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Saturday, May 09, 2020

Thinkers Vs Doers

... is the contest going on in America right now.

Yesterday, we went to Costco. The meat department had been significantly reduced. Storage space had been removed to make it still look full, but they had about half of what they normally do. I've seen a couple of reports about farmers having to destroy their livestock and crops because they can't get it processed and shipped. Yesterday's shrunken Costco meat shelves were shocking.

I've also seen reports that the farmers will receive government assistance. That means cash.

Since you can't eat cash, that solution only makes sense from a theoretical point of view. Also, as Senator Rand Paul pointed out recently, all of that cash is imaginary. So we pay people who we're preventing from making the real stuff that we need with imaginary money because that makes sense in our theoretical world.

And people wonder why the average person doesn't trust the Elites any more.

On the plus side, I was able to find a couple of trail heads that were still open in the Cleveland National Forest. We took the Catican Guards out on maneuvers at one of them yesterday.

6 comments:

  1. Did you see the latest and greatest from Gov. Newsom on the criteria for moving on to Phase 3 of the reopening? To move on a county has to have 14 consecutive days of no more than 25 new cases per day and 0 deaths. That's right no deaths for two weeks. Now I'm not going to say that this requirement is unreasonable (and there are in the hinterlands of California some counties that meet this now), but...

    How about here in San Diego County? Our current new cases is about 130 per day. So we'd need to drop by a factor of 6. That's a lot and probably unreasonable since they continue to increase testing, which will increase counts. But now to the other criterion. We've had 4 days with 0 deaths in the last 36 days. So that's 1 in 9. If we have to get to 14 consecutive days with that kind of statistics, the odds are (1/9)^14. Just a bit less than 1 in 23,000,000,000,000. To get to 1 in 500 odds the average death rate needs to drop to 0.36 per day (currently about 4.7 per day). That's close to a factor of 13. But 1 in 500 is still terrible odds. To get to 1 in 50 odds, you need about 0.24 deaths per day (1 death every 4 days) and to get to 50/50 odds the death rate needs to get to below 1/20 of a death per day. Unreasonable!

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  2. This is insanity. His budget is being incinerated. What's the plan anyway? He's going to want to run for president in 4 years which means he still needs to be governor for a couple more. In that time, he's going to have to deal with the fiscal effects of what he's doing now.

    You have to wonder if he really believes all of that progressive twaddle. He must or he'd be worried about his future debt load.

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  3. "This is insanity." That's everything the Goober has done in his political career nicely summed up in three words.

    As an semi-aside: This morning on KUSI TV the Mayor of El Cajon, Bill Wells (a Republican - not that really matters) talked about opening up (see it here). He said what I've been saying about letting the young and healthy back out into the world but continuing to protect the old and those with co-morbidities (watch starting at about the 2 minute mark). It's also clear that he's not gonna force any business in El Cajon to follow the stupid rules, as long as they stay reasonable.

    A politician that gets it. That's one. Only a few thousand to go...

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  4. "So we pay people who we're preventing from making the real stuff that we need with imaginary money because that makes sense in our theoretical world."

    If you ever saw the show 'Jerico', you may recall a scene where the Dude has a brilliant idea for restoring the country after the nuclear bombs and the EMP -- just get the internet working again and then we can order what we need off the internet.

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  5. Having thought about it a bit more...

    KT said the CA Goober is "going to have to deal with the fiscal effects of what he's doing now." And Ilion pointed out the line "So we pay people who we're preventing from making the real stuff that we need with imaginary money because that makes sense in our theoretical world."

    These are both completely rational if you believe in Modern Money Theory (a.k.a.: money theory for socialists and anyone else that can't do math). For those of us that can do math, we recognize that this is nonsense. But our patriarchal math doesn't apply in their unicorns and rainbows world.

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  6. Ilion - great take. After all, if we could just get Amazon running, we'd be saved!

    Ohioan - I think MMT is it in a nutshell. They are mistaking money for wealth. That's easy to do if you've never made or built anything.

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