The great Warren Buffet knows all about compound interest. That’s how you get rich. And that’s also the calculus of the coronavirus that far too few officials (e.g. Donald Trump and Mark Emmert) fully understand.
It goes like this. A checkerboard (or chess board, for you snooty coastal elites) has 64 squares. Put a penny on one square and the rule is that each day you double the penny and move it to another square. So that on the second day you have 2 cents, on the third 4 cents, on the 4th 8 cents, on the fifth 16 cents, on the sixth 32 cents (yes, this is just the power of 2 going nutty), on the 7th 64 cents and on the 8th $1.28.
By the time you get to that first row you have one dollar and 28 cents out of that penny. But you still have seven more rows.
By the time you get halfway through the board that penny has become more than $20 million. And we’re just getting started. Eventually you would actually have in the trillions of dollars. In just 64 days.
Now do the same thing with a virus and people. 64 days is nine weeks. Would the number of coronavirus patients double every day? Probably not, but the chances of that happening would be much higher if we all congregated in public places (sports events, concerts, etc.). So when we bitch and/or moan about basketball games being canceled or Pearl Jam’s tour being postponed, it might help to understand something about compound interest.
Because if all of us walked around as cavalierly spreading germs as our president and other CPAC attendees do, we’d go from Patient Zero to every human being on the planet in less than nine weeks. The thing to think about now is that this virus is warning shot for humanity. We’re lucky that it’s not more lethal. It’s dangerous, sure, but the mortality rate is very low. What if it weren’t?
We’re about 9 days away from the tipoff of the NCAA basketball tournament and thus far no indication from Mark Emmert that the coronavirus will stop them (whereas the Ivy League just announced that it would play its tourney sans fans). Is the NCAA tournament going to go an as if nothing is different? Oh, and why are we so fixated on that while NBA games continue apace, as do spring training MLB games?
Anyway, we conjured and NCAA tourney with no fans and how it might affect everyone’s favorite montage vehicle, “One Shining Moment.” Here are two openings, one from a Twitter friend and one from us:
You can put those “Dow 30,000” t-shirts back in storage. On Monday the Dow suffered its single greatest points loss in history, 2,013 points. That broke the record by more than 500 points, a record that was set less than two weeks ago. The Dow closed at 23,851.
Less than one month ago, on February 12, the Dow had climbed to its highest level of ever, 29,551.
One less thing you can boast about on the reelection campaign.
The Greatest American Nero
The Roman emperor had a fiddle. Donald Trump has a five-iron.
Let’s examine if there may be any cause and effect between what happened after the markets closed on Friday and the president’s behavior concerning the pandemic. First, he visited the CDC and gave an all-timer of a press conference, filled with lies, empty boasts and shatteringly tone-deaf ignorance.
I wouldn’t expect anyone to watch this entire video. Stephen Colbert condenses it here and you can go to 9:16 to see my favorite moment…
… as the president says, “I just think this is something, Peter, that you can never really think is going to happen.” He is surrounding by health-care professionals as he says, this, doctors who work at The Center For Disease Control. You know who really thinks this is something that you can think is going to happen? People who work at a place whose mission is in its name: Disease Control.
And he said this while wearing an updated MAGA ball cap.
Then he tweeted some.
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
I don’t believe that Donald Trump is gonna get us all killed. But he’s going to get a lot more Americans killed due to his handling of the coronavirus than any other president, Republican or Democrat (even George W. Bush), I can think of.
It’s funny what happens when you mix ignorance, arrogance, insecurity, pathological lying and craven self-interest and put them all into one person: the president. That’s one dangerous cocktail. Read this.
Gasp Mask
Joke’s on you, kid
Karma is having quite a week, now that we know that a VIP-ticket attendee has coronavirus and has come in contact with high-profile Republicans such as Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz and Doug Collins. And Gaetz, who is self-quarantining, rode on Air Force 1 with the president last weekend. And Mick Mulvaney didn’t look too well while speaking at CPAC, come to think of it.
More karma: The folks who supported putting children in cages and separating them from their families are now in isolation.
As we wrote at least two weeks ago, the coronavirus is the new Chernobyl. For both China and the USA. Government officials appear more intent on stopping the spread of information than they do on stopping the source of the disaster.
Lock Up: Italy
The greatest nation in Europe (the world?) and our ancestral home, Italy is closed. Pretty much. The president of Italy whose name no one knows has put the entire nation on self-quarantine. Finally, a manageable line for the Vatican Museum.
Is it time for a Roman holiday?
On Monday Italy’s coronavirus death toll jumped from 366 to 463. Only China has been hit harder.
Good Reads: The Big Goodbye
We finished Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye and so the first thing we’d recommend is seeing Chinatown (again, or for the first time). Then read this book on how the 1974 film that lost out to The Godfather II for Best Picture came to be made. One of the crazier aspects is how the murder of Sharon Tate had a direct and literal impact on parts of the film, including it’s most famous line.
Second, and here’s where Wasson blew us away, was the denouement. The film’s theme was very dark: corruption and evil will inevitably triumph over the earnest do-gooder. In the aftermath of the film, the four principle men behind it—director Roman Polanski, star Jack Nicholson, producer Robert Evans and writer Robert Towne—all in one way or another succumbed to their darker natures. And some in ways that mirrored the worst excesses and crimes of the characters in the film.
If you’re in any way a film buff, or are interested in Hollywood history, The Big Goodbyeis a well-researched book and a fun read. And Wasson pulls no punches.
–The stock market plunged 7% within five minutes of this morning’s open. The day of reckoning has at last arrived. Meanwhile, President Trump is in Florida preparing for a campaign fundraiser this evening. I hope Nero left him his playlist.
–It’s cute that Stanford and Princeton have told their students not to attend class. Meanwhile this virus has been incubating for at least one to two months stateside. Lots of barn doors finally closing after millions of horses were let out to roam wild in the streets. Containment is a swell idea, but at this point it’s far too late.
–Seeing as how there’s no vaccine for the coronavirus and that in most cases it is not fatal, I’m not sure what the inclination is for the average American to learn whether or not he or she has it. Is it a FOMO thing? If you’re sick, stay in bed and do what you’d always do. There’s nothing a hospital is really going to be able to do other than put you in closer to proximity with more sick people. If I’m wrong on this, please tell me. It’s not as if there’s a magic pill that will make you better. We’ve all been sick. Who cares if there’s a trendy pandemic attached to what you have? It’s the same difference at this point. Bed rest, proximity to a flushing toilet, maybe some chicken broth and perhaps watching Searching For Sugarman on Netflix if you’ve not yet seen it.
–Loathe as I am to do so, and I realize that his reasons for saying what he is saying are based solely in self-interest, Donald Trump does have a point about the relative (and I stress “relative”) danger of the coronavirus. Look, containment is pretty much out of the question at this point. And no vaccine is on the way probably in this calendar year. So the next issue becomes just how dire is it if you contract the coronavirus? And the answer, at least to this point, is probably not so dire if you are under the age of 70 years old. So at what point do we consider coronavirus as sort of a built-in cost of being alive, not unlike commuting or air travel or anything else that we gotta do to make a living but that comes fraught with potential disaster. Sure, there’s a much higher likelihood of dying from coronavirus than from dying in an airline crash, but the point is that both are very low odds.
Is the hysteria well-founded in terms of our ability to contain it? I’d say yes. Is it well-founded in terms of its overall effect on the young and middle-aged? I think not.
–If you are a fan of Shakespearian tragedy, or dramatic irony, you have to love what’s going on here. A few quotes come to mind, the first from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: “Nature finds a way.” The second from the title of Charles Blow’s op-ed in today’s New York Times: “You can’t gaslight a virus.”
So Donald Trump and MAGA have finally found an opponent they cannot ridicule, or accuse of promoting Fake News, or make fun of its size. It’s a totally agnostic, unassailable foe that is also lethal. Perfect.
Now here’s how the final chapter of the tragedy should play out. Someone finally approaches our Dear Leader, who is having coughing fits (while his Surgeon General maintains he’s the healthiest 73 year-old in America, healthier in fact than the SG), and explains to him that the stock market is tanking and Americans are panicking. Advises him that for the good of the nation the very best thing he can do is step down and calm both the markets and the populace.
And what do you think Dear Leader does? I think we all know the answer to that. Fade out with Slim Pickens riding a giant coronavirus globule into the Capitol rotunda and then it explodes. Fade to black.
