Let's discuss the environmental cost of the US dollar. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the government, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Washington which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. 🧵 (1/

TLDR on the US dollar and government spending: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to borrow more money after you do. (2/)
That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of the US dollar and associated military industrial complex are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3/)
The underlying technology of US dollar is based on the notion of "printing", a technical term for a process that keeps the government running and processing transactions. (4/)
I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of US dollar printing is to prove how much economic productivity you can waste, and the more productivity you can waste, the more votes you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your waste. (5/)
And so people have set up entire organizations of lobbyists and campaign organizers dedicated to run 24/7 consuming US dollars and performing the bribes required by the protocol. Globally this consumes *nation state* levels of economic output to keep it all running. (6/)
US dollar printing is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where no one solves puzzles for dollars, except the dollars go to buy weapons, launder money for politicians and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7/)
And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single 2,000-pound class Mk 84 unguided bomb costs $16,000, or 16,000 McDoubles. (8/)
ending this here because i just realized i forgot to block US dollar users from being able to reply.

More from Government

Which metric is a better predictor of the severity of the fall surge in US states?

1) Margin of Democrat victory in Nov 2020 election
or
2) % infected through Sep 1, 2020

Can you guess which plot is which?


The left plot is based on the % infected through Sep 1, 2020. You can see that there is very little correlation with the % infected since Sep 1.

However, there is a *strong* correlation when using the margin of Biden's victory (right).

Infections % from
https://t.co/WcXlfxv3Ah.


This is the strongest single variable I've seen in being able to explain the severity of this most recent wave in each state.

Not past infections / existing immunity, population density, racial makeup, latitude / weather / humidity, etc.

But political lean.

One can argue that states that lean Democrat are more likely to implement restrictions/mandates.

This is valid, so we test this by using the Government Stringency Index made by @UniofOxford.

We also see a correlation, but it's weaker (R^2=0.36 vs 0.50).

https://t.co/BxBBKwW6ta


To avoid look-ahead bias/confounding variables, here is the same analysis but using 2016 margin of victory as the predictor. Similar results.

This basically says that 2016 election results is a better predictor of the severity of the fall wave than intervention levels in 2020!

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