Castanza

What if this administration worked as hard at trying to contain the virus (like how almost every other country has done) instead of trying to contain information and science and play propaganda games? Are there any numbers on beach goers for the past two months? Haven't been able to find any detailed numbers. Might be an unpopular opinion, but the protests certainly aren't helping. An estimated 26 million people have participated. Not advocating for Trump, but what exactly is he supposed to do when the majority of lock down orders and "mandates" come from the state level? I agree with you on the concerns of the suppression of information you listed above. This past month and a half has been quite the catch - 22

It is bullshit. Don't know if the tweet is deliberate misrepresentation or incompetence, but given its fox news reporter, it probably both. I would not recommend following twitter accounts of fox new reporters for accurate reporting. See the source here (linked in the fox new article) and specifically the table from page 25 onwards for testing by laboratory - http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/covid19_report_archive/state_reports_latest.pdf 1. The testing results by lab is sorted high to low by # of tests administered and columns show # inconclusive, # of negatives and # of positives as well. It is clear that > 90% of the data is reporting correctly all numbers - inconclusive, positive and negative numbers. 2. Not only that, this is a long tail where the first 50 or so labs (page 25) account for ~ 80% of the total test results and are correctly reported. Infact, the top lab 10 labs itself report ~ 2 million tests. 3. There are labs reporting 100% positivity (not reporting negatives - they start to show up on page 29) but they are conducting very few tests comparatively. 4. Lastly, a lot of labs have reported conducting a total of 3 tests or less (page 40 on-wards). That is a very low number of tests and it is actually quite likely that all of them turn out positive or all of them turn out negative. This is because sample size is small. In fact, many labs do report 0% positivity when # of tests are very few. Vast majority of data is solid and of-course there are labs that do not report accurately but their influence on the data is rounding error. Thankfully the FL state health dept is still competent and not yet overtly political. I don't follow it, just saw it as a re-tweet. Makes sense though, thanks for the deep dive. There has been a lot of fake stuff going around regarding testing results as Liberty pointed out above.

Most likely bullshit. But would be crazy if true.

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BRK, USB, BAC

I like AFL a lot too. I owned it a long time ago & sold for a nice gain, then forgot about it until recently. A decade ago, they were getting nearly 80% of their pre-tax earnings from Japan. They made their bones selling supplemental cancer insurance policies in the only country to have 2 nukes dropped on it. For years, I was perplexed by the fact that they've bombarded the US with TV ads & didn't seem to be making inroads but the geographic revenue mix has started skewing towards the US market. I also like that their payouts are fixed & non-negotiable, unlike P & C & health insurers (correct me if I'm wrong here) & they do cover payouts for covid. Most premiums are made through payroll deduction so yeah, the threat to near term earnings is real. They could also experience problems with their investment portfolio in a serious deflationary environment. As per the March 2020 conference call: "we have identified approximately $1.4 billion of middle market loans, most exposed in the current environment and have stress tested $1.3 billion of transitional real estate. While this economic crisis is unprecedented and predicting the trajectory of the economy and recovery is difficult, we have taken a pretty bearish view in our credit stress test. For instance, we have assumed an extremely severe second quarter drop in economic activity of 30% to 50% with just a modest pickup through year-end; revenue declines of 30% to 80%, depending on the specific sector and company; losses on our most sensitive below investment-grade and middle-market loans of up to 20%; oil prices staying below $20 for most of the year as demand slowly recovers. Let me emphasize that the impacts to the global and U.S. economy are going to be highly volatile and very difficult to predict. We will continue to evaluate as more economic information becomes available, along with the impacts to the sectors and companies in our portfolio. Our loss analysis estimates approximately $680 million in pre-tax potential losses. This equates to approximately 100 basis points of potential losses on our total fixed maturity and loan portfolios, of which fixed maturity corporates are 72 basis points." --- Here's a very good report from 2012 that lays out every aspect of how they operate(d). https://www.aflac.com/us/en/docs/investors/fabbook2012_06222012.pdf Thanks for sharing your thoughts

AFL starter - seems cheap, divy looks solid, Q1 looked pretty good This sector does make me a bit nervous right now. Premiums collection could get hammered if unemployment remains high for a long time. Anyone else look at this lately?

AWS and Azure are not as “cheap and convenient” as people think. I’ve worked first hand with dozens of clients this last year who say they’re switching only to have them come back in a few weeks with their tail between their legs once they see the price and quality of service they get. AWS specifically nickel and dimes the hell out of customers. As a result I’ve seen a lot of clients in large companies instead build out their own IT and private cloud infrastructure in house! Now, I can’t say this is true for everyone. AWS and Azure are great products. But they have some work to do on their pricing and subsequent service offering.

PNC

I was thinking about this today. Tried to think of a positive situation. - High School graduates this year and the next few years may entertain the idea of not pursuing college right away or at all. - Could help sure up the lag in filling blue collar jobs. - Potentially change the financial mindset of an entire generation. - The plethora of BA. BS holders looking for employment may benefit if there is some lag in upcoming college graduates. Basically give them some more time to filter through the system (if the economy up ticks)

As far as a vaccine goes and whether or not people will get it. I think the Supreme Court case Jacobson vs Massachusetts will come into play at some point https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/

Not to mention even if schools manage to get solid systems and software in place for online learning there is still the issue of teachers themselves. Online teaching is a whole different ballgame. Throw in teachers over the age of 50 who have been in the classroom for 30 years and their effectiveness dwindles. Here in PA a ton of my coworkers pulled their kids from school and rushed them to PA cyber school simply because the teachers are at least trained for online learning. You're missing the point. The school system besides other important things is a giant day care program to look after kids while parents go to work so they don't become delinquents. It doesn't work online. It needs to be physical. What? I agree with you. I was just saying a lot of parents I know are anticipating the lock downs again and are trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

Not to mention even if schools manage to get solid systems and software in place for online learning there is still the issue of teachers themselves. Online teaching is a whole different ballgame. Throw in teachers over the age of 50 who have been in the classroom for 30 years and their effectiveness dwindles. Here in PA a ton of my coworkers pulled their kids from school and rushed them to PA cyber school simply because the teachers are at least trained for online learning.

He has a bunch of other lectures and interviews on YT which are even better and more in-depth. Lots of pictures from his days in the KGB as well.

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WFC, PBCT

Depends on what's a "reasonable time frame". The time frame I see most often in the media is 12-18 months. It's hard not to be doubtful of that claim. From what I at this point we have the knowledge and capability to pretty much make any (most?) vaccine in 12-18 months. So I'm not so worried about the time frame. What I'm worried when it comes to the vaccine is: 1. Will it be any good? 2. Will the moron internet people actually get vaccinated? I am by no means an anti vaccination individual. Get your vaccines and trust science. That being said, I don’t get the flu vaccine every year, and a vaccine produced for a virus we don’t truly understand does give me a bit of pause. I’m pretty much extremely low risk for covid to begin with. I probably would get it anyways, but seeing a vaccine rushed to market without any significant length of testing/long term effect analysis does make me think twice. There are people on here saying that hydroxychloroquine hasn’t been tested enough and verified with long term effects. Wouldn’t it make logical sense to be just as hesitant regarding a vaccine?

Depends on what's a "reasonable time frame". The time frame I see most often in the media is 12-18 months. It's hard not to be doubtful of that claim.

Does anyone believe a vaccine will be developed in any reasonable time frame? Sure, necessity is a great driver of innovation. But as far as I'm aware, not a single RNA vaccine has ever been approved for human use (correct me if I'm wrong on that). That includes former attempts at a vaccine for SARS. I guess there could be some extenuating factors that contribute to the lack of RNA vaccines other than current scientific understanding. Lack of funding, potential profit, and general interest from big pharma/govt entities could be factors as well.

Pre-civilized humanity was pretty interesting in terms of life expectancy. It was essentially a tri-modal distribution: lots of deaths around birth/infancy, around 25-30 (usually dying of tooth infections), and the remainder actually living into their late years (50s, 60s, 70s). Sources? 8) I'm not gonna dig it up for you, but I know that Sweeden has kept good mortality tables going back a long time. I was really surprised when I first found out. Big surprise, life expectancy isn't really increasing by much and it isn't increasing more than before. I did dig a bit, see my edit. And it's not as good as the "ancient humans lived to old age just fine" crowd presents. Sweden mortality tables clearly do not cover pre-agricultural society either. Edit: I have to acknowledge that I'm not an expert in this and 5 minutes of Google may be uncovering as much mis-information as information. Unfortunately, I am not sure anyone else on this thread is an expert either. So knowing what's true and what's debunked by scientific community would take much longer. I think I'm gonna cede the podium and not try to reach a definite conclusion. Have fun. Edit2: Actually, screw it. I pretty much believe these folks: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy And they show it's not just child mortality that affects life expectancy. They don't cover the pre-agri societies though and they only have long data from England (and the data you mentioned from Sweden in another graph). So FWIW. 8) Life expectancy, it seems, started to improve with the industrial revolution but urbanization conditions were very poor and a significant part of the improvement (on top of more available calories and general conditions) simply came from better (water) sanitation. https://scholar.harvard.edu/cutler/files/cutler_miller_cities.pdf TL;DR version: The gist of this thread is how to deal with excessive dietary affluence but a real game-changer happened when people stopped drinking their own feces and i shit you not. Hulu recently had an interesting documentary series called “The Food that Built America” was pretty interesting from both a historical business perspective and a dietary/health standard one. As with most significant inventions, they are born out of necessity.

I eat the same thing every day for Breakfast an Lunch Breakfast $15 a week - Steel cut oats - Black Coffee - 3 egg whites - 1 Whole egg - Banana Lunch $15 a week - A whole plate of raw spinach (no dressing or toppings) - Lean meat (chicken or venison) usually grilled and prepped for the week. Dinner (Probably $45-80 depending on the week) - Whatever my wife thinks sounds good. - pasta, steak, shrimp, grilled salmon, burgers, dogs, grilled sausage, tacos, sweet potato, salad etc. When my wife works (3-4 nights a week) I generally just eat breakfast for dinner, leftovers, or I stand at the fridge and eat a deconstructed sandwich like a schmuck.

FWIW, it looks like there is some footage of the incident and the aftermath that has surfaced on various websites. However I won't share them here, but if you dig hard enough I'm sure you can find them if you really want to see them. All I will say it, there were plenty of bullets exchanged.

Congress needs to pass the PRIME act. Vegas had an interesting situation. Apparently many farms around there rely on food scraps to feed pigs. Well with everything closed the pigs were not getting enough food and beginning to starve. Since these pigs were not a specific weight the farms were not allowed to slaughter them for consumption. Instead, they had to euthanize hundreds of thousands of pigs and discard them. This is happening all over and I personally know a farmer who has been dumping milk on the ground because schools are closed and he can't sell the milk directly to individuals legally. And he had to euthanize 2,000 pigs for similar reasons. I helped him spread the milk (now used for fertilizer) on his fields a few months back and good lord there is nothing worse smelling than that. From what I understand, pigs had a similar situation to oil where there was no available storage and with processing facilities closed farmers around the country were forced to euthanize millions of pigs. Pig farmers don't really have a way to store excess pigs since farms specialize in age groups and once pigs age out of the farm they go on to the next farm or to the processing facility. A really unfortunate situation compounded by a number of laws that prevent farmers from selling pigs directly to consumers, butchering them themselves, or for smaller processing facilities to sell to consumers. I think when there is time government at all levels should take a serious look at some of the food laws that have been enacted for our "safety". Federally regulated processing plants are a clear chokepoint in the system. Food waste is heavily driven by regulations. Go to any education center cafeteria and ask what they do with the leftovers. 90% of them will say they have to trash to food. They can't even donate it to homeless shelters for the most part. Craziness

Congress needs to pass the PRIME act. Vegas had an interesting situation. Apparently many farms around there rely on food scraps to feed pigs. Well with everything closed the pigs were not getting enough food and beginning to starve. Since these pigs were not a specific weight the farms were not allowed to slaughter them for consumption. Instead, they had to euthanize hundreds of thousands of pigs and discard them. This is happening all over and I personally know a farmer who has been dumping milk on the ground because schools are closed and he can't sell the milk directly to individuals legally. And he had to euthanize 2,000 pigs for similar reasons. I helped him spread the milk (now used for fertilizer) on his fields a few months back and good lord there is nothing worse smelling than that.