Would-a, could-a, should-a

     “Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”
           Ancient saying

I could have been fabulously wealthy. I had every opportunity.

You also.

I don't reflect on the new year in a spirit of remorse. Quite the opposite. I have had extraordinary good fortune, starting with having been born healthy in the USA in 1949 to a happy, stable, middle-class family in Southern Oregon. I didn't get polio. I didn't get drafted into the war in Vietnam. And my generation got to enjoy the greatest music of all time.

Part of what buoys my mood is the realization that I had great opportunities presented to me on a silver platter. I don't feel jealous of the Walton or Trump children. I had my chance.

Boomers in my age cohort -- born in 1949 -- were about age 50 in the year 2000, putting us in the full tide of adulthood. It was a particularly prosperous time in America. Many of us had some money to invest. The stock market was high and the U.S. was paying down the national debt rapidly at this point in Bill Clinton's presidency. 

I-Mac, circa 2000

$3.2 million. I was familiar with Apple computers throughout the 1990s. The company's stock was readily purchasable as a reasonable, prudent investment. A $10,000 investment in Apple at the beginning of year 2000, not counting the 26 years of dividends, would now be valued at $3,200,000.

$8.7 million. I became aware of Netflix about the time it went public in 2002. I rented movies from them. A $10,000 investment, again not counting dividends, would be valued today at $8,700,000.

$21 million. NVIDIA would have been a bit more aggressive a purchase for me. The company was not widely known, but I was, after all, an investment advisor with access to investment research and could have known about the company.  A $10,000 investment  would be valued today at $21,000,000.

$18 billion. Bitcoin did not exist to buy in the year 2000, but it was available to buy for five cents per coin in 2010.  A $10,000 investment in 2010 would be priced at about $18 billion today.

To be realistic about missed opportunities, I would not have bought $10,000 of Bitcoin. I consider it a fraudulent investment, something with a price but no real value. I liken it to other collectables, like stamps or rare coins, and therefore derivative of other wealth made from owning assets with value. (If a person owns a profitable widget factory, and wants to spend a million dollars on a misprinted stamp with Grover Cleveland's face on it, he can do so. And maybe he can sell it later to someone else who will pay two million, making it a profitable exchange for him. But as I figure it, the wealth came from selling widgets. Without the wealth, there would be no price for the stamp.)

$60 million

I would not buy $10,000 worth of something I thought was worthless, in 2010 or now. But in 2010 I might have been open to throwing away money on a totally crazy, stupid investment idea, digital tokens, as a $1,000 flier, if someone had pitched it to me. I might have treated it like buying an ugly painting at a charity auction to help a good cause, or perhaps on a bit of self-indulgence, like spending the extra $1,000 to fly United's Economy Plus on a cross-country trip, with two extra inches of legroom, rather than economy, which is my normal practice. I would figure that I could sell it the worthless investment for a loss in a year and take the tax deduction. That $1,000 flier would be worth $1.8 billion now and I could easily afford a Gulfstream jet. I have never bought any amount of Bitcoin. 

Sometimes we know the opportunities we have missed. We don't know some of the tragedies we have avoided: the oncoming car that swerved over the center line a minute after we passed each other, or the blood clot that stays attached to an artery wall and does not break free. Those missed events are out there, too.

I think the world is pretty messed up, and there lots of things that are wrong and could get a lot worse, but I don't have regrets over what I don't have financially. I had every opportunity. 

We all did.

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Happy New Year: a tiny piece of good news.

Shame is not dead.

Shame lost power as a motivator in public life in this era of Trump. Maybe it is regaining influence.  

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh didn't like what the term "Kavanaugh stop" was doing to his reputation.

Democrats are reluctant to admit it, but Trump has been extraordinarily successful as a change agent. He has changed settled American policy in multiple areas, running roughshod over entrenched institutions and processes. He exemplified the Nike slogan: "Just do it." His superpower is his lack of shame. Trump reveals that the most important checks and balances are not the formal structure of our constitutional system. They are our norms, our handshake agreements, our supposed shared consensus on what is true and reasonable and fair. Trump makes up his own facts. He doesn't bother with hypocrisy. 

If a president said we were at war, said we were under armed invasion, said we had a trade crisis, said Portland was a war zone burning up in flames, then he could claim emergency powers to do what he wants. He showed he could get away with this. Pretense drives a hole through supposed limits on a president's power. 

The most corrosive effect of this shamelessness is that a shared agreement on reality is revealed as weakness, something feckless Democrats and RINO turncoats like Liz Cheney or Mike Pence care about. Rules don't matter. Just assert something is true and dare people to prove otherwise.  Pretense is truth. He won the 2020 election by a landslide. He never had government documents at Mar-a-Lago.

The U.S Supreme Court majority shared in that zeitgeist. Pretense was good enough. In that context, the Supreme Court ruled that ICE agents could use signals of ethnicity -- skin color, Spanish language -- and call that probable cause to detain people, inquire about their immigration status, rough them up, and put them in jail. The pretense was that the stop would be brief and unobtrusive, and that this was consistent with due process and equal protection of the laws. A person could call it a narrow and limited license to investigate, and potentially Constitutional, but in the wink-wink reality of enforcement under current policy, it was a license to round up and arrest Hispanic-looking people on sight. Rough justice, with some conspicuous cruelty, was policy, advancing the optics of self-deportation. 

The blanket authorization for arrests of Hispanics created the term "Kavanaugh stops." Justice Kavanaugh's name entered mainstream discourse along with "Miranda warnings," the "Heimlich maneuver," and "Lou Gehrig's disease." A "Kavanaugh stop" was a thing. It was a license to profile Hispanics and presume illegality.

In the current Trump might-makes-right zeitgeist, I think some administration officials would welcome the name. Had they been named "Noem stops" after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, it might have been a point of pride for her. She might proudly claim that we aren't letting squeamish goody-goodies hide behind the Constitution and tell us not to protect our country by making Hispanics prove they aren't guilty of something.

But not Brett Kavanaugh. He is a Supreme Court justice, in a role supposedly devoted to truth and justice. He wants this cleaned up. He wrote a footnote in a case this week saying that "race and ethnicity" are NOT to be considerations when officers make immigration stops. It contradicts what he wrote in the prior case. I consider this a good portent for the new year. He does not want to be known for empowering cynical use of police power, branded under his name. He doesn't trust this administration not to embarrass him and further sully his reputation. He is be ashamed to be associated with what is going on and what might come next.

That is a good sign. Happy New Year.

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Thank you for reading this blog.

Year-end report: This blog gets about one million page-views per year. 

A typical day has 2,500 to 3,000 page-views. 

I publish this blog in two formats. The original format is the Blogspot one (https://peterwsage.blogspot.com). It has searchable archives going back to the beginning in 2015. I also publish at Substack (https://peterwsage.substack.com) for people who prefer to get the blog sent to them by email.

Substack sends me reports like this, which track daily page-views:

About 1,400 a day, or 500,000 a year via Substack

This weekly chart shows about 11,000 page-views a week, a number consistent with the daily reports:

Substack readership numbers are credible to me based on their consistency. I can see that readers open posts.

Blogspot readers need to click on the site URL to access it. The numbers Blogspot reports are higher, which is nice to see, but they are wildly inconsistent, so I doubt their credibility. My post on Monday on Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed 15,000 page views. It makes me suspect Russian robots noted the subject and scanned it, creating an inflated page-view report. I am confident that it didn't suddenly go viral among human readers.  

Some big-day spikes do seem reasonable and organic to me. My post on the Medford Multicultural Fair showed a big two-day increase. I am presuming that real people clicked to see images of themselves and their friends performing.

Blogspot reported 78,150 page-views this month, 107,320 last month, and 1,490,000 for calendar year 2025. I have a report showing those page views, and I could claim them, but I do not. I suspect robot page views. More plausible to me for actual, human, engaged readers is to take the lower-end number from this report by Blogspot.

Blogspot page views bounce off a floor of 1,000 to 1,500 a day, or about 40,000 a month, which is approximately the same as Substack.

I put the two reader channels together to get the estimated 2,500 to 3,000 human readers on a typical day: about 1,000,000 page-views a year.

My most popular posts were the Multicultural Fair and the various Easy Sunday short, light-hearted ones. A controversial one saying that land acknowledgements backfired on their intended purpose also drew extra readers. Many people disagreed with me.

I don't know how the local newspaper, the Rogue Valley Times, calculates page views, or if they discount potentiasl robot page-views the way I do, but the RVT reported today that they had 1,075,335 page-views this year. 

I have readers all across the country but most of them are in Oregon:

If my blog were better, or if I marketed it better, or if I got lucky somehow, the blog might have gone viral and become much more popular. It has not. My readership has been on a plateau in 2025. I get about 30 new readers a month and about 30 a month drop off.

I don't try to duplicate the historical perspective of Heather Cox Richardson nor the economics perspective of Paul Krugman. There is substantial overlap in my readership with them:

I wake up early every morning, "bright eyed and bushy-tailed" as my father used to say. I write between 5 am and 8 am. Medford journalist Tam Moore, age 90 and still fully engaged as a community-minded citizen, reads the blog most days; he typically points out two or three errors. Ben Beach is a college classmate, now retired from his career as writer-editor for Wilderness Society publications. He, too, reads it nearly every day and points out different errors. I am grateful to both of them.

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The U.S. healthcare system is broken.

Healthcare in America: Pay more. Get less.

Americans are sicker, die earlier, risk medical bankruptcy, waste time and money, distort labor markets, burden employers, and people hate it.

Let's fix this.

Alexander the Great cuts through the Gordian Knot

We spend more than enough money. We need to spend it better.

Most expensive by far

Worse outcomes by far

In 1996, when my college classmates and I were about 46 years old, I attended a class reunion. Graduates are mid-career. The lawyers, professors, writers, and finance people told me they loved their work. But doctors grumbled. They had regrets. They told me they spend too much time dealing with insurance gatekeepers and billing documentation, not patient care. The system was broken, they said.  

Everything that was broken then has gotten far worse. Everyone knows this: Democrats, Republicans, providers, employers, healthcare analysts, and anyone who has gotten sick in Europe and experienced healthcare there. We had a government shutdown over this consensus. Everyone agrees that we are patching a broken system.

Ten years ago, when presidential candidate Bernie Sanders campaigned on Medicare-for-all, the consensus for change did not exist except among a minority of Democratic voters. People who had private health insurance didn't want to give it up. They had "business class" tickets in the healthcare airplane and feared a downgrade to "coach." Labor unions opposed Medicare-for-all because a health plan was a hard-fought union benefit. Medicare-for-all seemed like loss and people hate losing what they have, even if something better is offered. Insurance companies lobbied against it. Republicans could have seen this as a business-benefit issue. After all, why should healthcare be the burden of employers? It made them less competitive than developed-country competitors where healthcare a public benefit. But Republicans stuck with their insurance company patrons, who called Medicare-for-all "socialism." 

Plus there is the free-rider morality problem that bothered Americans. Even if everybody would be better off, Medicare-for-all would mean that less-deserving people would get healthcare -- how unfair! Of course, public schools mean education-for-all, and parks and streets and national defense are socialized for the benefit of all, but not health care. It is different somehow. Institutions that benefit from the medical industrial complex have the resources to keep a majority in Congress in opposition and people thinking that health care is a consumer good, but schools, streets, parks, and the military are not.

I think the political mood has changed. The drip of rising costs changed what is possible. I don't think a president or presidential candidate would claim that the current American system deserves the A-plus-plus-plus-plus grade that Trump gave our economy. People know better.

My presumption is that change toward Medicare-for-all would come from the political left, and that partisanship would solidify Republicans to be in opposition. But they would be defending a weak hand, rather like trying to tell people in California, New York, Massachusetts, and Austin that homes are cheap and affordable. At some point people cannot be sold what they know not to be true.

Oddly enough, Trump might be the change agent here. Trump is impulsive and he doesn't care who he offends. Trump is willing to make abrupt change, to our trade agreements, to our foreign policy, to our relations with Russia, to our sensibilities regarding pardons and grift, to public ownership of private businesses, and to immigration. Americans have become accustomed to bold enlargements of executive power and Trump likes having the power. It is a new era in American politics. Trump could sell it to MAGA. I expect Republican legislators would go along as dutifully as they go along with Trump on everything else. It would be "Trumpcare."

Heads up to Democrats: Don't be knee-jerk opponents if Trump does something good. Let him score the "win." When Medicare-for-all gets branded "Trumpcare," don't protest. Trump and Republicans will take better care of it if it is named after Trump.

But the notion of Trump doing something bold and dramatic, and then aggressively selling it, can be a point of inspiration for Democrats. Trump changed the political environment. Now the American public is accustomed to bold, disruptive executive action. Trump would not pussy-foot with half-hearted, tentative, incremental change. Trump would know he had a great issue, because people are ready for change and they like seeing Trump smash through a stuck status quo.

If Trump could do it, so could a Democrat. The public is ready for this.

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Do Americans care who controls eastern Ukraine?

Fear, Honor, and Self-interest: The three reasons countries go to war, as identified by Greek historian Thucydides.

Peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are underway. The U.S. is in the center of it.

Trump understands an important thing about the American public: Few Americans know much about this part of the world.

Could Americans locate NATO countries on an unmarked map? Test yourself: Where is Latvia? Where is Estonia? Where is Lithuania? Which is which?

Belarus is tucked between Russia and Poland. Do you know where? Does it change anything for Americans if Belarus is independent, but aligned with Russia, as opposed to being part of Russia? Would it matter if it were independent of Russia but aligned with the West, like Poland? And Kaliningrad, that part of Russia off on its own; where is it? 

Unmarked map

Here is a marked map, but with the countries unlabeled. Does this help? Which one is Latvia? Where is Kaliningrad?

Trump won some support in 2016 as the no-foreign-wars candidate. Americans feel self-sufficient. The electorate truly cares about foreign policy only if it is a matter of fear or honor. We don't want to go to war for oil; that is the charge opponents of a war make against people who support the war. Trump says that the primary threat to the personal safety and national identity of people in the U.S. and Europe is invasion by immigrants from the global south: Latin America, Muslim countries, and Africa. Not Russia. Whether something is Russian or Russia-adjacent or Russia-aligned in Eastern Europe doesn't affect us. Muslims are the enemy, not Russians.

And since Russia isn't dangerous, then no honor is lost by letting them consolidate their own region. This is a Slavic civil war. There could be glory in it for Trump. He might be known as a better peacemaker than Barack Obama, who got the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump wants that.

All this makes sense in light of the new world order under Trump. Trump doesn't think that the rule-based order, exemplified by the United Nations has ever been anything but hypocritical window dressing. The post-WWII world order was always leadership by the powerful. Russia did not concede power in Eastern Europe because they loved democracy. They gave it up because they lost the economic and military power to continue their domination.

Trump is a peacemaker in the sense that he thinks that great regional powers ought to mind their own business. The Western Hemisphere is ours. Mexico and Canada are ours to bully. Venezuela is in our neighborhood, so we are going to stop pretending we respect the sovereignty of pip-squeak countries. We don't want to own them -- they are too much trouble to own. Look at Puerto Rico. But we are entitled to manage them.

And all this makes sense of what China is doing right now. China is displaying possession while Trump is demonstrating his position on regional power.

Huffington Post landing page

They understand Trump, and they think Trump understands the American public. We are willing to pound our chests and make threat displays, but we don't want actual conflict, not over something half a world away. Taiwan is Chinese. They speak Chinese there. They were part of China. They are in China's neighborhood. 

Which one is Taiwan? Which is Hainan? Which is part of the Philippines?

Maybe Americans care if Taiwan is fully independent. Americans can be made to care if our leaders tell us it is essential to our security, Maybe, if we get to keep getting the advanced computer chips we need from them or somewhere else, we can let it go. Maybe leaders can persuade Americans that it is a matter of honor. We continued a war in Vietnam for years chasing "Peace with Honor." But I suspect all we really want is their chips.

I expect some sort of resolution in Ukraine. Trump has refocused the threat to European security from Russia to Muslim immigrants. The rise in blood-and-soil rightist parties in Europe shows that Western leaders need to adjust to stay in sync with their publics. The Brexit vote was the early warning. Trump's election was the second notice. The real enemy isn't another aggressive consolidator of ethnic groups. It is foreign ethnicities. I expect Europe to go along with carving up of Ukraine. 

None of this is what I want, but I think it is what is happening, and I expect the American public will be OK with it if Trump leads it. Eastern Europe is so far away. So is Taiwan.

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Easy Sunday: Year-end reverie.

Be of good cheer. 

"We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden."
     Joni MItchell, Woodstock, 1970

We are a speck in the universe and everything ends.

The odd thing about existential nihilism is that it doesn't necessarily destroy meaning and purpose for our lives. It focuses it. It doesn't lead me to despair. It leads me to try to live well. 

Red giant 

The Sun appears constant and dependable. That steadiness tempts us to imagine permanence in an eternal story with good guys and bad guys: conflicts that must be resolved now or never; a present moment that decides if things are going to plan; an arc leaning toward justice. 

We read the news today, oh boy. 

Astronomy reminds us to lengthen our perspective from the crowded today. In deep time, the Sun will swell into a red giant and erase Earth and everyone on it. Nothing in the news changes that. It ends, and everything is erased.

I have reconciled to understanding that we have a brief window of coherence in a vast, indifferent universe. We are all aboard the Titanic, and we know its fate. Meaning must be local: in kindness offered and the care we take with one another. I can live with that. Wasn't that Jesus' message, the one I grew up hearing? 

I don't need the magic parts of the big stories that religions posit to make us feel better about the reality of an indifferent universe. I am OK with the here and now, because that is what there is, and it is on us. 

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Be careful out there

"I get the willies when I see closed doors."
     Joseph Heller, opening line from the novel, Something Happened, 1974 

 

There is always something to worry about. Most of it won't come true. Some will, though.

Don't mind me. I am an old man with too much experience.

Americans who watch financial markets know the warnings about a tech stock bubble. People with money or careers at risk during the internet boom and bust understand the risk. The potential is that artificial intelligence will unlock giant gains in productivity. The worry is AI companies won't earn monopoly profits from AI anytime soon, therefore the stock prices of companies spending money to create AI platforms are running ahead of their current value.  

Deutsche Bank asked its customers to list the biggest risks to market stability in 2026. Fifty-seven percent listed a tech bubble. The second was the fear that the new Fed chair would try to please the president who had just appointed him by lowering interest rates too far and too fast. Well down the list are other things readers have heard about: a crypto crisis, a China attack of Taiwan. Russia-Ukraine escalation, energy infrastructure failure, and a global trade war. Here is a chart, oriented in two directions for readabilty.

 

 

The best evidence that there is no AI bubble is that people worry about a bubble. If prices reflect nervous, skeptical investors, it is less likely to be a bubble. Bubble prices come from unchecked optimism.

Impending disasters are obvious -- in hindsight. Anybody can see that making mortgage loans to people without assets, income, or jobs is foolish, but from 2004 to 2007 bankers imagined that as long as they packaged bad loans with other bad loans, the resulting sausage was perfectly safe and AAA-rated and could be sold to pension funds or held on their own books. People were making great money creating those loans; it is hard to knock success. Nobody likes a naysayer. Same with people worried about the Magnificent Seven stocks. So far, so good on them.

There is no shortage of hazards and warnings. Many people distrust the U.S. dollar as a storehouse of wealth -- a reasonable fear. Readers who have scrolled social media this week are learning about a new reason for worry: a short squeeze on silver. An ounce of silver has gone from $30 to $80 in a year, and from $40 to $80 since September. Silver prices aren't reflecting industrial and jewelry supply and demand. They reflect stress in the financial markets.

Bank trading desks with short futures positions on silver must deliver silver. Funds that contracted to match ounce-for-ounce in physical silver their investors' deposits in their funds also need physical silver. It isn't available. What could go wrong?

I worry about the optimistic people holding crypto "assets." Crypto money is the equivalent of electronic baseball cards, but without the nostalgia. Crypto assets are valuable as long as people think the price of fairy-dust will go up. The prices reflect a social consensus that if there is a price there must be value, at least one that can be captured if sold to someone else. Banks go where the opportunities are and where federal regulators permit risk-taking. Banks are loaning money collateralized by crypto. What could go wrong?

There is a mismatch between incomes and home prices. President Trump's solution is more leverage and debt, now in the form of 50-year mortgages. What could go wrong?

There could be a geopolitical crisis. The U.S. has had 24 years where we are  doing the bombing: Iraq: Afghanistan: Iran: this month Venezuela; this week Nigeria. We dish it out; we feel both invincible and entitled. No one has bigger aircraft carriers. What will go wrong will likely be a surprise. It probably wont be an airliner crashing into a building. It will be something new. The U.S. does not have a monopoly on shock and awe. 

I am glad there are young people with optimistic entrepreneurial spirit starting new enterprises in garages and dorm rooms. I am glad there is competition among the companies creating AI platforms. I am glad Americans see opportunity and are racing to take advantage of it. 

I reflect a different perspective. I am OK with my age and situation. I hedge my bets. My goal is to survive bad times. I don't consider that pessimistic. I think it is realistic and good. If bad times come, the U.S. will need survivors. 

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