The economic storm, that is.

There is a lot of "rah-rah" over Trump coming back into office within days.  But the economic environment in his first term was very different than it is now.

For one thing housing affordability was double what is today, roughly.  That is you'd have to see house prices cut roughly in half with interest rates at a normal, positive-slope against actual inflation rate.  Current inflation at the monetary level from the government is about 6% so this means a 7+% mortgage, or roughly equal or higher than it is now.

In addition the squeeze on American workers has had four more years to ferment -- especially in tech but not exclusively-so.  This is an insidious and corrosive thing that has been going on for a long time but when you couple it with the end of a 30+ year rate cycle that has now convincingly ended and thus we must expect the other half of the cycle for the next 20 or 30 years you've got trouble with anything economic that depends on increasing debt loads.

IMHO from a personal preparedness standpoint the two best pieces of advice are no revolving debt at all and for the love of all that is Holy do not get yourself into a position where you depend on access to more of it to cover lifestyle or even emergency requirements as it may well not be there.

Back in the 2008 crash, and I expect things to be worse this time around, plenty of people had their credit card company slam their "available credit" down to their outstanding balance.  This of course cuts off more spending but it also does serious damage to your FICO score and thus frequently prohibits getting a loan from someone else because a significant part of that score is "utilization" -- that is, how much on a percentage basis do you have out compared with how much you have available.  You want that number to be low and for a lot people, despite having significant balances, it is -- it is not uncommon for a credit card company to give you a $10,000 line.

If you've got a $2,000 balance that's 20% utilization but if they slam it down to the $2,000 balance that's 100% utilization and will whack your score -- and they may, as they did last time, ratchet it down further as you pay it off so your utilization will remain very high.

This is a greatly-underappreciated risk for those who live their life off the plastic cards in their wallet.  Utilization percentage is roughly 30% of your score, so going from low-to-moderate to "slammed" can easily hit you for 100 points or more all at once.

That is not a small change and the compound effects of it in today's world where insurance companies use credit scoring as part of their pricing system means it won't be confined to interest rates and credit-card availability either -- it can easily ratchet up car and home insurance costs by 20% or more as well or even result in a non-renewal letter.

I cannot predict precisely when a "foldback" sort of event can and will come in the markets and economy but that we are at historically extreme valuation levels in the stock market coupled with severe affordability problems in the broader economy cannot be argued.  Our economy and markets are as dry as the SW California scrub with 80mph Santa Ana winds ripping over both and despite the smug pronouncements out of The Fed and others there is only a belief that someone will be there to buy at an equal or higher price that is behind any of the market.  Even firms that are very stable businesses such as Costco, which has a record of being able to expand earnings over long periods of time by 10% or so annually, is not selling at a 10 or a 15 multiple -- its selling at a 54 PE, which is easily four to five times a reasonable forward expectation -- this is a retailer with a 4% operating margin!

That which you could make a case for as borrowing got cheaper and cheaper over the last of 30 years doesn't work when that cycle ends -- and it has ended.  As that paper has to be rolled over the cost of doing so goes up and that hit drops directly to the bottom line.

No matter where you look in the market today you find this sort of multiple, with it being even more-extreme in certain areas.  Add to this the deterioration internally in the labor report on a quality, not gross employed number basis and the ratcheting upward of Americans' cost of living and the sky is rather gray with the wind picking up.

It is always better to be prepared to not need "freely available" credit and then not have anything horrible happen than to be neck-deep in debt, have all your revolving lines slammed down to their outstanding balance, have your FICO take a 100 point hit instantly as a consequence, your car and homeowners insurance price goes up 20% due to that and then your furnace fails and needs to be replaced right now in the middle of winter.

Don't be that guy.

This has fallen out of the news to a large degree because AirBNB (in particular) has split taxes and fees out, but other places -- here's looking at you Snowshoe in WV -- have not.

I'm talking about the wildly deceptive practice of putting out a price (on the web, usually) and then at the last screen just before you pay there's a "Taxes and Fees" single line, not broken out at all -- which could be 50% or more of the actual price!

What's actually in "taxes and fees"?  Good question.  Sales tax is of course charged in virtually all jurisdictions and that's an actual tax.  Some areas have separate "hotel" or "occupancy" taxes specifically leveled on short-term rental housing (e.g. hotel rooms, AirBNBs, etc.) in addition to or as a replacement for sales tax, and a few resort areas have specific tourism development taxes that are specific to certain types of lodging (usually geographically based.)

But then there are fees, which are not taxes.

If some business wants to charge these then that's fine but conflating a legally-mandated charge with a choice is a per-se deceptive practice since it leads one to believe that such is "mandatory" in some form or fashion and acts to conceal the magnitude of each, especially for out-of-state travelers who likely don't know what the state and local tax structure looks like.

The FTC has banned this sort of thing incrementally but short-term lodging and other tourism-related businesses have evaded enforcement, leading them to issue a new, tougher rule forcing the top-line advertised price to include all such fees.

Snowshoe appears to not have gotten the memo because they just tried this on me three days ago.  I closed the browser rather than complete the booking and due to questionable conditions for my intended trip (skiing) I bagged the whole thing rather than make alternative arrangements and deal with driving to and from the mountain daily.

Perhaps they'd like to get sued by the FTC or even better -- be put out of business -- on top of it; this sort of garbage needs to come with criminal penalties and prison sentences, not just threats and fines.  I won't put up with this garbage anywhere -- I never have, never will, and if getting around it is unreasonable under the circumstances then I don't patronize that place at all.

..... use salt water on wildfires, it will ruin the environment and the equipment!

Ok, then explain this from the FBI which is looking for the person who was operating a drone and it collided with a "Super Scooper" aircraft -- which was scooping up salt water from the ocean to dump on the fires.

ttps://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1878596321042735425

"I’d just like to stress, that technique, using that super scooper aircraft, are our most effective technique to fight fires like this, and when this happens, it puts everybody’s lives at risk," said the assistant director at the FBI’s LA Field Office."

Well now there goes that.  Add to the parade of nonsense the fact that San Francisco which has separate fire main connections at the wharf which they installed after the early 1900s earthquake so fire boats can connect to them and fill the system with saltwater at extremely high volume, recognizing that the domestic supply is both insufficient and will go "open" if buildings are severely damaged or collapse as another example.  In addition it ought to be obvious you can't pollute the domestic system with unfiltered salt water -- but salt water works perfectly well to put fires out (what do you think a fireboat pumps onto a burning vessel?)

Of course when the wind is howling aircraft operations are extremely difficult or impossible.  But the LA area could have put in fire-only mains terminating at the water (much like San Francisco did a hundred years ago) and purchased large mobile, diesel-powered pumps to connect to them with the suction put into the water from land where difficult sea conditions would not matter.

Instead what California did was ban fixed backup generators -- which means that whatever you have in your water towers when a fire starts (which is gravity-fed) is all there will be since the power will be cut off -- and without utility power you can't refill the water towers!

Incidentally for those who say that salt water "ruins everything" and thus cannot be used (despite them using it right now and being recognized as the most-effective firefighting tool against this sort of blaze) I owned property on the water in Florida for 20 years.  Several times the land itself (fortunately not my house!) was inundated with..... salt water from hurricane surge.  It did not kill everything vegetative (or the animals around there); the trees, shrubs and grass survived the event just fine.  I'm sure the rabbits didn't like it at the moment (being flooded out of your hole had to not be much fun) but it hardly made the land barren and uninhabitable, never mind that whatever it might do is certainly less-nasty than having everything burnt to a crisp!

May I ask why we don't have some of those aircraft along the west coast since fire risk is sort of a big deal there?  These apparently came down from Canada; is there something preventing us from buying a couple dozen of them and stashing them (with proper periodic maintenance, of course) so when the inevitable fire comes we can use them?

What happens when competence isn't important anymore and that which you need to be able to cover is not done due to other considerations?  Often and in fact usually nothing right away, but eventually all of the things that people who were hired and had as their only qualification competence, and which society endorsed with "we're doing this because we need to; if it has side effects we accept them" built and maintained wear out, break down or simply are overcome by events in capacity and thus when they should have been repaired, replaced, upgraded or augmented aren't something very, very bad eventually happens.

You might want to read about how Rome actually collapsed because yes, it can happen again and if we don't cut this out the odds are extremely high that it will -- and not just in LA.

Here we go again.

The Southern part of California and much of the rest of the land west of the Rockies is desert -- either technically or might as well be (in other words, it comes just over said thresholds on official precipitation amounts.)  Add to this that the weather pattern in that part of the nation often produces wild-eyed winds (the gradient between the highlands and lower land, along with the ocean that is right there providing a "sink" for it) along with terrain that creates "funnel" effects multiplying windspeeds and its obvious that if anything gets lit during those high-wind periods you got problems.

As you might expect if you look around at the vegetation that does grow there you'll find fire-adapted things.  Plants that have fire-activated seed, for example.  Nature finds a way, in short, and over millions of years has done exactly that.

Then we come in, we build things in places we believe are beautiful, and are unhappy when that which has been going on for millions of years occurs again.  We claim its unfair, that something is "changing" (often at human fault) and similar.

Well, no.  We're simply in the way and it is we who have to adapt because nature will not.

The same thing is true for living along a coastline subject to hurricanes.  The hurricanes have always come.  Yes, its beautiful 99% of the time.  The other 1% of the time Mother Nature is very angry and throws a 10 or 20' high wall of water and waves driven by 120kt wind at you.  Ditto living in mountain valleys; 99% of the time its nice, the other 1% of the time snow melts more-rapidly than expected or a storm gets blown into the mountain face, the air is forced upward, it cools as that occurs (go hike in the Smokies or anywhere else and note the 10-15 degree difference -- similarly at the Grand Canyon except its even more-pronounced there) and cool air holds less moisture than warm air.  The result is torrential rain that then flows down said mountain, blowing that nice river out of its banks and triggering landslides that cannot be outrun -- you are either not there when it comes or you will be buried by it.  If you look at the topography you can see the scars where its happened before -- and will happen again.

Its just that nobody knows exactly when.

We do add to the risk of bad outcomes in some cases; if there are trees with a fall-line that reaches a powerline then high winds can and will cause the tree to fall and if it does it will hit the power line.  The benign outcome is you lose power.  The malignant one is that this comes during a windstorm when its dry rather than a hurricane or serious thunderstorm (when its very wet) and thus starts a wind-driven fire which, until the wind dies down, can be nearly-impossible to extinguish so long as there is available fuel in the path.  By the way if the wind is howling "in the path" means anything that can burn within a mile as embers will be blown that far -- or further!

We do have defensive acts we can take against some of this risk.  If you live where hurricane winds are likely you can build to code levels that can withstand the wind.  If you're where you can get surged you can elevate the structure on stilts or make the lower level(s) sacrificial with the walls designed to blow out when challenged in this way, and the living portion of the building and systems up above.  If you live where wind-driven fires can occur you can maintain a significant fuel-free zone, clad your structure in things that won't burn and not have openings into the attic and similar where blown embers can get inside (and light the attic on fire), along with putting in a significant-size cistern, run some pipe and have a fuel-powered pump for suppression while keeping the structure and roof wet (note that if you have a pool that's a pretty-large cistern, isn't it?)  As long as you can put the embers out faster than they can light your house on fire and keep doing it until the fire passes you win although the smoke damage may still be quite extreme, especially if the building is poorly-sealed.  In earthquake-prone areas you can build to seismic codes.  We can insist that power companies not allow power lines within the fall line of trees, and put in place both requirements to remove or trim said trees that encroach and pass laws that prevent private or public landowners from blocking that pruning or removal. We can remove available fuel which dramatically reduces wildfire intensity and propagation, either through control burns or simply removing it if you're in an area where burning it during periods when its safe won't work.

In addition as with Maui the LA area has a literally inexhaustible source of water suitable for fighting wildfires: The ocean!  Of course this is non-potable and not suitable for anything else, but for fire suppression -- well?  Stick fuel-powered pump-houses down near the water with fire mains of HDPE running to strategic points and... done.  But nobody did any of this, right?

None of these are proof against a bad outcome, of course, but all do help and might save property.  However, all do damage to the allure many seek; sticking your "beach house" on stilts obviously isn't at beach level anymore, maintaining a 100' perimeter of non-combustibles around your house in a dry wind-prone area is some amount of work and that cistern and fuel-operated pump (so it works if the power goes off first) costs money, as does filling it for what might wind up being a "nothing" of a fire season where it goes unused.  Keeping tree fall-lines away from power lines means cutting down or pruning trees on a regular basis proactively or putting the lines underground and that costs money too. Living in mountain valleys where you can see the flat, fertile and nice-appearing land is rather obviously there because it did flood in the past and the scour marks from previous slides are clear on the mountain when you look -- and there is no actual defense in either of those cases that matters; you're not going to stop a landslide no matter what sort of defensive engineering you apply.  Damming rivers and tributaries can provide serious defense against valley flooding if you let the agencies who propose it do so, which residents of Asheville and Buncombe and surrounding counties infamously did not in the 1960s and 70s when TVA showed up with allocated funds to do so even after the disastrous floods of 1916 and 1940 along with several lesser events.

At the end of the day life is about balancing risks, rewards and costs.  There are plenty of people around here who have built "a cabin in the woods" on or near a ridgeline.  A significant "no combustible material" setback and careful selection of materials for the exterior and sealing possible means of ember intrusion, along with a nice big fat cistern tank and fuel-driven pump and controls to keep the building and immediate surrounding area wet in the event of a fire all damage the ambience folks seek (never mind being a bit expensive) and thus it is usually not done.  That's a choice, but if a fire gets going during a dry period coming up the face of the ridge your house is sitting on there's nothing you're going to be able to do at that point except run and you better do the running before your exit paths get cut off.

There's a lot of yelling going on in WNC right now, particularly around Asheville, on flood map revisions.  They always happen after flood and other serious storm events; post Ivan they certainly did around where I lived in Florida (I rode that one out at the house and it was bad -- however my efforts were successful.)  But the federal government has no control over whether you can rebuild -- that's under State, County and local control.  What FEMA and thus NFIP do have control over is whether you can obtain government-sponsored flood insurance and, if so, at what price depending on what you do when you rebuild.  We should remember that the entire River Arts district in Asheville was so reasonable in cost for people to come in and "redevelop" not that long ago specifically because the prior users of that land, which were industrial, left after the previous flooding destroyed their investments.  Everyone who built there knew this so what's the problem -- you made a decision having either known or you could have trivially determined said history and yet people built there anyway!

The same is true out in Southern California.  Fires aren't new there and the Santa Ana winds are an annual phenomena that have occurred long before the California Gold Rush brought a large influx of humans.  No, humans are not making it worse but we are putting more and more "stuff" of ever-increasing value in the way that can be destroyed.  Couple high wind with dry conditions, given that part of the country is borderline desert, and you've got a high-risk environment with vegetation which reflects that and in some cases actually requires fire to propagate!  Add to that state government policies that do not clear brush (on purpose!) and in other areas do not conduct control burns during the part of the year when high winds do not occur and you've got the natural environment and its oscillations -- including much larger fires simply because there's more fuel available and you refused to reduce said fuel load despite having the opportunity to do so in advance.  Now add deliberate refusal to build out fire-suppression infrastructure (in this case California residents approved a bond issue many years ago to do exactly that but it wasn't done!) and you have all the ingredients for what is now occurring.  If you want to know why insurance companies left they asked for rates that reflected this deliberate neglect and foolish set of decisions by said government agencies and, when you get down to it, the people who live there and kept voting those government agents into office.  The firms had already taken large fire losses as a result and thus they had no evidence any of that would change.  The rate adjustments were refused and thus their only sane option was to withdraw offering coverage and leave.

It sucks for those caught in the middle of it, of course, but as someone who lived in a hurricane zone on the water for 20 years they as I knew the risk, they and I all selected our precise piece of property to own and live in with our own evaluation of said risk or willful blindness toward it along with the expected rewards from doing so, we engaged in (or not) the mitigations we believed made sense on a cost:risk:reward basis and that, as a free person in a free nation, was and is my and their right to do.

But having done so the consequences were both mine and now theirs as well, whether for good or bad.

We're not going to change the natural world; it is we who, through technology, adapt to it and not the other way around.

The remaining question is whether those impacted will force those who had responsibility for said mitigations, in many cases explicitly funded with tax dollars yet they did not act in accordance with their responsibilities and either did nothing or spent the funds elsewhere, to be held personally responsible for any and all of their malfeasance.

There appears to be plenty of that to go around.