Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Till

Sorry to hear how your employer handles the crisis. The middle of april does not sound realistic with regard to the climax of the crisis, I fear. At 67, are you thinking about retirement?

My case is different, I can do home office and there is no sign yet that my salary could not come anymore.

Good luck to you!

I hope for more developments on unemployment insurance, though the Beast in Washington, DC does not have real concern for working people.

I'm not sure what my employer could have done differently. Illinois has gone to "shelter in place" and unnecessary travel and group association are strongly discouraged. A community social services agency can't do much except over the phone. The middle of April is when I will have to change over to Unemployment.

I have not been intending to retire as my job is important to me in serving the LGBTQI community.

Thanks for the kind thoughts. I wish the best for you and everyone.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

You can do what some municipalities do, issue "Revenue Anticipation" bonds. The rates might not be great and the pay off period will be stretched out more than normal. They are commonly used because income and expenses don't sync during the year.

Good point - and in a crisis as at present the federal government can backstop such bond issuance since, unlike states and municipalities, it has the power to create money as needed for such purposes. The Fed (as in Federal Reserve, a.k.a. "the crooked financier's best friend") is already doing it for the overleveraged-institutional-speculator class - like I keep asking in their general direction, "where's our bailout, assholes?"

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Exclusive: Rich Russians Are Hoarding Ventilators to Protect Themselves Against the Coronavirus
Meanwhile, doctors worry that Russia’s regions don’t have enough.

No problem; Ford, GM, Tesla et al will be happy to sell them as many as they'd like, eventually.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

9/11: Extremely symmetric, near-simultaneous stack-of-pancakes-collapse of both main towers which a professional demolition team would have been hard-pressed to match, while some nearby buildings were 'suspiciously' unscathed. (Alleged) lack of impacting-plane debris at the Pentagon.

Buildings are by design "statically indeterminate" structures. Many members carry the gravity load, wind load, live load, etc, in parallel. You can within limits sever a member and the structure still stands. What you can't do is heat all the structural steel or a large proportion of it to glowing red. The metal doesn't have to melt to become weaker than its share of the load.
Some things are quite unintuitive, and being able to take hold of a compressively loaded steel i beam and move its middle by inches with little effort of one hand is one of them. And that's a memory of an engineering mechanics lab from the 1970s, at room temperature.
The planes went into the towers at altitude, but with many stories above where they splashed their full fuel load. The fires had lots of time to heat and soften the structural elements of the towers. Likely the center area of the floors with fires were the hottest. Those columns would buckle first. When they buckle, they are subtracted from the columns holding the rest of the building above against gravity. The flooring acts like a membrane, pulling on them laterally. Eventually the loss of too many columns to buckling and the inward tug from the center subsiding sets off failure in the outer columns too, and down it all starts to go. After that, every floor below gets hit with a progressively bigger hammer dropped a full floor.
As to why it essentially all ended up in the building footprint, the membrane action of the flooring helps explain that, and the gravity vector is the definition of down. One might better ask, where's the driving force and energy to come from to send it OFF the foundation, either laterally, or radially outward? Second order effects, such as debris collision, wind, and the outrush of air between floors as the collapsing floor descends toward the next.
After a jet fuel fire of some length, I would not expect to find much aluminum. Given enough ventilation and heat, metals like steel and aluminum burn quite well. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
There is photographic confirmation of wall column buckling. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...umed-fire.html

The towers' collapses were far from simultaneous. After one collapsed, news crews had time to get on site and commence broadcasting live, well before the second tower went.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by CRGreathouse

The problem with test kits was that the CDC messed up the first generation and prohibited state labs (and others) from using theirs. There's no lack of reagents anywhere I know of

There is projected to be a shortage of reagents once the other more limiting constraints are addressed. Maybe the breweries can help.

There's no national stockpile of toilet paper; you'll just have to wait for this one to wend its way through the supply chain. The experts I've heard say we'll be swimming in it soon as orders have all gone through and people won't buy once they've stockpiled.

The raw material is stockpiled all over. We call them forests and tree farms. This will be good for what's left of Wisconsin's paper mills. http://www.paperstudies.org/millsonline/wisconsin.php

[xilman]

FT analysis now outside the paywall.

US seems to be running at a significantly higher rate than most other places which are showing ~33% increase per diem.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by xilman

FT analysis now outside the paywall.

US seems to be running at a significantly higher rate than most other places which are showing ~33% increase per diem.

Hard to say what fraction of the US case count increase is due to underlying spread and what is due to the much-belated ramping-up of testing. We can only hope the latter is a major component...

More on my earlier Q re. NYC - of course there's also stuff like this:

Cuomo panel recommends $400M in hospital cuts as coronavirus pandemic rages | New York Post

A panel appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo backed a plan that would slash Medicaid spending to New York’s hospitals by almost $400 million as the facilities scramble to address the coronavirus epidemic. The Medicaid Redesign Team overwhelmingly backed the slate of proposals at its Thursday meeting, which aim to slash spending on NYC Health & Hospitals — the Big Apple’s public hospital system — by $186 million in the fiscal year beginning April 1. The vote was unanimous with three abstentions. It will be forwarded to state lawmakers and Cuomo for consideration. The governor’s budget director, Robert Mujica, told the commission beforehand that implementation of some of the proposed cuts could be delayed thanks to federal aid for coronavirus. These are the latest in a two-decade-long pattern of budget cuts and insurance overhauls that played a key role in the Empire State losing 20,000 now-badly needed hospital beds to fight the coronavirus.

[kladner]

https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-...update/5705196

The Western media quickly took the stage and laid out the official narrative for the outbreak of the new coronavirus which appeared to have begun in China, claiming it to have originated with animals at a wet market in Wuhan.
In fact the origin was for a long time unknown but it appears likely now, according to Chinese and Japanese reports, that the virus originated elsewhere, from multiple locations, but began to spread widely only after being introduced to the market.
More to the point, it appears that the virus did not originate in China and, according to reports in Japanese and other media, may have originated in the US.

In February of 2020, the Japanese Asahi news report (print and TV) claimed the coronavirus originated in the US, not in China, and that some (or many) of the 14,000 American deaths attributed to influenza may have in fact have resulted from the coronavirus.

Then there is a follow-on piece : (my emphasis)
https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-...ted-us/5706078

As readers will recall from the earlier article (above), Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists and pharmacologists have determined that the new coronavirus could have originated in the US since that country is the only one known to have all five types – from which all others must have descended. Wuhan in China has only one of those types, rendering it in analogy as a kind of “branch” which cannot exist by itself but must have grown from a “tree”.

The Taiwanese physician noted that in August of 2019 the US had a flurry of lung pneumonias or similar, which the Americans blamed on ‘vaping’ from e-cigarettes, but which, according to the scientist, the symptoms and conditions could not be explained by e-cigarettes. He said he wrote to the US officials telling them he suspected those deaths were likely due to the coronavirus. He claims his warnings were ignored.

Immediately prior to that, the CDC totally shut down the US Military’s main bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, due to an absence of safeguards against pathogen leakages, issuing a complete “cease and desist” order to the military. It was immediately after this event that the ‘e-cigarette’ epidemic arose.

Of course, every country wants to point fingers elsewhere. For the US, it might be said that the chickens of denial are coming home to roost. The numbers of infected and the scientific evidence are both piling up. I also think there are a lot more 'chickens' still in transit to these shores.

[kriesel]

Tonight's numbers:

Globally:
cases 378601, deaths 16505, recovered 100982
CFR1 = 16505/ (16505 + 100982) = 0.1405 = 14.05%
CFR2 = 16505 / 378601 = 0.0436 = 4.36%

US:
cases 43901, 522 deaths, recovered not given
CFR1 = ?
CFR2 = 522/43901 = 0.01189 = 1.19%
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashb...23467b48e9ecf6

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
world 378842 cases, 16510 deaths, 102064 recovered
USA: 43734 cases, 553 deaths, 295 recovered; 42886 active cases of which 1040 are serious or critical

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-...update/5705196
Then there is a follow-on piece : (my emphasis)
https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-...ted-us/5706078
Of course, every country wants to point fingers elsewhere. For the US, it might be said that the chickens of denial are coming home to roost. The numbers of infected and the scientific evidence are both piling up. I also think there are a lot more 'chickens' still in transit to these shores.

The demographics of vaping cases don't fit the demographics of COVID19. Male/female yes, but not age distribution. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...s-tracker.html
Also, we're supposed to believe as part of this conspiracy theory that thousands of cases occurred all across the US and all the medical staff including coroners either missed the pathogen or were part of the conspiracy, for several months. It took the Chinese about a month to identify the issue and draw the adverse attention of law enforcement.
It would require further that all the medical staff and government officials went along with not preparing for an increase in COVID19 cases, for several months.
Now compare that to the FACT that the Wuhan BSL4 lab published, in Nature, the successful genetic engineering of a bat coronavirus with the ability to infect cells of the HeLa human cell line,by combining it with some SARS genetic material, in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_...virus_research "even before the outbreak of the pandemic, some virologists questioned whether previous experiments on creating novel coronaviruses in the lab justified the potential risk of accidental release."

I suppose someone could test the theory by exhuming some bodies and looking for traces of COVID19 RNA in vaping fatalities prior to mid December.
Blaming all of vaping's deaths on COVID19 originating in the US is a hard sale to make. Some of the deaths are from e-cigarette EXPLOSIONS. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...es/2096212001/

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by kladner

Welllll, doesn't the USofA have many people of many different nationalities that live there and travel "home". Also, doesn't the USofA have people traveling all over the place? So, sure it may have all strains. But, wouldn't you expect it to for the reasons above?