beerbaron
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Posts posted by beerbaron
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I would say think what is the long term objective of China and how they will want their policies to go with that objective. There is a well documented 50 year plan that aims to put China as the premier economic power by 2048.
After you understand that ask yourself if what we hear contradicts the plan or not.
BeerBaron
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6 hours ago, LongHaul said:
Beerbaron - read the Newsweek article Thrifty3000 posted.
After reading this I think the odds that the Covid-19 virus came from the Wuhan Lab are higher than I previously thought.
I would rate the article and A++ and the work of Drastic and A++. It is really amazing.
What are the odds that Covid-19 comes out of Wuhan? - a city that only has ~1% of China's population and also holds the National Institute of Virology.
Much more information will come out in the next few months.
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
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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
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Did you know that by the year 2020 Bitcoin will consume all of the worlds energy?
https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-track-consume-worlds-energy-2020-744036
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
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Did you know that by the year 2020 Bitcoin will consume all of the worlds energy?
https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-track-consume-worlds-energy-2020-744036
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
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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
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"a decade ago he was given 7,002 bitcoins as a reward for making a video explaining how the cryptocurrency works... the contents of his wallet are valued at $240m. But Thomas has forgotten the password that will unlock his fortune. Thomas has already entered the wrong password eight times, and if he guesses wrong two more times his hard drive, which contains his private keys to the bitcoin, will be encrypted – and he’ll never see the money"
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
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Jeez Sanjeev. Thats harsh. Especially when Cardboard does contribute and engage on the investment side of things. Particularly even here on FRFH in a way thats at least presenting differing viewpoints. There's so many others who dwell here that dont do shit or bring even pee wee level investment insight to the table. You've generally been fair, but occasionally, IMO, things like this go overboard. You've said for the better part of 4 months now that the new website will be up and no politics. And that until then, this site is what it is. The covid thread was allowed to be a political thread for the entire year. Getting into macro stuff begs for political pondering; I dont think thats unreasonable. Of all the shit Ive heard from Cardboard, I think banning him for this is quite petty. Sometimes its Jeckyll & and Hyde with you in regards to the bans....I say this wondering if this will be my last post as well, even though I am certainly not crossing any lines with what I am currently writing.
If you dont think Prem's bearishness up to 2016 and then bullishness(under Trump) wasnt somewhat politically inspired....then I dont think you're assessing the entire picture in a thorough manner. Even if it wasnt, it certainly isnt outside the realm of consideration to try and account for that going forward. Will Prem be bearish under a regime change with the rumored objectives? IE increase taxes and greater social programs plus widespread debt relief? If you invest in fixed income this is very relevant. FFH invests in fixed income.
But its your site, you do what you want. I just question whats the purpose? Investing? Or something else? I can probably list a dozen people ahead of Cardboard on the "they offer nothing" if the goal is to build an investing community....but maybe Im missing something.
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
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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
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Anybody tracking mRNA's vaccine trial enrollment rates? I am pretty upset that they used to enroll 4-5k patients per week but has been super slow since mid September. It is down to 2k a week and then 1k a week.
https://www.modernatx.com/cove-study
With nearly 3 million volunteers signed up for COVID vaccine trials, I don't understand why this is the case except for intentional delays.
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
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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
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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
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Crypto grew up in the tech community – as the shiny new toy, all very mysterious, very cool, and relatively simply to code. We think currency, because of the success of Bitcoin - the first practical, fully libertarian currency. Combined with options, BTC is by far the ultimate solution for low volume, completely off the grid, anonymous transactions. The innovations are the DL and the Smart Contract.
By itself, at the volumes required for practical applications - DL is utter sh1te.
Block verification takes too long, sucks up too much energy, and the mining community is not independent. It is technology with a VERY limited market – the $5 mouse-trap in a 10c market.
Almost all practical applications run on a monopoly PL – a master data base integrated with smart contracts. The PL is just another business funded IT project - business ‘tells’, IT ‘executes’. There are no miners, no utility token sold for cash to pay the coders and developers, and no buy/sell of token as investments. Grown ups rule.
For most businesses a PL integrated with smart contracts is becoming essential, and many will just outsource to a cloud provider. What used to require a cast of thousands, and millions of $ – is no longer a barrier to entry. However, the mind set is completely different – coders and developers just don’t have it.
The deal-breaker is the corporate social responsibility around implementation.
The initial annual cost for a very modest business may be the equivalent of 3 staff, excluding benefits – but save the cost of 5 staff including benefits and RE space. Assuming 50K/head and 25% benefits – about 162.5K/yr, excluding RE savings. With Covid-19 likely to be with us for some time, and most economies in various phases of ‘re-start’ – not enough to warrant laying people off tomorrow, and in quantity.
Obviously, interesting times.
SD
What do you mean by DL and PL?
Thanks
BeerBaron
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No spike in deaths relative to the number of cases in the US.
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
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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
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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
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A startup I am investing in is looking for expert virologist for consultation on how their product may be made to be used for Covid. Please private message me if you have the qualifications and are interested. (Might be small chance, but decided to ask.)
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
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This might cool off some heads.
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/04/university-finances.html
BeerBaron
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Yeah, the closing date is in a week so in a week we can celebrate.
BeerBaron
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Auction Buyback Announced
in Fairfax Financial
Posted
Cevian, there was literally 5 pages discussed in this thread, it's not like you were not warned. Reminds me times when I sat in meetings and nobody around the table remembered seeing a memo, although it was directly addressed to all of them the day before.
BeerBaron