Liberty

Texas: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Texas-set-a-new-record-for-COVID-19-15337187.php

"FDA revokes emergency use ruling for hydroxychloroquine" https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/15/fda-revokes-hydroxychloroquine/

A surgeon on masks: https://www.howardluksmd.com/sports-medicine/wear-a-mask-save-a-life-today-maybe-your-own-maybe-someone-elses/

Taleb on masks: https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7

Yeah, it's not about the nominal number of cases. Italy has 60m people, so talks of herd immunity after 35k deaths doesn't make sense. A country known for chaos and bad management has been able to totally crush its curve while the US has one of the worst curves in the world (which isn't surprising when you look at how bungled almost everything has been from leadership). 4.3% of world population with over 27% of deaths so far. The data coming out of the hardest hit places have been quite positive IMO: case counts, hospitalizations and positive test rates have been dropping steepest in the places that have seen the worst outbreaks yet serology testing in those places suggests 20-30% infection rates in those populations. This suggests that we might not need anywhere near the arbitrary but oft-cited 70% infection rate level to see sharp declines in the virus's prevalence. Has the very high false-positive rates in serum tests been addressed? I don't put much weight on those. Trying to spin things to say that the US hasn't made things much worse than they had to be isn't realistic. Weeks and weeks were wasted, opportunities to push masks were wasted, the federal government mostly hindered states and did little at crucial times, everything was politicized and made confusing to citizens, etc. Not it hasn't which is why serology tests for those with limited outbreaks (i.e. the Santa Clara study) or for individuals aren't useful. Serology tests in places with far more widespread outbreaks provide a much better gauge of the population's exposure level and it may well even understate the level of exposure at the time the tests were taken given the weeks it takes for antibodies to appear + sampling bias that favors a less susceptible population (i.e. healthy people going into grocery stores). Either way, it's the hardest hit places that are seeing their numbers decline fastest. Not trying to put a spin on anything just providing data points that show that the transmissibility of the virus may be far less potent than what many originally thought. I agree the virus is probably less dangerous than initially thought, though still pretty bad (115k deaths in the US after a few months, far from the end of the crisis), but you don't gamble on that during the initial confusion and panic, you take precautions and do the things that you know work, as they more than pay for themselves early on in an exponential process. If those had been taken well, we'd be in much better shape now, like SK/NZ/Taiwan/HK/etc, but that was bungled. I was looking at the high-level trends for whole countries (ie. Italy vs US, but you can look at lots of other countries that were hit hard but crushed their curve*). I agree serum can provide some info for specific highly-infected areas, but I wasn't looking at areas there so I'm not sure what it has to do with it. *

Yeah, it's not about the nominal number of cases. Italy has 60m people, so talks of herd immunity after 35k deaths doesn't make sense. A country known for chaos and bad management has been able to totally crush its curve while the US has one of the worst curves in the world (which isn't surprising when you look at how bungled almost everything has been from leadership). 4.3% of world population with over 27% of deaths so far. The data coming out of the hardest hit places have been quite positive IMO: case counts, hospitalizations and positive test rates have been dropping steepest in the places that have seen the worst outbreaks yet serology testing in those places suggests 20-30% infection rates in those populations. This suggests that we might not need anywhere near the arbitrary but oft-cited 70% infection rate level to see sharp declines in the virus's prevalence. Has the very high false-positive rates in serum tests been addressed? I don't put much weight on those. Trying to spin things to say that the US hasn't made things much worse than they had to be isn't realistic. Weeks and weeks were wasted, opportunities to push masks were wasted, the federal government mostly hindered states and did little at crucial times, everything was politicized and made confusing to citizens, etc. Not a good time to compare both when one country has almost no new cases for a while while the others a bunch more coming in, since it can take weeks for deaths after infection. Italy's median age of 46 (vs US at 39) and multi-generational homes certainly didn't help it there too, but that just shows how much worse the US would be if it also had those demographics and cultural traditions.

I thought it was interesting because Akre has been holding Berkshire for many decades, not because of the size of the position in his portfolio.

Yeah, it's not about the nominal number of cases. Italy has 60m people, so talks of herd immunity after 35k deaths doesn't make sense. A country known for chaos and bad management has been able to totally crush its curve while the US has one of the worst curves in the world (which isn't surprising when you look at how bungled almost everything has been from leadership). 4.3% of world population with over 27% of deaths so far.

Comparing new case counts in Italy to that of the US is disingenuous. For one, Italy is a far smaller country while the US is much more spread out. And two, the worst hit places in Italy likely already have a sufficient degree of immunity such that their numbers continue to fall even with limited mitigation. New York's numbers looks a lot like Italy's for instance - and this despite having widespread crowded protests daily for more than two weeks already. It's not what I'm doing.

People make it more complicated than it needs to be. We can see what works elsewhere. The way to keep the economic AND human suffering to a minimum is to keep R0 below 1 and as low as possible. The way to do this is first with the hammer (lockdown), which we've done in many places, and then have everybody wear masks, have hand washing stations everywhere in public spaces, try to have as much social distancing as possible in public spaces, have contact tracing, heck, recommend that everyone take vitamin D supplements. All this is basically free compared to letting things blow up again (well, much better than free.. huge positive value)... All no-brainers that have worked elsewhere. Anyone sane would be pushing hard on this. If even Italy can get things under control, anyone can...

Fisker Automotive was too early... If it had come out with a few renderings and hand-made prototypes today instead of 10 years ago, it'd be worth at least $30bn instead of going bankrupt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Automotive

Herd immunity: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-should-we-aim-for-herd-immunity-like-sweden-b1de3348e88b

When Italy is better run than the US...

FSG acquisition: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200611005431/en/HEICO-Corporation-Acquires-Naval-Hydraulic-Repair-Specialist

Above $1,000/share. Shorting is a hard way to make money...

I do this on a Mac Mini that I use as media server. The spinning HD was starting to fail, so I got an external SSD and I now boot from it over USB 3.0 bus. It's faster than the original spinning HD by a nice margin and it's extending the life of that computer (it's otherwise fine).

Good read by Gruber on the eventual transition to ARM CPUs for the Mac line: https://daringfireball.net/2020/06/on_apple_announcing_the_mac_arm_transition_at_wwdc

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-masks-study-idUSKBN23G37V

I'd go with an internal SSD and use an external drive if you need to store a lot of data. I'm typing this on a 2019 27" iMac 5K with a 1tb SSD and 32gb of RAM

Volaris acquisition in Israel: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/06/10/2046292/0/en/Volaris-Group-Signs-Agreement-to-Acquire-Flash-Networks-Ltd-Looks-to-Expand-Position-in-Communications-Media-Vertical.html h/t @pearnick

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-should-we-aim-for-herd-immunity-like-sweden-b1de3348e88b "Coronavirus: Should We Aim for Herd Immunity Like Sweden? And What Can Countries like the US or Netherlands Learn from It?" By Tomas Pueyo, from "The Hammer and the Dance" and other smart writings about COVID.

Good interview with the author here: https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/thomas-rid-active-measures-disinformation-political-warfare/ Book here: https://www.amazon.ca/Active-Measures-History-Disinformation-Political/dp/1250787408/

NZ:

First acquisition in Uruguay, by Vela: https://velasoftwaregroup.com/vela-software-acquires-infocorp/ H/t @pearnick

TSS acquisition in France: https://www.totalspecificsolutions.com/about-us/transaction-updates?tid=61 "300 customers 1,000 locations 15,000+ users 20 countries translated into 8 languages 23 employees, growing and profitable" h/t @pearnick