Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Oct 16, 2026 12:28 pm

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Oct 16, 2026 12:20 pm

"This report shows that rebuilding soil health is one of the few measures that can improve nutrient density, yields and climate resilience all at once, and farmers can do it profitably today.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 63325.html

Not as easy as they make it sound.

We had 100 plus degree temperatures every day for about 6 weeks as I was working on getting a fall crop started. I experimented with some different soil combinations, all of which were good by nutritional standards. However, they were drastically different as far as ability of the plants to withstand heat and drought. Once the weather broke about a week ago, everything took off; the soil type didn't matter. In fact, the soil that seemed to perform worst in the heat seemed to perform best once the weather broke.

Today the winds are gusting to close to 30 mph so this is not a good time to post pictures. I'll try to post some when the winds die down.

Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

Oct. 26, 2026 at 8:30 am Updated Oct. 26, 2026 at 9:39 am
By Alex Halverson
Seattle Times business reporter

Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees, or roughly a quarter of its workforce, as the company tries to control its head count while avoiding layoffs.

The Redmond-based tech giant announced Monday morning that eligible employees at the vice president level and below in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom would receive a “voluntary exit offer” of a standard severance package, based on their location. They’ll have until early December to decide.

In a memo to employees, Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said the move was building off the voluntary retirement program earlier this year, which was available to more than 8,700 U.S.-based employees, roughly one-third of whom took the offer.

“The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it,” Coleman wrote on Monday. “At the same time, we’ll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft.”

When Paul Krugman Won the Nobel for Economics

Eighteen years ago this week, Paul Krugman was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Ostensibly, he won it “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity,” but most likely he received it because he had spent the previous eight years attacking the George W. Bush administration from his perch as a New York Times columnist, as Bush was rather unpopular with a majority of Europeans.

For that matter, Barack Obama would receive the revered Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, less than a year after occupying the White House. His main qualification was that he was not Bush. (None of this is an endorsement of the Bush presidency, which by any measurement was an unmitigated disaster).

A few hours after reading the announcement of Krugman’s prize, Forbes Online asked me to write a brief article commenting on the decision to award Krugman, giving me about 30 minutes to produce it. What followed was “Krugman In Wonderland.”

Krugman In Wonderland

Today’s announcement that Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics, although not earth shattering, indicates that outright political partisanship is not a deterrent to winning. This is not as tragic a moment in western civilization as the sacking of Constantinople in 1453 or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but it suffices as one of those sad moments we will regret over time.

The committee that chose Krugman cited his “trade” theories that once made him famous for actually doing economics. (Krugman contends that nations can create comparative advantages by subsidizing certain industries, something the ancients once called Mercantilism.) However, Krugman has become a well-known public intellectual not because of his work on trade, but because of his twice-weekly op-ed column in The New York Times, where outright partisanship is substituted for economic analysis.

Paul Krugman is an unabashed liberal, and there is no crime in an economist having such persuasions. For that matter, many economists have a bit of that streak, too. Furthermore, many of us are in agreement that some of the economic policies of the Bush administration have been bad, if not downright disastrous.

However, the agreements end where Krugman begins to view U.S. economic history from a distorted lens, one in which all administrations run by Democrats are Good and Virtuous, and all Republican administrations are governed by Beelzebub himself. For example, Krugman has laid literally all of the recent financial meltdowns on free markets and deregulation, which he claims were the products of right-wing ideology and compliant Republican administrations.

This is a curious view of history. Until reading Krugman, I had no idea that Jimmy Carter and his economic guru, Alfred Kahn, were conservative Republicans. Carter and Kahn allegedly thought of themselves as liberal Democrats, and I even remember seeing Carter running for president on the Democratic ticket.

Yes, many of the major deregulation efforts came through the Carter administration, although Krugman apparently denies all of that. Carter’s administration deregulated airlines and pushed through huge banking reforms as the highly regulated New Deal financial cartel imploded amidst inflation and the inability of that system to be able to finance many of the upcoming high-tech industries.

The Carter administration also began the deregulation of the price control system for oil and gasoline and set into motion the deregulation apparatus for trucking, railroads and telecommunications. In fact, Ronald Reagan received the endorsement of the Teamsters Union only after he promised to delay trucking deregulation. I also remember hearing Lester Thurow at a lecture in 1984 calling for massive deregulation of financial services and the end to anti-trust law and an end to the Glass-Steagall Act. Thurow, Kahn and Carter were not ideological conservatives, and they certainly were not Republicans, but Krugman simply airbrushes that fact to give us his own wonderland.

In Krugman’s world, ideological right-wingers took a meat axe to the carefully planned, stable New Deal economic structures of finance, telecommunications, transportation and manufacturing and created an unstable mess in which greed overruled good sense. Going even farther, Krugman has called for a reinstatement of the New Deal or at least another set of legislative initiatives like the New Deal.

Given that the first New Deal ensured double-digit unemployment until the end of 1941, one would think competent economists would not support laws that restrict output, criminalize entrepreneurship, and keep unemployment levels in the stratosphere. It would seem that an economic recovery would require increasing output and employment, but who are we economists on the outside of the Nobel circle to question the wisdom of a Nobel laureate?

As for the current economic turmoil in financial markets, Krugman offers outright socialism as the cure but also continues to peddle the snake oil that the Bush administration is beholden to free-market ideology. Praising the near-nationalization of British banks by the government, Krugman writes:

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Paulson’s initial response was distorted by ideology. Remember, he works for an administration whose philosophy of government can be summed up as ‘private good, public bad,’ which must have made it hard to face up to the need for partial government ownership of the financial sector.
Remember, Krugman is describing a government that is looking to take equity positions in banks and businesses, and whose central bank, the Federal Reserve System, pretty much owns AIG . And there is that little $700 billion bond issue to buy worthless securities (something Krugman endorsed).

Thus, Krugman believes the problem is that the Bush administration is not socialist enough, which makes it ideologically “free market.” If Obama is elected and Krugman receives a high position in his administration, we shall see if Krugman becomes the first commissar who makes socialism work. I’ll be betting against him.

How will a generational stock market panic per the fourth turning theory of Strauss and Howe be different now that the world has entered a new dark age?

AI Overview

A generational stock market panic occurring today differs fundamentally from the classic 1929 model outlined in William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning due to modern structural, technological, and geopolitical shifts.

1. Central Bank Backstops and Liquidity Interventions

The 1929 Precedent: The Federal Reserve and government stood largely passive during the initial free-fall, allowing bank failures and deflation to run unchecked into a multi-year depression.

The Modern Dynamic: Central banks and regulatory agencies now operate with rapid-response liquidity tools, standing facilities, and direct market-stabilization playbooks. Instead of a clean, unmitigated cash-liquidity freeze, a modern panic is immediately met with massive intervention, turning a sharp free-fall into a managed or prolonged grinding devaluation, or shifting the damage into sticky, structural inflation rather than classic deflation.

2. Algorithmic Velocity and Retail-Led Coordination

The 1929 Precedent: Information moved via ticker tape, newspapers, and physical bank runs where depositors physically lined up outside brick-and-mortar institutions.

The Modern Dynamic: Trading is executed at microsecond speeds by algorithms, amplified by round-the-clock digital media and decentralized retail movements. Contagion spreads globally across asset classes in minutes rather than days, and collective digital action (such as coordinated retail hedging or meme-stock dynamics) can produce wild, non-linear volatility that defies traditional institutional control.

3. The K-Shaped Economy and High Valuations

The 1929 Precedent: The market crash hit an economy with lower baseline debt-to-GDP ratios and a less financialized everyday populace, though leverage among speculators was high.

The Modern Dynamic: Neil Howe and contemporary analysts note that today’s Fourth Turning enters with extreme asset valuations and a heavily K-shaped economy, where a narrow slice of mega-cap tech and wealthy households drive the bulk of consumption. A generational panic today threatens not just equity portfolios, but highly leveraged pension systems, sovereign debt loads ($37 trillion in the U.S.), and real estate markets tied directly to everyday retirement security.

4. Fragmentation vs. National Consensus

The 1929 Precedent: The Fourth Turning of the 1930s and 1940s culminated in a unified national mobilization (the New Deal and World War II) that forged a strong sense of collective public purpose.

The Modern Dynamic: Instead of rallying around centralized institutions, the current era is marked by deep polarization, regional/tribal divides, and a fragmented global order. A modern financial panic is less likely to yield a clean, unified patriotic re-founding and more likely to accelerate institutional distrust, regional economic secessionism, or geopolitical decoupling rather than a tidy systemic reset.