The wealthy will be fine, don’t worry. They’re safe.
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This is really it. Would I be as worried about the state of the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that collectively move everything any of you consume around the country to where it needs to go if they weren’t already in very bad shape? Nope.
The reality is that this economy is incredibly hollow. Everything about it is built on an incredibly precarious sand foundation. The profits of large corporations are based on not having to pay their employees a living wage, the ability to screw their vendors, access to cheap unlimited credit, and a whole host of other favorable factors. The (high) price of houses is based on the imaginary ability of millenials to pay those prices for them over the long term. Meanwhile the government is running a trillion dollar a year deficit and the tangible benefits the population is feeling from that absurd amount of spending is super minimal (unless you’re part of a few privileged groups who derive a huge % of their income from the government).
Something was always going to catch us with our pants down. A global pandemic was for sure on the bingo card.
Dow down 1k+ and Dow and S&P 500 now down for 2020.
Posting this again. It’s very relevent to the discussion in the last 60 or so posts.
Keep going past the hyped up first few paragraphs. It gets very good.
There’s a quote in there about how we now need to stop trying to prevent it from coming here and “them” giving it to “us” and instead transition to preventing us from giving it to each other.
In terms of victory laps. Pretty sure I nailed it in my OP and in subsequent posts.
The approach was to focus on the facts we knew and extrapolate from there to a range of outcomes. Pretty obvious on a poker board.
Opposing approaches were generalizing from other similar events.
I.e. its “we should fold JJ pre because of the action”
“Naaaaah JJ is always a favourite”
BS,
Can you elaborate on why the logistics/trucking industry was hard hit in 2019? Genuinely curious, not calling you out for being disingenuous. Thanks.
It was a hangover from a very good year. Basically there were new regulations that restricted the supply of truck hours (it was called the elog mandate and you can look it up if you’re super interested, I’m not trying to get mega detailed about it and derail this thread) at the start of 2018 which drove a trucking boom and 2019 was the bust that followed. It’s really not over it yet. Also the trade war very much didn’t help.
Of course everyone (absolutely including me) invested heavily in expanding capacity during the boom months… so the amount of retained earnings from 2018 left a lot to be desired when things turned.
2019 already culled an extremely large number of common carriers. Coronavirus will without a doubt kill more almost no matter what we do. Not least because so many truckers are squarely in the crosshairs of this virus demographically.
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There is no paperwork. CDC is one of the most powerful organisations in the USA. Also luckily one staffed with professionals until Trump starts getting the blame and starts firing people.
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After two weeks on the ground in China, a team sent by the W.H.O. concluded that the draconian measures China imposed a month ago may have saved hundreds of thousands of people from infection. Such measures — sealing off cities, shutting down businesses and schools, ordering people to remain indoors — have provoked anger in China and could be difficult to replicate in democratic countries with a greater emphasis on protecting civil liberties.
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In Iran, the outbreak has killed at least 12 people as of Monday, the largest number of coronavirus-linked deaths outside China. South Korea on Monday reported 231 additional cases, bringing the nation’s total to 833 cases and seven deaths.
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What is unclear to many public health experts is whether a shortage of testing kits is causing a large number of cases to remain undetected. Hospitals in China remain overstretched and many patients say they have been turned away. Health care workers are still coming down with the virus despite official pledges to protect them. Mr. Liang, the health official, said more than 3,000 health care workers have been infected.
USA#1 is ready to meet this challenge with highly competent government officials running the show.
https://twitter.com/homelandken/status/1232026318801338368?s=21
https://twitter.com/homelandken/status/1232027306732015618?s=21
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Narrator: the number of cases in China had not begun to drop.
Where are you getting that from?
Funny I was having that same problem where the Johns Hopkins thing was asking me to log in earlier today. It’s working fine again now.
The fact that the last time they said that the number of cases was 8x higher a week later, and the fact that they have no real reason or incentive to be honest about what is happening.
They aren’t telling the truth about the situation and never have been. That’s actually ok and I get why they are lying, but it also means they have zero credibility with me and I don’t take any of their numbers seriously.
Like obviously I’m speculating, but it’s not a big reach.
We should really get someone to call JH on that. Who to do it, who to do it…
I assume they are lying about Hubei province but doubt they lie about number of cases in Beijing/Shanghai as that would only hurt and not help.
They’ve sent out propaganda to their population that they’ve found a cure for the virus, so pardon me if I don’t agree that they aren’t capable of lying about their Beijing/Shangai cases.
It’s not that they are definitely lying about any particular thing, it’s that they absolutely could be, and as a result the entire countries situation is black box and everything we’re hearing/seeing about the situation is just an anecdote.
You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus
"H5N1 [Bird Flu] has a fatality rate of around 60 percent—if you get it, you’re likely to die. Yet since 2003, the virus has killed only 455 people. The much “milder” flu viruses, by contrast, kill fewer than 0.1 percent of people they infect, on average, but are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.
Severe illness caused by viruses such as H5N1 also means that infected people can be identified and isolated, or that they died quickly. They do not walk around feeling just a little under the weather, seeding the virus. The new coronavirus (known technically as SARS-CoV-2) that has been spreading around the world can cause a respiratory illness that can be severe. The disease (known as COVID-19) seems to have a fatality rate of less than 2 percent—exponentially lower than most outbreaks that make global news. The virus has raised alarm not despite that low fatality rate, but because of it.
Coronaviruses are similar to influenza viruses in that they are both single strands of RNA. Four coronaviruses commonly infect humans, causing colds. These are believed to have evolved in humans to maximize their own spread—which means sickening, but not killing, people. By contrast, the two prior novel coronavirus outbreaks—SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, named for where the first outbreak occurred)—were picked up from animals, as was H5N1. These diseases were highly fatal to humans. If there were mild or asymptomatic cases, they were extremely few. Had there been more of them, the disease would have spread widely. Ultimately, SARS and MERS each killed fewer than 1,000 people.
COVID-19 is already reported to have killed more than twice that number. With its potent mix of characteristics, this virus is unlike most that capture popular attention: It is deadly, but not too deadly. It makes people sick, but not in predictable, uniquely identifiable ways. Last week, 14 Americans tested positive on a cruise ship in Japan despite feeling fine—the new virus may be most dangerous because, it seems, it may sometimes cause no symptoms at all.
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The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. …Lipsitch predicts that, within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically , this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, around 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)"