Cold and damp. Still. And like yesterday. Gah. One star, would not recommend.
Spent yesterday sitting down. Back was right on the edge of being an issue and I didn’t want to push it. Did some light housecleaning. Put some stuff away. Did laundry. Normal domestic bliss.
Quite the contrast to the people in Ukraine. Sucks to be them right now. Anyone STILL think this isn’t one of those periods in history when everything changes? Show your work…
There will be some lessons for us if we have eyes to see. So far, it’s that when you have an army at your border, it is time to leave the city. In three or four days people are going to be pretty dang hungry. Water, power, and other ‘normal’ stuff is about to be in very short supply. The subways are going to be hellholes in short order if this proceeds.
I guess this breaks the McDonalds maxim, that no two countries that have McD’s have ever gone to war with each other…
And longer term, as others online have pointed out, Ukraine’s exports are not going out, now or anytime soon. They were a pretty big exporter. The whole world is going to be crunched for anything they’re no longer selling. That means more shortages and dislocations coming.
Probably not too late to add some more to your stacks. Food would be, and is, my priority now. I don’t think you could have “too much”.
Putin just acted to secure some good farmland and food that would have been exported. China has been buying up food for the last couple of years. There may be a shortage of fertilizer and fuel for our farmers this spring too. Add a flood, or a wet spring, and we’re triple F’d.
Some quick predictions.
More turmoil in the money markets. No one knows how this will play out and the longer it takes, the more conservative people will get, and that won’t be good for speculative markets like the US stock market. Food prices will continue to rise, and shortages will become apparent. It will take a while for this specific cause to become effects, but it will. Just in time is late now.
Putin will “finish the job” to whatever degree he has planned. Slow Joe will try to involve us, as he’s been taking money from Ukraine for a long time and they will want something for their money. He’s really caught on the horns of a dilemma with that. Our woke and worn out .mil will drag their feet hoping for a fait accompli so they won’t have to engage. There is zero popular support for engaging. Putin knows that and will do everything possible to avoid dragging the US into the conflict. We will be involved though, at some level. Be very suspicious of any casus belli.
China will move on Taiwan. There hasn’t been a swift response to Putin, there won’t be one to Xi. China will move when they can be fairly sure they control the fabs, so the workers don’t ‘spike the guns.’ Probably hostages, sleeper agents, and possibly spec ops teams moving in first will all be part of the takeover. China controlling world chip production will be bad. Really bad. Taiwan wiping out the fabs would be worse. Really worse. If I was a top guy in a chip fab, I’d be sending my family to Idaho, with armed security. Tough, when you probably won’t see them again, but better than having them used as leverage. That assumes the top guys don’t all flee too. I can totally see that, leaving the slightly lower guys with a higher sense of honor and duty to stick it out.
I guess we’ll see how it turns out, but I’m going with “bad for Ukraine and Taiwan” until I see some evidence of another path.
And I’m going to the store today. I’ve got empty buckets.
Stack all the things. Seriously.
n
