caulfield12

The best countries (in terms of effective testing) have been been at the 2-7% range, correct? On the plus side, it’s better than the national average for the entire country, largely skewed upwards because of NY/NJ. And, drum roll please, the biggest recipients of SBA loans? Ashford and two real estate investment trusts that it advises, Ashford Hospitality Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts, collectively applied for $126 million for 130 hotels and luxury resorts across the country that employed 14,000 people. All three are headed by Dallas hotelier Monty J. Bennett. The companies had combined revenue of $2.2 billion last year. They sought PPP loans for each hotel location with 500 or fewer employees. The companies earlier disclosed receiving $58.7 million in loans for hotels branded with some of the industry’s biggest names, such as Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and Westin. In new regulatory filings Friday, the companies reported millions more in approved loans. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/local-companies/2020/04/26/publicly-traded-dallas-hotel-group-says-its-keeping-126-million-in-small-business-rescue-loans/?utm_content=bufferfdbb6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Quite the list of political contributions during the 2016 cycle from Mr. Bennett, lol...$143,250 to Trump Victory and that’s just the starter. He can afford nearly $400k in political contributions, but can’t manage to take care of his employees? https://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/monty-bennett.asp?cycle=16

One can make an argument that the Trump administration is attempting to stop Bezos....at least that Department of Defense contract worth billions shockingly awarded to MSFT...and now tied up in a lawsuit. Not to mention trying to raise the prices by a factor of 5-6x on USPS deliveries of AMZN packages. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/13/amazon-gets-restraining-order-to-block-microsoft-work-on-pentagon-jedi.html That said, it’s not just Amazon. It’s the very top of the pyramid. Wal-Mart. Apple. Facebook. Google. Netflix. MSFT. They will have so much power, a financial and lobbying influence so disproportionate that the middle and lower class might as well no longer exist. We’re clearly seeing it with the banks favoring their deep pocketed institutional clients as well with two SBA funding rounds. If you don’t have at least a billion dollars, nobody in Washington will pay attention. The only way to fight back is a grassroots effort like Sanders had going strong based on thousands and thousands of small contributors, and actually winning elections (where they proved to be far less effective with their endorsed candidates.) Nevertheless, the establishment neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party wiped out five years of Our Revolution organizing in less than ten days, from South Carolina through Super Tuesday. This despite the fact a majority of the party was closer on most platform issues to the left than the right. For the second presidential election in a row, a majority of Dems don’t even have a candidate they 100% can believe in. This time, however, that and Tara Reade might not even be enough to save Trump from the massive hole he’s dug for himself.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sports/padres/story/2020-04-02/padres-mlb-no-fans-tv-corona-covid The answer is only the Yankees and the Dodgers would make profit from that broadcasting without fans model. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2020/04/17/the-mlb-stadium-revenue-at-risk-for-every-team-if-games-are-played-without-fans/#978e8d27a355 Not so much for the profits of the 30 teams—player costs would be reduced to a certain degree to account for the loss of stadium revenue—but because the loss of stadium revenue would necessitate a radical change in baseball’s revenue-sharing formula, whereby 48% of net local revenue from the previous season is pooled and shared equally among the 30 teams. The top five teams in stadium revenue (see full list below) for the 2019 season—the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants—chipped in more than $250 million combined toward revenue sharing, based on the previous season’s revenue. Several teams on the bottom half of the list—like the Miami Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Kansas City Royals, Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds—each received more than $20 million last season. New York Yankees: $470 million in stadium revenue Boston Red Sox: $366 million Chicago Cubs: $321 million Los Angeles Dodgers: $320 million San Francisco Giants: $299 million St. Louis Cardinals: $220 million Houston Astros: $217 million The White Sox were 23rd at $97 million. Texas, with their new stadium opening, would arguably have been over $200 million as well.

This is a bit misleading. Not going to calculate for each company, but the DJIA is still down roughly 16% on the year, not that anyone will be feeling sorry for the billionaire class. It bottomed out at around 18,000 and now at 24,100 and some change, so about a 34% swing back up.

https://news.yahoo.com/top-er-doctor-treated-virus-122258067.html Heartbreaking story...which all the governors reopening their states would take the time to consider the cost to health care professionals of overwhelming the system.

Of course, if you don’t have access to testing...especially rural counties...which encompasses 80-85% of the state, you can never qualify since Covid won’t ever be verified and you’ll be (expletive deleted) out of luck. But the cat’s out of the bag on how red states are planning on saving money. But I would hardly agree that’s a utilitarian case of the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

We’re never going to get a number...doing so makes those individuals sound like a cross between Mussolini and Pol Pot. It’s simply not the way most of us were raised. To willingly sacrifice so many American lives that were 100% preventable. This is clearly not the same issue as sending transport ships against fortified pillboxes on Omaha Beach.

South Korea and China have similar mobile phone applications. Hyperbole aside, South Korea presents their citizens with a considerable number of freedoms, comparatively. I worked there, so I should know. The ones in China work through WeChat and Alipay (Alibaba’s mobile payments’ platform.) The elephant in the room though...are you willing to allow a government controlled app to track your every single movement through GPS? To provide you a green (okay to work), yellow (warning) or red (must go into quarantine) based on a comprehensive set of data analysis parameters and algorithms? Are all 200 something million American adults? What about seniors or kids without cell phones, much more common in the US than in Asian countries, where absolutely every living soul except my coworker who attended Princeton had a smartphone at the beginning of this crisis. This app tracks your proximity to infected people...or at least those with a temperature...and allows one to access block by block and neighborhood/district by neighborhood detailed information about active cases. The problem is that we are not willing or unable to assign ten thousands (or in the case of China, millions) of trained workers to do contact tracing across the country. Most states with huge problems are on the verge on bankruptcy or insolvency, so funds would have to come from the Federal level to support public health initiatives. Dr. Birx has already basically thrown her hands up in the air and given up...hoping for some near future technological breakthrough on testing. Willingly or unwillingly, the entire country is now just rolling the dice, HOPING to protect the 20% most vulnerable and not to wipe out the other 80% in the process. The problem is that roughly 60% of Americans are elevated risk due to age or health factors. Whatever they do, opening businesses at 20-40% of previous capacity but 80-90% of the previous overhead costs is not going to save the economy. Only science can do that. Not a national salesman, confidence man or cheerleader. Politicians have never successfully confronted the public health crises of the last 150 years, only scientists have succeeded. And that will always be the case. We don’t need political solutions geared towards winning elections in the short term, we need long term investment in this sector so we’re 100% prepared for the next wave, the next year...the next emerging pandemic that’s lurking in a cave or wild animal somewhere in the world at this very moment.

Probably. Germany, Iceland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand some of the other standouts...Singapore before the weakness in keeping migrant/imported laborers clustered together in inhumanely overcrowded apartments due to the exorbitant cost of living space.

Which leads to an obvious point. In a concentrated geographic area less than half the size of California but roughly the same population....we went from January 23rd through April 26th before reopening the city close to 100% (schools, theatres, restaurants still not open.) That’s three full months. The US is still right in the middle of that timeframe...6-7 weeks. Our problems here were primarily concentrated in ONE contiguous area, not roughly 35 different states (with a vast divergence in mitigation strategies) compared to one unified, nationwide approach.

Well, they can’t even get airline passengers limited to essential travel only...because, profits. The Flight Attendants’ union is having to fight this battle, about PPE on planes, about discouraging touristic travel until the virus is contained, etc. They obviously don’t have the choice whether to work or not if they want to keep their jobs.

US intelligence briefing books (President’s Daily Brief) had over a dozen Coronavirus warnings in January and February...Trump has never read a single one, he gets them read to him roughly once a week, but God knows if he actually pays attention compared to Fox News. And something that makes absolutely no sense is blaming China while simultaneously extolling Xi Jinping and his personal relationship with him. The reason for the coverups/secrecy and “fear factor” for local and provincial officials here in Wuhan/Hubei in their attempt to obscure the true scope of the problem as long as possible has everything to do with the cult of personality here that has seen President Xi lift himself up to the highest stature (core leader) of any Chinese official dating back to Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. The two are inseparable. And “China hardly targeted American farmers“...they simply became the victim of the trade war/tariffs. There was no choice at that point but to turn to other sources for soybeans, primarily Brazil. We’ve (the US) spent tens of billions to subsidize those farmers and still are far from returning to their 2015-16 levels. With a world economic crisis brewing, it might take a generation. Almost every small business here in Wuhan has been wiped out, with the vast majority of financial support going to massive, state operated enterprises (exactly like the US government response.)

5.6% isn’t even close to the lowest death rate. It’s much closer to the worst ten than the most successful countries like South Korea, Germany, Taiwan, Iceland, New Zealand, etc. The United States, as of today, is at that exact same 5.6% rate according to the official numbers.

Great, now we’re getting VP Pence to provide his expert opinion on testing, and both Dr. Birx and Fauci are sidelined. Trump, predictably, took no responsibility for the hospitalization increases related to disinfectant. We have HHS Asst. Secretary Admiral Giroir quoting Fauci on testing without him being there. Talk of how the Federal government isn’t ultimately responsible for testing...yet more than half the press conference is extolling the virtues of what they have supposedly done or are doing. Still no idea why reporters don’t call out the President for not bringing up per capita comparisons vs. sheer numbers of tests...guess they’ve given up. ”I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. I built it.” Repeats. “I built the greatest economy thecworld has ever seen.” (Well, GDP closer to 2% than 4-5% doesn’t exactly count....China was at over 8% GDP growth for nearly thirty consecutive years.) The stock market was at 24,000 two weeks ago, btw. Just so obvious that everything is viewed from the lens or prism of November rather than the public health crisis aspect of this whole thing.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/opinions/west-point-graduation-trump-covid-19-hertling/index.html June 13th West Point commencement address looks like Trump’s first big attempt to get back out in public and hold a rally of sorts...in NY State of all places. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52434854 Cadets have been attending classes virtually since they left campus for spring break on 6 March. The president announced on 17 April he would be giving the West Point commencement address this year. According to the New York Times, that came as a surprise to West Point event organisers, who had yet to finalise graduation ceremony plans amid the coronavirus pandemic. In a weekend editorial, the New York Daily News cautioned "there's no reason to believe that New York State, nor the academy itself, is prepared to host a graduation ceremony amidst a pandemic". In a statement, the academy said approximately 1,000 cadets would have to return to campus to pack their dorm rooms, graduate and "eventually move to Army Officer Basic Training".

My mom’s assisted living center in Davenport had a staff member with Covid roughly two weeks ago (supposedly they caught it quickly, not that they would admit otherwise)...but we are just finding out about it now. The Waterloo situation can largely be explained by that plant closure, not sure about DM. Isn’t there a similar beef/pork processing plant in Sioux City? Arkansas was being touted a couple of weeks ago as the perfect Covid response by Trump...

It’s much bigger than testing at this point. This philosophy of deliberately destroying the government from within isn’t a solution that’s currently working well for the majority of Americans...and the rebound of the stock market due to the free money spigot being turned on by the Fed while thirty million are unemployed and major states are being advised to declare bankruptcy is simply not going to be a winning formula, Thursday’s press conference debacle notwithstanding. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/ The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning. We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

Last poll had him tied 41/41 with McGrath. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/senate/kentucky/

Right. It’s all about value-added skills. Coding, quantitative and data analysis, AR, VR, algorithms, cloud computing, IOT, there are all more specialized, white collar positions. The other side of that coin is the challenge for the top 1/3rd of blue collar workers to upgrade their skills before age 50 or so in a way that they become invaluable somehow to their companies. When we have this discussion in class...it’s more about setting parameters that will allow a program to create 1,000 designs in a second, then the architect essentially using their human instincts to choose from the best options, taking into consideration both aesthetics and functionality while creatively developing improvements on the original base design. Collaboration and cooperation vs. competition. Kai Fu Lee has an excellent 15 min. TED Talk as well as recent book on this subject that combines the best of American and Chinese approaches in this emerging field (he started his career in the US at Apple, Silicon Graphics and MSFT). All the middle and high schools here in China are adding AI components to the curriculum these next two years...

Playing these same numbers out for the United States following a similar strategy (see below) as the UK would yield rough 475,000 deaths. (Greg, I haven’t gone outside once since January 20th or 21st, haven’t cut my hair once, haven’t had Starbucks once...just curious, why do you feel that are you facing mental health problems that are especially acute or unique? I could even argue that I’m even in a certain amount of pain waiting to have a dental crown put on after having gone 4 months since the original series of root canal treatments... ) The UK could experience more than 100,000 coronavirus deaths later this year if the government eases restrictions to focus on just protecting those most at risk, according to one of the country’s leading epidemiologists. Neil Ferguson is one of the scientists who has been advising the government in its response to the pandemic. "The people most at risk of death are in care homes or have other health conditions," Ferguson said in an interview with the 'Unherd' website. "I am very sceptical (skeptical) we can get to the level of shielding which would make that a viable strategy,” he said, referring to the idea of easing restrictions for most people and focusing government efforts on those most at risk. "If you just achieve 80 percent shielding -- 80 percent reduction in infection risk in those groups – we still project you’d get well over 100,000 deaths later this year." www.cnn.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/us/coronavirus-trump-chloroquine-hydroxychloroquine.html Prescriptions surged by 46 times normal demand for hydroxychloroquine...for those who continue to believe the President’s words don’t have real-life consequences. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennials-are-new-lost-generation/609832/ What little data exist point to a financial tsunami for younger workers. In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45. Nearly half said that the cash payments the federal government is sending to lower- and middle-income individuals would cover just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults. This means skipped meals, scuppered start-ups, and lost homes. It means Great Depression–type precarity for prime-age workers in the richest country on earth. For Millennials out there, how do you think this current pandemic is going to change your outlook on life, having experienced this twice now in the last 12 years? Besides saving more, investing earlier, paying for everything in cash or at least not running balances on credit cards, rethinking the value of many four year degree programs or graduate school...staying closer to home, attending community college or state schools, more focus practical trades that will be in continuous demand and cant easily be replaced by AI/automation/algorithms...? Less travel/tourism? No longer buying or leasing expensive new/er cars? Eating at home more frequently...more cooking together, time spent with family? More reading and introspection?

At least the Nobel Prize for Economics boosting the sale of Lysol/Clorox... Creating this new “Memorial Day we will largely have this behind us” talking point is curious because 1) the amount of deaths will be significantly higher than 60,000, 2) Trump spent only 4.5 minutes the last week eulogizing the dead and 3) any holiday highlighting deaths and cemeteries, probably not the best idea. Before the states began reopening prematurely, I might have agreed with this vague, open-ended statement. But not so much now. Pretty scary that “we need a technology breakthrough in antigen testing” is Dr. Birx’s current strategy for feeling more confident that we can reopen the country. Maybe a nuclear confrontation with the new/future leader of North Korea will do the trick of distractIng everyone?

Nervous Republicans See Trump Sinking, and Taking Senate With Him https://www.yahoo.com/news/nervous-republicans-see-trump-sinking-160008532.html From the NY Times...and now we arrive at the primary reason for the ending of the coronavirus briefings. That said, the whole grab women by the pu#$& Billy Bush video came out less than a month before the 2016 election, and there was premature celebration and even a sense of complacency setting in from that moment on, through the Comey email findings. Beating any incumbent has never been easy, but the two most recent examples were both tied into economic declines or recessions (1980/1992).

Residents in Connecticut, Massachusetts (GOP governor but essentially a blue state), New Jersey and New York have some of the highest tax bills in the nation. They also pay thousands more in federal taxes than their state receives back in federal funding. In total, 10 states are so-called donor states, meaning they pay more in taxes to the federal government than they receive back in funding for, say, Medicaid or public education. North Dakota, Illinois, New Hampshire, Washington, Nebraska and Colorado round out the list. Among the top four, the negative balance ranges from $1,792 per capita in New York to a whopping $4,000 in Connecticut, according to a new report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Put another way, residents in Connecticut receive just 74 cents back for every $1 they pay in federal taxes. "What the report shows is, when you divide up the receipts, certain states win and certain states lose,” says Michelle Cummings, one of the report’s authors. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/04/23/andrew-cuomo-mitch-mcconnell-blue-state-bailout-coronavirus-intv-cpt-vpx.cnn https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/26/politics/mcconnell-trump-states-cities-budgets/index.html Will Trump Fight McConnell To Get Help For the States?

Is it possible that he doesn’t serve a full term, sure. Bernie Sanders already had a heart attack, and Trump has himself been under extreme pressure this last month. If it looks like Trump is still a threat when it comes to decision-making time, there’s going to be more pressure on Michelle Obama to run as VP, especially if Mark Cuban throws his hat in the ring. The likelihood of either happening has to less than 10%, though. Of course, that kind of complacency is how we got here in the first place, the Clinton campaign’s arrogance in trying to expand the board instead of protecting WI, MI and PA in the first place. At this point, the only thing that really matters is which administration (or future one) was is more dangerous to the health and prosperity of the United States...to me, it’s not even a close call. The fact of the matter is that with Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, Cohn, etc., all gone...the guardrails are completely off and there is just nobody he will listen to other than Ivanka and Jared Kushner. Eventually, a foreign policy crisis will arise and there will be nobody there with any degree of governmental competence to provide a counterweight to the President’s worst, most aggrieved impulses.