Isaac Schrödinger

D for Dumb

Matt Patsky confronts corporations on everything from their carbon footprints to the diversity of their workforces. But now, in the wake of racial unrest sweeping America, Patsky is having a reckoning of his own.

“I get a ‘D’ on diversity,” says Patsky, whose $3 billion Trillium Asset Management pressed investors to divest from South Africa during its anti-apartheid struggles. Just 10% of his 44 employees come from minority backgrounds -- a number that he said warrants a “C” relative to the broader financial industry. “We have to start walking the talk and make the same changes we’re asking companies to make.”

I wonder if this "representation" bullshit applies to all businesses. For instance, a company has a few dozen employees and all of them are non-White; do they have to fire 60% of their workforce to hire White workers to be in compliance with the non-racist current year? Of course, we know the answer.

“We have made considerable progress on gender equality, but I think that has to some extent been at the detriment of the same level of razor focus on issues to do with ethnicity and class,” Baig says.

Considerable progress on gender equality? Can you guess the percentage of women in the following professions in the USA?

1. Carpenters
2. Automotive service technicians and mechanics
3. Electricians
4. Construction laborers
5. First-line supervisors of construction trades
6. Industrial and refractory machinery mechanics
7. Maintenance and repair workers
8. Machinists

Answer: 2-4%. SJWs want quotas for vaginas in boardrooms but they curiously neglect those professions mentioned above.

Surreal Supremacy

Amir Pars asks a very interesting question:

Disparities are only proof of disparities. Just because Group X doesn't have the same as Group Y, doesn't mean that it's explained by racism. And why does this so called "White Supremacy" only run against one group of Black Americans? Why doesn't it run against Asian Americans, who out earn White Americans by over 60%? Why doesn't it apply to Jewish Americans? Or Indian Americans, all of whom earn more than... White Americans??

The concepts of "White Privilege" and "White Supremacy" are quite strange when the average Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Singaporean, Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani, and the Lebanese household out earns the average White household in America.

A Sinister Shortage

As health restrictions ease and stores, restaurants, and other services start to reopen, some employers complain they cannot entice workers back to their old jobs. Perhaps their employees changed careers or enrolled in higher education; others may be reluctant to come back while community spread of COVID-19 is still widespread.

It’s another headache for business owners trying to restart after the shutdowns. The President of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business went so far as to declare that Canadian employers now face a “shortage of labour.”

Technically, he's correct. If I was an employer and I offered jobs that paid $10 per hour, then there would definitely be a shortage of labour.

The correct solution to this "shortage"? Increase the wage. The solution that the employers want? Import peasants who'll work for low wages and not complain. Of course, if you oppose this, then you're a HORRIBLE RACIST WHO SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY AND PERMANENTLY CANCELED.

In theory, if something is in short supply, its price should increase. But the laws of supply and demand are suspended whenever employers complain it’s too hard to fill job openings — and then inevitably demand that government do something about it.

Yup. It's a neat trick. Keep wages low ... get almost zero local workers ... cry, whine, gnash teeth ... get cheap foreign workers!

While low wages are a big part of the problem, meager and irregular hours make matters much worse.

Employers’ recruitment problems are partly due to stingy wages. But their failure to offer decent, reliable hours is actually the bigger issue. Most retail and hospitality workers are scheduled for inadequate and irregular hours. As a result, weekly incomes are very low: a median of just $450 a week in the hospitality sector. Who wants to return to work and risk infection, for a handful of hours’ work at minimum wage?

I know that at my local grocery store, the workers are scheduled in an utterly unstable manner. It's not unusual to have the following work week for an average employee:

MON: 11 AM - 6:30 PM
TUE: 6:45 AM - 3:30 PM
WED: 3:30 PM - 8:30 PM
THU: OFF
FRI: 7:30 AM - 12:30 PM
SAT and SUN: OFF

Then, the next week brings a completely different schedule. And yeah, that's a minimum wage job. 25 hours a week, on average. Take home monthly pay? $1,300. What's really insidious is that a motivated employee can't really fit another regular, part-time job in the mix because the hours are unpredictable.

Just loot it!

C O N S U M E
P R O D U C T pic.twitter.com/Mk0Tz74ke6

— Count Dankula🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@CountDankulaTV) June 2, 2020

Banksters and boobs

Of all people, a real estate agent is crying about the greed of banksters:

When the pandemic hit Ontario, Kristina Barybina's income as a real estate agent dried up and she knew the writing was on the wall — she'd have to sell her own house.

She also knew there'd be a penalty for getting out of her five-year mortgage with TD Bank early — she just wasn't expecting it to be almost $30,000. "I thought my eyes were going to pop out," said Barybina. "It's insane."

Later in the article:

She was only 19 months into a five-year mortgage, with a fixed-rate of 3.71 per cent, and still owed $591,000. TD used a controversial calculation to arrive at the penalty for breaking the terms. She owed another $29,530.

$29,530 out of $591,000. That's a 5% penalty for getting out of the mortgage. It's steep but not unreasonable. It looks insane because the dollar amount is huge.

What should be more concerning is that this woman accepted over half a million dollars of debt less than two years ago while having zero emergency savings. She was on shaky ground even before the virus hit as she tried to sell the house six months ago. This means that her normal income streams weren't sufficient to cover all the bills.

She also shot herself in the foot by going public with this story. I certainly wouldn't want to hire this whiny fool as my agent.

White vs. Blue

People with physically demanding jobs take more sick leave. They also have higher unemployment rates and shorter work lives, a new Danish study finds.

"This study showed that high physical work demands are a marked risk factor for a shortened expected working life and increased years of sickness absence and unemployment," study co-author Lars Andersen and colleagues wrote. Andersen is with the National Research Center for the Working Environment in Copenhagen.

The difference was much smaller than what I expected.

For men age 30, working life would be expected to last almost 32 years for those with physically demanding jobs and nearly 34 years for those with physically undemanding jobs. Among women, the figures were just over 29.5 years and nearly 33 years, respectively, according to the researchers.

Old high school teachers and professors almost always have the option to teach a course or two in a given semester. Retired laborers, however, would seriously injure themselves in their old jobs. I knew a mathematics teacher whose husband was a car mechanic. They didn't need the money but he just loved his work. Eventually he had to give in as the body couldn't take the toll. A few years later, she retired as well. Funny, how that anecdote fits the data.

Sweden's Experiment

Scandinavia’s biggest economy will shrink 7 per cent this year, Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Tuesday. And while overall deaths are on the decline, Sweden’s had 6.25 deaths per million inhabitants per day in a rolling average between May 12 and May 19, according to Ourworldinsata.org. That was the highest in Europe on a per capita basis and just above the United Kingdom, which had 5.75 deaths per million.

Over the course of the pandemic Sweden, which reported a total 3,831 deaths as of May 20, still had fewer deaths per capita than the U.K., Spain, Italy, Belgium and France, which have all opted for lockdowns, but the Swedes have a much higher death toll than their Nordic neighbours Denmark, Norway and Finland.

The big unknown is the long term impact for those who got sick and recovered. Just how much damage did they suffer? Did the virus significantly reduce their lifespans? We simply don't know the answers at the moment. In a perverse way, Sweden has provided the world a grand experiment. Scientists can follow, record, and compare the myriad costs of Lockdowns vs. No Lockdown.

Modern Exodus

Message received

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020

Shocking news

pic.twitter.com/4yyUoNhpf5

— Orwell & Goode (@OrwellNGoode) May 8, 2020

The wardens are not happy

MIT has been uploading in-class lectures from certain professors for over two decades. A student can miss his 8:30 a.m. class and still get the exact same info at noon upon waking up. However, most universities don't offer this option. This old high school and university system is incredibly inefficient*. Worse, as the Dark Lord puts it:

Conventional classroom education is expensive, unhealthy, and unethical.

Of course, the purpose of the system isn't education but Leftist indoctrination. Also, as one commenter correctly states: K-12 is basically daycare for parents.

* Think about how much money universities could save by a) hiring only one superstar lecturer per course, and b) not having to pay weekly rent and utility costs for giant halls. From a purely economics point of view, online education would be a HUGE money-saver for these institutions. So, it's not about the money ...

Traitors in charge

A million Canadians have lost their jobs in a just a few weeks. An excellent way to help them is to import tens of thousands of foreign workers:

Employers bringing thousands of agricultural labourers into Canada in the coming weeks will be required to quarantine them before they can work, and the federal government is promising to offset some of the costs.

Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau announced $50 million in federal funding Monday to provide $1,500 per worker, which can be used to cover wages while they are in quarantine or the costs of space to isolate for the 14 days required under a law meant to stop the spread of COVID-19.

What a perverse situation: unemployed Canadians are going to pay higher taxes to subsidize workers from other countries. On the bright side, they won't be called racists.

The ChiCom Con

China has been absolutely brutal towards its own Muslim population. One would be an idiot to think that the Chinese dictatorship would be nice to foreign Muslims:

In a rather hilarious and an uncanny incident, China, the now 'fair-weathered' friend of Pakistan, had promised 'top quality' medical aid to Pakistan for fighting the deadly coronavirus infection has ended up sending N95 masks made out of underwear. China actually duped Pakistan as its 'top quality' aid failed to be of any help for Pakistan.

Reporting the news, the anchor of the Pakistani news channel said, "China ne chuna laga diya," which in English means China actually conned us (Pakistan).

Now, that's poetry.

A Very Bad Year

The staggering cost of coronavirus:

A staggering 16.8 million Americans lost their jobs in just three weeks in a measure of how fast the coronavirus has brought world economies to their knees. Meanwhile, religious leaders around the globe Thursday urged people to celebrate Good Friday and Easter from the safety of their homes.

Just two months ago, it was so puzzling to see all-time highs for the US stock markets. I thought: if the pandemic is serious, then surely people will be taking their money out? Where is the collapse? And then, we got the most epic selling in over three decades.

Now, in just one month, the job market is utterly dead. The unemployment rate is racing towards the worst in almost a century. The really bad news will be when mortgages go unpaid and banks start failing. That's the global nightmare triple failure: stock markets, housing markets, and banks. For the average person that's the massacre of their equity investments, real estate, and savings.

Communists screwed socialists

BREAKING: City of Toronto is recalling $200,000 worth of bad masks (don't stop spread of droplets) 62,600 were distributed to long term care homes March 28, now the city is trying to figure out how many employees were using the faulty masks and if possibly exposed to #covid19

— Cynthia Mulligan (@CityCynthia) April 7, 2020

Made in China, of course.

Unmasking the idiots

The "experts" were telling the public not to bother with masks a few weeks ago.

Idiots! Scientism kills pple's innate reasoning abilities & survival instinct

You don't wear a mask jus because you have evidence that transmission is airborne. You wear a mask because YOU DON'T KNOW whether transmission is airborne.#Asymmetry.https://t.co/A8VyyVFW2A

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) April 7, 2020

They were also discouraging people from stocking up on food, toilet paper, disinfectants, etc. If you stocked up, then the worse that will happen is that you'll have rice, flour, pasta, and so on for many many months. If you didn't stock up, then the worse is that the Coronavirus shatters the supply chains and YOU DON'T HAVE FOOD FOR YOUR FAMILY.

Stocking up is the rational option. Yet, idiots on the Internet point and laugh at those who took the logical steps.

Zoolander will educate Trump

Faced with a White House-ordered ban on exports of key COVID-19 medical supplies to Canada and abroad, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is trying a more diplomatic approach with U.S. President Donald Trump, hoping to convince him such a ban will harm Americans and Canadians alike. [...]

He highlighted that thousands of medical workers who live in Canada work every day in the United States, helping to treat novel coronavirus patients in America. He also noted Canada supplies the U.S. with many key COVID-19 supplies including pulp for surgical-grade N95 masks, test kits and gloves.

That's likely a good argument for the US to eventually make its own pulp to secure the supply chain and completely cut out Canada. Trudeau is correct, though. That will harm Americans: the masks will be more expensive. Canadians will be harmed as well: no surgical-grade masks from the US.

Knowing Trump, he'll make some deal.

Black Swan

Epic chart: US weekly jobless claims data series since inception. pic.twitter.com/G5k24nxJRS

— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ 🇺🇸 (@startupdaemon) April 2, 2020

Racing towards the worst

A quarter of the way there:

The coronavirus outbreak has thrown 10 million Americans out of work in just two weeks, the swiftest, most stunning collapse the U.S. job market has ever witnessed, and economists warn unemployment could reach levels not seen since the Depression, as the economic damage piles up around the world.

The bleak news Thursday — a record-shattering 6.6 million new unemployment claims on top of last week's unprecedented 3.3 million — came as the competition for scarce ventilators, masks and other protective gear seemed to grow more desperate and deaths mounted with alarming speed in Italy, Spain and New York, the most lethal hot spot in the nation, with nearly 2,400 lives lost.

The highest unemployment rate in US history was during the Great Depression: 25%. If it does hit that level again, then the total number of unemployed will be 41 million. The middle class will have to sell their equities. The stock market crash will continue. Others will have to sell their homes. The housing crash will begin. Many won't be able to pay their mortgages. Banks will start to fail. So, those who had put away a few bucks will see their savings evaporate. Guns, ammo, and toilet paper will be the new currencies.

The vaccine can't be made soon enough.

The Great Depression 2.0

An absolutely devastating possibility for the United States:

As the coronavirus, or COVID-19, wreaks havoc on the U.S. economy, more than 66 million jobs across sales, production, and food preparation services are at “high risk” of layoffs, according to a St. Louis Federal Reserve economist.

Using 2018 occupational data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) detailing 808 occupations, the St. Louis Fed’s Charles Gascon found that 66.8 million people — 46% of working Americans — are employed in these occupations that are at “high risk” of layoffs.

Coronavirus Carnage

Daniel Tencer:

Canada’s economy will clock its steepest decline on record in the coming months, and unemployment is set to rise to its highest level in nearly a quarter century, a new CIBC forecast says. [...]

The forecast predicts Canada’s economic output will shrink at a 15-to-20-per-cent annual pace in the second quarter, the fastest contraction in records going back to 1962.

Millions will feel serious pain because of the culture of debt. 180%. That's the average Canadian household debt relative to disposable income. Now, in just one week, half a million Canadians have lost their jobs. Worse, this will have a compounding effect: most will severely curtail their spending for months, if not years. Many industries -- airlines, hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, theaters, etc. -- won't be hiring new workers for a long time. Those who are graduating from universities with mountains of debt will have to suffer through rotten times.

Other countries will also take a serious hit.

Economists at investment bank Goldman Sachs see the U.S. economy shrinking at an incredible 24-per-cent pace in the second quarter.

The last time the global economies crashed in such a sharp manner was 90 years ago. This terrible virus is a painful reminder to avoid debt and always have emergency savings. People wrongly think that their incomes will be stable. Business failure, recession, war, natural disaster or a pandemic can completely devastate multiple professions.

"Ah, those things are rare!"

Yeah, something rare always happens!

The pain isn't over

What I wrote on March 18, 2020:

• Assuming that the data is correct, the mortality rate of H1N1 was 0.021%. This means that 1 person out of every 4,876 infected would die from the virus.
• Today, the mortality rate of the Coronavirus is at a staggering 4%. This means that 1 person out of every 25 infected is dying from this virus. COVID-19 is, at the moment, 195 times more lethal than H1N1.

Or in other words: If COVID-19 infects 60 million people in America, then more will die from it than the total number of Americans who were killed in all the US wars combined. This virus has the potential to be more lethal for America than all her wars over 250 years.

Vox Day writes today:

The USA has 32,000 ICU beds, which puts it right in between at one ICU bed for every 10,000 people. This means that if the mitigation calculations are correct, the medical resources would be overwhelmed by a factor of 8x, thereby leading to fatalities in excess of 2 million.

Yup. My basic arithmetic put the total US fatalities at 2.4 million; assuming that a) COVID-19 infects roughly 60 million people in America, and b) the mortality rate holds at 4%. The fact that people smarter than me are getting similar fatality numbers is extremely alarming.

The Value of Vigilance

World Total:
March 6: 100,000
March 17: 200,000, 11 days
March 21: 300,000, 4 d
Deaths:
Feb 18: 2,000 deaths
March 9: 4,000 deaths, 20 d
March 14: 6,000 deaths, 5 d
March 17: 8,000 deaths, 3 d
March 19: 10,000 deaths, 2 d

March 6: Bhutan 1 case, closed border. Today 2nd case. pic.twitter.com/CwrCyp0i79

— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) March 21, 2020

It takes 2-4 weeks to get this virus under control after a total lockdown. If the entire world did that today, then we would start to see hopeful results on April 7! Of course, countries that were careful are already seeing the value of vigilance.

Canada got serious about one week ago. There were 342 confirmed cases then. Today, there are over 1,300. A few more weeks of pain to follow. We should see a flattening of the curve here in early April.

Sadiq Khan's London

March 3, 2020:

Sadiq Khan has said there is ‘no risk’ of people catching coronavirus while travelling on buses or trains in the capital.

The Mayor of London has urged people to continue to use the Tube and go to concerts despite the outbreak of the disease. So far in the UK, 39 people have tested positive to the virus. 

March 20, 2020: The politicians are definitely assholes but these idiots only have themselves to blame. After the chaos, and high economic and financial costs around the globe, they're still close enough to cough on each other!? Yeah, keep tempting fate.

This was my commute to work in London this morning @BorisJohnson. This is what you get on London underground when you reduce the service but people still have to go to work. There was a lot of coughing too.

How do we stay safe in this environment?#CoronaVirusUpdate pic.twitter.com/wT345MEjND

— Lord Riley (@DRileyamusing) March 20, 2020

Not getting risk

In an analysis published Tuesday, Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis suggests that the response to the coronavirus pandemic may be “a fiasco in the making” because we are making seismic decisions based on “utterly unreliable” data https://t.co/vbvrqJDB92

— Mike 'Thomas Paine' Moore (@Thomas1774Paine) March 19, 2020

The virus started in China. There is no question that the political elite there are not telling the truth. The data is simply incomplete. However, once fragmented global statistics are compiled, the mortality rate turns out to be roughly 4%. Of course, the rate for young people is super-low while incredibly high for the elderly. Also, it's likely that hundreds of thousands of the infected have not been test and are not counted. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the true mortality rate is 1% or lower.

Given all this uncertainty, the main point of N. N. Taleb is utterly sensible: we need to be extra-vigilant against this global threat. Short-term pain is preferable over the possibility of long-term disaster.

Trump closed America's borders to China in early February. Canada waited till mid-March to do the same. Now, entire provinces are locked down. Schools, colleges, universities, bars, restaurants, theaters, cinemas, botanical gardens, and museums are all closed. Those 45 days of smug virtue-signalling by Canada will now cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost jobs and productivity. The Canadian stock market wiped out eight years of gains in under a month. The Canadian dollar crashed 10% against the US dollar in the same time. The Great Housing Bubble of the last decade is now ready to burst. The only rising stats will be for prices, bankruptcies and suicides.

The Year of Corona

The largest province of Canada has declared a state of emergency:

Premier Doug Ford has declared a provincial state of emergency in response to a worsening COVID-19 outbreak and will now order the closure of restaurants and bars not providing takeout service along with a host of other venues where crowds are known to gather. [...]

He says that under the order the government will prohibit all organized public events of more than 50 people until March 31, including services in places of worship. He said that the order will also force the closure of all facilities providing indoor recreational programs, all public libraries and private schools, all licenced childcare centres, all bars and restaurants that don’t provide takeout services and all theatres, cinemas and concert venues.

Taxman shows mercy

Canadians will have an extra month to file their taxes this year:

Canadians will have one extra month to file their taxes to the Canada Revenue Agency, the National Post has learned.

The announcement will be made tomorrow by federal ministers as part of a larger series of financial measures to assist Canadian individuals and governments through the COVID-19 pandemic.

So instead of an April 30 filing deadline for the 2020 tax season, Canadians will have until June 1 to submit their income tax return to CRA.

Many people will have to borrow money to pay their taxes. If this corona shutdown drags on for weeks, then people will have trouble making their mortgage payments. Eventually, quite a few will have to sell their houses to get cash. The magnitude of the housing market crash in the next year will illuminate the carnage.

The diversity cries out

Mara Gay: 500 million divided by 330 million is like 1 million

Almost everyone: wut no

Mara Gay again: Why do you hate black people https://t.co/vQgN4CQcKi

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) March 13, 2020

This entire time I thought that she couldn't do basic arithmetic because she's a woman. Now, I learn it's because she's a negro. The oppression!

Canada deteriorates

The wife of the Canadian prime minister tested positive for the Wuhan virus last night.

The prime minister will have to quarantine himself for two weeks. He's also considering steps to close the borders to limit the virus.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the federal government will warn Canadians against international travel and is considering tightening the border to some international travellers.

Public schools will be closed for the next three weeks in Ontario. Canadian universities are starting to cancel their classes.

A famous Chinese city is getting the maximum benefits of socialist health care:

Vancouver has learned that a shortage of personal protective equipment for physicians and support staff has Vancouver doctors turning patients away from their offices as the provincial health-care system begins to show the strain of potential COVID-19 infections.

Doctors of BC, an association of doctors and medical residents, says physicians across the province are concerned about the shortage of supplies like face masks, with no timeline for new supplies despite a government injection of hundreds of millions of dollars.

No matter how this plays out, it certainly won't be boring.

SPYfall 3

By Thursday’s close, the S&P 500 dropped 9.5%, or 260.62 points, in its largest percentage decline since the Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987. The blue-chip index slid more than 20% in total from its recent closing high from mid-February, sending it into a bear market.

The Dow’s 9.99% decline Thursday was also the biggest since 1987, and constituted a drop of 2,352.6 points.

So, today was the worst day for the US financial markets in 33 years.

And, if you thought that was bad, take a look at Canada:

The S&P/TSX Composite Index fell 12 per cent Thursday, the biggest one day drop since May 1940, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Trading was halted earlier in the day amid dramatic selling at the opening. The nation’s benchmark slumped to its lowest since February 2016 at the close.

The last time the Canadian stock market crashed so spectacularly, Hitler's armies were marching through and conquering the Western part of Europe.

SPYfall 2

I've been paying attention to the financial markets for the last eight years. Never have I seen such volatility and pessimism. The NYSE has halted a few minutes into the open because of a steep 7% drop.

U.S. stocks hit critical circuit breaker levels on Thursday minutes after the opening bell for the second time this week as global markets plunged amid investor fears about the coronavirus global pandemic.

SPY has gone from a high of $339 to $250 in under a month. That's a staggering 26% drop. TVIX has gone from $40 to $420 in about three weeks.

SPYfall

The New York Stock Exchange halted trading for 15 minutes after the S&P 500 tanked by 7% in a few minutes. That's the first time I've seen it happen in real time.

TVIX was around $40 last month. Today, it hit $302. Absolutely insane.

Equality!

Ladies, what's sexier? 🌸

A 50/50 relationship is when you split the bills, date nights, holidays, living arrangements, everything.

A man who provides means you can work if you want to but don't have to, he knows how to hold it down.

— Juliana Stewart (@JulianaStewart_) February 28, 2020

The ratio of women to men is approaching 2:1 in colleges. Plus, too many women support ridiculous vagina quotas for high-paying jobs. Not to mention, the downward pressure on wages thanks to near-open borders. So, how exactly are men supposed to get a job that would provide for their households?

Stretched thin

Aurora wanted to be #1 but now, there's a strong possibility that they'll go bankrupt:

Aurora Cannabis Inc. reported a second-quarter loss Thursday that missed analyst expectations due to a sharp decline in cannabis production, while writing down about $1 billion in assets as the pot giant looks to dramatically reduce spending to become profitable.

The management at Aurora used shares worth $3.2 billion to buy two companies (CanniMed and MedReleaf) in a six-month period in 2018. Not to mention the dozens of other companies they bought over the years. Today, the market valuation of Aurora is $2.13 billion. Its stock price is down 88% from all-time highs. They're losing money and running out of cash fast.

They were foolish to tout an annual grow rate of 600,000 kg of cannabis two years ago. Today, they are harvesting only 30,000 kg a quarter while selling about a third of that.

The quarterly results, presupposed by last week's corporate overhaul, mark a pivotal period for the cannabis company, which is the second-largest pot producer in the world by valuation behind rival Canopy Growth Corp.

I had a feeling that was wrong. So, I checked the market caps on Google Finance:

1. Canopy Growth (TSE:WEED) :: $9.3 billion.
2. Cronos (TSE:CRON) :: $3.2 billion.
3. Aurora (TSE: ACB) :: $2.13 billion.

Aurora was the second-largest. Now, it's at the third position.

The Short Squeeze of 2020

Tesla going to the moon:

"Tesla shorts were down $2.89 billion in ... losses in 2019 and are down $8.31 billion in ... losses so far in 2020, including $2.47 billion on today's price move," S3 Partners analyst Ihor Dusaniwsky said in a research note.

Tesla stock price at the beginning of this year was $430. It's now at $945. Those who bought calls made an absolute killing. Those who bought puts are crying.

The Socialist Mind

The rich vs. poor rhetoric is alive and well. All for the impossible quest of equality. One can't make the poor into life-long millionaires. The only way to achieve "equality" is to destroy the rich. Equal misery for everyone! Of course, the people who make these decisions enjoy their power and luxuries.

"No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars," Ocasio-Cortez said, receiving applause. "I'm not here to villainize and to say billionaires are inherently morally corrupt. ... It's to say that this system that we live in, life in capitalism always ends in billionaires."

Ocasio-Cortez said billionaires make their money "off the backs" of "undocumented people," "black and brown people being paid under a living wage" and "single mothers."

She addressed a hypothetical "widget" billionaire in her remarks.

"You didn't make those widgets, did you? Because you employed thousands of people and paid them less than a living wage to make those widgets for you," Ocasio-Cortez said. "You didn't make those widgets. You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages, and in some cases real modern-day slavery."

It's always amusing when Leftists bash the rich and wealthy. Here, Cortez accuses billionaires of paying "slave wages" and slavery. Yet, she can't name one person. 

Bill Gates? Michael Dell? Michael Bloomberg? Elon Musk? Steven Spielberg? Who are these evil, corrupt billionaires? Should they not be in jail for their heinous crimes? Why doesn't the righteous and morally pure Cortez use her political power to identify the barbarous billionaires and then put them behind bars?

Squeezing the "rich"

The top 10% of Canada’s earners make 34% of the country’s income, but are paying 54% of income taxes, says a new essay that questions the premise that the “rich” don’t pay enough tax.

“Despite common misperceptions and misleading rhetoric, our top 10 per cent of income-earners pay more than half of Canada’s income taxes — and this group includes people that few would consider wealthy,” said Philip Cross, a former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, in the essay released by the Fraser Institute.

[...] And here’s the kicker. Being in the top 10% of earners in Canada doesn’t mean you are wealthy. In fact, in 2017, any Canadian making $96,000 (or more) was in that group, Cross says.

Most of these evil rich people are your teachers, professors, doctors, and engineers -- and too many are hit by the top marginal income tax rate of 50%+! Yet, a large portion of Canadians think that the rich need to pay more.

Here's another shocking statistic:

The average Canadian household paid nearly $40,000 in taxes last year, more than the combined cost of clothing, food and shelter, according to a new report. The Fraser Institute’s annual Canadian Consumer Tax Index is meant to show how the tax bill has changed over time. Last year’s average tax burden of $39,299 is almost three times what Canadians paid in 1961, after adjusting for inflation – and has risen much faster than the cost of necessities, including housing, the institute said.

No wonder so many are drowning in debt. Clothing and food might be relatively cheap but the cost of shelter and taxes have skyrocketed. Guess what? The governments are largely to blame for the insane real estate bubble as well.

In my area, houses that sold for $250,000 twenty years ago are now being put on the market for close to a million dollars! Even those "rich" people are going to be slaves to their local bank if they want to buy those lavish closets.

Costly shelter

Mass immigration drives down wages and jacks up rent.

It has been brutal for the poor. https://t.co/cRMU0YDrwK

— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) 20 January 2020

Worse, they don't understand this basic math. Most support the very same politicians who champion their continued misery via open borders. It's just sad.

Won't you feel sorry for journalists?

After another year of massive layoffs in media, the remaining workers get to be responsible for like 4 different full time jobs at once while getting paid for one. This is a listing for a position at a local affiliate of a major national media corporation. pic.twitter.com/VRJt8rC09c

— Annie Shields (@anastasiakeeley) January 11, 2020

Learn to code, bitches!

Terrible stress

Financial Post: 'A terrible experience': The CRA asked Canadians to assess its customer service — and they didn't hold back.

One respondent pointed out a glaring inconsistency in response times between how fast taxpayers are required to respond to a request for information from the CRA, compared to how long it takes for the CRA to get back to the taxpayer once the information has been provided. As one respondent wrote, “Over six months since information provid(ed) and still CRA has not got around to looking at it.”

Once the dreaded letter is received, one basically has a month to provide the requested documentation for the approval of the Canada Revenue Agency. The CRA, however, can take its sweet time to reply as was the case here: When the CRA calls: Jamie Golombek on his 10-month, transit pass reassessment saga.

The public transit amount the CRA was reviewing was $747. Note that this was not the amount of tax under review as the transit “amount” was eligible for a non-refundable federal tax credit at 15 per cent, meaning the CRA was asking for proof to substantiate a $112.05 federal tax reduction I claimed on my 2016 tax return.

Yup. It took almost a year for the CRA to admit that the absolutely enormous tax reduction of $112.05 was legitimate.

P.M. Zoolander

Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs a few weeks before Christmas:

Canada’s job market unexpectedly weakened for a second-straight month, registering the biggest drop in employment since 2009 and casting doubt on the resiliency of the domestic outlook. The economy lost 71,200 jobs in November, Statistics Canada said Friday in Ottawa, following a decline of 1,800 in the prior month.

Of course, what Canada needs is millions of more immigrants!

pic.twitter.com/0kbHBwo9Go

— Kirky86 (@Kirky861) December 24, 2019

Isn't this flood of diversity just so lovely?

The flood of immigrants and non-permanent residents to levels not seen in a century has been one of the main drivers supporting Canada’s economic expansion over the past several years. That has kept the Bank of Canada as an outlier in the global easing trend as it held its policy rate unchanged, bolstering the allure of the loonie. [...]

The country’s population grew by 208,234 in the July to September period, or 0.6 per cent, the fastest quarterly increase since at least 1971. Some 83 per cent of that increase is due to international migration, according to estimates from Statistics Canada released Thursday in Ottawa. Over the past year, Canada’s population has jumped by almost 560,000, an increase of 1.5 per cent — that’s the fastest annual pace since 1990.

Sky-high rents! Exploding real estate prices! Crushing debt! Stagnant salaries! Fat bankster profits! Ho ho ho!

Also, won't you feel sorry for the Japanese who haven't flooded themselves with diversity?

Canada’s population boom has driven robust gains in the housing and labour markets, countering the effect of an aging demographic. This has helped to avoid the Japanification trap of low growth, low inflation and low interest rates that are slowly becoming evident in other parts of the world.

I'm sure the Japanese will be very sad in a few years as they turn on the TV to see the diversity hit the fan in Canada.

The Big Three Crushed

The three largest cannabis companies in Canada, in terms of revenue, are Canopy Growth Corporation (WEED), Aurora Cannabis (ACB), and Aphria (APHA). All of them were penny stocks a few years ago. The legalization hype in Canada made their stock prices skyrocket.

The approximate all-time stock price highs:

• WEED: $76
• ACB: $16
• APHA: $24

Then, in 2019, all the significant public figures from these three companies were basically fired. Vic Neufeld, the CEO of Aphria, resigned in January. Bruce Linton, the CEO of Canopy was terminated from Canopy in early July, and now Cam Battley from Aurora is being shown the door.

The stock prices on the close of Friday.

• WEED: $26.35
• ACB: $2.95
• APHA: $6.55

The Cannabis Bubble of Canada has definitely burst. Shorts made an absolute killing this year.

Canopy has $2 billion and Aphria has costs under control with a few hundred million dollars. Aurora is in serious trouble because they're running out of cash and they're not profitable. Their strategy of buying everything before 2019 is now coming to bite them. For instance, they paid roughly $4 billion in stock to buy two other cannabis companies in 2018. Now, their entire market capitalization is ... $3.1 billion! They've had to halt construction to preserve capital. Perhaps, they can sell off a few assets to Canopy or Cronos to survive ...

Quite a few companies are going to die in 2020.

Yeah, they're mostly "White"

equality is when the circles representing billionaires are racially diverse pic.twitter.com/aatBp4Qh4B

— Official Ted Kaczynski VEVO (@nachdermas) December 21, 2019

Robert "The Sham" Reich

Just a casual reminder that 60% of all wealth in America is inherited.

“Pull yourself up by the bootstraps” is a sham.

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 20, 2019

Reich is trying to be a clever demagogue. Note that he didn't say that 60% of the rich people inherited their wealth; only that 60% of the wealth is inherited.

Here's a scenario:

• A city has 100 millionaires.
• 80 of them inherited $0. Their wealth is worth exactly $1 million each.
• 19 of them got exactly $1 million inheritances.
• 1 lucky bastard got a mammoth $101 million dollars from his rich uncle.
• Conclusion: 60% of the wealth was inherited in this city. Yet, only 20% of rich people got inheritances!

Of course, when it comes to those horrible, eeevil rich people, perception and reality are often different:

We recently released the findings of the largest study of millionaires ever conducted, with 10,000 people participating. We also surveyed the general population, and we found out that 74% of Millennials believe millionaires inherited their money. So do 52% of Baby Boomers.

Our study of millionaires blows that theory out of the water. Only 21% of millionaires received any inheritance at all. Just 16% inherited more than $100,000. And get this: only 3% received an inheritance at or above $1 million.

So, four out of five millionaires inherited $0! Not only is it a lie to say otherwise but it also diminishes their efforts over decades.

We gave the millionaires in our study a list of items that could contribute to someone becoming a millionaire, and then we asked them to rank them. What ranked number one, beating out everything else? Financial discipline. What ranked number two? Saving consistently.

Here in Canada, there have been stories of people who worked for many decades and consistently added money to their Registered Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs). When they retired, they had over a million dollars in their RRSPs. By design, one can only contribute to an RRSP after earning an income. An old rich dude who never worked would have precisely $0 in his RRSP.

Instead of showcasing the teachers, doctors, and engineers who worked and saved to become millionaires, schmucks like Reich demoralize their audiences by telling them that they can't make it.

Banksters and Barbaria

This Financial Post story is just so delicious. The following part perfectly illustrates the airheaded combination of arrogance and incompetence of the Saudis:

[...] Aramco walked into the IPO under-prepared. Despite four years of work, executives still struggled to answer simple questions from foreign investors, its legal team couldn’t produce documents on time, and nobody at Aramco could convincingly explain why Aramco deserved its US$2-trillion valuation.

They can afford to be a bunch of fucking idiots because they've been paid handsomely for swimming on oil for almost a century. The halaal clowns really don't know how the world works.

[...] in the early hours of Sept. 14, a fleet of drones attacked the very heart of the Saudi oil industry — the giant crude processing plant at Abqaiq in the kingdom’s eastern desert. Half of Aramco’s production was knocked out in minutes.

That's how you shave $1 trillion off the top. Aramco is going to make billions of dollars for shorters one day.

The one constant from history

It's that people don't learn from history.

They tried this in Russia and China. Tens of millions died pic.twitter.com/BUr3VL0CzN

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) 5 December 2019

This time it'll be different!

Miserable Women

- 70% of professional woman are struggling with well-being
- 40% say they are “hanging on by a thread”
- Only 16% are very satisfied with their lives overall

I’ve been a workaholic entrepreneur and stay at home dad - parenting is better

Ladies - why do you want jobs not babies?

— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) November 21, 2019

Because they've been told that it's so icky and horrible to be dependent on one loving husband and that it's true independence to get volatile and pitiful paychecks from various cold, faceless, remorseless corporations.

Hatred of Debt

Too many people don't have the willpower and the discipline to save and invest. Mortgage payments act as forced savings for them. At least, they have something after decades of running in the rat race.

False.

There’s nothing wrong with home ownership of course, but in my 20s I was able to start a company because I was not in debt.

You can take the money for the down payment and invest it instead, or start a side hustle. https://t.co/LC7CwNiis8

— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) November 21, 2019

What Molyneux says is true. Though, it's amusing to see the reaction of normies upon finding someone who adamantly refuses to saddle himself with an epic house loan. Instead of being curious about other options, they react with shock, horror, and indignation. YOU RENT! OMG, YOU'RE WASTING MONEY! OWNING A HOUSE IS THE BEST THING EVER!

Ok Boomer

I have had more than one Boomer tell me that renting is stupid because YOU ARE THROWING YOUR MONEY AWAY! Get a mortgage and buy a house! Yeah, about that:

The average millennial’s after-tax household income is $44,093 a year, yet the national average price for a bungalow is $521,250. Even if the buyer comes up with a 20 per cent downpayment of $104,500 — monthly mortgage payments of $2,205 on a 20-year fixed-rate mortgage at 2.49 per cent will eat up around half of their income. That doesn’t include property tax and other expenses.

A 1% property tax on that house will eat up $5,200. The mortgage plus property tax gives us a total of $31,660 a year. So, the basic Millennial will have to pay 72% of his after-tax income for the privilege of owning an average house in Canada today.

Clueless boomers

Vox Day: OK Boomer.

As I wrote before:

I was chatting with an older gentleman last month who was very surprised to find out that I don't own any real estate. He said that owning a house is one of the best financial decisions he made. I asked him, "How much did you pay for your house?"

"$54,000."

"Do you remember your annual income at that time?"

"Hmm, about $20,000."

"Did you have a mortgage?"

"No, I borrowed from family and paid them back in a few years."

So, at the time, the price of his house was 2.7 times his salary. Today, for a guy in the Greater Toronto Area, the average price of a house is over 20 times his salary! (Annual income = $40,000. Average selling price of a house = $807,000.)

Another anecdote: I knew a guy who worked as a part-time English tutor at a private school in my area. This was around 2006. He, and other tutors, made $15/hr. The minimum wage at the time was $8/hr. Note, that this job required a degree.

Fast forward to 2013. I found out that a woman who had just graduated from university with a degree in mathematics was working at this school as a part-time math tutor.

Her wage? $12/hr. Minimum hourly wage at the time was almost $11. Tuition, rent, housing prices, electricity, and other costs had significantly increased in those 7 years but the tutoring work was paying just $1 more than a job where one flips fries. She quit after one month.

Boomers really don't have a fucking clue how the economic and financial situation for the younger generations has severely deteriorated. Worse, they're responsible for it.

Those sweet cannabis dollars

Following the one year anniversary of legalization, some Ontario municipalities are rethinking their original ‘say no to cannabis’ decisions and warming up to the idea of allowing legal brick-and-mortar cannabis stores in their communities.

A year ago, these idiots said 'yes to the black market'. They should have put a billboard on the road to their town, "Criminals Welcome!" Now, that the employment and tax dollars are materializing in other municipalities, these clowns are coming around.