The Great Bitcoin Play of 2023-2025 has begun

There are a whole bunch of videos talking about Blackrock's application for a Bitcoin spot price ETF (Exchange Traded Fund).  Crypto Casey's video, from July 2023, tells all the basics in 16 minutes, so it's a good place to start researching this potential move in Bitcoin, expected to play out over the next 1-2 years.  Investing in crypto, like any investment, carries risks, so be smart, do your own due diligence, and talk to any need professionals before making any investment decisions.

Disclaimer

Bitcoin, BTC, the crypto asset, the decentralized digital form of exchange, hosted on thousands of computers worldwide, began with a white paper published just over 15 years ago, by some mysterious person or group, who went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.  Satoshi's true identity remains unknown to this day.  A link to a white paper describing the concept was released on October 31, 2008.  The open source code network was created on January 3rd, 2009.  Using the info in the white paper, people began "mining" Bitcoin almost immediately.  You can dig into more details on the Bitcoin Wikipedia page, or watch the documentary The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, or one or more of the other Bitcoin and crypto docs out there.  In any case, in January 2009, reportedly inspired by the Great Recession of 2007-2009 (aka The GFC or Global Financial Crisis), the world's experiment with digital crypto currency and blockchain technology began.  It was over 8 years until the strange digital "coin" hit a value of $1,000 U.S. per Bitcoin.  As I write this in mid November 2023, Bitcoin is trading at $36,366 per Bitcoin.  According to Google, the total market cap of all crypto is $1.44 trillion, with Bitcoin making up $708 billion of that.  Obviously, a bunch of people see value in this digital blockchain technology and transaction system.  There are now many other blockchains, and thousands of other crypto coins being traded online.  

The point of this post is that we have the set-up for what appears to be another huge rise in the value of Bitcoin.  This began slowly, a year ago, as Bitcoin rose from the low after the SBF debacle.  The price is back up well over 100% from the low price in November of 2022, after the last big crypto crash and trough in prices.  But now there's another big event coming that could help the price of Bitcoin surge much higher over the next several months, and into the next year or two.  

Wall Street, and specifically the financial Goliath, Blackstone, has applied to create a spot price ETF for Bitcoin.  They applied for it last June.  A lot of other businesses have also applied.  But Blackstone is the largest, most well connected, traditional financial player (trad-fi), and they've had over 500 ETF's approved, and only one denied.  So the crypto world, and many others, expect Blackstone to eventually get approved to open that ETF.  

What does that do?  That ETF, exchange traded fund, will allow investors, particularly huge investment portfolios like pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, ultra high net worth individuals, and other major investors, get exposure to Bitcoin's volatile price action, while not having to actually buy Bitcoin itself.  Basically, the Big Boys and Girls Club of investors around the world will be able to make money off of Bitcoin, without the risks of actually owning BTC, or any other crypto coin.  It's a huge side bet arena, part of the traditional financial system, that would be as easy to invest in as stocks on a Robinhood account.  It would open the crypto environment up to hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars of investment in a traditional investment vehicle, an ETF, but also be able to profit when Bitcoin goes up in price.  The consensus view is that the Blackstone ETF, or perhaps a series of Bitcoin spot price ETF's, beginning with Blackstone's, would make Bitcoin itself much more valuable.  

In March of 2017, Bitcoin was under $1,000 per Bitcoin.  In December of 2017, the price rose to $19,650 per Bitcoin.  That's a rise of 2038% in one year, a 20X return, if sold at the peak.  Then Bitcoin, and other cryptos, crashed.  In December of 2018, the price got down around $3183 per Bitcoin.  In November of 2021, it peaked again at around $64,400 per Bitcoin.  That rise, trough to peak, was 2023%, another 20X rise.  Then crypto prices, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all the alt coins or shit coins, crashed again.  This last low was around $16, 452 per Bitcoin, in November of 2022.  I'm saying "around" for the prices because I'm using the Google chart to simplify things, which is weekly numbers, and not the absolute, intraday lows or highs.  

The crypto world, looking at the likelihood of the Blackrock ETF actually happening, sees the next big price spike for Bitcoin likely going to at least $100,000 to maybe $150,000 per Bitcoin, at some point in the next couple of years.  That's nearly a 10X rise in price, from the 2022 low.  If Bitcoin does another 20X peak trough to peak rise, that would put the next peak price at roughly $320,000 per Bitcoin.  That's the extreme high side of the next potential peak, driven in large part by the continued adoption of crypto, as well as the Blackstone ETF, and possible other Bitcoin ETF's, getting approved.  The Blackstone ETF potential approval dates are January 12-14th, 2024, and I think March 13-14th, 2024.  

But wait, there's more!  The next Bitcoin halving is predicted to take place around April 20th, 2024.  The "halving" is programmed into the Bitcoin code.  Once every four years, the amount of Bitcoin that Bitcoin miners earn for mining it, gets cut in half.  This generally leads to the price rising as well, in time.  The last two halvings, the price went down a bit at first, then recovered, and grew, a few months later.  In 2020, the price went much higher in a few months, but Bitcoin popularity was also growing a lot then.  In any case, miners get paid less Bitcoin to mine it, beginning next April 2024, which  tends to make Bitcoin more valuable, overall.  So there's a one-two punch set to push the price of Bitcoin higher next spring, the very likely Blackstone ETF approval, and the baked in Bitcoin halving.  

Last month, the news broke that the Blackrock ETF got approved, and the price of Bitcoin took off immediately.  Within a day, the news broke that it was a false announcement, based on an intern's mistake.  Sure blame the interns.  In any case, even though everyone realized the ETF did not get approved, the mistaken news leak sent the price of Bitcoin from around $26,800, to over $28,000 in ten days, and it has drifted higher since, and it now well over $36,000 per Bitcoin, after hitting #37,000 recently.  Ethereum and many other crypto coins have risen as well, sparked by Bitcoin's rise. 

Many traditional investors are now really happy to "T-bill and chill," after the 2022-2023 chaos in stocks, buying U.S. treasury bills that pay 5% to 5.5% annually on their money.  But over in cryptoland, there's this opportunity to ride the Bitcoin train up for the next several months, maybe for 1-2 years.  this opportunity exists because of increasing overall adoption, because of the effect the nearly certain approval of the Blackstone spot price Bitcoin ETF, and the Bitcoin halving, are expected to have on Bitcoin's price in the next 6 to 12 months, or more.  So that's the opportunity sitting out there right now, for any of you interested in investing in Bitcoin.  

Crypto is not as easy to invest in as stocks, U.S. treasuries, or something like gold or or silver.  It's volatile, the price swings day to day can be several percent.  You have to do quite a bit of research, if you're not already familiar, on how to safely buy crypto, then how to hold it safely in a hard wallet.  If this interests you, then dive into the research about this potential opportunity.  There are a lot of videos about the aspects of Bitcoin, the Blackstone ETF, and many opinions on how this might play out.  As I said above, Crypto Casey's video embedded above is a great place to start.  If the ETF does happen, and Bitcoin rises steadily in price for a while, that generally drags up the price of Ethereum, the other major cryptos, and many of the alt coins (or shit coins) as well.  Do the due diligence needed before investing any money in any of these. Be smart and be safe. 

If this whole idea makes sense, how do you play it?  Buy Bitcoin, or even Ethereum, and hold it through at least next April.  The real rise should come in the months after April.  Don't expect it to soar straight up in price, but make a bumpy, upward trend over time.  If this is the next big cycle in crypto, as it appears to be, then Bitcoin, and many other cryptos, could rise substantially over the next 1 1/2 to 2 years.  It's a buy and hold, mid term play, for several months, up to maybe 2 years.  You decide when to sell some or all of your crypto, and take profits, if this long move plays out more or less as expected. 

 If you don't know how to safely buy and store crypto, then take the time to do the proper research on how to buy crypto safely, and learn about hard wallets, and how to store your crypto safely.  

Again, this is a potential opportunity that seems to be shaping up, where the ETF approval and the halving will help push the price of Bitcoin up, over several months.  No one is obligated to buy any crypto because you read this post.  If this post sparks your interest, do the needed research, and see if this potential opportunity makes sense for you.  As this is playing out, it looks like we're heading into a recession, so expect much of the rest of the economy to be slow as we see just how the Bitcoin story plays out in the next year or two.  

I'm sharing this information because I see this huge potential investment hanging out there, at a time when economic growth around the world is slowing down, some countries are already in recession, and others, including the U.S., are either heading into, or will soon head into, a recession.  There are no paid links in this post, I don't make any money off of writing this in any way, whether you do or don't buy Bitcoin or other cryptos.  I'm just sharing the potential opportunity with those of you who read my blog, hoping it may help some of you, if it makes sense to you, and if this opportunity plays out close to how its expected to play out.  

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned, there's more to come.  Hit me with any comments or ideas on Facebook.  

Blogger's note- 11/16/2023- BlockRock just filed with the SEC to open an Ethereum ETF, to go along with the Bitcoin ETF that I wrote about above.  Here's the CNBC report on this.  So add Ethereum, the #2 crypto, and the first to incorporate smart contracts, to the ideas lined out above concerning Bitcoin.  

I've also been doing a lot of longer form writing on Substack, a platform designed specifically for writers, lately.  There I'm writing mostly about creativity, creative scenes, art, writing, and a little economic stuff. Check it out. 

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

There are no paid links in this post.

I just re-read "Revolutionary Wealth" by Alvin and Heidi Toffler

This 25 minute interview with Alvin Toffler is from 2007, and he goes into several of the many themes of his 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth.*  The book was published in 2006, and Toffler died in 2016.  Yet the book is still mind blowing for how deeply it dives into how different the emerging Information Age is from the Industrial Age we are still moving out of.  Seventeen years after being published and still very few people are talking about the changes to society that Toffler was exploring in the book nearly 20 years ago.

It's the middle of May in 2023 as I write this.  At this point it's hard for any of us to remember the "before times," way back in 2019.  Life in the 21st century was cruising along, not ideal by any means, there was always some new phone model or software update to learn.  But we were doing alright, it seems.  OK, we had the Retail Apocalypse happening,lots of name brands stores closing down. We also somehow managed to elect a whacko for president in 2016.  His autoritarian leanings scared any patriotic American who actually likes free speech and civil liberties, and that Constitution thing.  But even so, we were managing.  

Then we rang in a new decade, New Year's Eve 2019, rolled into 2020, the third decade of this millenium began, and things still seemed pretty normal.  And then the crazy virus from China hit U.S. shores on a couple of cruise ships from Japan, and the world went fucking nuts.  A 100 year pandemic that led to mandatory shutdowns of businesses all over, for most of you.  I was one of the homeless people who got left outside to die when everything closed down.  Turned out the virus liked it better in doors, but we didn't realize that for a while.  Either way, everyone's lifestyle was seriously impaced.  Over 40 million people lost their jobs for a while, some permanently, and the economy tanked, technically it was a short depression, because GDP dropped more than 10%, it dropped 32% in under three months.

"This will only be for a couple of weeks" we were told at first when mandatory face masks and shutdowns began.  Reember that?  Then "a couple more weeks," then another month.  The restrictions dragged on, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives.  But it kept going.  Work from home, Zoom calls, and whole families watching and making TikTok dance videos.  School was on a computer screen.  Then it kept dragging on, and on.  And that's for all of us who lived, over a million Americans, and millions more around the world died from Covid-19 complications.  We all know that stuff, as much as we're trying to forget.

Then came stimulus money, "helicopter money" as the business press often called it.  Suddenly people were locked down but buying cars and stocks and homes they couldn't afford when things began to open up partially.  The pandemic became a political issue, along with a health and economic issue.  Just about every single person's day to day life changed dramatically.  Then the stimulus money blew up the stock market, the crypto markets, the real estate market, and the car and truck market, even collectibles like vintage comic books and baseball card prices soared.  All that money eventually coagulated into serious inflation, which eventually led to The Fed raising interest rates to fight the inflation they caused.  The fastest interest rates rise in U.S. history in turn began to kill crypto, stocks, real estate, and now the auto market is feeling it.  Ridiculous prices on assets began to drop back down some.  But not before thousands of Millennials bought homes at above market prices at the peak of the market.  They've got a big lesson in basic economics coming soon.  Now we are heading into another recession.  

How did all this happen?  Why are so many things so crazy now?  Did anyone see this craziness coming?  Did anyone try to warn us about the long list of issues we've all been dealing with?  

Yes, as a matter of fact, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in a series of books that Alvin wrote, did forecast many of the things we have dealt with, not just since 2020, but since Alvin's first major book, Future Shock, was published way back in 1970.  His next book took a decade, and tons of research.  The Third Wave was published in 1980, and those two became the books he is best known for. 

The main theme was that we were leaving an "industrial-based society," and moving into an "information-based society," as he referred to them.  Now, 43 years later, it's easy to say, "Duh!," to the idea that we were (and still are) leaving the Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age.  We are all familiar with that basic idea now.  Alvin Toffler wrote several more books, building on The Third Wave theme, the last one being Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2006.  Alvin Toffler died a decade later in 2016.  But the incredible research, thinking, and insights in Revolutionary Wealth are still mind blowing, even today, 17 years after it was published.  Being a huge fan of the Tofflers, and having written about what I now call The Big Transition, the continuation of the Tofflers' Third Wave changes still happening in society, I just re-read Revolutionary Wealth.  

Here are just a few of the ideas in the book that should be everyday knowledge, but aren't, much to our detriment.  If you want to understand why the 2020's seem so crazy, Revolutionary Wealth is the single best book I know of, to help figure out what's happening today.  

We all know there are the things we focus on in everyday life.  For most people, everyday life revolves around their family, their job, their house, doing laundry, getting oil changes in the car, getting the kids to their after school activities, fixing dinner, and everything else people do day after day.  Then there are fundamentals in life, things like going to school, getting an education, finding a job, paying bills, the basics of life in today's world.  

Early on in Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin Toffler goes even deeper, into what he calls "Deep Fundamentals."  These are apsects of human life and human society that go on at a level that few of us, even geeky futurist thinker dweebs like me, rarely ponder.  Three of the major deep fundamentals he explores are the changes in how we relate to time, space (location in the country), and work.  

For example, when the Industrial Age was building, huge numbers of former farmers became assembly line workers in factories, and precise time became much more important.  Factory workers needed to be trained to get to work on time, to do repetitive jobs, and to do things at specific times.  That era, in the late 1800's, is when people started carrying pocket watches or wristwatches, and began to put clocks everywhere, at home, in the office, and in the factory.  Another part of that is that is when our current school system was invented, to "teach industrial discipline," that's actual wording from those days.  It's also a huge reason why our education system sucks in so many ways.  It's not the teachers, my sister's a teachers, and Alvin Toffler's sister was to, there are plenty of great teachers out there that want to make our education system better, in 1,000 different ways.  But we are stuck, for now, with an education system that was invented about 140 or 150 years ago, to turn farm kids into assembly line workers.  The system itself is outdated, and needs to be completely reinvented.  That's just one big issue affecting not only how "revolutionary wealth" is created in today's world, but it drastically affects how society evolves or devolves going forward.  

Back to the Deep Fundamental of time, few people actually work on assembly lines anymore in the U.S., how we interact with time has changed, and continues to change dramtically.  The same is true of the deep fundamentals of space, or location.  There was a time when a city needed to be near a deep water port, major railroad lines, or natural resources, like timber or minerals, to thrive.  That has changed to a huge degree in a world where wealth is often created primarily with ideas.  Austin, Texas is a major tech hub these days, not because it's on an ocean port or major navigable river like the Mississippi or the Ohio.  Austin is a tech hub largely because of a culture with lots of weird creative people, artists, musicians, filmakers, and tech entrepreneurs.  It's not dependent on nearby coal or potash mines.  Different things are important now, and we are in a long period of chaotic change between the fading Industrial Age society, and the emerging Information Age society.  Alvin Toffler explores these deep fundamentals and really digs into how these nuances make a big difference at a level almost no one is looking at or thinking about.  

As with all of his books since The Third Wave in 1980, Toffler goes over the concept that we are still moving into the Third Wave of human society.  He also explains this in the video above.  To clarify this idea, here are the three waves he defined in The Third Wave.  Originally, humans lived in small tribal bands that we generally refer to as hunter/gatherers in sociology today.  The First Wave was the change from hunter/gatherers into an Agricultural Age, a world of farmers.  This started somewhere around 9,000 years ago, probably in or near Turkey, according to Toffler.  Agriculture moved very slowly, and took thousands of years to become the dominant lifetstyle in the world.  But when people stayed in one place and became farmers, the lifestyle of every single person changed dramatically from the earlier tribal societies. Villages and small towns and cities began to form. 

The Second Wave was the change from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age.  The Toffler's put this age's start about 350 years ago, and it took a couple of hundred years to become the dominant lifestyle in the world.  That transition happend much faster than the Agricultural revolution, and again every single person's lifestyle changed.  Small villages became towns, and some towns grew into large, and even huge cities as the Industrial Age progressed.  

The Third Wave began in 1956, when the number of "white collar" office workers first outnumbered the number of "blue collar" factory workers in the U.S..  The Information Age began slowly growing from that point.  The transition between the two was still continuing, when Alvin offler published Revolutionary Wealth in 2006, and I argue this transition is still going on today.  

In today's world, in many developing countries, there still are First Wave people living off subsistence agriculture, and in "developed" countries, we still have many Second Wave Industrial Age people and businesses, still working from that mentality of building physical objects as the main source of wealth.  

We also have the Third Wave, Information Age people, creating "products" and services that in many cases, don't physically exist, like websites and internet content, streaming video, financial services, and the huge video gaming industry.  Huge amounts of wealth are now created in these revolutionary ways, built in a digital world and a physical world, yet in new ways.  

We also have a lot of battles between the people and interests in each of these waves.  Toffler refers to this as "wave warfare," where, for example, old school Industrial businesses lobby politicians for one sort of result, and Information Age tech businesses will lobby politicians for a completely different set of results and outcomes.  These different special interests are battling each other, though few people think of it this way.  This is yet another cause of drama and chaos in today's society.

Another issue Toffler dives into is the economic conundrum of "information-based" products and wealth.  One traditional definition of "economics" was "the allocation of scarce resources."  But knowlege is not a scarce resource, like coal or steel.  Another issue is that many different people can use the same "knowledge," but only one person can use a machine or a piece of steel at one time.  The point is that the whole world of "economics" doesn't even have models to even to begin and try and figure out how to quantify and analyze information-based products and services.  Economics is using obsolete Industrial Age concepts to try and analyze an Information Age world economy.  They simply don't have the basic tools to analyze business and finance in the Information Age world.  It will be decades before economists come up with, and agree on, even basic models to anaylze an information-based economy.

This brings me to another idea Toffler shares in this book.  The idea is that much of the knowledge each of us has in our head is outdated and obsolete.  It just isn't true anymore.  The Toffler's call this "Obsoledge," for "obsolete knowledge."  We are all operating with some knowledge about particular subjects that is simply outdated, because that specific area has evolved, changed, and our thinking hasn't.  

Another huge issue Toffler digs deep into in Revolutionary Wealth is the idea of "Prosuming," another word they made up, in a previous book.  Prosuming is creating a good or service for personal consumption.  Prosuming is work that is done by someone, but no money changes hands, so it doesn't get counted in the money economy.  For example, when you cook your own food and make dinner for your family, that was work that you did for your family's consumption.  But other than buying the food, no money changed hands for the actual work of cooking, serving the food, and doing the dishes afterwards.  If your whole family had gone to a restaurant, you would have to pay quite a bit for someone else to perform those services.  

Prosuming is its own non-money, which is much larger than the actual money economy.  All of this work that's done for free, all across the U.S., and around the world, that has huge effects on the money economy.  But the contributions of pro-suming are never really acknowledged by economists and others in academia.  Linux software was created for free, and has had major effects on the world.  Wikipedia is a huge, crowd-source, pro-suming project, another big example of pro-suming in today's technological world.  Wikipedia largely put encyclopedias out of business, but doing the job better, more up-to-date, with mostly amateurs, that correct each other's contributions.  The end result is an evolving "encyclopedia" that's doesn't physically exist, yet is available as a free resource to billions of people around the world.  Another great example of highly productive prosuming are all those thousands of how-to videos on YouTube, to help us all learn to use new devices, software, and other things.  YouTube was a year old, and still often laughed at, when Toffler published Revolutionary Wealth.  Now half of all TV watching, on big screens, is YouTube content, most of it creator-made content, not scripted shows produced by major studios.

The most influential pro-suming, as any mom knows, is all the work moms and dadsand other family members do raising kids, that never gets counted as paid work.  Employers looking for new people to fill jobs don't have to worry about their recruits being potty trained, knowing how to speak English (or whatever their native language in their country), and most basic social skills.  Parents do those things, and many more, to prepare kids to be adults.  Sure, some do better jobs than others.  But imagine how much money would have to be spent to hire a crew to raise and train a single baby until they were old enough to get their first job.  The cost would be enormous.  All that work of getting kids to adulthood is done by moms, dads, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and some friends.  That is an huge benefit to society that never gets any economic value attached to it.  That is just one part of pro-suming in today's world.

Another issue that all these other changes have lead to in this period of transition is the great mismatches in different aspects of society.  In the height of the Industrial Age, with most people working repetitive assembly line jobs, people were largely interchangable. When there were 1,000 job openings, average people could fill most of them.  A lot of those jobs could easily mix and match employees.  So when the government said we have million empty jobs, employers needed a million average people to fill the vast majority of them.  

Now we have far more jobs that involve specialized knowedge, creativity, critical thinking, or skill sets that are much more rare.  That's why, as I write this, we have (officially) 9.6 million jobs that need workers, and 6 million unemployed people.  Because long term unemployed people are no longer counted, we actually have two or three othe runemployed people for each one that is officially counted.  So we probably have around 18 million unemployed people of working age now.  But those millions people can't, or won't fill those 9.6 million jobs open right now.  So many jobs require specialized technical, or other skills and knowledge, that we have this huge mismatch.  We have lots of jobs that need filled, and lots of people who need good jobs, but they don't fit each other.  This mismatch is just one of many happening in society right now.  

Another mismatch is the spatial/geographical mismatch.  Tech jobs tend to cluster in a small number of tech hub cities, because tech companies cluster where the best tech workers are, generally.  Since tech workers have some of the highest pay in today's work world, they are willing to pay more for housing, and other services.  So tech hub citites and regions, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, L.A./SoCal, Boston, the Washinton D.C./Arlington area, Austin, Texas, have seen rent and home prices soar over the last 30 years or so.  This makes it much harder for lower wage service workers to survive in those areas.  

But at the same time, many former powerhouse cities of the Industrial Age, like Chicago, Illinois,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio, and many others, have struggled to survive and rebuild, after losing 100,000 factory jobs, and that many people, in some cases.  Other big Industrial cities have practically collapsed after the loss of tens of thousands of factory jobs,  like Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and one of the worst, Gary, Indiana.  We have cities where high paying tech jobs can't find workers.  And we have dozens of towns and cities that are a shadow of their former selves, struggling to find any jobs for all their residents.  

This is another mismatch of the cities that worked economically 50 years ago, and the ones that work the best economically in the emerging Information Age.  We have all kinds of cheap rental houses, and even thousands of abandoned ones, in places where there isn't near as much of an economy anymore.  At the same time, we have people renting treehouses in Austin for $3,000 a week or so to go to SXSW, the music and tech festival.  Alvin Toffler goes into other huge mismatches in society caused by the changes in how we interact with the deep fundamentals of time, space, and work.  

Oh yeah, Toffler mentions a pandemic as one major thing we had to look out for in the future, a handful of times in the book, yes, way back in 2006.  That was one of many issues he saw potentially arising and causing a lot of trouble.  

Revolutionary Wealth is over 500 pages, and this was the third time I've read it, the first was back in 2010 or 2011, I think.  I read dozens of books in that era.  I read it again in about 2015-2016, I think.  It's still mind blowing, although the world has changed quite a bit in 17 years.  There is so much of what he wrote about back then that is not only still happening, but almost no one seems to be using many of the ideas he wrote about.  If you ever get a chance to write a reading list for current world leaders, and city leaders everywhere, put this book on the list.  There is still a whole lot to learn from the work of the late Alvin Toffler.  We would be a lot better off today if most major leaders, at every level, had studied this book back when it came out.  We would be a lot better off if Revolutionary Wealth was mandatory reading in colleges 10 or 15 or 17 years ago.  

So there's a very brief look at an incredible book, now 17 years old, that still holds a ton of valuable information on why our world is so crazy today.  That's the mark of a good futurist, when the book still has a lot to teach a decade or two later.  Revolutionary Wealth is one of those books.  Now you know.  Maybe a few of you will read it, which is my hope.  

* Not a paid link

I have a new blog now, about side hustles, gig jobs, small businesses, the economy, and making money during the recession.  Check it out:

Small Business Futurist

Trend analyst Gerald Celente says, "The game is rigged"- Is he right?

Here's one of the best future forecasters out there, whose work I've never read.  My mistake, I only learned of him recently.  This is a crazy interview with Daniella Cambone, where he goes into economic trends, World War III, the future of democracy, the recession, crypto, politics, crypto, gold, and much more.  If any of these things interest you, watch this 42 minute video.  

I have a new blog called Adaptive Reuse SoCal, about finding new uses for old, unused, and abandoned buildings, as well as the economy, and commerical real estate in general.  Check it out!

Adaptive Reuse SoCal

The Third Anniversary of starting my book/blog thing: "Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now"

The home page of my 20 chapter "book/blog thing," as I call it, "Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1"  The idea for this came in October of 2019, I began writing out ideas and doing research right after that.  I published "Dystopia," chapter by chapter, from late December, 2019 until early June 2020.  

"The word 'recession" is basically meaningless in today's ultra manipulated economic world.  I'm calling this decade 'The Phoenix Depression.'  Whatever the numbers and the economists' statistics end up being, this decade will feel like a full blown great depression to most people."

-Me (Steve Emig) Chapter 1 of "Dystopia"

 I've been writing and self-publishing my thoughts since I started a BMX freestyle zine, in September of 1985.  I have not written a single "real," physcially published, paper book, in the 37 years since.  But, I have self-published the equivalent of 20 to 25 average novels worth of writing, over 1.5 million words total.  These pieces have been in zines, a couple of dozen published magazine articles, tens months at a paid newsletter job, over 2,500 blog posts, and two e-books, counting Dystopia.  This is the most intense piece of writing I've ever done.  

Yesterday something reminded me of Dystopia, and I realized that it has now been three years since I got started writing it.  After thinking about how much crazy stuff has happened in the past three years, and how our whole world has changed so much since, I decided to go back and re-visit Dystopia, look at what I wrote, and how that compares to the past three years' events, and where things seem to be headed now.  I've been writing about BMX, skateboarding, and action sports for a couple of months straight, not writing at all about the future, economics, or societal trends.  The big crash I saw coming is the one we are heading into now, so I stopped writing about the future a couple of months ago.  Everyone and their brother is writing and reporting on the economic trands now.  It seemed time to quit and go on to something else.  Now, realizing the three year anniversary of starting Dystopia, it made sense to come back to this blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear, to look back at my prediction of a great depression-like scenario in the future.    

I have been blogging about worrisome future trends, like the the loss of millions of jobs to new technology, for example, for many years.  This post, the second post of this blog, from June 2017, is an example.  The ideas in Dystopia didn't come out of a vacuum.  They were a culmination, and an organizing of my thoughts, along with theories, trends, and my observations, from over 30 years.  

In the 2000's, and into the 2010's, theories I'd read about earlier, gained validity in my head, as actual events seemed to bear them out.  As the internet, smartphones, and a whole slew of other new technologies changed our everyday world,  a whole bunch of somewhat related ideas and concepts were bouncing around in my head.  These gained steam, and seemed to become more interconnected, as we neared the year 2020.  I had written blog posts, and journal entries, about bits and pieces of these ideas, but never sat down to really flesh them out and organize them.  For a whole bunch of reasons, a big one being that my 5 1/2 years as a taxi driver led me deeper into homelessness,  I didn't have time to really sit down and dig into these ideas.  For most of the last 20 years, my life has been day to day struggle to keep going, sometimes with a place to live, very often without.  With no stability in my personal life, sitting down for months to write a serious book just wasn't going to happen.  So all these ideas about where society and the economy were going, just kept building.  

Most of that thinking happened while I was living in North Carolina, and then homeless in Richmond, Virginia, from 2008 to 2019.  Since I never could find a single "real" job in NC, I spent a lot of time reading books, and watching videos by smart people, at the libraries.  I made it back to Southern California in the spring of 2019, with a friend's help, so I could use my blogging and social media skills, to promote his new online business.  That didn't pan out as we planned, and I once again found myself on the streets of Southern California.  September 2019 found me selling small Sharpie drawings I drew for food money on Hollywood Boulevard, to tourists and locals.  I spent my nights over the hill in the San Fernando Valley, which was a bit less crazy and generally less dangerous.

One morning, in the second or third week of October 2019, I woke up in a parking lot where I slept, with a huge idea, about 4:30 am.  The basic idea was to watch the movie trailers of all the main dystopic future movies from the 1960's through the 1990's, and see how close they came to predicting the actual "future" we were living in 2019.  Part of the idea was realizing that I was living in the "future,"  of my childhood and high school self.  I remembered reading Popular Science articles predicting flying cars, traveling ot the moon as a tourist, and other things we'd do "in the 21st century."  In 2019, it was 30-45 years after watching many of those dystopian future movies as a kid and a teen.  Did any of those movies accurately predict the real world in 2019, or parts of it?  Or did they miss the mark?  By seeing how our best novelists and movie writers and directors predicted the future, in decades past, I could get some idea of whether my thoughts about an economic depression, and a chaotic decade of massive amounts of change, might hit or miss the mark as we entered into the 2020's.  Starting from a look at how others had predicted the future in earlier decades, I would start putting my ideas down about where I saw us heading in 2020 and beyond.  

At the time, there were three big theories I believed in, two of which no one else paid any attention to. Those theories/concepts were; Alvin and Heidi Toffler's "Third Wave," P.R. Sarkar's "Law of Social Cycle," and Richard Florida's Creative Class concept.  Those three theories together, along with other mid and long term trends, all seemed to be converging, all heading towards major inflaction points in the early 2020's.  The convergence seemed to be setting up the early 2020's as a time of both serious economic chaos, and major societal change.  So the insight I woke up with was one of those ideas that pops into the head of writers, seemingly out of nowhere, and saying, "Get started on this... NOW!"  I'd had those ideas before.  I acted on some, and ignored others, years ago.  I've learned to follow those creative impulses over time.  So I did.  

I had a hand-me-down laptop, a decent one, though about three years old.  So I watched trailers of futuristic movies, starting with 1927's Metropolis, and moving forward, hitting classics like Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Mad Max, and Blade Runner, and continued until I got to The Hunger Games.  It was a really interesting exercise.  The big take was that our best sci-fi novelists, screenwriters and directors got most of "the future" wrong.  But they got parts of it, like telescreens making video phone calls, (Facetime, Zoom calls, Skype calls) right.  

With those insights fresh in my memory, I got a cheap notebook, which I could barely afford, and started writing.  I'd grab on to one big idea, and just write where it led me.  Morning after morning, eating a cheap breakfast at McDonald's, I wrote for an hour or more, getting pieces of all these interconnected ideas on paper.  After a couple of weeks, early November 2019, they started to form into a few main themes, more concrete ideas and less nebulous ponderings.  I had no idea what to do with these ideas, but just a strong urgency to keep writing and see where it took me.  

One particularly interesting thing was that when I watched the Blade  Runner trailer, for the original 1982 movie, I noticed a silent slate at the start.  "Los Angeles, November 2019."  I was just getting into this big writing project idea, I wasn't even really a fan of the Blade Runner movie, though my dad really liked it when it came out.  But there I was, writing about the future, sitting in The Valley, a handful of miles from downtown Los Angeles, in the exact month and year that Blade Runner movie was set.  I had stumbled on a perfect comparison.  How did Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic stack up against real life Los Angeles in November 2019.  Not well, actually.  Nobody gave a fuck about replicants.  There are no replicants, unless you count those $6,000 love dolls.  People in real world L.A. in November 2019 were polled by the L.A.Times about their biggest worry.  The winner?  Homeless people.  L.A. people were totally worried about all the homeless people (like me).  Ridley Scott did get the telescreen thing right, their conversations in the movie were similar to Facetime and Skype calls, just on walls, not phones.  

Heading into December 2019, I had a couple of notebooks worth of rough ideas about where the economy, and society in general, was heading in the next several years, in my opinion.  I saw a huge crash looming, leading to a Great Recession level, or greater, economic event, at least 3 to 5 turbulent years long, maybe more.  The prevailing wisdom on Wall Street at the time was that a minor recession might happen in 2020.  Maybe.  

My ideas sat on the back of three theories by otherthinkers and writers, Alvin Toffler's Third Wave concept from 1980, P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle, which no one had heard of (except economist Ravi Batra, who wrote about it in 1989), and the much better known, and largely accepted Creative Class concept by Richard Florida.  If I wanted to write a book about my thoughts, explaining why I thought those three theories really helped explain the future that would actually happen, it would take a year toresearch and write, and probably two or three more to try to get everything approved, and actually get a publisher, if I was exceptionally lucky.  

What I was writing about was going to happen much sooner than any "real," major publisher book could be published.  As I said, there was an urgency to this whole idea from that first morning I woke up with it in my head.  I thought, "Well, I'm a blogger, what if I just built a blog, laid it out ahead of time, so the chapters would be in correct order (not backwards, like posts in a blog), and then just filled them in as I wrote it?"  My tech skills suck, overall, but that was easy to do on Blogger.  On December 21, 2019, I built a blog for "Dystopia," organizing it as a book, so you could read one chapter, then scroll on to the next one, a blog version of an ebook, basically.  That's how I published it to the world.  

It's always been free to anyone, and has never had any advertising.  I haven't made a dime from it, directly or indirectly.  This was just something I felt needed to be written.  I saw a really chaotic period coming our way, lasting years, and I wanted to alert anyone I could.  I wanted to explain what I saw coming, and why I thought it was coming, and explain some of the events I thought would happen in this chaotic period.  Nobody agreed with me at the time.  Except Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki, who had predicted a major economic downturn happening in 2017, way back in 2002, in Rich Dad's Prophesy.  He was about the only other person I knew of with thoughts of a big downturn ahead.  

When I build the blog, I thought I had maybe 10 or 11 chapters worth of material.  But I know how ideas can expand, or lead off to tangents, so I build a 20 chapter "book" blog, to give myself room to grow if needed.  The way I built it, I could easily delete chapters, but not add new ones.  I just had the chapter titles, and a random urban photo I had taken in Richmond, Virginia, as a placeholder for each chapter.  I wrote and edited Dystopia, chapter by chapter, from December 21st, 2019, to around June 8th, 2020.  

As we all know now, a lot happened in those 5 1/2 months, as I was writing it.  Our world changed dramatically, probably forever.  I wound up using those extra 9 or 10 chapters, filling up the full 20.  While I was writing, Covid-19 appeared in China, three months later, it made it to U.S. shores, and the completely inadequate initial response cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.  The shutdown crashed the stock market, led to the mass shutdowns, to 25 million people losing their jobs for a while, and everyone figuring out what to do while stuck at home.  

Well... almost everyone.  I wrote the first one or two chapters while homeless.  Then a friend in Orange County was able to let me stay in her spare bedroom for a couple of months, where I wrote 6 or 7 more chapters.  Then I went back out to the streets, and finished Dystopia, living as a homeless guy, outside, during the Covid shutdowns.  By the time I finished writing Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, we were just figuring out that the pandemic would not "be over in 6 to 8 weeks," and it was going to last "a little while longer."  Over 25 million Americans were still out of work, others were mastering Zoom calls, learning how to work from home.  Us homeless people were, literally, left outside to die.  That sounds harsh, but it's true, and there were definitely some people hoping for a dramatic reduction in the homeless population from Covid.  Nearly all of the resources, businesses and public buildings, that we relied on, were closed.  But as it turned out, the virus didn't like the outdoors, and a relatively small percentage of homeless people died.  Only one I know did, and he had very serious health issues before the pandemic  

So that's a long look at how I wrote the most intense collection of ideas I've ever written, as well as some of the most prescient.  The Dystopia book/blog thing, as I call it, has had less than 3,000 total page views in three years.  That's less than I hoped for as time passed, but far more than I initially expected.  In the three years since I started writing Dystopia, over 1.1 million Americans died after contracting Covid-19, we have endured a 100 year pandemic, a textbook economic depression (10% drop in GDP), and a textbook economic recession (2 consecutive quarters of GDP contraction), and we're just beginning what I believe will be the hardest 2-3 years of this decade.   But enough has happened to verify that I was onto something, writing this when I did.  There was life before 2020, and life after 2020.  The jacked up part is that 2021 got crazier than 2020, and then 2022 came in, when we'd thought we'd seen it all, and inflation soared, stocks dropped, The Fed raised interest rates to combat inflation, that caused the insane real estate FOMO market to slow down, tip, and head down.  And now bond market liquidity and a looming "real" recession are on most people's minds.  Politically, most people thought all this chaos would lead to a huge wave of Republican victories in the mid-term elections, and that Red Wave fizzled, taking far fewer political seats over than expected.  Things are just weird everywhere you look.  

This is what I tried to warn people about, in blog posts over the last four years, and particularly in Dystopia.  We're in a really weird place in history.  My thoughts, based on three big theories of others, is still the best explanation I've seen for all this chaos.  But now, three years after I started writing Dystopia, my thoughts have some credibility.  I still think my Big Picture view can help people weather the rest of this crazy storm we all find ourselves in as a country, and a society.  

Thinking about it last night and today, while writing this post, I'm going to re-visit Dystopia, chapter by chapter, and see where I got things right, where I didn't, and give my thoughts on where things may go now, and into the next two or three years.  

If you're one of the six or so people who read this whole post, thank you.  I know this is tough reading for most people.  But hopefully it's worth it.  Here's the link if you want to check out any part of Dystopia.  Each chapter can be ready seperately, without losing much context.  

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now

 

Things that are going to happen in the 2020's...

The decade of the 2020's started much like any other.  It kind of crept in quietly.  Most people thought things would go on as they always had.  And then...

We are now 27 months into the Tumultuous 2020's, probably the craziest decade any of us alive now will ever see.  On August 9, 2019, I wrote the blog post below, explaining trends playing out that I thought would turn the 2020's into a really crazy decade.  Check out the second to last paragraph in that post:

A Beginner's Guide to the Next Great Recession

When I wrote that post, the business media was saying that we might have a mild recession in 2020.  Nothing to really worry about.  As a lifelong student of long term trends, cycles, and futurist thinking, I knew they were wrong.  I just wasn't sure how wrong.  In September 2019, the Repo Market crisis happened, and the U.S. banking system seized up, and a continuous, low key bailout of the banking system began.  It's still going on now.  But everyday life didn't change much, most people barely noticed the Repo Market crisis.  Then Covid happened six months later.  As we all know, everyday life changed dramatically, for almost everyone.  2020 seemed like the craziest year ever... until 2021 happened.  

One of the big, underlying trends, is what the futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler called The Third Wave.  Very simply, we are making the long, sticky, messy transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age.  Many of our businesses and institutions have made the transition, like high tech and much of the media.  Many other parts of society are still working from an Industrial Age mindset and business models.  Like the difference between shopping at Sear's 30 years ago, and shopping online or on phone today.  Old school businesses and parts of our world are breaking down, and new versions, usually using lots of tech, are being created, and growing.  This is happening all around us, in schools, colleges, banking, government, political parties, and organizations of all kinds.  It's really stressful to all of us.  I call this The Big Freakin' Transitition.  With this concept as a background, I see a lot of trends headed our way before they become really obvious.

2020 and 2021 have been nuts.  So where do things go now?  Here are some of the main things I believe will happen in the 7 years and 9 months left of this decade:

Prices on most things keep going up, though slower- For a whole bunch of reasons, it appears that prices on much of what we buy will keep going up for many more months.  The money supply has been greatly increased, that's the big reason.  I think inflation will stay pretty high, but slow down as we head into another recessionary wave.  Stocks and real estate should drop quite a bit later this year.  But I think consumer goods will keep rising.  I wrote this yesterday, and the inflation rate came in at 8.5%, highest since 1981, this morning.  Figure out how to earn more money people, because prices will keep rising for quite a while to come.  

Another, bigger, "recession"- Simply put, we didn't let the 2020 recession (actually a depression, by definition) do its job.  Recessions generally weed out poorly run businesses, small and large, and lead to more innovation and new business and social models.  Instead, everyone, EVERY PERSON, EVERY BUSINESS, got bailed out, in some way, in 2020 and 2021.  Because the entire banking system has been continually bailed out (and still is), we all got bailed out, in addition to stimulus checks, PUA, PPP, and other money the federal government handed out.  So another recession was inevitable, and we're heading into it now (April 2022).  This one won't be as deep, but it will be much longer, and harder to crawl out of.

Real estate slowdown- Instead of crashing during the 2020 downturn, the trillions in newly created dollars fueled the real estate market to go completely nuts.  A low inventory of houses, millennial FOMO, and corporate/high tech home buying threw it into hyper drive.  In early 2022, that is slowing down, and as interest rates keep going up (already up 1.5% from 6 months ago) I believe we'll see a dramatic slowing down in real estate, and price drops in most areas, in late 2022 and into 2023.  

The College Apocalypse- After a conversation about colleges, with a couple friends in 2017, I looked into why student loan debt has soared so much since the Great Recession.  The reason is because since 2009, student loans have been sold and repackaged as investments (called SLABS), just like the infamous "sub prime" home loans in the 2000's.  Those sparked the Great Recession.  Right now, banks and institutional investors are sitting on over $1 trillion in student loan SLABS (investments), which are pretty much worthless, because hardly anyone is paying their loans back right now.  The system is in crisis already.  This isn't something in the future, this is where we are at now.  This will eventually lead to some colleges and universities going out of business, or closing smaller branch campuses.  This has happened already happened to dozens of small colleges.  Ultimately, I think we'll see 20% to 40% of today's colleges and universities close down in the 2020's and early 2030's, much like what already happened in the Retail Apocalypse. 

Student Loan Debt Crisis/restructuring- Student loan debt is crushing Millennials, and older generations, too.  It is one of the biggest, possibly the biggest drag, on the consumer economy.  We will have to find a better way to pay for college, if we want people to keep attending colleges in large numbers.  In addition, college itself will have to restructure into a model that works in today's high tech based, hyper-communication enabled world, where most information is available for free.  A complete restructuring of the higher education financing system simply must happen.  This will take 10-15 years to play, I believe.  It's just getting started now.

Eds and Meds ghost towns of the 2020's- When colleges and universities do start closing down in numbers, this will have a major effect on the cities where these schools are located.  These days, years after the loss of high paying factory jobs, a lot of small and mid-sized cities are known as "Eds and Meds" towns.  That means the local college or university, as well as the hospitals, are the main employers in town.  There are probably 100-150 cities in this category across the U.S..  When colleges get shut down, many of these cities, will shrink dramatically.  I believe most of these will be the second and third tier cities, far from the major cities and large metro areas.  Put it this way, if your mall and your discount store have shut down, check to see how strong your local college is.  There will be a lot of ghost towns ten years from now.  

Blockchain/crypto goes mainstream- The global banking system crashed in 2008, and hasn't been truly functional since. We've basically been in continual bailout mode, since, living on the government's credit card, so to speak.  While the central bank centered, worldwide banking system uses a ton of high technology, the basic structure of banks goes back to the Medici days of the 1400's.  Crypto, smart contracts, decentralized finance models (DeFi), NFT's and all kinds of new fintech have been invented and implemented since.  Since the banking system doesn't work well for MOST people at this point, we will all keep trying to models, until we find a system, using many of these building blocks, that works in today's world.  It will be pretty chaotic for a while, as some of these things go mainstream, and others fall by the wayside.  10-15 years from now, we will have a completely different worldwide monetary system, and it WILL NOT be based on central bank digital currencies.  We probably won't have central banks at all.  

What will this system look like?  I have no idea.  But many of the technologies, like crypto, phone based payment systems, and other pieces of today's world, will be parts of it.  Again, the old system is breaking down, and a new system is being built, like in every other industry that hasn't made the transition already.  

A new standard money- Warren Buffet, one of the world's best investors, recently said that the U.S. dollar has lost 94% of its value, in his lifetime (he's 91).  The Fed is testing a "digital dollar" it will try to force on us soon.  That's fact, you can google it.  But a central bank digital currency, any of them, will be an even more fiat form of fiat currency,  They ARE NOT cryptos.  And they won't work for the long term.  They'll just lead to hyper inflation and more problems, most likely.  We will have some new form of currency in the coming years, but we don't know what it will actually be.  Or we may have many private-based currencies, because right now, a lot of people have more faith in things like Bitcoin and Ethereum than central bank digital currencies.  Basically, the world will figure out some new kind of currency that will actually work in today's hyper connected world.  We just don't know what it will be... yet.

  

A heck of a lot of protests, marches, and a few riots- The U.S. Constitution acknowledged that all people have certain inalienable rights, rights which CAN NOT be taken away by legislation or the government.  But, in practice, many groups are harassed or have been victims of all kinds of prejudice for decades.  We've seen Black, gay, and trans rights groups rising up a lot in the last couple of years.  We will see many more groups fight for rights that have been stripped of them in previous decades.  Simply said, I believe there will be a lot more protests, and fights for legal rights for many more minority groups in society.  These may include immigrants, the homeless and poverty stricken, old people, young people, artists, thinkers, and creative people, and several small ethnic minorities.  This will be a big decade for social movements and social change, in general.

Change.  If there is one word to sum up what I call the Tumultuous 2020's, that word is change.  

These are not the only things that will happen in the next 8 or 9 years.  But these are some of the biggest trends I see headed our way, ones that will affect a large number of people.  These are my thoughts.  If they makes sense to you plan accordingly going into our weird and wild future.

I have a new blog now, check it out:

The Spot Finder     #thespotfinder

My 20 chapter book/blog thing- "Welcome to Dystopia" is still out there... waiting

Metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a Monarch butterfly.  In my opinion, this is the kind of transformation all of society is in right now.  

Just a reminder to the more geeky readers that, from October 2019 to April 2020, I wrote a 20 chapter book/blog thing online called Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1.  At the time, late 2019, I believed we were going into a great depression, a 5 to 7 year economic downturn, along with major social transformations predicted by a couple of ultra-long term theories I believe are pretty solid.  The Repo Market crisis was a month old when I started writing this.  Covid-19 hadn't even popped up in China, it was not on anyone's radar here in the U.S..  The stock markets were hitting all time highs, and the conventional wisdom was that there might be a minor recession in late 2020.

I disagreed, I saw us heading into "The Tumultuous 2020's," a time of unparalleled economic, technological, cultural, and social change.  Here's a quote from chapter 20, written in April 2020, about six weeks into the Covid era:

"Change.  Our current Dystopia is massive change.  We are in a period of societal change unlike anything in our known history.  Several aspects of human society are changing, all at once.  And that's hard.  As adaptable as we'd like to think we are, we humans don't like change.  But change is here, it's big, and it will keep happening for some time to come, like it or not.  The downside of this is that what we call "normal" is collapsing around us.  The upside is that we, as humans on Earth, get to build something new."  

"Dystopia," as I refer to this 20 chapter beast of a book/blog thing, goes deep into ideas few have even heard of.  I got things wrong as I looked forward from what is now the "pre-Covid Era."  I dramatically underestimated how much money the Federal Reserve would create to prop up the banking system, major businesses, and Wall Street in particular.  So the economic part is playing out different than I expected.  But I got the change part right.  

"Dystopia" can be read by single chapters, it's more a bunch of essays than a non-fiction book with a well-defined through line.  Or, if you're a glutton for pretty big ideas, you can try to read it all, straight through.  I just wanted to remind people that's it's out there, just chillin' on the interwebs, waiting for adventrous brains to come check it out.  It was written at the end of the "old times" and the very beginning of the "Covid era."  And it was written by me, a man who was homeless for four of the six months I was writing it.  If you want to check it out, click the link above.  

An Engineer's Son: Why I'm always looking to the future

This locomotive, to pull trains in mines, was made by Plymouth Locomotive Works, where my dad, Tom Emig, worked in the late 1970's.  The company went under in about 1983, but decades later, Plymouth locomotives are still working around the world.  That's what they were known for, incredible reliability.

I write about a bunch of totally different things on this blog, from old school BMX freestyle stories to  economics and our future.  Quite a few people wonder why I keep writing about the recessions, the economics of the United States, and things I never went to school for.  These are the blog posts that I've actually had my life and well being threatened over several times.  Some people think I have no business writing about these subjects.  Sorry.  This is a huge area of interest for me, and I'm always looking to the future and where we're headed as a society.  Why?  Because I'm an engineer's son.

And that's where Plymouth Locomotives, like the one above, come in.  I was about ages 10 to 13 when my dad worked at Plymouth Locomotive Works, in Plymouth, Ohio.  The Industrial Age was still roaring, most people worked in factories, or in the office next to the factory, like my dad.  This was the first plant I remember my dad taking me to as a kid, walking me through on a Saturday morning, as he went to check on something being built on overtime hours by the shop guys.  It was in this factory that he taught me to always look away and shield my eyes when I saw someone welding, since that super bright glare can damage unshielded eyes.

It was around this time that my dad first explained how he designed things.  I can't remember the actual situation, but I remember his outlook on how something should be designed.  First, he had to design a machine.  So, like this mining locomotive above, He had to make a machine a certain size, to fit certain sized rails, with all the parts needed to pull mine trains through tunnels in mines around the world.  So he had a certain size locomotive, and he and the other engineers had to make the engine, drive train, hydraulics, and all the mechanical pieces fit into that machine.  But that was only the start.  My dad knew that people had to work on and inspect his machines, so he thought about how that would happen, and in the case of this locomotive, they painted the whole thing white, inside and out, to help inspectors and mechanics who would be working on these in low light years later.  My dad would call the customer, and ask what the weather was like where the machine would be used.  Did it have to deal with 120 degree heat or 40 below zero cold?  That was taken into account.

My dad thought about how the machine, like this locomotive, would be shipped to the job site.  Would it be partially taken apart, ride on a train, a ship, a truck, and then have to be reassembled?  How could he design it to make that reassembly process happen better and without damage to the machine?  Would the machine operate in a place with lots of dust?  That was taken into account.  Would the machine operate in high humidity where rust and mud and sludge would be an issue? He took that into account.

Then, once all those factors were thought out, my dad would go out into the shop floor, and he'd sit down on a pallet, over lunch, with the welders and machinists and assembly guys, he'd tell them what he was working on, and ask how he could design it to make the actual assembly process easier, more efficient, and smarter.  My dad actually used to get in trouble at Plymouth because he would go out and have lunch with the shop guys, and sketch out a part on a napkin and give it to the machinists.  Then he'd give the official design to the lower level draftsmen, who would make the actual drawing for a part (they actually drew on paper then).  By the time the draftsmen took the official drawing out to the shop to have it built, the part was already sitting there, built perfectly, made from my dad's napkin sketch.  That drove one of his bosses nuts.

At one point, my dad told me his process.  He said he tried to sit there and envision the part he needed to design, how it interacted as a part of the larger machine.  Then he pictured the entire life of that machine, going decades into the future, and he tried to design in every little thing he could to make that part or machine do its job properly, and last as long, and be as reliable as possible.  He tried to anticipate every problem that might occur, and design the solution into the part.  He knew there would always be things he wouldn't think of, or crazy circumstances that may happen.  But he tried to design every machine in a way to alleviate nearly all possible problems that the machine would encounter in its whole working life.

Being my dad's son, I simply thought this was how everything was designed.  I also looked far into the future at what was likely to happen.  But I didn't, and still don't, have the mechanical genius my dad did.  He truly was a genius at what he did.  My area of interest is human society, and projecting what we're doing into the future, looking for the problems that will definitely occur, the problems that will likely occur, and other things that may happen.  Then, like my dad and his locomotives and other machines, I look for the solutions that that will keep most of those problems from happening, or will lessen the bad effects.

We can't predict the future absolutely.  But we can project what we're doing, and look at other major factors, prominent people, and forces in society, and get a good idea of possible problems.  Once we do that, we can, if we truly desire, take actions that will head things in a better, all around more positive, direction.  We can design our world to alleviate or lessen some of the problems will will undoubtedly face.

That's why I write about the next recession, future trends, and social issues.  I'm thinking ahead, finding inevitable issues, and looking for ways to get a head start on dealing with those issues.

Now, there are a lot of powerful people and organizations and informal groups who have their own agendas, many of those agendas are not so good for the whole population.  People with agendas, particularly devious ones, usually have to get a bit delusional to justify their acts.  When you look at these agendas from a more objective point of view, you see they're full of problems and will result in bad consequences.  In the intelligence community world, they even have a name for this, "blowback."  I heard about that when a book of that title came out years ago.

Groups of people are continually making plans, and even conspiring to work their way into power by taking actions that do harm to lots of other people.  Yet they almost always imagine their crazy plans will work, and there will be no reaction.  As an example, since the Reagan era, there have been all kinds of political actions taken to allow certain groups of people to amass huge amounts of money, and the power that went with that money.  Our American society has become horribly corrupt over these past 30-40 years, with CEO's getting $100 million incomes and huge golden parachutes, while the vast majority of people have seen their standard of living drop year after year for decades.  The inevitable consequence of this long term corruption, and manipulation of the financial world, is that the majority of people are really pissed off.  We have huge populist movements rising up, both on the political Right and the political Left.  Yet the people who planned for years to transfer most of our country's wealth from the old American Middle Class to a small financial and political elite, seem completely surprised by the rise of Donald Trump and of Bernie Sanders in the last election.

This was inevitable.  When you take money from 250 to 300 million people for 30-40 years, eventually they wise up and get pissed.  These same people who engineered the American wealth transfer of the last 40 years also didn't see high tech changing the social and business world the way it has.  They definitely didn't have Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google duo in their master plan.

I try to look at as many major societal forces as possible, try to imagine how they will interact with each other, and then explain what the INEVITABLE consequences will be.  I'm imagining the future of society at large the way my dad imagined the future of the locomotives he designed, some of which are still working decades after the company went out of business.

Maybe this will help some of you understand why I think about these big picture, long term, issues, and why I write about them.  Because we don't HAVE to deal with all the consequences of the less honest people working in our world.  We can do things today to build a better overall future.  I just point out some of the areas we should take a more serious look at.  

My dad, the engineering genius, a couple of years before his death in 2012.