Saturday Night Links

• For one thing, you have to have a lot of low-carbon funds to meaningfully increase the cost of capital of high-emissions businesses; it’s not like any one fund manager — even at BlackRock — can point to coal companies that he put out of business just by refusing to buy their stock. For another thing, “raising the cost of capital of high-carbon emitters” means increasing the returns on their stocks, which implicitly means ”our ESG fund will get a lower return than a non-ESG fund, because we hope to raise the returns of non-ESG stocks.” This answers the client’s question — ”how does this fund reduce emissions?” — but not necessarily in the way that the client wants to hear: “We reduce emissions by giving you a lower return on your investments.” [Matt Levine] 
• My girl and I get married at the end of this month. As we looked at a normal $30,000 American wedding approach, we found out halls and vendors couldn’t handle us until 2022. Why wait? Did the reception venue matter, and who would it matter to? This was about starting a life together, not a fancy party. As we decided on a small ceremony in a park, the only pushback we received was from outsiders expecting a big show. We show no stress compared to other couples planning big weddings. Covid meant no big shows, sports events or concerts. It clamped down on weddings. The masses will be reprogrammed to go out again in big settings, but this window of time offers us a chance to destroy one of the worst pieces of modernity. [The American Sun]
• Well, that’s because, contrary to the accepted narrative, the SolarCity merger was more of a bailout than an acquisition. It was a last-ditch attempt by Musk himself to save his companies from total bankruptcy. By creating a  phoney solar shingle and presenting it to Tesla shareholders on the day before the proposed merger was set to go through, he persuaded them to approve it. [link]
• With Chinese companies this sort of thing is generally called a “variable interest entity.” You set up a company in the Cayman Islands that can be owned by anyone. The Caymans company enters into a series of contracts with the local Chinese company, giving it, not ownership, but certain carefully curated economic interests and control rights over the Chinese company. Then you list the Caymans company in the U.S., and people buy its stock, and they sort of pretend that they’re buying stock in the Chinese company — they sort of pretend that the Chinese company is a subsidiary of the Caymans holding company — even though really they’re only buying an empty shell that has certain contractual relationships with the Chinese company. [Matt Levine]
• "If physicians tend to be upper middle class, dentists are gloomly aware they are middle, and are said to experience frightful status anxiety when introduced socially to physicians - as dentists like to call them. (Physicians call themselves doctors, and enjoy doing this in front of dentists, college professors, chiropractors and divines." [Class] 
• I remember driving up that first time to New York. You know that moment in The Wire where Bodie is going to mule drugs from Philly and the radio station changes? I took that word for word from DeAndre. We were driving up 95 and we lost 92 Q. We lost the hip-hop station and we started to acquire some end of the dial station. And all of a sudden, he’s listening to Garrison Keillor and Garrison Keillor’s doing his little Lake Wobegon voice and Deandre is like, “What The fuck?” [David Simon]
• Bush II was actually the disastrous presidency that current liberals claim that Trump is. The enormity of the Iraq War fiasco alone boggles the mind. The trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and the social trust that was wasted and stolen by that lie. Trillions and trillions of dollars were pissed away; they could have paved the streets in gold here with all that; free college or free meds for every fat Boomer smoking cigs in an Indian casino, border wall too, I don’t know, but we could have done something with those trillions and they were just pissed away, they just went up in smoke. Where did that money even come from? Whenever anyone wants to do something of substance and value money is impossible to come by. Just that stuff alone probably makes Bush II the worst president in American history. The cynical use of the most blatant propaganda, lying, bullying and mental gaming techniques to produce that 2003 moment of popular enthusiasm for war, in the aftermath of 9/11 no less (cynically leveraging that trauma!) had a permanent affect on American society. [link]
• Having just emerged from the fiasco of last year's coin shortage (which I wrote about here and here), the U.S. Mint has a new problem on its hands. The melt value of the nickel, or five cent coin, has suddenly moved higher than the coin's face value. The melt value of a nickel refers to the market value of the 3.25 grams of copper and 1.75 grams of nickel inherent in each five cent coin. In the chart below I've mapped out the melt value of a U.S. nickel going back to 2000, decomposed into its copper and nickel components. As you can see, the last time that the intrinsic value of a coin exceeded its face value was ten years ago, back in 2011. Thanks to the huge rally in copper prices over the last twelve months, the metallic content of a nickel is currently worth 5.9 cents. [jpkoning]
• Byrne's and mine are essentially the same idea, that bitcoin is a ponzi. Except not quite. Bitcoin is a decentralized ponzi scheme, one without a schemer. I describe it as an honest chain letter. Byrne uses the word automated. After all these years, I still haven't seen a convincing explanation for why bitcoin is neither a Nakamoto scheme nor an honest chain letter. That is, I haven't seen a good positive/descriptive response to the positive/descriptive statement that bitcoin is a decentralized ponzi. One of the best alternative theories, bitcoin-is-money, broke down long ago in the face of empirical evidence. And the bitcoin-is-gold description isn't panning out too well. Bitcoiners haven't turned the perceived slight into a virtue. If someone is calling you names, then proudly adopt the slur. If the descriptive statement bitcoin is a ponzi is accurate and popular, then adopt it and make it your own. "Yep, of course bitcoin is a chain letter/Nakamoto scheme. And that's a good thing." [jpkoning]
• The Nakamoto Scheme is an automated hybrid of a Ponzi scheme and a pyramid scheme which has, from the perspective of operating a criminal enterprise, the strengths of both and (currently) the weaknesses of neither. The Nakamoto Scheme draws strength from the same things which make pyramids and Ponzis so compelling, in that it promises insane investment returns, can be accessed by the man on the street with almost no effort at all, and recruits individual participants as new, self-interested evangelists of the scheme. It has no current weakness in that the regulators, blinded by lobbying from the Valley, have seen these schemes as futuristic and cutting-edge rather than what they really are: victim factories, which in the next crash will produce hundreds of thousands of howling investors with little formal legal recourse due to four years of inaction on the regulators’ part. [preston byrne]
• The LifeView laboratory process uses DNA samples from both parents(saliva) and the embryo (standard few-cell biopsy) to obtain a 99+percent accurate genotype. This accuracy has been carefully validated and has been published in peer reviewed scientific journals, and exceeds the adult accuracy given by common tests like 23andme. Using this genotype, future disease risks are predicted for each embryo, using methods validated to predict disease state in the adult. This new technology, called polygenic risk prediction, uses AI applied to very large genomic datasets: genomes of up to a million individuals, together with their medical histories. There sulting polygenic risk scores (PRS) are tested in separate validation populations (i.e., people not used in the AI training) to ensure accuracy. This area of research is advancing rapidly, with hundreds of scientific papers published each year on polygenic risk prediction. Widely validated risk predictors now exist for important conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, cancers, schizophrenia, and many more. The LifeView team are world leaders in this field. In particular, they were the first to publish validation studies which showed that PRS could identify which sibling in a family was most likely to develop a specific disease condition later in life. Embryos are ranked in order of proposed transfer. Sibling selection using our ranking has been validated to reduce disease incidence. Each disease incidence reduction is particular to that disease, to the ethnicity of the cohort, and the number of embryos. The disease risk reduction is concurrent - which is to say that ranking the embryos based on a single, aggregate number (the Embryo Health Score) has been shown to reduce the diseases at the same time, in parallel. [lifeview]
• You'll notice that all the traits being measured here are pretty serious medical conditions. In theory, you're not supposed to use polygenic screening to produce designer babies. What about in practice? Screening companies will give you the raw data if you ask for it, so if you want to screen for an embryo with green eyes, all you need to do is find some third party algorithm that can screen genomes to figure out the baby's eye color and plug in your data. [astralcodexten]
• It doesn’t matter how much evidence of election fraud there is in Arizona or any other state. Nothing will change the official narrative that the election was honest and Biden won. Just like all of the evidence that 9/11 was a false flag attack hasn’t changed the official narrative of 9/11, and all of the evidence that COVID-19 is a hoax and the vaccines are deadly hasn’t changed the official narrative of the “pandemic”. The official narrative of any event is whatever the NWO wants it to be. A combination of numerous useful idiots in the public who believe that anything that deviates from the official narrative is “conspiracy theory”, politicians who are controlled or stupid, a compliant MSM, and other factors ensures that the official narrative will always roll on. At most, there will be an admission that there was a tiny amount of fraud that wasn’t significant enough to change the results of the election, and possibly a few election officials will be reprimanded or fined. Another consideration is that Trump knew, or certainly should have known, before the election that there was going to be fraud. But instead of taking any steps to prevent that fraud, he waited until after the election and then mostly just whined and complained on Twitter. That means that he is either totally incompetent or, more likely, had already been told that the fix was in and he was going to lose the election. Of course it wouldn’t significantly change anything even if somehow the election was declared fraudulent and Trump was reinstated as president. Despite the beliefs of the Trumptards, Trump was as bad as or possibly worse than Biden. Trump, with his declaration of emergency, Operation Warp Speed, and support of Dr Fauci, is largely responsible for the overwhelming success of the scamdemic tyranny that we are now experiencing. In fact that is why the NWO selected him to win in 2016. (And there was likely election fraud in 2016 to ensure Trump won.) If Hillary had been president in March 2020 when the scamdemic tyranny started, the (armed) Right likely would have resisted vigorously enough to stop it in its tracks before it could become ubiquitous. But now the Right is accustomed to the tyranny, and that tyranny is just going to keep getting worse. [link]