Parsad

Yale's extremely well-regarded endowment manager, David Swensen, passed away from cancer: https://finance.yahoo.com/m/5fe5568a-2b47-3c65-847e-aee46bd42f41/david-swensen-dies-at-67-how.html

Not a huge fan of perma-bear David Rosenberg, but I thought his recent article was quite funny...and I'm sure he's got even more interesting experiences with Wall Street and Main Street! Cheers! David Rosenberg: I haven't been this excited about going against the herd in years | Financial Post

I've been getting requests for no ads, so I thought I would do a poll to see how people feel. Cheers!

Ok All, This one is locked. You are all more than welcome to start it up again on the Politics forum...go over there for this stuff! Cheers!

Possibly, but probably not. Most likely gave them some of the cash assets in the portfolio to manage. Cheers!

I'm checking out different plug-ins that will allow members to modify their view to their liking, including colors, themes, etc. So everyone will be able to change their view that makes it easiest to read for them. Cheers!

Hi Doc, You guys do most of the heavy lifting, so it's only fair that you get to continue to use it for free! Newbies on the other hand have yet to earn their keep. Cheers!

Hi, we'll work on modifying the ads so they aren't as obtrusive. Give us a couple of days, as we'll probably make most of the website changes over the long weekend. Cheers!

Ok, I've expanded the editor. You should have pretty full functionality now. You should also be able to edit and delete your own posts now. Let me know if you are having problems with either of the two above. Cheers!

You should be able to do this already. Let me know. If you cannot, I'll look into the settings. There are also tons of plug-ins for the Invision forums, so if you don't see it, we can probably add it. Keep sending requests on this thread if you have them. Cheers!

We'll move the ads within the threads to the side bars, so they won't cut through the posts. Will look into the emoji thing. Cheers!

Hi Everyone, It's taken a bit of time to put it together, but the new "The Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax" site is up! It's a bit of a change for everyone, but we'll all get slowly used to it together. I'd like to thank Paul Clerc and his team at Watermelon Webworks for their work and trying to get all my desired features incorporated! While I've been playing with the "Beta" version, it isn't exactly like the actual site, so please work with me as I figure things out and get used to the administration. If you were a paid member of the old site, you are "grandfathered" in, and your same username and password should work here. You won't have to pay for anything, and all services are open to you...again, we'll get used to all of the services together. So we have a base of some 3,500+ members using the site. For new users, the fee will be $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. I think over the years, from the experiences everyone has shared, both mentally and financially, that's pretty darn cheap! We have a number of useful features that members can tap into directly, rather than going through me...Podium, Classifieds, Zoom Room (which will feature recording and transcripting features) for members and their booked events. There will be an annual Stock Competition with cash prizes, an area to buy some COBF logo items (people have asked me to do this for a while), and yes a "Politics" forum with a separate link away from the "Investment" forum. Lastly, our new cleaner looking "Investment" forum has a ton of features and many that can be added. There are a ton of features within the site, but if there is anything you wanted or anything missing that you liked about the old site, please use this thread and respond. Paul and I will slowly try and incorporate any desired features with plug-ins and programming! Finally, my old contact email "[email protected]" is still active for queries, help, etc. You may have noticed the new domain name "thecobf.com"...a lot shorter and easy to remember. My future contact will be "[email protected]", which should be working over the next couple of days. Once again, thank you all for your support over the years! We are going on our 20th year, and it has been my pleasure to be friends with you all! Sincerely, Sanjeev

You're absolutely correct! Go down to the "Provisional Death Counts For Covid" on the link you selected. Go through deaths for each age group...you'll see spikes in all categories, especially younger ages, into December (15-24). And then you see the massive drop in deaths as people began to get vaccinated from January. I'm glad you selected that link, since it's about as clear as I can get about the matter! One can act smart without taking the vaccine, but your own data shows that taking the vaccine has a much more dramatic effect than just "acting smarter". Cheers! That makes zero sense. The CDC link was interesting - younger age groups had their peak deaths the weeks of January 9 to 23. That usually means they were infected in the second half of December or the beginning of January. At that time only 0.1-1% of the U.S. population had been vaccinated, practically all of them care providers or risk groups (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/). So you are saying that vaccinating this tiny fraction of people, somehow was miraculously the cause for a fall-of-a-cliff type drop in contagion and subsequent death rate of younger cohorts? Not to mention that the vaccines only protect the vaccinated from severe outcomes, but not from getting infected and potentially spreading the virus - or so we are told. No, vaccination dropped death rates for all categories...you can see the stats for yourself from January to present day. As the number of vaccinated people increased, the transmission rates dropped...the number of pneumonia cases dropped...the number of deaths dropped. Is it any wonder the number of influenza cases was so low in North America this year? That is due to social distancing, lockdowns, masks, increased disinfection...and you also see a decrease in Covid cases as inoculations occur. This is common sense and would be expected. Do vaccines carry risk...yes...but at extremely low levels as we've seen globally as inoculation results are studied more and more. Cheers!

Hi SouthernYankee, please don't take any offense. That argument would be ok if your choice in not taking the vaccine had no impact on others...say like getting a stent put in or not, because you have a clogged artery, or not getting chemo because you have cancer. But this is far more impactful and detrimental than even second hand smoke in how you affect others around you...unless you stay in your home locked up and never seen anyone again. I think that is the main point anyone in favor of inoculation is making...not the statistics, politics, etc. Simply that the more people vaccinated, the less likely vulnerable people will die from Covid by being exposes to others. And we've seen how variants are affecting younger, healthier people...so it is no longer just the old and immune compromised anymore. Cheers! Agree with Southern Yankee. The stats generally point to older folks (65+) or those with pre-existing conditions being the most vulnerable. It may sound selfish but if you are vulnerable the onus is on you to protect yourself. The overwhelming majority of young people recover pretty quickly (less than 2 weeks from Covid). In the US a country of about 320 million (fairly large sample size) only 8000 people under 40 have died according to the CDC. The covid vaccine was rushed to market for obvious reasons and nobody can be sure what effects if any might exist long term. If there was more science/data to support getting the vaccine I probably would. However, when the average FDA approval takes 4-8 years depending on the source to reach stage 4, I think I have a right (maybe an obligation) to be skeptical of a vaccine that went through all the steps in under a year. Stay safe and healthy--your body, your choice. Generally vaccines take that long because of limited dollars and extensive volume trials. But this was a pandemic and they essentially threw unlimited resources at it and fast-tracked emergency approval guidelines on clinical trials. In other words, the possible side effects and risks, were outweighed by the risks and deaths from not using the vaccine against Covid. You now actually have far more data, which has been extensively analyzed by experts around the world, than any trial would provide...and the results are the vaccines are effective and have limited side effects. Regarding age...some of the new variants are having a greater impact on those between 30-50, including higher mortality. So just because one variant affected older and immune compromised patients dramatically, doesn't mean a new variant could not pose a threat to the healthy and younger subgroups. And we know that the current vaccines are having some protective effect against some variants. Will that last...we don't know...but so far it is working. Cheers! Regarding the vaccine and side effects...in the short term sure you may well be right. In the long term we have no idea because the vaccine has not been used that long. Regarding age....no idea where you are getting those figures from. The deaths quoted above are directly from the CDC. Also, I find it unlikely that a new variant would do more hard to younger people with stronger immune systems than older people. In the US, doing the rough math 8000 deaths in the age bracket cited above while tragic comes out to about 22 people under 40 per day. Hardly worth rushing to get a new vaccine in my opinion. Type "Covid variants young people" in Google and you will find tens of articles discussing how some new variants are making young people sicker and even increasing mortality rates. Cheers! I did as you suggested and looked that up. Really saw articles saying what "could" happen. The reality which is what we know is that based on the facts younger people are basically not dying here. This is like someone suggesting a stock and saying google "buy name of company". Again, I say lets look at the reality-22 people a day in the United States---very sad but hardly an extraordinary number. https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-variant-in-u-k-probed-for-increased-risk-to-younger-people-11611661304 https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/12/data-reveal-deadliness-covid-19-even-young-adults https://interestingengineering.com/uk-study-shows-new-covid-19-variant-spreads-faster-affects-younger-people https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/15/uk-study-finds-kent-variant-may-be-70-more-deadly Just a few found in minutes. Cheers! I think the article that will really trump the four provided: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm Again, when dealing with reality, in the US with a population of approx 320 million people, it's pretty clear that younger people recover from Covid. To the extent the new strains "maybe" more deadly that clearly has not been reflected in the actual death rate in the US yet. I'm not saying don't be careful and act smart. But it's my belief that one can act smart without taking a relatively new vaccine. Cheers! You're absolutely correct! Go down to the "Provisional Death Counts For Covid" on the link you selected. Go through deaths for each age group...you'll see spikes in all categories, especially younger ages, into December (15-24). And then you see the massive drop in deaths as people began to get vaccinated from January. I'm glad you selected that link, since it's about as clear as I can get about the matter! One can act smart without taking the vaccine, but your own data shows that taking the vaccine has a much more dramatic effect than just "acting smarter". Cheers!

I think you can equally use this argument against gun control. Guns have been around for even longer than a year. And in 2015, about 13,286 died as a result of being shot, so certainly not more than 13,286 people died of being shot in the head. And there are about 330M people in the USA. Therefore, if you're shot in the head, you have less than a 0.004% chance of dying. There's basically almost no chance of dying if you're shot in the head. Thanks! I need that! Cheers! The way I understood the comment is following way: 10 million per year die of cancer deaths every year 2.6 million died of Covid since its start. Yet the policies are such that we reduced cancer screenings by order of 80% "During California’s stay-at-home order, cervical cancer screening rates among approximately 1.5 million women in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC) network decreased approximately 80% compared with baseline. " https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7004a1.htm According to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, we will be paying this price for decades to come, not just cancer screenings but diabetes, hypertension, reduced vaccination of children, etc. https://www.newsweek.com/jay-bhattacharya-stanford-doctor-says-reversing-covid-lockdown-damage-will-take-generation-1575522 Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford Doctor, Says Reversing COVID Lockdown Damage Will 'Take a Generation' About 607K people die of cancer every year in the U.S. out of the total population...not sure if your number is U.S. or global. 560K+ have died already from Covid with 30M+ cases to date in the U.S. Theoretically, with a generous conservative estimate that a third of the U.S. has already been exposed and recovered...you would still have over 1.6M deaths from Covid based on the total population of the U.S...conservatively estimated. Cheers!

Hi SouthernYankee, please don't take any offense. That argument would be ok if your choice in not taking the vaccine had no impact on others...say like getting a stent put in or not, because you have a clogged artery, or not getting chemo because you have cancer. But this is far more impactful and detrimental than even second hand smoke in how you affect others around you...unless you stay in your home locked up and never seen anyone again. I think that is the main point anyone in favor of inoculation is making...not the statistics, politics, etc. Simply that the more people vaccinated, the less likely vulnerable people will die from Covid by being exposes to others. And we've seen how variants are affecting younger, healthier people...so it is no longer just the old and immune compromised anymore. Cheers! Agree with Southern Yankee. The stats generally point to older folks (65+) or those with pre-existing conditions being the most vulnerable. It may sound selfish but if you are vulnerable the onus is on you to protect yourself. The overwhelming majority of young people recover pretty quickly (less than 2 weeks from Covid). In the US a country of about 320 million (fairly large sample size) only 8000 people under 40 have died according to the CDC. The covid vaccine was rushed to market for obvious reasons and nobody can be sure what effects if any might exist long term. If there was more science/data to support getting the vaccine I probably would. However, when the average FDA approval takes 4-8 years depending on the source to reach stage 4, I think I have a right (maybe an obligation) to be skeptical of a vaccine that went through all the steps in under a year. Stay safe and healthy--your body, your choice. Generally vaccines take that long because of limited dollars and extensive volume trials. But this was a pandemic and they essentially threw unlimited resources at it and fast-tracked emergency approval guidelines on clinical trials. In other words, the possible side effects and risks, were outweighed by the risks and deaths from not using the vaccine against Covid. You now actually have far more data, which has been extensively analyzed by experts around the world, than any trial would provide...and the results are the vaccines are effective and have limited side effects. Regarding age...some of the new variants are having a greater impact on those between 30-50, including higher mortality. So just because one variant affected older and immune compromised patients dramatically, doesn't mean a new variant could not pose a threat to the healthy and younger subgroups. And we know that the current vaccines are having some protective effect against some variants. Will that last...we don't know...but so far it is working. Cheers! Regarding the vaccine and side effects...in the short term sure you may well be right. In the long term we have no idea because the vaccine has not been used that long. Regarding age....no idea where you are getting those figures from. The deaths quoted above are directly from the CDC. Also, I find it unlikely that a new variant would do more hard to younger people with stronger immune systems than older people. In the US, doing the rough math 8000 deaths in the age bracket cited above while tragic comes out to about 22 people under 40 per day. Hardly worth rushing to get a new vaccine in my opinion. Type "Covid variants young people" in Google and you will find tens of articles discussing how some new variants are making young people sicker and even increasing mortality rates. Cheers! I did as you suggested and looked that up. Really saw articles saying what "could" happen. The reality which is what we know is that based on the facts younger people are basically not dying here. This is like someone suggesting a stock and saying google "buy name of company". Again, I say lets look at the reality-22 people a day in the United States---very sad but hardly an extraordinary number. https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-variant-in-u-k-probed-for-increased-risk-to-younger-people-11611661304 https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/12/data-reveal-deadliness-covid-19-even-young-adults https://interestingengineering.com/uk-study-shows-new-covid-19-variant-spreads-faster-affects-younger-people https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/15/uk-study-finds-kent-variant-may-be-70-more-deadly Just a few found in minutes. Cheers!

I think you can equally use this argument against gun control. Guns have been around for even longer than a year. And in 2015, about 13,286 died as a result of being shot, so certainly not more than 13,286 people died of being shot in the head. And there are about 330M people in the USA. Therefore, if you're shot in the head, you have less than a 0.004% chance of dying. There's basically almost no chance of dying if you're shot in the head. Thanks! I need that! Cheers!

First Google hit: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ Worst European country is Czech republic with 233 deaths per 100,000 population. That is 0.23%. Want a more average case? How about Germany with 90 per 100,000: 0.09% US lies between those two with 0.16% (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country) That same source has Canada at 61 per 100,000: 0.06% Those are far lower numbers than 0.5% already. On top of that, those percentages are for the entire population! Older people are the vast majority of those deaths. Let's take the US (not to cherry-pick). If we take https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863 for example that shows that 1.7% of the deaths in the US concerns someone under 44. 0.017*0.0016 = 0.0000272, so an average American under 44 has 0.00272% chance of dying from Covid -19 (about 1 in 36,765) And I didn't even filter out the morbidly obese and those with lung disease, those with compromised immune systems etc yet! To be able to calculate further I'll assume filtering that out lowers the factor by another factor 50-100 (same factor as the age filter, no uncorrelated data is available). Leading to a chance to die of Corona for an average healthy American of between 1 in 1.8M and 1 in 3.6M That's comparable to the chance that an average commercial airplane flight results in a fatality (estimation by aviation consulting firm To70 see https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/02/fatalities-on-commercial-passenger-aircraft-rise-in-2018.html): 1 in 3M So who's being facetious? Or are you also scared of flying? The chance of death is remote and the only thing happening is fear mongering. Your assuming that everyone has been infected by using the deaths per 100,000 number. In Canada, it shows 22K people died out of roughly 1M people infected. You cannot divide the 22K by the population of the country and assume that is the mortality rate. That's ridiculous! Even if you assume that 5 times as many people had Covid and recovered, you still have a mortality rate of 440 out of every 100,000 people. And I'm being generous in assuming that 5M people have been infected out of Canada's 32M population. This is just basic math! Cheers!

Cool, now try doing the same with "the earth is flat" and "5g kills". Stop being facetious! I'm not asking you to read any article...pick and chose the sources you feel comfortable with from all of those articles...whether it's the Harvard Medical Journal, World Health Organization, The Lancet, Vancouver Sun, Washington Post, any global news outlet or source...whatever you want. Cheers!

With all due respect: do you think you have ANY clue regarding side effects at this point? Regarding the individual we know there don't appear to be a great many immediate side effects. That is all we know. I'm not saying there will be terrible side effects: I don't know. But I think you are making a logical error here in assuming chances for that are so incredibly low. You are also using wrong numbers: I do not have 0.5/100 death chance. I would argue significantly lower than 1 in 1 million. (1 in 10 million seems the right order of magnitude for myself given the data). There are tens of articles, from media and scientific journals, estimating the mortality rate of Covid is around 0.6-0.7% with data backing up those conclusions...I gave you the benefit of the doubt and said 0.5%. How the heck do you get 1 in 10 million...is that conjecture, or do you have any ACTUAL data that supports that?! Regarding the effect to the population you are blindly assuming it to be positive. 1. As far as I've seen there is (as of yet) no evidence those inoculated no longer carry and spread the virus (please point me to a source if this has changed?) 2. As I wrote earlier that apparently it's immunology 101 to NOT vaccinate during an active outbreak as this will risk making the virus more dangerous. You wait until the outbreak dies down and start the vaccination scheme afterwards. Why isn't that game plan followed today? Why take the risk to make the virus actually dangerous? (with actually I mean more than influenza, which society has learned to accept as a part of life). I'm afraid the answer can be again found in political reasons (inaction is punished in society while action is rewarded, even if inaction is superior) 1. No that is correct. But if you are inoculated, you have less than a 10% chance of contracting the virus. Israel is nearly 100% vaccinated. Take a look at the daily stats trajectory since they started inoculations in December. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/ 2. Sorry to tell you, that's not immunology 101...not sure where you got that from. Perhaps the reason for your opinion is that you fell for mental shortcuts? In most of your life those refusing to vaccinate do so for illogical reasons (claiming it gives them autism or something equally unlikely) and now you think that is the case again. Taking the mental shortcut that those refusing to vaccinate are simply dumb/uneducated. I would argue circumstances are very different here and therefore require a different response. I'm actually providing you numbers. I have not seen any numbers backing your theories. Cheers!

Wasn't Fauci specifically guided by the administration to play down Covid? And if people don't want to believe Fauci, how about every other health minister in every other developed country tackling the problem? Cheers!

Hi SouthernYankee, please don't take any offense. That argument would be ok if your choice in not taking the vaccine had no impact on others...say like getting a stent put in or not, because you have a clogged artery, or not getting chemo because you have cancer. But this is far more impactful and detrimental than even second hand smoke in how you affect others around you...unless you stay in your home locked up and never seen anyone again. I think that is the main point anyone in favor of inoculation is making...not the statistics, politics, etc. Simply that the more people vaccinated, the less likely vulnerable people will die from Covid by being exposes to others. And we've seen how variants are affecting younger, healthier people...so it is no longer just the old and immune compromised anymore. Cheers! Agree with Southern Yankee. The stats generally point to older folks (65+) or those with pre-existing conditions being the most vulnerable. It may sound selfish but if you are vulnerable the onus is on you to protect yourself. The overwhelming majority of young people recover pretty quickly (less than 2 weeks from Covid). In the US a country of about 320 million (fairly large sample size) only 8000 people under 40 have died according to the CDC. The covid vaccine was rushed to market for obvious reasons and nobody can be sure what effects if any might exist long term. If there was more science/data to support getting the vaccine I probably would. However, when the average FDA approval takes 4-8 years depending on the source to reach stage 4, I think I have a right (maybe an obligation) to be skeptical of a vaccine that went through all the steps in under a year. Stay safe and healthy--your body, your choice. Generally vaccines take that long because of limited dollars and extensive volume trials. But this was a pandemic and they essentially threw unlimited resources at it and fast-tracked emergency approval guidelines on clinical trials. In other words, the possible side effects and risks, were outweighed by the risks and deaths from not using the vaccine against Covid. You now actually have far more data, which has been extensively analyzed by experts around the world, than any trial would provide...and the results are the vaccines are effective and have limited side effects. Regarding age...some of the new variants are having a greater impact on those between 30-50, including higher mortality. So just because one variant affected older and immune compromised patients dramatically, doesn't mean a new variant could not pose a threat to the healthy and younger subgroups. And we know that the current vaccines are having some protective effect against some variants. Will that last...we don't know...but so far it is working. Cheers! Regarding the vaccine and side effects...in the short term sure you may well be right. In the long term we have no idea because the vaccine has not been used that long. Regarding age....no idea where you are getting those figures from. The deaths quoted above are directly from the CDC. Also, I find it unlikely that a new variant would do more hard to younger people with stronger immune systems than older people. In the US, doing the rough math 8000 deaths in the age bracket cited above while tragic comes out to about 22 people under 40 per day. Hardly worth rushing to get a new vaccine in my opinion. Type "Covid variants young people" in Google and you will find tens of articles discussing how some new variants are making young people sicker and even increasing mortality rates. Cheers!

Hi SouthernYankee, please don't take any offense. That argument would be ok if your choice in not taking the vaccine had no impact on others...say like getting a stent put in or not, because you have a clogged artery, or not getting chemo because you have cancer. But this is far more impactful and detrimental than even second hand smoke in how you affect others around you...unless you stay in your home locked up and never seen anyone again. I think that is the main point anyone in favor of inoculation is making...not the statistics, politics, etc. Simply that the more people vaccinated, the less likely vulnerable people will die from Covid by being exposes to others. And we've seen how variants are affecting younger, healthier people...so it is no longer just the old and immune compromised anymore. Cheers! Agree with Southern Yankee. The stats generally point to older folks (65+) or those with pre-existing conditions being the most vulnerable. It may sound selfish but if you are vulnerable the onus is on you to protect yourself. The overwhelming majority of young people recover pretty quickly (less than 2 weeks from Covid). In the US a country of about 320 million (fairly large sample size) only 8000 people under 40 have died according to the CDC. The covid vaccine was rushed to market for obvious reasons and nobody can be sure what effects if any might exist long term. If there was more science/data to support getting the vaccine I probably would. However, when the average FDA approval takes 4-8 years depending on the source to reach stage 4, I think I have a right (maybe an obligation) to be skeptical of a vaccine that went through all the steps in under a year. Stay safe and healthy--your body, your choice. Generally vaccines take that long because of limited dollars and extensive volume trials. But this was a pandemic and they essentially threw unlimited resources at it and fast-tracked emergency approval guidelines on clinical trials. In other words, the possible side effects and risks, were outweighed by the risks and deaths from not using the vaccine against Covid. You now actually have far more data, which has been extensively analyzed by experts around the world, than any trial would provide...and the results are the vaccines are effective and have limited side effects. Regarding age...some of the new variants are having a greater impact on those between 30-50, including higher mortality. So just because one variant affected older and immune compromised patients dramatically, doesn't mean a new variant could not pose a threat to the healthy and younger subgroups. And we know that the current vaccines are having some protective effect against some variants. Will that last...we don't know...but so far it is working. Cheers!

Hi SouthernYankee, please don't take any offense. That argument would be ok if your choice in not taking the vaccine had no impact on others...say like getting a stent put in or not, because you have a clogged artery, or not getting chemo because you have cancer. But this is far more impactful and detrimental than even second hand smoke in how you affect others around you...unless you stay in your home locked up and never seen anyone again. I think that is the main point anyone in favor of inoculation is making...not the statistics, politics, etc. Simply that the more people vaccinated, the less likely vulnerable people will die from Covid by being exposes to others. And we've seen how variants are affecting younger, healthier people...so it is no longer just the old and immune compromised anymore. Cheers!

Amen! Wouldn't that be great. For now, it seems as though this may be an annual inoculation due to the variants of the virus...not unlike the annual flu shot. But we can hope and aim for it! Cheers!