The passage of time
is a smooth loop
of circles around the sun –
a ‘year’ has no natural edge
so can’t be ‘new’ or ‘old’
in any truthful sense –
these numbers we add up
are merely markers
of how long we’ve been counting.

But as winter catches our breath
it seems good to return to old rituals
so I pause and observe:
what is shifting inside
as we spin on this orbit?
what marks have been left
by recent joy and sorrow?
where will my heart lead me
if I let it?

Richard Watkins (2019) Alive or Else. Simply This Publishing

An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.

But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for an individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, some kind of personal organising system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act.

Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it’s the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

Kim Stanley Robinson (2021) Ministry For The Future. S.L.: Orbit.

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Today, an estimated 470 million smallholder farmers and supply chain actors across developing countries lose an average of 15 percent of their income to food spoilage. Spoilage limits how much of their harvest they can sell, and in times of surplus the risk of spoilage may prompt farmers not to harvest at all to spare themselves the hard labor required for diminishing returns. Another consequence is that the inputs – including labor, water, seed, fertilizer – and their environmental costs are lost along with the product. Over time, these losses compound, land yield drops due to mismanagement, and the overall ecosystem is affected. Food waste, spoilage, and loss are recognized globally as urgent problems. Yet, they are solvable and even preventable.

Solving for food spoilage would feed 1 billion more people by 2050 – many of them across Sub-Saharan Africa, where food insecurity is greatest. But it would mean more than just more food for more people – addressing spoilage would also increase nutritional security, build greater resilience within food systems, and improve farmers’ livelihoods. And it would create benefits to the local ecosystems, ensuring that scarce resource inputs such as crop land, freshwater and fertilizer yield useable calories rather than waste, which has both positive nutrition and ecologic impacts.
Source: Rockefeller Foundation

Apeel started up to address the problem by thinking of a natural way to preserve food – they use materials that exist in the peels, seeds, and pulp of all fruits and vegetables to create a protective layer that seals moisture in and keeps oxygen out. The layer is essentially tasteless, odourless, and plant-based protection. That means produce stays fresh, nutritious, and delicious twice as long. It also means less produce goes to waste throughout the supply chain—from grower to retailer to consumers at home. The second order effects of this monumental: reduces pollution from transport, reduced pressure on arable land, and less urgency to use up the ingredients.
Source: Apeel

The yield curve is usually upward sloping, where a higher fixed rate of return is earned from lending money for longer periods of time. Shorter-term yields tend to represent what investors believe will happen to central bank policies in the near future. Longer-dated maturities represent investors’ best guess at where inflation, growth and interest rates are headed over the medium to long term.

However, when an economy is slowing, and inflation expectations decline, yields on 10- and 30-year bonds typically fall towards those of shorter maturities, such as three-month and two-year notes as bond buyers bet there is less need for central banks to raise borrowing costs in the future; instead they may need to encourage spending.

This so-called flattening in the yield curve can at some point become a recessionary signal, in particular if the curve becomes downward-sloping or inverted, as happened last week. An “inversion” of the yield curve has preceded every US recession for the past half century. 

There are two possible explanations for this predictive power. One is that trading in the $23tn US government bond market serves as a kind of early warning system, identifying approaching dangers that individual forecasters struggle to spot. The other is that shifts in the shape of the yield curve play an active role in triggering downturns by undermining confidence in the economy.

Source