Shoot. I remember the first Gulf War. As much as I wish otherwise, I'm not a young buck anymore. :/ Philosophically, we're pretty much on the same page. My enjoyment for reading business articles died about three or four years back, near the beginning of the end for a lot of retail companies and all of these "analytic articles" kept on ignoring key things like rent and leveraged debt and companies' slow reaction to changing buying habits caused not by Amazon and the internet, but people's lack of jobs and such. It was all "Amazon This!" and "Consumer Confidence That!" After that, I pretty much felt like everyone was either making stuff up or outright lying to me, or writing the most inane and asinine articles. I'm not gonna name names, but you know how everyone on here loves to hate read that New York opinionist? I got someone like that too, someone so bad I once wrote to the paper editor, in summary, "Why do you guys allow comments on everyone else's opinion pieces, but not theirs? Your readers deserve the chance to call bs on their work." Never got a response, and those comment sections never opened up either. I trusted NBR, because with the exception of a few talking heads segments, they mostly said "this happened" and left it up to me as a viewer to figure out why. It looks like your suggestions both fit that nicely, so I'm definitely gonna check them out. Random aside and related but not, because it touches on your theme of collective heads in the sand, I'm really starting to worry that no one seems to really talk about agriculture for what it is. Between climate change, corporate farming starting to get kind of sideways, low wages and lies in enemployment numbers, and on and on I could go, I'm really worried about a future of growing food insecurity and all anyone ever talks about is "America has a bacon glut because China is demanding our disease free pork but they don't like bacon" and yeah, that's interesting, but the federal minimum wage hasn't gone up in thirteen years, rent is crazy, and mom and pop corner stores are tanking people. Maybe we oughta talk about food prices more.
Business news suffered a bunch when "how is the Dow doing" became "how is the country doing." It suffered more when "how is the Dow doing" became a read of the collective actions of a bunch of Markov bots. That's the dirty secret nobody wants to talk about: the very same technology that can't come up with a knitting pattern is responsible for filling your 401(k). Again, I think we'll be talking about it A BUNCH as soon as the market rips. Basically, all these bots have hidden the volatility until it breaks through, and when it breaks through it's newsworthy. But in the meantime yeah - when the whole world is bent on telling you everything is normal when all the details indicate it ain't, it's frustrating. And you're right - nobody wants to talk about food. It's another example of a system that doesn't run the way you're told it runs and bad inputs lead to bad outputs. The beef and dairy industry is 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Also, 73% of the dairy industry's profits are government subsidies. Crops? We pump $16b in subsidies into crops every year so that we have too much of it but China pumps $165b so now it's a trade problem, innit? In both cases, the system is functional as evolved. In both cases, the system is fragile to shocks from places you wouldn't think. I dunno. I realized a couple days ago that an ascendant feudal power running out of places to expand and fueled by an irrational need to homogenize describes Germany in 1934 and China in 2020. And I realized that a country released of all environmental regulations that collapses in recession only to be rescued by socialism as engendered by a rich genteel billionaire describes the United States in 1932 and could easily describe the United States in 2020 or 2024. In both cases, things worked out in the end. And in both cases, it was dicey AF in the interim.
That book rips in a good way and is probably in some way what led me to The Land Institute and permaculture and all sorts of things I’d love to get into and just need to go for. Can’t recommend that book enough.