Adjusted for inflation, Zoom is cheaper today than in June 2019, when the only lockdowns were for convicted criminals and any non-felon could work, socialize, and study in person to his/her/zir/their heart’s content. The P/E ratio is only 25. Compare this to the sexual orientation and gender identity educators at Disney with a P/E ratio of 78, and the Microsoft behemoth at 32 (though Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft have all proved that having an enormous market cap actually helps with growth since investments can be financed for almost nothing).
I had a Microsoft Teams meeting the other day that was an echo-plagued disaster unless I kept my microphone on mute. Then, using the same PC with the same webcam and speakers, it worked fine today. Zoom definitely seems to work better and the revenue is still growing (up 21 percent in nominal dollars compared to a year ago so a boost of about 10 percent in real terms).
What’s the major risk for Zoom? That Apple will crush them by bumping the FaceTime group max from 32 to 3200? That Webex and Teams will somehow wipe them out? That Google Meet won’t be canceled like everything else (except for ads) that Google has ever offered? If these aren’t huge risks, why can’t Zoom gradually increase its margins and more than justify a current P/E ratio of 25?
Warning: All of my previous investment ideas have been disastrous!
To protect the United States, which currently has 30,000 COVID “cases” per day and 600 COVID-tagged deaths per day., from COVID, our Science-following CDC requires that someone arriving with a passport from zero-COVID China undergo medical testing for COVID prior to travel. If he/she/ze/they is not a U.S. citizen, he/she/ze/they is required to also require proof of the Sacrament of Fauci (vaccination). (See CDC order of November 8, 2021.)
The Scientists at the Science-oriented CDC, on the other hand, have Scientifically determined that a migrant who says “I am under 18” can cross the border and stay permanently in the U.S. without either a COVID test or a COVID vaccine. The Science changed after a federal judge said that the Biden administration could not exempt people who said that they were minors from the Science. See “Biden administration says it will not expel migrant children following court order” (CBS):
The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which first authorized the migrant expulsions in March 2020, terminated the government’s ability to expel children who enter U.S. border custody without their parents. U.S. border officials can still use the policy, known as Title 42, to expel single adult migrants and families traveling with children to Mexico or their home countries.
Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman said the administration could no longer exempt unaccompanied minors from Title 42, arguing that Texas, which challenged the exemption, was financially harmed by the placement of migrant children in the state due to medical and schooling costs.
In a notice Friday, CDC officials said they recognized the “unique vulnerabilities” of unaccompanied minors.
“In the current termination, CDC addresses the court’s concerns and has determined, after considering current public health conditions and recent developments, that expulsion of unaccompanied noncitizen children is not warranted to protect the public health,” the agency said.
In a separate 21-page order justifying the decision to end Title 42 for unaccompanied children, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky cited the recent nationwide decrease in COVID-19 cases, as well as increased vaccination rates in the U.S. and in the home countries of migrants who journey to the southern border.
Science dictates that the border will be completely open to all unvaccinated and untested migrants as of May (Politico), even those who don’t say “I am under 18,” thus adding approximately 1 million additional residents to the U.S. annually (2 million were expelled during the last two years, according to Politico). So don’t say “no” if you’re offered the opportunity to invest in a crony capitalist “affordable housing” scheme!
… affordable housing targets the masses and serves the primary rental cohort in the United States, with about 72 percent of renters falling in the affordable-housing category. … Compared with market-rate apartments, affordable and workforce housing are, in a sense, recession-proof and provide downside protection to investors. … Because of this rising demand and diminishing supply, affordable-housing units experience little to no turnover and are almost always fully-occupied, consistently maintaining occupancy rates of about 98 percent. This differs significantly from market-rate apartments, which average about a 50 percent turnover rate.
Overall, “affordable” does not necessarily mean smaller returns. Investor portfolios in the affordable-housing sector tend to have stronger returns on investment, increased and stabilized cash flows, and provide investors with downside protection.
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Circling back to the immigration policy that Science (via the CDC) has given the United States, how is it consistent with the documented traveler testing requirement policy that Science (via the CDC) has given the United States? How is a U.S. citizen returning from a zero-COVID country a higher COVID risk, thus requiring pre-departure testing, than an undocumented migrant who has traveled overland through multiple COVID-plagued countries?
Only loosely related, a hotel in China, November 2019, that already had the tables separated for COVID prevention…
(The double boiled pig’s lung soup was about $200 at the exchange rate of late 2019.)
Related:
“Holy Cross is renaming its science complex for Fauci” (NYT, 4/4/2022), which could be good for discouraging young people from wasting time getting PhDs (see “Women in Science”) since Dr. Fauci, M.D. has become synonymous with Science without having had to endure a tedious decade of graduate school plus post-doc
We’ve had runaway government borrowing and spending, plus money-printing by the Fed, for the past two years. Now we have runaway inflation, which has led to some eye-popping asset prices and a government eager to collect a share of these assets even before they’re sold (“unrealized gains”). See “Biden to Include Minimum Tax on Billionaires in Budget Proposal” (NYT, 3/26/2022):
The tax would require that American households worth more than $100 million pay a rate of at least 20 percent on their income as well as unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets, such as stocks and bonds, which can accumulate value for years but are taxed only when they are sold.
Legal questions about such a tax also abound, particularly whether a tax on wealth — rather than income — is constitutional. If Congress approves a wealth tax, there has been speculation that wealthy Americans could mount a legal challenge to the effort.
Due to the threshold of $100 million in assets, I’m a huge supporter of this bill! (though I’m concerned that it won’t be long before either the threshold is reduced or $100 million is the price of a Diet Coke). But it makes me wonder about whether the whole framework of capital gains is Constitutional.
Let’s ignore the mechanics of taxing someone on gains that exist only on paper and just focus on traditional capital gains taxes on realized gains (i.e., money received after an asset sale). The government is mostly in charge of what happens to the value of money because the government can decide interest rates, money printing rates, and how much the government will borrow and spend. The Sixteenth Amendment gives the government the power to tax incomes:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
But it isn’t income when an asset goes up hugely in nominal dollars because dollars have been devalued by the government’s actions. This has been mostly ignored in U.S. history because mostly inflation hasn’t been too extreme (though, of course, for long-held assets, the cumulative effect could still be dramatic). Consider a person who hits 70 and sells some stocks purchased in 1972 to fund retirement. Let’s suppose that these shares were purchased for $10,000 in 1972 and sold for $65,000 today. According to the government’s own CPI calculator, the investor suffered a loss, not a gain, on these shares (no income). Yet, if he/she/ze/they lives in California, more than $20,000 in tax could be owed (20 percent federal long-term capital gains, 3.8 percent Obamacare federal tax, 13.3 percent state tax).
How has the current system persisted for so long without a serious Constitutional challenge?
“Getting “Real” by Indexing Capital Gains for Inflation” (Tax Foundation, 3/6/2018): Inflation is low today, but that may not always be the case. Indexing provides important protection for all citizens, even those who have no capital gains, by reducing government’s ability and incentive to raise effective tax rates by inflating the currency.
[Daniela Jampel, who served as an assistant corporation counsel for the City] had publicly challenged the mayor at an unrelated event on LGBTQ issues — as [Mayor Eric] Adams stood in front of a podium banner that read, “Come to the city where you can say whatever you want.’’
“Three weeks ago, you told parents to trust you that you would unmask our toddlers,” Jampel told the mayor.
“You stood right here, and you said that the masks would come off April 4. That has not happened.”
In other words, she said whatever she wanted opposite a banner that said she could say whatever she wanted. Example signs from NBC:
What happened next?
Sources close to the matter said Jampel – a leading local critic of the toddler mask mandate and pandemic school closures – was informed by e-mail shortly after the presser that she was fired.
(Note that Jampel need only move to Florida to live in a society that conforms to her preferences. It is against state law for a public school system to shut down schools, order children to wear masks, etc. She could leave New York City to the folks who like it the way that it is is and come to a place where most people would agree with her regarding the best ways to protect 4-year-olds from a disease that kills 84-year-olds. (see Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children for how Americans could be a lot happier if people were more mobile))
“The Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States” (Human Rights Campaign): In an HRC Foundation analysis of nearly 7,000 full-time LGBTQ+ workers, median earnings were about $900 weekly, about 90% of the $1,001 median weekly wage a typical worker earns in the United States, as reported recently by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Put another way, LGBTQ+ workers earn about 90 cents for every dollar that the typical worker earns. LGBTQ+ people of color, transgender women and men and non-binary individuals earn even less when compared to the typical worker.
Note that if we combine the last two points we find that New York City is spending its taxpayers’ money to recruit additional lower-than-average income residents who will thus be eligible for a full range of means-tested welfare programs after arrival in NYC. And, if a transition is just beginning, for every valuable 2SLBGTQQIA+ community member who is persuaded to move, NY taxpayers will be forking out $100,000 to gender reassignment surgeons and therapists, via Medicaid, that would otherwise have been shouldered by working taxpayers in Florida. Nonetheless, NYC may find itself outbid by Palm Springs, California, which is offering guaranteed cash to members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. See Guaranteed Income Pilot – DAP Health and California city to give universal income to transgender, nonbinary residents regardless of earnings | Fox News:
Transgender residents in Palm Springs, California are eligible to receive a UBI of up to $900 per month solely for identifying as transgender or nonbinary — no strings attached.
The new pilot program will have $200,000 set aside for allocation after a unanimous vote by the Palm Springs City Council last week.
Twenty transgender and nonbinary Palm Springs residents will receive the free money funded by the taxpayers for 18 months, with advocacy-based health center DAP Health and LGBT advocacy group Queer Works managing the program.
Not everyone in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is aligned on this one:
Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton, who is transgender, pointed to the transcript from the city council’s March 24 meeting where she “expressed strong reservations in general to guaranteed income programs.”
Former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio, a Republican who served as the first openly gay member of the city council, called the program “outrageous and discriminatory.”
“We’re completely opposed to guaranteed or universal basic income programs, because they ultimately cause inflation and raise the cost of living on everyone — they don’t work,” DeMaio said in a statement.
“But at least some of them have minimum income requirements to qualify, whereas this one is no-strings-attached ‘woke’ virtue signaling to the LGBT community in a way that is not only offensive but discriminatory,” he continued.
I personally disagree with Mx. DeMaio. If there is an income threshold necessary to qualify for free taxpayer cash then you’re pretty much guaranteeing that the recipient will limit his/her/zir/their working efforts so as to stay under this threshold. (See Fast-food economics in Massachusetts: Higher minimum wage leads to a shorter work week, not fewer people on welfare for how low-wage workers are smart enough to avoid working themselves out of means-tested entitlements.) If people are going to be paid for identifying as transgender or non-binary the money shouldn’t be conditional on them also refraining from serious work efforts.
Continuing the theme of celebrating the achievements of strong women, here’s one for the Apollo 11 astronauts:
To celebrate weekend warriors who like to put on uniforms, give themselves officer rank and uniforms, and buzz around in mighty Cessna 172s, one for the Civil Air Patrol:
To remember that Big Government is not always competent, one regarding the USS Indianapolis (Navy failed to notice that the ship hadn’t arrived and failed to take any action, not even a search plane launch, in response to a distress call received from the vessel before she sank):
The Mint celebrates John Muir, who advocated eliminating low-skill immigration to the U.S. in order to preserve the environment:
We have some stuff in storage (see PODS versus PACK-RAT for moving and storage). The monthly storage rate was bumped last month by 8 percent (over a price quoted in June 2021).
A local (Palm Beach County) dentist said that he’d raised hygienist wages by 20 percent to partially compensate them for the increase cost of rent (our building has boosted prices for new tenants by 70 percent compared to a year ago).
Our Netflix subscription will be boosted by 11 percent compared to a price set at the end of 2020. (I think we will cancel this $186/year service because they don’t show too many high quality movies and I don’t have the patience for long series.)
The local car wash is up to $29 from $25, a 16-percent increase compared to fall 2021 ($37 with tax and tip to remove the Happy Meal residue):
LGBTQ+ parents and pediatric psychologists say the law stigmatizes being gay or transgender and could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth.
Stella, 10, attends a private school in Atlanta, Georgia, and explains to friends that she has four moms. Two of them are the lesbian couple that adopted her. The other two are her birth parents, one of whom recently came out as a transgender woman.
“I’m so grateful that [Stella] is somewhere that sees” the family “as what it is: her moms just love her”, said Kelsey Hanley, Stella’s birth mother, who lives in Kissimmee, Florida.
But Hanley, 30, worries that children who have multiple moms or dads or are LGBTQ+ themselves won’t get the same acceptance in Florida.
That’s because the state recently approved legislation that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade and prohibits such lessons for older students unless they are “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate”.
(It is unclear how this anecdote relates to Hate in Florida because a 10-year-old with four moms, six moms, or any other quantity of moms would be in 5th grade and the new Florida law prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity only in grades K-3. Also, young Hanley’s four moms have sent her to a private school and the new law does not apply to private schools.)
What I find fascinating about this story is that, in the context of children’s mental health, it shows mentally healthy children outdoors in the baking Florida sun in rated-low-risk-by-the-CDC Hillsborough County… wearing masks:
Note the range of styles from covering face to under-nose to chin diaper and that none are N95 masks that could provide some protection against the unmasked. How can we be sure that these children are mentally healthy? The new law hasn’t taken effect yet, so these masked-outdoors children are among those whose mental health has presumably been maximized by unfettered public school sexual orientation and gender identity instruction starting in kindergarten.
One reason that Hillsborough County is “low risk” is that the CDC completely changed its standards in March 2022 (NPR: “Critics of CDC’s new approach say the agency seems to have moved the goalposts to justify the political imperative to let people get back to their normal lives.”)
The standard example of chutzpahhas been “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”
In a nationwide survey, high school students reported experiencing poor mental health and life disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC researchers said.
Among a nationally representative sample of high school students in the U.S., 37% said that they experienced poor mental health, and 44% reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, reported Sherry Everett Jones, PhD, of the CDC, and colleagues.
Furthermore, about 20% of respondents said they seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9% had attempted suicide during the 12 months before the survey, they noted in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
“Our data make it clear that young people experienced significant disruptions during the pandemic, and are experiencing a mental health crisis,” said co-author Kathleen Ethier, PhD, of the CDC, during a conference call with the media. “It is clear right now that young people need all the support we can give them.”
In other words, the agency that enabled state and local school systems to shut down for more than a year (while still ladling out taxpayer-funded salaries at 100%!) under the guise of following Science now says that people should look to them for advice on how to restore the mental health of kids whose schools were thus closed.
On 20 August 1782, the King and Queen were devastated to lose their youngest son, ‘dear little Alfred’, who died at Windsor Castle shortly before his second birthday. He had been taken to Deal by the royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch in the hope that he would recover from a fever through fresh sea air and bathing, but to no avail. The Court did not go into formal mourning as Alfred was not fourteen, but the royal couple were utterly grief-stricken. The Queen gave Finch an amethyst and pearl locket, and a lock of blond hair from ‘my dear little Angel Alfred’. She wrote to her brother Charles two days after Alfred’s death, ‘I am very grateful to Providence, that out of a family of fourteen children, it has never struck us except in this one instance, and so I must submit myself without a murmur.’ The cause was probably too high a dosage of the smallpox inoculation. The King and Queen were staunch advocates of this treatment, which was spearheaded by Edward Jenner, although they believed that Providence still played a large part in medicine.
When Edward Jenner finally perfected his vaccination technique in the mid-1790s, the King knighted him and became patron of the Jennerian Society which advanced the practice. In his enlightened way he did not allow personal tragedy to affect his rational appreciation of the great benefits of science.
If the U.S. had not traitorously rebelled, Americans might have funded a lot more scientific research during the 19th century.
Early in 1751, Frederick and Augusta settled the twelve-year-old George and eleven-year-old Edward at Savile House, adjoining Leicester House. It was the Hanoverian practice to give princes their own establishments early, and Savile House, built in the 1680s, was to become George’s London home for the next nine years. His mini-Court there consisted of a governor, preceptor (responsible for teaching), sub-governor, sub-preceptor and treasurer, with part-time teachers for languages, fencing, dancing and riding brought in from outside. He studied algebra, geometry and trigonometry. He was the first British monarch to study science, being taught basic physics and chemistry by Scott. He was receiving a good, all-round, enlightened education.
(But maybe not, since the British never taxed anyone in North America to fund government operations in England. Any taxes raised in the 13 colonies were spent in the 13 colonies. On the third hand, a British-governed North America led by a scientifically educated king might have funded local research labs.)
And we might have been spared the partisan politics that are often decried.
Contrary to the Whig imperative of minimizing royal power, The Idea of a Patriot King argued that the role of a constitutionally limited hereditary monarchy was important. Bolingbroke fully accepted that such seventeenth-century notions as the Divine Right of Kings had ‘no foundation in fact or reason’, and he believed ‘a limited monarchy the best of governments’. The limits on the power of the Crown, he maintained, should be ‘carried as far as is necessary to secure the liberties of the people’ and enough to protect the people against an arrogant (by which he meant Old Whig) aristocracy. Bolingbroke’s patriot king would revere the constitution, regard his prerogatives as a sacred trust, ‘espouse no party’ and ‘govern like the common father of his people’. A key message of the book was that government by party inevitably resulted in a factionalism disastrous to the state. ‘Party is a political evil,’ Bolingbroke wrote, ‘and faction is the worst of all parties. The king will aim at ruling a united nation, and in order to govern wisely and successfully he will put himself at the head of his people,’ so that he can deliver them ‘tranquillity, wealth, power and fame’.
Circling back to the vaccine… the situation is not directly comparable, of course. George III and Queen Charlotte were trying to vaccinated their child against a disease that regularly killed children.
A review of salary data shows that the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, plus Virginia Tech, boast some of the highest-paid DEI staffers at public universities, a Fox News review found. These institutions’ top diversity employees earn salaries ranging from $329,000 to $430,000 – vastly eclipsing the average pay for the schools’ full-time tenured professors.
Fox implicitly considers Comparative Victimhood to be simpler than Quantum Electrodynamics and, therefore, it is not reasonable for a diversity bureaucrat to get paid 5X what a young Physics professor earns (see AIP salary calculator).
Colleges that have gone “test optional” enroll — and graduate — a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds, the researchers found in the study
In short, Science proves that dispensing with the SAT leads to more diversity.
Within our office, we have a dedicated research and analysis team that continuously studies our processes, outcomes, and criteria …. not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education, relative to having them, given these other inequalities
There are some helpful hashtags, including #diversity:
When we combine NPR and MIT we find that Science proves that requiring the SAT reduces diversity and also that requiring the SAT increases diversity. It is therefore not unreasonable for someone tasked with applying this Science to earn $430,000 per year at a taxpayer-funded state university.
