Jackie and I call this path, along the top of the berm along the north edge of our little prairie, the High Road. There used to be a Low Road (down by the creek) and a Middle Way (in between), but they’re no longer mowed.
The sunrise is just a bonus.
While waiting for the bus to go to my Esperanto group meeting last night, I admired how these clouds were nearly the same orange as the barrels under them. (The water main break is fixed, I think. Now they need to fix the road.)
🎶 These snoots were made for boopin’, and that’s just what they’ll do! / Sooner or later these snoots are gonna boop all over you (do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do) 🎶
A group of friends and I agreed last week that the most likely result of the most likely policies coming out of this administration is stagflation.
Talking about it reminded me of the Wise Bread post I wrote All about stagflation, so I re-read that. I think has held up pretty well, even though circumstances (financial crisis followed by a pandemic) meant that things didn’t play out as I’d expected. Even so, I think the analysis of how to produce a stagflation is right on: raise interest rates to bring down inflation, but then panic when it’s clear that you’re in danger of producing a recession and cut rates before you’ve gotten inflation under control; repeat until you have high inflation and a recession.
That is, stagflation is usually the result of a timid Fed, that’s afraid to do its job.
The thing is, the policies that I see coming (tariffs and tax cuts) will produce stagflation even if the Fed does a great job. The tariffs directly raise prices, and the tax cuts (through increased deficits) raise interest rates, producing a recession.
In the Wise Bread article I warn that it’s tough to position your investments for stagflation. The reason is that inflation makes the money worth less (helping people with debts, but hurting people with money), while the recession hurts people with debts and people with investments.
Upon reflection though, I don’t think it’s quite that bad. In fact, it’s really just regular good financial advice:
Basically: live within your means and stay liquid.
Some years ago I came this close to setting up a rule that any email message with the word “webinar” in it be sent directly to spam. I never got around to it, and I guess I’m glad I didn’t, because I just attended a rather interesting webinar on “Fixing Chicago Union Station” by the High Speed Rail Alliance.
Enjoy the poster below, which is very cool, even though unrelated to Chicago.
I told Ashley that she’s “The number one girl in my eyes.”
Then I had to carefully explain that this did not mean that she should boop me in the glasses with her snout.
“A goofy number of guys think they’d win against a grizzly when they’d lose to a Canada Goose.”
— One of the sword fighters in my HEMA club
I don’t know, but I assume this is happening because I block scripts from sites other than the one I’ve gone to visit from running in my browser.
I wasn’t going to turn on scripts, because it didn’t seem important to visit this particular page, but in the time it took me to capture the image below and write this text, the page seems to have decided that I am human after all!
It was really too cold outside (2℉) to pose for photographs, so I brought Ashley inside before taking a picture.
Then, after taking her jacket off, I fixed myself a hot cocoa.
But no hot cocoa for the doggo. Poor thing.
I don’t think of myself as someone who wishes ill for others. I genuinely do not wish for anyone to come to harm. But I’m struggling just a bit with schadenfreude right now.
Take, as an example, the wildfires in California. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, these fire events were not just entirely foreseeable; they were actually foreseen forty years ago. And yet, there are tens of thousands of people who apparently made the calculation that the views from a house on a hillside at the urban-chaparral interface were so good it was worth taking the risk—and especially so, given that a large fraction of the costs of fighting those fires, and insuring against financial loss, could be spread to other people. People like me.
I think I’m allowed a bit of, “I hope you are enjoying the entirely foreseeable consequences of your choices.”
As another example, take the snow about to hit New Orleans:
By Tuesday, the winter storm will drop freezing rain, sleet and likely several inches of snow onto south Louisiana, including in New Orleans, Metairie, Slidell, Baton Rouge and Lafayette.
I have to admit that when people in red states face an extreme weather event that’s entirely to be expected, a certain part of me thinks, “Well, you could have voted for politicians and policies that would have greatly ameliorated climate change, but you didn’t. Enjoy the entirely foreseeable consequences of those choices.”
And, as a non-climate example, apparently a lot of black and brown male voters refused to vote for Kamala Harris. I suspect many of them will be surprised and saddened by the utterly predictable deportations of friends, family members, neighbors, coworkers, and employees over the next few years. And I will be very sad about that—sad for the people deported and their friends and family, and also about the dreadful police actions that will be required to make them happen. But I hope I will be excused from feeling no sympathy for the bosses who find themselves having to pay up to get workers who haven’t been deported, and very little sympathy for the people who voted for these policies and find that everything they want to buy costs more.
“Welcome to the entirely foreseeable consequences of your actions as well.”
