It really does seem like this thing can strike random people and kill them, but for the most part it's just the super old sick ones that have any actual charitable risk.

An acquaintance of mine was on Facebook saying "Covid isn't that risky, it'll be all right." Three weeks later, D-E-A-D.

I think something that the media should be ashamed of is how they're glossing over the risk factors. Every time I hear news about Covid (and that's basically all they report on now) the news is always that "it could kill ANYONE."

But this isn't accurate. There are very specific thinks that put you at risk. A few examples:

• Simply being old. The median age of death from Covid is 80 years old.

• The acquaintance of mine, who died, was on immunosupressive drugs.

That last one, it's been getting barely and press at all. For instance, there was a recent case where a gay bodybuilder had beat Covid. And they showed his "before" and "after" pics, and it looked like he'd deflated like a baloon.

Here's the thing : I know lots of gay guys and nearly 100% of them are HIV positive. And guess what happens when you're HIV+? That's right, you go on immunosuppressive drugs. The mainstream media didn't make a peep about the HIV status of the gay bodybuilder who nearly died, but I'm willing to bet it's HIV+

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/nurses-before-and-after-covid-19-photos-show-effects-of-weeks-on-ventilator/507-31394766-bbf4-432e-83fb-7101991e5115

I drove sixty miles in California on Saturday. Saw three Trump signs. Not one Biden sign.

Back in 2016, my first inkling that Trump might actually win, was that I easily saw a hundred Trump signs in Oregon.

This week was the first time I've ever seen a Trump sign in CA. I've seen one MAGA hat in California, in the last four years.

I know a dude who's college educated, has been in the workforce for 20 years, he writes books. And one day, we got into an argument about supply and demand.

It was so bizarre; he was literally arguing that supply and demand does not exist.

There's a full on Communist in Seattle government who's been aggressively trying to pass an Amazon Tax, and AOC basically nuked Amazon's plans for HQ2.

We're seeing Amazon and Tesla getting redpilled. Keep in mind, both of these CEOs have only been doing this for 25 years. It's starting to dawn on them that the Democrat party doesn't have their best interests in mind.

Keep in mind, inflation is a tax.

For instance, the U.S. Treasury just borrowed three trillion dollars. That's $12,093 for every tax payer, on top of the $180K that every tax payer owed already.

The U.S. Government can't raise taxes enough to squeeze us for that $192K. So instead, they just keep borrowing more money.

This is a big part of the reason that a house in 1970 cost $15K and a house in 2020 costs $500K. The government has been unable to raise taxes enough to pay for their spending, so instead they just borrow the money. But borrowing the money makes the currency worth LESS.

TLDR: Inflation is a tax.

Here's something else, that you might consider:

I do I.T. consulting, and in this job, we use a lot of "canned material." For instance, if a customers comes to use and says they need something, we will often re-use something that we've already created. In many of those cases, it's something that another customer paid for! Part of the gig is just building up a giant library of content.

In July of 2016, the I.T. consulting firm Crowdstrike declared that they'd concluded that Russia had hacked Hilary Clinton's emails. https://www.wired.com/2016/07/heres-know-russia-dnc-hack/

To me, the thing that was interesting about this, was how quickly Crowdstrike produced the report. The investigation was done by one person, and he produced a document that was something like 100 pages long, and then he quit the company a few months later.

The speed at which he created the report really sets off some red flags for me.

To me, "Occam's Razor" is that the DNC hired Crowdstrike, and the conclusion was foregone.

For instance, if a wife was going to accuse her husband of cheating, and she needed a private investigator to prove it, it's in her vested interest to hire someone that will deliver exactly what she was looking for... whether it was true or not.

This is particularly interesting, when you consider that Crowdstrike itself went on the record and said there was no proof that Russia hacked the emails. Crowdstrike said this in 2017, but the proof was only revealed a few weeks ago, due to these lawsuits.

With that information in hand, you can see how the DNC was creating a story that pointed at Russia months before the election. When the FBI referred to an "insurance policy" against Trump, the Crowdstrike investigation sure seems to be a big part of that.

If I connected the dots correctly, it really indicates that this was a well orchestrated setup that stretched back long before the 2016 election.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/crowdstrike-had-no-evidence-russians-stealing-emails-dnc-declassified-transcript-shows

Yes. And I think that China's current situation is a great example of that. China is spending money like a drunken sailor. Which is reasonable if there's a huge demand for what they're spending money on.

But in a lot of cases, it's not.

For instance, China is currently building a bridge in Croatia, to the tune of millions of dollars, which replaces a stretch of road that's perfectly usable. They've also spent billions on empty shopping malls and empty cities.

I'm in California, and even though weed is legal, 80% of the weed shops are illegal.

IE, weed sellers figured out that they can open up a Speakeasy and there's zero effort to close them down. This leads to a whole slew of moral hazards:

1. It means that the business is unregulated and untaxed. This is similar to another problem that California has, which is that a Taco Truck can park itself in front of your restaurant and take half of your busines, while paying zero in rent and possibly not paying taxes.

2. Sooner or later the illegal weed shops will realize that there's no disincentive from selling meth or coke or even heroin. Basically if you're already running an illegal business, what's stopping you from branching out? This is a big part of the reason that strip clubs in California are so tame; the clubs are licensed and tightly regulated, which discourages them from doing anything illegal. I find it awfully suspicious that California will shut down your bar or nightclub immediately if there's nudity and it's unlicensed, but it turns a blind eye to illega weed shops. It makes me wonder if the Mexican cartels are buying off California politicians.

3. The current state of affairs will lead to legal weed shops going out of business.

Lobbyists.

If anyone is wondering why the quarantine is stretching on forever, I can demonstrate that we are currently engaged in another corporate bailout. This one is similar to what we went through in 2008, but this time around, it's a broad-based bailout of nearly all of Corporate America.

Here is the evidence:

From 1980 until 2018, U.S. corporations have had the luxury of refinancing their debt whenever they were unable to pay it. If any of you have a friend or relative who can't afford their home, but who stays in their home by repeatedly refinancing the home, it's the exact same idea.

JC Penney is an excellent example of the phenomenon that I describe. Have you ever wondered how this company stays afloat, when nobody shops there? The answer is : borrowed money. JC Penney borrows money for terms as long as one hundred years and at rates of around 7.625%. (proof: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jcpenney-bonds-insight/insight-jcpenneys-100-year-bonds-swoon-amid-retailers-turmoil-idUSBRE97D04320130814)

So when you look at that, you can see that this is an issue. Imagine if your home mortgage was 100 years long at a rate of 7.625%? That wouldn't be good, right? Hold that thought.

The next part of the puzzle, and the piece that plays an enormous part in our current state of affairs, is that corporations have had the ability to refinance their debt, over and over and over and over, for 38 straight years. They could literally pile up on debt, and when it became unbearable, they'd just borrow more, at a lower rate, to pay off the old. That changed in 2015, and that lit the fuse on a corporate crisis of epic proportions.

Here's a graph of interest rates over the last 40 years. This is probably the most important part of this post; what we're suffering through right now, it is all about interest rates : https://fm-static.cnbc.com/awsmedia/chart/2019/6/30/export-0xXhZ.1564494597901.png?

In particular, note how rates when down continuously for 35 years, and then ramped up in 2015. Also note how everytime that rates have ticked up, over the last 35 years, it's been followed by a recession. In particular in 1998 and 2005. Like clockwork, when the Fed raises rates, the economy buckles.

To give you some insight of how bad it is, for these well known names, Ford Motor Company has so much debt, it would be the equivalent of you having $1,500,000 in debt while making just $50,000 in income per year. And when you look at that number, you probably realize that if you were basically eating ramen for every last meal, you could probably just barely keep your head above water with that debt, and that's the case with Ford. And the problem is systemic; something like 30% of U.S. Corporations are suffering through this sad state of affairs.

In the span of four months in 2020, The United States Treasury has borrowed three trillion dollars. (http://archive.is/pLXU4) There are 143.3 million taxpayers in the US. If we do the math, we see that each U.S. taxpayer has been burdened with $20,935 in new debt, just in the last three months.

If you do that math, you may conclude that it's quite unfair to U.S. taxpayers: a fraction of U.S. workers are getting checks for $1200, while all U.S. taxpayers are 'on the hook' for $20,935 in new debt. And this NEW debt is in addition to the $180,000 in debt that U.S. taxpayers were already burdened with.

If you've made it this far in my boring post, your head probably hurts. Buckle up, it's about to get a LOT more complex:

If the United States wanted to bail out corporations, the easiest way to do it would be to simply write them a check. But if the U.S. did that, the voters would riot. Imagine if the United States handed JC Penney a check for $500M.

Instead, the U.S. is achieving this "shadow bailout" in a far more subtle way: The United States is driving down interest rates.

By driving down interest rates, the United States is giving companies like Ford, JC Penney, and Fiat some "breathing room." The U.S. is giving them another opportunity for them to refinance their debt.

Everything that I've typed above, it's 100% verifiable. You can look up the bond rates for Ford, you can look up how much money the U.S. Treasury is borrowing. The previous points are facts, not speculation.

This next part is speculation:

I think it's possible that the quarantine is dragging on for three reasons, all of them financial:

1. The more that the Treasury borrows, the lower that interest rates go. There is a very real possibility that borrowing rates will go NEGATIVE. Yes, you read that right: we may reach a point where people will PAY corporations to lend them money. For instance, Apple Computer is in spectacularly good shape, financially. Apple may reach a point where investors will pay Apple to take their money! This is a consequence of the recession; when investors can see that inflation is going to hit, in five or ten years, they may pay a strong company like Apple to hold their money when there's nowhere else to put it. This is also why banks have been paying as little as 0.25% on deposits for about the last decade.

2. Big companies like Lowes and Home Depot benefit when small businesses are bankrupted. For instance, in the Portland neighborhood where I used to live, the nearest hardware store was an Ace Hardware, much smaller than Home Depot. The quarantine is impacting small businesses much more than large.

3. High unemployment is terrible for workers, and great for corporations. For instance, I know a number of people who have been furloughed from their jobs, who took jobs at Amazon's warehouse. These are people in their 40s and 50s who'd been working in their chose field for 20-30 years, and without any work to do, have been forced to work in a warehouse out of economic necessity. This is fantastic for Amazon, because Amazon has a never-ending need for labor. To give you an idea of how big Amazon is, they have 575700 employees now. That's three times larger than Ford Motor Company.

This has been a long boring technical post. Here's a summary:

• The United States response to the Covid pandemic has been good for large corporations. This is because it's pushed interest rates down to all-time-lows. This enables heavily indebted companies to refinance their debt. Without this, many US Companies were in danger of failing. This was a paradox of the very high DJIA that we had in 2018 and 2019: when the stock market is at an all time high, investors are wary of buying bonds, and that made life very VERY difficult for companies like JC Penney and Ford. Covid has reversed all of that.

• Citizens of the United States are being appeased with crumbs, such as $1200 stimulus checks, but the U.S. has borrowed the equivalent of $20,935 for every single taxpayer.

• As the quarantine grinds on, unemployment will rise and small businesses will fail. Both of these things are very VERY good for large corporations. It eliminates competition and lowers their cost of doing business.

This is arguably the biggest corporate bailout that the world has ever seen. It absolutely dwarfs the 2008 bailout in scale.

Sanders was opposed to open borders.

I think socialism is stupid, but I'll give Sanders credit for understanding that you can't have open borders and ALSO give people free shit.

He changed his tune on that in 2020.

but there is no way to regulate Marxism beyond the family level so that it works.

I've always thought this too. And I'm a bit surprised it doesn't come up in discussions more.

According to Price's Law, the square root of a group will do the the majority of the work. For instance, I live in a household of four people. My wife and I do most of the work.

In a small company of a hundred people, ten of the people will do most of the work. I saw this in my last company: there were about ten people who were making the big sales, making a name for the company, the glue that held everyone else together. This is why the loss of one or two great employees can be devastating for a small company, but isn't even a "blip" at a huge company. And it's why the number one talent of someone in a small company is the ability to amplify the productivity of the people around them.

Marxism breaks down because of Price's Law. For instance, in a country of 5.8 million, like Denmark, 2410 people will be doing most of the work. That's 0.04% of their population. Or to put it another way, one out of 2406 people in Denmark will be producing most of Denmark's output. Denmark is probably about the limit where Marxist policies can work.

But in the United States, with 328 million people, 18,116 people will be doing most of the work. That's 0.005% of the population. Or to put it another way, one out of 18,105 people will be producing most of the USA's output. And that's why Marxism is unsustainable in a place the size of the US: 18,116 people can't generate enough money to pay for all the rest. If the US was broken down into Denmark-sized pieces, some socialist policies might be tenable. But it would only be possible if you set up large barriers to entry, so that people couldn't just migrate to whoever had the most optimum policies.

Bernie Sanders certainly understood this: you can combine Marxism and open borders. Marxism fundamentally works only in small sets of people, with high barriers to entry. Sanders probably figured this out when living on a commune.

Can anyone explain to me the insane push to convict him?

Clearly there was an effort to convict anyone in Trump's circle on anything they could come up with. They certainly assumed that if they threatened enough people, somebody would either:

1. make up some shit to throw Trump under the bus

2. or someone would have some legitimate dirt on Trump

Neither happened.

Ah, that makes sense.

I think he is going to live to regret going forward with his “hey stupid slaves take my vaccine or stay inside forever” program.

I've noticed that a bunch of tech billionaires are trying to save the world, by any means necessary:

2. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to get man onto other planets, fearing that earthlings will eventually blow up their homeworld.

3. Pure speculation on my part, but if you couldn't get man onto other planets, another way to solve the problem would be to coerce people into NOT using fossil fuels. IE, the pandemic has nearly halted oil usage.

Buys a $43M beachfront home with lots of sunshine to keep immunity strong.

Oddly enough, it does seem to be one of the safest spots in California. Los Angeles' death rate is something like 10X higher than San Diego. My guess is that it's because the density is much lower, and it's a wealthy area where a lot of people can afford NOT to work. Compared to L.A. where people are packed tighter and don't have the luxury of taking three months off work to sit around and do nothing.

Here's a pic of the beach that the house is on: https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/12/46/5f/6f/del-mar-beach-from-above.jpg

I live a few miles away, I've been down the street a dozen times. The house sits about five feet above sea level. There's a handful of restaunts on the same street, and a public beach and a public parking lot.

Oddly enough, he has zero parking. So I'm guessing he'll probably buy another place nearby. He paid something like 30% over the asking price, so I have a hunch that this won't be the last place he buys on this street.

Gates has lived in San Diego for quite a while: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/sdut-jenny-craig-bill-gates-equestrian-horse-microsoft-2014oct08-story.html

Del Mar feels a lot like Kirkland, which is right nearby to where his home is in Washington. (His home in Washington is in Medina.)

You're starting to get it. We are - as we speak - being conditioned into accepting these current circumstances as our life now.

I used to do collections for a bank. To me, the most interesting thing about it was how paying your bills is habitual. IE, if I could convince people to pay something, even a fraction of what they owed, that action maintained a good relationship between the bank and the customer.

If those payments stopped for two months or three months, it was nearly impossible to get them started again.

We see this in so many things in life, there's so much that we do that is simply habit. Things like working out, eating right, smoking, drinking. Even relationships are habitual; all of us have dated someone and seen how being absent for a couple weeks or a month can change the relationship entirely.

Because of this, I wonder how people will respond once the quarantine ends? I have a feeling there will be a lot of people who will struggle to get back to work. Not just due to a lack of jobs, but also a lack of willpower to go back to work.

I think Buttigieg was controlled opposition. Basically some billionaires had him run to 'siphon off' votes from the other candidates, Sanders in particular.

The Democrat party DID NOT want Sanders or Warren to win; their policies would be disastrous for wealthy Democrats.

Due to this, Biden basically won by default.

The Dems would had a better candidate if they'd spent four years grooming a better candidate. But they were too busy trying to impeach Trump.

I've noticed a strong correlation between "people who want socialism" and "people who don't want to work." It's so bizarre; you'd think they'd open a history book at some point. Socialism isn't a society where people sit around at home playing videogames; it's a society where everyone is employed doing something, even if that something is pointless or inappropriate for that person's skillset. As Orwell wrote:

"In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant as long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the elite itself. Even the humblest bureaucrat is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he or she should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph."

We are seeing how tyranny is supported by its own victims and its nuts.

Fascinating, isn't it?

For instance, I work at home doing I.T. stuff. On the Seattle and Portland subs, I've been saying for weeks that the government needs to come up with a plan NOW to get people back to work. Because the west coast has already peaked, and we need a plan to get back to work.

And people just lose their minds.

And the weird part, is that I am largely unaffected: I was already working from home. But there are people who are straight-up unemployed who are clamoring for months or even years of lockdown.

The fact that Pelosi even considered that publicly, is treasonous.

As much as it enrages me that they keep doubling down on the same failed bullshit, you are 100% right.

I live on the border and there's a tremendous amount of people who go back and forth. It's wild.

I'd be willing to bet that about 10-15% of the unskilled jobs in the city are done by people who live in Mexico.