majos
“That” in parent comment is being sequestered at work, so the opposite of working from home.
Was also previously discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572311
As raw numbers but not percentages. 13% each of the past 3 days is better than the 15-25% (mostly nearer 25%) of the past few weeks.
1. the evidence-free claim of “full peer review”, 2. the fact that patients who refused or met “exclusion criteria” for the drug served as a portion of the control group, and were the only members of the control group from the same region as the experimental group, 3. the removal of people from the experiment group because they went to the ICU or died (only three of first and one of second, but a rather bizarre thing to happen before claiming 100% cure), 4. the lack of coverage from any major news source, despite this being reported about a day ago.
> In Drachenloch, however, not only were there [crude stone] walls, but behind these walls were found accumulations of bear bones — the long bones of the legs and more or less complete skulls. The pattern was very consistent. Where such walls were present, bones were present. Where they were absent, bones were rare along the cave walls.
These and other deliberate-looking accumulations of bones (including apparent crude “chests” of limestone slabs enclosing more bones) led Bachler to suggest the idea of a prehistoric cave bear worshipping cult. But a counterargument suggests this explanation is unnecessary. It might just be bears being bears, no cult required.
> When cave bears entered a cave to hibernate, they began by scratching nests into the cave fill. In the process, bones and small rocks were pushed aside, often falling into crevices among the fallen blocks. This had two effects. First, it helped to build up accumulations of bones in natural cavities among rocks or among piles of rocks. Second, it protected the bones that did enter such interstices from further trampling and, if they were buried there, from weathering and decay. It is perfectly natural, therefore, that modern excavators should find concentrations of bones in cavities surrounded by rock. Moreover, because further weathering of the cave roof naturally produced subsequent roof fall, it is perfectly normal that such cavities would be covered by slabs of greater or lesser size.
I wonder if something similar happened here. Obviously, the lack of a cave is an issue. But it’s a funny connection to something I read randomly a few months ago.
Cave bear stuff from https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cav... which is also a fun read if you like archaeologists sniping at each other.
> “Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak," said Prof [of mathematical biology at ICL] Ferguson. "There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably."
As of 2014 the number of deaths is <500, although the Wikipedia article [1] is written as if bird flu is something that may yet turn much worse.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5...
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2018-repor...
Granted, all these risks may be outweighed by those of covid, but it’s not a slam dunk choice yet.
There are trials for chloroquine starting at University of Minnesota [2] too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine
[2] http://www.startribune.com/university-of-minnesota-to-test-t...
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but an exponential growth rate is a mathematical model. We’re extrapolating the current curve into the future, that’s a model.
If you want an understandable, relatively short but info-dense writeup from a sober expert (there hasn’t been much of this on HN) this is nice.
Sorry, where do you see that in [0]? Table 3 has a pneumonia diagnosis but isn’t broken down by age, Table 1 is broken down (somewhat) by age but only differentiates between nonsevere and severe “disease”?
So Italy is older in the sense of “more people who are very old”. But you are right that the mortality difference so far is not explained entirely by this gap.
It may be informative to watch how this evolves in Greece, and to a greater extent (due to more infection before a lockdown) France and Spain. Those are the next oldest countries in the EU by this measure, and all are well above 3%.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/10166544/KS-...
What’s strange is I’m generally in favor of “staying informed”. But I typically skip most financial news. For example, looking at last week’s issue of The Economist, there are several articles in the finance section. I summarized these below, but my reaction to most is “yup, sounds like the logic I saw in my first-year econ class”.
Maybe my issue is that I rarely feel like I learn anything from these articles; they mostly read as applications of basic theory that might work. In this case, my read on finance is there’s a set of basic principles that explain most of the decisions made and then just beyond that lies an enormous set of more complex but also controversial material.
In contrast, I think of other areas as having a lot of “basic information” that I don’t know, with the controversial bits much further out. So if I’m trying to accumulate useful and relatively uncontroversial info, finance is not the best place.
(Those summaries:
1. interest rate cuts may not suffice to avert recession, governments may add in spending, tax cuts, and credit to banks to increase liquidity
2. fear has led to price increases for safe haven assets like gold, bonds, and stable currencies and drops for economic activity trackers like oil and copper; share price changes have varied depending on debt levels and how different companies are expected to react to societal slowdowns
3. might be a good idea to pivot between stocks and bonds as market rises or falls; downturns can be opportunities if your horizon is long enough
4. if the economy slows, how should banks deal with reduced payment abilities, especially when they may be legally required to not have too many bad-looking liabilities?
5. something about corporate bond trading [this one was most confusing]
6. some special bonds offer yields to investors with the catch that if some defined disaster strikes the investors will not get money back; these bonds have not yet been useful to covid because of stringent conditions on duration and impact of the disaster before payout, and complications of prevention (countries who respond well may get paid less)
7. covid has particularly hurt commodities markets, and by extension economies that rely on commodities (like Saudi Arabia))
I mean, I’m not completely financially illiterate. I understand compound interest. I stick with sinking most of my money into passive investing, saving x months of expenses in checking for surprises, and not accumulating any debt.
Every now and then I think about getting back into value investing (it was fun in high school) which is a little more active, but the effort required to understand this system seems enormous/impossible. There are simplified expositions of how to read a balance sheet, but then I run into weird edge cases of financial trickery that I’d never be aware of. So I figure I can’t compete with pros and passive investing seems like a reasonable enough approximation in the long run.
When I compare it to all of the other stuff I could learn or skills I could acquire in the same time, so far “learning about the financial system” is so messy and uncertain to me that I never really pursue it.
Has anybody run into this issue? What did you decide?
[1] https://m.ncregister.com/blog/smcafee/i-made-a-third-class-r...
As far as I can tell, for almost all Americans, this is our first pandemic. The closest analogue might be polio in the 1950s, but maybe 10% of the population remembers that.
Going down the list, none of the remaining pandemics within living memory seem to have made a large impact on life in the US [1].
It’s not crazy to imagine changes from this event. There doesn’t seem to be much precedent here for it.
It sounds like there hasn’t been enough time yet to see if the effects last?