This is simple enough – and it turns out great every time.

Key thing – you have to make the batter and use it within about 20 – 30 minutes. Otherwise your waffles won’t rise in the waffle maker because the baking powder will have finished its activation and there won’t be any more gas for it to release to power your rise.

Step 1
Combine dry ingredients in a sifter and sift into bowl:

2 cups all purpose flour
20 ml baking powder
2.5 ml table salt
15 ml vanilla sugar (this could be vanilla extract and sugar separately, too – if you use extract, though, add during step 2)

Step 2
Add to mix:

2 eggs
1/3 cup of vegetable oil
1 3/4 cups of milk

Step 3
Mix until fully combined into a batter.

Step 4
Pour into pre-heated waffle maker and cook until full brown

Step 5
Eat crisp waffles.

So, technically, Joe Biden is president. Administratively, the president has king-like powers with surprisingly few formal checks and balances that don’t end in the rhetorical cul de sac of “constitutional crisis” where, ultimately, nothing happens.

But politically, there is no longer any center of power in the US. In a democracy, people should see their elected officials as their greatest strength in ensuring that their views are represented. Of course, politicians have always been disappointing, but in the US, the strength of the democratic process has been replaced by a media proxy. Members of the pundit class, accountable sometimes to their advertisers but always to a loyal audience, rather than being subordinate to the democratic system behave as if they are beyond or outside of it; working with innuendo and narratives that exist outside of supported fact patterns.

With this in mind, I expect we will see some of the following things happen during a Joe Biden presidency:

1. Donald Trump does not go away. His future depends on having an active political role that is very supportive and very engaged. Otherwise he goes to prison. He may go to prison anyway, but this is the only way he can avoid it.
2. Mainstream conservative media depicts Joe Biden as a puppet. Because of his age and folksy style, the air of “senile” and “invalid” and “dementia” will hang on him. He will be called the puppet of Kamala Harris, of the liberal left, of Nancy Pelosi, of “the squad”, or any number of Conservative boogie men.
3. Conspiracy-minded conservative media depicts Joe Biden as a Manchurian candidate. Similar to how Trump was treated while he was in office, Joe Biden is a corrupted Chinese-controlled, election stealing interloper who must be driven from office.
4. Whataboutism drives the Senate. Assuming Republicans maintain control, investigations of Joe Biden will be at a pace greater than that of the Trump years. The justification will be both “concern” and “this is what you put Trump through so fair is fair.” Whether Hunter Biden, China, or whatever else, the comity Joe Biden may have had with Senate leaders will vanish within six months.
5. Mid-terms continue to be divided. Republicans will have activated their base on claims of stolen elections. Democrats will be harder to engage because of two years of investigation and obstruction in the Senate, with the marginally attached Joe Biden voter (read: most of them) not feeling like Joe Biden has done anything to earn their vote. Depending on how relevant Trump is, Republicans could gain seats in the House again.
6. Joe Biden won’t become a pugilist. Joe Biden will not learn to counterpunch – to animate his voters by giving them raw red meat. He will continue his strategy that centrism and compromise will lead to better outcomes for all. He will not be able to do what Trump was able to do because he believes too strongly in rules, norms and relationships. These relationships will not pay dividends for him because politicians no longer have the same ability to shape the narrative – that’s the job of the Pundit Class.
7. Executive orders and returning to a routine foreign policy will be the “major accomplishment” in the first 24 months. All the things a president can do without congress or courts will be what he gets done. Rule changes will come towards the end of that period. Most of it will be “you should have done that” stuff, not “I never thought of that and it’s brilliant.”
8. Foreign military policy will return to more like the Obama years. There will continue to be absurdly large military spending and the projection of power globally with a focus on NATO.
9. Immigration policy will change less than you expect. Trump was useful to centrists like Joe Biden in that he did things that they probably agree with without paying a political price for doing it themselves. Joe Biden will do the popular things; fully supporting DACA, making legal immigration paths more predictable, allowing more refugees in than Trump. But he won’t end stricter enforcement. He won’t end the asylum-outside-the-US process if he isn’t forced to. He is happy to always have the choice to loosen laws instead of being forced to tighten them.
10. China trade relations will improve but not return to what they were. Again, Joe Biden was happy that Trump did it, because now he can take advantage of it. Even though Joe Biden is an ordoliberal, he also thinks the relationship with China had to change.
11. Relations with allies will not return to normal. As long as populist conservatives can get nearly 50% of the vote, our allies won’t feel as close to us. We aren’t reliable anymore. We will get the “I like you Joe, but I don’t trust that this’ll stay this way.”
12. A centrist Democrat and Republican coalition may emerge. This will be focused on returning to good governance and democratic (small d) values. They won’t agree on a lot else and they may not be able to do anything other than appear on talk shows – but they may be able to peel off one elected official like Mitt Romney – but not until after he is re-elected, ironically.

The short version is that the next four years, functionally, will look the same as the last four years. Unpleasantly divided with nasty interactions between polarized constituencies with all sides too invested in their narrative to do anything other than fight – sometimes literally.

At the risk of sounding like an idiot, I’m just going to jot some notes down on this topic.  This isn’t intended to be a revelation, but just some thinking.

Many of us think of time as a linear concept – something that is a continuous line, where no point can be “returned” to from the future.  Turning back time, to return to a previous era or way of thinking is not possible – both literally and figuratively; there is no way to undo the effects of the present on the future.  There are other conceptions of time, but for the sake of this argument, I’m going to be relying on this view.

So much of our politics seems to be focused on “correction of the past.”  Particularly the view that whatever the previous administration had done can be undone, returning us to the stasis of a previous, near-past era that was “better.” In the case of Trump, it means undoing the world trade order, undoing the Obama era foreign policy agreements, undoing envrironmental regulation and so on.  In the case of Obama, it was undoing the wars and conflicts, repairing relationships with allies, returning our economy (such as it was) to strength.  But much of what is proposed depicted as an undoing of what previously existed in the recent past – a response to a president and a set of policies that were disliked by one constituency in the United States.

What is so often absent is a vision for what a new future would look like.  And since a new future is truly all that we can have (we cannot go back into the past), politics that focus on settling grievances of the past will never inspire a long term change in an evenly divided country.  If we focus on settling scores and righting wrongs of the recent past, we will forever be interlocked in stark contrasts and harsh disagreements, framed in the feelings of the recent past, characterized by the neverending score-settling we’re all very familiar with.

A coherent vision that takes us out of the recent past and into the future is one that corresponds with the reality of physics and will pull us out of our deadlocked political zeitgeist.

We can, with minimal effort, mitigate the larger share of the negative effects of the anticipated unemployment of large blocks of our citizenry if we collect better statistics on what jobs exist today, what kinds of jobs are open and what kinds of jobs are trending towards nonexistence.  The problem today is that labor statistics are collected using a content strategy that seeks only to identify wage-level, mated with reasonably specific employer-level data.  This does not give enough insight into employement trends to guide anticipatory decision-making around training efforts.

The existence and the expiration (permanent termination) of specific and categorizeable unskilled and semi-skilled jobs and skilled trades  is a knowable thing at a reasonable scale.  This assumption is critical to the formation of a labor market that values the continued employment of its participants.  If we cannot know what jobs exist, what jobs are available, and then what jobs have ceased to exist, coordinating labor (the training and deployment of) is going to be what it is today: messy and inefficient.

That labor can be divided into unskilled and semi-skilled jobs and, further, skilled trades is another assumption.  Unskilled jobs are those that require no training beyond a single day to perform (e.g., farm labor, janitor, porter, door man, et cetera).  Those that perform unskilled jobs are extremely fungible in the labor market; the protections for their jobs are low because of how easily their skills are found – depending mostly on speaking the same language, physical mobility, punctuality, and an ability to add value early on in the employment process.

Semi-skilled jobs are those that require some vocational skills; operating heavy machinery of some kind or a retail sales person, for example.  Those that perform semi-skilled jobs are less fungible but may be as susceptible to technological advances as unskilled labor; a technological improvement that obviates the need for those skills could wipe out a whole category of semi-skilled labor nearly at once.

Skilled trades are those that require vocational training, often lasting months or years and frequently having a kind of licensure to perform legally.  This is labor that is subject to overarching market forces, but whose participants are less fungible, as the specialized and context-dependent knowledge leads to meaningful impacts to the efficiency with which the jobs is performed.

Further, the data would need to be broken down within those specific categories into the specific types of services the worker was providing.  This categorization would be challenging, but nowhere near impossible. Providing a controlled vocabulary to surveyed employers within the BLS survey that enabled them to specific categorize employee-types would give the added dimension that’s necessary to better better decision-making.

According to data from the AFL-CIO, about 40% of the US workforce (and decreasing) are in jobs like these.  This trend is likely to continue with further automation and other technological advances.  If this matters, it’s because we have the  non-specific knowledge that a very large (but decreasing) portion of the labor market will be forced out of employement by predictable economic and technological factors (decreasing faster than workers in this category of work are leaving the labor market by choice – i.e., retirement).  Since we are interested in ensuring our citizens remain productive and participate in our economy, by not getting more specific measures of this data, we will be effectively choosing to make inefficient decisions around re-training and, ultimately, leave large sectors of the economy unemployed and without any reliable means to become employed.

Better data collection will go a long way towards understanding job-specific labor trends and direct us towards relocation, retraining, and educational investments that actually yield positive outcomes for the unemployed (or likely-to-become unemployed).  Similarly, knowing these trends can also help businesses make planned, humane transitions away from certain types of labor under programs that ensure that both employer and employed aren’t forced into making the Faustian choice where (a) an employer fires or lays-off good workers because greater economic factors drive them to replace them with more cost-effective alternatives (e.g., automation, offshoring) or go out of business (b) current employees engage in malicious compliance or strike outright to (understandably) protest the anticipated loss of their employment by factors out of their control.

With this information available, employers and employees will have a clearer sense of industry-wide trends that they will have to adapt to and, then, to develop anticipatory solutions to those issues.