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Quarantine Diaries: Day 168

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@preparedwombat
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A lot of jobs just aren’t coming back. An anecdotal bit of evidence: my stepdaughter had a part-time job; it no longer exists. Not just the job, the business. Her entertainment/hospitality employer shut down temporarily, as did thousands of others, during the governor’s stay-at-home order. Not remotely an “essential business” but like most other such businesses, they survived the shutdown. And then re-opened with extra cleaning, selling only pre-packaged food, water fountains disabled, et cetera. But open for business.

Yet customers did nor pour back in. The first day, only three people walked through the doors. A few days later on a Saturday, usually their busiest day, not one customer showed up. The business attempted to keep going. For about a month, salaried managers worked full shifts, hourly staff were only given one or two shifts a week, and often sent home after two or three hours because of how empty the place was. In part, many customers chose not to come because of fear of contracting COVID-19, others because their jobs were either gone or threatened.

And then the business shut down:

Those jobs are gone. Another commercial space soon to be empty. And this is being repeated all over the country (and the world for that matter). Nothing that the super geniuses in Washington DC can do will bring back those jobs. Mish has a strong argument that it’s professionals vs everyone else in the K-shaped recovery.

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Doubling down on failed policies with central bank digital currencies

Many central banks are researching retail digital currencies, which if implemented, would allow them to issue a new currency directly to the public, managed on a centralised ledger bypassing commercial banks. While there is an element of feeling the need to address new private sector currency developments which threaten central bank monopolies, specific objectives are beginning to emerge. This article does not consider technology issues, confining its comments to the policy objectives identified in an IMF survey of central banks. It points out the dangers to individual freedom and why the application of a monetary policy extended to include central bank digital currencies are bound to fail.

A judge asked Trump's lawyers to prove his claims about mail-in voting "fraud" — it did not go well

The Platform the GOP Is Too Scared to Publish

Republicans have decided not to publish a party platform for 2020. This omission has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult. This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. I’m about to list 13 ideas that command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans.

Badge thanks to @arcange