There is a lot of information available – perhaps just the amount of available information is so great that it keeps us from using data in deciding what to do. There is an article titled “Nine Ignored Trends That Will Shape The Future” at this link.
I turn the radio on when I drive – usually I settle for the bird sounds at home, interrupted by BN’s trains a mile away, or vehicles along Fortine Creek Road. I can’t make it to Kalispell without hearing a kindly physician voice explaining why we won’t provide opioids to people in pain . . . and I think how fortunate I was to go through colon cancer before this ban – and the trends article shows this graph:
The explanation doesn’t address the prescription drug overdoses the radio physician describes:
“1. The Silent Fentanyl Pandemic
• Overdose is the leading cause of death in under 45’s (Replacing suicide)
• Covid killed 8,900 young people in 2020. Overdoses killed 49,000. (2/3rds Fentanyl)
• In 2022, police seized enough Fentanyl to kill every adult and child in America”
If two thirds of the overdose deaths are Fentanyl, those ad dollars aren’t going in the right place.
I’m on the local school board. If anyone ever tells you it’s a thankless job, they’re right. The link has a couple of charts that demonstrate spots where it looks like public education isn’t dealing with the trends:
There are more, ranging from demography and fertility through economics. It’s worth clicking the link and spending a couple of moments thinking about where the trends are heading. Fentanyl isn’t a concern to me. I think I can explain the decline in GRE scores by citing the increased enrollment in graduate schools – and I recall that ten years ago, I listened to a presentation lauding the fact that 56% of our high school graduates were headed to college . . . that superintendent never wondered why 6/56ths (10.7%) of our college bound high school graduates were below the mean.
Trego's Mountain Ear 