Or, better yet, I could drive ten minutes down the road.

Because as William Faulkner said: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

In the Rust Belt, history is learned on the way to Walmart.

Past, present, and future—the lines are blurred.

Is that a factory, a startup, or just abandoned?

The hope is for the first two, but we have expertise in the third.

—

When do abandoned buildings become ruins?

Twenty years?

A half century?

A full one?

As a pragmatist, I try not to partake in such esoteric debates—I leave that to the bloggers.

On the other hand, I am interested in why such debates exist in the first place, as in why the abandoned structures are left to stand.

Imagine a strip of abandoned homes. It’s perfect for the homeless, drug-addicted, and criminally-predisposed.

A city knows the neighborhood is unlikely to become a tourist attraction.

And there starts the merriment.

Who owns the home(s)?

Can they be contacted?

Can they be pressured (via fines) into maintenance?

Or selling?

Would there even be a buyer?

If taxes are delinquent, can the city or an associated land bank seize the property?

If so, after clean up, can the property be handed over to a developer?

Does the local economy make such a project appealing to developers anyway?

Are the developers reliable?

Or is demolition the only option?

Should the cleared space become a park?

Or a public art display?

With an eroded tax base, where does the money for all this come from?

The county?

The state?

The feds?

How long will the entire process take?

Even if it ultimately comes together, what if the new incarnation is still appealing to the homeless, drug-addicted, and criminally-predisposed?

—

When do abandoned buildings become ruins?

Twenty years?

A half century?

A full one?

The post The Only Ruins I Actually Care About appeared first on ComposeMD.

WAB, you may or may not know, refers to Wins Above Bubble, a metric used by the NCAA to help decide which “bubble teams” participate in its end-of-the-season college basketball tournament and which stay home.

This was the brainchild of one Seth Burn, a self-professed math geek who likes to gamble on sports and blog about them.

On February 1, 2015, he first posted about WAB, the statistic he made up.

The point was that in a sport where teams play disparate schedules, sometimes the only way to measure relative performance is with numbers.

Make that good numbers.

WAB measures a team’s number of wins compared to how many wins the average bubble team would have been expected to have against the same schedule.

More specifically, and without getting into the heavy math I won’t pretend to understand, each game a team plays is assigned a win probability equal to a theoretical bubble team’s chance of winning that game. This number accounts for the opponent’s strength and the game’s location. If the win probability is 95 percent (0.95), such a win amounts to a WAB of 1 minus 0.95, or 0.05. A loss would equal 0 minus 0.95, or a WAB of -0.95. Alternatively, if the win probability is 0.15, the WAB for a victory would be 1 minus 0.15, or a more meaningful 0.85. A loss in this case would translate into a WAB of -0.15.

In other words, the more positive the WAB, the better. Obviously, a negative WAB is bad.

Fast forward 11 years, and what started as an obscure blog post now contains a number that is highly correlated with not only team selection but also team seeding.

But let’s pause for a moment.

This feel-good blogger story, even with its wildly successful outcome, is at best fringe.

In a world with war, disease, and natural disasters, obsessing about the fate of 18-year-old kids who play a game that a few people in one country care about is esoteric.

Even worse is when such pursuits consume one’s day, generating little to no revenue.

There’s an expression for that: waste of time.

I’m assuming that Seth Burn has a real job, the kind that pays the bills.

But as far as I can tell, he also continues to prioritize wasting his time.

And thanks to people like him, I’m inclined to keep wasting mine.

Acknowledgement: Belmont University student Sohan Shrikhande contributed to this article. He claims he was in class at the time.

The post How WAB Saved My Blog appeared first on ComposeMD.

The seed was planted some time in the 1980s, when somewhere up in northern Connecticut, I ended up in a foundry.

It was bound to happen, what with my father being a metallurgist and all.

I vaguely recall men in weird suits, sparks flying all over the place, and my personal favorite—chocolate in the break room.

The men, by the way, were making iron and steel castings for customers in the agricultural, energy, and automotive industries (among others).

I’ve been informed, however, this type of work has since dried up.

After all, that’s the manufacturing myth, usually told by people who’ve never worked a day in the industry.

I’m one of those people, and I might have continued to spread such misinformation if not for a minor detail: I opted to raise my family in the Rust Belt.

The story of death, the one I kept hearing, did not match what I was seeing.

That discrepancy led me to a data set courtesy the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which as an honest tax-paying citizen of the country, I believe I’m allowed to access.

There, among the fine print, the kind that reminds me that bifocals might be on the horizon, I found a few numbers.

In 2025, the nominal GDP of the US hovered around $31 trillion. Manufacturing—that of durable and nondurable goods—accounted for over $2.9 trillion, or 9.5 percent of total.

To put that in perspective, if the US had no other economy outside of manufacturing, it would still have the eighth-largest economy in the world, ahead of Italy, Russia, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Australia, South Korea, and so on.

Only one country contributes more to global manufacturing activity. Yes, it’s China, which also has four times the American population.

Being the internet addict that I am, I had no choice but to zoom in further.

Just how misleading is the great American manufacturing myth?

As of 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fourteen US states had over 300,000 manufacturing jobs each. All eight that border the Great Lakes (Rust Belt anybody?) were on the list.

Yet somehow, when the residents of these states express concerns about American manufacturing, they’re considered delusional?

Perhaps those who just know better, say those on the coasts, would prefer if such people devoted themselves to something more meaningful—say latte art.

Or perhaps, even among the educated, reality is no match for the rhetoric of mythology.

The post The Great American Manufacturing Myth appeared first on ComposeMD.

The reference, of course, is to anyone who doesn’t work for West-Coast tech, East-Coast finance, some sort of university, or a Starbucks.

In other words, the reference is to people in, say, Ohio.

The implication is that manufacturing is dead, and that not-particularly-intelligent Midwesterners need to deal with it.

Those jobs aren’t coming back, is a popular NPR-supported refrain.

How do I know all this?

Because I spent 25 years of my life on the East Coast.

And I said these lines myself, wondering why Ohioans can’t just move on.

But after spending a decade and a half in Western New York, aka the Ohio of New York State, I’ve found myself asking other questions.

What if those jobs never truly went away?

What if the dirty work, as in the stuff apparently better suited for lowly foreigners in Mexico and Asia, is still sullying our beautiful country?

I pulled up my preferred resources, one by one.

First was Wikipedia, specifically a list of US states and territories by GDP.

Ohio, as of 2024, was number seven, exactly what would be expected by population alone.

Then, being the cutting-edge internet guy that I am, I simply asked Google a question: What is the breakdown of Ohio’s GDP by sector? (Because I’m particularly hip, I didn’t actually use the apostrophe or caps.)

Per the AI overview, Ohio’s GDP is heavily anchored by manufacturing, which as of 2024-2025 accounts for approximately 16-16.5% of the state’s [private-sector] economic output, significantly higher than the national average.

Somewhat taken aback, I figured a large chunk of this had to be in advanced manufacturing, as in the kind that elites can get behind.

So I clicked on Dive deeper in AI mode, where I was immediately greeted by a chart showing that in 2024, $137.9 billion of Ohio’s GDP was attributable to manufacturing, the most of any sector in the state.

How many people in Ohio are employed in manufacturing? I asked.

As of December 2025, approximately 692,900 to 694,800 people in Ohio are employed in the manufacturing sector, replied AI. Ohio consistently ranks as the third-largest state in the US for manufacturing employment, trailing only [the far more populated] California and Texas.

Then I kept reading, and my heart sank.

Ohio holds national leadership positions in several specific areas:

• #1 nationally in glass, plastics, and rubber product manufacturing
• #2 nationally in primary metals, machinery, and electrical equipment

What kind of country do we live in, where people still have the audacity to make this low-class, non-advanced stuff?

What if that which the East Coast insists is nostalgia isn’t really nostalgia?

What if it’s—gasp—alive?!

The post Why the East Coast Is Dead Wrong About Ohio appeared first on ComposeMD.

The first was Dean Baker, who received a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

The second was Mark Weisbrot, who did the same exact thing.

Together, in 1999, they had co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, DC.

On that day in 2001, they released a briefing paper entitled: Will New Trade Gains Make Us Rich? An Assessment of the Prospective Gains From New Trade Agreements.

February 16, 2026. One blogger.

His name was Amol Shrikhande, a self-proclaimed Rust Belt obsessive with far too much time on his hands.

After many hours of accomplishing nothing, he found it.

The PDF!

Here’s what the two economists, a quarter century ago, had to say about the effects of trade agreements on Americans.

Economists…generally accept that trade liberalization has been one of the factors increasing inequality, redistributing wage income from workers without college degrees to workers with college and advanced degrees, in addition to shifting income from wages generally to profits.

For the vast majority of workers—the three quarters of the labor force who lack college degrees—the negative distributional effects of trade over the last two decades almost certainly outweighed the positive growth effects, causing them a net loss of real income.

…Most of the forms of trade liberalization currently being considered would redistribute income from workers to corporations, and from lower wage workers to higher wage workers.

The [International Trade Commission (ITC)] report found that eliminating the trade barriers it examined would benefit corporations more than workers.

It is important to recognize that the ITC study, like other research on this topic, does not attempt to measure indirect effects that trade liberalization could have on income distribution. Most obviously this indirect effect can take the form of threats, where employers threaten to move their operations abroad unless workers make wage concessions.

Blown away, the Rust Belt obsessive—otherwise incompetent at manual labor—put himself in the shoes of the American worker, the one on the wrong end of these trade deals.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could talk about the downsides of these trade deals without being called dumb and racist?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could mention how the same countries benefiting from the trade deals are sending in illegal drugs, further decimating our communities?

What if we elected someone who could renegotiate these deals? Or use tariffs to try to level the playing field?

What if, heeding the warnings of these two economists, we made American great again?

The post These Two Economists Knew What Was Happening All Along appeared first on ComposeMD.

You know, people staring at the sun, talking about low taxes, and all that.

In fact, if you haven’t made the move yet, you’re accused of having psychiatric illness.

But a little data leaves you wondering, Are the ones baking actually the crazies?

Myth 1: A good brand equals a good economy.

Most would agree that Phoenix, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Tampa have good brands.

You know what else those metro areas have in common?

As of 2021, they all had a lower GDP per capita than…Buffalo.

Myth 2: A low GDP per capita is balanced by affordable housing.

In 2024, the Demographia International Housing Affordability Report looked at 94 major markets in eight countries in terms of the ratio of median house price to median household income.

Among the seven most affordable metro areas in the world were Pittsburgh, Rochester (NY), St. Louis, Buffalo, and Detroit.

All had a higher GDP per capita (in 2021 dollars) than the less affordable Phoenix, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Tampa.

Myth 3: You’re smart for moving down South.

Eight of the ten least educated US states are in the Sun Belt.

Myth 4: None of these numbers matter because the weather is good.

According to one study, of the ten states most at risk for natural disasters, seven are in the Sun Belt.

Myth 5: The Rust Belt will share its water.

The Sun Belt may have stolen residents and businesses, but it won’t be stealing water.

Have you heard of the Great Lakes Compact? The gist of it is that the eight Great Lakes states have banned the vast majority water diversions beyond the Great Lakes Basin.

In other words, when the Colorado River turns into a little stream, we ain’t sharing.

The post 5 Myths About the Sun Belt appeared first on ComposeMD.

They usually center on anti-intellectualism, racism, and blind nostalgia.

In other words, these are not the types of myths you read to your children at bedtime.

Anyway, here are five common ones you’ve heard so often that you’ve accepted them as truth.

Myth 1: The Rust Belt keeps shrinking.

While definitions vary, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll consider the Rust Belt to overlap with the eight US states that border the Great Lakes. (Those lakes, after all, were rimmed with iron ore and the steel mills fed by it.)

Yes, some cities in these states have lost population, but their metropolitan areas have typically remained stable or even grown. In fact, these eight states—New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—are all among the 22 most populated states in the country. The five in bold are in the top 10.

And—gasp—the US still makes steel.

Myth 2: Racism runs rampant.

Racism is a global phenomenon, and the Rust Belt is on the globe. So yes, it can be an issue—just not in the way political “pundits” will lead you to believe.

Let’s take a look at Erie County, Pennsylvania (home to the classic Rust Belt city of Erie), which has exhibited a voting pattern found in many counties in the aforementioned eight states.

The northwest Pennsylvania county voted for Obama in 2008, Obama again in 2012, Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Trump again in 2024.

According to the coastal intelligentsia, this would make the place cultured, cultured, racist, cultured, and racist again.

Myth 3: The Rust Belt is homogeneous.

Which US city with over 200,000 residents has the largest Puerto Rican population as a percentage of total? Rochester, New York.

Which US state has the largest Arab American population as a percentage of total? Michigan.

And you already know where to find the largest Somali-American population: Minnesota.

Enough said.

Myth 4: It’s the land of angry white men.

The truth of the matter is that everyone is angry.

Remember the Great Migration? The descendants of those black workers have been disproportionately affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs.

Yet in 2024, when Trump made inroads with the community, everyone was surprised?

Myth 5: The Rust Belt is undereducated.

We can attack this myth from multiple angles, but let’s roll with this one.

Of the top 20 public universities in the country (per U.S. News & World Report), five are in Rust Belt states.

In other words, despite comprising 16 percent of US states, the dumb part of the US has 25 percent of elite state universities.

For more myths about the Rust Belt, please refer to The New York Times.

The post 5 Myths About the Rust Belt appeared first on ComposeMD.

Clearly, I was not the only one, as when I mentioned the same book several weeks later, the Ohioan receiving the information became misty-eyed as well.

Perhaps it’s the fallen majesty, how a Great Lakes freighter so iconic could simply disappear, swallowed on November 10, 1975, by the merciless Lake Superior.

Or perhaps it’s the irony that the ship, named after the president of Milwaukee’s Northwestern Mutual, could be met with the dreaded outcome that the company insured.

It’s undoubtedly the lives of the 29 men, the ones who brought iron ore from the shores of Lake Superior to the steel mills on the lower lakes. Together, along with the families they left behind, they helped build the American economy.

It’s also the haunting ballad that the shipwreck inspired—the 1976 classic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Written by the Canadian Gordon Lightfoot, himself an experienced Great Lakes sailor who would become close with surviving family members, the song shattered the idea of what it took to have a hit. Six minutes, twenty-eight two-line stanzas, no chorus, and no hook—raw emotion miraculously translated that formula into number two on the Billboard Hot 100.

And conceivably, it’s the occasional reminder, the type that might arise on a cold winter day courtesy a popular American porter. That tribute comes from Great Lakes Brewing Company, whose Edmund Fitzgerald Porter has accompanied many a conversation around these parts.

It’s all that.

But it’s more.

The reason for the dewy eyes, 50 years after the original heartbreak, can be found on the book jacket of Bacon’s account:

At the height of America’s postwar boom, no region was more vital to the nation’s economic strength than the Great Lakes. It was the beating heart of the global economy—possessing all the power and prestige that Silicon Valley enjoys today.

Bacon goes on to remind us that at the time of the tragedy, Toledo, home to about a quarter of the fallen crew, had a larger population than Portland (OR), Miami, Tampa, Charlotte, and Salt Lake City.

The Edmund Fitzgerald, in other words, has become a metaphor.

Just prior to the fateful moment, as he battled a historic storm and a list, Ernest McSorley, the seasoned captain of the Fitz, said, We are holding our own.

A half century later, we here in the Great Lakes region—including the champions among us—can’t help but look around and wonder, Are we really?

The post Why the Edmund Fitzgerald Still Makes Me Cry appeared first on ComposeMD.

And the worst part is that you’re expected to double down on the suction.

You know, why not put a gate around your already sterile existence?

Better yet, join a country club to verify your worth.

Of the utmost importance, of course, is that your car look like your neighbor’s.

Rush—the band—knew this a long time ago.

The goal, somehow, has become to live in The Truman Show.

It’ll make you happy, as long as you have easy access to antidepressants and depressed therapists.

But what if grime and grit bring the real joy?

Is that delusional, or could it be aspirational?

On January 17, 2026, I found my answer.

It was one of those Rust Belt chic moments, when instead of staring at empty storefronts, my wife and I opted instead for the art museum, aka the Memorial Art Gallery.

Based on her employment status, the wife’s entry was complimentary. I, meanwhile, forked over a 20.

The highlight, according to a museum banner, was a temporary exhibit on Impressionism, as in Monet and the type.

But on the way to that exhibit, tucked away in an unassuming corner, was the real highlight:

Urban Realism.

Go ahead and rewind the clock to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Now start a movement, artistic and literary, that captures the unvarnished realities of urban life.

Focus on the ordinary and their ordinary struggles.

Reject idealism.

Critique power structures.

The naysayers may denigrate the work, labeling it the Ashcan School (in reference to the ashcans used to dispose of fireplace ashes and other rubbish).

Many will fail to see the lure of the grunge.

But along the way, we’ll get Edward Hopper, Charles Dickens, and Richard Wright.

We’ll get, in other words, the answers to some questions.

Is there triumph in imperfection?

Is hardship the root of happiness?

Can grime be beautiful?

Is blight simply biological?

In loss, can we find gain?

Is this why some actually prefer the Great Lakes to the ocean?

Or extract more meaning from Toledo than Santa Barbara?

Is this why doctors prune their jobs and start blogging about the Rust Belt?

Inspired, I took the long way home, the one with a view of Rochester’s Urban Realism.

And then, as expected, I returned to the American Dream.

The post How Urban Realism Saved My Soul appeared first on ComposeMD.