| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a gabbagool of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. One of the downsides of getting older, arguably the primary one, is how your body parts stop working right. Maybe you can't process tequila or cheese pizzas the way you did in your 20s. Maybe you get a bum knee. Maybe your brain wanders and has anybody seen my keys? But most of us learn to live with these changes. It's looking more and more as if humanity's latest bum knee/tequila intolerance will be Covid-19. Herd immunity remains a distant dream, so we're going through a process of accepting that we'll just have to live with the disease. But Covid workarounds are far more complicated than, say, wearing a knee brace or avoiding pizza. Singapore recently tried to relax its zero-tolerance Covid policy, only to snap back into lockdown mode at the first outbreak, writes Rachel Rosenthal. The shame is this flare-up was avoidable, if only the government had focused more on sensible prevention rather than Byzantine rule-making. In the U.K., Boris Johnson celebrated Freedom Day — the day his country shed all its Covid restrictions — by entering his own personal lockdown because his health secretary tested positive. Freedom's just another word for not leaving your house for a week. With the delta variant surging, Martin Ivens writes, Johnson must tread a careful path of locking down neither too much nor too little. Easy peasy. Financial markets, meanwhile, had themselves a big old freakout about the economic implications of the delta variant. Stocks and bond yields tumbled, leaving the reflation trade a hazy memory. In fact, Mohamed El-Erian warns the world needs to stop messing around and work together to get shots in arms ASAP, or risk a stagflationary nightmare of sluggish supply and demand. Some chronic health problems are more debilitating than others. It's word association time. When I say "New Jersey," you think: - turnpikes
- gabbagool
- gym, tan, laundry
- fiscal responsibility
How many of you picked No. 4? Nobody, right? But maybe you haven't been keeping up with the Garden State. Four years ago, New Jersey had just come off a string of credit-rating downgrades. Since then it's been the best-performing muni borrower among big U.S. states, out-returning the national average and the mean global sovereign, writes Matt Winkler. And it has accomplished this, and grown its population and revived its economy, while hiking taxes on the rich, lifting minimum wages and boosting social services. It's almost as if you don't gotta get out while you're young.  We've long been conditioned to think of global warming as a boiling-water problem for our frog grandchildren, but lately it's been impossible to ignore the reality that we are the frogs, and the water is already boiling. Ha ha, just kidding: There isn't any water. Tim O'Brien, with the help of striking graphics by Elaine He (watch Lake Mead shrink before your very eyes!), writes about how Arizona is already struggling to deal with a rapidly disappearing water supply. Arizona's future crisis has arrived early, and it won't be the last.  The "early retirement" trend isn't really a thing, writes Justin Fox.  Just like Hertz, Luckin Coffee is enjoying a post-bankruptcy revival, writes Shuli Ren.  President Joe Biden's child-tax-credit experiment will fight poverty, but its costs and complexity are a problem. — Bloomberg's editorial board The UAE and OPEC have made up, but only temporarily. The alliance is only getting more fragile. — Liam Denning Bill Ackman's Universal SPAC deal was too complicated to live. Investors now must wonder if he knows what he's doing. — Chris Bryant Robinhood is spending big money on former regulators to fight off regulatory problems. How is this OK? — Michelle Leder Zoom's big cloud deal shows it has ambitions to take on companies like Salesforce. — Tae Kim It's far too easy for companies to steal money from workers by underpaying and firing them illegally. — Anna Stansbury A new weight-loss drug could do a lot of people good, but the system works against such preventive measures. — Max Nisen Avoid traveling to the U.K., the CDC warned. The first Jan. 6 riot prison sentence was handed out. The 2020 recession lasted just two months, the NBER said. We know what you're thinking: "I enjoy Bloomberg Opinion Today, but I want somebody to read it to me." It's a common complaint. Fortunately, there's a solution: a one-minute compilation of the top of each day's newsletter, right in your living room or wherever else you've set up Alexa to spy on you. And this doesn't even require you to go on a vision quest or answer a bridge troll's riddles, though the experience is similar. To make the magic happen, simply ask Alexa, "Play Bloomberg Opinion" or "Play Bloomberg Opinion Daily" or "What am I doing with my life?" Alexa will then invite you to add what is known as a "skill," called "Bloomberg Opinion Daily" in a thing called your "flash briefing." You can also set this up by opening your Alexa app, going into settings and choosing "flash briefing." After you do all that, you can just ask Alexa "What's my flash briefing?" and you'll get Bloomberg Opinion Daily. Please let us know if this doesn't work. The team of 47 developers that made this happen will gladly jump back on it. New ice bends without breaking. (h/t Scott Kominers) New Gilgamesh tablet just dropped. Fossilized "megaripples" hint at a dinosaur-killing asteroid. There are anti-sex beds in the Olympic Village.  Notes: Please send Gilgamesh tablets and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. | 
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