Over weeks of reporting, I’d learn that Rensko had scratched the surface of a larger scheme involving a Silicon Valley investor named Brennan Mulligan to sell what Texas health officials later flagged as “fraudulent” masks to the agency directing protective equipment to hospitals. Mulligan had enlisted Rivera, who was desperate for money after the pandemic had sapped his primary source of income, building furniture and manual labor via TaskRabbit. As countless others have, the two had a chance to make money off of the country’s public health nightmare.
When I caught up with Mulligan, he emphasized that he didn’t break any U.S. laws in his mask business. Rivera would acknowledge it was a gray area that had caught the attention of federal investigators. Both would defend their actions as simply cutting through onerous red tape put up by the Chinese and U.S. governments to get masks to those desperate for them.
Now, we can perform an Augmented Dickey-Fuller test to determine whether the spread is indeed stationary. It turns out that although there is not enough statistical evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the spread is non-stationary, the price and NAV are significantly cointegrated (this intuitively means that some linear combination of the price and NAV is stationary).
The Secret Economics of a VIP Party
Customers called Dre when they wanted to have a good time – in practical terms, a guaranteed table at the coolest club, surrounded by the best-looking women – and he wanted them to think of him as a friend. He was always on the hunt for wealthy men to add to his phone contacts, or, better still, a “whale”. Whales, men willing to drop a house deposit’s worth of cash in one night, were the most sought after prize of the vip nightclub economy. During my time on the scene, Jho Low, a Malaysian financier, was the biggest fish of all (Interpol later issued a red notice for his alleged role in a multibillion-dollar fraud.) “He spends $1m wherever he goes,” one promoter told me.
Whilst you dithered, you should have done the following:
Set a location for peaceful protest and forbid all protests that didn’t happen in that designated location — exactly what the City of Charlottesville did in their hour of trial;
Set a curfew, an hour before dusk. Enforce it. Really bad things happen during the anonymity of darkness.
Designate downtown as “off limits” to everybody after the curfew hour.
Call the Governor and ask him to preemptively send the National Guard to cordon off and protect private property.
Make it clear that violence, arson, looting would be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law.
Verbally condemn not peaceful protest, but importing Antifa and similar organizations, violence, arson, looting, and lawlessness of all types.
You have made Minneapolis a laughing stock of the country, empowered domestic terror, put kindling in the streets and let the terrorists light it up, destroyed the reputation of your police department, and empowered the terrorists like Antifa.
Mayor Jacob Frey, you have failed as the Mayor of Minneapolis. It is time for you to resign.
| element | word % | word rank | earth % | earth rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| lead | 15.50 | 1 | 0.001 | 36 |
| gold | 11.64 | 2 | 0.000 | 75 |
| iron | 11.14 | 3 | 5.612 | 4 |
| silver | 7.38 | 4 | 0.000 | 68 |
| carbon | 5.15 | 5 | 0.012 | 17 |
| oxygen | 5.13 | 6 | 45.956 | 1 |
| copper | 4.61 | 7 | 0.006 | 26 |
| hydrogen | 3.51 | 8 | 0.139 | 10 |
| sodium | 3.38 | 9 | 2.352 | 6 |
| calcium | 2.84 | 10 | 4.137 | 5 |