A dark trend in a loss of civil liberties -- combined with the all-recording record of electronic devices, this is likely to be an explosively bad combination for those dedicated to human freedom :(
It'd be interesting to get a split beyond just pure volume of startup businesses to dive a little deeper -- small businesses divided by industry, and also revenue/profit per small business might be interesting to look at.
Anecdotally, it doesn't feel like small businesses have slowed, though I live in the eye of the Silicon Valley storm. I'd love to dive deeper into the stats to try to reconcile what I'm anecdotally experiencing and the systematic truths that might be out there.
There's a difference between people who can implement models and those that can create them -- startups could use people who do the former, and many don't actually need the latter.
This gets back to how innovation is often advanced under military/security circumstances -- it's unfortunate that so much money stems to those reasons for research such that the intent of the researchers is always a tiny bit questionable.
There's been a lot of work done on the effects of long-term unemployment -- I'd wager that a lack of purpose drives opioid use rather than the other way around...
It works both directions. I'll give you a pretty common example for my neck of the woods. A good friend of mine worked in a machine shop and had a great job for rural America ran his own small lawn-care business on his days off. One day he hurt his back bad, he didn't have time or money for physical therapy (who else would pay the bills) which would've probably been best instead the doctor prescribed opioids and insurance paid. So he went for a few months and it got worse, which was probably just him building up a tolerance, rinse and repeat a few times and he was a fully burned out addict. Couldn't hold his job because of how fried he was.
This isn't an isolated incident it's an all too common pattern I've seen. The cycle works: you go to work and work as hard as you can, you get hurt, you can't afford the best care option, you take the cheaper meds so you can continue working, tolerance builds up, you can't perform, then you're let go. In the end you're left broke, hurting, unemployed, and addicted.
I don't buy fuel (don't use a car) and aside from the rates set by the electricity provider (essentially a monopoly provider in California) and public transit provider (a city monopoly), fuel costs don't affect me and I actually choose to spend a higher amount with discretion since I moved to the Solar Choice program.
Food is such a small part of my discretionary spend (I buy grains in bulk, specifically quinoa, and greens from the farmer's mart).
Looking back at my spend, the majority of it is in technology that is undergoing massive deflation, or my pet hobby of collecting rare books (neither of which is accounted for in the basket).
I am probably an edge case, but the point remains -- the basket that is set seems outdated. I can't imagine that people are spending as much on food as you think. ex: "USDA data shows that in 2010 Americans spent 9.4 percent of their disposable income on food"
If the Industrial Revolution is any analogue, there will be plenty of inter-state wars, revolutions within states and competing ideologies within a few decades...
The optimist in me says that there's been a period of 70 years or so without major wars between different state powers, and maybe MAD will hold up -- but in the theme of prologues repeating themselves...
Is it just confined to bread? I feel like subsidies/industrial farming have led to a homogenized diet overall -- to the point where it can be hard I think to confine the definition of oversupply to only one foodstuff.
