I might be wrong - but...
19 April ‘26 issue
I believe that if we spend 1% to 3% of our business revenue on insurance and risk reduction, then every business person should spend 3% of their time looking at the catastrophe scenarios and thinking them over. Whom is prepared, may adapt. Part 1: Revisiting March 11 Takeaways
Since some of y’all thought I was overly pessimistic - oh the email - instead of waiting a year to check my oracular skills, I am doing a next month check-in on my key points.
Logistics Takeaway: Expect your logistics prices to increase dramatically and quickly by summer, possibly by double or triple based on historical events.
Crude prices on 17th April: $200/bbl CnF Asia - that is cash price = real price, not futures.
Driver shortage effect: “FMCSA strongly encourages States to take immediate action to revoke all unexpired non-domiciled CLPs and CDLs that were not issued in compliance with 49 CFR Parts 383 and 384 in effect at the time the transaction occurred.” No hard numbers yet, that was just February of this year. Expectation is at least 170,000 licenses revoked over the next 18 months, Texas has already started. 7,000-ish driving schools have lost licenses as well. Plus other stuff. This is a slower moving problem, but it stacks on diesel prices.
Verdict - it ain’t summer yet, but cost doubling looks possible.
Iran War Takeaway: Whatever you are hearing from American Media, it’s stupidly shortsighted and ignorant of history. This is going to be ugly and stay ugly for months or even years. $150 crude may be an optimistic assumption for summer prices ($8 to $10 per gallon for diesel).
Well, yeah. Party ain’t over yet, either.
Critical Material Shortages Takeaway: Far too much of the global economy is going to run out of manufacturing and life-support inputs soon, it appears Iran can inflict pain in return for pain. In weeks, not months, this is going to get ugly. American farmers are fucked. Diesel price increases plus fertilizer price increases will hammer the already crippled agricultural industry reeling from tariff fallout and immigration caused loss of workers. Food prices are going to get stupid. The poor in developing nations may well starve, weak governments could topple, and worse.
And here we are. If you don’t follow international news, go take a look at how they are coping in Vietnam, Indonesia, India, etc (then go back to my March 11 article for a partial predictive list of materials to run out of). It looks like the USA’s quiet empire of soft power and dollar dominance was a lot shakier than we understood. Price of hubris, etc. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18, y’all (see also Obadiah 1:3).
Part 2: The AI Bubble Keeps Expanding
So if you are still believing anything you hear about AI taking all our jobs, and how all this wonderful technology is going to change everything, and that you should invest whatever money you didn’t lose on crypto in AI, I want to share Ed Zitron’s most excellent takedown, “Premium: AI Isn't Too Big To Fail.” Ed knows his shite from Shinola, and has been a wise cautionary voice in the industry for a long time. Let me quote him, “Billions of dollars of waste are justified by saying “OpenAI just like Uber” (it isn’t) and “the data center buildout is just like Amazon Web Services” (it isn’t, Amazon Web Services was profitable in a decade and cost about $52 billion between 2003 and 2017, and that’s normalized for inflation) and, most egregiously, that AI is “too big to fail.””
Example: Anthropic announces that their new version of their coding app is so good at hacking that it isn’t safe to release. The hype is endless - here’s a new shiny and YOU CAN NOT HAVE IT, so IT MUST BE GOOD. Over and over, that grift doesn’t age at all. Here’s a sanity check - at the same time, Anthropic’s CLAUDE update to version 4.7 is demonstrably crappier than 4.6 for either commercial reasons or because of increased context rot or because AI is trained on the contents of the web, and more and more of the web is AI slop so GIGO.
EDIT April 20: Two great articles were shared with me today:
“Token Inflation” is another sign of the hype/enshittification cycle of AI BS. Follow that link to ElReg’s snarky update.
Fortune Magazine’s lovely drill down: “Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago” on April 19.
Takeaway: Do not be part of the hype cycle. Senior executives are easy to sell on AI because they don’t do fact checking and love the idea of replacing as many pesky employees as possible, but that’s a rant of its own. I don’t have anything else to add, Ed’s piece is the best I’ve seen.
Part 3: Will USA Have a Biomedical Industry in 2029?
So back in early 2025 the Current Regime’s attack on expertise and knowledge went into high gear. A huge fraction of NIH and NSF funding was cancelled (and this year they aren’t bothering to pay out on much of the rest). The most notable was the hit job on vaccine development, “The federal government is calling off around $500 million worth of vaccine development projects that use mRNA technology…” Those were specifically for bird flu, general influenza, COVID, and a host of cancers - like the very promising treatment for pancreatic cancer that just completed first human trials. Vaccine development is not a profitable enterprise, if we want vaccines, we have to fund them ourselves.
Most of the discussion about this has focused on the generational damage to the scientific ecosystem in the USA. Postdocs and PhD candidates and the heads of research groups are all quietly moving to other countries. My morning news review includes a couple of Chinese newspapers, and it feels like every day I read about another senior scientist jumping ship. Factor in that a lot of research in green tech was also defunded, and that’s a hell of brain drain for the two technologies of the future.
In 2025 graduate international student enrollment declined 5.9 percent after years of steady growth, 2026 figures won’t be available till end of this year, but remember that those are smart people that won’t do research here AND word on the street is that foreign applications for this fall are in the toilet. Add that the research universities, already hard hit by the grant funding mentioned already, also lose out on a supply of new talent to make up for the other losses, plus those lovely out of state tuitions. So this explains why there are so many empty laboratories in biomedical research, and it’s getting worse.
The rest of the biomedical research ecology is also hammered. Labs that aren’t doing new work do not need new HPLC, chromatography, mass spec, and so forth. There are a lot of mid-size and small manufacturers that make the specialty equipment, parts, and consumables. Every research university has a host of companies in its area that do all kinds of special fabrication work. There are a lot of outside consultants and startups that depend on the flow of innovative technology to develop. All of these skills are tangible and depend on experience - once lost, they will be extraordinarily difficult to recover. Skill loss is why we cannot make modern microchips anymore, and let the Taiwanese make the chips and the Danes make the machinery.
Takeaway: America’s biotechnology lead is already gone, it didn’t take long at all. You can expect to see more and more of your health care depending on European and Chinese devices, therapies, and diagnostics. The support industries are not dead yet, but much like grass that has just been sprayed with Roundup, the end is inevitable and sooner than expected.
Summary: Well, there you go. I’m your agent of sunshine and cheer, as always.