My youngest child has food allergies.  That is still plural, as in more than one food allergy, although it used to be a much greater plural.  I had food allergies as well up until sometime early-mid last year.  Because my child has severe food allergies AND asthma, he gets to go see the allergist, in order to get epi-pens prescribed, and in order to have the 504 plan signed off on for school.  See, if you are disabled, then you need a doctor’s note to get accommodations in public school.  Food allergies and asthma are both disabilities which impact the necessary life activity of breathing if life-saving medication is not immediately available and somebody able to administer it is not present.

Public schools are “supposed” to be free.  They’re not, of course.  Not even for the able-bodied.  You must bring your own growing list of school supplies.  There are music and athletics fees.  There are lunches and snacks to be packed.  Furthermore, if you happen to be a double income with two and a half children attending schools, you have to have childcare for the days in which the teachers decide to train themselves how to better warehouse their future felons.  That’s a teacher joke.  One of my friends used to call the “Future Farmers of America” program the Future Felons of America.  This was before somebody had coined the phrase school-to-prison pipeline.

For a kid with food allergies, school is anything but free, unless you decided not to tell the school about your child’s food allergies in the first place.  There are only two settings: 1) You don’t tell the school, and your child goes to school without any epi-pens available or teacher notification, which could honestly save you hundreds of dollars, or 2) You fill out the appropriate form, get an allergist appointment in addition to the regular pediatrician appointment, pay the $350 office visit co-pay, plus $150 testing fees, and then pay a couple hundred for TWO sets of epi-pens.  One to be locked up in the nurse’s office, unreachable in case the nurse is only there 2 days a week or the school is in lockdown, or doesn’t follow the actual allergy plan, and one to have at home, and if you are extremely lucky, you can bring it with you on the bus for when somebody decides to eat PB&J for breakfast and poke your kid’s eyes out.  It is that expensive WITH insurance, because, hello, those high-deductible insurance plans were the only reasonable ones left on the list of available options from the employed person in the family.

Now, IF you didn’t go to public school, it would cost less.  Let’s say that you decided to homeschool.  Plenty of reasons for that, I don’t need to go into for the purpose here.  As a homeschooler, you don’t need an extra set of epi-pens and inhalers and spacer locked up in the nurse’s office.  You also don’t necessarily need to go to the allergist every single year.  You could, instead, get your epi-pen prescription through your pediatrician at the annual checkup, which IF it is coded correctly should not cost you a visit co-pay.

There are other things which need doctor’s notes at public school.  Let’s say, for example, that your child gets migraines.  Runs in the family.  Well, your child can NOT just take Ibuprofen to school with them and pop some pills when they need them.  At least not until late middle school when all the other post-puberty females are doing it one to three days per month, with their teachers looking the other way because it is still illegal.  Oh no.  They need a school form, filled out by a doctor, stating that they are allowed to take ibuprofen in school for a headache.  Plus an entire bottle kept under lock and key in the nurse’s office.  Without that form, and that doctor’s office co-pay, your child will just have to suffer, and may vomit, in which case they’ll have to be sent home and stay home an extra day.

Because you took advantage of this “free” thing, you now have to pay for it in other ways.  Because you have a driver’s license, you are required to show up for jury duty.  Because you have a social security number, you must pay income and property taxes.  Because you own a car, you must have the emissions inspected in order to keep the license tabs up to date.  Because you receive mail, you must have a mailbox which complies with the specifications laid out by the post office.  Because you live in the city, you must remove the noxious weeds from your property or it will be done for you at your expense.  Is there anything which is truly free?  Is the air I breathe free?  Well, no, I pay property taxes in order for somebody to organize and keep the chemical factory from expelling hazardous chemicals into the air I breathe.  It is all interconnected.  In for a penny, in for a pound.

It is the Dawn of a New Year.  It is the time of year when people around me make all kinds of predictions and all kinds of “resolutions.”  Resolution is a funny word, when you think about it.  It also means the conclusion of something, to resolve a problem.  I think it is weird to describe goals and the beginning of a change in behavior with the word “resolution,” especially when the goals people choose don’t typically re-solve any problem they’ve got going on in their life.

The predictions people come out with tend to be unconnected with any of the changes in behavior they choose.  When one hangs out with doomers in online forums, you’ll find all kinds of outlandish predictions.  Is this the year when the shit hits the fan?  Is this the year that industrial civilization collapses?  Is this the year when the American Empire finally dies?  The answer to all of these questions is no.  Timescales for human predictions tend to be way off.  Computers, on the other hand, for the large scale events, tend to be pretty good.  Thus, I’d be pretty safe in predicting the overall quantity of war to slowly increase over this next year.  I’d also be pretty safe in predicting the public confidence in governance structures to slowly increase until about mid-year, and then fall after that.  I could make less safe predictions, and go more specific, and say the nominal stock market value will rise, the value of physical gold will rise, and the US dollar will strengthen and cause serious trade impacts, including the further decline of US housing prices overall.

None of these predictions are all that hard, and none of them help you one bit.  They don’t help you put food on your table or a roof over your head.  They don’t help you figure out where or how to obtain the medical care you need during an accident, and accidents happen.  They don’t help you figure out how to get your dream job that you are passionate about, nor do they help you raise your children to be hard working members of the greater community.  You almost need to use 15 year predictions instead of 1 year predictions in order to plot out how you intend to navigate the next month, week, or day.  Even then, even if you knew where the globe was going to go in the next 15 years, it is not nearly as helpful as knowing where a specific location is going to go in the next 15 years.  If I knew that, for example, the Arctic Ocean would be ice free within the next 5 years, it would not help me plot a path to live in the Pacific Northwestern Portion of the United States.  It wouldn’t tell me when to grow my vegetables in my garden, and it wouldn’t tell me whether the long cold snap will kill my fruit trees or not.

People tend to need actionable predictions, coupled with goals which are much broader in scope than the typical “lose 20 pounds by eating in a disordered pattern with self-denial and self-hatred.”  So, let’s work on those.  Oil production is going to drop over the next 30 years.  Ignore why, because that’s a whole ‘nother book series worthy topic we’re not really discussing right now.  More importantly, using the land-export model, your individual access to oil is going to drop over the next 30 years.  It won’t be a steady drop, and sudden lurches hit different locations at different times, which are not predictable in advance.  Furthermore, particular industries are more dependent upon oil than others.  Industrial Agriculture is dependent upon oil to a vast extent, from fertilizer, to pesticides, to the machines with plow and plant and harvest, to transportation, to processing, to mining the metals in the machine parts and the cans, to the plastic cartons and wraps.  The command and control model simply can not and will not cope with the complexity inherent in the system.  Your food, water, transportation, and communication systems are at risk of disruption, and the risk increases over time as components age.  Some of these things simply can not be replaced using other energy sources, or feedstocks, regardless of sustainability or environmental change.  All of these industries will change the way they do business radically, and will decentralize to better manage their risks over time.

Furthermore, the global financial system will experience a crisis sometime over the next 15 years.  The crisis is in confidence.  The sheer quantity of bad-debt out there which will never be repaid is going to cause systemic disruption.  There are entire books written on this subject as well.  The combination of financial crisis and oil availability reduction will bring government bloat to a head, and cause a crisis in confidence there as well, sometime on the sooner rather than later end of the next 15 years.

When you have predictions like these, you can start to make goals that make more sense.  So, I can start very simply.  The first goal for me, is to raise my children.  Everything else flows from there.  I see the broad outline of the future, and I must decentralize my food sources.  By that, I mean eat local instead of global.  You know what doesn’t grow anywhere near here?  Sugarcane, Cocoa Beans, or Coffee Beans.  You take the typical “lose 20 pounds” goal, and translate it into “be physically capable of handling hard labor.”  Suddenly, it looks different.  There are multiple ways of getting there from where you are.  Integrate it into the first goal, of raising my children to be able to survive, and it doesn’t look like you working out 2 hours a day in the gym for the rest of your life, does it?

It goes on from there, to your personal financial goals.  When you are raising children to manage risk, you get out of debt by any means necessary.  Debt is the thing that keeps you anchored in place, unable to move out of your underwater house, unable to pay for the car that gets you to work when Murphy decides to steal a working car part from you.  When you are out of debt, you have more options.  Teaching your children about making hard financial decisions and how to live on a shoestring is a big deal when the bank runs are coming or when Zimbabwe hyperinflation is coming, or even when Murphy’s medical or job loss black swan arrives.  My goal is to increase my financial flexibility and optionality.

Then we come to the increasing surveillance and police state presence, which brings up my social goals.  It will help my children survive to have a very local and offline social support network, so that’s something I’ll be working on this year.  Anything online is capable of being taken from you (yeah, digital currency, again, another topic worth a book).  Offline is more difficult to take away from you.  This year, I’m making friends.