Coping: Analysis of “Urban Intel”

A while back on our www.peoplenomics.com site, I outlined how a person – even with just a phone – could put together a very good “intelligence platform” and using it, you could throw out your time sink known as “the talking heads” of the newsporn biz.

Not that they aren’t cute, quaffed, buffed, and rated based more on looks than journalistic skills, but frankly, folks like us have better things to do with our time that watch buffo’s and bimbos reading off a teleprompter.

Ergo, we did something about it.

As I’ve pointed out (almost endlessly), getting the information you can use is a much different task that immersion in the data bubble.

To show you the difference, take president Obama’s trip to Europe late last week and on, and on, and on…  Does it matter one iota?  Nope.  Oh sure, it gives the “journalism” types (those who are out “covering” the narrative – which used to be a story but it’s not a narrative which is getting closer by the minute to the real-deal right label – which would be fairytale) but in the end it doesn’t matter.

You see, one of the constant mantras of a good business education is to focus only on the variables you can change– not the ones that are shoved down your throat by Media Knows Best.

It doesn’t. 

I spent 13-=years of hardcore, big city, White House press credentials and the whole McGillah on the reporting and radio anchoring side.  (Radio worked because I wasn’t “pretty” enough, lol.)  And in the end, except for some human affairs coverage (a reporter named Joe and I hung out with the Nisqually Indians during the fishing rights disputes and so forth), there wasn’t much that was life-changing about being a reporter.

Except after a solid week of death (and poking a mic in someone’s face to ask the idiot questions like What was it like to lose your loved one?) one develops a taste for booze.  It’s like being on a movie set and not really having a part.  So you run the script and hope someone notices you’re a “natural” and you’re not.

Back to point: I build the “home intelligence platform” because I got sick and tired of stories that don’t mean much.  A few – like the two family murders over the past week – are interesting more from a Big Data and 135-140 day Murder Cycle standpoint.  But Obama selling trade deals to the British?  If they’re dumb enough to listen, they’re dumb enough to keep on kneeling.  I think Obama should stay home and fix our problems rather than jaunting off to sell another country into the slavery of corporatism in the EU.  But that’s just me – and with eye surgery Thursday, I’m a bit testier than normal.

So what matters?  I mean besides the Fed meeting and whether this POS stock market can zoom off to new highs, or it collapses later this week?

As always, I live by the Seven Major Systems of Life.  This is where we find the real news you can use.

Housing

One of the big trend changes in play right now is rethinking the size of housing. We’re going through that, too.  On the one hand, I pointed out an article for subscribers this weekend on micro houses.  But here’s one of “the system” this morning that says old paradigms die slowly. 

City rejects smaller lots for house construction,

This may not seem like a big deal – a city standing by a 6,000 square foot lot size instead of 5,000,but it really is a very big deal.

Suppose for a minute that EMP really happened, or there was some interruption of our food supplies. or you needed to gather rainwater and store it (as people used to do).

Right now (because the lights are on) it seems like you won’t need a den or library for all your rare books because they are just files now.  But some day?  This is the kind of stuff worth thinking about because you can have a direct impact one way, or the other.  You still get to vote with your wallet.

Food

The next item on our “list of seven systems, essential to UrbanSurvival” is chow.

Now before I spill the beans on the next item (so to speak) Elaine and I probably eat more meat than we “should” but on balance, as I go through the data, it’s way more healthy to eat a diet of minimally processed foods than it is to eat highly processed crap.  So here’s another article which popped up in our system which nudges our thinking along in that direction:

The Creepy Way Processed Food Packaging Messes With Your Hormones

Which we may have already suspected, particularly if high fructose corn syrup makes your blood sugar go wonky or if you too get “wheat belly” but here’s data on the hormone impacts and that’s the kind of physical “influencer” that you may not even be aware of.  Care for a grass fed steak and an organic sweet potato with a spot of real butter on it, now?

Communications

Other than a bunch of tech buzz that Facebook is looking at charging people to post comments not too much is going on in the communications world.  Ask yourself how many “apps” you use and most people use less than 15, more if single and cruising, less if you have a real life outside the electronics.

For those who are still device and app crazy, here’s an article in The Tennessean that outlines 4 communication tools to increase influence.  No, this is not about four apps to download.  It’s about the original communications – what, how, and why we say things to other people and how we go about it.

Only time this morning to focus on three of the seven major systems of life, but these are the kinds of items that seem to me to get the short-shrift in news coverage.

It’s much easier to get all riled up about a dead rock star, a pile of bodies in Ohio, the presidents latest road show/distraction, than it is to look at an insane world and try to make reasonable choices to move you along in the direction of reasonable survival prospects.

When the whole world is crazy, you need to think differently that everyone else or you’re going to be running with the dumbest group of people ever.

The herd.

Write when you get rich  (<-I’m going back to this for a while, but you can still write…)

George@ure.net