Liberty

And everyone would lose. No, Liberty (the concept) would win. ;) How naive you are. You think China would come out of a world war more democratic? You think liberty in the US would increase in the face of nuclear war? You think Taiwan wouldn't be potentially destroyed? You think dead people are free?

The definition of lying to some of the people all of the time. So trashy. Well, they can't fake the all-count deaths, at least (yet). Of which we have ~65,000 excess deaths, broken down by weeks ending: 3/28: +4,300 4/4: +12,900 4/11: +20,000 4/18: +17,500 4/25: +10,900 Trump has always only cared about how things look. That's why he gave gossip to journalists for decades with the only condition that they refer to him as "billionaire Donald Trump" even if he wasn't a billionaire, played a successful businessman on TV even though his businesses were terribly run. He wanted Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden, didn't care too much about the result, talks like a tough guy even though he's always run away from danger and has the thinnest snowflake skin around (remember when he sent photos of his hands to that journalist for years after he mentioned he had small hands?). Wanted photos ops with medical ships and at some Apple factory in Texas, didn't care that the ship wouldn't be used or the factory already existed and he wasn't really opening it, etc. This is more of the same. He figures if he can change the number, that'll be good enough and much easier than changing the actual health crisis, which he doesn't have the intelligence, competence, discipline, follow-through, empathy, team, etc, to affect much in a positive way.

Focusing on the important things: https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-pushes-cdc-to-dial-down-covid-death-counts

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/ Also:

And everyone would lose.

Because a lot of Chinese corrupt officials have their kids and assets parked in the US. If the war starts, their assets will be counterfeited by the US government. They will do everything they can to stabilize events. Seems like that's not gone and not zero, but I agree risk has been increasing. Just don't think it ever was zero. US has also tremendous dependence on Taiwan for electronics (TSMC, etc), and would hurt itself a lot in any conflict, like China.

Why do you think it was 0% before?

Herbalife seems like one that doesn't contribute anything but takes from (mostly) poor people.

Druckenmiller interview at the NY economic club from a few days ago: https://youtu.be/wKwoMuB2Tck

Leadership: UK vs New Zealand:

Trump knows better than everyone about everything: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/13/coronavirus-trump-says-faucis-warnings-about-reopening-are-not-acceptable.html

Good piece by Gavin Baker, I recommend it: https://medium.com/@gavin_baker/scale-and-loyalty-are-more-important-online-than-offline-which-drives-much-of-the-winner-take-992345be93a9

Thanks Obama:

(thread)

Of course even the UFO conveniently-timed distraction was BS:

I enjoyed this interview with Hanzi Freinacht: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/hanzi-freinacht-2/ It's the second one with this interviewer and I haven't heard the first one yet, but it's probably also good and I intend to listen soon. https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/hanzi-freinacht/

That's an important "but" that can't be hand-waved away. A lot of antibody tests had false positives in the 50% range, depending the population being sampled (it'll be higher outside of the major outbreak zones). That's way too high to be very useful.

For that, randomized antibody testing studies would be better. Depends what the false positive rate is. It's one more data point, but it shouldn't be given more weight than it deserves.

They're apparently going to tests 11m people in the city within the next 10 days. https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/chinas-wuhan-plans-city-wide-testing-for-coronavirus-over-period-of-10-days-sources

I think that is 100% right. It wouldn't cost anything if they distributed N95 masks at cost for all Americans to the pharmacies and people paid cost. That is what South Korea did. They are smart, I give them that. Masks would be an incredible high ROI. I actually just snail mailed some mask research to the most powerful person in the free world - The first lady - Melania Trump. We will see if she is able to get through to Trump. At least more and more people are slowly getting there and wearing more masks. I linked earlier in this thread to an economics paper that calculates the prospective value of masks, cloth, surgical, and N95. Each mask is worth thousands of dollars in expected value because the crisis is so expensive that anything that reduces the R0 and the time it lasts by even a little is worth a ton. Is was obviously the right thing to do 2 months ago to use the DPA to launch large-scale mask production and to encourage everyone to make cloth masks and wear them (like the Czech did). Edit: I found it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ua7j979dbqb045/masks_final_n_HF_NA.pdf?dl=0

One Irish doctor's take on the concept of herd immunity in this context:

I complete agree. They simply aren't available though and there is no way that Trump is going to order the production of them such that we can all have several when he has not even admitted to a shortage of them for nurses. Everything is so confusing about the federal government lately, but am I right in thinking that despite him saying multiple times that he'd use the defense production act, he never actually used it to produce more masks on a large enough scale to make a difference? Or did it happen and I just missed it?

Article about Hong Kong, and how a lot of it was bottoms-up and not from the govt: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/how-hong-kong-beating-coronavirus/611524/

https://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=AC BRK.B down by 83% and BRK.A down by 93% in his latest 13F.