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The covid pandemic was front and center today in economic news, when its impact was felt throughout the January payrolls report (if not to the same extent as December payrolls), whose disappointing +49k reading could be easily explained by continued job losses in the Leisure & Hospitality sector due to COVID-19 outbreaks and associated lockdown measures and restrictions.

However, as BofA’s Hans Mikkelsen writes, “given that the US COVID-19 situation is improving rapidly – for example the number of people hospitalized is down one-third over the past month – and restrictions are lifted in many large states like California, it is straightforward to expect much stronger payrolls going forward.”

Indeed, the latest Covid data shows that absent any major shocks – such as a mutant strain that is fully immune to any existing vaccines – the pandemic should be a thing of the past relatively soon.

Here are the latest facts: the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US has declined dramatically to 88,668, or 43,806 – one-third – off the peak which occurred on January 5th (Figure 4) – a rapid turn in the crisis (Figure 5). The decrease is broad-based (48 states+DC, except for AK, MT and VT that saw minimal 1, 1 and 7 person increases over the past week, respectively).

The  weekly percentage change in US COVID-19 hospitalized is consistent with the largest declines seen during the Coronavirus crisis (Figure 6). Moreover the 7-day test positivity rate has declined to 7.6% from the 13.6% peak on January 8th (Figure 7).

Since hospitalizations are lagged relative to time of infection the US Corona outbreaks peaked back in the second half of December. Finally, the vaccine rollout continues in the US at a rapid pace of around 1mn doses per day and a cumulative 35.2mn doses administered through February 2rd (Figure 8, Figure 9).

Finally, and in the clearest indication that we are almost out of the woods, even “scientific models” expect Covid to be a non-event by June. BofA notes that “a fresh update to the University of Washington IHME’s COVID-19 model shows they had underestimated the current rapid pace of improvement in the US coronavirus situation“, but are now forecasting another wave of increasing daily new infections starting in the second half of this month (Figure 2) – probably due to the new more infectious strains of the virus. However, and as we previewed first back in December, “due to ongoing vaccinations of the most vulnerable, the negative consequences in the form of hospitalizations this time around are expected to be diminished significantly.”

In fact IHME expects the number of people hospitalized in the US with COVID-19 to continue to decline every single day through June 1st, which is the end of their forecast horizon (Figure 3).

This continued improvement – and acceleration of economic growth due to little need for lockdowns and restrictions – suggests that the US economy – and broader society as well – should be able to move beyond covid some time in the early summer.

Authored by Francis Sempa via HumanEvents.com,

The “most honored and honorable man to walk the stage of human history” has been canceled…

It is reported that President Biden ordered the bust of Winston Churchill removed from the Oval Office. Twelve years ago, President Obama did the same thing. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented the Churchill bust to President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks, and Bush proudly displayed it in the Oval Office. When President Trump moved into the White House in 2017, the Churchill bust returned. Modern Republican Presidents honor Churchill’s legacy; Modern Democratic Presidents don’t. Churchill, it seems, is part of the American political divide.

Why don’t Democratic Presidents, unlike Republicans, deem it important to honor Churchill’s memory? What is it about the late British statesman and army officer that produces such different political reactions? Why is Churchill so anathema to recent Democratic Presidents—and leftists more broadly? (In June of last year, Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square was defaced by Black Lives Matter activists who wrote “Racist” on its base, prompting British authorities to install protective covering for the statue.)

Winston Churchill at a conference in Quebec.

POLITICIZING THE MEMORY OF WINSTON CHURCHILL

During his own long political career in Britain, Churchill was a polarizing figure. He changed political parties twice. Much of the political class in Britain viewed him as reckless, untrustworthy, and dangerous. In the days leading up to the First World War, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, ensured that the British Navy was ready when war came. As Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, from the war’s “first moment the sea-power of Great Britain ruled unchallenged throughout the world.” He proudly boasted that during the transport of the British army to France, “Not a ship was sunk, not a man was drowned: all arrangements worked with the utmost smoothness and punctuality.”

Yet, just a year later, Churchill would be forced to resign from the War Cabinet due to the failure of the Dardanelles campaign, for which he unfairly received the whole blame. (This British military campaign to force the straits with the goal of defeating the Ottoman Empire and linking up with Russian forces, which Churchill, among others in the War Cabinet, championed, failed due to the lack of navy-army coordination and poor execution. Instead of using sea power to circumvent the stalemate on the Western Front, British and allied army forces became bogged down on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They suffered more than 100,000 casualties before they withdrew.)

After rejoining the Conservative Party and serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the mid-to-late 1920s, Churchill was deliberately excluded from high office for ten years. It was during this time in the “political wilderness” that Churchill repeatedly spoke in Parliament about the growing Nazi threat, but his prophetic warnings were dismissed as the irresponsible and dangerous ravings of a warmonger. Even when events proved Churchill right and the war situation cried out for strong leadership, it was only with extreme reluctance that King George VI summoned Churchill to become Prime Minister in May 1940.

During the next few weeks, Winston Churchill would go on to save Western civilization by almost single-handedly resisting pressure to make a deal with Hitler and by (to paraphrase the American war correspondent Edward R. Murrow) mobilizing the English language and sending it into battle.

After Germany’s defeat and as the war neared its end, Churchill abruptly fell from power as the war-weary British electorate voted overwhelmingly for the Labor Party, which offered them the promise of socialism. Out of power, Churchill, in an early 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, warned the West that an “iron curtain” had descended over Central and Eastern Europe. Recalling his wilderness years, he reminded his audience, “Last time I saw it all coming, and I cried aloud to my own fellow countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention.”

Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference.

Winston Churchill saved Western civilization from Nazi tyranny and alerted the world to the danger of Soviet tyranny.

Previous Democratic Presidents, like John F. Kennedy, revered Churchill—JFK conferred honorary U.S. citizenship on the former British leader in April 1963, and praised Churchill as “the most honored and honorable man to walk the stage of human history in the time in which we live.”

But that was the old Democratic Party.

Today, Churchill is not “woke” enough for Democratic Presidents. He was a 19th-century man with traditional Victorian values, a champion of British imperialism who gloried in British history and conquest. He believed with all of his heart and mind in the superiority of Western civilization, and that belief is unacceptable and denounced by the Left today. It is no accident, as the Marxists like to say, that leftist mobs in London attacked Churchill’s statue. For the left, Churchill only symbolizes colonialism, racism, and xenophobia. They’ve ignored or tried to erase the memory of Churchill as a defender of democracy and savior of our civilization.

News reports indicate that the Churchill bust was replaced with the bust of Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), who spent three utterly unremarkable years as U.S. Attorney General trying to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, promoting military intervention in Southeast Asia, bugging Martin Luther King Jr., using the IRS to attack political opponents, and protecting his brother, the President, against allegations of mob ties and serial adultery. But when he campaigned for president in 1967, RFK went “woke,” becoming the “peace” candidate and sympathizing with the radicals in the streets who sought to tear America apart. Apparently for some—including our country’s new President—that symbolism trumps paying homage to the savior of Western civilization. A civilization is in peril when its leaders lose faith in it.

One of the obvious appeals of Bitcoin is that it is decentralized in nature and, therefore, immune from being plundered by governments and Central Banks globally. We haven’t seen a better example of that, in action, than a recent story out of Germany. 

German prosecutors seized more than $60 million in bitcoin from a “fraudster” who is now done serving his jail sentence, according to Reuters. There’s only one problem: they don’t have the password to access the Bitcoin wallet and the man is now out of prison. 

The person that prosecutors seized the Bitcoin from reportedly won’t spill the beans, either. He has been “maintaining his silence” after being sentenced to jail and has “since served his sentence,” the report notes.

The prosecutor in the town of Kempten said that police have made numerous efforts to access the 1,700 Bitcoin, but have been unsuccessful. 

Prosecutor Sebastian Murer said: “We asked him but he didn’t say. Perhaps he doesn’t know.”

Sure. The man who had committed fraud was sentenced to more than two years for hacking into other computers and using them to mine Bitcoin. But hey, maybe he just “forgot” his password to $60 million in Bitcoin. 

As most Bitcoiners already know, the currency is stored in digital wallets that are secured through encryption. A password can be used as a decryption key to open a wall and, when a password is lost or forgotten, a wallet can’t be opened. 

Ironically, when the man was put behind bars, his Bitcoin would have been worth significantly less. In early 2018, Bitcoin made its first run above $11,000. Since then, Bitcoin’s value has more than tripled. 

Authored by Patrick Cockburn,

“Get your retaliation in first,” is a cynical old saying in Northern Irish politics that means you hit your opponent whenever you can without waiting for a provocation. It neatly captures the violent traditions of the province and explains why the political temperature there is always close to boiling over.

Imagine then the pleasure of those unionists who had always opposed the Northern Ireland Protocol, which places the new EU/UK commercial frontier between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, to find that they had been genuinely provoked by the European Commission. In a classic cock-up, but one with grave and lasting consequences, Brussels had briefly called for a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, something it had repeatedly told Britain was an anathema because it would endanger the Good Friday Agreement and open the road to communal violence.

Yet here was a glaring example of the EU selfishly backtracking on its own warnings and fecklessly reopening one of the most explosive issues in European politics, the culpable purpose of this being to stop vaccines capable of saving the lives of British pensioners from being exported from the EU to the UK.

The Commission was instantly struck by a hail of abuse for its folly and it promptly withdrew the proposal with embarrassment, but for almost the first time in four years the EU was on the back foot in its relationship with Britain. No wonder Michael Gove was openly gloating as he told the House of Commons that the European Commission’s action had been condemned by everybody from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the former prime minister of Finland. And there was indeed some innocent pleasure to be had in watching somebody as poised and ostensibly competent as the Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, get quite so much egg on her face.

She had presumably miscalculated or ignored, as have so many politicians before her, the extreme combustibility of Northern Irish politics, or failed to notice how far they had already been inflamed by the creation of an Irish Sea EU/UK commercial border at the start of this year. Such flames are not be easily put out, whatever calming noises may come from Brussels, London and Dublin.

Port officials in Belfast and Larne, who actually conduct the border checks, have stopped working on the grounds that they fear for their safety. A piece of graffiti has appeared on a wall in Larne reading: “All Border Post Staff are Targets.” For weeks, the media had been full of stories about frustrated Northern Irish businesses facing ruin because of the new border checks.

Ever since Boris Johnson openly betrayed the unionists and signed the Irish protocol, they have felt the ground shifting under their feet and, they found to their horror, apparently shifting inexorably towards a united Ireland. They complain that even the British Army was having to fill in EU forms to bring military equipment into the province (it turned out that they were doing so, though they did not have to under the terms of the Protocol). An element of “getting your retaliation in first” surfaces here since, under pressure from those even more hard line than themselves, the Democratic Unionist Party leadership which – along with Sinn Fein – heads the government in Northern Ireland, has switched its stance. Instead of reluctantly enforcing the Irish Protocol, it now opposes it.

One of DUP ministers, Edwin Poots, ordered the withdrawal of the port inspectors, though the police had told him that they did not believe the inspectors were under threat from loyalist paramilitaries. Poots claims the police did not have “a full understanding of the risks” – and in the long term he is probably right.

The bizarreness – and potential dangers – of the permanent crisis in Northern Ireland cannot be over-stated. By leaving the EU, Britain created a new UK/EU frontier the effect of which would be to the benefit of either the unionists/protestants or the nationalists/catholics. A repartitioning of Ireland by resurrecting a physical barrier along the 300-mile-long land border was never feasible, if only because it largely runs through nationalist/catholic majority areas where any new customs posts would be burned or wrecked as soon they were established. Now the unionist/protestant community is extending a similar veto over an “Irish Sea border”.

In other words, the frontier between Britain and the EU is a disputed no-man’s land where two communities struggle ceaselessly for dominance. This is something that will affect – and probably poison – future relations between London and Brussels for decades to come. Brexit automatically destabilised Northern Ireland and now Northern Ireland is going to destabilise Brexit Britain.

But the embattled province will not be the only friction point, only the one with greatest potential for violence. Boris Johnson won the general election of 2019 by claiming that he would “Get Brexit Done”, promising that relations between Britain and the EU would soon achieve a stable equilibrium. But that is precisely what is not happening. Instability is built into the Withdrawal Agreement, and the row over vaccines and the Irish Protocol is only a precursor to decades of friction.

Britain will be permanently in the position of negotiating and renegotiating access to the single market for its goods and services. It will, moreover, be negotiating from a position of weakness and will be continually forced to make concessions – as was so often the case during its negotiations to leave the EU. British fishermen, once the symbol of the benefits to come of enhanced British sovereignty, have become the first visible casualties of this new and unequal balance of power.

Remainers once fantasised about the day when Leavers would see the ruinous errors of their ways in exiting Britain’s largest market and lament their folly. But the exact opposite is likely to happen: the EU will in future fight for its 27 members’ interests with even less regard for the views of the British government and British public opinion than it did before.

A Brexiteer government and pro-Brexit media will inevitably respond by scapegoating Brussels for everything that goes wrong in Britain, accusing it of overbearing behaviour and unfair practices. They may even be right, but this will not do them any good, simply because the EU has the stronger hand of cards.

Just at the moment the government can say – though not too loudly – that the advantages of speedy national action, unobstructed by the restraints imposed by an unwieldy EU alliance, are exemplified by its swift development and rolling out of the coronavirus vaccine, but this type of success is unlikely to be often repeated.

On the contrary, the outlook is that Britain will remain obsessed by its relations with the EU – and that those relations will generate continuous friction. The economic relationship may begin to sort itself out in time, but at the cost of much bad political blood while Brexit turbo-charges Irish and Scottish separatism. The furore in Northern Ireland is not an atypical hangover from the past, but the first instalment of a permanent confrontation between Britain and the EU.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

You don’t have to be a cog in the system.  For most of us, the only option that was presented while we were growing up was to get on the hamster wheel and run as fast as we could.  You know what I mean – go to school, get a job, pay a mortgage, prepare for retirement, etc.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  If you truly want to unplug from the system and live your life off the grid, you can.  Of course it isn’t easy, but nothing in life really worth doing ever is.

Sadly, the lives of most people are defined by the matrix that the vast majority of us are connected to on a daily basis.  In most cases, your income and status in society are defined by whatever “job” has been given to you by whichever corporation you are currently working for.  We like to call ourselves “employees”, but in essence we are basically corporate servants.

Of course most people feel like they can’t quit their corporate jobs because each month they have to make payments on mortgages, auto loans and credit card debts that they owe to giant corporate financial institutions.

And most people also feel the need to constantly “prepare for retirement” by pouring money into corporate securities in the rigged game that we call “the stock market”.

But what is going to happen to all of them when our economic and financial systems completely implode?

During this current economic downturn, millions upon millions of Americans have already lost their jobs, and it is being reported that millions of Americans could potentially be evicted from their homes in 2021.

When things go bad, it is the little guy that gets crushed first.

But you don’t have to wait around for that to happen.

An increasing number of Americans have decided that living off the grid is the way to go.  For example, 65-year-old Bob Wells will never have to make a mortgage payment or pay rent ever again.  He lives on public lands in his GMC Savana, and he uses solar power to run his 12-volt refrigerator.  In recent years he has become internationally known for his YouTube channel named “Cheap RV Living”, but it wasn’t always this way.

In fact, his decision to adopt a nomad lifestyle was originally sparked by deep dissatisfaction with the corporate job that he was working…

Before becoming a nomad in 1995, Bob lived in Anchorage, Alaska, with his wife and two boys. He worked as a union clerk at the same Safeway where his father had worked until retirement, only to die two years later.

Bob didn’t want his father’s fate, but there he was. As days became decades, he went to a job he hated, worked with people he didn’t like, to buy things he didn’t want. By his own telling, he was the living embodiment of Thoreau’s “quiet desperation”. He knew he wasn’t happy, but it never occurred to him to live differently.

When he suddenly found himself divorced, Bob made a dramatic choice that changed his life forever…

Then, when he was 40 years old, the divorce happened. After paying alimony and child support, he was taking home $1,200 a month, $800 of which went towards rent.

One day, fretting about impossible finances, he saw a green box van for sale and thought: “Why don’t I buy that van and move into it?” The idea struck him as crazy, but with the prospect of homelessness closing in, he drained the last $1,500 in his savings account and bought the van that was just “too ratty-looking” for its previous owner. He gave his landlord notice that night, threw a sleeping pad in the back of his new home, and cried himself to sleep.

Today, he has hundreds of thousands of online followers, and he is even featured in a new film called “Nomadland”.

But despite all of that success, he will continue to live in his GMC Savana.

For others, living in a van is not a palatable option, but they have still chosen to live off the grid.

Over in the UK, a British couple named Matthew and Charis Watkinson have fully embraced a philosophy known as “collapsology”…

NO bills, no mortgage, an endless supply of homegrown grub and even a hot tub to relax in – welcome to the world of two Brits prepared for the end.

Essex vets Matthew and Charis Watkinson gave up the rat race for the good life in the Welsh countryside after reading about ‘collapsology’, a movement based around the theory that society as we know it could fall apart.

Wouldn’t it be great to have no bills every single month?

Matthew and Charis gave up their £30,000-a-year jobs, and now they produce their own food on three acres of land in Pembrokeshire…

Matthew and Charis, 35, bought three acres of land in Pembrokeshire for £35,000 and spent a further £25,000 on building a house, chicken coops, greenhouses, a horse poo-powered gas cooker and even a hot tub.

They are entirely self-sufficient, installing solar panels, growing their own fruit and veg, building beehives, rearing up to 140 chickens and converting lorries and flatbed hay trailers into zero-carbon living quarters.

If the collapse of our society greatly accelerates, they are ready.

Meanwhile, they don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn every morning and drag themselves to corporate jobs that they absolutely hate.

As I was preparing this article, I was reminded of a Reddit post that I saw earlier today…

I don’t understand how people would rather have a job than be dead. I genuinely don’t understand the motive. I picked a field I love, I became educated, I have had multiple jobs that are vastly different from each other and every one gives me the same overwhelming feeling of “I’d literally rather die than do this”. It’s been every job I’ve ever had, even before graduating college. I simply don’t feel rewarded when I put in effort to complete a task, I never get fulfillment out of a job well done. I don’t understand how people do this their whole lives

Have you ever felt that way?

I think that most of us have.

Matthew and Charis may have simple lives, but they are absolutely thrilled to be free of the system…

“We’ve built a farm for a lot less than £100,000 and it’s all ours.

“We don’t owe anybody any money and we don’t have any bills – why aren’t more people doing this?”

I think that is a perfect question.

Why aren’t more people doing this?

If you hate what your life has become, maybe it is time for a big change.

Countless others have gotten free from the system, and you can do it too.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

China and Russia are rushing to field new tanks while the US continues to operate M1 Abrams designed more than four decades ago. 

According to intelligence firm Janes Information Group, the latest installment that the US is falling behind the modernization curve is China’s new lightweight battle tank has formally entered service. 

On Jan. 30, China North Industries Group Corporation announced on state-owned television that Type 15 (also known as ZTQ-15) lightweight battle tank entered service with the Xinjiang Military Command of the People’s Liberation Army Ground Force (PLAGF).

China Central Television (CCTV) said an undisclosed number of Type 15s were delivered to a PLAGF regiment in Xinjiang. CCTV broadcaster said it was “the first lightweight tank to join the military command.”

The broadcaster said the Type 15s are outfitted with special oxygen equipment to allow the tanks to operate at high altitudes. 

Janes said no confirmation on how many Type 15s were deployed, but it appears these new tanks will significantly increase PLAGF’s combat capabilities in the region. 

“The Type 15 tank is easy and flexible to operate and has high mobility, as it is equipped with a new engine designed for plateau missions and an oxygen producer. It also uses new armor materials and stealth technologies, so it has reduced weight but better protection and stealth functions,” Zhang Hongjun, a master sergeant class one at the regiment, told CCTV.

The new tanks are much lighter than the People’s Liberation Army’s Type 96 and Type 99 tanks, allowing it to become a rapid response ground-based weapon, with a maximum top speed of 43 mph.

“It also has advanced fire control and weapons systems, and extra battlefield situational awareness capabilities, particularly the ability to identify friends or foes, providing significant convenience to the troops,” Hongjun said.

The new tanks appear to be safeguarding China’s western borders. More specifically, Beijing has a significant “core interest” in the northwest Xinjiang province where it houses massive re-education camps of Uighur Muslims. 

Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,

The GameStop saga shows some “equity” movements are more equal than others…

Stakeholder theory, the corporate version of social justice, attempts to install this hopelessly amorphous concept of “equity” in the business world. Equity, unlike equality, demands different treatment of individuals and different distribution of resources based on need, identity, and historical injustices. But now equity has evolved beyond a political buzzword, and finds growing support in calls for stakeholder capitalism. The animating impulse in big corporate boardrooms today requires cultivating an image of social responsibility. Under this theory business firms should entertain all kinds of noneconomic goals and outcomes. No longer may owners simply concern themselves with profit or loss, but instead must consider the broader societal implications of everything their business does. Whether corporate leaders concern themselves with social justice out of genuine desire or merely to avoid backlash is an open question, but the events of 2020 clearly changed the conversations in boardrooms.

Under the old conception, businesses have four primary elements, namely owners, managers, employees (or vendors), and customers.

All four have skin in the game, which is to say their own money or income is involved.

The notion of stakeholders inverts this paradigm and grants a degree of power over ostensibly private businesses to those who take no risks and provide no benefit. By undermining the suddenly old-fashioned idea of profit and loss as the guiding principle for business, stakeholder theory calls into question the very existence of millions of businesses big and small—in fact their grubby and narrow focus is simply to make money.

To suggest that the general public or society at large ought to be a de facto partner in any business, based on the interconnected nature of any economy, is to suggest an unlimited and wholesale attack on the concept of private ownership. It is patently antiproperty and implies collectivism by its very conceptual foundation. It insists everyone in society ought to have an interest in and some say over what ostensibly private firms do—and not only with respect to their profits, but even their business practices and mission. Stakeholder theory even creates a starring role for the earth itself, as the ultimate nonrenewable resource which is dubiously always in peril from business.

Societal ownership of business firms traditionally takes three prominent forms, specifically socialism, communism, and fascism. But in 2021 these terms fail to shock or alarm us as they once did. The constant use of attenuated language makes us almost immune to powerful words that ought to be used judiciously. Socialism is increasingly popular, while fascism is the pejorative increasingly aimed at market capitalism. The newspeak of equity and stakeholders is yet another “third way” bridge blurring the distinction between private and state, between the economic means and the political means. And to be fair, equity and stakeholder movements per se do not represent outright socialism (or fascism) in either the Misesian or Rothbardian sense. We still have stock markets, we still have private owners, and we still have profits and losses. The equity revolution takes place within the form, as an evolution rather than a deviation.

Enter GameStop and its Reddit WallStreetBets bros, determined to prop up the fading retailer’s stock price in the face of intense short-selling pressure by powerful and rich hedge funds. This uprising, whether motivated by greed, gamer culture, or sheer spite against perceived Wall Street fat cats, is as much imbued with notions of fairness and societal benefit as any protest movement.

Yet suddenly the champions of stakeholder theory, like the predictably despicable Washington Post, find themselves singing a new tune about vulture capitalists, deciding that hedge fund short sellers are the good guys in the story.

After all, stakeholder theory means investment funds and major corporations have the right—or even the duty—to make uneconomic decisions. Broader societal interests, not just bottom-line profits and shareholder value, must be considered. So funds and companies frequently invest in supposedly green but inevitably less efficient technology, make donations to left-wing social causes like Black Lives Matter, and give money to a variety of charities. These actions may in fact provide long-term economic benefits from a positive public image, but they do not directly increase share prices or dividends.

Redditors have the same right. Correctly or not, they see social benefit in causing financial losses for hedge funds with short positions looking to profit off GameStop’s stock decline and anticipated eventual bankruptcy (due to downloadable games obviating any need for retail outlets). If Koch Industries can be characterized as a nasty fossil fuels polluter whose profits fund captured antidemocratic right-wing think tanks, why can’t Redditors similarly portray hedge funds as evil tools for the 1 percent to get even richer on the back of a struggling retail chain? The notion of rich Wall Street investment bankers using their inordinate financial power to rip the marrow out of a dying industry’s carcass used to excite the Left. Now that same narrative somehow becomes an alt-right populist slander, one used by Reddit bros in their evil plot to manipulate the GameStop price.

In truth there are no victims in this tale. Perversely, the celebrated former Fed chair and current Treasury secretary Janet Yellen was paid more than $800,000 by Citadel LLC—another player in the GameStop story. Should her “equity” be redistributed? Just yesterday GameStop stock dropped nearly 60 percent and has lost $400 per share from its recent all-time high. And while it all seems like a manipulated and even immoral series of events, we should remember that nobody put a gun to anyone’s head. The WallStreetBets group collectively chose to put their own money at play, knowing they were pumping the share price and could not all get out at once or even at a profit. Melvin Capital and other hedge funds heavily invested in shorting GameStop chose to take a significant risk, and their due diligence certainly could have included understanding and monitoring Reddit investment boards. As economist Peter Earle recently said, if you get in the ring, you might get punched.

The purpose of capital markets is price discovery. They help investors and businesses allocate capital to its best and highest uses, however imperfectly and haphazardly. Short traders, long traders, so-called insider traders, futures traders, derivative contracts, speculators, gamblers, colluders, and even naked short sellers all serve this imperfect process. All of these individuals and mechanisms constantly recalibrate and react to changing conditions, bringing a public company’s performance (and share price) into greater clarity. And any firm not wishing to subject itself to the vagaries of fickle equity markets or public campaigns can simply remain private and fund itself through operations or private placements.

The process is imperfect because humans are imperfect. It can manifest in fits and starts, and demonstrate deep irrationality or even mania. But the alternative is nothing less than creeping socialism by another name, whether stakeholder capitalism or otherwise. When your atavistic and deficient theory backfires on you, look for a mirror rather than a congressional bailout. Everything is not everyone’s.

Drones will significantly revolutionize last-mile logistical networks over the coming years. Companies from Amazon to UPS to Walmart and others are quickly working to pilot test drones for last-mile deliveries, with the hope that one day these autonomous aerial vehicles will be embedded in their supply chains to create higher efficiencies. 

The topic gains further significance in Israel, where Pizza Hut will pilot test drone deliveries in June. The company partnered with Dragontail Systems where the tests will be conducted at a single store in Bnei Dror. 

According to WSJ, Pizza Hut Israel won’t be flying pizzas directly to customers’ homes but instead will drop them off at government-approved hubs, such as ones that could be designated in parking lots. Delivery drivers will be able to retrieve the pies from the drone and complete the delivery’s final stretch. 

“Drone delivery is a sexy thing to talk about, but it’s not realistic to think we’re going to see drones flying all over the sky dropping pizzas into everyone’s backyards anytime soon,” Ido Levanon, CEO and director for Dragontail Systems, which will be handling the drone trial, told WSJ.

During the test, the country’s Ministry of Transportation has allowed an “air bubble” measuring 50 square miles north of the country, where the Pizza Hut drones can safely operate. 

WSJ noted that Pizza Hut’s Bnei Dror store will be armed with a fleet of drones that could serve up to 7,000 additional households. 

Ahead of the big test, Dragontail will be operating its cargo drones six times a day to perfect commercial operations. Pizza Hut and Dragontail hope the flights this summer will be enough data for the government to analyze to approve a more widespread drone delivery service at other stores. 

There’s one problem, the transportation agency has restricted the drones to a cargo payload of only 5.5 pounds. There is a plan to increase the cargo payload to 22 pounds, which would allow it to carry multiple pizzas and bottles of soda. 

With more people shopping from home in the virus pandemic, the need for faster delivery times has become a priority and concern for many consumers. The proliferation of drones integrated into last-mile deliveries will become a reality not just in Israel but in many other countries in the coming years.