Liberty

That's an important "but" that can't be hand-waved away. A lot of antibody tests had false positives in the 50% range, depending the population being sampled (it'll be higher outside of the major outbreak zones). That's way too high to be very useful.

Why would anyone invest in this if they haven't been able to make money for shareholders in 15 years, even in times when they had tailwinds? There's bound to be better investments, even if you're looking for a cheap "hairy" company...

For that, randomized antibody testing studies would be better. Depends what the false positive rate is. It's one more data point, but it shouldn't be given more weight than it deserves.

They're apparently going to tests 11m people in the city within the next 10 days. https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/chinas-wuhan-plans-city-wide-testing-for-coronavirus-over-period-of-10-days-sources

I think that is 100% right. It wouldn't cost anything if they distributed N95 masks at cost for all Americans to the pharmacies and people paid cost. That is what South Korea did. They are smart, I give them that. Masks would be an incredible high ROI. I actually just snail mailed some mask research to the most powerful person in the free world - The first lady - Melania Trump. We will see if she is able to get through to Trump. At least more and more people are slowly getting there and wearing more masks. I linked earlier in this thread to an economics paper that calculates the prospective value of masks, cloth, surgical, and N95. Each mask is worth thousands of dollars in expected value because the crisis is so expensive that anything that reduces the R0 and the time it lasts by even a little is worth a ton. Is was obviously the right thing to do 2 months ago to use the DPA to launch large-scale mask production and to encourage everyone to make cloth masks and wear them (like the Czech did). Edit: I found it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ua7j979dbqb045/masks_final_n_HF_NA.pdf?dl=0

One Irish doctor's take on the concept of herd immunity in this context:

I complete agree. They simply aren't available though and there is no way that Trump is going to order the production of them such that we can all have several when he has not even admitted to a shortage of them for nurses. Everything is so confusing about the federal government lately, but am I right in thinking that despite him saying multiple times that he'd use the defense production act, he never actually used it to produce more masks on a large enough scale to make a difference? Or did it happen and I just missed it?

Podcast interview with Steven Levy about his book on FB: https://www.jimruttshow.com/steven-levy/

Podcast interview with Tobi: http://investorfieldguide.com/tobi-lutke-building-a-modern-business-invest-like-the-best-ep-173/

Article about Hong Kong, and how a lot of it was bottoms-up and not from the govt: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/how-hong-kong-beating-coronavirus/611524/

https://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=AC BRK.B down by 83% and BRK.A down by 93% in his latest 13F.

Hi - Was just going through this thread while reading Mark's letters. How did you get 30% FCF Margin? Yes you are right that 30% FCF margin is not extravagant in software business but historically CSU has been around 20% margin and given very low or negative top line organic growth, how do you expect CSU to increase the FCF Margin, also considering the fact that most units are run independently without trying to do any cost rationalisation? Thanks Steady state margin would likely be in that range. Margin is depressed by acquisitions because it takes time for their margin to be brought up after acquisition (they do cost rationalization and implement best practices and sometimes get rid of low value things like hardware sales or consulting), plus acquisition costs.

This is how you crush the virus. Meanwhile, unhinged: https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1260177007490600960?s=21

Does it get any more shameless?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-recovery.html

None of these guys could run Tesla or SpaceX.

That is the life. Existence is suffering. You have to embrace the chaos and move forward. And we will. There’s degrees of flying blind. And there’s flying reckless. https://twitter.com/sam_baker/status/1259801828591534080?s=21 “ S. Korea had to re-clamp down because it got 34 new cases in one day. We have 25,000 per day and all we’re talking about is opening up. There’s even a risk of an outbreak inside the White House. We know what we’re on for.”

We're still learning so much about this. Another reason to try not to get sick in the early phase of this.. On blood oxygen levels and ventilators: https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-doctors-pull-back-on-using-ventilators-to-treat-covid-19-11589103001

Masks: Gary Kasparov:

Hadn't looked at Alderon in a while. $10m market cap. Wow. I should dig up some of those old presentations where they were showing the step-by-step timeline of how this was going to be a multi-billion project just like that Clliff mine close-by (can't remember the names or details after all these years.. ).

Who knows what will happen, but I could see a future where the industry as a whole grows slower for a while but Heico gains share faster since they help their customers reduce costs and that'll matter more than ever for a while. Another mitigating factor is that they may grow slower, but be able to acquire companies at lower multiples and/or more of them.

she's hilarious. Which is really weird given all she does is lip sync word for word. I think it's because we've become desensitized to Trump over time and judge him to a totally different standard than a normal human. So when we hear his words said by someone different, we can judge them more on their own merit and realize how crazy and stupid he sounds. Someone should lip-synch Trump to video of other presidents (from both parties -- Bush or Reagan or Clinton or Obama -- saying some of these things).

She’s good:

So is his phones ringing? If so, why the production lines are dormant? I (and millions of others I think) would like to buy N95 masks regardless of government purchases. I'd think states and private businesses would like to buy them too - so it's not even b2consumer issue. So why are the lines dormant? I'm confused too. That part is strangely written, I get the feeling that the backstory on this was cut out of the story and the line is now lacking context.

That's why you need a crapload of testing, good contact tracing, people wearing masks, discourage large events, etc.. This is how you avoid huge outbreaks that lead to large shutdowns. Easier to keep it to a simmer and crush little embers when they show up if you have measures to keep R0 as low as possible (under 1 ideally) and good testing to immediately catch things when they begin. If you don't have that, outbreaks go undetected long enough that you can't contain them and you have to do larger shutdowns again and again. Doing it right is easier than doing it wrong, which is the huge problem with the incompetence at the federal level in the US. A lot of all this could've been avoided with a competent early response (and I don't even mean super early like in January, but even later it would've made a big different because of the inherent properties of exponential growth).