ROBINHOOD: WE HAD TO KILL THE STOCK TRADES IN ORDER TO SAVE THE STOCK TRADERS

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev: Had To Pause Trading On Meme Stocks Thursday To Protect Customers, Ourselves

 

Johns Hopkins: The COVID-19 case fatality rate to date in South Africa is 2.99% vs. 1.68% in the US

 Virus variant from South Africa detected in US for 1st time:

The variant first found in South Africa was detected in October. Since then, it has been found in at least 30 other countries.

It is not obvious that the mutation found in October is responsible for the outsized increases in cases and deaths recently observed in South Africa. Both rose in tandem not until the beginning of December, and the mutation could have been present earlier. Seasonal factors may be at work. July is South Africa's winter, January its summer. Elevation moderates summer high temperatures and latitude its winter lows.

Johns Hopkins: US COVID-19 deaths passed through the 430k mark today

 

Berman and Milanovic show increased "intersection between the top decile of capital-income recipients and labor-income earners" since Reagan 1986 tax reform has led to higher income inequality

Regrettably the study does not mention another factor, how free-trade, particularly with China and East Asia generally, helped drive wages in the US at the bottom ever lower. The Reagan era produced a perfect storm of screwed for the bottom half in America.

Here:

Where does homoploutia come from? The data do not allow us to determine that with certainty, but they allow to investigate what is consistent with individual hypotheses. There is strong evidence that increased wage-stretching that began around 1980 is associated with the rising homoploutia (the other alternatives that do not perform as well are rising inequality of capital incomes and rising capital share).

The link between higher inequality of labor incomes and homoploutia might have occurred in two ways. The first is that many high-earning individuals saved a large share of their wages, invested it, and after some years began receiving large capital incomes. The second is that many capital-rich people decided, perhaps because of changed social norms, or because top jobs became more lucrative as marginal tax rates were reduced, not to treat university education as “luxury consumption” but rather to use it to secure good jobs. It could be, of course, that both mechanisms were at work. 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID-19 deaths climb to 420k

 

US COVID-19 Update for first 23 days of January 2021: January remains on track to be the worst month yet but may turn out to be a hump month

Total announced US COVID-19 cases, first 23 days of Jan 2021: 5,021,670 or 218,333 per day.

Dec 2020 cases per day: 206,809.

Nov 2020 cases per day: 146,872.

Self-reported mask compliance rates of 49% are probably still quite exaggerated. People who complain that health safety mandates don't work never contend with that fact. The virus wouldn't be spreading the way it is if it were really true that people are finally doing what's been asked of them. 

Total announced US COVID-19 deaths, first 23 days of Jan 2021: 71351, or 3102 per day.

Dec 2020 rate was 2516 per day.

Apr 2020 rate was 1961 per day.

Hospitalizations on Sat Jan 23: 113,609. Peak appears to have occurred Jan 6: 132,474.

Up-to-date charts for 2020:

Was QAnon started by this joker?

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths hit 410k

 

Trump clown show ends, Biden nightmare begins

US COVID-19 deaths plough right through 400k mark in Johns Hopkins data today

 This morning the figure was still 399,500 but this evening is already past 401k.

Think of it as Donald Trump's retirement number on his last full day in office.

Update for COVID-19 English-speaking world case fatality rates as of 1/19/21

 Per Johns Hopkins University (data changes slightly as we write):

Global totals:

deaths 2,044,445 / cases 95,703,104

Case fatality rate 2.13%

G-7 nations Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US, plus Australia and New Zealand:

deaths 713,992 / cases 36,041,142

Case fatality rate 1.98%

Rest of the world 2.23% 

Ten other nations with the largest English-speaking populations (India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Russia, Thailand, South Africa / data quality obviously varies):

deaths 295,121 / cases 17,399,153 

Case fatality rate 1.69% 

South Korea, not shown above, is a good example of how no matter what nations seem to do to stop the spread of the disease, case fatality rates everywhere seem to be ending up in the vicinity of 2%.

Early on South Korea was impressing with a rate well below 1%, but today it is at 1.75%. Japan is up to 1.33%. Much vaunted New Zealand is up to 1.10%.

Compared with Canada 2.51%, France 2.38%, Germany 2.32%, Italy 3.45%, the UK 2.61%, and Australia 3.16%, the good ole USA 1.657% is doing much better than the hysterical headlines would have you believe.

That said, in the US COVID-19 is still sixteen and half times more deadly than influenza. This is a serious crisis, the long term health effects of which are not known.

A recent long term study from May to November in the US showed an alarming rise in hospitalizations for COVID among children. Another study from the UK indicated an alarming rise in the death rate for individuals six months after recovering from COVID. The impact of the disease on the human vascular system is typically acute in the lungs, but remains a still not well understood threat to the rest of the body and its organs.

You don't want to get it. 24 million in the US already have, just 7% of the population.  

In past hits to full-time employment in the early 1990s, after 2000 and 2007, part-time usually soared, but it tanked in 2020 right along with full-time

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths climb to 390k, world deaths to 2m

 

Fred Upton, Republican chucklehead, MI-6, waits until the very last hours of the Trump administration to declare: "But it is time to say: Enough is enough”

What courage! What principle! What restraint!

Upton joined nine other Republicans in the US House, including my own freshman congressman Peter Meijer, Republican chucklehead, MI-3, and all the Democrats, 222 of them, to impeach Trump a second time 232-197. Four Republicans did not vote.

The roll call is here. Upton is quoted here.

Upton, 67, has spent his life as a useless heir to a Whirlpool fortune estimated under $10 million. Once an aspiring journalist with a B.A. in journalism, instead he became a staffer to the libertarian Republican Representative David Stockman in the late 1970s and followed him to OMB under Reagan in the early 1980s. He first ran for Congress in 1986, eleven years after graduating from the U of M. He has been a congressional pest ever since, aren't they all?, who has inflicted on the American people such things as lightbulb bans, eventually styling himself as a moderate.

Meijer, now 33, is embarking on a similar trajectory, but with a gappy resume. Reportedly worth $50 million from the Meijer grocery store chain, Meijer has landed in Congress also after a decade of searching for himself.

Meijer got in to West Point but ignominiously dropped out after one year, became an Army Reservist, and went to Columbia in 2008 where he salvaged himself with a B.A. in anthropology by 2012. He interrupted this period at Columbia with service in Iraq in 2010-2011 as a sergeant. Post graduation in 2012 he served with an NGO 2013-2015. He took a wife in 2016, and an MBA from NYU, apparently 2016-2017. Then there was a brief stint in 2018 with Ilitch Holdings of billionaire family fame as an "analyst" which ended in January 2019. When Justin Amash left the Republican Party in July 2019, Meijer announced his candidacy.

Just as Upton took up the occasion of the Capitol attack as a moment of historic gravitas which inspired him to rise to impeach Trump, Meijer similarly has over-dramatized it by relating it to the drama of his "combat" experience as an intelligence advisor in Iraq (insert smirk here). He also laughably pondered out loud the danger those in the order of presidential succession were in from the trespassers on January 6. He reminds one of no one so much as the ex-bartender become US Representative, AOC, who has similarly made it a point to appear distraught and blow everything completely out of proportion to the reality in keeping with her modus operandi everywhere. Think of red-lipsticked Alexandria at the border fence a while ago, clad in white, head in her hands, weeping, sporting her $600 wristwatch.

The lefty Michael Tracey has framed such over-the-top demonstrativeness as "unhinged threat inflation" in recent days, which is exactly what we're being subjected to for demagogic purposes. The manipulation of the American people is nothing new, it's just that these young people are probably less aware of it as a technique than they are themselves victims and mimickers of the technique.

No so with Upton. He is the old hand who is too grown up and knowing for this, who knows just when to say just enough in order to receive huzzahs as a statesman instead of the harangues for the seat-warmer he is in reality. 

Somehow the American people are content to let such people put us $28 trillion in debt. We chuckleheads have the chuckleheads we deserve.

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths climb to 380k

 

Climate Update for KGRR: December 2020 and 2020 Annual

 

Climate Update for KGRR: December 2020

Max T 53, Mean 53, Annual Max T 94, Mean 94

Min T 18, Mean 4, Annual Min T 4, Mean -7, tied for eighth highest on record with 2010 and 1911

Av T 32.4, Mean 28.4, Annual Av T 50.1, Mean 48.2, fifteenth highest on record

Rain 2.81, Mean 2.45, Annual 37.44, Mean 34.77

Snow 4.9, Mean 16, Snow season to date 5.3, Mean 22.7

HDD 1001, Mean 1128, HDD season to date 2277, Mean 2485

CDD Annual 832, Mean 694, Peak year was in 1921 at 1200

By average temperature 2020 was 3.9% warmer than the mean, not because the shorter summer season was especially hot but because minimum temperatures in the longer winter season moderated.

2020 was a disaster for full-time employment, wiping out eight years of progress, however anemic those were: 13 million full-time potential missing on average relative to 2006 peak at 52.3%

 

It took Reagan/Bush just six years to reach 52% after the early 1980s recessions, still unparalleled

LOL, Drudge shows Peter Meijer and orangutan

 

For some reason Peter Meijer, Justin Amash's replacement, feels the need to parade his combat cred, basically admits to mental illness: "fully uniformed", "parachute in ... not literally", "a through and through combatant"

Here, apparently because some people doubt it. He did, after all, bail out of West Point and will forever live with the stigma.

Read the whole thing and you'll see the freshman congressman is already psychoanalyzing his colleagues while admitting to the need for some himself.

Unbelievable. This is what we elect to Congress. A rich kid trying to be somebody.

There's a lot of things I respect about Rep. Amash. At the end of the day, you're going to be your own person. I think much of my approach is guided by my experiences overseas. I was fully uniformed, a through-and-through combatant in Iraq; I'd do intelligence operations. That gave me one vantage point. When I was working in disaster response efforts around the world, you—not literally, but kind of—parachute into an area, whether it was the Philippines or South Sudan, domestic response for tornadoes and hurricanes. You have to make a little bit of order out of the chaos. And then when I was in Afghanistan later for a couple of years, as a conflict analyst for the humanitarian aid community, that was a very different perspective, too. But I saw a sense of, how do things fall apart and how can they be rebuilt? ...

We've inserted ourselves into the middle of civil wars; we've taken sides. Sometimes those sides switch. In Iraq, we're backing the Sunnis one time, we're backing the Shia the other. In Afghanistan, it becomes a shifting set of alliances.

Ultimately I think that erodes something at the core of our national soul that we kind of paper over. That's something that I'll have to sit on a therapist's couch to better understand.

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths rise to 370k