ipcc.ch/report/ar6/HBITwg1/

ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

At 2°C global warming and above, the level of confidence in and the magnitude of the change in droughts and heavy and mean precipitation increase compared to those at 1.5°C. Heavy precipitation and associated flooding events are projected to become more intense and frequent in the Pacific Islands and across many regions of North America and Europe (medium to high confidence)40. These changes are also seen in some regions in Australasia and Central and South America (medium confidence). Several regions in Africa, South America and Europe are projected to experience an increase in frequency and/or severity of agricultural and ecological droughts with medium to high confidence40; increases are also projected in Australasia, Central and North America, and the Caribbean with medium confidence. A small number of regions in Africa, Australasia, Europe and North America are also projected to be affected by increases in hydrological droughts, and several regions are projected to be affected by increases or decreases in meteorological droughts with more regions displaying an increase (medium confidence). Mean precipitation is projected to increase in all polar, northern European and northern North American regions, most Asian regions and two regions of South America (high confidence)

IPCC Report (AR6 SPM-33 C.2.3)

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More:

climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth’s_atmosphere

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Previously:

(Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research) The projected effect on insects, vertebrates, and plants of limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C

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As part of a six-month investigation, The Times synchronized and mapped thousands of videos and police audio of the U.S. Capitol riot to provide the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.

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More:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

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Previously:

Reichstag Fire

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(House impeachment managers) Video of Capitol Insurrection

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Lina Khan is a noted academic and legal scholar specializing in antitrust and competition law in the United States.

Ms. Khan was named chair to the Federal Trade Commission in an unexpected move by the Biden administration, which speculators believe may implicate pending antitrust enforcement policy. She was confirmed to the seat on Tuesday, June 15th 2021 by the Senate.

Legal restrictions on anti-competitive behavior by dominant market participants were put in place during the Gilded Age of American history, where popular sentiment soured on large industrial companies. A select few industries abused their immense power to the detriment and destruction of workers’ lives, the environment, and the functioning of free markets.

If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

—Senator John Sherman, 1890

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Some scholars of American law and history believe we are currently in a second Glided Age, where technology, intellectual property and financial law, and exclusionary economies of scale have begun to concentrate power and wealth to the detriment of the same groups:

We are four decades into a major political and economic experiment. What happens when the United States and other major nations weaken their laws meant to control the size of industrial giants? What is the impact of allowing unrestricted growth of concentrated private power, and abandoning most curbs on anticompetitive conduct?

The answers, I think, are plain. We have managed to recreate both the economics and politics of a century ago—the first Gilded Age—and remain in grave danger of repeating more of the signature errors of the twentieth century. As that era has taught us, extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership. Yet, as if blind to the greatest lessons of the last century, we are going down the same path. If we learned one thing from the Gilded Age, it should have been this: The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public.

-Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness Introduction, 2018

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Disclosure: antitrust policy enforcement would be financially and professionally favorable to myself

The opinions expressed on this page are solely my own

The following is reprinted without express permission of its rights-holder

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yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

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More:

Amazon’s response:

nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/00-Amazon-recusal-petition.pdf

Facebook’s response(s):

July:

about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Facebook-Inc.s-Petition-to-Recuse-Chair-Khan.pdf

October:

npr.org/2021/10/04/1043093307/facebook-asks-dismiss-ftc-complaint-instagram-whatsapp

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Matt’s Note: Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a noted author, mathematical statistician, and financial risk analyst most famous for popularizing the term Black Swan. He is also known for having articulated an intuitive and mathematical approach to understanding how uncertainty and randomness impact people’s lives.

(I’ll read his books eventually, I swear)

fooledbyrandomnessdotcom.wordpress.com

In its current version, in spite of the hype, bitcoin failed to satisfy the notion of “currency without government” (it proved to not even be a currency at all), can be neither a short or long term store of value (its expected value is no higher than 0), cannot operate as a reliable inflation hedge, and, worst of all, does not constitute, not even remotely, safe haven for one’s investments, shield against government tyranny, or tail protection vehicle for catastrophic episodes.

What the blockchain added, thanks to the hash function (+), is the condition that r(.) must be functionally and probabilistically bijective: no two seeds must produce the same output (or should have a vanishingly low probability of that happening), what, in computer science terminology, is called collision.

This hard-wired attribute and absence of supervision of the blockchain thus allows the storage of activities on a public ledger to facilitate peer-to-peer commerce, transactions, and settlements.

…

Miners derive their compensation from both seignorage (the market value of a bitcoin minus its mining costs) and transaction fees upon validation –with the plan to switch to transaction fees as sole revenues upon the eventual depletion of the coins

…

The implication is that, owing to the absence of any explicit yield benefiting the holder of bitcoin, if we expect that, at any point in the future, the value will be zero when miners are extinct, the technology becomes obsolete, future generations get into other such “assets” and bitcoin loses its appeal to them, then the value must be zero now.

fooledbyrandomnessdotcom.wordpress.com

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More:

The New Yorker: The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System

newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title.

“The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.”

Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it + —a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”

newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system

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Previously:

(Campbell Harvey) We are in another Bitcoin Bubble

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March 6th, 2020:

(WHO) Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public

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ssrn.com/abstract=253123

This paper explains why the level of share prices has failed to rise during a decade of substantial inflation. Instead, the share value per dollar of real pretax earnings fell from 10.82 in 1967 to 6.65 in 1976. The analysis here shows that the inverse relation between higher inflation and lower share prices during the past decade was not due to chance or to other unrelated economic events.

The simple model developed in this paper conveys the basic reason why a higher rate of inflation causes a substantial reduction in the ratio of share prices to real earnings. The higher effective rate of tax on corporate income caused by historic cost depreciation and the tax on the artificial capital gains caused by inflation both reduce the real net yield that investors receive per unit of capital.

Although the real net yield on bonds is also reduced, for most shareowners this is outweighed by the fall in the equity yields.

ssrn.com/abstract=253123

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More:

The Plain Bagel via YouTube

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Previously:

(Campbell Harvey et al.) The Best Strategies for Inflationary Times

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Matt’s note: Claude B. Erb has co-authored papers with Duke Finance Professor and financial technologist Campbell Harvey on a few occasions to examine the financial properties of gold

ssrn.com/abstract=3746997

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Bitcoin is Exactly Like Gold Except When it Isn’t

Bitcoin has been described as digital gold. The phrase digital gold may be a brilliant and highly informative metaphor, a cynically clever sales trick (a form of associative and repetitive priming) intended to boost bitcoin trading by naïve investors or, perhaps, an indication of the futility of explaining the utility of bitcoin.

Elmandjra (2020) embraces the concept of bitcoin as digital gold and enthusiastically recommends bitcoin investment while Furman and Hatzius (2020) find both bitcoin and gold unappealing noting “that a security whose appreciation is primarily dependent on whether someone else is willing to pay a higher price for it is not a suitable investment for our clients”.

Winklevoss (2020) argues that as the appeal of bitcoin grows bitcoin will increasingly be seen as “gold 2.0” and that the market values of all the existing gold and bitcoin will converge.

About 18.6 million bitcoins have been mined and the maximum number of bitcoins, 21 million, might be mined by 2140. Chainalysis (2020) suggests that about 4 million bitcoins have already been lost due to lost private keys, thrown away computers, inaccessible wallets and a variety of other reasons. Those 4 million lost bitcoins indicate that over 20% of the already mined bitcoins have been lost. Peterson (2020) opines that the “maximum number of bitcoins that will ever be in circulation is 14 million” and that “about 28% of all bitcoins have been irretrievably lost”.

Both bitcoin and gold have been labelled as safe havens. Since there is no concrete definition of a safe haven there is no way to definitively explore whether bitcoin and gold are safe havens.

From an investment product marketing standpoint, some investment management firms may label the products they are selling as safe havens if there is empirical evidence that a product’s performance has been positive when the stock market’s performance has been negative.

Imagine flipping two coins simultaneously, heads representing a positive investment return and tails representing a negative investment return. If one coin (representing the performance of the stock market) comes up tails and the other coin (representing the performance of gold or bitcoin) comes up heads, then this combination can be called a safe haven return. Using this framework and historical data to see if gold has been a safe haven, Erb and Harvey come up empty handed. The same safe haven framework also provides no evidence that bitcoin has been a safe haven.

ssrn.com/abstract=3746997

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More:

Beating Bitcoin via TheEconomist:

(Article Behind Paywall)

economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/06/10/cryptocoins-are-proliferating-wildly-what-are-they-all-for

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Previously:

(Campbell Harvey) We are in another Bitcoin Bubble

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ssrn.com/abstract=3813202

The Best Strategies for inflationary Times

Over the past three decades, a sustained surge in inflation has been absent in developed markets. As a result, investors are faced with the challenge of having little evidence regarding how to reposition their portfolios in the face of heighted inflation risk. We provide some guidance by analyzing both passive and active strategies across a variety of asset classes for the U.S., U.K., and Japan over the past 95 years.

Unexpected inflation is bad news for traditional assets, such as bonds and equities, with local inflation having the greatest effect. Commodities and futures trend performance is strong during inflationary periods, with US regimes particularly relevant, and the most pronounced effect when the US, UK and Japan experience inflation simultaneously. Among the dynamic strategies, we find that trend-following provides the most reliable protection during inflation shocks. …

ssrn.com/abstract=3813202

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Previously:

(Bridgewater) Beyond the Election: What Doesn’t Change Will Be a Lot More Than What Does

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(Bridgewater) Tracking and Assessing Monetary Policy 3 Around the World

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history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/woundblstcs/chapter1.htm#table14

CAUSATIVE AGENTS OF BATTLE CASUALTIES IN WORLD WAR II

In order to determine which type of enemy weapon was most effective against U.S. troops in World War II, it would be necessary to know the causative agent for each wound inflicted. Not only was such information impossible to get for all areas for the entire war period but what was available was often inaccurate. Casualties who survived were frequently not able to determine the weapons that had wounded them. For those killed outright or who died of wounds, no opinion was available if there had been no witnesses. Prompt interment of bodies seldom left time for recovery of the missile that killed. Casualty surveys which supplied this type of information were made only in certain areas at specified times. However, these studies used different methods of reporting, and the lack of a uniform system made assessment and comparison of reports difficult.

Nevertheless, many interesting facts can be brought out from the material available. A report on the causative agents of battle casualties in World War II showed the comparative incidence of casualties from different types of weapons for several theaters. Compilers of the report believed that, while the more detailed subdivisions within their three major classes were open to question, their findings on the percent of total casualties due to small arms, artillery and mortars, and “miscellaneous” were reasonably accurate. From these they drew the following conclusions:

1. Small arms fire accounted for between 14 and 31 percent of the total casualties, depending upon the theater of action: The Mediterranean theater, 14.0 percent; the European theater, 23.4 percent; and the Pacific theaters, 30.7 percent.

2. Artillery and mortar fire together accounted for 65 percent of the total casualties in the European and Mediterranean theaters, 64.0 and 69.1, respectively. In the Pacific, they accounted for 47.0 percent.

The report showed the relative effectiveness of causative agents, which inflicted casualties on 217,070 living wounded of the First and Third U.S. Armies, European Theater of Operations, 1944-45 (table 14).

It is also interesting to note from two tables taken from studies conducted on Bougainville and in Italy that more casualties in the South Pacific were caused by rifle or machinegun fire than in the North African theater:

history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/woundblstcs/chapter1.htm#table14

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Kill the Homothetic Army: Gen. Guy Hubin’s Vision of the Future Battlefield

U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley wrote in the forward to U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Pamphlet 525-3-1, The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028, that “emerging technologies” are “driving a fundamental change in the character of war.” They have “the potential to revolutionize battlefields unlike anything since the integration of machine guns, tanks, and aviation which began the era of combined arms warfare.”

…

Hubin identifies in Perspectives tactiques three specific new capabilities new technologies brought about that he believes are changing warfare profoundly: the ability to know precisely and in real time where all of one’s own forces are, the ability to fire without stopping, and precision indirect fires.

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More:

time.com/5953699/eastern-ukraine-russia-violence/

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-troops-intervention.html

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agdugintranslate.gitbook.io/foundations-of-geopolitics/

Foundations of Geopolitics

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is a geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin. It has had some influence within the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites^[1] and has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military.^[1][2]

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youtu.be/CCmdmOr06pY

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Previously:

Bombshell 💣 🎆

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(Ted Kavadas) Substantial Peril Inherent In the U.S. Economic Situation

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science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6390/791

science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6390/791

Figure S6 indicates the projected changes in species richness globally at the four levels of warming (1.5°, 2°, 3.2°, 4.5°C above pre-industrial levels) and, where appropriate, (for animals) including or excluding realistic dispersal.

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We find substantial benefits to limiting warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels as compared with 2°C by 2100. The number of insect species projected to lose >50% of their range is reduced by about 66%, whereas the number of plant and animal species projected to lose more than half their range is reduced by ~50%.

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Matt’s note: insects are vital pollinators for agricultural purposes

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More:

climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth’s_atmosphere

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ICHEC Global climate temperature visualizations

Jan 24, 2020

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Click “Free Preview” to learn more

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