Isaac Schrödinger

Fuck you, White men!

Nasdaq is going to push Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) on White people:

Nasdaq is pushing for greater diversity among the more than 3,000 companies listed on its exchange. [...]

Under the proposal, the majority of companies will be required to have at least two diverse board directors: one woman and one person who identifies as either an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ. If a company cannot meet these requirements, it will not be delisted, but it will need to explain why it cannot satisfy the goals. Failure to publish board data, however, could result in delisting.

According to the article, more than 75% of companies don't meet this retarded diversity standard. The new colored, BBQ, vaginas that will get hired will surely be looked upon as bright and competent.

The acceptable inequality

#InternationalMensDay pic.twitter.com/N5ZlGUsJ51

— Rollo Tomassi (@RationalMale) November 19, 2020

Fight the Matriarchy!

How to destroy a country

The Canadian economy has been devastated by the political response to the pandemic. Millions of people have lost their jobs. Shelter, food, electricity -- all of it is becoming more expensive. The Canadian government has decided to throw fuel on this fire by planning to import over a million immigrants in the next three years:

On October 30, Justin Trudeau’s government announced its plan “to support economic recovery through immigration”. The plan would increase immigration between 2021 to 2023 by more than 1.2 million immigrants to “compensate for the shortfall” of immigration due to the pandemic.

What will this accomplish:

1. The out of control real estate market remains crazy. Banks and flippers are happy.
2. Rents spike as supply is limited. More residents packed in tiny apartments.
3. Downward pressure on wages as more cheap labor is available.
4. Public transportation and traffic get worse.
5. Cultural enrichment intensifies!

Get with The Narrative

So how does this happen in a “White Supremacist” society?  pic.twitter.com/EedUy5Nlrc

— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) October 31, 2020

[Biden style:] Come on, man!

Asians are honorary Whites. They're servants of White Supremacy. So, when Asian make more money, it's further PROOF of White Supremacy!

Real incomes crushed

Vox Day:

The two primary problems are debt and immigration, as can be seen by this comparison of 1952 and 2020 prices.

A few data points from the table:

Average income in 1952: $6,850
Average house price in 1952: $9,075

Average income today: $33,706
Average house price today: $312,803

The average American could buy a house with 133% of his annual income in 1952. Today, the average guy requires 928% of his annual income to buy a house. In seventy years, an average house has become seven times more expensive!

If one adds the young and foolish students who take on mountains of debt to go through university, then the situation becomes even more dire for them since the increase in tuition is much more worse than the real estate boom.

Socialism doesn't work

If you think my dad's cancer case is an argument for Medicare for all, you haven't been paying attention.

My dad is Canadian. He's paid into the Canadian Medicare system for DECADES. But when he needed it the most, what did that get him?

It got him on WAITLISTS. FOR MONTHS. https://t.co/YLtsNve9m6

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) October 27, 2020

Lauren Chen understands that there's no reasoning with such people.

When I shared about my dad's problems in Canada, I got shamed by socialists for "trying to jump the line" for his care.

When I brought him to the US for surgery, now socialists are saying "Well you wouldn't have all these costs if there was public healthcare!"

Fuck you people.

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) October 27, 2020

Learn. To. Code.

I can’t stop laughing. This is the best thing I’ve seen today. 🤣 https://t.co/YbCgWHj9Zi

— Alex Bruesewitz (@alexbruesewitz) October 13, 2020

"Free" health care

I used to live in Grand Forks, ND, which is just south of the border; I sold shoes in a store at a mall and I listened to many similar stories from people from Canada

— lame (@NarvaezZach) October 10, 2020

Think about that. Even with thousands of Canadians like Olson who drive to America every year and pay money to get necessary treatment, there's still a shocking shortage of doctors and a long waiting line in Canada.

The young and ignorant Canadians love their compassionate healthcare system. They pay sky-high taxes towards it their entire lives and when they truly need it in their old age, they see the ugly reality when they suffer through months or years of waiting to see a specialist. Given the mounting public debt, this situation is not going to improve.

The Oppression Continues

Standards are for White people:

As companies grapple with their roles in contributing to racial equality and inequality, diversity and inclusion programs have taken on more importance in the corporate world.

But in retail, one well-regarded bicycle brand led by an industry legend is innovating a more direct approach to address racial inequality: reparations in the form of a 45% discount for Black customers.

Rivendell Bicycle Works, based in Walnut Creek, Calif., is offering the discount not because they are “a nice thing to do, but because they’re owed,” Grant Petersen, Rivendell’s president and founder, wrote in a post explaining the new policy.

This would be a sweet enterprise for a Black dude. Offer your bike-buying services for White people for a small fee. Any White person who pays full price there is, officially, an idiot.

The joys of socialism

The public healthcare system of Ontario, Canada is sending its COVID-19 swabs to ... California!

There are private clinics that offer tests. What's the government response to this beneficial option that reduces the stress on the public hospitals? That's a two-tier system! Super-wealthy people can pay a $100 and get their results in a swift manner! SHUT IT DOWN!

Instead of thanking the private clinics, these thugs want to crush them.

White Privilege

This is the future the woke mob created for our sons to inherit. pic.twitter.com/vGkLxzGFJy

— Dr Jane Crofton MEng (@OnCroft) October 1, 2020

White people are discriminated against in their own nations. With skyrocketing real estate prices, exploding public debt, ever-increasing taxes, and hostile immigrants, the stage is set for war.

Deceitful Demagogues

The Fake News Media and the lying democrats are counting on the stupidity and ignorance of the average voter to make it look like that a horrible multimillionaire paid less than a $1,000 dollars a year in taxes.

Income tax =/= Total tax!

Of course, the Left will ignore the millions of dollars that Trump pays in other taxes: sales, property, payroll, etc. Here's one example in which waiters and illegal aliens are saints and ORANGE MAN BAD!

In 2016 & ‘17, I paid thousands of dollars a year in taxes *as a bartender.*

Trump paid $750.

He contributed less to funding our communities than waitresses & undocumented immigrants.

Donald Trump has never cared for our country more than he cares for himself. A walking scam. https://t.co/VZChbp8htu

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 28, 2020

AOC is a lying bitch. Trump pays more in taxes in a single year than what a waiter would make in his entire life.

The Road to Darkness

Genius. Weeks ago there were rolling brownouts, and we were ordered to turn off our electricity.

Given that Newsom has no plans to build zero-emission nuke plants, where's all the juice going to come from?

California: the state of magical thinking.https://t.co/Jl04TYVhC2

— Joel Engel (@joelengel) September 23, 2020

That's on top of one of the biggest disadvantages of electric cars: the time it takes to charge them.

To frack or not to frack

Billions Lost in Mayhem (BLM)

Foundation for Economic Education:

Dozens of people were killed or injured in the violent unrest, and thousands of businesses and properties, many minority-owned, were looted, torched, or otherwise vandalized. Only now are we beginning to realize the full cost of the destruction. New reporting from Axios reveals that the total insured property losses incurred during the George Floyd riots will come in at $1 billion to $2 billion.

That's only the insured losses.

[...] insurance is no panacea for the societal ills imposed by rioting. Indeed, 75 percent of US businesses are under-insured and about 40 percent of small businesses have no insurance at all. Their untold millions in losses don’t show up in the $2 billion figure. [...]

One study of the 1992 Los Angeles riots concluded that not only did the destruction cause $1 billion in initial property damage, over time it led to an economic decline of $3.8 billion in sales activity and at least $125 million in tax revenue.

The worst loss for the Left: the re-election of the God-Emperor.

Something about workers?

The modern Left. pic.twitter.com/5SItviIbxg

— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) September 15, 2020

Also, their economic policies have been devastating. The Left loves open borders while condemning horribly low wages for the average worker. Yet, they still get significant amount of the votes in the West. Goes to show that mass media propaganda works and, of course, MPAI.

Spend less

Rory Sutherland is quite astute:

There are two ways to become richer. One is to earn more. The other is to spend less on things you are forced to buy. Given the extraordinary centralising forces of the past 40 years — where the gains of the knowledge economy have disproportionately accrued to rent-seeking city landlords and transport networks — the freedom to work remotely is an instant 20 per cent pay rise. And sorry Boris, but if I travel to work in order to buy a £6 sandwich, in the short term, yes, I am bailing out Pret A Manger, but in the long term I’m bailing out the Duke of Westminster.

The cost of driving a car is staggering for the average person in Canada.

The total cost of ownership for a car is $955 per month when you include all your car payments, gas, maintenance, and auto insurance costs. After 3 years, you’ve paid for your car in full, and your payments drop to $502 per month.

That's $6,000 a year if you buy and use a prudent car for a long time. A cost that's not mentioned? The hundreds of hours burned in miserable traffic. I knew a colleague who often took over one hour to get home after work. During a horrendous snow storm it took him close to four hours. Living close to work (if it's not crazy expensive) or working from home (if possible) is definitely a huge income boost.

Of course, the landlords and, by extension, the banks won't be very happy about that.

Enlightened Riots

The trillions of dollars transferred over to blacks in the past five decades wasn't enough:

Supporters of reparations assume the racial wealth gap between blacks and whites is the result of slavery, and thus, something to be fixed through reparations. “If the 40-acres-and-a-mule that was promised to free slaves were delivered to the descendants of those slaves today, we would all be billionaires,” state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) said. “I hear far too many people say, ‘Well, I didn’t own slaves, that was so long ago.’ Well, you inherit wealth — you can inherit the debt that you owe to African-Americans.”

That's the evil of equality. It can never be achieved. The demands are, therefore, never-ending.

Eugene Volokh:

My parents and my brother and I came to the country in 1975. We didn't inherit any wealth in the U.S. (and really none anywhere). I don't owe any debt—because of my skin color my ancestors or theirs—to blacks or whites or Asians, and neither do other Californians.

Utterly irrelevant. What matters is that you've got $$$$ and the retarded losers don't. The power-hungry leftist politicians will have no qualms about extorting money from Asians, Indians, Jews, and even rich blacks in America to appease their precious black vote. In effect, it'll be another wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. The slavery rhetoric is there to call the opponents horrible, evil, racist Nazis who hate poor black people.

Strong, Independent, Fierce Women!

Math is very hard!

Just saw this video of someone else posting their experience pic.twitter.com/cVlnoU1HVA

— sheldon (@sheldonstevig) August 28, 2020

The diabolical and predatory universities have increased the costs of higher "education" while the real wages for most jobs are stagnant. Also, the government doesn't trust these teenage idiots with a can of beer but it's perfectly acceptable for them to offer tens of thousands of dollars in loans with shockingly high interest rates that eventually crush the wealth building capacity and sanity of young people.

The Left is not right

Life in NYC:

• High taxes.
• Increasing crime rate.
• Decreasing law enforcement.
• A disaster of a response to the epidemic.
• More homeless people.
• Violent crime spikes.

The result? The rich people start leaving and the city deteriorates even more.

NYC’s top 1% pays 50% of all income taxes. Personal income tax in the NY area accounts for 59% of all revenues.

The city’s very wealthiest blocks have decreased by 40% +.

Atlas shrugged, as we always predicted it would.

Y’all are gonna learn one day. https://t.co/OqR3cNCzzx

— Hannah Cox (@HannahCox7) August 19, 2020

Oh, they never learn. They'll just blame the eeevil rich for not paying their fair share.

A Very Bad Idea

Dan Mitchell: The Economic Damage of Wealth Taxation.

Consider a large farm worth $50 million in the US. The owner of that farm makes roughly $500,000 annually in profit. Now, the government decides to levy a "modest" wealth tax of 2%. The owner of that farm would have to pay $1 million a year, every year, for that farm. That one "small" tax is double his annual income. If he doesn't have substantial savings, then he'll have to sell the farm. Of course, then the new owner will have to worry about the tax. Most likely, the property value will drop and a few workers will be fired to make the whole enterprise more efficient.

Smart rich people will see this atrocity coming from a mile away. They'll quietly move a significant amount of their money to outside of the US before the wealth tax hits. In other words, the negative consequences of the wealth tax will be seen before it even goes into effect.

Can't satiate this

I think he is talking about taxing unrealized gains. AOC talked about it a month ago. It's insanity.

— Noelle Whaley (@Fan_of_Freddie) August 6, 2020

That's essentially a wealth tax. That would be extremely destructive. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see this proposed for real estate. Imagine a guy whose house doubles in value from $500,000 to $1 million. The clowns in government will be "asking" him to pay a 50% tax on those "gains".

Another dumb privilege

Eating “healthier” is really a privilege honestly

— Ghetto Barbie (@choKolatOnTop) August 1, 2020

Deal prices in Ontario, Canada:

• Dozen eggs: $2
• Potatoes: $0.2 per pound
• Chicken legs: $1 per pound
• Chicken breasts: $3 per pound
• Frozen turkey burgers: $1 for 1 (100 grams)
• Burger buns: $2.5 per 8
• Minced beef: $3 per pound
• Coleslaw salad: $1.5 per pound
• Ketchup: $3 for 1 liter
• Miracle whip: $3 for 0.9 liter
• Sriracha sauce: $2.7 for 0.7 liter
• Olive oil: $10 for 1 liter
• Apples: $1.25 each
• Tangerines: $0.25 each
• Mini-cucumbers: $0.5 each
• Tomatoes: $0.75 each

Add in salt, pepper, chili flakes, garlic power, paprika, and oregano, and you've got the essentials for healthy and inexpensive meals. 

Eating healthier isn't a privilege. It's simply inconvenient. Waiting in line for under a minute to get a calorie-packed meal combo is just easy. The average adult watches five hours of TV in a day in America. "I got no time," isn't a legit excuse.

Crushed under debt

"Welcome to the world"

The change in his expression is both sad and funny:

Comedy Break: Ecstatic teen opens his first-ever paycheck, learns what taxes are, is absolutely crushed https://t.co/cRCarYIym9 pic.twitter.com/Zj1siRhENq

— Disrn (@DisrnNews) July 26, 2020

It's under 8%. If he's making a decent living a few years later, then he'll be paying close to half of his income to the various levels of government (state and federal income taxes, sales taxes, property tax, etc.). That's really going to hurt.

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.