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beerbaron

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Everything posted by beerbaron

  1. Thanks for the recommendation. I red the article and placed myself a reminder to revisit in 3 months when the intelligence community has done it's job. At this point I have little opinion, it's quite possible it came from a lab but really the question should be how to make sure it never comes from a lab? Here is my prognostic of the findings in 3 months, I'll post in this thread then. You can claim I was wrong but I'm putting my neck down. US intelligence findings will be: There are circumstantial evidences that Covid might have come from a lab but no solid proofs. Understanding a virus genome is complicated because it changes a lot over time. China has not been cooperating with our investigation so our findings are not strong. BeerBaron
  2. It seems like a very valid question if the Virus was man made in China and was the results of incompetence. But to me its sounds like witch hunt. It is plausible that it was actually the case, and I would not be surprised if it happened, after all incompetence or human error is a function of our species. China, Japan, China, Europe, Russia all made monumental mistakes on projects... , Chernobyl, Mars Climate Orbiter, Challenger, etc... But what I fail to understand is what is the outcome here? First, it's almost impossible that we could be able to take the genome of COVID and come out with great confidence that it was man made. Analysis, peer review, fact, counter facts, etc... this can take 5 years of scientific debate and when we'll be finished all we will have in front of us is a 1000 pages document with a spaghetti of nuances. Nothing concrete will ever come out of it. Most importantly, what's the end game here? Would we go to war with China over this? An why? It's not like they would ever admit it and it's not like we could ever be close to proving this with let's say... 98% certainty. So why do all this if we won't do anything over this? Seems like a distraction IMO. However, you don't need proofs that China screwed up to improve things. Actually if any of you ever worked with Asian cultures you would know that not losing face is way above truth. Give them a way out and they will collaborate with you. The pandemic has made everybody very aware of the risks so we have a good opportunity here to reduce risks. Our focus should be on answering the following questions: How are each country handling their biological labs? Do all labs handling virus have proper procedures in places? How we better secure those labs? Which equipment's and knowhow are critical to making bio weapons and how do we control this? Pointing fingers is not going to help. Identifying the risks and make sure we have a unified approach and proper funding to avoid those BeerBaron
  3. Quite a sensationalized title and only if you extrapolate November 2017's monthly 25% energy growth rate over 3 years (as that part of the article mentions). The full analysis is found here: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Which estimates that today, the bitcoin network uses about as much energy as Chile. On a per-transaction basis, each bitcoin transaction uses 741 kWH of energy as of 2020, up from 686 kWH in 2019. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/) By comparison, 741 kWH would power approximately 497,000 transactions on Visa's network. This is why I don't think Bitcoin can work for high volume of transactions. How could as humanity justify building power plants to support something that can be done 1000000 cheaper in energy. If you are a government that wants to nail Bitcoin for taking over your currency just control the supply of electricity. Furthermore, wait till bad press related to CO2 emissions get there... Farms in China are not powered with solar. Technology will not save Bitcoin, we are already at ASics. Only a major protocol change can do it. Will it happen? Beerbaron It's only "cheaper" when you're only considering energy as a cost input and not wages/time/buildings/marketing/etc. all required for the current financial system On an all-in basis, BTC is cheaper and faster and is getting even cheaper and faster with the advent of new technologies to exist on top of the blockchain so not every individual transaction has to be run through the blockchain. You used to transact in gold/silver. Then we found out its cheaper and easier to transact on the second layer which was paper representing that gold and silver. Then we went even further and found it's cheaper to transact with eltronic blips that represent the paper money that used to represent gold and silver. BTC is likely to be the foundational layer for payments (gold and silver) and there will be improvements and developments on top of it that make it even easier/cheaper to transact in going forward - we're already seeing this. Visa and all their employees do not consume the energy of Chile. Beerbaron
  4. Quite a sensationalized title and only if you extrapolate November 2017's monthly 25% energy growth rate over 3 years (as that part of the article mentions). The full analysis is found here: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Which estimates that today, the bitcoin network uses about as much energy as Chile. On a per-transaction basis, each bitcoin transaction uses 741 kWH of energy as of 2020, up from 686 kWH in 2019. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/) By comparison, 741 kWH would power approximately 497,000 transactions on Visa's network. This is why I don't think Bitcoin can work for high volume of transactions. How could as humanity justify building power plants to support something that can be done 1000000 cheaper in energy. If you are a government that wants to nail Bitcoin for taking over your currency just control the supply of electricity. Furthermore, wait till bad press related to CO2 emissions get there... Farms in China are not powered with solar. Technology will not save Bitcoin, we are already at ASics. Only a major protocol change can do it. Will it happen? Beerbaron
  5. Well, I'm a Director of R&D and let me tell you what you are asking is almost impossible to measure. First, R&D can be applied to anything, to use a baseball analogy, singles, doubles or home-run. Who wins the game depends on skill and luck but you can't measure the skill in a short timeframe, home-run R&D projects takes years to materialize into sales. Furthermore there are companies that are R&D and patent heavy (IBM for example), but in reality their patent portfolio is so broad that they can't seem to be able to enforce their rights. To enforce your right you must have: 1- A rock solid patent. This is rarer than it seems. 2- People that find the infringers. If you are not focused it's likely going to be under your radar. If it's very technical it will very likely go below your radar. 3- A profitable proposition to enforce your patent rights. So how exactly do you spot good R&D spenders? Well the first I'd look at is consistency in market success (singles). If there is a lot of singles that means the product group identifies opportunities for the R&D team to work on. That also means the product teams know when a homerun is feasible. If you can, you should try to identify an all star R&D head. Usually that all star will not be the one solving problems but will have enough leadership to steer the product and marketing group away from technical pitfalls. I' recommend that you read Skunk Works, it's about the engineer that led the development of the first stealth plane. I'd call that a home-run... but it's boss (who was very competent and a legend) told him to drop it. It goes to show that luck and vision plays a role as much as skill. BTW, I take R&D spending at face value when reading annual report, if it's within the industry norm that is fine. Thanks BeerBaron
  6. That is a bit of BS, if could setup a mirror of the drive and try again and again. Painfully long but for 240M I'm sure he could even give it to a firm that would do it for him. That is especially true if the password is somewhat short 12 characters of less. BeerBaron
  7. Hi Greg, I fully understand your feelings. I have no problem if he attacks Prem, me or whoever. But he knows he's been warned countless times about keeping politics/religion/non-investment topics out of other boards/threads. He wanted to piss me off by quoting me...on religion...while the subject was Fairfax in the Fairfax thread. You don't do that. Yeah, once in a while you'll post outside of the Politics thread, but for all intents and purposes you do try to follow the rules, no matter how blunt you get. Cubsfan does too...LC and the liberal contingent do too. But Cardboard not only ignores the rules, he is often the instigator and I've had tons and tons of complaints against him...that I've ignored because he posted here so long. But I can't ignore it forever. If he's purposely going to be a dick, so be it...he's gone! Cheers! Cardboard is probably a good investor but he polluted my RSS feed with political non-sense so much in the last few years that it's image reflected badly on this site. I'll miss it's 5% of investment discussion, but certainly not the 95% rotten leftover. Parsad, you are the Sheriff. It's not a democracy, it's an investment board. Glad you are using your badge. BeerBaron
  8. I'd add that overdose death was trending up big time pre COVID. COVID does not help... but doing A-B is a bit misleading. COVID did not slow the opioids, I'd probably attribute 10-15% increase du to COVID, similar to alcohol usage. I remember a year ago there was a thread talking about opioids epidemics... before COVID. BeerBaron
  9. The anti-Trumpers wont agree, but if you follow the Great Barrington Declaration Herd Immunity is not a strategy, but inevitable. Herd Immunity, Dr. Bhattacharya says is like gravity. The plane is going to come down sometime. The question is how to land safely. This makes the therapeutics and vaccines much more important and only US government with Warp Speed project got them developed very fast. The shortest vaccine development I believe is for mumps with four years. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/31/us/coronavirus-vaccine-timetable-concerns-experts-invs/index.html The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky (April 1st) White House started working on warp speed project with aggressive timelines, and seems to be beating the 18 month time line which it self experts were skeptical. To quote from article "Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious disease expert at NIAID -- which is part of the National Institutes of Health -- said the typical vaccine takes between eight and 10 years to develop. " I'd say warp speed vaccine is something that makes me unwary if that means steps are being skipped. China and Russia are already bragging that they are ahead of the vaccine race. I suspect part of their lead is skipping steps. But what if skipping a step brings death to 0.1% of the population? That's 1.5M death... I'll trust to get a vaccine if all the steps of the stages have been properly respected. Anything else is just rolling dice. Apparently, the FDA is holding their stand toward pressure. Let's hope it stays that way. Trump has little to do with how fast a vaccine gets released... provided he does not force to skip steps. Tests take time and you can't make a baby in one month by making 9 women pregnant. You can however provide funding and make sure the production capacity is ready when it gets approved. But again, any government can calculate the risk/reward over 4T$ deficit VS 10B$ wasted production capacity. I'm sure even Canada, say's to it's pharmaceutical industries, money is no object. BeerBaron
  10. So with the federal govenrment borrowing like crazy and the housing market exploding... How levered are househould and goverments together? Do we have historical data to compare? BeerBaron
  11. Let me bet, other developed countries will get vaccinated at 90%+ rate and be done with it faster than the US. I can't understand the distrusts of the US citizen toward scientists and institutions. Scientific theory, and infrastructure improvement made it so that within 200 years most of us live better than kings on many metrics. Maybe that is just how the CEO of USA conveys it's message, IMO it feels rushed and improvised and that make the population nervous. They feel something is off, or the message is blurred... because as I recall a few years ago the CEO of USA was a bit of a vaccine skeptical. Funny how someone words has a impact on the populace actions much later one. For some reasons, some people fight innovations that have been proven again and again... and again. If the trials have been done in proper form I'll get me, my parents and my family vaccinated without questions. Why would anybody do otherwise? Don't we want to walk in a store breeding freely and see the smile of our neighbors when they feel great? It's in our best interest... just prove to all of us that the diligence has been done and that it's not some kind of banana republic scheme to win our votes. BeerBaron
  12. What do you mean by DL and PL? Thanks BeerBaron
  13. Well, I would argue that it actually did,you are comparing vastly different numbers in a linear scale. Also, you need to average it out a bit. Bottom was ~21K cases. Top was ~69K Cases. Bottom was ~400 deaths. Top is about 1K. So yes there was a spike, but not proportional to the case increase yet. Better treatments and a more testing could be the reason. BeerBaron
  14. I'm not sure what point they are trying to make, how deadly is the virus? Well here are Quebec virus data. Tests Positives Deaths Recovery Quebec 706116 56859 5636 90.0% Texas 2644496 250462 3112 99.88% Goes to show that you can't use a single data point. Furthermore, I've heard for a foreign nurse friend of mine that that in France they only count Covid deaths in hospitals. So IFR would be completely different, maybe similar in Texas. BeerBaron covid one-third death rate of flu in Texas. so hard to understand? The magnitude of testing is completely different. % of population tested for flu in 2019 is .6%; % tested for covid is 8.9%. Going by the same logic the flu has a case fatality rate of 32%. All this is saying is 6 months into the pandemic, covid-19 deaths are 1/3rd of full year seasonal flu deaths. Of course cases were not in Texas until March. So it would be more accurate to say Texas is only 4 months into the pandemic. Also this captures deaths from 1/2020 to 7/2020 which is a lagging indicator by about three weeks. Texas started to see a spike on June 15th. There are 3x as many cases today than on June 15th and non of the deaths attributable to the increase in case load is reflected in the number. So really, this is just a bullshit statistic... Good point, if the deaths are lagging positive by 3-4 weeks the statistic is useless. Had it been stable it could have been used. Corrected Quebec survival rate it's not 99% but 90%! They have had huge issues with nursing homes but still many orders of magnitude VS Texas. BeerBaron
  15. I'm not sure what point they are trying to make, how deadly is the virus? Well here are Quebec virus data. Tests Positives Deaths Recovery Quebec 706116 56859 5636 99.2% Texas 2644496 250462 3112 99.88% Goes to show that you can't use a single data point. Furthermore, I've heard for a foreign nurse friend of mine that that in France they only count Covid deaths in hospitals. So IFR would be completely different, maybe similar in Texas. BeerBaron
  16. What do you mean? Everybody is a virologist these days, look at this thread hundreds of engineers, asset managers and hobby investor debate models. Lol BeerBaron
  17. This might cool off some heads. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/04/university-finances.html BeerBaron
  18. Yeah, the closing date is in a week so in a week we can celebrate. BeerBaron
  19. You are right, it seems the financing is secured. At first glance I thought they were going to offer the notes to a bunch of bankers. BeerBaron
  20. That is excellent. With the disruption in financial markets, I had anticipated that they would not be able to float debt at a reasonable rate. However, this rate is perfectly fine and the amount is only $100m less than what I thought they might need. About a month ago, I listed a half dozen possible elements of a "successful" year for FFH in the context of the recent turmoil. This is one of them. A double-digit increase in Net earned with a mid-90s CR was another. Good to see! SJ SJ Don't celebrate yet, the notes will be offered but there might be no takers at the proposed rate. BeerBaron
  21. Allright, I was having a beer an playing with numbers. I saw that somewhere in Israel they were actually doing group testing instead of individual ones. Basically they had 64 persons spit and then if the group was positive they would test 32, etc... I tough it was an interesting concept, just like a DB works you can find a value much quicker by splitting the pile in halves over and over again. I then went to take Quebec numbers (I live there). Assuming there is 0.3% of the population that has Covid, you don't want the group to be so large that 100% will test positive but you don't want the group so small that it's a waste of resources. If I want about 25% of the initial test to turn out positive, how big should I make the initial group test? Well it turns out it's about 8000. For a population of 8M that is 1 000 tests (Quebec has a capacity of 12K/ test per day). So easily we can test all groups of 8000 on day 1, the next day, the groups that turned positive are split into 4 and so on. Within 11 days we would have tested 8M people, found out the individuals, and we could repeat the process again. 22 days and we would be done with it. Quebec has a capacity of 12K tests per day, so that would not even interfere with the screening of the symptomatic persons. Besides scaling 8000 persons per group what else am I missing here? BeerBaron
  22. I have a kegerator with 4 kegs, have been home brewing with wort pre-made bags for 10 years now. On keg 1 is cider made from apples from an orchard near by. It's close to 6 months of age now and it's surprisingly getting a smoother taste over time. i would not have expected flavors to change in cider in cold + carbonated conditions. On Keg 2 is a Festa Brew White beer infused with dried Hybiscus flowers. For any white beer lovers I'd recommend hybiscus infused beers, they tend to replace any aftertaste for a more floral tone. On Keg 3 I have All dressed beer, which is basically the leftovers from a 22L batch that can't fit into a 19L keg. It actually does not give bad results. Certainly blends in a lot of tones! On keg 4 tomorrow I'll be kegging a Festabrew West Coast IPA dry hopped with 1 Oz Citra. I might add another once in the keg. It really makes the citrus takes come out but ruins the first 5 beers as the leaves did not have time to settle completely yet. I'm fully stocked with 5 boxes 22L of wort unfermented and 1 in the carboy. I should be good to survive the next few months. BeerBaron
  23. I doubt the elephant would be a bank. BRK had to divest banks in the past for legal reasons and I can't think why the situations would be any different today. BeerBaron
  24. Gracias, it feels to me HY is nowhere near where it should be. I would be expecting a greater spread than the the GFC. BeerBaron
  25. Which ones indices are you looking at? I have access to Barclays which has the info on all of their indices. I'm looking to see if it could be worth it for me to move from some equity to corporate or muni bonds. I will especially be looking for companies with high financial leverage that might wipe out the equity but survive after chapter 11. I was thinking spreads for: Muni VS Treasury High Yield VS Treasury Investment Grade VS Treasury BeerBaron
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