the windshield every thirty miles or so during various periods of the summer.

Now, I can legitimately drive all summer and only need to wash my windshield if I park beneath trees with birds or aphids in them.

Where did all of those bugs go?

One group of people claim there are as many bugs as there ever were and attribute the perception of fewer bugs to modern vehicles being more streamlined and the bugs smoothly pole-vault out of the way as the air flows over the vehicle.

Academics* looked into the problem and they boiled it down to no less than eleven "important" causes:

1. Habitat destruction due to intensification of agriculture
2. Urbanization
3. Pesticide use
4. Introduction of new species
5. Climate change
6. Eutrophication (depleting oxygen in the water)
7. Pollution
8. Genetically engineered plants
9. UV radiation
10. Ozone depletion
11. Light pollution

The first cause plays out in a couple of different ways. As marginal areas come under-the-plow, the more diverse ecosystems are simplified into just a few different species of plants. Much of the production of the diverse systems was consumed by bugs and wild animals. The entire point of agriculture is to create a surplus that is harvested by humans and not bugs and wild animals.

The other way it plays out is that modern, economics-driven agriculture is rarely as diverse as earlier, subsistence-based agriculture. The subsistence model have very few inputs entering or leaving the farm. Most of the nutrients were quickly cycled and didn't leave the farm. The modern model trucks in nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous from Algeria, Canada and Morocco and then trucks corn (with the embedded NPK) to feedlots in the high-plains of the US, dairies in California, to turkey batteries in tidewater Carolinas or to Poland to raise hogs. Those nutrients do not get returned to the farm.

Even though the hobby-farmer or the sundowner are not "economical" in the monetary sense and are perceived as "quaint" in the same way that Revolutionary War re-enactors are, those kinds of farmers generally have a much richer tapestry of ecosystems and a much quicker cycling of nutrients than mono-culture agriculture.

The loss of on-farm animals (cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, horses) and the loss of fence-rows and hay-in-rotation may be the biggest reasons why my windshield stays clean.

*The current belief is that areas close to Universities (and are therefore convenient to study) lost 75% of the flying insect biomass in the last 25 years. There is no data going back to the 1960s.

Man killed Mountain Lion with Shovel, claimed self-defense. Colorado DNR doubts his story.

https://www.koaa.com/news/covering-colorado/man-in-canon-city-area-claims-self-defense-after-killing-a-mountain-lion

During WWI, a trenching tool (shovel) with a razor-sharp edge was preferred by the seasoned soldiers over bayonets and other "official" cutting tools. It served as both a thrusting and swinging weapon during melees while the bayonet was superior for thrusting but useless for "axe" attacks.

If you can kill it with a shovel, it was not fleeing. It was attacking.

Extinction Burst

All fishermen recognize the extinction burst. The trophy fish makes one last, all-or-nothing run for freedom as the battle draws to a close.

All parents (and grandparents) of two-year-olds recognize it as well. Just before the child accepts the absolute necessity of not hitting, scratching or biting of "their" adults...they make one (or several) final, last, desperate runs at flipping the tables.

Why that matters

We live in an era of distracted parenting and distracted governance. Appeasement is the life-hack of the distracted. There are many tranches of people who embraced mal-adaptive responses to environmental stimuli and the distracted parents rolled-over.

If you are a conservative, you probably believe that Donald Trump winning the 2024 Presidential Election will be a good thing.

In the long-term, I agree with that assessment. In the short-term, we are likely to see a storm of "Extinction Bursts" from various entitled classes. The most violent will likely be illegal immigrants who will be directed to spend their seven-year wait prior to a legal hearing IN THEIR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. But those will not be the only ones.

From the perspective of the entitled tranches, giving up their mal-adaptive responses is to lose a fundamental element of who they see themselves as. They see it as a partial-death of their persona.

Watch your back ESPECIALLY if Donald J. Trump wins the election.

For future reference

PRISM time-series weather data  for individual locations. Location can be changed by entering information HERE

It is also possible to download the data for additional analysis.

For example, I learned that my location near Eaton Rapids averages four events a year where the temperature drops more than 30 degrees overnight from above freezing to below +20F. In the last thirty years, there were seven times when it dropped more than 45 degrees F in less than 24 hours with the low less than +20F.

These kinds of events are rough on trees because the stems are juicy and thinking about growing and the rapid drop in temperature out-runs their metabolic processes to prepare for very low temperatures.

In comparison, the Missouri River Valley just west of Williston, North Dakota had 72 times when the temperature dropped more than 30F over-night and landed below +20F