I was at the grocery store recently when the woman behind me in line tried to return a pair of hubcaps.
There’s nothing wrong with them. I just need groceries more than I need hubcaps.
That’s what she said. The hubcaps cost $14. Fourteen dollars was the difference between her eating or not eating.
You may be picturing her in your mind. I’d wager your picture is wrong. She was a nicely dressed woman in her 50’s who would have fit right in at a corporate office. Perhaps she used to work in one.
“Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with them,” she repeated.
The store manager took pity on her and let her return the perfectly good hubcaps. In place of them, she slid a small pile of groceries down the conveyor belt.
It’s easy for us to make excuses. Isn’t this the government’s job? What about food stamps? But it’s easy for people to fall through the cracks of a system that’s largely indifferent to them. Paperwork gets lost, caseworkers don’t show up, appointments are all booked until three weeks from Tuesday, etc.
The economic devastation of this pandemic is very real. And it may be a lot closer than we think. I certainly didn’t expect it right behind me in line at the grocery in my well-off town.
How can we help? A favorite charity of mine is the Salvation Army. It provides food to people who have nowhere else to turn. You can donate here.
Have a great weekend and a happy Valentine’s day, everyone!
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How? Part of the story is something called “inventory obsolence.” Sundial lost $38 million because of it in the first three quarters of 2020. Sounds like their weed isn’t selling and winds up sitting in warehouses until it’s no longer any good.
Revenue growth is minimal. Gross revenue only went from $51 million to $56 million, if you compare Jan-Sept of 2019 to 2020. Growth is poor enough that Sundial is actually shutting down parts of their grow operation. From their financial report:
Due to decreasing estimates for the size of the potential Canadian cannabis market, the Company has curtailed the number of flowering rooms being used for cultivation at its Olds facility.
The situation is so bad that the company may soon run out of money. Sundial had $21 million in cash left as of 9/30/20. They burnt $25 million in the first 9 months of the year. Are they gone 9 months after that (mid-2021)?
The one thing keeping them afloat is reprieves from lenders and selling more shares. They’ve done new share sales on a grand scale, which means you own less of the company:
Any delay or failure to complete any additional financing would have a significant negative impact on the Company’s business, results of operations and financial condition, and the Company may be forced to curtail or cease operations or seek relief under the applicable bankruptcy or insolvency laws.
And the patience of those lenders is already probably running out, since Sundial keeps violating its loan agreements with poor performance. Sundial is:
in non-compliance with its loan covenants (note 11a) as at December 31, 2019 and March 31, 2020.
Those lenders forced the sale, at a loss, of a major asset recently: the Bridge Farm, that was supposed to sell CBD to the UK market.
The overall picture is of a company selling off some operations, shutting down others, burning cash faster than they can get customers to burn their weed, and barely skirting bankruptcy.
My friends at Reddit might get lucky if they can pump up the price enough by getting other small traders to buy in. But the risk here is off the charts. It’s a fundamentally terrible business and it would be hard to even engineer a short squeeze like they did on GameStop. (If you’re not familiar with short squeezes, read this.)
Bottom line: the fundamentals are terrible and the technical factors aren’t much better. Pass on this one and live to fight another day.
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Cats kill billions of animals yearly, but feeding them a meaty diet and providing lots of playtime can redirect them to less violent pursuits, a new study finds.
The mother of one cat in the study had seen her furry friend wreak havoc:
“We’ve had birds in the bedroom, rats in the paper bin, rabbits in the utility room, and several vermin that have died of fright,” says her owner, Lisa George from Cornwall, U.K.
But redirecting their prey drive to play, plus keeping them sated with meat, greatly reduced the body count:
the high-meat diet and playtime approaches had the most sweeping impacts, slashing all types of animals on the doorstep by 36% and 25%, respectively.
See the full study out today in Current Biology here.
A surprisingly large number of species have a prey drive. Our gerbil stalked, attacked and ate caterpillars, leaving only the legs. He also ripped the head off a cockroach and wisely left the remains for my wife to clean up rather than eating them.
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Vice President Kamala Harris introduced a bill to decriminalize marijuana as a senator.
GameStop was the darling of the merry band of traders on Reddit’s Wallstreetbets. Then this happened:
Ouch. Now the community is looking for its next play. I nosed around the message board a little today to see what that might be.
Wallstreetbets users are increasingly enthusiastic about marijuana stocks, in particular two companies called Sundial Growers, Inc and Tilray, Inc. Though both took a hit today, they are up significantly in the last month as the online buzz builds.
Reddit seems to have two main theories on why these stocks will continue to rise: a short squeeze and/or decriminalization of marijuana at the federal level in the United States. (If you’re not familiar with short squeezes, check out this post for a quick explanation.)
But their position here looks much weaker than with their last love, GameStop.
GameStop was much riper for a short squeeze than Sundial or Tilray. As of Dec 31, 2020, 71 million GameStop shares had been sold short. This is more than all the shares in GameStop that exist (70 million)! This can happen because the same share can be borrowed and sold short many times.
Meanwhile, Sundial and Tilray are nowhere near as heavily shorted. Sundial has 5% of shares sold short, and Tilray is at 19%. Compared to over 100% for GameStop, the likelihood of a short squeeze looks much, much lower.
Maybe marijuana gets decriminalized in the US. But maybe not. In any case, the Reddit traders aren’t likely to have any special information on that (nor do I). Everyone buying and selling Tilray and Sundial know about that possibility already. So it’s hard for the Reddit traders to get an edge.
Even if marijuana is legalized in the US tomorrow, Tilray and Sundial may not make a dime on it. Why? Both companies are based in Canada! To say that marijuana may be legal in America is one thing…to say we’re going to let it come across the border rather than favor our own domestic producers is quite another. Remember that we’re in a jobs crisis, so the good move for politicians is to (at least appear) to support jobs in the US.
So these are two possible rational cases to buy into these money losing companies. But what I notice over and over on Wallstreetbets is the lack of any justification at all, with people simply repeating the names of stocks over and over. Maybe Wallstreetbets doesn’t need much of a theory…they just need to get their fellow traders involved. (Or maybe it’s increasingly populated by bots.)
Thing is though, without any real rational basis for holding the stock, that same group of traders will have to get out eventually. What’s supporting the stock then?
Wallstreetbets would be better served buying broad index funds and waiting for corporate America’s money machine to work its predictable magic. But that’s just not as fun, is it?
I find this roving band of Reddit traders a very interesting phenomenon in markets. But I won’t be joining them any time soon.
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I came across this interesting new study today showing dragonflies can do backflips, even unconscious!
They found that conscious dragonflies, when dropped from the upside-down position, somersaulted backwards to regain the rightside-up position. Dragonflies that were unconscious also completed the somersault, but more slowly.
Check out the video below!
I happened to be watching a wonderful David Attenborough documentary on insects, including dragonflies, last night with my wife, so this interesting tidbit caught my eye! Nature continues to amaze me, day after day.
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This all started when I had to renew my library card.
I got an e-mail requesting a picture of a photo ID with my current address on it. I got my driver’s license and passport before I moved here two years ago, so I asked how else I could renew my card and continue to experience the joys of reading. The friendly folks at the library demanded a photo ID and two (!) proofs of residence.
This got me thinking about how a lot of things in this country are working. In short: not well.
We are carefully following rules and accomplishing nothing. We put in place an arcane system of regulations and lose sight of our overall goal. And it goes way beyond your little local library.
The Problem is Everywhere
Early in the pandemic, getting a COVID test was next to impossible. I volunteered to schedule them at a nearby hospital in March, and the desperation in the voices of the callers struck me.
Why was it so hard to get a test? The CDC first required all labs to use their test, which did not work, rather than letting labs develop their own.
The University of Washington sought to make a COVID test on its own in February. Widespread testing at that time might have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. They made a test, filled out the mountain of documents the government required, and sent them off.
One problem: regulations required they also mail a USB drive or CD-ROM containing the documents. Here’s the lab’s director, Keith Jerome:
We’ve got a lot of scientists and doctors and laboratory personnel who are incredibly good at making assays. What we’re not so good at is figuring out all the forms and working with the bureaucracy of the federal government.” Jerome said that Greninger had to call and e-mail the F.D.A. multiple times to figure out what they needed to secure an E.U.A. “At one point, he was very frustrated because he’d e-mailed them what we were doing so they could review it,” Jerome said. “But legally you also had to mail a physical copy. Here we are in this SARS-CoV-2 crisis, and you have to send them something through the United States Postal Service. It’s just shocking.” (The F.D.A. has since dropped the requirement to send a CD-ROM or USB drive with a copy of the application.)
Frankly, as much as I try to stay calm, reading this sort of thing makes my blood boil. Still not convinced? Well, let’s mosey over from the CDC to the Pentagon.
The Department of Defense took a year to get cloth masks for our soldiers. A year! But at least they got a great deal. Each one comes at the bargain price of $45:
It took a full year for the service to design, approve and distribute a face mask — called a Combat Cloth Face Covering, or CCFC — for its soldiers, an effort that required an additional $43.5 million in contracts to provide temporary solutions. That comes out to about $45 per mask, if you assume every active-duty, National Guard and Reserve soldier received one. A pack of 20 N95 masks at Home Depot costs about $20.
And yet, the Army congratulated itself on the “expedited” timeline, compared to the 18- to 24-month procurement cycle such an effort would normally take.
“The system worked as designed,” tweeted a former Marine.
If you’re still unconvinced we have a problem here, I’ll give you one last example. Here are some of the ways you can get a COVID vaccine in Hudson County, NJ where I live. Each one has a separate website, and some have no website at all! I haven’t been able to find an appointment on any of them yet:
An AirBnB engineer in New York, Huge Ma, made his own website for $50 that aggregates the similar patchwork of vaccination sites in New York into one slick system. Government had most of 2020 and millions of dollars to do something similar, but never saw fit to do it.
How We Can Fix It
Huge Ma shows us what one capable person can do, freed of constraints. What government needs to do is to get some capable people together, give them an overall goal, and let them do the work.
What might that look like? Get together a few of the best IT people in the New Jersey state government, call in a couple outside experts (perhaps Mr. Ma!), and tell them “We need to get people vaccines. Make it happen.”
Getting together a group of capable people, giving them an endpoint, and letting them figure out how to get there is how the best organizations work. The superb book Good to Great details how that process has succeeded at one organization after another.
In addition, we need all the Huge Ma’s we can get. Let’s have private citizens make things without permission, and also agitate to get government to work better.
With that in mind, I will now politely submit all the required documents for my new library card, but also enquire how we might make this process easier for others in the future. 🙂
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Kevin Davies literally wrote the book on CRISPR, the revolutionary new gene editing technology that earned Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier a Nobel Prize a few months ago. Today, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a talk he gave on that superb book, Editing Humanity.
If you’re not familiar, CRISPR is a technology based on the immune systems of bacteria. Bacteria find a particular genetic sequence they recognize from past infections and cut the genes in order to protect themselves. Scientists have harnessed this primordial system to cut and splice genes.
In today’s talk, Davies highlighted how accessible this revolutionary new technology really is. The equipment is not expensive and many labs could potentially use it. This presents great opportunities but also very real risks of misapplication.
CRISPR has been used successfully to treat sickle cell anemia in early trials. Davies noted that it has also been used to treat progeria in mice, which might some day bring an end to this deadly disease that ages children before their time.
I even got the opportunity to ask Davies a question, and inquired which other applications of CRISPR excite him most. He mentioned possible applications for cystic fibrosis and cancer therapy. He also said that as a graduate student in genetics, the idea of precisely editing genes seemed like science fiction, but today is a reality. It amazed me to think of how much the field has evolved.
Another interesting tidbit from the talk: due to COVID, Doudna accepted her Nobel Prize in the backyard of her home in Berkeley! I found that image to be quite a beautiful one.
One great silver lining of COVID has been how much easier it’s become to attend talks like this! In the past, one might have had to be in Cambridge, MA to attend, but now it’s open to everyone. I hope we continue to offer a remote option for these discussions even once in person events are possible again.
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There is a huge increase in homelessness in Brazil, per Der Spiegel. Many have lost jobs due to the COVID pandemic, leading to a second humanitarian crisis, this one economic. I found this quote from a factory worker who recently lost his job particularly striking:
“I never thought I would end up in this situation,” he says, “and suddenly …” He snaps his fingers and his eyes fill with tears. The worst, he says, is the hunger and the constant feeling of being dirty. “It is the most terrible experience I have ever had in my life, the biggest humiliation.”
This is a man who worked…he was not lazy. But unfortunately, he has still lost everything. Financial relief from the government, on which one third (!) of society depends, is expiring:
…the government in Brasília ceased paying out an emergency allowance for the poor struck by the crisis as of January. Fully 67 million Brazilians – almost a third of the population – had been relying on the 600 real (around 90 euros) each month. “It helped people in the favelas pay for rent or food,” says Kohara. And they have no savings, he adds. Their situations are now so tenuous that they could end up on the streets from one day to the next.
This drives home the importance of stimulus measures in the US. In addition, perhaps an international poverty relief effort is needed.
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.
So begins the famous Nature paper by James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Their discovery revolutionized biology and won them both the Nobel Prize.
I just finished reading Watson’s book The Double Helix, and as a layman I found the inside view of the process of scientific discovery intriguing. What struck me most was the importance of collaboration.
We are used to thinking of scientists as lone geniuses hunched over a lab bench until they exclaim “Eureka!” But Watson’s book makes clear how important the many scientists surrounding him at the University of Cambridge were to his discovery. He repeatedly checks his findings with others more experienced than he in a particular area, like structural chemistry. And without the long conversations with Crick, the discovery would never have happened in the first place.
Being in the right environment was so important to Watson that he left the University of Copenhagen, against the terms of his fellowship, when he realized he needed the expertise of the Cambridge circle to make a real breakthrough. He did what was necessary and asked for permission later. What would’ve happened had he sat around waiting for permission?
The casual sexism with which Watson treats Rosalind Franklin, the expert in X-ray photography that wound up playing a major part in the discovery of the double helix, was striking to me reading the book in 2021. Watson tends to characterize her opinions and insights as obstinancy or rudeness. He doesn’t view his male colleagues the same way.
If cooperation is so critical to science, I can’t help but wonder what Watson could’ve achieved with a more collaborative attitude toward Franklin. Would the breakthrough have come even sooner? Would they have been able to make even more discoveries together if Watson had been more open to her expertise?
I loved getting a view of what is in a scientist’s mind as they make a major breakthrough. Watson was by no means certain he was right at first, but he worked methodically to prove what he suspected. That even such a genius has doubt in his ideas can cheer the rest of us!
The great chemist Linus Pauling had suggested a different structure of DNA, which turned out to be incorrect. But when he saw the elegance of Watson and Crick’s double helix, he was in awe and thrilled, rather than upset at being proven wrong.
I find that attitude to be one of the great things about science. There is both collaboration and competition, but in the end, everyone is working toward one goal: understanding.
In all, I found Watson’s book interesting and instructive. Since it was written in 1968, I’m not sure how many people are still reading it, but it’s worth a look. Check it out!
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Of all the possible outcomes from COVID infection, clearly death is the one we want to prevent above all. We commonly see vaccine efficacy numbers from the 60’s to the 90’s, but that figure generally refers to how successful the vaccine is at preventing a COVID infection with any symptoms.
How effective are the vaccines at preventing you from dying of COVID? Turns out, regardless of whether you look at trial data from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax or the Russian Sputnix V vaccine, you don’t see a single COVID death.
I came across this information in fascinating Twitter thread today from the eminent Yale virologist Dr. Akiko Iwasaki:
How well do various vaccines reduce severe COVID disease & death? Awesome @YaleMed students, @dariusdariusdar, @ChaneyKalinich, @Larson_HaleighT & Caroline Valdez put together summary tables from vaccine trials. Remarkable ability of vaccines to ⬇️ severe/lethal COVID! 🧵(1/n)
Tremendous 