All the virus wants it to make more of itself. Obviously other regards don’t count. How far did it get so far? How much of the virus is there on the planet by now? 0.875 grams. Well, the math is my own so it could be wrong. I end up with that amount by calculating:
The 1000 gets us to Liters, and I assume 5 Liters of blood and 70 million infected people. The mass of a Virion is around 1 fg. 1000000000000000 of which are in one gram.
Royal successions are based on who is related to whom in which way. Presumably in the biological way. Since most rules for successions are not based on maternal, like for instance the much more pragmatic jewish faith, it could be interesting to back up the pedigree with actual genetic evidence. Something that could have been done since decades. Given how easy it has become it is surprising that no tabloid has gone there yet to offer proof about certain differences between the official story and the actual relationships. I wonder if there efforts on the way to protect the genetic information of people in royal families.
There are stories that latest North Korean Kim makes efforts that the output of his body remains under his control. What a strange job: Honeyboy to the dictator.
It is probably possible to go back in time as well. There are probably a couple of relics that have traces of DNA. Once Corona is in the past we have allot of PCR capacity that is sitting around. I wonder how cheap these machines will become.
Brookfield Asset Management (stock symbol BAM) owns considerable office space. In DTLA alone they pretty much own half of skyline via their subsidary Brookfield Properties.
The WSJ featured an interesting graphic today:
Basically more than 70% of office space are empty. Having been since spring. Why should people return? At what cost? It seems that wheels are still turning. Regardless if office drones show up – or not. Maybe there might a future market for temporary meeting spaces and rooms. Much easier to use them if they are shared. It is not that a meeting room would have corporation specific benefits.
So it seems that owning lots of commercial real estate being used as office would be bad for business. Since Brookfield is publicly traded one could expect that its stock is not doing so great. Turns out that that is not really true:
Yes, BAM trades higher today than it did in January. When business was ‘normal’.
This is nuts.
It also is crazy that seemingly more than 70% of people don’t need to show up for work at the office, and the sky is not falling. Which really raises the question: Why did they show up in the past?
Because a cubicle was a fun place to be? Because the commute is so much fun? Allot of time AND money flows into the daily mass migration from ‘burbs to city centers and back. Seems it can be replaced by a network connection people had for Netflix anyway.
What else do we do that we no longer need to do? Things get nudged along week by week. Month by month. Year by year. Decade by decade. All the while it could have been radically changed.
This is the real benefit of emerging countries like China: They can ask themselves at each step in any process how it could be done best. Not having a precedent of a somewhat working system gives amazing liberties.
I think at least half of work efforts in the US are being wasted. They could be optimized away. Mostly in the middle of these structures. Where work interacts with reality (blue collar) things have been optimized all the time. You can measure the throughput of a chamber maid much easier than that of an Excell spreadsheet jockey in some cubicle home office.
Google. They had a company motto: “Don’t be evil”. They no longer have. And it shows. They make a browser as well. Pretty much from the beginning you could set which page a browser should open with. Some people called it a ‘home page’. Whole companies got started around that concept of offering people what they might want to see.
Changing this ‘home page’ was easy enough. Once you grasped the concept of the URL you just could take that line of text and plug it into a form in the browsers configuration. Simple. Works. What could be wrong?
Well: you should go where Google wants you to go. Not where you like to go. So in 2020 you have to look for an extension to change the page that shows up when you open a new browser window. Doable. But you need to really want it to do it. With the result that there are no more ‘home page’ companies to speak of. Demand and supply.
If you are on the Internet you go where Google wants you to go.
When he came down that escalator it all began. And it ended when his friend Rudy held a press conference. At Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Which was as sketchy as it sounds.
Will this be the last time we heard from that man? Nope. Not at all. He started his political foray with the Birther BS. An outlandish attempt to discredit the legitimacy of the 44th US President. There was never substance. But it got him a kernel of a following. He realized that something being 100% made up is not hurtful in that concept. Au contraire. People will lap this substance free lore up. As long as you please their lower sentiments (“and some -I guess- are good people”).
So we are looking at years of this kind BS on the way out. Undefined slices of the GOP are involved, engaged as well. They are so power hungry that they swallowed all pride and just go along with the junk that flows out of Donalds mental orifices. If it gets them votes their pucker their febrile lips around anything he holds their way.
Birtherism never harmed those who dabbled in it when actual reality and facts folded it back into its ephemeral non existence.
Barack Obama was not born in Kenya. Everybody knew that. All along.
Joe Biden won the election November 3rd 2020. Everybody knows that. But there are careers to be had. There is power to grabbed in the lie that it would be different.
The real problem is that there is no cost to lying. The avalanche of falsehoods that the Whitehouse did peddle in was not helpful. At all.
Not that there would be an alternative. Just that stocks no longer look so great. They are about the future. And that one is – lets say – uncertain.
A couple of days ago (mid October 2020) I compared Market cap with product produced (things made or subscribers) and recent revenue and employee numbers.
Tesla had a market cap of one million dollar per car made. So the stock market thinks that Elon Musks car company will make a million dollars in profits in the future for every car they manage to make. The same number for other auto makers is between 3 and 8 thousand. Only Toyota (18K) Daimler (23K) and BMW (31K) are different. Still a 30 to 1 ratio between BMW and Tesla.
Apple is expected to generate around $9000US of profits for every iPhone they sold in 2019. So if you did buy an iPhone, and if we assume a simple and generous 50% profit margin, then you have to buy Apple stuff for $18,000 for this to make sense.
Oversimplifying things even more Amazon is expected to make $10633 from each prime subscriber they have. Which ignores AWS and non prime clients or other activities like Whole Foods. Still: Profit margin on amazon.com are in the low percentages. Thinking 2% would mean that prime people need to order stuff worth half a million with the online merchant. Even if you think that only 1/3 of profits from prime member everybody would need to get 2243 Instant Pots. Each. Good times.
In a week there will be an election. The polls look favorable for Mr Biden. They always did. Which polls? All polls. Mr Cohen got thrown under the bus in the meantime. The disregard for facts is part of the Trump system. The GOP has no problem to not replace a supreme court justice when he dies in February with the reason that it is an election year when the President who picks the candidate is a Democrat, while 4 years later 4 weeks is ample time to get a new one installed if it will be a Republican.
So, what happens if there is no blue landslide? Trump will simply not concede. Much as he tries to turn the election with lies and schemes before it happened he will do anything to hang on to power. For him it will be ideal if there will be unrest: The police will be on his side, not on the side of democracy. At least that is what is his plan. When there is chaos he can thrive. If he stays in power it does not matter to him -or many of his supporters – that he is on the level of Lukashenko.
As before the world, and the Democrats, will be flabbergasted by total disregard for any decency. As it has happened before. In a rally yesterday he claimed that he prevented the Democrats from blowing up Mount Rushmore. And yet around 30% of the people follow him. Read his constant nonsense on Twitter and paper their skulls from the inside with his nonsense. They believe him. They will find that it is OK that he stays in power. And in a couple of weeks Corona will be so bad that you can not switch horses mid stream. And least that will be their argument.
Luckily I have been wrong before. Sadly not as often as I would wish right now.
Worth your time. So well made. So nicely written. I was waiting for this kind of thing since there was DV tape. DV is around for 1/5th of the time that has passed since WW1. So there is that …
A birkin bag is a strange thing as it is. Jane Birkin recorded a song with a 41 Serge Gainsbourg in 1969 when she was 23. Their relationship was probably a bit of a scandal in 51 years ago. Today it would not be great for PR. And, yes, typos are seemingly a staple of news these days.
