When you are on a very long journey, and you are not sure if you will ever reach your destination, there are two ways of looking at it. The first is to celebrate progress, and mark every major milestone. The second is to understand how much further you need to travel, and note how many missed past and hopeless future objectives there are on the journey. Which viewpoint you choose might depend on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.
Being a realist, I enlist both viewpoints, as each performs important functions. Thus, when I checked my news-feeds, I found the two title reports. Each of these seemed to lean towards either the optimist or pessimist view at first reading, so I thought it was important to present them together. However, at the end of the day an article brings up a dataset that ends the discussion with a really big stick.
The two sections below focus on each of these reports. Section 4 is the stick.
