The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

It's practically impossible to avoid the news of ecological crises (plural) these days. I'm not talking about Russia strangling Europe this winter by cutting gas flows. That will be a politically-made crisis. I'm talking about the epochal droughts afflicting the entire planet. You know it's bad when river flows in Europe are so low that the Rhine can't sustain commercial traffic; when the Tiber water levels in Rome are so low that the foundations of Roman bridges from the times of Nero are exposed.  Resurfaced remains of a bridge in Rome’s River Tiber, in July. Photographer: Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg But you know it's next level bad when the literal "hunger stone" appears in the Czech Republic --an inscription from 1619 at the bottom of the Elbe river that says " If you see me, then weep " Hunger stone on the Elbe in Decin, Czech Republic (AFP/Getty) I wish it was only Europe. The Western US is going through the worst drought in 1200 yea

The more you want to get away from it, the easiest it finds you. Bad news and ominous signals have an inexorable way of powering their way to your skull. Regardless of how badly you want to get away from them. Our loss aversion makes us more attentive to bad news, because not acting on negative risk meant literally dying when we were apes.  Wanna know the saddest part of all this? This is still very much true in the year 2022.  I remember telling myself once and again when I heard nonstop reports on Russian amassing troops on the border with Ukraine before the invasion:  "Enough already! This whole 'will-he/will-he-not invade' non sense is getting tiresome. Of course Putin won't invade! I'm sick of this media alarmism. I mean, the costs are massive. Ukraine is too big a country. It's not Syria. It borders NATO, for God's sake! All Putin has to do to win is retreat, don't invade, and say 'See? I told you! Biden's a warmonger. I told you all along

Another cycle around our star and we're still stuck in the same rut. Still talking about dealing with uncertainty; about counting your blessings; about stopping and smelling the roses because  life is short  and it's better to appreciate the small things when a virus can snatch your life away any second should you dare step outside. Is Omicron deadlier? More contagious? Resistant to Pfizer? To Moderna? How many mutations did you say it had? Does it evade natural immunity? But it doesn't affect your smell? Oh, the symptoms are the same as the common cold? But masks still work, right? Oh, but not cloth ones?  The noise is  maddening .  Our hyper-mediatized, over-stimulated minds can't think of nothing other than what's in our handheld screens. And at the same time, our hyper-cynical minds won't believe those very same incessant, flickering alerts, either. Somehow our collective mind has entered a sort of  Schrödinger -like, superposition state. We  both   eat up e

Today I saw a man wearing a Lionel Messi jersey. It was weird. It was not the ubiquitous blaugrana   jersey that you see everywhere. No. It was the new Paris St. Germain one. It felt foreign . It got me thinking. How dares the emblem of Culés betray his tribe? And how cheap of that guy to jump ship from Barça to PSG just because of a player? The strangeness of seeing the PSG emblem in the same piece of clothing with the letters Messi   in the back hit me. We are nothing but pawns. Cheap imitators who crave for models to follow. Without them, we are lost. This whole post-modernist idea that says " you're unique ", " you're an individual " ,  " you're cool in your own way " is complete bullsh*t.  The man wearing that jersey wants to be like Messi. Why else would he be willing to shell out $200  to signal to the world that he's committed to emulate him? What part of Messi he wants to be, I don't know. The fame? The money? The ability to dr

We're instinctive animals. We act in accordance to what we feel: anger, happiness, compassion, pain. Your body is an evolution-optimized "soft machine"  whose actions can be traced and explained by specific emotions.  You are cold? You get a blanket. The pain your nerves communicate to your brain prompts you to act and look for warmth. You're angry because somebody flipped you off on your commute to work? Your return the gesture, or even escalate by cutting him/her off at the first chance.   Emotion begets actions. We are slaves to the whims of our feelings. Entire religions and eastern traditions are built around the concept of achieving control over what we feel and emote. Nobel prizes are given to those who invent  new branches of knowledge which merge psychology and economics (“behavioral economics”), based on the idea that our emotions makes us act stupidly.  This is evidently a huge blind spot in all of us. A vulnerability that's been exploited for centur

We can't predict the future. Chaos always reigns. The unpredictable compounding of events is inevitable, and we can always count on surprises occurring , which is why it pays to build our lives (and invest) with the certainty that something will inevitably go wrong. Accounting for the certitude that something you planned for will not go as planned should prod you to hedge yourself via diversification --or even better, redundancies. Of course, building redundancies takes resources. That insurance policy doesn't pay for itself. You sacrifice current income (and/or effort) to build that safety net in case SHTF.  And although it could very well be that you'll never use it, it's not stupid to build it. An example: Nature, in its infinite iteration game called evolution, gave us two kidneys. I am pretty sure it's not free (evolutionarily speaking) to carry an extra filter behind your belly just in case one clogs with crap you throw at your body. If evolution settles on an