allovernow

The way things are going now, it looks like we're heading into global recession or possibly depression territory.

The combination of the current global economy and this sudden crash brought about by a global pandemic is unprecedented. We are in uncharted territory. It all depends on how much faith you have in world leaders - this virus is shaking up geopolitics and markets may not bounce back from this for years, though that's quite a pessimistic take.

Personally I feel like a lot of the world has been propped up on a house of cards and this virus is about to expose a lot of it, which means hard times are coming.

So tl;dr if you have faith in world leaders, wait another week or two because the market is probably going to crash even harder when the fed pumps $1.5T into the market (we've shut down trade with Europe and China is still not back online so this can only lead to a dead cat bounce) and then if you have disposable income buy up some bargain stocks. But the most important advice I'd give you is to only spend what you are prepared to lose. Your general impression is correct - if a stock is significantly lower now than it was two months ago, it's technically a bargain if you buy and hold until this is over.

Now, that said, if we miraculously find a cure or vaccine in the next month or so, I imagine markets will skyrocket overnight. And given that this is probably the most attention a disease has ever been given in history, it's not impossible.

This. Everyone is speaking so authoritatively as though they knew crypto was not a hedge. This is the first real such test that crypto has seen. Yes, it appears to have failed, but no one could have predicted this with any certainty.

Can't count the number of downvotes I've received for pointing out that the official Chinese numbers are hugely underreported. This article is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is why I don't entirely trust their claimed recovery. Because an authoritarian government requires respect and/or fear in order to rule, face becomes a priority above all else. You simply cannot trust such governments. This wouldn't be the first time that the Chinese government has lied about something significant, and the Soviet Union is also an appropriate precedent.

>The inhaled aerosols of e-cigarettes contain numerous potential toxicities, some of which could be dangerous for health with long-term use. The safety of prolonged aerosol exposure is not known

Could be. The jury is out.

Sort of off topic, but aside from addictive potential there is very little in the way of evidence that vaping is harmful. And it's been around for some 15 years now - probably long enough to show some degree of long term harm.

Similarly, nicotine is guilty by association, I've been unable to find any literature pointing harm from consumption.

Now here's some speculation to take with a grain of salt - nicotine may offer a protective effect against 2019-ncov. We've known for a while that nicotine downregulates ACE2 receptors, and someone did an unofficial, but comprehensive meta review for SARS, MERS, and 2019-ncov and found that former and current smokers were significantly underrepresented among infected cases. Yes, it's a Reddit post, but the sources are all there and you can review and judge them for yourself.[1]

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/faluhv/an_exhausti...

>Ahh, the old cowardly downvote without comment because you don't like the reality of the situation that there is one party that's very much to blame

People are probably downvoting silently this time because explaining to you that you're obliviously consuming propaganda is one step deeper into flamewar territory which is unpopular on HN (and against the rules).

Case in point? Media reports that bill forcing employers to provide sick leave failed to pass because of evil Republicans. What you won't see on the news is the nuance that such a bill can't be passed without possibly bankrupting small businesses.

That's just one example. The administration shut down the border early on and was enthusiastically rewarded with accusations of sinophobia.

All politicians play this game. The US government institution has been rotting for decades, and yes, it really is a "both sides" issue when one side is so blinded by hatred that they refuse to acknowledge positive decisions.

There are literally almost as many people on the Republican side blindly dismissing everything Democrats do. Remember, Trump only lost the popular vote by 3%. Now is not the time for partisan idiocy.

You're not considering the upside of relaxing these regulations. There are far more legitimate labs than there are theranoses.

That's why I mentioned beacons for collision avoidance. They wouldn't be expensive. If we're about to build this industry from the ground up I would expect to see something like that done anyway.

Do you really think some moron bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world? Have you stopped to think about how unlikely something like that is?

You may not agree with his style (I don't) or his personality (hate it) but the guy has to be minimally intelligent to make it as far as he has. At the very least he knows how to work a crowd and spot opportunity.

You realize both countries can screw up, right? And the fact that the NSA belongs to a country that screwed up doesn't prevent them criticizing other responses?

Moreover, the Chinese government has still to my knowledge not cleanly released true figures for lethality, R0, total infection count, etc, as would have been responsible. Instead the world has had to rely on side channels like whatever publications from Chinese scientists made it past censorship. If other world powers were relying on official government numbers, like the WHO, they can't entirely be faulted for the slow response, though I'd like to think government agencies were competent enough to pick up on everything legit and unofficial that started flooding Reddit and 4chan in early January.

The CCP in typical fashion put the CCP first, and that will cost the world many lives.

This was clear from the start. In typical authoritarian communist fashion, China clamped down on the spread of information both internally and externally. Here's probably the best known example[0], but the most egregious manipulation came in the form of outbreak numbers, which are allegedly at least 10x underreported[1]. This was a deliberate combination of lack of testing, lockdown preventing citizens from seeking treatment at hospitals, misreporting cause of death by listing E.G. pneumonia, and other issues. When an authoritarian dictatorship orders no new cases, the people report no new cases.

I don't understand how people are so shocked to hear of China's manipulation. There's evidence for this kind of trickery from every major socialist state, especially the Soviet Union, which formed the mold the the initial CCP.

An authoritarian state can only exist so long as the people are too respectful and/or afraid to revolt. This creates perverse incentives to save face by, say, controlling information or spreading disinformation even at the cost of citizens' lives. And speaking of perverse incentives, like any massive bureaucracy, they are pervasive in states like China. For example, factor output is measured by the government by tracking electricity production. So if the government orders factories to come back online, but you don't have goods or employees to produce anything, you run the machines empty to run up the numbers.

0. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/china-li-wenliang-whistl...

1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...

To be fair, autonomous flight is probably an order of magnitude easier than autonomous driving. Particularly because it's far more predictable and you can put beacons on drones to automatically avoid collisions.

The sky is mostly empty space and landing zones are clearly marked and purpose built. You don't have to worry about any pedestrians or unpredictable drivers or roads.

You're missing the point. The freedom may make the virus less likely to spread as information about it is easier to come by. The more people know and the sooner, the better off we all are.

How do we know that the numbers are trustworthy? They weren't for the first two months and China has clamped down on any information leakage. Meanwhile as of last week their factories were still at around 50% capacity or less (check pollution maps online) and now I'm hearing rumors that they're forcing uighurs to work the factories that migrants are refusing to go back to.

I'm not convinced yet. This would not be the first time a communist authoritarian regime lied about a bad situation - far from it, it's standard if you look at history in the Soviet Union for example. Authoritarian regimes cannot work without being respected and/or feared by the people, so they are incentivesed to lie to save face and simultaneously punish anyone who questions the lies.

Especially considering that the longer this drags on, the more likely nations and corporations alike are to pull production from China permanently.

Well, NYT also accused him a few years ago of covering up 3 Cholera outbreaks in his home country of Ethiopia.

Given the display across the world right now I don't know if the experts are that much more informed than the collective wisdom of online society at this point, at least for this matter.

>The basis of the argument is that China is authoritarian regime that we should not be doing business with

I don't think anybody is saying that. What I'm saying is that criticism of the Chinese response/government is neither sinophobia nor nationalism.

The difference is that in the US all of this is due to incompetence, but given the nature of our laws and society people are free to point out the shortcomings of the response.

In China you are publicly admonished and/or disappeared for going against the official government narrative. That is a stark difference between not just Western/Chinese government, but culture, and cannot be underestimated. It leads to a totally different society and hopefully because of freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly.

Also you're much less likely to keep the majority of the population ignorant of an outbreak when you don't have a legal and judicial speech suppression machine. Yes, their authoritarian measures were effective in containing the spread (allegedly, all sources afaik from China have gone silent), but they did spend at least a month hiding the outbreak and keeping people from talking about it, for reasons I won't go into.

Not all governments are created equal. Not all cultures are the same. That's pure fantasy brought about by decades of indoctrination in the west.

Note that this isn't just blind nationalism. I fully recognize that under these circumstances the extreme authoritarianism in China may prove to be the best containment measure out of any other country short of North Korea. Good luck convincing 360MM Americans to stay home for a month.

This was all verifiable in real time and is consistent with the behavior of authoritarian regimes. You want to pretend China isn't interning Uigurs as well?

Hell, that doctor whistleblower who ended up dead from the virus was officially "admonished" and forced to publicaly apologize for "spreading rumors".

The world isn't the Disney movie land that most Americans grew up. Plenty of organized evil exists throughout the world.

Well the admin was very quick to shut down travel from China.

And the Trump did order masks from 3M early on.

I don't deny that there has been a display of incompetence to date be careful not to let partisanship blind you into denying credit where it is due.

No, I mean China. I personally witnessed the tweet before it was deleted.

>https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/chuck_schumer_q...

And a surprising lack of reporting on the dozens of side channel leaks from China - videos of dead bodies, videos from leakers including the young doctor who was admonished and succumbed to the disease...

Yeah a lot of it was rumor and hard to verify but...nothing? You'd almost start to wonder whether our journalists were cooperating with the Chinese government or something in censoring everything. I struggle to come up with a legitimate excuse other than total incompetence. It was all over the internet and a lot of it (first hand accounts from Chinese citizens within China) would have been reasonably easy to verify for a journalist who knew a Chinese speaker.

>and still seems sharp as a tack

That's highly subjective and no doubt any assessment is likely to strongly align with partisanship.

Which is why we need age limits. You can't expect people to objectively evaluate whether those inside or outside their party are still legislating or judging effectively in their 80s. Obviously most Republicans would lean towards arguing that she's senile and most Democrats would lean toward the opposite.

And then I imagine cognitive decline does not affect all faculties equally - so someone may still, say, have no trouble writing essays, but their judgement may be compromised.

That's a bit of a stretch...there are probably dozens of other obvious correlations in places where authoritarianism pops up, because authoritarianism is much more likely to spring up where people are poor and uneducated...

Not if you avoid other people.

Yes, I've been saying this from the start as well. Also note that they used China's severely misleading statistics from day 1 with no disclaimer. The WHO is incompetent and/or corrupt.

>I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world.

While I too favor decentralization, what we really need to do is return merit to our institutions. We need a social climate that encourages Pattons and Churchills and the like. Unfortunately to return to such a time of competent leadership (not just in government, but society at large) would require undoing decades of propaganda that convinced some two generations of children that we all have equal ability and any of us can do anything. The dangerous downside of giving everyone a trophy across society is that now people have grown up less able to judge competence and merit in others.

And Bernie is 78. There should really be age limits for government, especially given how much we now know about cognitive decline.

You know Democrats (media and Schumer's tweet) immediately accused Trump of sinophobia when he (appropriately) shut down travel with China?

This is really not the time for petty partisan politics. Both parties are propaganda machines. It is the nature of the two party system.

The quality of medical infrastructure is going to play a small role in outcomes when the entire system is overwhelmed many times over in the next month or so.

Honestly at this point the socially responsible thing to do is not to attend, regardless of whether they cancel or not. You are not just putting yourself at risk by attending. We all must take steps to combat the spread.

But I don't envy your position, I know these are tough calls to make.