Because the fossil fuel economy is so big, its decline could pose a significant threat to global financial stability. Fossil fuel companies have a combined market capitalisation of $18 trillion, 25% of the total value of global equity markets, and they account for $8 trillion of corporate bonds, more than 50% of the non-financial corporate bond market. Unlisted debt may be 4x greater.
Tag: covid
Biosensor scaling
The tests are performing well, but are still being optimized. The biggest hold back at the moment is to scale from mass production (10s of 1000s of chips per month) to extreme mass production (10s of millions and, with time, 100s of millions of chips per month).
2021-10-07: This seems to have happened:
Covid-10 has driven a change in diagnostics technology. Many companies debuted new technologies for at-home test kits under the FDA emergency use authorization last year. “It’s going to go beyond Covid-19 testing. Everything from cancer detection to STD testing and anything that would go through the historical lab chain. We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries for rapid test kits from various companies about new applications. It’s going to be a revolution for the diagnostics market. To go from a test that would take 24-48 hours and cost $150 to get processed, to something you can do in 15 minutes for $20 or $30.”
COVID-19 will disrupt Universities
the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves.
Stop Superspreaders
In our study, just 20% of cases, all of them involving social gatherings, accounted for an astonishing 80% of transmissions. Another 10% of cases accounted for the remaining 20% of transmissions — with each of these infected people on average spreading the virus to only 1 other person, maybe 2 people. This mostly occurred within households. No less astonishing was this corollary finding: 70% of the people infected did not pass on the virus to anyone.
Subscriticality
There will be explosive economic, biological, and technological moves, much more explosive than in the recent past, in part because the ground has been cleared for them, but also because our new, over-excited society has collective scar tissue making it predisposed to jump sooner, further, and faster. This will lead to more rapid technology adoption, faster cycles, and great gains for investors willing to embrace the emergence of subcritical society.
WaPo hypocrisy
WaPo complains about too much privacy
Basically all of this is wrong or bullshit, and a good reporter would have either (a) immediately pointed out that this is bullshit or (b) not published the bullshit.
Africa & COVID-19
African governments, unlike their Western counterparts, aren’t relying on common sense. Judging from the numbers, and interpreting them with the scientific information that’s understood so far, Africa has made the better bet.
Cannonball Run
All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with America’s most illegal record having been beaten 7 times in just 5 weeks.
Inflamed children
the new inflammatory syndrome appears to be a delayed reaction driven by a child’s immune system response to the infection, in contrast to the primary way that the virus affects patients by attacking the cells in their lungs.
Obvious disaster
COVID-19 is anything but a black swan. It is perhaps the most foreseen (and foreseeable) disaster of its kind in history. Which makes the people who “saw it coming” more like the ideological equivalent of self-important Yelp commenters, rather than Hari-Seldon-grade psychohistorical geniuses.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 