brianr27

Sanctions are an experiment in loss aversion. Putin's control over the media may enable him to deflect the anger towards the west. If he's unsuccessful in deflecting and he's overthrown, the outcome is very unpredictable.

Russia is badly damaged by this conflict. It's clear that Russia doesn't know how to execute a 21st century war where the world participates on social media. The world is seeing in real time the incompetance of the Russian military. I don't know if the images of tanks being towed by tractors and helicopters being shot down are real but they are destroying the image of Russian military superiority and emboldening adversaries. Russia's partnership with China looks very unbalanced. Russia's position is extremely weak and vulnerable to Chinese demands. China's supply chains gain an advantage in access to raw materials. The sanctions will drive up input costs for every other major manufactoring country. The EU is temporarily aligned with the US on security. This probably won't last given the EU's dependency on Russian oil and gas. A big question is whether the Ukraine will be able to accelerate developing their own oil and gas in the Black sea. This would be another major problem for Russia. I think that China is going to come out stronger. Their supply chains will have an advantage in access to raw materials from Russia. The sanctions will drive up the input costs of manufacturing for everyone but China. Japan and South Korea will be disavantaged. The US will import more than ever from China.

Clearly Munger does not view the CCP and regulations as risks. He's on record supporting the CCP's proactive interventions and believes that they are benefincial in the longer term. The US tends to allow problems to grow unconstrained for too long (e.g. dotcom, GFC, crypto) and the longer you wait the more costly they are to fix. In a recent interview, Ray Dalio placed the odds of a civil war in the US at 30% in the next decade. That may sound far fetched but it's not clear to me that the US is going to anymore politically stable than China in the coming decade.

My guess is that contact testing will require widespread testing. Anyone flagged as at risk via contact tracing to be required to self-quarantine until they can provide a test result showing that they are not infectious. Ideally, the person would take an at home test and submit the results but that could be open to tampering. A less ideal option would be that the person would go to a drive through, show an ID and be certified non-infectious.

You are missing the great companies from 2029 ;)

This doc offers a clear set of phases with the milestones that need to be hit on path to recovery: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/National-Coronavirus-Response-a-Road-Map-to-Recovering.pdf In the US we're clearly in phase 1. Phase 2 is probably sometime in early May based on this model: https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

"another of the biggest factors in whether a virus becomes seasonally recurrent is whether it reaches a level of transmission that is pandemic (prevalent everywhere) and endemic (circulating constantly in local human populations)." This article discusses whether COVID19 will be endemic. Does that mean that drive through testing clinics, home testing kits, social distancing and travel restrictions would become part of everyday life until vaccine is in place across much of the US population as well as in many other parts of the world? https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/flu-comes-back-every-year-will-coronavirus/

www.inoreader.com