Oregon, PDX: I’ve noticed a lot of businesses and restaurants closing and a ton more overdoses and emergency vehicles downtown.
My job specifically relies on business to business interactions and NOBODY wants to be downtown. It’s to the point Ted Wheeler (mayor) is now pleading for people to go back to the office because the commercial realastate bubble is on the verge of hitting and business owners know it.
We are blindly waking around hoping things go back to the way they were and I see so many delusional takes and wonder where we are going to be next year as a city.
I have trees budding in December, wheat that is still producing, green grass, and mushrooms growing on my woodpile. None of these are particularly normal here. At this point none of it is surprising, either.
Right now my big question is: What happens when this El Nino ends? My expectation is that “normal” will not return, and it will slowly start to become more apparent to everyone what path we are on (an accelerated one).
Location: Southern Germany. Lots of fallen trees and broken tree branches and train disruptions for weeks after extreme snowfall (some 45 cm within a day, heaviest since weather records began). I saw zero PV power production for about two weeks until the snow melted.
North East USA… Flooding instead of snow and weirdly enough gnats keep spawning. Like whole little swarms of them that hover around as if it were spring or summer.
I don’t think it’s even quite warm enough for them since it’s only the 50s but yet there they are. It’s so odd yet so obviously wrong.Location: Germany
The right wing is gaining here, as it is in all. Of Europe (and very obviously in the US) and it terrifies me.
Migration has been the skape goat for so much lately and most parties are blaming Imigrants and are moving towards right wing positions (France for example just got a law trough that has been called the “most restrictive Migration law in 40 years”.
I, as a rather progressiv left leaning person, am in fear that my political stance will be a problem in the future. I am very much pro climate action, pro feminism, pro LFBTQI+, pro Refugees, etc.
And I fear that such positions will be problematic in the future to come. We are expecting children (unplanned), and I am in terror thinking about the world they will grow up in.
If the left actually took an anti immigration stance the right would start fading . If the left had a “take care of the people already here first goal”
Lots of left wing people are sane enough to recognize labor competition from immigrants and poor cultural assimilation leads to lower standard of living for them and their children. As long as this continues and things get worse you will be feeding the growth of the right wing. people will vote for survival and standard of living even though they loathe most everything else about the right
There is a new, real “left” party about to be formed in Germany by people around Sahra Wagenknecht. It is going to soak up all the protest voters, some of which go currently to the “right”.
Leishmaniasis is now happening in the USA in my location. The tropical diseases are here but we still get occasional hard frost enough to kill the tropical fruit trees and not enough chill hours to make temperate fruit work. Worst of all worlds.
EDIT forgot to mention im in texas
Location: Germany. Primary energy use decline (-8% to prior year), mostly due to deindustrialization continuing https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/energieverbrauch-ist-2023-kraeftig-gesunken/
Make sure to scroll down to the PJ labeled graph to see that it’s a long term (since after 2006) trend: https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/AGEB_Pressedienst_06_2023-Grafik-PEV-Verlauf.png
Oh, and we’ll see some 11 deg C this Christmas night, in Southern Germany. EDIT: now 15 deg C on 25th of December.
