is this the indicator piece from two weeks ago?

guards gives the wrong impression, think shop attendant/waiter/doormen/behllhop instead

every housing complex and office complex has doormen/security (despite being one of the safest countries on earth, people are obsessed with security) but you gotta view them culturally the way we view doormen back home, they aren't there to be physical or threaten people or anything like that

but yeah, they take everyone's temperatures going in and out of buildings so if anyone has a fever they can get tested and isolated until they get results

i agree with the system, i strongly believe it's measures like this that allow me to begin living a normalish life in safety where my parents will be basically living out of a home they've turned into a makeshift bunker for an unknown amount of time

didn't hear anything about wechat in the piece, nor have i seen anything at all related to that - it makes sense though but they wouldn't need wechat to track your location, they'd get much better and more accurate data just asking the telecom company

Data from the Diamond Princess and China show these % have no basis in reality. Diamond Princess currently has a case fatality rate of 1.4%, it still has 15 in serious/critical condition. Italy has a population of 60 million, there modeling suggest that up to 15 million could currently be infected in Italy. If you look at deaths in Italy for the past 10 days, they have not been growing exponentially, let's just assume there are no new cases in Italy for the next month, let's assume there is 15 million infected currently. Based upon looking at the slope of Italy's deaths, and when they implemented there lock-down, I think it is highly unlikely Italy will have more then 30k deaths by the end of April, I actually think it will be lower then 30k, so I am being generous. This gives you a case fatality rate of only 0.2% in Italy, by the way, this is with an overwhelmed medical system where they are taking ventilators away from the old and giving them to the young individuals.

What about much simpler explanation: they are just not as fat as Western nations.

How are South Korea an outlier? They have a 1.65% death rate and climbing (it will end up over 2%), with full high quality medical care/no overwhelming AND a large chunk being unusually young. Experts (which we love! great people!) were quoting them as an outlier/sign of global overestimated death rate at 0.6%, now that they're 1.65% these same experts are giving crickets.

Maybe we can finally stop with the "South Korea is an outlier" meme.

Step aside TS, Best Buddy will take it from here.

ok

Speaking of crickets, what are everyone's opinions on those companies promoting insects as alternative meat sources?

This ToothSayer chap is really starting to wind me up.

I think as a matter of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability, yeah, insects are pretty solid as sources of protein.

But still kind of silly. We're very close to purely plant based food that tastes virtually the same as beef/pork and whatever we're used to. With some molecular gastronomy brought into the main stream, soon we'll be talking straight up synthetically created flavors (or combinations of them) that people find supremely delicious but are not found in nature.

There's not much analysis left to do now except for how bad the US gets, so winding people up is the next best thing. All that's left is waiting for is data on true infection rates now.

The thing we need to start analyzing deeply and can now is what the market/business impacts will be on the other side. I can't see travel recovering to old levels for more than a year, there should be a wave of bankruptcies even after the bailouts as the market simply won't support that many players due to lowered demand. Lowered demand from fear of traveling in >10% of the population, country border restrictions for months if not a year yet, far lower discretionary spending and risky spending.

More interesting and difficult to analyze is if we see prolonged economic impacts and of what sort.

Regardless of what the government does, we'll come out of this 20% poorer this year than last year (purely as a function of economy shut down for 2 months globally plus time to ramp back), and that all comes out of the discretionary and luxury stuff. The loss is paid somehow, and the other side flows into necessities and security first before people become willing to spend again.

This is a giant aside, but during the biotech boom in the early 2000's there was a lot of venture capital money being thrown into startups that were trying to mass produce insects as a protein source, along with a lot of other ideas of how to apply biotech. Nothing ever came from it. I would conjecture no one was able to come up with a way to make it safe, cost effective and scalable.

At this point, it seems like that idea (and a lot of others that were having money thrown at them at that time) is dead in the water, and the most promising application of this type of technology is culturing meat from animal cells.

I think chickens represent maximum protein building efficiency and are a much-loved food source. They're a 3:1 feed to meat ratio which is incredible, and they eat the cheapest feed possible (grain). I don't know how you improve on that with insects, and certainly not with cultured meat which will always be worse on cost than chickens. There was a thread about this a while ago.

the probiotics post was idiotic.

One potentially huge issue that I haven't seen discussed is how all of this will affect students going back to college in the fall. Lots of international students starting to mingle with students from all over the United States.

Virginia Tech orientation starts in July. Move-in is in August and classes (and football) start in September. Students are a massive part of the local economy.

Maybe it's because there is still a lot of time between now and then.

I think cultured meat is just DoA. Plant based stuff is getting a lot more acceptance, including from myself, than I expected. It honestly just doesn't taste that bad at least as substitute for ground meat.

I think it's a matter of time before they come up with a plant based steak substitute. Once they figure out how to replicate the texture of whole cut meats... basically everything under the sun is fair game. $200/lb Iberico ham? Let me just adjust that here and there. Boom.

Sorry. This is my last post on the topic in this thread.

Fair enough. My wife recently went down a "look at how cruelly we treat animals we raise for food production" Youtube video rabbit hole, and became a born again vegetarian.

Since then, we have been eating more and more plant based "meat" and it is fine. Not as good IMO, but passable.

Seems BRK is far more at risk than the SPY short term with the overexposure to airlines and insurance claims stemming from this insanity.

On the other hand, they have tons of cash waiting.

Knowing Buffett, it’s possible he waits until the airlines are on their last legs and buys them all up on the cheap. He’s loved them and oil is dirt cheap now. I think his investment alone makes a total loss through bankruptcy less likely than normal.



I know someone who is in touch with many presidents of major universities (30-50). He told me a few weeks ago most expected doors not reopening until 2021. And he wavered when I asked if that meant Jan 1.

My wife has had a fever for over a week. They just opened up a testing facility around here and we're going to be among the first to get tested.

We'll know the test results in ...

Count on no mass gatherings of any kind until a vaccine arrives. Universities at least have the means to teach online and maybe have small classes, but what about the average middle/high school?

Plenty of kids don't have computers and internet at home, and going back to 1k+ people in a single building isn't going to be possible. People clearly don't realize this yet because everyone just has the next few weeks in mind.

New York DOE gave everyone that asked an iPad or computer to participate in Google Classrooms. To be frank, it's not working very well.

Teachers aren't well trained to conduct remote learning and many students just aren't engaged. Some parents have actually reported they don't have "materials" to do the assignments when the only materials required are:

Crayons
Pencils
Papers

I am sure they'll figure out more systematic ways to equip homes and train teachers for remote learning if social distancing is still happening in July. Probably too late by then though.

This is probably further down the line, but technological innovation could really change the paradigm.

Imagine we all had hand held point-of-care devices that could take a small blood sample and tell us if we had active COVID viral antigens. Or even a less ambitious version of this, where every student and teacher checked in once a week with the school health clinic to get a test.

Given our current technology, I don't see any reason this would be a giant obstacle.

They are already building such machines. We'll have hundreds of thousands of those in... I'd say 6-8 weeks. Millions by the end of the year, if not more.

Problem is we, as in all humans, need billions.

One of my daughters is home from university and taking classes via Zoom. The administration just adopted a policy where classes can be dropped or turned to pass/fail AFTER grades are reported, so I expect to see massive grade inflation.

My second daughter is in high school and classes reconvened via zoom from spring break yesterday. So far so good. It's a private school with 12-16 students in every class and 100 per cent of students have internet access, so it will go fine. APs may be a cluster, and there is some testing adjustment to de-emphasize closed-book exams, but all that is trivial. But yeah, i'm not worried about how privileged private schools deal with all this; I worry much more about giant school districts like LAUSD with a ton of disadvantaged students and massive bureaucratic structures.

gold

It's a huge tech of the future. Simple home tests that check for an increasing myriad of conditions - virus, cancer etc etc.

On food. There's tech coming that will allow you to print a steak. That's an interesting one to watch out for as it becomes cheap and advanced. Push a few buttons and dinner is printed and cooked for you. On a plate.

On kimchi. Delicious!

People should just homeschool. Roughly 70% of the public schools in the U.S are effectively worthless anyways and are run by bureaucrat babysitters. Homeschooling was good enough for Ben Franklin it's good enough for my kids too.