My previous piece on this general topic was on the difference between people who take a science view of things and an engineering view of them.  I explained how an engineering view, when faced with an unexpected failure of some sort, immediately stops whatever they're doing, reverts it if something was recently changed.

A "science" view holds that statistical power is enough.

The problem is that each human is not a statistical problem; you are an engineering example.  That is, there is only one of you just like for any individual road over water there is one bridge.  One bridge failure is not tolerable because there may be cars on the bridge when it fails and the people in the cars will die.

The key to an engineering view is that engineering looks at the world as deterministic and thus statistical failures are not permitted.  That is, it looks at the world like physics does even given our imperfect understanding, and thus seeks to place outcomes well beyond confidence intervals.

Physics says that kinetic energy is always 1/2 mV^2.  Never anything else.  2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O + energy, always.  You never get gold, you always get water.  Gravity (on earth) accelerates all objects at 32 ft/sec^2, always.  It does not matter if the object masses one gram or one ton; that is the acceleration.

Here's the functional difference, and what you must understand: Everything in the universe is in fact deterministic.

But wait, you say -- medicine never seems to be.  Nor does weather.  Nor, for that matter, is so-called "climate science"; remember we were told by scientists the polar icecaps would be gone 10 years ago?  Well, they're not.  The weatherman can't even tell you with certainty whether it will rain tomorrow at 2:00 PM and he's wrong more-often than right.  The NOAA forecasters can't give you where the hurricane will hit in five days and how strong it will be either, or if a tornado will form.

Every one of these outcomes is in fact deterministic -- that is, it has exactly one outcome, just like hydrogen and oxygen always produce water and energy when combined at or above the activation level of heat.

Note that it was, for quite some time, believed that a rock and a feather were acted upon differently by gravity and this, it was believed, was part of why birds could fly.  It wasn't until we figured out how to construct a vacuum pump and remove the air from a chamber we proved otherwise.  That which looked not to be deterministic (gravity) in fact is; it didn't look that way because we did not understand enough of the full system in which it applied.

So why is it that when you are told you have cancer the doctor cannot tell you whether or not he can cure it?  At best he can give you some set of odds.  Ever notice that a medical study that claims a "p < 0.001", that is, almost-certainly the result is allegedly real, still does not claim that everyone is cured or helped?  It doesn't have to in order to get that "p" value -- it just has to have an outcome that is wildly improbable to be due to chance.

It is active fraud to use such to claim you should or must do a given thing.  To suggest a course of action is fine, but to cajole, coerce or mandate it is not.

Why?  Because you're always a trial of one.

So why is it that we can't actually tell you where the hurricane is going to hit a week out, whether the tornado will come (and where if it does), whether the medicine will cure you or whether you need your umbrella in two hours?

Simple: We do not actually understand the thing we are analyzing; at best we have only a partial understanding.  When it comes to biochemistry that understanding beyond the basics (e.g. metabolism of foods into ATP and thus your survival) is in fact quite poor in both depth and breadth.  This is also true for essentially all large-area physical systems on Earth and indeed through the universe.

An example from the planet we live on: Despite the claims that CO2 emissions are driving the warming of the earth nobody, to my knowledge, has been able to accurately provide the carbonate buffering reaction between the atmosphere and the oceans.  This is in fact critical to being able to accurately model anything related to same because there is far more carbon dioxide in the ocean in the form of carbonate than that which is in the atmosphere as a gas.  Without being able to describe this buffering reaction accurately (and several scientific groups have realized, after much experimentation that they have no accurate idea at all how to do so) you can't possibly determine how this will all balance out -- or, even more-importantly, which is the driver and which is the driven element -- or whether both in fact are in different places and times!

We lack the understanding required to be able to accurately describe it and, despite decades of trying, we are nowhere near being able to do so.

Yet in fact the outcome -- that is, the buffering reaction -- is deterministic and, if we understood what we were analyzing we could tell you 100% of the time what was going to happen.  The reason we can't is that we're ignorant of significant parts of what's being treated or predicted.

That's all it is folks.

There are myriad buffering reactions in every living thing.  We do not understand how most of them work accurately enough to describe them with a formula, function or model yet all are utterly essential to survival.  I can list a dozen off the top of my head and every single one of them is essential to the continuation of that organism's life.

The claims of anyone in these fields are not facts -- they're guesses.  Perhaps educated guesses but they are guesses and you must never confuse them with facts.

Policy, especially binding policy, is never legitimately made from a guess.  That is no different than religion; I may believe in God, but that belief is a guess.  I cannot prove it and you cannot disprove it; we both lack the ability to reach a deterministic outcome.  There is one but neither of us know what it is and by the time we know its too late to change our minds.

A climate "scientist" might tell you that we must reduce CO2 because he claims that humans emitting CO2 will cause the earth to get warmer and the sea level to rise, both of which are claimed to be bad and must be avoided.  I'll leave the "warmer" thing out for a minute and focus on the sea level aspect.  Said "scientist" in fact has made two claims, not one: First, that the sea level will rise (the bad outcome) and second that CO2 emissions by man are the cause -- that is, if we stop doing that the sea level will not rise.

This claim has multiple problems not the least of which is that he can't design an experiment to validate his hypothesis because said scientist doesn't have a spare earth laying around that is identical to this one upon which to run his experiment nor does he have the hundred years or more to prove he's right.  Therefore all he's got is back-fit mathematics which do not meet the scientific method that, I remind you, requires a hypothesis, formulation of an experiment in which only the desired variables are changed, recording and analysis of results and then publication of all of it so the results can be replicated by any interested party.

A back-fit model is never scientific; it is not, by definition, a test of a hypothesis.

Remember, the alleged "scientist" has not only claimed an outcome will occur he claims he knows why.  He has no evidence for either of these claims other than a historical back test which, anyone who's worked around any system that has a lot of unknowns (e.g. the stock market, for example) will tell you almost never validates on a forward basis.  These sorts of models don't even have the record of a coin toss; they nearly always fail to be predictive.  There are plenty of people who have blown up their trading accounts believing they have found the exception to this rule and nobody that I've ever heard of who has even a decent record of being right with what they've discovered in that regard in any system that exhibits evidence of non-deterministic, as we see it, behavior.  If such could be done the person who did it would wind up with all the money, obviously.

Let's ask what happens if he's wrong about the reason the sea level will rise?  Let's first presume that he's right in part and the sea level does rise.  He can't prove that his claim of cause is correct, however, as he cannot show determinism; he doesn't have enough facts to produce a deterministic result.  If he turns out to be wrong we take all the costs, societal, economic and otherwise, to reduce CO2 emissions and yet the people will still get screwed because the sea level rises anyway!

That is the alleged "solution" makes it worse than if you did nothing; the people still get hosed by the sea level rise but you first confiscated a large amount of their money by raising the cost of power, transportation, heating, cooling and agriculture so your "solution" screws them twice!

The engineering view of this problem, assuming the fear is that sea level will rise and destroy property and people is deemed both reasonable and worth defending against, is to build walls and otherwise insulate people and property from the sea level rise, or move the people and things out of the way so they don't get flooded out.  That, provided you do so beyond a reasonable confidence interval of said rise and are far enough on the safe side of it, will always work.  That is the engineering solution; it is deterministic in that provided you build the wall to the correct height with the specified materials of a given strength and/or move the stuff the bad result will not occur.

Why the sea rises from the engineering perspective is irrelevant.

When the pandemic hit in the first couple of months it was clear that young, healthy people were at statistically no risk (materially less than the flu) yet older, more-morbid people were at serious risk I put forward an engineering-style solution, albeit an imperfect one as we had wildly insufficient knowledge to get a decent confidence interval, which was ignored.  That is, the sanitarium model which was used for tuberculosis.  That absolutely would have worked far better than what we did because it did not rely on anything that we did not know was correct; there was no element of guesswork in the solution.  The only people allowed in and out of facilities housing said high-risk people would be those who had seroconverted and thus were known unable to acquire or transmit the infection.  We had no choice but to accept the "who's living there and has tested negative now is ok" but that risk only had to be accepted once for a given facility at the very outset when few people were infected at-large.  This meant putting up housing (e.g. rented RVs) at said facilities on site for workers who hadn't seroconverted and paying them whatever was required to work and stay there with food and other essentials brought in and sanitized.  If they rotated out for any reason they could not come back in until and unless they had seroconverted.  As the young, healthy people in the general population got the virus, shook it off and did seroconvert they could be hired to work safely and not have to stay on-site.  Within a couple months with no attempt to contain spread among the low-risk side of the population there would have been tens of millions of available seroconverted workers and those who found the premise of on-site lodging onerous could have been replaced.  There were no unknowns that could result in ineffectiveness; while we might have had some failures here and there due to human mistake (people are not perfect) beyond that it would have with near-certainty prevented the infection from getting into those facilities and very few high-risk people would have died.  Instead we did the exact opposite in several states and shoved infected people into those buildings, attempting to rely on masks and testing to prevent transmission. The masks and testing regimes repeatedly failed as they were based on statistical reductions which we had every reason to believe was irrelevant (once you cross the threshold of enough virus to become infected how much more gets into you doesn't materially matter with a virus since viruses replicate exponentially) and many died because the fools implemented a scientific method focused on probability and statistical reduction in emitted particles rather than an engineering approach that relied on deterministic process designed to be well beyond reasonable confidence intervals.

Engineering is always deterministic because it has to be as a discipline; if its not people die and the engineers who did not employ deterministic methods are held responsible for the failure.  Scientific methods only are deterministic and thus interchangeable on a functional basis when all the variables are known and correct.  The practitioners of scientific methods are almost-never held responsible when they're wrong; when was the last time a hurricane forecaster was charged with manslaughter when he incorrectly predicted where the storm was going or failed to predict the intensification of the Cat 2 storm to a Cat 3 or 4?  The engineering answer is always superior since it does not rely on that which is not known to be correct -- or even known at all.  If I do not know, for example, what the physical load a bridge pier that is driven to 80' can take without displacement under a specific set of conditions then I have to measure that before I can accept 80' as a suitable depth.

The scientific answer often kills people when all the inputs and variables are either not known or incorrect because it is a guess and guesses are frequently wrong.  The more unknown variables the worse the guess will be.

Facts are absolutes.  Physics is a set of facts.  Chemistry is a subset of physics, when you get down to it; it describes the physical interaction of atoms and molecules, which are comprised of protons, neutrons and electrons (and then subatomic particles beyond that.)

If and when we ever manage to understand biological systems sufficiently we will reach the point of determinism in medicine.  We will not say "you have a chance of beating this condition"; we will know what the outcome will be and whether the condition can be resolved or not -- and if so what you must consume or do to resolve it.

The same is true for "climate"; what is currently proclaimed may be a scientific process but it is not engineering and must never be used to drive policy because we simply do not understand what we're studying well enough to make accurate predictions nor establish causation.  The predictions that have been made have almost-all been proved wrong and as such they don't even qualify as educated guesses.  To make policy decisions on that basis is to make the wrong decision in virtually every instance, that is to screw people in some form or fashion who then have the bad thing happen anyway.

Some day we will reach an engineering level of understanding when it comes to medicine, climate, and many other things -- just as we have with chemistry and, at least at the atomic level, physics.

That day is not today, whether we are talking about climate, weather or all manner of biological things around us - including medicine.

As is my typical practice I "score" last year's predictions first, and then make some new ones.  I'm probably my own worst critic in this regard but scoring is critical; poor reflection on the past leads to bad decisions forward, and we should all strive to improve.

So with that said here we are:

• Inflation will not calm down.  Bullseye.
  
  
• The Democrats are going to get obliterated in the midterms.  Clean miss; I didn't even hear the whizz of that one going by.  No, the narrow margin in the House isn't worth even a fraction of a point.
  
  
• The Fed will be force into draining liquidity.  Bullseye.  They didn't like it, they tried to avoid it, but they're doing it.
  
  
• The USSC will split the abortion decision.  Miss.  They instead overturned Roe, which was not what I expected.  I expected a decision confirming the first trimester Roe holding and underlining it.
  
  
• The equity market is extremely vulnerable. Bullseye.  How's your 200.5k doing?  It didn't move the election, however.
  
  
• There is no short-term supply chain relief coming.  I'll take a 50% credit on that one although there is a cogent argument both ways.  Since there is, fine, half-point.
  
  
• Business is going to get it in both holes.  Bullseye.  Between labor productivity which I correctly predicted would be hammered as a result of what firms did with mandates and similar, along with inflation and uncertainty of supply, has hammered businesses in all corners.
  
  
• The blue hives are in particularly-serious trouble.  Bullseye.  This data showed up directly in the midterm elections and continues.  Detroit-style crime and breakdown conditions did indeed manifest all over the blue hives this year.
  
  
• Significant geopolitical trouble.  Nuclear bullseye.  If it was legitimate to give myself two points I would, but it isn't.  Ukraine anyone?
  
  
• Ghislaine.  Miss.  And not a close call either.  Since this is on the "not-censured" side I'll leave it at that.
  
  
• Biden is finished.  Miss.  Surprising, but miss.
  
  
• Business uncertainty lifts in the back half.  Miss.  If anything its gotten worse.  More on this below.
  
  
• Housing, as a bubble, is done.  Ding-ding-ding-ding.  Buckle up Buckwheat, this is just getting started.  More below.
  
  
• The medical complex has a serious problem.  Nuclear bullseye.  More below and I thought we might not get it this year about Septemberish, but I was vindicated.  "Here it comes."
  
  
• The credentialism of the so-called top-schools will deteriorate / collapse.  Miss.  Not yet, at least not visibly.  I think it is happening but it doesn't count if its not evident to the common  man, so nope.
  
  
• Trump is done, along with Trumpets.  Half-point.  He demonstrably ruined several seats in both the House and Senate, and likely cost the GOP the Senate with who he backed in the primaries, leading to unwinnable races in the general.  But, it wasn't the collapse I expected, at least not yet.  I do, however, have to take the half-point that DeSantis was the winner of that because whether you like it or not he was.

Ok, so how's this all add up?

16 predictions were made, and of them I score it as 9 points, for 56%.  All-in I call that not bad for predictions over a year's time.  As I also pointed out in last year's entry I intentionally omitted anything related to a specific virus because the Google censors had deemed my views and predictions on same to be "misinformation" even when what was being cited were formal, published scientific studies.  We now know, of course, that they were not "misinformation"; in fact they were decent prognostications and deductive reasoning that in nearly every case has been vindicated, and further it is now proved that the government stuck its foot on the scale and violated the First Amendment in doing so, specifically with Twitter and, it must be assumed, all other social and electronic media organizations.  

Those of you who read the -NAD side of the site know that I haven't shut up about such things, just removed them from places where so-called "advertisers" and "big tech" can complain about and attempt to levy punishments based on same.  That will continue in the coming year and likely beyond but the reasons for that form part of the next prediction series, so with that said here we go.

• The virus "response" is collapsing -- and will continue to.  The pattern is ridiculously nasty, so far beyond any sort of statistical burying (despite the CDC trying to do so) and, in other nations, the same data is evident.  Indeed its an unbroken pattern with no exceptions that I've been able to find.  People can point fingers and call you a nut only until their loved ones start being disabled or worse because they followed the narrative, and the side effect profile starts to show up beyond the virus and its effects.  All of this is happening and will continue.  This spells bad news in a number of related areas because the destruction of trust within the medical system, which they earned and deserve, is going to get people killed for other reasons.  While what was done was statistically unsupportable and relied on unproved claims, essentially all of which have now been disproved, that does not mean everything in the past was also disproved.  Semmelweis anyone?  This is going to suck, in short, but the medical industry has only itself to blame for it.
  
  
• That collapse and the wild cost increases it is bringing will accelerate the detonation of the federal budget via CMS.  I've predicted this for a long time and in fact in the 1990s put a mid-to-late 2020s timeline on it, then revised that to 2024 about 10 years ago.  We crossed the $2 trillion threshold in spending this last fiscal year, close to a third of all federal dollars spent and that's not all of it because Medicaid is a federal/state combined program and getting accurate data on state spending is difficult.  The Federal Government is studiously trying to avoid any sort of debate on this but at a certain point that the curtains are on fire and avoiding the checks bouncing means inflation cannot be tamed comes into full view and demands a response.  I am not predicting that collapse will come this year to get the point on this prediction, but that it is wildly evident will become clear and said debate will ensue (or I have to score it as a "miss.")
  
  
• Other schemes and BS peddled as "medical advice" will be increasingly explored.  There is already evidence in the scientific papers that the mad push to vegetable oils and similar was basically underwritten by... you guessed it -- the people who made those products.  In 2011 I discarded the oft-repeated claims of what you "should" eat for what my own research said was a better and sustainable choice.  It was; I lost 60lbs, it has stayed off and, at least as importantly, my athletic performance skyrocketed and even today, at 59, I'm faster than I was when it comes to cross-country road running at the age of seventeen.  I require and consume no prescription meds and unlike most men of my age "everything still works as its supposed to in a man" if you get my meaning.  I'm not predicting that all of this will disappear, of course, but the prediction of the general view that "Beyond Meat" is the answer to anything is going in the dust bin along with said companies will, if it occurs, give me said point.
  
  
• The consequences of corporate and government mandates will manifest in severe dislocations through industry.  We're already seeing it.  Southwest and their flight disruption is not just Southwest; it is not only a "oh we have a system engineered to remove all unnecessary cost" (which then has no redundancy in it so when something goes wrong it all goes to Hell immediately) it's everywhere in the airline industry and elsewhere.  It has been known for a decade that there's a problem coming with qualified pilots and part of the entire nonsense with increasing automation and such in cockpits, along with pressure to reduce qualifications.  Rather than make the investments in both training and pay to incentivize people to take that path the choice was made to lower standards and press existing employees.  That never turns out poorly, right?  Uhhhhh.... yeah, ok.  Health care is another example; people are screaming about shortages of beds and similar but there are beds -- just no staff, so entire wings are shut down because you need the staff to run that wing, and you don't have said people.  Management has gotten awfully arrogant, often with government backing (e.g. jab mandates) when it comes to employees and the bill for that will become increasingly critical this coming year.  All-in this is probably a good thing for society as a whole as labor/management balance is just that, but it won't come without pain and adds further inflationary pressure.
  
  
• The cost-shift game in "online shopping" will crack.  This is a late one that I didn't previously have on the list but I truly believe it now.  Amazon, in particular is in trouble.  This is probably not specific to them either, but is most-acute there.  They have, for years, evaded what amount to net operating losses in their online marketplace through AWS sales.  But cloud is not a panacea; its just someone else's computer, and overhead is never free.  The more people who deal in a transaction the more it costs, always for the simple reason that nobody ever works for free.  There are already clear signs of this, where the "non-Prime" shipping that used to be a three or four day affair (2 with Prime) is now often quoted as close to two weeks.  Obviously the company is moving inventory around when they don't have everything in one place so as to avoid multiple shipments.  That's an indication of stress and its present.  We'll see how bad it gets, but if you're used to the "order it today, have it tomorrow" game I think you're in for a big surprise.  That squeeze is not local to one company and leads to.....
  
  
• The market is not done going down.  Yeah, you didn't like that decline did you?  It's not over.  Trust me, I know both sides of this argument having been both an employee and a CEO, but what's happened over the last three years is egregious and outrageous -- and has consequences.  I'll be specific: We'll see at least another 10% decline from prices as of 12/31 sometime during the year, and a 20%+ decline is not off the table, or I won't take the point.
  
  
• The Omnibus insures inflation is not over either.  Remember that inflationary pressures take six to twelve months to go through the system.  There was an indication of this relaxing in the last few months of the PPI but the Omnibus is going to reverse that.  Thus the odds are very high of a "false dawn" in that regard.
  
  
• Rates are not done going up.  If you invest as if they are you're going to get it in every hole you have.  There are hundreds of firms, especially in the tech space but certainly not limited to there, that have survived and had their stock prices go to the moon over the last ten years specifically because of ever-decreasing rates.  This year is the second after that ended and short-term debt is going to roll over.  What you see this year in terms of that impact on balance sheets and earnings is nowhere near the full depth of it and you will hear repeated claims that it is.  These claims are knowing lies because corporations have been taking their revolvers and similar short-term facilities and issuing debt out the curve for a long time precisely because they could borrow at 2% or in some cases less.  That paper now is frozen and has to be held to maturity by whoever bought it lest they take a huge capital loss, but when it rolls, and it will, it will be at double or higher the previous rate.  This is going to go on for the same 10 years the original trend did and there's nothing that can be done about it.  If you think this won't translate directly into stock prices and cause a bunch of bankruptcies you're wild-eyed crazy.
  
  
• Business is going to have return to employees actually being functional, and if you're not you're going to get fired. The Twitter example is going to play out nationally.  For those who haven't been paying attention Musk fired more than half the staff and the site still functions just fine.  This is proof positive that said half were not doing anything that keep the lights on and this is common through industry. More in the next point.
  
  
• DEI and ESG will be increasingly recognized as resulting in DIE.  This won't play out entirely in one year, but it will start in earnest this year.  There are plenty of people who think they can double down on this and force it to not only continue but expand.  They're wrong and they're about to get a very expensive and personal lesson starting with the loss of their job and recognition that their lavish lifestyle does not square with the income that can be generated in the fast-food industry.  Refusal to recognize that the end of "free money" means you must actually produce and that means meritocracy wins and all else loses will lead you directly to the nearest Federal Bankruptcy Court.
  
  
• Russia isn't going to be "beaten"; that is, Ukraine can't win -- and their support will vanish.  This year is my prediction for that.  Whatever side you're on for this makes no difference when it comes to outcome.  There is simply no path for Ukraine to force Russia to give up.  The one wild-card in the mixture is the possibility (much-rumored) that Putin is very seriously ill with cancer and may succumb.  The odds of it all going sideways, if that occurs, are very high.  In short the last thing you want is for him to drop dead as he is likely far more reasonable than whoever might replace him.  If Putin is indeed terminally ill as some claim the odds of this issue escalating into a no-bullshit real war that involves the entire Eurasian land mass are very high.
  
  
• The impact of the Omnibus passed in the waning hours of 2022 will be historic, and nasty.  A fundamental tenet of our Constitutional government is that no Congress can bind the next one.  Never before has Congress even attempted to circumvent that constraint, having respect for the institution above all else.  That seal has been broken now and its going to get ugly.  Neither party can claim to be above this since the threshold to begin debate in the Senate on the bill was 60 votes and they got them, so trying to pin this entirely on the Democrats (which has already started) will fail.  Yes, the House majority is slim, but a majority is a majority and as with votes one vote is as good of a margin as one million.  Those are the rules of the game and everyone knows it.  I'm expecting a severe reaction as the more-egregious provisions in that 4,000 page monstrosity come to light but while technically it can be repealed it won't be as the Senate is in Democrat hands, like it or not.
  
  
• Green energy is headed for the dustbin and the firms in same are in serious trouble.  We'd all like a planet that is not despoiled but the fact remains that alleged "green" energy is unsustainable, cannot meet America's needs (or anyone else's) and the capacity for smaller-scale storage and use (e.g. EVs and similar) doesn't exist in terms of the resources necessary to make and maintain them as a displacement of existing ICE vehicles rather than as "sports cars" and other niche products. Further, the projections of an ever-warming planet that will produce "catastrophic" outcomes unless we cut carbon use to zero are fantasies as has been and will become increasingly clear.  There are multiple decade-long-period climate-related oscillators well-recognized in meteorology and the pattern is clear -- they're turning.  The claims that the recent cold snap were "unprecedented" are nonsense; Nashville, for example, in 1985 took a winter storm hit that was worse than what we just went through in terms of temperature -- by a lot.  In fact the daily mean temperature during that event was -5F, wildly worse than the single-digit figures we just put up.  The entire premise of shutting down all the coal plants was that this would never happen again because the planet is getting hotter and thus that capacity wasn't needed, even though we told people to stop installing gas furnaces and rely on heat pumps.  Wrong.  I very distinctly remember the late 1970s and early 80s weather patterns and the winters were nasty.  That cycle (yes, its a cycle Marge!) appears to be coming back around much to the chagrin of Greta and her adherents.  If you can't engineer a power grid to supply that plus a reasonable margin in addition, including provision for all the people added to the state since 1985 you have no business being involved in public policy when it comes to critical infrastructure -- period.  Essentially all of the companies in the "green energy" space continue to operate only as a consequence of massive direct and indirect subsidy, including putting their toxic waste in other nations such as China.  As this shifts and tolerance there wanes (and it will!) the economic capability to continue this scheme will end.  Further, if you think this recent storm in Buffalo was bad contemplate what it will be like with no natural gas allowed for heating, particularly when the power goes off and all that's left are small personal generators sufficient to run a circulating fan but definitely not a heat pump, strips or electric space heaters.  If the people let this happen and do not force governments to cut that crap out there will be major waves of death that result in future winter seasons.  NY and other states have banned natural gas as fuel-fed heat sources in new construction and intend to force everyone off existing plant.  I predict you'll see the start of a serious pushback on all that this year and to get a point, that's what has to happen.
  
  
• Ron DeSantis will either basically cement his front-running RNC position or self-destruct; no middle ground.  He recently asked for and got a Grand Jury to investigate any materially false statements related  to the Covid vaccines by their manufacturers and the medical industry.  There are state fraud laws that bear on this and this is a rather high-stakes gamble on his part along with that of his state Surgeon General.  I am reasonably sure what the record shows if it surfaces.  If the Grand Jury whitewashes (or worse, stalls) and fails to produce a work product the political damage to DeSantis will be severe.  However, factual findings, however they go, likely vindicate and seriously help him politically.  Either way I expect a resolution this coming year and will take a point for either extreme but not if Trump is still materially in the game but he isn't politically finished (whether he admits it or not doesn't matter.)
  
  
• Political shifts are going to increase in ugliness; there is no "reconciliation" in the new Congress.  Two points have already come into focus on this -- the first being the Lake fiasco in Arizona where clear human action had to have taken place that did implicate the results -- this was proved -- and under Arizona law intent, that is malice, is not necessary for a contest to win.  The Judge ignored the law and ruled only on intent, ignoring the actual standard in the Statute.  That's going to get appealed, obviously.  But what might actually be worse is what has come out about Santos (R-NY) in his recent "win"; he essentially fabricated huge parts of what he presented as his personal history to voters.  He flipped the district too so this really is an election that mattered.  Of course we all know politicians lie and trade on information as well; indeed that sort of game is so well-established that it makes professional wrestling look honest and thus one has to wonder if all the strum and furor is just noise.  Whether these two incidents go anywhere or not my prediction is for more of it, more strife and more nastiness, not less, and I'll put a stake in the ground: At least one eye-popping egregious event that reaches into the realm of undeniable criminality  that even the most-partisan cannot deny will occur this year by at least one of these clowns in the House or Senate.
  
  
• The economic and political disparity between "blue" and "red" area will grow and start to produce actual fractures in supply lines and cooperation.  The number of pundits who have ignored what is clearly in the data from the last election stun me, frankly.  I've never seen more stupidity in that regard in my 59 orbits around the flaming ball responsible for all of global warming (and indeed life) on this rock.  The "Red" states where middle fingers went up to mandates to any degree at all (none of them sufficient) gained population and thus their "Red" voting percentages increased.  Those places that played lockdown mania and worse lost people, and disproportionately they lost productive, high earning people who pay taxes in size.  Those people moved to the Red states and it is clearly visible in the Governor's races in this last election.  The pundits all refuse to deal with the fact that in politics a win is a win and thus what happened actually decreased those "blue" races that can in the future be flipped "red" because once you win by one vote siphoning off more votes from some other jurisdiction does not help your victory but damages the capability for the other state or locale to flip red as well.  The same of course applies in reverse.  A pluralistic society cannot function reasonably if the various factions refuse to get along and while you can pass all the laws mandating "full faith and credit" you'd like (I remind you said is in the Constitution) you can't force someone to like someone else and as we've seen full faith and credit isn't worth the paper its printed on when it comes to many areas already, including but certainly not limited to areas such as immigration and marijuana.  To be clear -- I'm not predicting a revolutionary-style event between states, but I am predicting substantial trouble that reaches into supply lines and interstate cooperation.  So far, with the exception of lots of noise and a few states banning "official travel" this hasn't happened so for it to start would be a major shift.
  
  
• Illegal immigration forces policy change this year.  Buried in the Omnibus just passed is a provision that bans the use of any additional federal funding to secure the border.  A quarter million people attempting to enter this nation a month without prior authorization is not a "humanitarian" situation, it is an invasion as these are intentional acts taken with knowing disregard for the law.  This is not only not sustainable its already well beyond the point that one or more states with said border should have declared what's going on an invasion and acted on their own, as the Constitution requires the Federal Government to do and in the absence of same they can indeed step in, with doing so being entirely Constitutional.  The odds of this setting off a political crisis approach 100% and thus I'm reasonably sure this one will score.
  
  
• Housing is nowhere near done going down.  If you haven't sold yet you're not at the bottom.  If you're holding on thinking you missed the window -- you're wrong.  I'm starting to see the cracks here and Real Estate is always local to a large degree but deals are falling apart at a much-accelerated rate and sellers are increasingly forced to cut prices bigly or nobody buys.  Its always true that a properly priced house will sell but "properly" might be 20% off what you see in the other listings, none of which have moved in the last two months!  If you think this trend has bottomed and thus property taxes are stable and will be able to be raised on a net collection basis IMHO you're nuts.
  
  
• Auto prices, specifically used car prices, are going to massively collapse.  Some of the practices I'm hearing about are unbelievable and almost-certainly wind up as frauds perpetrated into the securitized markets for car loans.  These unsound practices in the face of ratcheting inflation will result in repos headed through the roof and there will be plenty of supply by this time next year in the used market, which means dealer capacity to play games with "market adjustments" on new cars will evaporate.  The squeeze in that business will get quite-acute, blunted only by the shortage of new cars and as a result floor lines are likely basically non-existent so the debt won't kill them.  That's the good news, but hunger for business has a way of fixing inflated prices when supply is plentiful, and I expect it to.  Indeed, I'm looking forward to quite-possibly being able to do such a transaction myself in this coming year.  If you think Carvana's 52-week stock performance is a one-off you're about to get a rude surprise.

I hope everyone enjoyed the relative "salad days" of the last 10 or so years; they're over and this isn't one of the predictions since it isn't something that will be a 2023 event in particular.  Rather, the new way to look at it is "embrace the suck" much as it was in the early 1980s and didn't really start to clear up and improve until the middle of the decade.  If we're lucky things will start to get better in about five years -- if not, well, the 1930s might in fact be the best fit for how bad it will get and how long it will last.

As always I reserve the right to add or revise prior to 12:01 AM January 1st 2023, and will exempt this thread so it will remain available through the year for commentary and review.

Good luck!

Preamble

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. - The Declaration of Independence

It has been decades since willful blindness and deliberate neglect to the principles of this nation have taken root both at the State and Federal level, often becoming subservient to the interests of foreigners and foreign nations.  Our manufacturing has been offshored to nations with weak environmental laws and near-slave labor conditions, with zero of those destinations honoring even the most-basic of human rights ensconced in our Constitution.  Our energy sources have been corrupted and fealty to foreign heads of state ensconced in Statute exempting same from anti-trust laws, without which OPEC could not sell a single barrel of oil into the US without the owners of said firms, many of them foreign royalty, being subject to US prosecution and the funds from said ventures recaptured through fines and forfeiture.  We have entered into conflict and war at the behest of other nations with a clear and clean question as to whether those making said decisions are in fact doing so as United States citizens with an undivided interest here, or with divided loyalty to both the US and some foreign power.

Decades of corruption of this sort have gone unanswered, and conflicts have come and gone, both economic and militarily, some of which are in process today.  This issue of divided loyalty raises the question of whether the United States indeed is a sovereign nation at all or whether it has been and continues to be corrupted by foreign influence, both within and beyond the government.

The founders expressed concern for this possibility, and in fact put in a supra-requirement for the Presidency as regards citizenship and undivided loyalty, yet over the last hundred years not one candidate from either party has presented, or have had vetted, their bona-fide undivided loyalty to this nation prior to becoming a candidate or, in the case of success, ascending to office.

In addition despite statutory prohibition on unbridled entry into the United States for purpose of residence neither major political party has lifted a finger to stanch what can only be reasonably called an invasion over the last three decades at our Southern border.  No nation can stand that does not defend itself against invasion, and no representative republic can stand over time if it allows foreign interests, whether via invasion and then subsequent lineage, or direct influence, to subvert The Rule of Law.

Therefore, in order to correct these matters and bring them in concordance with The Constitution of the United States, this Amendment is hereby proposed.

BE IT RESOLVED THAT:

• The 14th Amendment is modified to read:
  "All persons born of two citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States, or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person citizen or lawful resident within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
  
  
• The first and second clauses of the 17th Amendment are modified to read as follows:
  "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years chosen through means selected by the Legislature of each State and signed into law by the State's Governor or enacted via override of his or her veto and shall serve a term of six years, with each Senator subject to recall by simple majority vote of both Houses of said Legislature during said term; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.  This clause shall take effect with respect to both the election and recall of Senators one calendar year after the date of ratification.
  
  When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election in concordance with the election of Senators in that State as prescribed by State Law to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election the process set forth in the enabling State legislation can take place as the legislature may direct.
  
  
• New Text as Amendment {28 or subsequent as appropriate at the time of ratification} shall read as follows:
  "No person shall run for, be nominated for, or serve as a US Representative, Senator, President, Vice-President, Cabinet Member or be employed in a position of direct policy-making authority within any federal agency or instrumentality if they hold or have held citizenship or the right of lawful permanent residency in any nation other than that of the United States during the previous seven years.  No person shall be eligible to ascend to the Presidency or Vice-Presidency, irrespective of whether by election or succession, unless at the time of their birth both their biological mother and father were United States citizens and neither held either foreign citizenship or a right of permanent residency.
  
  For the purposes of this Amendment a federal position is considered to be that of direct policy-making authority if the person in question has direct input, authorship or capacity to approve, reject, negotiate or implement any statutory or federal regulatory authority of substantial burden on any person or entity within the boundaries of the United States and its possessions.
  
  A one year grace period to renounce all foreign citizenship shall apply to all current office holders and federal employees as of the effective date of this Amendment.
  
  The US House of Representatives is set to be apportioned at 1 Representative per 100,000 US Citizens, with the US Census directed to include and enumerate only citizens for the purpose of apportionment.  The increase in House membership shall take place after the first 2 year period has passed post ratification of this Amendment.  No voting in the US House shall be permitted by other than personal presence upon the floor of the chamber.  Changes in apportionment shall take place in the year following the decennial Census, with the new apportionment to be effective for the following 2 year election cycle.
  
  No Bill that impacts or raises revenue, which by the Constitution must originate in the US House, may be altered as to its materiality or primary purpose in The Senate as a means of circumvention or abrogation of the original Constitutional requirement on revenue bills.
  
  No Bill or Amendment may be voted upon in either the House or Senate prior to one business day elapsing after publication in finished, to-be-voted upon form for each one hundred letter-sized pages of text, with a minimum delay of one business day, counted as Monday through Friday excepting Federal Holidays, as printed in legislation-conforming format determined by the Government Printing Office, and each clause of all bills, whether in original form or by amendment, shall bear sponsorship of at least one Representative and one Senator."

A reasonable postulate for virtually every thing that is wrong in the US -- and much of the rest of the world -- can be stated as "selective prosecution has ruined the world, and cannot be fixed until the people enforce equal application of the law."

"ESG", which in the vernacular is "Environmental, Sustainability and Governance", all are externally-imposed costs on corporations, specifically public corporations.  Unlike laws, which are also externally-imposed costs, these costs are imposed by a cartel, and cartels under penalty of being "disinvested" or even having your leadership ejected by force.

Cartels are illegal in the United States, with few exceptions:

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

This law (Clayton, which is the second of two, the first being Sherman which criminalized the act while Clayton was rapidly passed to criminalize the attempt irrespective of success) dates to 1890.

It does not just impose a fine (of up to $100 million) but also 10 years in the pokey in the form of a criminal felony conviction for each person involved.

So if you and I get together, agree to impose cost by coercion on other people and in doing so our intent is to do so in a cohesive fashion such that competitors must all comply we have committed a criminal felony.

Cost is cost no matter how it works or what sort of cloaking and greenwashing you do with it.  If myself and three other large Internet providers in a given area all get together over some beers, lament that now we can't get people to work because the government has turned into a free-money fest for them and decide together to all raise prices by a dollar on our customers so we can all offer our employees a nice fat raise we have committed a serious federal offense.  When I ran MCSNet I wouldn't even contemplate having lunch or beers with one of our serious competitors in my market lest the conversation go in that sort of direction and I've now done something that could, quite-reasonably, lead to me doing 10 years in the federal slammer.

Corporations must comply with the law and to the extent that some organization or group lobbies to get laws passed, which all comply with, that's not a felony. 

But absent law such coercion is a felony.

Why?

Because without coercion one or more of the competitors in a market will tell said "ESG" people to pound sand.  That firm will have lower operating costs and as a result will tattoo those who do enact said policies.  This is called competition -- and, to be precise, productivity and it is productivity, doing more with less, that is responsible for every bit of our standard of living in the modern world.

In 1890 we, through our representative process, declared such coercion by other than law imposed evenly on all a felonious act.  There is no exemption for "investment companies" like Vanguard, Blackrock and similar to these laws.  None.  Yet here we are, and just like in 2008 when nobody committed any crimes (to directly quote Gary Johnson who was at the time running for President as a Libertarian, and was lying like a bearskin rug) we are facing record-high gas prices and inflation to a large degree precisely because we are not prosecuting acts that, under the law, are declared as crimes.

In a word: No.

Biden has a bunch of scolds cheering this onward, and there are plenty of people who think it would be "popular."

If you're one of them then you're arguing against your own interest for political purposes, and that's dumb.

Broadly the problem with college education cost today is two-fold:

• It's too expensive.  Its expensive because the government subsidized it and removed risk computation in lending.  This in turn made an effectively unlimited price payable by the "student", even though said student had no income, no assets and no guarantee of ever being able to earn enough to both live in a reasonable fashion and make the debt service.  This never happens in a free market because those who lend money in such a stupid fashion lose it when it can't be repaid.
  
  
• Colleges do not care if they sell effectively-worthless educations.  A college would care if it had to underwrite the loans and they were dischargeable in bankruptcy.  If the only actual post-college market for a "gender studies" degree is teaching gender studies then (1) the price will be something that can be paid by someone teaching gender studies and (2) you won't get a loan except on risk-adjusted terms that reflect that.

If you want to solve the problem, in other words, the price has to come down and the lender has to take the risk of default and non-payment.

Thus you do the following:

• College debt from this day forward is dischargeable in bankruptcy.  Period.  It's unsecured debt -- sort of.
  
  
• If your college debt is discharged your degree is void.  That's the hook to prevent "strategic" defaults, which was what goaded Congress into restricting defaults in the first place -- a bunch of high-fautin people who decided to strategically default and eat the 7-year credit ding.  Since there is no physical thing you can repossess but the degree has value and is what was bought then the correct answer is you revoke every credit-hour earned and thus the degree is revoked if a person files for bankruptcy and successfully throws off the debt.  Congress can do this since Congress explicitly has the power to set uniform national bankruptcy law binding in all 50 states.
  
  
• The Federal Government gets entirely out of the college financing business.  If colleges want to underwrite and carry the paper they can, at whatever price they want.  Ditto for private lenders.  The above two checks and balances will make very certain that nobody lends more than can, on a risk-adjusted basis across the pool of students, be paid and thus the price of the education will reflect the actual value in the marketplace.

That's it.  Three simple steps, problem solved.

#1 and #2 are opt in for all current student debt.  This is entirely legal as well and shuts up the whiners.  If you have a "worthless degree" then fine -- turn it in, file bankruptcy, take the credit hit and go on with your life.  When the price falls (and it will, like a stone) and you want to go get it again, have at it, this time at a more-reasonable cost.  No, you don't get credit for the other classes; you said they weren't worth the money so they don't count.  That was your decision, so make if that is your call for both good and bad.

If you simply want a FREE degree, on the other hand, and many people are arguing for exactly that -- the right to steal the cost from other people -- then this change will expose those who have as their actual intent grifting rather than truly being in trouble while making certain those who were in fact misled as young adults have a reasonable path forward.

Fix the problem instead of screwing other people.