low expectations for 2023

[mellowtigger]

I have a few thoughts on today's holiday. I've done it once before, telling people to expect bad things from a calendar year. I'm doing it again now for 2023.

See empty grocery shelves and read the forecast...

Food: Last week, I went grocery shopping again, and prices are still high. The egg shortage has more to do with an epidemic (chickens, non-COVID) than the usual supply chain problems that keep other shelves low on stock. The store shelves were entirely or almost empty of egg cartons at both Aldi's and Cub Foods. People are going online to try to find affordable eggs in Minneapolis. I bought my usual cage-free eggs at Cub, but they cost 0.8 hours of US minimum wage for a dozen eggs. Expect it to grow increasingly difficult to afford the calories to feed your body while you work to afford more calories. Forget about reserving any money for rent. (Shelter is a luxury in Amurrika. The police returned to evict that homeless camp. Merry Christmas, from Mayor Frey. Still no word yet if my pictures helped that lawyer get information from the city, at long last.) I blame capitalism for my low expectations on this topic. I don't think government lip service will help this cost inflation problem.

Climate: It is unusual for our climate to experience a "triple dip" of 3 consecutive La Niña years. When it finally ends in a few weeks/months, expect El Niño to just be hot. Expect more trouble with water supply and crop production.

Pandemic: I predicted that 2022 would be the year when the world finally realizes what's at stake with this pandemic. I was wrong about that realization. I wasn't wrong about what's at stake. More data arrived that infection is permanent. It's still not the ideal study to prove my point, but it's just one more piece of evidence in a continuing trend with the same conclusion. SARS-CoV-2 infection is permanent, like chickenpox. As with Hepatitis C, we should just assume that people who got infected are still infected, unless we find some compelling evidence that a particular individual escaped that fate through luck... or nasal neutralizing vaccines, maybe. The problem with this particular permanent infection is that it's much less benign. It damages the immune system (like HIV in several details, including recently reported dendritic cell damage, plus something new about CD14+ white blood cells) and causes blood clots throughout the body. I still expect global mortality to rise significantly over time. It is not doing so at the moment. In the USA and elsewhere, excess mortality appears to be stabilizing. That's against my prediction. But HIV takes about 10 years to progress to AIDS, so I may have to wait a long time for society to reach my level of worry. We know the damage is happening, but it's not killing people en masse yet, so "nobody cares".

Sure, it's hard to stay realistic in tough times without becoming cynical. I'll try to keep the bad news to Moody Mondays, and I'll try to bring more good news to my posts on other days. I still hold great hope for humanity's future and the Earth's. Good luck to everyone with surviving until that good future unfolds.

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[mellowtigger]

P.S. Minneapolis is still going on about the price of eggs.