Liberty

I'm sure it's more than one thing, and just reflexively taking the contrary position that your opponent is taking is also very common. But usually when it comes to being this wrong and killing your citizens and destroying your economy this many months into a crisis, you need to be seriously dumb and mentally inflexible, IMO. Politics is the mind-killer: All this epidemic stuff should be such a non-partisan issue. I'd be fine if Romney was in charge or if Obama was in charge, they'd do such a better job, and would save the US tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives by the time this is over, and how many millions of jobs and trillions of dollars (both of lost productivity and of government debt)... This is such a big hole that is being dug, it's going to take years to dig out of it and get back to the spot on the trendline that the US would be if they had just copied everything almost every other country did that has a curve that is almost back to baseline...

WOW! They're really going all in on this. Weird! It's a weird mentality that changing your mind is a sign of weakness, rather than a sign of learning. The question should always be, are you changing your mind for good reasons (learned new facts, had new insight) or for bad reasons (polls are changing, following someone else, there's a new fashionable position, it's more convenient for you to think X, etc.)

The IQ-challenged virus-collaborators strike again: https://apnews.com/3db1db2c24ad60d215733cb7820892d5

Just the fact that it's illegal for government officials to endorse products is enough... 5 CFR § 2635.702 - Use of public office for private gain ("An employee shall not use his public office for...for the endorsement of any product..")

They're busy: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCrAzKiBFUQ/ (when I saw this photo, I was sure it was a photoshop job after Ivanka's illegal product ad on her twitter... but this is from his official Instagram account)

Maryland governor on his COVID experience: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/16/larry-hogan-trump-coronavirus/

They didn't waste any time:

Also:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.15.20151852v1 The mortality rate is high of about 25%. The number of days since symptom onset 9 days before medicine administration On oxygen or ventilation at baseline: 67% Many doctors who use Hydroxychloroquine say 1) It works better with Zinc, and optionally Azithromycin. 2) Works when given early but not when given later when symptoms of pneumonia have started. For example Dr. Harvey Risch from Yale says: I think that there has been confusion about treating the cold versus treating the pneumonia. These medications don’t seem to work so well for treating the pneumonia. As early as possible is crucial, within the first five to six days of symptoms. https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/25085/ While I've got you here, what's your take on nuclear fusion? You a fan of tokamak reactors?

Speculation isn't investing, comparing the two generates more heat than light, IMO. Some people *do* win the lotto. Playing the lotto was smart *for them*, ex post facto. Doesn't mean you can know beforehand if you'll be "them".

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.15.20151852v1

Management teams are going to present Q2 like this:

Excess death data for Spain, Italy, UK, Belgium: Also, how crazy is this: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/politics/trump-administration-coronavirus-hospital-data-cdc/index.html 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?

I'm really happy to see this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-mandatory-masks-indoor-public-spaces-1.5647203

Thread on US numbers: Also:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-japan-has-long-accepted-covids-airborne-spread-and-scientists-say-ventilation-is-key/

:-X What do you think would've happened without pardon power/AG saying can't be indicted by Mueller/not testifying/not allowing most witnesses/not providing financial information/not following subpoenas/no senate that doesn't do its job in trial/clearly telling his cronies they'll get pardoned if they don't cooperate with law enforcement?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-03/canberra-free-from-known-coronavirus-cases-sewage-confirms/12418272

Fauci piece in the FT: https://www.ft.com/content/57834c2c-a078-4736-9173-8fb32cfbbf4e

Bill Miller podcast interview: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-07-10/bill-miller-on-the-classical-value-portfolio-podcast

https://apnews.com/a319d390255fbe1836228e8c9a07ea64

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/10/wearing-masks-is-now-the-most-important-thing-for-the-economy-feds-kaplan-says.html "Wearing masks is now the most important thing for the economy, Fed’s Kaplan says" Took them long enough.. Also: site I hadn't zeen before that tries to estimate the R0 in each state of the US: https://rt.live/

A way to scale images would be useful. I always end up with huge images hosted somewhere else that I wish I could resize quickly, and I don't always have the time to resize locally and re-upload somewhere else. You can do it manually per below: {img}url{/img} {img width=XXX}url{/img} I'll give it a try. I tried at some point, but I probably didn't do it right because it didn't work. I use the above all the time. Of course the curly brackets have to be replaced with square brackets. img width=800 img width=400 img width=200 I think I may have used width="X" and it doesn't work with the quotemarks..? Maybe something else. Either way, thanks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And not banning religious assembly either. The US Constitution continues to drive this. People lose all nuance. The very worst kinds of places for spreading seem to be interior places where people are close together, stay there a long time, touch a lot of surfaces, and talk or sing or scream really loud, with AC that recirculates air and pushes it around. So bars seem to pretty much be the worst.. Everybody screaming really close at each other because of loud music, staying there for houses in recycled air, touching lots of common surfaces, etc. Restaurants really bad, but a little better than bars, probably. Churches are pretty bad too, with all the singing and standing close to other people and such, staying there a long time, though not as bad as bars. Exterior things seem to be a lot less risky (I've seen 10-20x numbers vs interior), and if you can keep mostly a distance and wear a mask, probably not ideal, but not too bad. You don't touch a lot of common surfaces and any wind/air flow will make a huge difference. So a sporting event will be worse because people are sitting (touching seats) close by for hours and are screaming (lots of droplets from talking and screaming) and eating/drinking (putting hands close to face, can't eat with mask), etc, than a protest where people are marching in open air and can more easily stand apart and will wear masks. Probably explains why the cities with the biggest protests haven't seen huge spikes despite the time lag yet. But protests are definitely dangerous too. It becomes a question of risk vs reward. If this is the moment when people can finally get some progress on systemic police brutality and racism and change some things, to many it'll be worth taking some risks to get there. This is different from a sporting even, where you're not going to change laws and affect civil rights that may change many people's lives for generations to come... It's a bit like the hong Kong protests, some things are important in a democracy. Just like you don't cancel the election because there's a virus, you figure out how to do it as smartly as possible (which is why Trump is trying to taint the idea of voting by mail despite the fact that absentee ballots have been pushed a lot more by republicans than democrats in the past 20 years and Trump himself voted by mail).

Usual urban legend/conspiracy theory fare. ::) We have a fair :P share of these on CoBF too. Yeah, but we know that Russia is actively planting stories like these, so it could be either one, or started by one and amplified by the other. Their aim is to hurt the US, so disinformation and sowing division are tools to that aim, just like supporting Trump was. You can go back to the report on Russia disinformation in 2016 and this is exactly their style. It's not a conspiracy theory when you know they're actually doing it, even if you can't know for a specific piece of data. But if they wanted to hurt the US, they couldn't do better than convince people that the virus and masks are a political issue and/or a hoax. That'll cost thousands of lives and trillions of extra dollars over what the cost would've been otherwise.