The one-month anniversary of Dr. Joe Biden, M.D.’s vaccination order for Head Start workers

by philg

From the US Department of HHS:

Vaccination of Head Start staff is essential as we work together to build back out of the COVID-19 pandemic and move toward fully in-person services. On September 9, 2021, President Biden announced a plan requiring all Head Start program staff and certain contractors to be vaccinated. This action will help more programs and early childhood centers safely remain open and provide comfort to the many parents and guardians that rely on them every day to keep their children safe.

Beginning January 2022, all Head Start teachers and program staff will be required to be vaccinated to help ensure the health and safety of children, families, and their communities.

COVID-19 is an emergency requiring unprecedented suspensions of what had been considered Americans’ rights. At the same time, it is not such a serious emergency that people need to be vaccinated sooner than four months after the President/Physician-in-Chief’s order.

Related:

  • “Head Start: A Tragic Waste of Money” (CATO, 2010): Created in 1965, the comprehensive preschool program for 3- and 4‐​year olds and their parents is meant to narrow the education gap between low‐​income students and their middle‐ and upper‐​income peers. Forty‐​five years and $166 billion later, it has been proven a failure. The bad news came in the [Obama administration] study released this month: It found that, by the end of the first grade, children who attended Head Start are essentially indistinguishable from a control group of students who didn’t. … In fact, not a single one of the 114 tests administered to first graders — of academics, socio‐​emotional development, health care/​health status and parenting practice — showed a reliable, statistically significant effect from participating in Head Start.
  • “The Head Start CARES Demonstration: Another Failed Federal Early Childhood Education Program” (Heritage, 2015): The two small-scale studies—of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project begun in 1962 and the Carolina Abecedarian Project begun in 1972—that were used to demonstrate the effectiveness of such interventions are now outdated. Their results have never been replicated.
  • coming to the opposite conclusion (i.e., give them more money) … “The Never-Ending Struggle to Improve Head Start” (Atlantic, 2016): The federal government has invested billions in preschool, but there’s still lots of room to grow. No rigorous research project followed the children Johnson was talking about to determine whether now, in their mid-50s, the 1965 Head Start graduates are living the productive and rewarding lives predicted for them. Critics charge that Head Start is a big federal program spending billions of tax dollars on a pipe dream: that the effects of being born into poverty can be averted for a lifetime with a few hours a day spent in a classroom at age 4. On the other hand, its champions argue that everything Johnson predicted is still possible, if only the country gives the program the resources it needs to succeed. … Despite its evidently strong program, there is scant empirical evidence supporting Portland’s success at improving the academic futures of its graduates beyond that first year of kindergarten entry. The same is true of Head Start as a whole.
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How will the Afghan refugees get washing machines? (WSJ)

by philg

“Why It’s Easier to Find Expensive Appliances Than Cheaper Ones” (WSJ):

Whirlpool, GM and other companies are prioritizing higher-price products as they try to offset supply-chain snarls

“There was a day when a customer could walk in the door and buy a secondary piece or a landlord special and have 100 options to choose from,” said Mr. Coughlin, a co-owner of All Shore Appliance in Port Washington, N.Y. “Now it’s more along the lines of, we explain to the customer what we have.”

As the global supply-chain crisis snarls production and bloats manufacturing and shipping costs, companies that make products from lawn mowers to barbecue grills are prioritizing higher-priced models, in some cases making cheaper alternatives harder or impossible to find, company executives, retailers and analysts say.

Some are pushing upscale products in an effort to make up for added labor, shipping and manufacturing costs. Whirlpool Corp., maker of washing machines, KitchenAid mixers and other home appliances, said in July it would shift toward higher-price products as part of a plan to help cover rising costs.

General Motors … stopped making the Chevrolet Malibu midsize sedan for more than six months, but has kept all shifts running at a factory that makes its most expensive SUVs. The average new vehicle in September sold for a record $42,800, up nearly 19% from a year earlier, according to research firm J.D. Power.

Televisions are among items for which cheaper models are becoming scarcer, said Mike Abt, co-president of Chicago appliance seller Abt Electronics. He said the price he pays for appliances is rising and he expects that to continue next year. For the first time he can remember, the price of televisions has actually increased—they typically get cheaper every year.

A tough time to be setting up a new household as a refugee, but perhaps the U.S. Treasury has enough cash to buy the high-end LG front-loaders?

Related:

  • for those of us already sick with envy, some additional motivation to support President Biden’s Tax the Rich proposals… “Gulfstream Adds Two Models To Its Large-Cabin Line of Business Jets” (AVweb): The $71.5 million G800 adds 500 nautical miles of range (8,000 NM) to that of its 10-foot-longer, larger-cabin G700 sibling, the in-development $75 million flagship of the Gulfstream fleet scheduled to enter service next year. … At the other end of the scale, the $34.5 million G400 updates the “entry level” of the large-cabin line (the smaller-cabin G280 is classed as super-midsize). The 4,200-NM-range G400 is slated to make its first flight in early 2023.
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Facebook reminds me to get with the program

by philg

I haven’t been using Facebook since my father died (see Should one stay off Facebook, Instagram, et al. following the death of a parent?), but I checked in on my birthday last month. Here’s part of the page showing my timeline:

Note the lower left section in which I am exhorted to be virtuous:

Add a COVID-19 vaccine frame to your profile picture
We can all play a part in ending the pandemic. Add a frame to your profile picture. Your new picture will be shown to your friends to inspire them to get their vaccines as soon as they can.

You might think that the robots at Facebook would have figured out that 95 percent of my friends are Democrats (most are in academic, pharma, or medical jobs where a bigger government means they’ll enjoy a higher income, or they’re in Silicon Valley where expressing skepticism regarding Joe Biden would mean ostracism) and that the majority are already vaccinated (they’ve posted pictures of themselves getting shots, added their own vaccine frame, etc.). What is the rationale for asking me to celebrate my now-stale vaccination with a frame? That Facebook friends who’ve resisted 10 months of intensive propaganda from the government, the media, and Facebook itself will suddenly be convinced? Remember that most of the unvaccinated folks I know live in Massachusetts and are exposed to demands that they comply (“play a part in ending the pandemic”) every few miles while driving, every few minutes when walking in an urban area, etc. A vaccine frame from me would increase their exposure to pro-vaccine propaganda by less than 0.1%.

How long do we keep up the vaccination virtue signals?

[Separately, my father’s experience is not the best advertisement for COVID-19 vaccine safety. He went into a steep decline and died one week after receiving his second injection of Pfizer.]

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Finally a use case for cryptocurrency? (currency conversion fees)

by philg

I did a lot more research after Portuguese stocks or Lisbon real estate for the next five years? (May) and, as part of an EU citizenship project, decided to purchase stocks over in Portugal rather than take on more real estate ownership hassles (one of the big joys of our Florida move has been saying goodbye to homeownership).

Moving money from Bank of America to Bankinter led to some discoveries about international wire transfer costs. If you move a small amount in euros, Bank of America says that they won’t charge you any fees:

But the exchange rate was actually 1.17 on 9/24. So this is a 2.65 percent fee (still only about $31, plus whatever Bankinter will charge to receive the wire (0.05 percent, minimum €5, maximum €30)).

What about for the million euro transfer that is necessary to get the golden visa/passport process kicked off? Compared to the quoted market, the hidden fees within Bank of America were about 0.75 percent (e.g., about $7,500 on $1 million). If sent in USD, however, and converted by Bankinter, the non-hidden cost is 0.5 percent, a little cheaper than BofA, but still about 80X more than the cost of a Bitcoin transaction on the blockchain, right? (right now roughly $60 to the miners?). Given that we supposedly live in a seamless global economy, I’m kind of surprised at how much it costs to change a couple of database records at two banks that are already tightly coupled.

Could this be an argument for cryptocurrency, assuming that just one of the Ponzicoins prevails and becomes a worldwide currency?

(Why is it fair to call these Ponzicoins? Whoever creates a cryptocurrency can mint the first few million or whatever at almost no cost and then they gain value when he/she/ze/they convinces others to buy in.)

Separately, let’s look at the motivational factors from May:

At least to judge by our media, the U.S. is embroiled in white v. Black, white v. Asian, white v. Latinx, and hetero cisgender v. LGBTQIA+ fights. We’re also adding $trillions in debt, welcoming millions of new welfare-dependent citizens, and instituting dramatic changes in government (every day we hear a new and exciting idea for a bigger more powerful central government!). It seems like a good time to ensure that children have the option to study, work, and live in Europe. The Europeans bumped up against the limits of how much government could be responsible for and don’t seem anxious to go back to the 1970s.

There is no way to predict whether Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, or Sweden will be a better place to live than the U.S. in 2030, but keeping only a U.S. passport is essentially a bet that the U.S. will be a better place to live than anywhere in the E.U. Would we want to make that bet?

Now that we’ve had a full summer of rule by Joe Biden and the Democrats, do the above factors still apply to the U.S. as reconceived from Washington, D.C.? Let’s take them one at a time.

embroiled in white v. Black, white v. Asian, white v. Latinx, and hetero cisgender v. LGBTQIA+ fights

The conflicts described in May don’t seem to have been resolved. To these we’ve added roughly half of Americans who now hate Texas and Texans (see “Boycott Texas,” for example, from The Nation, 9/14: “With SB 8 following a crazy new gun law and mandatory mask ban, the Lone Star State has more than earned the cold shoulder”). We also have the hatred of the vaccinated for the unvaccinated, a new-since-May phenomenon.

adding $trillions in debt

“America’s Need to Pay Its Bills Has Spawned a Political Game” (NYT, 9/26): “The Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage the United States in waves, frequently disrupting economic activity and the taxes the government collects, complicating Treasury’s ability to gauge its cash flow.”

In other words, the U.S. will continue to bury itself more deeply in debt so long as coronapanic continues. And, absent an enormous advance in treatment, we know that coronapanic will continue so long as the virus has the capability of evolving.

(Of course the U.S. also buried itself more deeply in debt before COVID-19 emerged, but at a somewhat slower pace (St. Louis Fed))

welcoming millions of new welfare-dependent citizens

This one might have changed. In order to hit our goal numbers for Americans dependent on government-provided housing, health care, food, and smartphone, we’re no longer relying on immigrants (the “welcoming” part of the headline). We’ve got the new $3,600 per year per child handout, which started in July. Going forward, the NYT tells us that what we used to call “welfare” is our common destiny: “From Cradle to Grave, Democrats Move to Expand Social Safety Net” (9/6, regarding $3.5 trillion in new spending, “a cradle-to-grave reweaving of a social safety net frayed by decades of expanding income inequality, stagnating wealth and depleted governmental resources, capped by the worst public health crisis in a century.”). Tens of millions of additional residents of the U.S. will be dependent on government support (no longer called “welfare”) going forward, but, due to the massive expansion of the welfare state, most of them will be native-born.

On the third hand, once chain migration (wives, cousins, kids, parents, etc.) is mostly complete, we’ll have at least 1 million new citizens from Afghanistan as a result of our spectacular defeat in August and decision to evacuate mostly men mostly at random rather than simply pay the Taliban not to bother people on a list. If these folks are like previous immigrants from Afghanistan to the U.S., they and their descendants will be among the poorest of the poor here, eligible for every form of government assistance for at least three generations. (See “Challenges to the economic integration of Afghan refugees in the U.S.”: “Afghan refugees’ earned incomes are the lowest of seven refugee/immigrant comparison groups”)

instituting dramatic changes in government (every day we hear a new and exciting idea for a bigger more powerful central government!)

Other than the welfare state expansion that the NYT describes above, I can’t think of anything new since May from the Biden administration or Congress.

If an EU passport was a good idea in May 2021, therefore, it seems like it might be an even better idea today. If you want to buy yourself and your children the option to study, work, or live in Europe (or simply travel back and forth during lockdowns), I would recommend acting ASAP. The Portuguese love hardcopy, notarization, etc. and it will take a two months to jump over the bureaucratic hurdles, even with two-day FedEx delivery of signed hardcopies. Email if you need recommendations for a lawyer and bank over there.

Related:

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Follow-up on the Coinbase corporate version of Florida

by philg

A year ago, the CEO of Coinbase paid employees who were the most passionate about social justice and political causes to leave. See “Coinbase is a mission focused company” and also “Taking a Stand Against Social Stances” (NYT, 9/29/2020). (If he’d been a Southerner he might have said “Don’t let the screen door hit you on the butt on your way out.”)

In other words, he was trying to create something like the Florida that we’ve experienced. After nearly two months here, I have seen exactly one Black Lives Matter message (bumper sticker on a black (not “Black”) Toyota Prius as we were on an excursion to Miami (IKEA, Guitar Hotel, and Marlins baseball game)). Supposedly there are a lot of people here who voted for either Trump or Biden, but there is no evidence of that from lawn signs or bumper stickers. Bumper stickers are display at perhaps 1/200th the rate compared to in Maskachusetts and the most common type of bumper sticker is school-related.

What happens at a company without on-the-clock activism? Discrimination against those who identify as Black, according to the NYT… “‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at the King of Crypto Start-Ups” (11/27/2020):

One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black.

The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.

One of the employees was Alysa Butler, 25, who worked in recruiting. During her time at Coinbase, she said, she told her manager several times about how he and others excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible.

“Most people of color working in tech know that there’s a diversity problem,” said Ms. Butler, who resigned in April 2019. “But I’ve never experienced anything like Coinbase.”

(Wikipedia says Coinbase is “remote-first”, so how do employees know anything about the race IDs of other employees? See Achieve college student skin color diversity via image processing? as well)

How did it go for Coinbase from Management’s perspective? The CEO who wanted people to fight their social justice and political battles on their own time followed up with a Twitter thread:

It’s been about a year since my mission-focused blog post. It wasn’t easy to go through at the time, but looking back, it turned out to be one of the most positive changes I’ve made at Coinbase, and I’d recommend it to others.

We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction.

One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we’ve grown our headcount about 110%, while our diversity numbers have remained the same, or even improved on some metrics.

Several people told me this would never happen when I circulated the original draft internally. It turns out that there are people from every background who want to work at a mission focused company.

…

If he is putting employees into buckets based on skin color in order to get “diversity numbers”, isn’t he himself engaging in a social justice cause at work? There was no legal requirement for Coinbase to gather these data, right? (Let me guess right now that age is not one of the axes of diversity for which Mr. Armstrong is anxious to get numbers!)

In other diversity news, the guy who stirred up hatred at University of Chicago (see “Geophysical Sciences Grad Students Call on Faculty to Denounce Videos By Department Member” 12/2/2020) got literally canceled at MIT, where he had been scheduled to give a lecture. From the Daily Mail:

…. after outraging ‘totalitarian’ Twitter mob by arguing that academic evaluations should be based on merit not racial ‘equity’

Dorian Abbot was denied the opportunity to give the Carlson Lecture, which is devoted to ‘new results in climate science’ and hosted by MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

The lecture was scheduled to be delivered on October 21, but Abbot learned over the weekend that EAPS would be canceling his talk.

In August, things took a turn when Abbot co-wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek in which he argued that the ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI) initiative embraced on many college campuses nationwide ‘violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.’

DEI, according to Abbot and co-author Professor Ivan Marinovic, ‘treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.’

Abbot and Marinovic instead proposed ‘an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.’

(But who decides “merit”?)

It is kind of exciting for alumni when MIT can share a newspaper with Joe Biden’s $2.5 million granddaughter.

What would Dorian Abbot have talked about? He seems to be at least a little interested in Snowball Earth, one of my favorite geology subjects ever since reading an awesome book on the subject. He’s also interested in exoplanets, which fascinate everyone far more than how their Windows 11 computer or iPhone work. Maybe if Professor Abbot can get Elon Musk to blast him off to Gliese 273b (shouldn’t take that long to go 12.2 light-years in a Plaid Edition rocket), his critics will forget about him?

Related:

  • “Tesla must pay $137 million to a Black employee who sued for racial discrimination” (NPR, 10/5/2021), in which we learn that the article doesn’t match the headline. The now-rich elevator operator worked for a contractor to Tesla and was never directly employed by Tesla. (electrek has a more accurate headline: “Tesla is ordered to pay ex-worker $137 million in racial abuse lawsuit, releases blog about verdict”: Mr. Diaz never worked for Tesla. He was a contract employee who worked for Citistaff and nextSource. Mr. Diaz worked as an elevator operator at the Fremont factory for nine months, from June 2015 to March 2016. There was no witness testimony or other evidence that anyone ever heard the n-word used toward Mr. Diaz. Even though Mr. Diaz now complains about racial harassment at Fremont, at the time he said he was being harassed, he recommended to his son and daughter – while they were all living together in the same home – that they work at Tesla with him.)
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Hospitals are full; doctors and nurses have quit; hospitals advertise for new patients

by philg

Aristotle is the most relevant ancient philosopher for our age (see Coronascientists are the modern Aristotles?) and, as it happens, is credited with documenting the syllogism.

Here’s the Coronasyllogism of the Day:

  1. American hospitals are packed. People are literally dying for want of a hospital bed. (“Americans are dying because no hospital will take them” (Vox, September 14, 2021): The country’s pandemic failures have sometimes led to deadly health care rationing. … America, the richest country in the world, is not supposed to be a place where patients are left at the door to die. Yet that is exactly what’s happening now — 18 months into the pandemic.; “American Hospitals Buckle Under Delta, With I.C.U.s Filling Up” (NYT, August 17, 2021): “Outside some hospitals, officials are erecting large tents to house everyone.”
  2. Doctors and nurses have quit because it is exhausting to work in a hospital overflowing with patients. (“Covid has made it harder to be a health-care worker. Now, many are thinking of quitting” (CNBC, May 30, 2021): According to recent studies, between 20% and 30% of frontline U.S. health-care workers say they are now considering leaving the profession.)
  3. Therefore, it is critical for hospitals to invest heavily in every possible form of advertising for new patients.

If you weren’t familiar with the wisdom of the ancients, you might naively wonder “How is it that hospitals are so anxious for our business if their rooms are packed while their staff has figured out that the U.S. is a work-optional society?”

Do airports and FBOs in South Florida advertise seeking hangar tenants? No. Why not? They’re actually full. If there is a waiting list of 190 people for 300 hangars (F45, truly in the middle of nowhere), why waste money trying to get a 191st aircraft owner to sign up?

One could argue that the billboards and ad spots were purchased prior to COVID-19, but we’re approaching the second anniversary of the disease. Surely that is enough time for hospitals to turn over their ad space to “essential” (in Massachusetts) marijuana and liquor stores and other businesses for which the media hasn’t informed us of any difficulty with worker retention.

Related:

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No, no, no on Windows 11

by philg

Today is the official launch of Microsoft’s Windows 11. How’s my $2,500 state-of-the-art-in-2015 PC doing with the new software? Here’s the report from PC Health Check:

I thought that I had filled out all of my TPS reports, but apparently there is no Trusted Platform Module in my PC. This is because the idea is new? I think it goes back to 1986 when IBM Watson developed ABYSS (1990 paper), in which a secure coprocessor decrypts software before it is run, first checking to see if the user has the right to execute the code (the ultimate copy protection hammer!).

Who here is actually running Windows 11? Is it a whole new world of awesomeness that would justify days of pain to set up a new PC, transfer applications from the old PC, move hard drives, etc.? And how many kidneys would I have to donate to get a GPU? Just one? Or two and then go on dialysis?

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The concerns of a Massachusetts public school superintendent

by philg

Email last month from the superintendent of schools in a nearly-all-white suburb of Boston:

The Superintendent’s Bulletin can be accessed by clicking on the link below:

Superintendent’s Bulletin – September 23, 2021

In This Week’s Bulletin:

Letter from the Superintendent

Diversity & Dialogue Series 2: Hispanic Heritage Month

Adolescent Mental Health Free Clinic

Webinar: Anxiety in a Time of COVID

Sustainable Food Parent Survey

October Flu Shot Clinics

Free School Lunch Through June 30, 2022

Employee Benefits Open Enrollment

District Calendar of Upcoming Events

————————————–

Quiz for readers: What topic is missing?

Second question… if typical children are not at risk from COVID-19 (other causes of death being much more common), how did they become anxious about it?

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Should investors react to the change in Germany’s government?

by philg

After 16 years of rule by Angela Merkel and the Christian Democrats, the government in Germany is changing. I talked to some European bankers and a former hedge fund manager to find out what, if anything, investors should do about this.

The general consensus was that very little would change in Germany. As in the U.S., grand plans from a party can be derailed by an individual member of parliament who thinks that the grand plan will have a negative impact on his/her/zir/their own little corner of the country. For better or worse, this tends to make the German system stable.

Nobody said that Merkel would be missed. One banker pointed out that Merkel was likely voted out by the low-skill welfare-dependent migrants that she was instrumental in bringing to Germany (welfare in Germany is much less generous than in the U.S., but still leads to a better material lifestyle than trying to work for a living in a lot of countries). “They’re betting that the Social Democrats will increase the handouts,” he said. “The conservatives bring them in saying that they’ll work and they turn around and vote for liberals so that they don’t have to work.” (After five years in Germany, about 51 percent of migrants don’t work, which is considered an improvement and a success story by pro-migration Germans.)

Another banker said that Merkel was responsible for the UK leaving the EU. “The British could have just ignored the EU’s demands to accept migrants, as the Eastern European countries did, but they’re too bound up in being law-abiding,” he said. “The Eastern European countries just refuse and dare the EU to throw them out, but there isn’t really a mechanism for kicking a country out of the EU.”

The former hedge fund manager said that Merkel was an unprincipled follower of public opinion. While she initially told Germans that most would be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and therefore most resistance would be futile (e.g., masks and shutdowns would just slightly delay the inevitable), when people demanded lockdowns she locked them down.

How’s Europe doing? “Euro zone inflation hits highest level in 13 years as energy prices soar” (CNBC, October 1, 2021):

Headline inflation came in at 3.4% last month, according to preliminary data from Europe’s statistics office Eurostat. This was the highest level since September 2008 when inflation stood at 3.6%. It comes after German consumer prices rose by 4.1% in September — the highest level in almost 30 years.

The rise has been driven higher by surging energy prices, deepening concern among policymakers. The front-month gas price at the Dutch TTF hub, a European benchmark, has risen almost 400% since the start of the year.

What’s more, this record run in energy prices is not expected to end any time soon, with energy analysts warning market nervousness is likely to persist throughout winter.

France has become the latest country to step up measures to mitigate the costs for consumers. Prime Minister Jean Castex said Thursday the government would be blocking further natural gas price increases as well as rises in electricity tariffs. However, before these measures kick in, gas prices will rise by 12.6% for French consumers as of Friday.

I.e., France is copying Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls and hoping for a different result. (See also “Nixon Taught Us How Not to Fight Inflation” (WSJ): His price controls led to an exponential increase in demand, which caused a shock when they ended.)

I asked the hedge fund manager if the European inflation numbers were cooked like the U.S. numbers (e.g., food and energy costs are excluded from some measures, the cost of buying a house is excluded from all measures (the government comes up with a fictitious world in which people can rent their houses from themselves for a government-determined price)). “Completely fake of course,” he responded. “However, there is one reality of their own making. To ‘save the world’ (read: tax more) they recently yanked up taxes on natural gas and the such. Together with rising oil prices, this has created quite a bit of inflation as you can imagine.”

If the Europeans are inflating away the value of their currency just we are inflating away the value of ours, what is an investor to do? Move money to China, as BlackRock has recently started to do? That’s a bridge too far for a lot of non-Chinese investors. How about “Mining Stocks Offer a Cheap Play on Growth. Dig In.” (Barrons, September 17, 2021), in which we learn that iron and copper miners have P/E ratios of 5-7 (compare to over 30 for the S&P 500):

We have no idea where the euro and dollar will be after the politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are done with their manipulations of the respective economies. I’ve always hated gold as an investment because it isn’t productive. And, in fact, once you factor in dividends paid (“total return”), gold has underperformed U.S. stocks going back to the beginning of our galloping inflation (1971):

(black is the total return; silver is bumping along on the bottom; the S&P (without considering dividends), the Dow Jones, and gold are clustered in the middle)

Could mining iron and copper be considered a hybrid of gold’s inflation hedge and the return to be expected from investing in a productive activity? People will still need steel even if there is a lot of inflation in one or more currencies. On the third hand, aside from the low P/E ratio, why are raw materials miners better investments than upstream manufacturers? And if the P/E is 5 or 7, is that because a company is heavily indebted and can go bust (rather than simply slim down) in the event that demand is reduced?

Related:

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California versus Florida government workers

by philg

Jesus said “The last shall be first and the first last.” Perhaps he was talking about government workers in Florida and California who swapped jobs?

Searching the Web for teaching examples of strategic plans (private companies’ plans tend not to be available), I found one for the Florida DMV (“Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles”). Pages 11-12 cover the outcomes that Florida considers important to measure. All of them relate to the customer until the last one…

Employee welfare is not even a “value”. Page 4:

What about their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters working for the California DMV? The 2021-2026 strategic plan puts workers #1 on page #1:

This is over a heading mentioning “stakeholders” (i.e., people other than customers). A little more detail on page 4:

Separately, it turns out that a resident of Florida doesn’t interact with “the DMV” to get a license, register a car, etc. County tax collectors are responsible for dealing with the unwashed. Due to coronapanic, the thinly populated counties are refusing to deal with non-residents and the densely populated counties, such as Palm Beach, require appointments. Once there, one finds that the front-line workers are all masked and behind the Plexiglas dividers that #Science first told us to install and now says are useless. What about the management overlords who set up the mask policy? They’re in open cubicles, about 20′ behind the front-liners, next to a bank of windows looking out at the palm trees… unmasked.

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