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Thread: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

  1. #19171
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    • starting strength seminar april 2024
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    I hate to dig up an old discussion to make cheap shots but...

    https://archive.is/8h2Dl

    Thank God America never gave up its guns otherwise the Los Angeles DA George Gascon would ensure that an adult male pedofile would be imprisoned in a juvenile prison for Girls.

    Disclaimer: I disavow any violence against George Gascon, or other district attorneys appointed by Soros.

  2. #19172
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yngvi View Post
    The adverse events must be at minimum underreported by 100X
    I agree. I think the only reason why you don't have many more dead bodies is because everybody has been lying about how many people got the vaccines. If any country actually had 90 percent of the population vaccinated, you would have a major death party.

    Quote Originally Posted by mkm5 View Post
    Yes, but I don't think they are afraid to even hide it anymore.
    It seems that those people running the scams suffer from some professional pride. They want you to know it was them, they can’t just do their business and stay hidden, they want some kind of recognition.

  3. #19173
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    All around the world governments are lifting mandates and stopping covid passports.
    "We won," you cheer.

    Most likely it's just part of the plan and we're going to have a different kind of fun next.
    Check this out. Suddenly governments around the world are in the process of implementing digital currencies and becoming less dependent on cash. For your health and freedom, of course...

  4. #19174
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  5. #19175
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    Quote Originally Posted by Gilead View Post
    Reuters to the rescue again. This time to spin the actuary debacle.
    Life insurers adapt pandemic risk models after claims jump | Reuters
    Reuters actually reported that point correctly in their original post of the article before they updated it a few hours later in order to spin the narrative.

    The news loves to distort reality. Reuters does a nice little scare quote from Hannover Re about how claims are higher than expected (true). Then, ties it in with their opinion about Delta being the cause (shockingly, with no real evidence).

    I am not as familiar with foreign life insurers. But, I do know that this is mostly considered a blip in the grand scheme of things for U.S. life insurers because they consider this a mortality *event* and not a mortality *trend*. Reuters assumes, with zero evidence, that this is a mortality trend.

    As for eating up more reserves to pay claims, yes this has happened. I already covered this in my article on my blog, but let's cover this again with a specific example:

    Northwestern Mutual (one of the oldest, largest life insurers in the U.S.) paid out $3.965 billion in claims through Q3 of 2021. This is against $17.7 billion in policy reserves. Was that $3.x billion more than they expected? Sure. Does this unexpected payout put them at insolvency risk? If you have enough math skills to subtract one number from another, the question answers itself.

    Even at the large international reinsurers, this looks fairly small, in spite of large mortality increases for 2020 and 2021. The article mentions Hannover. They posted (I think) losses of $404 million, but still netted a gain for 2021. Even when we get down to the one-year term (pure insurance) products, where mortality has a direct impact on profitability (which is the boat reinsurers are in right now), all these insurers like Swiss Re, Munich, SCOR, Hannover, etc. refer to COVID as a temporary disruption and very manageable.

    In other words, this is not a cataclysmic event in the way Reuters wants it to be.

    Contrast Reuters reporting of a 12% rise in mortality in the life business with the "shock value" of reporting One America's 40% rise in the group market. Yes, both are fairly large increases, but zoom out and we're still talking about small absolute numbers relative to the total. But even the disparity in relative increases is huge, and the narrative is getting away from them. The reality isn't what they want it to be, which is a story about how the world is ending or how COVID is a permanent fixture that will forever cause problems. The world isn't ending, COVID will not forever cause problems, which should make everyone happy. But, instead, it seems to make these folks try harder to explain why the world is ending, why you should live in fear, why everything will not be OK, and why your life insurance will get more expensive. These people are going to put readers on anti-depressants.

    Speaking of which, there is something the news *isn't* talking about, and that is the long-term mortality *trend* totally unrelated to COVID. There is increasing mortality tied to things like opioid addiction/OD and other health problems (mental, physical). Right now, mortality improvements (in a very broad sense) have stalled. It's not clear how *this* will affect long-term pricing for insurance but my guess is it's not going to be good.

  6. #19176
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    Quote Originally Posted by Subby View Post
    It's a digital marker that is mathematically unique and limited as well as being fungible.

    It's value comes from where all value comes from, other people are willing to accept it in return for goods or services.
    Except, that’s not where the “value” of real money or a metal as a currency comes from, which Bitcoin does not have.

  7. #19177
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    Additionally, are we no longer allowed to ask whether we've been arrested [for trespassing]? A Leftist would be RHEEing and putting on a show, like the ones escorted out of Coulter's or Milo's shows five years ago, not pointing out hyprocrisies as they politely and non-violently comply.

    Maybe the Left has beaten us in this game too because I'm sure all the hippies at Rip's high school and college knew how to play the law to allow their protests to continue, or at least be heard and acknowledged. I don't see how or why the American and British high school kids allowed themselves to be taken into custody, essentially, without any justification. Damn the communists sure are good at their game!

    Quote Originally Posted by Jovan Dragisic View Post
    They will literally pretend nothing ever happened, not the masks, not the Ausweis, not the lockdowns, not the price increases, nothing. Coming to you this spring.

    Jovan you've been singing this tune since LAST February, at least. What makes you think ending the Madness is beneficial enough, or continuing it detrimental enough, for TBTB, that they're actually just around the corner from dropping it all? 9/11 was 20 years ago and the Shoe Bomber how long ago, but we still enter full-body scanners in our socks in order to fly anywhere. I thought most Eastern Europeans, not just the Russians, were sarcastic, pessimistic realists - why all the unfounded optimism from you?

  8. #19178
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yngvi View Post
    Some points about Bitcoin if you haven't learned crypto yet:
    1. Bitcoin technology is miles behind some of the newer cryptos.
    2. Keeping your crypto on an exchange leaves it vulnerable to bank robbery or government seizure (exchanges are like a bank).
    3. The purpose of crypto is not speculation, if you are using it responsibly. Same way the purpose of oil or real estate is not speculation.
    4. Crypto should not be viewed as a stand alone system or free from risk. It is early; There will be more technological advancements that may make your current crypto choice, like BTC, obsolete in the future. There will likely be unexpected security issues, network outages, government-sponsored attacks and hacks. Plan accordingly and develop a hedging strategy.

    People tend to argue that commodities, including Bitcoin, is a sort of wealth preservation play since they represent already-created wealth and not a productive business in and of itself.

    But, the actual trading of these commodities is absolutely speculation as a natural part of the price discovery process. This is normal and inherent in every market. It's what makes markets.

  9. #19179
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    Quote Originally Posted by mkm5 View Post
    Help me understand, what is the "asset" or inherent value behind BTC? It literally appears to be the definition of a massive Ponzi scam, sponsored by some agencies with lots of capital letters, maybe...
    About 10 years ago I got deep into cryptocurrency. I bought a mining rig and mined about 500K dogecoin (No, I don't have them anymore). And questions like yours really had me in a logical dilemma. I couldn't wrap my head around the contradictions. I am open to opinions here, but this is what I couldn't reconcile in my head.

    There are 2 core use cases for cryptocurrency. As a store of value (Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc) or as a proof of contract/NFT (Ethereum)

    So let's start with the first use case as a store of value:
    Fiat currency is called fiat because it doesn't count anything but itself and thus has no intrinsic value. This is also true of all cryptocurrencies, they don't count anything but themselves and their entire value is based on belief of value. So really they are just fiat currencies with different controllers.

    Cryptocurrency have no intrinsic scarcity by the technology itself. You can have an inflationary cryptocurrency or a fixed pool. For example, dogecoin is inflationary and bitcoin is a fixed pool. In principle the logic goes that since these coins are either low inflation or no inflation they behave more like commodities such as gold and silver. But in practice they have fundamental differences. Commodities are physical goods that will continue to exist in material form regardless of ownership. Even a vault of gold will always be in the same place, full of gold, whether you have the key or not. Cryptocurrencies can vanish when someone loses their key to the wallet or loses the wallet file itself. That means that the total supply of the Bitcoin is decreasing as people lose wallets or lose control of their wallets. And this is a "gone forever" kind of deal. Evidence of this is someone who has been searching a garbage dump for years for a hard drive that has his bitcoin wallet worth millions on it. This consolidates the value into the hands of a few people who got in early and held on. There isn't enough supply of bitcoins left for everyone else. So for people who are not tech savvy, don't have good backup strategies, or are not good with password management they will likely get screwed. UNLESS, they put their money into a crypto exchange who shares the keys with you to the wallet and also take a cut of every transaction made from your account. They see every transaction and can track it. Basically a bank just like any other. And you might think that you can avoid one of these things, but if you ever want to purchase something with bitcoin the clearing time of a transaction is, on average, 10 minutes but can be an hour. You are not going to wait 10 minutes for every customer in a restaurant to clear their transactions. It would slow down turnaround and profits. In 10 minutes the stock market makes millions (billions?) of trades. When you try to do anything with Bitcoin that is outside of just a storage of money you almost always have to translate it to some other currency (likely fiat), to actually do something with it. And you need a crypto exchange to accomplish that. So basically, anything practical you want to do with Bitcoin requires a bank of some kind.

    And, no matter how bad it is, fiat money has 1 major technical advantage. It can be created out of thin air. Sometimes banks lose a bunch of money or lose access to it because of computer issues. With constant cheque-clearing (because that's how US banks still work) and fractional reserve banking, any significant limitation in access to money from any of the big banks can completely stop the economy from moving. However, for a short period of time, the central bank can loan money to the big bank until they fix their issues. This money is made out of thin air. Now imagine a large crypto exchange suddenly "losing" access to a bunch of wallets. That's it, they are gone and every person who is affected is just screwed. No recourse, no fixing it. No amount of lawsuits will get those Bitcoins back (because no on has them).

    So bitcoin has the scarcity of commodities without the permanence and has the value assignment of fiat currency without the ability to generate liquidity on demand. It seems like it took the worst parts of both mediums of exchange.

    The second major use case is proof of contract or NFTs

    In this case we use the cryptocurrency as a token that guarantees a transaction has occurred. This verified by the blockchain and, mathematically, it is a very robust system. But in this use case, the value of token should be as close to 0 as possible. Because the value of the token is additive cost to the transaction you want to promote lots of transactions. Further, the transaction should close as quickly as possible to promote more transactions. This is a high-volume, low-margin game for the cryptocurrency. Tokens are created out of thin air and are counting things that are not themselves. The only winner for the small value of the cryptocurrency is the minter of the currency. NFT exchanges, Ethereum foundation, etc. No one else will make money on this.

    I haven't even touched things like energy costs of mining and transaction clearing (which seems quite high per transaction on the face of it).

    Would love to hear other thoughts

  10. #19180
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    Quote Originally Posted by David.Lewis View Post
    The news loves to distort reality. Reuters does a nice little scare quote from Hannover Re about how claims are higher than expected (true). Then, ties it in with their opinion about Delta being the cause (shockingly, with no real evidence).

    I am not as familiar with foreign life insurers. But, I do know that this is mostly considered a blip in the grand scheme of things for U.S. life insurers because they consider this a mortality *event* and not a mortality *trend*. Reuters assumes, with zero evidence, that this is a mortality trend.

    As for eating up more reserves to pay claims, yes this has happened. I already covered this in my article on my blog, but let's cover this again with a specific example:

    Northwestern Mutual (one of the oldest, largest life insurers in the U.S.) paid out $3.965 billion in claims through Q3 of 2021. This is against $17.7 billion in policy reserves. Was that $3.x billion more than they expected? Sure. Does this unexpected payout put them at insolvency risk? If you have enough math skills to subtract one number from another, the question answers itself.

    Even at the large international reinsurers, this looks fairly small, in spite of large mortality increases for 2020 and 2021. The article mentions Hannover. They posted (I think) losses of $404 million, but still netted a gain for 2021. Even when we get down to the one-year term (pure insurance) products, where mortality has a direct impact on profitability (which is the boat reinsurers are in right now), all these insurers like Swiss Re, Munich, SCOR, Hannover, etc. refer to COVID as a temporary disruption and very manageable.

    In other words, this is not a cataclysmic event in the way Reuters wants it to be.

    Contrast Reuters reporting of a 12% rise in mortality in the life business with the "shock value" of reporting One America's 40% rise in the group market. Yes, both are fairly large increases, but zoom out and we're still talking about small absolute numbers relative to the total. But even the disparity in relative increases is huge, and the narrative is getting away from them. The reality isn't what they want it to be, which is a story about how the world is ending or how COVID is a permanent fixture that will forever cause problems. The world isn't ending, COVID will not forever cause problems, which should make everyone happy. But, instead, it seems to make these folks try harder to explain why the world is ending, why you should live in fear, why everything will not be OK, and why your life insurance will get more expensive. These people are going to put readers on anti-depressants.

    Speaking of which, there is something the news *isn't* talking about, and that is the long-term mortality *trend* totally unrelated to COVID. There is increasing mortality tied to things like opioid addiction/OD and other health problems (mental, physical). Right now, mortality improvements (in a very broad sense) have stalled. It's not clear how *this* will affect long-term pricing for insurance but my guess is it's not going to be good.
    Thank you David for your time and input!

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