First Blog

Peering Through the Corona Looking Glass The coronavirus will catalyze changes in society. It will cause future suspicion, caution, and fear of contagion. (We do not yet know if there are carriers of this disease. Compare Typhoid Mary.) There is more, mostly about life-style and government operations. The use of masks and gowns will become widespread, at least for a while. The elderly will be more careful; nursing homes will require medical tests prior to admission.   Hospital will require tests as well, with new patients possibly quarantined on their day of admission.   These provisions you would expect.   There are more, and they apply to all. Many students, now forced to stay at home to study, may never return, preferring another career direction for their lives. New employees will be given thorough medical exams. Many companies will discover that many of their functions are better served by workers at home, thus saving office costs. Supervision issues will be solved.

Nowadays we hear a lot about whether the COVID-19 is an actual BLACK SWAN event.   This means the Coronavirus is actually and totally unexpected, novel, and unpredictable. ( Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2010) [2007].  The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable  (2nd ed.). London: Penguin.  ISBN   978-0-14103459-1 . ) In fact, every year we have a devastating virus attack, the flu.   It usually claims tens of thousands of lives. This year is no different. Yet, all we are told to get a flu shot.   That’s it! This year we have COVID-19, a rather contagious virus not well understood.   It seems to claim more lives of the aged than for younger citizens. It’s scary.   It became more scary when China basically shut down an entire province of multiple millions.   People were dying all over the place. But it is not too scary because we’ve had similar deadly viruses attack us in past years.   (SARS, MERS, etc) This makes our current virus as a surprise but not unexpected.   Another

FUTURE SPEAK “I can write but I can’t read.” Who could ever say that?   In fact, much of what you read today is generated by such entities.     Huh? You need a couple of active, commercially available products in wide application today.   Both are a part of NLP – Natural Language Processing.   The first is NLG – Natural Language Generation.   This is an outflow from AI (Artificial Intelligence) that can generate text from data (with templates and bias if you want). It is almost undetectable as machine generated, makes sense, and can be generated at the rate of thousands of pages per second.   It is used by news organizations, corporations, Investment firms, accounting firms, and the like.   It can be and probably is used by political parties to generate manifold texts for wide distribution.   Input is data, headline texts, and articles. It is nearly grammatically perfect. NLU – Natural Language Understanding.   Also, it is an application of AI. You Alexa uses this alr

A few weeks ago the keywords in society were well known.   Among them were, organic, green, carbon footprint, worker, shareholder value, new capitalism, social justice, healthcare, impeachment, big data, electric cars, and global.  The new keywords have changed to healthcare, quarantine, sequester, infection, risk, pandemic, survival, vulnerability, lock down, separation, work-at-home, coronavirus, school closures, work-place closures, isolation, and more. In just a month, the axis of the world has tilted from the direction of selective prosperity to a direction of possible depression and decline. Adjustment is difficult. Reconciliation is difficult. Acceptance is nearly impossible.

You may think billionaires have a natural advantage in the investment business. They do. They are offered deals never available to you and me.   But that’s not all. Case-in-point. Consider Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world.   He is known for taking over companies by buying a controlling share of their stock.   He did it again this year.   He privately bought about 20 million shares of Krogers for about $25+/share.   This expense cost him about $450,000,000.   So what happened?   The shares, in the past three months have risen about 16% to $33/share, implying his investment has already accrued at least $70,000,000.   In addition, he gains $40,000,000 in dividends.    That is a considerable increase (more than 20%) on his original investment - in just a few months.   But why did the stock go up so much?   Because he announced that he bought the stock. That meant thousands of others piled on hoping to cash in on whatever Buffett was thinking, driving the share pri