Unemployment – how the employed can support the unemployed

We decided for numerous reasons to respond to the pandemic by issuing stay at home orders in many states and nations. This has led to people being unable to care for family members with disabilities. Unemployment rocketed to 20% or more, levels not seen since the great depression. Many local businesses will not survive. Poor people, faced with having no savings or government help, take whatever work they can regardless of risk.

How can we help others in need? 
This is my vision for how we can get through this without starvation, especially in India and America:

Canning Food: Many Americans who worked in the food industry before have lost their jobs. Many food contracts have been canceled leaving farmers nowhere to profitably sell their produce. Cans will be marked properly so we can later tell if there was an infection in the place they were canned, so they can be returned or disposed of.

Former restaurant workers have the skills and training to make canned goods for sale, prepared meals, soups, pastas, etc. Millions of them could direct others in how to do this, leading to a cycle of learning. Truckers who would normally ship food that is currently going to waste, farmers without contracts, and millions of unemployed, stand to benefit. Each will get shares of any profits generated, and food can be stored for later sale given enough investors, this is a wise investment. You can turn a tiny amount of money into a profitable amount of canned food for next year, when we can guarantee that food will be more scarce somewhere in the world.

Canning food could be a generic solution to extreme poverty, like selling apples in the depression.

Other ideas:
Farm hands: this is a good time to get back to farming. So many farms are unable to harvest or plant due to restrictions, and they need all the help they can get. Social distancing is possible on large farms.

Virtual programming: use the social isolation as an opportunity to help others learn programming, financial advice, law, accounting, or any field that doesn’t require physical presence. 

Fighting spam calls and emails: hiring people to track down and arrest those whose response to this crisis is to prey on the weak. Having people who are scammed raise bounties, and getting people to find those responsible, force them to return their money, and having a share of the money go to those who can get it back.

Disability aid – there are many with disabilities that are having trouble finding what they need during these times. They often have money, but not enough people to help them. We should be putting out jobs on job boards looking for people willing to help. Hemophilia, lupus, autism, down syndrome, there are many who need much that is hard to get in these times. Hire people to do it, it is worth taking the small risk for the big reward of helping save somebody. That is the definition of essential work.

Virtual assistants: we can help people around the world by hiring virtual assistants. What better time then when so many have so little to do? It may not pay much, but it can be a good learning experience while making some cash. Best to hire far outside the USA, like India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Africa, or Israel. 

Contract tracing en masse: Over 1 million health care workers are out of work, but we need contact tracing. Most of them would qualify for this kind of work, tracing the contacts laboriously and looking for people who may also be infected. This can be done for covid, flu, strep, or new viruses we haven’t seen yet. It is a useful skillset for now and the future.

There are many ways to help, we need to organize these ideas and more, and do so in a better way to help those in need. For too many, social distancing is a luxury they cannot afford. We can do more than handouts and unemployment benefits. We can help others in other nations where poverty adds to their troubles.

We are not limited by our circumstance. We are also limited by how we shut ourselves away from achieving our goals. We are too often limited by avoiding learning new methods.

financial advisor quant

The simplest way to beat the market



For every company, profit has been the goal. But what does that mean? Isn’t profit an evil capitalist lie to exploit the workers and keep them poor?

Quite the opposite.

If you are a farmer, profit = food. For millions of years, humans either “profited” by getting more food than they planted in the ground, or they simply died.

Profit is a necessity for civilization, like food and water. It allows us to have this meeting.

How much you profit vs. how much you have to invest is a good rule of thumb for embarking on an enterprise.

When you divide the investment by how much you profit, that is Price (how much you pay) over Earnings (how much you gain).

Companies tend to grow into relatively stable profits and expenses over time, leading to an expectation that we will gain, in the future, about what we did in the past.

Thus, companies publish thousands of numbers. And there are thousands of numbers others calculate from them.

But the P/E is the grand-daddy, the others are merely imitators. If you want to make money, and don’t have the time or energy to read all the literature, just invest in an index fund. They make about 8% a year on average from 1910s until today. That’s better than bonds, or most loans, and far better than inflation.

If you want to beat the market, then invest in low P/E stocks. The average P/E is about 18-25.

If we go back to the farming example, imagine that your farm, after you pay (feed) your people and animals, makes 5 cent profit a year for every $1 dollar invested to buy the farm.

That would be a P/E of 20.  .05/1 = 20

Not bad, and that’s after you haven’t starved to death. Great job, you can now do things like paying taxes and having children with that profit.

Now imagine we have 10 farms we can invest in. They have PE ratios of 100,90,80,70,60,50,40,30,20, and 10. One has a PE of 10. That means the farm is making 10% profit each year, or 10 cents on every dollar.

You guessed it, buy the farm with the best profits and you tend to do better than the average farmer!

Similarly, you want the stocks that make the most money for their shareholders, and that means the lowest PE values.

So, that’s what a good investor will look for.

You need to look out for scams, unfortunately, and there’s no common way to do that. Most scams go on for years before they are caught.

So spread out your investments, and look for companies that get steady good incomes.

If you do that, and invest in the top 5th of all stocks in terms of p/e… you will gain about 12% a year in your investing on average, which will double your money 50% faster.

It still helps to be able to read a balance sheet, however most actively managed funds are too consumed by the 10,000 numbers out there to grasp the simplicity of the P/E, and this has been shown.

If you are investing in stocks on your own, there are two rules to keep in mind: Low PE, and buy the stock in the companies you buy things from, since they will do well in the future.


Want a scientific algo that automatically does this for you to find the best investments?