Politics

February 17, 2021

There really is no better medium than social media when it comes to stupid arguments. And perhaps the epitome of stupid arguments are these reply-threads that discuss not masks or vaccines or politics… I mean, as misguided as some opinions might be, they’re at least based on some “fact” that someone has latched on to and decides to defend it, no matter what. There are certain personality types who simply can’t admit they’re wrong, and will simply double-down when called on their bullshit. There seem to be more of them these days, no doubt empowered by the former president of the U.S., who, incredibly, was never wrong in four years of power. That he had to descend to incredulous lows to defend his indefensible positions went from confusing to concerning to finally just amusing. Remember that sharpie-modified weather map?

On Facebook, I’ve stepped back from a lot of discussions because they’re not actually discussions; they’re just people trying to bury others with their opinions. Very few are actually listening… even fewer with the mindset that their opinions might even be changed. Just loud echo chambers where everyone either agrees and pats each other on the back… or disagrees, and roasts each other mercilessly.

But then… there are these things that come up for discussion, usually in the context of “Only 5% of people get it right!!” or “Even Einstein was fooled!!” Of course, it’s just click-bait… and it’s usually something like: What is 3 + 6 x 4 ?

They are usually more complicated than that, but that will suffice for my example. Some people will say the answer is 36. Some will say it’s 27. Others will come up with something else… and if you came up with something other than those two numbers, I’d like to hear what you came up with and how you came up with it.

The correct answer here is 27… because there exists an order of operations (you may have learned it as PEDMAS… or, depending where you’re from, PEMDAS, BEDMAS or BODMAS. In the U.K., it’s BIDMAS. No matter what acronym you attach to it, they all say the same thing… and one thing they all say, with respect to my example, is that multiplication gets done first; after that, addition. Accordingly, this example is 3 + (6 x 4) which is 3 + 24 which is 27. If you did this going left-to-right, you’d get 3 + 6 equals 9, and then 9 x 4 = 36. But that is wrong.

And that’s the thing… there are countless message threads with people arguing this, like it’s up for discussion. Like math can change with differing opinions. “Well, that’s the way you do it… but I choose to do it differently.” … or, “I was taught left to right, no matter what” or, even, “PEDMAS didn’t exist when I went to school.”

As infuriating as it might be to engage with an anti-mask or anti-vax proponent, at least they have their misguided facts upon which they can fall back. But there are no opinions when it comes to math… or, at least, there shouldn’t be. But there are, and the name-calling and bullshit is as strong as anywhere else… and, honestly, it drives me even crazier.

It also reminds me.. it’s not up to me to understand why some people refuse to accept facts. These aren’t convoluted, contrived, complicated theorems that take a lot of understanding to unravel. They’re just facts, and they’re indisputable. But people choose to “not believe in it”, because “science is just a theory” and scientists change their minds all the time, so they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.

Wanna try to convince someone who “doesn’t believe in math” that they should get a vaccine and wear a mask? Yeah… me neither.

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By |2021-02-17T17:04:21-08:00February 17th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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February 14, 2021

Happy SnowyFamilyDayWeekendValentinesDay!

You may have noticed how quiet and peaceful it gets when the ground is blanketed by snow. It’s simply due to the fact that snow actually absorbs sound… and, also, the uneven surface helps to disperse sound waves. The opposite of a polished concrete floor is a snow-covered surface – the fluffier, the better.

Two bits of fluffy vaccine news:

One is that the province of Manitoba has ordered 2 million doses of our own mRNA Canadian-produced vaccine; vaccine that’s made in Alberta by Providence Therapeutics. The only slight problem with it is that the vaccine doesn’t actually exist. Well, it does, but it’s only in a Phase-1 trial. Optimistically, Phases 2 and 3 start after May, and counting on emergency authorization from Health Canada in the fall, perhaps it’ll be getting into Winnepegian and Flin-Flonian arms before the end of the year.

Of course, we’ve been told the majority of us in the rest of Canada would have plenty of Pfizer and Moderna available by then, so what this really means is the government of Manitoba saying to the Federal government… “We don’t believe you.” Hard to argue. One thing is clear… one day, Canada will be flooded with vaccine… from what we ordered and from what we’re making. When exactly will that be? Perhaps around the time Hell starts looking like my front yard. At least we’ll have plenty of vaccines around for when this transitions from pandemic to endemic.

The other is that Bill Gates’ daughter Jennifer got her first vaccine dose today. She couldn’t help but crack a joke about it not actually implanting some sort of dad-designed microchip into her brain. It’s funny, but it’s also sad… that enough anti-vax people believe that nonsense to the extent that, as per above, this virus is unlikely to ever go away entirely. At least we’ll have plenty of vaccine supply…

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By |2021-02-14T17:03:30-08:00February 14th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |1 Comment
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February 13, 2021

Snow day!! No school!! And also, no local numbers… which of course, snow or not, is always the case over the weekend. And, can I just say… back in the day when it snowed enough to actually cancel school, why did the big snow-dump always happen on a weekend? Not fair.

But, briefly, speaking of numbers and things that are not fair… New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is going to be facing some tough questions. The explanations are inconsistent and the story changes, but the bottom line is that in NY, Covid-19 deaths were underreported with respect to nursing home residents at the height of the pandemic. At its most fundamental level, this is just politics trumping science. Cuomo just didn’t want to look bad to the Trump government and face all the noise that’d be coming his way.

It’s ironic… in that the Trump loyalists, especially at the time, were always the ones claiming it’s a hoax and nobody is dying; that death numbers were being inflated and, anyway, old people are going to die. Had all of this come out sooner, they would’ve been faced with an interesting contradiction… how does one complain that deaths are being overstated… while at the same time, have proof – actual numbers that would provide you with actual evidence to justifiably criticize your opponents – that say the exact opposite?

Except among the truly deluded, long gone are the “Covid death rate is 0.000243%!!!” posts. The nonsense that the flu kills more people, etc. If you’re curious… these days, more people in the U.S. die from C19 in any rolling 10-day period than typically die from flu in an entire 12-month cycle. And this year, that ratio will be sharply higher because flu cases (and deaths) are way down.

Excess deaths in the U.S were around 300,000 between January and October last year… and Covid-19 deaths during that time averaged 975 per day. Since then, C19 deaths have averaged close to 2,500 daily.

At least this explains something that head-scratchingly wasn’t adding up… what are all these American excess deaths attributable to, if not C19?

Yeah… it turns out it was C19 after all.

Oh, some breaking news… I’ll conveniently provide it in the form of a poem:

It’s snowy and peaceful
And time for a book
The Senate acquitted
But Trump’s still a crook

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By |2021-02-13T17:03:01-08:00February 13th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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February 11, 2021

A kind of funny story… back in 1968, parts of Chile were pretty disconnected from the rest of the world, and, more to the point, so were the people who were born, grew up, and worked there. For a lot of the workers there, they were born in small towns, and they remained in those small towns their entire lives. Some towns were only 40km from the coast, yet some of them, guys in their 20s, had never even been to the ocean. Accordingly, they weren’t too clued-in as to what exactly was going on in the world.

On June 6th, 1968, my uncle was in his office, sitting at his desk… also there was my dad… both of them discussing whatever. Then the phone rang, and my uncle picked it up… and it was a group of miners expressing their condolences… “We’re so sorry to hear the news”, they said, “It’s so sad, it’s so awful, him with his pregnant wife and everything…”

“What the hell are you talking about?”, asked my uncle.

“Your brother, of course.”

“What about him?”, asked my uncle, staring at my dad sitting across from him.

“Well, we heard he got shot and killed in Los Angeles yesterday.”

“That was Robert KENNEDY, you idiots! KENNEDY… not KEMENY!”.

Perhaps an innocent but somewhat amusing misunderstanding for some people who weren’t granted the benefit of the big picture.

But here’s something that’s not so funny… and it has to do with Robert Kennedy Jr… the aforementioned’s son… someone who certainly should have a good grip on reality.

He just got banned from Instagram, for promoting a whole bunch of anti-vax bullshit. But this guy is especially awful… because he lobbies Congress to give parents exemptions from state requirements that mandate vaccinations for children. He has an anti-vax Facebook page with over 300,000 followers… and yet… all of his children have been vaccinated. This is the worst kind of hypocrite on the planet… pandering to the masses; “elevating” themselves to the crowd they feel they need to reach. Vegans who secretly eat meat when no one’s looking. Environmentalists who throw all of their garbage and cardboard and food scraps into the same, landfilled-destined plastic garbage bags. Green Party members who drive 12-cylinder mega-fuel-injected super-turbo-charged Italian sports cars that get 2 miles to the gallon. Robert Kennedy Jr. They can all go to hell, pontificating their holier-than-though ideas while brazenly doing the exact opposite.

Speaking of vaccines, if you’ve been watching the bolded, inverse vaccination-percentage numbers near the top of the attached data, you’ll be disappointed to see that most of them went down. It’s because I adjusted the data… and because, for a while, all doses being dished out were first doses, and that’s what I was tracking. But now that the second doses are kicking in, it throws things off. The idea is to represent how many people have had at least one shot… not just simply shots divided by population… a number that doesn’t really mean much. Accordingly, the numbers have all gone down, and the more second doses that have already been injected, the bigger the change.

Well… not all. It was most interesting to see Quebec, the huge outlier… who have given out a total of… zero second shots. They’re really going all-in with their policy: Get as many first shots done as possible, and stretch that window for the second shot as far as possible and… hope fervently that enough doses show up in time when they’re needed.

Anyway, going forward, that’s what those bold inverted numbers mean; the percentage of the population that’s had at least one shot. B.C. is at 2.8%. Canada is at 2.5%. The U.S. is at 14.5%. For a bit of comparison… Israel is at 68%, the U.K. is at 21%, and Chile… even though they may not know the difference between the U.S. Attorney General and a local mining executive… is at over 7%, which puts them in the Top-10 in the world. Canada used to be in that Top-10, but we’re now we’re barely hanging on to our Top-40 position… sliding down the charts like a one-hit-wonder whose moment has come and gone.

We’re told that’ll change in the coming weeks. Let’s hope so.

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By |2021-02-11T17:03:27-08:00February 11th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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February 10, 2021

I must admit, it feels good not to be writing about Donald Trump. Because now, I read the news about the guy and my first thought is always, “Who cares”. Washington will have their hands full with the impeachment circus, and by the end of it it’s highly likely he’ll be acquitted… but through the motions they go.

I find it pathetic that the Republican Party hasn’t got the internal fortitude to figure out what’s really important to them; some of them cling on to their has-been demagogue for the simple reason that there’s still an army of misguided supporters out there. What they perhaps don’t realize is that those aren’t fellow Republicans. They’re cult followers. Jeez, if the events of January 6th can’t convince you of that, nothing can. Or, of course, they *do* realize that, and don’t care. Which is really far worse, when you consider the implications. Either way, I look forward to it all going away. And, hopefully, not coming back.

Sifting past the pages of all that nonsense for something relevant to write about in the few minutes I have to do so, I found an interesting story from the CDC claiming that double-masking can block 93% of potentially infectious particles. That number varies, depending how well you double-mask and how well knotted it’s done… but it’s drastically different than single masking in the 40-60% range. It’s a far cry seeing that published and possibly adhered to, as opposed to the aforementioned has-been demagogue who spent a year telling everyone masks are useless. For those who like math, the extrapolation of triple-masking goes to 97% and quadruple-masking 99%. Beyond that, it’s 100% because you probably can’t breathe.

Yeah, wear a mask or two… it makes a huge difference. I look around with some envy at places that had these mandates in place early and effectively… places where two-week mandatory quarantines don’t have exceptions and you pay for it yourself and you don’t complain; those are now the places that have bustling restaurants and crowded stadiums and no mask mandates. There are indeed places on the planet that are back to normal. The U.S. completely messed-up their opportunity, but that was because of colossally crappy leadership, right from the top, and right from the start. We’ve done a lot better here in Canada, but now that we’re a year into this thing, it’s not difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons. It could’ve been a lot better. In gambling terms, it’s called the “woulda coulda shoulda” – it’s what you hear from most frustrated horseplayers moments after the horses cross the finish line… I woulda bet the 6… I coulda bet the 4.

And yeah, we shoulda had masks everywhere… long ago.

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By |2021-02-10T17:05:17-08:00February 10th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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February 9, 2021

Let’s talk about something else entirely… at least for today.

Like Covid-19, it’s invisible to the naked eye. Like Trump, it’s wildly volatile. Like both of those things, its future is uncertain, but there’s plenty of speculation. What I’m talking about is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin (BTC) was born almost exactly 11 years ago, created by an entity known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody’s too sure if that’s a real person, or a group of people, and/or whether that individual, if it is one, is still alive.

The first time I heard about Bitcoin was some time in 2010… from a friend I’d formerly worked with… a very smart guy, one of the best Linux/network admins I’ve ever met. Smart guy, but nobody took his touting of Bitcoin seriously. This was late 2010, and Bitcoins were worth less than a $1. The following year, they started going up in value… all the way to $20. He was very happy. Then the price crashed back down to a few dollars again. He was not so happy. It all still felt like something not to be taken seriously… but that started to change as time went on.

In late 2013, the world’s first Bitcoin ATM opened up… right here in Vancouver. It’s still there… in Waves Coffee, on the corner of Smithe and Howe.

Very cool. I went down there with $500, plugged it into that machine, and bought 2.5 Bitcoins. And when you buy BTC, there’s no tangible evidence of it… but then again, there’s no tangible evidence of your bank balance, except for what your phone or computer screen tells you. You just assume the little numbers translate to value. Like cash or stocks or gold or anything else with a number that describes what it’s worth. Then I bought a coffee and some food with it; Waves was one of the first places to accept Bitcoin for payment.

I dabbled with BTC over the years; for a while, I had my own mining rig… but it wasn’t anything too sophisticated. In fact, it was computer motherboard and three video cards all crammed into a milk crate. That thing ran hot… and loud. I was selling most of what I mined as quickly as I could… BTC was $400 at the time… and that was the mindset; create $ out of thin air and lock it in. Obviously, in hindsight, holding onto all of that would’ve made far more sense, but BTC back then, at least in my mind, was simply a new-fangled digital currency to be used like any other. And like any other, it’ll fluctuate… but never appreciate to levels of insanity. You wouldn’t expect a Canadian Dollar to suddenly be worth $2,000 U.S.; this was no different. Eventually, I shut it all down. Mining BTC becomes more difficult and more expensive as time goes on. Doing the math on how much energy I was consuming in this increasingly-difficult exercise implied it was no longer worthwhile. The garage, where it had been running, became much quieter and colder.

Except… it was different.

The first evidence of that was in 2013 when BTC shot-up to over $1,000 a coin… and it was because of currency restrictions imposed in Cyprus, during a financial crisis. People there were frantically trying to get their money out. In the old days, you’d try to do that by smuggling out gold or diamonds… but if you can seamlessly tap-tap-tap here and somewhere else in the world, someone else does the tap-tap-tap and now has all the money (and, of course, that someone else can also be you)… and no financial regulator was in the way… well, great. Even better, even if the financial regulator saw that transaction go by, they have no idea who did it. BTC became the de-facto currency of the Silk Road marketplace, a dark web Black Market site for purchasing all sorts of illegal goods.

When the Cypriot financial crisis sorted itself out, the BTC prices came back down to earth, but everyone took notice. Hmmm… forget buying coffees and croissants… if this thing can hold its value, given everything else it brings to the table… hmm…

What else does it bring to the table? It’s secure. So far, nobody has figured out how to hack it, though many have tried. The general consensus is that it’d take a very long time for all the computer power in the world at present to do so. The infrastructure is secure and transparent. Everyone can know what every wallet balance in the world is at – but not necessarily know to whom it belongs. Transactions are verified in real-time by multiple machines around the world. It all simply works. And who’s to say what a BTC is worth? Well, who decides what gold is worth? Or a diamond? It’s simple… it’s worth exactly what at this moment in time, someone is willing to pay for it while someone else is willing to part with it.

But perhaps the biggest intangible, the one thing this particular commodity brings to the table that no other one does is… that it’s finite. Given how it’s designed, only 21,000,000 BTCs will ever be mined. Around 18,500,000 have already been mined, but, like I said, it’s getting harder and harder. The last one won’t be mined till around 2140, and it’ll take decades for that last one to emerge.

Oil, gold, diamonds, wheat, sugar, cocoa, pork bellies… the earth always provides more. Nothing is infinite, but we’re nowhere close to running out of those things… we can always mine, grow or breed more. But not BTCs. So what happens when you have a trusted commodity where supply is known to be limited? You’d expect it would appreciate in value.

At this moment, a single BTC is worth $60,000. That coffee and chocolate croissant I bought way back when for 0.05 BTC? It cost me $3,000 in today’s dollars. That initial $500 in BTC I bought (and is now long gone) would be worth over $150,000… but if that makes you go ouch, consider the very first BTC transaction ever… two Papa John’s pizzas… worth about $30… for 10,000 BTC. That is, in today’s dollars, a six-hundred million dollar pizza. Sorry, two pizzas.

A lot could go wrong with BTC, which would vapourize all that value instantly. Someone could crack the encryption. Governments could conspire to shut it all down. A better crypto-currency could appear, and all the value would flood in that direction. Or… it could continue to appreciate forever. Some people are saying a single BTC could be worth $500,000 within a decade. Given its recent meteoric rise, who knows.

People also wonder what’ll happen after 2140, when there’s no more reward for being part of the network, since mining will have stopped. But in the same breath, the answer is obvious. Not our problem… just like in 2140, perhaps we’ll all have fusion-powered diamond-makers in our homes, or do-it-yourself alchemy kits for turning old pennies into gold. Not our present-day problem.

For now, the world has a trusted, unique, ubiquitous and accessible form of wealth storage that seems to find a little bit more of legitimacy every day. Recently, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would be accepting BTC for payment. And that Tesla holds $1.5 billion in BTC, just as a part of a diversified investment portfolio. And perhaps that’s what a well-diversified portfolio looks like in the future… cash, equities, bonds, gold, real-estate, commodities… and now, also… BTC.

As far as my friend is concerned, the one who was into BTC so early in the game… at some point, he cashed it all in (whatever “it’ is), bought a boat, and has been sailing around the world ever since.

** Disclaimer: I’m nobody’s idea of a registered investment advisor. None of the above is intended as advice; just interesting info. Should you choose to dabble in BTC, do so at your own risk. Past returns are never indicative of future whatever yadda yadda…

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By |2021-02-09T17:03:00-08:00February 9th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |6 Comments
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February 4, 2021

Appropriate for sympathizing with the world’s smallest violin is the guy who decided to go visit a friend in North Carolina, took the wrong test on the way back (rapid test, which offers more false negatives than the government-required PCR test), and found himself stuck in a Toronto hotel, whining to the world about how unfair it is. I will gloss over the facts, because there’s something near the bottom of the story that’s just as important.

Indisputable is that this guy traveled to North Carolina to visit a friend, restrictions on non-essential travel notwithstanding. Canada requires proof of a negative PCR test, taken within the last 72 hours, to allow boarding onto a Canadian-bound plane… or, upon arrival. The guy should not have been allowed on a plane to begin with, but he was. And so, when he landed in Toronto, his answers with respect to quarantine were inadequate… and he was taken to what he describes as a detention centre. It was actually an airport hotel, where he was “incarcerated” for 60 hours.

He laments he’s out $130 for the useless test. He laments he could see Tim Horton’s, Harvey’s, Subway and Swiss Chalet from his 9th-floor room, but wasn’t allowed to order from them. He was stuck with the government-issued free food instead of that potential gourmet offering. And… he got in under the cut-off, so you and I paid for his hotel, food and internet.

The reporter reached out to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) to generate some outrage to add to the story, but the CCLA seems to be in agreement with the government. Their Director of Fundamental Freedoms, when asked to comment, replied, “If you take a look at section 4, it seems to deem a person without a proper test to be someone who is unable to quarantine themselves (s. 4(1)(a)), and then in s. 4(2) says that those who are unable to quarantine themselves must follow certain directions related to quarantine, which I think would include the requirement to quarantine in a hotel like the situations you describe”.

Basically, this guy made his own tax-subsidized bed, and then he had to lie in it… having neither a valid test result nor a quarantine plan upon his return.

But what bothers me most about this story is another quote from this poor, unfortunate soul who was stuck for three days with his warm bed and free food and free internet… with respect to the other eight people from the same flight taken to that hotel: “Some cried and said they would lose their jobs or didn’t have babysitters.” In other words, those other eight people also had the same idea as our hero: to hell with quarantine; it’s not in our plans.

You don’t have to agree with the rules, but you have to understand that they’re there for a reason, and that they’re clearly being taken seriously by the people enforcing them. Perhaps you shoul do the same. Or not. Up to you… but… play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

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By |2021-02-04T17:03:22-08:00February 4th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics|Tags: , , , , , , |7 Comments
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January 30, 2021

If, off the top of your head, you had to guess which three countries in the world had the most cases per 1M of population, you would think about it, come up with three countries, and be completely wrong. It wouldn’t make sense not to include places like U.S, India, Russia, Brazil, U.K, Spain, Italy… etc… on that list of guesses… but again, with exception of the U.S. (which lands in 8th place), none of the others even make the top 10. In fact, with only Spain at number 18, none of the others make the top 20.

The list of the top three countries with the highest case counts on a per-capita basis are: Andorra, Gibraltar and Montenegro.

Wait, you say, those places are barely populated and that skews the numbers. That is correct. Andorra, top of the list, scores 128,000 per million of population who’ve tested positive. Close to 13% of the population. That’d be like Canada having close to 5 million cases (we’re at less than a million). But, of course, Andorra only has a population of 77,000. Only 100 people there have died of C19. Gibraltar has a population of 34,000. Same idea… and, for what it’s worth, both of them share a border with Spain, where, no doubt, all of their cases came from.

So what, you may be asking….

If you look at Europe as a sort of big country, and each individual country as a province, then some issues relevant to Canada come to light.

Like, with respect to vaccinations, guess where in this country we have the highest per-capita vaccination rates. Now you know it’s a bit of a trick question, so perhaps it’s harder to fool you… so if your guesses included places like the three northern territories, you’re correct. By far.

Vaccination rates for a few key provinces…

B.C.: 2.5%
Ontario: 2.2%
Quebec: 2.8%

Vaccination rates for the territories:
Northwest: 21.0%
Nunavut: 13.5%
Yukon: 15.4%

Some say that’s fair. Some say they should be distributing it more evenly. Some say more should be directed to the hotspots. And everyone is a little perturbed with last week’s news… at the start of the week, we heard how we were not getting what we were expecting from Pfizer… and at the end of the week, we heard how we were not getting what we were expecting from Moderna. Too bad. C’est dommage.

At what point could we conceivably start counting on ourselves for some vaccine? Some homegrown, domestically produced vaccine where we would be first in line?

The only viable possibility would indeed be home-“grown”, and that is Quebec-based Medicago’s tobacco-plant-based vaccine which recently wrapped up phase-2 clinical trials and is about to enter phase 3, involving 30,000 people in 11 countries. For what it’s worth, it’s off to a great start… 100% of people who received the vaccine developed significant antibody responses with no severe side effects. Like Moderna and Pfizer, this one also targets the spike protein, so there’s no real actual virus involved and therefore zero chance on getting sick with C19 from the vaccine. Side-effects – nothing bad so far, and we shall see what phase 3 reveals.

Unfortunately, the earliest we could hope to see this vaccine available to the public would be the second half of the year… but, certainly the government’s order of 76 million doses (and all the money that came with it) is helping push things along. But also, unfortunately, although they’ve been trying to get funding for years, we still don’t have the manufacturing capabilities in place. Medicago reps met with government officials no less than 24 times from 2017 to 2020 trying to find a way to fund the construction of just such a facility. The funding finally came through… in March of last year, when the “Oh shit” moment arrived. At least we’ll be all set for the next pandemic.

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By |2021-01-30T17:04:17-08:00January 30th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |3 Comments
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January 29, 2021

There’s an age-old question… would you rather fight a horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?

OK, it’s not an age-old question. It actually materialized in 2003, in a UK newspaper, but really rose to prominence in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread in 2012… where it was a question posed to president Barack Obama. Obama never got around to answering it, but the question wound up on “the crawl” on TV, and the rest is history. Here are my thoughts…

While a 1,000 pound duck would be formidable indeed, it’s one single enemy… and a coordinated, well-timed attack is all you’d need to neutralize it. On the flipside, I know horses… and I can tell you, dealing with a single angry horse is a handful; a potentially dangerous one… and 100 angry little horses would step on you, kick and bite you relentlessly, and not give up… so yeah, I’ll try my luck against the big duck.

Speaking of Reddit, and fights between one big thing vs. lots of little things… you’ve probably recently heard the words GameStop and AMC and short squeeze and hedge funds…

In a nutshell, here’s what’s going on:

The opposite of the well-known game-plan of buying a stock when you think it’s going to go up, holding it, and then selling it for a profit… is what’s called “shorting” the stock… and it’s what you do when you think a certain stock is over-priced. What you do is borrow the shares from “someone”, sell them… and then wait till the price goes down… and then buy it back at the lower price. Then you return the shares you borrowed and pocket the difference.

Huge (multi-billion-dollar) hedge funds like to short stocks here and there… for varying reasons. Given that their mandate is to hedge risk (it’s in the name…), part of that might be to take positions that go contrary to upward market movements… to hedge the risk in case the opposite happens. But also, using the same analytics and metrics they’d use to picks stocks they think will go up, they do it in the opposite direction.

Arguments can be made about the ethics behind shorting stocks to begin with; you’re basically betting and hoping that a company will do poorly. It goes against a lot of principles, like… well, you can’t sell a house or a car or anything else without actually owning it… why is this different? Because, at least for the moment, the people who run the exchanges say it’s ok. It doesn’t go against the principle of making money… therefore, as long as capitalism exists, so will short-selling.

One thing about buying shares and being wrong… the worst thing that can happen is you lose what you put into it. I buy 10 shares of ACME at $100 each and ACME goes bust and the shares become worthless… I’m out $1,000. But if I short 10 shares at $100 and it goes up to $200… well, I need to come up with $2,000 worth of ACME shares to give back to whoever lent them to me… and it means buying them back from the open market. I have the original $1,000 I made from the sale, but now I have to come up with $1,000 out of my own pocket to cover it. And if ACME went up to $900 a share, now I’m out $8,000 of my own money… and here’s a big problem. Zero is the limit on the way down, but there’s no limit on the way up… and what do I do when I see the price crawling upwards…?

There are two options. One is… cut my losses… buy it back at the higher price, give back the shares, and pour a glass of my finest single-malt scotch, while pondering recent life decisions. Or… double-down. Sell more. If I thought selling it at $100 was a good idea, then selling it at $200 must be a better idea… and now, when it goes down, I’ll make even more. Great plan if it actually goes down… but what if it keeps going up? And now everyone who’s short is buying back in, further lifting the price and causing more panic… this is what’s called short-squeeze, and it’s what sends stock prices soaring very quickly. But here’s an additional wrinkle…

Technically, when you short a stock, you would be borrowing the shares to do so. The brokerage house facilitates that for you (and takes a fee, of course). However, these brokerage houses play a little loosey-goosey with that… not too different from the banks, I suppose, in that if everyone suddenly ran to BMO and demanded all their money, there simply wouldn’t be enough to cover it. They’re counting on not everyone needing all of it all at once.

At the moment, something like 150% of GameStop shares are short. In other words, more shares of GameStop have been sold than actually exist. So… when the people who actually own shares, or own call options (which give them the right to purchase shares at a specified price) suddenly say “Hey, I’d like my shares now” – those shares are nowhere to be found. Frantic buyers who need to come up with them will just keep driving the price higher and higher.

An army of Redditors (from /r/WallStreetBets) decided months ago that if enough people bought up certain heavily-shorted stocks and/or call options (GameStop, AMC and some others) and then promised to hold them, it would drive up prices significantly. One of their targets, GameStop, was being shorted incessantly by a huge $13-billion hedge fund called Melvin Capital.

Shares in GameStop were below $3 last year… and not long ago (early November) were trading at around $10 a share. Then, the Reddit army started buying it up, feeding into the Melvin shorts. The prices started going up… and up…. and more up. And Melvin, instead of covering their losses and taking a bit of a hit… sold more, where it was quickly gobbled up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This morning, GameStop shares opened at $380. They went as low as $250 and as high as $414 before closing out the week at $325. And there are still a colossal amount of open shorts that will need to cover eventually.

A lot of these stock-dabbling Redditors, swearing to hold it till the cows come home, have made thousands of dollars. Some have made millions. Melvin Capital has lost $5 billion. And it’s not over yet.

Let’s rephrase the original question… and remove the human… who would win the fight, one big duck or an army of little horses?

Perhaps I’m a little biased because I’ve been betting horses all my life, but this is no different… and it’s not 100 of them; it’s literally millions. The big old-school Wall-Street Scrooge McDuck might not have that huge pit of money to swim around in much longer.

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By |2021-01-29T17:03:03-08:00January 29th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics|Tags: , , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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January 28, 2021

There’s a lot of vaccine news these days… perhaps too much to accurately convey in a short space… but I’ll take a jab at it…

Like in the Seinfeld episode where they’re arguing about the rental car… it’s easy to book a reservation. Having it honoured is a whole different thing. At present, although Canada is at the top of the list with respect to reserving (“procuring”) vaccine, we’re 20th on the list for vaccinations per million, and that number is going to drop further… because every time there’s going to be a delay in deliveries, it seems like we’re part of it. We’ve “reserved” 10 doses per person, more than any other country… but we’re not getting the stuff. It’s clearly understood that there’s a world-wide demand, and everyone wants as much as they can get, as quickly as they can get it… but it’s not difficult to see what this would look like if the countries were personified into a crowded pub where everyone wants a drink, and is storming the bar, much to the concern of the two bartenders who are feeling totally overwhelmed.

Some countries would be pushing their way to the front, shoving others out of the way… “Hey, gimme two hundred million vodka sodas!” – while Canada would be standing near the back wall, timidly raising its hand… “Umm… excuse me… umm… sorry, could I get… oh, sorry, no, you go ahead… yes, of course… sorry.” So… we politely standby while everyone else gets served.

We’re told it’s just a little bump in the road… we’re told we’ll effectively get it all at the pace we were promised, just not at the rate we thought. Try to parse some sense into that… implying we’ll hit the finish line when we were promised, just not at the speed we need to get there.

Or… throw all that away, because there’s a report today that completely contradicts PM Trudeau’s promise that most of us will be vaccinated by September. The report claims it’ll be “well into 2022” before most Canadians get their shot… and that’s because countries like the U.S., the U.K. and all of the E.U. come first. Maybe you need a “U” in your name to get attention. Hey, Canaduh would like a drink.

It’s interesting how that report paints us as a bit “behind” those aforementioned countries… where we’re in a secondary bracket, along with Australia and Japan.

Pfizer, trying to capitalize on our politeness, has gently suggested that since we’ve intelligently managed to extract 6 doses out of each vial instead of 5, how about they just label each vial with a 6 instead of a 5, and that way, we…

… oh, you thought I was going to say, “that way we get more doses.” – but no. Actually, that way, Pfizer can just send us less vials and still deliver the same number of doses they promised. Canada is balking at that, but of course… we’ll eventually cave, because it’s the polite thing to do. But if you’re wondering where the 3.5M doses we’re getting vs. the 4M that were promised comes from, it’s that.

In the meantime, the E.U. is trying block exports of E.U. produced vaccines, namely the UK-based AstraZeneca vaccine which they want ahead of anyone else. Of course, the U.K themselves want it ahead of everyone, even the E.U…. and contracts be damned. Visions of a bar-fight, as everyone jockeys for position, and to hell with everyone else.

What are we going to do? Sue? Years of litigation when all we really want is the vaccine that we contractually bound ourselves to purchase?

We have no leverage here. We will take what we can get, or what… we will pout and we will be disappointed, yet somehow, we’ll still be apologizing. And, no matter what, we will be patiently waiting.

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By |2021-01-28T17:03:59-08:00January 28th, 2021|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Science of COVID-19|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |7 Comments
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