On July 26, 2026, relentless Cyber-wandering landed me on a headline: “Colorado River reservoirs hit record lows as Trump administration threatens major cuts.”

I feigned shock—could rapid population growth in a desert have consequences?

Seven states—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, California, and Arizona—depend on the 1,450-mile-long river and its famed reservoirs (Lake Powell and Lake Mead) to quench their thirst.

One—Arizona—deserves special attention.

Located at the end of the line before the river dives into Mexico and empties into the Gulf of California, the state has concocted the following formula:

Keep taxes low.

This will ensure low per-pupil spending, low teacher salaries, and dated facilities.

The result will be the worst public school system in the country.

Allow high-tax states like New York—home to the best public school system in the country—to educate the next generation.

Meanwhile, use the low taxes to steal businesses from other states.

Then, go ahead and steal the young residents that other states paid to educate in order to fill those jobs.

While you’re at it, take some retirees as well so they can spend their life savings in your state as opposed to the ones where they made a living.

All of the above will equal Phoenix, the tenth-largest metro area in the country, home to 500% population growth over the past 50 years and 5.2 million residents—in a desert.

To make the place look nice, build a ton of golf courses and use the Colorado River to water them.

The last step, of course, is to complain that there’s not enough water.

As a final option, consider asking the states from which you stole businesses and residents if you can use their water.*

—

*The Great Lakes Compact, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2008, is an agreement between the eight Great Lakes states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), coordinated with two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), that with very rare exceptions bans the diversion of Great Lakes water outside its natural basin. And, on that note, I’ll have another glass.

The post Why the Colorado River Can Kiss My… appeared first on ComposeMD.

The addicted, I’ve learned, get fixes everywhere—Wikipedia, Reddit, ChatGPT, even an airline ticket.

Granted, the fix may not come with a dopamine surge—it may just be a solution, or solutions.

That’s the type of fix I sought, courtesy Southwest Airlines, the kind that reverses the maladies of which Rust Belters whine.

It involved 1,036 flying miles, approximately due south, some time after Independence Day in 2026.

And the solutions, they came fast and furious.

First and most obvious was the cloud cover. The low and gray had been exchanged for the blue and high. Somewhere up there was a brilliant star, worthy of sunglasses and a touch of air conditioning.

The narrow made way for the expansive, as in ten lanes instead of two. Lowly pedestrians were nowhere to be found.

Empty buildings were full, teeming with every chain restaurant the country had ever known. Even Hooters made an appearance.

There were no dirty factories, the type that pollute the air and clutter the world. In their place were theme parks—clean, happy, and full of chicken fingers and 1.5 times minimum wage.

The place was a magnet for visitors, unlike the Rust Belt, where people have to be coerced into making an appearance. The tourists filled the theme parks, chain restaurants, and all ten lanes.

New homes were popping up all over the place—because people actually wanted to live there.

And the buildings, the ones I mentioned, were new, too. They were boxy and bland with little attention to detail, but they were spotless and unaged.

It was everything the Rust Belt addict could ask for, leaving next to nothing worthy of a gripe.

But all the fixes came with one glaring problem:

It wasn’t the Rust Belt.

The post Confessions of a Rust Belt Addict appeared first on ComposeMD.

By that, I mean it’s a nightmare, something that technically falls under the umbrella term of dream.

But you may want to ask ChatGPT, as I’m not much for terminology.

In any event, back in 2021, I started planning for the day, five years later, when being a writer would pay dividends.

The day would be July 7, 2026, and it would go something like this:

Argentina would be playing Egypt in the World Cup—let’s say at noon.

I would wake up late, smiling at how in my pre-2021 life, I would have been at work for several hours already.

I would revel in the genius of having outsmarted the system, trading the dialysis unit for creative work, living off passive income—the American way.

And then I would meet my British friend at the bar, finally being the person whose income stream no one could understand, nor could anyone deny.

I’d start with something light—like a double IPA (DIPA). I’d tilt my neck upward, take a sip, and focus on the big-screen.

The game would feature some studs, guys like Mohamed Salah and Lionel Messi.

And just for kicks, the underdog Egyptians would net the first goal. Heck, midway through the second half, the African squad would notch another, putting the defending champions on the ropes down 2-0.

But in the 79th minute, Messi would assist on Argentina’s first goal, breathing life into the stretch run.

Then, in the 83rd minute, he would take matters into his own hands (feet), scoring the equalizer and giving the stadium the literal shakes.

Expecting extra time, I would order another DIPA, sipping slowly while waiting for the inevitable.

In stoppage time, however, the inevitable would be avoided, putting Argentina ahead 3-2 and cementing the comeback victory as the best of the tournament.

I would text all my friends, partly from frank bewilderment and partly just to show off my enviable life.

Finally, I would head home, and my wife and children would shower me with compliments regarding the fabulous existence I had gifted them.

That was the dream.

But being a writer, as I mentioned, is not that type of dream.

It’s the kind with visions, ones that come with night sweats.

It’s the kind that makes you see your reflection in the face of the beggar.

In other words, it’s the kind that on July 7, 2026, had me up at 6 am, showered, dressed, and on the way to the dialysis unit.*

—

*Note: I watched highlights of the Argentina-Egypt match at night.

The post How Being a Writer Ruined the World Cup appeared first on ComposeMD.

First, it didn’t.

And second, it didn’t.

Let’s start with the first one.

The World Cup—as in the 2026 version—boasts 16 host cities scattered across a trio of countries.

Three are in Mexico, eleven in the US, and two in Canada.

Located at 43°39’09″N 79°22’54″W, along the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario, is a place called Toronto.

Six games will be played there.

So like I said above, it didn’t.

And now for the second one, the American one, if you will.

To arrive at a conclusion, we have no choice but to access a list of US metro areas by population.

Ten of the 11 US host metros—New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle—are among the top 15 American metros by population. (The outlier, at number 31, is Kansas City.)

The five metros in the top 15 that didn’t make the cut include Chicago (at number three) and Detroit (at number 14).

Anti-Great Lakes bias?

The answer, among other places, can be found in Chapter 14 of Soccernomics—the 2026 World Cup Edition, of course.

There, authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski expose the myth that hosting a mega-event is a sound financial investment. In most cases, the expenditure involved in preparing for the party far exceeds any economic return.

In the case of the World Cup, things are even worse, what with FIFA’s lack of transparency and its unreasonable demands, whether they pertain to playing surface, seating capacity, public transit, or whatever.

Sure, there might be a “feel-good” factor, though we can call it what it is—a line of cocaine.

American cities, particularly those that have been around the block, are quite aware of this reality. Short-term gains, which might not even exist, can translate into long-term losses.

Great Lakes cities, the likes of Chicago and Detroit, have seen a thing or two. In other words, they ain’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

That’s why in 2017, Detroit opted out of consideration to be a 2026 World Cup host.

In 2018, Chicago did the same.

As such, the real question—if anyone is still asking—is why the Great Lakes gave the World Cup the shaft.

And the answer key, as you know, lies with FIFA.

The post Why the World Cup Gave the Great Lakes the Shaft appeared first on ComposeMD.

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.