The world’s number one problem today is that the world’s population is too large for its resource base. Some people have called this situation overshoot. The world economy is ripe for a major change, such as the current pandemic, to bring the situation into balance. The change doesn’t necessarily come from the coronavirus itself. Instead, it is likely to come from the whole chain reaction that has been started by the coronavirus and the response of governments around the world to the coronavirus.
Let me explain more about what is happening.
[1] The world economy is reaching Limits to Growth, as described in the book with a similar title.
One way of seeing the predicament we are in is the modeling of resource consumption and population growth described in the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, by Donella Meadows et al. Its base scenario seems to suggest that the world will reach limits about now. Chart 1 shows the base forecast from that book, together with a line I added giving my impression of where the economy really was in 2019, relative to resource availability.
Figure 1. Base scenario from 1972 Limits to Growth, printed using today’s graphics by Charles Hall and John Day in “Revisiting Limits to Growth After Peak Oil,” with dotted line added corresponding to where the world economy seems to be in 2019.
In 2019, the world economy seemed to be very close to starting a downhill trajectory. Now, it appears to me that we have reached the turning point and are on our way down. The pandemic is the catalyst for this change to a downward trend. It certainly is not the whole cause of the change. If the underlying dynamics had not been in place, the impact of the virus would likely have been much less.
The 1972 model leaves out two important parts of the economy that probably make the downhill trajectory steeper than shown in Figure 1. First, the model leaves out debt and, in fact, the whole financial system. After the 2008 crisis, many people strongly suspected that the financial system would play an important role as we reach the limits of a finite world because debt defaults are likely to disturb the worldwide financial system.
The model also leaves out humans’ continual battle with pathogens. The problem with pathogens becomes greater as world population becomes denser, facilitating transmission. The problem also becomes greater as a larger share of the population becomes more susceptible, either because they are elderly or because they have underlying health conditions that have been hidden by an increasingly complex and expensive medical system.
As a result, we cannot really believe the part of Figure 1 that is after 2020. The future downslopes of population, industrial production per capita, and food per capita all seem likely to be steeper than shown on the chart because both the debt and pathogen problems are likely to increase the speed at which the economy declines.
[2] It is far more than the population that has overshot limits.
The issue isn’t simply that there are too many people relative to resources. The world seems to have
- Too many shopping malls and stores
- Too many businesses of all kinds, with many not very profitable for their owners
- Governments with too extensive programs, which taxpayers cannot really afford
- Too much debt
- An unaffordable amount of pension promises
- Too low interest rates
- Too many people with low wages or no wages at all
- Too expensive a healthcare system
- Too expensive an educational system
The world economy needs to shrink back in many ways at once, simultaneously, to manage within its resource limits. It is not clear how much of an economy (or multiple smaller economies) will be left after this shrinkage occurs.
[3] The economy is in many ways like the human body. In physics terms, both are dissipative structures. They are both self-organizing systems powered by energy (food for humans; a mixture of energy products including oil, coal, natural gas, burned biomass and electricity for the economy).
The human body will try to fix minor problems. For example, if someone’s hand is cut, blood will tend to clot to prevent too much blood loss, and skin will tend to grow to substitute for the missing skin. Similarly, if businesses in an area disappear because of a tornado, the prior owners will either tend to rebuild them or new businesses will tend to come in to replace them, as long as adequate resources are available.
In both systems, there is a point beyond which problems cannot be fixed, however. We know that many people die in car accidents if injuries are too serious, for example. Similarly, the world economy may “collapse” if conditions deviate too far from what is necessary for economic growth to continue. In fact, at this point, the world economy may be so close to the edge with respect to resources, particularly energy resources, that even a minor pandemic could push the world economy into a permanent cycle of contraction.
[4] World governments are in a poor position to fix the current resource and pandemic crisis.
In our networked economy, too low a resource base relative to population manifests itself in a strange way: It appears as an affordability crisis that leads to very low prices for oil. It also appears as terribly low prices for many other commodities, including copper, lithium, coal and even wholesale electricity. These low prices occur because too large a share of the population cannot afford finished goods, such as cars and homes, made with these commodities. Recent shutdowns have suddenly increased the number of people with low income or no income, pushing commodity prices even lower.
If resources were more plentiful and very inexpensive to produce, as they were 50 or 70 years ago, wages of workers could be much higher, relative to the cost of resources. Factory workers would be able to afford to buy vehicles, for example, and thus help keep the demand for automobiles up. If we look more deeply into this, we find that energy resources of many kinds (fossil fuel energy, nuclear energy, burned biomass and other renewable energy) must be extraordinarily cheap and abundant to keep the system growing. Without “surplus energy” from many sources, which grows with population, the whole system tends to collapse.
World governments cannot print resources. What they can print is debt. Debt can be viewed as a promise of future goods and services, whether or not it is reasonable to believe that these future goods and services will actually materialize, given resource constraints.
We are finding that using shutdowns to solve COVID-19 problems causes a huge amount of economic damage. The cost of mitigating this damage seems to be unreasonably high. For example, in the United States, antibody studies suggest that roughly 5% of the population has been infected with COVID-19. The total number of deaths associated with this 5% infection level is perhaps 100,000, assuming that reported deaths to date (about 80,000) need to be increased somewhat, to match the approximately 5% of the population that has, knowingly or unknowingly, already experienced the infection.
If we estimate that the mean number of years of life lost is 13 years per person, then the total years of life lost would be about 1,300,000. If we estimate that the US treasury needed to borrow $3 trillion dollars to mitigate this damage, the cost per year of life lost is $3 trillion divided by 1.3 million, or $2.3 million per year of life lost. This amount is utterly absurd.
This approach is clearly not something the United States can scale up, as the share of the population affected by COVID-19 relentlessly rises from 5% to something like 70% or 80%, in the absence of a vaccine. We have no choice but to use a different approach.
[5] COVID-19 would have the least impact on the world economy if people could pay little attention to the pandemic and just “let it run.” Of course, even without mitigation attempts, COVID-19 might bring the world economy down, given the distressed level of today’s economy and the shutdowns experienced to date.
Shutting down an economy has a huge adverse impact on that economy because quite a few workers who are in good health are no longer able to make goods and services. As a result, they have no wages, so their “demand” goes way down. If the economy was already having an affordability crisis for goods made with commodities, shutting down the economy tends to greatly add to the affordability crisis. Prices of commodities tend to fall even lower than they were before the crisis.
Back in 1957-1958, the Asian pandemic, which also started in China, hit the world. The number of deaths was up in the range of the current pandemic, relative to population. The estimated worldwide death rate was 0.67%. This is not too dissimilar from a death rate of 0.61% for COVID-19, which can be calculated using my estimate above (100,000 deaths relative to 5% of the US population of 33o million).
Virtually nothing was shut down in the US for the 1957-58 pandemic. When doctors or nurses became sick themselves, wards were simply closed. Would-be patients were told to stay at home and take aspirin, unless a severe case developed. With this approach, the US still faced a short recession, but the economy was soon growing again. Populations seemed to reach herd immunity quite quickly.
If the world could somehow have adopted a similar approach this time, there still would have been some adverse impact on the economy. A small percentage of the population would have died. Some businesses might have needed to be closed for a short time when too many workers were out sick. But the huge burden of job loss by a substantial share of the economy could have been avoided. The economy would have had at least a small chance of rebounding quickly.
[6] The virus that causes COVID-19 looks a great deal like a laboratory cross between SARS and HIV, making the likelihood of a quick vaccine low.
In fact, Professor Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus and winner of a Nobel Prize in Medicine, claims that the new coronavirus is the result of an attempt to manufacture a vaccine against the AIDS virus. He believes that the accidental release of this virus is what is causing today’s pandemic.
If COVID-19 were simply another influenza virus, similar to many we have seen, then getting a vaccine that would work passably well would be a relatively easy exercise. At least one of the vaccine trials that have been started could be reasonably expected to work, and a solution would not be far away.
Unfortunately, SARS and HIV are fairly different from influenza viruses. We have never found a vaccine for either one. If a person has had SARS once, and is later exposed to a slightly mutated version of SARS, the symptoms of the second infection seem to be worse than the first. This characteristic interferes with finding a suitable vaccine. We don’t know whether the virus causing COVID-19 will have a similar characteristic.
We know that scientists from a number of countries have been working on so-called “gain of function” experiments with viruses. These very risky experiments are aimed at making viruses either more virulent, or more transmissible, or both. In fact, experiments were going on in Wuhan, in two different laboratories, with viruses that seem to be not too different from the virus causing COVID-19.
We don’t know for certain whether there was an accident that caused the release of one of these gain of function viruses in Wuhan. We do know, however, that China has been doing a lot of cover-up activity to deter others from finding out what actually happened in Wuhan.
We also know that Dr. Fauci, a well-known COVID-19 advisor, had his hand in this Chinese research activity. Fauci’s organization, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, provided partial funding for the gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. While the intent of the experiments seems to have been for the good of mankind, it would seem that Dr. Fauci’s judgment erred in the direction of allowing too much risk for the world’s population.
[7] We are probably kidding ourselves about ever being able to contain the virus that causes COVID-19.
We are gradually learning that the virus causing COVID-19 is easily spread, even by people who do not show any symptoms of the disease. The virus can spread long distances through the air. Tests to see if people are ill tend to produce a lot of false negatives; because of this, it is close to impossible to know whether a particular person has the illness or not.
China is finding that it cannot really contain the virus that causes COVID-19. A recent South China Morning Post article indicates that roughly 14 million people are to be tested in the Wuhan area in the next ten days to try to control a new outbreak of the virus.
It is becoming clear, as well, that even within China, the lockdowns have had a very negative impact on the economy. The Wall Street Journal reports, China Economic Data Indicate V-Shaped Recovery Is Unlikely. Supply chains were broken; wholesale commodity prices (excluding food) have tended to fall. Joblessness is increasingly a problem.
[8] If we look at deaths per million by country, it is difficult to see that lockdowns are very helpful in reducing the spread of disease. Masks seem to be more beneficial.
If we compare death rates for mask-wearing East Asian countries to death rates elsewhere, we see that death rates in mask-wearing East Asian countries are dramatically lower.
Figure 2. Death rates per million population of selected countries with long-term exposure to the virus causing COVID-19, based on Johns Hopkins death data as of May 11, 2020.
Looking at the chart, a person almost wonders whether lockdowns are a response to requests from citizens to “do something” in response to an already evident surge in cases. The countries known for their severe lockdowns are at the top of the chart, not the bottom.
In fact, a preprint academic paper by Thomas Meunier is titled, “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic.” The abstract says, “Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, or reproduction number trends. . . We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.”
It appears to me that lockdowns have been popular with governments around the world for a whole host of reasons that have little to do with the spread of COVID-19:
- Lockdowns give an excuse for closing borders to visitors and goods from outside. This was a direction in which many countries were already headed, in an attempt to raise the wages of local workers.
- Lockdowns can be used to hide the fact that factories need to be closed because of breaks in supply lines elsewhere in the world.
- Many countries have been faced with governmental protests because of low wages compared to the prices of basic services. Lockdowns tend to keep protesters inside.
- Lockdowns give the appearance of protecting the elderly. Since there are many elderly voters, politicians need to court these voters.
[9] A person wonders whether Dr. Fauci and members of the World Health Organization are influenced by the wishes of vaccine and big pharmaceutical companies.
The recommendation to try to “flatten the curve” is, in part, an attempt to give vaccine and pharmaceutical makers more time to work on their products. Is this really the best recommendation? Perhaps I am being overly suspicious, but we recently have been dealing with an opioid epidemic which was encouraged by manufacturers of Oxycontin and other opioids. We don’t need another similar experience, this time sponsored by vaccine and other pharmaceutical makers.
The temptation of researchers is to choose solutions that would be best from the point of their own business interests. If a researcher gets much of his funding from vaccine and big pharmaceutical interests, the temptation will be to “push” solutions that are beneficial to these interests. In some cases, researchers are able to patent approaches, even when the research is paid for by governmental grants. In this case they can directly benefit from a new vaccine or drug.
When potential solutions are discussed by Dr. Fauci and the World Health Organization, no one brings up improving people’s immunity so that they can better fight off the novel coronavirus. Few bring up masks. Instead, we keep being warned about “opening up too soon.” In a way, this sounds like, “Please leave us lots of customers who might be willing to pay a high price for our vaccine.”
[10] One way the combination of (a) the activity of the virus and (b) our responses to the virus may play out is as a slow-motion, controlled demolition of the world economy.
I think of what we are experiencing as being somewhat similar to a toggle bolt going around and around, moving down a screw. As the toggle bolt moves around, I picture it as being similar to the virus and our responses to the viruses hitting different parts of the world economy.
Figure 3. Image of how the author sees COVID-19 as being able to hit the economy multiple times, in multiple ways, as its impact keeps impacting different parts of the world.
If we look back, the virus and reactions to the virus first hit China. China’s recovery is moving slowly, in part because of reduced demand from outside of China now that the virus is hitting other parts of the world. In fact, additional layoffs occurred after Chinese shutdowns ended, because it then became clear that some employers needed to permanently scale back operations to meet the new lower demand for their product.
Commodity prices, including oil prices, are now depressed because of low demand around the world. These low prices can be expected to gradually lead to closures of wells and mines extracting these commodities. Processing centers will also close, making these commodities less available even if demand temporarily rises.
As one country is hit by illnesses and/or shutdowns, we can expect supply lines for manufacturing around the world to be disrupted. This will lead to yet more business closures, some of them permanent. Debt defaults tend to happen as businesses close and layoffs occur.
With all of the layoffs, governments will find that their tax collections are lower. The resulting governmental funding issues can be expected to lead to new rounds of layoffs.
Natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and forest fires can be expected to continue to happen. Social distancing requirements, inadequate tax revenue and broken supply lines will make mitigation of all of these disasters more difficult. Electrical lines that fall down may stay down permanently; bridges that are damaged may never be repaired.
Initially, rich countries can be expected to try to help as many laid-off workers as possible with loans and temporary stipends. But, after a few months, even with this approach, many individual citizens and businesses will likely not be able to pay their rent. Default rates on home mortgages and auto loans can be expected to rise for a similar reason.
We can expect to see round after round of business failures and layoffs of employees. Financial systems will become more and more stressed. Pensions are likely to default. Death rates will rise, in part from epidemics of various kinds and in part from growing problems with starvation. In fact, in some poor countries, lower-income citizens are already having difficulty being able to afford adequate food. Eventually we can expect collapsing governments (similar to the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union) and overthrown governments.
Longer-term, after this demolition ends, there may be some surviving pieces of economies. These new economies will be much smaller and less dependent upon each other, however. Currencies are likely to be less interchangeable. The remaining people will need to learn to make do with many fewer goods than are available today. It will be a very different world.
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For those who do not think that this pandemic was planned.
In this short October 2014 interview, journalist Harry Vox explicates the Rockefeller Institute pandemic scenario known as “LOCKSTEP” and provides a reference to the document in question. It provides a precise description of what we are experiencing today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuOxG-rnj30
The original document can be found at https://archive.org/details/pdfy-tNG7MjZUicS-wiJb/mode/1up
Its true that the elite see themselves as shepherds and the proletariat as sheep or cattle but it’s hard to believe there is this much agreement on anything. All it takes is one group of people to release it. The reactions to a pandemic will be either b e defensive (lockdown) or opportunistic–looking at how to use a crisis to further personal agendas or hide other failures of government. The thing is we are not sure how things were going prior to the outbreak since reporting on the real economy and other things has become scarce is recent years but we do know there was talk of trade wars and countries wishing to exit international agreements. This crisis does force most countries to behave more uniformly but aside from that…there isn’t much of a sense of international camaraderie. If internationalists are forced to admit that friends abandon each other in times of crisis… they stand to gain very little from orchestrating it.
https://files.gamebanana.com/img/ico/sprays/51159f9a79a52.png
In 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation wrote a document written about getting greater top-down control of the population using through the use of a pandemic. No specific pandemic was mentioned in the document, but the recent pandemic of interest was Ebola, active in 2009.
According to the scenario the forecast (as scenarios in the past tense), doing this would get rid of tourism and break supply chains. The authors want you at home, in front of commercial television. The pandemic allows increasing control by the government of all activities. In their modeling, Chinese government fared better in virus control, because of its top-down control. Rockefeller foundation believed that this would be the best form of capitalism–top down capitalism.
The video also talks about National Security Memorandum 200. This is a document that talks about Implications of Worldwide Population Growth and the need for Depopulation (reducing the existing population). It was published in 1974, when everyone was worried about running out of oil. It was prepared at the direction of Henry Kissinger; Nixon was in charge. https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pcaab500.pdf
It also mentions that the CDC has a patent on the Ebola virus, so that it could profit from any vaccines for Ebola. According to Google, some believe that this was simply a money making scheme by the CDC.
Disturbing!
but if ‘capitalism’ managed to somehow inflict all this guy is going on about, no ‘capital’ would be generated in any ongoing sense.
‘capitalism’ requires that most of us are capitalists to a greater or lesser degree–(-i sell my house to move to a bigger one–buy another care etc), this generates capital flow
you might, for a while have billions of robotic ‘worker bees’ producing stuff , but ultimately it would be purposeless, and so would collapse in on itself because such ‘stuff’ would be unsaleable.
if i lived in a barrack block, worked for 12 hours, then ate and slept, my only function in life would be to produce more ‘workers’ ad infinitum
one might imagine such armies of workers ‘producing’ just food, but that is the economy of the anthill or the beehive.—in the most literal sense.
i watched that video till he got to the part about flying low over african villages scattering ‘ebola’
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Anti-vaxers exist because they never experienced the epidemics that we oldsters (b 1942) dealt with as children. Go to an old graveyard, There are few child-sized headstones after the first half of the last century.
Don’t worry about being forced to take the Covid vaccine. When it comes out there will be a demand and shortage that lasts for years. I, age 78, with congestive heart failure, will be first in line and highly appreciative of the vaccine refusers who stay out of the waiting lines.
“There are few child-sized headstones after the first half of the last century.”
Typhus is almost unknown today in the West but used to be endemic. What happened?
Rising living standards. Less war. Better diets. Plumbing and sewage. Running water. Cheap and easily available soap products. Typhus did not disappear because of a population-wide typhus jab.
And by the way, given that this whole covid scenario is plainly a transparent con, we are perfectly right to ask what it is they want to inject us with and why. After all, this is a corona virus, as are SARS, H1N1, MERS, and the common cold. So how is it that we still have no vaccine for these corona viruses, but we can suddenly and in such a short time have a vaccine for wuhan?
Typhus was nightmarish in Russia during the Revolution: no-one one could get hold of soap (except maybe the Commissars) and hot water was a luxury, because fuel to heat was in short-supply. People simply swarmed with typhus-bearing lice, and it became one of the great terrors of daily life.
Most embalmed bodies of medieval kings showed they were infested with parasites in life. Our ancestors crawled with fleas.
I agree with Interguru. Many diseases disappeared with vaccination. It started in the early 1800, when Spain undertook the first transcontinental vaccination campaign to fight.. don’t remember what it was. They put one infected guy and 30 orphan kids in a ship, and got passed the infection among them in a controlled manner to keep the bug alive during the trip. Simple and effective
But covid vaccine is just cheap talk right now, it takes time to know a candidate has no side effects. Generally speaking Covid is not much lethal, so there is no need to risk taking a vaccine that hasn’t been tested for a while. Of course many people wouldn’t allow to be vaccinated under such circumstances
https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bill-gates-says-world-will-need-7-billion-doses-covid-19-vaccine-stop-pandemic/
Maybe the world will need these doses, but it is not at all clear that anyone can develop a suitable vaccine, no matter how many tries.
Like flu mostly old, diseased people die … KFC Big Gulpers should get the vaccine if it ever arrives (or course it won’t…).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105596/covid-19-mortality-rate-by-age-group-in-spain-march/
“Court found it immaterial that a portion of the medical community thought the vaccination worthless or even injurious. The state has the right to choose between opposing medical theories”
“Furthermore, it is immaterial whether or not the vaccine is actually effective, so long as it is the belief of state authorities that the mandatory vaccine will promote common welfare and is a reasonable and proper exercise of the police power”
” a compelling state interest may abridge religious freedom”
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/mandatory-vaccination-legal-time-epidemic/2006-04
Forced vaccinations are on their way
In the Lands of the Free, you always get a choice.
The other choices—such as re-education, ostracism, incarceration and termination may not be very appealing, and going to the bother of organizing and taking part in a huge civil disobedience campaign may seem like too much work just to avoid a jab, but if you are absolutely adamant, you won’t have to put up with the needle and the damage done.
I’m not at all against vaccines, but I’m not sure I’d get one coming from the US
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/488831-coronavirus-vaccine-disaster-warnings-swineflu/
If i can choose, i wiil opt for ostracism. To a misanthrope, ostracism is in fact paradise.
It may even boost your productivity in translating, JMS.
Right. Except my productivity is unboostable since i am diagnosed with a disease, unfortunately incurable, called acute laziness (accedia morbida). All the doctors of the soul and body I consulted were of the same opinion: “If you want to reach old age, never work more than four hours a day. And don’t even think about getting out of bed before eleven in the morning!”
Hmm, that terrible disease is spreading JMS: I’ve noticed that curtains stay closed further and further into the day around here.
Apathy is taking hold I suppose.
I notice this only because I am conscious and out and about doing productive things – like walking the dog.
As I have a productive business lunch afterwards, in which I go over my plans for expansion and innovation once things re-open – a bottle of wine usually helps in the brain-storming – I occasionally yell ‘Get up you lazy buggers!’
But it’s as if they were all dead……
Befuddle the cattle enough and they lose all interest …
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/05/11/lockdown-learned-helplessness/
Didn’t occur to you that they can be covidead in fact? Didn’t your dog notice some rotting smell in the air? To make sure, i would suggest you to blow a vuvuzela beneath your neighbours’ windows. (If by any chance they get mad, you can always explain this is not a vuvzela, but the trumpet of apocalypse. I’m sure they will understand.)
I can understand why people move to remote parts of Alaska… fish … hunt… and read books …
I recently read this after wondering what it would be like to live alone with virtually zero contact with the world …
https://www.amazon.com/Solitude-Seeking-Extremes-Patagonia-Wilderness/dp/1577316746
Excellent article! Clear and convincing proof that those who write for the AMA Journal of Ethics have no ethics whatsoever. Their argument is in direct violation of the oldest and clearest of all medical ethical principles: Primum non nocere. It served us well for 2300 years, but it seems no longer to serve the greed infested US medical system.
This was sent to me:
Maybe we don’t have it that bad?It’s a mess out there now. Hard to discern between what’s a real threat and what is just simple panic and hysteria. For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900.On your 14th birthday, World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday. 22 million people perish in that war.
Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until your 20th birthday. 50 million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.On your 29th birthday, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, the World GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy.When you turn 39, World War II starts.
You aren’t even over the hill yet. And don’t try to catch your breath. On your 41st birthday, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war.Smallpox was epidemic until you were in your 40’s, as it killed 300 million people during your lifetime.At 50, the Korean War starts. 5 million perish. From your birth, until you are 55 you dealt with the fear of Polio epidemics each summer. You experience friends and family contracting polio and being paralyzed and/or die.At 55 the Vietnam War begins and doesn’t end for 20 years. 4 million people perish in that conflict. During the Cold War, you lived each day with the fear of nuclear annihilation.
On your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, almost ended. When you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends.Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How did they endure all of that? If you were a kid in 1985 you may have thought your 85-year-old grandparent didn’t understand how hard school was. And how mean that kid in your class was. Yet they survived everything listed above. Perspective is an amazing and valuable gift. Refined and enlightening as time goes on.
Let’s try to keep things in perspective. Your parents and/or grandparents were called upon to endure all of the above – today we are being called upon to stay home and sit on the couch.
I can imagine the person who wrote this is going to be in for one hell of a surprise to find him/herself… starving to death … because of the flu….. completely oblivious to the Big Picture (and the CDP). It’s pretty hilarious actually.
It’s actually so funny that I can’t wait.
When the internet goes down I’ll think of people like this to amuse myself….
Good grief FE, that almost describes my father’s life. He was born in 1907. He and my mother, born in 1915, were very conservative people. When I came along, he asked her why did they needed me? Fortunately for me, she replied that I was her project, so he could go stuff it. Yeah, mom. OTOH, when I see many of the neighbors with small children, I just shake my head. What kind of life will they have?
why did they need…
Well… fortunately for these people the PTB are locking everyone down… so while their young children will have very short lives… at least the odds of them being hunted down and roasted over a fire are much reduced.
Can you imagine how these people would behave if they were not convinced to lockdown and their food ran out?
https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/1/590x/Black-Friday-2017-fight-videos-881871.jpg
I actually don’t care much for the term goyim (cattle)…. cattle do not behave like this….
All those deaths, but, alas, to no avail. The world’s population kept rising, remorselessly, thanks to fossil fuels, specifically oil.
How Green Was My Valley, Bub?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/7e92aa1dab495fb20cd20545d7864a511e906d27.jpg
At the same time, amazing changes were taking place. There were automobiles that came along, as well as airplanes and antibiotics. Electricity became available in homes in the developed world, and very often in less developed countries. Birth control pills became available, allowing family planning.
All these inventions sealed our fate as a species…
https://media.tenor.com/images/c62207367c217db34e295d519e2dd59e/tenor.gif
If accurate this is a monstrosity beyond anything depicted in 1984
The story of China possibly killing persecuted minorities on demand and harvesting their organs for medical tourists willing to buy these organs.
Let me pen something that is different. It is not CDP. I am in agreement with FE but mine has no mastermind.
As an entrepreneur, I am very much a main street person. I realized that many people, especially those working for some big companies, academics and some out of touch people don’t realize the importance of CASHFLOW. Without a positive cashflow, the company would have to close down and declare bankruptcy. A company can be very well run but if the supplier is chasing the money and the consumer is not paying (defaulted) and the person has to pay salary, rents, utilities, etc. The only shop is to close down. There are some people who don’t realize that the suppliers/customers are all on credit terms (maybe 30-day or 15-day). Am I surprise if the economist in the ivory towers or the doctors or career politicians who are crafting this COVID policies are ignorant on these? Having a degree in political science or economics does not automatically make you aware of this. If you are not aware, then you are just screwing the main street big time. They will ask “Why bankrupt? The lockdown is only for 6 weeks and we are cover 50% of the salary”
The second thing that I realized that is most important is “velocity of money”. We cannot compare the velocity of the olden days (even just 20 years ago) to the present because we are in an interconnected world and things move extremely fast. It can be said that a lot of the businesses in the world, especially the small/medium-sized industry (SMI) have thin margins due to globalization and extreme competition. Your product margin may be high but add in the overheads (Actual and government), your net profit is low. With the lockdown, it will really screw you. Only the large multinationals have it easy. Small/medium- sized businesses are the main economic driver
Now, for velocity of money – I believe this is the most important metric but I don’t think economist appreciate it. In fact, I am not sure how accurate that number is. Velocity of money is defined as the speed of which the money changes hands.
The main street economy is all about the velocity of the money. The faster the money change hands, the more revenue and the more money to be made. That is what it counts as “prosperity” and the “feeling of wealthy” that is common in large cities. That is why people say in the city, it is easier to make money as compared to small towns. Money changes hand slow or even rarely in small towns.
In Asia, velocity of money is critical and it forms the basis of people taking loans to expand business or to buy stuff or properties. With thin margins but high volume, one can still make money and each week, a little money is put into savings or to pay off the loan. There will still be money left behind for personal use (in terms of small mom/pop shop). I believe this is the same in larger cities like NYC, Sydney, etc.
When COVID19 hits, the velocity of money dropped to zero or close to zero for these small businesses. It will never shop up in the statistics because it includes all the multinationals, financial institutions, etc. The small frys are the ones who are screwed. CASHFLOW becomes an issue as customers defaulted on paying (they have not customers as well). The chain goes backed up many levels of suppliers.
The problem with “interconnectedness” is that it is now global. Many SMI have global customers and suppliers. What happened in Europe and Asia will impact USA.
** I don’t read this anywhere on the internet in Feb when China was shutdown. ** Everyone was saying that when will China will come back up and supply us. What everyone did not say was “when China was back up and running, the whole world is locked down and China has no customer”. I stand corrected if I am wrong.
When velocity of money dropped to zero and people are being fired, it is a postiive feedback loop with a huge negative implication. It is extremely difficult to restart this because people are scared and saved money, paid down debts and don’t spend unnecessarily. This in turns suppresses the velocity of money (remember I am talking about main street level and not the financial world). It is like a circular reference or chicken/egg issue.
Keynes was saying that the government would have to come in and step up the spending. It is similar to saying that we need to get the velocity of money up. However, the stimulus that every country is doing is NOT BENEFITING the main street but the big boys and their pals.
**Important paragraph **
The government should be buying up hundreds of thousands of smartphones, not from Apple or Samsung but from the shops in the city. The government has to buy thousands of lunch boxes, computers, furniture from every single shop in every segment of the economy in order to revive the economy. Now just imagine how much money the government has to be spent and the immense logistics problem in buying these items (And then throw away?). Giving money even at large amounts to individuals or companies DO NOT help in increasing the velocity of money in the main street economy as it will be used as savings (for rainy days) and pay down debts. In another words, when deflation strikes, printing money does not help because the hole is so much bigger than what they can print. Giving $5000 to each family in USA does not mean that they will spend all the money. This was proven in Bush’s tax refund some years ago.
Now, multiply that worldwide because of “interconnectedness”. See the paragraph above on the China thing.
This is why the economists who have died a long time ago (Keynes, et al) said that deflation is Central Banker’s worse nightmare but there is NO workable solution (buy thousands of smartphones, chairs, computers, furniture, etc from every shop to get the velocity of money moving?)
Modern day economist are have no idea about this. They have no idea what is happening at the main street level AT ALL. They have no idea at all why the velocity of money is dropping and it can never come up (because deflation has already taken its toll since a long time ago. Inflation in assets and food just makes the velocity of money lower -you just don’t buy computers for every room of your house even if you have lots of money; food costs higher and you spend less and less on other stuff which causes the shop to sell less and less items)
As of today, as far as I can see it, no one is interested in the velocity of money. The cure prescribed by Keynes is correct (government spending money to boost economy) but it was not done in the right manner. It just enriches certain people.
It is just too late now to rectify this velocity of money issue. With COVID, velocity money took a big drop (at the main street level). The employment rate is caused by the low velocity of money and not the other way around. The unemployment rate is the symptom of low velocity of money.
Even if we have expensive energy but with a high velocity of money, higher turnaround, higher revenue, more people spending, more bonuses and higher profit, the cost of higher energy can be absorbed by the economy. It can drag out the peak oil issue.
As long as the velocity of money is close to zero, there is no way that the economy can recover. There is no way that you can get the supply chain to move. I think this post makes it clear that we are really at the end game because the medicine (stimulus) given is given wrongly and the dosage is way too small.
I hope that you can understand what I am writing……
Even if we have expensive energy but with a high velocity of money, higher turnaround, higher revenue, more people spending, more bonuses and higher profit, the cost of higher energy can be absorbed by the economy. It can drag out the peak oil issue. You really right i like your post. When Money go slowly All the knots come to a head. Anyway about Keynes i am not sure he Is a God of Economist. If he had eroei and population se have now he collaps too. Not law in economia help when termoninamics law rules. Alexis.
We live in a emergent world–
Keynes at the time was a “God of Economist”.
In late stage capitalism, like now, probably less so.
CTG, I agree with you completely that the velocity of money is the key indicator. That is the most important metric in a debt based economy. (Whether a debt based economy is itself a good idea is a topic for another day) But I respectfully disagree about Keynes. When governments create fiat money, it does not flow into the real, main street economy; it flows into the hands of those who know how to manipulate governments. Where it is sequestered in offshore havens and vanity projects. We knew better in the 19th century, when small, local organisations pooled money from local people and lent it out to local projects. That is how the first building societies came into existence, and many other agents of wealth creation. But I fear there is no going back.
Our local authority on the Isle of Wight in the UK borrowed £9million to invest in retail property to get enhanced returns. Did they invest it on the island? No they invested in retail parks in the north of England. Just how stupid is that?
Cardinal rule of speculation. Err, I mean, investing:
“Never trade with money you can’t afford to lose.”
I am not smart enough to make specific arguments so my ideas could be way off. Money can trickle down if there are investment opportunities, currently there are very few, Exxon cannot both make money and pay a dividend, they are a damn good company. Apple, Berkshire are putting paper in box, it is tough to even loan the stuff out.
FDR did a passable job, Social Security, CCC, large infrastructure projects which were forward looking in serendipitous ways, think the Columbia River. Not even FE could foresee making some metals into devices that went “boom” and ended the war in the Pacific.
Technology changed main street, looking at Zoom and its valuation we may be seeing incredible changes in commercial real estate, travel and higher education. Zoom would make it possible to replace much of the lost year in CA secondary to closing of the University system. Credentialing by examination which seems a next logical step could bring home the lessons of redundancy to economics and other professorial staff in very short order and would definitely reflect cash flow. Ouch.
Dennis L.
Yep, velocity of money was the factor our conservative friends left out during the Early 80’s.
Volcker finally abandoned the delusion, and eventually got things somewhat back together.
(Reagan tripled the National Debt– more than the last 100+ years combined).
Secrets of The Temple goes this over step by step, if you are really interested.
https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Temple-Federal-Reserve-Country/dp/0671675567
This is a link to the Secrets of the Temple book from Amazon Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.
The image is supposed to appear above, but my browser just shows a blank box.
Your experience matches mine, ratcheting up is slow, generally the business is run at 110% capacity before additional equipment/employees are added. All business are cyclical, my experience was good going up, when I saw a plateau and no way to increase sales I sold the businesses and existing capital equipment. There really is no other way as going down margins decrease more quickly than revenue. The trick is to find someone who invests in a rear view mirror and is convinced they are smarter than you are.
The hard part of selling is knowing you are not smart enough to either grow or maintain the plateau. “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Dennis L.
I think you are correct.
thanks C T G… your essays are good reading…
“The employment rate is caused by the low velocity of money and not the other way around. The unemployment rate is the symptom of low velocity of money.”
so from a laws of physics starting point:
decreasing net (surplus) energy puts downward pressure on the velocity of money…
which pushes up on the unemployment rate…
around here, in a suburban/rural part of the northeast USA, money is moving in different ways…
most money seems to be flowing through supermarkets and (pickup/delivery, no dining in) restaurants and liquor stores…
then, to whatever else is still open… golf courses, and garden/lawn/yard supply stores…
so the flow of money is into essential businesses first… mainly food… (maybe too obvious)…
then, spending on non-essentials, obviously only if the person has the funds to do so…
yes, small/medium industry SMI is in big trouble…
as others have said, I hope that many/most businesses survive this lockdown-induced massive economic damage, even those that appear to be much less essential than those involved with food…
but by what you have written, it looks like the survival of much SMI is only short term…
it will take a while, but by late 2020 early 2021 the extent of the death of small businesses will be much clearer…
Thank! What you are writing makes sense.
The lockdown order is, more or less, an order for citizens not to spend as much money on a lot of different kinds of services, which are no longer available. We could not buy gym memberships; we could not get our hair cut. I could not attend an out of town’s aunt’s funeral, because the funeral was limited to 10 local people. My vacation trip to Greece was cancelled.
All of these changes greatly reduce the demand for finished goods and services. They also reduce job opportunities. They reduce the velocity of money in buying goods. Quite a bit of money sits as balances on airline company’s balance sheets, and as “available for future trips” for the companies selling vacation services. In fact, it is likely to permanently disappear, as these companies file for bankruptcy.
Something needs to break the log jam and make all of the goods truly available. People need to be able to go to conventions again, so that there is work for convention planners. People need to be able to go to out-of-state weddings, funerals, and graduations again, so that there is work for all of the people in these supply chains. One of the deal-killers at the time of the would-be funeral was lack of restaurants open to serve large parties coming in from out of state. We need a good supply of restaurants open.
People around here are busily fixing up their homes and yards, with their new-found spare time. This is helping the home improvement stores. But without conventions and airlines and vacation travel and many other things (such as everyone driving to work, necessitating road repairs and the addition of new lanes), the whole cycle of increasing demand won’t keep pulling the whole economic system forward. The debt needs to go for specific goods and services, whose purchase will help the economy.
Giving businesses some money to pay 50% of workers salaries for a short time won’t work unless the whole demand chain roars back.
‘Short time’ is all that is left. That is all they are concerned about.
There is no plan nor possibility of returning to normal. Normal was what we had before Covid was unleashed — and normal was about to collapse.
The moment we have all been waiting for has finally arrived … the beginning of the end.
So many on OFW are rolling out defence mechanisms to attempt to make sense or deal with what is about to happen. Some even want to fight it.
How about we just face death head on and go down with intellectual dignity rather than begging and pleading to be delivered to a safe space.
Mother is about to beat cancer. Is that not a good thing????
CTG – first off… I am operating off of the assumption that the CBs looked at the data last year and realized they were pushing on multiple strings. They would have known this was inevitable and they would have long ago put in place contingency plans (see 1.6 billion rounds of hollow point sniper rounds….)
They know full well that this was the end game for civilization — they certainly understand what you are explaining but none of that is relevant.
That paradigm was over because BAU was ending. What you speak of is only relevant if BAU is functional. The Wealth of Nations and every business and economics textbook was rendered worthless and tossed into a fire.
If the CBs were to continue to follow ‘the rules’ then we would likely not be here right now — without a doubt the tipping point would have been reached. Collapsing car sales and industrial production begets more of the same — and the snowball would have picked up speed and girth and smashed BAU (likely in Q1)
So the CBs rolled out the final plan. They are not concerned about the old rules — those apply to a functioning patient (even if it was terribly unhealthy).
What they were faced with was a patient that was about to die. He was gasping for air and turning purple.
At that point the doctor does not say to the patient ‘now you better get some exercise, eat more veggies, and stop drinking and smoking’ — those are the rules that apply to a patient that is likely to leave the hospital and live longer.
This patient was as good as dead.
They could either let the patient die (and they die too) but not without horrible suffering…. or they could do whatever it takes to keep the patient alive with minimal suffering.
Of courses they choose the latter option because they want to stay alive awhile longer + they prefer that the patient not suffer.
For certain they are aware that the medicines they will apply to keep the patient alive and not suffering are very bad for him — injecting him with enormous amounts of opiates to alleviate the suffering would ruin a healthy person — but this patient is doomed…. if he wants to eat pizza and drink beer and smoke cigarettes then let him do it — if it reduces the suffering.
This is how I believe we need to look at the situation. The CBs are giving the patient whatever it needs to stay alive e.g. they are paying the wages of people who are not working … they are bailing out whatever needs to be bailed out…. pumping up the stock markets…. plugging whatever holes they can plug…. it all seems illogical/insane but only IF the patient was going to check out of the hospital at some point….
We have to remember – the patient would have suffered brutally and died by now …. so even though this is not a perfect situation — it’s enough to keep the patient alive and not suffering. The goal is not a return to health.
The CBs recognize the patient has lost the battle — they realize that their fate is tied to that of the patient… and they are applying palliative care now.
If Adam Smith were to poke his nose in and say ‘you are violating the rules’ they would shove him out the door and say buddy.. just let us die in peace…
I very much like this imagery…. the engines are shot… the ship is smouldering … it is completely ruined…. there is no way to repair it…. it’s just waiting to go to the bottom….
If you look closely you can see the name on the bow…. ‘BAU’ …
Where’s my bottle of bubbly stuff… let me smash it against the steel — some do that to celebrate when a new ship is launched … I do it to celebrate a ship going to the bottom… good fkkking riddance.
https://a57.foxnews.com/images.foxnews.com/content/fox-news/world/2013/03/13/abandoned-russian-cruise-ship-remains-adrift-in-north-atlantic/_jcr_content/par/featured-media/media-1.img.jpg/0/0/1422517118466.jpg
There is no velocity of money. Every contract is a single! depth-relationship, payable to a fixed dated.
Dr. John Day, a man whose humanity, humility and humor I greatly admire, has given Gail an honorable mention while commenting at The Automatic Earth.
Gail Tverberg has the completely valid other horn of the dilemma: We are finding that using shutdowns to solve COVID-19 problems causes a huge amount of economic damage. The cost of mitigating this damage seems to be unreasonably high. For example, in the United States, antibody studies suggest that roughly 5% of the population has been infected with COVID-19. The total number of deaths associated with this 5% infection level is perhaps 100,000, assuming that reported deaths to date (about 80,000) need to be increased somewhat, to match the approximately 5% of the population that has, knowingly or unknowingly, already experienced the infection.
If we estimate that the mean number of years of life lost is 13 years per person, then the total years of life lost would be about 1,300,000. If we estimate that the US treasury needed to borrow $3 trillion dollars to mitigate this damage, the cost per year of life lost is $3 trillion divided by 1.3 million, or $2.3 million dollars per year of life lost. This amount is utterly absurd. (Note: It IS Absurd and completely unreal, making the zombie system keep walking forward by plugging impossible black holes of debt due today with even more vast impossible IOUs of future payment.)
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2020/05/debt-rattle-may-16-2020/#post-58851
My thanks to John Day, indirectly through your comment.
How much of that $3 trillion has actually gone to replacing income (and therefore money spent) for workers who have lost their jobs? How much of it has gone towards containing the virus (vaccine research, PPE, etc) and the costs of caring for those infected?
I think most of it is just pork for the usual suspects, cronies and the well-connected. Very little has been spent trying to make up for the lost productivity. I think if you exclude the pork, the cost per person-year lost is more in line with the actual cost of the lost productivity.
The $3 trillion dollars does not save all of these people from death. At best, it postpones getting the infection until the next round, perhaps three or six months. The risk of getting the infection is still there, until herd immunity comes along (if it does) or a vaccine comes along (if it does). There is no guarantee of anything. We may be able to get COVID-19 and later variants many times.
With the shutdown, 5% became infected, and 0.6% of those will die. Without the shutdown, perhaps as many as 40% or 50% might have become infected, on this “round” of the infection. (Infections seem to come in multiple rounds, even without curve flattening.) So perhaps the shutdown allowed 35% to 45% of the population to avoid getting COVID-19 until a later round. They were not saved completely from getting COVID-19. So perhaps 700,000 to 900,000 who might have died were spared from dying until the a later round.
So perhaps the $3 trillion dollars buys about 800,000 people (averaging the 700,000 and 900,000) another 3 to 6 months of life. At 3 months, this amounts to 200,000 people years of life. At 6 months, this amounts to 400,000 people years of life.
Dividing $3 trillion by 200,000, this amounts to $15,000,000 per additional year of life. Dividing $3 trillion by 400,000, this amounts to $7,500,000 per additional year of life. Either of these is absurdly high. Such an approach is not repeatable.
There are also other impacts, such as broken supply lines and permanently lost jobs, that the $3 trillion cannot possibly replace.
The problem, as we saw in Italy, is that if too many people become infected, many people have to be left untreated based on who has the best chance of surviving. So the mortality rate triples or quadruples. Also, a lot more health care professionals burn out or suicide when they are constantly forced to choose who gets treatment and who is left to die.
I’ve thought of another way this analysis has gone astray.
It starts to head in the right direction by looking at the 5% infection level, but then abandons that line of reasoning. Extrapolating linearly (dubious assumption), it should conclude that a strategy of herd immunity – the alternative to spending $3 trillion – and which, without a vaccine, happens when basically everyone has been exposed – and no intervention would mean 2 million deaths. That is the number to divide by, not 100,000.
It comes out to $115,000 per person-year lost, using the original assumptions (13 years, etc).
A quick look on Wikipedia says GDP per capita in the US is $67,426. And the analysis you offered doesn’t even try to account for productivity losses due to damage to the health care system, nor does it try to account for productivity losses to due long-term disability among the persons who recovered. So $3 trillion might actually end up being on the cheap side.
Hmm, would FE like to hoax Gaia?
‘www.wanderinggaia.com’
On this lavish site, one can follow her Journey in ‘documenting the Anthropocene’, with lots of cute photos, interviewing fascinating climate warriors at whose feet she has landed by, let’s see: Levitation? Magic carpet? Or…… passenger jet?
Surely not the latter! Gaia forbid!!
Or maybe it flew on burning Vegan coffee grouts and almond shells? Yes, that’s it! Phew, I almost thought she had to be a hypocrite.
Keep burning the hand-made incense candles, Gaia, the Goddess will love you!
“Wouldn’t it be great if wealthy nations collaborated with resource-rich (poor) nations in an inclusive global economic programme? Sustainable production of crops and minerals in the global south could help fuel the rich world’s low-carbon transition.”
Throwing around magical terms like “sustainable” and “low-carbon” make any actual analysis of the practicalities moot, apparently. But go, Gaia – live out your jet setting yet somehow eco-friendly dreams and don’t let us old cynics get you down!
https://democriticreviews.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/bravo.gif
Is this were Imagine, Koombaya and We are the World start to loop?
There are many who believe this stuff — it keeps them hopeful… and hopeful cattle produce lots of milk and tender beef…
Maybe the farmers realize that they cattle cannot produce more milk in the future and is instead setting up a kind and gentle slaughterhouse, or as they would probably call it “disruption” a period or readjustment. The people at the very top must know this is going to lead to collapse, the kind they desperately tried to avoid in 2008. They don’t want to be slaughtered.
They want to be in a influencer
https://wanderinggaia.com/
or a manager overseeing the slaughter than to have to downsize to living in broken car and eating bugs themselves.
How’s Saudi Arabia’s oil production doing?
https://files.gamebanana.com/img/ico/sprays/51159f9a79a52.png
This keeps comings so often that I wonder if this was part of the plan all along.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/821285204/trump-sends-mixed-messages-about-invoking-defense-production-act
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-covid-economy-recession-pandemic
The second of these links is, “The Left Must Seize This Moment, or Others Will.”
We get back to the whole idea of making use of any crisis to advance whatever cause a person is interested in.
For light relief, an hilarious article in The Guardian, by ecological writer Gaia Vince (love the name).
How we can have thriving cities without all those nasty fossil fuels, and how cool the lock-downs are, with all the clear skies and urban wildlife and stuff and people biking and jogging and not going to work and stuff.
We can have a Green World, and a Doughnut Economy, too! We mustn’t waste the gains of the lock-downs, etc.
Second thoughts, not worth wasting a second of one’s remaining life on reading it.
Dear Gaia
It sounds so cool and sweet, and so Green and Clean, but just take a look at the world in 1800 and see if you can work out why, on the whole, the mega-cities we live in now did not exist then, just one or two biggish places scattered here and there across the globe, lots of tiny towns and innumerable squalid little villages which did not look like they would win the ‘Prettiest Village in Surrey Award’.
When you’re working out how to get from Here to There while ‘thriving’ , I’ll get the padded cell ready for you.
PS The future, in fact the very near future, certainly promises a lot of people not going to work in evil industrial FF civilization. But, alas, no Vegan lattes on which to thrive…..
Nothing quite as green as mining, lol.
“Make no mistake: We are running out of elements…
“…we need lithium and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries, tellurium for solar panels and dysprosium for wind turbines.
“Yet we cannot make these elements — they formed, along with Earth, billions of years ago. To replenish our dwindling stores and keep up with a growing, modernizing world, we must mine for more.”
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-world-is-running-out-of-elements-and-researchers-are-looking-in-unlikely
Apart from gases lost to space and not renewed, and apart from radioactive decay, we cannot “run out” of elements; they are forever. As I have pointed out before, the problem is we are mining them where they are (or were) easy to get. The only sustainable way to mine is from the ocean, and we have most of the technologies that can allow us to do that. For example, we could extract enough phosphorus from the Malacca Strait to meet the needs of the entire planet. And of course almost all the phosphorus we use on land ends up in the ocean: it would be a near-perfect cycle.
Minerals that are too widely disbursed to be economically collected are effectively lost.
The energy required to mine from the ocean is very high; this is why we don’t get minerals from the ocean now.
There are more of the elements likely available in the bedrock, or buried very deeply. The top layers gradually erode and reveal more of the lower layers. Waiting for this erosion to happen would be a very long wait.
Gail, widely distributed minerals are being collected all the time, including phosphorus, which is harvested by many marine creatures. That is where the mined phosphorus comes from: the bodies of fossil marine creatures that sequestered phosphorus. Once, sunlight was too widely distributed to be collected, until Nature invented grass. Iron in streams could not be collected, until Nature invented the bacteria that create “bog iron”, out of which my Viking ancestors made their swords. Even lowly carbon dioxide in ocean solution is collected: into huge limestone cliffs.
I am sure we could create a strain of algae that sequestered phosphorus, and then collect and process them. Processing would be trivial because none is needed: put the dried creatures in bags and sell them as fertiliser. Same old message; work with Nature, not against her.
“I am sure we could create a strain of algae that sequestered phosphorus, and then collect and process them. ”
If it were that easy, we’d already be doing it.
Animals that eat grass have to spend most of their time eating and digesting grass because of its low energy content. Mined phosphorous is the result of billions of years or marine activity that becomes concentrated over billions of years. We are using it much faster than we could ever replace it. There is no industrial process that would allow us to gather trace amounts of phosphorous over the entire planet and in large quantities. None.
You read too much science fiction.
I find it very hard to believe that any adult can sincerely believe such things. Can anyone – and this is someone presumably intelligent – really be so stupid and impractical?
It’s a leg-pull, right? Please, tell me it’s a leg-pull.
What’s really funny is that the 1800’s did not have 7.8 billion humans roaming the planet, while being encouraged to make lots more. And we got to 7.8 billion with fossil fuels. I would like them to think that out.
No, just look her up. TED talks and everything -coming to my town in the Fall. Can’t wait!
Remember… you are being played …. and the main instrument is the MSM… so whatever you read there… has a purpose…
Edward admits it — yet what amazes me … is that most people will refuse to accept this.
http://hmapr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Edward-Bernays-2.jpg
I respect Norman’s views in much the same way as I respect the views of Noam Chomsky. Both are intellectuals who have an enormous amount of knowledge and both offer out-of-the-box analyses of how human society really works. Yet both appear to have enormous blind spots that prevent them from seeing what is right under their noses, and what wonderful precision instruments those noses are. Those noses get one whiff of something dangerous to their worldview and a signal goes up the olfactory to the visual cortex of the brain causing them to convert the image impulses from the area from which the smell was detected into images of hazy mist rather than into sharp objects, which allows them to exclaim, “I don’t know what on earth you are talking about, blah, blah, blah.”
With that thought in mind, I wonder what Norman’s view of this Bernays character’s utterings might be?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D8ErqmbVUAEfZmC.jpg
Madmen … Don gets his partnership … the old guy says ‘now you get a seat at the table and get to be involved in running the world’…. something to that effect…
Not only does the Higher Power control the money supply and the MSM… they would also invite into their circle key people who are useful to them – and who are smart enough to understand that there is no reason to expose the dual nature of the world….
It’s like getting into a very exclusive club — it is both prestigious and lucrative…. you now have the best connections in the world… and they will take care of you.
So why would anyone in the club break omerta? They would only be thrown out and ridiculed as connspeeeraceee theeerists. Zero upside.
Obama in in the club… (all POTUS are)… most senior politicians… major businessmen… key intellectuals… people like Krugman… Musk… Gore…. it would be a substantial list… surely Chomsky is in there… anyone on the Davos list is in ….
My only question is why isn’t Fast Eddy in that club? You might think they’d invite me to stop me from exposing the club…. but then why would they …. anybody reading the above will think FE is off his rocker….
Bernays wrote books about the Club — that nobody reads or cares about — or believes…
FE, I read your first para, above, and immediately thought “Krugman”! (And Summers tbh). Lo, you went on to mention that very gentleman! Poster boy for what Taleb (I believe it was he) called the Intellectual Yet Idiot.
Many people are reading that and it is helping them to form a reality…. other people read that and reject it because they have their own reality… and there will be those mocking that reality… just as one mocks the ‘green’ reality espoused by that article….
The only way it is possible to be in touch with true reality is to accept:
http://hmapr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Edward-Bernays-2.jpg
The true reality is fairly simple — it involves a desperate and brutal battle for the earth’s limited resources….
“[Latin America’s] overcrowded and underfunded prisons have become centres of disease, with inmates rioting for better protection… some inmates had been so desperate they had eaten a cat…
““In prisons, like everywhere in Venezuela, there is hunger,” said Tamara Taraciuk, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director in the Americas. “It’s not that they don’t provide adequate food – it’s that they don’t provide food.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/latin-america-prisons-covid-19-riots
Prisons are a problem. So are law breakers who have COVID-19. What do you do with these folks?
I reckon the best option… since pro sports are not allowed — would be to put them into air-tight cages and let them fight to the death…
Does anyone not think this would be enormously popular? Sure a few people would oppose it as barbaric (the same few who oppose MMA fighting … and the latest derivative of that – bare knuckle fighting).
All that is needed are some well-respected people to endorse this new form of entertainment — and there would be literally billions tuning in for the daily Death Battles….
Humans love this sh it… it’s why they slow to a crawl when driving past an accident …
“Pension funds and other income hungry investors hoping for another year of generous dividends in 2020 have instead been pummelled by savage cuts to company payouts.
“A record $1.43tn was paid in dividends last year by companies worldwide, according to Janus Henderson, the asset manager. It had forecast that global dividend payments would rise by about 4 per cent this year. But then coronavirus struck.
“Strict lockdown measures ordered by governments to limit the spread of the virus have created severe cash flow problems for companies across multiple sectors, forcing them to make painful cuts in payments to shareholders. In some industries, such as banking, regulators have stepped in to limit payouts.”
https://www.ft.com/content/8ce3382b-a1e7-449f-aa71-68ca4fcf0db5
“Blackstone Group’s Gavilan Resources LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy late on Friday, citing this year’s oil price collapse and a bitter legal battle with a partner.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-gavilan-resources-bankruptcy/blackstone-shale-oil-venture-gavilan-resources-files-for-bankruptcy-idUKKBN22S0WT
They know they are overreacting but say it’s okay because they have no knowledge.
https://time.com/5801010/coronavirus-overreaction/
This thing has been out in the world for over five months but the experts don’t seem to know more than they did in March, which is nothing.
Guidelines on how to prevent its transmission have been put out in public.
Research is allegedly being done on it to develop vaccines and treatment.
The guidelines and research is being done with no knowledge about the virus whatsoever.
The experts must be trusted and listened to even though they don’t know anything.
In the mid-twentieth century, Walter Lippmann said experts should be trusted instead of the common person because of the experts have more understanding and knowledge. Today, we are told to trust the experts because they’ have good intentions.
‘Expert’ has in many ways become a marketing and propaganda term.
Add to that fads, fashions and corruption……
Is it possible to be an expert … in everything?
Not if you don’t go to skool.
https://i.imgflip.com/3ch8ad.jpg
“Today, we are told to trust the experts because they’ have good intentions.”
They have bad intentions like Bill Gates who wants every citizen in the world to be vaccinated or they can’t be apart of modern society aka “The Mark of the Beast”. Even if that means a rushed vaccine that has not been proven to be safe.
Then of course there’s Dr. Fauci who knows better than everyone even though there’s a really, really effective anti-malaria drug available. Nope he has his own drug he’s pushing that quite a few in the medical community have their doubts.
Then of course we have the Politicians who are experts of nothing because most of them have never worked outside of government making the decision to shutdown the global eCONomy. Then when the SHTF, they get to blame someone else.
Gotta love EXPERTS !
Anti-vaxers exist because they never experienced the epidemics that we oldsters (b 1942) dealt with as children. Go to an old graveyard, There are few child-sized headstones after the first half of the last century.
Don’t worry about being forced to take the Covid vaccine. When it comes out there will be a demand and shortage that lasts for years. I, age 78, with congestive heart failure will be first in line and highly appreciative of the vaccine refusers who stay out of the waiting lines.
To each their own
People demand that they be saved from the COVID-19 problem, not realizing that some solutions could be at least as bad as the problem they want to solve.
Of course humans are about as smart as a dog… superficially they may appear intelligent .. but ultimately their actions are not guided by logic or facts …. fear… hunger… survival … status… those are the real drivers of their decision-making.
It would be a mistake to assume otherwise…
“The Bank of England is looking more urgently at options such as negative interest rates and buying riskier assets to prop up the country’s economy as it slides into a deep coronavirus slump, the BoE’s chief economist was quoted as saying.
“The Telegraph newspaper said the economist, Andy Haldane, refused to rule out the possibility of taking interest rates below zero and buying lower-quality financial assets under the central bank’s bond-buying programme.”
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/boe-looking-more-urgently-at-negative-rates-riskier-assets-haldane/articleshow/75785206.cms
“The Treasury is weighing plans for a “bad bank” to hold stakes in bailed-out businesses amid fears that nationally significant firms could fail in the Covid-19 crisis.
“The plans, which are at an early stage, range from creating an “asset resolution” scheme to recoup value for taxpayers, to a sovereign wealth fund.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-loans-default-treasury-eyes-plan-for-bad-bank-s39mpnd58
Spend £’s sterling now before it goes down the tube, eh Sir Harry? Frightening, actually…..
Absolutely, Xabier. As several commentators noted, the £ was behaving like an emerging market currency under Brexit duress last year. That situation is still dangerously unresolved and now we have the colossal financial shock of the coronavirus on top.
Definitely time for a frenzy of on-line purchases and perhaps a bacchanal or two.
“Post-Brexit talks have hit an impasse six weeks before a legally binding deadline expires ruling out any extension to the transition period.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/change-tack-or-we-won-t-make-a-brexit-trade-deal-david-frost-tells-michel-barnier-s6q25zg8c
There may not be a European Union to worry about. It was already fracturing with the UK leaving, Italy and Spain making noises about leaving.
If we are scrabbling around for silver linings, then this may indeed be one, Rodster.
“Welcome to the First Global Economic Depression of Our Lifetimes…
“We should really be concerned about middle-income and developing economies in a coming global depression given that they have even less resources, less resilient healthcare infrastructure, much larger populations and much more unsustainable debt. And they’re the next phase coming.
“We could well be looking at multiple defaults, which in turn could lead to the global financial crisis that policymakers are currently struggling to avoid, compounding global economic woes even further.”
https://time.com/5837442/first-global-depression-our-lifetimes/
“The COVID-19 economic crisis has increased the risk of defaults and restructurings of sovereign bonds, as it has coincided with the closures of mines, a hibernation in the tourism industry, and an oil price war that has decimated the oil markets.”
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/covid-19-economic-crisis-impending-10326/
“Algeria – The North African nation has seen its debt soar to 45 percent of GDP from just 26 percent in 2017. It had based this year’s austerity budget on oil prices of $50 a barrel.
“Angola – In 2018, Africa’s second-biggest oil producer received a $3.7bn loan from the IMF and could be banging on its doors again. It relies on the sale of crude for 65 percent of its tax revenue.
“Ecuador – Creditors have given the country a debt payment holiday. But it could still default on its $17bn debt. It also received an IMF loan of more than $600m.
“And then there is Africa’s biggest oil producer, Nigeria… The country is dependent on oil for 90 percent of its export earnings. With crude prices cratering, it has little room to service debt.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost/2020/05/opec-nations-struggling-money-200516120541961.html
“Nigeria could face a situation where 2.6 trillion naira set aside to service debt consumes almost all of its revenue, unless it gets a waiver from creditors. Interest payments could take 96% of the federal government’s revenue.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/nigeria-presents-ambitious-spending-plan-despite-oil-slump
Seems everyone is on an interest only scheme now….
“We have already borrowed and we are going to borrow,” Michael Famoroti, chief economist of Stears Business in Lagos, said by phone.
“As long as we can still pay our interest there is no problem, but when we are getting to the point where are spending about 95% of our revenue on servicing debt, then our creditors begin to doubt that we can actually pay back.”
At independence in 1960, Nigeria’s total debt was less than 10 million pounds sterling, or about 10% of GDP. The subsequent explosion in debt tracked almost exactly the “investment” in oil. And the Naira has fallen from its initial value of 0.5 pounds to (today) 0.002 pounds.
It is good we have COVID-19 to blame all of our problems on.
“…commercial activity in the Arab world’s most populous country [Egypt] has slowed and vital sectors such as tourism have come to a complete halt.
““The hit has been 100 per cent,” said Mounir Wissa, who owns two Nile cruise boats and rents a third.”
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/m/f4317f56-a4b4-326d-9bbe-bd19d76d5fe5/egyptians-face-economic.html
“Inflation in Sudan jumped to 99 percent because of rising food prices, official figures showed Saturday, more than a year after the country was rocked by protests sparked by bread price hikes.”
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1675591/middle-east
“Lebanon’s financial prosecutor has ordered the arrest of the head of monetary operations at the central bank amid a widening probe into manipulation of the country’s volatile currency.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/lebanon-arrests-central-bank-official-currency-manipulation-200516104538538.html
“In addition to long-standing hardships, a financial crisis that hit neighbouring Lebanon in November has taken a toll on its own economy, leading to the collapse of the Syrian pound and inflation. Many Syrians keep their savings in Lebanese banks…”
https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/editorial/why-are-more-than-half-of-all-syrians-going-to-sleep-hungry-1.1020164
Lebanon was not doing well before either. It gets worse and worse.
“Economists are slashing forecasts for Canadian output again as the country haltingly reopens with large parts of the economy still shut down.
“Canada’s economy will shrink by 42% annualized in the three months through June 30 from the prior quarter, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The magnitude is staggering, with the expected decline almost five times the largest quarterly contraction during the 2008-09 financial crisis.”
https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/economic-contraction-in-canada-seen-five-times-worse-than-2009
“…there’s no guarantee that [Canada’s] economic activity will return to pre-pandemic levels… Many companies — even entire sectors — may not survive the shutdown.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/coronavirus-pandemic-covid-budget-deficit-morneau-1.5571999
This is actually as good as it is going to get… there will be no recovery or return to anything remotely resembling normal.
This
https://a57.foxnews.com/images.foxnews.com/content/fox-news/world/2013/03/13/abandoned-russian-cruise-ship-remains-adrift-in-north-atlantic/_jcr_content/par/featured-media/media-1.img.jpg/0/0/1422517118466.jpg
Is not going to be rebuilt into this
https://endeavorglobalgroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/yacht-pegasus-v-princess-mariana-luxury-motor-yacht-aft-with-heli.jpg
Problems everywhere!
“These 7 economic signals flashed red this week, showing the continued damage being inflicted by coronavirus [on the US economy].”
https://www.businessinsider.sg/economic-indicators-show-continued-impact-coronavirus-recession-economy-downturn-lows-2020-5-2
“Stunning aerial pictures show hundreds of aircraft parked in a desert ‘boneyard’ after airlines including Delta and United placed them in long-term storage as flight operations are cut to around 5% of normal operations due to the coronavirus.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8327011/Hundreds-planes-parked-Arizona-desert-giant-boneyard-airbase-remain-storage.html
“Economic analysts are souring on the prospect of a quick recovery that would see the economy bounce back once the coronavirus pandemic is brought under control…
““The worry and increasing likelihood is that the downside is becoming the baseline again,” said Beth Ann Bovino, S&P Global’s chief economist for the U.S.”
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/498090-hopes-dim-on-quick-economic-recovery
“America’s food banks — charities across the country that provide donated food for the hungry — are being pressed into service as never before as unemployment surges during the coronavirus crisis and many working-class and middle-class families seek help for the first time.
“Feeding America, the largest US hunger relief organisation, representing 200 food banks across the country, said it had experienced a 70 per cent increase in those seeking food assistance since the crisis began. Roughly 40 per cent of the people wanting food are first-time visitors, it said. In April alone, the group said it served 433m meals.”
https://www.ft.com/content/fe657560-854d-4cbc-8ccd-b376483d034a
“Close to 800,000 Americans across the country may wind up homeless by the summer as the coronavirus pandemic forces unemployment figures to resemble numbers not seen since the Great Depression.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8326541/800-000-people-end-HOMELESS-summer-COVID-19-unemployment-hits-14-7-cent.html
At least it’s warm….
Bernays is never out of my mind when I read Harry’s headlines….
I’d use these aircraft to house homeless people
At the same time, Atlanta is doing everything it can to open up. I understand day care can have up to 20 occupants (teachers plus students) per room.
Our nearby mall is opening up, with at least some of the stores open for business, but I haven’t gotten over there yet. I see that Macy’s Department Store is open.
Our family went out to eat on Saturday evening, at the chain “Taco Mac.” We sat outside, as we usually do. Half of the outside tables had been closed off; available tables were pretty much filled with customers. We took the last available outdoor table when we came.
There were only a few glitches. Quite a few of the local beers on the menu were not really available because the beer had gone bad during the time when the restaurant was closed. Also, it took our waitress quite a while to find catsup. It is now dispensed in little disposable cups, rather than setting the bottle on the table. The menu seems to be shorter. It is now provided on a one page photocopy, to be shared with the table.
Restaurants in QT have no draft beer… too few customers so it will I assume lose fizz if it’s not sold quickly.
There is no atmosphere in any of the restaurants — there are not many patrons… and with half the tables removed even if there are customers it feels empty … like dining in a morgue… we are mostly avoiding all restaurants.
The gym is severely limiting numbers so one has to book days in advance… then you have to wipe everything down after use — also there are 30 minute spaces between group classes (so they can disinfect…) — I sometimes stack two classes so forget about that….
I’ve suspended my membership as I cannot be bothered with all this bull sh it.
I cannot even begin to imagine how long it would take to get on a domestic flight — so I will not be doing that either.
Not that I am a fan of cruises — but it feels a bit like being on a cruise on this ship
https://a57.foxnews.com/images.foxnews.com/content/fox-news/world/2013/03/13/abandoned-russian-cruise-ship-remains-adrift-in-north-atlantic/_jcr_content/par/featured-media/media-1.img.jpg/0/0/1422517118466.jpg
My gym opens this Friday. There will be no charge until June 1. They want people’s reactions to what they have done, to get ideas on what might still need to change. We haven’t heard about limits to use. There are no baby sitting services now, and the sauna is not open. Based on earlier plans (which may have changed), what used to be a basketball court will now have part of the exercise equipment distributed around it. People need to bring their own mats, instead of the gym providing them, especially for exercise classes. The exercise classes will now be limited to a smaller number of participants.
It’s all part of the ‘New Normal’…. phrases like this keep the cattle from freeeeeking out …
Strip this back a bit — if someone were to describe the current situation to any of us 25 years ago — every single person would be horrified. We would see it for what it is — the moments before the End of Days…
Yet here we are … living it…. and almost nobody on the planet recognizes what this is….
Magic.
It is .. a good thing… if you acknowledge what humans are capable of … particularly when they realize that ‘enough’ is about to be a thing of the past.
https://i.pinimg.com/600×315/a1/ee/e9/a1eee9f88f12136ba1e9eb46dbf67c66.jpg
https://www.guystuffcounseling.com/hubfs/wife-believes-she-is-married-to-an-angry-man.jpg
Lots of layoffs, while new hires are down!
From a mate who lives in Bangkok:
there are loads of tourists stuck here with no money, begging and stealing, already a few murders its going to get pretty hairy. I assume most people who come on holiday are broke by the end of it let alone after 3/4 months
We are friends with a family (kids aged 12, 9 and 4) who had planned to spend 2020 travelling the globe. They rented out their home and sold their small business; pulled the kids out of school.
They made it as far as Thailand – the first leg of their journey – where the family owns a small villa with plunge pool, and are now stuck there. In fact Thailand closed its borders the week after they arrived. Apparently the supermarkets do not have a particularly good range of foods and the kids are going out of their minds with boredom.
I feel very sorry for them. When they make it back to the UK they will need to find a place to live and a reasonable income, which may be challenging in these straitened times. The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men…
Planning can easily go astray in the current environment.
“European countries should brace themselves for a deadly second wave of coronavirus infections because the pandemic is not over, the World Health Organisation’s top official in Europe has said.
“In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Hans Kluge, director for the WHO European region, delivered a stark warning to countries beginning to ease their lockdown restrictions, saying that now is the “time for preparation, not celebration”.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/16/second-wave-coronavirus-europe-winter-uk/
“China has asked trading firms and food processors to boost inventories of grains and oilseeds as a possible second wave of coronavirus cases and worsening infection rates elsewhere raise concerns about global supply lines.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-food/china-urges-food-companies-to-boost-supplies-on-fears-of-further-covid-19-disruption-idUKKBN22T052
https://www.edelman.com/ is prepping the photos of the overwhelming second wave of infections as I type…. hospitals are being designated to receive all flu patients + thousands of actors to create Fear and Panic.
Food supply lines are a big issue!
The lockdowns will continue… obviously… the only question is – do we make it to next winter?
We need to figure out how to deal with the second wave, without closing countries down.
Bernays ‘Prepping the cattle’ —- and I have been told by various cattle that NZ locked to get the hospitals ready for a deluge of covid (the country locked when there were 8 cases…) — seems they are still not ready…. the fear and panic will continue….
Covid 19 coronavirus: Seventy cases reported from reopened French schools
But French Education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer sounded the alarm yesterday, telling French radio RTL that the return has put some children in new danger of contamination. He said the affected schools are being closed immediately.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12332939
Covid 19 coronavirus: New Zealand’s readiness for a second wave in focus
New Zealand remains on track to stamping out Covid-19 but a second wave of the potentially deadly virus can’t be ruled out and health experts fear we may not be ready.
It comes as the country has just 45 active cases of Covid-19, with no new cases reported yesterday. Of the country’s 1499 total cases, 96 per cent have now recovered.
While hospitals have started ramping up all services that were put on hold during lockdown, Sarah Dalton – chief executive of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – said there was still a long list of unmet needs.
Dalton hinted that we may be in trouble if we were to see a second wave or new variant of the virus.
“We have a lot of hospital buildings that are not well able to cope. We are still broadly under-staffed and so we have a lot of older staff who are at higher risk in terms of comorbidities and how effective they would be if they did come sick and likelihood of recovery.”
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12332720
Coronavirus peak: Is America ready for second wave in the fall?
Coronavirus: When will the second wave of infections hit
‘If this thing boomerangs’: Experts warn of second wave of …
Beware of the second wave of COVID-19 – The Lancet
Endless headlines…. (repeat repeat repeat… use fear to achieve your goals)
“Current data suggests the US Real Estate market has begun a dramatic slowdown even though the listing and pricing data does not reflect this data yet…
“News of recent delinquencies in the mortgage market shows an incredible increase in the number of mortgages under pressure.”
https://www.fxempire.com/forecasts/article/real-estate-showing-signs-of-collateral-damage-part-i-649663
“UK Banks and building societies have dramatically cut their ranges of 90% and 95% loan-to-value mortgages since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, with only a handful of deals now remaining for buyers who have the smallest deposits.”
https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/05/banks-withdraw-nine-in-10-low-deposit-mortgages-whats-next-for-first-time-buyers/
“Banks in Ireland are expecting their ‘biggest ever’ collapse in mortgage demand because of the virus lockdown of the economy.
“The shocking slump in expected lending is revealed in a new Central Bank survey of the country’s banks which shows how the coronavirus will affect their credit conditions.”
https://extra.ie/2020/05/16/business/irish/ireland-banks-collapse-in-mortgage-demand
“Hong Kong’s property sales flopped for the fourth straight weekend, as homebuyers turned their backs on unsold projects to wait for better discounts, amid a real estate slump in the city’s worst economic contraction in decades.”
https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3084725/hong-kongs-homebuyers-shun-property-sales-fourth-weekend-row-they-await
I have commented before that the two real estate agents I know in the Atlanta area are still saying the home sales are quite good. There aren’t enough homes on the market, and some people badly want to purchase a home.
Atlanta may be one of the hot spots within the country. I found this real estate article from April 15, 2020; it characterizes Atlanta as a hot spot because many people want to move here and home prices are fairly affordable.
https://www.noradarealestate.com/blog/atlanta-real-estate-market/
A sample of two real estate agents really isn’t enough. I am sure that without a big turnaround, prices will drop badly.
For now, Atlanta has a reputation of where to be when the economy starts moving again.
For the city of Atlanta (not suburbs), I found this site:
https://www.redfin.com/city/30756/GA/Atlanta/housing-market
It says “Homes sell for about 2% below list price and go pending in around 42 days.”
“Hot Homes can sell for around list price and go pending in about 13 days.”
“Some homes get multiple offers.”
Of course the PR people have created the perception that now is the time to buy.
They are the ones who create the belief in the V recovery…. they power the headlines.
They work hand in glove with the MSM.
Ever wonder why the major news stories are the same across all MSM?
It’s because the MSM is centralized and controlled by the people who control the world… it exists to control what you think…
They work HAND in GLOVE with the PR firms…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI
https://whoradio.iheart.com/featured/simon-conway/content/2017-02-23-our-job-to-control-exactly-what-people-think-mika-brzezinski-tells-msnbc-audience-watch/
Comprehensive collapse
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/15/what-spiked-languished-or-collapsed-to-near-zero-in-12-charts-of-retail-sales-in-lockdown-land/
Frightening charts. Makes it clear that today’s problem is far worse than 2008.
What’s fascinating .. is the lines are mostly all continuing to head south…. no L to be seen…
Maybe there won’t be an L…. it will just be an I…..
And then
https://usatftw.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/kingdome.gif
Hang on … where have I seen an implosion before…. Building 7 … Sept 11….
http://www.h4cblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/wtc7naudetxf5.gif
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3baE4GC3lkE/UnmdqEPuAcI/AAAAAAAAufA/C_vvSLC3gqs/s1600/too%2520pig%2520to%2520fail.jpg
The comic does not explain how the pig got so !@#$%#@ FAT.
Asset appreciation with lower interest rates!
https://pics.onsizzle.com/in-almost-every-act-of-our-daily-lives-whether-in-4596481.png
https://earlyamericanists.com/2020/05/05/early-american-women-unmasked/?fbclid=IwAR00SwYWtLXVHZrLxGylze0Reuor-mDRo_Ed6MtQWmRFAtjSr_7n91IEPF4
I hadn’t realized that early Americans wore masks. Women wanted to protect their complexion from the sun, for one thing. Limit the amount of Vitamin D from that source.
the plan will be all about growth which means the bubble will be blown even bigger interest rates will go negative for a long time an alternative world currency will be born but first there will be the mother of all crashes ,
all countries are working to avoid “the mother of all crashes”…
they very likely may fail, but avoiding that crash is what is being seen in plain sight throughout the world…
in plain sight the world is trying to avoid the crash but we know it is unavoidable so who is to know if there may not be a plan to save the world if there was an immoral plan to save the world i believe it would be kept secret
if the covid19 is a hoax then obviously there is a plan well done fast eddie you are thinking outside the box,
the “plan” is wrapped in tin foil…
there have been many comments by some of the smartest persons here at OFW who have very well discredited any so-called “plan”… in my opinion…
though I am all for the continuing freedom of speech here, so those who agree with such a “plan” are thus just as well able to use their freedom of speech…
Propaganda is useful. As is $7.6 trillion aum.
https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter
A person needs to understand that a lot of what is published in Main Street Media is simply nonsense. Even earnings reports can be spun to look much better than they really are. Plus all of the wishful thinking about climate change and new energy sources.
Assume that everything you read in the MSM …. is spin. Essentially everything is ‘advertorial’
Most people assume everything they read in the MSM … is truth.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/20/56/0e/20560e55f49121a3d718a813e05d4d48.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/75/e9/f275e92f5e01b49d1587624f79cb100f.jpg
I had read and forget where that he was a master at public relations. I also read but could be wrong that he started the idea that bacon and eggs was an American breakfast.
The takeaway from all of this is that few things in this world happen by accident.
https://prandotherdrugs.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/quote-we-are-governed-our-minds-are-molded-our-tastes-formed-our-ideas-suggested-largely-by-edward-bernays-86-82-17.jpg
https://healthimpactnews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/08/Edward-Bernays.jpg
http://www.renegadetribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/tumblr_ojx9gpS7Qn1vvaom8o1_1280.jpg
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” (Edward Bernays)
A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed the “engineering of consent”. During World War I, he was an integral part of the US Committee on Public Information, or CPI, a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise, and sell the war to the American people as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy”. The CPI became the blueprint for the marketing strategies of future wars.
Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell, Propaganda, lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science, and education. To listen to this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regard to the organized manipulation of the masses.
https://www.audible.com/pd/Propaganda-Audiobook/B0741R8RD8?qid=1589681780&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=e81b7c27-6880-467a-b5a7-13cef5d729fe&pf_rd_r=E01EMN0YE7XTZZS4ECM3
Public relations and propaganda are pretty much the same thing. “Spin” any story the right way.
I was unaware of how pervasive PR was …. everything … and I do mean EVERYTHING… is controlled by PR…
PR men and their teams of psychologists are as pervasive as lawyers and accountants in every significant company… they are knee deep in religious organizations, charities, and governments…
Nothing .. and I mean NOTHING of significance gets decided without their involvement.
If you don’t like lawyers… then you really will not like PR people if you read Propaganda. They are far more insidious…. If you do not like why the world is the way it is (particularly if you are an environmentalist)…. you will not like PR people…
They latch on to the visceral drives — the BEAST — in humans and whip it into a frenzy…. and their plans are impossible to resist.
If you think you have freedom of thought – think again. If you support one political party over another and believe that is because you do because of rational decision-making… think again.
Bernays explains the specific strategies used win people over to a point of view. He even references specific news headlines and shows how he does it. He’s a magician.
I am wondering if one is able to resist – even if one is aware of the absolute levels of manipulation.
Half way through this ….
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493213.Public_Relations
This will be next
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1196248.Crystallizing_Public_Opinion
How funny is that!
He admits his scheme… and nobody cares and/or nobody believes him…
All the cattle want to do is graze….
And there are those who wonder how it is possible to control the cattle… it is so easy … look at how billions of fools are willingly marching to their deaths right now … because the PR people have told them they need to fear the flue….
Goyim. What a fantastic word. It smacks of total disdain and at the same time encapsulates the st up i dity of most humans….. no different than an average barnyard animal hahahahaha
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/UglyColorfulAnteater-size_restricted.gif
It would be quite bizarre if the west dropped the bomb in china and now the chinese are benefiting from low oil prices resulting from western lockdowns, driving their new cars and thinking… what could they think?
They were hoping for a new electric car market to sell their cars to. Low oil prices don’t help sell electric vehicles.
China car sales increase yoy. Perhaps they really got the thing controlled, can have bau for a while
https://www.ft.com/content/34e5759f-107c-4e8b-a372-7096d599c9fd
“However, the country remained on course for a third consecutive annual decline in sales, CAAM said, giving an “optimistic” projection of a 15 per cent fall and a worst-case scenario of a 25 per cent contraction.”
so the yoy increase was really just an insignificant monthly comparison of this April vs last April…
and:
“CAAM also highlighted the risk of disruption to imported auto parts supply chains, due to the global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, that could result in production halts.”
not so good… and that “worst-case scenario” of down 25% for all of 2020 is just a wild guess… it could be 50 or 75 % down when we hit 1/1/2021…
Yes, april did good because march was particularly bad and people were somewhat rushing after lockdown. It’s true that China cannot be an island. The overall picture seems to be that virus fighting has been effective but the economy is stuck, still doing better than most of the world, better than where I am for sure
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2020-05-15_06-59-07_0.png
the Q1 drop in GDP is misleadingly small because most of Q1 was not effected by lockdowns… Jan Feb and early March…
Q2 will be much deeper because April was the first full month of lockdowns and May/June is not enough time for any significant recovery…
it happens when it happens…
Q3 is setting up as the more interesting quarter, whether or not there is any recovery from Q2…
from Q3 forward, there might be increases in GDP… 3 or 4 or 5 % who knows… but that will not mean much after Q2 comes in at minus 30 or 40 or 50 %…
Speaking about colleges, only HYPS counts. And maybe MIT. If your child can get into there, mortgage your parent’s house to pay for the tuition. NEVER, never borrow money for college if the school is not included above.
Send your kids to MIT if you want them to work for the Borg: Monsanto, Big Pharma, Big Defense/CIA/Sandia Labs, Bain Capital, Wall St. algo traders, FAANGs.. that sort of thing. I had no idea how limited the “opportunities” really were.
Send your kids to MIT if you want them to learn that the only way to do research is to find the answer the big company paying your grant wants you to find. That outfit were the pioneers of “science for hire”.
I have hardly ever encountered an actuary who went to a “Big Name” university. Almost everyone went to unpretentious schools.
My husband (who teaches computer science) got his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his Ph. D. at Harvard. He was strongly in favor of sending our children to unpretentious schools.
This modern economy is like a large modern aeroplane; there is a minimum speed required for controlled flight. The turbulence of the reaction to Con-vid may have reduced us to stall speed. The descent has begun, and is from a too low altitude to regain control. Most won’t realise the plunge is underway and will not awaken from their blue-pill world until their own life suffers the impact of the crash landing. Until then its just a news item.
Only those from outside NZ can make the claim that NZ got it right! Our country is now heading for a soviet style command economy.
“Most won’t realise the plunge is underway and will not awaken from their blue-pill world until their own life suffers the impact of the crash landing. Until then its just a news item.”
yes, I agree that there is a huge plunge underway… general public awareness? maybe later in the year, maybe when Summer is turning to Autumn and things just refuse to get better…
though… this modern economy is not equal to any metaphor…
it could be a train that has to reduce its speed by half so that it doesn’t fall apart…
no one knows yet… by the end of 2020 and into 2021, it will be clearer…
You are definitely right about the stall speed problem.
Also, without enough energy, it is not possible to maintain an elected, representative form of government. It is too energy expensive and cumbersome. A king or queen or some equivalent dictator seems more likely.
From the outside, New Zealand looks to be resource rich. But it cannot really “go it alone.” It needs a lot of trading active partners, including China and Australia. Not having many COVID-19 cases on the first round simply means that New Zealand has a relatively more vulnerable population on the second round.
What went wrong in Armenia? (Reddit discussion)
https://www.reddit.com/r/armenia/comments/gkr30w/239_new_cases_todaywhat_do_you_think_we_did_wrong/
I particularly liked SrsSteel’s comments.
Armenia is a rural area. It tends to get the virus later than area than areas more connected to China and other epicenters of the virus. Even if an area does clamp down tightly, long before the virus gets to them, it doesn’t stop disease transmission very well, as long as essential industries need to go on. The disease continues to transmit.
We can look at Armenia new cases relative to US new cases, on a per capita basis. They follow a very different pattern.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/armenia-united-states-new-cases-1-wk-ave-may-17.png
Armenia’s new cases are not approaching the level of the US’s average new cases. The trajectory is fairly different, however.
Looking at some US data by state gives some indication of how more rural areas can develop. For example, Minnesota is more wealthy and more rural than Georgia. It clamped down harder on activities within the state about the same time as Georgia, in mid-March, even though the virus hadn’t yet had much impact of Minnesota. Now Georgia is letting up more than Minnesota.
When we look at Minnesota – Georgia data, we see that reported COVID-19 cases have recently been accelerating in Minnesota, while they have been slowing in Georgia. (It took a while for COVID-19 to get to their essential industries, such as meat packing.)
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/minnesota-and-georgia-1-week-ave-new-covid-cases.png
On a cumulative reported case basis, we see that Minnesota appears headed to catch up with Georgia.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/georgia-minnesota-total-confirmed-covid-19-cases-may-17.png
In fact, on a total death basis, Georgia and Minnesota seem pretty comparable as well.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/georgia-minnesota-total-deaths-may-17.png
I cannot put Armenia on the same chart as Georgia and Minnesota using the graphing package I am using because Armenia is a country and Georgia and Minnesota are states. If we look at the one week average new cases counts, we see that Armenia was reported at 56 per million population. This is a little above Georgia’s most recent lower average. If in fact there are 239 new cases, it may be popping up to a Minnesota type level. Russia’s average new case per week level is 70. It may be thought of popping up to that level as well.
Holding new cases down for a while doesn’t necessarily mean that they will stay down.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Here’s our ‘Something’ burger for the day – 4.7 million cases, 311,919 deaths and who knows how much organ damage to the 1.8 million that recovered (to possibly get infected later). That burger’s got some meat between the buns, a sheet of cheese, some condiments and over time it will get bacon strips and eventually onion rings. India adding 4,800+ cases just today and that number has steadily been rising and will just keep going up. Oh it’s a something burger all right and we’re just a few months into this pandemic.
I’m also wondering if attempts at vaccines will only force the virus to mutate into more virulent strains. Remember there already are 3 versions of this. There is no indication so far that it is similar to a flu from the standpoint of going away during the warmer months. It’s just out there and steadily building numbers as seen already in hot weather India.
Lies in – lies out.
Bali has minimal infections and minimal deaths. That is something I can confirm.
Elsewhere I can only confirm that:
– the Javits centre is empty
– the white hospital ship that was in NY sat their empty for two months
– there are endless videos of empty ER/Covid wards across America
– there are two ER doctors stating that they and others are being pressured to mark Covid as the cause of death when it is not
– there is a tent hospital in central park that is empty (yet headlines state it is overwhelmed)
– CBS News has been caught twice presenting fake news 1. using ICU footage from Italy pretending it was a US hospital 2. creating fake queues at a hospital in Michigan (they acknowledge both fakes)
In light of this you can shove your worldometer up your dog’s a ss. If this ‘crisis’ was so bad there would be no need to fake anything.
This is what I want to say to people I encounter here in NZ when they regurgitate their MSM BS … but for obvious reasons I cannot ….
I believe he’s been spending way too much time on Chris Martenson’s site.
One of these was linked from Drudge the other day:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/05/15/asia-pacific/tourism-bali-coronavirus/#.XsDC8kQzaUk
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/05/miracle-explains-bali-coronavirus-cases-200502035557649.html
There is no miracle — and people are NOT sitting at home – they are out and about and working wherever there is work. And then they go back to their villages/homes….
The reality is Covid is NOT that big of a deal.
Hong Kong has also NOT locked down – twice the population of NZ — fewer total infections..
Go figure.
And the numbers are accurate — because if the hospital wards were full social media would be filled with images of this to make Carrie Lam look bad
“Here’s our ‘Something’ burger for the day – 4.7 million cases, 311,919 deaths and who knows how much organ damage to the 1.8 million that recovered (to possibly get infected later)”
Out of a population of, ready……..7.8 billion. Call me when it hits 10 million. As far as the speculation of future organ damage, who the hell knows? This whole thing has been hyped more than a category 5 hurricane off the coast of Miami.
Here’s a little nugget of life. As you age your organs begin to age and fail. So can we say it was age that caused the deterioration or Covid 19? I’ll bet the Covid people will tell us it was the virus. Just like the Florida man who jumped out of a plane without a parachute only wearing his Speedos.
Normally … it takes years of meticulous research and analysis to come to conclusions like those we are being fed regarding Covid. That’s just the way it works.
Yet ‘scientists’ are reaching these conclusions within a couple of months of this virus presenting itself.
It cannot get more ridiculous.
However we need to be locked down to prevent us from ripping each other’s faces off and eating the neighbour’s children…. so we do not want to convince the cattle that the Covid story is a Big Lie.
“It cannot get more ridiculous.”
OH, it can !
…and it will !!!
I think its about as something as the tooth fairy but who cares. Maybe saddanm did have those WMDs they were moved to syria…Who cares. Its silent. No planes in the air. Few cars on the road. its like moving to nova scotia without moving. IC is toast.
Any kind of mutations could in theory make the virus more of a problem, especially if we find ourselves with several different variations traveling around the globe simultaneously.
This event has enabled the NZ government (not that many with experience outside of academia) to put together a budget ‘to change the world’.
Doublespeak abounds:
A Reset (new restrictions)
Regenerate (‘Sustainable’ investments)
Renewal (Re-education on correct living)
Pivot (down the sh.tter)
…that was about all I could listen to of the budget before feeling ill.
…and spend Spend SPEND.
Its a huuuuuuuge chance to refocus people away from their populism and return us all to the safe fold of the experts. All this cash will dominate the economy here for years to come and you better use the right words when you come crawling to the government to get some.
You know the words; inclusivity, diversity, moving forward, sustainability blah blah.
Planned economies equals cronyism, nepotism, and finally despotism.
In other words, nothing will change.
I’ve been around the planet quite a bit.
NZ s one of my favorite places- get out a bit, and loses the ideology.
As things keep falling apart, it will be one of the last standing, in my opinion.
A friend guides there– not near the hassles and oppression of the States.
Hint:
Immigration there is almost impossible (gee, I wonder why?)
If you have a 700IQ it’s easy… residency granted 6 months after touching down…
I suspect we’ll be dead before any of that can happen.
I wonder how long the burning ship can stay afloat…
A person might get ill simply from all of the liberal panaceas spewed out!
Liberalism is very much the ideology of growth; understandably its advocates believe that any threat to liberalism derives from other ideologies, but this is not the case. Ideology is dictated by resource availability almost mechanistically. In times of abundance societies are more willing to allow self-preservation instincts to erode in favour of the novel; similarly resource deprivation brings patterns of preservation sharply back into vogue. As the decline continues unabated in the real economy, liberal permissiveness will give way to increased localism, trade protectionism, calls for autarky, identity politics and conflict. We are already beginning to see this in the tensions between the West and China.
The liberal or ‘progressive’ ideology is a legacy worldview of a bygone age. It’ll be interesting to see how long people keep believing in these panaceas when they are quite so divorced from reality on the ground.
The sauvignon blanc is way overrated—
But I’m from Sonoma.
The Fly Fishing isn’t.
A stable and rich country, with benign socialism.
You can’t move there– everyone would be on the way.
Why isn’t there a global outcry about allowing immigration to NZ?
NZ follows very similar rules to countries like Canada. You can buy your way in … you can enter on a skilled worker visa .. or you can come in as an entrepreneur….
If you can meet the criteria you can get in … it’s far from impossible.
https://www.visabureau.com/new-zealand/visas-and-immigration
One thing that is an issue for a lot of people is the very stringent medical requirements… if you have spent your life as a fan of KFC and Big Gulps…. you are unlikely to pass the checkup…. we were told by the clinic when we did ours that NZ was one of the most comprehensive of all countries…
They will never admit it… but I am pretty certain that if you are white – and from a commonwealth country — you get accepted and you get your residency more rapidly (as much as I like to think it’s the 700IQ being acknowledged)…. they may also be looking at how much they can drain from you in taxes… again they will not admit that
One reason not so many people move to NZ is the salaries are low – and cost of living high.
We had a friend who wanted to move here — she had managed some fairly substantial businesses and trained and worked as an executive chef… She tested the waters and found that the best she could do in a management role was NZD25/hour… that’s under USD15….
Consider a litre of petrol is USD5 per gallon (more in places like QT)… and just about everything including food – is expensive.
We priced some search lights for the anti-horde driveway gate — 6-8 weeks for them to come into the country — checked Australia – in stock — just slightly over half price including delivery…. that puts it into perspective…. (and the cost from Aussie would be significantly more than buying in the US)
When I visited Hawaii to give a talk in November, representatives of Hawaiian Companies were trying to recruit actuaries to come there. The population of Hawaii has been falling slightly in recent years, because living costs are terribly high relative to wages. People no longer want to come, when they figure out that it is very hard to live on the wages.
Now with COVID-19, Hawaii is having a real problem with lack of tourists. There have been many fewer tourists, even though the number of reported COVID cases is not very high. Hawaii has had a total of 17 deaths, compared to New Zealand’s 21 deaths. Hawaii has a smaller population, however, with 1.4 million people compared to New Zealand’s 4.9 million.
Welp. There goes Bill’s chance to achieve world domination through vaccination.
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1261534354569867264
So there is some good news still!
My daughter just elected to go work at a fast food joint (Sonic Burger ) in NC for a starting wage of $8 hr now that school, has been shut down and she is taking her courses on line. I tried to convince her to work on her studies instead. Every 8 dollars an hour she gets now for working will cost her $80 an hour later for not having studied. I tried to explain to her that straight A’s in today’s public schools are meaningless and that whether you believe in them or not, the colleges will rely on mostly her SAT or ACT board scores, as they are the only metric left to evaluate and compare applicants. I bought her an SAT prep test manual and explained to her how she had to “play the game has done only three tests in 6 months while her ACT and SAT scores have remained flatlined at the 1150 / 26 range. “Of course, unless she goes to a decent college like NC State she is probably wasting her money on tuition. I now refuse to sign for any school loan. She had the ability to make it to UNC-Chapel Hill if she had worked, but that is now beyond her reach at the end of her junior year. I have even just purchased her a 27” Mac Desktop to give her the best learning environment, and with her 90 WPM typing ability, should have an advantage over her fellow students in typing on-line essays. She has squandered her opportunities handed to her on a silver platter.
I guess sometimes tough love is the only thing left.
See you still believe in BAU – Business As Usual for her generation in the upcoming future times. Sorry, but I don’t agree that the brand of degree will propel her to a secure future. Of course, the ABILITY to learn and apply in a useful manner to ones social 😁 network will be of prime necessity. What to learn? That is the question of utmost importance! Unfortunately, for recent graduates a good many will not be able to utilize their degrees in their major. Pity those in the Aviation majors, Hotel and Hospitality graduates, to name a few. One aspect overlooked is good fortune, being at the right place/ right time, and seizing the moment!🤩
Hope you and yours are one of the fortunate few that will escape the upcoming hard times ahead. A good many are heading it right as we type.😣
Unless your daughter is majoring in a field that is “HOT or in demand”, she is better off working at the Burger joint for $8 hr. Becoming a debt slave just to say she went to College is a waste of money. So many kids today go to College just to treat it as a vacation. Then when they graduate there’s no job waiting but now there’s 10’s of thousands to pay back. Walmart pays a good portion of an employees tuition.
Rodster is correct. Its better to work at the burger joint than go to the worlds most expensive summer camp for four years and THEN work at the burger joint $80k in debt. You dont know how many kids I have seen with decent degrees and GPAs become plumbers or electricians. Everyone cant be a plumber or electrician. Walmart is not a bad employment option nowadays. There are still opportunities for small business. maybe… when this is over… I hope.
People need to wake up. There will be no recovery from this. It’s the end of the road.
I’d suggest advising a student to drop out put on a backpack and travel the world …. but that’s not possible… so the next best thing is travel around the country you live in and experience BAU while it still exists.
There is NO future.
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/bfmB55A.jpg
I agree
There’s not just one path to success. She might become an apprentice of some kind and learn a trade, join the military, work abroad, etc. (Not all of these are possible right at this moment, of course.) And she could always go back to school later. Embedded as I am within academia, I see how much of it is bs, and sympathize with students who rebel against or abandon the system. If a student is not intellectually inclined, and has no specific career goals, then much of it is indeed a waste of time, useful only for obtaining an increasingly worthless credential. And the sad thing is, this charade isn’t even necessary. After a certain point, nobody will care about your degrees, or how you got them, or the schools they came from.
I personally think experience working, and having relationships, is just as important for young people as their formal schoolwork. I mean, most of them are going to work for a living, and be in relationships. It’s only right that they should learn what these are like, and develop the skills necessary to maintaining them.
I also think a big part of growing up is making decisions (good or bad) for yourself, and figuring out how to support yourself. At some point you have to just let your daughter make her own mistakes.
Only have one issue with your comment: Job suggestion “join the military”
That is absolutely the LAST thing that anyone with a functioning brain should do.
With America’s history of attacking 3rd world Countries & experimenting in a bad way with Soldiers, Sailors & basically every service person it’s terrible choice & should be avoided at all costs.
What’s wrong with attacked other countries – particularly if they have the resources that allow you to live large?
Let me guess – you subscribe to the NYT.
Maybe she perceives that a bird in the hand ($8/hr. now) is worth two in the bush (4 years of college expenses, and *then* $8/hr.). Maybe she understands that half the country is out of work.
As an Apple user for 36 years, I can say that I am ready to throw the thing out the window. It is not a “learning environment”; it is a corral. The best thing going in the tech universe are YouTube videos on how to knit, sew, make shoes, grow a garden, change your own oil in your car, breed goats, etc.
Tell her to rent out her typing skills. Maybe she could learn a bit of editing and jump on the college plagiarism essay-selling bandwagon.
Besides not co-signing for a student loan, what is the “tough love” you envision?
If you have the means, why not buy her a small plot of land and/or house rather than contribute to college? I have 30-yr.-old friends with student debt: they say their parents had been amenable towards helping pay for schooling, but would not give them money towards their small self-built house or establishment of a homestead.
You sound like my father, except that I finished school while he pulled out of his end of the bargain halfway through and signed me up for private bank loans to finish my worthless education. I work at a grocery store now – probably a much more stable job than I would have “aspired” to before I wised up. Unionized, benefits, and gravy as hell.
Your daughter is doing what she needs to do to stay sane in a precarious, ever-shifting economic landscape and job market.
Be careful how you treat her. I’m still debating on whether or not I plan on taking care of my father in my own home when he’s old, or whether I want to leave his ass to rot in a convalescent home because of this very attitude.
What did you study? And when did you finish?
I am afraid the other commenters are right. The time to spend a lot of money on college (mostly borrowed) is probably past. If your daughter has finished her junior year, working for $8 per hour is probably a good experience for her. Things are changing quickly. I know I started taking summer jobs when I was the equivalent age, and I encouraged my children to do that as well. It is probably a good idea to work now, and watch how things develop.
Who had “return of child labor” on their dystopian future BINGO card?
https://twitter.com/CBCAlerts/status/1261284668160253953
They’re even clawing back $2 from middle-school students. (rimshot)
“Middle school students must have permission from their parents and will make about $13 an hour.
High school students will be paid about $15 an hour.”
High school students have been working as laborer in the farm industry for a long time. I am not so certain about middle school students, though.
Thank You again, Gail.
I have appreciated your work since around 2008, in TOD. Good crowd.
I am a public health MD in Austin, Texas.
I have the professional opinion that vitamin-D deficiency is the underlying condition that makes this virus so horrible in some vulnerable people.
That hypothesis is finally supported by data, which should have been out 3 months ago.
Take 10,000 Units vitamin D3 for 2 months, then 5000Units/d after that, until you die of old age.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/05/vitamin-d-day.html
Thanks! People whose skin is darker in color have less Vitamin D, I understand.
I have started taking more myself, but what I am taking is about 1,000 units a day. Some articles seem to suggest 2,000 units a day are safe.
This article says “Too much vitamin D may harm bones, not help.” Another article says, Excess Vitamin D linked to kidney damage.
Given the risk from COVID-19 now, I suppose we might want to err on the side of taking a little too much.
I think rather, that people with darker skin need longer sun exposure to produce vitamin D, as they are adapted to areas with more sunlight. The darker skin gives them some resistance to skin cancer, but can lead to rickets when living in northern climates. That’s basically the enter function of having lighter and darker skin tones, to adapt to different amounts of sunlight.
Dr John Campbell was talking about Vitamin D and disease resistance two months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5yVGmfivAk
Thanks! That is a very fine video. It indicates that for people with low Vitamin D, supplementation to get to the proper level can reduce respiratory illnesses by 70%.
I found an different video earlier talking specifically how helpful that they seem to be with respect to COVID-19. Vitamin D is definitely helpful.
Probably the most comprehensive information on vitamin D in a single place is at the Vitamin D Council: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org. You can find evidence there for the 5,000 IU daily recommendation. (The site appears to be down just now when I checked, but maybe that is a fluke.)
I couldn’t get that link to work either. I did find another link that seems to be quite worthwhile:
https://www.vitamindsociety.org
It seems to be an Australian site. I noticed that it lists the recent studies about COVID-19 and Vitamin D. I didn’t notice anything about the 5,000 IU daily recommendation, but I did recommend that the blood level of Vitamin D be above 100 nmol/L (or 40 ng/ml in the notation used in the US).
Good post and I agree with most of it. Been in lock down for 2 months now, just leaving the house a few times. Working from home still with no prospect of when that’s going to change, if ever. The volume of trucks/trains crossing the US/CA border has up-ticked slightly in the last 2 weeks but we’re still down at least 30% in real terms since March 1st. Who knows how this all plays out but I can imagine that many people are becoming restless with this situation in the US.
The Federal Reserve and Federal Government are still doing their parts I see. Another $3 Trillion dollar stimulus package passed last night, spear headed by Nancy Pelosi. It probably won’t pass but that isn’t going to stop them and I imagine more bills are forthcoming. The Federal Reserve is going to be stepping up their QE some more I expect and the “we’re not doing negative interest rates” talk is just funny. Of course they’re going to do negative interest rates because if it’s that or the economy collapses they would do anything to remain in power.
I’ve been keeping busy with exercise, gardening, and trading stocks. People need to keep their immune systems up as long as possible and to the maximum extent possible. Stock up on vitamins/supplements and try to get 30+ minutes of exercise at least 5 days a week even if it’s a treadmill or doing chores around the yard. You do not want to be sick, get the virus, or be heading into a bad situation with a weakened immune system. Use the time we have right now as preparation for the future.
‘Use the time we have right now as preparation for the future.’
One Pond:
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/fukushima-radiation-spread.jpg
If you are already not a big on exercise person …. (i.e. you enjoy it)… I’d skip that and just do what you like to do…
For those of you concerned with the scary stuff Freddie / Paul / whatever is posting, this map is an image of wave height from the 2011 tsunami, and has nothing to do with radiation.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/
Ah snopes… isn’t that run by two diabetic KFC Big Gulpers?
Anyway – how’s this — now remember Chernobyl’s ponds were never breached:
http://origins.osu.edu/sites/origins.osu.edu/files/Chernobyl%20image2.jpeg
https://i1.wp.com/laconteconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IMG_3077.jpg