Peace and Justice is a theme I’ve been passionate about my entire life, but particularly since September 2001. I began this blog in 2009. The intended focus of this site is Peace, Justice, Environment, Sustainability, Global Cooperation and related issues.
The intent of this site is to publish positive pieces with thoughts about building a better future for our world and everyone in it.
I believe in the value of dialogue. A lifelong mid-westerner, with deep roots in rural North Dakota, I have spent most of my adult life in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. dickDOTbernarddt1878ATicloudDOTcom
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“Make do”
/0 Comments/in Uncategorized /by dickbernardDecember 20 I went in for my haircut, still a regular event in my life, albeit thinner. Just a haircut and beard trim, once every four weeks.
This particular day I said to Pamela, “I suppose you’ve been pretty busy”. Pam, who’s also the manager, said they were pretty busy for the holiday, but business had been unusually slow in November. As she scheduled the next haircut she said “Five weeks or six”, which surprised me – I’ve always done four weeks. “Why?” Customers were cutting back, she said. Worried about anticipated personal economic downturns.
The entire thread of conversation surprised me, but not when we chatted a tiny bit about it. We were talking about the practical matter of personal economics – the kinds of decision making individuals make all the time. Can I afford this or that, or is it best to hold off, to make do, in case personal economics go south?
Examples? Start with yourself, and how you really feel as this year ends…and how you act..and what you see and hear in person where you live, including yourself, family members, neighbors, friends.
We are not in normal times and in sundry assorted ways ordinary people, which are the overwhelming vast majority of us, have a cautious and apprehensive eye about the future, which is about to dawn in a few days, on January 1, 2026. Most of us have been through “make do” times when we have to scrimp due to scarce resources.
Cutbacks like personnel layoffs are reductions in income with consequence. Illusions and fantasies are not reality: tariffs are taxes to consumers, not costs to the provider of a good.
Credit card purchases are not free money. AI [artificial intelligence] and the like promise to reduce labor cost, but wages to labor are what makes an economy vibrant. On and on.
What nobody at the highest levels seems to internalize is the fact that the true engine for prosperity is the little folks like all of us who produce and consume the goods that generate income, and “we” includes not only the people who live in our own home, state and country in this interdependent world.
And wealth is more and more concentrated in the ranks of the already super wealthy who have absolutely no need for the surplus money they covet. The obsession with colonizing the moon or Mars is an endless fantasy…don’t expect a lineup of migrants to either; nor expect boatloads of new resources from Mars to be mined and delivered to the local factory down the street.
I’ve always considered myself to be an optimist. This attitude is being sorely tested. In the coming weeks and months we’ll find out.
POSTNOTE:
Very relevant column in today’s Minnesota Star Tribune: Mn Star Tribune Billionaires 12 27-28 25
COMMENTS:
from Jeff:
AI=Job losses
AI=Data Centers
response from Dick: Jeff, at the same time you were sending this I was visualizing the above post . I’d really appreciate your thoughts – each of you.
from Jeff: I have looked into the options when using google or other devices to opt out of any AI generated info…it doesnt exist…so you are forced to
from Barbara: Jeff, I’ve noticed that, too. “That” being the omni-presence of AI uber alles.
Working on training myself to keep scrolling down, away from AI, to flesh and blooders. Not absolutely sure where there’s a recognizable line is between the one and the other.
Simplistic, but there you have it.
more from Dick: I actually use the search function of AI frequently, when I am searching for a credible source about something or other. As you know, the first references are almost always AI generated and acknowledged as such, abut in turn they at least open the door to verifying or refuting or modifying their assertion.
I was nearly 50 before I ever had use of a computer, and well into my 50s when the internet entered my vocabulary. This was basically the later 1980s and forward.
Then it was slowly off to the races. I remember the magic of word search, pdf’s, Adobe Acrobat, color copy and such, endless stupid jokes being forwarded, etc., etc., etc. We all have these memories.
I think the solution to the problem (and it is a big problem) now is very simple. It is the same one we learned when we were younger: if something seems unbelievable, it probably is. So you try to find sources that seem most credible and even better verifiable, particularly if the issue is important to you. I did this most recently yesterday. The son of an elderly (99 year old) friend was asserting that our esteemed President was going to Nicaragua where hundreds of thousands of Christians were being slaughtered. I don’t know if he actually said this, or if this is how she interpreted what he said. Nonetheless it was startling, so I had to fact check, and of course, it wasn’t true. What apparently is true is that there is continuing serious problems in northern Nigeria in Africa where some version of radical Muslim are doing bad things to all sorts of people regardless of religious belief. I haven’t delved into that one more deeply, since it was a data point that simply didn’t seem believable.
Of course, there are endless opinions and examples beyond this, but each of us has the ability to separate enough of the wheat from the chaff to at least have a notion of how to avoid poison! Thanks much. Happy New Year.