The number of vaccine doses administered has been accelerating and we are now inoculating more than 1 million people per day. The chart below is a guess at how this is going to play out:
The line shows the average number of doses per day, with the acceleration slowing down over time and topping out at about 2.5 million per day. The numbers are the cumulative number of doses administered.
If we end up somewhere in this ballpark, we will have administered 400 million doses by July 1. That's 200 million people, or about 80% of the adult population of the country—assuming, of course, that 80% of the country wants the vaccine. That's well over the number needed to get the virus well under control and get the case count plummeting.
Don't take this as any kind of rigorous prediction. It's just to give you a rough idea of how the cumulative numbers add up given acceleration in the number of daily doses administered. The actual numbers will depend on how much vaccine is available and how much better we get at distributing it. Nonetheless, I think this is a fairly conservative guesstimate. By May we should start seeing real improvement, and by the end of June we should finally be in pretty good shape.
Assuming, of course, that our vaccines remain effective against whatever new variants show up . . .
Here's my latest M-protein test result: The last few months have been almost eerily stable. That's good news, of course, since as long as my M-protein level is stable it means my multiple myeloma is under control
Bret Stephens has a column in the New York Times this week taking on the now-tedious subject of what a hellhole California is. This is not a topic I really feel like wasting time on anymore, other than to say (a) every state has problems, and (b) California is a high-tax-high-service state. That's not for everyone, I suppose, but it's a pretty good model for a lot of people.
However, Ramesh Ponnuru points out that one of California's genuinely worst problems is its poverty rate, due largely to our high housing costs. This got me curious about the relationship between poverty rates and urbanization. Is California's poverty rate high largely because it's heavily urban? Here's a look:
You can see two things here. First, poverty clearly increases significantly in heavily urban states. Second, California is nonetheless well above the trendline, which means our poverty rate is higher than you'd expect even given our high rate of urbanization.
There's a lot of noise here, and urbanization doesn't explain a lot about poverty, but it does explain some. In California's case, I'd guess that our heavily Hispanic population also has a lot to do with it.
Smartmatic, the voting software company that Donald Trump’s lawyers falsely accused of manipulating vote counts in the 2020 presidential election, has filed a $2.7-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and three of its on-air hosts — Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro — who presented the disinformation on their programs. The suit filed Thursday in New York State Supreme Court also names Trump’s lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani, who were frequent guests on Fox News programs in the weeks after the November election.
....“The company’s reputation for providing transparent, auditable, and secure election technology and software was irreparably harmed,” the suit said. “Overnight, Smartmatic went from an under-the-radar election technology and software company with a track record of success to the villain in [the] Defendants’ disinformation campaign.”
I have no idea if Smartmatic has any chance of winning this suit, or even if it has much of a case, legally speaking. And God knows, Fox has settled plenty of suits in the past for large sums, none of which seem to have slowed them down.
Still, it's worth putting them on notice that there's a price to be paid for going off the deep end on dangerous and absurd conspiracy theorizing. Maybe losing (or, more likely, settling) a few more suits like this will finally teach them a lesson or two.
This is a hamadryas baboon at the San Diego Zoo. Isn't he handsome? In the bottom picture he's playing with a baby baboon, just as any good daddy should.
October 9, 2020 — San Diego Zoo, San Diego, California
Over at New York, Olivia Nuzzi speculates about why Donald Trump has been so quiet lately. One possibility, of course, is that he literally doesn't know what to do now that he's been kicked off Twitter and Facebook. That seems unlikely, though. Nuzzi suggests that Trump is just angry and dejected and not in the mood to fight, which also strikes me as unlikely. Then there's this:
His avoidance of the press seems like a means of avoiding acknowledging the reality of how this ended. Though, I’m sure, his advisers and his new lawyers (and his old lawyers before that) have made the case that he won’t be helping anything if he rambles for 45 minutes on the air with Maria Bartiromo or whatever low-rent propagandist equivalent they have hosting a show at OANN or Newsmax. All it would do is remind any Republicans on the fence about their votes what a nuisance he is.
Obviously this is just a guess on my part, but in the past there's been only one way of successfully getting Trump to shut his yap: warning him that he might be in legal trouble if he says anything publicly. Trump has a lifelong addiction to the legal process, and advice from lawyers actually seems to get through to him sometimes.
I have a hunch that Trump remains scared of the impeachment trial coming up and is taking his attorney's advice to say nothing until it's over. It's an unusually wise move from a man not noted for his wisdom.
Here's the usual way for a private company to go public:
Hire an investment bank to manage the process.
Create a "book" of investors who want to buy shares of stock issued by the company.
On Der Tag, open for business on the stock exchange of your choice.
The investment bank makes money by charging for its services. The private company makes money by selling shares of stock. Investors hope to make money when the stock opens at a higher price than they paid for the company stock. All nice and tidy—but also sort of a pain in the ass. The company has to write a prospectus and reveal all sorts of private information. Investors have to be rounded up. Quiet periods often prevent the company from normal marketing activities.
Enter the SPAC, aka a "blank check" company. A SPAC is basically just a pile of money, maybe a few billion dollars or so, that's already a public company. Now the process of going public is different:
The SPAC noses around and finds a private company that looks interesting.
The SPAC merges with the private company.
The merged company is now basically the private company + cash + a listing on a stock exchange.
The private company now has access to a big pile of money. SPAC investors make money when the value of the company goes up. And it's all done quietly with none of the nonsense of prospectuses and road trips and worrying about the SEC. It's become a very popular way of taking a company public. Perhaps too popular? Check out the recent story of Lucid Motors:
When news emerged in December that Churchill Capital Corp, a blank-check company with no assets beyond its $2 billion in cash, had made an offer to acquire DirecTV, its stock barely moved. After a report in January that Churchill was in talks to merge with the buzzy electric-vehicle startup Lucid Motors Inc., it was a different story.
....The stock has surged more than 220% since the report last month, the biggest-ever stock increase of a special-purpose acquisition company before announcing a merger, according to SPACinsider.com. Talks between the two companies are continuing, though a deal isn’t imminent, according to people familiar with the matter.
Zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds! And all for the low, low price of $161,500.
Now, you might be wondering how a "company" that consists of nothing but cash can surge 220%. Cash is cash, and the value of the company is the value of its cash, full stop. What's more, even if Churchill does end up merging with Lucid, it will do so at a (supposedly) fair market price, which means the value of its stock shouldn't change. At most, buzz over the deal might move its stock a few percentage points, but it certainly wouldn't double its value.
The Journal article acknowledges this and attributes it to "the extraordinary appetite among stock-market investors for electric-vehicle startups," but that doesn't really make any sense. Cash is still cash, and it would only be worth twice its value if investors think Churchill is somehow going to merge with Lucid on fantastically favorable terms. But no one thinks that.
So rather than demonstrating the thirst for electric vehicle startups, perhaps this is more a sign that SPAC mania is finally reaching its frothy top. Bewarned.
UPDATE: Want to learn more about the exciting world of SPACs? David Dayen has you covered here.
Over at his new Substack home, Will Wilkinson suggests that Americans have been unhappy for a while. Here's his evidence:
Regular readers know that I'm not a stickler about charts having y-axes that start at zero. Still, this chart is pretty determined to show a tiny decline as a huge one. A careful look at the y-axis shows that general happiness has recently gone down from about 2.22 to 2.18. This is not a gigantic change.
I wouldn't bother pointing this out if it weren't for the fact that I think this is an important argument. As near as I can tell, Americans aren't especially unhappy these days. Here's the same GSS data plotted slightly differently:
The percentage of people who say they're happy declined from 90 percent in 2000 to 85 percent in 2010, and then bounced back to 87 percent in 2018. That's a net drop of three percentage points, which is barely even noticeable. (Note that all of this is pre-COVID.) Here's similar data from the World Values Survey:
Again, there's a slight decrease between 2000 and 2010, bringing us back to about the same level as the late '80s.
There's other data you can look at that's more specific—financial satisfaction, personal satisfaction, job satisfaction, etc. They all show much the same thing: either no change at all or else a very small change over the past couple of decades.
You can make a case that Americans are slightly less happy today than in the past. You can also make a case that happiness has dropped more dramatically for certain specific subgroups. But that's about it. In general, the changes are small and far from historically unprecedented. The real mystery is why Americans are so angry and frustrated despite being about as happy as ever. There's an answer to that question, I think, but in any case it's the question to ask.
The line shows the average number of doses per day, with the acceleration slowing down over time and topping out at about 2.5 million per day. The numbers are the cumulative number of doses administered.
The last few months have been almost eerily stable. That's good news, of course, since as long as my M-protein level is stable it means my multiple myeloma is under control
