I just completed my taxes. I was unimaginative and did exactly the same process as last year, using TurboTax to file the documentation for federal, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania taxes. I sifted through many old envelopes but didn't find anything that wasn't already in the online records with the tax website. I even checked if I needed to report a generous gift from my parents early last year. (The IRS site said that I did not.) TurboTax cost me about $200. It's not how I want to do this process, but I figured I should avoid any novel behavior if it could draw attention from the IRS as Trump crushes the group that audits rich people... leaving them to audit whom exactly? Yeah, it's a mystery.

In addition, I owed almost $300 in Minnesota taxes, and I got zero back from the federal government. This status confuses me. I have my employer deduct the usual maximum amount from every paycheck, so I never have to pay money unexpectedly later. I always get a federal refund, and I never owe more tax. What happened this year, and why am I paying more in taxes than usual?

I don't have the mental bandwidth to do my usual breakdown in a convenient table like in years past. (Ugh, this job taxes my mental stamina.) Maybe eventually, since I expect my taxes to go up even more, now that Trump is in office. Yes, I know, he promises people will pay lower taxes, but I expect that offer to be invalid for poor people... just like happened to me during the previous Trump years (2017-2021).

Now, I need an Advil. I have a headache.

I've written here a few times over the years that I think GDP is a bad measure of the condition of an economy. I'm very happy to report that the United Nations apparently agrees with me and has passed a "Pact for the Future" (from their "Summit of the Future") which will try to leave behind this outdated mode of thinking.

From the UN's own press release about this pact adoption:

"Improving how we measure human progress, going beyond GDP to capturing human and planetary wellbeing and sustainability."
- https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2024/09/press-release-sotf-2024/

What this means about new measure, I'm not yet sure. Stuff like this, however, is why I'm still optimistic for our long-term future. Somebody's paying attention to the trends with long term thinking.

For more than a decade now, I've been warning about this particular predictor of societal collapse: the cannibalization of infrastructure. It happens when people find more value in the material of a thing than in the function of that thing, especially functions that benefit the community as a whole. Besides the examples I provided in the link above, the problem continues with people stealing catalytic converters.

Today, I saw this Ring video on a NextDoor post. It's located north of downtown Minneapolis, and the camera owner said he didn't learn until the next day that police said someone stole the copper from water/sewer pipes that night. You can see people hauling something big that looks like "hose" in the background of that video. It's not just here in the Twin Cities. Throughout the USA, people are even stealing electric cables right from the utility poles.

Cannibalization of infrastructure is a warning sign of societal collapse. I keep ringing that same warning bell, but nothing changes. I warned in the 2020 USA election that this was our last chance to elect a president who could change our course, but somebody insisted that we elect Mr. Nothing-Will-Fundamentally-Change instead.

Nothing has fundamentally changed. The collapse continues. The beginning is near.

I still want to write a think piece about capitalism. That word, capitalism, was never used by Adam Smith. It seems it was defined by Karl Marx (yes, that one) in Das Kapital, which I really need to read before launching into a proper investigation of the concept. Apparently he detailed its uses and pitfalls.

These days, though, the pitfalls abound. The idea is very much on my mind. Here for Moody Monday is just a short collection of the things that we are doing to ourselves (they don't passively happen to us) in the USA because of unregulated capitalism and profit-at-all-costs psychology.

• Why Americans Are Obsessed With Big Cars (hint: "heavy trucks" avoid regulation, even though bigger vehicles are more dangerous)
• Corporate Profits Surge to an All-Time High of $2 Trillion
• Most theft is wage theft. (and necessary citations 1 and 2, plus a related GQ article)
• ‘Pay or Die’ Review: A Scathing Doc About the Cruelty of Insulin Costs
• Munger: A little inequality is good for the economy
• 39% of Americans say they’ve skipped meals to make housing payments: report
• Assisted-living homes are rejecting Medicaid and evicting seniors
• Why are working people being blamed for inflation?
• Inflation and Price Gouging
• What if We Actually Taxed the Rich?
• Man 'eaten alive' by bed bugs in Atlanta jail - family (disturbing death image available here)
• Homeowners Associations (John Oliver explaining another abdication of government's role)
• Prisons for Profit: An Industry of Exploitation (yet another abdication, and with another good John Oliver video)

By far the best thinking material, though, is this 95-minute YouTube video on Chokepoint Capitalism. I already knew some of the bad stuff that was happening, but this discussion opened my eyes to a lot more. That video explains that we need to have alternatives ready to offer. The Real-World Economics Review is a good place to learn what actual economists think on this topic.

We can imagine better. We deserve better. Failure would be unbearable.

I mentioned before that I keep potassium iodide pills in stock as a protection against radiation exposure. The problem, though, is that I might not know when is the appropriate time to take them.

The nearby Monticello nuclear plant leaked 400,000 gallons of radioactive tritium back in November, but they didn't bother telling the public until March 16. They assured us that everything was fine only when they finally informed us months later... until suddenly it wasn't fine. Another mere hundreds of gallons has leaked again. This time, they admit the possibility of it reaching groundwater then moving from there to the Mississippi River where cities get their drinking water. Sure, a few hundred gallons now are potentially dangerous, but 400,000 gallons previously are just fine. How? I need diagrams and pictures with this explanation, please. On the plus side, the kind of radiation here (weak beta) is relatively easy to block and wouldn't respond to potassium iodide treatment anyway, unlike the kind when uranium is involved. The NRC has more detail on tritium dangers.

Minneapolis says it is "developing plans to safeguard" our drinking water. Just now?! Developing plans... when we live literally 80km/50mi downstream from nuclear plants? Why do I always find government bureaucracy so incompetent? Does nobody else but me see systemic risks and try to plan for them ahead of time?

Once again, I find an urgent need to discuss "capitalism", as it exists now in its current state. People keep trying to promote nuclear fission as a green form of energy. It isn't. They keep telling us how safe it is now, but it's safe only when there are no accidents. (Hint: There are always accidents.) Moreover, uranium is in limited supply on planet Earth. I suspect somebody just wants uranium to be the new oil, with a few resource owners doling out a limited supply for a desperate energy-hungry world. I've mentioned before just how limited is our supply of uranium. Don't fall for these misdirections. Maybe thorium fission reactors are different. Absolutely, hydrogen fusion reactors (which coincidentally will need tritium) are safer and greener, with potential fuel supplies lasting far into our future. Wind energy is safe. Geothermal energy is safe. Solar electric energy will be truly safe only after we stop using dangerous chemicals to produce solar panels.

For now, I'm annoyed that I don't know if my drinking water is safe. The contemptible interplay of capitalist interests with government oversight is just... dangerous.

It's tax time again, so I'm updating my chart from previous years.  This year, I paid $118 to a corporation for the privilege of submitting my taxes to the U.S. and Minnesota governments.  It's quite the profitable corruption.  Republicans claim to want to simplify taxes, which I'm all for doing, but their plan is just another way to give rich people more riches. It won't actually help poor people, the same as their last proposal. Meanwhile, we continue the practice of targeting poor people instead of the rich for tax payments. Yes, I blame Democrats too. Both major parties serve neoliberal economics, which is hurting society.

My extra income this year is due to cashing out my stock market 401K "pension plan", thanks to being old enough to not take any extra penalties. Doing so allowed me to pay off my mortgage and greatly reduce my expenses during this period between jobs. I "gained" only about $3K extra income from the 401K after paying the mortgage, taxes, and penalties back in September. My actual wages (no pension) are listed in parentheses.

Year	IncomeUS$	Change	FederalTaxUS$	TaxChange	CreditScore	Mileage	MonthlyMileage	CO2MetricTons
2016	30,500		2,384
2017	33,800	+11%	3,048	+28%	720
2018	36,600	+8%	3,938	+29%	723
2019	37,451	+2%	2,839	-28%	730	128.3Kmi	428mi (overall)
2020	38,458	+3%	2,926	+3%	701	129.8Kmi	125mi (annual)
2021	39,374	+2%	3,020	+3%	703	130.8Kmi	83mi (annual)	5.93
2022	69,737 (20,185)	+177% (-49%)	8,108	+268%	750	131.4Kmi	50mi (annual) 324mi (overall)	5.99

Read my thoughts on the details of these numbers...

mileage: Over the 115 months that I owned my car, I drove an average of 324 miles (521km) per month. That's just 1/3 or less of the distance that the average American drives. The 50 miles per month that I drove in 2022 just isn't worth the cost of private vehicle ownership. We need better options for local travel/shopping in the metro, so transit doesn't require half a day of wait/commute delays.

credit: The credit score is still a useless figure. As always, it penalizes everyone who fails to feed the exponential economy (think: multilevel marketing exploitation) at the needed level. My paid-off mortgage penalizes me, because the "length of debt" is now down to only a few months for my credit card. The credit card is what raised my score so much, which I didn't have for years until I realized I was going to end my mortgage so I got one... for exactly this stupid reason.

carbon: I used this carbon calculator again. My carbon cost for electricity is zero, thanks to easily windsourcing my home power. My cost for gasoline is low, thanks to seldom driving anywhere. My biggest carbon expense is the 718 therms from natural gas for heating my house and water in 2022. I estimated all of the secondary expenses. I should start keeping a separate spreadsheet for my carbon footprint, since it requires so many data points.

wages: Since I survived 2022 on just over $20K of income, I'm pretty sure I can continue to do so. I might even have enough left over for needed house repairs (like those very drafty bedroom windows). I don't mind taking a job for less money than in recent years, just to keep going here in this house a while longer. I want more cherries and juneberries.

It's drizzling right now in Minneapolis. "But," I can hear you say, "Minnesota's nickname is the land of 10,000 lakes, so doesn't it rain a lot there?" Yes, but it's mid-January and one of our 2 coldest months. We're expecting several days of above-freezing weather. It's raining even in north Minnesota. Sure, it has rained here in January before, but this now is in the context of the unusual 3-year La Niña cool period. Our Great Lakes are at a near-record low ice cover, and the global oceans are experiencing record heat. Expect hotter El Niño conditions to take over soon. Remember that each year you live, it will be one of the coolest (and most weather stable) years for the rest of your life.

Read about employer and government problems...

There's a good TikTok video that shows this chart of US national minimum wage compared to monthly rent costs. It covers 1967-2022, which is my lifetime. It's bad news. It's very bad news, but it's not the complete story. We got here through repeated systemic choices. Capitalists have been allowed to externalize their (very significant) costs for so long that they no longer seem capable of understanding they too are part of a very complex system. I've written before about the shortage of nurses and pilots due to coronavirus damage they've suffered, after failures to provide adequate protective equipment or even requesting (and receiving) relaxation of pandemic protocols. Workers, they assumed, were disposable... until they weren't.

• Inhumane treatment has left Amazon unable to find (or retain) workers.
• Injustice across multiple government systems seems to leave Minnesota prisons unable to recruit workers, to say nothing of police department hiring.
• Minnesota teachers wanted to quit mid-year, even early in the pandemic. "... those who are teaching in in-person scenarios said they felt less safe."
• ABC News channel 5 on Minneapolis local television aired a segment about homelessness on January 13th at 6pm. They showed someone saying that our area needed 100s or 1000 more spaces for homeless people than we have. I can't find that segment on their website or YouTube now, but this article (not an impartial source) says the same thing. We're usually told lies that that our shelters are sufficient, that a few dozen more "affordable" housing units are sufficient. They are not. The suffering, particularly in winter, is a policy choice.
  edit: Found it! Or at least, a text version very close to the video report that I saw.
• Republicans think government is broken, and they'll break everything to prove it. They're already talking about letting the USA run out of money to pay its bills. (But they simultaneously want to reduce government tax income and let the already-rich gain the most from their generosity.) They know that somebody will profit from their action, and they intend for it to be themselves. Rules are meant for you, not for them.
• Moderna plans to drastically increase COVID-19 vaccine prices, despite already earning billions in profit, even at previous prices. If money exists somewhere, anywhere, then capitalists will try to siphon it away from all other uses. No profit is sufficient to satisfy neoliberal capitalism.
• A slum landlord in Minneapolis reached an agreement with our local government to start obeying the law. That's it. That's the judgement. No real penalty that I can tell. (There is a $5,000 payment for "cost recovery to the City", but not for disobeying rules.) The rich get ample opportunity to obey the law that they should already know better than the poor people they exploit. People are obviously upset. It harkens back to the polluter in my area who was given 2 more years to pollute, because mostly poor people live here, so clean air regulations don't matter.

It's depressing, but you can see these principles in action using a city-building game. The Spiffing Brit, a popular YouTube gamer who shows tutorials of a sort, demonstrates how government manipulation is done with profit in mind, with a recent video: "I Built A City Exploiting Suffering In Cities Skylines - (It made me infinite money)". There's a similar kind of explanation for the USA healthcare system, in one of the "Honest Advertisement" skits by Cracked.

It's a sustained pattern of government behavior. We all are disposable people, until there are no longer any replacements available from the larger pool of humanity. People care. It demonstrates that a LOT of people care, because they are refusing even to apply for jobs with some of these employers during a time of widespread hardship. It's one small signal that gives me hope. It matters what our government systems are doing to us. People are trying to distance themselves from the corruption and abuse, and they should. As I've said before, people can collectively choose to let bad systems simply collapse by their non-participation. It might have happened before, and it might be happening now.

Bring on the economic and political collapse. I'm hopeful for what we can create from the ashes.

It's 3pm, and I'm finally writing in my blog. I finished several errands today, like completing a new job application for Aspiritech, a site specifically intended as part-time work for people with an official autism diagnosis. The application form included marking my availability for morning and/or afternoon, each day for Monday-Saturday. That's great flexibility! Of course, that required going to the library today to scan my diagnosis paperwork from 2003, so I have a PDF file ready to submit to them. Of course, that required contacting AuSM (pronounced "awesome") a week ago to ask for a copy of my diagnosis paperwork, since I couldn't find mine from nearly 2 decades ago.

Another errand completed was the grocery store this morning, during an early time while viral aerosols in the building's air are lower than during evenings or weekends. I've noticed price increases for months, but it was really unreasonable today. Everything was more expensive for smaller portions. I noticed more containers that were either boxes with thinner depth to them or shapes with indentations so they provide less volume. One "splurge" purchase I made this time was a box of frozen tamales. There used to be 8 in there, years ago, I'm certain. I got it home and opened it but there were only 5 tamales. They were in a plastic bag filled with air, so those 5 didn't flop around inside the box that would easily fit 8.

Let's take a look at a few prices. Not in US Dollars, though, but in terms of the hours needed to work at the current USA minimum wage.

Look at the tables of data from local Minneapolis prices...

Item	Hours of work
2 uncooked chicken breasts	1.1
4 non-meat frozen bratwurst sausage (a luxury, sure)	1.1
12 free range chicken eggs	0.8
5 frozen tamales	1.2
12 rolls toilet paper	2.7
1 bag dry cat food	1.6
1 box dried potato powder	0.6
1 box coconut milk (cow dairy is bad for my sinuses)	0.4
1 head of lettuce	0.4
10 ounce package of cherry tomatoes	0.7

That's already more than a day's labor (10.6 hours total), and nothing there is an outlandish purchase. All of the smaller things I purchased are also more expensive than they should be. How long until it reaches the point that people can't afford the calories they need to work for that day? And that's to say nothing of other purchases that are "non-essential".

1 gallon of gasoline for the car (a typical small car requires 12)	0.5
1 rush hour fare on express bus (job commute would require 2 daily)	0.4
1 "Impossible Burger" (non-cow) meal at Burger King, small	1.6
2 (just 2 individual) COVID rapid home nasal swab tests at Walgreens	3.3
1 month of cheap health insurance in Minnesota	53.7
1 average apartment in Minneapolis, per month	217.9

There are supposed to be only 8 hours of work per day and 173 hours of work per month. This inflation is insanity. I've been warning about wealth inequality for years, at least since the Occupy movement. People literally cannot support themselves at work right now, but corporations are raking in so much money that they are buying back stocks from the people who need to sell.

Inequality was already horrible in the USA, and we're watching another upward wealth migration happen right now in front of us. Greed is destroying us.  At least, some new people are trying to figure out which specifics of capitalism have brought us here, so we could change them, although some old voices have plenty to say too.

This isn't a Moody Monday post, because it's centered primarily on my daily life. People in civilized countries may not understand that this is what life is like in the USA.

1. A few months ago, when I had my 2nd broken tooth, I discovered that some earlier visits to this clinic had not successfully been charged to my health insurance policy, so I had to pay them myself. I did so, and I alerted my workplace to the error. They notified the insurer, who contacted me, and they tried figuring out the problem with this clinic. They didn't succeed while I was on the phone, but I noticed that subsequent visits were reimbursed normally. I recently got a call from the clinic that they needed to verify my information so they could mail me a check to reimburse me for the earlier double payments. Apparently insurance reimbursement was finally figured out months after I quit my job. Better late than never. I've used part of that unexpected income to buy a month's worth of Hulu, so I can watch the excellent "The Orville" season 3. (More on that later.)


2. I finally received my new health insurance card today. I spent a month or more without coverage, and I was hopeful that I wouldn't need any healthcare during that time. I'm now a member of Hennepin Health. I still don't know what it will cost me per month. I hadn't budgeted health insurance into my estimates while living unemployed. Of course, taxpayers of Minnesota are subsidizing it for me, but there will still be some portion that I have to pay. I just don't know what. At least I won't immediately have to sell the house if something bad happens to me, but it's still disconcerting not to know the details before the bills arrive.


3. I've been writing here at least since the Occupy movement about living costs, healthcare, wealth inequality, criminalization of poverty, and the awful unsustainability of it all. We deserve so much better than literally eating rats.  This morning, I see the news that housing costs and wages are so bad in California now that one school district is asking people to allow teachers to live in their homes.  Let the societal collapse begin.

You know how I feel about the worship of wealth. We need a new system that doesn't reward selfishness at the cost of humanity's welfare.  I've told everyone that for at least a decade, but I still don't see the necessary change.

The worries pile up faster than a single Moody Monday post each week can accommodate.  These are wild times, aren't they?

( Read more about Climate, Corruption, Pandemics, and Minnesota... )

Don't get hospitalized in Minnesota in the coming days.  The strike of 15,000 nurses is imminent.

Stay safe out there.  Keep masking.  Keep isolating.  Keep distancing.