Liberty

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-27223/v1 "Hydroxychloroquine in the treatment and prophylaxis of SARS-CoV-2 infection in non-human primates"

https://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-of-reopen-america-twitter-accounts-are-bots-report-2020-5

Seems pretty uncontroversial to keep position sizing not too large to mitigate risks when managing other people's money. Isn't this pretty standard for portfolio managers? Is she getting flak for it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Daily stats from states are unreliable and I hope people don't make conclusions based on them. There were zero cases in MA one of the days: https://covidtracking.com/data/state/massachusetts#historical Of course. It's still a better sign to see it down than up, it's just a small update to priors that should be tracked over time to get a significant sample. I mostly didn't know that MA had done this about masks, that was the most interesting part of it, so it'll be interesting to track

Double-counting tests in UK... so much lying with data going on: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/tens-thousands-coronavirus-tests-have-double-counted-officials/

From a doc I follow (his background: "ICU doc with expertise in biothreats preparedness, translational research, and drug/vaccine development."):

You not picking up your own bills reminds me of:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/22/dr-anthony-fauci-says-staying-closed-for-too-long-could-cause-irreparable-damage.html Indeed. Exactly why managing the situation well is so important, and mismanaging it is so costly and has strong non-linear effects (as expected from an exponential process).

Andy Slavitt thread on brazil:

Study of HCC in Lancet: https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb-assets/Lancet/pdfs/S0140673620311806.pdf

This is a big-ish acquisition? Like needle moving type? We don’t have the exact financials, but it’s likely their biggest deal since TSS, and this sounds like a faster organic grower than their usual.

Pre-making decision, regardless of the facts in the future: "Trump says he won’t close the country if second wave of coronavirus hits" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/trump-says-he-wont-close-the-country-if-second-wave-of-coronavirus-hits.html

Exactly, it shouldn't involve politics at all, and it doesn't in other places, afaik. Just like the virus, it's a medical/scientific question. We should make the best decisions with the best data available at the time, the things with the highest probability of mitigating negative effects of the crisis because it's so incredibly expensive that even tiny improvements will be worth billions and save thousands of lives... But it has been politicized, just like the virus. When the most powerful, most visible person in the world spends weeks calling something a hoax perpetuated by his opponents to hurt him and downplays it (and then all his surrogates at Fox News amplify his message 24/7) and tweets in all caps LIBERATE and says "masks are totally optional, I won't wear one" and then doesn't wear one for weeks as his medical advisors clearly are wearing masks behind him, that makes it political, and it weakens greatly the call for citizens to wear masks. Which is stupid because it's such a low cost, effective way to help us reopen quicker and save lots of lives. In 10 days the whole Czec Republic made cloth masks and it helped a lot. Austria similarly, iirc, like pretty much all successful countries. But I'm pretty sure Trump tried one on, looked in the mirror and thought "that looks weak", so his narcissism is keeping him from doing the obviously correct thing.

Politicizing masks further:

Pearnick has found more good stuff on Topicus, I'll just post a link to his thread here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-distancing-deaths.html?referringSource=articleShare

Of course masks are good. I was also highly in favor of masks early in this thread. You just can't keep saying that masks aren't being pushed because of WHO. It's also because of Trump, who won't even wear one, who won't use his influence and reach to convince people to wear them (one of the main powers of the presidency is explaining things to citizens and persuading them of something), and who didn't order emergency production of PPE months ago despite talking about it repeatedly, and has greatly contributed by his words and actions to politicizing them (should seatbelts and condoms and vaccines also be politicized? so stupid). It's not like other countries can't and haven't pushed masked whatever the WHO said early on, or if they listened at first, haven't later course-corrected rather than kept going in the wrong direction.

Article on states hiring contact tracers. Better late than never, I guess: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/what-is-a-coronavirus-contact-tracer-and-how-to-get-hired-as-one.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/coronavirus-cdc-quietly-releases-detailed-guidelines-for-reopening-us.html CDC still seems paralyzed and not playing its role, either because of incompetence or fear of angering Trump. They all saw people getting fired or attacked for contradicting him, and since he himself contradicts himself all the time (from on day to the other it's "shelter in place" to "reopen America"), it's hard to know where to stand to be safe. Of course, Trump is in charge of the CDC as head of the federal government and picked CDC leadership, so all this is his responsibility.

Nah, he doesn't have the introspection capability to update. He'll just keep saying the same thing over and over again, forever, smug in his belief that he's the smartest and most correct and we're all dumb idiots.

You're such a cliché. I don't think everything is Trump's fault. Just the things that are, and I point out what they are and why. If you ever have an actual argument to make to support any of your positions, go for it. It would be a nice change for you from the classic gambits of "I'll act like I won the argument so others may think I did" and strawmen arguments ("you think everything's Trump's fault".. what does that even mean? I also think that a lot of things are Putin's fault (or Harvey Weinstein's fault), because he did them, but I don't think everything is Putin's (or Weinstein's) fault, but it also doesn't mean I should think nothing is his fault..? What a silly line of thought to do down on..). As for having opinions about people, it's life. We all do it every day. I don't know where it got started that people shouldn't have opinions about the mental states of others. I guess because psychiatrists have a professional code that they can't diagnose people they haven't met, which others have turned into something quite different, which is that nobody else can have an opinion about someone else's mental health. That's interesting in itself, because plenty of mental health professional have come out to say that they think Trump is sick -- they think it's so bad that they had to override their usual restraint in such matters to warn the public. You can't have a solid opinion from just meeting someone, but when you observe someone over years and years and hundreds and hundreds of hours of talks and interviews and reports from those around them about their behavior, the picture becomes a lot clearer. I mean, when I look at Tom Cruise being interviewed by Oprah that time, I think there's a high chance he was heavily depressed. It's just pattern matching and looking at the facts. When I look at Trump, I see all the signs of a sociopath with narcissistic personality disorder. Those signs are codified, they lead the observable behaviors. They mean something. For borderline and subtle cases, it can be hard to know, you have a high degree of uncertainty, it's a probabilistic judgement call. But with Trump, it's clear as day. I'd be way more surprised if he wasn't these things, that would raise a lot more questions, because he's certainly not behaving in a neurotypical way.

You just can't make up your mind, can you now Liberty - one day Trump is a dictator, one day he is powerless - keep the stupidity coming bro... That's you attempting being clever, right? I think it'd play really well on the primary school yard. The man clearly has authoritarian tendencies (I never said dictator, but clearly he wishes he was), and he's making a lot of stupid and incompetent decisions. At the same time, he plays the victim and keeps blaming everybody else as if he was powerless and not actually president of the US. It's Obama's fault, it's China's fault, it's the governor's fault, it's the WHO's fault, it's the democrats' fault, it's the CDC's fault, the media's fault, nobody could've done anything (while clearly others have), etc. There, both things can be true at the same time. I know it's a complex thought for you, but I'm sure others get it.

Coming from you, it's the greatest compliment. If you agreed with me, I'd know there's something seriously wrong and I'd get a MRI.

More than 70,000 of them, sadly. :-\ Thank your savior Andrew Cuomo and DeBlasio for most of them in the US! Oh, yeah - and don't forget, the spectacular job done by WHO... Dude, we agree with you others made mistakes. We also see Trump's mistakes, but you don't. You're the one who's putting his hands over his ears and going "lalalalala" The man is president of the US and he acts like he has no power, there's nothing he could do, it's all someone else's fault, he's a victim... What position should he have to be able to do something if president isn't good enough for him and all he can do is be a crybaby about his impotence?