The corporate press and political class have gone crazy over the below data.
The positive test match the amount of testing. Which means they are not conducting test the proper way. I address this problem in my post, “Unscientific and Sloppy“. 
Even more embarrassing, none of these measures seem to do anything.
The first doctor makes the point on the proper testing that should be done to understand what is happening. At 4:50, he explains the proper way to get valid data.
No one conducting any type of scientific experiment would do it in the manner in which it is being done now.
The next video explains how we really do not know anything because of the way testing is being done.
Based on various reports, my sense is that if you are older and do not have good health, you should refrain from interacting with others. To shut down the entire world economy when we do not really know is foolish.
The idea that there is no trade off between health and commerce is silly. Of course there is. We make everyday decisions based on the trade off between price and safety. When you buy a car do you get every safety feature? When you buy a house do you have fire rated walls installed and bullet proof windows installed? Over 30,000 people die on highways each year. We could reduce this substantially by making the speed limit 10MPH. Are we evil for not advocating for a 10MPH limit? No. We take chances in life.
Via independent.org.
Politicians in California like to show how much they care about making the world a better place by banning things. Making the world a better place isn’t something they seem to care much about, however, because if they did, they would be doing very different things.
As Exhibit A, please consider San Francisco’s new ban on sales of bottled water at the city’s international airport, which just took effect on August 20, 2019. The Wall Street Journal‘s Andy Kessler considers a scenario that may become all too common thanks to the city’s new law aimed at inconveniencing air travelers passing through SFO:
After running late for your flight after a 30-minute security line only to have TSA confiscate your Fiji water bottle, you’ll now have to stop at a crowded water fountain to fill your own metal flask. Or buy an overpriced glass or aluminum bottle at the concession stand, paying another 10 cents for a bag. And your teeth will chatter if you drink through a paper straw. Of course you could risk dehydration instead: Men lose up to a half-gallon of water during a 10-hour flight. Oddly, you can still buy sugary drinks in plastic bottles at SFO; only healthy, calorie-free water is banned in plastic. You can’t make this stuff up.
It’s not that city officials don’t like the idea of people buying overpriced bottled drinks at the city-owned airport. Rather, it’s the idea of people buying water in plastic bottles that upsets them—especially because of what they seem to think happens with all those bottles after air travelers drink the water in them.
The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Dustin Gardiner quotes state senator Scott Wiener’s justification for state politicians’ efforts to ban all things plastic in California:
“Plastics are frankly strangling the health of our oceans,” Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said as the Senate debated SB54 last month. “This is a huge problem, and it’s time to move past baby steps to address it.”
A huge problem, indeed. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, over 8 million metric tons of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year. If California’s politicians think they are going to have a meaningful impact in solving that problem with the actions they take, they must also think Californians are major contributors to that problem.
Are they really?
A study by Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research suggests that over 90 percent of all the plastic waste in the ocean flows into it from just 10 rivers. Alex Gray of the World Economic Forum reports:
By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean.
Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
According to National Geographic, “relatively little plastic waste enters the ocean from North America and Europe because of their more robust waste-management systems.”
Californians may not be as environmentally destructive as state politicians believe.
But perhaps that’s not true in San Francisco, if politicians from that city think their latest ban on sales of water in plastic bottles at the city’s airport will have a noticeable impact on the global problem of plastic waste being dumped in the oceans.
Let’s play pretend and say that instead of disposing four million plastic water bottles with a robust waste-management system, San Francisco’s politicians allow city employees at the airport to dump the bottles into San Francisco Bay each year to flow out into the Pacific Ocean and add to the global plastic waste problem.
Before the ban took effect, San Francisco’s airport was selling 4 million water bottles each year. Assuming all were half-liter containers, each weighing 9.3 grams, that amount of plastic bottle waste would total 37.2 metric tons. If the public employees of the airport were dumping that many empty plastic water bottles into San Francisco Bay, it would account for 0.000465 percent of all the plastic waste flowing into the world’s oceans each year.
An effective solution to that hypothetical problem wouldn’t be to ban the sale of water in plastic bottles at the airport. It would be to establish and operate an effective waste management system for the city while also banning the city’s employees from dumping empty water bottles into the bay. If they already had done all that, why not focus on making their system work better?
Do you suppose that common sense solution occurred to the politicians? Or do you suppose they cared more about showing how much they care about the environment without really caring enough to do anything to noticeably improve it, regardless of whatever harm and inconvenience they might impose upon the dignity of air travelers passing through the city’s airport?
James K. Galbraith is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He has posted a response to Rogoff called Modern Monetary Realism. The points made by the MMT professors are either nonsense or not true. From the Galbraith’s post:
MMT is not, as its opponents seem to think, primarily a set of policy ideas. Rather, it is essentially a description of how a modern credit economy actually works – how money is created and destroyed, by governments and by banks, and how financial markets function. Nor is MMT new: it is based on the work of John Maynard Keynes, whose A Treatise on Money pointed out back in 1930 that “modern States” have functioned this way for thousands of years.
From this description, certain straightforward facts flow. Governments create money by spending and extinguish it via taxation.
The last statement is simply not true. Government spending and taxing does not necessarily mean increases or decreases in the money supply. Let’s use an example. An economy consist of $100,000 dollars in cash. Some individuals decided to deposit a total of $50,000 in the bank. Therefore, $50,000 are now demand deposits. The total money supply is still $100K: $50K in demand deposits and $50K in cash. If a government taxed people $25K, the money supply doesn’t change. The $25K is just transferred to the government demand deposit from the individuals. This $25K is not ‘extinguished’. When the government withdraws the $25K from its demand deposit to spend it, the money supply does not change. This $25K will just move from the government demand deposit to other peoples demand deposits (or will be held in cash by the people). This government spending did not ‘create’ money. Even when the government issues debt, this does not mean the money supply will increase. If in the above example, the government issued $25K worth of debt, instead of taxing the money, the outcome would be the same for the money supply.
The money supply expansion is created when the Federal Reserve buys assets and when banks create additional money on top of their reserves (fractional reserve banking).
He does not define what he means by ‘money’. However, even if we looked at the monetary base, M1 and M2, as shown below, we will see that the money supply goes up and down.
The government always runs a deficit. That is, it spends more than it takes in each month. If what he was saying was true, than the money supply could never have a decrease. Looking at the chart, it trends upward but it has dips. You could go back further in history for all of these money supply numbers and see how false his statement is for different time periods. In short, MMT is very far from realism.
Voters in San Francisco went to the polls to vote on Proposition C, “Gross Tax for Homelessness service.” Voting yes meant you were in favor of raising taxes on certain businesses.
In the true spirit of democracy, it won by about a 60 to 40 margin. What do you expect when two wolves and a sheep have a vote on what’s for dinner? Tyranny of the majority.
I can summarize the philosophy of the western world in one statement:
“Don’t steal… except via the ballot box”
Tyler Cowen reports via a Harvard study:
Even in a unionized environment, where work tasks are similar, hourly wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions, female workers earn $0.89 on the male-worker dollar (weekly earnings). We use confidential administrative data on bus and train operators from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to show that the weekly earnings gap can be explained entirely by the workplace choices that women and men make. Women value time and flexibility more than men. Women take more unpaid time off using the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and work fewer overtime hours than men. Men and women plan to work similar overtime hours when they are scheduled three months in advance, but men actually work nearly 50% more overtime hours than women. Women with dependents value time away from work more than do men with dependents. When selecting work schedules, women try to avoid weekend, holiday, and split shifts more than men. To avoid unfavorable work times, women prioritize their schedules over route safety and select routes with a higher probability of accidents. Women are less likely than men to game the scheduling system by trading off work hours at regular wages for overtime hours at premium wages. Conditional on seniority, which dictates choice sets, the weekly earnings gap can be explained entirely by differences in operator choices of hours, schedules, and routes.
This is true by observations in the real world. In general, women prefer more leisure than males. Women rather spend time with the family than work overtime. Whether this is a biological trait or a result of tradition and culture, I don’t know.
Further, there are many studies that discuss the pay gap between women and men. Many have sloppy methodologies (or intellectual dishonest). Some studies do not even bother to normalize the difference in hours worked. For instance, person A and person B both get paid 50K per year. However, person A sacrifices weekends and holidays to work overtime. The end salary for person A is 60K because of all the extra hours worked. Aggregating salaries, a false conclusion would be person A gets paid more than person B because of (fill in the blank- race, gender, attractiveness). The reality is person A just works more hours and is willing to sacrifice leisure. Males work more hours on average than females. Studies that do not take this into consideration are misleading. Statistics and facts are useless without the proper philosophy looking at them.
Three academics conducted an experiment. See video below.
They created a fictions author and a non-existent institution- The Portland Ungendering Research Initiative. They took the most absurd ideas and retrofit them into today’s politically correct dogmas. Here is a sample:
“Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.
We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.”
These papers got peer reviewed and published. Even hailed. The dog park paper got special recognition from the journal “Geneder, Place,and Culture”. The data and empirical evidence they used to backup their claims was pure nonsense and made up. No one bothered to even look at the references or raw data they were using. No one even bothered to research their institution to see that it was fake.
The academic world is digging its own grave. I suspect over the next few decades these colleges will loose their audience. Consider this, it was less than 20 years ago the main stream media was the only outlet to get news. Due to the internet and the decentralization of information, they have lost credibility. Alternatives have popped up to replace their monopoly.
Some entrepreneur will become filthy rich doing two things. One, making a better college curriculum. Two, marketing it to parents and students. There are many curriculum’s online that are excellent. Some are 100% free. However, they have failed in marketing. Very few parents or would be college students take the idea of an alternative to mainstream college serious. You can quiz out of college by taking CLEP exams. Most students do not due this. They would rather go to one of these colleges. The parents have this mentality: “It is not that bad”. It is very bad. The marketing campaign should focus on how bad it is.
Amazon has been attacked for not raising its minimum wage to $15 dollars per hour by government officials. Finally, Amazon did raise its minimum wage to $15 dollars per hour. It was hailed as a political victory.
At the same time Bernie Sanders was patting himself on the back, Bloomberg is reporting Amazon is eliminating monthly bonuses and stock awards for warehouse workers and other hourly employees. Some long term employees are saying they will be making less.
A quick search on indeed, shows that Amazon employees, with added benefits, were probably already making over $15 dollars per hour.
None of this matters to the left who are fueled by emotions.
As a side note, this raise is more likely do to a tight labor market and the results of market pressures. Not the loud mouths in DC.
Now, Amazon is lobbying the government to raise the minimum wage to $15 dollars per hour. Any small company that wants to go up against Amazon now has higher labor cost. This makes it difficult for new companies to come into the market and compete with Amazon. Amazon, of course, can absorb paying more to its employees. New companies just starting out will have a difficult time.
Corporations use the powers of government to stifle competition. When emotions trump logic this is the result.
Social Security’s total cost is projected to exceed its total income in 2018 for the first time since 1982 according to the 2018 OASDI Trustees Report. The 2017 OASDI Trustees Report estimated this would not happen until 2021.
Every year the following chart from the OASDI Trustees Report gets worse and worse. Here is what is in the 2018 report.
Depletion is scheduled for 2034.
Social security was passed by FDR in 1935. The original age to claim Social Security payments was 65. The average life expectancy in 1935 was 62 years old. Today, that would mean the retirement age to receive SS benefits would have to be 80 years old.
Just like in the 1980’s, SS “reform” will come. When you hear the word reform think “can kicking”. Think higher SS taxes.
Social Security taxes are assessed on all wages earned, up to a capped maximum of $128,400 as of tax year 2018. The path of least political resistance is to raise this cap significantly. Any significant cuts in SS benefits will cause a wipe out of any congressman who supports it. The public demands the benefits continue. Where it comes from is not their problem.