Showing results by author "Charles Hugh Smith" in All Categories

This book has an entirely practical aim: to inspire the adoption of a new set of values that establishes goals and incentives to do more with less so we use fewer resources to sustain a high quality of life that’s accessible to all who embrace these values and contribute to a fairer, more sustainable way of living.

Ultra-Processed Life is my term for everything that is analogous to ultra-processed snacks: attractively marketed, instantly alluring, easy to consume, addictive by design, tasty in the moment but harmful over time, its origins a black box of unknown processes, the brightly colored product bearing no resemblance to the real-world ingredients, an idealized form of what is inherently imperfect, untethered from the natural world or the future, disconnected not just from the consequences of our consuming the snack but disconnected from the consequences unleashed by those consequences.

The current conventional-wisdom view of our soon-to-be future is rose-tinted: Automation will free millions of people from the drudgery of work, then by taxing the robots doing all the work, we can pay everyone universal basic income (UBI), enabling a life of leisure and artistic pursuit for all. The result: a future of universal happiness. But is this accurate? Is this what UBI is actually capable of doing? More importantly, is this what we want? And even more importantly: Will this “future” be our best future? Listen to find out more.

With the soaring cost of higher education, has the value of a college degree been turned upside down? College tuition and fees are up 1000% since 1980. Half of all recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed, revealing a deep disconnect between higher education and the job market. It is no surprise everyone is asking: Where is the return on investment? Is the assumption that higher education returns greater prosperity no longer true? And if this is the case, how does this impact you, your children and grandchildren? We must thoroughly understand the twin revolutions now ...

Will you be richer or poorer? What does the future hold for you - and for the world? Supposedly, we're all getting richer, but many of us feel we’re becoming poorer. Why? One reason is our economy doesn’t even measure many kinds of wealth and ignores many costs. Clearly, clean air and water, good health, and civil liberties are valuable, but you won’t find these on any balance sheet. Our system’s incentives are to maximize short-term financial profits, and everything else is treated as if it doesn’t exist.

On the eve of a wedding, what to do when the groom mysteriously disappears? When the police and private investigators come up empty, what's a desperate bride to do? Call in the man with no qualifications: Caverlock Victor Oliver -- the world's only Consulting Philosopher. Will he prove there's no mystery that can withstand the prodigious powers of Applied Philosophy? Will he succeed in reuniting sweet Victorine with her lover? Will a Taoist-quoting bookworm solve the mystery ... and will he be paid? How much do you pay a Consulting Philosopher, anyway? The answers to these questions (and ...

All nations, including the United States, face systemic crises that are reinforcing each other at an explosive point in history. The status quo is now the problem rather than the solution. These novel crises demand an entirely new grand strategy. The global crisis offers an opportunity to redraw America’s grand strategy from the ground up. Should we fail to make full use of this opportunity, the United States will fail, along with all the other nation-states that are incapable of redefining the problems so that new solutions become possible.

America teeters on the precipice: our government is now captive to special interests and big money, twin cancers that threaten our democracy. This accelerating crisis is exacerbated by a toxic social media-fueled tribalism that has replaced “what do you think?” with “which side are you on?” Our crisis isn’t just political - it’s structural: as the pace of change explodes from gradual to non-linear, the organizations that dominate our economy - centralized corporations and government - become destined to fail.

When I burned out, what I wanted but could not find was a practical guide by someone who had experienced burnout themselves. None of the material I found spoke to what I was experiencing or to my sense that our economy is now optimized to burn people out. I decided to write the guide I wanted but could not find. This is my experience of burnout, reckoning, and renewal. Burnout is a life-changing experience in a good way, as absurd as that may sound to those in the depths of burnout. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on, but I must go on. There is a way forward.

In Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, respected financial blogger Charles Smith (oftwominds.com) turns the conventional wisdom on its head. This book delivers the insight and positive action plan to get you employed. Just starting out? Laid off? Trying to restart you career? Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy arms you with the knowledge you need.

Garrett Trask needed a job, badly--and this weird one would do. If only he knew .... "At some point you're willing to take a job, any job, just to break the dispiriting cycle of looking for work: hopeful application, positive interview, anxious wait, polite rejection, numbing disappointment. Getting tipsy and wandering onto the Golden Gate Bridge in a deep fog was an optional step six, and then it was back to step one again."

Debasement of the dollar as a result of ill-use of leverage is destroying the global economy, and in Leverage, well known market commentator Karl Denninger follows the path of money throughout history to prove that currencies are debased when moneyed and powerful interests pull the levers of government and policy to enrich themselves at the expense of the masses. The result is ugly: the value of everything - including gold - falls, and even personal safety is at risk in a world where there is limited money even for essentials like food and fuel.

Things are falling apart—that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Readers of my blog oftwominds.com asked me to explain why in a clear, comprehensive way, and then present solutions. This book is my answer. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand. We will cover the five core reasons why things are falling apart: 1. Debt and financialization 2. Crony capitalism ...

Our status quo - the pyramid of wealth and power dominated by the few at the top - has failed and is beyond reform. This failure is not rooted in superficial issues such as politics or governmental regulations; the failure is structural. The very foundation of the status quo has rotted away, and brushing on another coat of reformist paint will not save our societal house from collapse.

What if we could hit the reset button on the way we create money, work, commerce, and community? This is not an idle question, for technology now enables us to hit that reset button and organize the creation of money, work, commerce, and community in new ways. If we could start from scratch, what would a new system look like? To answer that, we must understand why the current system is failing. The current system is based on five principles that are assumed to be true.

What every human wants is fairness, a chance to belong that offers everyone opportunities to get ahead by our own merit and a say when decisions are made. Even before the global upheavals, our system was failing - it wasn’t fair at all. Now that it’s unraveling, it’s time for a new arrangement that’s actually sustainable on our resource-depleted planet that doesn’t favor wealthy insiders. Those gorging on inequality will never accept reforms that strip away their unearned privileges, and so the only practical way forward is a Hacker’s Teleology.

Inequality is rising globally, and rising inequality is destabilizing. A status quo of increasing inequality self-destructs. To avoid this fate, we must answer this question: Why is the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else widening? The answer boils down to one word: privilege. There are many types of privilege, but they all share two characteristics: Privilege delivers benefits, wealth, and power that are unearned. Privilege is destabilizing for many reasons: The dead weight of privilege reduces productivity, generates perverse incentives, and fuels social injustice.

When we see the word “revolution,” the shared imagination conjures up images of violent political upheaval. I use the word not to denote the bloody overthrow of a political order, but to describe a blossoming of understanding so profound that it leads to peaceful transformation of our social order, economy and culture. It’s easy to confuse faith and political ideology. We resist changing our understanding,as we experience this transition as instability and insecurity. But changing our minds does not require changing our faith; rather, the firmness of our faith—in our Creator, in ...

Sixteen-year old Claire, overprotected her entire life by a hardworking worry-wart Mom, must now find the father she never knew in Paris, France, and soon, or she'll never have the chance: he'll be dead. What starts out as a simple summer visit to Paris with her best friend Camden and their guardian, Claire’s spinster aunt May, quickly splinters into multiple mysteries: where is her father? What did he do to make such tenacious enemies? The silver ring he sent her—can it really protect her? What do the ring’s Chinese characters mean? Claire and her plucky friend Camden are soon up to ...

Verona Uyeki is in a romantic pickle she never expected; three men claim to love her, but she only loves one. Two want to marry her, but not the one she is mad for. Beset by family pressures and precarious finances, Verona must respond by Sunday to a suitor's sudden ultimatum. On the weekend she must decide between the three, her first love pays her a surprise visit in San Francisco. What a young woman from Hawaii remembers, and discovers about herself, is also unexpected....