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The Coronavirus - a virus from eating bats, an accident or something sinister gone wrong?


swordfish

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https://www.npr.org/2020/01/28/800442646/acclaimed-harvard-scientist-is-arrested-accused-of-lying-about-ties-to-china

Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has been arrested and criminally charged with making "false, fictitious and fraudulent statements" to the U.S. Defense Department about his ties to a Chinese government program to recruit foreign scientists and researchers.

The Justice Department says Lieber, 60, lied about his contact with the Chinese program known as the Thousand Talents Plan, which the U.S. has previously flagged as a serious intelligence concern. He also is accused of lying about about a lucrative contract he signed with China's Wuhan University of Technology.

In an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Robert Plumb said Lieber, who led a Harvard research group focusing on nanoscience, had established a research lab at the Wuhan university — apparently unbeknownst to Harvard.

In response to the charges against Lieber, Harvard said in a statement to NPR: "The charges brought by the U.S. government against Professor Lieber are extremely serious. Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is initiating its own review of the alleged misconduct. Professor Lieber has been placed on indefinite administrative leave."

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/why-did-chinese-university-hire-charles-lieber-do-battery-research

Why did a Chinese university hire Charles Lieber to do battery research?

By Robert F. ServiceFeb. 4, 2020 , 12:45 PM

Among the ongoing mysteries surrounding last week’s arrest of Harvard University nanoscientist Charles Lieber is the precise nature of the research program Lieber was conducting in his cooperation with Chinese researchers.

Lieber was arrested on 28 January on charges of making false statements to U.S. law enforcement officials and federal funding agencies about a collaboration he forged with researchers in China. He was released two days later on a $1 million bond. An affidavit outlining the charges against Lieber notes that in January 2013, he signed an agreement between Harvard and Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China. According to the affidavit, “The stated purpose of the agreement, which had a five-year effective term, was to ‘carry out advanced research and development of nanowire-based lithium ion batteries with high performance for electric vehicles.’”

Officials at WUT have not responded to requests for comment on their agreement with Lieber. But it outlines just the kind of high-tech work that U.S. prosecutors involved in efforts to investigate Chinese attempts to acquire advanced technology from U.S.-based researchers say they are concerned about. They allege that the Chinese government has used such collaborations to improperly take advantage of the federally funded research enterprise, and gain an edge in economic and military advances.

In Lieber’s case, however, the battery angle poses a puzzle. That’s because a search of the titles of Lieber’s more than 400 papers and more than 75 U.S. and Chinese patents reveals  no mentions of “battery,” “batteries,” “vehicle,” or “vehicles.” (According to Lieber’s CV, through 2019 he has co-authored 412 research papers and has 65 awarded and pending U.S. patents. The website of the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration indicates that Lieber has been awarded 11 Chinese patents.)

In fact, one U.S. nanoscientist and former student of Lieber’s says: “I have never seen Charlie working on batteries or nanowire batteries.” (The scientist asked that their name not be used because of the sensitivity surrounding Lieber’s case.)

Lieber joined Harvard in 1991. Early on he pioneered a variety of techniques for growing nanowires from the bottom up in a chemical flask. Researchers have long been able to etch large chunks of semiconductors, metals, and other materials to make wirelike structures. But this top-down approach typically requires the use of expensive clean room facilities, the sorts used by computer chip–makers. Lieber’s strategy opened the door to making pristine nanostructures with simple and inexpensive chemical techniques. He went on to show that he could use these nanowires to serve as transistors, complex logic circuits, data storage devices, and even sensors.

More recently, Lieber’s Harvard lab has shifted gears to integrate nanowires with biology. In 2017, for example, he reported creating soft, flexible 3D nanowire mesh that could be injected into the brains or retina of animals, unfurl and wrap around neurons, and eavesdrop on the electrical communication between cells.

Other research groups have adopted Lieber’s nanowire growth methods to fabricate nanomaterials useful in making batteries. But that’s never been the focus of Lieber’s research. Which begs the question of why his supposed collaboration in Wuhan was focused on a line of research outside of his specialty.

 

Isn't Wuhan the "ground zero" for the latest virus?

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28 minutes ago, swordfish said:

 

Isn't Wuhan the "ground zero" for the latest virus?

Yes it is.  Interesting connection that the researchers could be using strains of Coronavirus for deploying this nanotechnology in animals.

 

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https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/dont-buy-chinas-story-the-coronavirus-may-have-leaked-from-a-lab/

At an emergency meeting in Beijing held last Friday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke about the need to contain the coronavirus and set up a system to prevent similar epidemics in the future.

A national system to control biosecurity risks must be put in place “to protect the people’s health,” Xi said, because lab safety is a “national security” issue.

Xi didn’t actually admit that the coronavirus now devastating large swaths of China had escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is exactly what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”

Read that again. It sure sounds like China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong, doesn’t it? And just how many “microbiology labs” are there in China that handle “advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus”?

It turns out that in all of China, there is only one. And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be … the epicenter of the epidemic.

That’s right. China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab that is equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, a Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.

According to the PLA Daily, Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax. This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.

Does that suggest to you that the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Chen’s job is to try to put the genie back in the bottle, as it were? It does to me.

Add to this China’s history of similar incidents. Even the deadly SARS virus has escaped — twice — from the Beijing lab where it was (and probably is) being used in experiments. Both “man-made” epidemics were quickly contained, but neither would have happened at all if proper safety precautions had been taken.

And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.

You heard me right.

Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach.

Also fueling suspicions about SARS-CoV-2’s origins is the series of increasingly lame excuses offered by the Chinese authorities as people began to sicken and die.

They first blamed a seafood market not far from the Institute of Virology, even though the first documented cases of Covid-19 (the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2) involved people who had never set foot there. Then they pointed to snakes, bats and even a cute little scaly anteater called a pangolin as the source of the virus.

I don’t buy any of this. It turns out that snakes don’t carry coronaviruses and that bats aren’t sold at a seafood market. Neither, for that matter, are pangolins, an endangered species valued for their scales as much as for their meat.

The evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 research being carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus may have been carried out of the lab by an infected worker or crossed over into humans when they unknowingly dined on a lab animal. Whatever the vector, Beijing authorities are now clearly scrambling to correct the serious problems with the way their labs handle deadly pathogens.

China has unleashed a plague on its own people. It’s too early to say how many in China and other countries will ultimately die for the failures of their country’s state-run microbiology labs, but the human cost will be high.

But not to worry. Xi has assured us that he is controlling biosecurity risks “to protect the people’s health.” PLA bioweapons experts are in charge.

I doubt the Chinese people will find that very reassuring. Neither should we.

But it is still a wild conspiracy theory....Ain't no way the Chinese are not telling the truth.......This thing just "popped up" from out of nowhere......

 

 

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If the coronavirus isn’t contained, a severe global recession is almost certain: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/if-the-coronavirus-isnt-contained-a-severe-global-recession-is-almost-certain-2020-02-24?&mod=home-page

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The world woke up Monday to the reality that the coronavirus epidemic is going to have a much bigger impact on the global economy than investors and policy makers had assumed. Just how big, no one really knows.

Last week, it seemed as if financial markets believed that COVID-19 would be contained. But new cases in Italy, South Korea and Iran over the weekend undermined that belief. The World Health Organization tried to reassure the public on Monday, saying the disease was not yet a pandemic because it was not spreading in an uncontained way.

No matter, stock markets GDOW, -5.05% SPX, -2.55%  and other financial markets BUXX, -0.26% TMUBMUSD10Y, -4.24% GC00, -1.78%  were quickly recalibrating the worst-case scenario, one in which hundreds of millions of people would be infected, and millions would die.

Investors are just beginning to price in the possibility of a sharp and nasty global recession that would be followed by a rapid rebound once the disease has run its course. Whenever that will be.

In the longer run, of course, a pandemic could have more far-reaching effects, including a smaller and less productive workforce and even a reordering of globalization.

We’d like to think that we can know the worst that could happen, but there is still so much that isn’t known about COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus that emerged in China and now spreading around the world. Most of the economic analysis is based on past pandemics, such as the 1918 global influenza pandemic, and more recent bouts with avian flu, SARS and MERS.

Nothing like it in recent history

But none of those examples fit the current situation perfectly. For one thing, unlike the flu, no one in the world has any natural immunity to this disease, nor is there a vaccine. The coronavirus is quite contagious, and many more people are likely to get COVID-19 than is assumed in these generic pandemic simulations.

The more recent pandemics weren’t nearly as widespread or deadly as this one seems to be. People who don’t appear to be sick can transmit the virus, making efforts to contain its spread magnitudes more difficult.

What’s more, the 1918 flu pandemic occurred in a different world, the world before airlines shrank the world, the world before globalization knitted our economies closer than ever, and the world before the internet, a technology that can spread misinformation and fear virally around the globe in an instant.

For example, the 1918 pandemic didn’t seem to have much impact on global trade or financial markets. Compare that to what we’ve already seen with COVID-19. Here’s what Apple, Procter & Gamble, Walmart and other U.S. companies are saying about the coronavirus outbreak.

That means the economic impact of a global pandemic of these proportions could be much larger than what investors and policy makers have assumed.

Could GDP contract 4.5%?

Many economists have tried to model the economic consequences of a pandemic.

CBO did a study in 2005 and 2006, modeling the impact of a 1918-sized flu pandemic on the economy. They found that a pandemic “could produce a short-run impact on the worldwide economy similar in depth and duration to that of an average postwar recession in the United States.” Specifically, a severe pandemic could reduce U.S. gross domestic product by about 4.5%, followed by a sharp rebound.

The CBO assumed that 90 million people in the U.S. would get sick, and 2 million would die. There would also be demand-side effects, with an 80% decline in the arts and entertainment industries and a 67% decline in transportation. Retail and manufacturing would drop 10%.

The U.S. wasn’t prepared for a flu pandemic then, the CBO said, and it isn’t now.

Also read: White House seeks $2.5 billion in emergency funds to fight coronavirus

“If a pandemic were to occur in the near term, the options for the United States would be limited to attempts to control the spread of the virus and judicious use of limited medical facilities, personnel, and supplies,” the bipartisan agency concluded. “In the longer term, more tools are potentially available, including an increased treatment capacity, greater use of vaccines and antiviral drug stockpiles, and possible advances in medical technology.”

Other simulations of the U.S. and non-U.S. economies have found similar economic impacts, although that research came at an earlier stage of globalization, when our economy was not quite so reliant on far-flung supply chains.

Quarantining the economy

Much of the immediate economic impact of a pandemic can be traced to the efforts to contain it, rather than from the effects of the disease itself. As we attempt to quarantine those who might spread the disease, we shut down a lot of economic activity.

The quarantines might be the only way to slow the spread of COVID-19, but they could also hamper our response. Our health-care system also relies on vital inputs for medicines, supplies and equipment produced all over the world, including China and other hard-hit Asian economies. And of course we rely on the free flow of thousands of other goods and services.

The potential for disaster is sobering. The economies of the world are extraordinarily resilient, yet extraordinarily dependent upon each other in a crisis. Sadly, the things we need most to get us through this — wise leadership, global cooperation and clear thinking — are harder to find than a surgical mask.

Time to buy gold.  And seeds.

 

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4 hours ago, Impartial_Observer said:

All I know is they need to get a handle on it ASAFP, my small portfolio is bleeding all over the place. 

AMEN!

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15 hours ago, foxbat said:

AMEN!

I looked again this morning, I think I just need to quit looking!

FIA has already canceled the Chinese GP in April. Although with cash layouts to get F1 one to come to your city are often cost prohibitive, the impact locally is well into the 100's of millions. Changing dates has pretty much been nixed given the already crowded schedule with the addition of two race weekends this year. The logistics of moving the F1 circus across five continents is a pretty tightly orchestrated machine in and of itself, which is all pre-planned months in advance. 

The summer Olympics in Japan are now rumored to be in jeopardy. This could be a major hit for the Japanese, rescheduling is not really an option given the athletes' schedules. When you look at the amount of cash outlay host countries/cities have just to secure the hosting, this could well be catastrophic for the Japanese, with no real chance to get any ROI. 

Not to mention the day to day economics of it all. Just in the markets alone, the losses will be staggering, not to mention possible shortages of goods worldwide. 

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CDC Warns Coronavirus Outbreaks Likely to Hit U.S.: https://gizmodo.com/cdc-warns-coronavirus-outbreaks-likely-to-hit-u-s-1841913357

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On Tuesday, health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a dire warning: The U.S. will almost certainly not be spared from the outbreak of a new pneumonia-causing coronavirus that threatens to sweep across the globe. It’s only a matter of time before the virus will start to spread locally, if it isn’t doing so already.

Since the outbreak first emerged in China this past December, U.S. health officials have taken a cautious but not-too-pessimistic tone, saying that the risk to the general public remains low. To date, there have been 53 documented cases of COVID-19—the disease caused by the virus—in the U.S., with most involving people who had recently traveled to China or who were aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship that harbored an outbreak.

But COVID-19 has clearly spread beyond mainland China in recent weeks, setting off local outbreaks in countries including South Korea, Italy, and Iran. The chances of stopping it from reaching the U.S. entirely now appear slim to none.

“Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in the United States,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, told reporters in a conference Tuesday. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses.”

Messonnier also warned that the U.S. and the world at large need to start preparing for a potential pandemic.

“We really want to prepare the American public for the possibility that their lives will be disrupted because of this pandemic,” Messonnier told reporters, adding she had told her own children the same. “We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad.”

There are now at least 37 countries with reported cases of COVID-19, with several Middle East countries such as Iraq added to the list in recent days. Overall, there have been more than 80,000 reported cases and more than 2,700 deaths.

I've got about 100 gallons of potable water and few 50 pound bags of rice stored in my basement.  We should be ok.

But still buying gold.  And seeds.

 

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1 hour ago, Impartial_Observer said:

I looked again this morning, I think I just need to quit looking!

FIA has already canceled the Chinese GP in April. Although with cash layouts to get F1 one to come to your city are often cost prohibitive, the impact locally is well into the 100's of millions. Changing dates has pretty much been nixed given the already crowded schedule with the addition of two race weekends this year. The logistics of moving the F1 circus across five continents is a pretty tightly orchestrated machine in and of itself, which is all pre-planned months in advance. 

The summer Olympics in Japan are now rumored to be in jeopardy. This could be a major hit for the Japanese, rescheduling is not really an option given the athletes' schedules. When you look at the amount of cash outlay host countries/cities have just to secure the hosting, this could well be catastrophic for the Japanese, with no real chance to get any ROI. 

Not to mention the day to day economics of it all. Just in the markets alone, the losses will be staggering, not to mention possible shortages of goods worldwide. 

Right now, the markets are responding to issues with companies like Apple talking about missing numbers due to the supply chain and demand aspects ... and most of these are what are classified as luxury items.  Wait until the impact hits the more necessary items like food, medicine, and even general commodity items like sheltering supplies.  I read yesterday or day before that the advances for the year had already been wiped out and we were in negative territory YTD for the markets.  I haven't yet checked my stuff as I've been busy, but like you said, it's probably just a good idea not to at this point.  Likely to get worse before it gets better.

 

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29 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

It is a well attached to a windmill or a hand pump?

Better buy seeds.

 

 

My niece is married to one of these preppers. He spends inordinate amounts of money that they don't have on guns, bug out bags, freeze dried meals, and various survival equipment. It begs the question, if the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans/terrorist attack, are they really going to attack rural Jennings County, furthermore, wouldn't that be where the survivalist go to?

I have plenty of beer in the garage refrigerator, I assure you I'll be able to survive any impending doom that may come my way. My freezer is well stocked with meat, and if I am stocked up on anything, it's charcoal. 

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28 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

My niece is married to one of these preppers. He spends inordinate amounts of money that they don't have on guns, bug out bags, freeze dried meals, and various survival equipment. It begs the question, if the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans/terrorist attack, are they really going to attack rural Jennings County, furthermore, wouldn't that be where the survivalist go to?

I have plenty of beer in the garage refrigerator, I assure you I'll be able to survive any impending doom that may come my way. My freezer is well stocked with meat, and if I am stocked up on anything, it's charcoal. 

Processed barley and hops ... should be a good carb alternative unless it's that light beer stuff. 😀

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59 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

My niece is married to one of these preppers. He spends inordinate amounts of money that they don't have on guns, bug out bags, freeze dried meals, and various survival equipment. It begs the question, if the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans/terrorist attack, are they really going to attack rural Jennings County, furthermore, wouldn't that be where the survivalist go to?

I have plenty of beer in the garage refrigerator, I assure you I'll be able to survive any impending doom that may come my way. My freezer is well stocked with meat, and if I am stocked up on anything, it's charcoal. 

It's probably not the Russian/Chinese/North Koreans/terrorists he is arming himself against, especially if other in Jennings County know he has a nice little stockpile when the shit hits the fan.

 

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1 hour ago, gonzoron said:

No photo description available.

Surprised that the US isn't carved up based on electoral votes, by land mass, ... see picture below of the president hosting visitors in the Oval Office during a praying in schools event ...

image.png.adbe35a00788df733b4bb91f95d1bddd.png

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Does the Coronavirus Make the Case for World Government?: https://mises.org/power-market/does-coronavirus-make-case-world-government

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Sometimes terrible things happen without any human malfeasance, and the novel Wuhan coronavirus may in fact be one of those things. It is entirely plausible the virus emerged from "wet markets" in the Hubei Province of China rather than as a fumbled (or worse, intentionally released) bioweapon cooked up by the Xi Jinping government. 

We may never know, of course. But easy or readily apparent answers to the question of how this could have been avoided should be viewed with the skepticism appropriate to any state propaganda. Crises of all kinds, whether economic, political, military, or health, send ideologues scrambling to explain how such events fit neatly into their worldview. In fact, political partisans often attempt to paint any crisis as having occurred in the first place precisely because their policies and preferences have not been adopted. 

The Wuhan coronavirus seems tailor-made for this. Alarmists who argue for (i) much more robust and comprehensive "public health" measures by national governments and (ii) greater supranational coordination inevitably point to infectious diseases as justification for increased state power over personal medical decisions. Scary and fast-spreading viruses are perfect fodder for their busybody argument that people cannot simply be left to their own devices.

Cross-border outbreaks of illnesses are particularly well suited to the preexisting bureaucratic desire for power over populations: they make the public much more willing to accept forced quarantines and arrests for noncompliance; forced immunizations; involuntary commitments to state facilities; curfews; restrictions on business operations and travel; and import controls. They also allow public health officials to commandeer and manage efforts to find "the cure," who then take credit when the virus eventually relents. 

These are the sorts of things that authoritarian politicians want all the time. Crises simply provide an opportunity to ratchet up their power and also to accustom the public to being ordered around and taking cues from centralized government sources.

Antistate libertarians are not immune to this phenomenon of attempting to place square events into round holes. We tend to explain crises as the result of state (or central bank) interference, either created or made worse by the lack of market discipline, incentives, and property rights lacking due to state action or state regulation. Libertarians think the Food and Drug Administration, for example, kills more people than it saves by approving bad drugs and delaying regulatory approvals for promising treatments. 

Moreover, an individualist libertarian perspective on bodily sovereignty poses an obvious challenge to public health. No individual should be forced to accept quarantine or immunization against his will, and in fact no individual should be forced to consider herd immunity or other collectivist notions when making medical decisions. Just as most libertarians don't think Doritos and Mountain Dew should be banned because their consumption imposes "public" healthcare costs in a statist/fascist system of mandatory insurance and tax-funded Medicaid, most don't think that individual health decisions should be overridden by politicians—even in an "emergency" outbreak situation. 

So how do we reconcile public health with individual rights? Should the latter be sacrificed to protect the former?

Three observations present themselves.

First, even the highly authoritarian Chinese national state has been unable to contain the virus, though it can cordon off whole cities by dictatorial fiat and impose wholesale house arrest over cities in a manner unthinkable in Western countries. Chinese state police literally drag people suspected of carrying the virus out of their cars, forcibly put them handcuffed in hazmat vehicles, and haul them off to what amount to prison hospitals. Chinese citizens who speak out publicly against the Xi government's handling of the crisis are arrested. So, if the Chinese government can't contain it, even with martial law and control over media, how in the world do Western countries expect to do so? Imagine trying to quarantine, say, Dallas and Fort Worth!

Second, poor countries (and China is quite poor per capita compared to the West, ranking around sixty-fifth internationally) almost invariably suffer from worse public health conditions. Sanitation, nutrition, and access to drugs, facilities, and competent doctors matter a great deal when it comes to incubating infectious diseases. Richer countries are healthier countries, and the West benefits when conditions improve and modernize in the Third World.

Third, we already have de facto supranational bodies such as World Health Organization tasked with preventing and lessening the spread of diseases like the coronavirus. The WHO has been around since 1948 and hasn't prevented a host of modern epidemics like SARS and Zika; excatly what new international agency or organization will do better?

If anything, pandemics call for decentralization of treatment. After all, the best approach is to isolate infected people rather than bringing them into large hospital populations in crowded city centers. What doctor or nurse wants to work in a hospital full of coronavirus cases?

We might wish for a utopian libertarian answer to public health crises like the coronovirus, along the lines of a Rothbardian externality argument for airborne pollution. But sometimes bad things simply happen. The best hope is market incentives, the rapid application of individual human ingenuity and self-interest to the situation. Liberty is better, not perfect. And governments, including the Chinese government, are clueless as always.

Indeed they are.

 

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On 2/25/2020 at 12:36 PM, Impartial_Observer said:

All I know is they need to get a handle on it ASAFP, my small portfolio is bleeding all over the place. 

Today in stock market news ...

 

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1 hour ago, Impartial_Observer said:

Damn you! Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, after modest losses yesterday.

Thought you'd enjoy that. 😀

Now's the time to just go grab some of that beer stockpile that you have, cook a couple of steaks on the grill tonight, and then catch the opening of Season 2 of Altered carbon which kicks off today.

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10 minutes ago, foxbat said:

Thought you'd enjoy that. 😀

Now's the time to just go grab some of that beer stockpile that you have, cook a couple of steaks on the grill tonight, and then catch the opening of Season 2 of Altered carbon which kicks off today.

After a week or so of less than stellar hot water in the shower, I arose this morning to very little water pressure and essentially no hot water. There will be no TV until the weekend. I went a picked up a water heater this morning and hilarity will ensue when I get home this evening. 

I made the move to tankless, so the install is a little more than swapping out water heaters, plus I need to swap out some 1/2" gas line for 3/4". Hoping to have a hot shower by tomorrow afternoon., that should make me have a little better outlook!

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Pandemic simulation game Plague Inc. pulled from iOS App Store in China: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/pandemic-simulation-game-plague-inc-pulled-from-ios-app-store-in-china/

Quote

Plague Inc. maker Ndemic Creations says the game has been removed from sale on the iOS App Store in China because the relevant authorities say it “includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China.”

The popular game—which asks players to shepherd a virus' deadly spread around the world—has been available on the Chinese App Store for years without issue. Ndemic says it's "not clear to us if this removal is linked to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that China is facing," but it certainly seems like the most likely proximate cause.

...

Good game.  The 'BSanders' and 'AOC' viruses in my games have wiped on the world several times over now..............................

 

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