Unlike most sites, UrbanSurvival is an “idea ranch.”

A concept that came out of a childhood where Pappy was called “the Encyclopedia” in our local fire department, and where Scrabble words (derivations and alt spellings) comprised the brain food on family road and camping trips.  I come by this stuff honestly.

Pause-n-Drop?

I’d like to congratulate the Latter Day Ponzi crowd for breaking below $70,000 overnight with their darlings with small bids.

Not like they are alone, however: Early futures has the Dow slumping another hunnsky at the open.  Oh, and our lunch money trading account?  I’m lining up to do some “pressure relief” spending to keep too much from piling up.

See, I don’t give specific investment advice, nor manage anyone’s money – or even talk to people on the phone.  My little Peoplenomics.com site is plenty-enough real.  And if you want second opinions, The Economic Fractalist has a similar view.  If your visual cortex has recovered from the abuses of Ure, Bob Prechter’s Elliott Wave studies are grand, as well.

Why Pawzindrop?

Because, pal, what we’ve been warning of (collapse from the 200 dam [daily moving average]) is now squarely in our faces.  Based on the early read today? Behold ’em and weep. We are wandering through familiar American ruts:

The reason we pause – right here, right now – (with a nod to Jesus Jones) is that markets are slamming the 200-day pin now.

There are some very smart people (like our tax consigliere) who remind us that a lot of investment policy groups in funds look at the 200-day moving average like we do our own 85-day/17-week trend line.

That’s when (on the Peoplenomics side) we start talking about “Wimmen & chilluns to the lifeboats” to sample the pilot bread & water and wait while the menfolk see if we can get precious jewelry and personal effects out of the stateroom before the band quits playing.

Praying Ahead

My consigliere and I have been noodling the path ahead for both dollars of the Ure family generational wealth.  Here’s a rough guess for planning purposes.  And, what was that old movie line? Oh yes!  “I picked a hell of a time to stop drinking, didn’t I?”

• Now through mid-April.  We seem destined to drop at least as far – maybe 3-5 times – as far as we have now.  (We banter back and forth on scaling.)
• A pseudo rally happens in summer.  Neither of us is sure how to weight G.A. Stewart’s Nostradamus “King of Terror from the skies” in that window.  (stu’s site was blowing a 403 error at https://theageofdesolation.com when I went looking earlier, so rotsa-ruck.
• However, if Taiwan hasn’t been snatched in Round 1, it may go over summer.
• That leads to the Main Event this fall.
• And the good news?  Well, the latest cross-tabs of the computational, astrological, and remote viewing crowd points to wreckage and cleanup being the main life activity of humans from 2029 on…

Not that it will matter.  Because the Internet Collapse, which I began to write about back in 2012 (“Broken Web”) is also circling our boat, Jaws-like…

Broken Web Coming?

The curse of “getting things right” is you can get them stupid-early.  Which beats late, so let’s shift focus… Internet Burnout: When the Machines Outnumber the Humans.

One of the more sobering data points we’ve pulled recently is this: for every living, breathing human actively using the internet right now, there are roughly three to four mechanical systems humming in the background.

These bots, crawlers, ad bidders, personalization engines, and tracking scripts are constantly watching traffic, placing real-time bids, scraping content, and trying to tailor every experience to keep you clicking. The Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report just confirmed it — automated traffic has officially crossed the line at 51% of all global web traffic, the first time machines have outnumbered real people in a decade.

In the end, only the humans actually matter — or at least we used to — but the mechanical crud is choking the results so badly that genuine signal is getting buried deeper every month.

We may have finally reached — or passed — the “glitz limit” of page design. Everything flashes, pulses, auto-plays, and tries to hijack your eyeballs at once. Infinite scroll, AI-generated images, layered notifications, and algorithmically engineered engagement traps have turned the web into a glittering overload machine. The more “optimized” it gets, the more exhausting it becomes. People aren’t just tired of bad content anymore. They’re tired of the entire glittering apparatus trying to sell them something every second they’re online.

As a direct result, more folks are waking up to an uncomfortable truth: posting on social media doesn’t pay the bills for the vast majority of users. The great influencer dream is hitting the same wall every gold rush eventually does. Because here’s the thing about influencers — they’re a lot like opinions. And opinions, as the old saying goes, are a lot like butts. Everybody already has one. When supply vastly exceeds demand, the market corrects. We’re watching that correction in real time.

The bigger picture? Internet burnout isn’t just a personal problem anymore. It’s becoming a structural one. When the mechanical layer overwhelms the human one and the economic rewards flow only to a tiny handful at the top, people start checking out. The machines keep optimizing. The humans keep burning out. And somewhere in the middle, the actual value of the internet is quietly suffocating under its own weight.

All Chipper and Cheery?  Let’s move on to our next category:

Drought’s About

Next on our “Replaying the Depression” dance card we have the fresh drought outlook.  With the caveat that “As goes Hormuz, so go global food stocks.”

Around here, we will end the month around 6.8 inches of rain and based on outlooks? We have scaled back our gardening plans to the most water-efficient varieties, plus or minus a house salad.

Already, things are so bad in the Southeast that we’re wondering if Orange growers will have to start selling orange powder instead of juice.  A little “tang” to that view?

Sitting here reading Meteorologist warns about ‘unheard-of’ temperature shift spreading across US: ‘It’s pretty wild’, it occurs to us, what with cli-sci blowing up, maybe climate.gov prediction processing should relo to Vegas?

Philly Fed and Jobless Claims

Data dribbles on.  From the Philly regional Fed:

The diffusion index for current general activity rose from 16.3 in February to 18.1 in March, its third consecutive increase (see Chart 1). Over 39 percent of the firms reported increases, exceeding the 21 percent reporting decreases; 35 percent of the firms reported no change in current activity. The index for current new orders fell 3 points to 8.6, while the current shipments index rose 22 points to 22.2, its highest reading since January 2025. Over 40 percent of the firms reported increases in shipments (up from 22 percent last month), 18 percent reported decreases (down from 22 percent), and 42 percent reported no change in shipments (down from 50 percent). The inventories index ticked up 2 points to 1.4.

And from the latest Unemployment Filings…

Tomorrow is a pretty slow-looking news day, maybe I will announce my next AI book…

Dendrite Dander or Amyloid Amusers?

[We assume our readers all know that a dendrite is a branching extension of a nerve cell that receives incoming signals from other neurons and carries them toward the cell body. And that Elaine and I are walking APOE4 allele roulette spinners…]

ViseGrips to the forearms! USA Today gets religion on Minn-fraud: Minnesota fraud is just the tip of a growing iceberg | Opinion,  Liberals always talk a hard game until election day.  Remembers the “solid borders” fairy tales?

And me odd sense of humor strikes again. (Spoken with a post-Paddy brogue.) That racing mind of mine read on the upcoming Saturday news schedule: “10:30 AM US: Sat, Mar 21: Jerome Powell speaks.”  The voices in my head demanded to know “Does he sit, fetch, and rollover?”  Nope, he might be Warshed up… (rimshot)

Around the Ranch: ISOS Ratio Time

A couple of provisional patents have gone in, a new book is pending on Amazon (I fat-fingered the title so waiting for that to cycle through the updates). A rag email to SSRN because one of my papers hasn’t been approved yet (and no more until then). Plus got taxes filed, helped my son with a few AI projects…yeah, busy as hell around here.

And that’s where we get to InSide our heads and OutSide our heads – it’s a ratio.

And it’s worth focusing on. I’ve had a couple of days in the past week where, out of 15 waking hours, fully 15 were spent “inside my head.”  Or, working on various co-telligence breakthroughs with the AI stacks.

But now, I am back to OutSide focus again.

A reader asked me a long time ago: I think she said “how do you get so much done?”

Eventually – thanks to her question – I have come to realize that I heavily block (in a very Cal Newport “Deep Work” way) most days of my life.

People don’t widely appreciate how much friction loss there is in task management. I got seriously into cockpit workflow when I was flying, and it makes all the difference in the world. GUMP checks on up, flying is about disciplined mental workflows. So is AI work, too. The reason is simple enough: every time you context-switch, you pay a tax. The American Psychological Association notes that even brief mental shifts impose measurable switching costs, and those costs rise as the work gets more complex. In plain English, your brain does not change gears for free.

The research on interruption is even uglier than most people suppose. Gloria Mark’s long-running work out of UC Irvine found that people in information work switch activities with startling frequency — in one study, about every three minutes — and older UCI work found people often spend only around 12 minutes in a “working sphere” before shifting again. Another oft-cited result from the same research stream is that after an interruption, it can take more than 23 minutes to fully get back to the original task. That is not a minor nuisance. That is a productivity wood chipper.

Which is why the InSide/OutSide ratio matters so much. If I spend a whole day inside the stack — writing, modeling, prompting, restructuring ideas, refining workflows — I can get a shocking amount done, because the setup cost is paid once and the runway stays clear. But if the day gets chopped into errands, side quests, email loops, phone calls, browser tabs, and “just one quick thing,” what leaks away is not minutes. What leaks away is cognitive pressure. And once that pressure drops, it takes real time to build it back up again. Microsoft’s recent work on the “infinite workday” makes the same basic point from another angle: modern digital work keeps slicing the day into smaller fragments, leaving fewer uninterrupted stretches for actual thought.

So when people ask how I get so much done, the answer is not speed. It is fewer gear changes. Deep blocks beat frantic motion. Workflow beats willpower. And the older I get, the more convinced I am that most people do not have a time-management problem at all. They have a context-switching problem. They are not running out of hours. They are bleeding them out through friction.

So, pays to pick your best personal lubricant for life, right?

Write when you get rich,

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