The price of everything

Bug Tussle

“Bug Tussle, n., a brief, vigorous dispute between insignificant persons, esp. of sleazy and low character.

“No need to bring in the Marines, it's just a Bug Tussle,” or, “The arriving officers were told that the bar fight was not a big thing, just a Bug Tussle”.”

• Definition of ‘Bug Tussle’ in Urban Dictionary.

“We have read predictions for the total number of Covid-19 deaths in the UK ranging from 6,000 to 20,000 to around 66,000. It seems that epidemiologists’ models are as diverse in their outcomes as economists’.

“Epidemiologists did not predict last year that a pandemic would happen now, in the same way that economists did not foresee the financial crisis (or the current downturn). Developments are not that of a passive evolution in an isolated population, but influenced by government policies, which change over time, and individual actions, accompanied by massive economic costs and uncertainty.”

• From a letter to The Financial Times from Dr Jennifer Castle, Dr Jurgen Doornik and Sir David Hendry of Oxford University, 11^th April 2020.

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The Great Suppression

“Katie and Jim DiGangi, who run a dairy farm in Wisconsin, have spent the last several weeks dumping as much as 20,000 gallons of milk a day. In California, Jack Vessey, a lettuce and leafy green farmer, has destroyed 350 acres of his crop by ploughing his tractor through unharvested fields.

“The two farms are almost 2,000 miles apart but both have become examples of the damage done by the coronavirus outbreak to the complex supply chains that bring food from farms to tables in the US.

“As restaurants, hotels and schools have closed, farmers and ranchers who supplied them have lost customers. But redirecting their production to grocery stores has proved difficult because of the differing demands of commercial food operations and people cooking in their kitchens.."

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China’s Chernobyl

“An RBMK reactor uses Uranium-235 as fuel. Every atom of U-235 is like a bullet travelling at nearly the speed of light, penetrating everything in its path: woods, metal, concrete, flesh. Every gram of U-235 holds over a billion trillion of these bullets. That's in one gram. Now, Chernobyl holds over three million grams, and right now, it is on fire. Winds will carry radioactive particles across the entire continent, rain will bring them down on us. That's three million billion trillion bullets in the.. in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Most of these bullets will not stop firing for 100 years. Some of them, not for 50,000 years.”

• Professor Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) in the HBO mini-series Chernobyl.
  
  

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Worst film ever

“Just put yourself into the mindset of any company.. Pick a great company that you’ve admired.. So I’ll pick one that I’ve admired for a very long time, for good reason: Workday. That’s a company that’s basically 10x’d their market cap. in the six or seven years they’ve been public, trading at an incredible valuation – cheap, now.. this is not to pick on Workday, but it’s a perfect example of what other companies will go through because I think this one of the best positioned companies.. They were – before all of this craziness – going to companies, the global 1,000, and basically saying: you need to upgrade two big parts of your legacy infrastructure – human resources management, and how you actually count all of the money you make, your general ledger.."

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Before Coronavirus

“I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candour and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.. In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone..”

• President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.

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Ludicrous speed

“Col. Sandurz:             Prepare ship for light speed!

Dark Helmet:              No, no, no, light speed is too slow!

Col. Sandurz:              Light speed, too slow?!

Dark Helmet:              Yes, we’re gonna have to go right to…ludicrous speed!

Col. Sandurz:              Ludicrous speed?! Sir, we’ve never gone that fast before. I don’t know    if the ship can take it.

Dark Helmet:              What’s the matter Colonel Sandurz? Chicken?”

• From Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs, writers Mel Brooks, Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham.

 

Readers with a spare hour on their hands – and these days, who hasn’t ? – may wish to watch this short film by the late Professor Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Its official title is ‘Arithmetic, Population and Energy’ but it is just as accurately described on YouTube as the most important video you’ll ever see.

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Crisis and opportunity

“This is rumour control. Here are the facts !”

• Andrews (Brian Glover), Alien 3.

 

“F*** it, I’m going 100% takeaway.

1. Supermarkets have earned enough
2. Local businesses need support
3. I’ve always wanted to live like this.”

• Tweet from Geoff Norcott, 20^th March 2020.

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Weeks where decades happen

Well, that escalated quickly.

When historians come to run their lenses over the market and social environment of early 2020, the chances are that they will not treat the mainstream media particularly charitably. Nor should they. This is a point well discussed by the statistician Graeme Archer in his Unherd essay, We don’t deserve our wretched media class:

The Times, this morning: “Boris Johnson will attempt to wrest back control of the coronavirus crisis today after No 10 was stung by criticism of its performance and the death toll rose to 35.” One small sentence, of the sort your eye glides over daily by the bucketload in our wonderful British press. Let’s take it apart.

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Everyone has a number

As we wrote on 6^th February (‘Bless you !’), Jim Rickards has an intriguing thought experiment that touches on the same ‘cave brain’ behaviour as the new Covid-19 / coronavirus does. Imagine you were in a hotel ballroom with 500 other people..

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Get to the chopper !

“‘Get to da choppa !’

“Short for the whole phrase that Dutch (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) says in the movie Predator, which goes: “RUN! GO! GET TO DA CHOPPA !”

“This can mean any number or things, or mean nothing at all. Frequently it is used when something exciting is happening or will happen and they need to be going someplace. It's used when there is no need to mention where you're going, you all already know where you're going. So you just yell GET TO DA CHOPPA!!!! Friends get in their separate cars, about to leave school and meet up at the diner, but before leaving they roll down their windows and one yells "GET TO DA CHOPPA!!" before they all speed off.”

• Definition for ‘Get to da choppa !’ from Urban Dictionary.
  
  

“You know, if baseball umpires were on the front page of the sports section every week, you'd know something was desperately wrong with the game.”

• Jim Grant, on central bankers.
  
  

The director John McTiernan made two of the best action films of the 1980s. Die Hard surely needs little introduction – completists of the film can see its backstory in the series The Movies That Made Us on Netflix. The other is 1987’s Predator, with Arnie in one of his most memorable roles, as Major “Dutch” Schaefer, sent into the jungles of Latin America ostensibly to rescue some CIA folk, only to end up doing battle with a murderous monster from another planet.

Speaking of monsters from another world takes us neatly to Christine Lagarde, the lawyer who has been President of the European Central Bank since November..

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