Global tech upgrade with a focus on Crypto happening now

From Zero Hedge:

Based on publicly available evidence, it’s clear a group of tech business leaders got together and hatched a plan to move the world’s system of Capitalism away from the Entrepreneur (risk) and into the hands of a few mega-powerful corporations who know best.

The idea is honorable enough, it’s not like they want to kill people.  But what investors want to know is what does this mean for the markets?  A huge swath of the economy isn’t going to recover.  But the mega-cap companies, they are going to get more mega, and mega, and mega.  What are some of the beneficial technologies that will dominate the next 10 years based on the reaction to COVERT-19 or the Wu Flu?

• Information Technology – All I.T. will benefit, but especially remote work solutions like TransparentBusiness
• Telemedicine – A major tech upgrade is going on to the healthcare system around the world
• Genetic Engineering – companies like Ginkgo Bioworks for example
• Cryptocurrency – The Chinese are sanitizing physical dollars because they can carry viruses and germs – this is the ultimate argument for a cash-less society.

But Bitcoin is not the only Cryptocurrency in the world.  There are other coins, educational projects such as News Crypto with it’s platform provides tools to help you trade other Crypto. According to a press release by the company:

"Our main focus is to solve the problem of finding the right information at the right time while being a trustworthy source and offer our members the best user experience possible. Therefore, we strive to give our members security and confidence at the highest level while providing them the best indicators and analysis on the market."

The question many investors have been asking is what companies are going to be “COVID positive” and what are not.  Many businesses are failing.  But some, such as Zoom and Amazon for example, are thriving.  Cryptocurrency certainly is going to get a boost from the circumstances – but which token or coin will thrive?  That’s what NewCrypto.io can help with – providing information in a fast paced market for those who are not familiar with the market.

Education and tools have always been the foundation to success.  Information is power, they say.  Well, this fits like a hat on a bald head.

So, are you ready for the big global tech upgrade?  Some people are starting to get creative with Coronavirus ‘hacks’ – but what’s really going on is a big upgrade to the global technology system.  That includes things like Microsoft digital hospitals, Amazon delivery systems linking every supply chain on the planet, and digital money (Cryptocurrency). 

So if you aren’t familiar with Cryptocurrency, News Crypto is a great place to start.  Because the future is about using the technology and mastering it.  If people think making stock picks or choosing the next “Bitcoin” is going to solve all your problems you are gravely mistaken.  Users need to embrace technology, understand it, and integrate it into their lives.  Basically, those who don’t participate in this upgrade are going to be societal outcasts.  We have two choices, to embrace transhumanism or to be left alone on the fringe of society.  As we are seeing a total transformation in how we work, live, eat, play, and recover. 

So it’s only logical that the first place to start your knowledge journey is about money, whether it’s using a cryptocurrency tool like News Crypto or reading a book like Splitting Pennies.  Mastery they say takes 10,000 hours – even if you aren’t a student or expert – if you use something like a technology for 10,000 hours you can consider yourself a master.

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Did The Lockdown Save Lives? No it didn't.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

For two to three months, Americans have suffered the loss of liberty, security, and prosperity in the name of virus control. The psychological impact has been beyond description. We thought we could count on basic rights and freedoms. Then over a few days in March, it all ended in ways hardly anyone could believe possible. 

The manner in which governments dealt with foundational principles of modernity has been shocking. They put half the country under house arrest and managed every movement in disregard for the Bill of Rights and all legal precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. It felt like a coercive unraveling of civilization itself. It’s like we are all waking up from a bad dream only to look around and see the wreckage that proves it was all real.

So how can we deal with this terror that befell us? One way is to figure out some aspect in which our sacrifice has been worth it, maybe not on net given the consequences, but surely some good has come out of this. If my email and feeds are correct, this is how many people have been justifying this. The psychology here is rooted in the sunk-cost fallacy: when you commit resources to something, even when it is a proven error, you tend to find justifications by doubling down rather than just admitting the mistake. 

Thus have many people written me to say that whether you agree or disagree with the lockdown, we have to admit that it has saved millions of lives. I always write back and ask how they know that. They send me a link to a projection – those very projections that presume all kinds of things about cause and effect that we cannot know and which have proven wrong time and again throughout this crisis. 

So let’s just grant that it is possible that lockdowns can be credited with slowing the spread of the virus, and perhaps preserving hospital capacity (which turned out to be unnecessary). Still, the virus doesn’t then get bored and move by to Wuhan or to another planet. It still sticks around, so at best, these measures only “prolong the pain,” in the words of Knut Wittkowski.

So even if lockdowns slow the spread in the short run, it’s not clear that they have saved lives from the coronavirus, even if it results in more death overall from deferred surgeries and diagnostics, suicides, drug overdoses, and depression. 

The trouble here is that certain features of this experience stand out to contradict the idea that lockdowns are saving lives over the longer term. In New York, two thirds of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were in fact sheltering in place during the lockdown, essentially living in forced isolation. The lockdown didn’t help them; it might have contributed to making matters worse. 

Meanwhile, despite the media hate poured out against Florida’s youthful spring break revelers, where hundreds of thousands declined to socially distance at the height of the virus risk, I’ve yet to find a credible report of fatalities beyond two that were probably unpreventable. This is because the risks to the younger population are negligible, as we’ve known for a long time now. 

In many countries, 30% to 60% of excess deaths trace to nursing homes. These environments are neither locked down nor open; the virus spread among the most vulnerable population after even just one exposure due to possible negligence and distraction by mass frenzy. In the midst of locking down the whole world, and our politicians were consumed with the desire to enforce stay-at-home orders and forced separation, the population that needed the most care was neglected. Even worse, in New York, California, and New Jersey, nursing homes were forced to take in COVID-19 patients. 

One way we might discern whether and to what extent lockdowns have had any effect on infection and death is to examine the empirical case. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, T.J Rogers examined all the existing studies:

Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis.

o normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York. This wide variation means that other variables—like population density or subway use—were more important. Our correlation coefficient for per-capita death rates vs. the population density was 44%. That suggests New York City might have benefited from its shutdown—but blindly copying New York’s policies in places with low Covid-19 death rates, such as my native Wisconsin, doesn’t make sense.

Turning to the international front, consider the work of Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development. His detailed study from around the world compares locked down countries with those that stayed open. The Times of Israel summarizes his findings as follows. 

A prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst and former general claims simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.

Even a casual look at the open societies of Sweden and Korea – despite going too far in interventions – demonstrate that they experienced lower rates of death than Europe and the U.K. Even the World Health Organization has praised Sweden’s response. 

And a very careful empirical study of counterfactuals in Sweden concluded:

On the basis of the available data, we find that a lockdown in Sweden would not have limited the number of infections or the number of COVID-19 deaths. Theory suggests that this may be the result of people maintaining a larger social distance even in the absence of a lockdown—there could be, in other words, voluntary social restraint. Krueger et al. (2020), in particular, show this in the context of a formal model and suggest that this may be the relevant case for Sweden

Finally, we have a decisive study from Bloomberg that carefully charts lockdowns and death, concluding:

There’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.

Cause and effect are notoriously difficult to discern in human affairs on a macroscale. Even if it connects somehow to intuition that locking down keeps the virus away, they do not deal with the reality that the virus is still there, even if temporarily contained (which itself is arguable). 

Quarantines, lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders and so on reflect a premodern bias and an unscientific impulse to run away and hide, a method used from the ancient world through selective quarantines in some cities in 1918. Then we got smart, developed a modern theory of viruses (well explained here), and eschewed them in every pandemic since World War II. Then, somehow, and mysteriously, one century flipped to the next and we got dumb again and here we are. 

Did the lockdown save lives? It’s possible but not yet proven, and the evidence so far points to a negative answer. No matter how much we try to spin this in our heads, no matter how much we want to believe that something good has come out of this catastrophe, we are all going to have someday to deal with the terrible but likely reality that it was all for naught. 

I conclude with the words of the great physician who is credited with smallpox eradication, Donald A. Henderson (1928-2016). 

The interest in quarantine reflects the views and conditions prevalent more than 50 years ago, when much less was known about the epidemiology of infectious diseases and when there was far less international and domestic travel in a less densely populated world. It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.

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China's Baidu Considers Delisting From Nasdaq; Stock Tumbles, Drags Chinese Megacaps Lower

From Zero Hedge:

The US can't kick out Chinese companies from US stock exchanges if said Chinese companies delist first.

That is probably what went through the head of Chinese search giant Baidu - metaphorically speaking - one day after the Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that could stop some Chinese companies listing on U.S. exchanges unless they follow standards for U.S. audits and regulations in an escalation of a long-running dispute between Washington and Beijing about giving U.S. regulators access to Chinese audits.

In response, Reuters reports that Chinese search engine giant Baidu is considering delisting from the Nasdaq and moving to an exchange closer to home "to boost its valuation"  amid rising tension between the United States and China over investments, three sources said. It wasn't clear how moving away from the biggest pool of megatech bubbles in the world, the Nasdaq, to some other exchange would "boost its valuation" but whatever: clearly the political feud between Trump and Xi is now translating into soft capital controls, and explains why Baidu stock tumbled on the news, sliding briefly below $100 after dropping first yesterday on news of the Senate bill.

The news also dragged lower other Chinese megatechs such as Alibaba and the broader China internet sector.

As Reuters further reports Baidu - one of China’s first US listings - is reaching out to "trusted advisers" to see how it could best be done if it were to proceed, including looking at issues around funding and any regulatory reaction although the discussions are at an early stage and are subject to change, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is not public.

The company pointed to comments by co-founder and CEO Robin Li who told the state-controlled China Daily on Thursday that Baidu was paying close attention to the tighter U.S. scrutiny of Chinese companies listed in the country.

“For a good company, there are many choices of destinations for listing, not limited to the U.S.,” he told the newspaper.

The sources also said that Baidu believed it was undervalued on the Nasdaq exchange in New York; which probably answers our question from above, if not actually "how" it is undervalued. In other words, Baidu wants to be closer to the chronically insane momentum-chasing gamblers that make up the Chinese investing class. 

Baidu’s shares have fallen more than 60% since their peak in May 2018 while the Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index, which tracks Chinese firms listed on the U.S. exchange, has lost less than 10% over the same period. Baidu’s market cap just below $30 billion is only 5% of the market value of Alibaba, which has shares listed in Hong Kong and American Depository Shares listed in New York.

In January, Reuters reported that Baidu, Ctrip and NetEase have all held preliminary talks with Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing about a possible secondary listing to follow Alibaba in establishing an investor base closer to China.

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"Trust Is Being Undermined" - Harvard Medical School Prof Questions Fauci's "Shading" Vaccine Results

From Zero hedge:

At a moment in time when narrative-following "scientists" are lauded like unquestionably omniscient supreme beings enabling dumb-as-a-rock-partisan-politicians to play omnipotent overlords without fear of blowback, the world needs more people like William Haseltine.

The last two weeks have seen markets and politicians jump exuberantly at the hope of every press release from a biotech firm that proclaims one of their pet rabbits didn't die when they fed it their latest DNA-reshaping test material (oh that is except if anyone dares say anything positive about hydroxychloroquine but that is a topic for another discussion) as the fate of global citizenry rests on a vaccine (and definitely not herd immunity, don't even mention it).

Barstool Sports' Dave Portnoy said it right - when did we shift from "flatten the curve, flatten the curve, flatten the curve" to "we have to fund a cure or everyone's going to die."

And so, that is where we find ourselves... Every talking head proclaiming the same malarkey - we will re-open carefully, with PPE, and social distancing, and whetever else is mandated from on-high "until we find a vaccine in 12-18 months" at which point the world will be made whole again and Kumbaya...

All of which brings us back to the man of the day in our humble opinion.

Former Harvard Medical School professor and founder of the university's cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments, William Haseltine dared to speak out today about the high level of bullshit and damage that is being done to "trust" in "scientists" and even dared to break the one holy writ that shall go un-mentioned, throwing some shade a Dr.Fauci.

Reflecting on Moderna's press release this week (which was immediately followed by massive equity raises across numerous biotech firms and upgrades from the underwriters, surprise), Haseltine said:

"If a CFO had tried to get away with such an opaque and data-less statement it would have bee treated with derision and possibly an investigation."

The CNBC anchor desperately tried to guilt him into the official narrative of clinging to any hope as long as it lifts stocks - no matter its utter bullshittiness - but Haseltine destroyed her naive party line:

"we all know its an emergency, and in an emergency it's even more important to be clear on what you know and what you do not know."

Moderna did not follow the process:

"you don't know what happened, we don't know what happened, there is no data."

But, but, but... the CNBC anchorette blubbered, "are you questioning Dr. Fauci who also said that this was encouraging news?"

"Whether [Fauci] shaded what should should have been done, I think is an important question. He's obviously under enormous pressure for positive results but it was not the right thing to do if you can't see the data."

The full interview below is a must-watch by all who care about their freedom being controlled by a narrative directed by fearmongering elites in the name of "science" when the "science" is a) being ignored, b) being bastardized to meet a political need, c) being treated as if handed down on high from the man himself, or d) being manipulated explicitly.

Why this former Harvard Med School prof says Moderna's vaccine trial 'publication by press release' from CNBC.

Haseltine's interview is perfect lead into his opinion piece in todays' Washington Post:

Faith in medicine and science is based on trust. But today, in the rush to share scientific progress in combating covid-19, that trust is being undermined.

Private companies, governments and research institutes are holding news conferences to report potential breakthroughs that cannot be verified. The results are always favorable, but the full data on which the announcements are based are not immediately available for critical review. This is "publication by press release,” and it’s damaging trust in the fundamental methods of science and medicine at a time when we need it most.

The most recent example is Moderna’s claim Monday of favorable results in its vaccine trial, which it announced without revealing any of the underlying data. The announcement added billions of dollars to the value of the company, with its shares jumping almost 20 percent. Many analysts believe it contributed to a 900-point gain in the Dow Jones industrial average.

The Moderna announcement described a safety trial of its vaccine based on eight healthy participants. The claim was that in all eight people, the vaccine raised the levels of neutralizing antibodies equivalent to those found in convalescent serum of those who recovered from covid-19. What to make of that claim? Hard to say, because we have no sense of what those levels were. This is the equivalent of a chief executive of a public company announcing a favorable earnings report without supplying supporting financial data, which the Securities and Exchange Commission would never allow.

There is a legitimate question regarding what Moderna’s unsupported assertion means. The scientific and medical literature reports that some people who have recovered have little to no detectable neutralizing antibodies. There is even existing scientific literature that suggests it is possible neutralizing antibodies may not protect animals or humans from infection or reinfection by coronaviruses.

Such “publication by press release” seems to be a standard practice lately.

The National Institutes of Health announced last month that the drug remdesivir offered a clear benefit to covid-19 patients with moderate disease, shortening the length of their hospital stay by several days. But did it really? Twenty days after the announcement, the supporting data has still not been published. Without the data, no doctor treating a patient can be sure they are doing the right thing.

Another paper, published the same day, found that remdesivir had no measurable effect on patient survival or the amount of virus detectable in nasopharynx and lung secretions. What then should a practicing physician do? Follow the unsupported advice of a news announcement or a medical report published in a leading scientific journal? This is not an idle question: The NIH announcement triggered a global stampede for limited supplies of the drug.

The case is more nuanced for the vaccine developed by the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, though the mileposts remain the same: It started with a public pronouncement of favorable results from an early study, this time in monkeys, well before any data was publicly released. An NIH scientist working on a trial of the Oxford vaccine gave an interview to the New York Times, claiming the drug was a success.

But the data, released as a prepublication version more than two weeks after the story ran, didn’t quite live up to the early claim. All of the vaccinated monkeys became infected when introduced to the virus. Though there was some reduction in the amount of viral RNA detected in the lungs, there was no reduction in the nasal secretions in the vaccinated monkeys. So the positive result reported by the Oxford group turned out not to be protection from infection at all, something most would agree is what a successful vaccine would do. Instead, it lowered only the amount of virus recoverable from the vaccinated monkey’s lung.

To the Jenner Institute’s credit, it does warn visitors to its website that there have been many false reports about the progress of its vaccine trial. Still, having a scientist working on the trial paint preliminary results in such a positive manner without having yet released the full data is cause for concern.

We all understand the need to share scientific and medical data as rapidly as possible in this time of crisis. But a media announcement alone is not enough. There are ways to share the data quickly and transparently: posting manuscripts before review or acceptance on publicly available websites or working with journals to allow an early view. Publishing in this manner allows doctors and scientists to reach their own conclusion, based on the evidence available.

The media also bears responsibility. Asking experts to opine on unsubstantiated claims is not useful. Medicine and science are not matters of majority opinion; they are matters of fact supported by transparent data. This is the backbone of scientific progress and our only hope to end this pandemic. We can’t give up on our standards now.

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So, by all means, trust in "science" but choose your "scientist" well...

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