1/ Covid rules, beliefs, and passions are a 21st century religion, with orthodoxy, heretics, and apologists.
Religion once incorporated “all answers to the unknown.” Why does the sun rise? Where did we come from? What is right and wrong? What happens when we die?
2/ Then came science, which is about falsifiable, testable, reproducible hypotheses. “I like the color blue” isn’t falsifiable/testable, nor are questions of morality. “The earth rotates due to preservation of angular momentum” is. So is “the earth is flat” (it was falsified).
3/ “You can’t sit on a park bench” or “You can’t eat inside unless it’s at an airport” isn’t science without *setting and testing a hypothesis.* It’s an insult to science. Some follow these rules blindly. Some fight them blindly. Some make them blindly. It’s religion.
4/ America is a land of many religions and levels of observance. It’s remarkable how these psychographic traits manifest in terms of calls for enforcement (“he’s not wearing a mask over his nose! Call the cops!”), calls for denial (“Bill Gates vaccine mind control”) etc
5/ What I find fascinating is how many secular people have embraced orthodox Covid religion, whereas how many very religious people have wholly rejected it. What is the reason?
6/ Conformists and skeptics are but two types — there are also those who craft the laws, those who hypocritically violate while endorsing them, those who pretend to believe out of fear, etc. All this has tons of past precedent through our millennia of experience with religion...
7/ My biggest concern is that when “science” is thrown around without being science, it casts doubt on other things that emerge as part of the actual scientific method. Throw in probability and it gets even worse/easier for people to throw out anything coming from “science”
8/ There ARE a lot of fake claims out there. Vaccines and autism. 5G and cancer. Those on the side of actual science should be offended — and fight hard! — against the bastardization of the term science and “Covid Religion”...because we are heading towards “boy who cried wolf”
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1/ There's been a lot of misinformation about IPOs -- particularly around the narrative of "intentional underpricing" and subsequent IPO pops / "money left on the table." IPOs aren't perfect, but the problem isn't the pop -- a sideshow caused by quirky supply/demand imbalances.
2/ The things to fix are aggregating the most demand, blurring the lines between private and public for a seamless transition to being public, and more thoughtful lockup releases, while also ensuring that a company is sufficiently well capitalized.
3/ Many are celebrating SPACs and Direct Listings, which both have their place as valuable tools, as the "death" of the IPO *because* of a misunderstanding of what causes a pop. A price without a quantity is not a price: block sales happen at a discount, M&A at a premium.
Today is August 15, the 49th anniversary of the de facto end of Bretton Woods, creating the fiat currency world we know today. Bitcoin’s birthday is October 31, 2008, but it has a spiritual secondary birthday of today — the widespread beginning of fiat money.
Until August 15, 1971, dollars were backed by gold at a fixed rate of $35/ounce. The dollar was the world’s reserve currency, and underpinning this reserve was this gold backing. Any foreign government could convert their dollars to gold.
At least, they could *conceptually* convert dollars to gold. In reality, by 1971, the US was “writing checks” (printing dollars) that the gold vaults couldn’t “cash” (or metal!) — a run on the gold, so to speak, would metallurgically bankrupt the vaults.
1/ There’s an opportunity to turn remote education from a weakness to a strength — from a badly rendered “sage on a stage” (constant in education for 100s of years, but *worse* online!) to individualized instruction. To see why, let’s take a trip to 1984 — not Orwell, but Bloom
2/ Prof Benjamin Bloom wrote a seminal work in 1984 showing that individualized instruction lifted outcomes by 2 standard deviations — outperforming 98% of regular students: web.mit.edu/5.95/www/readi…
But he remarked, it was “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale”
3/ But the Internet has solved this problem, conceptually! What we need(ed) was a forcing function to abandon the status quo, which Bloom showed is demonstrably worse than individualized tutoring. We potentially have that in Covid, which has incredibly made the status quo *worse*
1/ MasterCard now showing first year over year *increase* (+1%!) in worldwide volume since the pandemic started. But there’s a major confounding variable: the erosion of cash.
2/ In other words, card volume can grow as overall (all tender type) volume shrinks. This was inevitable but just as the pandemic accelerated e-commerce (see second chart above), it’s also accelerating contactless, mobile payments, and even outright bans on cash (virus❤️ paper?)
3/ In turn, this will accelerate the questions of geopolitical risk on having all commerce go across two US private entities:
”It’s temporary”: there is NOTHING else to do, people stuck in homes, kids cannot be shipped off to school or daycare, therefore MORE work gets done + people always accessible...but upon opening, people will start playing hooky
2/ “It’s permanent”: the tools for WFH are great (think Slack/Zoom), meeting length gets collapsed to the core substance (1 hr -> 30 mins etc), less travel/commute, accountability via more trackability...
3/ For small companies, “it’s permanent” could have a seismic change on their financials given real estate costs as a % of revenues. But IMHO jury still out on productivity gains/losses given unique nature of this forcible SAH (stay at home!), not just WFH, experiment
1/ The government *does* have an agency that can remit money at scale. It may surprise you, but it's called the IRS, who pre-COVID had disbursed 37.5 million refunds *this year* cnbc.com/2020/03/05/her…
2/ PPP is desperately needed, but the process is the least efficient process imaginable. It's like an Easter Egg hunt with the most sinister possible Bunny who hid the eggs. Here's what it looks like, since, unlike your taxes, you don't file with/to the government...
3/ On the Treasury site, you can start looking for eggs...i.e., where to get your loan.