Ariel University will pay 5000 sheqels for long distance exam ideas

Currently we are teaching by Zoom but soon it is exam season and the University has no ideas about how to do it. It will pay 5000 shqels = about 1500 dollars for a good idea.

In a previous conversation (by zoom) I proposed to copy American universities. Then I looked up in google and saw that none has solved satisfactorily this problem. Cambridge has a system with an invigilator observing non-stop the examinee seated in front of the camera, but it requires lots of personnel, and they have to be paid.

Ten years ago I used to hold "open exams" that is, the question were real life problems and I wanted to test them as they would do in real life, like in an engineering office with a library. They were allowed to bring computers and textbooks to the exam, and propose solutions. The higher-ups forbid this practice. I still think that exams should reflect real life situations. 

Protesting Against the Zionist Rebellion

Yesterday we celebrated the 72nd anniversary of the proclamation of Israel. It was a very quiet event, we are all closed in our homes, public meetings are forbidden. These are the days of the corona virus pandemy.

Not so in Mea Shearim neighborhood. The Neturey Karta sect demostrated in the streets against the existence of Israel. "We are mourning the 72 years of the Zionist Rebellion against God and his Law". The police dispersed the crowd.

The corona mortality in the neighborhood is very high, this week died rabbi Zvi Hirsch Porush, 58, and his wife Beilah, 47, and one of their sons is agonizing in the hospital. 

El Corsodromo de Corrientes

Carnaval Marzo 2020 - Life goes on in Northern Argentina

The flu season is ending

The coronavirus epidemy is probably seasonal and with the coming of spring and summer it is slowly disappearing in Israel. Of course, may be it is wise measures taken by Netaniyahu and the people's obdient following of the rules. Or may be not. Anyway, while driving to my daughter's place, to take the Shkeddy to the fresh air, a radio interview revealed that the official death figures for elderly people in the last three months actually fell, and instead of excess death as registered elsewhere, we Israeli ancients are dying less. The reason is that in this three months of coronavirus, there were fewer car accidents, fewer work accidents, no elective surgeries (which tend to cause complications nd deaths) and people went less to the hospitals because it was known to be infected by the virus.

Superstitious Jews avoid voicing optimist hopes because out there the Devil is hearing everything and dying to spoil everything good. I commented three months ago in a blog that this is a seasonal flu epidemy and in May it will disappear. It was insinuated that I am an idiot. Could be. May be not. Depends.  

where I discover that I am very ordinary

In this confinement universe where I am living, I sleep more than before and have vivid dreams, which I never had before. This morning I woke up at 6 as regular and thenwent back to bed to continue sleeping and dreaming. I was house guest of Dr. Jacky, then decided to leave and took my bag and walked to the train station. The train was leaving and I was missing it, but in the end I got inside and I was travelling. Then I remembered that I had a car stationed nearby so why I was running after the train?

Running after a leaving train is the most common and ordinary of all dreams. Millions are and have been dreaming of missing the train. My mind works like everybody else's and uses the most average and commonplace of images. I am not special. I am normal.

What is the biblical disease "tzara'at"?

This week we should be reading the chapter Tazria about the skin disease that affected the Israelites of the Bible. Tzaraat is habitually translated as leprosy but the sympthoms of the Bible are completely different. In my opinion, it could have been stress hives (pic).

The Bible prescribes several purification procedures which are ineffective against anything we know but may have been effective to cure some spiritual, mental condition. It certainly caused no harm, and it was shorter (and cheaper)  than psychoanalisis. 

The Fernandez of the Casa Rosada

Alberto Fernandez is a serious university professor, and according to The Economist, is doing a good job as President of Argentina. He is divorced and lives with Fabiana, a 22 years younger actress. He has one son with his former wife, called Estanislao (pic), whose professional name is "Dyhzy". His profession is the oldest of the world, that is, he is a famous drag artist. His/her husband completes Argentina's presidential family.

Argentina has progressed a lot since I made aliyah in 1976. Those were the times of the dictator General Videla, a fanatic pre-Conciliar Catholic, imposing inquisitorial morals on the nation. Argentina is now poor but a democracy. 

Financial Chaos

Students at the University of Miami have filed a class action lawsuit claiming they have paid for in-person courses at a higher rate and, with online instruction, they aren’t getting what they paid for this semester. Students at Drexel University in Pennsylvania have filed a similar suit asking for tuition refunds. In Israel no one is asking for refunds - yet.

The online teaching through ZOOM is definitely not the real thing. It takes much effort to prepare the classes because the students prefer to watch unseen (I presume they are watching, probably not) and ask no questions. And the classes are recorded and downloaded and probably circulated. 

The financial world is in chaos. The Central Banks of all the countries are buying their own bonds, and also stocks. They have to do it because the pensions are based on stocks hedge funds. Already much of the financial assets are owned by the State, which assumes large debts to buy and stabilize the markets. I imagine that much of the stocks are also owned by the State, meaning a silent nationalization or expropriation of the industrial and other companies. Just as Marx predicted, Capitalism leads to the social ownership of the means of production, which is the definition of Socialism. 

But definitions are unimportant, there is no economic activity without the permitting of the State, limiting the concept of "ownership" to a fiction. 

Back to 2018

This corona-crisis destroyed some 20-25% of my savings, to the level of end 2017 - mid 2018. My gas and oil shares are now almost worthless, as the price of oil is 11 dollar a barrel. Two months ago it was sixty. Cheap oil is a potent economic stimulant, so after May the stock exchange may emerge stronger.

But just now, after a month of solitary confinement, and the growing anger against China, I am less optimist than generally. New projects are coming in, but somehow it fails to make me happy.  

Germany Preparing the Demand for Compensation

Julian Reichelt, the prominent editor-in-chief of the Bild, wrote to Jinping that “Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper Bild whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the coronavirus is inflicting worldwide.”

"You [Jinping], your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn't respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.”

The best-selling paper Bild calculated prior to Reichelt's editorial that China owed Germany €149 billion for coronavirus damage, triggering the angry response from the Chinese embassy in Berlin.

Bild said the compensation amounts to €1,784 per person if Germany's GDP drops by 4.2 percent. The Bild article was titled: "What China owes us."

Pic.: 1901 - China occupied and divided between 8 occupying powers.  If I were in Xi's shoes I would be worried because of this German quasi demand.

Argentina is in "Virtual" Default

President Alberto Fernández said Sunday night that Argentina is in virtual default, comparing the economic situation to the 2001 crisis – the worst in the country's recent history.

The country is in recession and has suffered 18 months of economic crisis sparked by a currency crash. Its economy is expected to shrink by 3.1 percent in 2019.  

Again, the country will not pay its debts. I see nothing virtual in its default. The IMF tried to solve it insolvency but it only accelerated the process. It is difficult to explain why Argentina is suffering so much.

Free Oil

Nigeria is giving out oil at 12 dollar a barrel and it cannot sell it all. The low price of energy is stimulating world economy, preventing recession.

Argentina's Health Authorities are discouraging contact sex during the quarantine, and recommending masturbation and videosex. They warn of complications of the stress for cohabiting couples. Buenos Aires is the world capital of Freudian psychoanalisis.

Corona virus psy war

Bad news. China created the corona virus and tried to blame the Wuhan wet market. History is becoming a dystopia movie. From the Jerusalem Post:

On Wednesday, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper accused China of withholding important information regarding the coronavirus.

"I think in due course, once we get through the pandemic we're in right now, there'll be time to look back and really ascertain what happened and make sure we have a better understanding so we can prevent this in the future," he told America's Newsroom.

Also Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo voiced his own suspicions regarding the responsibility of the Wuhan lab.

"What we do know is we know that this virus originated in Wuhan, China. We know there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was. There is still lots to learn," Pompeo told The Story.

"You should know that the United States government is working diligently to figure it out."

The secretary of state added that the laboratory "contained highly contagious materials – we knew that, we knew that they were working on this program, many countries have programs like this. In countries that are open and transparent, they have the ability to control them and keep them safe, and they allow outside observers in to make sure all the processes and procedures are right. I only wish that that had happened in this place."

In the early days of the outbreak, China reportedly attempted to suppress evidence of the spread of the coronavirus, with doctors being censored and some journalists allegedly being "dissapeared." In addition, allegations have also been made of supposed complicity on the part of the World Health Organization (WHO) in covering up evidence of China's cover-up.

In response to these allegations, the Trump administration announced a temporary halt to all US funding towards the WHO, claiming that the organization "political correctness over lifesaving measures".

Turnaround time

In addition of the non-existence of herd immunity vis-a-vis COVID-19, President Trump's accusation that the WHO was misguiding the world by advising end of lockdowns, and the palpable failure of Singapore and its return to strict lockdown, is desinflating my natural optimism. We may write down this year 2020 as lost, certainly from the economic point of view.

I expect:

- breakdown of global supply chains and re-organizaton of world commerce, including stop of globalization, just-in-time inventories, and complex supply and finance chains
- sovereign debt downgrades as countries cannot export enough to pay their foreign obligations
- huge and unsustainable increases in public sector debt, including via unprecedented commitments to private sector debt obligations, specifically in the USA

So, why should it be that global equities are within 10-15% of their 2020 highs? 

I have to reverse direction and start selling instead of buying stock.

P.S.: On the other hand, why should a bad flu cause such a universal quilombo? (Balagan, in modern Hebrew)

PSS: China is agressively testing America's resolve to defend Taiwan. Coming a testing time for America. Its alliances will be tested on the field. Bad, bad. 

No Herd Immunity in sight

The Koreans discovered that people "cured" of the flu disease, can be re-infected by the virus. This is very bad, it means that only total erradication of the virus a-la-Wuhan can lead to renormalization of economic life. I wonder if NASDAQ will crash tomorrow.

The idea of herd immunity is that as more people get infected, that is, once a large proportion of the population gets infected (more than 50 percent), then this would protect the rest from infection.

While UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his advisers sparked an uproar when they bluntly proposed this approach - and later, at least formally, backtracked - this is actually something approved by politicians and public health experts in Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway as well. This is considered a cruel, eugenic policy. However, it appears that it would not work. 

Lab ferrets

The internet is a great collective mind, and processes a great number of ideas. Someone remembered news of criminal trials of Chinese lab workers selling lab animals in the local wet market. It was not in Wuhan, but knowing China, it stands to reason that the large biowarfare lab in the center of the town, two blocks away from the market, was supplying live and dead lab animals.

I posed a question in Greg Cochran's blog: Will the coronavirus evolve to a more or to a less virulent form? Natural selection will favour the lines that infect faster and more effectively, and that means ambulant and coughing carriers. Those lines that send the carriers to the bed or kill them, survive less. So the tendency, I reason, is the corona virus gradually turning into a common seasonal flu. Let's see what is Greg's opinion.   

Winding down the corona epidemic

Several teams in Israel are building models how to end the economic disaster of the corona epidemic lockdown.

Bar-Ilan University researchers led by Dr. Baruch Barzel of the Department of Mathematics, have devised a strategy based on alternating lockdowns: first splitting the population into two groups, then alternating these groups between lockdown and routine activity in weekly succession.
The official team that is dealing with this problem includes the Ministry of Health and the Treasury, and the Modeling and Prediction Unit of the Mossad (I didn't know of its existence). Their solution is gradually freeing up the industries that employ much manpower and pay low salaries, to avoid mass unemployment (which is almost irreversible), and the high tech sector. Tourism, restaurants, entertainment, aviation, etc. are to be left to the end. One of the reasons to lift asap the lockdown is the possible increase of social tensions between economic classes and ethnias.

Vengeful Germans

Der Spiegel does not hide its Schadenfreude: 

 Donald Trump's disastrous crisis management makes the United States the new epicenter of the pandemic. The country is facing an unprecedented economic crash. Is the world experiencing the implosion of a superpower?

Mass Graves in New York

Long trenches in Hart Island (near Staten Island) being excavated for the coronavirus epidemic victims. And the malignant blogger world was searching for trenches in Iran, schadenfreude. Now no one is laughing. It is frightening. 

Working in Captivity

No one is allowed in the street. My downtown corner is deserted, there is a strange silence, the air is pure and the pidgeons are seeking where to nest. I am clearing up my contract debts, like preparing a clean autocad scheme of the flowchart of a large wet food factory. What are all those pipes? Which is connected to which machine? The factory has dozens of Gordian pipe knots like the pic. There is no one to ask because they don't answer the phone and because no one knows. I left this to the end, and now the deadline has been reached. I finish and hopefully get paid for the whole project. I know that if I focus for a few hours I can do it, but focusing is extremely hard work and I prefer to blog. Oy! J,  if you keep distracting yourself blogging, you will lose the payment. J, think of all that money!

Virus spreading through vent pipes

There was a famous case of a 50 storey residential building where people in different stages infected each other - apparently by aerosols dispersed through sewage vents.  That happened a decade ago - the SARS virus that caused 342 confirmed cases and 42 deaths in the complex. The virus was transported by air droplets escaping from dry U bends (siphons) and negative pressure in the bathrooms caused by extractor ventilators. See the interactive graph above. The interconnectedness of the sewage system not only in the same building but between nearby complexes (such as hospitals) facilitates the dispersion of pathogens. Recently the Lancet recommended (1) investigate the sources of sewage odors, (2) maintain the U bends full all the time opening the tap twice a day for 5 minutes.  

Boris Johnson in Respirator Machine

I am feeling sad for Boris and his unborn child. England is now ruled by Raab, a distant relative of mine. Our is the Orthodox branch while his parents were Bolsheviks.

This coronavirus epidemy occupies my mind. Now it seems to me obvious that the Chinese government's immediate, brutal (and successful) reaction to a  handful of atypical flu cases in Wuhan in January was caused by the knowledge that it was a biowar virus escaped from the Chinese Central Biowar Labs in Wuhan. It was an accident, for sure.

On the other hand, epidemics are nothing new, one killed a third of all Europeans and no one created it. So it is almost certain that this one is also natural. 

Hysteria in TASE

Delek Kiduchim posted 28% up. It is crazy. 

Boris Johnson Hospitalized

The corona flu infected him two weeks ago. A man full of vitality. I like him and feel sorry. 

Several of the people around Johnson have also tested positive. His pregnant partner, Carrie Symonds, has also experienced Covid-19 symptoms, and said that she is "on the mend."

Corollarium

Source.  Doctors are already prescribing hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin to potentially help severely ill COVID-19 patients. Matter of fact, the FDA has already approved hydroxychloroquine for emergency use for these patients. The reason why this drug is good for COVID-19 is because it provides the ability to inhibit immune response. That's important, because COVID-19 causes acute respiratory distress syndrome or ARDS, because a patient's immune response is severe against the lungs. That causes the air sacs or alveolus of the lungs to flood with fluid and it becomes hard for oxygen to be delivered to red blood cells. Another belief is that hydroxychloroquine also inhibits viral replication as well. Azithromycin is believed to help with pneumonia.

As far as potential treatments in development, I believe that Gilead's remdesivir may potentially offer some therapeutic benefit. That's because this drug is a nucleotide analog which blocks a particular enzyme that is required for viral replication. Hydroxychloroquine has already been approved by the FDA for emergency use. Remdesivir may also get the greenlight for use, should several studies to be reported in the coming weeks turn out with positive data. As far as vaccines go, it will be roughly 12 to 18 months. That's because it will take time to randomize several hundred patients and then test safety and efficacy. Especially, if you want to make sure that there are no long-term negative side effects. Plus, you have to be able to produce millions of doses, which may take some time to ramp up. As far as profitability may go, it is likely that a good amount of revenue will be made, but that depends where it is priced at. In addition, it depends on the seasonality of this virus also.

Corollarium: We have a maximum of six month till something is found. The only problem I see is that the companies will emerge with much debt, that may lead to inflation. Dollar inflation. 

Building character

Seeking Alpha  in a note titled "The worst is to come" points out the silver lining  of coronavirus pandemic: The hardship that we are experiencing right now is tragic, but it fosters resilience and builds character.  

At my Mathusalemic age, do I need to build character? I prefer to build wealth, to increase the worth of my portfolio.

"Also, we will soon know a lot more than we do now. Tthe true negative impact on the economy and the financial health of corporations is unimaginable right now. And as we progress through the month of April, the economic reports and corporate earnings announcement are going to undoubtedly be absolutely horrendous."

Good. Reality is now returning to global capital markets. Much character building.  Let's think of a plan. 

Stopping the Economy to fight the Pandemic

Some are doubting the wisdom of stopping the economy, closing down factories and shops to fight the corona flu. After all, the actual disease affects about 1% of the infected and the number of deaths is statistically insignificant and of unhealthy/improductive people. Everybody is suffering, in Israel one million persons are unemployed and without income, business is closed and cheap loans are super-risky because loads the business with debts that will have to be paid back. England tried to choose a more rational path but soon had to adopt drastic measures like everyone else. I am old and deep in the endangered class, so I assume I am unable to think clearly. Anyway, the State of Israel has decided what to do and possess the means to exact compliance from small people like me.

The economy is adapting to the pandemic. Everything is being done by computer and mobile phone. A self-help parallel economy is aborning: people drive out to farms to buy produce, and they are sewing and selling masks. I have been working from my home studio for the last twenty years, so I feel the difference only by having my wife non-stop over me or shouting on the phone. 

Israel Forever

Israel sold $1 billion of 100-year bonds in international markets as part of a record $5 billion fundraising to finance government aid to help the economy cope with the coronavirus outbreak.

Israel joins a handful of countries such as Austria, Mexico and Argentina, which have sold “century bonds.”

The local Treasure says it is a testament to the faith in Israel's solidity. Yet Argentina also succeeded in selling similar bonds, and the purchasers already lost half of their investment. 

How Much TEVA?

It has been two weeks of emergency in Israel. It is forbidden to walk the streets. One million people has been sacked and is unemployed living on Social Security. The bourse is very depressed, cheap, with prices lower than two years ago. TEVA, a large pharma company, lost 90% of its value, but it is working and profiting organization, and in this epidemy, its products should be invaluable. I decided to buy some more. How much? Thinking.

Perineum sunning

It is a German invention. It is deeper than nude sunbathing. No pictures.