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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So right now people seem pretty worried about the US economy (yes, we still have one, in theory). AI is starting to hit predictable skids, data centers are both annoying people and not completing as fast as claimed, Iran hasn’t met a Strait they didn’t want to shut down, and so on. A lot of people are predicting some kind of crash of the stock market and the US economy.

Now I have my concerns on that, which perhaps I’ll share another time. But having been through many an economic crisis since being born in the late 60s, I have another concern - the recovery from a likely crash or severe downturn.

Namely, my concern is that there won’t be one like we’re used to. There may not really be one to speak of.

Recoveries take awhile. The 2008 crisis took five years for the stock market to recover - and the stock market isn’t the economy. The history of the 2008 crisis and its many year followup is wild, and I’m sure we all know people who didn’t recover or didn’t live long enough to recover.

This is where I get concerned about the next US downturn, which is almost certainly coming. I don’t think we’ll have the kind of recovery we’re used to, and it may be a dismal slog after a “new normal.”

Here’s why:

First, our position in the world is shot. We’re losing allies who are bypassing us for defense, technology, trade, etc. We won’t come back as fast as long as other people don’t trust us.

Second, the Iran situation has long-term impacts from the rearrangement of trade to affecting growing cycles due to fertilizer shipments. Will iran keep blockading the Strait of Hormuz (and possibly the Red Sea)? If Iran does regulate traffic under some agreement, the throughput won’t be the same. If Iran just opens up there’s still months of securing the area and clearing mines. The impacts will have repercussions for years.

Third, it’s pretty clear our stock market is propped up on a few big players. Any of those take a hit and who replaces them? For that matter, who might try to replace them and inflate values - only to make mini-crashes.

Fourth, a lot of Americans have been on the edge for awhile. They won’t have a recovery if there’s not enough to recover with. Young people already facing enormous headwinds won’t be able to get going.

Fifth, in no way do I trust our current government to do any kind of effective bailout - corrupt or otherwise! I mean I trust corrupt, but not effective. I have big problems with the money games played in response to 2008, not enough people went to jail, and we needed companies to fail while PEOPLE got supported. But there was at least some effort made - though I expect a few ham-handed efforts to keep things going.

Sixth, and finally, the US is going backwards. Science has taken a hit. We’re stuck in oil (and the people profiting from it) while the rest of the world heads for solar and wind. China and Europe are doing their thing. We’re the past.

So whatever economic crash we may see, I think the real issue will be the recovery won’t be so great. There may be no recovery to speak of, just a new normal of slower growth and less opportunities. I keep hearing Stagflation invoked, which is a flashback to my childhood and worrisome.

Sometimes it’s not the crash, it’s the recovery. And that’s where I’m even more concerned.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Humanity has survived for aeons, is able to inhabit any environment, take control of its own evolution. Humanity also keeps producing utter a-holes hellbent on greed, malice, and wiping out large chunks of humanity. It’s almost a testimony to the fact we’ve survived our own weird stupidity in enabling people like that. Like we somehow outlive our own dumbassery. Go, humanity.

While contemplating the a-holes in the world for reasons that I’m sure are entirely obvious, I thought of something. Maybe our problem is that we’re fighting the last a-hole.

I got this idea from watching Vladimir Putin (an a-hole) get his aging, paranoid backside handed to him by the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians aren’t fighting the last war - they’re fighting war in a new way. Putin may have been pretty good at bribery and propaganda up to a point, but when he decided to shovel his military meat shield towards the Ukraine, the Ukraine took the support they got from freer nations and rethought war.

Putin may have been a modern a-hole to some extent, with his troll farms and the like, but militarily he was old school. However, having seen Kremlin talking points penetrate various Influencers, political parties, etc. Putin was thinking ahead. Just not far enough, though judging by the people I saw discounting or lauding the murderous bastard, he got pretty far.

So as I often hear talk of how people lose by “fighting the last war” (as the US seems to be in danger of doing in Iran), I think we loose by figuring the next tyrant or dictator or genocidal maniac will be like the last one.

That might seem like a good bet because tyrants are incredibly predictable to a point. I’m amused that author Timothy Snyder could write On Tyranny, his quick guide to resisting tyranny, so concisely. However dictators and tyrants are in many cases the same, but smart ones are updated.

You aren’t going to get the next Hitler, because people did Hitler and that didn’t work. You will get someone like him, someone possibly inspired by him, but they won’t be the same because people learned about him. Apparently not enough to judge by the state of politics in some countries, but at least enough that “hey, someone’s doing a Hitler” alerts some resistance.

(Meanwhile, you can see a lot of media who don’t want to acknowledge dictators desperately wanting to discount it, but that’s for another rant.)

For people who are pro-freedom and pro-human dignity we have to act like an immune system. We don’t just learn from the last dictator but need to identify “similar infections” and rally to stop them. We need to be ears open for when history rhymes because it never repeats. We need to be ready to predict the next a-hole.

Of course what we really need to do is focus on freedom and functional, healthy, responsive societies a-holes can’t twist, turn, and exploit. But that too is for another essay, perhaps.

We need to keep an eye out for a-holes, updated or not. We’re the immune system, and maybe that gives us space to build a freer world that’s harder for a-holes.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In one of my recent readings of Cory Doctorow’s valuable blog, he discussed the value of “vultures” in the economic ecosystem, and reminded us of an important idea by Douglass Rushkoff explaining the weird “abstractions” we see.. To quote Doctorow:

“Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta": don't drive a taxi, rent a medallion to a taxi driver. Don't rent a medallion, start a ride-hailing app company. Don't start a ride-hailing company, invest in the company. Don't invest in the company, but options on the company's shares. Each layer of indirection takes you further from the delivery of a useful service – and insulates you further from risk.”

Going meta is something we see everywhere, to the point we are used to it. Giant companies with packages of packages of companies. Financial jobs that are, as I heard it once put “sloshing money around and scraping up what falls out.” Hell, with Kalshi and Polymarket and the various betting markets, we’ve gone meta on reality, allowing people to bet on anything, including things that are already pretty meta.

A friend recently summed up the overwhelm of modern technology by noting how much of what we do is metadata. You can fill out a paper form and have to store it and retrieve it - but if you put it on a computer it needs a name and a location - and cloud storage involves even more metadata behind the scenes. New software that lets you “easily” track information often has “new” features that require you to enter even more data to use features. At some point paper seems easier because the metadata can take more effort than the data.

(Remember, I once interviewed at software company that did Scrum with post it notes, having given up on tools.)

The ultimate meta is AI. AI takes our data, our metadata, and approximates us. It’s a world of data centers funded by this group, run by that group, and owned by another group. The power and water consumption are abstracted away. That’s if things are even being built, which seems to be a point of confusion - but boy companies want AI in everything.

It feels like our world is more and more meta all the time. Actual, hands-on, reality has layers of layers over it and we consume the reality to power the unreality.

Everything else is pretty meta too. Ever notice how these days in 2026 that our health care decisions by the federal government seem to be driven by internet conspiracy theories not based in anything? How memes and rumors can drive actions even if they have no existence in reality? Watch the news and people are trying to talk about reality with a thick layer of marketing and political opportunism. Even the propaganda seems meta, if people even know it’s propaganda, and sometimes I’m not sure the propagandists know.

So what I wonder is how much time and energy are we wasting doing meta but you know not doing stuff? I mean here in May 2026 farmers seem to be pretty impacted by whatever the hell is up with the non-ceasefire in Iran but it’s not making the news enough. Various Influencers famous for being famous are going around being famous and Influencing, but what are they about? People are betting on various important events in the world while others short markets, making us suspicious of what’s happening why. Also software seems to get exponentially harder to use as we add more stuff because of . . . I dunno, sales or something?

I mean how much time and energy are we burning here? Well time, energy and planet. Not sure much meaningful is happening, you know.

The problem with all this “metaness” is I think we won’t notice it breaking down until a lot of other stuff does. All the meta stuff, all the abstraction, the financialization, the investment vehicles, the BS media hype, that can keep going for awhile as it has money and momentum. But there comes a day when memes don’t fill your bank account, you can’t use AI as fertilizer, and you didn’t bet on very angry people being upset about unemployment. The people who think meta miss this stuff.

It’s best we don’t.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My regular readers will know that Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine was a big influence on me. If you didn’t know this, well, you’ll probably keep hearing about it every now and then. Anyway, the short summary of this must-read book is that a lot of our systems (government business, etc.) go off the rails because they focus on a few metrics, insulate themselves and their leaders from impact, and become destructive.

There, I summarized an enormously complex book that sums up decades in a paragraph. Go me. Anyway, on to the subject.

I was reading a recent article in 404 media on how people are “staffing” companies with AI, or even discussing having entire companies that are just bots/agents. Yes, it won’t surprise you that people flush with cash or wild ideas imagine a world where they just automate everything and rake in cash. Yeah, you’re not surprised.

Nowhere’s many things wrong with this idea, from data center water burn to legal complications to AI being surprisingly crappy at many jobs. But I want to address something about what it’d be like to run a company with a bunch of stochastic systems doing work for you, because this sounds like the fears of The Unaccountability Machine taken to it’s logical conclusion. Or illogical conclusion.

Anyway, let’s imagine these AI companies, these automated companies, and what we know about AI. You have a lot of automated processes running things, running them with no moral agency because they’re not people. We know how sycophantic AI can be dangerous because it tells you what you need to know. All of this abstract and distant from real human experience, moreso because of the hype cycle.

What you’ve got here is, well, an Unaccountability Machine. A nearly completely automated company of AI agents spinning around one person is not going to get good, safe decisions. You may get something you can use to juice stock and sell off, but it won’t be safe.

What you have are devices that ape human awareness, using old data, telling people what they want, and when things go wrong the AI takes the blame. You have people insulated from real information, focused on limited measures, and using technology that will sound like it’s kissing up to them. All it is is amplifying what happens to various leaders anyway in our decaying government and business systems.

So, really, it’s just business as usual but faster. You can spin up bad ideas and unaccountability quicker.

Now I suspect a lot of this is just juicing stocks, posturing, and trying to ignore how AI costs are going to go up and legal issues will proliferate. So I’m more concerns what happens in the meantime and I doubt it’ll be good - and then of these “auto-companies” will need their work walked back.

Honestly, I hope most of them are scams. Maybe that’d be good.

I suspect Dan Davis is going to have to write yet another book.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So let me take a break from discussing heavy world issues to focus on organization. In this case a more personal experience - what day of the week should I do my planning on?

No, trust me on this. Let me explain.

For a long time I did my planning for my week on Sunday (being an organized person, of course I plan my weeks). However the more I did that the more onerous it became. I was using my weekend to plan things and not relax. Why end the weekend with bureaucracy?

Yet at the same time wasn’t Sunday the start of the week and the end of the weekend? Wasn’t it the perfect day to do this? As a professional Project and Program Manager I felt myself in a quandary. As an organized person in general I was also in a quandary. Double quandary.

I confess this felt ridiculous at first. Why did the day matter? Well as I thought it over it mattered quite a bit.

Think of much much specific days matter. There’s the day you start work and the day you end it. There’s the time off you have that you want to enjoy. There’s the day traffic is the least worse so that’s when you do grocery shopping. All of these things affect your life - and thus when it’s best to plan it.

After some thought and discussion with friends, I settled on Monday as my planning day - essentially my week began and ended on Monday. It was the start of the workweek, it wasn’t on a weekend, and it wasn’t so far along the week it made things confusing.

My Mondays often got busy, but I’d carve out the time to make it work. Know what? It did.

Monday fit my needs perfectly as planning day, even with other things happening. The need to plan on the weekend was gone. I had clarity on my week and weekend. Thinking about what’s the best day to plan made a huge difference - and it was much less stressful.

I even changed up how I did my planning. Now that I was more aware of my time usage and rethinking things, I asked what other things I might do differently. I start planning my months not at the end of a month, but in the middle of the previous month. That let me get a better view of my upcoming weeks, which made Monday planning easier. One change had led to others.

Of course this helped me at work, and made me think over what I did when at work. I have statuses and reports and meetings to do. Now I have an experience to guide me on selecting the best day for things, a way to explain it, and some insights to share.

It’s a simple thing, but in busy times, deciding when to do what, the ideal day or week or month to accomplish something, can make a huge difference. Small things make a big difference organizationally.

So what day, or week, or monthly planning might you want to switch up?

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So as of this writing the Iran War ended. Or restarted. Or is under negotiation. I have no idea what’s going on and anything I do say may be irrelevant. Anyway it’s August 11, 2026 so you can remember how wrong or right I am.

You know I’d like to discuss what an absolute humiliating mess this was for America. But plenty of people far more qualified than me are discussing it. Actually people less qualified are discussing it too. Welcome to the modern age, and because it is the modern age, let me discuss two things that surprised me which is what I DO want to talk about it.

“War never changes,” is the quote from the Fallout games. Well, guess what, it damn well changed, and that’s a good reminder that we’re usually living in the future and don’t know it.

First, let’s talk drones.

We’re well aware of how effective drone have been for the Ukraine in their battle against Russian aggression. We know Iran has deployed both missiles and drones to definite effect, and everyone I read seems concerned about the drone part. A $10,000 drone can cost you an expensive missile and do plenty of damage if said missile misses.

Now Ukraine’s work with drones, it’s innovations, has been a diplomatic and economic boon thanks to relations with Middle Eastern states. Ukraine innovated on drones because it had to, and now that’s given it power and prestige, further giving it allies against Russia (or what’s left of it).

How much change did we miss, or not take into account, or figure was a localized issue? How much drone tech is out there we haven’t payed attention to as a society? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that a whole lot of war changed, and a lot of people haven’t adjusted their mindsets? In turn this means Iran surprised people and Ukraine has leveraged their experience to become an even more major player.

It’s multiple world-powers getting ju-jitsued. It reminds me of a recent joke about people who played games like World of Tanks missing that their games were irrelevant.

Next, let’s talk memes.

I did not expect Iran’s social media game to be this good. From memes challenging the president to mockery using Lego aesthetic, they had a good game. I didn’t expect a repressive theocratic republic to be this good at social media, not going to lie. In a Mastodon discussion, someone noted they found the dry Iranian sense of humor was known, but not to Westerners.

As I understand it the team is probably a subcontracted group that’s not even in the country. But who knows what the story is. Anyway, whoever they are they’re playing to win.

Honestly, where was America’s meme game? What little I saw was Trump ranting, some strange propagandist stuff, and that was about it. Where was the humor? The fun? The meme potential? The Iranian social media folks seemed to be having fun, which is not something I associate with the Iranian government who are, let’s be honest, a bunch of religious a-holes.

And I saw it get mentioned all over, amplified. I have to ask how much are memes part of modern warfare. I wish I knew because I expect it’s a lot more than I would have guessed.

So here we are in iran. It’s a fluid situation as I write. I don’t know what’s happening. But what I do know is I saw two changes in warfare, and we need to pay attention. I’d like a future without warfare, but until we get there, we need to understand how they work.

And apparently it’s drones and vicious mockery. Well, that’s what I missed and some others missed - what else are we missing?

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

A friend came up with the name but the meme is entirely my fault.

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Han Solo’s famous quote (and Harrison Ford’s brilliance) aside, sometimes I want to know the odds. Actually I definitely want to know the odds, because I’m someone that likes to plan things, evaluate success, and plan for contingencies. I say this as a person who has debated with himself on “what day of the week does the week really start” kind of planning.

The odds, to me, a professional Project Manager (which I suppose means I’m worth listening to), are a way to calculate what to build. They let me evaluate success, plan for contingencies, and make something solid. If I do things right, the odds barely come into play because the plan, risk assessments, and options are all in place.

The odds are, at best, a tool, a way to get better, a way to improve. For all my world of flowcharts and checklists - professionally and privately - my world is one of solidity. I deal in how and results and measurements. From personal zines to environmental systems, it’s about results

But right now it seems society is more and more about playing the odds. As my friend Serdar put it once, more and more aspects of our society are coming to resemble a casino. The problem is casinos aren’t about building things, and that’s the problem.

As of this writing there are plenty of discussions about Kalshi, Polymarket, and other activities that are “prediction markets” which are really just gambling. That’s it, they’re gambling, and you can’t call it anything else. Draft Kings may have led the way with sports betting, but now we have prominent gambling companies. Call it what it is.

Our society is a casino. But it has been for awhile.

The stock market is not the economy, as we’re often reminded. It is, to an extent, about playing the odds and estimating chances. Now any economy is going to have some of that, as will any part, but if you ever looked at overvalued stocks and wondered, it’s not about the economy in many cases. It’s about the odds that something pays off, and it’s why some investments in companies that don’t do anything pay off, because people think they can sell before they loose.

Then there was Crypto, which really is just a stock on the blockchain. Then there was the NFTs, which thankfully crashed and burned then sunk into a swamp, that was gambling as well. Now we’re just to plain almost-honest gambling. It’d be refreshing if it wasn’t so prominent, so pathological, and in more and more cases it seems about people manipulating odds.

It’s all been a bit of gambling for decades - centuries? - but now it’s all gambling front and center. Bets and odds and manipulation. Know what it isn’t? Doing something with measurable achievements..

Where’s the plan? The results? The thing built? The thing made? Something that gets something done, that helps people, that can be felt, seen, touched, used? Where’s something I can break down into a Kanban backlog, where I can say “yes, here is a distinct result.”

But it’s a Casino. It’s about playing the odds, getting money, and that’s it. Nothing to be built, to be made, to be achieved. If you can manipulate things (say, with a bit of insider political information) so much the better. Why do something that has a role, a result, a history when you can just get paid for wondering what the body count is in a train wreck?

Play the odds enough and that’s all you can do. Look for the gamble, the payoff, the high. You just slosh money around and play the odds. That’s it.

The Casino economy is forgetting how to do things, and forgetting the value of doing things for and with people. And as a Project Manager, a person, and a citizen, I hate it.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com