🙃 Power went out while I was making a delicious squash soup, and only hours after I switched on the fridge.

It is One of Those Days.

What's a nice thing you did for yourself today?

@NiveusLepus has been beautiful at gently reminding me that I'm allowed my personal upsets when the world also royally sucks. (Thank you, lovely bun!)

On my way to buy squash for soup, I ran into three street regulars: one worn ragged and getting ready to try their luck on the coast, one who is the nicest person who smells like fecal matter I've ever met, and one woman in her mid-sixties who's been struggling ever since she moved to this country.

Eight billion struggles, all of which matter.

If anyone else needs a refresher, here are some unhelpful thinking styles we might fall into when something major goes wrong (or, you know, just because). I'm a real pro at all-or-nothing thinking, personalization, and fortune-telling, myself.

I'm also turning on my fridge tonight, electric bill be darned. I need start imagining what life would be like if things started going better for me again--& acting like they can.

Also: making soup, and going first thing tomorrow for a run.

We press on.

Well, the expected bad news came a day early.

Lots of work to do now, to figure out how to go forward. I've been bailing and bailing for years now - but that's common for many of us, eh?

Tough and confusing times for the world.

The rest of today is for making a list of everything I need to organize for what comes next.

And even though I'm okay mentally right now?

No skimping on prep to make sure it stays that way.

Stay shiny and chrome out there, folks. We can and do survive *such* things.

Another SCOTUS explainer today, this time breaking down some of the nuance in yesterday's oral arguments and the issues in contention around free speech and social media.

Can a private company grow big enough as a public platform that it loses its right to curate user experience through de-platforming certain content? Does it have First Amendment protections? Is it sheltered by Section 230?

And if not, what will happen to the many businesses currently operating online?

https://onlysky.media/mclark/social-media-free-speech-and-scotus/

Rats. And I'll be losing other income in March as well.

Not panicking, but I know myself well enough to know I need to knuckle down to redirect the stress.

If I finish this novella by month's end, I'll at least have something in queue to offer a financial buffer down the line.

So that's the aim between work M-W. Then we'll see what Thursday holds before further plans. No stress-dithering.

Newsletter & OS posts (& my Connections ladies!) but otherwise off 'til March.

Be good, but not angels!

A shoe I've been waiting to see drop might finally come to pass on Thursday.

It's been hard living on tenterhooks--harder than just having the hammer fall swiftly--but since I still have a few days before I'll know for sure... well, I have other tasks to focus on first!

There will come a point in my life when I don't need to have a dozen balls in the air all the time... but not yet. This is still a mess of a time for me, in a really messy time for the world.

We keep screaming.
Er.
Swimming. 🐟

🤣 This podcast literally had a hedgefund manager gloss over 2008 as a "little problem" and admit that a key part of current industry processes is covering for how there isn't enough work for any one fund manager to justify the client fees they're charging - so they group portfolios and strategies to cover for the downtime on individual resources.

One wants to laugh at how scummy the world is, but it's just too bleak when you think about it. At least the weasel-speak fueled an OK run today! 👍🏻

Oooo, and my sociopath pod's main topic today is hedge funds and how they've created profit resilience across market cycles. I'm going to run well on fury in the park, I can just feel it. :)

PUT ME IN COACH.

I'm rarin' and ready to go for this silly week in our deeply unserious world.

💪🏻 Mornin', CoSo!

Ho ho! The day is young, but we already have a good contender for "most blatant clickbait." I'm not sure what's more inane about this: the headline blatantly reframing a book about women in politics to talk about one man's horny statements, or the paragraph justifying this slimy media move by suggesting that the paper can't help but follow a news trend of disproportionately focusing on a tiny section of the whole book.

"But but it generated headlines elsewhere!" says the better-funded paper. 🙄

I feel like most everyone on CoSo knows how to make #potato-ade out of a situation, so this one's for you. G'night!

Me: *riled up before bedtime*

Also Me: ...And what did we learn?

M: *grumbling through their toothbrush* No news during sleep hygiene routines.

AM: Good. And being the rational creature that you are, now that you know how much it riles you up, you'll surely--hey! Stop that! What are you doing?

M: *checks news again, grumbles even harder*

AM: 🤦‍♂️...Well, maybe tossing and turning counts as exercise, at least.

M: I'll check online!

AM: No, wait, don't--!

Enshittification, mi gente!

It's not just for online spaces, unfortunately.

In Ontario, this government has been gutting education and healthcare for years so that poor outcomes therein help to provide a case for private industry to step in.

Private lobbies did NOT always hold as much sway in Canadian systems as they now do. But the slide toward US models does not need to continue. There's still time to reverse this bullpucky and restore the public trust--*if* a willingness to act shows up.

&--

"While the Ford government is diverting hundreds of millions of dollars to for-profit clinics and hospitals to rebuild operating room capacity, across Ontario there are ORs in every public hospital that are underused. ... The majority of the time, the majority of Ontario’s OR capacity in our public hospitals lies dormant. In many hospitals there are [ORs] closed permanently ... because the hospital does not have the funding to recruit and retain the staff and pay for the operation of them."

Cont'd:

"The [OHC] has phoned all the private clinics in Canada twice, and all the private for-profit clinics in Ontario an additional time. Each time we caught the majority of them extrabilling patients. This violates the Canada Health Act, the Commitment to the Future of Medicare Act, and other provincial legislation. Without question, the privatization of public hospital services poses a real and urgent threat to the future of single-tier public medicare in our province and our country."