415 karma · joined August 18, 2021
It's the ultimate dumb move for somebody who won the lottery (either real or figurative)
When things go well the public falls in love with the players, when things go south the owners are the first in line of the firing squad . Fans , media, talk show hosts...they get attacked by everybody, maybe only the coach has it worse but at least he can leave.
Let's be serious. Most doctors back then couldn't tell the flu from a coronavirus, and it was probably for the better.
You are taking the present-day degree of information and discounting it back at a much too generous rate.
People, even doctors, were all but alarmed in those years of flu epidemic, even though people died, and young people at that (the flu is a notorious killer of babies and young people)
They were not alarmed because in the great scheme of things nobody died. Most importantly nobody or almost nobody they knew died, so the process of extrapolation and panic didn't start, because those people perceived stuff which didn't happen in their circle of acquiantaces as not relevant to them, which is true even today, but we forgot about it.
But there is more to life than work, people want to be able to go to a stadium, a club, to fly to Vegas or Macao to get shitfaced and play poker against the pros, they want to be able to go to resturants without having to wait half n hour for the vaccination check, want to be able to fly to Dubai or the Seychelles or Maldives or Aruba for the winter
Matter or fact the vast majority of people who consider themselves work-a-holic they are such because in their minds they know that they always have the option to unwind and do all the above things if needed be.
Remove that option and all of a sudden their mental health goes down drammatically
Gone are the days when the S&P and the GDP represented a condensed data point to enable people to evaluate the general health of the economy and companies.
This happens everywhere, as soon as a KPI start monopolizing the conversation, the optimizer/cheater in all of us decides to start finding ways to prop up the KPI instead of improving operations and let the KPI fall where it may.
But truth cannot be hidden, lies won't conceal it.
Even with stock market at all time highs, people are miserable, that's the only KPI you cannot fake.
That study claiming 13 years had a big asterisk: "those dying from COVID-19 may be an at-risk population whose remaining life expectancy is shorter than the average person’s remaining life expectancy. This methodological concern is likely to be valid, and consequently our estimate of the total YLL due to COVID-19 may be an overestimate"...DUH!!!
> And btw. what is the world view if someone dying 4 years prematurely (on average) is something that one can state as OK?
At this rate we are ALL going to lose 4 years of our lives with eternal lockdowns and travel restrictions and all this wheel which keeps spinning.
It's time to do what Sweden did, now we can roll out a new mRNA vaccine in 100 days if needed be, we have the Merck and the Pfizer pill.
It's time to go on with our lives , again , before we ALL lose 4 years, not just the immunocompromised and the overtly obese.
Besides, those categories who are handicapped are able to live a life with dignity because there is an infrastructure providing for them, that infrastructure has come to a halt, so they are losing those 12-48 months of life anyway .
Thing is, somebody who is 12-48 months away from the grave is susceptible to a ligth breeze, so if it's not COVID taking them it's the effect of lockdowns and the failure of the infrastructure.
People were just less anxious and depressed back then, especially according to recorded stats the most severe was the 68/69 it was basically the peak of huge human gathering, between marches, students protests, Woodstock, Summer of love, Beatlemania, surf culture. In short nobody gave a darn about the flu.
It seems to me, people nowadays are more concerned with existing that living, and somehow have convinced themselves to hold out long enough and they'd be able to reach immortality.
it's like they don't know that sooner or later they'd die anyway and that the secret is to live in the moment and enjoy life , stumbling on their way to the grave with a smile on their face due to the fun they had along the way.
The original recently sold in an auction in poland for 63,000$
Further proof that JPGs are essentially worthless and NFTs won't change this.
The most expensive painting is the Salvador Mundi sold for 450M. The painting which is worth the most is of course the Mona Lisa, everything from 5 to 10 billions.
63,000$ vs 10B. All because you can "right click" the former, whereas you can never "right click" a painting.
It all started in 2006 when the economy grew at 6.6% in Q3 and the Fed still claimed that not tightening was a great insurance policy.
Fast forward:
Subprime crisis
Bernanke says "subprime is contained"
Subprime was not contained
Wheels come off in 2008
Everybody runs away like chicken with their heads cut off
Everybody goes back to Bernanke asking for solutions
Bernanke proposes QE, something that he claims "works in practice, but not in theory"
Slow recovery
More panic
More QE
Temper Tantrum
More QE
13 years of regular QE
2 years of QE on steroids due to COVID
Asset prices only go up
Everything bubble
And here we get to the current scenario where scam companies are worth trillions and Docusign is worth 50B
How many months were trimmed off each COVID victim lives?
In 99% of the cases it's between 12 and 48 months
1918 flu attacked the youth, it trimmed between 48 and 68 YEARS off their lives, as I said: firecracker vs. nuclear weapon
1) 675k in 1918? make it 1M, perhaps more. Also every COVID death is a COVID death, a flu death back then could be ascribed to anything. People say Nigeria and Brazil and India COVID figures aren't reliable, how is 1918 US stats reliable?
2) But the most important statistic is number of years trimmed off the life of every victim. 1918 flu trimmed as many years as the WW1, perhaps more as it attacked the same cohort. How many months is COVID trimming off the lives of people who perish?
In 99% of instances between 12 and 48
How many people you know died of COVID?
The spanish flu had roughly 1 death every 2/3 families.
Honestly you are comparing a firecracker to a nuclear weapon, and if you want to do that, then you have to produce the proofs.
What do your parents tell you about that year?
Students protests
Vietnam War
Woodstock
Moon landing
Drugs
African Americans finally getting their voices heard.
Nobody ever mentions the 1968 flu pandemic, given how things are 50 years from now we'd still be talking about COVID and fearing its #100,000 variant.
> As for Covid, I personally know at least 5 people who got sick, 1 was out of work for 4 weeks, though none died. How about you?
1 got sick, recovered in 8 days. Considering the median individual has a circle of 200 people they know.
It's 1/200 for me and 1/200 for you.
No, they didn't. The population back then wasn't as depressed and anxious as today's population.
They didn't extrapolate figures and trends and charts. They were not bombarded by news on 5 different screen devices.
They'd notice when 5,6,7 or even 10 people they knew, and in the same age/health cohort as them would become incapacitated for more than 4 weeks, but in order to really notice it the same amount of people would have to be dying from the disease.
How many people you know became incapacitated for more than 4 weeks because of COVID? 2 years into it how many died?
It's an epidemic of depression and anxiety ravaging through society, which doesn't spare anybody.
I became interested in Sweden's approach of not doing anything at all , per the John Hopkins University website COVID deaths in Sweden are 15,000.
15k in 2 years, now how many months/weeks were trimmed off those people's lives? Note that I said months/weeks, not years.
Back in the 1990s or the 2000s we'd have not even noticed that COVID even existed, not to mention the 1970s and 1980s.
How many COVIDs came and went through the human history without us noticing?
Diseases and virus didn't change. We did. We are much more depressed and anxious.
The end all be all seems to be existing, not living.
To avoid any downside risk in order to stay around. If you plan your life with the goal of staying around, pretty soon you would not want to stay around any longer.
With regards to informations. There is not one bit of informations out there which doesn't move the stock/bond/money markets.
Perhaps you are just a news&market type guy, who finds relevant bits of information and then retroactively tries to model how the markets will behave, you do this by analyzing how widespread is the knowledge of this particular bit of information and how are people reacting to it as they (like you) become knowledgeable.
There is no shame in betting on other people's reactions, matter of fact it's the best way to make money on a risk adjusted basis.
Creating Amazon or Google as a way to profit off the rise of the internet is a terrible bet on a risk-adjusted basis, what you'd want to do is create a portfolio of internet companies in 1995, then sell when things became frothy in 1997, resist the temptation to short the bubble for 3 years and then buy again once the bubble popped in 2001.
BioNTech/Pfizer already said that they need 90-100 days to put together an entirely new vaccine.
The infrastructure for distribution is already in place given that the 1st vaccination round is not over yet and people who had the first round are now getting boosters.
The Merck/Pfizer pill should not be affected by mutations given that it's oriented at the effects. They are both approved in the US and are about to be approved in Europe, the US purchased 10M doses in advance.
Masks , temp check, vaccination status check are already commonplace.
THIS IS NOT US GOING BACK TO MARCH 2020. EVEN IN THE WORST CASE SCENARIO.
Free and libre software was always doomed because people who are worth their weight in gold due to their programming abilities want a nice mansion in Naples, FL with a nice dock and a 40 footer boat , not just a tap on their shoulders for a job well done.
This will only be solved or contained once we vax the developing world, so that we curb and slow down the emergence of variants.
Problem is that nobody in the developed world wants to be found with their briefs down and no vaccine availibility so the West is stockpiling jabs for people who essentially don't want it.
The west has been stuck around 67-70% for months now, with no tangible progress.
Those jabs, are the "use it or lose it" kind, if a vaccine resistant variant emerges in the 3rd world, all those stockpiles won't do any good, at that point for nobody.
Bill gates
Jim Simons
Mark zuckerberg
Larry&sergey
Plus you have the guys who do something else entirely for a living but are so G-loaded that won’t be able to ignore the singularly and in fact will participate…again some names:
Ed witten
Terence tao
Ignore the techno utopian snake oil salesmen such as :
Elon musk
Ray kurzwell
Michio Kaku
And also those whose career depends on singularity talk ranging from Oxford to the rationality blogosphere
The former prime minister not only shoot his shot early and in an aggressive manner
Later he didn’t follow up the courting to make sure that she could be feeling good about being on his mind for a while (and not just his penis for a night)
More generally if you don’t have a ring on it expect every woman who you had a romantic approach (successful or unsuccessful) to talk smack about you .
Sometimes the smack talking also comes if you put a ring on it .
The higher the fame then the biggest the platform given to her when the smack talking begins
The smack talking is not personal , meaning it’s not “against-guys” ….it’s “pro-her” to reinforce to herself and society the fact that there was a clear reason for her not receiving a marriage proposal or 500 , and that she dodged a bullet .
Accepting failures and low success rates
People who love machine learning belong to the camp of the serial optimisers.
There is hardly something which is more at the opposite end of the spectrum
Also given that we are taking about machine learning let me quote the movie Moneyball
Moneyball of course isn’t about machine learning , but it’s actually about something even more important: how clean are the data being used
In any event at some point Billy Beane portrayed by Brad Pitt says :
“I hate losing…in fact I hate losing more than I love winning”
Well in order to be “good with social skills “ you gotta be the opposite …you gotta love winning much more than you hate losing , so that the few victories will get you excited and propel your spirit through all the rejections .
unlikely things which cause tremendous damage are for sure cause of concern because it only needs to happen once and it’s game over for the person/group/entity which find themselves at the receiving end of that
Microsoft is like Marylin Monroe, or Michael Jackson or that person who lived to 123 years old.
You'll never see a company like that ever again in your lifetime.
They did what Standard Oil did, in perhaps an even cleaner and uncontroversial manner.
Tons of talent and luck aligned in the exact right way for it to be the phenomenon it became.
Gotta thank god that the majority of people believe bad stuff doesn't apply to them.
It's a burden for few.
If you want to see society collapse just improve the literacy in statistics
Seems like a good pitch to fund National Labs instead.
National Labs != space.
Unless you have a clear and defined QOL plan then space has proven to be a money sink for the longest time.
The Apollo mission didn't have any clear plan, the Voyager-1-2 missions didn't have any clear plan, Mars missions won't have any clear plan, the ISS didn't have any clear plan, the space shuttle didn't have any clear plan.
Matter of fact it's the opposite of what you claim, if you leave space in the hands of military maybe some QOL trickle down will happen (GPS, Sat communications, ICBMs keeping us safe).
If you leave it in the hands of wide eyed individuals who want to discover exoplanets and clusters which we'll never reach then you'll just throw money down the sink.
Any human will die at some point without artificial hearts, meaning all humans are slowly dying due to non availibility of artificial hearts, further meaning that all humans are slowly failing to survive without artificial hearts.