Maturity in Facing the Music

I was looking at some population statistics with my fractal idea in mind.

This is China confirmed cases on a log scale

I think China’s data is a load but prior to the arrow I think the data represents some kind of growth curve that represents the virus embedding itself into a population. Everything to the right of the arrow is completely made up. It represents the day the Chinese declared the virus to be over.

Here is Italy

I think this curve represents the natural log fractal of the virus embedding itself into the Italian population. Notice China took off basically on New Years day and Italy took off on Valentines day. Note how the curve is starting to fall over to an asymptote.

This is Iran

Iran started very close to when China started. I think the Iran data is crap as well but none the less it’s harder to hide your crap on a log curve. Notice the curve is falling over toward an asymptote

This is Spain

Spain took off about Valentines day but has a flatter growth meaning it’s growing faster. The more linear the curve, the more parabolic the growth. The more asymptotic the closer the growth goes from parabolic to linear. So what these curves are showing are the changing face of virus penetrance measured within boundaries of countries

Here is South Korea

South Korea had experience with SARS 17 years ago and understood the dynamics. Also there is no social taboo to wearing a mask in S Korea, so the country donned masks. Look at S Korea vs Spain Korea blew up about a week before Spain but has asymptoted its parabolic growth, while Spain continues along a parabolic course.


Here is the US. Look at how the line is a nearly strait line. This means US growth is still nearly perfectly parabolic. This will not begin to be over until our curve looks like South Korea’s curve.

Every day we are parabolic is a day the economy is crashing. It doesn’t matter if business is open or closed the economy is crashing at an exponential rate PERIOD.

There are arguments to just let ‘er rip and get to herd immunity. THIS IS A STUPID IDEA. It presumes all workers are equal. All workers aren’t equal. There is something called the Pareto principal and here is a case where application of Pareto actually makes sense.

A corporations productivity is functionally related to 20% of the employees. 20% account for 80% of the productivity. It doesn’t mean the 20% work harder, it means 20% occupy the spots of critical decision making in the matrix that creates a company’s productivity. Thus a jr engineer might design a perfectly good bridge but a senior project manager understands how to design and specify a bridge that comes in under budget and makes the company money, 2 very different levels of productivity. These positions are not interchangeable and if the senior dies, productivity dies and is not easily replaced. What if half the physicians die? What if half the surgeons die? The long term consequence of let ‘er rip is not trivial and it WILL decimate your portfolio. You won’t be buying the dip you will be the dip. Let’s say we quarantine and try and save those senior engineers or cardiac surgeons. We will live to fight another day.

As it is now our response as far as I can see is let ‘er rip under the window dressing of “concern”. My county has failed to close our beaches, this is let ‘er rip. The first case has been recorded in my town. I live in the country 5 miles outside a small village of about 10K people. If you look at Italy, this will be the growth curve for my town, and over the next couple to three months 300 to 500 of the people in my town will be dead, because we are letting ‘er rip. That’s what the fractal math predicts. No telling how many will get to live a life of permanent respiratory disability. The notion of fractal penetrance is the virus penetrates based on it’s relationship with a human hosts. If it’s 10 human hosts the fractal will occur. If it’s 10K human hosts the fractal will occur. 10M human hosts the fractal will dominate human penetrance. If that’s the truth then it’s a useful bit of knowledge to understand your/our future.

If you think this is going to be a V shaped recovery frankly you’re an idiot. Pandemics last 2 years and the consequence is going to last many more and all the funny money in the world won’t save us. It will only force the price of loaves of bread to $100 in the face of 30% unemployment. I lived through 1973 and it’s stagflation and 1981 and hyper inflation but I think this is 1929 – 1937. Amazon will likely survive but it may be worth $100 a share not $2000 a share. This is what a VIX of over 80 means. The VIX is lower today but the risk is still gargantuan. It’s like a meteor is heading strait toward you and you think moving 10 feet to the left will save you. Exponential math will flat out kick your ass, and multidimensional exponential math, fergitaboutit. Near as I can see there is no past sequence that in any way rhymes with what is unfolding. We won’t know more till the dust settles so if your trying to place bets on a long term basis right now it’s probably more than 50/50 you are throwing your money away. Have you considered the possibility AMZN goes out of business? What if the odds of that are 50/50.

Speaking of music:

4 Replies to “Maturity in Facing the Music”

  1. I live about 2.5 hours drive from Savannah Ga. Drove there yesterday to deal with a legal issue for my elderly parents, taking as much precaution as possible – disinfectant lotion, latex gloves, packed own lunch and ate in car, etc. Driving through downtown Savannah I noticed heavy traffic and nearly every business open and busy. I guess they think closing sit down portion of restaurants and bars is all it takes. They are NOT taking this seriously and you are correct – fractal math will result in a virus buzz saw through these areas. Some lessons have to learned the hard way.

  2. Hi Eric
    We only have limited control. The virus has no legs. The virus has no will. The virus isn’t even alive. The virus is merely a piece of code that takes over it’s human computer with the simple effect the human computer makes more copies of the code. AT NO TIME IS THE VIRUS ALIVE in the sense of it being an entity that creates its own energy of survival. This means WE are the legs, we are the will, we are the means of energy of survival. Once infected in some essential way we become the virus. We are strongly conditioned to simply ignoring viruses as a yearly nuisance and rely on immunity to save the day.

    The more I look at the biology the more I see this virus effectively consumes immunity. Once infected It becomes a kind of “arm wrestle” between growing infection and growing immunity but certain cells in the immune system, the monocytes seem to be present but dormant, and the infection gets way out of control before monocytes have the chance to do their thing. This is the difference between the 20% and the 80%, the 20% have run out of effective immunity. The diseases attacks the lungs and there is no living without breathing. Breathing is the thing that allows respiration all the way to mitochondria’s consumption of O2 to happen and there is nothing more mission critical to a cells survival, and therefore an organ’s survival and therefore an organisms survival than cellular respiration. The diseases of metabolic syndrome insulin resistance, HTN, CAD, DM, Renal poor ability to fight infection etc seems to be associated with this loss of monocyte immunity.

    So that’s the game matrix. For the some percentage of the 20%, who will die, to to survive, 80% have to achieve herd immunity, the 80% who would attain immunity anyway. In other words in 100 people 80% will attain immunity because that is the nature of human host, to achieve immunity 80% of the time in a non complicated way. 20% will exhaust immunity and say 10% of that 20% will die. You may say well “to bad so sad”, but of that 2% of the total population, dead, a large percent will likely be mission critical to keeping the mechanics of society going. If you have a power plant full of dead workers you’re out of power. If you’re out of power you’e out of internet and commerce and banking and stock and bond trading. If you have fields full of dead farmers, you’re out of food.

    This is also going to dictate what industry springs to the fore. Colleges are going out of business for example in this scenario. They are too over bloated and full of fluff and inefficient to survive, and people will need the 529 money. Jr will need to pull his load not spend 6 years on a drunk. No 529 no colleges.

    The notion that you have the luxury to possess 6 genders and all this other woke nonsense is gone. Nobody will have time for that bullshit. Idaho just passed a law banning trans gendered XY athletes from competing with XX women. The notion of solar and wind are dead. Solar and wind have very poor energy density and nobody has time for that nonsense. Coal which has extremely high energy density will re-emerge and dominate. Coal stocks are dirt cheap and pay dividends, something useful in a time of inflation and negative bond yields. Tesla is dead. It’s marginal at best in an opulent time. In a time where good housing will consist of living in a trailer nobody will own one. Stagflation means big ticket items deflate like housing cars boats etc, while small ticket items like bread, go nuts price wise. You think anybody in Venezuela is in the market for a boat?

    The point is the narratives we have been sold while we have been eating cake, like the FIRE narrative are about to have their nakedness revealed. I don’t know if any of that will happen in particular but it’s how I’m gaming it out. Mission critical value stocks with a clean balance sheet and no debt will make you rich in a post virus world. I.e. buy coal, farmers, gold, gold miners, Deer, plant a garden etc. I never thought value stocks would return but I’ve completely changed my tune. Once they get cheap buy BRK.B and Costco IMHO. DO NOT buy SPY or VTI. Those indexes will be full of zombie bailed out over indebted companies of little value.

  3. I really thought the world would wake up and realize nuclear energy is the way to go, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

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