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We’re Dumb about Exponential Growth. That’s Proving Lethal
We’re Dumb about Exponential Growth. That’s Proving Lethal
And not just for COVID-19. The same ignorance accelerates the climate crisis.
Gradually, and then suddenly. That’s how exponential growth can ruin your day, undo your family, evaporate your economy, destroy your climate, crush an empire and destabilize a planet.
Consider the performance of COVID-19.
Last month a 30-year-old male attended a “COVID party” in San Antonio, Texas.
At a COVID party, the host has tested positive. He or she then does not sit down with a math primer to understand how many human dominoes they might cause to fall. Nor does the host watch this handy video which, in three short minutes, explains the deadly implications of exponential growth of infection.
No, at a COVID party the host invites others to come over and mingle, have a few drinks, test fate, laugh in the face of reality.
The 30-year-old male who came to the COVID party died several weeks later, but not before he made a brief confession to the nurse attending him. “I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.”
That’s how exponential growth can ruin your day.
The percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19 in Texas has risen steeply in recent weeks. Up to 22 per cent of tests showed positive in the San Antonio area last week.
The exponential function is all about growth, and growth follows a logical curve. It can be linear or exponential. Linear is what children do as they grow in weight. Or what stalagmites do as they grow with dripping water.
But exponential growth looks like a jet taking off. It is rapid and explosive and follows a geometric progression. It is often about doubling times.
After China reported its first case of COVID-19 last January, it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 global cases.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Redesigning the World – The Great Reset
Redesigning the World – The Great Reset
COMMENT: Melbourne is getting locked down again. 5 million people on lockdown for 6 weeks at least! People will only be allowed to leave home to go to work (if they can’t work online), grocery shopping, or for medical reasons.
All because of 191 alleged virus cases.
Catalunya is now mandating obligatory masks even where there are no people. In all public places incl. if you’re the only person there (say in a deserted park or street at a time when there is no one else).
They’re also openly saying masks and “social distancing” will be part of life now for the long term, i.e. forever or until everyone is vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Spain has extended the moratorium on payment of mortgages and rents for another 3 months (until end of September). No doubt they’ll keep extending it much longer than that. So, since March people don’t need to make their monthly mortgage and/or rent payments. In theory, the unpaid mortgage debts are just accumulating and will need to be paid once the moratorium ends (yeah, good luck with that). Rents won’t be paid, obviously, because there is no realistic way landlords could get this accumulated unpaid money from tenants. At present (and likely at least until the end of the year) they can’t even evict any tenant.
So everything will keep getting extended….and everyone will still pretend that once the “virus” is gone (or everyone is vaccinated) things will just switch back on and everything will return to normal.
PG
QUESTION: What about the rest of the billionaires. Can’t they see what these people are up to? Why have they not come to you to try to promote Socrates worldwide?
GW
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What Happens If Most Businesses & Consumers Tighten Their Belts at the Same Time?
What Happens If Most Businesses & Consumers Tighten Their Belts at the Same Time?
Europe may be about to find out. 128 days with my Mother-in-Law.
As market players cling to the hope that a V-shaped economic recovery is still possible in Europe, to match the central-bank engineered rebounds of benchmark indexes such as Germany’s DAX and the Netherlands’ AEX, the reality on the ground continues to get worse for many families and businesses. On Tuesday, the Bank of Italy published the findings of a survey of Italian households on the impact of the lockdown. As you’d expect, most of the findings were pretty bleak:
- More than half of the respondents said they have suffered a contraction of household income following the measures adopted to contain the epidemic.
- Fifteen percent of households have lost more than half their income.
- Some 40% of families are struggling to keep up with their mortgage payments.
- More than half of the survey’s respondents believe that even when the epidemic is over, they will spend less on travel, holidays, restaurants, cinema and theaters than they did before the crisis.
No V-Shaped Recovery.
For most of these people, there will be no V-shaped recovery. Not only are they spending less money today, they expect to spend less tomorrow. While it’s true that people often say all kinds of stuff in surveys about how they will act in the future and then not stick to it, this particular response chimes with my own experience as well as the accounts I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances in countries as far and wide as Spain (where I live), the UK (where I’m from), Mexico (where my wife is from), France, Argentina and the U.S.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Rabobank: “We Live In A Pretty Crazy World Right Now”
Rabobank: “We Live In A Pretty Crazy World Right Now”
Crazy World
I think we can all agree that we live in a pretty crazy world right now: and that’s an appropriate title for the Daily today too, for reasons that will be explained shortly.
It’s a world where we are seeing staggering increases in public-sector deficits. We have already seen WW2 level spending in the UK, for just one example: and yet the British Chancellor is now planning to introduce 10 deregulated “free ports” across the country where UK taxes and tariffs will not apply at all. It’s obviously the inverse tactic of spending more money on left-behind places. Yet will somewhere like Luton hypothetically become the next mini-Hong Kong just because there are no regulations and no taxes to be paid there? We shall see: and those deficits will swell even further. Laffer would approve of course: and using the logic his fans always push for, by cutting taxation to zero, presumably tax revenue will now be infinity.
Equally, it’s a world where despite one in three Americans worrying about making rent, there appears reticence from the White House to push for a new major fiscal package. Is this all political timing, and huge stimulus looms in weeks? Or do the it-will-all-be-fine arguments from economic advisors like Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow reflect the official line?
It’s a world where despite all this state largesse, or absence of state largesse, bond yields continue to move lower anyway: the US 5-year touching 0.25% last week (though at the giddy heights of 0.29% at time of writing) as it does not throw in the kitchen sink; the UK 5-year gilt is at -0.07% even though they ARE throwing in that ‘no-taxes-here’ sink.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Serious Message From Chris Martenson
A Serious Message From Chris Martenson
Time is running short to brace for impact
Like a windstorm toppling a hollowed-out tree, SARS-CoV-2 didn’t cause the current recession so much as it exposed how rotten things already were.
Even before SARS-CoV-2, households were struggling. Far too many were limping along without any savings at all, one crisis away from financial ruin.
Debts at every level were at record highs before SARS-CoV-2 came along, and the Federal Reserve was already busy bailing out the US financial system before the virus hit.
The shale oil industry had failed to generate any profits for over a decade before anyone ever heard of Covid19.
The worldwide wealth gap was already record levels before we were forced into lockdown.
What the coronavirus pandemic has done, though, is give the ruling authorities aircover to accelerate all of these trends to warp speed.
Billionaires have been, by far, the largest winners in this story so far. Ditto for mega corporations. Main Street and small and medium-sized businesses have been utterly crushed.
Where the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 could have been — and should have been — a wake-up call to operate the system more equitably and sustainably, it was used instead as an excuse to make things even worse.
No bank executives were charged or even went to jail for any crimes they played in bringing the financial system to the brink of disaster. Accounting deceit, wire fraud, and forgery — anybody remember ‘robosigning’? That was forgery, a felony, and not one charge was ever leveled. Instead, the Too Big To Fail banks were bailed out and got bigger at the expense of smaller, more responsible firms.
My point here is that SARS-CoV-2 has laid bare our true value systems. Some countries have done an admirable job of showing they care about their citizens, making public safety and health their top priority. Other countries, such as mine (the US), have demonstrated the opposite.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Groupthink Pandemic
The Groupthink Pandemic
Groupthink is all around us. Decision-making in government, in the media and at work. It’s slowly killing the world.
In the background of the most important events, the Covid-19 response and increasing tension and conflict in the world, it might be worth looking through some of this in a bit more detail.
I’ve experienced groupthink working for large organisations, most notably in my last job. We were tasked with investigating and solving complex problems. Some technical expertise helped but was not crucial to the role.
Critical thinking and balancing evidence and differing viewpoints was key.
Yet the organisation decided that this was no longer required and changed the whole operating model to a one-size fits all type of call-centre. This new high-risk approach was recommended to us by the outside consultants Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) who were clueless about our business.
Those of us who were experienced in the role argued that the model wouldn’t work. But the organisation ploughed on regardless. It was obvious from day one that the financials didn’t stack up which they tried to deny and later concealed.
The executive largely ignored our concerns to start but then paid limited lip-service when the wheels started to come off. Anyway, in the end they offered us redundancy while employing fresh university graduates to replace us. As far as I know the place is still in denial and heading down the pan.
Groupthink is described as follows:
Groupthink is a term first used in 1972 by social psychologist Irving L. Janis that refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people strive for consensus within a group. In many cases, people will set aside their own personal beliefs or adopt the opinion of the rest of the group.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Food sovereignty now and beyond COVID-19
Food sovereignty now and beyond COVID-19
COVID-19 has changed daily realities in nearly every corner of the world. But for millions of people, fears about access to food have made the crisis even worse. Recently the UN warned of disruption to food supplies and further loss of incomes and livelihoods – up to 1.6 billion workers affected in the formal economy alone. Food banks and community organisations are doing their best to help those in immediate need. But as the pandemic collides with inequality and climate emergency, it’s clear we need major changes in our approach to food and agriculture.
The food system was broken long before coronavirus came along. The current crisis has exposed the fault-lines and renewed urgency to tackle root causes. This means asking hard questions and digging deeper for solutions. How is it that 30% of food is wasted globally and unhealthy food is fuelling obesity and diabetes, while 820 million people don’t have enough to eat? Why are millions being “forced to choose between hunger or COVID-19”?
The industrial and commodity-based food system has failed to adequately feed many people in this world. This isn’t due to a lack of food but to the conditions of extreme inequality, and the wrong type of food being produced, traded or promoted by powerful corporate interests that control the food and agriculture sectors. COVID-19 has once again shown us just how risky it is to let corporations be in charge of feeding people.
Changing our food system
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Our conversation with a coronavirus
Our conversation with a coronavirus
We have all been flummoxed by the way in which the coronavirus called COVID-19 has behaved as if it has agency in the world. We say it “moves,” “adapts,” “evades,” and “tricks us.” We attribute an intelligence to it. We marvel at its ability to manifest itself in so many ways. And everywhere we read COVID-19 is an enemy, an invader, and a killer, one that uses stealth to spread itself. We must defeat it, wipe it out, and eradicate it.
Many places on the internet we are implored to understand COVID-19 in order to stay safe—but only until such time as we vanquish this foe of humankind with a vaccine.
It occurs to very few people that we might be in a conversation with this coronavirus which is transmitting information to us by its actions and responding to our actions with its own reactions.
The rise of antibiotic resistance is another reminder that we are, in fact, in dialogue with the natural world. Everywhere—after centuries of practicing an ideology that claims we humans can control nature and with the right tools always and everywhere bend it to our will—we are being reminded that we are part of nature, that we are, in fact, organisms in an environment.
The modern environmental movement reintroduced the idea that we humans must align ourselves with the natural world or perish. But much of that movement is now focused on technical fixes such as electric cars designed to enable humans to live pretty much as they have been in the recent past.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The ten worst predictions in history: learning from past mistakes
The ten worst predictions in history: learning from past mistakes
Ugo Bardi experiments with new predictive methods.
This post was inspired mainly by the shock I had with the various failed attempts to predict the outcome of the Covid-19 epidemic. It was truly a sobering experience: bad predictions, clueless politicians, arrogant scientists, idiotic journalists, and more. It made me doubt of the usefulness of models in general. I think we are doing several (too many) things wrong with the way we use models and (sometimes) we trust them. I’ll be discussing more on this subject in future posts, for the time being, here is a list of failed predictions that I think can teach us something.
1. Coronavirus Deaths. In 2020, the model developed in large part by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College in London was the main element that led the British government to engage in a strict “lockdown” policy to avoid the hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of deaths that the model predicted as a result of the COVID-19 disease. Most European States followed suit. It is still early to evaluate how the real world followed the model but, if we look at the result proposed in the “Report n. 9“, we see that the model was clearly overly pessimistic. The authors of the model defended their work saying that their prediction of doom was just one of several scenarios, which is correct, but weak as a defense. In the future, we’ll be able to say if Europeans truly wrecked their economies for nothing but, for the time being, the coronavirus experience can be seen as a sobering experience on the limits of the models as predictive tools.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is America Heading For Civil War? Of Course It Is…
Is America Heading For Civil War? Of Course It Is…
In last week’s article I discussed the issue of American “balkanization” and the rapid migration of conservatives and moderates from large population centers and states that are becoming militant in their progressive ideology. In my home state of Montana there has been a surge of people trying to escape the chaos and oppression of leftist states. Some are here because of the pandemic and the harsh restrictions they had to endure during the first lockdowns. Others are here because they can’t stand the hostility of identity politics, cancel culture and race riots. Either way, they are fleeing places with decidedly leftist influences.
Uprooting and moving to an entirely new place is not an easy thing to do, especially in the middle of a pandemic. For many people, such an idea would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Believe me, moving to a place like the Rocky Mountain Redoubt is not an easy transition for most. Hopefully these people understand that they will have to make extensive preparations for the rough winter and be ready to work hard in the spring and summer months to survive. Maybe they don’t realize yet how tough it is here; maybe they know and don’t care.
That’s how bad the situation has become – Rational and reasonable people are willing to leave behind their old life and risk it all to keep a margin of freedom.
In my view it is clear that the political left has gone so far off the rails into its own cultism that there is no coming back. There can be no reconciliation between the two sides, so we must separate, or we must fight. I advocate for separation first for a number of reasons:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The epidemic in the US: a comment by the virologist Guido Silvestri
The epidemic in the US: a comment by the virologist Guido Silvestri
Many have noted the spike in the number of coronavirus cases observed in the United States. The fear is, obviously, that this increase will result in a corresponding spike in the number of deaths after some delay. The virologist Guido Silvestri wrote a comment in Italian on Facebook about the situation and I thought it was interesting to translate it in its entirety and post it here. This translation is made by smoothing a Google-translated text and it remains rough, but I verified that it maintains the meaning of the original. This text was written a few days ago and, so far, we saw no large changes in the trends of cases and deaths in the US. But, as Dr. Silvestri himself says, we need to wait a few more days in order to see if the spike will continue and result in an increase in the number of victims. On this subject, see also this post by Chuck Pezhensky.
COVID-19: SITUATION IN AMERICABy Guido Silvestri
June 28 at 7:51 AM
Many ask me to talk about the situation of the COVID-19 epidemic in the US. I try in these lines to start from the data, without making political considerations. Science, always science, and very strongly science, as you and I like it 🙂
First of all, I would start from the curve that you see in the graph, above. Today (28 June), it was the second-highest day in terms of number of cases (yesterday was the highest ever). So it is clear that we are in full pandemic with many new cases diagnosed, especially in the large southern states (CA, TX, AR, FL, GA etc). Not that it is a subject not discussed at length, but it is good to start from these data.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
9 Things to Buy Every Time You Go to the Store
9 Things to Buy Every Time You Go to the Store
Lots of folks have mentioned that their grocery stores never fully restocked after the rush on food and supplies back at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. And with the current news stories about spiking COVID numbers, it may not be long until we’re locked down again.
Work on what’s within your control
It’s important to note that even if you are unconcerned about the virus, there are a lot of things that could be out of your control in the event of another governmental series of actions:
- Workplaces may close back down
- Supply chains may be further damaged
- The economy will take another hit
- You may not be able to go where you want
Real, or not real; dangerous or not, the end result for us is the same.
It’s just like the debate over whether a terror attack in the news is a false flag or an actual terror attack. Every time I write about surviving one of these attacks, people flock to the comments to tell everyone that it was all crisis actors, the whole thing is a hoax, or our own government did it to take away our guns.
But we’re talking about survival. If you’re there when the bullets are flying or the bombs are going off or the planes are crashing, it doesn’t matter who’s behind it. Your only goal at that point is to survive it.
With COVID, does it even matter if the numbers are accurate or not? Because the government is using it as an excuse to exercise rigid control over all of us – telling us when we can go to work, when we can visit with loved ones, keeping us away from hospitals and leaving our ailing relatives to die alone, and enforcing laws about masks and appropriate distances.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Blain’s Morning Porridge – June 29 2020: What if it’s just begun?
Blain’s Morning Porridge – June 29 2020: What if it’s just begun?
What if the real pain is still to come?
“That about sums it up for me..”
There is an amusing piece on the FTs’ Alphaville listing 20 things investors should look for when trying to work out who will be the next Wirecard. You don’t need to be a financial genius to work out which company they might be talking about… It’s a basic wake-up call. In periods of economic darkness, its all-to-easy to be persuaded as to the efficacy of snake oil. If something over-promises, makes lots of noise while underdelivering, and is basically a personality cult – then it’s long-term unlikely to be a particularly successful investment.
Back in the real world…
We are nearly half-way through 2020. Although we’ve been shocked, surprised and buffeted by the Virus, and buoyed by the swift and effective intervention of Governments to support companies and mitigate job losses while Central Banks have calmed markets with the opium of QE Infinity, I can’t help wonder if the real earthquake is yet to come.
I am still bullish about long-term recovery as we adapt to the virus and it spurs a new tech development age. But I can’t help feeling deeply uneasy about current markets and the resilience of global financial systems.
This crisis is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. Normally a market crash is explosive event – it occurs when something in the financial sphere breaks; like confidence in housing and financial systems in 2007, or valuations in the Dot.Com crash, or faith in credit constructs like during the European Sovereign Debt crisis in the 2010s. In each of case of financial mayhem I’ve experienced since the Great Perp Crash of 1986, the initial shock and horror gradually lessens as the market discounts the shock, shrugs it off, and carries on.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
COVID-19 and the economy: Where do we go from here?
COVID-19 and the economy: Where do we go from here?
The COVID-19 story keeps developing. At first, everyone listened to epidemiologists telling us that a great deal of social distancing, and even the closing down of economies, would be helpful. After trying these things, we ended up with a huge number of people out of work and protests everywhere. We discovered the models that were provided were not very predictive. We are also finding that a V-shaped recovery is not possible.
Now, we need to figure out what actions to take next. How vigorously should we be fighting COVID-19? The story is more complex than most people understand. These are some of the issues I see:
[1] The share of COVID-19 cases that can be expected to end in death seems to be much lower than most people expect.
Most people assume that the ratios of deaths to cases by age group, computed using reported cases, such as those included in the Johns Hopkins Database, give a good indication of the chance of death a person faces if a person catches COVID-19. In fact, the cases reported to this database are far from representative of all cases; they tend to be the more severe cases. Cases with no symptoms, or only very slight symptoms, tend to be missed. The result is that ratios calculated directly from this database make people think their risk of death is far higher than it really is.
The US Center for Disease Control has published Planning Scenarios, based on information available on April 29, 2020.* Using this information, the CDC’s best estimate of the number of future deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms is as follows:
Ages 0 – 49 0.5 deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms
Ages 50-64 2.0 deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms
Ages 65+ 13.0 deaths per 1000 cases with symptoms
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Market Begins To Internalize Reality
Market Begins To Internalize Reality
Summary
- The financial media is beginning assign blame to the recent stock market weakness to the spike in COVID cases and the potential for a November Democratic sweep of the White House and both chambers of Congress
- Nothing new to GMM as we have been on this early and stood alone
- The stock market’s valuation is at a historical extreme
- The stars are aligned for a nasty and protracted bear market. Timing is anyone’s guess
- The Fed has created an asset scarcity induced stock market bubble, similar to the Beanie Baby bubble of the late 1990s
In graduate school, Rudy Dornbush, Jacob Frankel, and Michael Mussa, all giants in the field of macro and international economics, gave a seminar to our economics department. I was invited to dinner with them along with the department’s international economics professors. The one take-away from that dinner was a comment seared into my mind by Jacob Frankel, who went on to become the Governor of the Bank of Israel and now serves as Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International.
Why Markets Do What They Do
Over dinner, he laughingly mocked the financial media for their propensity to assign specific reasons for why the market did what it did on a daily basis. He quoted two diametrically opposed and contradictory headlines, one from the NY Times and the other from the LA Times, which explained why the market was down that day. That comment has stuck with me throughout my career — nobody knows what really causes the stock market to do what it does on a daily basis. The best, and the safest explanation I have heard on a down day, for example, is “there were more sellers and buyers,” which doesn’t even suffice. The comment should be qualified, “there were more sellers than buyers at yesterday’s closing prices.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
