3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts

THE FACTS

* The NAACP’s founders were all white. On February 12, 1909, Mary White Ovington, William English Walling, and Henry Moskowitz established the NAACP as an advocacy organization for black civil rights. Recognizing the importance of having an African-American on the governing board, they invited W.E.B. DuBois (in photo, above), a Harvard educated lawyer, author, and the founder of the Niagara Movement (which advocated equal rights for blacks) to join them.

* AOC was not in the Capitol Building during the January 6 riots. On February 2, she posted a video talking about the trauma she had experienced, locked in her office, during the invasion. The video went viral. The NYT hailed her for her bravery. The next day, Fox News reported that her video did not come from the Capitol Building, where the rioting was going on, but from the Cannon House Office Building, two blocks away, where she was safe and sound and protected by the Capitol Police. The NYT has not yet corrected its reporting.

* “The Quietest Place on Earth” is located in Minneapolis. It’s inside what is called an anechoic chamber in Orfield Labs. The chamber is designed to be completely silent at -9.4 decibels – conditions that have been known to cause hallucinations. The room is so silent that one’s bodily functions become as loud as car traffic. It’s so disorienting that, according to Orfield, “If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.”

 THE NUMBERS 

* $43,625 – the value of a single Bitcoin during its high on Monday, February 8, after Tesla invested $1.5 billion in it. Several other cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum and Ripple, also rose in value. Bitcoin is up 50% this year after gains of more than 300% in 2020.

* $16.1 trillion – the total economic costs of COVID-19 in the US (according to data gathered by Visual Capitalist). This includes a GDP loss of $7.6 trillion, a cost of $4.2 trillion in health impairment, and $4.4 trillion in premature death. For reference, the combined cost of all post-9/11 wars was $6.4 trillion.

* $29.5 million – the amount earned by 9-year-old YouTube star Ryan Kaji in 2020. His channel, where he reviews toys, has more than 28 million subscribers. He started doing this at the age of 3, when he posted a video reviewing a Lego train set – a video that has had more than 50 million views.

 THE THOUGHTS 

* “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all.” – James Baldwin

* “People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” – Isaac Asimov

* “You can’t act one way and be another. Your behavior is your character. It is who you are.” –  Michael Masterson

And here’s another flip-flop…

The Washington Post, staunch supporter of a federally mandated lockdown, has lately changed its tune:

“Vaccines plus masks minus lockdowns. That’s the approach public health specialists are advising to curb the spread of contagious variants in the United States. Without firmer data showing widespread variants here, strict stay-at-home orders, as seen in Europe, will be hard to justify.”

Could This Happen in the US? 

Argentina is broke. It’s been sinking into debt for some time. The 2020 shutdowns from the pandemic have only made things worse.

Seizing on the latter, the government just initiated a wealth tax with the stated purpose of paying for the financial costs of the COVID crisis. It was explained as a one-time tax assessment on all citizens whose total assets exceed the equivalent of 2.3 million US dollars. The tax is between 3% and 5% of those assets.

A friend asked me, “Could that happen here?”

I don’t see why not. In fact, I think it’s all but inevitable. A wealth tax was a talking point of Bernie and AOC during the Democratic campaign, and I’m quite sure it will be talked about this year in Congress.

The first version would probably be limited to “the richest of the rich.” Perhaps only the one percent of the one percent. But that could be loosened up later.

And if those in favor of a wealth tax are smart, they will take a lead from Argentina and introduce the bill as a one-time emergency relief tax. (Who could refuse that?) Later on, of course, there would be other emergencies.

If you’ve ever been part of a poorly funded condo association, you know how this works. A one-time assessment to fix the leaky roof this year. Another one-time assessment to fix the plumbing next year. And on and on.

Actually, it’s different than a condo assessment in a very important way. A condo assessment is a tax that is paid for (and benefits) all members equally. A wealth tax – in theory – benefits all, but is paid for by a tiny fraction of the population.

A few facts about wealth taxes:

* In 1990, 12 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries employed some form of wealth tax. Today, that number has fallen to 4: Belgium, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland.

* Finland established their wealth tax in 1919, but repealed it in 2006 due to its “negative impact on enterprises” and “many possibilities to evade.”

* Ireland introduced their wealth tax in 1975 over concerns of wealth inequality. But administrative costs were too high, many exceptions were built in, and ultimately very little money was raised.

* Austria, which introduced their wealth tax in 1954, abolished it in 1994 due to “high administrative costs that accrued in the data collection process and because of the economic burden the wealth tax meant to Austrian enterprises.”

* Spain established theirs in 1977, but repealed it in 2008 amidst the global economic crisis. It was reinstated in 2011. Incomes over 700,000 euros are taxed by 0.2%, which gradually increases to 2.5% at 10.7 million euros (depending on region). Those living in the capital of Madrid are exempt.

* Belgium introduced theirs in 2018 with a 0.15% tax on securities accounts over 1,000,000 euros. Anti-abuse provisions were implemented in October of last year.

* Norway imposed theirs in 1892, and it’s still in place, with a max rate of 0.85% tax for incomes above 1.48 krona.

* In Switzerland, the tax is handled not by the federal government but by the country’s 26 individual canons, and the rate varies. The range is 0.3% to 1%. It has been responsible for at least 3% of the country’s total revenue since 2000, according to OECD data.

* In 2018, the OECD conducted a study to examine why some countries had repealed their wealth taxes. Major reasons were “concerns about their efficiency and administrative costs, in particular in comparison to the limited revenues they tend to generate.” The study noted that European wealth taxes generated only 0.2% of GDP in revenue.

* In the US, according to the Cato Institute, “it would be simpler to eliminate a high‐​end loophole in the income tax – such as the tax exemption for municipal bond interest – than to impose a new wealth tax system.”

The Rise of Cryptocurrencies:

Another Reason to Buy Gold 

Longtime readers know that I own gold. I bought it not as an investment per se, but as a hedge against some extreme financial catastrophe, such as hyperinflation or (its cousin) the collapse of the US dollar.

In such a scenario, gold – and particularly a stash of gold bullion coins – provides some advantages:

* It’s real. Like real estate, gold is tangible wealth. As such, it tends to rise when inflation rises, which is something that’s not true for many financial assets.

* It’s private. For the most part, you can buy, hold, or sell gold without anyone knowing about it.

* It’s portable. You can carry $20,000 worth of gold in your pocket, or $1 million in a carry-on bag.

* It’s universally valued. There is always a ready market for gold in every city on earth.

Now there is another reason to buy gold: the rise of Bitcoin.

I asked Tom Dyson to explain:

In the not-too-distant future, Tom says, digital wallets will become universal – perhaps as universal as cellphones. “In effect, we will all become our own banks.” And as I’ve argued in previous discussions of cryptocurrencies, it’s highly likely that the Federal Reserve and other central banks will want to administer these systems. Tom believes they will make it happen by “launching some sort of wallet app for our mobile phones.”

Why would the Federal Reserve want to do this?

Simple, Tom says. “The Fed must inflate or die. But it’s struggling to create inflation at the moment. Interest rates are at zero. And the Fed has already promised to keep them there indefinitely. It can’t force Congress to keep printing and spending.

“A digital cash system would free the Federal Reserve of existing obstacles in the way of inflating the supply. In moving towards a digital dollar, the Fed would be escaping from the downward trajectory of the existing dollar, which it knows is doomed. This doesn’t bode well for retirement funds, college savings, business endeavors, or any other financial plans we may have.”

His solution? Buy gold.

If you don’t have a stash of gold already and are wondering if you should buy now, check out the essays I’ve written about the subject here, here, and here.

3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS

* Kamala Harris is not the first person of color to be named VP of the US. From 1929 to 1933, Herbert Hoover’s number two was Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Nation and descendant of two Native-American chiefs (one from the Kaw, the other from the Osage). Curtis championed women’s suffrage, child labor laws, and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to Native-Americans born within US territory. However, he also notoriously sponsored the Curtis Act of 1898, which resulted in the US forcibly breaking up reservations and gaining control of 90 million acres of what had been Native-American land.

* Throughout the 2020 election, Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon, was a staunch supporter of mail-in voting. That was then, this is now. Amazon/Bezos has taken legal action to try to squash an attempt to unionize workers in the company’s Alabama warehouse by keeping them from doing the vote by mail. Because of COVID, the National Labor Relations Board had ruled that the vote would take place entirely by mail. To keep that from happening, Amazon filed a motion seeking to delay the election so it could take place in person… with no votes by mail (even from workers on sick leave due to COVID). Per an Amazon spokesperson, “We believe that the best approach to a valid, fair, and successful election is one that is conducted manually, in-person.”

* The WHO is finally telling the truth about the PCR (nasal swab) tests for COVID – considered the “gold standard” in detection of the virus. They are now admitting that they should just be considered a diagnostic “aid.” In a recent notice released “to clarify information previously provided by WHO,” they point to the increased potential for false positives and state that “health providers must [therefore] consider any [PCR] result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.”

 THE NUMBERS 

 * $27.75 trillion – the current US debt, according to data from Statista. Just one year ago, it was at $23.2 trillion. A dramatic jump occurred between the months of March and July, at the height of the pandemic and as the first stimulus checks were going out.

* 400,000 – the number (approximately) of Holocaust survivors still living. Most of the survivors are in Israel and the US.  January 27 – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945 – was designated by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005, 16 years ago this week.

* $376.5 million – the budget of the most expensive movie ever made: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The film earned $1 billion in worldwide box office sales.

THE THOUGHTS 

* “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” – Anne Frank

* “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” – George Bernard Shaw

* “You earn the right to criticize someone only after you have demonstrated the willingness to help someone.” – Michael Masterson

3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS 

* Built for Donald Trump in 2018, Cadillac One is known as “The World’s Safest Car” or “The Beast” – and deservedly so. The limo-shaped tank has bulletproof windows and a reinforced chassis capable of withstanding a direct bomb attack. The Beast’s fangs include pump-action shotguns, tear gas cannons, and (rumored) grenade launchers. But even with its $1.5 million price tag, it isn’t the most expensive presidential car ever. That honor goes to JFK’s Lincoln Continental SS-100-X. It cost $200,000 in 1961, which is $1,741,000 today when adjusted for inflation.

* In La Gomera, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, people “speak” the only whistled language in the world. Called Silbo Gomera (“silbo” is “whistle” in Castilian Spanish), it is thousands of years old, but it’s estimated that only about 22,000 people currently speak it correctly.

* Customers of HSBC bank in the UK that refuse to wear a mask have more to worry about than COVID-19. According to a statement by the bank released last week, “if individuals put themselves or our colleagues at risk [by not wearing a mask], without a medical exemption, we reserve the right to withdraw their account.”

 THE NUMBERS 

* 884,000 ounces ‒ the total amount of gold in American Gold Eagle coins sold last year, according to the US Mint. This was a 455% increase over the 152,000 ounces sold in 2019, which was a four-year high.

* 94% ‒ the percentage of employers surveyed by the Mercer consulting firm that said company productivity remained the same (67%) or higher (27%) after many of their employees switched to working remotely. In 2021, more and more companies are expected to have remote work arrangements in place. And according to FlexJobs, working from home is also expected to become an increasingly popular alternative to retirement.

* $30 million ‒ the amount paid for the highest-selling domain name of all time (“voice.com”). The highest-selling “publicly reported” domain name, that is. It’s believed that more than 75% of domain name sales are unreported – and since most high-end sales are private (and confidential), there’s no telling what any of them have sold for.

 THE  THOUGHTS

* “There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.” ‒ Walker Percy

* “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ‒ Arthur C. Clarke

* “Capitalists value freedom because they need freedom to thrive. Socialists value power because without it they cannot survive.” ‒  Michael Masterson

Someone Who Did for Others… 

After reading Gellhorn’s letter, I found it interesting to read this amazing story.

From The Epoch Times…

“How Much Can One Person Really Do” 

Ever wonder how much one person can do against – well, everything?

In Nazi-occupied Poland, one Polish woman once saved 400 lives. Her name was Irena Sendler.

When Nazis forced the Jews into Polish ghettos during World War II, Irena came into contact with many Jews due to her occupation as a social worker.

Despite the overwhelming pressure of her political environment, Sendler soon joined Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews, and began to use her job as a cover to smuggle Jewish orphans to safety. After they got out of the ghetto, Sendler would arrange for the orphans to stay with other families or in convents.

Eventually, as the living situation in the ghetto deteriorated and more and more Jews were sent off to camps, Sendler and her associates began smuggling out children from Jewish families as well. She would keep track of each child’s true identity before forging them false ones, burying all the records in a jar so that the parents could reunite with their children one day.

Unfortunately, many of these parents would not survive the concentration camps. But because of Sendler, their children would.

By the end of World War II, Sendler and her colleagues managed to save around 2,500 Jewish children. Of these 2,500, about 400 were rescued by Sendler herself.

3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS

* There’s an even more contagious strain of COVID here in the US! With a recent surge in cases, reports in the media, and Dr. Deborah Birx’s comments at a recent coronavirus Task Force meeting, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the situation is a lot more dire than it is. But in a recent press briefing, Henry Walke, the CDC’s COVID incident manager, said that though the evidence to date indicates that newly emerging variants spread more easily and quickly, “there is no evidence that these variants cause more severe disease or increase risk of death.” He also said that, according to all available information, current vaccines will be effective against these strains.

* Psychedelic drugs are generating a great deal of interest as an effective treatment for mental disorders that have worsened in the wake of the pandemic. This interest has been reflected in the market, with psychedelic drug stocks soaring in 2020. Companies like Mind Medicine and Numinus saw their shares climb by 1060% and 360%, respectively.

* There are more potential outcomes to a game of chess (10 to the 120th power) than there are atoms in the observable universe (an estimated 10 to the 80th power). That was the conclusion of mathematician Claude Shannon in a paper he wrote in 1950. Shannon calculated his number by assuming that the average game has about 80 total moves. There have been many, more conservative, calculations done since then. But as pointed out on Medium.com, even if we use the most conservative assumptions, and all humans spent all their time playing chess… it would take us millions or billions of years to play all possible combinations.

 THE NUMBERS 

* 59 – the percentage of people with COVID that transmit the virus without showing symptoms. 35% of the transmissions have come from people that eventually developed symptoms but transmitted the virus before those symptoms were evident. 24% of the transmissions were spread by people that never showed symptoms at all (asymptomatic)

* 7.05 billion – the number of times “Baby Shark Dance,” the most-watched video of 2020, was viewed on YouTube. It was followed closely by “Despacito,” with 7.04 billion views, and “Shape of You,” with 5.05 billion.

* $84.5 million – the amount paid for Francis Bacon’s Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus in Sotheby’s first digitally streamed live auction. The painting was won by a collector in New York after a fierce, 10-minute, “socially distanced” bidding war with an online bidder in China.

THE THOUGHTS 

* “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” – Pablo Picasso

* “Courage is the power of the mind to overcome fear.” – Martin Luther King

* “Few will admit it, but in the commerce of ordinary life, there is no human characteristic more valued than physical beauty.” – Michael Masterson

If you have any interest in investing, you’ve probably heard of the efficient market hypothesis. It’s the theory that stocks are always priced as they should be at any given moment, and therefore it’s futile to try to achieve better than average returns by buying at discounts and selling when prices are high.

It won the Nobel Prize for Economics. And many economists and stock market experts believe it. But it’s not true.

Bill Bonner explains…

True Confessions

By Bill Bonner 

Let me begin with a confession. Actually, it is a confession in two parts… because I have a lot to confess.

First, I have been publishing investment advice since 1980. But I only became interested in investing itself, not economics, when I became serious about my children’s and grandchildren’s money.

It’s one thing to make money in a business or profession. It is quite another thing to protect your fortune by investing it properly.

Investing is not economics. Economics is the study of how people work together to build wealth… what kind of conditions help them… what kind of circumstances and policies hinder them… and why some people prosper and others don’t.

The study of economics is endlessly fascinating, because people are fascinating… And the collective action of people – the great things they undertake together – is particularly entertaining.

But you want to keep your distance from it. Because large-scale, centrally planned, collective action is almost always counterproductive and frequently disastrous.

Since we are so badly equipped to deal with modern public policy issues, we tend to make a mess of them. We can understand small-scale issues in a small community. We know what things are worth. We have a pretty good idea, in a small group, of how to work together.

But get people in a big group… of millions… and confront them with healthcare, government debt, or war… and ignorance multiplies by the square of the number of people involved. The result is almost always a full-blown disaster.

I Was Wrong… 

But I haven’t told you the second part of my confession, have I? Part of the reason why I had no interest in investing for the first 60 years of my life was because I believed it was largely a waste of time. I was wrong about that…

I thought it was a waste of time because I first learned about investing in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) was popular. And though I was skeptical of it, I accepted it as mostly true. Not completely true. And not provably true. But logically and theoretically, it made sense to me.

The gist of the EMH is that the stock market reflects all of the available facts and opinions at any given time. It then aggregates that information and comes up with a price.

It’s not necessarily a perfect price, since it is often based on things that turn out to be unreasonable, unimportant, or untrue. But it’s the best you can do. And if you’re able to beat the market – that is, if you are able to come up with a better price – it’s probably luck.

I thought that view was correct. And I still think it’s more true than false… and worth believing, even if it’s not true.

Investors who think they can’t beat the market, in other words, are less likely to use their primitive, tribal brains trying to do so. They usually come out ahead.

A Winning Formula

You’ve probably seen the studies. There are many of them. And they all show that the typical investor would be better off not trying to beat the market.

By trying to pick the best stocks… and timing trades in and out of the market in an attempt to do better than the market itself, the typical investor handicaps himself – with performance that’s not even one-fifth as good as the market itself.

The EMH guys look at this and say: “See… We were right; you can’t beat the market.”

But I know now that the EMH is less correct than I thought. And we proved it ourselves…

Two of the investment letters we publish in the US more than doubled the performance of the S&P 500 over a 10-year period.

Could it be luck? Well, there may be some luck involved. But it seems unlikely for lightning to strike twice in such a small place… and for both of the analysts who beat the market to be using a similar approach of value investing – the same approach used by a certain well-known gentleman from Omaha, Nebraska.

According to Bloomberg, Warren Buffett’s rate of return consistently beats the market over the long term. Pure luck? Not likely…

Profiting From Errors 

Time, patience, energy, hard work, and discipline – in almost every aspect of life, these qualities pay off. I believe they pay off in the investing world, too. That is, it makes sense to invest the time and effort to try to discover what stocks are really worth.

And if you work at it long and hard enough, I think you can beat the market…

Let me explain why this is so.

In a nutshell, it’s because most investors are not doing their homework. They’re using their tribal brains to try to beat the stock market. This leads them to make serious errors of judgment as to the value of companies.

The prudent investor, with a sharp pencil and a sharp mind, profits from these errors by buying, or selling, the mispriced equities.

Investing is primarily a rational, logical attempt to determine the present value of a future stream of income. I’m not talking about speculating – where you guess about what is going up or down. I’m talking about serious investing, as it was taught by Graham and Dodd… and practiced by Warren Buffett and many others.

If every investor did it, stocks would be more or less properly priced all the time… and it would be very, very hard to beat the market.

But most investors don’t do it. Most investors use their small-scale, small-group brains. They buy and sell investments based on what someone told them… or rumors… or what they read in the papers… or half-baked ideas of all sorts. They root for stocks like they root for a football team.

Seeking Alpha 

A friend of mine told me that he once knew the top of the market was near because his mother asked him if she should try to get in on a new IPO. She’d read about it in the paper and it sounded exciting to her.

The last time his mother wanted to get into the stock market was in 1999, when she wanted to buy dot-com stocks.

It is only because most investors are so unserious that there are still some good opportunities available to more serious investors.

Another way to look at it is this: The system also functions as a moral system. That is, virtue is rewarded. Vice is punished.

What’s virtue? Hard work, patience, and self-discipline.

What’s vice? Greed, vanity, the need for immediate gratification. And laziness.

It just makes sense that, over time, the hardworking, patient, disciplined investor – calmly calculating what stocks are really worth – will do better than the great mass of unserious speculators and trend-followers.

That’s how you get alpha. You just do a better calculation than most people. You don’t have to read the paper. You don’t have to watch TV. You just do the numbers.

And yes, there is always some guesswork involved. And some judgment. You should get to know the business model. And the people running the business. And the product. Those are qualitative judgments.

You’ll be right sometimes and wrong sometimes. But – at the margin – you’ll be making better stock selections than the typical investor. And, with a little luck, you’ll get a better result.

Betting on Beta 

And now, let’s go to a better way you can beat the market: Beta.

It’s tough to beat the market chasing alpha… and most who try fail. That’s why we pursue opportunities to make above-average returns when the markets move to inefficient extremes.

This is really where I focus my attention, because I don’t have the patience for stock analysis. You can get beta by simply getting out of the stock market when it is at a historic high… and getting back in when it is at a historic low. This is very broad-brush timing. But it works.

Taken together, stocks are almost never really worth a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of greater than 20. The only exception might be when you have a fast-growing economy. Then you can expect the stream of income to increase.

But if the market is trading at more than 20 times earnings, there is likely more downside ahead than upside.

The P/E ratio for the stock market is a very rough measure. Earnings can be defined in a number of ways. Wall Street prefers anticipated earnings rather than reported earnings.

And reported earnings themselves are subject to quite a bit of manipulation. When interest rates are artificially low, for example, earnings will be flattered. And companies often report “pro forma” earnings – in which they have cooked the books – rather than the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings the IRS requires.

When you do “alpha” analysis, you have to get into the books and root around until you understand what is really going on.

Beta analysis is different; you’re looking at the big picture. For example, you can look at the whole capital value of the stock market compared to GDP.

This is the way Warren Buffett prefers to do it. In an interview with Fortune magazine back in 2001, he said that looking at total market capitalization relative to GDP is “probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment.” This approach eliminates the problem of the manipulation of earnings. It’s the way I prefer, too.

You can also tell when a market is too high by looking at what Lord Keynes called “animal spirits.” This is a great expression because it goes to the heart of the way most people actually do invest – as primitive animals… moved more by greed and fear than by any rational calculation.

When the animal spirits run wild, markets – bonds, US stocks, contemporary art, real estate – head toward bubble territory. That’s when you should sell out of these things rather than try to pick the absolute top.

That’s market timing… It usually doesn’t work. But it can work, rarely, when markets are at the extremes.

3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS

* If you were floating around in outer space without a spacesuit, would you boil to death or freeze to death? If you guessed “boil,” you’re right. The lower the atmospheric pressure, the lower the boiling point of fluids, and space has zero pressure. So without a spacesuit, all the liquids in your body (i.e., blood, water, eye gelatin) would quickly come to a boil and you’d die from ebullism (the formation of gas bubbles in your system) or hypoxia (the lack of oxygen to your tissues) in about a minute.

* What is the single most important factor in maintaining health and longevity? Diet? Exercise? Genetics? According to a recent study, the answer is… wealth! An Oxford Academic study of 25,000 people in the US and England on “socioeconomic impacts on health/longevity” found that for both men and women, an individual’s level of wealth was the most important factor in living a long, disability-free life. This finding is consistent with many previous studies. In summary, the researchers stated that “higher wealth gives access to better housing, healthier life styles, as well as better health services.”

Another more plausible explanation: Smart decisions, good habits, and the ability to defer gratification makes you both wealthier and also healthier.

* The WHO has finally agreed with me: Large-scale lockdowns as a way to fight a pandemic like COVID-19 may be useful to keep hospitals from being overrun, but they have serious consequences. In a recent release, they admitted that lockdowns can have “a profound negative impact on individuals, communities, and societies by bringing social and economic life to a near stop.”

 THE NUMBERS

* 395%  –  the increase in Bitcoin’s value in the past year, according to data from MarketWatch. In January, BTC’s value was $8,000. It steadily increased through 2020 to its current value of just below $40,000.

* 0.7% – the chance of contracting COVID-19 from someone in your home if they are asymptomatic, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This is 25 times less than the already small chance of contracting it from a household member that does have symptoms (18%).

* 16 – the number of official languages in Zimbabwe (a Guinness World Record). They include Chewa, Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, Koisan, Nambya, Ndau, Ndebele, Shangani, Shona, sign language, Sotho, Tonga, Tswana, Venda, and Xhosa.

 THE THOUGHTS 

* “If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.” – Chuck Yeager

* “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” – Henry Ford

* “The most relentless force in the universe is entropy. And that is why, to achieve anything in life, one must continually create order.” – Michael Masterson