jamesmadison

The grocery thread talks about money, seafood, steaks, and erections. 4 things most of us enjoy. It shouldn't be weird it's popular. Indeed. As opposed to current affairs, which we are all scared to touch with a ten foot pole ;)

Not one reply or comment yet. Odd given how much members are willing to comment on just about anything (Grocery price increases turned into a 10 page thread) ;). May be too hot too handle or just too depressing to contemplate. Or maybe no else wanted to listen to the whole thing, especially given the terrible fidelity. That said, it's pretty unreal to watch someone from 36 years ago describe what's going on (or at least a pretty credible interpretation) as if he had access to a time machine

I think Baldor figured out that they can upcharge by selling directly to consumers. Since restaurants operate on such slim margin, Baldor has to watch their pricing. Anyone who switched over to buying from Baldor is buying in bulk, i.e. 15 lbs of ribeye, they can afford to pay up for the convenience and quality. I think Baldor is increasing pricing to pad their margins. Or there could be a serious sourcing issue for these prime ribeyes from small farms. I have also used Baldor. Have placed 4 orders with them since they started consumer deliveries. I agree that you may be right about their realization that they can raise prices. However, I also noticed that their prices seemed to change with each and every order. I think that they have a much more dynamic pricing model than supermarkets or Fresh Direct, which generally keep things pretty constant in comparison. In particular, the meat prices have definitely increased. I finally went to Costco for the first time this weekend since late February. Their meat prices are better than Baldor's and can be purchased in more manageable quantities. You also need to be careful when ordering from Baldor. In my last order, I purchased a side of strip loin. Was charged for 14.5 lbs. After carving it up, I thought it looked like less. Weighed the individual steak on my food scale. Was 8.5lbs!! Talk about getting shorted. They did credit me, but still not a good thing.

Do you have any graphs of daily deaths? Sorry, that doesn't fit their narrative. You know what they say, however, "wait two weeks" I wonder what happened in late May and early June that could have been a catalyst for the increase?? Of course, “this time is different”, we should not worry about mortality going up because covid is not a real threat, right? Yes please tell me what happened in late May/early June in AZ, FL, TX... Well, if you want to ignore the protests, then the answer is nothing. Nothing different happened. The increase in social interaction has been continuously increasing since the middle of April. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ebb02WuUEAIUcmb?format=png&name=medium Lol! The huge protests in AZ, TX, and FL? Why you leave out NYC, DC, MN, cities in the EU which had by far much larger protests tho? Contradicts the narrative? The cult is strong with this one. Note how cultists can’t even bring themselves to name their Daddy anymore...a sign of shame It's at this point, when someone starts using epithets and insults, that I stop engaging.

Do you have any graphs of daily deaths? Sorry, that doesn't fit their narrative. You know what they say, however, "wait two weeks" I wonder what happened in late May and early June that could have been a catalyst for the increase?? Of course, “this time is different”, we should not worry about mortality going up because covid is not a real threat, right? Yes please tell me what happened in late May/early June in AZ, FL, TX... Well, if you want to ignore the protests, then the answer is nothing. Nothing different happened. The increase in social interaction has been continuously increasing since the middle of April. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ebb02WuUEAIUcmb?format=png&name=medium

Do you have any graphs of daily deaths? Sorry, that doesn't fit their narrative. You know what they say, however, "wait two weeks" I wonder what happened in late May and early June that could have been a catalyst for the increase??

Well, that was a mistake. Everyone knows Flu is seasonal (and experts assume Covid will have a second wave in the fall). The thing that doesn't make sense is that Flu season is over! Even in Arizona and Florida. ???? As are Corona Viruses https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200407164949.htm

Perhaps ... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbTNx76UwAA6mZV?format=jpg&name=900x900 It is very curious that U.S. is the only country showing these dynamics. Canada, as an example, has increased testing but decreased cases and hospitalizations despite reopening. And our cases are also skewing younger. And it is very strange how the sunbelt was largely spared in March but seems on the edge of a major outbreak now. So weird. Are you being sarcastic? It's hard to tell. Regardless, the video literally answers your question. There's no part of Canada that's tropical, while large swaths of the US are. Thus, the US is partially like Italy (NYC) and partially like tropical regions (Tx, AZ, etc.) and we may be seeing the death curves regionally match up.

Agreed. Anyone worried that hospitals are running at 82% utilization doesn't know anything about the way hospitals operate. ICU utilization is frequently 90-100% as well under normal circumstances.

Perhaps ... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbTNx76UwAA6mZV?format=jpg&name=900x900

It's hard to know exactly what's going with the increase in positive testing in the warmer states. There are a number of theories out there. I strongly recommend watching the video below. Assuming some level of immutability of virus behavior, we may simply be seeing what happens in a very large country with dramatically different geographies.

Maybe not a charlatan, but he is a hypocrite. He broke the lockdown rules himself to be with his lover. A definition of a limousine liberal? Not mutually exclusive. He's both. Take a look at his historical record of predicting 7 of the last 1 pandemics.

You stay classy, vinod

Many seroprevalence studies have the same faults as the Santa Clara study. I've read a number of the studies he's included, and the bottom line is, seroprevalence studies are just not a great way of estimating IFR when the false positive rate of the serology tests is so high. NY just has some of the better statistics I've seen available--I just included as a proxy for general IFR estimating. I wouldn't hang my hat on those estimates, but even the population level death statistics show that it's higher than he's estimating. New tests are much more accurate. More serology large scale tests should be done. https://diagnostics.roche.com/us/en/news-listing/2020/roche-highly-accurate-antibody-test-for-covid-19-goes-live-at-more-than-20-initial-lab-sites-in-the-us.html It provides 99.8 percent specificity, Yes, that's my point. We should be looking at serology studies that used high quality tests. Not a meta-analysis of all serology studies (with varying quality in study design and test used). I'd rather read one good study than find the "median" of crappy studies. Agreed. As opposed to what that charlatan, Neil Ferguson, did with his POS useless model in which he used the median of all the crappy outputs to help justify the lockdowns. ;)

Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information. https://www.medrxiv.org/ John Ioannidis is the author of the discredited Santa Clara serology study. There were multiple issues with the study, including sampling bias, not adjusting for the sensitivity and specificity of the serology test, poststratification, and others. This new study aggregates his original study with a bunch of other seroprevalence studies with similar flaws, and gets the same as his original results....but with the same limitations. Perhaps the bottom line is best summed up by Nate Silver: When you look at locations with larger outbreaks, you see worse mortality rates. Why? Because if the false positive rate is 2%, then if the base rate of the population is 20% who have COVID, the error is only 10%, while if the base rate is 1%, it could be 200%. Serology surveys are used to tell us approximately what proportion of the population has had a disease, not typically to estimate the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). There are numerous threads by good sources on Twitter from back in April on this by Trevor Bedford, Natalie Dean, PhD, and many others. One such thread here walks through a number of the limitations: A Columbia statistician named Andrew Gelman discusses the problems here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ Natalie Dean thread here: If you want an estimate based on less noisy data, you can look at the NYC population level deaths and you can calculate some back of the envelope estimates. Pretty clearly COVID hits older folks much harder, but I think the rates are higher than Ioannidis claims based on serology studies. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page Citywide, the death rate is .21% (that's of all people in NY, not just cases), with 75+ having a death rate of 1.57%, 65-74 0.63%, 45-64 0.19%, and 18-44 0.02%. That's on a population level, in a city with an estimated 25% prevalence, these numbers would have to be multiplied by 4 if you want to estimate the IFR, giving you approx 0.84% overall IFR, with subgroups 75+ 6.28%, 65-74 2.52%, 45-64 0.76%, 18-44 0.08%. Based on the data I've seen, those numbers look more realistic than Ioannidis. Your critiques are totally reasonable about his work. With a 2-3% false positive rate and a 2-3% prevalence, who knows what's going on. Are you sure, however, that all 23 studies are similarly flawed? However, I think it's a bit "strange" for you to use NYC - literally the hardest hit area in the entire country (maybe the world?) as a counter-point. Do you really think NYC is a good proxy for the entire country? That seems like quite a stretch. Furthermore, if you are willing to use the estimated 25% prevalence rate in NYC to do your calculations, why are you resistant to using the others? What's interesting is the lack of recent news about sero-prevalence studies. There hasn't been much on that front in well over a month.