MacGyver

As of last week, Iceland was doing wide scale testing - but had only tested 17,900 people. 1% have come back positive. I have no know where that 46% came from - but I have seen data from Iceland suggesting that roughly 50% of those positive cases were asymptomatic. Mind you 1% of 17900 is 179 cases with roughly 90 being asymptomatic. It’s not a large sample group.

I read something the other day that’s stuck with me for a bit. The essence of it was, “turns out Atlas can’t really shrug after all.” The rich, holed up in their enclaves - depend on the masses to bring them their groceries - and then fearfully wipe them down wondering if they might be infected. A lot of us are lucky to be able to work remotely. I know I designed my firm that way. That’s a luxury. But this whole system depends on people showing up and doing jobs that have to be done live and in person so to speak. In remember reading a few years ago that, “if you can’t find a dog, or a cat, or a snake doing you job in a Richard Scarry book, it might not be a real job.” If anything, I think that’s why it’s critical for folks like me to do my part and stay home - so that people who can’t aren’t unnecessarily affected by my carelessness. I hope that when this is all said and done that people will have a better appreciation for all the folks who keep the wheels on this economy. If I’m making wishes - I might wish that we find a way to decouple the 70-80% of our economy that depends on consumers continuing to buy stuff. I appreciate you guys.

I just talked to a friend in New York. She lives in the city - in Brooklyn. She said that all you hear is sirens - all night long - it's maddening. She said that it's so bad there that anyone who can stay in - absolutely is. No one is going out that doesn't absolutely have to.

I'm not the author of the above, but looking at the underlying code, it seems to be live to (n-1) days. So, it should push up to yesterday's data each day. I don't know what time of day that push happens. Here's the underlying source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

I'd almost guarantee it. We work with a counseling organization that did more telehealth based counseling sessions last week than it had ever done in a prior week in person - and it was larger by a magnitude of scale.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Great Recession - some of it's self-motivated as a small business owner to think about how we made it through last time. I'm sure others here can weigh in - but in the '08 recession, it almost made it look like there were two economies. If you were in the upper middle class, if you worked in a professional capacity, or maybe in an IT relatated job somewhere - it's almost like the last recession didn't really affect you that much. Maybe it affected your home value. But, for other swaths of the economy - it decimated them - and it what we had left coming out would never look the same again - manufacturing, automotive, etc. There's a school that hopes that the strength of the economy leading into this will give us more of a V-shaped recession - a steep decline and steep gains on the way out. The more I watch though, I'm wondering if it won't be the same L-shaped recovery as last time with steep losses up front and long, slow periods of growth on the way out. I think it's probably way too soon to tell - but they hopes for a V-shaped recovery probably grow dimmer by the day.

Domestic movie theaters brought in $5,179 last week. That’s down 99.98% from the $204 million they brought in during the same week last year. It’s been years since I’ve been in a theater - but I’m guessing one screen at the megaplex up the street does better than that on a good Friday night.

6.6 million new first time unemployment claims this week. Add to the 3.3 last week, and 10 million people have lost their jobs in the last two weeks. To put it in perspective, that was the peak of unemployment during the Great Recession. Man, prayers for everyone. Be graceful with yourselves of those around you.

Nobody is going to look at you twice. Unless they're wishing that they were heading out to go fishing, too. With the kids at home, the wife trying to teach from home, and running a small business - it's been too crazy to get out there. But, the water is warming up and the spawn is coming on. I'll be out there in a week or two.

He’s not gotten an infrastructure bill passed yet - we’ll see if the eleventh time is the charm. On the plus side - interest rates are low. On the harder side - Congress has to borrow that money. Ostensibly by offering treasury bills. There’s probably not a lack of demand - but at some point the well has to go dry. Also in the plus side - in theory there’s a bunch of jobs to be created there. On the negative side - here’s a $4 trillion dollar whale. Fraudsters will come out of the woodwork. We don’t currently have an IG to run point on investigating corruption. So there’s that.

Heck, there’s a lot more Democrats these days. At least the way it’s colloquially defined, right? I mean, y’all are all sitting at home. No one’s working. Everyone’s waiting for the government to send them their check.

When you've got time (and likely a lot of people have a decent amount of time right now), it's worth sitting down as a family and making a list of meals that you regularly enjoy - especially looking at some of the simpler ones to start with. For instance, in my family of five - it's guaranteed that we'll do spaghetti once a week - and my kids wouldn't complain if it was more. When the local Publix has Buy One Get One on jars or sauce or noodles, it's easy to put one away without even noticing it. Since they regularly run sales of some items biweekly - and others monthly - within 3 months max - you can have enough set aside for a month without even going outside your normal food budget. Date the items you buy - and put the new stuff in the back so that you use the oldest stuff first. There are other meals that this is pretty easy with as well. If you grew up like I did having a pot of beans and a pan of cornbread once a week - there's a complete protein. Likewise with a lot of soups or curries. Americans have really gotten out of practice living out of their pantries. Part of the reason supply lines have gotten tight in places is that up until two weeks ago, America was eating over half its meals in restaurants.

For some levity - please take Samuel L. Jackson's advice here. It's beeped - but may not be safe for work??? If you're still at work - likely no one cares:

That's a daily rate - it's not annualized.

I don't think IPB will let me push native Javascript to the page - with good reason - but the following visualization is worth your time. It shows COVID-19 going from 0 to the third leading cause of death in the US in 31 days. This is why we're concerned: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/1727839

You can’t reasonably assume that Hillary would be able to operate as some type of force all by herself. Heck, a lot of our current Congress was built with the specific goal of limiting Obama to being a one term president. When they failed at that, they immediately pivoted to stopping Hillary. Had she won in 2016 - she would have been met with investigations day one. She would have been hamstrung from the get go. The ironic thing was how ineffective the GOP truly was once they got their hands on all the levers of power for two years. You get the government you deserve, I guess.

Leonid Brezhnev approves of this thread.

This Atlanta boy is going to edit the title of the thread to reflect an R.E.M. appropriate The End Of The World As We Know It.

Competent governance matters, y’all. Despite the fact that the current captain of this ship is historically unprepared and unqualified - the hull of this ship has been rotting away for a while. The Chinese can blame Xi Jinping. We can partially blame the Chinese for underreporting - but it’s not like that we don’t know that’s within their standard operating parameters. The Iranians can blame the mullahs. But we’ve got ourselves to blame. Our partisan - what’s good for my side must necessarily be bad for your side - one-upsmanship has left us unprepared.

Of course. There are certainly states where we’ll have data in a few weeks. Tennessee is probably an example where you’ve got stricter measures in some cities than you do the state at large. Mississippi, Florida, and Texas are others. If in a couple of weeks we see more rural/non-metro outbreaks like Albany, Georgia and Lander, Wyoming, you’ll certainly have a lot more people asking what their governors were waiting for.

Fauci is a pro - and has been for a long time. I’m starting to view him and Birx through the lens you’d use in a hostage negotiation. They are valuable and need to stay alive - or in this case on the job. There are some rules they have to play by - because staying alive could literally save thousands of lives.

The above quote was by Michael Crichton referencing physicist Murray Gell-Mann. I’m going to sound like a complete jerk here. But, I might suggest taking everything the White House says and parsing it through that framework. I don’t really care what you chalk it up to - but this administration has no more idea what they’re talking about this week than they did a month ago. They can present new charts with updated casualty ranges. They can beg people to take it seriously now when a month ago they were saying the opposite. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. They lack the ability to comprehend the depth of the problem - because they lack the ability to care about anything other than lining their pockets. They are historically unprepared - and thousands upon thousands of Americans will die because of it. It’s an absolute disgrace. And all of us ought to take a good hard look in the mirror and use this time in quarantine to think about how we got here.

I don’t know that there’s ever been another gun store in Tennessee that understood marketing as well as Joe did. Man that’s a hard business.

Sometimes I wonder if Memphis is sandbagging on its own reputation - sort of Br'er Rabbit style? "No, Memphis is horrible. You wouldn't want to move there. It's a pit." They might be onto something.

Nashville is full. They’ve got to go somewhere.