USA is a "rich but poor" country, you dont realize it till you travel abroad and live in different places

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) March 24, 2020

One of the reasons so many Americans are all “USA! USA! USA!” is because most never travel overseas.

Do that, and it’s like jumping 50 years into the future. Most Americans have no idea just how far behind the US compared to much of the rest of the world.

About the economy, the Republicans are accidentally correct for selfish reasons. All they care about is the stock market and their wealth, not deaths or helping anyone.

But the “liberals” are awfully fucking wrong because they have no idea how the economy works, nor do I have time or inclination to educate them here. Yes, I do own stocks, but I don’t care about that very much. The idea, though, that we’ll suddenly and radically re-order the economy in a few weeks or months to prevent the worst is just utterly delusional.

The world always presents difficult choices. That liberals want to pretend that isn’t the case so they can posture as righteous at the moment doesn’t mean that’s less true. It just means they care more about moral preening than they do about making tough decisions.

Unfortunately, now is the time for difficult decisions — and since the liberals seem only to care about wailing on the ground like contumacious children rather than making those choices, other will (as usual) do it for them.

Seeing all these people on Twitter thinking we can just pause everything for a year or 18 months — just wild, like people believing they’ve been abducted by aliens. Most of them will be dead in a year or two if we do that — and not of any virus.

I wish economics in general weren’t in such a poor state, as more people really need to learn something about it.

The choice is not

a) everyone stays home, economy hurt
or
b) everyone goes out again, economy fine

it's

a) everyone stays home, economy hurt
or
b) everyone goes out again, millions die, hospitals collapse, social chaos, economy hurt just as bad if not worse

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) March 24, 2020

I don’t think these are the choices. False dichotomy. Covid-19’s fatality rate, while higher than the flu, is probably overstated. More and more evidence is pointing that way. I disbelieved this at first but the evidence is becoming more clear.

Germany for instance has reported 24,000 cases with a death rate of 0.4 percent. Chances are very high as well that there are loads more barely-symptomatic or asymptomatic people out there so my guess is that the fatality rate in Western countries will be somewhere around 0.2-0.3 percent when the final tally occurs.

Note that the death rate in Italy is so high because they only test when symptoms are severe, etc., meaning they miss most infections.

The real solution is nearly-ubiquitous testing, tracing and social distancing/quarantine for those positive or confirmed exposed.

Otherwise, there will be many millions dead as the economy utterly collapses in 2-3 months, as that is exactly what will happen. The people who disbelieve this have zero understanding of how the economy works or what its weak points are.

I’d suggest we practice social distancing for another 2-3 weeks until testing ramps up, get masks distributed (yes, they do work), do test and trace and then start up the economy again. Otherwise, we’re going to have 20-50% of the population starving in the streets.

And you think the pandemic is bad now, wait till we have 500,000 people living in Central Park in tents or rougher than that. Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet compared to that.

Anyone talking about 9-month or 18-month-long lockdowns in the US is absolutely delusional. No matter what the economy will have to be restarted in three months maximum or we’re looking at 40%+ unemployment rate and people starving in the streets.

Because we’ve hollowed out so much, the US is not an economy that can possibly withstand a 9 month lockdown and now’s not the time we can change that.

I’m not talking about morality. I’m talking about practicality. If we want the economy to be capable of restarting at all, it has to be initiated within ~3 months or forget it. While this aggravated stoppage might be good for climate change, I’d guess it will result in 20 million extra deaths in 2-7 years if no economic restart within 3 months.

Now is when you’re really seeing ideologies catastrophically failing. Signs are everywhere. People are deservedly blaming the Trump administration for its failure to respond to Covid-19, but how much time was lost to all the “liberals” claiming that social distancing and avoiding handshakes was racist? How many more infections were caused by assertion of the right to do as one pleases no matter what? Note that I heard this pronouncement just as much from progressives, especially at first, as I did from those on the right.

There’s no discrimination now in dogma disintegration. It’s a buffet of ruination and none are immune. In reality, the liberal (in the general sense) dominates all, even those purportedly on the right. This ideology won and the only real protests are at the edges, marginal.

The pandemic is just accelerating the dissolution of what was already fraying on its way complete breakdown.

What’s your point? 2 grams of caffeine can kill you too, but no one is planning on prescribing that much.

This bullshit is why everyone hates and doesn’t trust the media. They are trying to create fear for clicks with misleading and irrelevant info.

You people truly suck! https://t.co/HU2KtD37TW

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 21, 2020

Can’t believe I’m embedding a tweet from Donald Trump, Jr., but he’s correct in principle. The LD50 of caffeine is more like 10-20 grams depending on weight, though, not 2 grams. Two grams would be enough to kill most kids, however, as they are both more sensitive to it and weigh less.

Dose matters. You can even overdose on water. And yes, people do die from water overdoses.

Here’s how my arm looks now:Compared to five months ago:Terrible lighting in that first one, but notice the greater size and definition there — and I’m not even flexing half as hard in the first one as in the second one because my tendons were sore. If I fully flexed as I was in the second one, I’d look quite a bit bigger.

I am also noticeably stronger now. It’s slow but it’s happening.

Wall Street’s Crisis Began Four Months Before the First Reported Death from Coronavirus in China; Here’s the Proof.

Indeed it did. This was not at all reported in the general press, but it was well-known in the market community. There’s a reason I sold some underperforming stocks months before I’d ever heard of Covid-19. I wanted the free cash for what was to come.

What was to come has now arrived, and it’s so much worse because of Covid-19 — but anything could’ve triggered it.

To be clear, I don’t sell many stocks. My strategy is generally very Warren Buffet-like: I buy good companies at cheap prices and hold them a long time. I don’t sell because I think the market is going to crash. That’s a fool’s game and an excellent way to lose money on both sides of the trade. My predictive power is not that great.

However, I knew something was going to happen soon. All the signs pointed to it, so I jettisoned my losers and mediocre stocks to get ready.