April 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Maybe an irreversible methane tipping point is happening. This could be the scariest thing out there short of nuclear war.

Most hopeful story: 3-30-300 is a nice, simple idea. “you can see 3 trees from your window, your neighborhood has 30% tree canopy cover, and you are within 300 m of a half-hectare park.” Sure, you have to figure out some details and make some sustained effort over time to implement simple ideas. Still, not rocket science. Combined with the “15 minute city”, this is a pretty good urban planning philosophy that should be communicable.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I made what I would consider a “common sense” trade policy proposal. “I generally support…free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders.”

https://homertree.com/blog/the-3-30-300-rule/

My Keys to Happiness in the Moment

I’ve been thinking about this, whether there is any recipe for my personal happiness in the moment. Happiness in the moment is something different from overall life satisfaction, maybe a topic for another day. Anyway, here is what I have come up with.

  1. Sleep. Enough sleep, and quality sleep. I’ve always had some trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, and I don’t have all the answers. Keeping a set routine most of the time, including weekends, helps. Winding down for an hour or so before bed helps (not always under my control with the life of a working parent). Podcasts and audio books can help for those nights when the mind just doesn’t want to settle down. A quiet, dark, cool bedroom and comfortable bed help (again, not always under my control, although I have taken to sleeping with earplugs at times.)
  2. Coffee. Surprising to see this at #2? For me it’s the only 100% reliable antidepressant out there. I often wake up feeling like the world is not such a nice place, and 30-60 minutes after I have my coffee, it feels like a much nicer place. More coffee is not better, of course. 1-2 cups, at about the same time each day, works for me.
  3. Exercise. Anything including stretching or a walk can provide a temporary mood pickup, but consistent exercise several days in a row really seems to improve my mood. It doesn’t have to be long – maybe 20-30 minutes – but it does have to involve some heart pumping, heavy breathing, sweat and/or sore muscles to maximize this effect for me. Part of the effect of exercise may be that it reinforces good sleep.
  4. Down time. I think the introvert/extrovert framework is a useful way to think here. For extroverts, spending time with friends and family may count as down time. For me, it does not. I love my friends and family, and I don’t want to live my life in solitary confinement, but for me some alone time is non-negotiable to feel my best. Reading, thinking, ideally some time in nature or at least outdoors. Ideally it would be at least an hour a day, a day a week, and a weekend each month. The latter two have been impossible in middle aged working professional family life, but I grab the alone hours and moments where I can. I know however that my mental health is never what it could be if I could slow down and have more time to myself. Perhaps if I live long enough to retire…but it’s sad to look forward to the later stages of your life. Such is the supposedly modern world we have created for ourselves.

That’s it! There are many other things that might help at the margins. Good nutrition certainly. Meditation. Power naps. I do not oppose the light recreational use of alcohol and possibly other substances, in particular to enhance that down time that is in such short supply. And of course professional help is out there and worth trying for many people. I’m sure I could come up with a long list here. But none help that much without nailing the top 4.

Finally, it helps me to think of high and low moods as being like the weather. High and low moods will come and go. Sometimes there is no obvious reason for them. You can’t predict them with certainty, and you can’t expect to control them all the time even if you do everything perfectly. Following the “Top 4” things above improves the odds considerably I think, but there will still be bad days and occasionally weeks. So on those emotional “rainy days”, it is okay to slow down a bit and just remind yourself that the bad weather will pass.

Roundabouts

Roundabouts are not really cutting edge, but they are new to many of us in the slow-on-the-uptake Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Here’s a video on what you are supposed to do.

Youtube

One thing drivers are NEVER supposed to do is pass a bicyclist in the lane, in a roundabout or anywhere else. I observe that most drivers and bicyclists are confused about this. Not only do bicyclists often hug the right edge of the lane, drivers tend to speed up as they pass them, which is going to be deadly if anything unexpected happens. Under our state law, cars have to give bikes 4 feet of space. Lanes are around 12 feet wide, so this means a car centered in the lane cannot physically pass a bike legally. Police do not enforce this rule, and signs stating it are very rare. We occasionally see the “BIKES MAY USE FULL LANE” sign, but a better sign, which I have seen in other states, adds “CHANGE LANES TO PASS”. Separated, protected lanes for low-momentum zero emissions vehicles with their own signals at intersections would be the superior, most modern way to go, of course.

heart attacks in young people linked to Covid-19 (era drug abuse)

At least one cardiologist thinks the documented increase in heart attacks among younger people since Covid is due not to Covid infection itself, but due to abuse of Adderall and Ritalin that picked up around that time. Sleazy online doctors are writing these prescriptions apparently. It’s sort of a hidden, slow motion version of the opioid/fentanyl epidemic because stimulants don’t cause your heart to just stop beating, they just raise the risk that it will explode over time. By the way, I’ve been listening to Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast occasionally because it is a good gauge of MAGA propaganda. The first sponsor he mentioned last time I tuned in was a sleazy online pharmacy.

This also reminds me of the book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany which is about massive methamphetamine abuse by German soldiers and civilians at the time.

As I write this I have been popping Sudafed for a couple days to try to keep a head cold from settling into my chest. It’s kind of a nice feeling. But I only bought 24 of them and when they are gone, they are gone.

Amazon

No, I’m not an Amazon associate. I’ve just noticed that posts with pictures and videos get more attention.

India cancels major water sharing agreement with Pakistan

This seems like an important story to me that has not been widely covered. There was a tragic terrorist/insurgent attack on civilians in Kashmir which was covered. But in response, India has unilaterally pulled out of a major water treaty that has been been in place for half a century. From the AP:

India also suspended a landmark water-sharing treaty that has survived two wars between the countries, in 1965 and 1971, and a major border skirmish in 1999.

The Indus Water Treaty, brokered by the World Bank in 1960, allows for sharing the waters of a river system that is a lifeline for both countries, particularly for Pakistan’s agriculture.

Pakistan has responded angrily that it has nothing to do with the attack and warned that any Indian attempt to stop or divert flow of water would be considered an “act of war” and met with “full force across the complete spectrum” of Pakistan’s national power.

I wonder if the end of the water treaty will be permanent, even after this crisis of the moment passes (assuming it does). Is it possible that the government of India was waiting for a reason to pull out of the water treaty? We have been hearing that water supplies for South Asia originating in the Himalayas are becoming less reliable, at the same time the region is becoming much hotter and the monsoon season is becoming less predictable.

Wikipedia

news coverage of protests in the U.S.

I’m still thinking about Charlie Stross’s concern about U.S. protestors being targeted. I don’t doubt that there was surveillance present at the recent protests, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the technology exists to track people. But the news coverage of the event was very muted here in the U.S. compared to what people might have seen abroad. The BBC headline was Anti-Trump protests held in cities across the US. But here in the U.S., many people I spoke to were not even aware they were happening. I happened to be aware because I am on a text list for Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign supporters, which still seems to exist and get used by mainstream Democrats from time to time. (So if there is in fact a cross hairs, I am most likely already in it.) But anyway, I turned on the local news that day in my city, which is a big city and definitely one of the protests sites, and the local protest was not only not the lead story, it was never mentioned in the first 20 minutes of the news broadcast (which was much more local TV news than I normally subject myself to.) Sure enough, leading news outlets in the U.S. including the New York Times, Washington Post, and ABC News seem to have intentionally minimized the event.

So either it was a small event not worthy of much coverage, or there was some censorship here. It was not a tiny event. In my city (Philadelphia), I know they closed off four blocks of a major downtown street, and I heard eyewitness accounts of people who were there. (I would have liked to be there but I can plead child care issues. Lack of child care is a pretty effective way to suppress political energy among working parents.) Anyway, this article from Fair.org, which is a left-leaning organization, offers some facts and figures:

  • 1400 cities
  • “At a conservative minimum, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to resist the Trump administration’s many assaults on democracy; organizers estimate the total reached into the millions.”

500,000 people spread over 1400 locations works out to an average of 400 per location. So say you had a few thousand at the larger protests. A few thousand people sounds like a lot, but spread over a few city blocks it is not exactly going to go un-noticed but it may not attract a huge amount of attention. The 2020 George Floyd protests in Philadelphia were estimated at 50,000 – 80,000 people, and those were impressive. I tend to think we may have spent a generation’s political energy on those, and it is questionable what we got. Besides more awareness of police violence, an important but narrow issue in my view in terms of the number of people affected, we possibly got some tangible reductions in the prison population, which is something.

The Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl parade crowd this year was estimated at 1 million people. That is a big, borderline dangerous crowd and gives a sense of how packed with people it is possible for the city streets to get.

facts and figures on U.S. manufacturing, jobs, and trade with China

This blog post summarizes a famous paper from 2016 called The China Shock. The post points out that a number of things in paper were misunderstood by general audiences, in some cases because it was politically convenient to do so.

Now, before I get into it I will say that I have some personal perspective on this. I come from a former manufacturing town in Appalachia and many of my relatives were employed in the furniture and textile industry there at one time. By the 1990s, these factories were closing as jobs were moving to Asia, where labor costs were much lower. The economic pain and attendant social problems are very real, and I have seen them firsthand. So some communities were in fact hit very hard. The U.S. government had a “Trade Adjustment Assistance” program that was supposed to retrain people, but it was just too little, too late and not all effective. There has been major brain drain with the younger generations leaving town for better opportunities, and the people left behind are in a very destitute situation. So some groups of people, in some locations, were very badly hurt by free trade, even if there is an argument to make that the country as a whole benefitted from low-cost goods and moving to higher-value-added industries.

Anyway, the facts and figures based on this article:

  • The word “shock” in economics means something different than what it means it newspaper headlines. It means an unforeseen or outside event. It doesn’t necessarily have to be large or “shocking” in an emotional sense.
  • The original paper estimated a loss of about a million manufacturing jobs over about a decade after China joined the WTO in 2001. This should be put in the context that the number of U.S. “goods producing jobs” has held steady at about 20 million while service sector jobs have boomed by around 100 million over the past 50 years. Although another chart shows a loss of about 8 million “manufacturing jobs” over roughly this same time, so “goods producing” and “manufacturing” must have different definitions. Either way, manufacturing certainly declined in relative importance to the economy and in the absolute number of jobs represented. But outsourcing to China specifically is only part of this. (I would note however that Chinese businesses themselves are outsourcing to Southeast Asia, and I don’t know how that gets accounted for in these numbers.)
  • Despite the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, U.S. manufacturing output has not declined over this time period. It has stayed approximately constant since 2000, dipping during recessions and then bouncing back after each recession. The reason output can stay constant while jobs decrease is increased productivity due to automation.
  • Bottom line: The original paper concluded that competition from China explained about 12% of overall manufacturing job losses during the decade after 2001, and manufacturing job losses were about 1.5% of jobs in the overall economy. Overall job gains were greater than job losses during this period, although some individual workers, towns, and regions were more heavily impacted than others (like my relatives in Appalachia).

I generally support more or less free trade. But if we are going to trade freely, we need a safety net for people who are hurt. We could do this with generous unemployment benefits and retraining programs. We could help people relocate to places with jobs. We could provide much better communication and transportation infrastructure allowing them to commute regionally to places with jobs. We could educate their children so they are prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We could institute a value added tax on our productive, growing economy and use it to provide services or cash to workers. We could invest even more in research and development to make our economy even more productive and growing. We could invest in neighboring countries to help them be more productive and growing, import cheap stuff from them, and reduce some of the migration pressure on our borders. We could refer to these as “common sense” policies.

The Tangerine Shitgibbon

Charlie Stross has a vivid imagination. Take the genocidal American police state in the last three novels of his Merchant Princes series. I don’t want to ruin the plot for you – let’s just say that in the last three (written in 2017-2021) of the nine-novel series the U.S. is an authoritarian state run by a genocidal maniac and using advanced surveillance technology based on cell phone tracking and facial recognition. You have to commit to reading thousands of pages to get to this point, but I highly recommend it. But it’s just fiction, right?

Now here is Stross’s blog post from April 7, 2025.

The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won’t be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they’ll just dig mass graves. (If you’re really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won’t be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.) …

One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on “insurrectionists”, whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law…Upshot: I think I was wrong as little as a week ago. The USA may very well be moving into a pre-revolutionary crisis within the next month, with an authoritarian administration seizing emergency powers and preparing to execute an increasingly violent crackdown on the public.

If you are a US citizen or resident you should be very cautious about what you say in the comments on this blog entry.

Well, if he is right I don’t need to get myself in trouble on his blog, I am probably already in plenty of trouble right here on this one so why not dig the hole a bit deeper right now?

Imaginatively paranoid or prescient, time will tell. The technological tools of tyranny have been here since the Russian czar/Nazis/Stalin/Stasi/J. Edgar Hoover started using file cabinets at least, and probably back to the Inquisition or earlier. We are seeing the surveillance take a sinister turn though with the tracking and scoring of people in Xinjiang, Palestine, Libya, and Syria recently. Why would we think the New Management in the U.S. would not be tracking and scoring people? This is basically just marketing technology, and was probably invented here. You can build a statistical model of every American and give score them based on how many dollars you think they are likely to spend on whatever widget you are selling. Then you can target the top 20%, 50%, or 80% with ads. Or, you can use the same logic and the same technology and start dropping bombs on these individuals and their extended families. So the technology has existed, although it seems to be getting more sinister and more accessible all the time. It is our liberal democratic institutions that are supposed to prevent the tools from being used for tyranny.

Ozempic vs. drug and alcohol abuse

This journal article suggests GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic) are effective in reducing opioid and alcohol abuse.

The association between glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and/or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist prescriptions and substance-related outcomes in patients with opioid and alcohol use disorders: A real-world data analysis

Prescriptions of glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and/or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists appear to be associated with lower rates of opioid overdose and alcohol intoxication in patients with opioid use disorder and alcohol use disorder. The protective effects are consistent across various subgroups, including patients with comorbid type 2 diabetes and obesity.