The BLS says the unemployment rate fell from 10.2% to 8.4%. Other BLS data casts doubt on the number.
Unemployment Rate Calculation
The unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed by the civilian labor force.
Unemployment Rate = 13.550 million / 160.838 million = 8.42%
Note that the reported headline jobs number today (+1.4 million) has nothing to do with anything. That is the establishment report number.
The number of employed (+3.756 million) does play into the calculation, but indirectly, as the labor force denominator.
Labor Force vs Employment
Note that employment rose by 3.756 million but the Labor Force only rose by 968,000. The impact of this discrepancy actually boosts the unemployment rate, but only by a tiny amount.
It’s the numerator that matters. The numerator should match continuing claims. It doesn’t.
Continuing Claims
The BLS reference week is the week that contains the 13th of the month. That is the week of August 9-15.
Major Discrepancy
Continued claims for the week ending August 15 was 14.492 million as per the BLS.
Yet, the BLS also says the number of unemployed for that week was 13.550 million.
Minimum Number
14.492 million is the extreme lower bound we should see for the number of unemployed.
Why?
State claims only include those eligible for state unemployment insurance.
Missing From Continued Claims Number
Gig workers
Self-employed
Those who have not worked long enough to qualify for state benefit requirements
Those who have maxed out the number of weeks the states allow
Primary PUA Claims
Pandemic Assistance
Primary PUA claims for the reference week were 13.57 million, an increase of 2.6 Million.
PUA picks up all 4 categories missing from Continued Claims. But it also picks up some number of part-time workers.
But at least some of those 13.57 million did not work at all.
For the sake of argument, assume a mere 3.0 million of these workers did not work at all.
Unemployment Calculation
Unemployment Rate = (14.942 Million + 3.0 Million) / 160.838 Labor Force = 11.16%
Other Discrepancies
I discussed other discrepancies in my Jobs report earlier today.
I suppose it is possible for the claims revision to be correct, but that still does not account for all the gig etc. workers on Pandemic Assistance that are genuinely unemployed.
Conclusion – Garbage
My conclusion is today’s unemployment rate numbers are total garbage.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3gZd2t2 Tyler Durden
In a dreary age in which we’re battered on one side by authentic police mayhem and on the other by puerile PC paladins, Hulu’s new comedy series Woke is little short of a miracle. It manages to carefully and very funnily thread a needle through a political and social straitjacket.
Created by cartoonist-rapper-Michael-Jackson-impersonator Keith Knight and Barbershop screenwriter Marshall Todd, Woke is based (with a lot fewer hallucinations, I’m guessing; we’ll get to those in a minute) on Knight’s cartooning career.
His alter-ego is Keef Knight (Lamorne Morris, New Girl), who draws a strip called Toast and Butter for a dying and penniless local paper. But his life is looking up. “The last time you’re going to see broke Keef Knight,” he brags to his roommates as he heads off to sign a syndication deal that will launch him into big-league, big-money syndication.
Toast and Butter is, by Knight’s own description, “a comic strip about bored breakfast food,” and he resents complaints that it’s not politicized enough. “Why is it that people of color are always having to stand for something or say something in our work?” he snaps at one (black) editor. “You know, I’m just a cartoonist.”
That changes abruptly when Knight is manhandled by (white) cops who mistake him for a mugging suspect. The aftermath: Inanimate objects spring to life to talk to him. Bottles. Mailboxes. Trashcans. His own cartoons. A lot of them agree with the editor and want him to weaponize his artwork, though not all of them are channeling Van Jones. Advises a bottle from a convenience-store beer cooler: “Did you know malt liquor makes black people impervious to bullets?”
The litany of street wisdom starts to alert Knight to some things he hasn’t noticed, including that his new syndicate has noticeably lightened his skin in his publicity photo, and his (black) neighborhood barber has been replaced by (white) hipsters who charge 10 times as much but make everybody look like Russell Brand. One of Knight’s roommates makes a quick diagnosis: “This nigga woke!”
The problem is that Knight’s wokeness looks, to many people, more like craziness, particularly at his highly publicized appearance at a comic-book convention where, goaded on by mocking pens and pencils, he kickboxes with a big cardboard cutouts of himself and his characters even tries to eat them. Gifs of him screaming “Fuck toast and butter!” pop up all over the internet. Knight’s career is over before it’s begun. “You’re gonna be turning tricks in the hay for vegan sliders,” gleefully exclaims one of his hallucinations.
Knight the cartoonist’s dawning awareness of a racism he’s willfully ignored all his life is clearly the major thrust of Woke. But Knight the producer keeps his comedy from turning into a tirade by opening fire on any target of opportunity, particularly the affections of white liberals. One hires him to come to a cocktail party so her friends can speak to an actual black person, touch his hair, snap selfies with him and introduce themselves with the breathless proclamation that “I don’t think O.J. did it!”
Many of the comic balls are kept in the air by Knight’s roommates, the (black) horndog hustler Clovis (Chicago comic T. Murph) and (white) professional sperm donor Gunther (Blake Anderson, Workaholics), who’s also working to market cocaine as a powdered energy mix. Their sometimes goofball and sometimes cynical takes on Knight’s troubled new consciousness are flat-out hilarious. When Knight, inspired by his experience as a paid attraction at the cocktail party, draws a strip titled “Black People For Rent,” Clovis promptly puts it on T-shirts.
Knight is outraged. “Blackness should not be a commodity,” he insists. Shrugs Clovis: “It’s the original commodity.” The ability to find that kind of humor in 2020 makes me think we may survive it yet.
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Just read an interesting Aug. 19, 2020 opinion of N.Y. State Education Department Interim Commissioner Betty A. Rosa (just posted on Westlaw), Appeal of N.R. N.R. was an eight-grade student who was suspended for a month because of what he searched for on his school-issued computer and the key legal analysis:
[Valley Central School District’s] letter charged that, on or about November 19, 2018, the student “searched for inappropriate topics” on his school-issued computer (the “Chromebook”). The notice of charges for the long-term suspension hearing identified the following searches, which the district alleged were inappropriate:
What temperature does gasoline freeze at Fahrenheit;
worst WWI gun;
I will kill every drug addict;
funniest ways to die;
what’s the sharpest knife;
nitroglycerin explosion;
is nitroglycerin really that unstable;
the fastest gun firing rate;
mother of all bomb explosion;
what is the sign that death is near;
is lidocaine legal; [and]
kill shot ….
In a written recommendation dated December 20, 2018, the hearing officer recommended that the student be found guilty of the “charged misconduct by making inappropriate searched on his school-issued Chromebook.”
[1.] I agree with petitioner insofar as the district was limited to charging the student with misconduct for the specific search terms identified in the notice. At the hearing, certain search terms were discussed which were not listed within the written notice, such as “claymore” and “biggest european sword.”
[2.] The district also implied at the hearing that the student violated district policy because some of his searches were unrelated to his schoolwork, rather than inherently inappropriate or violent in nature. The Commissioner has held that a district must be held to the language of the charges it chooses to pursue against a student. While it is unclear from the record if the hearing officer, superintendent, or respondent found the student guilty based upon any search terms that were not identified in the notice of charges, any such reliance would have been improper. Indeed, at the hearing, the middle school principal admitted as much when he indicated that the district chose not to charge the student with misconduct for certain search terms (e.g. “worst poker hand”) that were not related to the student’s academics.
[3.] Education Law §3214(3)(a) permits the suspension of “[a] pupil who is insubordinate or disorderly or violent or disruptive, or whose conduct otherwise endangers the safety, morals, health or welfare of others.” … I cannot find that [the student’s] searches violated either Education Law §3214 or the district policies identified in the notice of charges….
I agree with respondent that several of the terms for which the student searched—e.g. “the fastest gun firing rate,” “nitroglycerin explosion,” and “kill shot”—appeared violent on their face and warranted further investigation. At the hearing, however, the student testified as to his underlying reasons for conducting the searches, and none of these reasons were violent in nature. For example, the student testified that he searched for “kill shot” because he was looking for the lyrics to a popular song titled “killshot.”
Similarly, the student testified that he searched for “nitroglycerin explosion” because he wanted to understand how nitroglycerin can be used as a medication for heart conditions when it was also used as an explosive during the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Indeed, the student’s search history revealed that he had also searched for “what was nitroglycerin used for?” in close proximity to the “nitroglycerin explosion” search. The district notably did not submit any evidence to rebut the student’s testimony during the hearing. Thus, there is no evidence in the record establishing that the student posed an actual threat of violence or had any violent intent when conducting the internet searches listed in the notice of the charge.
Furthermore, the record reflects that the student conducted the “hard reset” search on November 2, 2018, prior to the date upon which he engaged in the other search terms to which respondent objects. Thus, it could not have been performed, as respondent implies, to conceal the student’s search history. Respondent did not otherwise explain how the “hard reset” search was improper, nor did it allege or prove that the search violated any district policy.
Moreover, respondent failed to prove by competent and substantial evidence that the mere act of searching for such terms—regardless of the student’s intent—endangered the safety, morals, health, or welfare of others. The student’s search history was only discovered after respondent decided to examine the student’s Chromebook for reasons unrelated to student discipline. Notably, there is no evidence that the student informed anyone of his internet searches or that anyone at the school would have been aware of the student’s search history if not for the district’s review of such search history. Nor is there any evidence in the record that any students or faculty members became aware of the student’s search history after the district’s review of the student’s Chromebook, except for those individuals involved in bringing the instant disciplinary charge against the student.
Thus, I find that the student’s conduct, which was unknown prior to its discovery and which would not foreseeably cause any disruption to school operations or activities, was not conduct for which the district could properly suspend the student under Education Law §3214(3)(a).
The analysis seems quite right to me. A school might be reasonable in doing some investigation based on such student searches, if it happens to learn about them—but not in simply suspending the student.
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Smith & Wesson Reports “Record” Gun Sales As Violent Crime Soars Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2020 – 13:30
Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. reported on Thursday after the cash close that its quarterly firearm revenue doubled, compared to the same quarter last year, as the virus pandemic, social unrest/violent crime, and crashed economy fuelled unprecedented demand for guns and ammo by first-time buyers.
The Springfield, Mass. based gun company’s firearm segment reported a record $230 million in gross sales for the quarter ending in July, a massive 141% increase compared with the quarter a year ago. Net income soared to $55 million over the period, or 97 cents per diluted share, compared to $1.7 million in 2Q19, or about 3 cents per diluted share.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Smith credited the jump in quarterly sales to the increase in first-time gun owners, along with the company’s ability to quickly scale up and handle the rise in demand over the three months.
“Today, I am pleased to report record-breaking first-quarter financial results for Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc.,” Smith wrote in the quarterly report.
He said, “Our record revenue and unit sales during the quarter demonstrates our ability to rapidly respond to increased demand through our flexible manufacturing model and our state-of-the-art distribution facility, delivering outstanding products that resonate with the firearms consumer.”
Smith continued, “With the successful spin-off of our Outdoor Products & Accessories segment last week, we have now returned to our heritage as a pure-play firearms company, with a focus on organic growth and returning excess capital to our stockholders. As such, our Board of Directors has authorized the company to declare a regular, quarterly cash dividend of $0.05 per share. Our first quarterly dividend will be payable on October 1, 2020, to shareholders of record as of the market close on September 17, 2020.”
During an earnings call with analysts, the CEO said, “the current increase in consumer demand for firearms is, in many ways, unparalleled.”
Smith & Wesson shares have surged 421% since the start of lockdowns in mid-March.
Smith nor the quarterly report specifically mentions social unrest as a driving force behind the company’s sales. As readers know, gun and ammo manufacturers have been riding a massive wave of consumer fear that has led to one of the most massive gun demand spikes in years.
Handguns, particularly the M&P9 SHIELD EZ semiautomatic pistol has been a popular weapon sold to first-time buyers over the last six months. We noted on several occasions that surging demand for pistols has led to a 9mm shortage.
The latest FBI background check data shows 3.1 million checks were logged in August, with total checks this year at a record high of 28.4 million.
Smith said the fastest-growing groups of new weapon purchases are African-Americans and women.
At least 5 million Americans, for the first time, bought a gun(s) this year as a socio-economic ‘bomb‘ explodes across major US cities.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Z5j1X8 Tyler Durden
It has been five months since the American people were told they would be under house arrest for three weeks to “flatten the curve.” Under the guise of protecting us from Covid-19, America’s politicians completed one of the greatest nonviolent power grabs in US history, pushing the lockdowns well beyond the initial three-week prediction, thereby taking control of 330 million lives.
To justify this, they shifted the goal posts from flattening the curve, to halting transmission of the coronavirus entirely. Some even talked about maintaining lockdowns, at least in part, until a vaccine is developed. That could take years.
Quelle surprise.
How did it come to pass that a nation of 330 million was effectively imprisoned, with virtually every sector of the economy shut down either in part or in total?
The answer to this question is as clear as it was wrong: In the early days of Covid-19, politicians and experts lined up to tell us that, if we did nothing, up to 2.2 million Americans would die over the balance of 2020.
As of late August, there have been fewer than 170,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States. If the 2.2 million projection was accurate, then the US lockdown saved in the neighborhood of 2 million lives. But at what cost?
In early March, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the economic output of the United States economy over the period 2020 through 2025 would total $120 trillion. Just four months later and because of the Covid lockdown, the CBO reduced its projection by almost $10 trillion. That $10 trillion difference is income Americans would have earned had the lockdown not happened, but now won’t.
Economists outside the CBO have estimated this loss at almost $14 trillion. For perspective, the median US household earns $63,000. A $10 trillion loss is equivalent to wiping out the incomes of 30 million US households each year for more than five years.
Our desire to keep people safe, no matter the cost, has already resulted in 10 million Americans being unemployed. By the time things have returned to normal, the total price tag, just in terms of lost incomes and adjusted for inflation, will have exceeded the costs of all the wars the US has ever fought, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan – combined.
And the costs are staggering. As of August, estimates from Chambers of Commerce indicate that around one-third of the 240,000 small businesses in New York City have permanently closed. If that ratio holds for small businesses elsewhere, we could see around 10 million small businesses close permanently across the country. Major retail bankruptcies in the US have been every bit as disconcerting.
All in, the effort to save two million lives from Covid-19 will end up costing us somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 million per life saved. People generally assume the lockdown was worth this massive cost, but there are a couple of things to consider before drawing that conclusion.
First, for the same cost, could we have saved even more lives than we did by doing other things?
Second, how plausible was the prediction of two million dead in the first place?
If saving lives simply, rather than saving lives from Covid-19 were our goal, we could have likely saved more than two million lives and at a lower cost. How so? For every $14,000 spent on smoke and heat detectors in homes, a life is saved. For every $260,000 spent on widening shoulders on rural roads, a life is saved. For every $5 million spent putting seat belts on school buses, a life is saved.
Each year, 650,000 Americans die from heart disease, 600,000 die from cancer, 430,000 die from lung disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s. To fight these diseases Congress allocated $6 billion for cancer research to the National Cancer Institute and another $39 billion to the National Institutes of Health in 2018.
The lockdown will cost us more than three hundred times this amount. For a three-hundred fold increase to NCI and NIH budgets, we might well have eradicated heart disease, cancer, lung disease, and Alzheimer’s. Over just a couple of years, that would have saved far more than two million lives.
The lesson here is a simple one: There is no policy that just simply “saves lives.” The best we can do is to make responsible tradeoffs. Did the lockdowns save lives? Some people claim they did – at a cost of $7 million per life saved if the initial estimates were correct – while others fail to establish any connection between lockdowns and lives saved.
Regardless, there are all manner of other tradeoffs here. The lockdowns didn’t just cost millions of people’s livelihoods, they also cost people’s lives. Preliminary evidence points to a rise in suicides. Nationwide, calls to suicide hotlines are up almost 50 percent since before the lockdown. People are less inclined to keep medical appointments, and as a result life-saving diagnoses are not being made, and treatments are not being administered. Drug overdoses are up, and there is evidence that instances of domestic violence are on the rise also.
But what if the lockdown actually didn’t save 2 million lives? There is strong, if not irrefutable, evidence that the initial projections of Covid-19 deaths were wildly overstated.
We can refer to a natural experiment in Sweden for some clarity. Sweden’s government did not lock down the country’s economy, though it recommended that citizens practice social distancing and it banned gatherings of more than 50 people. Swedish epidemiologists took the Imperial College of London (ICL) model – the same model that predicted 2.2 million Covid-19 deaths for the United States – and applied it to Sweden. The model predicted that by July 1 Sweden would have suffered 96,000 deaths if it had done nothing, and 81,600 deaths with the policies that it did employ. In fact, by July 1, Sweden had suffered only 5,500 deaths. The ICL model overestimated Sweden’s Covid-19 deaths by a factor of nearly fifteen.
If the ICL model overestimated US Covid-19 deaths merely by a factor of ten, the number of Americans who would have died had we not locked down the country, but instead practiced social distancing and banned gatherings of more than 50 people, would have been around 220,000.
To date, the CDC reports around 170,000 covid deaths in the United States. In other words, adjusting – even conservatively – for the ICL model’s demonstrated error, it appears that the $14 trillion lockdown perhaps saved about 50,000 US lives. If that’s the case, the cost of saving lives via the lockdown was not $7 million each. The cost was over a quarter of a billion dollars each.
Finally, there is mounting evidence that even if targeted closures had been necessary, a general lockdown wasn’t.Eighty percent of Covid-19 deaths in the US are among those 65 and older. Even if ICL’s flawed model had been correct, and we had been facing the possibility of 2.2 million deaths, only 400,000 of those would have been among working-age Americans. That’s less than two-tenths of one percent of working-age Americans. Social distancing and mandatory masks might have reduced that further. We could have quarantined the elderly, saved nearly all the lives that even the most dire predictions anticipated, and let the economy continue on as usual.
But we didn’t.
Of course, in March, we knew a lot less than we do now. In the face of 2.2 million likely deaths, many claimed that locking down the economy was the right thing to do. Over the subsequent weeks, as data emerged that the threat was far less deadly and far more focused than it had at first appeared, politicians could have released the lockdown.
But they didn’t.
They didn’t because politicians invariably feel the need to “do something.” Despite volumes of evidence from disparate fields like economics, social work, ecology, and medicine, it never seems to occur to politicians that sometimes doing less, or even doing nothing, is by far the better approach. Why should it occur to them? When politicians act and their actions do more harm than good, they always say the same thing: “Imagine how bad it would have been had we not acted.”
But this time, we have evidence. We can compare what happened where politicians reacted with a heavy hand to what happened where they reacted with a light touch. And the evidence we have so far points to the same conclusion: Our politicians destroyed our economy unnecessarily.
This won’t stop our politicians from congratulating themselves, of course. Nothing ever does. When the next crisis comes along they will land on the same sorts of heavy-handed solutions they did this time. The only thing that will chasten them is the anger of the American people. Politicians did far more harm to Americans than Covid-19 did, and that’s what the American people need to remember next time our politicians start down the same pointless road.
Because they will.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lQWM0T Tyler Durden
Questions Swirl Over How Anti-Trump Troop Ad Cropped Up Just Hours After Disputed Atlantic Article Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2020 – 12:50
On Thursday, The Atlantic published an article, citing four anonymous sources who claim that in 2018, President Trump called fallen soldiers buried at France’s Aisne-Marne American cemetery “suckers” and that the grounds were “filled with losers,” and “blamed rain” for canceling a planned visit to the site.
The report has been vehemently refuted by Trump administration officials, and is already beginning to unravel.
On that Atlantic Story – @JeffreyGoldberg and his “four sources” claim Trump’s helicopter flight to the US/French cemetery wasn’t cancelled due to weather.
FOIA docs prove this to be false.
Their “sources” are failing basic fact checks – making them essentially worthless. pic.twitter.com/wAa7FrSxoW
The Atlantic‘s EIC, Jeffrey Goldberg, said the sources wanted to remain anonymous because “They don’t want to be inundated with angry tweets and all the rest.”
Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg explains why he used unnamed sources in report about Trump insulting dead soldiers:
Perhaps even more interesting is an anti-Trump ad from ‘VoteVets’ based on the Atlantic article which cropped up a mere 12 hours later, raising questions over whether this was a coordinated hit.
Very interesting that the Goldberg story drops just hours after Trump appoints an Ambassador to Afghanistan who actually wants to withdraw troops https://t.co/PTAyu1c6la
Spoke to a source who doesn’t want to get tweets at, that while there’s no way to prove it without going on record, this arranged call, plus an ad already airing on Morning Joe sure looks like coordination. My source has nothing further to add. https://t.co/zFvYgbG6cW
“Ok, folks. That RNC visual with wounded vets standing for Trump was powerful. How do we respond?”
“Say he thinks WWI vets are losers.”
“Huh?”
“Claim he HATES them!”
“Really?”
“Let’s say he refused to visit their graves in France!”
“Even Bolton says that’s not true.”
“Who cares?”
It looks like Vote Vets (who colluded with the media on The Atlantic story) repackaged their two year old false claims about President Trump worrying about messing up his hair in Pittsburgh for their new fake story about the reason he wasn’t able to visit the cemetery in France. pic.twitter.com/FoI8yd9FcS
Looks like we can file this one under ‘dirty politics.’
As Monica Showalter opines in American Thinker regarding Trump’s relationship with the military:
* * *
He’s always celebrated servicemen and servicewomen. He’s visited injured servicemen and made trips abroad to be with servicemen. One of the most notable things he’s done has been to call in enlisted and noncommissioned soldiers and sailors to solicit their input about how to make things better in the service for them. He’s beefed up the military budget and demanded military parades to celebrate events. He’s celebrated military victories. He’s also cared deeply for the welfare of soldiers and sailors — specially calling up the family of young servicewoman Vanessa Guillen, who was murdered by a sex-harassing stalker also in the military — and talking about a plan of reform. He’s ordered Saudi “students” out of U.S. military facilities after one of them tried an al-Qaeda-style attack. He’s put veterans first in the Veterans Administration, reducing waiting times and raising customer satisfaction. He’s been ultra-respectful of the military brass, defending a naval commander who broadcast the presence of COVID on his ship to the press (and America’s enemies) instead of up the chain of command, recognizing that if he was misguided, or “had a bad day,” as Trump put it, he was trying to look out for the welfare of his sailors. Trump explicitly said he “didn’t want to ruin” the captain’s career with a relief of command. The captain was reinstated, and the naval bureaucrat who derided him was fired. If anything, Trump’s been a little too solicitous and trusting of the Pentagon brass. He hired Deep-State political animals such as H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis, and John Kelly, all of whom turned out to be major disappointments, with at least some of them compulsive plotters and leakers on the side.
Trump adores the military and honors America’s heroes. He adores them so much that the left, up until now, has called him a “Nazi” for it, which is about par for the left. Now the canard is going out that he doesn’t like them at all. It’s another shape-shifting “narrative” unmoored in facts.
To claim that Trump would make remarks about not wanting to get his hair wet and would therefore refuse to visit a storied military cemetery in France because the dead all were “losers” defies belief. It’s clearly false. Trump himself has utterly denied it, with an edge of fury, given all he has shown of his care for the military. And a lot of the people who were there, with names attached, said it was garbage, too.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3gX103n Tyler Durden
“Smart Beta” Is Actually Still Just Dumb Money: New Study Reveals The Quant Strategy To Be A “Mirage” Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/04/2020 – 12:35
Color us not surprised that that dumb money, even if it invests in “smart beta”, is still really just…dumb.
A new study called “The Smart Beta Mirage”, released this summer by collaborators at the University of Washington, Michael G. Foster School of Business and The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Business and Economics, has all but debunked the idea of “smart beta”.
Fueled by the notion that historical quantitative data can somehow give you an edge to passive investing, smart beta strategies “seek to passively follow indices, while also considering alternative weighting schemes such as volatility, liquidity, quality, value, size and momentum,” according to Investopedia. Long story short, it is a fancy term that allows ETF owners to charge higher fees by claiming they are doing something technologically brilliant that most of their semi-conscious customers wouldn’t understand if they lived to be 150.
But that gravy train appears it is ending. Ever see those disclaimers on Wall Street that say “past performance is not indicative of future results”? Those pushing “smart beta” products would do well to give these types of disclaimers a read on the daily.
Why? Because the study found thatstrategies that worked great according to their historical data simply don’t work going forward.
The abstract reads: “We document sharp performance deterioration of smart beta indexes after the corresponding smart beta ETFs are listed for investments. Adjusted by aggregate market return, the average return of smart beta indexes drops from 2.77% per year ‘on paper’ before ETF listing to −0.44% per year after ETF listing.”
It continues: “We find evidence of data mining in constructing smart beta indexes as the post-ETF-listing performance decline is much sharper for indexes that are more susceptible to data mining in backtests. Our results caution the risk of data mining in the proliferation of ETF offerings as investors respond strongly to the stellar performance in backtests.”
Similarly, Vanguard published a white paper in 2012 that found similar results, according to Bloomberg: “…indexes created for fund launches using backfilled performance data, in which most fared well before inception…generated weaker returns once turned into ETFs.”
But this hasn’t stopped “smart beta” from becoming more than 20% of the U.S.’s $4.8 trillion dumb money ETF market.
Because if there’s one thing this Fed-rigged market has shown us, it’s that facts, evidence, numbers and data have all but become completely meaningless.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/331f5bd Tyler Durden
In a dreary age in which we’re battered on one side by authentic police mayhem and on the other by puerile PC paladins, Hulu’s new comedy series Woke is little short of a miracle. It manages to carefully and very funnily thread a needle through a political and social straitjacket.
Created by cartoonist-rapper-Michael-Jackson-impersonator Keith Knight and Barbershop screenwriter Marshall Todd, Woke is based (with a lot fewer hallucinations, I’m guessing; we’ll get to those in a minute) on Knight’s cartooning career.
His alter-ego is Keef Knight (Lamorne Morris, New Girl), who draws a strip called Toast and Butter for a dying and penniless local paper. But his life is looking up. “The last time you’re going to see broke Keef Knight,” he brags to his roommates as he heads off to sign a syndication deal that will launch him into big-league, big-money syndication.
Toast and Butter is, by Knight’s own description, “a comic strip about bored breakfast food,” and he resents complaints that it’s not politicized enough. “Why is it that people of color are always having to stand for something or say something in our work?” he snaps at one (black) editor. “You know, I’m just a cartoonist.”
That changes abruptly when Knight is manhandled by (white) cops who mistake him for a mugging suspect. The aftermath: Inanimate objects spring to life to talk to him. Bottles. Mailboxes. Trashcans. His own cartoons. A lot of them agree with the editor and want him to weaponize his artwork, though not all of them are channeling Van Jones. Advises a bottle from a convenience-store beer cooler: “Did you know malt liquor makes black people impervious to bullets?”
The litany of street wisdom starts to alert Knight to some things he hasn’t noticed, including that his new syndicate has noticeably lightened his skin in his publicity photo, and his (black) neighborhood barber has been replaced by (white) hipsters who charge 10 times as much but make everybody look like Russell Brand. One of Knight’s roommates makes a quick diagnosis: “This nigga woke!”
The problem is that Knight’s wokeness looks, to many people, more like craziness, particularly at his highly publicized appearance at a comic-book convention where, goaded on by mocking pens and pencils, he kickboxes with a big cardboard cutouts of himself and his characters even tries to eat them. Gifs of him screaming “Fuck toast and butter!” pop up all over the internet. Knight’s career is over before it’s begun. “You’re gonna be turning tricks in the hay for vegan sliders,” gleefully exclaims one of his hallucinations.
Knight the cartoonist’s dawning awareness of a racism he’s willfully ignored all his life is clearly the major thrust of Woke. But Knight the producer keeps his comedy from turning into a tirade by opening fire on any target of opportunity, particularly the affections of white liberals. One hires him to come to a cocktail party so her friends can speak to an actual black person, touch his hair, snap selfies with him and introduce themselves with the breathless proclamation that “I don’t think O.J. did it!”
Many of the comic balls are kept in the air by Knight’s roommates, the (black) horndog hustler Clovis (Chicago comic T. Murph) and (white) professional sperm donor Gunther (Blake Anderson, Workaholics), who’s also working to market cocaine as a powdered energy mix. Their sometimes goofball and sometimes cynical takes on Knight’s troubled new consciousness are flat-out hilarious. When Knight, inspired by his experience as a paid attraction at the cocktail party, draws a strip titled “Black People For Rent,” Clovis promptly puts it on T-shirts.
Knight is outraged. “Blackness should not be a commodity,” he insists. Shrugs Clovis: “It’s the original commodity.” The ability to find that kind of humor in 2020 makes me think we may survive it yet.
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Just read an interesting Aug. 19, 2020 opinion of N.Y. State Education Department Interim Commissioner Betty A. Rosa (just posted on Westlaw), Appeal of N.R. N.R. was an eight-grade student who was suspended for a month because of what he searched for on his school-issued computer and the key legal analysis:
[Valley Central School District’s] letter charged that, on or about November 19, 2018, the student “searched for inappropriate topics” on his school-issued computer (the “Chromebook”). The notice of charges for the long-term suspension hearing identified the following searches, which the district alleged were inappropriate:
What temperature does gasoline freeze at Fahrenheit;
worst WWI gun;
I will kill every drug addict;
funniest ways to die;
what’s the sharpest knife;
nitroglycerin explosion;
is nitroglycerin really that unstable;
the fastest gun firing rate;
mother of all bomb explosion;
what is the sign that death is near;
is lidocaine legal; [and]
kill shot ….
In a written recommendation dated December 20, 2018, the hearing officer recommended that the student be found guilty of the “charged misconduct by making inappropriate searched on his school-issued Chromebook.”
[1.] I agree with petitioner insofar as the district was limited to charging the student with misconduct for the specific search terms identified in the notice. At the hearing, certain search terms were discussed which were not listed within the written notice, such as “claymore” and “biggest european sword.”
[2.] The district also implied at the hearing that the student violated district policy because some of his searches were unrelated to his schoolwork, rather than inherently inappropriate or violent in nature. The Commissioner has held that a district must be held to the language of the charges it chooses to pursue against a student. While it is unclear from the record if the hearing officer, superintendent, or respondent found the student guilty based upon any search terms that were not identified in the notice of charges, any such reliance would have been improper. Indeed, at the hearing, the middle school principal admitted as much when he indicated that the district chose not to charge the student with misconduct for certain search terms (e.g. “worst poker hand”) that were not related to the student’s academics.
[3.] Education Law §3214(3)(a) permits the suspension of “[a] pupil who is insubordinate or disorderly or violent or disruptive, or whose conduct otherwise endangers the safety, morals, health or welfare of others.” … I cannot find that [the student’s] searches violated either Education Law §3214 or the district policies identified in the notice of charges….
I agree with respondent that several of the terms for which the student searched—e.g. “the fastest gun firing rate,” “nitroglycerin explosion,” and “kill shot”—appeared violent on their face and warranted further investigation. At the hearing, however, the student testified as to his underlying reasons for conducting the searches, and none of these reasons were violent in nature. For example, the student testified that he searched for “kill shot” because he was looking for the lyrics to a popular song titled “killshot.”
Similarly, the student testified that he searched for “nitroglycerin explosion” because he wanted to understand how nitroglycerin can be used as a medication for heart conditions when it was also used as an explosive during the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Indeed, the student’s search history revealed that he had also searched for “what was nitroglycerin used for?” in close proximity to the “nitroglycerin explosion” search. The district notably did not submit any evidence to rebut the student’s testimony during the hearing. Thus, there is no evidence in the record establishing that the student posed an actual threat of violence or had any violent intent when conducting the internet searches listed in the notice of the charge.
Furthermore, the record reflects that the student conducted the “hard reset” search on November 2, 2018, prior to the date upon which he engaged in the other search terms to which respondent objects. Thus, it could not have been performed, as respondent implies, to conceal the student’s search history. Respondent did not otherwise explain how the “hard reset” search was improper, nor did it allege or prove that the search violated any district policy.
Moreover, respondent failed to prove by competent and substantial evidence that the mere act of searching for such terms—regardless of the student’s intent—endangered the safety, morals, health, or welfare of others. The student’s search history was only discovered after respondent decided to examine the student’s Chromebook for reasons unrelated to student discipline. Notably, there is no evidence that the student informed anyone of his internet searches or that anyone at the school would have been aware of the student’s search history if not for the district’s review of such search history. Nor is there any evidence in the record that any students or faculty members became aware of the student’s search history after the district’s review of the student’s Chromebook, except for those individuals involved in bringing the instant disciplinary charge against the student.
Thus, I find that the student’s conduct, which was unknown prior to its discovery and which would not foreseeably cause any disruption to school operations or activities, was not conduct for which the district could properly suspend the student under Education Law §3214(3)(a).
The analysis seems quite right to me. A school might be reasonable in doing some investigation based on such student searches, if it happens to learn about them—but not in simply suspending the student.
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In an academic version of the Rachel Dozezal controversy, the New York Times is reporting that George Washington University is investigating the bizarre case of George Washington associate professor Jessica A. Krug who admitted in a Medium post Thursday that, despite publicly identifying as a black woman, she is in fact a white Jewish child from the suburbs of Kansas City.
Krug has called herself a “cultural leech” and announced that she was “cancelling herself.”
Much of our minority status designations are based on such self-identifications. The Census Bureau approach is based solely on self identification. Since 2000, it has allowed people to check multiple boxes for races and ethnicities. Brown University attracted attention for proposing a pure self identification system for “people of color.”
Krug, 39, wrote a Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.” She revealed what she described as a life built on a “napalm toxic soil of lies.” That career include different claims of minority status from African to Caribbean to Puerto Rican roots as well as being raised in a poor family in the projects. This background gave her greater credence in writing as a “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora.”
Krug has a Ph.D. and is the author of the book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” according to her GW faculty profile. She was also a Diversity Achievement Scholar at Portland State and an Advanced Opportunity Fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She wrote:
“To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken.”
In a culturally ironic twist, she then declared that she was going to publicly commit self-cancelling: “I am a coward,” she writes, and then repeats it. “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”
Notably, she insisted that she wanted to be held accountable. It is unclear legally what form such accountability could take. Securing minority positions or benefits can be fraudulent like those at Wisconsin. However, the benefits (as discussed in the Warren controversy) can be less direct or easy to isolate for academics. As with “stolen valor cases,” the most common punishment is public recrimination and isolation.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32YIYsz Tyler Durden
