Charlie Daniels: Put Some Skin in the Game

I am going to do my level best to aim this column straight down the middle, glancing neither left nor right, in what the politicians in D.C. call a bipartisan fashion.

It is an attempt to circumvent personal political preferences, step around the hyperbolic, the rhetorical, and the prejudiced vendettas so firmly ingrained into our minds by media on the left and on the right.

I want to ask a question and I am not going to give my opinion, but leave it to everybody who reads this to answer, the only caveat being, that you be honest with yourself, using only your own thoughts, unclouded by the obviously tilted and verbose comments of those with a very dull axe to grind.

If you were President of the United States, how would you have handled the coronavirus pandemic?

Let’s say the country is buzzing along economically, with no major military conflicts, no immediate heavy-duty problems looming on the horizon, that international prestige and relationships were in good shape, unemployment was extremely low, domestic industrial startups were proceeding at a pace not seen in decades, the stock market continued to break records, and GDP was inching into rarefied territory.

And let’s say you had large and acquiescent majorities in both houses of Congress, freeing you to do basically anything you wanted.

And like a bolt from the blue along comes coronavirus and in a matter of days it becomes obvious that this disease is so contagious and so deadly that it has the capacity to kill millions of Americans in a matter of months.

It’s never been seen before, very little is known about it, if it is passed by person-to-person contact, by lasting for days on surfaces, by being airborne, or if it's capable of infecting the food chain or the water supply.

How fast is it capable of spreading and how many ways can it be passed, what is the incubation period, and what is the best way of slowing it down and isolating it?

And now on top of that, the disease starts popping up all over the world, worse in some places than others, totally catastrophic in some, and nobody in the medical or scientific communities has the answers.

Now remember, you have no barriers to speak of from the legislative branch, which leaves you free to do basically whatever you wish.

Now without the benefit of the hindsight we have today, take yourself back to the first days of this developing pandemic and answer honestly.

Would you close down the incoming flights from the country of origin and curtail the flow of foreigners from nations where the virus was known to be rapidly spreading?

Would you immediately start making arrangements to drastically increase the production of ventilators, personal protective gear, specially equipped hospital beds, even to the point of enacting a war powers act to actually force private industry into manufacturing the needed products if necessary?

Would you commission a group of the best and brightest to research, manage, and advise?

Would you basically shut down the economy of the nation, forcing citizens to quarantine themselves for a period of time, allowing only what is deemed as urgent and imperative business and services to operate?

Do you wait while 350,0000,000 people are tested to make sure the virus has been stamped out?

Speaking of Charlie,

We Calculated How Much Your Soul Is Actually Worth Walt Hickey Sep 30, 2013, 2:21 PM

Breaking Bad is over, and fans are left to haggle over whether Walter White indeed redeemed himself. In many ways, the former High School chemistry teacher sold his soul for a meth empire. Which brings us to an interesting question. How much is a soul actually worth?

Clearly, there isn't exactly a sticker price on something that may or may not exist. But we can still survey the market, given the popularity of Faustian Bargains in the corpus of Western literature.

Here's how the legendary transaction works. You've got a soul. The devil's got stuff you want. You make the switch, and then a couple years down the road you do your best to get out of the arrangement. Sometimes it flies, sometimes it doesn't.

So by analyzing some of these transactions we can get a sense of how much a human soul is worth.

Take, for instance, the song "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" by The Charlie Daniels Band.

Released in 1979, the Devil bets a fiddle of gold against Johnny's soul. Johnny accepts.

So how much is a fiddle of gold worth?

Futurama took this one on too. Futurama Wiki Well a violin weighs about 450 grams and is primarily made out of spruce and maple. The density of spruce is 0.43 g/cm3, and the density of maple is 0.6 g/cm3. As an estimation, we'll just average these and suppose that the average density of the material of a violin is 0.515g/cm3. If the violin weighs 450 g and has a density of 0.515 g/cm3, that means that the volume of the wood of the violin is 873.8 cm3. Our hypothetical golden prize had gold in lieu of wood. So 873.8 cm3 of gold weighs 16.9 kg — almost forty pounds! — or 543.3 troy ounces.

In 1979, gold was going for $307.50 per troy ounce. This means that Johnny bet his soul for roughly $167,000.

Factoring in inflation that's about $540,600 in 2013 dollars, and roughly 36 times as large as the median household income in Georgia in 1979. So that's some serious dough.

How about some other bargains?

In "The Devil and Daniel Webster" by Stephen Vincent Benet, a man Jabez Stone sells his soul to the devil for ten years of "prosperity."

Had that taken place today — say, someone spending 10 years in the 95th income percentile from 2003 to 2012 — would have made a total of $1,745,926, according to U.S. Census data.

There's also the story of blues man Robert Johnson, the musician who — according to the legend — sold his soul at the crossroads in exchange for guitar skills. His career lasted six years, from 1932 until his death in 1938. Given that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income of a working musician was $37,380 in 2003, increasing 3% annually, the net financial gain from this hypothetical transaction would be $241,789 for a career extending from 2003 to 2009.

In The Twilight Zone episode "Escape Clause," a man exchanges his soul for immortality. Sounds pretty cool since the debt would have no collection date. Needless to say, it being the Twilight Zone, things don't go as planned for our protagonist. Anyway, "immortality" is a little difficult to put a price tag on. The best we can is use the U.S. Government's creepiest published statistic, the VSL. Developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the VSL — or Value of a Statistical Life — is an estimate used by the government when conducting cost-benefit analyses of new policies that could save lives.

For our purposes — since selling one's soul is perhaps the most iconic cost-benefit analysis question in literature — we'll just use the full VSL.

The current VSL is $7.4 million in 2006 dollars, which is about $8.6 million in 2013 dollars.

So what we've found is that the market rate for a soul — in 2013 dollars — is anywhere from $540,000 to $8.6 million. It's almost as if the market participants aren't rational actors.

But still, it's also worth taking a look at some extreme examples.

On the low end, take one Homer Simpson, who sold his soul to Devil Flanders for a donut (MSRP ~$1.00 at Dunkin Donuts)

On the other hand, take Jesus Christ, who was allegedly offered "all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor." Now needless to say, poaching the soul of the guy who sources claim was the son of god would be a rather good get. The price evaluation of that today comes down to what is meant by kingdoms. If kingdoms are interpreted as governments, the world GDP is $71.7 trillion per year. If kingdoms are interpreted literally, as monarchies, that number decreases a bit to a wimpy $16.6 trillion.

If we learn anything from the finer points of contract negotiation with the devil, it's probably the latter.

So ignoring the extreme cases of $1.00 and $16.6 trillion, we have four examples where the soul was evaluated at $540,600, $1,745,926, $241,789 and $8,600,000 in 2013 dollars.

While the sample size is admittedly small — if only people kept better records when they sell their souls — the average here is $2.8 million for a soul.

So if you're offered a golden instrument in exchange for your immortal soul, let's hope you play at least the cello.

Https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/how-much-is-your-soul-worth-2013-9%3famp

‘Do you wait while 350,0000,000 people are tested to make sure the virus has been stamped out?’

You’ll be waiting until COVID-87 is a thing.

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Yesterday Trump said they already tested 3,000,000 people.

An extraordinary effort that we heard about at every press conference went on for weeks to make ventilators, etc.

And now we realize we don’t need them.

Why wasn’t the call put out to literally any company that had the potential to make testing machines to start making them weeks ago? You multiply Abbott labs by 1000 and you could stop this virus in it’s tracks. Instead going back to school, college, sporting events, malls, restaurants, etc. will all come with a giant question mark.

And if someone has heard what the plan is if groups start getting sick again, please let me know because I haven’t heard it.

The thing that bothers me most about this idea is that Trump never even considered it. And there was no push back from any other leader in a country that I like to think finds ways to accomplish incredible things rather than meekly concede that we can’t do it.

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