Spekulatius

The distribution plan in IL and Chicago is similar to what is being done elsewhere. For the initial week, "they" chose to prioritize regional "hub" hospitals where prevalence has been high (the candidates there include frontline healthcare workers). Early distribution plans also include nursing homes (residents and at-risk staff) and first-line responders. Over time, it can be assumed that the age profile will skew higher. Same here. Frontline workers first without age consideration.

Yes, Rudy was well respected then but now has become a shadow of his former self. Blasio is simply not able to govern the city effectively in a time it really matters (like Rudy did around 9/11/2001). I think there will be a big reset coming, one way or another.

Reduced SIMO a bit.

I can see wabuffo‘s point. If the treasury issues a t-bill to Pimco, it would in exchange for cash. Now the treasury would hold cash. Nothing would change (no money creation , just an asset swap) until they spent the cash.

Enjoyed: Christmas crossfire ( German film Noir with a bit of a seasonal setting). Imposters - 3 episodes in and the script and acting is pretty good Bridgerton - nice production. Has a bit of a woke touch to it with all races equally represented, despite being a fictional setting in England late 19th century. The Midnight Sky -yawn

Yes, I agree with this. Norway indeed may be a model to follow. I think the larger stations around highways may be fine as they can adjust their business model, but I am not sure about smaller ones in more urban/suburban areas where I stead of refueling folks just charge up at home. ai have no idea how this plays out, but know the gas stations have to compete with typically larger Conviencience stores as there wouldn’t be much of a difference. I also think there isn’t much to fear in the next 5 years in terms:of gasoline sales for EV, but one needs to take into account that the market may reduce the terminal value of assets accordingly over time due to shrinking duration of cash flows.

Imagine 100% of cars sold this year were EVs. Total car and light truck sales per year are around 17 million in the U.S.. There are a total of 274 million registered vehicles in the U.S. In that draconian scenario, it will still take 16 years to replace the fleet. If you are projecting it will take a decade to hit 50% of sales to be EV, when do you think we will hit 100% sales to be EV? My point is we have many many years ahead of usage of high quality refinery and gas station assets. The lower quality ones will start shutting down first. I think we have to handicap percentage reduction in volume of gas by timeline. How much reduction in gas demand do you need to make refining and to a lesser degree distribution a crappy business due to margin pressure - that’s the key question not when 90% of the gas demand disappears. Prior to the shale becoming a factor, refining had a lousy decade due to overcapacity. This could well happen again.

Study from Germany in the Munich area: -about 3.3% have antibodies (2x the value from April) - 0.47% derived IFR rate (which is a 2x the guesstimate from the CDC) - 4250 samples https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wissen/studie-rund-drei-prozent-der-muenchner-mit-corona-infiziert,SK3xCl6 The dark matter of undetected infection is way lower than it was during the first wave In March/ April due to more testing.

What's (not) funny is that I'd bet that those who argue for the strongest measures in a public forum like here all broke rules one way or another. This guy blocked me, I have no idea why. I recall him being a TESLAQ fellow, but I am not exactly a bull. probably no big loss that I can‘t read his tweets.

You know, we generation X folks and boomers had Janus funds back in the day, and the millennials now have $ARKK:

Looks like my kind of place too, but I would go for the home brewed beers rather than the whiskeys. I really don’t drink whiskeys much, but prefer the smoother Irish whiskeys over the scotch’s generally. I am currently having a bit Calvados, which is my favorite goto drink for something a bit stronger.

Tikr.com does provide 1 year forward estimate, but I am not sure they are consensus estimates (I think they are: https://app.tikr.com/register?ref=o94y6y Another thing, I can access CapitalIQ through my public library (Boston public library) for the time being.

It seems that other sources have a more nuanced recap what Fauci actually said. One thing is sure - if a more transmissible form of COVID-19 starts to dominate, the threshold for herd immunity will go up.

I don’t think there are a lot of Japanese financials that are thriving , they seem more like the zombies in Walking Dead that keep moving.

Seems like everyone who wants to start out investing on behalf of friends and family or even wants to start out with SMA as a business should read this thread as a cautionary tale. To me at least, it seems like doing these binary type bets in SMA looks like a ticking time bomb and lawsuits waiting to happen. If you keep doing these things, it is probably just a matter of time until it blows up and creates a nightmare of lawsuits. It is probably not just people being bad, but the human brain will remember failures and losses much more so than success. I could easily envision an investor making 4 equal sized bets with three of them being doubles and one being a wipeout and yet in the end this investor being disgruntled as the failure was “evident from the start” in retrospect of course. After the fact everyone knows better . It’s just how humans are wired, I think.

On thought that crossed my mind is that it could work out really bad for insurers if interest rates stay near zero while inflation picks up. The reason for this is that higher inflation means that cost to settle insurance claims will pick up. Since premiums are paid for future claims, it means that the underwriting ratio will develop unfavorably in this case, because there costs will outrun the premium increases for a couple of years possibly.

Maybe why GILD is near a 52-week low? I owned GILD and sold during a spike due to Remdesivir news and it turned out the right decision. Remdesivir was never central to the thesis though, but the pipeline disappointments and continued issues with their Hep C franchise are putting a lid on the stock.

I watched Greyhound too. This is also basically an alternative history movie where all the German U-Boot commander collectively loose their mind.

My wife just got the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine today. So far, so good. Some unrelated stuff: My wife talked with an ICU nurse at the hospital and she mentioned they that generally don’t administer Remdesivir for COVID-19 cases any more. Frontline treatment are steroids and often it is just that.

Same here. Only a tracking position, but up >70% in just a few weeks on no news?

An acquaintance of us bought an Airstream this summer. I have seen his wive walkthroughs of the interior and a lot of pictures but none where on the road. I wonder if they used it at all. I do think 2 years from now there will be a buyers market for used ones.

Well, good point really: the more power you give politicians in this Covid situation, the more they ignore the real problems of our country: https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/21/overdose-outnumber-coronavirus-deaths-in-san-francisco/ 621 people have died in San Francisco of drug overdoses – that equates to nearly four times as many as have been killed by COVID-19. The most recent data released on Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) indicates that approximately 81,230 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12-months ending in May 2020, a new record. “The increases in drug overdose deaths appear to have accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the CDC noted. 81k death is an increase of 12k over the 69k overdosing death in 2019. 12K<<326k incremental death due to COVID-19 so it is not “the real problem” by a wide margin. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/20190911/20190911.htm

This will be resolved in a less than a year but the path there seems anything but pretty. In my opinion, BJ has not proven to be a good negotiator or even a good leader with his wavering and indecisiveness and I am evens sympathetic to his (very British) quirks.

Picasso, thank you for writing your side of the story. It puts thing into a different perspective and takes guts to do so.

It looks like all politicians get early access to the vaccine- even COVID-19 denier Marco Rubio got his shot already. I guess the idea is to increase public trust in the vaccine. I agree that neither Rubio nor AOC should be high on the priority list otherwise. Let’s just Invert this and assume Rubio and AOC would state that they wouldn't get the vaccine yet, would the optics be better or worse? I think they would be worse, so it’s probably better to get all the ruling class vaccinated. I personally find Deborah Birx’ behavior much more deplorable. The Uk and other nations have fired politicians on similar grounds.