It’s time to start putting as many random thoughts and fragments onto e-paper as possible now. Days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months, etc. and this shit will be fucking fascinating to look back on later.
- When will Alberta/Canada “flatten the curve” ? Hard to say, but a military shutdown of the country can’t more than two weeks away now. A provincial State of Emergency was finally announced yesterday. Most businesses are closing their doors. Employees who can work remotely started to do so late last week. Gatherings are now restricted to 50 ppl, and should hopefully be down to 5 by the end of the week. There are 97 confirmed cases in the province with only 20 confirmed in Edmonton.i There are 598 confirmed in Canada with 8 deaths.
- Canada more broadly and Edmonton in particular will fare better than Italy and its cities. The advantages of our young population within sprawling suburban cities with “inefficient” density are made manifest in a pandemic like this where physical space is man’s best protection against nature. Frank Lloyd Wright knew what the fuck he was talking about when he proposed a full acre/man.
- The US is a fucking powder keg. They aren’t even testing properly. From Coronavirus alone, we could see a million deaths in that country this year. The benchmark for a “bad” outcome is the 1918 Spanish Flu, which saw about 500`000 deaths, albeit with a smaller population and poorer medicines.
- Most people are utterly lousy at exponential maffs. Admittedly, anything that quadruples/quintuples weekly is outside of the realm of almost every lived experience.
- NN Taleb called it first back on Jan 26th. I believed him then, and the implications took me for a spin for almost a week, not least of all because my degrees and work experience in Immunology, Infection, and Public Health were compounded by my sixth sense for non-linearities, but I allowed my own “lived reality” to bring me back down. I don’t regret having been balanced-out at the time. Stocking emergency supplies even three weeks ago seems bloody prescient compared to the average response, which is just getting going now. And now I’m chill as a fucking cucumber, playing the waiting game.
- That being said, my rage-o-meter and public pronouncements haven’t been this vocal since 2013/2014.
- I’m telling everyone who will listen to get the fuck out of equities.
- I’m telling everyone who will listen to self-isolate and socially distance.
- Chamath Palihapitiya was and is also on the fucking money, as usual. His March 14th podcast is a must-listen for those interested in the higher-order and longer-term consequences of the pandemic, starting at minute 53.
- I thought that Bitcoin was a “safe haven” asset until last Friday, March 13th, after its
“value”price was halved in a week. Over the weekend, I reset my possibility parameters to include a bottoming out in the hundreds of US Dollars. Is any safe haven asset really “safe” when there’s a MASSIVE deleveraging like this going on ? We’ll soon see. - That being said, the only way that governments are going to get out of this mess is to print TENS AND HUNDREDS OF TRILLIONS of useless paper. This is the systemic shock that will prove Bitcoin’s long-term value as an inflation hedge. The war we’d been preparing for is here at last, just as MP left the chat. Go figure.ii
- This is our generation’s WW1 moment. The world will not be the same after this little episode.
- I’m making sure to stay as connected as possible with neighbours. We’ll need each other’s support in the months and years to come and we genuinely have an incredible community that I want to bounce back as quickly as absolutely possible.
- My new favourite caveat is “all things considered.”
- I’m talking to family by phone and FaceTime more than ever before. It’s kinda nice.
- There’s no doubt that China will be the primary beneficiary of this virus. They’ve handled it the best, showing the strength of their top-down, data-heavy model. They’ll set the precedent for how nation states operate in the 21st century. This pandemic is only adding jet fuel to China’s establishment as the new top dog.
- That being said, on the other side of this, most countries will improve, or at least aim to improve, their self-reliance long-term. They won’t forget the time that China has them by the balls as they rebuilt their economies from the ashes with China’s assistance. Globalism will take a big hit from this. Localism will grow more powerful.
- It will take 3-5 years to rebuild the economy to where it was at the end of 2019.
- The rebuilt economy will not be the same economy, it will be much more digital. Zoom and Slack will prove to be immensely valuable pillars of most business operations, particularly for all the various types of consultants who otherwise spend way too much money on slick, more-signal-than-substance real estate.iii
- Commercial real estate will take decades to recover from this blow.
- I’m still not sure how the energy economy will look going forward, or how long it will take to recover.
- Our live-out nanny opted to remain so and stay with her husband instead of us for the next 2-3 months. Can’t blame her. We laid her off today but will top-up her EI benefits so that she experiences no loss in income. She’s been with us for over four years and she’s been nothing short of incredible in that time. Truly, she’s a part of our family. But with neither The Girl nor I with much work to do over the next few months, we’ll have plenty of fun looking after the kiddos ourselves!
- I’m feeling confident that I have sufficient resources to weather this storm, support those around me, and hopefully even pick up some deals, so will it all just feel like an extended holiday ? How long until I’m so bored, frustrated, cooped-up, or justifiably anxious that I want to crawl out of my skin and die ? Does that need to happen at all ? Or will I be one of the psychological/thought leaders throughout this thing and onto the other side ?
- I have enough books in my library to last a lifetime, but will I finally crack some of the dustier spines, or will the lures of the web prove insurmountable ?
- My order of panic was, thus far: parents –> family –> community –> personal business –> personal finances –> global finances –> global industries. I’m pretty happy with that outcome even though it was in no way planned. I think I’ve got my priorities mostly straight! Even thought it wasn’t “cheap” to have personal finances comes so low down on the list. I definitely took a whack, but at least I’m not alone, and misery sure does love company!
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- To Alberta’s enduring credit, they’re testing like mad men. I can only assume that these are PCR tests rather than IgG tests, but 12`355 tests have been conducted as of March 17th and 12,258 have come back negative. So while other locales (ahem, US) may have 50x the actual number of infected individuals compared to confirmed cases, Alberta may be closer to Wuhan when they locked down, having only ~7x. ↩
- Why it took MP an extra two years to finish his finishing will be left to better historians than yours truly. ↩
- Not that there’s any replacement for physical proximity! See footnote ii. ↩