How do we better measure the impact of a disease when it is widely acknowledged that traditional methods of measuring disease mortality are inaccurate?
One tool is "excess death" analysis
This is simply a comparison of current mortality to a historic baseline
Here's an example of excess death analysis
The white line represents the number of deaths per month that we EXPECT, given history
The black line represents the ACTUAL number of deaths each month
THE LOST BOYS was released 36 years ago today. A reinvention of the vampire genre, and an 80s cult classic, the behind the scenes story will have you cursing all the damn vampires…
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In the 1980s, writer James Jeremias read Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire, featuring a 200 year old in the body of a 12 year old girl. A fan of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, Jeremias thought ‘what if the reason Peter could fly and came out at night was that he’s a vampire?’
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Jeremias and his writing partner, Janice Fischer, fleshed the idea out into a screenplay they called The Lost Boys (another Peter Pan reference). Warner Bros were interested and the first-time writers sold their script for $400,000.
Same data set, but with linear trend lines. I use one month into the pandemic as a crossover to allow time for social services to normalize and to eliminate skewed data during the start. Dotted - pre, solid - COVID era.
3 - 4
Now some calculus. The dotted line is the six prior month derivative, the solid one is the six month moving average of the derivative. The distance above the black dotted line is proportional to the increasing rate of claims.
En el Guayaquil de los años 20,donde el calor pegajoso del río se mezclaba con el bullicio de una ciudad que crecía,existía un lugar que todos conocían:la pequeña fonda en las calles Clemente Ballén y Pedro Moncayo.
Justo diagonal a la Plaza Victoria. Allí,un olor embriagador de especias y chancho frito atraía como un imán a ricos y pobres,jóvenes y viejos. Era el aroma del legendario arroz con chancho de Gualberto,un plato tan exquisito que había convertido a su creador en un hombre famoso
Gualberto, un serrano de rostro apuesto y carácter fiestero, había construido un imperio modesto pero próspero. En una época donde el encebollado y el bolón aún no dominaban el paisaje culinario, su fonda era el epicentro del sabor.
Los domingos,las familias que salian a pasear
The problem with Chibber's (and Brenner's) economic history might be summarized as it being a theory of "Capitalism in One Country."
The enclosure of peasants' land to convert to sheep pasture for commodity wool production, for example, was fueled by Italian and Spanish demand.
Italian and Spanish demand, in turn, was fueled by early colonial enterprises. The Italians' trade and marine networks were hugely determined by the advent of the Crusades--to the point where it's hard to imagine the Genoese or Venetians as we understand them in retrospect *without* the Crusades shaping them. Not only did they engage in merchant activities, but provided transport, mercenary, and supply services to the various Crusader armies.
The Crusades also gave the Genoese and Venetians durable access to Eastern Roman and Muslim markets and (more importantly) demand. The Eastern Roman empire was fabulously wealthy compared to the relatively cash-poor Western European states, and that monetized demand allowed Italian merchants to engage in an early M-C-M' capitalist accumulation cycle.
Not only this, but the massive expense and risks inherent in these maritime networks--particularly when providing and outfitting massive Crusading fleets during a major crusade--led to a banking renaissance in the 12th century. The Crusades required financial coordination on a colossal and international scale, driving innovations in insurance, banking, and bookkeeping, which (directly or indirectly) gave rise to modern financial technologies like double-entry bookkeeping, fractional-reserve banking, and specialized risk insurance.
The Crusades' financial and logistical challenges also enhanced processes of state-centralization in places like England, which would be important for the enclosure process and removal of the peasantry from the land that accelerated in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.
But it wasn't just Levantine crusading: there was also the Reconquista in Iberia (with associated, formally-declared Crusades), crusading in the Baltics against pagans, and colonial enterprises in the Balearics as early as the 13th century.
The Northern Crusades in Prussia and the Baltics were crucial in driving North Sea maritime trade into the hands of German trading cities and the formation of the Hanseatic League, which ultimately drove commercialization as far as London and Amsterdam. Do you get the Dutch East India Company--the world's first joint-stock company--or the Amsterdam Stock Exchange without the Northern Crusades ~400 years earlier? Probably not!
Colonial enterprises in the Mediterranean led to the first cash-crop sugar plantations west of the Indus River--established by the Venetians as a direct result of lands acquired through Crusade. In the 12th century! Long before English or Dutch capitalism!
Commercial plantation agriculture spread throughout the Mediterranean islands as Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese merchants and nobles conquered Muslim island polities, before expanding into the Atlantic with the conquest of Madeira and the Canary Islands. All of which was carried out with the social, political, technological, and financial innovations first pioneered through the Levantine Crusades.
England and the Netherlands, in other words, did not develop capitalism sui generis, as a mechanistic consequence of the Black Death or whatever else. Indeed, Chibber's argument that the presence of colonial plunder in Spain and Portugal disproves the particularity of an English/Dutch capitalist origin is the same problem with his theory of high labor costs and low rents after the Black Death resulting in English capitalism--the labor shortage was continent-wide, and so were the rising wages for laborers. Why England, and not France, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany?
Of course, the real answer is that capitalism does not have an English or Dutch origin, but was a complex, international economic development that spanned centuries and the entirety of Western and Central Europe, plus parts of Eastern Europe, Anatolia, the Black Sea, and the Levant. It gestated in network-nodes like Lubeck and Venice, Amsterdam and Genoa, Tyre and Florence, as people gradually worked out the necessary financial, political, military, legal, and other technologies that could make such a system possible at national scales.
Finally, even with all of this, who knows if it would've stuck in places like England if not for the massive influx of international demand for commodity goods (like English wool) directly consequent to the massive expansion of colonialism via Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonial projects, plus the huge opportunity for profitable investment in colonial ventures! That second part is important; it's not just that colonialism brought back silver and spices, but that it provided investment opportunity.
Chibber is correct here; feudal economies had money--which is to say, they had demand, which money simply tokenizes. The bigger problem preventing the development of capitalism was the lack of profitable investment opportunities. This was an incredibly difficult, colossal barrier to the development of capital.
European colonial projects--properly dated to an origin in 1096, not 1492--were essential in overcoming this problem, by providing huge coordinated pools of demand for commodity goods (food, metals, weapons, horses, etc), transport, mercenaries, and logistical demand for banking and insurance. They deepened international economic relationships profoundly, and acquired new lands where the old order of the previous occupants could be obliterated and replaced with new commercial ventures; enclosure wasn't a problem for Venetian merchants setting up sugar plantations around Tyre, because the old relationships of the people to the land were invalidated (in their eyes) by violent expropriation and by the Otherness of the people so expropriated.
The Crusader states, the Balearics, Crete, the new Prussian and Baltic cities that joined the Hanseatic League, these were all commercial zones made possible by Crusade. The opening of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to colonialism--effectively, a new kind of Crusade, which relied on similar religious justifications and political technologies, as well as the material and financial technologies honed through Crusade--provided an explosion of investment opportunity as profitable venture after profitable venture brought back slaves, silver, and spices to Europe.
So, no, capitalism didn't develop consequent to colonialism in the manner of the strawman argument Chibber provides, where Mexican silver magically transformed the relations of production. But the relations of production were transformed by the practices and technologies and investments of colonialism.
Another way of saying this is that Chibber is correct when he asserts that feudal people tried to avoid and constrain markets. Indeed, peasants everywhere have always distained markets for their risk, and preferred land for its security.
And without robust markets, you can't turn a profit, which means you don't have investment opportunity. So Chibber is also correct when he says that this meant, during feudalism, the rich landlords invested their money in warfare, which was the most reliable way to turn wealth and power into more wealth and more power. The rudimentary, feudal M-C-M' cycle, but where C is just...violence.
But where he fails is in explaining how feudal Europe emerged from this trap: how, exactly, did investment in commerce displace investment in violence as a profit-center? As it happens, the answer is: it didn't. The two were intimately commingled for the entirety of capitalism's prodromal stage beginning in the 11th and 12th century, all the way through the height of mercantilism and then laissez-faire, and even well into the 20th century.
But, crucially, in the earliest stages, investment opportunities were developed almost exclusively through colonial violence, where unwanted (and generally unequal, and unfree) commercial relationships could be imposed on a conquered, colonized populace. Again, you didn't need to worry about the politics of enclosure--or seigneurie, or whatever--in Mallorca or Madeira or Antioch or Rostock, because the proto-bourgeoisie was setting up shop anew, on its own terms, not competing with the political power of landlords and peasants. They had to go outside the European feudal system to find new places that could be brought to heel, and where they could hone both their technologies of violence and of finance.
It is instructive that the Venetians, Genoese, etc, did not become financial sophisticates and early nodes in a capitalist international network by investing at home, but by investing in violence abroad. Eventually investments came home, yes, but only after this emerging merchant class had built sufficient political, financial, and military power to impose a new order.
England and the Netherlands are certainly notable for bringing the logic of a capitalist investment cycle to domestic agriculture earlier than other European states, and they did become wealthier by it. But it was something they brought to domestic agriculture; it was not invented there. It had already been honed for centuries in Mediterranean and North Sea colonial networks.
Before the English brought capitalist logic to bear on the peasantry--and simultaneous to that process, and for long after it was completed--they were investing abroad in networks of conquest, which were totally necessary to empower the emerging bourgeoisie such that they could remake the relations of production.
Also, in general, historiography has been (rightly) moving away from nationally-isolated, arbitrarily-periodized theories like Brenner's of a sui generis English capitalism. It's old-man history, fettered by the nationalist, 19th century biases from the discipline's origins
The results if voting red versus the results of voting blue.
States with highest Murder Rates
🔴 Louisiana : 16.8
🔴 Mississippi : 15.4
🔴 Alabama : 12.2
🔴 Missouri : 11.8
🔴 South Carolina : 10.5
States with the lowest Murder Rates
🔴 Utah : 2.2
🔵 Rhode Island : 2.0
🔵 Maine : 1.7
🔵 Vermont : 1.5
🔵 New Hampshire : 1.1
Bottom 5 public school systems (based on test scores)
🔴 Alaska
🔴 Louisiana
🔴 Arizona
🔴 Oklahoma
🔵 New Mexico
Top 5 public school systems (based on test scores)
🔵 New Jersey
🔵 Massachusetts
🔵 Connecticut
🔵 Vermont
🔵 Minnesota
States with the lowest life expectancy in years
🔴 Mississippi : 70.9
🔴 West Virginia 71.0
🔴 Alabama 72.0
🔴 Louisiana 72.2
🔴 Kentucky 73.5
States with the longest life expectancy in years
🔵 Hawaii : 79.9
🔵 Massachusetts : 79.6
🔵 Connecticut : 79.2
🔵 New Jersey : 79.0
🔵 New York : 79
States with the highest infant mortality rates
🔴 Mississippi : 9.11
🔴 Arkansas : 8.59
🔵 Delaware : 8.07
🔴 Lousiana 7.65
🔴 West Virginia : 7.47
States with the lowest infant mortality rates
🔴 North Dakota: 3.29
🔵 Massachusetts : 3.31
🔵 New Jersey : 3.61
🔵 New Hampshire : 3.66
🔵 California : 3.95
States most reliant on the federal government (per dollar)
🔴 Alaska : $2.36 per $1 in taxes paid
🔴 Kentucky: $3.35 per $1 in taxes paid
🔴 West Virginia : $2.72 per $1 in taxes paid
🔴 Mississippi : $2.34 per $1 in taxes paid
🔴 South Carolina : $3.42 per $1 in taxes paid
States least reliant on the federal government (per dollar)
🔵 New Jersey : $0.35 per $1 in taxes paid
🔵 California : $0.50 per $1 in taxes paid
🔵 Minnesota : $0.58 per $1 in taxes paid
🔵 Massachusetts : $0.41 per $1 in taxes paid
🔵 Illinois : $0.60 per $1 in taxes paid
States with the most domestic violence arrests
🔴 Nevada
🔴 Oklahoma
🔴 Missouri
🔴 Kentucky
🔴 Florida
States with the lowest domestic violence arrests per capita
🔴 North Dakota
🔵 New York
🔵 Rhode Island
🔵 Vermont
🔵 Massachusetts
Lowest GDP per capita
🔴 Mississippi : $53,061
🔴 Arkansas $60,276
🔴 West Virginia $60,783
🔴 South Carolina $61,616
🔴 Alabama $65,889
Highest GDP per capita
🔵 New York : $117,332
🔵 Massachusetts : $110,551
🔵 Washington : $108,468
🔵 California : $104,481
🔵 Connecticut : $99,035
States with the highest incarceration rates
🔴 Louisiana : 775
🔴 Mississippi : 717
🔴 Arkansas : 614
🔴 Oklahoma : 598
🔴 Texas : 563
States with the lowest incarceration rates
🔵 Massachusetts : 116
🔵 Maine : 130
🔵 Rhode Island : 152
🔵 Vermont : 153
🔵 New Hampshire : 165
States with the highest obesity rates
🔴 West Virginia : 41.2%
🔴 Mississippi : 40.1%
🔴 Arkansas : 40.0%
🔴 Lousiana : 39.9%
🔴 Alabama : 39.3%
States with the lowest obesity rates
🔵 District of Columbia : 23.5%
🔵 Colorado : 24.9%
🔵 Hawaii : 26.1%
🔵 Massachusetts : 27.4%
🔵 California : 27.4%
States with the worst public transportation:
🔴 Mississippi
🔴 Nebraska
🔴 Wyoming
🔴 North Dakota
🔴 Alaska
States with the best public transportation
🔵 New York
🔵 Massachusetts
🔵 Washington
🔵 New Jersey
🔵 Illinois
States with the lowest college graduation rates
🔵 New Mexico
🔴 Nevada
🔴 Idaho
🔴 Oklahoma
🔴 Alaska
States with the highest college graduation rates
🔵 Massachusetts
🔵 New Jersey
🔵 Connecticut
🔵 New Hampshire
🔴 Virginia
States with the highest sex crime rate
🔴 Alaska : 118.4 per 100k
🔴 South Dakota : 72.6 per 100k
🔴 Nevada : 70.2 per 100k
🔴 Arkansas : 52.0 per 100k
🔵 Michigan 72.4 per 100k
States with the lowest sex crime rate
🔵 New Jersey : 15.1 per 100k
🔵 Connecticut: 18.2 per 100k
🔵 New Hampshire : 19 per 100k
🔵 Maine : 21.3 per 100k
🔵 New York : 22.7
States with the most teen pregnancy
🔴 Mississippi : 26.4
🔴 Arkansas : 24.5
🔴 Louisiana : 23.8
🔴 Oklahoma : 22.9
🔴 Alabama : 22.0
States with the lowest amount of teen pregnancy
🔵 Massachusetts : 6.1
🔵 New Hampshire : 6.6
🔵 Connecticut : 7.6
🔵 Vermont : 7.8
🔵 New Jersey : 8.3
BUT WAIT! Theres more!
States with the highest suicide rates
🔴 Alaska : 28.15
🔴 Montana : 26.65
🔴 Wyoming : 26.31
🔴 Idaho : 23.28
🔵 New Mexico : 22.76
States with the lowest suicide rates
🔵 New Jersey : 7.7
🔵 New York : 7.9
🔵 Massachusetts : 8.0
🔵 Maryland : 8.5
🔵 California : 10.5
States with the worst healthcare
🔴 Mississippi
🔴 West Virginia
🔴 Arkansas
🔴 Louisiana
🔴 Oklahoma
States with the best health care
🔵 Connecticut
🔵 Massachusetts
🔵 Rhode Island
🔵 Hawaii
🔵 New Jersey
It's the largest and most profitable health insurer in the US, thanks to its vertical integration.
Its profitability took a significant hit this year due to higher-than-expected medical inflation and morbidity, but it's set a rebound for the next year as it significantly raised prices.
Legendary CEO Stephen Hemsley is back at the helm, and he is guiding for growth next year.
Compounder with a giant moat trading at attractive levels.
It created the whole obesity drug market with Ozempic and Wegovy, but the stock is depressed as investors are concerned about competition from $LLY and compounders.
Though the competition is serious, $NVO has a very strong pipeline in weight-loss and a few catalysts ahead.
It's expecting FDA approval for its oral Wegovy in the next 30 days, which will be the first GLP-1 pill on the market.
The market currently assumes only 7% growth for the next 10 years. It can do way better than this.
1) It's been fascinating to see the marketing flywheel in full force over the last few days with @dgt10011 substack publication.
Jeff is a majestic force of nature in his analysis, publications, and time dedicated to the promotion of our/his business, and while he is an expert sales person, he (I would imagine he would agree) is not an expert in options.
'One must have first of all a strong foundation' - Sri Aurobindo
I'll take a look at those foundational assumptions that Jeff has made to determine his 'One chart that explains why Bitcoin won't go up' masterpiece.
Make your own mind up.
Also for the purpose of large accounts that retweeted Jeff's substack with conviction:
@coinbureau @WuBlockchain @BitcoinNewsCom @CorySwan @dotkrueger @Andre_Dragosch , multiple kaito yappers and ai bots.
(I'm not looking to engage or promote anything).
I wanted to present a different view for people not just to take for granted that which is written and retweeted by large accounts.
🧵
2) Jeff is ofc correct that BTC is becoming more institutionalized, and with that being long the underlying BTC and selling Calls is a well-known and ancient tradfi strategy employed by an increasing amount of participants on Deribit and IBIT.
3) Jeff argues that 'There is currently (and has been for a while now) a major divergence on upside skew between IBIT and BTC'.
@Gravity5ucks published the following chart that shows skew is not dissimilar in the 1month bracket.
Hi, I'm Layla, and I'll be live-tweeting today's morning Chicago City Council Budget Talks meeting starting at 10:00 a.m. #CHIdocumenters @CHIdocumenters
The secret of hedge funds is revealed in a 41-page PDF:
This paper analyzed 464 stocks that 10X-ed over a 24-year period.
Here are the best factors that drive outperformance: (number 3 is the best 🧵)
1. Size Effect
"Small-cap stocks outperform medium and large companies in 11 out of 12 cases"
Smaller stocks tend to perform better, but it's not the only contributor.
2. Value Effect
"A low book-to-market value (B/M < 1), i.e., low equity and relatively high market cap, implies that investors are paying more for a company than its net assets are worth."
Don't overpay - Overpaying tends to drive underperformance.
The UKHSA have started publishing this goldmine again - but this year it's even more valuable *because they've reset it to a period when testing was consistent*.
This is very important and it shows yet again:
Covid infection makes you vulnerable to other infection.
So... in the weekly flu and covid surveillance report (that also covers other respiratory infections too), they publish these two charts.
Covid and Flu's interactions with other infections.
@Osint613 If that statue 🗽 was in Poland the police of Poland would put it in their asses so not a single person would see what happened to it. They do the same to hide all of the corruptions in Poland especially the ISIS jihadists live in their ass and their mothers' asses.
@LawdanBazargan @BenWeinthal @saeidi944101 رئیس همه اینها یک فرمانده سپاه قدس که اسمش کسری نرمند
Kesra Nermend
و اهل سوریه و عضو سیستم بشار اسد است می باشد که در شهر اشچچین لهستان در دانشگاه اشچچین پنهان شده است.
عکس های او در دیدار با مقامات جمهوری اسلامی در اینترنت قابل مشاهده است.
🚨1/4 We are requesting the public's assistance in identifying a person of interest in Saturday's incident at Brown University. Please share these video clips and direct all tips to 401-272-3121 or fbi.gov/brownuniversit…
🚨2/4 We are requesting the public's assistance in identifying a person of interest in Saturday's incident at Brown University. Please share these video clips and direct all tips to 401-272-3121 or fbi.gov/brownuniversit…
🚨3/4 We are requesting the public's assistance in identifying a person of interest in Saturday's incident at Brown University. Please share these images and direct all tips to 401-272-3121 or fbi.gov/brownuniversit…
Final thoughts on #Steelers and Dolphins an hour before kickoff.
Dolphins running game is strong. Offense is creative. Bears-like vibe, though ball comes out quicker in pass game.
Achane big play guy. Brewer one of best pulling centers. Can spread you out and run power with a FB. Alert pistol/sidecar/Pony looks. Lots of calls built off it.
Pass game has been muted. Tua hasn't been asked to do much during win streak. Throw to sticks on 3rd down is their goal.
Waddle a big play threat. Waller at TE could be a problem. 'Tare' concept out of 3x1 (two outs + No. 1 vert).