Antarctica Starts Here.

It is highly unlikely that you've missed the events of the last month or so. If you were sufficiently fortunate to have been in a medically induced coma, you missed Donald Trump not only alienating every possible ally the United States still had on this planet but starting a trade war by enacting a tariff policy which appears to have been generated by an LLM which, predictably, fucked up badly.

• Bangladesh - 37%
• Bosnia - 35%
• Cambodia - 49%
• China - 34%
• the Falkland Islands - 41%
• Fiji - 32%
• India - 26%
• Iraq - 39%
• Liechtenstein - 37%
• Norfolk Island - 29%
• Sri Lanka - 44%

And, of course, not Russia.

Look, I'm not an economist. I don't claim to be. But I will say that people who are economists (you know, experts - remember those?) are saying that this makes no damn sense. And if experts from multiple institutions scattered across the political spectrum in this country are in agreement and getting each other medical attention because they gave themselves concussions by smacking their foreheads extremely hard, it's safe to say that this this biggest fuckup since Dubya and Dick Cheney lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In just forty-eight hours (as I write this on 4 April 2025) the stock market has gone off a cliff. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2231 points, Nasdaq fell 962 points, and the S&P 500 fell 31 points. Trump, of course, says the stock markets are now booming... and if he happened to mean "boom" as in "detonation" he's not lying for once.

I offer some free advice, which as we all know is worth exactly what you paid for it: Don't pay attention to the stock market or your retirement fund. It's bad enough that the various retirement fund companies are sending out "Yeah, this is fucked" e-mails to customers. It won't be good for your mental health and there isn't anything that you can do about it. Looking at everything from what may as well be MEO there's sweet fuck-all that anyone can do about the situation we're in.

In the last couple of days I've been re-reading The Shockwave Rider (affiliate link I think ¹), and recent events have given me new thnigs to think about. I never really stopped to consider what the "progress at all costs," "there is no stability," "by the way, everybody in power gives more of a shit about their social engineering projects and computers than actual people" world of the novel would look like. The state of the world in 2025 is uncomfortably similar to the world of the novel in many ways.

I could prattle on about companies going head over heels about LLM technology and using it to lay off organics because software constructs are cheaper (or so they think), people having so many things to keep track of (some of them out of necessity, some of them voluntarily ²) that they start freaking out, folks moving because there is almost no safety net where they live (for example, insurance companies refusing to honor their disaster insurance policies), and people being treated as inherently disposable components ³ for crappy wages and zero benefits. But if you're paying attention to the world, you get this.

Here's the thing: There is no stability anymore. There's almost no predictability beyond the short term (and I'm not referring to "That Fucking Guy did something stupid again") because the world and everybody in it is so densely networked that the ripple effect may as well be called the tsunami effect. Consider the last couple of rounds of layoffs in the USian business world. For all we know a CEO in Texas has a bad drive into the office and decides to fire some folks that they never liked anyway. There would be no way to know if that was the case (sure, you can guess, you can say that's what happened, but can you prove it to any extent that you could do something about it?) Point being, you can't know if or when such a thing is going to happen these days. Not with everybody in the world not just keeping their heads on a swivel but getting whiplash from things changing so much, so fast, so often.

In this sea of chaos, I think the best thing that any of us can hope for is keeping our heads above water. Bob like a cork on the waves rather than try to swim against them. I'm sure there are plenty of criticisms of this (and there bloody well should be, it would mean that people are actually thinking about something rather than reacting) but for the vast majority of us down at street level who are not wealthy, well connected, well resourced, or sufficiently well informed to know ahead of time what to invest in and what to sell off trying to stay the course just doesn't work anymore. There is a time for acting and a time for reacting. And this doesn't seem like a time to act (because it's going wrong more often than not these days). To put it another way, adaptations rapidly become maladaptations when the environment changes too radically.

It makes sense to want to cling to some kind of order - procedure, policy, process, plans, some other words that start with 'p' - but ultimately whether or not they're appropriate remains a matter of question. There is one more word that starts with 'p' that comes to mind, however - principles. While having principles is a good and decent (and increasingly difficult to find) trait in people these days, I meant the fundamental assumptions underlying things. Don't worry about knowing how to fix an F-150, but understand how to fix pickup trucks in general. Don't learn how to use vue.js, learn how to use Javascript frameworks. Don't memorize where everything is in a library or garage, learn how to find what you need.

In other words, learn how things work, and you can figure out the specifics when you need to. Because it's pretty much the only way these days to keep our heads above water.

And be ready to switch up your plans if they go south.