Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

• JANUARY: Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
• FEBRUARY: Cyber-attacking may be a lot easier than cyber-defending. Also, nuclear proliferation is back partly thanks to diplomatic unforced errors by the United States.
• MARCH: Invoking of emergency powers was the first step down the slippery slope for the democratic Weimar Republic. New research suggests that climate change can be the trigger that pushes a society over the edge.
• APRIL: The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
• MAY: Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
• JUNE: The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!
• JULY: The water situation in India, and the major city of Chennai in particular, sounds really bad.
• AUGUST: Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
• SEPTEMBER: Being a TSA air marshal may be the worst job ever.
• OCTOBER: A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
• NOVEMBER: The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
• DECEMBER: Pilots occasionally go crazy and crash planes on purpose.

Most hopeful stories:

• JANUARY: The dream of fusion power is not dead. There is even some hope of new advancements in fission power.
• FEBRUARY: Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.
• MARCH: The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
• APRIL: There is forward progress on a male birth control pill.
• MAY: Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
• JUNE: There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.
• JULY: Deliberate practice is how you get better at something.
• AUGUST: I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
• SEPTEMBER: I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
• OCTOBER: I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story! 
• NOVEMBER: There is progress on carbon capture technology. Also, just restoring soil on previously degraded farm and grazing land could provide large benefits worldwide. There may also be real progress on fusion power.
• DECEMBER: Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

• JANUARY: Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
• FEBRUARY: We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.
• MARCH: China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
• APRIL: Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.
• MAY: Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
• JUNE: In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.
• JULY: I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.
• AUGUST: Liquid hydrogen could theoretically be used as a jet fuel.
• SEPTEMBER: I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.
• OCTOBER: A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
• NOVEMBER: Google claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy“. This may allow us all to live lives of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
• DECEMBER: Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

I want to give the reader some brilliant synthesis of all that, but you could probably go back to my past year in review posts and find that I am saying pretty much the same things each year. Well, here goes.

There is a list of serious risks that are being acknowledged but not effectively addressed. These include climate change, nuclear war, drought, rainforest loss, loss of freedom and human rights, economic recession, cyberwarfare, and automation leading to job loss. Climate change, drought, and rainforest loss are clearly intertwined. Solutions are largely known and just not being implemented due to dysfunctional politics at the national level and lack of international cooperation. These trends seem to be going in the wrong direction at the moment unfortunately.

Other than rainforest loss, the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity, biomass and ecosystem function is mostly not even being acknowledged, let alone addressed. Biodiversity is a somewhat esoteric concept to most people, but hearing about mammals and birds and even insects just vanishing on a mass scale really starts to get to me emotionally. I don’t hear others in my social circles talking about these issues much, so I wonder if they just haven’t heard the same facts and figures I have or if they just don’t have the same response. Politicians are certainly not talking about these issues.

The risk of catastrophic war is very real. The world is in a very cynical place right now, but we have made progress on this before and we can do it again.

Recession and automation have an interesting relationship, where recession is a short- to medium-term reversal of economic growth, and automation, at least in theory, should lead to a longer-term acceleration of it. Of course, even if the acceleration happens it will benefit the majority of workers only if the wealth is shared. I’ll just repeat what I said above: “Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” Or just copy the Dutch because they seem to know what they’re doing, the smug bastards.

You could accuse my blog of being US-centric, and I would accept that criticism. I am living in the US after all. I’ve lived and worked abroad though, and came to appreciate the strengths of my country more when I spent some time away from it. The US is still a good country to live in as a middle class professional person, but we are cruising along on the momentum of our past extraordinary success. We have lost momentum and begun to slip not only out of the leadership position among our developed country peers, but below the middle of the pack. The hard evidence on this is clear. We have politicians that just tell us that we are “great again”, because that is what we want to hear, without taking any necessary steps that would at least help us to keep up. 2020 is an election year and we have a chance to make some changes. We need to deal first and foremost with our systemic corruption problem which causes our government to respond to wealthy and powerful interests rather than citizens. We need real, inspiring, once-in-a-generation leadership to make this happen. I have decided to support Bernie Sanders for this reason, even though I don’t agree with every one of his stated policy positions.

There are some interesting and even astonishing technologies in the list above, from fusion power to micro-satellites to quantum computing to genetic engineering. It is 2020 after all.

And finally, when I’m not thinking and worrying about the world at large, I’ll be tending to my garden and my family and eating my hard shell tacos, and reminding myself that life here in the United States on the planet Earth is actually pretty good.