Irreverently Relevant

2021 is barely 3 months in and already there has been an attempted armed insurrection in the US capitol, a polar vortex that crippled Texas, and a US covid death rate of 519K. For the state of Texas, this has happened before, most recently in 1989 and, in 2011 when natural gas plants reported failures that resulted in rolling blackouts. The state of Texas has a GDP of $1.9 trillion with a capital "T," and still could ill-afford to deal with Winter. According to IMF info, Texas has a larger economy than Brazil (which comes in at 10th at $1.84 trillion), South Korea, and Canada.  While Gross Domestic Product is not an accurate measure of development (unlike HDI, GINI, and per capita income), Texas has always been a state on the move, with some of the world's largest corporations setting up shop in the state, most notably Oracle and Hewlett Packard. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, also set up in Austin TX.  This is the state with the second largest GDP (after California) in the ...

Vietnam: 35 covid19 casualties throughout the duration of the pandemic.¹ Other countries such as New Zealand, Samoa, and Tonga, are doing, well, pretty fine. The latter two are presumably covid free having reported no cases of the virus.  Looking at those countries, one would likely assume that total isolation and draconian restrictions on movement are the best way to contain the contagion. Maybe, and no. Argentina, once one of the wealthiest nations on earth, and with a per capita GDP higher than that of a Japanese empire in the process of implementing the Meiji restoration, now has poverty rate of close to 47%.² Now Argentina is a country which seems as addicted to the pain of crises like it's some sort of sexual fetish. This time though, the country has been subject to what may now be termed as the "world's longest quarantine."  This has devastated an economy that's already devastated. Axalta Coating Systems, BASF, and French auto parts maker Saint-Gobain Sekur...