ERICOPOLY

Fair enough. What's your take on the Democrat's reluctance to support the stimulus bill? What do you expect of them? This is politics.

Are you incurious as to why Trump kept saying this is a hoax and a conspiracy against his presidency long after he was briefed about the threat and it continued to spread? Surely you understand there is some mental illness there. The man literally believed this was a global conspiracy against his presidency.

And the rest of the country has the ventilators they need... Bill Barr claims he will aggressively prosecute 'hoarding'. Will he order hospitals with ventilators to share in order to save lives in NYC?

Of course his first priority is himself. He's a narcissistic personality disorder and likely a sociopath. He doesn't care about reopening for "the economy" in general, he knows this current path doesn't lead him to get re-elected, and it's really bad for his hotels and resorts and his debt payments, and if he's out of power it's dangerous that he'll be investigated without pardon power, so he's ready to gamble it all and put all his chips on 15 black and spin the wheel in the hope that this other approach may be better for his election and businesses. He's been incredibly lucky all his life, born to wealth, getting away with all kinds of stuff, becoming president.. He's just gambling with lots of lives and the US healthcare system in the balance that his luck will hold. And he didn't know back then. He's not intellectually capable to have understood the implications when it was still theoretical, and he's surrounded by yes-men and he fires or drives away anyone who's independent-minded pretty quickly. Listen to him talk about any of this and it's just a bunch of word-salad "it's great, going tremendous, big effort"... No real understanding. Even now as people are dying and hospitals are being quickly turned into disaster zones, he's not listening to the people who know what they're talking about, he's driving away Fauci and contradicting his task force on TV and picking petty fights with desperate governors who need federal help. He's likely never even spoke to anyone on the front lines of this and shows zero empathy for anyone dealing with this, only worry for himself veiled in language about "the economy" (which was how he always said he measured his presidency, always talking about stock market records, etc). "it's great, going tremendous, big effort" More like "it's very very great, going tremendous, quite tremendously, big big effort. very big. so big you won't believe but it's there and I'm almost always right about these things."

If Trump said it was a 'hoax' to undermine his re-election chances... shouldn't we invert and suspect that Trump deliberately downplayed the threat to keep his re-election chances alive? 1. We know he was tipped off in Jan by US intelligence, and he now admits that he "knew it was a pandemic all along". 2. The Washington Post reported yesterday that he is focusing on his re-election chances, and that coincides with him downplaying the threat again yesterday. It doesn't look good for our collective chances if his first priority is himself.

NYC will likely run out of respirators at a time when other parts of the country still have idle capacity in their ICUs. People will get in their cars and drive to the nearest hospital with capacity. When will geographic borders be sealed off? Will they or won't they?

1. Fauci corrected Trump in front of the cameras, causing him to lose face. 2. Fauci was not at yesterday's conference. 3. Trump now suggesting he is casting Fauci's advice aside. Is it at least partly about wounded pride?

Just imagine if an Admiral were listened to in a particular wartime situation: http://www.doug-long.com/leahy.htm

Trump is live on CNN. Beep... beep... beep... He's talking about getting things going again after this introductory 15 days is up. Said it will make a lot of corporations happy. Confirms what the Washington Post printed.

However, that rhymes with being right for the wrong reason. He was correct that at some point in the future the market would crash. But he was incorrect as to why. It has (thus far) crashed only to 2016 levels but his comments were from 2014.

I was wondering when Trump would get bored of talking about coronavirus.

The reported P/E ratio was highest in 2009 after the market bottomed. It went to 123x in May 2009. https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/73827/why-was-sp-500-pe-ratio-so-high-on-may-2009

With Rand Paul out and more Republicans in quarantine because of it, the've lot 5 votes in the Senate and the Democrats haven't lost any. What's it going to look like in a few weeks? Rand Paul is asymptomatic, I wonder how long he's had this.

The reason why Europe is such a mess is because the idiots wouldn't listen. The days before national emergency/lockdown orders came through the restaurants/cafes/ etc were full. The virus probably had an orgy with the culture of kissing too. Now the Pence appointment is making sense to me.

1). I have two kids that spend a week at my house and a week at mom's. They go back and forth every 7 days. 2). My wife also has two kids that go back and forth to her ex's household every 7 days on the same schedule, except one of them comes back to our place after only 3 days.. 3). My wife's ex is also remarried, and his new wife has a child that goes back and forth to her ex's household every week, and he is a laid-off painter. 4). My wife's ex is going into work still (the only adult amongst us all who is still working at the office). 5). My ex-wife has rented out the downstairs of her house to a family of 3 and only a curtain seals off the upstairs from the downstairs. The HVAC return downstairs recycles the air back to the upstairs where my ex lives with my kids. Currently my kids are with my ex, and my wife's kids are with her ex. The current custody arrangement of back and forth every week is risky. What custody arrangement makes sense? Yikes.

Rand Paul has it.

Yes, every time I think about the provisions in the Patriot act, it raises my blood pressure. This thing hands the keys to Big Brother. The Federal Govt requires Real ID, and California requires that you give them your finger print during the Real ID application process. So now they can identify every licensed California driver from a photograph showing the underside of your fingertips. In the UK, they busted a ring of drug dealers from the photo in a WhatsApp message showing a bare hand holding ecstasy (they took the fingerprints off the digital image). And while WhatsApp messages are secure, they got the message off of a phone they acquired during a prior drug bust.

Do standard (non-N95) masks aid healthy people avoid infection, prevent sick people from spreading, or both? Nobody knows if they are infected or not according to the idea that people are spreading it without feeling any symptoms. Here in California, I've been sneezing because everything is blossoming. So if I have the virus, I'm spreading it.

There is a lot of information put out there that masks don't help unless you are infected (which isn't helpful since we also are told that you can spread it and have no symptoms), and people are being asked to save them for the hospitals. So they may be doing as they've been told.

This is a golden opportunity to work outside, at a 6 ft distance from each other, and repair roads when there is no traffic. Makes the cost of fixing roads much cheaper if it can just be banged out quickly.

Thank goodness we have our deposits centralized in the too-big-to-fail banks instead of spread across thousands upon thousands of small banks as was the case in the 1930s.

Terrifying speed and identical rate of spread

Yeah, I cannot get toilet paper, so I use $ bills instead. Cheaper too. Reminds me of Beavis:

I suppose if they were willing to give up their Bank charter. And if they weren't a bank, it would free up Berkshire to acquire Delta without worrying about the Fed fretting over a very material commercial relationship... The government wouldn't help Delta if Berkshire already owned them. They'd tell Berkshire to help Delta. So Delta would tie up Berkshire's capital in times like this. So maybe it's worth more operating alone rather than being owned by deep pockets?

Actually, WhatsApp has 2 billion users today and it was 1 billion users in 2014 -- so Facebook bought them for $19 per user and today it's $9.5 per user. Facebook has $26 in revenue per user per quarter. This helps explain WhatsApp's value to Facebook: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/040915/how-whatsapp-makes-money.asp Is it Really About the Money Though? Industry insiders have speculated that part of the rationale behind acquiring WhatsApp was for Facebook to access user’s behavioral data and personal information. With location sharing data, 65 billion messages sent per day and access to users' entire contact lists, Facebook has access to a ton of personal information – all uploaded and saved on its servers.15 While Mark Zuckerberg has previously promised that this data won’t be used to improve consumer targeting in Facebook ads, it will be unless the user changes the settings to not share information with Facebook.