You Do Know the Frog Jumps Out of The Warming Water, … right?

If the crisis is big enough, our leaders and society will tackle it

There is a perpetuated story that if you put a frog in tepid water and turn up the heat, it will perish. Thankfully this is not true. It jumps out.

And this analogy is often applied to our current clutch of world crises. It is wrong on every level. Geopolitically, positivity is the order of the day and we have many current situations to corroborate this. I am no geopolitical expert, but I am a retail strategic strategist and consultant, and studying the trends of the world is a vital part of reaching a conclusion on the future of retail trends.

I use a combination of the Delphi Method and Judgmental Forecasting. I am not comfortable with either Time Series Model or the Econometric Model because I feel the changing World is now too rapid to allow them to be objective. My method, therefore, takes two scenarios, a most positive, and a most negative and I discount (but not ignore) the fringe margins and then arrive at a reasoned middle path. If you totally discount the anomalies and outliers you arrive at a prediction that is too whitewashed and clinical to be accurate.

Is it fool proof or original, no. But it works for me and consistently gives me reasonable data with which I am able to predict.

I find we have to be subjective about expert opinion because very often they do not see the forest for the trees. An example is well documented by Faith Popcorn when she discusses what a people carrier vehicle should contain. The experts would never have come up with the idea of cup holders or microwave ovens in the glove compartment (cubby hole). They are too focused on the stereotypical vehicle. Yet a people carrier is designed for mothers and families, and cup holders or microwave ovens would be a wonderful option when carting family around. A fact totally overlooked by vehicle design experts.

And I feel that our world cannot be viewed in any stereotypical fashion anymore because the speed with which WIFI, internet, cyber, and Ai are operating, makes today’s ideas obsolete before the dawn of tomorrow.

With that said, I feel we have much to be optimistic about though. Many would disagree, but hear me out.

Ukraine:

Putin totally misjudged the West when it came to Ukraine. He assumed they would do exactly what they did in 2014. Roll over.

They didn’t.

Why is this significant? It indicates that when the issue is big enough, it will be tackled. Nobody saw the European Union and the USA and its allies and partners galvanized so quickly to come together and deal with the threat.

It is a massive miscalculation. And China has taken notes. China will have realised that there is NO way it can simply annex Korea or geopolitically adopt a bullyboy approach to any land grab anywhere.

If the UK & USA had strong enough leadership, this could be applied to the Hong Kong question as well. As a collective. And would send the right message to the entire world. We cannot sign agreements with the intention of breaking the terms when it suits us. There will be consequences, no matter how big you are.

In support of this point, China has not taken up the option to buy cheap energy from Putin. China plays a good game of chess, and they, by not buying energy from Putin, realise that the USA market is something they cannot do without at worst, or do not want to jeopardise at best.

This is very positive news. It is also a major slap in the face to Putin & BRICS. China often does not vote with the pack, and that is seen by the West as a negative, but it should be noted that they have also not voted with BRICS of which it is the major player on the issue of energy.

China cannot be bought. And as long as that holds true, they are a positive force for good in the world.

10-15 years ago our message was to save the whales and hug a tree. That was the sum total of our earth message. Very few people had any idea of the plastics issues in our oceans and beyond. Climate change was unheard of. ETC.

Only a select few scientists and people in the industry or directly linked to reality knew what was going on. Think back to Al Gore and how quiet his message was. Yes, it was out there, but it was NOT heating up the airwaves.

All that has changed.

Compare Al Gore’s platform then, to Greta Thunberg’s. Greta was a nobody. But now she is as big on the world stage as anybody. A relative nobody can be heard today. This is a good thing.

Now the world has woken up to reality. That is a HUGE step toward tackling and dealing with the issues. Nobody today denies climate change, the deniers are on the same trajectory as the flat earth society. This is a huge achievement that cannot be underestimated. Like alcoholics, the first step is accepting we have a problem, and then formulating steps to correct it must follow.

For some, it will be too slow, and for some too fast, but it will happen. The world is tackling climate change. Right now, today, it is happening. The argument is about solutions. Percentages. That is a good argument to be having when just a few days ago, we were denying it was even a thing.

We now believe the scientists.

And China is charging full steam ahead to build electric cars and wind farms. To harness the sun and many other initiatives. So what do you think the EU and the USA are doing, they are gearing up as well.

One thing I love about the USA … they are a very competitive nation. Trends in the USA are showing a HUGE increase in its youth going to the gym, exercising, and eating healthier. I predict a much healthier America in the near future. Fast-food gluttony is a thing of the past for the youth.

Now put that thinking into Solar, Wind, and Electric (S, W & E)and you will see America rise to the challenge. They do not want to be left behind by China because it involves HUGE money. America has always followed the money trail.

Those three things (S, W & E) are the equivalent of the combustion engine and the Industrial Revolution rolled into one. I consider it the equivalent for the USA as the space race from 1955–1974. Nobody thought they would beat the Russians, they came from behind … but they did.

Regarding the balance of power, as noted above with China not buying Russian Energy, both China and the USA realise they are far too interdependent on one another. And that fighting each other is very bad for both. There is no economic benefit and most wars are fought for geopolitical benefit or money.

They realise — they can hate, but they cannot fight one another.

I also think the USA will reduce its spending on military and operate a more strategic military presence. Despite all of Trump’s mistakes and lack of knowledge internationally, he did do one thing which stuck. He made the other UN and NATO nations sit up and take note that the spending on the military component of the various institutions has to be evened out. And with his appalling foreign policy lack, they also realised they could not depend/rely on the USA all the time.

It caused them to up their own game which was a good thing. The lack of focus and instability of Trump caused the EU, NATO, and the UN to become more focused and concentrated on their defense and other programs.

1st World countries will come to the realisation that they are going to have to fund the weaker 3rd World countries in battling climate change. Right now India is going through heat waves that make living almost unbearable. So they have to burn more coal to power the electricity to cool themselves etc. If the leading nations say stop burning coal, they are going to have to help fund the change to clean energy.

This is also a means to redistribute the wealth that was stolen from these emerging economies during colonialization. World history shows us that wealth always moves from power to need. During colonisation, wealth moved from the colony to the powerful empire, but in order to combat the issues of today’s world, it must now flow back. There is no alternative.

Example: Migration. If we do not help starving countries, they will migrate to wealthy ones. It is a force of nature, you can not stop it.

The migrant issue is a mental issue. We struggle to accept the reality of migration and refugees. But that will change media will highlight its plight and migration will become a non-issue. If you google speeches about Immigration, you will see the move from it being an issue, to a more “we were all immigrants once”, narrative. This is vital to our mental ability to process immigration which will become the biggest issue facing the world in the near future.

The reason the trafficking is happening is that the Governments are making it hard for migrants to migrate through proper legal channels.

How does a migrant arrive on the shores of the UK? If not by boat. It is an island. The UK will soon be compelled by its own citizens to put an Ellis Island-style processing station up and deal with the refugees and migrants properly. The world will realise we are one planet, nation status will diminish as the youth take on the globalisation structure that business has begun.

Our current baby boomers have spoken about global for decades, always for profit motives. But the under 25 now see this globalisation as cultural, and that is a huge differentiation. They want to integrate with the global population because they feel the one-earth pull which is enhanced by TikTok and social media. We are all on this planet together is a modern mantra. Globalisation is no longer about financial gain as was the original intention.

You cannot have youth in England communicating with ‘followers’ in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka or the USA without the social media connection becoming a human connection. Soon, ethnicity, language, and nation status will be obsolete as Ai allows for communication and language barriers to disappear.

We used to have events like RED NOSE DAY highlighting the plight of the underprivileged … celebrities used to go out to these countries and send back harrowing video clips that shocked us. Today we can view these in real-time via social media. We can connect on a personal level as little or as much as we want.

And nothing beats personal connection to see change come about.

As we read this, it is primarily the elderly who oppose immigration, not the youth. That youth percentage will consistently grow. Travel and thus migration will become part of a modern changing mindset. Young people are traveling to more remote parts of the world than ever before. 50 years ago it was unheard of for a Western citizen to go to China, or Vietnam for a work assignment. And probably vice versa. Today it is an aspiration.

People no longer are content to read about culture. They want to feel it, be immersed in it.

The RULE OF LAW will be front and centre for the first time in decades. It was like the sunrise, we just accepted it was a part of our day. Ukraine, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, etc has changed all that.

Russia has shown us not to take it for granted. It needs protecting.

A fine example of this is OLAF SCHULTZ deciding to cancel Nord Stream 2. Nobody would have believed it 2-years ago.

But it proves that nations will cut their noses off to fight for the rule of law.

Abiding by the rules of law will become a huge glue in our future nation dealings, and we will learn to accept alternative rules of law. But they cannot interfere with humanitarian and moral issues. Those are our new religious beliefs. As religion loses its foothold, humanitarian and moral ethics will increase.

The EU has been heavily criticised, but it is the only super nation organisation around. It has become stronger and more unified of late under Ursula von der Leyen. Its handling of the Russia-Ukraine issue has been incredible and it has gained influence and strength from this.

It has learned to operate with urgency. And this augers well for the future. I think the UK will deeply regret its decision to leave the EU and its regrets will be felt soon.

But the real effect of the EU super nation status will be copied, emulated, and watched by the rest of the world. Nations will learn to operate as a team to fight global warming, the increased influence of Ai, refugees, and many other issues that currently are not dealt with collectively.

Wealth distribution will be the final frontier to economic and industrial globalisation. We will have a form of Wealth Globalisation in the next decade. The nation-states will realise that being the wealthiest nation in a flood or during a virus-spread is not much good. You’ll have nobody to sell the product to.

Covid has taught us this, and the benefits of supplying vaccines to less wealthy countries so that the covid does not spread back to the wealthy nations have not gone unnoticed. People are realising that we need to do the same with hunger, Aids, curable diseases, water, knowledge, and most importantly, corruption-led regional conflicts, etc.

We have much to be grateful for and I for one am very optimistic.